Comments on Blue Belle's

Man, pictures take forever to load. We won't go over my learning curve regarding editing them into a post.

My first thoughts on this little booklet are tri-layered. That usually happens when I think about anything Grandma related. On the ME layer, the booklet was written on school-type paper and then rolled up and kept for, I'm guessing, 82+ years. It is yellowed, friable, and permanently curled into a tube. It is also in the recycling, now that I've typed it up and logged it here, with a copy on my hard drive in the genealogy folder.

I sort of resent the amount of time it took to do that. There was a good bit of wrangling and weighting down involved in just getting each page to lay flat for its turn at immortalization.

On the Grandma layer, it's both touching and sad that she kept it for so long. She really did have an urge to create. She became more than pretty good at drawing and painting, and did handicrafts her whole life. I haven't seen any other stories, or much of her writing, besides letters and wills. (I'll tell you about those some day.)

According to Uncle L, she supported herself and her children, at least for awhile, by making felt "jewelry". It's hard to guess how much time she put into that, though. She also made Barbie (tm) clothes and fancy clothespin dolls.

Like I said, she had an urge to create. Unfortunately, she also had an urge to go drinking with servicemen. (No, I’m not implying that she got drunk.  I have no clue about that.  I’m just saying that she liked to go to bars and that her eyes would light up when recalling men fighting over her.) So she never put in the time to get serious about trying to make a living with her drawings.

The third layer is the voice of my Dad, complaining. At some point he decided that his personal troubles were all her fault. After that, well, let's just say he complained about her a lot. I'm not going to talk about him much until I've got most of Grandma and Aunt D's stuff sorted. He's a whole different kettle of guilt.

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Now let's see if I have anything I want to say about the story, itself. The plot is, of course, a hot mess. That's not a phrase I usually use, but it's a phrase that I don't seem to be able to veer from using in this case. It's a hot mess. I really hope that she was in the low end of her teens when she wrote it. I wrote stuff that was just as bad in my low teens, but I don't think I kept any of the really stinky stuff.

Of course, Grandma had more of a weakness for Romance novels than I ever had, so she would have liked it for that. Grandma kept me supplied with romance novels during junior high and high school, mostly with old style Harlequins and Georgette Heyer. I kept them in Wrigley's Gum boxes (the big packing boxes) under my bed.

At one point, Dad put his foot down, saying that if any more came into the house, an equal number had to leave. I was fine with that. I don't think I ever re-read them. Even so, when I moved away to college, and donated them to the local library, there were more than a thousand of them. (The library was thrilled. They became "honor" checkouts - not tracked - and there were apparently a number of little old ladies who just loved them.)

I read them as a cheap way to travel for a twelve-year-old. The stories were always set in England or Australia or somewhere else I'd never been. And the regencies, especially, were pretty good vocabulary builders. (Lately, I was tickled to see Terry Pratchett add that little bit of information to one of his books. It was Unseen Academicals.)

I never read them as romances, or even novels of manners. I suspect that Grandma did, though. For me, after the first dozen or so, it was too obvious that the characters were acting out a formula. The people and relationships never seemed real.

So - back to the story. The plot was a hot mess. The word cowboy was never stated, but everyone but Belle (or Belle's) talked cowboy. The hero shot the heroine and had to open up her shirt to discover that she had boobs. With eyesight that bad, it was a wonder he hit his target. But everyone else made the same mistake, so maybe in the time of the Flapper (the early 1920s), boobs were passé, even cowgirl boobs..

I will not speculate on how Belle got on a wanted poster, why her father was kidnapped, or why everyone knew the owner of the Circle R Ranch, but no one knew that he had a grown daughter. Wall Rock was the foreman of the Circle R, for Pete's sake. This is a bigger oversight than missing a set of boobs. I will also not ask what self-respecting Spaniard would name a town La Crane.

She must have liked the name Wall Rock, because she started so many sentences with it and never shortened it to Wall unless someone, say, the Sheriff, was talking. And Wall was a special guy: able to hide his horse in a clump of bushes, ambidextrous, and a soft touch for a sob story.

The heroine must have been wildly attractive for a woman with no cleavage. He decides not to turn her in to the Sheriff for the $5000 reward before she even wakes up after he shot her . . . again. Even though she had shot him. Rather than holding that against her, or even saying ouch, he's ready to assume . . . what? I'd say he thinks she's too feminine to be a criminal, but she just shot him. Then got shot without saying ouch herself.  That sounds manly to me.  Or maybe in The West, bullet wounds are just the casual punctuation of conversation. 

I feel so cheap taking pot-shots at this story. It was obviously written by someone very young. At least I earnestly hope that Grandma was close to twelve when she wrote it. She told me once that when she was young, she and her best friend made a pact to run away to The West and marry cowboys. This story would fit right in with that frame of mind.

As that kind of story, I think it's cute. "You'll need a yarn and a pair of lies" isn't a bad line. Neither is "I stopped him, but the pony got away with him." At twelve, there's plenty of time to learn where to put apostrophes.

Things I've learned about the Grandfather I never met

I'm also going to list things that I probably knew, but hadn't thought about for awhile. 

1. He was in the Navy.  He was assigned to the U.S.S Colorado according to the letters sent from 1930 to 1932.  About every sixth letter he talks about needing to get out of the Navy to be home with the people he misses.
2. He was a fiend for run-on sentences.  They read fine, because I read them as if they were broken up. So I didn't really notice until I typed a couple of them into my notes.  I'd have added paragraph breaks to some of those sentences.
3. He uses the words gee, keen, and swell a lot.  He often starts sentences (or clauses, in his run-ons) with gee, well, or heck.  He used sure as an intensifier, as in 'you're sure swell' or "it's sure keen." 
4. He always writes 'to' instead of 'too.'  (Yes, I do get paid for technical editing.  Why do you ask?)
5. He leaves the apostophes out of most of his contractions and the few he includes tend to end up before the N rather than after it.
6. "I sure have got those blues again . . ." ; ". . .well I should hope to smile."; ". . . well it all counts on twenty."; "I'm an honest square shooting man. . ."; ". . . desperately in love. . .".
7. More than a few people called him Red.
8. His ship was berthed in Seattle when his son (my Dad) was born in Bensenville, Illinois.  He didn't see him until he was 4 to 6 months old. 
9. He and Grandma called my Dad "Little Pal" (with the quotes) before he was born and for about half a year after.
10. In 1931 he usually started his letters to Grandma with:  My Honey Bunny Boo. 
11. I can't send money this week because - things will just be perfect when we finally get together - you're nearly perfect - you're an angel - I almost never leave the ship so I won't be tempted - I get crazy jealous when your letters mention other men. 

This is from Grandma's letters.  I remember other bits and pieces from Aunt D's things, but I'm not going to open that box now.

Unpacking Grandma

If the pile of Christmas stuff didn't look like enough to make a full van load, this is the reason why. Along with bins and boxes of Christmas stuff, Aunt D was storing Grandma L's "paperwork".

While Aunt D had saved, among other things, the bible that her ex-husband had given to his Grandmother in 1965 and every bill she had ever paid, still in the envelope with all inserts; Grandma L had saved every piece of paper that anyone had ever sent her and then some.

The years of Aunt D's back bills and banks statements I dealt with before she was released from the hospital to hospice care. They had been neatly arranged in rows in her dresser drawers. A few things were in boxes in closets. I didn't throw away anything that was needed. Once a utility has acknowledged your payment on the next bill, I don't see any point in keeping back copies.

The bundles on the top are letters, cards, and postcards.  Underneath are diaries.  Some of the entries were in handwriting that was perhaps 3 points tall.  (Check that out with your computer font.) 

The diaries scare me a little.

I'll share an email that I sent to my sister while my desk was looking like the top picture. Can't see my keyboard? Well, I did have to move that maroon box to reach it. Or the burgundy box if it's necessary to be picky. (Skin Horse is a cool webcomic, but it's best to start at the beginning. Immerse yourself in the archives.)

So many ways to start this email . . .

1 - I have strange relatives all over my desk . . . and under it.

2 - The urge to light a match has been mollified by finding a clipping of The Mob. (No, there will be no explanation.)

3 - OMG she never threw any piece of paper out.

Aunt D was a pale echo of the original. Although I didn't find any bills beside the 1939 water bills and doctor bills. Either she didn't keep those or she only kept things that were evidence (they were from when she was married to Woody, if that's pertinent) or Aunt D tossed the rest of the bills. My recycling bin is grateful, whatever spared it.

As it is, every diary and photo album is filled with random clippings and bits and pieces. I can't just toss them because maybe one in six is related to a relative. The rest are poems, advice columns, editorial essays, etc. (Etc. includes a clipping of the birth of a 16lb 4oz girl at General Hospital by caesarian section, with speculation that it may be a record.) ((It also includes a little notebook with hand-written risqué jokes from someone named Ted Storm.))

I am evil because I threw out all of the negatives. I blame new technology. I collected the pictures and threw out a couple of those sticky page albums - minus the sticky. I am evil because I'm going to throw out the disintegrating "family" bible after I'm sure I got the information out of it. It was started by Grandma L some time after she married Woody, so it probably doesn't have anything I haven't already logged.

I am evil because I keep saying "Who are these people?" instead of thinking of it as a treasure hunt. She did label some of the older pictures and the newer ones that came pre-inserted into album pages. But some of the old ones were kicked around a bit, then glued into one of those old black paper albums, then ripped off and put into a sticky page album. So the writing is often half covered with adhered black paper splotches.

I'm evil because I keep thinking "Why did you people write to each other in pencil so often?" Smudgy handwriting on darkened paper is not fun to read. Saving letters may have been a generational thing. She not only has the letters her kids sent her when they were away, she has her letters to them. That means they brought them back to her. Or maybe they were just trained.

I’m also evil because I’m only going to keep so many pictures of Cousin R. For some of them I had a set and then I inherited Aunt Linda’s and now I have Grandma’s too. I like R and all, but I have to assume that he and Uncle L have copies of these, too.

Found another copy of the RCH will, with his step sister listed has having tenancy of the Sunland house for her lifetime and then it going back to JH (Grandma's first husband and RCH's son). Also some correspondence, which petered out about the time that a lawyer said that they'd need to have the wife that was married to JH when he died petition for it. And that it had to be done before someone legally bought it. (Which may or may not have been true. The lawyers weren't estate lawyers, they were helping Grandma out for free because they knew her.)

I think that's were the adventure of The House That Was Meant To Be Ours ended. Aunt Linda never mentioned the surviving wife bit (it would have been his third one), and may not have known. She certainly latched onto the story. It was one of the big tragedies of her life and proof that she could never catch a break. She was determined that it would never happen again. Not determined enough to, you know, make a will, but determined enough to give me marching orders. See previous post.

Well, I'm going to be more evil and try to identify enough letters as tossable to make the rest fit into one bin and one box for stuff to keep. Did S take up the harmonica? Because it looks like I have Grandma's now. Also an embossing stamp with her name and address. And diaries. I mentioned that the diaries scare me, and not just because I found another set of cheesecake photos . . . taken outside.

I'd better get back to it. May your desk be emptier than mine.