Dear Bread,
Bread, you are my ordinary oracle. A routine I study as if you can tell me everything about being, about the world.
Spurred by an Instagram post by quilter Sarah Gagnon, I’ve been considering the value of patterns. I resist order, but patterns emerge anyway: coffee, writing, baking.
I want each moment to be as shining as the sun. And I used to think that only the unusual parts of life could do that.
I’ve learned that the usual is what shimmers, if you pay attention.
What a strange wonder to skim his thoughts. To be with him from the 1960s through about 2010. He had his first strokes in 2007, and he had to relearn reading and writing, and afterwards, he didn’t write as much.
Right after he died in December 2020, I sifted through boxes of his writing that my mom had moved to the attic. Pretty easily I came upon some nice fragments, including a few different tellings of his father’s death. I loved reading the drafts he’d written of PaFrank’s dying, as if he was giving me a recipe for how I would make it through the next while.
At his memorial, I read two vignettes I’d discovered. These were typed up, his preferred form of journaling.
“I remember riding in the car on our way home from vacations or day trips, lying down on the floor of the back seat, my brothers and sister dozing on the seat above me, and feeling the hum of the tires on the road and the drone of the Ford engine while I dwelt somewhere between waking and sleeping, comfortable in the knowledge that my father was driving the car safely home, not aware that he was as tentative about and scared of the world as I was. The dying light of day would make different patterns on my half-closed eyes as the terrain streaked past us and I was safe.” —K.C. Halloran
Another reminiscence of driving echoes the first.
“I have great thoughts when I’m riding along in the car – not earth-shaking or cosmic dimension thoughts, but thoughts that make me happy to be driving in my little steel cocoon with my son and my wife and sometimes one or two of the girls along for a weekend vacation or a visit to the inlaws. And I see houses or roads or things along the highway that make me smile because they have pleasant associations. And the feeling of having a group you’re somehow tied to captive for a short while as the car is humming its relentless way along the blacktop at sixty miles an hour.” —K.C. Halloran
What lush descriptions and comforting sentiments! This week, I found a similar sense of security in something my grandmother wrote.
“It was a cold night in the winter of 1906. We had said our prayers and settled down in bed, after the usual talking, giggling, and the parental admonition to “be quiet and go to sleep”. I lay waiting for sleep to come, snug and warm under the numerous blankets and patchwork quilts, bundled to my neck in a flannel nightgown, my feet cozy in bootees, or ‘footlets’ as we called them. As the whispering of my sister subsided, the house took over, talking to me in many voices. There was the slow trickle of the kitchen faucet (left running so that the pipes wouldn’t freeze) and the creaking of the walls, which seemed to be telling us that they would protect us from the winter cold. The “parlor” stove was outside my bedroom door, and I could see the glow of burning coals through the isinglass windows of its door. An occasional coal dropping in the grate told me that it had burnt itself out to keep me warm. I could hear my father’s snoring, an assurance that he was there to take care of us. … Ottside the wind whistled around the house, rattling hte shutters. A sleigh drive by, the horses’ shoes striking the icy roads – probably the doctor on a call. It was a cold winter night – but I was safe in my warm bed. I snuggled closer to my sister, and then drifted off to sleep.” —Georgiana Cole Halloran
Being with their words is a way of being with them. An obvious statement, but one worth noting, as I marvel at how long it took me to open up this archive of my family’s words. I wanted their ghosts, didn’t I?
I’ve been continuing to investigate M. Emily Greenaway, another writer from Cohoes, New York. I got a copy of her novel, “Sweepstakes” from the UAlbany library. The book is about ordinary people who hope that money will ease their everyday’s. It was published in 1941, and through a piece of dialogue, I have a hint of what the author wanted from writing.
“Someday,” Michael went on, “I am going to write a book. It will be a great book. It will be a book about the fortitude of ordinary people. Men like you too. I keep notes on all that happens here, day by day. I put down what you say and how you say it, what you think, and how you feel. It will be a book of the glory of men.”—M. Emily Greenaway
The ordinary glories. The fortitude of ordinary people.
I found her grave today, across the river at the Waterford Rural Cemetery. Her name is on a family stone, along with her siblings, parents and grandparents. William and James Greenaway were professional bakers, and their names are on other sides of this family stone.
Minnie wrote books, and my father and grandmother did not, yet I get to review their manuscripts all I want. Everything I bake vanishes. Everything I write is ephemeral, too. But these processes, these patterns feed me.
What patterns are feeding you?
Amy