My great grandfather, who papa said got to at least meet me as an infant, jumped ship in NY at the turn of the century and departed himself to the farthest reaches of the U.S. because at the time one could be hung for such an offense.

He was a German merchant marine, joined that because the other alternative was to be impressed into the Prussian army. And he ended up in Afton, OK.Where my proud papa introduced me to him when I was waaaay too little to know.

Because he was a farmer or some other such, I doubt we were any kind of ‘steps’ from anyone famous, aside from being oppressed by them. Then again we live with someone who is 2 steps from Kevin Bacon. ….

“A man of my acquaintance was addressed, when a child, on the subject of Oliver Cromwell. The speaker was a lady of 91. She told him sternly never to speak ill of the great man. She went on: “My husband’s first wife’s first husband knew Oliver Cromwell – and liked him well.” It was an admonition my friend has not forgotten.

At first hearing, the story is unbelievable. This was not a great-grandfather who knew a great-grandson. Here at the dawn of the new century is someone able to recall a single matrimonial generation linked directly with the mid-17th century*…

*The remark was made in 1923 by a lady born in 1832. At the age of 16 she had married an 80-year-old man named Henry. Sixty-four years earlier, in 1784, the young Henry had, for reasons obscure, married an 82-year-old woman. Her first marriage, in 1720, was to an 80-year-old who had served Cromwell before his death in 1658. ”

The piano my daughter and I still play frequently was bought in 1889 by my gg-grandparents, who were born in the early 1850s, and was probably played (and certainly heard) by members of the previous generation, born in 1819.

I shook hands with Eubie Blake, so I am 2 handshakes from James Reese Europe, Josephine Baker, Bert Williams and Scott Joplin. I imagine that the Josephine Baker connection would put me 3 handshakes away from all kinds of interesting people.

Interesting topic. We talk about how much things have changed in our generation, but compare that to my grandfather (born 1886) or his grandfather (born 1815) and I wonder who really saw the most change.

Kipling talks about how farm labour in Britain was much the same as it was at the time of the Norman Conquest, but that way of life was gone soon after the First World War.

More notably, depending on one’s temperament, my German teacher in college remembered coming down to breakfast in 1907 to see a newspaper reporting a military skirmish between Russia and Austria. In the 1950’s, he had a monthly correspondence with Martin Buber. After leaving Germany, his family stayed for a while with the Chief Rabbi of the British Empire in London. I wish I’d asked him if he had met Wittgenstein. Two handshakes to Ludwig would be cool.

That said, the novel wears the era of its composition so heavily on its sleeve, that one might be led to wonder about the significance of the idea….

Major digression, my mother trained for years to be concert pianist. She used to play at night after she put us to bed—I think it was a form of therapy for her. In any case for almost a decade I would hear other people’s mothers say that they could play the piano and whenever I heard them I thought they were awful. I couldn’t understand why they would talk about playing the piano when they were so bad. They had miscues on classic pieces of moderate complexity while my mother could whip about a new arrangement of something she was doing with the church choir on the fly. It wasn’t until I was 16 years old that I finally realized that these other people weren’t so awful, my mother was just very good. As a child it was hard for me to realize that my mother excelled at something—she was the baseline for normal.