The Photo Gallery

My husband has indulged me by spending countless hours hanging the framed photos I have accumulated over the years of various family members and close friends.  Today I was looking at a photo of my paternal grandmother pouring tea at some afternoon do--you can see other ladies in the background, a silver pot, a plate of something or other.  So genteel.  She was from Boston, often remarked upon by my mother, who grew up in Oak Park, Illinois as did my father.  My mother could never get over the mystique of Boston where she had spent a couple of years at a finishing school, the educational program of which I guess included a course or two at Fanny Farmer's Boston Cooking School.  She always mentioned Fanny Farmer with a peculiar flourish, as though the lady were an habituée of the court of Louis XIV.  The Boston grandmother lived to be very old, so that my life span began before she bid this earth adieu, and I had the chance more than once to hear that plummy marbles-in-the-mouth Boston accent over which I do believe my mother secretly swooned.  The odd thing about this hyper gentility was that the grandmother was married to my grandfather, who immigrated to America as a teenager before the Civil War, and had grown up in a small farming community in Braunschweig.  Enlisting in the Union Army gave him citizenship and somewhere along the line he acquired business skills which brought him to sufficient prominence that a public school building was named after him. as an immigrant a gentleman who died long long ago, and thus was unknown to almost all of us.  He crossed the ocean with only his teenaged cousin for company and the two boys somehow worked their way on farms all the way out to the Midwest.  How he got from that to the woman from Boston pouring the tea is a mystery.  Still more mysterious is that the father of this Boston grandmother came from Maine, and left there as a teenager, and walked, yes, walked all the way to Boston, another courageous youngster on a mission, and when he got to what is now Charles Street which was in the nineteenth century the embankment of the tidal basin, he claims to have sat down, taken off his shoes and socks, and soaked his feet in the soothing waters of the Charles River.  And how do we get from that scene to the grand dame pouring the tea?  Which of these people knew each other?  Did the German immigrant ever have the chance to exchange anecdotes with his father-in-law?  And yet we know that the couple met and married in Oak Park, a suggestion that she never went home again, never brought Wilhelm around.  He fathered nine or ten children and promptly died. There are no photographs of him, I don't remember hearing anyone describe him.