Prologue
The little girl was sitting on the sidewalk observing her scabbed knee as if it were a thing apart from her. Her straight brown hair blew in the gentle breeze and with an impatient hand she brushed it from her serious dark brown eyes. She raised her head and gazed up and down the shaded street, then seemed to look right into my eyes, though I knew she couldn’t see me because I was some 65 years beyond her.
I recognized the child and knew just what she was thinking as she sat there on the warm cement clutching her own world about her, shutting out her youngest brother, Douglas’ crying, the sound of a sweeping broom on the front porch behind her, and all the other extraneous stimuli that fought for her attention. Even her brother, Philip’s, plaintive plea, “Come play with me,’ fell on deaf ears.
She felt happy that she lived in a small town with trees and grass around her and with dirt from the earth on her hands and legs. She was pretending that people in passing cars would look at her and say, “Isn’t that a lucky little girl who lives in a house in the country.”
I know she thought this. I knew just what she was feeling, too, how the ‘being glad’ was orange and yellow and a favorite tune she’d heard on Mama’s and Daddy’s Victrola. The feeling of belonging where she was became a warm and comforting blanket about her. It all came back to me—-sitting there on that sidewalk in front of my home, being glad I lived in Palo Alto, no longer in San Francisco, being contented I was me.
No more did I have to wait for someone to take me out of the boarding house to a park where I could swing or slide and then walk home over treeless streets in my hat and coat, as clean as when I had started out. But that part of my life was becoming a faded memory now—not like the reality of living in this beautiful white cottage with the big brown barn-garage at the end of the unpaved driveway that ran down the side of the house like another street.
As my memory focused on that long ago day it triggered other thoughts of my childhood, of the people who influenced those years and of the ones who had come before.
Who Are We?
We cannot know them all, These ancestors of ours Who’ve left us through the long slow years Such strangely varied dowers.
One gave me wistful dreams And love of wind tossed foam. Another gave a heart that clings To tranquil ways and home.
One gave me truth and trust. One gave me pride and fire. The gift of one was faith enough To grasp my heart’s desire.
Women with laughing lips, And one who fought and dreamed, So through my veins, the changeful tide Of diverse lives has streamed.
And sometimes I must ask, As life so strangely runs, How much of this myself is, How much those other ones.
-Anonymous [IMAGE INSERT “Barbara Grimes Scandalis 1974”] [IMAGE INSERT “Phillip Stanford Grimes”] [IMAGE INSERT “Douglass Warneke Grimes”]