Premonition? Part Two
Sometimes a frog is just a frog
If you missed Part One last week, here it is.
Warning: I am not editing my words this week, apologies for the acute stream of consciousness…
I’ve often pointed out at Rooting Around that while others have oodles of family heirlooms, photos, and other ephemera, any actual evidence that my family ever existed that can actually be held is scant. After too many moves to mention, several floods, and my sister and me both working overtime to block out our childhoods have resulted in a few scraps of paper and a couple of falling-apart photo albums as the only tangible evidence.
That’s why my discovery of all of the classified ads that my mother had placed in the 1960s and 1970s morphed me into a deer in headlights for several days years. I may have never wanted to know about my childhood, and blocked out huge swaths, but hey, here it was. Maybe just a peek…
Of course, that sent me off in a totally opposite direction, hungry for whatever other scraps might float up.
So when my cousin Carol sent me a story that my maternal grandmother Lottie had written, I was blown away. The story appears in last week’s Rooting Around, and though I said I’d try to unpack it here, I’m not sure what I’m looking for I can learn from her words.
After all, she was a stranger to me. And life just got harder for her as she got older until one day, a couple of years before her death, she was found running down the streets of Linden, New Jersey, clad in her ubiquitous apron/coverall in the middle of a frigid December night, and shortly after was spirited away to a county home to keep her safe.
But some clues showed up in the few photos I have of her.
Lottie’s on the left, my paternal grandmother Anna is on the right. The cake is for my fifth birthday…and Lottie’s 69th. I was born on her birthday.
One commonality.
Here’s another photo from that day. She’s smiling at me. I don’t remember her smiling at anyone. She used to chase my sister around the kitchen snapping a wet dishtowel at her legs to make her behave.
And look what’s on the coffee table: a typewriter (!) I have no idea if she gave it to me, but I like to think she did. And again with the smile. Did she plant the seed for me to become a writer? Did she see something in me that no one else did? It’s really not important how I got here, but that I got here. But still…
Another commonality: Our first names start with the same letter; I don’t know if that was intentional or not.
And one more: She was very musical and sang and performed with several members of her family, entertaining at restaurants, clubs, and other venues throughout Passaic County, New Jersey in the first decades of the 20th century.
I picked up the piano very easily and very early. I trained for conservatory but ultimately decided against pursuing a musical career because I couldn’t stomach the idea of spending 8+ hours a day holed up in a practice room.
Here she is with me and my sister at Christmas, 1968, What can I tell from this photo? It’s December 24th, for one, given just a few gifts under the tree, and we’re in our PJs…duh. But the photos was taken in the second house of my childhood, the one I wrote about visiting earlier this year.
I’ve always been a little fuzzy about when we moved to this house, and this photo confirms that it was in the summer of 1968. So at least there’s that…
I am so accustomed to relentlessly digging for some weird and extremely obscure fact to plop into my biographies: Alex Trebek had X-rated wallpaper in his 1960s-era Toronto bachelor pad, Rachel Maddow grew up with a blue Volkswagen Vanagon her family dubbed The Blue Space Twinkie. I live for these moments of uncovering something that NO ONE ELSE KNOWS.
But what little I know about Lottie’s story from her writing and her pictures will inform everything…and nothing. I’ve always said what ends up on the pages of my published books is just the tip of the iceberg, and maybe only 10% of what I discovered along the way. But that final work would look different if I’d dug for one less fact. Sometimes it takes awhile — years, even — for the truth to surface and to make the connections between yourself today and a woman born at the tail end of the 19th century.
You just gotta be patient…or not.
This Week’s Takeaway: Just because you find a long-lost or never-known family heirloom doesn’t mean you’ll be able to make sense of it, either right now or ever. Sometimes a frog is just a frog. Other times, the truth will hit like a sledgehammer, though it may take years, decades.
In other news, Propaganda Girls entered the Final Round of the Goodreads Choice awards for best history & biography! Can you take a minute and vote? Here’s the link. Voting ends November 30th, winners will be announced on December 4th. Thanks!
Don’t bury the lede… a journalism term that xxx…
Link here to gr page
With that out of the way,
Walt, Lottie’s first-born son, was clearly her favorite. Gladys — the oldest and the offspring of the reviled ex-husband — had to drop out of school at the age of 13 to take care of the three youngest, including Walt, Jean [my mother], and Leon, Carol’s father. Gladys later became a librarian, to offset the education she was cheated of in her childhood.
https://www.goodreads.com/choiceawards/readers-favorite-history-bio-books-2025
Final Round
Interesting to find these connections between you and your maternal grandmother. A typewriter in the photograph and smiling at YOU!
I really love your style !