While adding to Farmer Gary‘s side of our family tree, it’s a treat to share newly discovered family stories (and family members) with him. Our conversation the other evening began with, “Your dad was first cousins with her mom. Still, I can’t help but think Joan Wharton and my mom would have been great friends.” It’s been somewhat of a scramble climbing from one side of our family tree to the other, but well worth it. Joan Wharton didn’t grow…
Growing up in the 1960s, getting new clothes for Easter Sunday was a big deal. I don’t know where she found it, but one spring Mom came home with a “coat of many colors” for middle-brother Dave. It was … to use a dated word … snazzy. Nearly 40 years later, Mom remembered that jacket in a poem: David Growing upyou prized foil candy wrappersa bright heap on your bookcasemade merrier by the sun Your younger brother later your own…
No, I’m not referencing the situation here in America. There’s another former president from a far-away land who also says he didn’t do it. This year is the 25th anniversary of the Kosovo War. That country’s former president pleaded not guilty at The Hague today to war crimes and crimes against humanity. Mom had a way of deeply humanizing stories of political and ethnic conflict through her writing. From Paddy McCarthy’s part in Belfast’s Bloody Sunday in 1971 to the…
Mom had a really good friend named Mary. Two friends named Mary, come to think of it. Mary Donahue and Mary Fleming. Turns out they were the same person. I’m a bit embarrassed to admit this is a recent discovery on my part. When they met in college, Mom was Joan Cassidy and Mary’s last name was Donahue. They were thick as thieves, those two, along with Gloria Dowaliby. Here’s Mary’s yearbook page from 1952, graduation year: Their final year…
When your mother is a prolific poet, it may be best not to try and figure out too much about each individual poem. Mom loved words, the sound of words. And weaving them together into poems was one of her life’s great delights. Perhaps unfortunately, there’s something in me that is so literal, I have to spend at least a little bit of time to try and “figure out” each verse. As if it’s a riddle. Which I know it…
This selection of Mom’s prose from 40 years ago captures memories of the Quinnipiac River, located just down the hill from her childhood home in New Haven, Connecticut. Here’s a photo of her dad, Frank Cassidy from around that time, heading home on Chatham Street after one of his brisk walks. That’s the Quinnipiac in the background. The river has had good years and bad. My memories of it are from the 1960s, when it was befouled by industrial waste….
Do teachers still send home a “reading list” with students over their summer break? I seem to remember a few lists coming home in the boys’ backpacks over the years, but never one as intimidating as this. Mom was an incoming freshman at Saint Joseph College the fall of 1948. As an English major, she was expected to read a lot. She wrote to her future husband (she and Dad had dated since they met at age 14 and were…
This year, Thanksgiving falls on the third anniversary of Mom’s passing. Anyone who’s grieved a loved one’s death knows the sadness is unpredictable. Sometimes it sneaks in with a sigh; other times it clobbers you like a mallet and takes your breath away. But you learn, bit by bit, to “carry on” and do your best. And so I dug around this week for a Thanksgiving poem, knowing how Mom loved the holiday and the gathering of family and friends….
It’s been exactly 155 years since a wee fellow named Joseph Malachy Regan was born in Belfast, in what is now Northern Ireland. Although I’ve blogged about him several times already, it seems only right to let his youngest daughter, Cecelia, have her say. Grandma was crazy about her father. She was the only one of the Regan girls to marry, and he gave her away in full regalia: Thanks to my middle brother, Dave, who was working on a…
When I first read Mom’s poem titled “Litany for a Cold Church Made Warm,” I wasn’t sure what to think. It just didn’t seem like the style of poetry she’d written as a teen and young mom. As time has passed and I’ve dug through more archives, I’ve learned her “Litany” was used in a celebration Mass on Thanksgiving 1977 at St. Thomas Aquinas Church in Indianapolis. Sadly, she wasn’t able to attend, as our family had recently moved back…