Ann Marie Gamble

Archive for the ‘Genealogy’ Category

Local Hazards

Friday, May 30th, 2014

My grandparents lived in suburban Chicago, and one of their solemn duties when the small-town kin came to visit was to warn us of the dangers of trains. My grandfather took a train to an office in the city most days, and we’d go to the station to pick him up. Or we’d take the train in ourselves to sight-see, museum trips with a little extra thrill, launched as they were with warnings.

Don’t stand near the edge of the platform, of course, but also–and long before any of us were driving–don’t stop on the tracks, don’t drive across tracks at an angle, look both ways before crossing even if there are lights and a signal. Then some cautionary tale, always a different incident–although we heard more than once about the mother who could only get one child out of their stalled car.

freight trains along the Missouri

Where I live now, the trains are freight and out in the country. Instead we tell tales about the river. The Missouri sluices past gravel bars and snags, muddy eddies made less opaque where creeks join the flow, but no place transparent enough to see the fish, rocks, or tree limbs underneath.

Don’t dive in. (more…)

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Deja Vu All Over Again

Monday, December 17th, 2012

“The stories of childhood leave an indelible impression, and their author always has a niche in the temple of memory from which the image is never cast out…”

—Howard Pyle

Christmas in Manchester

My son goes to the same junior high school that I went to. There’s a new wing, but the main part of the building, the entryway, the band room, and the gym are the same. He plays in the pep band for basketball games; I played basketball one season and kept stats for another. He’s there for eighth and ninth grade; I missed eighth because my family went to Manchester for a year.

My Anglophile grandmother was ecstatic over this development. Granny Becky was a not-so-closeted royalist—she’d once squired an Anastasia Romanov claimant, who she totally believed, around Chicago—and watched any BBC that was broadcast in those days before cable and satellite, including Doctor Who. (more…)

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The Harder Part of This Summer

Saturday, September 1st, 2012

my aunt and my grandfather

my son

Also this summer
We did another underwater photo shoot with different wardrobe. We ran through some of our usual “up in Michigan” activities—climbing the Big Dune, biking around the bay. But in between heat waves, car repairs, and mysterious illnesses, my aunt collapsed and died.

My mom rushed to Nebraska help her niece and nephew manage the details, and we took care of the pets and otherwise held down the fort at the house their grandfather built. My mom had left behind a photo album, and I told my kids stories about being at the lake with my grandparents and showed them pictures—these in black and white of different sand babies on the same shore, kids bundled up after swimming on the same front porch (now with big trees!) hamming the same ham for whatever relative was holding the camera.

These trips were not entirely easy. The overlapping households were run by smart women whose only venue for the exercise of power was the house, and their ideas of appropriate behavior–on vacation or otherwise–and effective management often clashed. (more…)

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Crying Over the Cranberries

Tuesday, December 20th, 2011

“There’s nothing like duck grease to oil a pan.”
–Grandfather Chick
Or maybe he said goose grease? . . .

I used to work at the public library, and I was scheduled at the reference desk on Wednesday nights. On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, the desk was fully staffed but the public was not, and we had plenty of time to “familiarize ourselves with the collection”–scour the cookbook collection for what we would take to the dinner we’d been invited to the next day. Oh 641s, how you whiled away our hours!

The Wednesday before Thanksgiving, the library stayed open. The night before and after Christmas, however, the board looked at the traffic data and started to close for a few days. My mom and I seized the lull and dashed up to Chicago to spend Christmas with my grandfather. He hemmed and hawwed but his wife got them a tree; we got up at a reasonable hour and opened gifts, him having to reassure that he was not senile, he knew there were more presents for him but this one was very interesting, thank you very much. (more…)