Discoveries

My husband's mood of nostalgia was still prevailing a few days ago when he said, "I'm going to Winfield to see my cousin!" Then he continued, "And I'm also going to try to find Sandra while I'm up there." I knew who he meant. We had looked up his cousin a few years ago and found him changed from the strikingly handsome man with the Summers' looks that I remembered to an emaciated old man on a breathing machine.

Sandra was a valued former employee from the store in New Orleans. He heard that she had moved to Winfield, Kansas, where she was from, since then. It had been a good 30 years, but he has been curious about her, especially since someone at church living in that area said there were a lot of families there with her last name.

So yesterday Howard and our son Greg took the 40-mile trip down memory lane. I asked him about their excursion when he got home. "I couldn't get anyone to come to the door at Martin's house," he explained, "then a neighbor came out and said he had passed away five months ago." I was afraid of something like that.

I knew how he felt, since I had cousins living about two hours away in the town where I was born and had always intended to look them up. But sadly, during a genealogy search my niece was doing, she found they had both passed away, one in 2010 and the other last year.

I had asked him before they left how he expected to find Sandra, his old secretary. He said you ask around, talk to people--at McDonald's, the police department, etc. The police called a number that was listed, but the answer was that she didn't live there anymore. Howard had just gotten home after dropping Greg at his house when the phone rang with the news that Sandra had called. She had moved to Topeka. Howard returned the call and they had a nice chat. When he told her he was 75, she couldn't believe it, but then again, she was 62!

He didn't say much about the trip to me, but I figured it was because his findings were saddening and disappointing. Then at breakfast today he dropped the tidbit that he and our son had visited a music store in Arkansas City. To hear him tell it, it was a store to end all music stores! He described the guitars, fairly salivating over a Taylor guitar he had tried, and related stories the proprietor shared about former hippie customers who spent thousands there. Apparently a huge bluegrass festival is held at the fairgrounds there about this time every year, and he said there were already many trailers gathering.

"This guitar store was better than the ones they have in Houston!" he went on. Here I was hoping that he had gotten digging up the past out of his system, but being the eternal optimist that he his, he always looks on the bright side, and this trip was no exception! Who knows what the next venture will bring?