I don’t know why I’m spending so much time thinking about my relatives. Maybe it was the bread, but maybe it’s a love story that my grandma often told me. My grandma was a single mom of two boys when she got sick with polio. She was living with her own mother, who struggled to take care of her. A family friend named Joe McNeney came over every day to care for her. He’d already had polio, so he was immune. Day after day, he would carry her to the bathroom, and tell her to think nothing of it. When she was better, she married him.
An epidemic is part of my family origin story, so perhaps I am seeking out these stories now. Or maybe I feel stuck in the present moment and feel the need to unearth the past. I think even Dot is feeling it. When we were on our walk a few days ago, she stopped in the middle of the street, looked up and said, “Oh hi daddy’s grandpa! Bye bye grandpa! I love you!” She was so convincing I asked my husband to phone is grandpa to make sure we hadn’t been visited by a ghost.
So, ghosts all around us. Whatever the reason, I spent Dot’s naptime scanning a stack of documents and photos that my uncle had given to me years ago. My family’s on the eccentric side, so while other people find staged photos of Christmas gatherings, I find rhyming erotic poetry about dances in the 1940s in Burnaby and narratives about how my grandma’s gin poisoned a cockroach. But it was lovely to see my grandma’s handwriting, and to read all the old recipes, and to marvel at the wonderful strangeness of my ancestors.
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