Stories My Father Never Told Me

Aivazovsky_-_Strong_WindMine is not a family of storytellers. I don’t know what my father did in World War II. I don’t know if his heart skipped a beat the first time he saw his future wife, my mother. I don’t know if there was an instant he doubted he would live when his sailboat was torn to toothpicks in a hurricane a mile off the Florida coast. That was an event. But he never made it a story to pass on to his children. And so I don’t know why or how he made it to shore across a mile of stormy seas, only that he did.

It might sound funny to wonder why he survived. But plenty of people wouldn’t have made it. Even people with the swimming skills and physical strength to make it. You also need a powerful will to live and the courage to face what look like insurmountable odds. He was sailing solo, so there was no one else to help make the decision to ride out the storm with the ship or to brave the raging seas. There was no easier choice to just follow someone else’s lead. Decisions don’t come any harder than the ones he had to make in his life. This was only foreshadowing what was to come. Stormy SeasDid he quickly calculate his odds and swim for shore as soon as he saw the boat was foundering, or did he try to hold her together till there was no hope left, braving seas that were by that time dramatically worse to try and save the boat he had lovingly built by hand? Did he risk going down with the ship by groping frantically through rising waters in the below-deck cabin for one treasured belonging he couldn’t bear to leave behind? If he did, what was so valuable that he risked his life over retrieving it? And when he reached shore did he walk away unscathed, or were his nights haunted with nightmares of drowning? A sea of churning water stood between him and life on that…that what? I don’t even know if it was night or day. Either way, he lived to not tell about it.

As a child I one time skipped down barefoot onto a gnarl of fish hook cactus that lodged deep in the sole of my foot. My father came toward me to take it out and I warned him away with screams and tears. He laughed and asked if I intended to leave it there forever. Without an ounce of bravery, I had to think about it for a minute. If it had been me in that sinking boat, the smallest doubt of whether I could swim over raging seas and make it to land alive would have had me clutching to the last bit of floating debris of that boat like it was God Himself, and only He could save me from being swallowed by the sea. My fate would rest on how buoyant my bit of detritus was. I would use all my strength trying to make that shard of timber float, unable to trust my ability to survive a swim to shore.

Cast up by the Sea - Winslow HomerNo such complications for my father. All my life he whistled while he shaved, sang while he worked, and went about his business with good cheer. Each day was a new opportunity to enjoy life, and whatever stories his past held, that’s where they stayed. When I grew up and became interested in him as a person as well as a father, one day I asked how he had the sheer guts and strength to get up and go back to work shortly after breaking his back and being paralyzed (for life) at 35. All he said was, “I had to, I had a family to feed.” Those words were plenty to tell me what he was made of, but I wanted all the elements of plot. I wanted the how and the why, and the who, what, and whereAnd yet I didn’t have the guts to ask.

I wasn’t born yet when he fell off the roof of their new home and into a wheelbarrow, but I hurt to even think of all the crashing of bones and nerves and hearts and hopes and dreams that started when his body came freefalling onto the edge of that wheelbarrow spine-first. I wonder about the pain, how scared he must have been, how dashed his dreams, how fearful for his future, no less his pregnant wife’s and two young sons’.

In the hospital after his injury doctors tickled his feet. They poked his calves and pressed their fingers into his thighs. Nothing. No feeling. So they wouldn’t operate. They said it was no use. My grandmother stormed the hospital and they relented, slicing a 14-inch gash down his back. They poked around a bit, sewed him back up, and said, “Yep. He’ll never walk again.” He didn’t talk for a month. Then he dragged himself out of the hospital, stuffed his bodycasted self in the family Jeep with my mother and brothers, and said goodbye to their new home in Denver. They couldn’t think clearly there. They needed to re-gather their lives within the familiarity of the house they still owned in California, among loving family and concerned friends. For the next six months he taught himself to walk with a complex series of movements that began with swinging his hips and legs forward with the strength of his glutes. When his uncle, Pappy we called him, told him it was time to saw off his body cast and see what he had, that’s what he did. After fits and starts he began walking with two canes, then one, then finally none. Still with no feeling below his hips. But it was something. A miracle of the will.

After the injury he developed other strengths. His arms could hold all us children at once. His calm could make any problem, however seemingly tragic at first, suddenly approachable. His courage could hold the weight of all our worlds on his shoulders. But part of that courage came by refusing to consider himself in any way but like everybody else. He simply refused to treat himself as paralyzed, and damned if anyone else would dare. So if I asked even the most innocuous question about his injury, would opening up and talking about it, satisfying his cherished daughter’s curiosity, open a hole that let all that long-ago pain come rushing back? I wouldn’t risk it.

Harrrison - Ocean NocturneThat’s what I know. And I wouldn’t ask him for more. It wasn’t really lack of courage that stopped me from asking. I know that now. It was respect. Every day my father lived his life as a man with full use of his body would. He never gave in to physical limitations, never mind self-pity. He would not use handicap parking spaces. He coached and umpired Pony League baseball. He climbed on roofs and pounded them with sheets of shingles whenever that needed to be done, and I doubt he ever considered that irony.

He was a man of few words and was a firm believer that the value of a person’s life is in his deeds. That didn’t make him hard. Quite the opposite. He knew what a man is capable of. But he also knew how a man can suffer. Just seeing my father and what he did every day was enough to tell me the worth of the man. I didn’t need to know how he made it to shore to know he was strong. I didn’t need to know what he did in the war to know he was brave.

All this happened. And it affected our lives in unimaginable ways. In aggregate the consequences of that accident hurled our little family off orbit. He spent months at a time in the hospital because of internal injuries and infections and other complications. My mother tried to hold it all together, keeping house and feeding and caring for her three beloved children plus being a more intimate nurse to her husband than she could have ever dreamed of. But her struggles are a different story. The family is still trying to regain its balance now, a decade after he’s gone and well into his grandchildren’s adulthood. We’ll make it. In another generation the pain won’t even be a memory. But the family will be strong. Partly because he refused to let us be weak.

When he was late into his 70’s, on kidney dialysis for some kind of a record dozen years, his speech a little slurred from mini-strokes and body wasted by decades of the complications of paralysis, it finally occurred to me that he was not immortal. I asked him to write his life story. I wanted to know whatever stories he wished to share with me. He said he would, and so he spent his days at dialysis filling notebooks. His hands weakened and his handwriting deteriorated. We got him a dictation recorder, but he didn’t want to bother his fellow dialysees. So he went on with the notebooks, filling them with barely legible sentences and paragraphs and pages, pouring out his life with clearly apparent joy at what he had lived. He started with his grandparents, describing their lives, and four yellow-lined legal notebooks later he ended with his own early adulthood. That’s as far as he got before passing away on August 31, 1997, at 1:55 in the morning.

He never got to the part about the sailboat. But that’s alright. I know everything that’s important about my father.

Art - Winslow Homer - Sunset Fires

She Would Follow Him Anywhere, Even Oklahoma

It turns out that Pearl Abigail Eggleston married a dreamer, much like her father, who had changed from physician to Methodist clergyman, to Unitarian clergyman, and finally to writer.Victorian couple

Pearl’s husband, Robert Berryman, would have a career as varied, and as interesting. You can read about some of his adventures here.

Soon before their marriage Robert left for a one-year assignment in the wilds of post-Spanish American War Philippine Islands.

Straight out of college, instead of all the things this athlete and academic prodigy could have done, he took a position to teach in this dangerous place, where rebels still marauded from their hideouts in the jungles.

Robert traveled from town to town by boat, around the islands instead of through them, because it was too dangerous to enter the jungles. He was instructed to always carry a gun when he left the house, and he did.

By the time he ended his one-year assignment, he had been made Superintendent of Schools for the entire chain of Philippines Islands. All this on a not-yet 25-year old man.

Pearl imagined that was his adventure, that he needed a wild experience before settling down.

Victorian woman on lakeShe waited for him. She taught school and lived with her parents in Oberlin, Ohio, where her father, Francis Otto Eggleston, was a pastor and her mother, Clara Brown Eggleston, was a successful businesswoman who owned and ran a boarding house for students.

When Robert returned, they married, and I’m sure Pearl now thought her world was perfect. A new life with a husband she was deeply in love with, the love of her parents and friends nearby, and a future laid out before her that looked as smooth and contentment-filled as what she had come to expect of life.

Now she had every reason to believe Robert would take a position as a professor or other professional. He was so smart, so interested in politics and the world, so driven in everything he did, and now, so well-educated, and with a first professional success under his belt.

She let him have his adventure, and now it was time to settle down, to settle into adulthood.

He was offered a professorship in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which I assume means at the University of Michigan; the family history does not get more specific. But that was not to Robert’s taste. It was too tame.

Peg knew they might not live near her parents after marriage. That was alright, she wasn’t afraid of leaving her parents’ home, or even their town. Her father’s woVictorian couple2rk as a Methodist minister meant they moved often, and had lived in places as varied as Troy, New York and Knoxville, Tennessee, and she had boarded away from home at several schools.

Peg knew how to quickly make a new place her own. She was ready to follow Robert, if only he would choose his career now that he was back.

They were starting a new life together and could go anywhere, be anyone! Peg may have dreamed of New York, or Chicago, or maybe a quiet little college town somewhere in the Midwest.

But Robert had different plans. Once back from the Philippines he discovered he had inherited a sheep ranch in Oklahoma, and so they moved to that dry wilderness, sight unseen, to be sheep ranchers.

I’ll never understand that decision. Perhaps it was because they were bright-eyed and full of promise that they went, and because they had never seen Oklahoma. After all, they were only young adults, infallible and indestructible in their own minds, but years away from wisdom, and perhaps with no knowledge of the kind of toughness that Oklahoma demanded of its inhabitants.

How did a young couple, bright, well educated, from prosperous and prominent if not wealthy Ohio families, end up on a drought-desiccated ranch in Oklahoma? The world was wide open to them. Robert and Pearl (Peg) Eggleston Berryman had led charmed lives since birth.Couple

He was a star athlete at Oberlin College, a record holder in the two-mile run, and was a prodigy as a scholar, finishing high school in one summer and college in three years. His accomplishments brought attention, and he was offered top positions right out of college.

Peg was an adored daughter whose parents and grandparents doted on her. She was the preacher’s daughter, attended two different colleges, and had just married her college sweetheart, the man her father wrote she had “fallen deeply in love with.” The world was their oyster, and Peg was ready to take her place in society beside her gifted husband.

When her gifted husband inherited an Oklahoma sheep ranch, Peg’s plans changed. Never dreaming she would be a ranch wife, she nevertheless packed up her belongings, her silk and lace dresses and silver hair clips, a few necessities, and the young family headed into that great unknown.

They traveled across Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, through St. Louis, and then, at the end of their 1,000-mile journey, in the blistering heat of a dry Oklahoma summer, Peg Berryman opened the-stairsthe door to her one-room house on an isolated sheep ranch amid a wilderness of desolation. And there they set out to make their lives, like fish out of water.

I wonder if she cried on that first day. I wonder if she begged Robert to take her home. Or maybe she put on her bonnet and apron, rolled up her lace sleeves, and got to work making that one room house a home.

I think she cried, and then she went to work. She had to. What else could she do? Her other home, the one with her parents, was in the past. It might as well be a million miles away. This was home now.

I imagine that Pearl came here willingly, though unenthusiastically. It would be easy to say this young wife’s starry love focused her eyes only on her husband, following him anywhere he might take her, but that was never her character. Pearl Eggleston was taught to think for herself. I imagine her father taught her by Socratic method, asking questions that would encourage her to think critically, to form firm and logical conclusions, and to consciously solve any problem she encountered rather than defer to another or put off to a later time.

This was a young woman who led the pampered life of an only daughter, who dressed in white lace and played croquet and tennis on the grounds of her grandfather’s mansion. Yet faSAG65029r from frivolous, she was serious-minded, and put her considerable intelligence to use on issues and questions of the day. Women’s suffrage, racial discrimination, hunger, and war occupied her thoughts and conversations. In that she and her erudite husband were well matched.

And now, here this eager and idealistic young woman was in Oklahoma, on an isolated sheep ranch with barely a house to live in, the nearest town so small and ephemeral that it would disappear entirely in a few years, decimated by drought.

Robert, my grandfather, could withstand any degree of hardship. He once broke his leg so badly that the bone protruded from the flesh. But he braced himself against the pain and set the leg himself.

Peg, my grandmother, was no so tough. She was not delicate, but preferred life’s delicacies. Still, here she was.

Oil had just been discovered there, and the illusion of prosperity and a limitless future filled the imaginations of thousands of immigrants who flocked to the nation’s newest state to seek their fortunes. Many more came when Congress opened the Indian Lands to settlement by any who would claim and work the land.Tissot - july

The reality was starker. More than two hundred thousand farmers struggled, while oil corporations sent their wealth out of state.

Deepening drought turned family farms into tenancies, and social unrest from increasing inequality of income grew worse.

This is the landscape my grandparents inherited. I don’t know if, when they arrived at the property they had moved to sight-unseen, they sat down and wept because it was dry and lonely. Or perhaps they laughed for joy because it was theirs and they were in love.

Whatever their outlook, this was their new life.

There were no woods, no trees like there were at the homes her family had had in Ohio, Tennessee, Vermont, New York, or Virginia. After her father’s visit to the young couple, he wrote that, “There was very little wood or trees. To make wood we burned old roots and stuff we picked up.”

Then one day the house burned down, and Peg and Robert moved into the barn loft. They slept on hay, cooked in tin cans over fire, stored what few belongings they salvaged in corners, like hobos.387px-James_Tissot_-_Chrysanthemums

Peg hung in. But she cried; I know she cried. Maybe only at night, while her husband slept.

Or maybe only when washing clothes at the water pump, or in letters home to her mother and father, or to her dear friend Elizabeth, who by this time was married to Robert’s younger brother, Waldo, and starting her own family, though more comfortably.

But however openly or secretly she cried, her father came to visit, and when he saw how they were living, he made up his mind to take Peg home with him for an extended visit. She had a baby due now, and he did not want his daughter giving birth on a remote farm far from family or doctor. But first he helped Robert to rebuild a house.

The next chapter of Pearl Eggleston’s life will be published soon. To make sure you don’t miss the rest of the story, sign up to this blog at the top right of this page.

My Tragic Boyd Blood

Aside

On my father’s side I come from a long line of Boyds. So far so good. But things happen to Boyds that make me want to look over my shoulder now and then just for having Boyd blood.

Of course, things happen to every family, but when they happen to Boyds they tend to be so big or tragic or astonishing that they are recorded in history books.

This story tells only one of them.

Starting with Robert dictus de Boyd in 1262, the Scottish Boyds ascended to nobility…were given a castle…were accused of treason…lost their castle…were literally stabbed in the back…regained Royal favor and a few more castles…were imprisoned in the Tower of London…executed… mortified… regained favor again…and were generally kicked about like royal hacky sacks for some 500-odd years.

Then, in 1746 Sir William Boyd was executed for attempting to take the British Crown. cabin-in-the-wilderness-lake-georgeMeanwhile, half a world away in the wilds of Pennsylvania, John and Nancy Boyd were about to have their lives ripped apart.

In the mid-1700s my Scots-Irish ancestors came to America in search of a place where the land would sustain them.

Where they could build a home, raise a family, and live in peace, far from the volatile mess in their homeland.

the-comforts-of-homeJohn Boyd and Nancy Urie thought they found it in the unbroken wilderness of Pennsylvania’s Cumberland Valley.

They cut their plot of land from the forest, built a log cabin, and commenced living the hard but independent life of a frontier family.

John was a farmer, and a few miles away lived his neighbor, John Stewart, a weaver.

the-french-lessonOn February 10, 1756, John and his oldest son, William, started out for Stewart’s to buy a web of cloth.

With five active children and a new one on the way, Nancy Urie Boyd needed plenty of cloth to sew, one stitch at a time, into clothes.

David Boyd was a responsible boy of 13, and after his father left for Stewart’s, his mother sent David out to chop wood.

He took his hatchet, and his little brother John, who was six, went along to pick up chips.

cherokee-scouting-fort-duquesneTheir two sisters, Sallie and Rhoda, ten and seven, stayed inside with their mother and little brother.

David got busy with the wood, and his hatchet rang out through the forest.

He put all his concentration on placing the hatchet perfectly straight into the log, splitting it right through the middle.

Taking of captive babyHe was concentrating so hard, in fact, that he didn’t hear the Iroquois Indian who had walked right up to him.

But little John did, and he screamed. David turned, but it was too late.

The Iroquois grabbed David by his belt, threw him over his shoulder, and ran off into the forest.

John was snatched the same way, and in seconds the two boys disappeared into the trees.

Within moments Sally and Rhoda and their little brother, not yet three, were taken, and all five of them were brought together a short ways off.

chase-womanThe Natives instructed the children to run.

As he ran, David looked back to see his agonized mother standing before their home in flames, her hands raised to the heavens, praying, “O God, be merciful to my children going among these savages.”

The party of Natives that took the Boyd children also took their mother after setting the cabin to flames.

They drove the party on until the pregnant mother and smallest child could go no more, and so they were killed along the trail.

Boone_abductionThe children were traumatized. But they did as their captors told them, running on the trail, always running, and staying silent.

And so they survived and were taken hundreds of miles into the Ohio Territory, and there they were separated and given to different tribes.

But they were not made to be prisoners in the way we usually understand the term.

rice-gatherersYou would think that a captor brutal enough to slaughter a babe before his mother and a mother before her children could not show humanity.

But the Boyd children were adopted by the community and given new parents who taught the children this different way of life.

They ate and slept alongside these Iroquois and Delaware people.

They helped to hunt or prepare food, to care for babies and elders, sew shirts, haul firewood, prepare herbal medicine.

Tthe-tannerhey learned lessons of the forest and the stars and the animals. They became what people of the day called white Indians.

After living in the tribe for four years, David Boyd’s adoptive Delaware father decided it was time to return him to his white family.

David hesitated. This had become his new family, and he liked his new life.

He went reluctantly and was reunited with his father, John Boyd.

Twice thereafter he attempted to flee back to his Delaware family, but was brought back each time, and eventually he married a white woman, settled down, and had ten children.

Rhoda Boyd was rescued by the famous captive hunter, Colonel Bouquet.

Sarah Columbia Boyd Berryman.border.rBut on the trip to Fort Pitt, where she was to be reunited with family, she escaped to her Native family, and never returned to white society.

Sallie was returned to her father on February 10, 1764. John was returned on November 15 that same year, along with his brother, Thomas.

That was exactly 250 years ago. I don’t know of any Boyd tragedies of the kind that make history that have happened since then. My family left the Boyd line behind with my great-grandmother, Sarah Columbia Boyd.

Perhaps the Boyd family can rest now.

There are numerous differing accounts of the Boyd capture. I chose to follow what seems the most credible source, the book Setting All the Captives Free, by the scholar, Ian K. Steele.

I’m Finally Embracing My Scots-Irish Ancestry

I’ve never embraced my Scotch-Irish ancestry.

In the first place, my mother always emphasized that the word is “Scots,” not “Scotch.” I’m prettyturnbull-s-whiskey-of-hawick-scotland sure it’s because she disliked Scotch’s association with whiskey. And she never hyphenated “Scots” with the “Irish” part.  To her, our ancestors were purely Scottish, and the fact that they passed through Ireland for a generation or two was of negligible consequence. Irish meant Catholic to Presbyterian her, and we assuredly were not Catholic, thank you very much, and here you can see where comes all the trouble in the Isles of England.

But the main reason I never embraced the Scots-Irish is because any time that designation is mentioned it seems to be preceded by “The Fighting.” I don’t find that embraceable. A certain segment of Scots-Irish Americans, led lately by former Secretary of the Navy, Jim Webb, likes to proudly point to the Scots-Irish propensity to, as he says, mistrust government and bear and use arms. Butler_Lady_Scotland_for_EverHe even wrote a book called, “Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America.”

If the Scots-Irish are so damn testy, where are all of Scotland’s wars? Huh?

Webb and his cohorts say the Scots-Irish have “a propensity” to mistrust government and bear and use arms. All “a propensity” means is “a prejudice.” A propensity to mistrust means that however a person decides to act, the decision is already weighted toward mistrust; the deck is stacked against trust. Completely objective people do not have “a propensity” to believe a certain way, no matter what the evidence says.

battle-of-king-s-mountain-south-carolina-1780-american-revolutionNow, don’t go all political on me. There’s no political subtext meant here. Honestly, if Webb and others are right, I’m glad the Scots-Irish were around to save our butts in the Revolutionary War. (But then, if three quarters of the Rebel Army was Scots-Irish, as he points out, how do you explain the South losing the Civil War? …Just askin’.)

You know, it takes (at least) two sides to make a war. Nearly all Scotland’s wars were fought with the English, but we don’t go around calling them, “The Fighting English,” do we?

A little background might help here.

andrew-carrick-gow-cromwell-at-dunbar-1650When the Scottish people began their several hundred year migration to America, they had just spent 700 years battling the English. No kidding. 700 years! Finally, in the early 1700s, Scotland’s James I became king and unified Great Britain. James decided to stock Ireland with Protestants from Scotland, and the Scots were only too happy to oblige because they were just coming out of a decade-long famine and hoped for better lives elsewhere. Their new lands were in Northern Ireland, where they were immediately seen as the enemy by the Catholics opposed to their religion and infringement on Ireland’s lands.

So far we’ve tallied 700 years of war, a ten-year famine, and now 150 or so years of strife within Northern Ireland. But there’s more.

frontier-father-reading-to-his-children-by-firelight-1800sThe American Colonies were prospering, but they had problems with the Natives. (And the Natives had problems with them!) Natives kept attacking the towns and settlements, and the situation was particularly bad in those parts of the Colonies that bordered the frontier. So the secretary of state of Pennsylvania thought up a clever solution. He would create a human buffer between his colony’s towns and the frontier. And who better to be border buffers than the fighting Scots-Irish. So he offered free land to lure immigrants, who were already eager to get out of Ireland.woman-weeping-outside-a-log-cabin-in-ruins

Those poor Scots-Irish. An entire people suffering from “soldier’s heart,” a sort of constant anxiety first described in Civil War veterans. They couldn’t catch a break.

People become conditioned to their environments. Said a different way, your environment can make you a different person. If they had just come out of 860 years of peace instead of war, maybe Jim Webb’s book would be called “The Peace-Loving Scots-Irish.”

small_house-on-the-hudsonMy mother’s mostly-Scottish family is rural Virginia, though by what evidence I’ve seen so far they came by way of Jamestown, not by the well-traveled Scots-Irish route via Pennsylvania and down through the Ohio Valley. The character of my mother’s family is gentle, communal, earthy, peace-loving, home-loving, and not particularly religious or political.

Since getting interested in genealogy I’ve come to better embrace my one quarter Scots-Irishness. I can move beyond media-friendly monikers like “Born Fighting.” ernie-cselko-frontier-reflectionsI can see now that it’s not about the fighting. It’s about the courage. They didn’t move into Ireland to fight. They didn’t sail to America to fight.

Labels like “The Fighting Scots-Irish” emphasize a certain kind of courage at the expense of other kinds. Like the courage to cross a border, even a sea, to better their lives. Like the courage to walk into the wilderness and carve out a place to call their own. That doesn’t take aggression. They didn’t move forward by way of slaughter or hacking down forests. They moved forward by facing the unknown with a powerful strength of character and purpose. To carve a place in the wilderness and make it their own, after being chased around and out of for a couple centuries. “Leave us be!” could have been their moniker.

Leave us be! To live our lives in peace and community, we’ve crossed the Irish Sea, and then the Atlantic Ocean. We were lured by King James, who planted us as Presbyterian seeds in Ireland, and then by American colonists who sent us to the hinterlands and planted us a buffer between them and the Natives. Conflict precedes us, it does not follow us. You think us fighters, but we are not. Leave us in peace and we stay in peace!

john-faed-evangeline-and-gabrielNow here we are further cementing the fate of these people by popularizing the fighting image, lauding them as heroes for sending their boys to fight our shared wars. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be proud of them, because we should. But we shouldn’t make it seem expected of them because they’ve got fighting in their blood and that’s always been their role.

I’m embracing the one quarter of my blood that is Scots-Irish. These are most assuredly people of strength and courage, and I like that. Of course, there’s also the music, but that’s another story for another time.

May the best ye’ve ever seen
Be the warst ye’ll ever see.
May the moose ne’er lea’ yer aumrie
Wi’ a tear-drap in his e’e.
May ye aye keep hail an’ hertie
Till ye’re auld eneuch tae dee.
May ye aye be jist as happy
As we wiss ye noo tae be.

 

My Mother’s Special Drawer

My mother had her own drawer as a child.

With a family ofViolet green swallow.GIF 12 in a four-bedroom farmhouse that’s all she could get, one drawer.

But she didn’t feel deprived, she felt special.

The way she put it was, “My mother gave me my own drawer.”

She doesn’t know if her brothers or sisters had their own drawers, because, “I just thought about my drawer, not theirs.”

It was the Depression, and theirs was one of the fortunate families. They had their farm, and Mom’s father had a good job with the Norfolk & Western Railroad. Doll 1912.GIF

They had abundant food and some income to buy new shoes and little combs, maybe a doll at Christmas, and to go to the fair once a year and get other occasional small luxuries that gladden a child’s heart.

In the afternoons after school, with her homework done and still too early for supper, she liked to open her drawer and look at her special things.

There was a small, doll-sized tea set, and sometimes she had teDoll tea set 3.GIFa parties for her doll on the downstairs parlor windowsill.

There was a doll’s comb, and sometimes she sat on the edge of her bed and quietly combed the pretty hair on her precious doll with the bisque head.

Brown thrasher.GIFBut what she loved best of all were her bird cards. She had a whole stack of them and she liked to take them out, spread them on her bed, and look at them.

She examined each of the birds, their colors, the fineness of their feathers, the tilt of their heads, the way they perched so lightly on a twig.

Then she turned the cards over and read what they said on the other side.

She read about the brown thrasher, that, “On beautiful May mornings he is seen and heard singing his clear, rollicking, joyous, and variable song, while perched on the topmost branches of tree or bush.” Dickcissal.GIFSuch vibrant, lyrical language!

She read that the dickcissel’s “unmusical song, which is given with great earnestness, resembles the syllables, ‘dick dick chee chee chee chee,’ and from this the bird’s name is derived.”

And that the crested flycatcher’s territory “is pugnaciously guarded by the male, who brooks no intrusion by any other bird.”

But mostly she looked at the delightful pictures. Each of them was drawn with great skill in vivid colors and detail exacting enough to show the bird’s features, but artistically enough to be a creative representation of the bird in its environment.

She handled them gently, always carefully restacking them and putting them back into the drawer, precisely in the near-right corner, squared to the two drawer sides.

Bird and bee.GIFHer mother gave them to her, only her, and she got a new card every time  her mother came home from the store with a new box of Arm & Hammer baking soda. They came one to a box.

Sometimes after looking at her bird cards she liked to go to the windowsill of her upstairs bedroom and watch for the real kind.

Her home was at the edge of land where the rolling green valley of Shenandoah meets the dense forest of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

She could look out past heBlue tailed sylph and crimson topaz.GIFr mother’s locust tree, west across the long sloped field where Stony Run Creek flows from Grindstone Mountain, and beyond that to far distance where Bearfence Mountain sits at the peak of the Blue Ridge Mountain range.

I don’t know if she knew how privileged she was to grow up in one of the most beautiful places in the world.

But she did recognize and treasure the beauty and everything that environment gave her.

Off in the field she could see vivid blue buntings perched precipitously on swaying twigs.

And grosbeaks with their bright red chests. Towhees were harder to see, blending Eastern bluebird.GIFwith the field grass and bushes until they flew from their hiding place.

Pretty bluebirds sometimes nested in the locust, and in summer the robins always seemed to be hop-hop-hopping along.

Sometimes she tried to catch them. “If you put salt on its tail,” her mother told her, “you can catch it.”

She tried sneaking up close. She tried tossing salt from as far as she could throw.

She tried dropping it on them from up in the peach tree, where she sat quietly until one got near enough.Black and white warbler.GIF

But nothing worked. She only realized years later that what her mother meant was that if she could sneak close enough to shake a sprinkling of salt on the bird’s tail, she was close enough to grab it.

No matter. The bird cards were just as amazing as the birds themselves.

They were painted by Louis Agassiz Fuertes, considered by some as history’s greatest portraitist of birds.

He did 90 paintings for Arm & Hammer’s chromolithographed bird cards.Great horned owl.GIF Today the originals are among the  collections of Cornell University.

Some say the cards were so popular that they helped create the Victorian era bird watching phenomenon, when dapper men and dainty ladies alike took to hill and vale to catch a prized view of rare and colorful birds.

Arm & Hammer added mottoes to the cards: “For the good of all, do not destroy the birds.”

It was already too late for the passenger pigeon.

What had been a bird so plentiful that flocks would darken the sky, became Passenger pigeon, last one.GIFextinct when Martha, the last one, died on September 1, 1914.

Now conservationists were afraid for other birds as well.

The birdwatching craze included watching for bird feathers on ladies’ hats, the more gloriBird of Paradise hat.GIFously spectacular the plumes, the better.

Some hats even sported entire stuffed birds. More than 95 percent of Florida’s shore birds were killed by plume hunters.

Two women objected. They started a group they called the Audubon Society, and waged a nationwide campaign to stop the feathers for fashion craze.

Thanks toSpoonbill.GIF them, and to conservationist president Theodore Roosevelt, an act of Congress was passed to stop the slaughter.

My mother was spared knowing any of that. She just loved her birds. And her bird cards.

I don’t know when she stacked theSummer tanager.GIFm in the near-right corner of her drawer for the last time.

They were still in there when she placed her high school diploma in the drawer.

And when she went off to Washington D.C. to work as a shop girl at Garfinkle’s department store.

The drawer became someone else’s, and the cards disappeared sometime over the years.

But my mother never lost hePatio July 10 2011 020r love of birds, and today, at age 93, she sits in the patio and watches yellow finches cover the finch feeding bags.

When her children call, she always tells them how her birds are doing, and whether the mallards have visited the swimming pool.

She doesn’t have any bird cards, but she remembers them, the favorite of all the special things she kept in the drawer that was her own.

The End.Crested titmouse.GIF

Happy Not Anniversary

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Today is not my wedding anniversary. But my husband and I celebrate the date every year. This morning he gave me a big hug and said, “Do you know what today is?” I thought for a second and said, “Oh, it’s our Not Anniversary.” Later tonight we’ll have a nice dinner and laugh about the events of 31 years ago. We had been engaged for about a year but hadn’t gotten around to getting married. He was more of a traditionalist than I, so asked me sweetly if I would care to finally settle on a date, please. I gave it some serious thought and came up with March 4th. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more convinced I was that there was no more appropriate date in that or any year than March 4th. The date itself would add a layer of significance to our marriage. It would be as symbolic as the vows, the ring, the wedding cake, and the two-foot tall candle I bought to burn on each anniversary for the next 50 years.

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He and I have both made our livings as writers during various times of our lives. We can’t go into a restaurant without proofreading the menu. We rewrite actors’ lines in the TV shows we watch. We read book passages out loud to each other if they’re particularly well written. We love words, and we love when they are used in ways that imbue them with layers of meaning. Like the name of this blog: We’re All Relative. At its most basic the blog is about my family’s genealogy. I am telling our stories to the family’s future generations so they don’t have to wonder who they are or where they came from. Peel off that layer and you’ll see a second theme, rather the opposite of the first, that the end game of genealogy is ultimately an exercise in meaningless. Because the farther back you go the more ancestors you have, until you ultimately have a connection to everyone. And therefore no one.

My fifth great-grandfather was Sir John Boyd, who left the comfort of his peerage position in Scotland in 1736 to ply the seas and take up life on the wild frontier of Pennsylvania. Good enough. But I wonder what my other 253 great-great-great-great-great grandparents were doing in 1736. Am I really up to finding out? And what about their parents, and their grandparents? Because they’re all my ancestors too, all 1,024 of them. And this is where the numbers really start adding up. Go back three more generations and you have 15,382 direct ancestors of the grand-parental variety to sort out. Add four more generations, putting you roughly back to 1450, and you have more than a quarter million grandparents of various great- and great-greatness. Add in just one sibling per grandparent and you’re over one million grandparents and first cousins. They all have stories. But I’m not digging them up.

Okay, we’ve peeled off that layer of meaning to We’re All Relative. The next, and last I’ve thought of so far, is about our own meaning in this world. Who we are is relative to place, time, and circumstance. That we are alive today, our ancestors – all billions of them – had to pick the spouses they did, cross the seas when they did, survive the plagues of disease that they did and outrun the wild animals that they did. Robert Boyd was one of three children of my before-mentioned fifth great-grandfather John Boyd, who were killed in an attack on their home by hostile Native Americans. My ancestor was not home at the time, and thus I was born. The fact that I exist is predicated on billions and billions of individual circumstances, decisions, and fates that came before and still occur every day. Which makes me think I could have named my blog, We’re All Irrelevant, or We’re All Impermanent, So Watch Yourself. I think I’ll stick with the top layer. I just like it that I can dive into deeper waters if I have a hankering.

March 4th carries a much less existential symbolism. It is a date with semantic meaning. To be married is to march forth into a shared life. It is to face the trials and share the joys of life side by side, always side by side. It is a commitment to the future, to shared goals and dreams and spontaneous diversions. I’m not one to ever want to march anywhere, but to march forth is in keeping with the formality of a traditional wedding. After our march together down the aisle and then back up the aisle, we fairly ran everywhere else. Sometimes with direction, sometimes not. Sometimes together, sometimes not, but always verging back to our shared place.

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But we didn’t do it on March 4th. No. After being excited about the date and planning the time and place for the wedding and making all kinds of preliminary plans, he came home from work one day and informed me that he had to shoot a commercial on March 4th. It Had Been Decided. The client, the agency, the talent, the production team, even the damn helicopter had been put in motion toward a March 4th date. It was written in pen, while my wedding had only been penciled in. That was the rationale.

We ended up not getting married for another year. There was no urgency pushing us toward a specific date, so we let life carry us along until one or the other – I forget which – decided it was time to pen in a date. We had a lovely wedding on some date, either May 2nd or 4th or 5th, and proceeded to forget which actual day it was every year thereafter. We used to rely on my mother-in-law to settle the date question every year. She’s gone now, but my sister has a pretty reliable memory and a rock-solid reliable planner. I couldn’t tell you even now what day we got married. I only know it was early May and it wasn’t March 4th. I’ll probably call my sister on the first or second of May to get it straight. Sometimes we forget entirely, or remember sometime around mid-May. But we never, ever forget our Not Anniversary on March 4th.

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Happy Not Anniversary, dearest husband.

John Fitch, Chapter 1: Soon to be a Major Motion Picture!

John Fitch and I are second cousins eight times removed. That means my ninth great grandfather was his second great-grandfather, and my eighth great grandfather was his great-granduncle.

It’s nothing I’d get too excited over. Except that I wouldn’t know about him if I didn’t have this connection, and you wouldn’t be reading about his major-motion-picture life of an itinerant button maker.
John Fitch portrait.GIF

I’m thinking Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

Am I right?

Joseph Gordon Levitt
I’ll give you a 30-second preview of the movie in my head.

(To be read aloud in your finest action movie trailer voice):

“As a mapmaker, his surveys helped open the Western Reserve territories… As a silversmith, he was renowned as the finest in the land… As a button-maker, he built a fortune… And as a land investor, he was captured in Kentucky Territory by hostile Natives…

“And that’s only the beginning… Fitch was traded to the French. He was confined to a prison island, and made another fortune. Bound on a prison ship, he narrowly escaped being sunk in sea battle by his own American comrades. Set free in New York, he set out for Kentucky to do it all again… And then…he invented the steamboat.”

Researching your genealogy isn’t just about dates, places, and begats. It’s history. And a way to learn history. When I saw the loooooong line of Fitches that stretch out behind me for many hundreds of years, I wanted to know more about this family and the history it wound itself through. It happens that there’s more out there on Fitches than for your average fairlJohn Fitch book cover.GIFy anonymous ancestor.

One of the things I dug up was a little (as in diminutive) 413-page book about James Fitch, published in 1857.

The book is The Life of John Fitch, Inventor of the Steamboat, by Thompson Westcott. You can get it free at www.archives.org.

Author Westcott treads the victim theme pretty heavily, from Fitch’s reprobate family (How could he rise from this?!) to the many times he was slighted, cheated, lied to, given empty promises, and otherwise played the patsy. But I didn’t see it. I mean, how do you take a man who builds part of his fortune on supplying beer and tobacco to troops in the field and call him anything but an opportunist? And opportunists sometimes get their hands slapped.

Be that as it may, Fitch was brilliant and industrious, and knew how to turn a circumstance to his advantage.

When he was born in 1743 there were just under one million Colonists in America. By 1760 that number had swelled by three quarters, to a million and a half, and they were revving themselves up for a Revolution. Paul Revere - Dunsmore

That’s the world John Fitch was born into. Roiling, uncertain, full of promise and knee-deep in opportunity, but as changeable as a fire wind.

With no guidance from people who loved him, John had to find his own place in the world. And because he was full of ambition but short on patience, he took a few ground balls to the chin along the way.

Fresh out of his father’s home, FitIndenture certificatech endured an unsuccessful apprenticeship with a clockmaker who wouldn’t teach young John how to make clocks, so after fulfilling the duties of his three-year indenture he was tossed to the world with scant skills at age 21, which was considered somewhat of a late start.

By grit and determination he found himself a position making buttons for a lazy silversmith, and before long he had bought out the man’s equipment, which he financed by making brass buttons and selling them town to town, traveling by foot.

His reputation grew and he somehow finagled himself the commission of armorer to the Revolutionary Army, providing arms and ammunition to the ill-equipped recruits who flooded in from small towns and woodlandLafayette - spirit of the colonists settlements to fight the bloody British.

He set up a small factory to build guns, but continued to supplement his income by making and selling buttons town to town.

By this time he was worth the healthy sum of 800 pounds. But with British forces ever on the move forward, and his racing around from town to town hauling buttons, he worried about his money.

After considering the alternatives, he decided to secretly bury it on his friend Charles Garrison’s place in Buck’s County, Pennsylvania.

993px-Parable_of_the_hidden_treasure_Rembrandt_-_Gerard_Dou

And that’s when the story really gets interesting.

To be continued!