2 Board Alley

Summer Research

I've spent the summer researching the Irish-American fishing industry in New Bedford, Massachusetts in order to continue working on my Irish poetry cycle.  This summer has affording me the time to relax into thinking poetically--for example, I 've been mulling over the structure of the overall piece as well as the poems themselves and am using the design on my wedding ring, a Celtic labyrinth of peaks and swallows, to guide the big picture.  In terns of the writing, I'm leaning towards some repetitive structure for the poem I'm writing about my great-grandfather, a fisherman who was lost at sea.  There are some drafts of other poems in my notebook which will take shape in time. 

The video above is courtesy of rootstelevision.com. 

Best Easter Memory

The very best Easter of my childhood was spent in Copenhagen, Denmark.  Although at nine I was past believing in the Easter Bunny and the magic in fairy tales, I was still young enough to be pulled in by the stardust such belief brings. 

Another thing that made the event so special was that it was one of the rare trips that our mother came on.  Normally, Mom stayed home with my sister and her nanny, while Dad piled my brother and me into the black Mercedes Benz and drive across East Germany on one of many travel adventures.

I always wanted my mother to come along, but she was too tired and too sick to have the energy to tear through Europe at my father's pace:  "Look, kids!  There's Switzerland! And now we're in Italy.  Say hi to Italy because in a few minutes, we'll be in France!"

This trip was slower, and it was magical.  Magical because Mom was with us and Mom was the parent who knew what I'd been reading and who knew exactly why I'd be thrilled to visit Hans Christian Andersen's home.  She and I walked through the exhibits together, and I was amazed to see the very same copy of his Fairy Tales published in a variety of languages, and in each of then was the same frightening painting of the ghost who visits the emperor in the Nightingale's Tale. Am I getting this right?  All I remember was the faceless black ghost.

Anyhow, traveling through Odense and Copenhagen, ferrying the car across the waters, attending Easter mass in Danish--all of these were warm and exciting family memories for me.  In Copenhagen, we stayed at a fairly fancy hotel with rich carpeting and gilded furniture.  Our Easter Baskets that year contained interesting cardboard eggs that opened to reveal little treasures inside.  We ate breakfast at a restaurant whose name escapes me, but whose reputation was big, at least in those days.  Hot chocolate.  Salmon and rolls.  In the afternoon, a visit to the statue of the Little Mermaid, and then the long drive back to Berlin and my baby sister, who had spent Easter with her nanny.

Dad at Christmas

One of the best things about Christmas this year was that my father came over and spent the day with us at my brother's house.  He sat in that chair for the most part, reading, napping, eating, and, of course, holding CC, the family cockapoo and watch dog.  She is also Dad's number- one fan, and whenever he visits, she leaps in his lap and licks his face.  I suspect that her enthusiasm reflects those golden days of a few years ago, when he lived with them and used to sneak her chocolate, which makes her terribly ill, but which she wolfed down like a good chocolate addict.

He did pretty well during the long day and only became crabby towards the end (as did we all).  My sister-in-law and I took him back to his room, and while she conferred with the staff, I sat down with Dad and listened to him read aloud from Neruda's 100 Sonetos de Amor.  In Spanish.  And then he translated them, too.  I began asking him questions in Spanish to see if he had a stronger memory in another language, but no.  he didn't remember my mother or his mother, regardless. 

But I don't want to end this post on a sad note.  The beauty of the visit was that all three of us children and our families got to spend the holiday together with Dad.  And another plentiful moment was listening to him talk with my sister-in-law on the drive home.  "Look at the size of the moon!  It's beautiful," he said.  Simple comments about the natural world said by someone who can still appreciate it. 

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Eight Things About Me

Laurie tagged me this week with the challenge of writing eight things about myself--here are the rules:

Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves...People who are tagged write their own blog post about their eight things and include these rules....At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged and they should read your blog.

OKAY.  And Away We Go:

1.  I have prehensile toes.  That is, I can pick things up off the floor with them.  I can write with my right foot though I'm not often called upon to do so. 

2.  I'm finally picking up (but not with my toes) my other contact lens after a year and a half wait--that's how hectic things have been 'round here.

3.  Do I like Second Life? Well, yes, conceptually.  In reality, I don't have time for it, my first life being busy enough. 

4.  When I was a little girl, I always had to have a lavender (or "purple" as I called it) dress at Easter time, regardless of the continent, regardless of my age.  Who needs to grow old to wear purple?  The black and white photo below shows me in my Easter finery at age seven.  I know that I must be seven because the dress was the prototype of my first communion dress, which was white and had a gauzy slip that scratched when I sat down.

5.  Such a sweet photograph of a darling angel.  I threw my roller skate through one of those windows right behind me. Actually, I tapped it hard until the window broke.  My mother watched me do it and was furious.  She called my father who worked three blocks away at the embassy, and he came home to administer justice over lunch. I told him that the evil spirits had gotten into me and forced me to do the deed (so much for free will--I was predestined to do it).  My mother stood in the doorway, fuming, and my father sat me on his lap and said that there was no good excuse for breaking windows even if I did believe that the "evil spirits" had provoked me.  Which they hadn't. 

6.  I'm standing front of an orange- tiled pole, which I used to run around whenever my mother or our maid, Clair, chased me with a belt, which was often, but thankfully not a tag-team event.  Part of the wall to wall windows in the background was a large, heavy door, and I used to bolt out, climb over the concrete wall and run to the trees to get away from them.  Not that I hadn't provoked their irrational, immature reactions to my childish behavior. 

7. It was during this time that our CCD class had an enormously pregnant woman as a substitute teacher.  Normally, we were being prepared for the sacraments by sisters in a non-English speaking order, which put all of our bilingual skills to the test. But this morning, a parish member of St. Thomas More, the Catholic Mission to which we belonged in Caracas, came in and talked about God's rewards for good behavior.  Dressed in yellow with a round white chapel cap on her head, she reminded me of an enormous Easter egg.  She railed at us with the passion of a preacher, explaining how our pure behavior would result in gifts heretofore unimagined by our seven-year old minds.  I know I sat quietly in my seat and chewed on my mantilla while she described in great and lurid detail the story of a young boy, our age, who was SO GOOD that God wanted him to come and live in heaven.  And soon.  This little boy never talked back, always helped his parents, and went to CCD without an argument, all attractive qualities for a heavenly life.  To reward his good behavior, God gave this wonderful boy a terrible, painful, terminal disease that caused great suffering, which the young lad bore uncomplainingly, and which only caused God to further reward him with the ability to see JESUS CHRIST FOR REAL on the communion wafer--the boy having found time to prepare to receive the sacrament while dying. 

And thus it was that when I received that first dry, sticky round disk and made it nearly evaporate on the roof of my mouth so that IT WOULD NOT TOUCH MY TEETH, I reflected on the story of this noble young boy and realized that I could best save my life by performing naughty acts from time to time since it appeared that God was not looking to take the bad kids to heaven.

8.  It was around this time that teachers began suggesting to my mother that I had a fine imagination and would be a good writer when I grew up. 

And now it's your turn.  I'm lazily tagging any of you who want to take on this meme.

Under Construction, Cont'd. Literacy Narrative

I'm redoing my TypeLists--specifically consolidating them and cleaning up links.  Excuse the mess.

In my real time life, I'm working on the next draft of my literacy narrative, and have come to realize a few things that now require further thought:

1.  The drive to strive is still there three generations later, but we are not reaching towards getting at least a high school education to become teachers and escape poverty.  Education was a given, though paying for it was up to each of us.  All of my grandmother's granddaughters (that would be three of us) have degrees and graduate degrees.  One of us is a lawyer, another is a dual-language researcher, and the third is a community college professor.  So what?  This may merely reflect the rise in the family's income  along with the the momentum of the women's movement.  In between, my mother was a teacher (with an M.Ed.), and my aunt was a librarian.  our mothers each had three children; in my generation only one of us has children.  But all three of us are in careers that in some way involve language.

2.  Unlike the other contributors who are either scholars of or residents of (or both) of Appalachia and who are thus grounded in the place, my Appalachia is a memory, a passed down story and a dream and intersects with the everyday reality of the place only when I visit. When I first went there and listened to the stories, I imagined that my relatives lived a Laura Ingalls sort of existence, a little house in Jellico, so to speak.Now, like Merlin in T.H. White's The Once and Future King, I feel like I'm moving backwards in time while others may ground their writing in a forward- moving life narrative or research project, I'm reaching back to tell my story of discovering myself from others' past and others' recording of that past, through saved letters, photo albums and oral stories.

3.  Education was pushed to a great degree, but my parents never preened about it--I taught myself how to read at four, and when my mother realized, as I read out loud the stained-glass windows in church on Easter Sunday, that I could read, she just more or less took it for granted.  From that time through first grade, I was always surprising my parents with what I'd learned. Since they didn't brag or preen, I didn't either, and just taught myself things like how to tie my own shoes because my parents were busy and i was impatient.   

(Reading though is something that I need to write about in greater detail because it was singularly the best and most important thing in my life.  I was impelled to learn to read.)

My verbal precocity lead my teachers to want to push me ahead two when I was in the primary grades.  I wish they had.  My best friend was two grades ahead of me.  But my mother had been pushed ahead two grades and absolutely hated it.  Of course, she was also the daughter of the superintendent of schools in a small town, and I think that the attention that that must have generated might have added to her woe.

But the point I'm trying to make here is that my reading life was wide and varied because my parents were generally liberal and didn't supervise what I read.  I wish that they had talked to me a bit more about my forays into the grisly (Catholic Martyrs' Lives) and the gross ("I Am Joe's Kidney" in The Reader's Digest.)

( Reading was such a regular activity in our family that I never realized until I was a teenager that the RD was a subscription and a yearly gift from my aunt's family--I assumed that everyone got it, like a free local paper.

So we could take reading and writing (and, alas, ciphering) for granted.

I also want to spend time writing about those orange-bound biographies that I read in third grade--the women were either wives and mothers of presidents or "the first woman.  . ." The vocational influence that this series had on my was that I wanted to be a "first woman who. . . ," and was not picky about what the career would be.  Astronaut, President, Underwater Photographer, Airline Pilot.  Why not?

3.  religion reinforcing literacy--both via Protestant and Catholic strands.  More later.

4.  My family was so involved in getting and giving educations that the Goins family motto was"whatever you do, don't teach middle school."

5.  When I was very little, I never thought that i would be forced to be a stay-at-home wife and mother.  I always felt that I would do something(see above)outside the home.

6.  Books were given as gifts, always with inscriptions from the giver to the given.  Sometimes family friends (like Velma Linford) would give us inscribed copies of books that they had written.

And tomorrow I'll add this to the draft.

2 Board Alley Delivers

In working on my literacy narrative, which has become more about me and less about Gran, I've realized that 2BA, the place where ideas first  come to be drafted, has been a gold mine.  I've  taken  about six pages from  the blog and pasted them in the essay.  The big question is, do I have to cite each blog entry or can I say that much of the information in the essay originally appeared on the blog?  I plan to cite family letters and such, but I'm not clear about how exactly the blog should be treated.
 

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Half-Done, Half a Century Lived

In honor of tomorrow's festivities, I have only completed 50% of my revamping of this blog. 

I don't have any profound thoughts about this turn of age and sensibility, but I will, just as soon as I finish writing a narrative due Friday, about my Appalachian granny who never saw 50, but managed to see everything else in her short, 44-year life, and then write about it, in journals, letters, business letters, scrapbooks, manuscripts and on and on.  Had she lived today (to be an energetic 111), she would have surely blogged, wiki'd and emailed profusely.

As it is, just reading her life story was exhausting, and in May, I was sick of reading her things.  I felt that my life had been given over to her, and being melodramatic, I put it all away for awhile.  And forgot about it. Except to discuss her with my sister, who pointed out that Grandma Goins had lived quite a remarkable life for someone of her background.  And I pointed out that she certainly was remarkable, and I had the documentation to support that claim, but not the physical desire to record it. That was, until I realized that I can read her work on a voice-to-text program and save time and finger pain. Still, I managed to keep Grandma's words in the basement while I tended to other things until my editor sent a cheerful reminder yesterday.

So I'm going to put aside my reading of "The Awakening" for next semester's Women in Literature class, and get busy writing offline.

The  photo credit belongs to my youngest niece, who at three, is devoted to my camera, and has also shot what will later be called "The Knee Series," and "Feet, Feet, Feet."

 

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Joannagreatgramma

Here's my great-grandmother Howard with one of her granddaughters in the thirties. There's something about her eyes that reminds me of my father.  Her hands are so large, so long-fingered, kind of like mine.  This is the only picture I have of her, and I've only had it for a few years.  getting pictures of the Howards has been harder than of the other side of the family--which just underscores for me what a photo enthusiast my maternal granddmother was.

A Poem, Now, For My Cousin on The Eve of Her Birthday

Oh Marion Jane, Marion Jane,

I've set out the teapot and berries again--

I'd send you a card, whatever the cost,

If I had not your new address lost.

Oh Marion Jane, send me again

Your address--That I'll retain,

Like your blue willow set

(Can I play with it yet?).*

* My mother took me to visit my cousins in Nebraska when I was four.  I fell in love with the fragile, dainty tea set, which made my nine- year-old cousin nervous.  Piece by piece, she took it away from me and gave me a plastic set to use instead.  I have never let her forget it.  Two years ago, she finally gave it to me. 

Would You Like to Swing on a Star

My father calls me a few times a day, and we talk for maybe five to ten minutes.  Lately, he's been talking about his parents--my grandmother called him last week to tell him that she was going back to college, which I find remarkable since Grandma has been dead for over fifty years, but as my sister says, maybe that's the way things are in heaven.  I say, does everyone get eternal tenure, and how long does continuing ed. last?

This weekend, Dad's calls have revolved around planning a trip to take everyone in the family to Italy and Ireland, where "our parents" are from.  Before we go, though, he wants to teach all of us Italian so that we'll be able to speak over there.  But what to do about Grandma Cella?  She's too frail to travel, and can't be left behind.  Can we leave her with your aunt, Dad?  Oh, no.  Our mother doesn't get along with her sister at all.  Well, then why don't we bring her along?  If she dies, she dies in Italy, and we'll just bury her with her parents. 

Dad doesn't know about this, or about leaving her with Uncle Jerry or Tony.  I guess they'd do it, he says, but we'd probably have to give them money.

Yesterday's call was about his parents being dead.  He wasn't sure about it and wanted to make sure before he goes to visit them.  Yes, I said, they died a long time ago.  And the house?  They sold it and Grandpa built a small one in West Roxbury where he lived with you and Mom.  So you're saying that our parents are dead.  Well, Dad, your parents are dead, and my mother died in 1971, but you're my dad and you're still alive, right? He laughs at this.

Then he wants to know who in the family is still around.  So we work our way through the index card that I know he's holding on the other end of the line.

These conversations with the living and the dead don't upset me--instead, they comfort me.  If my grandparents and his grandparents are talking with him, then maybe he's starting his transition to death.  I hope it happens as smoothly as talking with me one minute, and his mother the next seems to be.  He's also begun to take whatever happens on the television to be reality, so often, he doesn't sleep at night, and one night, when he was watching the movie "Titanic," he became so agitated and frightened that my brother, who'd dropped by to see him, took him home for the weekend.  So, if his reality is shifting, I'd so much rather it be a reunion with his family than a horrible scenario on television.

Why my father is taking on the role of the teacher, and why schooling seems so central to his travel plans doesn't completely make sense to me.  He is a lawyer, not an academic, though he's always been a reader and a dreamer.  Maybe passing on involves a certain learning and that's how he expresses it.

When I was about three or four, my great-aunt  Mary died, and I remember thinking that in heaven , she'd get to have her own star, from which she'd peek at me and wave. Age and science have proven the likelihood of that happening to be nil, but right now I'd like to dream my father into an afterlife of eternal education and travel, and of course, his own star.