newspaper cuttings & eccentricity

one of my enduring memories of my grandfather, john william jurd, was of him walking down the pathway to our back door and slipping into the kitchen with a newspaper cutting for my dad to read. such bizarre behaviour saw me simultaneously dying of embarassment, even though there was nobody there to see, and wondering why on earth he would do such a thing.

you see, born in 1912 and the son of a preacher without a whole lot of money, grandpa was relatively uneducated so he took it upon himself to read widely. knowing that dad had less opportunity to read at that time it was a small act of service on his part to supply dad with articles of interest that he might have missed otherwise.

as i grew into an adult and most particularly a mother of young children i started to appreciate it when dad did the same thing for me. i still thought it was pretty eccentric, though.

as the internet rose in popularity dad would sometimes send me a link rather than bring me a cutting but the intent was the same.

then i met a man whose mother would send him links or forward emails and i started to think maybe there were other eccentric families around. (looking back it's all pretty obvious, any internet news and lots of other pages are accompanied by "send this to a friend" buttons)

just this saturday the process came full circle as i read an article about a reunion of holocaust survivors, originally russian jews, and considered sending the cutting to leah.

i had to laugh.