Reading: Straight Man

Moving: walked 2.7 miles

Learning: how to hook up the scanner

Watching: a magpie laugh

10 August 2000: Photographs

When I went home last month and my mother encouraged me to rootle around in my grandmother's room, this is what I saw. I don't know what's become of all of Granny's artwork, but I have to make sure my mother knows I want it. In November Granny tried to give me jewelry, which costume or real is nearly meaningless to me. I want stuff she's painted, sewn, touched in some way. My Christmas ornaments and little sled painted with the Little Drummer Boy; a winter scene of some trees and a barn painted on wood; a rabbit crouched in snow, done on pasteboard; a little ceramic duck she painted and had fired unglazed; an oval ceramic with a low-relief extremely depressing basset hound; a wooden box with a curved lid painted with flowers; a quilted runner in blues and lavenders. That's the sort of thing I want to remember her by.

When my great-grandmother died, my grandmother gave each of her three granddaughters a handkerchief Gram had embroidered as a memento. Mine has a yellow flower. Rootling through other boxes, my mother found lace and doilies and now I also have a small round doily tatted by someone, either by Granny or Gram or one of their sisters, or by someone even farther back like maybe my great-great-grandmother, the young girl whose photograph I was drawn to that day.

In the full 5"x7" photograph, her hands look careworn, already when she here could have been no more than 12, given her size and the length of her skirts. BDL contradicted me flat out when I said I remembered her ("Not your great-great-grandmother you can't!") and my mother, standing up for the longevity of her line if not necessarily for her daughter, said oh yes, Eva died at 94. Since I was about five, which would have been 1973, then Eva was born around 1879. Her first child, my great-grandmother, was born in November 1896. This girl's mother died when she was very young, and so her father farmed her younger sisters and her out, probably severally, to various relations. I imagine that she lived rather like Fanny Price, somewhere between a servant and a foster child, and therefore was much encouraged, by both the family and her own desire for her own home, to marry as soon as possible. She accepted a man in his early 30s when she was 16 or 17, which accounts for her having borne my great-grandmother so young.

Another photograph I have but have never displayed, because it's in as distasteful a frame as Eva's photograph was, is of my father as a boy. He gave it to me the winter before I was married and he moved to Florida. His father was a housepainter (and my father remembers him peeling apples with his putty knife still damp with lead paint) and had five children of whom my father was the youngest; I cannot imagine how bad my father's vision must have been for anyone to notice before he went to school, almost sixty years ago when toddlers weren't routinely tested, or what an expense his glasses must have been for his family. He got them when he was four. He might be as much as eight here.

Look at hyperopic he was, so young. Look at the t-shirt he wore for a formal portrait. Look at his expression, that expression, worn so young. Imagine him as a man in his 30s, with small daughters and that same expression. "I don't know why you girls think you have self-esteem problems." My dad. And look! He has hair! Just teasing, Dad.