Finding Family
By Kevin Gray
I know what critics say about social networks like Facebook: spending time on a keyboard is instant isolation, your information goes public, cyber bullying and crime’s a constant concern, personality brain disorders, and all that lowered face-to-face communication. But just like anything else, the key is moderation.
Negatives aside, social networking comes with a lot of positive attributes like bringing people together. Yes, I said bringing together.
I enjoy getting to see how hundreds and hundreds of former students are getting on with their lives. When many of those young people walked across the stage at graduation, I felt like my own kids were leaving me. I was the weird teacher, the one who hung around after graduation to offer my congratulations and goodbyes.
Admittedly, social networking works well for marketing purposes. I have two books of my own and one of poems written by my father that I had published posthumously.
But what has been so exciting – thanks to Facebook – of late has been meeting family I knew about but had never met or met briefly years, I mean, years ago.
Cousin Marilyn on my mother’s side and from California (she’s in both my books) just came on board. She has always been more the sister I never had than cousin. This is really something because, when I was growing up on the East Coast, she was in a little town called Morro Bay overlooking the Pacific. Marilyn likes to talk on the phone; I like to communicate by letter/email, thus our keeping up has been extremely sporadic through the years. Facebook changes that. Short chats are now available.
Even better has been getting to know those cousins I have never really known. Ever since my father, his three brothers, and one sister passed on, I have been suggesting in Christmas cards to distant first cousins that we all start talking family reunion. I have first cousins in St. Charles, Ill.; Houston, Texas; Monroe, Wis.; and in Florida, California and Pennsylvania.
Most recently, my St. Charles cousin, Donna, popped up on Facebook. I friended her immediately and began noting young faces with the name Gray in their profiles, as well as a young man I thought was the son of my St. Charles cousin. When I finally had time to ask Donna, she filled me in and my suspicions had been correct.
Donna’s son did Iraq twice, with a sniper team, was in Afghanistan, and now is going to a Harley Davidson motorcycle school in Arizona. His Gray family resemblance is uncanny. The daughter of another St. Charles cousin was also on Donna’s Facebook site. I do remember meeting this young woman when she was about three.
But it has been cousin Ann (second cousin) in North Carolina that I have been chatting with the most often. As far as I’ve always been concerned, her dad has been my long lost cousin. The only time I met Bob Gray was when I was 10. He and his father, my uncle Don, came to Virginia. I have black and white photos of a teenaged Bob and his dad at Mt. Vernon and in front of the Lincoln Monument. Bob was taking the photos that day, while my father shot photos of Bob taking photos.
Since that day, Bob did Vietnam for three tours (from what I have heard) and found work in Pennsylvania. It was his wife, Sandy, who came up first on Facebook and I friended her and then their daughter Ann.
It was on Ann’s Facebook site that I saw cousin Bob for the first time since 1962. Ann has a college (University of North Carolina) aged daughter and one in high school. I have already been able to offer a few suggestions and put the college daughter in touch with someone knowledgeable about her field of study, marine biology.
The point is simple: I am in touch with people I figured had dropped off the face of the earth. And even better yet, my dream of a “cousins reunion” just might still be possible. Not everybody is on Facebook, but the chances of coordinating a get-together just jumped higher on the possibility scale.
All of this made possible by social networking.
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Posted by Kevin
on Sep 8 2010. Filed under Kevin Gray, Opinion.
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