A great advantage of a mature age is the ability, sometimes, to reflect on the several stages of one’s life with humor, horror, amusement, distance and imperfect understanding of past issues and challenges, which were, once, assumed to be of paramount importance.
Even today, as I weave through piles of memory material, which has already been accumulated in Word documents, JPEG files and email messages, challenges quickly come to the fore. The overall theme of the intended text needs the support of a select number of events, impressions, gaffes, stories, conclusions, and other emotive material, which will convey a compelling glimpse into the reality, or surreality (new word), of the participants.
Since everyone has his/her personal point of view on any and all happenings, caution ought to be given at the start that history with supporting hard facts are left to historians but, in contrast, a personal history such as a memoir remains but a compilation of someone’s hopes, feelings, fears, joys, impressions, disappointments, failures and pains, which often were shared by others at a given time period. Surprisingly, or not so surprisingly, these commonly shared experiences are not always remembered with similar clarity by those who were also physically there at the time.
Eye witness accounts of a shared event often disagree with one another to the consternation of all district attorneys, I suspect.
Welcome to the real world! Life on this planet needs much improvement. We are all in need of quicker, more reliable brains, so, we are left with imperfect memories of past events, which might be the real stuff for a memoir.
The textile city of Lowell, Massachusetts located on the Merrimack River was the town where the lives of my Franco-American, immigrant parents and grandparents – both the Bolduc and the Charbonneau sides – had crisscrossed during more than five decades of sporadic and, often, temporary, low-wage employment in the eleven, decadent mills of that extensive industrial complex.
Back at the start of the 20th century, red brick factories, four or five stories high, with the individual girth of a present-day football stadium dotted the city landscape along the river and by the several man-made water canals, which provided the falling-water power needed to operate large electrical turbines driving one hundredth or more infernal, clanking, weaving machines, which turned cotton thread into cloth or fabric for the garment industry.
Within the text, there will be found dynamic adventures experienced by relatives carrying family surnames such as Ouellette, Clermont, Bolduc and Charbonneau plus those of friends with a family moniker such as: Bourbeau, Bergeron, Galibois, Beauparlant, Valois, Chabut, Guilbeault, Duchesne, Dupont, St-Louis, Ducharme, etc. Much happened in Lowell from 1939 to 1961, and these pages will prove the point.