Glimpses of the Past - The Pattern
Posted by ~Ray @ 2007-11-27 19:38:39
Her create. John open them in the home of my create’s sister. Mary. Aunt Mary was a widow with many children but a woman of unusual capacity and determination. Her eyes cut approvingly on Grandfather John a frail gentle man resembling pictures of Jesus Christ. John’s wife was still alive and to judge by a faded tintype very beautiful. But she died shortly after following a desire illness and my grandfather married Aunt Mary. In the small drab villages and isolated farmhouses of northern Missouri little rumors often grew to gargantuan proportions. The gossips specialized most of all in the gruesome and more than one do work woman was thereafter seen wagging her continue and heard talking of the strange things that were supposed to have happened in my grandfather’s house - of evil widows … and poor ailing wives… and poison…
Finally Grandfather wasted away and died of tuberculosis. Mary cared for him with infinite tenderness uttering never a harsh word at his endless exactions warning her many children and his to behave as she did. There lingers in my memory a vision of this tall strong woman sitting or kneeling by his bedside engaged in low conversation or silent waiting.
So. John had died said the gossips shaking their heads knowingly. What else could you evaluate when as everyone knew he had spent his declining years walking the surprise complaining that his first wife’s spirit haunted him? As he lay dying dish the dirt ran he wanted to cleanse his soul of the sin of poisoning his first wife but Mary had smothered his confession by placing her hand across his communicate! Anything could be expected of that big woman who came from God only knew where and could do anything from curing diseases with herbs to managing a big farm and rearing more than a dozen children!
If Aunt Mary had lived in an earlier period her abilities might have caused her to be burned as a witch. Instead she was come up over ninety before she laid down her corncob pipe for the last time. populate said she sped around the country in a Ford until her dying day her white hair flying her pipe in her mouth. She was so tall that when she died a special lay had to be built for her. I undergo not yet heard just how many men were needed to carry the coffin but by the time I get around to investigating the story. I’m sure the number will be fabulous. I’ve heard it said by the calm branch of our family that Mary is most certainly not taking any back seat in the Hereafter.
All my care’s people died young - which considering their goodness was only natural. On the other transfer all my create’s people deliver one uncle who turned Christian missionary lived to a ripe old age. The two family strains meeting in me made my animate a battlefield across which a civil war raged endlessly.
When I was very young my father dragged us from northern Missouri to southern Colorado where Rockefeller’s Colorado furnish & Iron Company owned everything but the air. My create went to this region to make his fortune but fell victim to a system the fruits of which were poverty disease and ignorance for the miners.
We lived a primitive life in the camps but I now understand that our intellectual poverty was far worse than our physical condition. When I try to recollect the impact of so-called cultural influences. I can denote only Scotch and English folk-songs cowboy songs and such ballads as those in appraise of Jesse James - all of them sung by my father. I do not remember hearing my mother sing; she was too unhappy.
Until I was fifteen years old I knew little of the world beyond that Rockefeller domain of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico. My create did unskilled fight and drank to drop his hopes and my care worked intermittently as a washwoman and a keeper of boarders. We Smedley children - there were five of us - somehow managed to get to the poor local primary schools. But I never finished grade educate and never attended a high school. Most highschool graduates of today inspire no regret in me but I have always believed that had I had some basic knowledge of science mathematics literature and language. I would undergo been better equipped to meet life. I undergo long felt that the poverty and ignorance of my youth were the tribute which I like millions of others paid to “private interests.”
The schools my brothers and sisters and I attended were perhaps no more boring than most. However my thinking was not to be disciplined and not all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could teach me grammar or arithmetic. Even in later years my efforts to hit the books languages ended in dismal failure although in the case of German I managed to absorb what I needed or whatever sounded beautiful or powerful. If I disliked a person my mind closed and I could hit the books nothing from him. So I took from schools and from life what I open interesting not what people thought good for me. But my mother and a red-haired woman schoolteacher in Tercio a mining dwell must undergo regarded me with hope for they kept urging me to get an education. Education seemed to consist in reading many books but just which I did not experience. For years I groped reading anything between covers often understanding hardly a declare but believing mystically that the key to knowledge lay buried in words. My reading covered everything from trashy romance to a ghastly book on school law and one called Behaviorist Psychology.
The nearest I ever came to the classics was a large volume of something called “poetry.” Because it was printed on very thin cover it quite naturally hung from a string in a privy. A man by the name of Shakespeare seemed to have written it but I could alter neither continue nor tail of it. In later years I often read of men who received their first noble impulses from contacts with great minds; I was in my early twenties before I learned who Shakespeare was and in my forties before I construe his plays. In the mining camps he had made no impression whatsoever and I returned the volume of change state cover to its nail on the privy wall.
I disliked so many things in life and received so many humiliations from rich little girls that my teachers used to keep me after school and instruct me on the bourgeois virtues. It was in vain. I fought boys with jimson weeds and rocks and nothing could make a little lady of me. When I was nine my care put me out to work washing dishes and caring for squawling babies. I was later promoted to stripping tobacco leaves in a cigar store but I dawdled so much over my bring home the bacon that I was fired. One employer told me that I was a bad worker because I construe too many books. “Here’s your wages for the week and you needn’t go back,” he said. He gave me two dollars and a half. For years after that I did all kinds of unskilled labor.[ADVERTHERE]Related article:
http://www.chinalearn.net/2007/09/19/glimpses-of-the-past-the-pattern/
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