I called my grandmother today to tell her The Kid just learned how to ride the bike she bought for him.
She said she learned how to ride a bike in her hometown of Neon, Kentucky. It is an old coal mining town, in the Kentucky mountains, which are straight up and down mountains. There are a couple of streets in the narrow bottom of the valley, and houses, businesses and the graveyard march up the steep valley walls on either side.
There was one bike in town, which belonged to the local doctor's daughter. The little girl with the bike would let all the other Neon kids share. No helmets or shin guards or knee pads in the those days. Grandmother learned on a borrowed bike and her first ride was down a steep Kentucky dirt road.
Showing posts with label Folklore and Fish Tales. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Folklore and Fish Tales. Show all posts
Friday, September 3, 2010
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Folklore and Fish Tales Friday: New Mexico Cabin
My grandfather was a one-handed insurance salesman. He left his family in Texas one winter to buy a cabin in New Mexico, a vacation spot for his wife and children. When he was away he wrote letters to his family, telling them about the blizzards he drove through and his negotiations to purchase the land and the building. The letters are over fifty years old, as is the cabin. The letters end with "kisses and hugs to my girls." I know this because I've held the old letters and felt their paper, like cloth, while sitting at the cabin's small dinner table. My grandfather died when my mom was still young, and I never met him.
It's one of those places linked to its surroundings. It wouldn't be the cabin without the trees sloping down the hill, or the rocky earth, so many round rocks that beg for countless hands to line them along paths, to pick them up and place them again on trails after they've rolled down the hill. The dirt roads snaking to all the little vacation homes lead to green views and to the small town of Eagle Nest and further, to the lake and the river, where my mom learned to fish.
The card-playing is done with one eye on the cards and one out the window, waiting for the birds to find the gluttony of seed laid out for them. There's a fireplace, and a kitchen, and two bedrooms. The furniture is decades old, and the books are too. The food on the pantry shelves often expires before anyone can cook it - there are cans of beans from the 1980s and popcorn with a plastic smell. There's a three-ring binder filled with "Cabin Notes," in which each visitor attempts to recount their trip and ends up writing about the people they came with: "We went fishing at the lake today and Papa couldn't figure out how to steer the boat" and "It rained hard today and Gram beat everyone at hearts again; Mom made soup and we laughed and laughed" and "Our last day, but we don't want to leave - work awaits."
There's the cabin folklore:
Have I told you about the time the bear tried to take our fish on the river? Your Papa stood between the bear and the stringer.
Remember when we found the baby magpie and tried to save it? It's buried at the cabin on the path to the outhouse.
That's where the wasp nest was, the one we all stepped in. Good thing Uncle Prunie was there when I was stung right on my eyelid.
And older stories:
Daddy put us on the horses and I thought my mother was going to die - she was so afraid for us!
I couldn't see ten feet in front of me in the blizzard - it took us eight hours just to get to the cabin from the state line.
Fifty years ago, my mother and her family spent their cabin time fishing and riding horses and running through the tall thick pines. In my office, I have a black and white photograph of Mom when she was ten years old. She's got her nose up and is stretched out, pointing one toe and holding up a fishing pole with a four inch trout on its string. She's quite the angler, so much so that when I became a game warden I had to break it to her that she could no longer catch my dad's fish for him (that's called party fishing, ma, and it's illegal).
It's the cabin, this space my grandfather carved for his family so many years ago, that gave my mother her love of the outdoors. It's why she dreamed of living in the country, and why my sister and I grew up where we did, twenty miles from the nearest town, with horses and chickens and a cabin-like home of our own. It's my mother who gave me the idea that problems can be solved as long as you get a good night's sleep and have the time to take a walk in the woods.
Because of the cabin, I have a tangible connection to a man I've never met.
It's one of those places linked to its surroundings. It wouldn't be the cabin without the trees sloping down the hill, or the rocky earth, so many round rocks that beg for countless hands to line them along paths, to pick them up and place them again on trails after they've rolled down the hill. The dirt roads snaking to all the little vacation homes lead to green views and to the small town of Eagle Nest and further, to the lake and the river, where my mom learned to fish.
The card-playing is done with one eye on the cards and one out the window, waiting for the birds to find the gluttony of seed laid out for them. There's a fireplace, and a kitchen, and two bedrooms. The furniture is decades old, and the books are too. The food on the pantry shelves often expires before anyone can cook it - there are cans of beans from the 1980s and popcorn with a plastic smell. There's a three-ring binder filled with "Cabin Notes," in which each visitor attempts to recount their trip and ends up writing about the people they came with: "We went fishing at the lake today and Papa couldn't figure out how to steer the boat" and "It rained hard today and Gram beat everyone at hearts again; Mom made soup and we laughed and laughed" and "Our last day, but we don't want to leave - work awaits."
There's the cabin folklore:
Have I told you about the time the bear tried to take our fish on the river? Your Papa stood between the bear and the stringer.
Remember when we found the baby magpie and tried to save it? It's buried at the cabin on the path to the outhouse.
That's where the wasp nest was, the one we all stepped in. Good thing Uncle Prunie was there when I was stung right on my eyelid.
And older stories:
Daddy put us on the horses and I thought my mother was going to die - she was so afraid for us!
I couldn't see ten feet in front of me in the blizzard - it took us eight hours just to get to the cabin from the state line.
Fifty years ago, my mother and her family spent their cabin time fishing and riding horses and running through the tall thick pines. In my office, I have a black and white photograph of Mom when she was ten years old. She's got her nose up and is stretched out, pointing one toe and holding up a fishing pole with a four inch trout on its string. She's quite the angler, so much so that when I became a game warden I had to break it to her that she could no longer catch my dad's fish for him (that's called party fishing, ma, and it's illegal).
It's the cabin, this space my grandfather carved for his family so many years ago, that gave my mother her love of the outdoors. It's why she dreamed of living in the country, and why my sister and I grew up where we did, twenty miles from the nearest town, with horses and chickens and a cabin-like home of our own. It's my mother who gave me the idea that problems can be solved as long as you get a good night's sleep and have the time to take a walk in the woods.
Because of the cabin, I have a tangible connection to a man I've never met.
Friday, April 16, 2010
Folklore and Fish Tale Friday: Grandmother's Fist
Grandmother's Fist
We call my father's mother Grandmother, because Grammy or Grandma is too casual for her, too informal. Grandmother is five feet tall, 100 pounds, and she cusses every once in a while, just enough to make you cock your head at the words coming from her mouth. She is not a little old lady. I get a lot of my favorite traits from my Grandmother. My temper. My righteous indignation. My sarcasm. My ability to survive on my own. My pure disgust at the sentiment when people offer to help me. Here's the family story, which is different depending on who's telling it.
Papa, my father, and his brother were in the front yard, pulling weeds with their mother. It was a hot sticky day, oppressive heat you can only find in North Carolina where the ocean funk creeps west over the lowlands and hunkers down between the land and the sun, refusing to leave. Papa and his brother were fed up with the work.
It was time to come in, and they ran in the front door and locked their mother out. There they were in the living room, not really giggling, because I can't imagine my father has ever giggled, but surely immensely pleased with their joke.
Grandmother didn't say a word. She punched through the window on the door and glass shattered into the house. Then her hand, like a disembodied appendage out of some horror film, found the doorknob on the inside and unlocked it.
Papa said he had never been more scared in his whole life. Grandmother said her sons never tried another trick on her again.
Folklore and Fish Tale Fridays are all about the way I remember family stories. My father is a true storyteller, so much so that the actual truth of his tales are highly suspect but their spirit and wisdom never come into question. This is my attempt to capture the wisdom unique to my family.
We call my father's mother Grandmother, because Grammy or Grandma is too casual for her, too informal. Grandmother is five feet tall, 100 pounds, and she cusses every once in a while, just enough to make you cock your head at the words coming from her mouth. She is not a little old lady. I get a lot of my favorite traits from my Grandmother. My temper. My righteous indignation. My sarcasm. My ability to survive on my own. My pure disgust at the sentiment when people offer to help me. Here's the family story, which is different depending on who's telling it.
Papa, my father, and his brother were in the front yard, pulling weeds with their mother. It was a hot sticky day, oppressive heat you can only find in North Carolina where the ocean funk creeps west over the lowlands and hunkers down between the land and the sun, refusing to leave. Papa and his brother were fed up with the work.
It was time to come in, and they ran in the front door and locked their mother out. There they were in the living room, not really giggling, because I can't imagine my father has ever giggled, but surely immensely pleased with their joke.
Grandmother didn't say a word. She punched through the window on the door and glass shattered into the house. Then her hand, like a disembodied appendage out of some horror film, found the doorknob on the inside and unlocked it.
Papa said he had never been more scared in his whole life. Grandmother said her sons never tried another trick on her again.
Folklore and Fish Tale Fridays are all about the way I remember family stories. My father is a true storyteller, so much so that the actual truth of his tales are highly suspect but their spirit and wisdom never come into question. This is my attempt to capture the wisdom unique to my family.
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Folklore and Fish Tales
It occurred to me last night, as I was telling one of my father's favorite stories to The Old Man, that my dad's stories have less than a 50/50 shot of being entirely true. In fact, when I have heard the same stories from his brother, the essential elements are there, but key and sometimes major details have changed. There's wisdom in these stories though, an effort to preserve what was and amuse and teach the next generation. I highly admire the ability to expand and exaggerate on known quantities, to spin a good story. My father (Papa) is a genius at this. So as I remember them, I'm going to write down some of his stories, the way I remember them told. Realize that now the stories have been through at least two filters, and any resemblance to the truth is irrelevant.
Robert's Pop
Robert (Papa's cousin) was left-handed in school in a time when being left-handed made people suspect you were the devil's minion. This was North Carolina, the south, where superstition was the Bible God's-honest truth. The accents can only be described as slow o's and tongues lazily skipping syllables and hot hound dogs on the front porch softly bellerin' for their supper.
For the most part Robert was a good boy, but every once in a while he acted out in class. One day Robert was sent to the principal's office for punishment and received a leather strap across his backside. He came home bruised and welted.
The next day Robert's Pop visited the principal. He walked into the wood-paneled office, sweltering already in the morning sun slanting in from the tall windows. The principal sat at his desk, and Robert's Pop closed the door behind him. He pulled out his shotgun. "If you ever touch my boy again," he said, while aiming the loaded gun straight at the principal's head, "I will kill you."
No one ever laid a finger on Robert again.
Robert's Pop
Robert (Papa's cousin) was left-handed in school in a time when being left-handed made people suspect you were the devil's minion. This was North Carolina, the south, where superstition was the Bible God's-honest truth. The accents can only be described as slow o's and tongues lazily skipping syllables and hot hound dogs on the front porch softly bellerin' for their supper.
For the most part Robert was a good boy, but every once in a while he acted out in class. One day Robert was sent to the principal's office for punishment and received a leather strap across his backside. He came home bruised and welted.
The next day Robert's Pop visited the principal. He walked into the wood-paneled office, sweltering already in the morning sun slanting in from the tall windows. The principal sat at his desk, and Robert's Pop closed the door behind him. He pulled out his shotgun. "If you ever touch my boy again," he said, while aiming the loaded gun straight at the principal's head, "I will kill you."
No one ever laid a finger on Robert again.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)