Catcher In the Rye: Objects Have Meaning....

Hello All...

As I was growing up, my grandparents were a huge part of my life. When my grandfather, Thomas Eugene O'Laughlin, passed away, my mother gave me this worn out plastic four leaf clover he used to hold in his pocket. Some of the green paint was chipping off of it, but my mom told me that he used to carry it in his pocket for luck. My grandfather is a storyteller, and his parents immigrated to the United States from Ireland. I always liked thinking that I came from a long line of storytellers. I carry this four leaf clover in my bag with me at all times. It reminds me of him and reminds me to keep telling stories.

Below is actually a narrative poem I wrote about my grandparents /my history:

What It Means To Be Irish By Kristen Pastore-Capuana

My grandmother was a nurse.
She was born in Guelph, Canada and left home when she was fourteen
To live with a wealthy family as their nanny.
She was able to go to school, she was the first woman to finish college in her family.
My grandfather worked for Nabisco Shredded Wheat as a baker.
Before that he was a boxer, a scrapper, he didn’t attend high school, but he worked so his brothers could.
My grandfather had a nose that looked like he boxed, but he had a quiet serenity that would make you disbelieve that he ever could fight.
They would write letters to each other, letters about World War II, letters about the farm in Canada, letters about their families.
My grandfather always kept a journal, and on these papers he would catalog the happenings in the world, the seasons, his backyard garden harvest.
He grew tomatoes that were enormous, so red and sweet, with a hearty skin that thrived in the sun
And survived.
He also grew roses that lined the pavement of their driveway, petaled pink and orange roses that climbed up the house on 82nd street and greeted you at the squeeky screen door.

I installed their airconditioner one summer when I was seventeen. It had been sitting in the basement for years, but this summer was especially hot. My mom was in the kitchen doing the dishes in the sink, grandma was in the front room and grandpa tried to help me.
He was sick, so I wanted to do this for him.
Sometimes I just wanted to say “I love you” out of the blue because I saw his eyes growing more tired and somehow I knew even my invincible grandfather was real.
I hoped the air conditioner could speak for me, I wanted it to sit in the back window and work, cool the room, and make things comfortable. I wanted that little machine to work so eloquently, as if that portable air conditioner was almost holy.

My mother used to call me “muscles” because I was the only one who really could pick up my grandmother. I was the only one that could withstand the reality of walking your grandmother to the bathroom.
I really couldn’t though, but I didn’t want my mother to be alone.
We would lift her up, use the wheelchair sometimes, or just try and get her to walk a little bit.
One step,
Please, one more step.
Her skin was soft, and I would link my arm to my grandma’s feeling the strength of her bones, listening to her breathe.
My mother always would wash her hair in the white basin we kept under the sink. Her younger hands washing my grandmother’s coarse white hair. We tried to curl it and brush it, I was the hairstylist, trying to make conversation.

And once,
As we started the journey back to the front room,
We were stuck in the kitchen and her feet just weren’t moving.
And the three of us, three generations of women started to sink to the linoleum floor,
Slowly.
And we stopped there, sitting on the kitchen floor. My mother started to laugh and I followed, because...
And we looked at my grandmother, and looked at ourselves, our arms linked to eachother, caught between the refrigerator and the sink, three women,
And we started to cry.

For my college graduation, my parents bought me a brown leather bag, my mother thought it was academic-looking. We sat at dinner after the ceremony, and I opened this present. Inside of the first pocket was an old, green, coin with a three-leaf clover on it. It was probably not worth much and it had a chip on the corner, revealing its copper insides.
Always carry this coin, let it sit in your bag. My grandfather had carried this in his pocket for years, this chipped piece of Ireland.

I have been to Ireland, walked on the Cliffs of Moor and sat in bars in County Cork. I drove stickshift around rugged roads outside of Galway,
Looked for O’Laughlins in their phonebooks, tried to write limericks, only realizing, I just can’t rhyme.
Something just wasn’t there, wasn’t in the beautiful rain coated pieces of grass, not even in the tales of James Joyce or gray stone buildings near the Liffey River.

I carry around my grandparents. I know I always will, and as I start to tell a story, I realize this tradition started at a table, in a living room in Niagara Falls, from a woman who couldn’t speak anymore, and a man that loved her so much, he told stories for both of them.
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Take a moment and think about Holden and his brother Allie. Holden mentions this baseball glove with poetry that he has from his brother who has since passed away from Leukemia. This glove holds a special significance for Holden, and he used it when writing Stradlater's composition. For this blog posting, I would like each of you to consider an object has meaning to you--perhaps it was given to you by someone, perhaps it reminds you of a memory or of specific person in your life. This object may even be something you found once and decided to hang on to. Whatever the object is, I would like you to spend some time writing about how it came into your life, what significance it may have, or even how this object has become a part of your identity. Feel free to post a response comment to anything someone else may have written that interests you.
Thanks,
Ms. Pastore-Capuana