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In a documentary I watched last night, Yo Yo Ma's father reputedly stated that it takes three generations of concerned parents in order to produce a musical genius in the family tree. In the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching it is written, "... three days before, three days after." How revealing could it be for some scholarly sort of person to research to find out if for three generations after the musical genius evolved, the genie upped and left that lucky family.
This causes me to think of my grandfather. My father's father. He died when I was around two years old and he was 74. My father was his youngest child by a long shot. I don't know the truth because they never talked about it around me, but my uncle, the oldest child, eighteen years older than my father, may have been more of a father figure to my father than their real father. My great-grandfather, however, was a little more known, but he died a broken man not long after he returned from the final battles at Petersburg, Virginia at the end of the Civil War.
One thing is for sure. My immediate ancestors weren't trying to produce a musical genius like with the Yo Yo Ma family. With my question being: What was their focus, if any at all? I came along at the end of an era. Everything my ancestors tried to build up got torn down by acts of nature or of God. Depending on what a person buys hope with.
My father seems to have exaggerated the importance of his forefathers. My older sister and my youngest brother, both Aquarians, dispelled by their research the grandness of the "old home place" and the general store and cotton gin my grandfather supposed operated. My sister got caught up in the genealogy bug, and my brother has a penchant for collecting family photographs. Between them, a different image than the one my father painted came to light.
My great-grandfather did serve in the Civil War, but as a private, not an officer. Not even a Sergeant. He was a magistrate and county registrar, not an Alabama Supreme Court Judge as had been whispered. He apparently did own a two-thousand acre cotton plantation and a couple of hundred slaves. I don't know what it might mean if I knew or had known the facts.
My father may not have made these claims himself as I remember, but he didn't really go to the trouble to correct our (my) impressions. Almost the entire time he stayed up here in North Carolina where he only intended to stay temporarily until the Great Depression ended. He openly meant to go back to Mississippi and take over the family farm his parents had managed to hold on to, and said so on many occasions.
It never happened. In the end it couldn't happen. His father died, and that left everything in his mother's name. She secretly instructed my father's siblings to sell the farm to anybody but my father. She didn't want him to come back to Mississippi once he ever got out of what must have been for her a living hell. He was her baby boy and she protected him even against his wishes. Too bad she died before I knew her.
I don't know the truth. I don't even remember what she looked like. I was still a baby when she died. The whole Civil War/Reconstruction/Boll weevil/ Great Depression sequence appeared to have caused her to lose faith in Mississippi ever becoming a good place to raise a family. What she did broke my father's heart, but it probably best for his family. I saw what happened. I was born there. The place is sadly jinxed and a hard row to hoe.
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I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
