Remembering Champ

This is my Champ at the house I grew up in, in Lexington, Massachusetts.  We had Christmas there one year. I don't really know what he's doing in this picture, but something about it and the way he looks reminds me of my Uncle Tommy.

I like this picture of Champ.  He usually had a cigarette going.  And a beer.

This is my gram and Champ. They were divorced at the time of this picture.  Seems like they were usually divorced, but also living together most of the time.  It was complicated.  Champ was complicated.  And not always as nice to my gram as he could have been.  But I won't get into that or people in my family will get upset.  Suffice it to say, they loved each other very much. 

But this blog isn't going to be about my Champ.  It's going to be about me and the other children, grandchildren and great grandchildren he sired and all the other people in my family.  It seems to me that a lot of our strengths and weaknesses, both as individuals and collectively, can be traced back to Champ.  And he was a genealogist! How about that?!

It's kind of like the toast my dad made at a family wedding many years ago (not the toast he made at my mom's wedding where he said, "take my wife...please", though that was clever, too).  He compared our family to the Holy Roman Empire and remarked that someone once said the HRE was neither Holy nor Roman nor an Empire.  Dad observed that in the Stoddard family, many folks aren't actually Stoddards and we're certainly not holy or an empire, but, "here we are."  The toast may have only been funny because it was back in the day and most of the people at the wedding were stoned (not me, I was a little kid).  But the truth about this group of people we call family is that only some of us are connected by blood.  We're a pretty eclectic conglomeration of folks connected mostly by something else.  Something hard to name, but very beautiful.  

This is me making a stupid face.