I met Harriett in 1990, when I was brought to Colonie as
Jaye’s new boyfriend with the beard and ponytail. It was a revelation to me how distinctly
different life inside the house on Whip Circle was from where I came from. You see, in my family, we do a lot of joking
and breezy talking about recent events, but no one ever sits for very long in
one place. What I discovered when I came
here was conversations. Wonderfully long conversations.
And where I came from, no one read that much or talked about
books, and no one did crossword puzzles.
And while my Dad grew tulips on the front lawn and my Mom grew tomatoes
in the backyard, there was nothing like the kind of serious flower gardening
that went on here.
I loved this new world, where what you did after you arrived
was to settle in and explore a universe of conversation. Bruce had seen much of the planet while I had
been to Canada. And it amazed me how
many subjects Harriett could discuss knowledgeably and incisively.
Though I’ve been around here, on and off, for a couple of
decades, I know I’m really an outsider, and I can only offer an outsider’s
perspective – an in-law’s point of view.
There’s so much that you all know that I don’t. I would just like to share some
souvenirs. As I look around the
apartment where we live, I keep seeing things that remind me of Harriett and
how far she has reached into our lives.
I see a photograph of our president and his family that Jaye
placed in our living room and I’m reminded of the times Harriett would proudly
list the Republican presidents that she said she did not vote for. I look at her children and see a lot of independent
thinkers – no doubt a source of some political exasperation to their dad at
times. That independence of mind, I
think of that as very much Harriett.
I see our incredibly messy and disorganized recipe
collection outside our kitchen and I’m reminded of all the times Harriett
talked about food and shopping for food and the parking lot where she bought
the food and especially cooking food.
Here’s a recipe that I remember she was excited about – she wrote it out
and gave it to Jaye. “Rosemary sauce for
fried or sautéed fish.”
In our hallway, I see a framed photograph of a flinty-eyed
Pierce Roscoe Hobble, Harriett’s great-grandfather, veteran of the Civil War
and survivor of Andersonville Prison.
I’m reminded of Harriett’s love of family history and the way she
collected stories, some of them true, about her rich heritage. The Hobbles and Forees, the Shays and Lyons,
the Bolens and Poiniers. The family line
may or may not have extended back to the Pharaohs and Charlemagne, as her
father wrote, but it certainly did cover a vast swath of American history, from
the beginning, and you could sense that she felt that she was a part of it.
On our bookshelves, I see all these books that came back
with us in our car after visits to Colonie.
It got to the point where I would say to Jaye as we were driving up,
“Listen, you can’t ask your Mom what she’s been reading lately because you know
she will insist you take six books home, and we have nowhere to put them and no
time to read them.” Harriett read like
some kind of magnificent word and idea vacuum machine. She didn’t just read with incredible speed,
she absorbed what was in those books and spoke critically about it.
In Jake’s room, there is the massive Latin dictionary that
she gave him. And there’s this little
book, New Latin Grammar from 1895
(isn’t it a little odd that there could be new
Latin grammar?), which used to be owned by some guy named David Sider in
1967. Harriett bought it at the used
bookstore and wrote her name in green underneath his (without crossing his
out!). These books remind me of her
years as a scholar, a girl from Needles, California who learned Greek and
Latin.
And I seem to have a lot of photos, and images in my mind,
of Harriett among or near flowers. She
was a marvelous gardener, someone who knew a lot about plants and truly
delighted in them, even though it was hard to get her to admit it. I would always wait for it, the moment after
one of us would tell her how beautiful the garden was when she would say “Oh,
those are just out of control, I haven’t done anything with those, I really
haven’t been able to keep this garden the way it should be,” or something like
that.
In our bedroom, there’s a box which holds this key on a
ribbon. It’s the railroad key used by
Ted Hobble, Harriett’s father. Harriett
gave this to Jaye. It’s a reminder of
Harriett’s father – even though I never met him, I often had the feeling that
he was in the room, and not as a smiling presence. From what little I know, it seemed to me that
his legacy was a challenging one for Harriett.
They don’t need to be dwelt on, those challenges, but I feel they need
to be acknowledged.
Finally, there’s a living memory of Harriett that is thankfully
almost always around me, and that’s Jaye, who sometimes can actually sound a
bit like her mom, say when someone cuts her off in traffic. But what I really mean is that there was a
true, warm, generous sweetness that was in Harriett which lives vibrantly in
Laura, Bob, Don, Jaye and Margaret.
Thanks to that, I will always remember Harriett, and will always miss
her.
