Down the Rabbit Hole

 One advantage of Zach’s maturity (not to mention that there are no longer any legal repercussions!) is that we can talk about those uncomfortable subjects of family history in full detail…

Somehow the subject of his namesake (paternal grandfather Lee Jaffe) came up a few weeks ago, with Zach relating some nonsense his father had told him about them having some sort of “deathbed reconciliation” - now, granted, Michael & I were freshly divorced when Lee passed away in Y2K, so I don't know what sort of deathbed conversation they might have had, but I DO know while we were married they were not “bitterly estranged”… (File under strange coincidences but Michael went through a hell-raising stage when he was a teenager and for whatever reason Lee & Edwina decided to ship him off to his bio-dad in Colorado, whom he barely knew, to finish out his high school years - there’s the nugget of that estrangement story! And the probable root cause of why Michael decided to start Custody Battle the 3rd with me when Zach was 16 and likewise going through his own experimentation phase)

Anyway, since I have limited time to talk to Z these days with his busy busy life, I decided to write it all out - he has not come back with any more questions (yet):

Mom’s View of History

(You may not want to read or know any of this, but I guarantee my memory of family events is more accurate than your father’s)

Grandma Edwina was a teen bride (it was probably a shotgun wedding) to (Bio-grandpa) Larry Immel, who got shipped out to Vietnam, where he met/fell in love with Grandma Phu. He mailed a Dear Jane letter to Edwina, divorced her so he could remarry Phu & bring her & her 2 kids (Lisa & Vincent) back to the US. They later had one child of their own, Lynn (‘71, I believe)

Meanwhile, Grandma Edwina migrated to Florida (how or why I know not?), where she met Grandpa Lee who was a widower. Apparently they had a whirlwind romance, were married & Lee legally adopted your dad & Aunt Linda. They also had one child of their own (Aunt Reva) in ‘69 or ‘70. 

I’m not quite sure when Edwina & Lee’s marriage dissolved but your dad experimented with marijuana (along with other hell-raising activities) in his early teens and got himself shipped off to Larry & Phu’s household in CO for his high school years (‘72 - ‘76). When Michael graduated high school, he had no place to go and wound up in Fort Worth, living with great-grandma Jimmie for a while until he got steady employment at RadioShack and could afford his own apartment. He wound up getting hired on with Dallas County, working maintenance in Las Colinas when it was just beginning to be developed. That’s where he learned to operate & repair heavy equipment.

Michael was taking some night courses at TCCC and UT Arlington,   where he met Dave Roberts, who was an amateur herpetologist. I don’t know exactly when he started collecting snakes (for all I know it started “in the wilds” of Las Colinas as they cleared that land & built the canal system), but soon he joined the North Texas Herpetological Society, actively swapping & trading.

Dave & I became friends at UT Arlington when we took Ornithology & Natural History courses together; when he found out I liked herps, he invited me to NTHS meetings. I went & joined up “as a family” with Granddad - I thought he might go to some of their meetings with me, a fun father/daughter activity!

Michael saw me at the meetings but was scared off when he looked up “George & Val Lewis” - he thought I was married! We wrangled over Rafael, my rescued boa constrictor but I won since I had no other snakes while he had a closetfull! Somewhere during that time he mentioned me to Dave & Dave told him no, I wasn’t married - George was my dad! Our first date was for me to be his “plus-one” at Steve Hammack’s wedding in December of ‘84.

We were married by May of ‘85 - I had my reservations, really wanted to cohabitate but Amamma & Granddad weren’t having it; they would’ve withdrawn my college funding.

Michael proposed in February, and as we started planning our wedding, I know he told Lee in short order. Lee wasn’t able to fly out for our wedding (or maybe he thought it would be awkward since Edwina & Eddie Kaminsky, her 3rd husband, lived in Ft Worth at that time?) but he bought us a new Honda Accord as our wedding gift. That was a great car!

Lee was extremely generous with us over the years: the car, the horse trailer, downpayments on other trucks, our big tractor, etc etc! We visited him in FL usually once or twice a year, where Michael tried to pay him back by doing all sorts of home-maintenance chores. By that time, Edwina & Eddie had moved back to Davie so it was never much “vacationing” - they had their “To Do” list too while I was usually the errand girl. If we were lucky we’d schedule one day at the beach, and one banner year your dad & I took a few days off & trekked up to Epcot since Aunt Linda had family passes.

We would usually have at least one big family dinner hosted by Lee, since he had the biggest house by the time: we had your father & I, Aunt Linda & Donny with their growing brood, Eddie & Edwina & Aunt Reva when she could coordinate her visits…

So I don’t know what kind of alternate reality your father has constructed, but that’s the way I remember things. Michael & Lee were certainly not the closest, but it was a long way from hatred & bitter estrangement.