As Discussed at His Table with a Tramp Biographer
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Copyright 2024 James LaFond
The Writer to limit publication to site posts and paperback proofs assigned to his grandchildren
Hardback, E-book, Audio, Video, Animated Rights Reserved for the Subject
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Dust Cover
A tramp writer unable to extricate himself from the study of forgotten and ignored working Americans, was contacted in July 2024, by his younger cousin, Michael, grandson of the writer’s favorite uncle and sweetest aunt. A good decade since they last attended a funeral together, the homeless author arrived at his cousin’s Baltimore County house for coffee. A comparison of life experiences, such as living as a pedestrian in Baltimore City, the place that had driven them and their entire extended family to the hills of Maryland and beyond, gave way to Michael’s vivid recollection of his search into his family’s ancestry, a search that overlapped with the writer’s reluctant and compulsive exhumation of the fabled American Dream.
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Extended Dust Cover
The writer recalled Michael as a soft spoken, mild mannered cousin who stayed at the periphery of family gatherings, often held at his Grandparent’s house in Hamilton, Baltimore City. Looking at his cousin’s thoughtfully appointed and nearly spartan house, seeing the numerous pictures of ancestors on display, especially hearing the considerate cadence of his once soft voice now filled with the grit of life, the writer could not shake the thought that in Michael, Uncle Robert, the fiercest mind of their family, lived on, beyond he two coffee cups on the dining room table.
Michael demonstrated an encyclopedic knowledge of the family that the writer had never considered as worth a thought. In a way, Michael and the writer were both strangers at the table of life, men who stayed to its margins rather than seeking its stage. Turning and looking at a picture of strident Uncle Robert and sweet Aunt Alice, whom had served him more closely as life guides than modern grandparents usually do, the grit in Michael’s strong voice faded away, showing his age to be nearly as advanced as the broken down writer, and he spoke like a shadow of his younger self, “I miss them so much,” and sadly spread his left hand near his empty coffee cup.
At that point in family decline the wayward writer decided, and blurted, “Could I interview you about your ancestry research, you speak in a cadence that is easy to follow and should gel with my limited typing?”
“Sure,” Michael smiled his eyes looking too much like windows of loss for the bum of a writer who turned his back on the same family, to welsh on. [0]
I Miss Them So is an oral memoir of one man’s plumbing of his family’s well; of the why and the how that helped him grasp the who and the what of our ever erasing passage through time.
Inspirational Quote
“The Quaids are tough to research. They each had so many kids its like tracing… this one has twelve, than that one has ten… Its a mess.
-Michael by phone to the writer in Utah, August 2024
“For the Kearns your mother is the source. She has the oldest pictures, the memories. We got together for a picture party out at her place. She recalls a lot. You should interview her about the Kearns.”
-Michael, at his table, Friday, October 27, 2024
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Writer’s Notes
I cannot name my person as the “author” of this book. I am merely asking questions of the only authority on our family history, my father’s side mostly blank and forgotten and my mother’s more numerous side I have entirely neglected. The book will be listed as coauthored by Michael and myself. Today, I sit at the table of the matriarch of another Baltimore family, driven by our replacements out of East Baltimore and into the East Baltimore County barrio, where she resides as a respected relic among the teaming Latinos who have replaced our replacements. Two widows live here and welcome me for company at their table where I write and eat in return for chores and an escort to the supermarket. When Jojo, my long time lady friend, heads to work at 7:00 AM, I will accompany her and take a divergent bus route to Michael’s pleasant house. This feels like something of a prodigal pilgrimage, my face a little warm with pride that Michael is accepting my aid with this many-hearted thing so close to his heart, a heart I sense is guarded.
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About the Author
Impressions for the reader to better appreciate the telling of what is then written within.
Michael and I met perhaps a dozen times in our youth. He was a nice quiet, round-headed boy with straight black hair of a feathery texture. As an adult, I had a nice conversation in about 1989 with him concerning his college education and my weird artist ambitions, he being the only family member I could discuss my writing urge with without being laughed at. I was his senior by age, but he was more grounded. Beginning in 1990 my life descended into chaos, working many jobs for many hours, battling our replacements as I traveled back and forth to work at night in Baltimore City. In the last twenty years, I maybe saw Michael twice at funerals. I missed the funerals of almost all of our elders, nothing but a creature of work. Michael told me at one funeral that he had worked in India and liked it a lot. That is all I know about the kid cousin who is only five or six years younger than I and has the face of a man who has thought a lot about our human lot. I do note that his new house has many similarities to the house he grew up in, especially the above ground pool he recently had installed.
As a boy and punk I recall that Michael and his brother, lived upstairs in the loft of a Hamilton single home. That stairwell came down to the kitchen in the back of the house. It was a place of mystery to me, a protective nest for Michael’s mother, whose name I do not know how to spell. Indeed, I might be misspelling his. He can correct this in his edition. I chose to keep my ignorance of my own family on display.
Uncle Robert and Aunt Alice had a daughter who was a single mother. I always got the sense of warded protection radiating from my favorite uncle and sweetest aunt towards their daughter and grandsons, who lived upstairs from the kitchen.
Michael had a brother, whose name might have been Johnny, of whom I do not even know if he is alive. Johnny was a younger boy, thinner of form and face, who I always thought was going to be in trouble as an adult. He seemed like a scrappy kid, the kind of kid I would have liked to be.
My time at Uncle Robert’s house was, as a boy, youth and adult, decided on by my mother and later my wife, if I had time away from work. The time spent there was always focused on Uncle Robert first, who was involved in smelting precious metals in a basement furnace. Of second importance was Uncle Bernie, the rowdy bear hunter, married to my sweet Aunt Ann, her and Alice being the mildest mannered of five Quaid sisters, and on Uncle Bill, a man who always wore a suit and insisted on walking to Robert’s, through increasingly terrible neighborhoods. Aunt Alice held the family Easter Egg hunt for the children, which my eldest son was able to attend.
I relate below the story that brought Michael’s family search together with my writing.
I stood next to Uncle Bill whose beer’s I got from the fridge, which he would let me sip from. I think I was 11or 12. I was watching men, seeing how they acted, eager to leave the dependent boy life behind. My Grandfather, Fred Kearn, a real solid guy, and I think the eldest, sat at the head of Robert’s dining room table, back to the kitchen. The table was of lighter make than the others in our family. The women were in the sitting room, a kind of alcove to the left of the main room.
The conversation turned to society and Bernie said that all of the blacks should be made to swim back to Africa, with a Jew under one arm and an Italian under the other, dropping them off in their respective nations. Being a map nerd, I was suspect of Bernie’s geography. Then he apologized to Robert, hugging him with one arm, and saying, “No offense.”
Robert grinned, perhaps in agreement.
On the way home, as I sat in the back seat of the family sedan, I asked something like, “Mom, is Uncle Robert Italian, Jewish or…”
Mom took a great mental side step and said, “I’ll tell you what my mother told us.”
The rest I have to paraphrase, as I have written it before, and when I do so I tend to forget. Indeed, I write largely to forget what I write, as a purge of a crowded mind. Uncle Robert was in the Merchant Marine in the Pacific when his ship was sunk by a Jap sub. He was adrift in a life boat and there earned his bronze skin via a sunburn that never went away!
That is all I know of Michael’s side of the family, except that I saw Uncle Robert free a rabbit caught in a fence once, and that he once argued with my mother that corporate agriculture was poisoning Americans, her arguing the establishment line.
-James LaFond, Colgate & Eastpoint, MD, 10/19/24
Pre Script
My intent is a living document of conversation, preserving Michael’s answers to my unrecorded questions and prompts, in the order related, imposing no structure other than curiosity on Cousin Michael, my kind host at coffee.
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Notes
-0. I am confident that no one in my family is of Welsh ancestry, so here use the English insult.
