Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

I just spent an hour talking to my cousin who lives in the midwest. He's so fun, and we talk a mile a minute. He and his wife were my only blood relatives at my younger two kids' weddings. My brother used to stay with him and his family when we went back to visit, and I stayed with my girl cousin nearby. We reconnected when he began traveling here for conferences. He's a compound pharmacist and owns three pharmacies back there. He wife and kids are great and we go to restaurants together when he's here, but of course the pandemic put the kabosh on that this last year. We like to talk movies and music and travels and food. He was telling me today of a documentary film festival there that he knows I'd love to see. His mother is 93, and he drives down to her town each Friday night, takes her out to dinner and spends the night. She's a feisty gal, always was, and he caught her contributing to Trump recently and displaying a tote bag she'd been given. To say their politics don't agree is an understatement. When we were talking we found we'd both been reading the same books: Abram X Kendi, Isabel Wilkerson, and Obama's autobiography. We'd both just been thinking of Harry Truman as well; how ahead of his time he was about race in the military and other issues. I can talk to him about my brother, whom he adored, and remember the good times and how full of joi de vivre he was. I appreciate this person who lived my history with me. I told him something he didn't know about his dad as well. A story my aunt told me about how he stayed in a hotel room in another town to work in a factory when they were young. My mother was 15 and my aunt 17 so he must have been really young. He was my mother's favorite sibling.