Questions, always questions about the world around us
A spontaneous fire in a hot attic, a loop-the-loop toy cyclist traveling upside down in a circular track on the kitchen table, nuns eating fish on Fridays, my Mémère Bolduc too weak to leave her room and Germans attacking our French relatives across the Atlantic Ocean.
These were some of the issues that plagued my early days during those uncertain years that we, now, call World War Two, or WWII for anyone born before 1938.
Adults around me moved about in their daily activity, busy with issues and agreements formed long before through marriages, friendships, contracts and business dealings. But for me, everything seemed new and interesting, and yet, for my mother, father, uncles, aunts, cousins and grandparents, I might have seemed like a new addition, an added responsibility, to an already busy lifestyle.
Clearly, everyone around me had a job to do, a relationship to maintain and personal goals that transcended my own, puny set of concerns regarding a bottle-feeding and, also, a change of diapers.
Even when you, as a child, feel neglected and overlooked as only a drooling child and launch into a spirited outburst of tears and anger from the depths of your new white bassinet, there is no guarantee of a quick and effective response from those large individuals, – such big faces – who just 30 minutes ago were cooing at you with love, interest and joy.
No one can always be first, a hard lesson difficult to accept for most of us! Even in the crib, Mother Nature is out to teach us important lessons.
When I showed up on the scene in Lowell, Massachusetts in January 1939, the last gasps of Roosevelt’s Depression, which had been marked by bread lines, family evictions, vagrants living as hobos on trains crossing the landscape plus bank failures, massive unemployment and general economic collapse, all these unpleasant facts were slowly showing signs of relief.
Maybe, there would be life and hope after the collapse of our world?
Spirits must have been booming in the shriveled frames of the survivors. These are the folks that I encountered every day and, yet, I could hardly know them and understand their sense of daily scarcity in food, medicines, clothing and also gasoline for the very fortunate few, who were often business people.
Personal experiences make for personal differences and attitudes. We all see the world around us with personally filtered eyes.
Even in Lowell, the Birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution, a few, textile mill workers were, again, finding menial and dangerous jobs in several, sooty, decaying, red-brick, factory buildings scattered throughout the city, which housed the antiquated, production equipment such a looms, belts, pulleys and spindles, that, four decades before, around 1895, had represented the finest textile manufacturing equipment in the world.
But, technological evolution in textile manufacturing with new and more efficient machinery plus ready access to low-wage, unskilled workers in North and South Carolina had prompted financial investors in the textile industry to develop manufacturing centers in the South that yielded a higher profit margin. These harsh, economic realities, combined, effectively strangled any further economic vitality in the lives of those thousands of foreign-born laborers living along Lowell’s lower Merrimack River basin.
This is how my introduction to Life in America happened, some years ago.