Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.
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THIS WEEK WITH MARGARET by MARGARET DICKSON We all have them. Not bad hair days, though we all have them as well. I am talking embarrassing relatives. I had a great laugh with a friend recently about the relatives we cannot believe we received in life's great familial lottery, and a few days later I chanced upon a syndicated column recounting embarrassing Presidential relatives. Remember Billy Carter, Jimmy's bro who signed on to work for Libya and pitched for — and apparently consumed a good deal of — Billy Beer? Wonder what a six-pack of that would be worth today? Lyndon Johnson had a brother who enjoyed a snort as much as Billy did, and Richard Nixon had one called out for questionable fi nancial dealings. John Kennedy continues to embarrass himself posthumously with bimbo eruptions that just keep coming, but in real time his wife, Jacqueline, had an aunt and a cousin so notorious for hoarding cats in a tumbling down mansion that a movie, which became a cult classic, detailed their travails. Who could ever forget Patti Davis, Ronald Reagan's daughter who apparently resented her parents' political lives so much that she posed nude in a girlie magazine. Mercifully, she eventually matured out of that stage. More recent Presidents have endured Roger Clinton whose proclivity for various substances landed him in the news, and Neil Bush who was overly fond of S&Ls. A cousin of President Obama got a highly publicized DWI ticket outside Boston with the President nowhere in sight. And now comes a cousin Mitt Romney has never met — Romney has many cousins because Mormons tend to have large families — who is speaking ill of the family faith and thereby calling attention to it. We all have them, the oddballs, the free-thinkers, the daffy ones, the certifi ables and occasionally, the criminal. While some do, in fact, embarrass us, others are genuinely loved, or at least thought of fondly, for their eccentricities. Here are a few of ours. I have a true soft spot in my heart for the cousin who almost always says what she is thinking, no matter what the current circumstances. One of my favorite stories about her is the day she was riding in a hearse with her husband who has just lost his only sister and the sister's two young adult children. The atmosphere was said to be quiet and thoughtful and certainly sad, when the cousin suddenly leaned forward to address the owner of the funeral home who was behind the wheel of the big black car and who had been her childhood friend and classmate. Blurted the cousin, "Fred, I know the funeral home business is lucrative, but how THIS WEEK WITH MARGARET You Never Know When One Will Pop Up Billy Carter do you stand it?" Another, a feisty great aunt long gone to her reward, married an Episcopal priest. After his retirement in a small eastern North Carolina town, he worked part-time for several mission churches, a job that was demanding only on religious holidays when each small church wanted him to conduct services. At the end of one such long day, he asked his wife to join him for the fi nal vespers service of the day to which she replied, "No, Jack. I am not going. I have been to church so many times today, I have not even had time to sin!" Years ago, a friend told me he had seen the oddest sight at a crossroads in our state's rural east. He recounted a tale of a man with a microphone atop a fl atbed truck, ranting and raving to passing vehicles about the giant utility company that had condemned some of his farm property for power lines. The truck on which he paced was decorated with homemade banners accusing the utility of all sorts of unsavory and predatory acts, giant amps for his lengthy harangues and loud music when he got too tired to shout, and was lit by strings of colored holiday lights. Yep, I thought, that is one of our down east kinfolks who also dropped thousands of anti-utility leafl ets all over that part of our state as he fl ew his crop dusting prop plane over counties served by the hated company. The utility dispatched its fi nest lawyers to put a stop to this riveting show, but my cousin got the last laugh by meeting his maker before they could get him into court. When the Precious Jewels were teenagers, I used to tell them that one of my jobs as a mother was to embarrass them as often as possible, which is incredibly easy to do to children that age. Twenty-somethings are less sensitive, more tolerant and maybe even amused by the foibles of their parents and other goofy relatives. It still gives me some satisfaction, though, to remind them of that old standby, "The apple does not fall far from the tree." MARGARET DICKSON, Contributing Writer, Up & Coming Weekly, COM- MENTS? Editor@upandcomingweekly.com. VISIT US AT: www.upandcomingweekly.com 6 UCW FEBRUARY 15-21, 2012 WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM