My dear Uncle Bill is gone. It wasn’t a surprise. Bill was 93 and had been in extended care for 18 months or so. But it still hurts like hell. Bill was an old-fashioned family man. As a young fellow, he permitted his mother and future mother-in-law (my Grandma Cassidy) to fix him up with a stunning redhead. “Oh, boy. Those legs,” he remembered decades later, from his bed in The Guilford House. His walk was no longer steady, but…
Mom collected a lot more than books. She collected friends. We moved around a lot in the 1960s and ’70s, and she stayed in touch with each group of friends and neighbors. This was pre-email, of course. Dad used to tease that Mom kept the post office solvent. One friend was Newberry-winning author Madeleine L’Engle. In a future post, I’ll share some of their correspondence. In the meantime, I read L’Engle’s most famous book (finally!) this month. Week 1: A…
Farmer Gary sets an annual goal for himself: Complete the harvest before Thanksgiving. Yesterday, he finished combining ‘beans and today he’s planting the last of the winter crops. And all without a scarecrow. I can’t help but wonder if “city folk” would even know about scarecrows were it not for The Wizard of Oz. (As an aside, it still makes me laugh to remember Harry’s high school story about sitting in a quiet classroom, taking a final exam. The silence…
As a young girl, Mom had a pen pal, her Aunt Margaret Regan. Known to non-family members as Sister Amabilis, she was only 16 when she entered religious life. It was September 1943 and Mom was 13 when she wrote this to her aunt, who wasn’t permitted to visit her family very often. It was September 1943; her older second-cousin Eddie was on furlough from the Army during World War II. Eddie wrote on the back of the photo, “Quit…
“Jelly” is an occasional topic of conversation in our household. It seems Gary was traumatized as a child by all the plum jelly he was forced to consume. Growing up on a farm, with parents who remembered The Great Depression like it was yesterday, Gary knew better than to complain. So he dutifully ate plum jelly on a slice of bread (he calls it “jelly bread,” which I’ve always found confusing) when it was served to him as a kid….
My great-aunt May Regan was a wonderful woman. She was kind and fun and caring. A good cook, too. May was also Mom’s godmother. May grew up on Lombard Street in Fair Haven. In later years, May lived with her brother Pip; together they were like a bonus set of grandparents to us. On June 12, 1989, Mom presented the eulogy she wrote about her godmother May at her funeral. Here it is: In Praise of May She was our…
Mom wrote this poem, called simply Cherries, when her granddaughter Lucy was just a few months old. It may be that this cute little outfit inspired her. Cherries Lucy’s little yellow dress is cherried Take her to the hammock under cherry treesand in the early evening wrap herin the childhood cherry spreadremembering another eveningwhen we rode a ferris wheelafter a day of cherry picking Grandchildren and sister loved the cherriessent for summer birthdaysand from a country marketwe wooed each otherwith…
No, not that Jack Cassidy. But yes, Mom had an uncle named Jack whose gregarious personality both flattered and flustered. As girls, Mom and her sister, Bunny, would scurry into the pantry to hide from that big personality. I did the same years later. As a child, I cowered from my uncle John Cull’s Eugene Levy-esque eyebrows. We shy lasses eventually grew up to appreciate these fine gentlemen. Mom wrote this poem about her uncle Jack Cassidy, a steamfitter, 13…
Today is Grandma Cassidy‘s birthday. And it’s Poetry Day. Born in 1903, Grandma wouldn’t have permitted us to calculate her age, had the luck of the Irish kept her with us all these years. Saints preserve us! Me sainted Grandmother has made her home in heaven since 1991. I was “great with child” at the time, with middle-son John on the way and couldn’t travel to attend her funeral in New Haven. I’ve always believed her blithe spirit lives on…
All my life, Dad has talked about what a scamp he was as a kid. Yet, there were no stories to back up his claim. Was this silence on his part due to not wanting to set a bad examples for his four children? Perhaps. It’s only now that the confessions are spilling forth. As his confessor, I am impressed, but not yet mortified. Here’s a story: Times have changed over the generations, thank heavens. Back in the 1930s, Catholics…