Florence & Felix Leger

First I want to apologize in advance to any Leger's living in the in the area - I mean no disrespect, none at all.

One of my frequent dog walks is what I call the cemetery route.  It's up on a hill, it has well defined walking areas, it's peaceful up there and you get beautiful views in every direction.  It's a nice walk.

I pay attention to the headstones and frequently wonder about the lives of the people buried there. One that has repeatedly drawn my attention, and my wondering, has been the marker for Florence and Felix Leger, who both died young, within 7 months of each other. 

First, I assumed they were married.  They share the same last name and the same headstone, Felix is somewhat older than Florence so it fit nicely with preconceived notions and assumptions.  But you wonder what could cause a husband to die just past his 33rd birthday, and a wife to die 7 months later a month shy of her 24th birthday?  My thoughts were accident or disease, not entirely original thoughts, or even hard to think of thoughts.  Anyway, I've been walking up that way for some time now, and I've frequently wondered what happened, but I just let it go.

Well, I mentioned this to Patti Anne and she did some quick research.  Her research turned up some interesting things and some discrepancies, as research often does.  Had we the money and inclination (we probably do have the time, now that I think about it) we could research this much further and maybe find some definitive answers to things, but I believe what Patti found is good enough.

Apparently Florence and Felix were not married - they were brother and sister.  Felix died of kidney disease, and Florence died in what must have been a horrific automobile accident, so their deaths were completely unrelated, just one of those terrible random tragedies that sometimes strike families. 

There are a couple of discrepancies - the headstone list's Felix's birthday as Sept 5, 1907, while other documents lists his birthday as Sept 5, 1908.  Also, the first initial on the tombstone (M. Felix Leger), does not agree with a census entry which lists his name as Wilburn Felix Leger.

So...... a couple of possibilities. 

First, back then all these documents, census entries, birth & death certificates etc, were hand written.  And as I recently found when one of my older relatives died, there is sometimes disagreement among relatives on the actual date of birth, so a year's discrepancy on a headstone is easily explained.  But the first initial I wonder about.  Is it possible for someone to mistake a "W" for an "M"?  Is is possible for someone to write down Wilburn in a census, when perhaps his name was really Milburn?  Sure it is.  Or could someone had made a mistake when carving the name into the marker?  Maybe "W. Felix Leger" was written, but whoever was doing the work read the "W" as an "M".   Maybe the template was turned upside down.

The second possibility is all our assumptions are wrong.  Possible, but I don't think so.

Back in late 1940 & early 1941 this family went through a pretty rough time.

Wordless Wednesday - 27 Oct 2010

Finished "Life: A User's Manual" by Georges Perec.

I'm not going to review this book because I'm positive I could not do it justice.  And I'd hate to spoil it for the legions people who read this blog (ha!) who may feel inspired to tackle this book.  But I'll write just a bit about it, and it's possible this may turn into a lengthy post. 

This book is about the current and former occupants of an apartment building in Paris, as well as the building itself, located at 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier.

First, physical characteristics of the actual book I read:  it is paperback, measuring 9 1/4 x 6 x 1 3/8 inches - so it's quite a bit larger than your typical mass market paperback.  It weighs 30 ounces - almost 2 pounds.  The "story" part of the book is 500 pages, divided into 6 parts, 99 chapters & an epilogue.   In addition to these 500 pages, there is a table of contents, a preamble, an outline of the apartment building at 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier with notations of current and former residents, an extensive 58 page index of people, places, and other items in the novel, a chronology starting in 1833 and ending in 1975 (the books 'present time'), and an alphabetical checklist of some of the stories narrated in the novel.

This novel is a challenge to my intellectual abilities, and I'm not just talking about the author's use of big words.  The story is not straight forward, in fact the first time I read it I didn't even realize what the story was until near the end.  And the author assumes a the reader has a very high level of cultural knowledge.  Not only of things like history & literature, but also science, medicine, economics, religion, various world wide cultures - from highly advanced civilizations to tribal organizations past and present, languages, the ancient Greeks & Romans, Mathematics, music and on and on.  It seems endless. 

There are a couple of interesting things about this book, and I shall mention them right now.  Puzzles play a large part in the story, particularly Bartlebooths puzzles created from him by Gaspard Winckler.  All told, Bartlebooth commissioned 500 puzzles.  500 puzzles, 500 pages.  From what I know about Georges Perec, that is probably not a co-incidence.  But why?  And the next, and this is really odd, has to do with the chapters.  There are 99 chapters, so they tend to be short, only a few pages a piece.  They are titled with the chapter numbers & a subtitle, followed by a number to indicate how many times this subject has been covered.  So chapter 41 is written as "Forty-One On The Stairs, 6",  Chapter 42 is "Forty-Two, Foulerot, 2" and so on.  All 99 chapters are written in that format except chapter 51.  For some reason it is written as "The Fifty-First Valene, (Servants' Quarters, 9)".  Why is it written "The Fifty-First" and not "Fifty-One"?  This isn't an accident, but I don't know the reason.

There are lots of stories in this book about the current and previous occupants of the apartment building.  The stories are interesting and exhausting at the same time.  One of the stories is a very detailed examination of a map on Bartlebooth's wall.  It is an antique map of the New World, I believe from the very early 16th century, just after it was discovered by Europeans.  The story includes the historiography and scholarly debate about Amerigo Vespucci's role (or lack of) in lending his name to North and South America.  After several pages of this I was wondering what in the heck this story had to do with anything.  Turns out, this was the only officially commissioned map which had a name other than "America" for the new world, and as such was purchased by Bartlebooth's great Uncle James Sherwood, who collected unicum - objects which are the only ones of their kind.  James Sherwood was the ultimate source of Bartlebooth's great wealth.  Suddenly, the whole map story sort of made sense.

It is very tempting to skip over large sections of some of these stories - when the author decides to list the contents of the various cellars, for example, or when he lists 179 subjects & scenes Valene the artist would like to paint.   But my advise is to not skip a word.   There is a fair amount of humor & satire in this book, but it's not going to knock you over with obviousness. You have to recognize it when you see it, and it pops up when you least expect it. 

The book has a story - rest assured.  It's a very strong story and I could tell it to you, but I aint gonna. If you've never read it before you won't know what it is for a long time, but it is there.  It's neither a happy nor sad story.  It's life, I suppose.  The creation theory or big-bang theory aside, life is life.  The world chugged along happily before anybody who is alive now was born, and will not stop when everyone who is alive now is dead. 

This is one of my favorite books, ever.  It just blows away most other books I've read.  It's not easy to read, but it's worth it.  It's entertaining (I especially liked the story about how the Danglar's (a staid & prominent couple who occupied Bartlebooths apartment before Bartlebooth did) found their kink), and it's thought provoking at the same time.  It's actually kind of mind blowing.  When you think about it.

I bought this copy off eBay for just a few dollars.  You can also get it cheaply on Amazon, or if you're lucky you could find it at a thrift shop for a couple of bucks.   It is well worth the investment of time it will take to read it.

Accents

When I was young I didn't realize I had any kind of accent.  I could not hear it in myself or others, even when I was removed from my native Kentucky environment.  When I was 11 years old, I found myself living near Glasgow, Montana, the definition of the middle of nowhere.   It was there that I had perhaps the first inkling that I grew up speaking a different way than most of the people I was surrounded by.  I still could not hear it - the people there sounded normal to me and I thought I sounded normal to them.  Even when we took trips up to Saskatchewan, I couldn't hear any difference in speech.  Maybe I wasn't paying attention, or maybe I was a child. 

Children are like that. 

The inkling about my speech pattern came from 2 sources, one at school and one back home.  I was sitting in a 6th grade math class way up in the frozen tundra of eastern Montana, a class taught by a very strict teacher I didn't like (Mr. Bach - pronounced just like the musician), when I was called on to answer a math question.  I was very quiet & I never volunteered, so he actually called on me.  It just so happened that the answer to the question was "nine".  Mr. Bach made me repeat "nine" 3 or 4 times, because he couldn't believe what he was hearing.  And you know how kids in a classroom are, they start to giggle and stuff.  I remember I finally spelled "n-i-n-e" which just made things worse.  I didn't realize that he understood me perfectly well, he just thought the way I was saying it was odd.

Anybody familiar with North American English knows that most native speakers born & raised south of the Ohio River tend to elongate and flatten out words with a long "I".  It's like a marker, and if you're losing a southern accent without realizing it, that is apparently one of the last things to go.  Apparently in Montana that kind of speech was a novelty.

A little later, when we had gone back home for a short visit, an aunt told me my accent was changing.  I'm sure it was, but I didn't have a clue.

From that point on, I felt like I was in a speech pattern no mans land, though I still wasn't particularly conscious of my way of speaking.  In the South people thought I came from the North, in the North they thought I came from the South.  When I was 16 or so and my father had been transferred to Germany, I remember asking one of my friends one day where he thought I came from.  Without hesitation, he said Tennessee.  That was actually pretty close, the speech patterns in the area of Kentucky I come from are extremely similar to the patterns in eastern Tennessee (or Western Virginia, or western North Carolina). 

At some point I began to be able to hear accents in other people.  When I went back home, the accents were so strong they'd knock me over, and I began to understand what my aunt had meant when she told me my accent was changing.  The people back home hadn't changed, I had.

Here are ways of speaking I never lost, no matter how long I had lived away from Kentucky.  I've always said "you all".  I've always had a great tendency to say "I reckon" instead of "I think" or "I guess so".  It's just so familiar to me.  I elongate and drag out words with a long "I" in them (nine, time, fine, mine, dime, night, fight, delight etc).  I've always had a tendency to place an accent on a first syllable of some words that others might not (IN-surance, UM-brella).  Depending on my level of anitmation (which is generally pretty low) I can easily turn one syllable words into multiple syllable words.  Words as simple as "this" and "that".   There are probably other things going on I don't realize. 

Speech wise, I do not feel out of place living in western North Carolina. People who lived around here all their lives may or may not know I'm from somewhere else, but they certainly won't think that I'm from Pennsylvania or anything like that.    It's not hard to find people around here who are from way north of the Ohio River, and speech wise it's very noticible.

You people from Iowa don't think you have an accent? Guess what - you do.  And it's very strong.  Same to you all in Montana.

Things we did today

The highlight of the day without a doubt was the flu shot.  We went to a Walgreens drugstore in Hudson, right on Rt 321, and we took the scenic route up thru Rhodhiss road.  We got to take all kinds of strange turns in the Alfred Hitchcock like small town of Granite Falls along the way. 

The pharmacy was actually quite busy - not because there were so many people waiting for service, but because there were so few pharmacists.  I wonder about that, people dealing with medicine who are obviously professional, but at the same time VERY busy, quite overwhelmed. 

At any rate, we managed to get a flu shot & it was even covered by our insurance. This year's shot included the "pig flu" shot that was so scarce last year (and which I never did get), so we should not be oinking any time soon.  (I said OINKING, pay attention).  And of course we spent some money on the way out, which I'm sure is one of the reasons they offer flu shots there in the first place.   We were classic flu shot customers.

On the way to get flu shots, we took advantage of early voting in North Carolina, voting at the Connelly Springs Town Hall.   We were approached by a couple of ladies while in the parking lot - and one gave us a sheet telling us all the conservative candidates to vote for.   They may have technically broken the law by approaching us in the parking lot - you have to be a certain distance way from the polling station, and that may have been too close - but they looked like a cross between Aunt Bea and your favorite grandmother, so I doubt the Burke County police will slap them in the hoosegow any time soon, unless Barney Pfife shows up.  They were very nice, and we thanked them, but I'm pretty sure I didn't vote for anyone on their list.

Today we also dealt with installing a new DVR box, which was a lot more difficult than it should have been.  But basically all that had to be done was put the TV input (or is it output) cord on the correct post & pull out and re-seat the smart card.  Took a few minutes to figure that out, especially the smart card.  But now we are back in the 21st century.  We can once again DVR programs, pause live tv and skip the commercials.  Skipping commercials is important.  It's how I get past all the political ads, and in a month or so, it'll keep me from going crazy because of the Christmas ads. The old box suddenly quit working yesterday, and they got the new one to us today - pretty quick.  We have to send the old one back, so that'll be fun to deal with.

The day started with a dog walk, as usual.  We took the long way up to the cemetery, which means I got to walk up lots of hills, but only one way.  Not like in the old days when you had to walk up hills both ways, thanks of course, to modern engineering.  The last few days have been very pleasant, warm days, cool nights, clear skies, and the mountains are quite visible.  The leaves are changing, and things are very beautiful.   I hear it's going to rain though - fine with me, let it rain.  Just means Pickles and I will get wet when we go for our walks.

Wordless Wednesday

Just a little motoring

It's a beautiful fall day here in the foothills.  I always wondered why there is both a foothills region and a Piedmont region in North Carolina, since Piedmont is French for foothills, I think.  You see & hear "foothills" everywhere - on the news, names of businesses and so on.  Secretly (or not so secretly), even though they say we're in the foothills, I'm pretty sure we're in the Piedmont.  There are actual mountains to the south, west & north of us (I know they're there, I can see them out the kitchen window), and we're in an area that is anything but flat, but is not in the mountains, which spells Piedmont to me. 

I got off topic before I even got on topic.  Maybe it's the pre-topic.  Think of it as pre-boarding, or pre-ordering, or all those other "pre" things they tell you you're doing before you actually are, hoping you never stop to think that it is impossible to do something before you actually do it.  It's a marketing thing to try to make you think you're special, take my word for it.  OK, that's off topic discussion number 2.  Enough!!!

The real topic:  I went for a ride today in the little red mustang.  I shifted gears with abandon, flew up and down hills (only going airborne a couple of times) careened on two wheels around curves on these narrow, twisty, country Piedmont roads which frequently co-exist within sight (or hearing) of I-40. I laughed maniacally & rudely pointed at all those drivers plodding along on staid, old I-40, driving from here to there in relative safety, speed, comfort & respectability. How boring!  Leaves are starting to change, the air is clear & crisp, the mountains are beautiful and it was good to get out and about & careen around curves.

Hmmm.  So I wrote almost twice as much about things I didn't mean to write about than the thing I did mean to write about.  Interesting.