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IN THIS (ISSUE) News from your class agent News From Your Class Agent What’s New With You? MFGP Outpatient Programs Keeping Time Homecoming 2011 Family of the Year More News From Your Agent Football Game Coupon Fall Alumni Events From the Desk of Lisa Tilma
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Dear fellow MFT’s,
For the last few months, I have been going through my parents’ things in my garage. I packed up all their belongings when my mother died in 2003 and moved them to my place. Well, I got this idea that I needed to have a garage/estate sale in order to reduce the accumulation in the garage. That means over the summer I’ve been looking through boxes to determine what to keep, what to throw away and what to sell. One of the most interesting things I have found has been the correspondence between aunts and uncles on my mom’s side. The letters begin with Bible verses and then the verse is applied to events in their lives. I realized that the verses were there in order to cover how mad they were at each other. It was all very subtle but it could cut deep.
Lu Duerksen, M’01 MFGP Class Agent luandu@sbcglobal.net
Read about Homecoming 2011 inside!
Correspondences on my dad’s side had a few surprises in them as well. I had an uncle who lived in Washington, D.C., who wrote me letters dated about the time when I was five years old. There are many letters from him to my entire family and we loved to visit him because we went to the Mall, the White House, zoo and the Capital. Security was not very tight during those days, so we were
able to go into prominent senators’ offices, sit down at their desks and take pictures. I also got to hear Vice President Nixon report to the House about his trip to Russia. I also found a letter I wrote my parents when I was about 13 years old. It described going to Colorado with my uncle and aunt and my aunt’s parents. They spoke Low German, which I understand and can speak, and I observed that this would probably be the one and only Low German trip to Colorado I would ever experience. (I had wanted to go along with the church bus kids BUT my parents said “it would do me good...”) I laughed out loud when I read the letter. Now, how does this all fit into marriage and family therapy? Although it has been difficult at times to read the letters, I have found the experience enlightening. I learned about my mom and dad’s relationship, about my dad going to a lawyer and trying to get a man from stalking him, and my dad resigning from a community board due to continued criticism.
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