Thanksgiving '23
Ed Evans at a Boy Scout camp—from an unknown photographer
That’s an early a photo, hanging an arm on a vehicle, rolled-up shirt and boots to his calves because? It was summer camp. Even that young, he was serious. Boy Scout camp. A ghostly photo. It kills me how I could have been his brother.
It’s a one-way trip no matter how many tokens you stuff in the machine.
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We had a very nice pre-Thanksgiving visit from up-north relatives we don’t often see—weddings and funerals pass for visits in our family. We folks down south are always saying things like ‘they’s northerners,’ like that explains things. “Ya’ll ain’t from here, are ya?” Meeting after a long time. My memory of northerners visiting us when I was a boy has a mental distance as long as the physical one. I absolutely knew how far it was we were living from the family.
Larry is the youngest first cousin. He and his wife Isa, cruised down from Pennsylvania and my sister and her husband motored up from Richmond. Motoring was what they called it in the 50s—like they’d be hoofing it otherwise.
A multi-hour family history session ensued. Photos laid out were duplicates and a lot were not. D charitably led Isa to the deck—D’s quick that way. I need to admit, I know far less about our family than Larry does. Though I’ve dug around the family lore for stuff that interests me enough to write about it.
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I caught an interview yesterday with Henry Lewis Gates–on David Rubinstein’s PBS show. On the show Gates admitted, since he was a boy, being interested in genealogy—he surprised me, but maybe I shouldn’t have been. It’s curious to think how Rubinstein was made fabulously wealthy by finance is also curious about history and people. His TV persona is one degree from not having one, but he’s got enough money to buy himself a country, and he spends a ton of it on the public good.
Gates, as well, has adopted a placid face on his genealogy show, but there’s an underlying anger that slips out reacting to his African Americans guests’ learning what their long ago ancestors went through. It’s a trope that African Americans alive today don’t know much about their ancestors. Most of us European descendants don’t know either, and so Gates digs around for immigrant stories as well. We’re certain he’s used that same mid-19th century steamship in more than one show. My great grandmother, Susan Barry came on one of those.
Gates hasn’t found a native American yet, but he might get there. I hear a few of them are still around.
Gates’s own great grandfather was white. That’s fucked up, having to think about slaves in your own family. Sorry, Mother. But we watch Gates’s show when we can—it’s most successful when his guests are engaged in the quest. Some will surprise you. He’s partial to stories about immigrants—the obvious point being how we’re all immigrants on this bus, to misquote Firesign Theatre—even the native Americans if you go back far enough.
Being stoned at parties in the 70s was good for a lot of wasted time, but hearing Firesign Theatre’s wacky records was excellent preparation for when Monty Python’s Flying Circus came along. I’m telling you, it was all my mother’s doing.
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I always figured my interest in genealogy came from where I came from—growing up our small family was missing a father, and we were close to poverty and a long way from our original home in Pennsylvania coal-country. So that was how I explained the interest—it made me curious.
Years before, when Mother was living with my sister’s family out in Sterling, our cousin Larry videotaped interviews with her. Two different trips in 1994 and 1995. Four-and-a-half hours. This was before her death in 1999. Parkinson’s destroyed her last years, took that beautiful, curious mind to mush. Our DVD player’s in a drawer downstairs. She’s still in my heart, but hearing her again ‘live’ will be a shock. A winter project, provided I have the guts.
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I married a girl—younger than we thought we were—from southern gentry, though she was the furthest from a southern belle. She had her father’s curiosity—and his family had a real plantation back in Civil War times, with its own railroad spur to haul the cotton. Her family had slaves. And kept slave papers in the family bible—I saw the bible. But she was another one interested in where she’d come from. Still is.
Most of my family’s genealogy research came from Larry’s mother—Larry has shared all her notes. When D and I took the boys to Ireland, we visited kin there, thanks to Larry and Joe, another cousin we’ve not seen since the last funeral.
Family Farm - Ryan with his cousin at the Barry-Fitzgerald house, Ennis, Ireland—photo by William E. Evans © 1991
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We had dinner that night in McLean near where my brother-in-law’s older brother lives. I don’t think we dropped the average age in the place none. But the Persian menu at Amoos was great as advertised—and though it was a long way from Ennis, County Clare, I felt like the place met the event. D and I enjoyed the Middle Eastern—one of us was born to it.
At dinner, I sat next to my brother-in-law’s brother who was sharp as always. His baritone rumblings can deceive—he retired as a senior lawyer at Intelsat. As a senior Boy Scout leader, he officiated at Ryan’s eagle scout ceremony back in 2002. His mother had pushed Ryan through the process—we lived apart, he and I, in those years. I remember at that night’s ceremony wanting Ryan to understand how we admired him. Ryan stood proud, his arm around the girl he planned to marry. Nothing he accomplished touched his unsatisfied self-perception.
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So Larry and I have a plan: my last library was built in Pennsylvania a few years after I left the soulless firm that had bought the Lukmire Partnership. Kennett Square is a tidy village just over the border from Maryland. The volunteer library board had reached out to hire us based on our reputation for libraries. Kennett Square was one I really wanted to see built. You have these designs in your head, but they don’t mean much until you see them built.
Being gone from the firm, I don’t like how Kennett Square Library was finally built. Nor was it how I’d planned to exit architecture, but I still want to see it. I had presented the design in a series of community meetings, describing how libraries were community anchors. I hope it’s bringing life to that end of Kennett Square—and the classrooms are helping the Latin immigrants fall in love with reading.
We hope to visit Longwood Gardens while we’re up there. And take lots of pictures—I have a few Gbs left on the Nikon’s twin flash drives from our trip to Spain.
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The Medium piece, if you don’t get around to reading it, closes with:
“If you’ve ever studied the cave paintings in Avignon, wondering who those people were, curiosity about earlier times would seem familiar. Past is prelude—alliterative symmetry, though often as untrue as not. Still, where else can we look with any kind of clarity? We study the past because we can’t see the future.”
NOTES from No Moral to It.
The following was edited out of this month’s Medium story, which was beginning to ramble.
The English spellings—centre, colour, honour—as a kid I was forever spelling the English and upsetting the nuns who were sure I was a hopeless case. None bothered to ask, was I coming away from hours reading Dumas’s Count of Monti Cristo, The Three Musketeers, Victor Hugo’s stories, all the Hornblower works by C. S. Forester? Those substituted well for television cartoons. The gift my mother gave her three children was to read. I was a boy reader to be sure.
I even read James Fenimore Cooper, so I learned early what annoying writing was all about.