Posting About Nothing

I'm at a loss for something to write about today.

Can't write about politics, because I have taken a sacred oath not to. Anyway I have no views on politics right now, other than, "Eeuch." That won't fill a column.

Can't write about family stuff because I just don't write about family stuff. If I did, I would tell you that Harold and I drove to a charming beach house in Harvey Cedars last Sunday to celebrate the fiftieth birthday of my eldest son. Outside, the surf was crashing and the sea grass newly planted on the dunes was waving in the breeze. My daughter-in-law put on a wonderful spread, baked ziti, roasted sausage and peppers, crispy rolls. One of my granddaughters brought two of the most deliciously decadent cakes I've ever tasted. I saw relatives I hadn't seen in years. I met family connections I hadn't ever met. There was a baby running around. Everyone seemed prosperous and healthy. It was great.

One of my son's half-brothers made me a very pretty speech about how thankful he was that we—his adoptive mother and I, as well as the adoptive mothers of the other twenty or so half-siblings—had given them homes when their birth mothers couldn't take care of them, and I treasure his remarks. I've always seen myself as something of a failure where my adopted boys are concerned. I'll take all the compliments I can get.

If it were a novel there would have been undercurrents at the party, perhaps simmering feuds that might have led to hurt feelings or outbursts of violence. Fortunately for all of us it was real life. Which I hardly ever write about.

And so I have nothing to write about today, nor am I starting to write my memoirs. In fact, I'm not writing much of anything these days. What I'm about to do is go down to Rojo's and have a coffee with Harold. Maybe I'll write about Lambertville later on. Or murders. Something.

© 2014 Kate Gallison

The Picture of Dorian Gray

I put this picture up on Facebook yesterday morning to amuse my cousins. It's me and my sister, Liz, posing in our "formals" so that our mother could take a picture of our beautifulness for posterity. I blew it up a little when I scanned it in, and now I can see a number of things about this snapshot that aren’t immediately apparent in the little Kodachrome print.

First of all, my sister did not have a green neck. This effect is caused by a big thumbprint. When they tell you not to touch the front of a photograph it's for a good reason; skin oils, over the years, will spoil the colors. It’s my father’s thumbprint, I guess. Toward the end he forgot stuff, like how you’re not supposed to touch the front of a photograph. I found the picture in a pile of snapshots amongst his things.

The picture would have been taken in 1957, when I was a freshman at Douglass and my sister was a sophomore at Washington and Lee High School in Arlington, Virginia. I was home for the holidays, as you can see by the red ribbon in the background with all the Christmas cards pinned to it. My parents had many friends, my father many business associates, so they always got enough Christmas cards every year to go all around the living room archway.

Of whatever living room. During the years we spent in Arlington we had to move every year, because we rented houses from colonels who were posted to places like Panama for a year and then wanted their houses back. I’m looking at these bookshelves and thinking, yes, I know the books, all right, but I can’t remember ever seeing those shelves. What was our house like that year? Brick, I suppose. They were all brick in Arlington. I can’t remember the street address.

The elements of decoration I know well. We carried them from town to town every four years when I was growing up. They gave a comforting sameness to our different houses. The Currier and Ives picture is “Beauty Awake.” On the other wall, out of the frame, would be “Beauty Asleep,” a mirror image of the first one but with the eyes closed. My mother collected Currier and Ives pictures and other Victoriana, which she picked up at auctions in Illinois and New Jersey.

The chair I’m perching on is the famous Governor General’s Chair, a family piece of Canadiana dating back to the visit of the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) to Kingston, Ontario, where my great-great-grandfather was a big cheese, possibly the mayor. It was made by convicts, they say, for a ceremonial meeting between the prince and the Canadian head of state. How my forebear got hold of it, or what became of the prince’s special chair with the three feathers, are matters shrouded in mystery. The fuschia upholstery may have been original or it may have been commissioned by my great-aunt Ethel. I know my grandmother didn’t have the money to have that thing recovered. My mother did, though, and I did, so it’s been reupholstered twice since the fuschia brocade. Note the beaver carved across the top. No, it is not a rat.

The last and most bitter item I want to mention is my dress. My mother dragged me to Woodward and Lothrop to buy some clothes for college the summer before I went off to Douglass. I had never been to a prom and had never had a prom dress, unlike my sister, whose pretty yellow dress in this picture was bought to wear to an actual prom. In fact, I’d never been on a date. If I had had the choice of how to spend the money my mother paid for this wretched dress I would have bought a chic black-and-white tweed suit and got a lot more wear out of it. But my poor mother had dreams about how I would go off to college and finally meet someone who would be attracted to me, hopefully a boy, for as it happens she had begun to secretly fear that I was a (shudder) lesbian. Which I wasn’t, although the concept is much less threatening today than it was in 1957. So she dressed me as her heterosexual dream daughter.

I wore the dress once. Twice, if you count putting it on for this photograph.

Having the dress, I felt impelled to invite someone to the Douglass Christmas Ball. There was a fellow I was kind of sweet on. I called him at the fraternity house and asked him to go to the dance with me (cold sober, would you believe; it took all I was worth to sound nonchalant). A few years later we were married, fulfilling my mother’s dearest wish, at least until it all went south. But if it weren’t for that stinkin’ dress—!

© 2014 Kate Gallison

How People Used to Live

Still poking among the ancestors. Now, however, I've worked around to the folks who were here within living memory (mine). As you might expect of any storyteller, my immediate forebears were storytellers, too. So I've heard many of the family stories over the years. These tales are of interest to my cousins, and maybe also to you. I feel that we are an extraordinary race. Your family is, too. There are, after all, no dull people, only forgetful relatives.

So we remember each other. There are family members whose titanic personalities cause them to stick out above the rest of the tribe like the faces on Mount Rushmore. My father's mother, for one, known to all as Ma Gallison, who used to run the family store in Vanceboro, Maine, without a bank account. She took the train to Bangor to settle the accounts with the wholesalers in cash. Ma ran the family as well as the store; she was feared. Her father, George W. Eales, Sr., was another towering figure. He joined the British navy at the age of ten, in 1825, and got off a ship in Halifax, Nova Scotia, at the age of thirty, declaring that he was now a farmer. Thanks to various cousins I have pictures of him. He was clearly a seaman, even when he was old. That jacket looks to me like original purser's issue.

He died in 1907. In addition to his widow he left four sons and three daughters, of whom my grandmother was the youngest. His sons had daughters who were friends with my grandmother. All these women remained close their whole lives long, helping each other in time of need. I used to hear their names all the time, but since most of them married, their names were all different. I never understood exactly how we were related until last week, when I sat down with Ancestry.com and mended the Eales branch of the family tree.

Two of those cousins or aunts or whoever were expected to come and take care of little Bobbie, Aunt Mildred's boy, so that Mildred could pursue her career with the Bureau of Immigration and Ma could work in the store. One would come for six months, then send a letter to the other one, who would come and relieve her. I heard this story from my father, but I can't remember which aunts or cousins were involved. Anyway the one who was on duty gave my dad the letter asking to be relieved, and he put it in the pocket of his band uniform, which was hung in the closet and forgotten, band season being over. When the second woman failed to show up for duty it caused much ill feeling and many hard words.

You're thinking, why did they do that? Why didn't they hire an au pair, or send the kid to day care? It wasn't done. First of all Vanceboro practically ran on a barter economy, especially during the Great Depression, when Bobby was small. Secondly, the tradition was to take care of one's own. My great grandmother, George Eales's wife, prepared corpses for burial, my father told me. She was the one who did that in Vanceboro, washed the bodies and so on. You didn't pay a funeral director to do that. You didn't pay for help when someone was sick in the house, either. You summoned a cousin. When my mother was operated on for breast cancer in 1948, Cousin Mae Glew came all the way from Vanceboro to Crystal Lake, Illinois, to take care of us while she recovered. The loveliest woman. She used to make us cinnamon buns, all hot and buttery. They would be waiting when we came home from school.

And needless to say you never stayed at a hotel when there was a cousin within fifty miles. Our house in North Plainfield, New Jersey, was on the road to Florida for some of the cousins. I remember a number of merry visits. If we didn't have enough beds we doubled up. Good times.

Now and then I think about the old Vanceboro days when I hear people talk about the American Way of Life. What way is that, exactly?

© 2013 Kate Gallison