Harrison - Robison Family Tree

1. Rachel Irene
2. Charlie Reuben

1. Charlie Reuben
2. Russell Bolden
3. Bennie William
4. Queenie Myrlene
5. Lewis Sanders

1. Lewis Sanders
2. Queenie Myrlene
3. Bennie William
4. Charlie Reuben
5. Calvin Coolidge
6. Russell Bolden

Charlie would have been 99 in December. He'd been in a nursing home for over a decade with Altzheimers. He's the one the in my family story "If You Like It Too Much. He and my aunt Rachel, who died before Russ was born--she would have been so excited!--were the ones in the McCormick family who were closest to us. He used to give me 50 cent pieces when I was a child just to make me happy. He was a bee keeper like his father and PaPa. He worked at the foundry in Lynchburg until retirement. He and Rachael lost, I think, three babies until one lived, Joyce who taught Heather piano. Their graves are at old Concord Church where Papa, Charlie, and a lot of McCormicks are buried. Joe Vaughan was Charlie's only grandchild.
Maurine

If You Like It Too Much

Uncle Charlie seemed transfixed, transported to another world, other times and places. Uncle Charlie, my father's oldest brother, was intently studying the family genogram covering most of his dinning room table. It was an assignment for a graduate course I was taking in family counselling. The genogram, a psychological family tree, was drawn on the back side of a large roll of Christmas wrapping paper--the largest thing I could find that could be quickly rolled up and carried easily from place to place. It mapped out psychological history of generations in our family as far back and as broadly as I could find information.

He silently studied the notations denoting significant things about each person on the tree, the patterns that jumped out of the many circles, squares, symbols, and connecting lines. Memories came trickling back. I listened as he told story after story. I asked the key questions I had been instructed to ask like, "Who was most like your father?" and "Who was most like your mother?" questions a family therapists might use when using a genogram to reveal patterns of behavior across generations.

One thing that was painfully obvious about of family with Scotch-Irish and Native American ancestry was multi-generational problems with alcohol--a subject rarely, if ever, talked about in the family.

This man of few words and private thoughts, already in his seventies, opened up with a startling insight he had decades earlier: "You know, when I was a young man I very soon learned that I liked drink too much. I decided I should leave it alone and have been a teetotaler ever since." It was not spoken between us but the truth he intuited so early was clear there on the genogram before us--too much pain and difficulty across generations for others in the family who "liked it too much" but didn't have the insight and resolution to "leave it alone" before it cemented its destructive grip of addiction.

If you "like it too much," whatever it is, it has the potential to irrevocably change your brain to insatiable craving and addiction you will have to battle the rest of your life. It is a power to be respected. If you "like it too much" and if you're smart, like Uncle Charlie, you'll leave it alone without apology or regret.

Maurine Harrison