We left home on Tuesday and arrived in Altoona, Pennsylvania, Wednesday afternoon. Knowing we were coming, Nancy's cousins arranged a mini-reunion for Thursday evening at nearby Marzoni's restaurant. The requisite picture was taken. Around the table from the left are Nancy, Nancy's cousin Joyce, Orville (husband of cousin Becky), Nancy's cousins Joe and Dan, me, Dana (Dan's wife), barely visible Connie (Joe's wife), cousin Becky, cousin once removed Jill (Joyce's daughter), cousin Susan, and Brian (Susan's husband). We had so much fun, Becky and Orville invited everyone to their home in Cresson for a Friday evening barbecue. Great to see everyone. It's been a couple years since our last visit.
Two asides: 1) At Marzoni's Nancy and I each ordered an "individual" pizza. They were so big and so piled high with stuff that we left half of each pizza. I boxed them up and talked cousin Joe into taking the remainder home for Friday lunch. 2) Orville invited a close friend of theirs to the barbecue last night who, I found out later, graduated with a physics degree from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Since he was an undergraduate during the years when I was a grad student, I suggested that he may have been a student in one of the classes I taught. He said he didn't remember me.
Yesterday morning we drove to my home town, Nanty-Glo. I was trying to find my maternal grandparents grave site. It dawned on me a couple weeks ago that I do not know the location of their final resting place. We had no luck, but a lady with the local undertaker is searching for information that they may have. I'm to get back in touch with her next week. After that we drove down the street to the house in which I grew up. Nancy talked me into stopping and she knocked on the door. When I told the lady who answered the door who I was and that I had been raised in her house, she invited us in. Not only that, she called her sister, who lived nearby, to come over and meet us.
It turns out that the lady who bought the house from my mother around 1964 still lives in the house with her daughter. It was the daughter who answered the door and she produced the deed on which, very clearly, was my mother's signature. AND the older daughter was a student in my mother's third grade class. I talked about the history of the house. The basketball net that I put up in the attic is still there! They had a little trouble believing that we actually played basketball in the attic. The sound downstairs must have been a killer. And they wondered for years about the mound of dirt in the back yard. It sounded like they may have fantasized that some people were buried there. I cleared that up for them. It was our garden. We raised the ground to level the garden in an otherwise slanted back yard. No, I don't know why.
All in all, a very interesting couple of days.
