What Could Have Been A Love Letter(You Haven't Entirely Driven Me to Full-Blown Misanthropy, But Know You've Pushed Me Quite a Ways in That Direction)

I will not dare to call you fair,
though I used to hold you dear.
Too much to bear, let's clear the air
of all these senseless cheers.
(Is it a routine?)
For my age to turn a page
in a book driven by disdain for humanity?
Or is this a hidden tourist attraction,
a guided tour to the brink of misanthropy?
Where boundaries are overstepped
and secrets we kept
(shhh)
become recorded and commonplace
through the ever-flawed system of
customer comment cards.
Is it too much to ask for
a better past for my future to
(fondly)
reminisce about,
for times of war to go ignored
to bask in the love
I've learned to live without?

After all these years,
I just want a day without
my hand curling into itself
becoming fist in a fit of rage.
If I stay here
without a doubt,
my neck wrapped in a belt,
I'll turn the page.

The Marriage Chain (Part 2)

My grandmother did some truly great detective work, especially when you consider the resources she had: Jonathan’s old papers and the city newspaper archives. At the university library I made quick work of confirming all her findings, and delving a bit deeper into the history of her husband’s previous marriages and of Mary Bradbury Stern Price’s first marriage to Mr. Stern, whose first name was Nicholas. I made other discoveries, as well: I found out that the marriage chain my grandmother had intimated was, in fact, even longer than she had thought.

From what I can tell, now, the first link in the chain was reverend Robert Hooker, from Bath, England, who was born in 1766. He married a woman called Louise Eldridge in 1815—I don’t know if either of them was married before, although I found no evidence to suggest this so it’s safe to say this is where it started. Louise was seventeen when she married Robert. They had three children, all daughters; Robert passed away when he was eighty; Louise married again, in 1840. She became the first wife of Nicholas Stern, a thirty-one year-old Bristol businessman. Louise gave birth to twins two years later and died at the age of thirty-three. Nicholas Stern’s transport business became very successful; when his daughters were older he moved to America to profit from the economic boom that followed the Civil War. In 1867 he married again, to Mary Bradbury, the daughter of a business associate and friend. Mary, who was twenty-three years old when she married, gave Nicholas a single child, a son. In 1883 Nicholas passed away; Mary married again three years later with Jonathan Price, a twenty-six year old lawyer. In the same year, Mary contracted tuberculosis; she passed away in the spring of 1888. Jonathan remarried twice: in 1891 with Angela Lawrence, who died in childbirth in the same year, and with Jane Sommers in 1903. When Jonathan died, just after the war, Jane, who was in her late thirties, was left in a difficult financial position with three sons to take care of. She married Raymond Stand, a butcher, in 1920. They had one son, my father, who was born a few years later.

Little did Robert Hooker know, when he married the young Louise Eldridge at the beginning of the 19^th century, that his union would start a familial anomaly that would join together eight people across a century and produce over 150 descendants in four different branches of surnames. I can’t help but wonder if, other than my grandmother, any later members of the marriage chain had figured out what they were part of.

*

These are the fruits of my research. I sent my sister an email with the completed family tree, but she replied only to tell me what a strange coincidence it was. “Strange,” she wrote, which implied that it was not really interesting, or life changing. I initially wanted to track down some of the other descendants of the marriage chain—our half-cousins several times removed—and get in touch with them, but I decided otherwise after reading my sister’s response. My discovery is only interesting from a historical point of view; it’s only fascinating on paper. It has nothing to do with our lives or identities.

Still.

I opened the door to my son’s room last night after he’d fallen asleep. He is my youngest child, my only son. An image struck me: I saw him as if he was the very tip of a mighty ship’s prow, propelled by the force and bulk of what came before him. He stands, supported by the past, cutting into the future.