Elderly Relatives

[poliphilo]

I remember, as a child, being taken to visit elderly aunts and uncles. I had only the vaguest idea who any of them were or why they needed to be appeased. Some were bona fide relatives and some weren't- and generally speaking the ones who weren't were nicer. My mother's elderly relatives were peculiarly grand and- from a child eye's view- peculiarly distant and frosty. I seem to remember being schooled ahead of a visit to Great Aunt Margaret- who was enormously rich (by our standards)- in the kind of late-Victorian manners that would be expected of me.

And now I'm the elderly uncle who gets visited...

Comments

[basefinder]

I remember those type of visits! On our summer vacations to Massachusetts, our carefree shorts-and-tee-shirts rambles would be interrupted by a day of putting on "good clothes" and visiting great grandparents, great aunts and uncles, or even older friends of the family. For us kids it was usually just a couple hours of fidgeting while my parents had coffee with the great relative and chatted.

Of course, if I could go back in time I'd be taking notes and photos at those visitations. But when you're a youngster....

[poliphilo]

Elderly relatives are weird. They mostly just sit there and drink coffee and talk about gardening and the servant problem and why would any human being want to do that?