Following the funeral, as we were all chatting, Skip mentioned that no one had been able to get ahold of my other aunt to tell her about the funeral.  So, I'd been meaning to talk to her anyway (we chatted at the last funeral, and she made a strange reference to a major event at my 1st b-day party... so of course I wanted to find out more)  so I got directions to her house, (which is odd, we only lived less than 20 minutes from them, and dad worked only like 5 minutes from them for a good while, and we NEVER visited them??? I always thought they lived really really far away!) and went to chat.

Well! I definately learned a lot.  Ya know how most people say you shouldn't speak evil of the dead?? She has NO SUCH belief!!!! *giggle*   So, yeah, learned a lot of interesting family things I'd never heard before.  And, as we chatted, she started talking about her childhood.  She's German, and was actually living in Germany during WWII.  She talked about the American soldiers coming through her town, how the trains were so unsafe to ride because they were targets, and the buses weren't much safer...  and do you know, she almost drown once because as she was swimming along, all of the sudden the water was way deeper than the rest?  Turns out it was a hole where a bomb had fallen.   Really cool to hear about WWII from a person who experienced it!!!

Very weird though to see how she feels about black people... goodness... makes me see how the Germans must have felt about the Jews!!!!!! She used the "N word" more times than I'd heard it in the last 5 years put together!  I was shocked speechless!!!!!!!!  And I decided I did NOT want to ask her if there were any Jews living in the town where she grew up, I was way afraid of the answer!!!!!!!!

So, no idea what I'll do about that in the future... but living in the land of rednecks, I've learned that nothing you can do can change another person's prejudices...  so.... *shrug*  But it makes life really wierd tho because my roomate is black.  Tho none of my dad's family comes here (they live an hour or more away and do not now nor will they ever know where I live, for various reasons), it still just seems... wierd.  Like when I go back, I step back in time, and then when I go back to "reality" I feel like I get pulled in different directions.  *sigh*  Maybe I'll write a post about racism later...

OH and the 1st birthday party incident?  Seems that my dad threatened my mom, in front of my aunt, that if anything happened to me or I got hurt, he would kill her.  Sadly, this was so normal in their lives that when I asked mom about it earlier, she didn't remember anything eventful happening that day. Sometimes the years living with my dad seem really far away... like they didn't happen, like a very bad dream.  But when I hear things like that, it really makes me grateful for my mom, and the great risks she took each time she let me do things "normal girls" did... some of the time even lying to dad so he'd give permission for me... spending the night at a friends house, playing in the front yard alone (seems kidnappers love houses in the middle of ABSOLUTELY NOWHERE!!!!), staying in the basement at church during services (seems she thought we were supervised?  But no... we literally climbed out the windows and ran to play with the kids in the neighborhood!)  So mom is getting a really great card tomorrow! Which reminds me... I should be making that now! Adios!