it's my brother's last night before he heads back to japan so he wanted to visit our grandparents. we are two oreo cookies and had to bring along the cream filling (twiddle thumbs) to make us whole. no, i have never used that analogy before! perhaps for the first time in my life visiting my grandparents, it was only them. there were no other relatives present. usually there's at least 1 aunt or cousin hanging around. as the evening progressed, we talked more and more of the past, or rather, my grandparents did. the past was brought up because they had recently looked at an old photo album and brought it out to share the pictures. sometimes it's very weird for me to see pictures of my dad's family when everyone was young simply because they are so damn white. my dad was blonde as a kid through high school and i think the only one of his siblings who did not have blue eyes. it's also hard to imagine my grandparents when they were young. i will say this about my grandpa, he was a handsome man for the times. he had that rugged look that was in, sorta like william holden. think about how white america was portrayed in the 1950s and how people who lived then say that life wasn't like that at all. oh no, it was like that! at least, for my family. the cleanest cut, most recessive people. they make the cast of "happy days" look like a palestinian refugee camp.

nothing gets old people animated like talking about the past so my grandpa really came to life. i enjoy hearing about california as it used to be because i have the hardest time imagining what it's like. although, sometimes i find it to awkward to ask my grandparents about what it was like in regards to race. i feel this would've been a better conversation topic with my father. so i never ask racial questions. plus, i notice my grandparents aren't pc. i think my grandma means well, but everytime she talks about someone who is japanese or oriental (you can tell what generation someone is by their lexicon--even my mother says oriental and not asian), she has to look at me when she says it. couldn't she have turned to the other oreo or the cream filling? hahahahaaaaa

tonight for the first time, i actually noticed my grandpa say "colored" as in black people, african-americans, etc. at least he didn't say negros (weird) or worse (horrible)! you see, my grandpa is from the south and yes, the racist parts. (to me the south is synonymous with racism but i try not to generalize. i will find the unracist parts.) i mean, really bad, so i've heard. i've never heard my grandpa express racist views but this was the first time his choice of words raised my eyebrow. after we left, i mentioned the "colored" thing and twiddle thumbs said she has heard my grandpa say "colored" before. we told her that my grandpa doesn't talk much so she said that she really pays attention when he speaks. i've been on the lookout for racist speech ever since i learned about that side of the family's racism but i really can't recall him saying "colored" before. maybe i was so sensitive to my grandma's slant that i overlooked my grandpa's speech.

i kinda sidetracked from my main point which is that i did get up the nerve to ask one question that puzzled me because i never really was sat down and told the family history. i learned some in high school when i did a family tree project but i must have some lingering childhood confusion about the family. i thought after my grandma's parents divorced, her father went back to ireland. made sense to me 'cos he was irish and i thought she said when she went to ireland she visited the town her father is from. well i didn't clear up the whole which town in ireland bit because i wanted to clarify that he went back to ireland. it turns out, after they divorced, he went back to illinois! woops! not ireland, illinois. my grandma and her parents moved to california when she was 4 but i had relatives that apparently moved earlier to california. my family lived in the el monte area for years and the ethnic composition is completely different now. that is why it's so interesting to hear them speak of the past. twiddle thumbs is familiar with that area since that's where she grew up. that is why my grandpa was so animated, because he spoke of streets and places that twiddle thumbs knows. it's like he was giving her a bit of a history lesson.

oh yeah, and now i know for sure that my grandpa killed japanese in WWII. well, he didn't say he personally killed anyone but i knew he had been to china, cuba, and the bikini islands in the 1950s but i was never sure of where he was during WWII. i found out he was at midway for 15 months and his ship sunk a japanese fishing boat. i've joked about my family history being a series of ancestors on opposite sides of the same war but to know about actual combat/killing is a different matter. i didn't really flinch because that's what happens in war but if he had been part of the battle of okinawa, that would have been another matter--completely chilling.