the American Dream
Found this yesterday doing family history research (Celia is an 8th cousin of my mother). Found it to be very poignant story about how tough life could be in the American past.
Not sure about copyright, this is about three paragraphs I think, but to see it online you need to register. Hopefully my 9th cousin won't mind me sharing this story.
"My aunt Celia killed herself
On her birthday
By inhaling gas
Through a rubber hose
In the bathroom
Of a tenement in Brooklyn
In the middle of her life, (age 35)
In the middle of the night,
In the middle of winter, (29 March)
In the middle of the Depression. (1936)
Eight of us, three generations,
Lived in that cramped, cold-water railroad flat, (in Brooklyn)
In poverty, without privacy or dignity.
Stifling in summer, freezing in winter.
It was our confining world.
I, still very young, (born 1922)
Knew that this for me was the bottom rung
Of the ladder I must climb to change my fate.
For Celia it was too late
To escape the cage of her life.
In the twelve years that we lived together
She gave me the incomparable gift of classical music.
With her meager factory worker's salary
She would buy recordings
Of operatic arias, of concertos, of symphonies
Played over and over again on her wind-up Victrola.
It was she who took me to stand at the old Met,
To the Brooklyn Academy of Music to hear the glorious voices
Of Lawrence Tibbett and John McCormack.
In the dead of winter she would go to the piano
In the freezing front room of our flat
And speak to me with nocturnes of Chopin,
With the joyous lilts of Debussy and Johann Strauss.
All of my life I have rejoiced to her gift to me.
Her picture hangs beside my bed.
Every day I say "Thank you.""
She was the youngest of three daughters. Her father lived to be 87, as did her mother, her sisters 92 and 96. The above was written when her niece was 90.
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