100 Bits of Happiness 74/100

[mabith]

Here is a very short (1 min, 11 sec) segment from the oral history interview two of my aunts did with my Granddaddy Brooks. The year is 1963, they had just moved to Egypt, and my aunt would have been five or six when this event took place. It's about her being scared of ghosts in their new house, with a very typical reaction from granddaddy

Comments

[mabith]

I do! The whole thing is great, and about 3 1/2 hours long. I transcribed it a couple years back, because it's always nice to have a written copy.

Parts of it are just hilarious. He had a very stereotypical engineer mindset and is so bluntly straight forward about everything. My aunt Betsy said that the picture she had of her mother was very pretty (she died when Betsy was only seven or eight). Granddaddy goes "She wasn't real pretty, she was good looking but she wasn't as pretty as any one of y'all really. Her nose was sort of flat."

It sounds much meaner in print than it does on the recording, where his tone is very "Well, no, it was this way and that was fine, so why embroider the truth," (though it's sad for my aunt to not have *somebody* to be sentimental and nostalgic about her mother, as Madre and the next youngest sister are distinctly unsentimental).

[mabith]

Truthfully, I think he mainly saw marriage and children as part of a checklist. He was engaged to two or three people before her, one he'd only known for a month. Though I do think he appreciated my grandmother and loved my mom and aunts, there was definitely an element of "let's strike that off the docket..."

There is a fair bit on the tapes that Madre and my aunts didn't know, and it's just fun to hear them interacting.