Notes from the Multiverse

*Got up with Tegan (Sorry I didn't hear her sooner, honey!)

* Got Tegan dressed, dressed myself.

* Went to park, played with Teegs for over an hour running and sliding and pushing her on the swing, and MAN am I tired.

* Got bike tire (mostly) fixed. Let's hope it works right.

* Did some (not all) dishes, then read while Tegan napped for an hour.

* Played outside with Teegs in backyard, discovered she's afraid of the sand moving around her feet--she started crying because my moving the sand around in one part of the sandbox made her think something was under her in the sand! Poor baby!

* Now playing with baby in family room. She's a really good baby, but she's missing Mom something fierce. When she woke up from her nap, she said "I want mama." When I said mama was at work, she started to cry until I offered to take her out in the backyard to play. Now she's demanding penguins.

I love my life. No, really. Even though ten months out of the year, I want to smash heads regularly.

Until yesterday, I never knew my grandfather was at the Bikini Atoll nuclear bomb tests.

He was showing me pictures of his crewmates aboard the USS Dixie, and casually mentioned "that was at the nuke test at Bikini Island." I expressed wonder at having never known he was there, and he pulled from his wallet -- that's right, he still carries it -- a faded and worn card which the Navy issued, proving he took part in Operation Crossroads, that being the test's codename.

"There were two blasts," he said. "One underwater, and one above ground. I was looking right at that son of a bitch when it went off. Brightest goddamned light I ever saw, even with my hand covering my eyes."

I talked to my aunt about it, and we've decided to get a videocamera on him and drag more of these stories out. He's expressed interest in writing a book about all he's seen, and we figure not only would that be a good way to make him do it, but it would be cool for us to have when he's gone.

My aunt mentioned something about my adopted dad that made sense... it wasn't so much that he was a bad person, but he would bend over backwards to please whatever woman he was with at the moment. He and La Vada adopted three kids because that's what she wanted -- I'm sure he would have stopped at me, or maybe even before me. Probably after, in many ways I think he looked at me as a replacement for the son he'd lost to a surgical mistake a few years earlier.

When he divorced La Vada (and who could blame him, really? I only wish I'd been able to go with him), his new girlfriend didn't want him bringing us along, so he ignored us for a long time. I suspect as well that La Vada told him we didn't want to see him, that we were too enamored of her new husband. The truth is, we were terrified of Jim and would have done anything to move in with Ron -- with Dad.

Later, he married another woman. It was shortly after this I went to live with him, and six months later she maneuvered him into getting rid of me. She was manic-depressive, and would constantly decide to stop taking her pills, then go nuts on us. Rather than accept that her inability to keep taking her pills was the problem, she convinced herself I was the problem, and made him send me to my aunt.

Ron died several years ago. I went to the funeral despite not having seen him in five years. It was an incredibly painful event, where I realised I'd basically been written out of that family. But my sister, who hasn't had a good thing to say to me since we were kids, told me one thing that salvaged the day. She said that Ron knew I'd changed my last name, and though it hurt him, he acknowledged it was his own fault, and that I had done what I had to do to make a new life for myself. According to her -- and I don't care if he really said it or she lied to help me out -- he said to tell me that he would always be proud of the man I'd become. She said he'd been asking her for reports on me for years, but didn't want anyone else to know.

I asked her, at the funeral, how we ended up with such an incredibly screwed-up family. She said "I don't know. We didn't deserve this, not really." I think maybe we did, though. I think it was necessary for me to have gone through all that, to learn the lessons needed this time around the Circle. I guess my next incarnation will determine if I've learned the lesson well enough.

At any rate, there's a lot of years left in THIS incarnation. So I'd best get started on them, yes?