Wednesday, January 02, 2019

random events that ripple across time

When my wife and her brother were somewhere in adolescence, they stumbled on a document that made them realize that BOTH their father and mother had had prior marriages.  This was a complete surprise to them.

We know a little about my father-in-law's first wife.  She was a holocaust survivor named Maely - they divorced in the mid-1940's, without children.

She subsequently married and divorced former child-actor Freddie Bartholomew, and moved at one point to Harlem, where she became good friends with Billie Holiday.

She ended up married to a writer named William Dufty, with whom she had (and raised) a son. Based on his wife's first-hand knowledge, William Dufty got interested in Billie Holiday and subsequently wrote the book "Lady Sings The Blues".

Implications of all this, if my father-in-law had had a happy first marriage:

* I would not be living in this house, for the past 27 years
* our two cats and the dog would not be sleeping upstairs
* my two boys would not exist
* Diana Ross's film career would have been different

There's probably more.