FAMILY

I have, as I said earlier, been climbing up the family
tree lately and been finding myself pretty far up there
in branches I never knew existed. It's easy to find
yourself driven to find more connections and fill in
more blanks in the family. There will of course reach a
point where I will get as far as I can because of the
brick walls (see Elusive John C. and Grandpa Bastard
below)but for the moment it seems like there's a ton
of people to enter into that pedigree list.

That being said, I also have come to realize how little
I know about the generations closer to me because of
the Bastard's walking out so many years ago on my Mom's
mother. And there are things about both my parents that
I know that I've long forgotten.So every once and awhile,
I'm going to write some in here and eventually turn it
into some sort of record for my niece and nephews.
Dad, Floyd Earl West Jr. was born just before the
Great Depression hit and grew up in the northwest area
of Maine. Somewhere around here there's an old photo of
Dad and his older sister Dorothy as kids, dressed in potato sacks because it was summer and the sacks were
able to take wear and tear and save clothes. He got
invited to leave a military academy after hustling pool,
saw action in the Pacific in World War 2 and after the
war settled in Boston and was working for a landscape
company when he met my mother on a blind date.

My mother was the youngest of two surviving children of
my grandmother, Agnes White. Mom had red hair and was
known to all her cousins as "Red White". She had St.
Vitus Dance as a younger child, dropped out of the Mary Curley High School, and went to work as a cashier at the old A&P grocery chain when her cousin Nancy fixed her up with Dad on the blind date. They married in June 1947 and a year later I was born. Cheryl came along five years later,and then after seventeen years,my kid brother Phil arrived.

Grandma Agnes lived with us when I was young and was
called "Nannie" by all us grandkids. She looked a lot like my mother but with black hair that was grey, and there's a picture of her sitting at the kitchen table eating peas
on a knife. She'd had rheumatic fever when she was a
child back at the turn of the century and that resulted
in a rheumatic heart. One night we visited some of her
cousins who had an Irish wolfhound. As we were leaving,
the dog jumped up, knocked Nannie over and she broke her
nose. Apparently she had a heart attack from the incident,
because I recall the oxygen tanks and the doctor's visits
started around then. She'd led a hard life, since she'd divorced her husband, a shameful thing for a Catholic in those times, and her heart just gave out on her at age 56.

Think I'll stop there. It's waaaaaay late.