Family Legends

From long ago.

My maternal grandmother was the eldest of fifteen siblings (a dozen of whom lived to adulthood). Born in a log cabin in rural Maryland. I was privileged to be able to step inside that cabin in my youth.

Beginning in her teen years, she taught in a two-room school. When her father died, she was the primary financial support for the family, so she and my grandfather could not marry until her younger siblings could financially support themselves and the rest of the family. Only single women were allowed to be schoolteachers. So my grandparents did not marry until they were both in their mid-20s (unusually late for the 1910s and 1920s).

I do have the privilege of having letters they wrote back and forth during their wait. (My grandfather had moved to the city to seek work easier than harvesting corn for a dollar a day.) It is a little weird reading the lusty teenager love letters between your grandparents.

From more recently.

An episode I would like to become family legend, but may not because it’s not known in enough corners of the family.

Spring 2007

We lived in a suburb of Rochester, NY.

The end of our son’s first year at college in Potsdam, NY. (200 road miles northeast of our home) was approaching. He had to be out of his dormitory by the end of the day on Saturday. He did not have a car there.

I was scheduled for one of my frequent business trips to the west coast of the United States to visit three company facilities where company employees did work for which I had responsibility. (I could accomplish more in my first hour of such a visit than happened in weeks of emails and telephone conversations.) Routine. Fly out early Monday morning, with Mrs. Tabby (my wife) dropping me at the airport (a 25 minute drive from our home - she didn't like leaving our cars at the airport) at 4:30 am. Change planes and have a nice breakfast in Chicago. Arrive Portland (OR) airport 10:30 am (local time). Company facility by noon. Monday and Tuesday at company facility near Portland, Oregon. Wednesday and Thursday at company facility in Palo Alto, California. Friday at company facility near Los Angeles airport. Then I would spend the weekend with my father in Orange County, California. Fly back to Rochester on Monday.

Mrs. Tabby was OK with getting our son out of his dormitory on her own on Saturday while I visited my father. She had moved our daughter out of a dormitory three previous times, so this was routine, though those moves were with a 40 mile round trip, not a 400 mile round trip. She strictly instructed our son to have everything packed up and ready to put in our minivan when she got there.

All scheduled and arranged.

But then two days before my outbound flight, my mother’s husband (they married later in life) had a debilitating stroke and had to be hospitalized. He was likely to be hospitalized for a while. My mother and her husband lived in a house on rural property just outside Columbus, Ohio. 440 miles road miles southwest of our home (i.e., the opposite direction from our son’s college).

My mother was blind and mostly confined to a wheelchair. She could not stay in that house without her husband.

Fortunately, my mother and her husband had already leased an apartment at an assisted living facility, but had just not gotten around to moving in yet.

Mrs. Tabby told me to continue with my planned business trip. She would take care of moving MY mother. (My mother’s husband’s eldest son also lived in Lancaster, and arranged for some men to help move furniture and heavy stuff.)

So, on Monday, Mrs. Tabby dropped me at the Rochester airport at 4:30 am, drove 440 miles to supervise over the next three days MY mother’s move into an assisted living apartment and getting her settled there. She kept emphasizing to the others involved in the move that she needed to finish on Thursday, since she had to be in Potsdam on Saturday. That kept the move on schedule. While my mother recognized the move to assisted living was necessary, she was not happy about it. But Mrs. Tabby pushed her through it, and it got accomplished. Mrs. Tabby said later, probably better than it would have had I been there.

Friday Mrs. Tabby drove 440 miles back to our home near Rochester. Then Saturday morning she drove 200 miles in the opposite direction to Potsdam, where our son did in fact have everything packed and ready to go. And then drove the 200 miles back to our home.

In the meantime I had a fantastic visit with my father.

A lot of miles and a lot of work by Mrs. Tabby (who does not like to drive) to answer the needs of family.

Family matters.

By the way, my mother’s husband recovered from the stroke, and they enjoyed several more years together.

One of my favorite family stories:

I'm fourth of five kids. Oldest sister, two older brothers and one younger brother. Oldest brother (I'll call him "Bruce", because that's his name) was big and scary in high school. He once invited next oldest brother ("Larry") on a weekend camping trip, and Larry went, because he was afraid to say "no".

In any case, we all got along much better as we got older. As one brother describes it, "We all got along fine as kids, and we have the scars to prove it."

The story: At a family dinner some years ago we were discussing how we had learned to drive a manual transmission. In my case, Bruce picked 17-year-old me up after I'd spent a week backpacking in Glacier National Park to drive back home to Wisconsin. About an hour after I'd gotten in the truck we were travelling east on US-2 in Montana, he stopped, said "This is first gear, that's second, that's third. This is reverse. That pedal is the clutch. Drive". And I did.

After telling that story, Larry said his experience was more or less the same. He and Bruce had been on a trip out to (The Grand Canyon?) and were travelling east through the mountains. It was night, it was snowing, Bruce got tired and decided to have Larry drive while he slept in back. He took an off-ramp off the freeway, gave the same spiel, then crawled in back, stripped down to his shorts and got in his sleeping bag. Larry struggled getting the truck going up the onramp to get back on the freeway. Eventually Bruce unhappily got out of the back, still in his shorts, still in the snow, drove the truck to the top of the ramp, and told Larry "Now drive!", which he did.

Then about 2 or 3 miles down the road, Larry started wondering - had Bruce had time to get back in the truck before he drove off, or had he left him standing on the side of the freeway in the snow wearing his shorts? And then, after another minute or so of consideration, if he hadn't, did Larry really want to go back and face him?!

He finally did stop to check, and yes he had gotten in, and wasn't really happy that Larry had stopped again to check.

Full Size Tabby (View Comment):

From long ago.

My maternal grandmother was the eldest of fifteen siblings (a dozen of whom lived to adulthood). Born in a log cabin in rural Maryland. I was privileged to be able to step inside that cabin in my youth.

Beginning in her teen years, she taught in a two-room school. When her father died, she was the primary financial support for the family, so she and my grandfather could not marry until her younger siblings could financially support themselves and the rest of the family. Only single women were allowed to be schoolteachers. So my grandparents did not marry until they were both in their mid-20s (unusually late for the 1910s and 1920s).

I do have the privilege of having letters they wrote back and forth during their wait. (My grandfather had moved to the city to seek work easier than harvesting corn for a dollar a day.) It is a little weird reading the lusty teenager love letters between your grandparents.

I have a stack of letters between my mother and father from when they were in college in the late 1940s. I found them maybe 20 years ago when I was going through my deceased fathers foot locker that had been stored in my basement. When I told my mom I had found them, she made a face and asked me not to read them until after she died.

Four years ago mom (then 94 years old) was killed in a car crash. At one of the post-funeral family events I pulled out the letters and a few of the adult grandchildren scanned through them very quickly and tried to get them sorted out in roughly chronological order. Unfortunately many had been separated from their envelopes that would have had postmarks on them, some of the letters themselves were dated with no more than a "Monday" or "Thursday".

I still haven't read more than a handful. They're sitting in a basket on my desk three feet away from me. Some are just typical boyfriend/girlfriend in their early 20s "taking a break and thinking of you, you won't believe what so-and-so did this morning" type things. But there are a few that reference another girlfriend that apparently did my dad wrong and he sounded kind of bitter about it. I'd really like to be able to ask about it. After 43 years of marriage before dad died, and a least a decade of widowhood before I found them, it's hard to believe she had those particular letters in mind when she asked me not to read them. One of these days I'm going to have to sit down and go through the whole stack.

Not exactly a "legend," but my first post on Ricochet was a family story:

(1) One Piece of Cake › Ricochet

And another:

(1) ‘Is It the 4th Yet?’ › Ricochet