A Story of the Mid-Sixties.

This post doesn't really have anything to do with Mango Dog. I just found this embellished version of the drawing and wanted to share it.

A Sad Story

When I was 11 years old, my family moved to Texas. Actually, I should say we moved back to Texas. We had moved there previously when I was 7 years old and returned to Massachusetts after a couple of years.

When it came time to move back to Texas, I remember that my grandmother (who was always referred to as Memere) was very sad to know we were leaving again. She had expressed this quite a few times. Specifically, she was sad to see me go. She liked the rest of my family and all her other children and grandchildren, but I was her favorite.

My mother once told me that I was her favorite (therefor validating this to be true) because when my grandfather (Memere’s husband) died in 1957, Memere "transferred her love to me." This idea of love being transmitted occurred at a time when I, along with my pregnant mother and younger brother, lived with Memere in her house while my father was away in Korea busy protecting the world form communism by being a radio DJ.

If Memere transferred her love to me and my mother had an awareness of this psychological transference, it was an unprecedented intuitive and insightful observation that my mother would never again in her life demonstrate an ability to repeat. Besides only completing the eighth grade in school, she's never been particularly aware of other people's feelings or motivations. I don't know who first suggested this "transference of affection," but I doubt that it was my mother.

I’m not sure why there needed to be a reason that Memere favored me. She just did. Perhaps people needed to find a cause to go along with the effect so they could explain how it was that they didn’t become the favorite. However, if the transference effect was valid, why were there more pictures of Memere and me during the years her husband was still alive than pictures of her with anyone else? Those would have been pre-transference years, right?

I believe I was Memere’s favorite because we had an unusual connection, one that couldn’t easily be explained. Our relationship was special and it lasted 44 years. I never thought of the relationship being unusual in any way and would not have thought that I was being favored if other people didn’t subtly (and sometimes jealously) suggest that I was.

It was in 1966 that we learned that the Air Force was transferring my father back to San Angelo, Texas. We had to drive to Texas (a three-day journey) because my father’s rank at that time didn’t provide the relocation assistance that would come to him later in his military career. His low rank of Staff Sargent meant that the Air Force wouldn’t pay for him to fly his family to his new assignment location nor pay for the moving of his personal effects.

So, on a clear sunny day in the summer of 1966, we packed up the car and were ready to begin our journey. In those days, seatbelts weren’t always included in the back seats of cars so the three of us kids rode from Massachusetts to Texas without wearing seat belts. But I’ve gotten ahead of the story a bit.

As one might expect, we had to go to the gas station to fill up the tank with gas before starting our Texan Trek. We went to the Texaco station on Main St. back in the days when gasoline sold for 0.24 a gallon.

Memere was so distraught about our departure that she followed us to the gas station in her own car just to have a few more moments with us before we left. She didn’t actually get to be with us, she just watched us from her car as we filled the tank. My parents were irritated with this and verbalized their annoyance. This was confusing to me at the time.

Then, as we drove away, I stood up, turned around and waved to her from the back window and she waved back. It was the only time I was ever upset about moving. I felt that I was being separated from the one person who had ever given me unconditional love. Of course, I was 11 and wasn’t able to actually understand the concept of unconditional love but I knew how I felt and I felt a sadness I had never experienced before. I was powerless over the situation and it seemed as though I was being stolen away.

When I think back to that time and see the scene play out in my mind, I don’t see Memere waving goodbye to me. I see an 11 year old version of myself waving back to her through the glass with no expression on my face. Just a hand waving back and forth and becoming smaller and smaller as the car got farther and farther away.

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."

On this day in history...

In Loving Memory

Hermaline Tarzel Noel (Laferriere)

July 17, 1902 - July 8, 2000