It is the anniversary of my Canadian grandmother's birth today, and it would be kind if readers said a prayer for Gladys' Protestant soul. She rarely darkened the door of any church, but she told me near the end of her life that she was an Orangeman--Q.E.D. I prefer to dwell on the fact that her family was from Scotland and that she lived for a short time in Edinburgh itself. If she is permitted to know, she must be pleased that I moved here.
Incidentally, I had it in my head for years that until 1940 or so, immigrants to Canada (or the USA) necessarily came stuffed into the hulls of coffin ships, fortunate to survive the journey, fortunate not to die of typhoid on the shore. They had wept when they said good-bye to their loved ones, for they were unlikely to see them or their ancestral village ever again.
This is not actually my ancestral experience. History does not relate how comfortable my great-great-grandfather was when he went over from Ireland in the 1840s, but the German side of my father's family crossed two decades later in First Class. The two Scottish sides of my mother's family emigrated in about 1900 and then 1914, but the 1914 bunch went back and forth across the Atlantic until the Second World War. No heart-rending scenes on the shore for them.
Meanwhile, my grandmother volunteered for years at the local old folks home with a couple of pals. Her pals, a married couple, played and sang while my grandmother danced with the residents--proper dancing, of course. People born before 1900 were not doing the twist, let alone whatever it was my friends and I were doing in the 1980s. It seems very fitting, then, that I am hosting a Waltzing/Swing Dance party today. We are moving into a new hall, my expenses have doubled, and I must go to wrap a shoebox in some cheerful paper: I'll be accepting donations now.
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