It’s my last night of bachelorhood, dear reader! The official VM fiancee is moving in tomorrow, and I’ve been living it up in style tonight!
That’s right: Now that I’ve gotten over my ass-whomping case of the avian head-cold, I did laundry, cleaned the bathroom AND the kitchen, and also had a long phone conversation with my mom! I live a playboy’s life!
Seriously, that was about it for this evening, along with searching for a new company to host some MySQL databases, since Network Solutions isn’t doing a great job handling my DB needs (which has kept me from moving this blog into a neat new format).
So them’s the thrills at Chez VM. Bathroom and kitchen floors are nice and clean, laundry’s folded, and Mom and I were able to talk about some of our family history. Turns out she found some good resources at Yad Vashem about the branch of our family that was wiped out in Poland in 1941. I’ll post some links to that when she sends them over.
She came across all these records from other, distant family members, posted since the 1950s. We talked about all the generations and stories that were lost. She told me that her rabbi had some interesting comments recently about the undying nature of the soul, but both of us thought they were bordering on Kaballah mysticism.
I told her I think stories are how we live after we die. It reminded me of the line from Unforgiven where Clint Eastwood says, “Hell of a thing, killin’ a man. Take away all he’s got and all he’s ever gonna have.”
She told me that one of the massacred was supposed to have been named Rachel, and Mom couldn’t understand why another name showed up for that person in the records. I told her that there was probably a really easy explanation for it, but that it was just a day-to-day story that was lost. Stories are how we keep living.