March 10

Occasionally I wonder if I really want the life I have.

1965

I got an F on the test - that's not a flunking F, it's a C+ or B- equivalent. He didn't mark anything wrong, so I guess there was just something missing. We had a test on basketball in gym and then played one short game of basketball. I only made one violation - TRAVELING!! Of all things! We start tumbling Friday, I guess.

2006

Tests, mysterious tests. I still do not understand this grade on my 10th grade history test, which, if you recall was a single essay. My guess, now that I am a teacher, is that the entire class bombed and he got tired of writing comments before he got to my exam. But he couldn't fail the whole class, so he curved the grades.

This was modern European history, which I think went from the 1400s to sort of the present (i.e., a little past WWII). I started off strong in the course, but slipped second marking period and stayed in the B range, by the skin of my teeth. The odd thing is that I experienced one of my great "aha" moments sitting in Mr. Liedlich's history class. We were learning about Voltaire, and something he said made me look at Voltaire's portrait in my text and realize he had actually lived. Suddenly, I was able to grasp the reality of history -- flesh and blood people, now accessible only through the documents and artifacts they left behind. But Mr. Liedlich never asked me about that.

1981

For what it’s worth, my new time management scheme has lasted four days so far. I think the exercise is working; I feel looser and more energetic when I walk out the door. I may not be able to keep up with it on weekend. Maybe I will shift to doing free weights upstairs. 

I often wonder how my students and other people react to me. A couple of times now I’ve been surprised to hear their assessment of my mood (angry, upset) when I have been unaware that I was feeling that , much less expressing it. Is it isolated paranoid people or me? Am I really feeling anger, etc and I just know know it?

1982

It promises to be in the high 50s today. I’ve been dragging around a bit since Monday night. A bunch of us went to the Hangar Club, a strip joint (it’s male strippers on Mondays). Interesting, but not erotic. The ballet I saw last summer was more sensual and arousing. But the Hangar Club was worth seeing. It’s just that it was a late night; I didn’t get home until 1. 

For the first time, last night, the thought crossed my mind that I was tired of being pregnant. I think it’s because I am finally visibly pregnant. It’s opened me up to all manner of unwelcome personal comments and intrusions.

1984

I am babysitting for a 14-month old, and it’s 12:30 AM. I thought I’d sleep, and I also brought some papers to grade, but I have done neither. So far I’ve rocked the baby, read lots of magazines and browsed through their photo albums. I have realized that I won’t be able to fit in a “me” day during spring break. Maybe the week after… There’s a lot to do, but would a day off really put me that far behind?

I figured out that I work about 50 hours a week, 7 days a week. Lots of times I work  evenings and weekends, and I work everywhere: home, office, library. Occasionally I wonder if I really want the life I have. I have too many trivial tasks (though I am working on that). I have little time for intense focus or deep thinking. But when did I ever do that, when I had the chance? I think of the days before Kiddo and wonder what I did with all that time.

She really is a joy. She’s transformed me into a mother and is making us into a family. What a very interesting experience.

1986

Am I ready to have another child? Yes and no. I’m not sure this timing would work (arriving mid-year instead of at the end of spring semester). I am fairly confident in my ability to cope with the changes in my schedule doing the early months, if I just keep my wits about me. But I’m also aware that things can go wrong, and babies are unpredictable. 

Sometimes I look in the mirror and see a middle-aged woman (usually in the morning) and think “am I really still young enough to deal with all that?” Well, I guess so. And I won’t get any younger. Sometimes decision making is a matter of talking yourself into what you really want.

1997

A hurried Monday morning, but one that promises sunshine and spring-like temperatures.

2023

Grandma Mabel and Pop-pop, ca.1960.

It’s funny how dates can stick in your mind. March 10. It’s the day Pop-pop died in 1964. My dad’d father, Harry Chester Barraclough, was the only grandfather I knew well, since we visited him at least once a year. We had also lived with him and his third wife (Grandma Mabel) for several months when we moved from Nebraska to New Jersey. As a kid, I used to say I had eight grandparents, which wasn’t quite true. Pop-pop had been married three times. The first was Emma, with whom he had two children; all three died between 1911 and 1915. The year Emma died, he married his housekeeper Rachel, who was the mother of my dad and his older brother Joseph. She ran off with a younger man when my father was five, and eventually married him, becoming Grandma Hanby. Husband 2 died when I was a baby, and Rachel lived with us for several miserable months (according to my mother).  Sometime later, she got hitched again and became Grandma Walker. In 1944, the year my parents were married, Pop-pop found love for the third time and married the feisty, garrulous lady we knew as Grandma Mabel.

Elsewhere in the country, my mother’s parents were married 55 years.

Ancestry.com labels Emma, Bob Hanby, George Walker and Grandma Mabel as my “step grandparents”, which is probably genealogically true in some way, but I only knew Mabel. It is weird that realize that Pop-pop was the only grandparent I really knew who was a blood relative. I saw my mother’s parents twice in my entire life, for short visits when I was four and again when I was twenty-four. So my laconic, probably introverted Pop-pop, who hated to travel, provided my only insight into my genetic heritage. Grandma Mable did the talking for both of them, as he spent his mornings in the downstairs printing shop. He’d come up for lunch and watch soap operas on tv while he sorted his huge stamp collection. If the weather permitted, he would be out in the garden or tending his bee hives. If he had to be inside, he’d nap on the couch. His snoring voice and his speaking voice were the same: low, nasal, and very sonorous.

Here’s the kind of person he was, in three stories.

Young Bob Hanby came to plead for Harry to give Rachel a divorce, threatening to drown himself in Richard’s Run, the creek that ran by the print shop. Dickie’s Ditch, as it was known locally, was mostly mud except during hurricanes. Harry looked at the ditch, said “Go ahead and jump, you damn fool” and went back to work.

There used to be a trolley line that ran through town to the oystering communities about a mile away on the Delaware Bay. It shut down in the 1920s, and Pop-pop bought a trolley car and put it in the far reaches of his property, where it became the favorite playhouse for my father and his schoolmates.

Southern New Jersey is below the Mason-Dixon Line, and the town where he lived was about as segregated as any small town in Dixie. But Pop-pop hired and trained Black men as Linotype operators and printers. Before he died, he sold the business to one of them, passing over a grandson and prompting much grumbling in town.

He went into the hospital on November 22, 1963; we got the call the evening, a few hours after the news of the Kennedy assassination. When he died on March 10, 1964, it hit me harder than Kennedy’s death. It pleases me deeply that he shares a May Day birthday with Kiddo 1.