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. \u00a0I had the chance to talk to her alone, which I rarely have in my life.\u00a0 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. \u00a0 Ditto for a family reunion at Lake Tahoe in 1992 and another one two years later in Poughkeepsie.<\/p>\n
Barbara’s lots of fun and very with it.\u00a0\u00a0 More au courant with current events than I realized.\u00a0 She asked me for the name of some good blogs and news sites.\u00a0 I’ll send her some.<\/p>\n
Both of my mother\u2019s parents are descended from the original Mayflower passengers.\u00a0 You can\u2019t make this stuff up.\u00a0 Don\u2019t think for a moment that my mother’s parents were rich WASPS however.\u00a0 They definitely loop back to the Puritan cognate, not the later Episcopalian strain.<\/p>\n
My mother\u2019s father was a biology professor at Williams, during the days when almost no one actually lived on a professorial salary.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
My grandmother Anna grew up in South Africa the daughter of missionaries.\u00a0 While the Jewish relatives on my father\u2019s side tend to be vociferously expressive, the Protestants are restrained, sometimes to the point of repression.\u00a0\u00a0 With age they loosen up somewhat.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s parents backstage during ABT’s Kennedy Center season years earlier.\u00a0 It was a real highlight for them.\u00a0 As my grandmother Anna wrote me later, \u201cthe world of make believe\u201d was something \u201cquite out of our experience.\u201d<\/p>\n
As a boy my grandfather Allyn worked in a rubber factory after school following his father’s death.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
I think similarly of my father’s mother Sallie, who dropped out of high school to sew in a factory.\u00a0 (Go-getter that she was,\u00a0 she soon married the factory owner’s son.)<\/p>\n
How people have struggled, and of course are now struggling,\u00a0 to live in this country is something deeply personal to me.\u00a0 But it’s something that most of our politicians seem to have utterly forgotten–or about which they simply couldn’t care less.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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. \u00a0I had the chance to talk to her alone, which I rarely have in my life.\u00a0 … Continue reading