Poems by Stella

I blame Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. 

After all, watching Professor Gates' Finding Your Roots is bound to make a person want to fire up an ancestry.com account and see if you too have a witch, or a witch-hunter, in your past.

Knowing that I don't, but thinking I might be able to go back a little further than the stories my family has told over the years...I opened an account and went to it. 

I was a genealogy virgin, and wow, there’s a lot I don’t know about how to do this. But still, it was fascinating.

I always thought my maternal grandma's name was Bernadette. It appears to be Bernice. I always knew her as "Gammy Bernie" - though I didn't actually know her since she died the year before I was born. 

Why, you might ask, can I find my great aunt's travel documentation of entering the US from Canada, but not my grandma's? Why does one of the few records I can find of my grandma list 3 other last names for her I've never heard before? 

Will I ever figure out the right names to search to see if I can find their names on a passenger manifest on a boat from Europe? 

These are questions I'm going to ask my mom and dad, for sure. 

After this rabbit hole, which I only stopped because my computer ran out of battery, I pulled out a manila folder my dad gave me years ago.

I thought it was full of letters from Gammy (my parental grandma, the only one I knew), and might shed some light on these questions.

But it's not. It's full of...poems. I think that's what they are. They could also be toasts. Or just little rhyming notes that she wrote to herself or to her family and friends.

Some of the poems (let's just call them that for the sake of the title of the book I clearly need to write, shall we?) are really clever. Some are funny. Some are heart-wrenching. Several made me cry, particularly when they were directed to me. She wrote me a poem about being 13 and how it's a stupid age, and how when I have a daughter that age I'll say the same thing to her. I don't often regret not having kids, but knowing that Gammy just assumed I would sorta stings a little. But I'll say it to my niece instead. 

The truly magical piece of this is that there are two, sometimes three copies of each poem. One or two are handwritten, as if she was practicing or making copies. One (and sometimes two) are typed or could be photocopies of a typed version. This is a blessing, because Gammy wrote in beautiful, feathery, hard-to-read cursive. Oh, did I mention that English was not her first language? You would never, ever know that to read these gems. 

I never, in all my life, saw Gammy use a typewriter. But her younger sister, my great aunt, who went by Ciocia to me and my brother, always did. And it makes me wonder…are these the poems/notes that Gammy wrote, and then the typewritten versions are copies that Ciocia did after she died?

If that is the case...just...wow. So much love in one dusty manila folder. Both of these incredible women, whom I loved dearly and looked up to, have been gone for a long time, but I got to visit with them a little bit tonight and I didn't know how much I needed that.