What would you rather do, or go fishing?

I've been thinking about my maternal grandfather quite a bit the last couple of days.

Alexander Francis Luberecki was born in Shamokin, Pennsylvania in 1913. At 15, to get away from an abusive father, he took the birth certificate of a brother who had been stillborn 3 years before him and joined the US Army, at which time he became officially known as Frank Jacob Luberecki. (I remember visiting some of his family in Shamokin when I was about 5 or 6 year old. I knew his name as Frank Luberecki, I guess from mail that he'd get or whatever. And I knew that my grandmother and my father called him "Lu," short for Luberecki. So I was confused when his siblings would talk to "Al." I remember asking my mother who Al was. I doubt I sounded quite as exasperated as Jimmy Dugan [Tom Hanks] in "A League of Their Own" when he shouted, "WHO'S LOU?!?" But I think I felt that way.) After the Army, he married Rose Panarese. They had 3 children, the youngest of whom is my mother. He died in 1987, when I was 14, the first grandparent I lost.

Luberecki, as you may have noticed, is a Polish name. I believe my grandfather's generation was the first of his family to be born in the US. I read, always including (often only) the Letters to the Editor from several newspapers from the places I have lived. Yesterday, there was a letter to the Wilmington, DE News Journal decrying a recent editorial cartoon that the writer saw as degrading and demeaning to Polish people. The News Journal's website allows comments about the letters to be posted, which I sometimes do. Most of the replies to this letter were of the "lighten up" variety. One poster indicated that (s)he had not met a Polish person who did not love a good Polish joke. This is what caused me to think of my grandfather, and to reply to that post telling how I'm sure I heard more "Polock" jokes from him than from all other sources combined. To this day, any time I have occasion to use a flashlight, I think of it as the solar-powered one of Polish invention, and smile at a memory of my grandfather. He loved all kinds of jokes. The title of this post was one of his favorites.

Here's the thing, tho. Other than the short bio, and the jokes, I don't have a lot of knowledge or memory of my grandfather. I know from their stories that my siblings all do, pretty much commensurate with how much older than me they are. When I was born, my family lived next door to my grandparents. We moved to Delaware - about 50 miles away without a straight shot of Interstate highway until several years later - when I was about 3-1/2. We visited, they visited, but not all that often. And I don't know how it is in your family, but when I was a kid of single-digit age, you didn't get that much time with the adults during a family visit. About 4 years after we moved, they moved to Florida. We visited twice, they visited quite a few times, but of course it's not the same as being a young kid and having great and loving grandparents (which they were) right next door.

One thing that was a consistent theme in my upbringing is that, tho I am not separated in age from my siblings by a great deal (they are 2, 3 and 5 years older than me), time after time after time it seemed that all 3 of them had a very similar experience, which I did not share. Growing up, their circles of neighborhood friends seemed to overlap and intertwine quite a bit (till each of them got a good piece into the teen years - I personally don't think that fact and the increased mobility that comes with that age are coincidental), while mine was separate. Movies, music, TV shows - there are countless examples of ones that 2 or all 3 of them would consider "theirs," that I was either not much enthralled with, or not even familiar with.

Those are just a few examples. I don't know that I could ever fully explain the experience, or the feeling. I don't believe that it's anything that anyone intentionally did, but in some very fundamental ways, I've long felt that the life I lived growing up was separated from the others in my family. I can't help but wonder if the fact that I was so young when we moved away didn't play a part. When we were in Pennsylvania, not only did we live right next door to my grandparents, but my mother's sister - and 2 cousins - lived in the same neighborhood, and my mother's brother - and 2 more cousins, including the only one who was very close in age to me - were just a few minutes away. When we lived there, the families did things together. Often. But given my age compared with theirs, I was either not yet born or not involved (I can't tell you how many pictures my mother has with my siblings out and about - doing, seeing, having fun - things I never did and places I never was), or I there but so young that I have no memory. After we moved, other than visiting extended family, there was very little my family did as a family. I've often wondered what it would have been like if my family hadn't moved. Obviously I'll never know, but I suspect that I would have felt more included, would have been more included, as I would have been involved in more things that were done as a family - the big group.

Including, as I've been reminded recently, having more time with, and better memory of, our grandparents.

Nobody's fault. Not fair or unfair. Just life.