To the fathers in my life
Musings on the summer solstice and memories of childhood
I hadn’t intended to be sitting here writing this morning. It is the summer solstice and, to the surprise of many I think, the sun is out and shining in a clear blue sky since around 5 am, although the sky was growing light hours before. It will still be light in the far west sky as late as midnight tonight. I know because the light was there last night when I let the cat out before going to bed—bands of pale, pale green streaked with dark cloud to the northwest. No… writing was not on my list because there’s gardening to do and weeding and maybe a walk by the river after my household chores. But here I am in my studio writing since breakfast.
We recently had a glorious three day visit from our dear friend Gearoid. He is newly retired from teaching in Canada and on a trip around the country to see friends and family before heading off to Paris where he hoped to get to his hotel in time to watch the Clare match on GAA Go. Hurling has apparently taken up the space where other more scholarly pursuits had occupied his attention. The thing about having Gearoid in the house is the wide-ranging conversation… nearly non-stop. It takes days after one of his visits to sort and order the divagations and perambulations of the 100 or so topics visited and revisited in the course of the day… and in the evening over food and wine. I think Robbie and I spent much of the day yesterday, after his departure for Dublin airport, in silent digestion of the stories told, the questions asked, the jokes, the encouragement, and the marathon session of translating one of Robbie’s songs into Connemara-ish Irish. Robbie took TWO naps and I sat and caught up on three days worth of quilting while listening to WCRB streaming calming wordless classical music in the gazebo. The waterfall to our pond had been repaired and was gently trickling and babbling in the background while the birds chirped and sung.
One of the things Gearoid and I talked about at length was my Québecois family on both my mother and father’s sides, especially my mother’s parents: where they were born, lived, married and died. Their huge families, 12 births and nine surviving children on my grandmother’s side and ten that I believe I’ve tracked down on my grandfather’s side.
Odias Bolduc, “Pépère Bolduc”
My grandfather, Odias (Joseph Jacques) Bolduc was born in 1906… his oldest brother was born in 1888, 18 years before. That’s some span.
What I remember most about my Pépère was his laughter and curiosity. He didn’t get beyond primary school before he went to work on the farm and in the lumber camp where he was a “cookie” helping the camp cook with fetching water and tending the fire, learning how to feed a crowd of hard-working hungry men. He had no English when my grandparents moved the United States just before the Wall Street Crash.1 He taught himself to read in English with Reader’s Digest. All in all, he was a self-taught, self-made man that worked his way up to head chef at Scoler’s Restaurant, a popular businessman’s establishment in West Hartford. He retired at sometime in the mid ‘60s but he made such a mess of my grandmother’s kitchen—using up all the pots and pans but never washing them up—that he was banished and went back to Scoler’s but only part-time as the pastry chef.
Each summer in the 1950s, when my sister Elise and I were young, we spent several weeks traveling to the Eastern Townships of Québec where my grandparents were born and raised. We would start by spending a week or so in Hartford where they had settled and then would pack the trunk of the powder blue Cadillac with suitcases of second hand clothes my grandmother had collected and carefully mended and “made new” over the past year to be given to the families of her brothers and sisters. My cousins remember that time fondly as “Christmas in July.” These trips slowly got shorter and trickled away once I was a teenager and my grandfather “retired.” A few years later my grandparents moved back to Québec to be near their families and our visits to the Eastern Townships recommenced.
All the food I remember best—and for which am most nostalgic—are the foods he made for us: tourtière, cretons, “Granpères” (dumplings cooked in maple syrup), Apple Brown Betty (with ice cream!). In the summer when we would visit my grandparents in St. Jean d’Iberville2, he would barbecue juicy steak with sweet corn from their garden, thick slices of homegrown beefsteak tomatoes, and a salad made of romaine lettuce with a dressing of sour cream and chives with a touch of salt and ground pepper. The only time we ever went to a restaurant in my many, many childhood visits all over Québec (although we never got further west of Lachine where my aunt was a sister in the Mother House of Les Soeurs de Ste. Anne), was the Cabanne à Sucre during the Easter vacation. We would meet with the aunts, uncles, cousins, and stand in the long queue waiting for seating at the long wooden tables for a breakfast of everything imaginable that could contain a bit of maple syrup. You haven’t lived until you’ve had scrambled eggs cooked with a soupçon sirop d’érable and maple smoked bacon.
I could go on for pages about this “father” in my life but I want to do a little more investigating first. I haven’t really been doing much genealogy work lately with all the other projects taking up my time, but our visit with Gearoid has raised more than one little mystery that I have to explore… e.g. why the man I thought was my great-grandfather is supposed to have died 5 years before my grandparents were married. Who is he? He’s in lots of family photos from around that time. An uncle maybe? Did my great-grandmother remarry? It wouldn’t surprise me with all those children.
I will leave writing about my paternal grandfather until I have done more research. For some reason, my Québec family has been pulling on my heartstrings more strongly of late and I have not had much luck getting more info about my dad’s father’s roots. However, I do have a few things to mention about my dad.
Paul Edmée Vigeant, “Pépère” to our children
Paul Edmée Vigeant was born May 22-23, 1929. Accounts vary, as does the order of his first and middle names, and led to no end of confusion when he went to get his official passport to visit us for our first Christmas in Ireland. His emergency passport was obtained when he and my mother travelled with us when my mother-in-law had died in a car accident and the rest of Robbie’s immediate family were in hospital. When my dad went for his official passport, he had two names and two birthdates to reconcile so the passport office in Boston said, “You can either have Paul Edmée with the 23rd or Edmée Paul with the 22nd.” Since his father was the “Edmée” of the family, he chose the former option. We still celebrated his birthday on the 22nd… hard to break the habit of a lifetime, and when our first son was born on May 22 and named Paul, we got closure… at least in the family.
My dad was smart—got accepted into Harvard Pre-med because he wanted to be an Egyptologist, but the family business needed a bookkeeper so my grandfather sent him to Bentley Business School—I got my Master’s from Bentley’s Graduate School some 55 years later. My father taught me to read with big archeology coffee table books, pictures of Nefertiti and the pyramids. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts “Egypt Room” was the first stop whenever we went there. And the same when we went to the New York World’s Fair in 1964—a sunny day in brutally hot New York City was on the itinerary but the Met was the real destination. We must have spent hours there.
Sadly, he never got to visit Egypt in real life. With a family of six daughters—and the family business to run with his brother Ralph—having the money to go to Egypt didn’t happen until he was retired and handicapped with emphysema. My parents booked tickets and were all ready to take off for a tour at the end of September 1997. On the 18th of September, terrorists killed nine German tourists with a grenade launched at their tour bus outside a museum in Cairo.3 My parents’ tour to Egypt was cancelled.
My dad gave me many gifts: the love of philosophy and anthropology, of opera, of art, of books in general. Most of all he gave me the love of camping out, cooking marshmallows and hot dogs over an open fire, listening to the rain on the roof of a canvas tent, playing cards at the picnic table, listening to the crickets and peepers at dusk.
My dad was the eldest of six and I wrote a short piece about him last year on the anniversary of his death. I mentioned creating a photo book about him, which I still intend to do but haven’t found the time as yet. However, here are some photos that weren’t in that post that will be in that album.
Robbie O’Connell, “Dado” to our grandchildren
The third father I want to write about today is my husband Robbie. Now that we are empty nesters, although that tends to fluctuate a bit when one or another of our chicks come back to the nest now and again, I’ve come to appreciate what a great father he is, and has always been, to our children. In the early days when he was on the road doing gigs and tours, he may have been physically absent, but when he was home… he was HOME. And he always sent them postcards from wherever he was.
Our best times were camping at Nickerson State Park on Cape Cod from the time our youngest could barely walk. We’d take every week we could get before the 4th of July. No phones, no TV, nothing but the little yellow transistor radio4 (when you are camping you REALLY need to know about the weather), the hammocks, and books to read. It was the making of us all.
As a father, he is conscious of not interfering too much in their lives (they are all in their 40s now). But, if asked for his opinion, he is ready with cautious advice that, I think, stems from trying to protect them from disappointment. He, like his father before him, is the epitome of unconditional love. He is deeply proud of their achievements and talents. Having worked all his life to make a living as a musician and songwriter, he’s acutely aware of how turbulent and uncertain is the life of the non-conformist. He wants his children to be safe and secure and yet… he completely understands—and respects—that the paths they have chosen, while sometime precarious, are what they are meant to do and makes their lives worth living. And that is what every child deserves: love, support, respect.
…
Happy Father’s Day to all the fathers out there, those that are with us both past and present.
In doing the little bits of fact checking for this piece, I discovered my grandfather’s U.S. Naturalization Petition. I found out that he FIRST came to the US in 1922, age 16, to Jackman, Maine, on Moose River, via the Canadian Pacific Railway Train #40, most likely to work in the lumber camps there, possibly the Jackman Lumber Company. More research is needed!
Now called St. Jean sur Richelieu.
https://1997-2001.state.gov/global/terrorism/1997Report/review.html
“Barbo’s, Barbo’s, for furniture you will live with, happily ever after!”… still going strong apparently!