PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

[after georgeschaefer's essay, "51%"]

Nostalgia is very often a comfort.  I am sure that how I remember the summer of 1976, the summer of the first great love of my life's experience, is not always entirely accurate.

   My father often spoke of his great grandmother, Amy Kirby Brelsford, whom he called "Little Grandma."  He told me how very petite she was, standing no higher than five feet, and hence that is how his nickname for her came to him.  He told me she passed away when he was six years old, and that he knew little about her, except how kind she was when he visited at the farm owned by his grandparents, her daughter and son-in-law.

    Now my father was a perfectionist, although his own parents were not.  Some of it was required by his trade---as a land/public road surveyor.  When I went to work for the County has a gopher on survey crew # 1, which my father had once supervised, I was told by others who worked with him that he was an artist of exquisite skill on the transit; that he turned an angle once, and only once, and it was always accurate.  He did the initial centerline survey of a project that turned a large number of unconnected roads into an almost continuous beltway around ouer metropolitican area; and, when riding in a car, I always feel safest and very proud on that particular road.  He did not tolerate inaccuracy, in himself and others.  Although I shall always be grateful to him for adopting me and giving me the heritage of a historic New England name, of which I am most unworthy, I must admit that for most of my life we were in extreme disagreement over most things.  One of which was my interest in geneaological history.

     We reconciled six months or so prior to his passing.  Years after that, I began to find out some information about Little Grandma, Amy, that certainly called into question what he told me---as a deliberate misleading.  Again, keep in mind, he demanded accuracy from himself and from all others around him; and except for his mother, my Grandmother, who could verbally cut him down to size, he tolerated no silly errors---in himself, or others. 

     Truth of the matter is, Little Grandma did not pass away when he was six; she passed in his sixteenth year.  A man who worked with numbers, and on whose numbers the traveling safety of the public depended, would not have made such a forgetful error.  Hence, I can only conclude that it was deliberate, and that he misled me.  I soon found out why.

      Little Grandma had run away from her parents farm, in rural Indiana, when she was fifteen years old, in 1873.  She ended up in New York City, with little money, no marketable skills, and no career prospects.  However, she had three aspects---intense beauty, small stature, and adolescence---which, at that time, gave her the prospect of being a very successful . . . prostitute.  For three years, she worked in a high class brother in New York City.  When she became pregnant, and insisted on keeping the child, she was dismissed from the brothel.  We are not sure how she subsided for the next two years, but she returned, when her daughter was about two, to the MidWest; this very region where I now live.  Still possessed of a most attractive beauty (and, certainly, some other skills that might make for very pleasurable intimacy), she caught the eye of the son of a man who owned several grist and lumber mills in the county just north of my residence, and had made a fortune therefrom.  When her daughter came of age, she married my great-grandfather, and they farmed successfully for decades, raising thirteen children, one of whom was my grandfather.  However, this marriage ran afoul of the family patriarch, a hellfire and brimstone preacher whose preaching was so harsh and judgmental, that no local church would sponsor him (he had to rent vacant lots and set up folding chairs as his preaching venue).  His rage against his son's marriage to the daughter of a whore split the family into two branches, which lost touch with each other, although still within communication---such that my father, a surveyor, did not know that his grandfather's cousin was an astronomer of great distinction who discovered, and named, a galaxy which is still up there in the sky today.

     I believe that, like the old preacher, my father was ashamed of Little Grandma, although he apprently loved her very much.  I can understand this, because, for decades, he was ashamed of me, although I think he loved me very much---enough to adopt me, enough to fund my college experience, enough to bestow on me a surname and familial history of which I am not worthy.  He was able to maintain a split response toward me and toward Little Grandma, a private affection that was very often denied public expression and was openly replaced by silence or misdirection.  He turned angles on the transit once, and once only; he held his prejudices in the same way.

      I have said all that to say this.  I think in times of social pressure, we tend to revise the past---our own, our families', or our nations'. in order to feel better about ourselves.  The historical truth of Little Grandma's adolescent prostitution, and the illegitimacy of her daughter, and the severe split of our family into two seperate, and incommunicative branches, made him feel very uncomfortable.  Thus this man, this artist on the transit, whose angles' accuracy are proven by the traffic on the roads he surveyed, conveiently forgot that Little Grandma passed when he was sixteen years old, not six, and the fact is carved in granite on her tombstone, which I have visited.  

    We like to view our national history with nostalgia.  The Founding Fathers wanted to overthrow a dictatorial monarchy that allowed no representation:  no, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which brought William III and Mary II to the English throne, ensured a representation of some.  The lower house of the English Parliament was called the Commons, so that their representatives had a substantial influence on the politices of the British government.  The taxes imposed on the colonists were the result of mismanagement of public finances, caused by the collapse of the East India Company, and was not deliberately imposed on the American colonists to line the pockets of the Royal Family.  The colonists were not entirely innocent of perfidy, either:  they often physically abused, and even mutilated, certain civil servants of the crown, especially tax collectors.  They looted and destroyed property that belonged to individual absentee investors, simply because those investors were not colonists, or residents of the colonies.  Every great accomplishment in history has a dark side.  Even the American Revolution and its great experiment in democracy had a dark side:  the maintenance of human slavery, for a prime example, and the Founders' belief that the common voter, whom they expected to be a property holder (renters were not enfranchised), could not be trusted to elect the chief magistrate; thus, the existence of the Electoral College which has, from time to time, suverted the decision of the popular vote . . . as it did in 2016.

    We paint a nostalgic look at the past because we do not want to face its uncomfortable facts, or the uncomfortable facts of our present.  We celebrate Abraham Lincoln as the pioneer kid who split rails and told funny stories, and we forget that his first employment was as a railroad lawyer, who incorporated the Illinois Central Railway, and acquired, for it, vast right of ways through legal means that were not always fair to the pioneers who had cleared that land first.  We forget that Ulysses Grant was a besotted drunk; and that Thomas Edison was loathe to deal with businesses that were owned by, or managed by, ethnic Hebrews or persons holding the Hebrew faith.  We gloss over these details because the glossier version makes us feel better.  The truth disturbs us, and we are so sensitive that we cannot accept it, so we cover it with nostalgia.

     You can imagine my shock when, as a young history major (even before college), I learned that victims of crucifixion---male and female---were crucifiied without benefit of clothing; yes, naked; yes, even Christ Himself.

Starward