Carol H Tucker Passionate about knowledge management and organizational development, expert in loan servicing, virtual world denizen and community facilitator, and a DISNEY fan
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beladona Memorial Be warned:in this very rich environment where you can immerse yourself so completely, your emotions will become engaged -- and not everyone is cognizant of that. Among the many excellent features of SL, there is no auto-return on hearts, so be wary of where your's wanders...
On the middle shelf in the secretary that used to stand in Grandmom Riley's house, there is a framed picture of my mother and my father standing on the marble steps of a rowhome in Highlandtown, Baltimore. It is May 28th, 1949 and they just got married in the parlor of the pastor's house next to St Elizabeth’s.
Pete and Jerry had grown up within a block of each other. They were both pretty popular in school and apparently they both dated others, but in the end, they always ended up together. He asked her to marry him before he left school 16 to join the Navy during WWII. I don’t know what the differences were, but that engagement ring went back and forth at least three times, so the engagement was rather tumultuous. But in the end, they got married. There are no happy pictures of friends and family to be found to mark this date -- the only two people who saw them get married was Aunt Nell, Mom's older sister, and Uncle Harry, Dad's older brother. You see, my mother was Roman Catholic and my father was Lutheran [I think] and that was a problem. Grandmom Riley supposedly insisted that Mom would have to be married in the Church, or she wouldn’t come to the wedding. Dad supposedly lost his temper and declared that if her mother couldn’t see her married Protestant, then his mother couldn’t see him married Catholic. Both Grandmom Riley and Grandmom Hughes agreed on one point – the day of the wedding, both mothers sat home and cried their eyes out.. It was not an auspicious start to the marriage and indeed, there were many problems.
I remember hearing this story when I was around eight years old – third grade it was [and I have written before about how life changed for me that year in explaining why Mira is 8 in SL]. I heard it again and again through the years from both of my grandmothers, with slightly different perspectives of course, as to who was at fault. Aunt Nell and Uncle Harry never spoke about it to me, nor did my parents, but my grandmothers both tried to give me a perspective on the relationship as things started falling apart around me, knowing that as an only child I was blaming myself for the dissonance in the house.
And what did that 8 year old learn? Most importantly, that there are always three sides to every story – his, her’s and what actually happened. That sometimes the way that you look at something changes the way that you feel about it, or about someone, and how you remember what happened. In later years, this perception crystallized into my oft-repeated comment that there is no such thing as an historical fact because it is all based on what someone remembered.. But she also learned that being in the middle of differing stories sucks because someone always wants you to take sides. In later years that has meant that I am sometimes alone because I refuse to do that….
I keep the picture, I keep the secretary, they are both a little piece of family history and part of my story about the choices I have made that make me who I am.
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