So the course of this saga has been always governed by purpose, 

   and I stop to define so —lest the work ever be shelved onto the pile of ‘modern memoir’ or who-knows-what 

well what do we mean by purpose, yet again, after all…, 

so let us be clear 

    I am an observer of people,

 a people watcher 

 so I guess as a witness to a society, there is a passion within me to try and awaken the sleeping dragon of the slothland, yet so apathy seems to come from the exhaustion of experience 

I must use my own life as the example; the apparatus to dissect and as my mission is true to my soul, I am always true to my purpose and so, I know this is odd to say but, it is the thruth; it’s never let me know how it feels to ever get to come first …. to anyone and not even to myself to seek what I need 

So I look outside my one Self of Celves to the dynamic I landed in 

and wonder about DNA memory —the sins of the father ….do we take on their guilt…. 

Do we take on their guilt! But it is not just for the sake of the torture ….you see

you see?

You know, I must search backward, I think and so wonder as how Freud has identified how trauma did warp the generations he witnessed. And I look to Freud because that was the generation that came on the boat from the old country in my ancestry. 

As I have mentioned the mystery of the woman who was my grandfather’s mother from Pinsk who claimed to be a widow. On my grandfather’s side we have this mystery: She gave birth to my grandfather soon after her arrival (yet this never was discussed or ever addressed in the family)and from the old photos I recall, she looked like Ingrid Bergman and was quite tall and blonde.she did not look like the peasant, nor of the faith she claimed to be. And my grandfather never spoke about it. And thst says so much 

But on my grandmother’s side is another mystery. Who was my grandmother’s mother? 

She died young. After twelve births. And many more pregnancies that did not make it to full term.

My grandmother was the twelfth one. She had eleven siblings. Her name was Jewel. Sometimes in records it is ‘Julia’ and in my family it seems everyone has had derivative alternatives to their names. I think this was intended for many purposes  

My mother spoke of the husband. The father of the twelve . She called him “Manny” and she told me he was narrow boned like me and had small hands and feet. It made me wonder about his other appendages especially considering his success rate and ….when she would say, “Grampa Manny was a trombenik,” and then looked at her sister and mother they would exchange glances in —that way. Very telling when you learn to interpret facial expressions quite young. 

My grandmother would say,

“they really should trace the family line through the mother. They can claim it’s the husband but only she knows. And sometimes even she doesn’t.”

They would sit around the round kitchen table, Harry’s girls, as they were called by my grandfather’s buddies —and there was my mother, my grandmother, my aunt and my cousin Pat(my hippie idol among the cursed 27) and play with their make up, trade lipsticks, open new boxes and gossip about this enormous family of cousins ….and if I pretended to fall asleep, I’d get to hear all the dirt. And there was a lot

But my grandmother’s mother? 

“She was a gypsy,” according to my grandfather but my grandmother would get angry and say,

“She was a trapeze artist!”

“In a traveling circus,” he would counter 

“Well, they moved around a lot and were more like nomads—from Warsaw— but we only tell everyone we’re French—“

Nobody at the table believed the French remark snd all burst out laughing as soon as she said it. 

Which is funny because I ended up with the French from the other means and by a means she never approved of. 

a Gypsy trapeze artist from Poland who had twelve children with a no good trombenik 

I don’t know about Halcyon Days but once having read Freud I understood : what - went - wrong - there ….

do you know how many cousins come from twelve? From the oldest to the youngest the generations span 

 My mother had dozens of photo albums of their weekends at Jones Beach and Coney Island and every photo album took hours for her to tell the stories behind them

As a literary biographer you look at turning points in people’s lives that caused impressions on the artist and upon their lives

A ship to Ellis Island 

The Great Depression that the photo albums were filled with. Poverty was their reality. And often twelve sibling’s children and children’s children were crammed inside apartments meant for families a third that size.

 And …. yet …. 

   one day my mother put all the albums away 

     and not once ever did she tell those stories again. Turning points and catalysts. Harry’s girl’s lost two members six months apart. First Jewel and then it was Pat who overdosed; intended or not

but within a year we left Florida and my mother was never the same (having to also hide that she’d have also been a widow because my biological father had also just passed away); became a shell of herself, the ornament of her husband’s arm with a frozen smile

My grandfather was the only sane one —or I should say; the only one looking out for me. While he was alive my mother had a protector and —so did I  

I focus here —to lay to rest a past

it’s what an artist does for growth with a cathartic work and is the lens of my focus

What it becomes as it would to anyone and how it manifests is the art of free will and I am just here to log it as well as I may