My Talking Heart - Chapter Seven: THE FACES IN THE PHOTOGRAPHS

Marlin Landon "Bob" Gaffin circa 1941

When I think back on the houses that have contained my life, including farmhouses, a log cabin, single-family homes, duplexes, condos, and apartments, located in diverse areas across Southern Ohio, Central Ohio, Queens and Long Island, New York, and the Atlantic Coast of Florida, one of the things all of them had in common was framed photographs of family members hanging on walls and ranging the tops of furniture—copious photographs that were, and are, storyboards of the lives of my ancestors and of me.

                My attachment to family photographs began when I was a toddler. The Second World War was raging, and Bob, my mother’s oldest brother, was in the very throat of it, serving as a half-track driver and sharpshooter in Patton’s Army in Europe. Bussy, my mother’s seventeen-year-old brother, had died seven months before I was born. My grandmother’s worries about Bob, and her grief over the loss of Bussy and of her own mother just weeks after Bussy’s passing were a serious threat to her emotional well-being. On the advice of our old country doctor, my parents agreed to let me stay with my grandparents, in the hope that my presence would be the balm my grandmother needed to regain her health.

The following is a scene evocative of the root of my love of family photographs. It is a dialogue between my grandmother and me when I was about two years of age. It is a fictionalized account of much less structured discussions we often shared about the family photographs that are the subject of the piece. I wrote it for GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS (http://goo.gl/imUwKO), my novel that is a blend of fact and fiction, a book populated primarily by my great-grandparents, my grandparents, my parents and the people of their circles, as well as one main fictional character. Mommaw and Poppaw in the passage are my maternal grandparents; Uncle Dickie is their teenage son.

Excerpt of GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS

“…As, like Mommaw and Poppaw, the sun gave up working for the day in our corner of the world, and retired behind the lazy hills reclining all across the broad horizon, it was then that the gloom of death-revisited settled in upon the household once more. Our nightly ritual never varied. Riding Mommaw’s hip, she carried me to the room where I slept. While the bedtime stories of other children were of “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” mine were of Uncle Bussy and Uncle Bob. 

Bussy Gaffin 11 years old circa 1936

On the wall, within eyeshot of my bed, was a photograph of Uncle Bussy, a grainy black and white enlargement of his face and upper torso picked out of a family photograph taken when he was about eleven. Riding my grandmother’s hip, always she carried me to the photograph where it hung on the wall. He had been a good-looking, fair-haired, pale-skinned boy, and like my mother, his nose and cheeks were dusted with freckles, his station in life clearly evident in his bib overalls. It was like one of those portraits where the eyes follow you all around the room, and although some children might have been frightened by it, it called to me, instead. 

“Mommy says dat Uncle Bussy called me ‘Tadpole’ ‘cause I was in Mommy’s tummy when he knew me,” I reminded my grandmother, my pudgy index finger tracing the cheek of the young boy in the photograph. The man he would never become was unmistakable in the outline of the jaw, although not quite angular, was on the verge of being, like a flower halfway between budding and full bloom.

“My land, yes, Honey. He tried so hard ta hold on so he could see you. Poor Little Bussy,” my grandmother replied, her voice breaking, her great intake of breath tamping down the nagging voice of her great loss. 

“I wish Uncle Bussy could know me, Mommaw. He wooks so sad in da pichure. I could pway wiff him and make him feel bettuh.”

“He was just so sick, Honey.”

“Is Uncle Bussy in Heaven, Mommaw, wike Mommy says?”

“He surely is, Honey.”

“Can people come back home fwom Heaven, evew, Mommaw?”

“He surely would want to, if he could, ‘specially ta see you.”

“And, dis is Uncle Bobby,” I pointed to a photograph on another wall in my bedroom, a photograph of a young man in a military uniform, sporting a handsomeness so blond and well put together as to be the envy of any movie idol. Mommaw carried me over to the photograph, my brow wrinkling seriously. “Uncle Bobby is fighting dat bad man in…I can’t ‘member dat pwace, Mommaw.”

“Uncle Bobby is fightin’ a bad man named Hitler in a place called Germany. Hitler is the leader o’ them German people, an’ we ‘er fightin’ them ‘cause they do bad things,” Mommaw explained patiently, speaking to me as if I were an adult, as she always did.

“Uncle Dickie spanked Wex dis morning. Wex got in da henhouse. He ate some eggs after dat fox weave.”

“I know, Honey. Uncle Dickie had ta learn the dog that it’s bad ta eat them eggs. That’s kind o’ like what Uncle Bobby is doin’ over there in Germany, but not exactly.”

“Is Gewmany weawy, weawy fawr away, Mommaw, wike Heaven?”

“Germany is away over on the other side of the world, but not as far as Heaven.”

“Why did Uncle Bussy go to Heaven, Mommaw?”

“Because he sneaked out ta play when he was down with the measles.”

“You wet me go out to pway, and I don’t go to Heaven.”

“Uncle Bussy got real sick outside. When people git real sick sometimes they go ta Heaven.”

“You made bad wike Wex, Mommaw. You forgot to tell Uncle Bussy no when he went outside, wight?”

“No, not exactly, but I shoulda stayed right there in the room with him.”

“Did Uncle Dickie spank you for being bad wike he did Wex?”

“God spanked me, Honey.”

“Did it weawy weawy hurt when God spanked you, Mommaw?”

“Yes, Honey.  It really really hurt, an’ it still hurts mighty powerful.”

“But when I go out to pway, I won’t get sick ‘cause Uncle Dickie says I’m weawy weawy stwong. Uncle Dickie says dat Uncle Bobby is vewy big and stwong. And he wuns weal fast wike Old Smoky.”

“He runs pert near as fast as that old horse.”

“He can wun home to us, den, if dat bad man twies to hurt him.”

“The Good Lord awillin’, he will, Honey.”

 The nightly “visit” to the photographs of Uncle Bussy and Uncle Bob completed, Mommaw carried me to the living room, where the old rocking chair sat in wait. And Mommaw’s rocking and crying commenced anew. After I had fallen to sleep, she carried me to my bed in the downstairs room nearest to the bedroom she shared with Poppaw….”

Award-winning author and artist, blogger, and interior designer Linda Lee Greene is on social media at the following:

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Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/#!/LindaLeeGreeneAuthor

Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/LindaLeeGreeneAuthor

Twitter: @LLGreeneAuthor

Blog:  http://Ingoodcompanyohio.blogspot.com

Also look for her at LinkedIn and Google+

My Talking Heart - Chapter Two: IN DAD'S SHOES by Linda Lee Greene

IN DAD’S SHOES

Dad was in the garage,

Working on a car.

One of his,

Or one of his brothers’,

Or one of my mother’s brothers’.

It didn’t matter

‘Cause Dad liked working on cars.

Dad removed his greasy shoes and grimy socks before coming in the kitchen,

And as always before and again that time,

I noticed his feet –

So much like mine,

And I took the photo of his shoes to remind me,

And hoped I would be more like him in other ways with time.

 Linda Lee Greene

December 9, 2007

My father’s given name was Leland Edward Greene, but he preferred the shorter Lee Edward Greene. The brief version won out and was his name for the entirety of his 89 years of life. I am named for Dad. The distinction is mine among the four offspring of my parents due to the order of my birth: I am the firstborn, and because of that accident of chronology, by tradition the name was given to me. As time passed, however, it seemed meant to be, because among my three siblings and me, I resemble my father in appearance most closely. The jury is still out on whether or not I take after him in other, more crucial ways. But I try! I try!

            For the past three years, I have been honored with the enormous responsibility of writing eulogies of members of my family whom have died during that time. The assignment began with the passing of my father on March 29, 2014. I haven’t the foggiest recollection of the writer of my mother’s eulogy upon the occasion of her death on June 29, 1992. At the time, nobody, including me, knew me to be a writer…that is a story better left for a future chapter of “My Talking Heart.” Recently, I came across the little funeral flyer produced for my mother, and it presents a woefully inadequate tribute to her. Oh, how I wish I had had the presence of mind then to write a eulogy for her that did her life justice. I intend to make up for that deficit in her legacy in these writings.

            To know my parents is to know me. I introduced an aspect of my mother to you in Chapter One of “My Talking Heart.” Chapter Two introduces my father by way of the opening paragraph of the eulogy I wrote for him, as well as an excerpt about him featured in my novel GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS. The quality that comes across most prominently about him in these passages is his grit. I think I might resemble him a little bit in that regard, too. I try! I try!

(Excerpt of eulogy)

“Lee Edward Greene, 89, beloved son, brother, husband, father, grandfather, great grandfather, and cherished friend was one of the last of the Greatest Generation, a loving and dedicated family man who was a joyful and steadfast breadwinner. He was a man good with his hands whether the task was to fix a leaky faucet, to make a car purr, or to build a house. But essentially he was a simple man – he held no public office, never attained fame nor amassed a fortune, but within the small circle that comprised his life, he was the center that always held, the rock upon whom everyone depended, the flint against which everyone struck on his/her passage to adulthood. We aren’t likely to see his kind again any time soon…”

(Excerpt of GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS - Lee going to school)

“The one-room, Cedar Fork schoolhouse across the holler from the little log cabin on the near side of Peach Mountain was a tolerable two-mile walk in mild weather. It was an enjoyable walk actually, if one had time to swing from a grapevine on top of a high cliff and drop into Cedar Fork Creek for a lazy dip, or to stop by the Workman’s place for a quick smoke of their cornsilk tobacco. But in snowdrifts as tall as thirteen-year-old Lee Greene, in threadbare clothes, thin hand-me-down coat, and barely covered feet in holey socks flopping in an old pair of secondhand shoes that were several sizes too big for him, the walk that frigid morning was worse than pure misery.

Lee’s chronically aching stomach was hollow and rumbling. His meager breakfast of cornmeal mush and sugar water was quickly wearing thin, but he had more important things than his stomach to worry about that morning. He was stewing about the paucity of milk he had drawn from their cow tethered in the yard just beyond the lean-to kitchen at the back of his family’s tiny log cabin. The two-story structure, built by his father A. E., Lee, and his brother Bill only five months before, comprised a common, or front room on the main level, a primitive lean-to kitchen at the back, and a bedroom where his mother Eva Love and A. E. slept, housing the only closet in the place. A rough-hewn timber ladder gained access to the upper deck, where, in an open-to-the-front loft, all of the many children slept on crude cots, or thin pads on the floor. A large ceiling-to-floor fireplace of indigenous stones in the common room on the first floor was the only source of heat in the place. Felled tree trunks supporting its roof, a porch spanned the width of the front of the log cabin.  

The soil where they lived on Cedar Fork, thin, hard, and dry, a crusty layer of sediment topping a bedrock of limestone, dolomite and shale, made for poor farming and gardening, posing a formidable challenge for the growing of adequate food. Squirrels, rabbits, opossums and birds, hunted and brought in by Lee, the insufficient supply of milk from the cow, and scant eggs supplied by their paltry flock of scrawny chickens in the yard, were the only sources of protein for the family. In season, a large vegetable garden and a stand of corn were coddled into fruition in the poor soil, but only if they were favored with enough rain.    

His nose and eyes crusty from yet another head cold, gloveless hands thrust into the pockets of his thin coat, and his feet turning to blocks of ice, Lee trudged on to school, his white-blond head under his hat hunkered into his shoulders. Despite the fact that he might not make it through the perpetual hardships of his life, much less that cold, windy, and snowbound morning, his soul was full of dreams, his mind of intention, his body of vigor and endurance, and on the strength of pure power of will alone, and maybe some help from the man upstairs, Lee was determined that if he ever got out of his childhood alive, nothing would ever encumber him again.

The one-room schoolhouse was dark and frigid, Lee, by design, having been the first to arrive. The door was unlocked, as it always was, and Lee, halting for a few minutes to give his blood a chance to circulate again in his frozen limbs and digits, sat down on one of the benches. He would have wept if he had allowed himself to seriously consider his unfortunate circumstances – but not Lee! No, not Lee! Not the boy/man who would one day be my father. He had a chance to earn fifty cents that week, and every week for weeks to come, fifty cents for building a fire in the “Warm Morning” coal-burning, heating-stove each morning before school, and that was exactly what the sam hill he was going to do…”

***

 

GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS, (http://goo.gl/imUwKO) is my novel of historical fiction blended with the true story of my maternal and paternal ancestors, including my mother and father’s childhoods, a story that takes place during the early to middle Twentieth Century. It has been compared to Pulitzer Prize winners, “The Grapes of Wrath,” and “Angela’s Ashes,” as well as to Jeannette Walls’ “Half Broke Horses.” 

"Lee Going to School" by Linda Lee Greene

Today is the second anniversary of the passing of my father Lee Greene. It would also have been the 93rd birthday of my mother Roma Greene. Today, I want to post an excerpt from my book GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS http://goo.gl/imUwKO that describes the type of individual my father was. This particular piece takes place when he was a young boy, but his strength of character presented in this little excerpt endured all the 89 years of his life.

GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS

An Excerpt

Lee Going to School

The one-room, Cedar Fork schoolhouse across the holler from the little log cabin on the near side of Peach Mountain was a tolerable two-mile walk in nice weather. It was an enjoyable walk actually, if one had time to swing from a grapevine on top of a high cliff and drop into Cedar Fork Creek for a lazy dip, or stop by the Workman’s place for a quick smoke of their corn silk tobacco. But in snowdrifts as tall as thirteen-year-old Lee Greene, in threadbare clothes, thin hand-me-down coat, and barely covered feet in holey socks flopping in an old pair of secondhand shoes that were several sizes too big for him, the walk that frigid morning was worse than pure misery.

Lee’s chronically aching stomach was hollow and rumbling. His meager breakfast of cornmeal mush and sugar water was quickly wearing thin, but he had more important things than his stomach to worry about that morning. He was stewing about the paucity of milk he had drawn from their cow tethered in the yard just beyond the lean-to kitchen at the back of the tiny log cabin. The two-story structure, built by A. E., Lee, and Bill only five months before, consisted of a common, or front room on the main level, a primitive lean-to kitchen at the back, and a bedroom where Eva Love and A. E. slept, housing the only closet in the place. A rough-hewn timber ladder gained access to the upper deck, where, in an open-to-the-front loft, all of the many children slept on crude cots, or thin pads on the floor. A large ceiling-to-floor fireplace of indigenous stones in the common room on the first floor was the only source of heat in the place. Felled tree trunks supporting its roof, a porch spanned the width of the front of the log cabin.  

The soil on Cedar Fork, thin, hard, and dry, a crusty layer of sediment topping bedrock of limestone, dolomite and shale, made for poor farming and gardening, posing a formidable challenge for the growing of adequate food. Squirrels, rabbits, opossums and birds, hunted and brought in by Lee, the insufficient supply of milk from the cow, and scant eggs supplied by their paltry flock of scrawny chickens in the yard, were the only sources of protein for the family. In season, a large vegetable garden and a stand of corn were coddled into fruition in the poor soil, but only if they were favored with enough rain.    

His nose and eyes crusty from yet another head cold, gloveless hands thrust into the pockets of his thin coat, and his feet turning to blocks of ice, Lee trudged on to school, his white-blond head under his hat hunkered into his shoulders. Despite the fact that he might not make it through the perpetual hardships of his life, much less that cold, windy, and snowbound morning, his soul was full of dreams, his mind of intention, his body of vigor and endurance, and on the strength of pure power of will alone, and maybe some help from the man upstairs, Lee was determined that if he got out of his childhood alive, nothing would encumber him again.

The schoolhouse was dark and frigid, Lee, by design, having been the first to arrive. The door was unlocked as it always was, and Lee, halting for a few minutes to give his blood a chance to circulate again in his frozen limbs and digits, sat down on one of the benches. He would have wept if he had allowed himself to seriously consider his unfortunate circumstances—but not Lee! No, not Lee! He had a chance to earn fifty cents that week, and every week for weeks to come, fifty cents for building a fire in the “Warm Morning” coal-burning, heating-stove each morning before school, and that was exactly what the Sam Hill he was going to do…