It's been awhile, and I've been thinking. Why not tell my own stories? After all, those are the best ones...
She says our Iroquois ancestor was called, “Shimmering Water”, clearly an Indian princess or some one high up. Couldn’t be something like, “Mud in Face”, or “Snores While Sleeping”.
Then on my dad's side we're Spanish, German or Dutch, English, and I'd swear Apache. All together it's quite a mix from an Anglo-Saxon perspective, but completely normal. With all the mixing that's been going on, who can say what we are, except maybe human.
Both sides of my family like to go on about our ancestors who had it better and harder than we do now from all accounts. Mom says another long-lost ancestor was none other than Ulysses S. Grant, although he has never shown up in any of my ancestral searches. Mom used to say he was our, “Great, great, great, great, great, great, grandfather", and talk with disparaging intimacy of his drinking and womanizing and mood swings. He was definitely Irish, so Mom says.
No one ever dared contradict our Mother when she was on a roll, telling stories and holding court. No one. That would be dangerous, if not deadly. My step-dad did once in so many words. It was memorable.
They had been arguing at the dinner table, and even after he had reached up and turned off his hearing aids so he couldn't hear her, she kept going. My brother and I were just trying to get through the meal, when all of a sudden my step-dad's hand shot out, across the table, and grabbed my mother by the neck. Then he started to get up, his arm rigid, and my mom suspended from his fist like a fish, turning all red, and kind of sputtering. Rick and I bolted out the front door into the driveway, screaming for help. I guess my step-dad had reached the end of his patience. He was pretty patient. He was Belgian and Welsh. Mom called him either "The Belch", or "The Blemish". (Flemish - Belgian... get it?)
My mom had a bit of a temper, due to the Irish in her, she would claim. She says she once got so mad at her father that she went down into the basement where his long-johns were hanging to dry and cut off the legs and arms of each set with her scissors. Why any one would have let my mother have scissors is beyond me.
Mom went to Sunday School, at her mother’s insistence. Nanny was a tried and true Catholic, a fact that irritated the hell out of my grandfather Frank, who was himself a Protestant at best. Nanny ruled on religion, so Mom had to go, never mind her heathen father’s opinion. She was given money for the collection plate and the bus, and was sent off on the streets of Trenton, New Jersey. This would have been around 1940, when it was relatively safe for kids wandering around big, industrial cities alone. Mom was about 9.
One day when the nuns were teaching Determinism, my mom dared ask a question. I don’t know how long she had been going there, or what had happened up till then, but I know my mom and it’s hard to believe she had been quietly sitting there all along. Speaking up runs in our blood, so to speak, probably the Scottish in us. So they started in on Determinism, about how everything is already set by God forever to go a certain way.
Mom thinks about this, and then raises her hand: “If everything is pre-determined, and God has everything all planned out, then why do I have to sit here?”
The nuns, after a brief argument, decided to leave my Mom to God, and sent her home, telling her not to come back without her mother.
She took the money for the collection plate and the bus and started going to art classes at the local YMCA. She never told her mother about her lesson at Sunday School. She did indeed continue with her art, which she decided was what God had in mind all along. Not that she believed in God, as such.
But that’s another story.
