Table of contents for 2009 Review

1. Career
2. Cameron
3. Mr. Helms
4. Grandma
5. Marriage
6. Jenny’s School
7. Jon’s School
8. My School
9. The end

2009 was a spectacular year to get married.  I was invited to 5 weddings, but only 4 tooks place.  Still, only 3 really had any impact on me.

On the same weekend my grandma died, I tagged along with Jon as we drove around LA to visit his Marine friend John Burchardt.  Burchardt was a new recruit who had graduated bootcamp and was training in his specialty of field communication repair before being deployed.  He’s a formerly fat, grinning soilder who is the type of person you wouldn’t trust with your car, but would trust to follow into battle.

We met him at the wedding of Cantrell, another marine, by crashing it.  It was a backyard wedding, and the bridge was pregnant, but they welcomed Jon and I right away and insisted we start drinking.  I was the designated driver, and apparently the only sober person at the party.

Out of the blue, someone had purchased the bride and groom a surprise honeymoon suite at a hotel, so I chauffered them there in our rented Dodge Charger.  As a stranger, and on their special night, they were incredibly talkative and friendly.  There was no social veil dividing us because of our jobs, age, race, or even where we lived.

Perry’s wedding also had a ethnic twist to it, as he later revealed that just about everyone thought they stood out.  Aki’s friends thought everyone noticed they weren’t Americans, Ben and Chris thought everyone noticed they weren’t Asian, Aki’s parents thought everyone noticed they were the only Japanese, and the Lawrence Lab crew thought everyone noticed they were much older.  Silly in a way, as I’m sure nobody cared.  But as an aside, I’m glad that we live in a society where our biggest concern is being socially awkward at multi-cultural events.

In contrast to Cantrell’s wedding, Perry and Aki’s was superbly planned and executed.  It had finesse, and class without being lavish.  There’s so much I could go on about, but in the end it made me look forward to being married.  I was honored to be a groomsman though, and was overjoyed to even be invited.

Which is more than I can say for Brad Walker’s wedding, that was to take place in June this year.  We had fallen out of touch as middle school friends as he moved to Detroit to pursue a rap career.  His mom moved to the northern burbs where Brad eventually ended moving back in to, only after what I imagine is an intense rivalry with several prominent rappers and drug dealers.  I always cherished his friendship, but we no longer had anything in common.  His friends have cool rapper names and go around getting each other pregnant.  My friends have stupid names and spend most of their time buying more hard drive space.

Again I was commanded to be a groomsman, where Brad was to be wed to the mother of his daughter.  I was honestly happy for Brad, it seemed like the smart choice, and perhaps he had grown up.  He was previously married for about 3 months when he was 19.

I was wrong though.  A week before the wedding I met his sister on the train, where we chatted and I told her I was looking forward to the wedding.  I called Brad to chat, where he told me that the wedding was cancelled.  Apparently he had kicked his fiancé out of his mom’s house and had started dating the maid of honor who was also a single parent.

Disgusted at this Jerry Springer bullshit, AND that I had to call to find out the wedding was cancelled, AND the fact that Brad seemed more interested in continuing his retarded lifestyle than finding a job to support his daughter I ended up breaking off all contact with him.

It’ll be interesting to follow up with all three couples in 2010.  I’ve got a good notion, but I’ll leave the speculation for a later post.

Table of contents for 2009 Review

1. Career
2. Cameron
3. Mr. Helms
4. Grandma
5. Marriage
6. Jenny’s School
7. Jon’s School
8. My School
9. The end

The oldest, and most telegraphed of the three passings this year was my Grandma’s.  We’ve known for about a year or two that she was suffering from cancer, and her condition had notibly deterorated from about spring onward.

Grandma was adventerous, often worried about us kids, and religious.  We had been making the most of her time left, planning a slew of family reunions and bringing in relatives from California and Hawaii, but only my younger sister saw Grandma in her final bed ridden days.  Still, she had copious amounts of cheer.  A devout Christian Scientist she accepted and wasn’t afraid.

She passed away at the end of summer, with her two sisters by her side.

At her house in California, we held a non-traditional funeral with music and food stations spread throughout the pool deck area and the living room, per her request.  It was like a get together, and a surprising amount of people came, invalidating my theory that the older you get the more you lose contact with people.  Some people came to honor my Grandpa, who passed away when I was a kid.

Grandma’s death fell upon me numbingly.  During one point in her life, she moved to Clarendon Hills to try to connect with us grandkids, but it was largely a failed attempt.  The generation gap was just too large, and although I now appreciate her attempts to culture us, at the time it was just a bother.

We thought she was a bit too uptight, along with the rest of our religious relatives.  While preparing for the funeral, my extended family further treated us like children, which only served to divorce me from any pain of her passing.  Jon felt the same way, but spoke the truth when he said, “At the very least, she’s responsible for our being.  We owe her for that.”

This left my dad as the de facto head of the Kimball family now, as the oldest male.  Living in Chicago, he wasn’t able to be with her at the end, and he spent his time working on the CB360T engine in the garage.  When he got the call that Grandma had passed, he was cleaning out carburetors.

Grandma’s death illustrated to me a lesson in aging and respecting the elderly.  At the get together, the slideshow showed she was a beauty queen as a young adult.  The remarkable American beauty was nothing like church going senior citizen I knew.  It’s sometimes hard to believe that every geriatric walker using pensioner was once a rebelious 20 something with dreams and a probable disrespect for authority.

I just wish I got to know that side of her better.