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Last month,
we invited you to take part in a creative project:
write a paragraph about a family member, from
a
generation that preceded you. I’d like to
share with you what people wrote (see below).
I
hope this inspires you to write your own (for more
details, see last month’s article).
Gordon Bain:
Born of the land, and driven by passion to dominate
and acquire, my grandfather was every inch a Scotsman.
He died at 85 from gangrene after driving a manure
fork through his foot while cleaning stables on
his farm. He refused to go to a doctor, choosing
instead, to treat himself with concoctions from
the old country in which he believed. During the
time I knew him as a child, I never saw him smile.
The picture that I hold in my mind of this powerful,
domineering man fades into the reality of my father.
He was of a much smaller build, favoring his caring
and gentle mother, but his approach to life mirrored
the ways of his father. In my mind I see him, small
of stature, wide shouldered, stubborn to a fault,
and strong, caught by a two directional pull as
real as the team horse pulls he loved to participate
in as a boy. My dad was driven by an instinctive
need to be his father while the genes of his mother
stirred feelings that defied the make of the man
he wanted to be. Therein was born an unpredictable
nature and the inconsistencies that shaped my life.
Dale Leffler:
She was one of thirteen, born in the middle of
the pack. She stove to get her fathers attention
by crawling upon his lap at the end of his long
day in the dental office adjacent to their home
on a prominent corner of Amboy Ave and Green Street
in the township of Woobridge NJ.
This striving, put her at odds with the rest of
needy yet self sufficient team of siblings. They
would grow up to follow in the fathers foot steps
to become dentists, doctors of oral surgery, directors
of dental laboratories engaged in making dentures
for other Doctors across the nation. She would marry
beneath her class to a merchant marine complete
with tattoos and a love of alcohol. When she was
sixteen she would give birth to a single female.
Being so young, she gave her only child to her older
sister to raise as she helped with the war effort
polishing optics for gun sites for the bombers that
would end the great world struggle against evil.
By the time the war was over, so was the marriage.
He was driving "nitro" in a sling from
NY to FLA for the big ditch in Central America while
she returned to become a dental assistant in her
fathers practice. At the age twenty, the pretty
4' 9" little girl, whose only goal was to become
a stewardess but thwarted by her size, would marry
a 6'2' dental technician who worked in her uncles'
laboratory. At the wedding, my Grandmother and Grandfather
would reunite after a twenty year separation. Upon
his return to the carnival where he was a knife
thrower and trapeze catcher, he would write: "
Bess send me $100 and I''ll come home." She
replied with a Western Union Money-Gram for $10.00.
He climbed on board a Greyhound bus for the 36 hour
ride to his soon to be once again bride. They would
spend twenty years together before death would separate
once again. A sad widower in her 90's today, she
waits for Jesus to call her home.
Tom F Sheehan
This is about my grandfather Johnny Igoe
who read W.B.Yeats to me when I was a youngster,
rocking in his chair, smoking his pipe, making music
and rhythm in his life, and in mine.
Johnny Igoe, Spellbinder Remembered
Then, a high-biting, cold spring day in 1955 I
knew would be memorial, the sun but snippets, ice
still hiding out in shadow, winter remnants piled
up in a great gathering, me bound to a shovel for
the tenth day in a row. That’s when I heard
of Johnny Igoe's death in his 97th year. Grass and
buds and shoots and sprigs of all kinds were aimless
as April. All vast morning I'd hunted the sun, tried
to place it square on my back. But the breeze taunted,
left a taste in my mouth. Sullivan Marino, brother-in-law,
boss who loved the shovel, sweat, doing the Earth
over, walked at me open as a telegram. Sicilian
eyes tell stories, omit nothing in the relation.
"Your grandfather's dead." He was vinegar
and oil and reached for my shovel. It would not
leave my hands; I saw Johnny Igoe at ten at turf
cutting, just before he came this way with the great
multitude. I saw how he too moved the ponderous
earth, the flame of it caught in iron, singing tea,
singeing the thatch, young Irish scorching the ground
he walked. He had come here and I came, and I went
there, later, to where he'd come from; Roscommon's
sweet vale, slow rush of land, shouldering up, going
into sky, clouds shifting selves like pieces at
chess, earth ripening to fire. I saw it all, later,
where he'd come from, but then, sun-searching, memorializing,
Sullivan quickly at oil and odds, his hand out to
take our tool away, could stand no dalliance the
day Johnny Igoe died. He poled his star-lit way
down the Erie Canal. Swung a sledge in Illinois.
A hammer north of Boston. Died in bed. But the tobacco
smell still lives in this room. His books still
live, his chair, his cane, the misery he knew, the
pain, and somewhere he is. He might be housed in
this computer, for now he visits, or never leaves,
Yeats on record but the voice is my grandfather’s
voice, the perky treble, the deft reach inside me,
the lifting out, the ever lifting out. In the dark
asides before a faint light glimmers it is the perky
pipe’s glow I see, weaker than a small and
struck match but illuminating all the same. I smell
the old Edgeworth tobacco faint as a blown cloud
in the air, the way a hobo might know a windowed
apple pie from afar, and I hear his rocking chair
giving rhythm to my mind, saying over and over again
the words he left with hard handles on them for
my grasping.
JeanAnn McKiernan:
Two days ago, I attended my grandmothers funeral.
I spoke at the service about how I not only lost
a grandmother but, how my family lost a ruler, the
Queen, of our little Kingdom.
The irony of my words was that my grandmother and
I never got along.
Not until she passed away did I realize what a great/strong
women she was.
When my grandfather died years ago, she took his
place. She used her authority to protect and nurture
all of us. I always thought she was just mean.
My five year old daughter was mad at me the other
day and said: "I'm not your friend, I hate
you," and I said to her: " I'm not supposed
to be your friend, I'm your mother".
I said that to her because, being a parent requires
one to initiate actions and make decisions based
on what one believes to be true, and life is filled
with many painful truths.
The Queen, my grandmother, wasn't my friend, she
was my leader and I cherish, what she has given
to me, grief and all...
Vincent Chabrol:
Written in French
Elle etait indiscutablement d'une autre epoque,
la belle epoque dont elle evoquait souvent ses souvenirs
avec des tremolos dans la voix.
Pour nous, ses petits enfants, il s'agissait d'un
age d'or qui bien sur ne se reproduirait pas, tant
ses souvenirs etaient impregnes d'insouciance, d'aisance
et de volupte. C'etait comme un film en costume
qu'elle nous repassait de temps en temps.
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