Personal blog of christian
writer & fallible mom
Katy McKenna Raymond
in Kansas City, Missouri
Katy is represented by
Greg Johnson at
WordServe Literary
Read more Katy at
LateBoomer.net
Recent Posts
- Try
- Becoming Brenda Starr
- Off Beat
- Scattered
- That’s It
- So I’ve Finally Signed With An Agent. Now What?
- The Spoon
- Sciatica
- Sweetheart
- A Woman’s Train of Thought Has No Caboose
- However much we own, we are all still living on borrowed time
- After all, when restaurants shrink portions, they don’t shrink prices.
- As with everything in life, balance is key.
- Slow down, you move too fast…
- Yeah, I know. I have issues.
Syndicate
E me at katy @ ngenius.com
The Ultimate Gift
Here’s a holiday question for you. If you could only give one gift this year, what would it be and to whom would you give it?
It doesn’t have to cost anything, or it could cost a gazillion bucks. Whether you actually have the means to afford the gift doesn’t matter for our purposes. This is just to get our creative Christmas juices flowing. The dream gift could be given to any person—dead or alive. If you want most to give Whirled Peas to the President of Iran, go for it!
Right now, I’m thinking I’d love to do the work I’ve been postponing on Family Tree Maker and give my siblings the Gift of Roots.
When my father died nearly 23 years ago, he knew the names of his parents and that’s all. Didn’t know their birthdays or birth places, except to say “Scotland” for his mother and “Ireland” for his father.
My father came to this country from Scotland at the end of WWII as a 26-year-old orphan, who’d already served eight years in the British Army. He literally came with the clothes on his back, and he wasn’t stylin’, believe me. His Uncle Frank, himself an Irish immigrant, sponsored my father to come over—along with five of my dad’s six siblings.
In those days, immigration was strictly controlled. You couldn’t get in to America without a sponsor guaranteeing that if you turned out to be a slouch, the sponsor would be completely responsible for supporting you. It was a huge responsibility for the married-but-childless Uncle Frank to take on—and a huge risk. Frank’s place, in a neighborhood in Kansas City which was at that time an enclave of Irish immigrants, became a flop house for his nieces and nephews.
My father and his brothers would work by day, drink and gamble by night, and land on the living room floor just inside Frank’s front door during the wee hours. They didn’t even have beds, the joint was so packed. Of course, even if they’d had beds, they were too drunk to climb the stairs. They’d stagger off the floor in the morning and lather, rinse, repeat.
My mother killed Uncle Frank in 1959, a night I remember well. He came to our place for dinner—the first and last time he ventured to do so—and she fed him something innocuous seeming like spaghetti and meatballs. The Irish cannot abide by a meal like that, and she should have known better. They don’t do casseroles, and want their meats and starches strictly separated on the plate. Anyway, he went home that night and evidently dropped dead from the shock.
Mom killed her own father similarly, with a breakfast of bacon and eggs, after which he only survived an hour, but this blog entry is NOT supposed to be about my mother’s high (or low) culinary crimes and misdemeanors, now is it?
It’s supposed to be about the gift of a lifetime. I’d like to finish the work I’ve started on my father’s family history, and present it to my siblings. And my cousins, for that matter. It’s important to me that they think of their dad in terms of his place in an age-old story, not as just another guy who got plunked down here for a few years and then was gone.
That’s my dream gift, and those are my dream recipients.
What’s yours?
- Sorry, Katy, I'm cheating because I have three, but I couldn't decide on one.
I'd like to gift:
My niece Danielle with mental health.
My niece Nancy with total deliverance from crack addiction
My husband with zero debt!Posted by Suzan on 11/27/06 at 09:22 PM - Suzan--You deserve three, as they are so generous. I hope all your gift ideas come true.
Posted by Katy on 11/27/06 at 11:04 PM
- Top of my head...I'd give everyone in your family McDonald's coupons in case Mom takes up cooking again. :)
Posted by Michael Main on 11/28/06 at 08:32 PM
- I can't stop laughing, M. You know what? Mom told us years after the fact that toward the end of Dad's life, she find the food she cooked him scraped off his plate into the trash bin. Was he SCARED she might do him in? Hmmmm. All I know is that while a heart attack was blamed for his death, he DID only weigh 90 pounds. 5'8". You do the math..... ;)
Posted by Katy on 11/28/06 at 08:42 PM
- Oh really very nice and awesome information you share here. Thanks for your nice information.
Posted by Gift Ideas India on 03/09/09 at 11:04 AM
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