A Letter from the Youngest Grandchild

Greetings from Sarah G, Uncle Mike and Aunt Eileen's youngest.

I'm living in Kansas City with my partner Sarah (it was a popular name in the early 1980s) in our newly purchased 100-year-old home. I work as a Community Organizer for a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender rights organization- it's my total dream job!

I have always considered being "the baby" a privilege and a blessing. I'm the youngest of the five Uncle Mike & Aunt Eileen kids and the youngest of the twenty-two Gillooly cousins. I imagine my feet never touched the ground as a baby or toddler, as there were always aunties and sisters and cousins to hold me at those fabled Gillooly weddings! I grew up watching the adventures and misadventures of everyone who came before me, which gave me the time and passed-down-wisdom to plot my own course in life (though I claim no lack of my own misadventures). As mothers, fathers, aunties, and uncles get a little older and pass a child or two (or four) up through life, they get a little less strict, and the hijinxs of "the baby" are sometimes treated with a bit more permissiveness. I have an entire giant tribe who have known me my entire life; how fortunate this makes me feel!

Perhaps the only down-side to being the baby is that, by the time my memories begin, the older among us are, in fact, older; and since my memories begin in the mid-1980s, I have missed out on the many of the joys and sorrows we Gilloolys have seen as a family. In particular, Grandpa Gillooly died many years before I was born. My memories of Grandma Gillooly are only of an old woman. Don't get me wrong; I cherish the memories I do have of her: her refusal to eat anything but pumpkin pie and coffee for breakfast when she came to stay with us, the time my father was called into the office of the nursing home when Grandma slapped another resident for trying to steal her dessert (she was a feisty old woman, wasn't she?), listening to Aunt Mary sing "How Great Thou Art" to her in her final days, and watching my own father rock his frail mother in his lap. In our household still, when someone asks, "Now what am I supposed to be doing?" it is met with deep belly laughs as we all remember Grandma's constant refrain when she got bored or forgetful. But again, these memories are of an old woman. I have few memories of The Old Homestead. I have no memories of Grandpa or memories of Grandma as a younger and healthier woman.

So, what I would like from this blog, dearest Gilloolys, are your memories of our Grandparents -- things that stick out in your mind about who they were and what they were like. Similarly, my memories of all of you (Aunties, Uncles and Cousins) are limited to when most everyone else was "all grown up." I'd like to hear the stories of the Grand Adventures of Gilloolys young and old.

Much love, Sarah G. (aka Baby Bones)