grandmother washington connecticut, my daddy's momma, was a distant figure in my childhood. "she was crazy and she didn't care anything at all about y'all" (her grandchildren), was my granny's assessment of her, 'granny' being my momma's momma. certainly grandmother connecticut evidenced no dotage upon children. as an artist (for she earned sometimes her living thusly on the back of skills acquired from a paris art school to which her father had sent her - he was an architect who i am told kept two households, family and mistress, abroad much of the time) she was perhaps most successful as a children's portraitist - i cannot think these were pleasant experiences for the subject. indeed she rather gloated over the fact that they were not, for she 'knew how to handle children'.
daddy hated washington connecticut and circled it like a damned moth his whole life for his mother outlived him, would not leave the town, and begged him ever to return to it.
a cousin of mine once said of my father: "of course john thinks the rocks in washington are evil."
i replied: "it's not an original thought with him. other people have come to that conclusion."
"really?"
yes. (h.p. lovecraft, with l. ron hubbard, is absolutely a literary light of mine but this is in no way the result of textual criticism. hell, i've never read l. ron.)
grandmother washington connecticut is the first person i ever hear disparage jewishness. she is fiercely anti-semitic. from her mother's family descends our mayflower blood and (with perverse intent) daddy develops a theory of her father's jewish ancestry based somehow upon that patriarch's swedenborgianism. daddy is always trying to find non-yankee blood in his own. on all other political subjects grandmother is sort of liberal and free-thinking but she and her sister edith, who share two sides of a house and invite each other over for cocktails on evenings they are free, worry a lot about jews taking over the town and ruining it.
grandmother gives me a subscription to yankee magazine for christmas the first year i live in houston ('69)...
grandmother connecticut painted the dancing girl mural at joe ianni's italian village but by the time i discover that she has forgotten all about it.
my granny would get you a g.i.joe in the hard to find diving costume set and grandmother would send you a hand painted christmas tree ornament.
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