Finding Dobby

Some of you, I'll bet, are from families as mixed up as mine.

My mother's family has outdoor reunions in August, a month when France shuts down. My mother's family is not French.

My father's family, as far as I know, has never had annual reunions. While this may seem cold, I take comfort knowing Sullivans don't swat flies eating potato salad.

The sad fact is that, while I am close to my mother's side of the family, I barely know anyone on my father's side. That's what a 1940s divorce does for family relations.

A few years before my mother died, after she was widowed by the death of my stepfather, she picked up the phone one day and called my aunt who had married my father's brother. Her husband, my uncle, had died sometime earlier. And thus started, after more than 50 years of no contact, a telephonic relationship that comforted both of them. My mother said it helped her survive. A few days ago, my aunt said nearly the same thing.

The last time I had seen my aunt was at my mother's funeral and burial on a hilltop in the Ozarks over yonder with a view of Brushy Creek where my mother grew up. Sitting next to my wife, my aunt leaned over and pleaded: "Don't forget me." My wife vowed that would not happen.

But around Christmastime last year the cheerful cards my wife was sending to Aunt Dobby started coming back.

Here's the problem: Relations with my Sullivan cousins, Dobby's daughters, have been nil all these years.

Then, a couple of weeks ago my father's daughter from his second marriage called to tell me she not only had found Dobby, in a nursing home, but also had visited her and found her doing quite well.

The following weekend we drove to the nursing home. "There she is," said one of the nursing home's employees, "coming down the hall."

Yes, there she was, spry and mobile (with a walker) with her thick-lensed glasses sliding down her nose. We had been warned that her memory sometimes failed, but she immediately recognized us and whooped and hollered. We whooped and hollered too. That's a lot for Sullivans.

Dobby, a native of Advance, is a devout Christian who informed us she had learned to cuss since moving to the nursing home. Dobby said she saw her doctor in the hallway, and he told her, "We're working on making you better." And she said, "Work harder, dammit."

We won't forget you, Dobby.

Who could?

jsullivan@semissourian.com<I>