One of my more insightful blogs from 2020 10 2 this day 25 5 25

 

You know each day during my adult life I have walked for up to an hour a day round the town or a part of it and in the process got to update something I call my continuing story: endlessly incomplete…

Just lately my elder brother J, 16 months my senior, has been much in my thoughts because it appears he phones me less and less, the last time I calculated was on the 3^rd of September, I say calculated but in point of fact I simply refer to my old Nokia which logs my calls: incoming, outgoing, which together with his house phone and mobile numbers properly edited, I can see who has been in touch, with duration in minutes, time of day, etc: mainly him and my sister M who are together the main people who call me on a regular basis.

But yesterday I got to decide I wouldn’t get on his case about it because he has never been the kind of needy person I see myself as, and in the process got to review many of the traits which run through our families. Things perhaps which when we are younger we never reflect on, but which with the passage of time we have more time to dwell on such matters.

So thinking of him I got to review the traits we inherited from our father who died of leukaemia when J was 7 and I 5½, our kid sister M not quite 2. He got the first of his 3 names,  J, as I got my Ma’s favourite brother’s, E, and my sister got her favourite sister’s, in turn no doubt deciding these things for herself. She always said how he had wanted to name their daughter after her mother who had the name A, same as the first name of her own Ma…

Then I got to thinking how I got his eye and hair colour, and his less than a perfect set of teeth unlike my brother, and incidentally our eldest son, S, who both share the trait of perfect teeth. But J junior has a dormant myeloma which the health services keep tabs on and we now think that he probably inherited this from our Da, only in Da’s case it ceased to be dormant at a half his eldest son’s current age, when he unfortunately died. But J junior also got to inherit his father’s skills in terms of being good at woodwork, and in turn taking the top job in his profession like his Da, but not using wood but metal: the one a Pattern Maker the other a Tool Maker, among other jobs.

My elder son, S, was docile and undemonstrative as a baby like his uncle J, 30 years older, and when his younger brother P arrived 30 y after I did, he was just the opposite, the most needy kid imaginable just like I had been, hahaha.

Well I always related this to the fact that the first born in any family doesn’t have the competition from other siblings the later children have, to explain this kind of behaviour, until yesterday when I threw a few other things into the mix, like our younger son’s twin daughters, both of whom survived their foetal fatal birth defect during babyhood: unlike their paternal grandmother’s and paternal great grandmother’s twin sisters? Since A-E and I had no daughters this trait, if inherited, skipped a generation to re-appear with the first and only daughters of the next generation, although our sister M also had a daughter but no twins?

Then I got to thinking how P followed his Da with a heart attack in mid-life, in addition to getting a less than perfect set of teeth, but only yesterday did I get to thinking that maybe the heart murmur and delayed closure of the two halves of his heart, which in normal children follows on naturally quickly after birth, to facilitate healthy breathing, may also have been inherited from his Da, me!?

Nice after all these years to think that my son’s neediness was simply the result of his poor body getting insufficient oxygen during his first days, before his breathing heart was quite fully developed for the job ahead, rather than the alternative, I have blamed on an insatiable neediness, which no-one can reasonably approve, which is not to say my own wife ever saw it for anything other than what it was ! (the result of his heart murmur) Hahaha.  

PS the pic above is from when we crossed from Finland into Norway and we decided to follow this pic in a book of where we might walk on the morrow, stay tuned if you'd like to learn more?

Update almost 5 yrs on...Well I am so grateful to myself for having written these blogs, and also having adorned them with pics to illustrate the content in some cases. This neediness blog is something else because, despite the professed insightfulness, I still think of my neediness which may have derived from my also possessing a heart murmur shortly after birth, maybe not, who knows for sure? But 5 years on it is a fact I bought the book from where the pic above was borrowed, and in the interim with recurrent visits to Norway's biggest island of Senja, I, together with my wife for part of the time, have managed to climb a good many more of its beautiful peaks, and got to interact and know more of its very friendly ppl, with a next trip projected for the 6 weeks beginning 6th of June 2025..?