F ³: Creeds and Questions

 

It fell out of an old picture album as my sister and I sat on the couch together. I very nearly squealed.

“That’s it! That’s it!”

It was a newspaper article from 1965. 

A while back I had been searching the internet for information about my paternal grandmother. There are more traces of her out there than many of my other family members because of her professional life. My most recent find was this:

“Lives her creed.” What did that mean? I conjured up memories of my grandmother. They were childhood memories. I know only what we did together, the television shows she liked, the big basket of Christmas cards she received each year and the little drawer in the coat closet where she kept the odd and quirky toys we could play with when we visited.

What was her creed? I wanted to know.

The newspaper is very probably The Cleveland Press, which ceased publication in 1982. And these snippets were all I had to go on: just the title and her photo, nothing else. I tried searching in any number of ways but came up empty. It has been sitting in my “things to pursue” file ever since.

Now it was in my hands - - folded, brittle, worn , and marked by old cellophane tape.

I should have taken it upstairs and scanned it but, as you can see, I just laid it on the couch and took a picture of it. I was in rather a hurry to read it. Finally I would get to find out what “her creed” was.

You never live a memorable day unless you have done something for someone who cannot do anything for you.

I remembered my mother telling me once that the reason my grandmother got so many Christmas cards every year was that she had helped so many people. During the Great Depression she and her husband helped people out when they were in dire financial straits and truly struggling. They never forgot. I remember that there were several old pieces of furniture in their apartment which had been given by people who had no other way to express their gratitude or pay her back. 

Oh.

My father’s childhood stories included two additional characters I never met: Mrs. Forrester and her daughter, Jean-Anne. They lived in the old house on Bender Avenue along with him and his parents. My grandparents had regular work. So Mrs. Forrester cooked and was the housekeeper.  And Jean-Anne grew up alongside my dad. 

I wonder: did this arrangement come about because Mrs. Forrester and her daughter had nowhere to go? Is this another example of giving people a hand when times were rough and then pitching in together to make things work? 

I don’t know. When I could have asked all these questions I was too young to have thought of them yet.

I remember my grandmother (we called her Gaga) not as cuddly, or warm and tender, but straightforward and no-nonsense. Certainly she was kind to me and treated me to special things from time to time the way grandparents are wont to do. But she was definitely of the school that “you did the things you had to do” and didn’t make a big fuss about it. 

My father was the same. I learned shortly before he died that he was driven all his life not just to do the expected things in life but to feel that he had “made a contribution” to the greater good.

What is my creed, I wonder. What words would turn up in a newspaper article about who I am and what I do? 

And what about you? 

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