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thisnewdayThe most profound and precious legacy that my grandmother left me, aside from my earliest memory of unconditional love, was that she provided the foundation for my own love of language, of reading and of writing. On any occasion when I would be spending time at my grandparents' house, I remember being read to, a practice which my mother continued after she and my father had established their own household.
Of course there were others who also encouraged and supported this during my early childhood and later life. My great grandmother, Anna Patterson, who also lived with my maternal grandparents during most of my childhood and young adulthood, was always a willing reader of favorite stories when asked.
Also my paternal grandmother, Ruth Compton Knickerbocker, who had been a four-year college graduate and country school teacher before marrying and raising her own large family during the Great Depression, always gave books to her many grandchildren for birthdays and Christmas. And, in later years, she promptly dispersed a sizeable inheritance, from the estate of an uncle who had made his fortune as a supplier to Roosevelt's TVA, in the form of educational endowments to those same grandchildren.
(As an aside, I'm obviously afflicted with that wordsmith's tendancy to notice patterns, derivations, and usages of words which other people would either dismiss as trivial or simply find annoying. Not surprisingly, the most interesting of all words are those by which we identify ourselves to others, a use through which they become both label and definition.
And what I've recently discovered is that the names by which I knew both my maternal and paternal grandmothers were not their given first names. In both cases, I made this discovery while mining the various obituary and genealogy sites for information that I might not have learned through casual conversations with other family members.
Also, in both cases, a disfavored first name had been discarded for a better-liked middle name by which they were exclusively known over the course of their lifetimes. What I haven't learned, in either case, is why the given name was so disfavored as to have been virtually unknown to family members of succeeding generations.)
There have been times, over the course of my own seven decades, when I've stopped to marvel at what a privileged life I've had. And much of that has been due to the efforts of a generation for which there were few social safety nets, aside from family, and few prospects beyond a lifetime of hard work and the ever-present threats to individual and family survival.
Sadly, even as I write this, I realize that few besides those raised by the offspring of the Great Depression (later called "The Greatest Generation") will truly appreciate that expressions like "hard work" and "family survival" are anything more than literary hyperbole. Which, in fact, points to another aspect of my own privilege: that of being raised by those whose experience of that life was real and personal and whose recounting of it was vivid, heartfelt, and direct.
Which is not to say that they didn't experience the same human failings that we see and experience today. The difference seems to be that, given the circumstances under which they lived, the consequences to individuals and families were often immediate and substantial whereas today individuals and families suffer less but the consequences of living irresponsible lives are driving an alarming deterioration of the schools and other institutions which have assumed responsibility for them.
Still, I'm not about to close with yet another old timer's lament about the "good old days," because, in fact, those days were sometimes not so good. The 1950s and '60s, the era in which I grew up, were marked by racial violence, gender discrimination, and political assassinations. Not to mention a brutal war waged on foreign soil, for debatable ends, at the cost of 60,000 American lives. At the same time, this country was experiencing its own version of China's "cultural revolution," years when some of us were so alienated from familial roots that, to paraphrase that rebel of another generation, Thomas Wolfe, we really couldn't go home again.
Today, I consider myself most fortunate to have experienced all of that and lived to write about it, to have come full circle with a perspective and appreciation I might not have had were it not for the risks taken and the dangers survived. If I have a single regret, it's that I haven't the means to tell my grandmother, and those of her generation, of my respect and admiration for what they accomplished and endured for all of us who have come after.
And so, for what it's worth, I offer this modest return on the legacy of love and literacy which my grandparents made mine, those many years ago, in the white-shingled house at Fremont Street and Station Road...
LPK
LiveJournal
11.18.2013 (a)
Of course there were others who also encouraged and supported this during my early childhood and later life. My great grandmother, Anna Patterson, who also lived with my maternal grandparents during most of my childhood and young adulthood, was always a willing reader of favorite stories when asked.
Also my paternal grandmother, Ruth Compton Knickerbocker, who had been a four-year college graduate and country school teacher before marrying and raising her own large family during the Great Depression, always gave books to her many grandchildren for birthdays and Christmas. And, in later years, she promptly dispersed a sizeable inheritance, from the estate of an uncle who had made his fortune as a supplier to Roosevelt's TVA, in the form of educational endowments to those same grandchildren.
(As an aside, I'm obviously afflicted with that wordsmith's tendancy to notice patterns, derivations, and usages of words which other people would either dismiss as trivial or simply find annoying. Not surprisingly, the most interesting of all words are those by which we identify ourselves to others, a use through which they become both label and definition.
And what I've recently discovered is that the names by which I knew both my maternal and paternal grandmothers were not their given first names. In both cases, I made this discovery while mining the various obituary and genealogy sites for information that I might not have learned through casual conversations with other family members.
Also, in both cases, a disfavored first name had been discarded for a better-liked middle name by which they were exclusively known over the course of their lifetimes. What I haven't learned, in either case, is why the given name was so disfavored as to have been virtually unknown to family members of succeeding generations.)
There have been times, over the course of my own seven decades, when I've stopped to marvel at what a privileged life I've had. And much of that has been due to the efforts of a generation for which there were few social safety nets, aside from family, and few prospects beyond a lifetime of hard work and the ever-present threats to individual and family survival.
Sadly, even as I write this, I realize that few besides those raised by the offspring of the Great Depression (later called "The Greatest Generation") will truly appreciate that expressions like "hard work" and "family survival" are anything more than literary hyperbole. Which, in fact, points to another aspect of my own privilege: that of being raised by those whose experience of that life was real and personal and whose recounting of it was vivid, heartfelt, and direct.
Which is not to say that they didn't experience the same human failings that we see and experience today. The difference seems to be that, given the circumstances under which they lived, the consequences to individuals and families were often immediate and substantial whereas today individuals and families suffer less but the consequences of living irresponsible lives are driving an alarming deterioration of the schools and other institutions which have assumed responsibility for them.
Still, I'm not about to close with yet another old timer's lament about the "good old days," because, in fact, those days were sometimes not so good. The 1950s and '60s, the era in which I grew up, were marked by racial violence, gender discrimination, and political assassinations. Not to mention a brutal war waged on foreign soil, for debatable ends, at the cost of 60,000 American lives. At the same time, this country was experiencing its own version of China's "cultural revolution," years when some of us were so alienated from familial roots that, to paraphrase that rebel of another generation, Thomas Wolfe, we really couldn't go home again.
Today, I consider myself most fortunate to have experienced all of that and lived to write about it, to have come full circle with a perspective and appreciation I might not have had were it not for the risks taken and the dangers survived. If I have a single regret, it's that I haven't the means to tell my grandmother, and those of her generation, of my respect and admiration for what they accomplished and endured for all of us who have come after.
And so, for what it's worth, I offer this modest return on the legacy of love and literacy which my grandparents made mine, those many years ago, in the white-shingled house at Fremont Street and Station Road...
LPK
LiveJournal
11.18.2013 (a)
