The prayer card handed out at Rose Anna Gilbert Plante’s funeral was in French. Even though she lived all but 14 years of her long life in Lewiston, Maine, Rose Anna still listed French as her spoken language on the census form every ten years. “A la douce memoire de …” means “To the sweet memory of …” Rose Anna lived to be 87. She outlived her “epouse,” Jean Vincent Plante by 29 years. (Jean was a brother to my…
Among the many trunks and boxes of Mom’s poetry, prose, and other papers, a Halloween story surfaced this week. The one-page spooky story looks to be a theme paper written for a high school class. Young Joan Cassidy typed it carefully; she was a student of New Haven’s St. Mary’s Academy. Associates in Magic My buck-toothed product of the harvest grinned maliciously in the kitchen window. His crooked nose and glaring eyes made him appear utterly ridiculous. I attempted futilely…
Back in June, as Gary and I cleared out my parents’ home for sale, I phoned my cousin Suzanne about one particular wooden chair. “The chair with the lions. That was from Grandma and Grandpa’s house, right Suzie?” You mean the Frankenchair? Up until that moment, I hadn’t realized the chair in my folks’ music room had a story behind it. Our grandpa was a policeman in New Haven, Connecticut, from 1926 through 1952. He loved to walk the beat…
There’ll never be a Halloween when my brothers and I don’t think of Mom. She loved everything about fall, especially getting spooky in late October. In addition to decorating the house and loading up on apple cider, Mom got a lot of use out of this witch hat: We liked that photo so much, it reappeared as a pillow, which Mom treasured: It’ll be years before I run out of Halloween poems from Mom. She wrote a bunch! All Hallows…
Mom would be pleased that her poems – even those from long ago – are causing her children to research and reminisce. This poem was written in August of 1977 following the death of someone named Madeline. A friend? A relative? I checked first about a certain writer friend, but she spelled her name Madeleine and lived for three more decades. A search on our massive family tree on ancestry.com brought me – at last – to Madeline. Madeline Sturmer….
Does anyone really use a dictionary anymore? I mean a real dictionary. Hard-covered and hefty. With hundreds and hundreds of tissue-paper pages. Tiny type. Here’s Mom‘s copy, now in our home: I weighed it. Thirteen pounds. Measured it, too: 11.5″ x 9.5″ x 5″. Thousands of pages … … starting with Mr. Webster: Researching Mr. Webster a bit, my favorite quote is that he was instrumental in giving American English a dignity and vitality of its own. He served in…
Well, I left something out in an earlier story. As much as I learned about Grandpa Vayo while researching “The Family Scholar,” I didn’t pick up on one important attribute. Sarcasm. Grandpa knew how to take a sarcastic turn in his writing. Here’s a letter Grandpa mailed to Dad on July 30, 1952. My father was in boot camp at Fort Dix, New Jersey, preparing to be sent overseas during the Korean Conflict. Dear Son: Guess there isn’t much news…
A few weeks before Dad‘s 60th birthday, Mom wrote this playful poem about her handy husband: Handyman Hal If you need a window lowered at nightOr somebody strong to switch on the lightOr the tablecloth straightened from left to rightCall Handyman Hal! If you reach him the key he will open your doorGive him a jug he’ll be happy to pourAll of these projects and many things moreHandyman Hal. If you want Christmas presents placed under the treeA wise man…
The year was 1934. The location was Utica, New York. Dad was four years old. And he was on the move. Dad wasn’t running away from home, he just had things to do and places to go. Dear Grandma had her hands full. With the lad who was called “Big Boy” at times and “Junior” other times, plus baby Jean (a year younger than Dad) and another sibling on the way (Aunt Janet), it probably took a few minutes for…
A few months ago, I went through a big pile of Mom’s poems. Little by little, I’m reading them and trying to sort them into decades and themes. I set this one aside. The carriage Mom mentions in this love poem to Dad wasn’t the type of carriage you read about in a fairy tale. Something as Bright What did you know of mewalking our children under the leavesand over the bridges of towns too smallfor memory. Shoes from the…