We went to see Byrnes Hollow several times when I was a kid. My dad told us stories of growing up there, pointing out all the different places where some of those events happened. Some of those stories were the last memories that my dad would hold on to, the last remnants of his life that his mind would lose. Towards the end of his life, just to engage him, I tried to get him to talk about some of the things he had related to us years ago, but it was difficult. He had memories of them, I knew, because I could mention them and he would begin to talk about them, sometimes coherently, many times not. I think that after a certain point his mind just became a patchwork of memories, and too many frames of references had deteriorated away keeping him from making sense of any of his remaining memories.
Of all the things my dad related to me regarding those memories, two things stand out to me. The first was the poverty of his childhood. He never let us forget how hard life had been for him and his family growing up during The Great Depression. The other was his admiration for his mother. He loved his mother, he respected her, and he admired her; I never once heard him say a derogatory remark about her.
Excerpt from A Life Well Stolen
Chapter One, continued
When we were kids, he took us to see that childhood home, though by that time the building was long gone and so were all the rest of his relative’s houses. Besides a few bushes that might have once been part of a yard, a few planks and a lone chimney at the top of the hill were the only evidence that any homes had ever been there.
“Was this your house?” we asked him, referring to those few lonely remains.
“No, that was my uncle’s house,” he said. “He was an ill-tempered fellow, and he was fond of the bottle, so we stayed away from him most of the time.”
“What was like it like growing up here?” I asked him.
They were very poor, he said. They had no running water and no electricity. They lived off of the land, trapping or hunting for their food and canning their own home grown vegetables.
Surviving was hard work during The Great Depression. There were no jobs, so they did what they had to do. It was a strenuous life and it wore people out. Like his father, who, according to my dad, just gave up and left one day, leaving my grandmother to raise their family on her own. My dad said he didn’t know how his mother had managed, but somehow she had.
He spoke often of his admiration for his mother. She was a hard working woman who raised five boys and one girl on her own during the worst economic times this country has ever seen. She was tough as nails, very stern, intolerant of misbehavior and quick to unleash punishment for any wrongdoing. It was her way or the highway, she often said, a philosophy my dad adopted for himself later on in life. Her character left an indelible impression on my dad. His father also left an impression, just not a positive one. Both parents shaped his personality as he adopted the characteristics that gave his mother her fortitude, and adapted against the traits that he believed lent to his father’s failures.
No comments:
Post a Comment