Rowlee's 3Rs

 International Student Identity Card: Blog # 4 (revised) and # 5 (the conclusion or "the rest of the story").

     All but one or perhaps two of my most valuable possessions are pictures. Pictures of family and friends, with ‘family’ leading the words ‘and’ and ‘friends,’ but not because of any priority or principle I might possess.  No, my only reason is simple. Ninety-nine percent of all my precious pics happen to be pictures of my family. Notice my use of the verb happen. I do not, in any way, mean that my alliance with my family is greater than the one with my friends; no. It is simply because my family took pictures during most special occasions while my friends, for various reasons, didn’t. Fact is, I’m 99% sure none of my junior-high and high school buddies have any pictures with me in them. Why? Because, I don’t recall one moment in my teen years when I posed for a picture with a friend for any venue other than our high school yearbook, and then almost always because of membership in the same club, participation on a sports team, or some other school-oriented activity.

     The second verbal preference behind the order of ‘family and friends’ is that I’ve always called any image of family and friends as a ‘picture’ versus a ‘photograph.’

     Why has Picture forever been my go-to term of choice? Because, it is not only simpler to learn-  by a country mile - than its lengthier sibling, photograph. See, it was years after I first pronounced ‘pic’ and ‘chur’ that I grew the teeth and developed the tongue dexterity and technique to properly place my tongue to pronounce the 3-syllable mouthful known as ‘photograph.’ So, of all the pictures - and not a single image other than a conventional photo embossed on legitimate photographic paper – of all the pics I possess today at my advanced age, ninety-nine percent or more are of family. And, more than half of those family pics are black & white. The earliest in my ‘collection’ are from before my father’s birth year of 1926; and every one is of Dad’s parents’ families - his adoptive patriarch’s Rowlee clan and adoptive mother’s Smith family. But, the fact that neither the Rowlees nor the Smiths were our ‘blood relatives’ never mattered to my two sisters nor myself and does not today.

     However, the head of the Rowlees had quite a change of mind after Grandpa died in a car accident with Grandma the lone survivor. Clara Smith Rowlee, through her attorney, decided to write my sisters and me out of her will for what reasons, we had not a clue. However, it became apparent to the three of us that “Gram,” as she directed us to call her, believed somehow that her adoptive son Robert’s children were not quite…. her grandchildren, after all. So, after Grandpa perished in a car accident probably caused by the backseat driving of “Gram,” Clara Rowlee directed her lawyer to send each of my sisters and me a document with which we were supposed to release ourselves from Grandma’s last will & testament so that “Justice will be done.”

     My Dear Bloggees: Let me ask you this: Why on earth would our grandmother insist that after her son and husband had died see fit to have three of her grand kids not only written out of her will and testament, but request through a total stranger / her well-paid lawyer - that each of us signs a document releasing us from our family so that “justice will be done”? Please explain how any of the details in this last sentence in the form of a question can be explained logically? They can’t. I know, I’ve tried many a time, including asking Gram.  

So, you ask - with possible annoyance rising in your voice: “How does any of this information have anything at all to do with blogging about your international student travel ID?”

Good question. Here goes “THE REST OF THE STORY,” as the late radio commentator on life Paul Harvey used to proclaim in his gruff, inimitable style:  

     Let me first take a proverbial big breath to settle my mind and attempt to keep my blood pressure from rising up like an Apollo spacecraft from Camp Canaveral / Kennedy. (Here I take a real breath.)

Okay, my peeps, so a little over two months after I posed for the I.D. card you see above with lengthy locks and quirky mustache, my roommate from college and I returned to Paris to check our mail at the American Express offices somewhere downtown in the City of Lights. To my surprise, there was not one, but TWO pieces of mail from across the Atlantic Ocean awaiting my skinny, road-weary fingers to open. The first was a letter from my elder sister introducing the second piece of mail by explaining Grandpa’s death in the car accident in which Grandma sustained two broken wrists (no doubt trying to brace herself from the impact of the oncoming vehicle), whose driver’s fate I never learned. Diann then informed me that she and our little sister had neither the desire nor the need to sign the document releasing us from receiving anything from “Gram’s” future will.

     At this juncture, dear readers, you may want to take a break, perhaps by refreshing your thirsty mouth with a cool beverage, and taking one more glance at my ID card. The guy (me, of course, but I feel led to suddenly switch to the third person), the young man you see in the photograph (it’s too official of a photo to be called the more familiar picture). Okay, so when you see this image of a twenty-two-year-old man who could’ve been the poster boy for Hippies Who Help or Green Peace for Pete’s sake, you don’t see a pragmatist with a modicum of common sense, but a steely-eyed idealist, right? Well, if you answered in the affirmative, I have some advice for you: Don’t judge a book by its cover. Or, better yet, don’t judge a dude’s judgment just because he clearly looks… like a dude… who has... no judgment.

     As you might surmise, I went right along with my sisters to boycott the whole process and refuse to sign away whatever estate we had rights to. But, you would’ve been as right as I’m really a Rowlee. No, I signed the document, licked the self-addressed, stamped envelope after depositing the “So Justice will be Done” doc and handed it back to the counter person with excellent English skills.

And my sisters? They eventually “caved in” after their spineless brother descended into his own sinkhole of an abyss. But you know what I told them later, after I’d returned to the States three weeks hence, that might’ve been the tipping point in persuading them to spelunk (cave)?

I paraphrased the late, great comic Groucho Marx's remark: “I don’t want to be a member of any club that doesn’t want me.” You notice I employed the term club instead of family. You must know why by now, but I’ll tell you anyway, because it draws this two-part blog-fest about my silly hippie ID card picture to a humane close.

So, now you know quite a bit more about me (or at least the long-haired version) than before you went “blog-lunking” with Yours Truly.

Time won’t allow for me to tell you the actual “rest of the story” of what transpired after I visited my grandma two more times before she passed quickly and peacefully in her nineties. No, I will defer the next couple chapters of this wacky “family” saga to my next couple of bloggies. Until then, think of all your photographs (official ones) and pictures (friends & family). Until next time, PR