Rebekah

Introduction

Rebekah with Joel (Samantha's dad / Livia's husband) in the renovated kitchen at Mubbie's house

It has belatedly occurred to me that this site has long neglected one of the key members of our extended family – Rebekah Wade, Livia's mom, affectionately referred to as my "mother-out-law"; also known as RBW and R_x.

A Brief History

When Livia and I initially decided to move to Athens to help Livia's ailing grandmother (Rebekah's mother), Mubbie, in the fall of 1991 it was Rebekah who offered to help out with our moving bills. For reasons best explained elsewhere* (read my lips: no new jobs), I was very leery of taking on the expense of moving without having a job already secured. Rebekah offered to help with the expense, and I was ultimately convinced to go through with it. Once we got there, Rebekah helped pay off the moving truck ($200, I think) but sadly could not offer any further assistance. Our credit-card debt immediately began to escalate.

In spite of this somewhat rocky beginning, Rebekah always did her best to offer helpful advice to Livia, especially in cases where R felt I might need a gentle nudge in a better direction. She generally declined to speak to me directly about these matters, fearing (perhaps rightly) that I might be able to rationally justify my actions and thus evade her corrective tendencies – which were (of course) only intended for the best.

While I no longer get to see Rebekah when she visits Athens for holidays (since I don't live there anymore), I do get to see her a few times a year when Anna is in town. Our interactions are almost always very pleasant, and leave me with no reason to think that there is any hard feeling left over from the friction we both endured while I was living in Athens.

Letters

A brief chronicle of our correspondence; this doesn't fairly represent her point-of-view, I'm sure, as I haven't yet located any of the replies she may have sent, not to mention the original letters to which I was responding in some cases. I'll post them as soon as I can find them.

• 1993-10-28 Woozle writes to Rebekah
• 1994-01-01 Woozle writes to Rebekah
• 1994-01-11 Woozle writes to Rebekah
• 1994-09-06 Woozle writes Rebekah
• 1994-09-16 Woozle writes Rebekah
• 1997-01-27 Woozle writes to Rebekah

Footnote

*My contract at Duke had just concluded and I was reeling under the weight of unplanned expenses from a job-related trip shortly before that, so I was extremely reluctant to leave Durham, where I had job contacts and where there was a lot of computer activity – especially right in the middle of a huge recession. It turned out after we moved there that The University of Georgia, which would have been my most likely prospect for quick employment, had instituted a hiring-freeze... so there simply were no new jobs for programmers.