Picking up my 82-year-old aunt Barbara at JFK last week and driving her back there for her return flight to Seattle was a treat. I had the chance to talk to her alone, which I rarely have in my life. Even when I stayed with her in Marin County a couple of times during the 1980s I usually saw her in a small group situation. Ditto for a family reunion at Lake Tahoe in 1992 and another one two years later in Poughkeepsie.
Barbara’s lots of fun and very with it. More au courant with current events than I realized. She asked me for the name of some good blogs and news sites. I’ll send her some.
Both of my mother’s parents are descended from the original Mayflower passengers. You can’t make this stuff up. Don’t think for a moment that my mother’s parents were rich WASPS however. They definitely loop back to the Puritan cognate, not the later Episcopalian strain.
My mother’s father was a biology professor at Williams, during the days when almost no one actually lived on a professorial salary. In fact, his dep’t head told him he was only one in the department, in those Depression days, who actually was making do on the $3,000 per annum.
My grandmother Anna grew up in South Africa the daughter of missionaries. While the Jewish relatives on my father’s side tend to be vociferously expressive, the Protestants are restrained, sometimes to the point of repression. With age they loosen up somewhat.
In the late 1990s I wrote a little piece for Pink, a wonderful subscription-only publication edited by Donna Ghelerter and Ingrid Schaffner, about taking my mother’s parents backstage during ABT’s Kennedy Center season years earlier. It was a real highlight for them. As my grandmother Anna wrote me later, “the world of make believe” was something “quite out of our experience.”
As a boy my grandfather Allyn worked in a rubber factory after school following his father’s death. My grandfather never allowed himself, or anyone else for that matter, to complain about anything for long; he told my mother it was all good, since “I was shy and stuttered,” but he made a friend at the factory.
I think similarly of my father’s mother Sallie, who dropped out of high school to sew in a factory. (Go-getter that she was, she soon married the factory owner’s son.)
How people have struggled, and of course are now struggling, to live in this country is something deeply personal to me. But it’s something that most of our politicians seem to have utterly forgotten–or about which they simply couldn’t care less.