I don’t have a lot of knowledge of my mother’s family. Oh sure, the basics: her sisters (3, and she was the youngest, by 20 minutes) and my resultant uncles and cousins, her parents’ names (I had to give those for the death certificate – did you know that the funeral home issues that?). But the only stories of her I have came from a few visits with cousins, who evinced a bit of surprise long ago that I never knew all this..
- when she poured a chocolate milkshake down a mail chute and a very new uncle had to take my grandmother rowing on the lake while everyone else got the resultant furor smoothed out.
- when she and her twin, up at their summer place in Michigan, stole some highway signs and rerouted the Fourth of July holiday traffic into a cornfield.
- when she was in Boston at finishing school in the Forties, and one Saturday night as all the girls came back from their dates, being made by the teachers to call their parents and say they were alright. The Cocoanut Grove nightclub had burned down, taking 492 people with it.
- following my father to Camp Polk, LA, when they were newlyweds, and being so bored there that she dyed her hair red. All Dad had to do was give her a quiet stare, and she washed it right out.
Most of my life, we were on terrible terms. I do not regret it — it saved my sanity, and indirectly my life, to have kept her at as great a distance as possible.
It’s the stories I miss.
white pebble 