Some 1,000+ years ago, the Anglo-Saxons named September ‘Haefast Monath’ or Harvest Month. September was the time when the last of the produce was collected from the fields. Even back to the bible, that process of gathering up brought a sense of fullness and joy.

In Orange County, NY, September is still prime harvest month for onions. Corn, too, of course. Just this Monday I rolled a local cob around in some butter and chewed across it typewriter-style to great fullness and joy. 

The school bus has returned to our house on weekday mornings. If I’ve managed to hustle the girls out the front door in time, we have time for a quick run around the front yard. (Just enough for the dew wet their socks.) Then,“The bus! The bus!” and a mad dash through the path nearly covered by flopped-over black-eyed Susans.

Today, as most days, I held my smaller daughter on my hip and said “look!” pointing across the road. As the bus pulled away, she could spot the window from which “sissy” smiled and waved back. It occurred to me that September always feels like this kind of happy/sad goodbye.

Is now a good time to cue the Neil Diamond? “September moooorniiiiiiiing…”

I warn you against listening to that song again (like I did). I’ve got that part of the refrain replaying in my head and I can’t stop it. The sentiment of it clashes so greatly with the rushing of breakfast, teeth, hair, socks, shoes, etc. that it’s almost laughable.

At any rate, I was talking about goodbyes when – really – today’s post is about ‘hello and welcome’. Here is a picture of the McEwens and the McMillians visiting with Eleanor, Merritt and the children some time in 1911.

Who were the McEwens?

George W. McEwen was a farmer, born in 1859. In 1906 he worked at Sunny Side Stock Farm in Mechanicstown, a fact I know only because his name appeared in newspaper advertisements selling eggs from there.

That enterprise moved to Canton, PA and in later years I find various advertisements where he’s selling cows. The address listed as R.D. 2 in Middletown which, actually, may mean he worked at Dunning Farm. Here’s an example from 1919:

FOR SALE – Registered Holstein bull and heifer calf, from 2 to 4 months old; up-to-date breeding

His wife, Mary, sits beside Aunt Kate in this picture. She was born in 1862 and married George when she was 30.

Who were the McMillians?

John Henry McMillian, born in 1847, owned a real estate and insurance business on 25 North Street in downtown Middletown. If the numbering hasn’t changed, it’s currently either a dental clinic or a nail salon called “Fancy Nails”.

He lived with his wife, Margaret (Maggie) at 14 Wickham Avenue, in Middletown. The McMillians were friends of the Dunnings through 1st Presbyterian Church. In a March 1892 newspaper, I found a note that Mr. McMillain was re-elected as elder there.

Margaret is the first person I’ve looked up who was born in a foreign country. I dug around a little to find that she came to New York from Hesse Kassel, Germany with brother, Edward Alonzo, and parents, Israel and Catherine.

By 1870, that family settled in Warwick where Israel did very well as a farmer. When he was 40, Margaret’s younger brother Edward moved in with the McMillains where he would die of an “attack of pleurisy” at the age of 47, in 1895.

Cassie, the McMillians’ daughter, has her birthplace listed as Germany too. Also a first for me, she is listed on the census as “adopted daughter”. In this picture she’s 34 and continued to live with her parents into their old age. (They still live together on Wickham Avenue as of the 1930 census: John, 83, Margaret, 77 and Cassie, 53).

How about those hats?

Aren’t they wonderful? Ladies’ hats tended to be large in 1911. (Think about the hats from the movie Titanic, only one year later). Both women’s hat styles are considered Edwardian even though King Edward passed away a year earlier.

Merritt’s hat is known as a bowler hat. According to historyofhats.net “it was favored among cowboys and railroad workers, criminals and lawman alike, because it was close-fitting and stayed firmly on the head even when the strong wind blows…” Practical, probably like the wearer himself.

Possible conversation topics?

A few months before this picture was taken, on June 22nd, 1911 King George V’s coronation took place in England. You may think that would be a distant event. In fact, when King Edward died in May they played “God Save the King” in Broadway shows and the NYSE was closed the next day (This from The Good Years by Walter Lord).

Crisco shortening came out in August 15, 1911 so maybe the ladies would have offered an opinion on using that for apple pies? The men might have talked sports. The Yankees set a record on September 20th for recording 12 errors in a double header. (Um, whatever that means).

On September 17, the first transcontinental airplane flight took place from New York to Pasadena. It took over 82 hours. Could they have imagined that someday it would only take 6 hours? After scanning our bodies and suitcases?

So that’s what I’ve managed to ‘harvest’ from that picture! As always I feel like Time, that worm, ate through the kernels ahead of me. At least I get the sense that the Dunning home was a welcoming place…always a spare chair out on the porch.

“September moooorniiiiiiiing”. Stop it, Neil. That’s enough.

Do you know that song? If you’re like me, you can sing two lines of one verse of it:

‘Mid pleasures and palaces
Though I may roam
Be it ever so humble
There’s no place like home

The song was published in 1823 and became a favorite of homesick Civil War soldiers on both sides. The tune is also played at the end of The Wizard of Oz (1939) as Dorothy repeats that line “There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.” It’s a sentiment that any of us who grew up in a happy household can understand.

Around the time of the song’s release, Catherine Arnout and Henry Dunning (my great-great-great grandfather) set up their home (a homestead, really) near Mechanicstown, NY. They raised five boys there:

Charles Seely (born 1828)
Henry White (born 1830)
Horace (born 1833)
William Arnot (born 1839)
Edward Payson (born 1836)

Each of the brothers appear to be named after someone important at the time. Charles Seely was a well-known British politician and industrialist. Henry White was one of the founders of Union Theological Seminary (UTS) and a professor of Systematic Theology there. William Arnot was a Scottish minister and theological writer, and Edward Payson was a Congregational preacher.

Horace, my great-great grandfather? Was he named after the Roman poet? Or more likely for Horace Mann, educational reformer? Like so many other things, it’s anyone’s guess now.

What must have made Henry extremely proud (if the naming of his sons is any indication of his religious zeal) was that no less than two of them became important preachers in their own right. What’s more, his first-born, the Reverend Charles Seely Dunning, ended up marrying the daughter of Reverend Henry White (Maria Haines White) for whom his second-born was named.

I know that sounds a little crazy! I have to assume that Henry Dunning and Henry White had some sort of mutual acquaintances. Or could the world really have been so small?

Sons Henry W. and Horace grew up to be farmers. Horace inherited the homestead and Henry W. lived on an adjoining farm. Horace and wife Clarissa then raised their five children there. (My grandmother would later raise her five children there, too).

By 1911, when this photo was taken, Horace’s wife Clarissa had passed away, and two of the children had left the house. Horace Henry (1865) married Addie Gale and started up at his own farm nearby. Smith G. (1867) had settled in Ohio and started a family of his own. This, after having attended Princeton, followed by McCormick Seminary in Chicago, followed by missionary work in Africa.

In the 1910 census, only Henry Dunning (then in his 70s), and unmarried daughters Louise (47) and Kate (40) lived there. It would seem to me that the census took place just before Merritt moved there with Eleanor and took over the farm. In 1914 they will rebuild it and…you guessed it…there are renovation pictures coming.

Phew! That’s a lot of genealogy for a few paragraphs.

You may be relieved to know that besides Aunt Kate (seated on the left in the photograph) I can’t positively identify any of the other women she invited to the house. One’s last name is Jordan and another’s last name is Burrows. It was a beautiful day for a get-together.

The narrator in my book questions whether today’s generation can even understand what ‘home’ felt like for someone of our grandparents or great-grandparents’ generation:

I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can’t go home again. I have done it…but it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places.

Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

Most people don’t live for generations in the same house anymore. Most people, of course, don’t have a farm to hand over. But it’s rare now to even live your entire childhood in the same place. A friend from college argued that every child should move at least once in their life: she thought the experience of change and dislocation was a good sort of ‘growing pain’.

I’m not big on pain. I feel lucky to have lived in one house my entire childhood. Even now – children in tow – there’s a “no place like home” sort of feeling when I walk in and see the bookshelf here, the sofa there. So much of our lives is virtual and changeable these days: it makes the touch and smell of an old bedroom that much more comforting.

I agree with my book’s narrator: my generation and my children’s generation may never go home again in the same way. Yet it’s also true that you can’t move forward without letting something go. Maybe we just need to learn how to live deeper wherever we find ourselves?

Writing about my grandmother’s photo album on the internet is a sort of attempt on my part. What about you?

Here come the last days of August! Before anyone feels entirely ready, a smattering of dead leaves starts to collect on the sidewalk. We look out the window at 7PM or 7:30 PM and think, “It’s darker. It’s getting darker already.”

Since starting this blog about my grandmother’s family I’ve meditated more than usual about how time passes. This is the season though – that transition between Summer and Fall – that everyone feels it. “Where does the time go?”

Strangely enough, that feeling was expressed on the very first page of a book I began reading last week. The narrator records himself saying his location and date into a tape recorder. He reflects that even has he does this, his action has become part of the past.

“I started to establish the present and the present moved on. What I established is already buried under layers of tape. Before I can say I am, I was.”

Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

A little daunting isn’t it? At every moment, we’re writing our personal histories.

Before I started college, I met with a cousin of mine who recommended that I keep a journal during my time there. “You’ll have so many big thoughts”, he told me, “and if you don’t write them down, they’ll be lost.” 

For years I filled up journals with my ideas. I never read the old ones – I just kept writing. Eventually we bought a house and relegated them to a big cardboard box in the basement. Some time after my first daughter was born and I felt time slowing down a little, I decided to excavate.

I wanted to read my old journals. I couldn’t wait to see what my younger, more ‘alive’ self had to say about the world!

Well.

Talk about depressing. Far from “big thoughts” I had written about studying, parties, boys and calories; I sounded insecure, anxious and stupid. So stupid! I sat there with the journals strewn about me, dumbstruck.

I thought I had recorded something meaningful. Instead it was a ten year history of egotism: reality-TV-level navel-gazing. My 30-year old self was not impressed by my 18-year old self. But was that really fair of Older Self?

Heraclitus and I, prophets of flux, know that that flux is composed of parts that imitate and repeat each other. Am or was, I am cumulative, too. I am everything I ever was…I am much of what my parents and especially my grandparents were – inherited stature, coloring, brains, bones…plus transmitted prejudices, culture, scruples, likings, moralities, and moral errors that I defend as if they were personal and not familial.”

Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

Whereas talk of ‘nothing staying the same’ and ‘constant movement’ exhausts me (sorry Heraclitus), this idea of adding on, of continual building really appeals to me. If I am cumulative, then it’s natural that something I wrote as a teenager wouldn’t sound very wise.

No need for shame.

What’s more, if we are cumulative, then it makes sense that we’re drawn to exploring our grandparents’ history. The effort of trying to identify who these people were and how they interacted with the world need not be a pointless exercise.

Al contrario. Au contraire. (However your relatives might have expressed it!)

It can be a way of connecting yourself to a world that feels increasingly virtual. I may feel like I’m drifting without purpose. Yet generations of people worked with a furious purpose to put me here. Why not use our roots to feel grounded? Isn’t that what roots are for?

(Speaking of roots, is that a wysteria wrapping itself around the house’s entrance? Just curious.)

How’s that for a picket fence? What do you think the white thing is there beside the ladies? Do you keep a journal – is it worth starting again? 🙂

Fall, 1910: Schinook the family horse has been hitched up to escort Eleanor, Clara and baby Ferris to town for a Saturday afternoon’s shopping. Clip-clop, clip-clop. There they go, leaving three tracks in the grass…the middle one made by the horse’s hooves, of course!

In 1910 cars were just starting to outnumber horse and buggies. Ford produced the famous Model-T in 1908 but he wouldn’t set up his factory in Highland Park, Michigan until 1913. Cars were no longer just a rich man’s toy as in 1900, but neither had they yet taken over as in the next 5-10 years.

Horses were still doing lots of jobs in 1910: they delivered groceries, they served as taxis, they pulled steam and pumpers to fires and harvesters over the farms. New York City had plenty of stables and carriage houses for horses. Rows of these stables, called mews, have now converted into expensive pieces of real estate.

There were certainly downsides to this mode of transportation, however, quite aside from the welfare of the animal itself. Allow me to fill you in!

5 Horse and Buggy Drawbacks

1. Dead Horses: While the well-to-do took care of their animals, many city horses were overworked to the point that they dropped dead in the street. The cost and difficulty of removing a 1,000+ pound beast meant that their carcasses were often left to rot, attracting flies and breeding disease.
   
2. Manure: The average horse produced 15-30 pounds of manure per day. PER DAY. In a city like New York with 100,000 horses, the Sanitation Department could not keep up with these…deposits. Again, flies, disease, stink and great expense for the manure removal.
   
3. Runaway Horses: Though, certainly, horses went much slower than automobiles (10-15 miles per hour) they could get spooked and cause accidents, too. I reviewed articles from the Middletown Times Press from 1906, searching by the keyword “runaway”. From just April 18-25, I came up with three separate incidents:
   
   • April 18: Barber Shops Peril: Runaway Horse Tries to Enter Through a Window (You can’t make this stuff up.)
     
     April 24: Killed by a Runaway (58 year old man dies of injuries sustained in a runaway on Thursday, on the Cocheton turnpike).
     
     April 25: Lively Runaway: A horse ran away on West Main Street…the wagon was smashed .
4. Crossing the Street: Electric traffic lights had not yet been invented. Policemen helped direct traffic, around 1910, with the help of sempahores. (A semaphore was a tower with moving arms to signal “go” and stop”).
   
   Prior to that, in an “age of numerous vehicles which constantly imperil innocent childhood”, according to the Buffalo Enquirer from September 1897, “the following from an English magazine seems very pertinent, and worth teaching to the nursery folk:
   

Look up the street, look down the street,
Before you leave the gate;
If horses’ feet the cobbles beat,
Stand very still and wait.

Look up the street, look down the street,
If nothing there you see; 
With footsteps fleet, my toddler sweet,
Cross over carefully.”

And last but not least…#5:

Isolated communities: At this time in history, when telephones were still scarce and there were no radio or televisions, communities were far-removed from one another. Each community had to depend on its own food, entertainment and civil society.

Depending who you were and where you found yourself, that could certainly be seen as a drawback. Notes Frederick Lewis Allen in The Big Change, “a trip to see friends ten miles away was likely to be an all-day expedition, for the horse had to be given a chance to rest and be fed.”

You’d have less friends. You’d also, necessarily, have a smaller view of the world at large. Things were already starting to change though.

The World’s Fair was held in St. Louis in 1904. Among its displays were an Alaskan tribe, a Japanese pavilion and a Congolese Pygmy. The success of the fair (an estimated 20 million visitors…”Meet Me in Saint Louis“, anyone?) attested to the fact that people had an interest in different communities and cultures.

Then in 1907, Theodore Roosevelt decided to send sixteen battleships and 14,000 men on a voyage around the world. In addition to showing off our Navy, the Great White Fleet improved international relations, making 20 stops across six continents. Again, the public enthusiasm for that trip seems to indicate that people in the U.S. were increasingly curious about the world beyond our borders.

In short, there’s a reason that people use the phrase “horse and buggy” to refer to things that are out-of date. It’s a mode of transportation that was too limiting for the country we were quickly becoming.

Since Eleanor couldn’t take a picture of the kids pretending to drive the car, here they are pretending to steer the horse. I might call that questionable parenting. Then again, I may be helping my grandchildren on to a driverless school bus some day so no judgement here!

At some point, as children, my sister and I received music boxes in which to store our personal treasures. My sister’s had Noah’s Ark on top of it and played “Talk to the Animals”. I don’t recall what mine looked like but it played “In the Good Old Summertime”, a song first published in 1902.

There’s a time each year
That we always hold dear
Good old summertime

I spent an inordinate amount of time winding up that box to listen to the music going crazily fast, then slower and slower before finally giving its last little ‘ting’. Only to wind it again. I’d watch the ballerina pirouette round and round, transfixed by who knows what.

With the birds and the trees’es
And sweet scented breezes
Good old summertime

Summer is just the season for this sort of ‘zoning out’. There’s more time in the day to make room for leisure: a swim, a walk, lawn games. The good weather gives us an excuse to lay our domestic chores aside for the moment and enjoy being outside.

Of course, as an adult it’s a fight to clear your head, even in summer. Does the car need a new transmission? Should we be putting parental controls on the ipad? Oh great, the freshwater animals are dying off.

In July 1910, when these pictures were taken, summer disorder resulted from the “fight of the century” between Jack Johnson (a black man) and Jim Jeffries (a white man). That a black man could even fight against a white man in a prize fight was an extraordinary thing in those days.

This fight only occurred because Johnson had beaten (white) Tommy Burns in Australia in 1908 to become Heavyweight Champion. Jeffries was therefore picked out as the “great white hope”: a white boxer who could win the title back to ‘redeem the race’. (Let’s pause and give thanks that the phrase “redeem the race” sounds so out-of-touch to today’s ear).

No trouble annoying
Each one is enjoying
The good old summertime

There happens to be a Ken Burns documentary on this event called “Unforgivable Blackness”, which I highly recommend. The website provides background into it and how Johnson’s flamboyant personality and marriages to white women increased the stakes of the fight.

“Johnson did not seem to care what whites thought of him, and this bothered most whites a great deal. He was not humble or diffident with whites.” You can imagine the historical significance, then, on July 4th, 1910, when 20,000 people gathered in Reno to watch Johnson fight Jeffries.

You might also imagine what happened when Johnson dominated and knocked his opponent out in the 15th round. Race riots erupted all over the country, resulting in a number of black deaths. The film of the fight was soon banned in some cities for fear that the images would incite more violence.

My relatives undoubtedly knew of these events. (Riots even broke out in New York City). My best guess is that, as regular church goers, they followed the church’s beliefs that two men bashing each other for money was an immoral and un-Christian act.

In fact, the churches didn’t want the Johnson-Jeffries fight to happen at all. I found this account in the New York Times from July 4 which gave me a little laugh. “There was scarcely a church in the state to-day that didn’t send its plea up that some thing will happen to prevent its so-called blot on the fair name of Nevada.”

The fact is that as troubling as most of the ‘big news’ events are, they rarely touch our lives directly. Eleanor would surely not recall the summer of 1910 as the summer that Johnson knocked out Jeffries. She might instead remember it as the summer that Ferris took his first steps.

Likewise, I won’t remember this as the summer of shooting sprees. This was the summer I had zinnias in my planters and my daughter had the lobster bathing suit. The difficulties of the country bite at my ankles like annoying flies that I’m fortunate enough to swat away as needed.

In summer, especially, we all need that. I’m aware and saddened, though, that then as now, many people don’t have that luxury.

I’ll end with a very idyllic picture of Eleanor and Ferris enjoying each other’s company. Don’t you love how there’s a little piece of hair that’s come out of her bun? That imperfection makes this photo even more beautiful to me.

Strolling thro’ the shady lanes
With your baby mine;
You hold her hand and she holds yours.
And that’s a very good sign.
That she’s your tootsie wootsie
In the good old summertime.

The word “progressive” gets bandied about these days. It’s become popular with Democratic candidates, even when it’s not clear what they mean by it. It’s an insurance corporation featuring bizarre commercials.

From 1890-1920, it was an era unto itself: the Progressive Era. These thirty years marked a time of activism in the United States. From the local up to the national level, across all social classes and regarding all different sorts of issues, Americans sought reform.

President Theodore Roosevelt led one part of the charge by bringing a suit to dissolve the Northern Securities Company in 1902. Never before had the government interfered in such a brazen way with business interests. J.P. Morgan (who helped create the company) was shocked and called the attack ungentlemanly.

Federal law, at the time, didn’t have the power to reign in things like monopolies or stock manipulation in the business world. Bad behavior was dealt with privately. As J.P. Morgan said to Roosevelt following the suit, “if we have done anything wrong, send your man to my man and they can fix it up.”

Why should the government have a say? The idea pervaded that great men would make society better if they could build their great things (railroads, factories, banking enterprises) unhindered. If this process made a select few extremely wealthy, that was “their just reward and carried the blessing of a Higher Power”, as Walter Lord puts it in The Good Years.

That’s not theoretical, by the way. John D. Rockefeller was known to have said “God gave me my money.”

The suit against Northern Securities Company didn’t radically change any of these views. What it did was to show that the law could be used to improve a situation. It encouraged the idea of a “moral standard” which – if upheld – could make life fairer.

This is a picture of Clara from 1910. She doesn’t look particularly happy in this one but I love it anyway. Except for the giant bow, it could just as easily be me as a little girl, or one of my daughters.

One thing I appreciate about being a parent is that though my entire workday be dull, repetitive, or filled with dead-ends, it takes only five minutes with my girls to change my attitude. Children refresh.*

At some point after pick-up, my daughter will say “oh, mom!” and go on about something new or exciting that happened. She passed her swim test. So-and-so has the same shirt as she does.

It doesn’t have to be anything consequential for her excitement to infect me. Soon I’m telling her about something good I had for lunch. I rack my brain to come up with an anecdote from the day to entertain her.

Reading about the Progressive Era for the post this week gave me the same sense of well-being. A sort of positive energy seemed to flow through people then. Some pushed for popular government, others for better working conditions in factories and still others to conserve the country’s forests.

There were women campaigning for votes. There was a movement that would turn social work into a profession. Just two years before this picture of Clara, in 1908, Lewis Wicks Hine was hired by the National Child Labor Committee to take pictures of his own, documenting the horrors of child labor.

Little as these people had in common, they were alike in seeing the nation, not as a place where everybody went his own way regardless of the plight of others, but as a place where people had a common destiny, where their fortunes were interlocked, and where wise planning, wise statesmanship could devise new instruments of satisfaction for all men.

Frederick Lewis Allen The Big Change: America Transforms Itself, 1900-1950

We’ve still got some want-to-be robber-barons around, yes, but this period in history strengthened our laws and oversight. Pharma bro’s in prison, the Theranos founder is likely on her way and the S.E.C. (not created until 1934) has Elon Musk on speed dial.

There was a time when one of the most important financiers in the country, George Baker, could declare, “It’s none of the public’s business what I do…I owe the public nothing!” I don’t think that statement would be well-received in 2019. No Charitable Giving department would know what to make of it.

In fact, this George Baker began to engage in philanthropy in the 1920s, joining God-gave-me-my-money-Rockefeller. I’m inclined to think that – generous as those donations proved – both did so because they were advised that they should. I think the ethos of the Progressive Era began to hold leaders to a higher ‘moral standard’.

Perhaps since Flo the Progressive Commercial lady has forever destroyed the word “progressive” we could bring back “Square Deal” instead? Square Deal II 2020?

*sometimes

Today it’s time to answer the question that’s been on everyone’s mind, “what were cats doing in 1910?” Doing cat things, yes. Also, being pets, though they had it harder than now.

I found a “Brooklyn Eagle Humane Club” column which ran for years in a Brooklyn newspaper. Readers would write in to Aunt Jean, ask to join the club and then raise a question about good pet-keeping. The reader would always sign “your niece” (which confused me to no end, at first)!

Here’s an example:

Dear Aunt Jean,

I wish to become a member of the Humane Club. I promise to be kind to all animals. I have two lovely Maltese cats. When we go to the country, we express them, so they have a nice time running around as well as I.

Your loving niece, RUTH V. SWEENEY

I do not believe that cats enjoy traveling very much. They do not seem to like the idea of being boxed up, but prefer to be permitted to run about freely. It is nice for you to take them along with you.

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, pg. 27, December 01, 1911

PETA was a long way off. Well into the twentieth century, boys and girls kept pigeons, chickens, rabbits, and other tame (or semi-tame) animals as pets. White mice and rats were pocket friends.

Even wild animals were made into pets. According to Pets in America: A History by Katherine C. Grier, squirrels were the most popular. They could chew through wood so special cages had to be made to hold them.

I apologize, here, to the squeamish. The thought of rats and squirrels running up and down my children’s bodies is more than I can stand myself. Let’s turn to back to cats, shall we?

In fact, “Maltese” is not a breed – it just refers to a cat that’s grey. Apparently, there are lots of grey cats in Malta and that’s how they came to have that name. I’m not a huge cat fan (allergies) but even I have to admit that the Dunning’s cat is a good-looking one.

The only literary reference I found to Maltese cats around 1910 was a short story by Rudyard Kipling called – you got it – “The Maltese Cat”. This was just the name given to a race horse in the story, though.

It was not until 1939 that T.S. Elliot immortalized cats in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. In 1910 Elliot was studying philosophy at the Sorbonne. It would still be another five years until he wrote “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

Lloyd Anderson Webber’s long-running musical Cats was based on Elliot’s 1939 cat poems. A friend from college told me that she knew a man who was on the cast of Cats so long that he began to believe he was a cat. She said when he got home from the show, he would have milk from a dish on the floor. Not proven, but an interesting anecdote…

In honor of Elliot and my grandma’s cat, here’s a poem to end my rambling. Have a nice day, everyone!

Our Maltese Cat
the Lord of the Barn 
hunting the mice and protecting the feed
let others play with balls of yarn
he’s got a job to do, indeed

the chipmunks too
are quite a scourge
he’ll have to grab a few today
relentless in his vermin purge
before he rests upon the hay.

Oh just this once, 
he’ll pose for you
with paws together, ears in air
but he’s got better things to do
not for him, that rocking chair! 

They rested. Hard-working farming family that they were, it’s clear that at the beginning of the 20th century, the Dunnings observed the sabbath. Almost every time a relative is mentioned in the Middletown newspapers of those days it concerns an event at the First Presbyterian Church.

The picture below shows what I believe to be a church party, likely on a Sunday. I don’t recognize any relatives but it’s my assumption that those are fellow church members. (I also assume they’ve clumped together to be included in the photograph).

Two things stand out to me about this shot. One, the look of satisfaction of the man on the right side. He may not be the pastor but he wears a sort of ‘proud of my flock’ look, no? Two, the girls who are sitting on the ground balancing their heads on their hands. “How much longer do we have to sit here?”

It’s just a picture, of course. That juxtaposition, though – the difference between the older generation’s view of the church and the newer – comes through loud and clear in two novels of the time.

Here’s a quote from Room With a View by E.M. Forster (published in 1908): “Paganism is infectious – more infectious than diphtheria or piety – and the Rector’s niece was taken to church protesting. As usual, she didn’t see why. Why shouldn’t she sit in the sun with the young men?” The Rector’s niece found church boring, and Lily Bart from Edith Wharton’s 1905 novel House of Mirth agrees with that assessment.

“Lily, oppressed by the close atmosphere, and the stifling odour of fresh mourning, felt her attention straying as Mrs. Peniston’s lawyer, solemnly erect behind the Buhl table at the end of the room, began to rattle through the preamble of the will. ‘It’s like being in church,’ she reflected, wondering vaguely where Gwen Stepney had got such an awful hat.”

Already, in the early 1900’s there was an opting-out of religion for one or the other reason. In Lily Bart’s set, those reasons were as varied as shampooing one’s hair, playing tennis or “smoking the cigarette of young despair” in one’s bedroom. In the Forster novel, opposition is intellectual.

Lucy’s fiance Cecil respects “honest orthodoxy” but only as a “result of a spiritual crisis; he could not imagine it as a natural birthright, that might grow heavenward like flowers.” In other words, he looks down on Lucy for accepting her parent’s religion wholesale.

“Victorian earnestness gives way to modern irony and indifference.” writes Pericles Lewis in an essay entitled “Modernism and religion”. Modernists wanted to turn conventionality on its head. That meant the questioning of things that were givens for their Victorian-age parents…things like regular church attendance.

It certainly struck me reading these novels that turning away from the ritual of church life in the U.S. was already well underway by 1905. That’s not to say, Lewis argues, that Modernists were complete secularists. On the contrary, he argues that they simply “came to define their religion in increasingly personal terms” so that “the sacred no longer has its former public role.”

Where has this led in 2019? Binge-watching as spiritual ritual? Facebook for social belonging? Oprah for belief? It’s easy (but not helpful) to be too cynical. All I know is that when I look through the pictures on my phone I don’t have any that look like the one above…and I wish I did.

The next picture in the album features Catharine Dusenberry Sly holding granddaughter, Mary, on her lap. If I’ve got Mary’s birth date correct, then the year should be 1909. Grandma Sly, born in 1840, will live four more years while Mary will live another ninety or so.

Birth dates and dates of death are, obviously, an important part of genealogical research. For each relative you look up, you get the date and then do a quick mental calculation. “OK, 1840-1913 so she was…73 when she died”.

Soon enough, though, you dread doing those calculations. As you go, you’ll find a date of death that looks too close to the date of birth and realize that this was a child who died. So many years later, not even knowing the people intimately, it can be very upsetting.

Yet this was a part of life even well into the period that these photographs were taken. A cure for tuberculosis, for example, wasn’t tried on a human patient until 1949. It wasn’t even discovered until 1882, at which point it caused the death of one out of every seven people living in the U.S. and Europe.

According to records, grandma Sly lost two of her own children. Eleanor (my great-grandmother) was her eldest child. He was followed by James Clark (baby Mary’s father) three years later. The two children after that died early.

First, she lost baby William in 1878, at 7 months of age. Then, four years later, she lost Clara Harlow , who was only 6. These babies were buried with she and her husband, Jacob, at Warwick cemetery. (You can view the gravestone here if you wish).

I’m really not well-versed in death, if you want to put it that way. Some things I talk about all the time…books, recipes, financial data (!)…but nothing about my current situation leads me to have conversations about the end of one’s life. I’m grateful for that.

I mean, really! It’s been over 10 years since my grandma’s death and I’m just now able to dig out her album and process it!

As ever, I think my ancestors were made of stronger stuff. Catharine made it through what must have been a horrific five years and went on to live over thirty more. Counting Mary, there would be five grandchildren to hold on her lap: five squirming, crying, amazing beings that would go on to outlive her.

I’ve decided to let a quote from Willa Cather do the wrapping up for me today. Willa was, coincidentally, born on a farm herself, a year before my great-grandmother Eleanor. Her family moved to Nebraska when she was nine to avoid the – yes – tuberculosis outbreaks that were occurring in Virginia.

Though the novel My Antonia, from which I quote, was not published until 1918, by 1909 she was already working nearby, in New York City. I wish you all a good weekend, a long, healthy life and (since we’re on the subject) a peaceful death when it comes, as it must.

“I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.”

My Antonia by Willa Cather