Finding the Threads in Family History
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by Brian Everett Faulkner
Just over a year ago, I decided to take stock of my life. What brought me to this at nearly eighty-two years of age was a realization that the huge bulk of my time on this earth now is behind me. It’s odd it took so long to reflect on this--and odd, as well, that there were aspects of my family story (and my part in that story) I’d not taken time to consider as life rushed by. |
For instance, why do I think the way I do and how has that helped shape my life? How much of my story has been grounded in who I am intrinsically (how I’m wired, perhaps) vs. how I may have been influenced by family and family circumstances during the eighteen or so years with my parents, brothers and grandmother in my true first home?
Did others in my family--grandparents, parents, brothers and even my children--find themselves caught in some of the same grooves that I did and end up living, loving, working (and perhaps even wandering) to the beat of the same family tune? I decided to dig into these questions and write about my findings while my mind remained sharp. And knew that if I claimed to be able to write memoirs or complete family histories for others, I’d better get to work and prove I could do it for myself!
The Ageing Conundrum.
We all age in our own ways and at our own pace, although I think every one of us has shared (or will share) the bewilderment at waking up one day to find ourselves in a strange place of aches and pains and pills and potions and senior discounts at the grocery store. We wonder, "How did we arrive here, on this Isle of Old, with all the other ageing people?"
When my parents were in their mid- to upper-eighties, they refused to go out for fear someone in the restaurant would think they were “old slobs who should no longer appear in public” and, instead should stay in their retirement villages with other ancient castoffs where people wouldn’t have to look at them. This was especially hard on Dad, who had a swallowing reflex issue that forced him to eat super slowly. Most times, his fork would meander a good bit before it reached his mouth, and sometimes it missed altogether. Ice cream was the worst, but he doggedly worked through one of those tiny cups of the stuff with unusual good humor at the end of every meal.
Our parents saw people grow frail and die in the assisted living facility where they spent their final years. Mom knew more about what was going on there than Dad did because she had cared for elderly patients as an RN. But both adjusted to the rhythms of the place surprisingly well, Going on twenty years earlier, they had sold the family home and moved from Massachusetts to Florida, where they bought the first house they'd ever picked out together. They had looked around our local area once when we kids were still young, but the only thing that came of that venture was a truly funny family story about a huge house they found and thought seriously about buying--for about twenty minutes! Finally, well after we had all flown the nest and both grandmothers had passed, they made a trip to Florida to visit hometown friends who had moved there.
Their visit must have been during late winter, because the Port Charlotte climate was on its best behavior and the open house a few blocks from their friends' place charmed my mother as soon as they walked in. What's more, it came with a pool and a lanai that helped convince them to make an offer practically on the spot. Mom, the story goes, actually got down on her knees and begged Dad to buy it! And so, the little house where they'd stopped on a whim became their tropical paradise. It had a palm tree in the front yard and fruit trees in the back and promised a style of living so far beyond their staid New England sense of being that they must have thought they awoke every morning in dreamland. It was here they stayed from the time the moving truck arrived on Spring Lake Boulevard in the summer of 1989 (with a respectably small cache of their New England belongings) until poor health forced their move to the retirement village going on 20 years later.
To this day, the whole thing still seems wild, like some sort of miracle! It was unimaginable to us brothers that two people who could take six months to decide whether to purchase a $500 used car would decide (seemingly on the fly) to pick up and move to Florida. But back home, in Massachusetts, a river of discontent that had coursed beneath their lives during the decades they lived in the house that Grandma and her first husband built in the '20s helped propel the move. This undercurrent wasn't anything earth shattering. In fact, unless you'd been aware of it from the start, you wouldn't have known the issue was even there. If was of little consequence to us kids but all too real to our parents and lurked beneath their lives like a bothersome itch, which didn't get scratched until 44 years later when they packed up and moved to the land of endless summer.
Plans Curtailed.
After Dad returned from wartime service in 1945, the parents’ plan had been to get their own apartment and raise the two children that had come along by then (me and my brother, one of us just two, the other a tiny baby). But Mom's mother's second husband was sick so they stuck around to help out and, like the man who came to dinner in the movies, never left--despite that underlying current that had generated so much intergenerational tension in 1942: an edict laid down by Mom's Irish-Catholic mother to bring us children up in the Church or not get married. The betrothed couple gave in, but not happily, Dad's mother didn't get her way, of course, which appears to have been a shattering experience for this rather self-possessed woman who never lost her bitterness over the marriage decision, which then got added to other events that had overshadowed her life and made her rancor even worse. She lived on the other side of the nearby city, but her words could travel through thin air like freshly sharpened knives. The victorious mother-in-law, the grandmother who lived with us--or we with her, continued to let everybody know who was in charge and kept her own set of verbal knives close at hand, which she could let loose with in a moment. This, of course, put our mother on edge and drove Dad to distraction. It was a great house with plenty of room for all of us in a good neighborhood in a very nice town. But the marriage thing and the clash of grandmas hung in the background of our family from that time on, although the inter-generational tension did abate somewhat in later years.
I’d never thought much about this growing up--or any other overarching family issue (some overt, others more subtle) and how they may have affected my life and way of thinking, However, the longer I wrote, the more certain "threads" reached out and prompted my attention.
A Worthy Experiment:
I waded into this experience never having written a family history and wanted to see if I could do it. The experience was both challenging and fascinating and, 50-thousand words later, showed me how much there was to explore and write about. Even in an “ordinary” family. One thing I had to learn was when to stop writing, and after many drafts and a few false stops, I finally did bring the project to a close--fifteen chapters and many stories later!
Here are the titles and descriptions of what I call "parts" because they're more like freestanding memoirs strung together than chapters in a novel.
Preface-Digging Into Life
Intro - Memory and Mist
Part 1 - Threads: Setting the stage for an ordinary American story.
Part 2 - A Sense of Place: Sometimes you end up a long way from home.
Part 3 - Ancestral Cornerstones: A story that goes back to the Mayflower.
Part 4 - Grandparents, Memories of a Quiet Generation: They're probably not like yours.
Part 5 - Parents: Hope and Chill: High school sweethearts marry and find challenges.
Part 6 - Brothers: The Four of Us: Four boys grow up almost without major calamity.
Part 7 - Children, And Then There Were More: A father's dream comes true.
Part 8 - Grandchildren: Sprinkled by Stardust: Hope, love and silly things.
Part 9 - Pets and Their People: There are dog nappers in the neighborhood!
Part 10 -Tote That Barge, Lift That Bale: A journey through a wandering work life.
Part 11 -The Butterfly and the Tornado: How a career choice became a national news story.
Part 12 -The Love Bug: A young man wrestles with love and marriage.
Part 13 -Call on the Lord Where He May be Found: Coming to grips with organized religion.
Part 14 -Good Words: Compliments from unexpected sources.
Part 15 -Grace Notes: A grab bag of essays that provide a subtext to this story.
- bf
Did others in my family--grandparents, parents, brothers and even my children--find themselves caught in some of the same grooves that I did and end up living, loving, working (and perhaps even wandering) to the beat of the same family tune? I decided to dig into these questions and write about my findings while my mind remained sharp. And knew that if I claimed to be able to write memoirs or complete family histories for others, I’d better get to work and prove I could do it for myself!
The Ageing Conundrum.
We all age in our own ways and at our own pace, although I think every one of us has shared (or will share) the bewilderment at waking up one day to find ourselves in a strange place of aches and pains and pills and potions and senior discounts at the grocery store. We wonder, "How did we arrive here, on this Isle of Old, with all the other ageing people?"
When my parents were in their mid- to upper-eighties, they refused to go out for fear someone in the restaurant would think they were “old slobs who should no longer appear in public” and, instead should stay in their retirement villages with other ancient castoffs where people wouldn’t have to look at them. This was especially hard on Dad, who had a swallowing reflex issue that forced him to eat super slowly. Most times, his fork would meander a good bit before it reached his mouth, and sometimes it missed altogether. Ice cream was the worst, but he doggedly worked through one of those tiny cups of the stuff with unusual good humor at the end of every meal.
Our parents saw people grow frail and die in the assisted living facility where they spent their final years. Mom knew more about what was going on there than Dad did because she had cared for elderly patients as an RN. But both adjusted to the rhythms of the place surprisingly well, Going on twenty years earlier, they had sold the family home and moved from Massachusetts to Florida, where they bought the first house they'd ever picked out together. They had looked around our local area once when we kids were still young, but the only thing that came of that venture was a truly funny family story about a huge house they found and thought seriously about buying--for about twenty minutes! Finally, well after we had all flown the nest and both grandmothers had passed, they made a trip to Florida to visit hometown friends who had moved there.
Their visit must have been during late winter, because the Port Charlotte climate was on its best behavior and the open house a few blocks from their friends' place charmed my mother as soon as they walked in. What's more, it came with a pool and a lanai that helped convince them to make an offer practically on the spot. Mom, the story goes, actually got down on her knees and begged Dad to buy it! And so, the little house where they'd stopped on a whim became their tropical paradise. It had a palm tree in the front yard and fruit trees in the back and promised a style of living so far beyond their staid New England sense of being that they must have thought they awoke every morning in dreamland. It was here they stayed from the time the moving truck arrived on Spring Lake Boulevard in the summer of 1989 (with a respectably small cache of their New England belongings) until poor health forced their move to the retirement village going on 20 years later.
To this day, the whole thing still seems wild, like some sort of miracle! It was unimaginable to us brothers that two people who could take six months to decide whether to purchase a $500 used car would decide (seemingly on the fly) to pick up and move to Florida. But back home, in Massachusetts, a river of discontent that had coursed beneath their lives during the decades they lived in the house that Grandma and her first husband built in the '20s helped propel the move. This undercurrent wasn't anything earth shattering. In fact, unless you'd been aware of it from the start, you wouldn't have known the issue was even there. If was of little consequence to us kids but all too real to our parents and lurked beneath their lives like a bothersome itch, which didn't get scratched until 44 years later when they packed up and moved to the land of endless summer.
Plans Curtailed.
After Dad returned from wartime service in 1945, the parents’ plan had been to get their own apartment and raise the two children that had come along by then (me and my brother, one of us just two, the other a tiny baby). But Mom's mother's second husband was sick so they stuck around to help out and, like the man who came to dinner in the movies, never left--despite that underlying current that had generated so much intergenerational tension in 1942: an edict laid down by Mom's Irish-Catholic mother to bring us children up in the Church or not get married. The betrothed couple gave in, but not happily, Dad's mother didn't get her way, of course, which appears to have been a shattering experience for this rather self-possessed woman who never lost her bitterness over the marriage decision, which then got added to other events that had overshadowed her life and made her rancor even worse. She lived on the other side of the nearby city, but her words could travel through thin air like freshly sharpened knives. The victorious mother-in-law, the grandmother who lived with us--or we with her, continued to let everybody know who was in charge and kept her own set of verbal knives close at hand, which she could let loose with in a moment. This, of course, put our mother on edge and drove Dad to distraction. It was a great house with plenty of room for all of us in a good neighborhood in a very nice town. But the marriage thing and the clash of grandmas hung in the background of our family from that time on, although the inter-generational tension did abate somewhat in later years.
I’d never thought much about this growing up--or any other overarching family issue (some overt, others more subtle) and how they may have affected my life and way of thinking, However, the longer I wrote, the more certain "threads" reached out and prompted my attention.
A Worthy Experiment:
I waded into this experience never having written a family history and wanted to see if I could do it. The experience was both challenging and fascinating and, 50-thousand words later, showed me how much there was to explore and write about. Even in an “ordinary” family. One thing I had to learn was when to stop writing, and after many drafts and a few false stops, I finally did bring the project to a close--fifteen chapters and many stories later!
Here are the titles and descriptions of what I call "parts" because they're more like freestanding memoirs strung together than chapters in a novel.
Preface-Digging Into Life
Intro - Memory and Mist
Part 1 - Threads: Setting the stage for an ordinary American story.
Part 2 - A Sense of Place: Sometimes you end up a long way from home.
Part 3 - Ancestral Cornerstones: A story that goes back to the Mayflower.
Part 4 - Grandparents, Memories of a Quiet Generation: They're probably not like yours.
Part 5 - Parents: Hope and Chill: High school sweethearts marry and find challenges.
Part 6 - Brothers: The Four of Us: Four boys grow up almost without major calamity.
Part 7 - Children, And Then There Were More: A father's dream comes true.
Part 8 - Grandchildren: Sprinkled by Stardust: Hope, love and silly things.
Part 9 - Pets and Their People: There are dog nappers in the neighborhood!
Part 10 -Tote That Barge, Lift That Bale: A journey through a wandering work life.
Part 11 -The Butterfly and the Tornado: How a career choice became a national news story.
Part 12 -The Love Bug: A young man wrestles with love and marriage.
Part 13 -Call on the Lord Where He May be Found: Coming to grips with organized religion.
Part 14 -Good Words: Compliments from unexpected sources.
Part 15 -Grace Notes: A grab bag of essays that provide a subtext to this story.
- bf
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