The Apple Doesn't Fall Far From The Tree, or Does It?

An article in today's NY Times titled "Your Ancestors, Your Fate," offered an interesting analysis of how our social mobility hasn't changed much over time, and that our overall chances of success can be predicted from as far back as our great, great, great grandparents. Hmmmm. I'm definitely beginning to see that as I delve into the two centuries of family letters I have. I would, however, like to be in the same room with the author of this study and go into much more depth than he was able to in the article, as I have many questions about his methodology and just exactly what he means when he talks about "elite" names, and using registries of doctors and lawyers to draw his conclusions.

Actually, though, it caused me to think about some recent discoveries I made from a box of "stuff" I found at Christmas time when I pulled the boxes of decorations out of the storage area. I thought it was a box of my junque as it had some framed photographs from my life on the top, along with the Super 8 movie camera. Surprise! Below the first layer it turned out to be a box of my father's memorabilia. I have no memory of this box or when it came into my possession, nor had I ever looked into it.

When I first looked at it about 3 weeks ago, I really almost threw up my hands in despair. It needs major sorting, some pitching out, and some saving of stuff. Two things I found that intrigued me were a report card from Dartmouth, where I always assumed he had done very well academically (but realize now that I don't believe we ever talked about that)and discovered a rather average report - grades of C, even. I also found two letters from the President of Dartmouth, Ernest Hopkins written to dad and one letter from dad to Pres. Hopkins after he had graduated. They seemed to have a fairly close relationship, and I surmise that is because dad was President of the Inter-Fraternity Council, and probably had a lot of dealings with the administration. There apparently were some deaths at Dartmouth that year, and I haven't discovered what caused them, but part of the correspondence has to do with prevention of same, going forward.

The other day, I walked past the box again, and grabbed a handful of photographs, a small photo album and found two more discoveries. A rubber band held 4 letters together written by dad to his parents. Three of them were written while he was "courting" my mother, and for the first time I get to see dad's perspective on her family and how he felt he had found "the right girl." The other letter in the packet was written after my oldest brother Rob was born, and he describes in some detail the lead-up to mom going to the hospital. Each time I find something pertaining to my dad, I realize how little I knew him and how much I wish I had known of the existence of these letters during his lifetime and could have talked to him about them.

The other discovery was a small red leather diary which I first assumed was a small address book. It turned out to belong to my brother Rob, and was kept in 1951, the year we left Manchester, VT and moved to California. He was 12 at the time. There was a small wooden pencil stuck in the spine which said Charles Letts & Co. London. The space for entries was only about 5 tiny lines, but I read through all of them. (Many pages were blank).

I was quite surprised that he actually mentioned me in one entry, and it was something I had completely forgotten about: August 9, 1951 ". . . Kay started Baton twirling." We moved to California on August 26th, according to his diary, so my baton twirling lessons were short-lived. I do remember someone (dad?) had made me a baton out of a large-sized dowel and it had something like the rubber end of a cane at one end. Later, in California, I think, I had a real baton with a shiny silver shaft and I can remember practicing twirling it, but I was never destined for glory as a twirler in a marching band. Probably not in the genes I inherited from my great, great, great, grandmothers.

The Universe of the Back Yard

As another storm approaches, this is a set of scenes I will see again tomorrow, or possibly the next day, depending on the timing of the storm.

Snowscapes

Wind banked snow against the house
blew crystals into ripples
across the back yard,
each a thin shadow,
as if winter fairies
had etched the landscape.
Look away, look back,
squirrel tracks stamp,
circle the bird feeders
make spokes to forsythia,
clothesline post, willow tree,
a white on white mandala
the birds will fill
with black-oil sunflower,
yellow seed corn, peanut shells.

Drama in the back yard

As is my habit when I arrive in the morning kitchen, I check the temperature (a balmy 62 inside and 33 outside) and then put the shade up on the big window over the sink. I scan the back yard for birds, tracks, snow depth (about 3 feet) and anything unusual.

Today, some movement just on the far side of the forsythia bushes down on the snow caught my eye. Grabbing my trusty binoculars, I could see a mouse-like critter apparently chasing its tail around and around. It had a tail like a mouse, but was rounder than I think a mouse is and didn’t seem to have quite such an elongated face as I picture on a mouse.

The behavior continued as I watched, and I saw a small red squirrel run along the boundary line and a larger gray squirrel venture out of a tree and up into the forsythia and then to the top of the clothesline post where it seemed to watch the small critter below and then dart down and over to the base of the bird feeders in case there were any seeds on the ground.

Was the little guy trying to stay warm? Was it trying to find its home? Was it rabid? I’ll never know. It continued its frantic skittering on the ice-glazed snow, leaving a yellow stain on the territory it traversed, finally coming to rest on its side, about a foot from where it started. If I had been 10 minutes later coming downstairs, I would have missed this drama. I heard Pete Seeger singing:

“To every thing, turn, turn, turn/ there is a season, turn, turn turn,/and a time for every purpose, under Heaven.”

Good friends, good times

I mentioned in an earlier post my love of all things fabric-related, and I think it's clear also how much I love being outdoors. Today combined the best of all worlds for me, and I wish I had photos to illustrate. Some things, though, can't be photographed easily. Start with friendship. I am spending the weekend with my college roommate and her husband on beautiful Lake Kanasatka in Moultonborough, NH. How do you photograph 49 years of friendship??? Certainly plenty of photos exist of us over the years, but the intangibles are what I'm talking about. The ability to talk about anything and everything; the shared history; the love of sewing, quilting and fabrics; the knowledge that whatever difficult situation you may be in, the other person is there to support you - these are things that can't be photographed.

Had I thought about it in advance, though, I could have photographed our cross-country skiing on the lake this afternoon, past makeshift bob houses (i.e. tents) and "open air" fishing by folks participating in the Lake Winnipesaukee Fishing Derby (but on Lake Kanasatka) and I could have photographed our trip to Keepsake Quilting this afternoon, where, for once, I was the person buying and not the person watching. But maybe it's a good thing that I wasn't busy trying to photograph all of this, I was just enjoying it, being present in these moments of activities I love with people I love. Enough said!

The day after snowfall

Even though I am sick of snow and cold, I still enjoy the day after a storm when the sun comes out and the landscape is once again refurbished and shiny. Today was one of those days with around a foot of new, rather powdery snow glittering in the morning light. Shadows of bare bushes stood out in sharp contrast to the white background, as if etched with a finepoint stylus.

A squirrel made his morning run from the willow (out of sight on the right) under the back side of the bushes to make sure all was right in his world. No other tracks revealed the presence of another living creature until . . . . . some feathered visitor landed under the bird feeder and hopped around it, wondering where all the fallen sunflower seeds had gone.

As morning lengthens toward noon, another critter left his tracery on the way back part of the yard - too small to be a squirrel, but too extensive to be another bird: You have to look carefully to see a widespread Vee-shape which looks like the bottom of a valentine heart and then a squiggly line which heads back toward the compost bins, which makes me wonder if it is a mouse or a vole perhaps enjoying the layers of leaves and grass clippings I thoughtfully provided for him this winter.

By tomorrow morning, the kaleidoscope will have rotated and the beauty of today will be replaced by changing patterns of light and shadow, imprints of animals, birds and humans and the shifting winds of the universe.

Free Your Voice

Last Saturday I had the rare opportunity to participate in a two-hour yoga, meditation and chanting workshop led by my daughter. I thought I might be out of my element, possibly the only non-singer in the room, and potentially not able to do all of the yoga. Fortunately, none of that turned out to be true and I settled in for two very enjoyable and fascinating hours.

Some who know me might wonder why I even cared to "free my voice." And I'll bet there are plenty of people who think I've always freely spoken my mind and have had no trouble speaking in public, or even singing in public. Even the name of this blog suggests that I am a pretty opinionated person who feels free to share what I think in this public forum.

That may be who I am on one level, but there is a "but" to all of that, and it has to do with the fact that in my poetry, I haven't quite gotten "there" in freeing my emotional voice, hence, my poems may be well-crafted, but not, perhaps, evocative or spoken in my authentic "heart-voice," as I would name it. And I know I tend to avoid writing about anything emotionally difficult for me. I think that the workshop on Saturday started me on the path to trying to fathom how I can get past my rational self to find my heart center and then, express it. A big thank you to Sarah for all her help in unlocking the creative process for me through this wonderful afternoon, and earlier in January in her e-course Renew Your Creative Voice.

Wonderment

In 1989 I began serious research in order to edit a collection of 19th century letters written between my great grandmother and my great, great grandmother. I read books, traveled to Brooklyn, Chicago, Keokuk, Iowa, Topsfield, MA and various libraries and historical societies in NH. My big purchase to aid in my research was the first laptop made by Apple which came out right around 1991 or 92. The battery lasted a very short time and most often I didn't have a cord long enough to reach the closest plug. It was (and probably still is) a time when the Chicago Historical Society made you wear white gloves in order to handle documents in their archives. I loved all of that travel and research and finally in 1996, the book was published by the University of Iowa Press.

Fast forward to 2014. I have just finished transcribing the letters of my great, great, great Uncle Cyrus, who was born in 1793. His letters begin in 1818 and conclude in 1836. There are 19 of them. If I proceeded to conduct research in the same way, I would be traveling to Mumbai (which was Bombay when he went there as a missionary in 1827) and to various locations all over the state of Massachusetts. Whereas it is true that I am not going to write/edit a book similar to the one I did before, I still need to educate myself on the context of his letters and discover as much as I can about his life. You are no doubt wondering how any of this connects to the title of this post.

Here it is: I have not budged from my house, but because of the vast difference in the internet and the digitization of books, magazines, and archives, I have read the articles he wrote that were published in the Missionary Herald; have found his second wife's journal which was published in 1876 by their son and digitized by Google, and found citations about him in many different sources online. He was not a famous person, which makes it seem all the more remarkable to me that so much information is available. Gone is the laborious note-taking - I can just download or bookmark these items and refer to them at will while I have multiple documents open on my laptop.

The one thing that remains constant from my experience from 1989 to now, is the importance of people in this whole process. My good friend and colleague, Kathy Kentner investigated online and sent me in the direction of Google Books, where I found Cyrus's second wife, Abigail Stone's journal. The archivists at both Andover-Newton Seminary where he received a divinity degree, and at what is now Kimball Union Academy, where he studied for a year and a half before going to Dartmouth, both responded immediately to email requests with excellent information, and in the case of KUA, we have discovered that our fathers both taught at KUA at the same time, and because it was an all boys school then, her brothers were able to attend KUA, but she was sent to Gould Academy and because my father moved to an all-boys school in California to teach, my two brothers went there to school while I attended the local public schools. These serendipitous, and somewhat extraneous coincidences bring me great delight. One source the KUA archivist sent me today revealed that Uncle Cyrus and his first wife sailed to Bombay on the ship "Emerald" out of Salem. Now that made my day.