I never had any interest in genealogy. Maybe it was because all my relatives seemed so uninteresting. Maybe it was because I was the youngest of all the kids in my father’s extended family and they all picked on me. I don’t hold it against them (too much). They were just children, too, and children, like coyotes, always single out the weakest and the smallest. I was weak and I was small.
Unbeknownst to any of us, I was blind, too. No one figured it out until I was in fifth grade and lessons started to appear on the chalk board in nasty Miss Mitten’s classroom. My memories are scrambled and like torn scraps of paper. All I remember clearly was that when I was very little, I’d complain to my parents that I had headaches. Their ironic response still jangles in my mind. “It’s all in your head,” they’d say. Was it eye strain? Was it anxiety? Do little kids have migraines? I don’t know.
I just remember going to an eye doctor and, when he asked what was the smallest line I could read on the chart, I said, “What chart?” So, I got glasses. I can remember the first movie I went to that I could actually see on the screen. It was CASH McCALL with James Garner and Natalie Wood. Before that, everything was just fuzzy. When other kids would ask if I saw something, I’d say “yes”, just not to be left out.
But I started talking about genealogy, didn’t I? Like I said already, it didn’t seem like anything worthwhile to me. My parents were boring. My aunts and uncles were boring. Their kids seemed stupid and mean. The whole pack of them seemed to be living in a different world than I was. They all went to church and so did I. Away from work, the men all dressed formally and the women all wore dresses and were overweight.
The thing that stuck out in my mind was how self-righteous and pompous they all seemed. They prided themselves on their humility.
What I didn’t know then was that both my mother’s family and my father’s family was chock full of preachers. My mother’s grandfather, Judson Hudnut was a circuit rider for the Free Methodist church. He took his horse and buggy from Cedar Springs to Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, preaching to people. I got to read his diaries. “Praise the LORD,” he would write, “One soul was saved.” Some difference from the Billy Graham crusades we always watched on television. On my father’s side, the first ancestor of mine to touch his feet onto the New World was Jacob Clement. He arrived with a cluster of other Moravians from Switzerland in 1706. According to the history I’ve read in the past twenty years, most of the men and grandchildren in Jacob’s family went on to become Mennonite preachers.
My dad must have been a rebel: he got worldly and became a Free Methodist.
Now, I have to change gears and be nice. The fact is, I lived an over-protected and pain-free life (outside of school, where I was faced with normal children). Every Sunday, we’d get dressed up. My mother even put cufflinks on my shirts and made my older brother and I wear ties. Every Sunday afternoon, we’d have dinner at grannie’s house. That was Fern Anderson. Her dad was the circuit rider. Her husband was Axel Anderson. I wish I’d gotten to know my grandpa better. He got to America from Sweden when he was just six. I saw a picture of him in his WW I uniform, once. He always scared me because he talked so loud and he never interacted with us kids much. He was quite deaf, probably from working in a foundry most of his life.
We would watch INDUSTRY ON PARADE on television and get sleepy because it was always too warm.
But holidays were a treat. They really were. My family, for all its faults, as boring and straitlaced as they all were, they loved Jesus. Every holiday, be it Easter or Thanksgiving or Christmas, was a very holy event. At Christmas, my cousin Roy, my brother Randy, and I, would be in a skit and sing “We Three Kings”. At Thanksgiving, the adults would dress us up like Indians. There would be prayers and singing. My mother, her sister Lois, and my granny all sang like angels.
We seemed to live in a protective bubble, separate from all the rest of the world.
I wanted to escape so bad I felt like howling at the moon or banging my head on the ground.