The Life of a Story in Progress 009: Ancestral Matters. Dions.

As you can see by the imprint on the right-hand side of this photo, the year is 1957.

This is a picture of me, my father and his mother. My father's mother didn't have a name. Or so I thought for quite a long time. Whenever she was mentioned, she was referred to as "your father's mother." She did, of course, have a name. Her name was Florida; middle name Marie. I can only remember her as a really old woman. She was born in 1898, the year in which the Spanish-American war started. She almost never smiled and she didn't speak English (she spoke Canadian French). She is only 61 years old in this picture.When in a group of people who could speak French but were speaking English, she would admonish (in French) saying: "Pourquoi ne pas parler français?"

My father was born in 1932 and he had two brothers and a sister. Lucien was 14 years older than my father, Leo was about 12 years older, and Jeanne was 6 years older than he was. My father's sister, Jeanne, died at the age of 12 in 1938. There are no pictures that include both my father and his sister in them.

 

My father's father (who also did not have a working title) was named Ovide Amedee Dion. He was born in 1886, the year in which Utah was admitted as the 45th state. He did speak English, although not particularly well. He occasionally smiled. He lived in several "tenements" in the Rockdale section of Northbridge, Massachusetts. He spent all his time (post-1963) in a small neighborhood bar drinking beer and hanging out with friends. He never lived more than walking distance from that bar for most of his adult life. He was born in Canada, as was his wife, my grandmother. It's unclear if either of them were American citizens. 

Ovide is in the middle.

Here he is pretending to be in a barbershop quartet, he is second in from the right.

For posterity's sake, here are pictures of my great-grandparents:

My father's grandparents pictured above including my grandfather as a baby.

My father's maternal grandparents pictured above.

The family mythology as that my father's father "never did much for him." I took that to mean that he wasn't very involved in my father's life. My only memories of my grandfather are during the intermittent visits we made when I was young during which he and my father would watch a baseball game with very little interaction. Me, my brother, sister and mother were left to fend for ourselves in the kitchen, visiting with my grandmother (who, if you remember, didn't speak English). Once, she took a bottle of Vermont Maid pancake syrup out of the refrigerator, took a swig, and somehow manged to explain that it was like her "beer."

When my grandmother died, she left money hidden all throughout the house. They found money sewn into the hems of dresses, hidden in holes in the walls behind pictures, and in a lot of other unusual places. After this time, it would often be said: "we probably never found all the money she hid."