On Sat, 26 Sep 1998 09:41:17, Jen W VanderBeek wrote:

I've been thinking.

Let's call them the CRiCks. They are an old family with a patchy history. Since those first faded, yellowed days right off the boat they have lived by scraped knees and knuckles. Backs bent over their wheelbarrows, balancing their loads (high virtues, hard work ethics), taming wild patches of the continent for harvest. You would like this family if for nothing more than its daring, its perseverence, its ability to hang on to a dream. Carpet hats and wooden shoes, strong coffee and thin stew - all they had from their ancestors, which wasn't anything you could see or weigh, was all they had to shape and build their new lives.

The CRiCks. Seemed a typical bunch standing there against the wooden crates on the dock. The youngest boy, you see him there in knees socks and short pants even though the ice is hugging the bannister next to his hand. He has his other hand on a satchel that could hold four of him. His face is eager. He is bouncing his gaze from his Mother's face (her eyes are locked on the table and the officials at the beginning of the line) and his Father's face (he is puffing a hand-rolled cigarette and staring out over the sprawl of the city beside them, his back to the ocean and the ship that carried them). The older brother, imitating the Father leaning against the rail, moving his hand to rub his chin with almost the same look of concentration as the man beside him who is rubbing his beard. The sisters, two of them, hands knotted together, standing under the shadow of their Mother's warmth.

The CRiCks seemed typical and they were in many ways. Father's rule commanded their lives. Mother quietly set the flavour for each meal and each day. The children learned while they were small and then worked alongside their parents for the good of the family. It didn't take long before they had established a place for themselves in the melting pot. They had made it in the new world thanks to those characteristics that they still held, that still demanded a hushed respect (though not quite awe) from the neighbours - endurance, strength, honesty, boldness, solidity, piety, and most of all, loyalty.

The CRiCks flourished through the next generations. Around them the culture of the land changed and the family adapted itself by bits, though change did not come often or quickly since any new consideration first had to be filtered through the list of characteristics. But little by little the CRiCks shed their accents and removed their wooden shoes, which they polished and set behind the glass of Mother's Oma's CupBoard.

Around the supper table, the CRiCk brothers and sisters laughed and felt secure. Humour twinkled, smuggling in the love that they felt for eachother. No other expression dared. Yet even when rebellion flared up in one or the other of the children, the family stayed united through the crisis and the rebel almost always came back to the full acceptance and forgiveness of the rest. The CRiCks knew they were not a perfect family, but they thought they were alright.

So what a surprise to read in the Town Crier one Saturday morning the stories. Father accused of hating women - though it was true he had slapped AnneMieke when she refused to scrub the pantry walls before catechism (the family knew it was Harm more than catechism she was eager to see), well, the family didn't see that as a display of Father hating women. The paragraph about Father oppressing Mother and giving her no money! The family knew Mother did not want the fuss that went with keeping the money. She said it often. And Father treating the girls as less than the boys, well, the family didn't see that as unusual. That was just how they did things in their family. The stories went on for two thirds of the page. Neighbour women who had smiled and waved from across the street, who sent their children to play in the CRiCks neatly trimmed yard, who accepted wrapped loaves of raisin bread when they were recovering from childbirth. The stories these neighbours told! Heavy handed cruelty that Father dealt his family, they said. The times he shouted for the children to come do their work - the CRiCks all knew their Father only had one tone to his voice and it was LOUD and NOW. Not as scary as the neighbours made it sound. The time their Father wore a brand new overcoat and Mother and two of the children wore pieces of his old coat - remade, while the other children wore lines where hems and sleeves were let down. The Family knew that it was a surprise they had all worked together for - to spare Father's back from the winter cold.

The CRiCks felt the stories slap them and they strained against the silence and secrecy that would not let them explain. So they looked to eachother - and suddenly there they were again as they had been on the dock with the youngest brother looking furtively from the face of his Mother to that of his Father...

It should not surprise you, dear reader, that it comforted those CRiCks to see so evident in and through all of them the characteristics that still held them together - endurance, strength, honesty, boldness, solidity, piety, and most of all, loyalty.

And because of that, though they knew that again they were on the brink of something, they had hope.
_____________________

Jen (c)