That whole subject area is full of ambivalence for most people. Let me give you two examples. When I was a child my siblings and I thought my grandmother was the world's greatest sweetheart. And in the eyes of her grandchildren, and as a grandmother, she was every bit the angel we thought her to be. We could never understand why my mother was often angry and offended at her mother. When we became adults with our own children and developed our own complicated relationships with my mother, we re-evaluated our image of our now deceased grandmother through the prisim of adult experience. We all concluded that while she was a sweetheart of a grandmother, her relationship with her children was a complicated, far from idyllic, mixed bag. That loss of innocence was painful. I will give you another example from a freind of mine. His grandparents lived in the Azores and he never met or spoke with them since by the time he visited the Azores they were dead. His grandfather was a larger than life legend in the many stories his father and the friends of his fathe,r who had been brough up in the village, told about the sainted old man. However, when this friend of mine met someone years later who had known this old man, he got a very different and disturbing story of his sainted, near legendary grandfather. It seems that the old man had been a notorious tom cat and that the whole village knew about it. His poor wife, who was a real saint, was often humiliated and worse, pitied by the villagers. My friend could hardly believe his ears and angrily dismissed what he had been told as a vicious defamation of character. His father was dead by this time and after many days he timidly approached his mother with the tale he had been told. Her eyes fillup with tears as she told him that story was absolutely true. What about all the other stories about his greatness, his generosity, his willingness to help anybody down on his luck? Those stories were also true. His father had never been able to reconcile the two sides of the same old man and so his dark side was never, ever talked about. We human beings are complicated folks. Everybody has a dark side as well as a good side. In the innocence of childhood we tend not to see the darkside. When we become adults, the scales fall off our eyes. But it is the childhood memory of Vavô and Vavó that we hang on to, may they rest in peace. And its the legend we pass on to our kids. John Miranda Raposo
________________________________ From: Michael Gilfilian <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, September 11, 2012 9:50 AM Subject: Re: [AZORES-Genealogy] Re: Writing the family history That is a great story about your daughter, but I don't see an upside to spoiling the vision that future generations of family may have about thier grandparents, On Sep 10, 2012 9:04 PM, "Cheri Mello" <[email protected]> wrote: Loved your story, John! >Cheri Mello >Listowner, Azores-Gen >Researching: Vila Franca, Ponta Garca, Ribeira Quente, Ribeira das Tainhas, >Achada >-- >To unsubscribe from this group, send email to >mailto:azores%[email protected]. Follow the confirmation >directions when they arrive. >For more options, such as changing to List, Digest, Abridged, or No Mail >(vacation) mode, log into your Google account and visit this group at >http://groups.google.com/group/Azores. Click in the blue area on the right >that says "Join this group" and it will take you to "Edit my membership." -- To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. Follow the confirmation directions when they arrive. For more options, such as changing to List, Digest, Abridged, or No Mail (vacation) mode, log into your Google account and visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/Azores. Click in the blue area on the right that says "Join this group" and it will take you to "Edit my membership." -- To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. Follow the confirmation directions when they arrive. For more options, such as changing to List, Digest, Abridged, or No Mail (vacation) mode, log into your Google account and visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/Azores. Click in the blue area on the right that says "Join this group" and it will take you to "Edit my membership."
