SOME OLD FAMILY MEMORIES

My Mom used to write things down as she remembered them, and this is something I recently found among my papers.

The original Memère (according to Mom) was her grandmother, my great-grandmother.) Mom’s mother, my grandmother, became Memère in turn for me and my brother, and now I am Memère (Maymay) to my grandchildren. That name has quite the history!

So my great-grandmother wanted some good photos taken of her and Pepère, her husband. He agreed as long as he could have one special one taken just of him. His special photo of him is of a man with his back turned to the camera!

The original Memère and Pepère had several children, among them my grandfather (called Peno) and his brother Leon, along with three daughters, Cora, Josephine and Olive. The daughters were of the opinion, probably gotten from their mother that their father was a bum, because he liked his bucket of ‘suds,’ as they called it, when he came home from work. The original Pepère was a wood carver, and he did altars, statues, and communion railings. As such he had to travel and was often away from home for a month, taking two or more days to get home, walking and hitching rides on wagons.

For this reason, the whole family (except Pepère) was against liquor – until a time when Pepère was very old, when Leon decided to do what other French Canadian families always did on New Year’s Day: serve alcoholic drinks to visitors. He had Peno buy one bottle each of rye, gin and rum for the celebration. My Mom and her dad, Peno, went to visit the family after Mass on the first of January that year. Others had visited before so Leon apologized because all he had left was half a quart of gin.

He fixed them drinks, a water glass half full of gin with a little water and ice cubes. It was so powerful that Peno poured his onto Olive’s plants and Mom poured hers down the bathroom sink.

Mom and Peno laughed all the way home because Cora and Josephine had greeted visitors in their pocking chairs and had something to drink with every visitor, mixing very strong drinks that Leon made, willy-nilly. We watched while they rocked their chairs back and forth across the floor.

Mom and Peno did not visit them the next day for obvious reasons!

I don’t remember Great Aunts Cora, Olive or Josephine very well, but I do remember Great Uncle Leon. He used to come to my grandparents’ house once a week to play pinochle with his brother. He and Peno played in the back room of the house, where I slept when I was there, and I remember them laughing and jabbering away in their French Canadian patois and having a grand old time.