Sense of community feels like a warm blanket

In most families, you’ll find someone much like me.

I’m a story person in my generation who the kids might call to fill-in-the-blanks for a family history project at school, a budding genealogist, history buff or scrapbooker — and keeper of the family Bible or what not.

I can tell you where Grandma was born and her parents and grandparents as well. Do you want to know what date Grandpa sailed from his immigrant homeland and on what ship? I do know that. During 1956, where and what was everybody in Mom’s family doing during the month of June? I might know this as well.

So I can tell you with considerable authority that the last person in both maternal and paternal lines to get a divorce from their spouse was just a few years short of 60. Before him, the last relative to divorce was in Japan in the early 1900s.

Until now, family history has been mostly made by others, a pleasure to tell because I’ve been merely an observer. In mid-October, events came together as to bump up my role to the next level. It now appears I will be the one to increase the number of family members in this category by at least one.

This role in the spotlight is one which surprisingly I have been unprepared, despite the statistical realities of growing up as a fully participating member of the Baby Boom generation.

After punching the marital clock with my daily companion of 31 years since we met five years before our modest wedding at the student chapel on the campus of Seattle Pacific University in 1977, I had long ago dropped any real guard about preparing for the possibility of a hasty retreat in the middle of the night.

This unexpected event having dropped into my lap brings with it the forgotten message that life in its fullness can always be counted to bring a few interesting surprises. And while it may not be as unusual or headline grabbing as, say, the bouncing of gas prices and imploding of the real estate market and tumbling of some of those formerly untouchable Wall Street icons, it must be and will be dealt with in the same firm and realistic manner.

My speedy transport to the universe of those persons embarked on the dismantling of their relationships and accompanying lives that were constructed around them has already had — like the time I was pregnant with our now twenty-something son — an unexpected payoff.

Back in those pre-diaper and baby gate days, I was an employee of an old, well-known, respected and longtime downtown business and social club responsible for putting together a monthly bulletin of membership events.

It was the kind of position whose duties could be executed in less public rooms of the club. So during the previous eight years of my employment, I had more limited contact with members than many of my colleagues on staff.

I was quite used to coming and going to and from my office without notice, so you can imagine my surprise when during the ninth year on the job almost everyone I happened to see took notice of my increasingly pregnant self as if I were a celebrity!

While it is no surprise to most that the topic of babies brings out a crowd, as the eldest daughter in a small family of rather quiet and introverted individuals, I had been blissfully personally ignorant of the transformation one could make by choosing to bring a newborn infant into the world.

For nine months I was a star! The widespread support and gentle adulation folks in the community extend to the ranks of budding mothers-to-be enveloped me like a warm blanket. I was confident that I belonged to humanity.

During the last divorce in my extended family, my late very correct Japanese-American uncle recalled that the prospect of facing his folks and other members with the news of “his failure” drove him into depression.

I myself did not discover the existence of this aborted marriage until I was a full-grown woman. The gentleman’s soon-to-be adult daughter had no inkling of this chapter of his history until she read of it in a family history I published when my son was about 10.

As the news of my current troubles percolates mostly through the strainer of close family and friends, ripples of community rather surprisingly appear to have been activated.

And so these rapidly approaching end-of-year festivities oddly will not be as much of a desperate and dismal time as I might have imagined — had I taken time in the past to do so.

Due to the presence and affirmation of these significant others, my spouse’s exit via the left side of the stage may well prove once again to be an invitation to pause and absorb a more fuller and deeper appreciation of the social linkages that we call community.

Federal Way Mirror Culture Connections Mizu Sugimura can be reached at mizu.s@comcast.net.

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