Knowing

Emma, my grandmother, wanted everyone to be clear on one thing....
There was a time before she married Joseph Wallace when things were different, very different.
She had not always lived in the squalor of the Irish Channel.
Emma spoke of being brought up in a household where the table was set for each person to have an individual bread plate and butter knife..... The vision of this blew me away.
First, we had no butter.... The oleo-margarine was kept at room temperature in an old Blue Plate jar.
And our table service was just a mish-mash of chipped china and cheap stainless.
The bagged Sunbeam bread never left the table....or the bag.... until we ate it.
Emma would look at me with her big watery-blue eyes....eyes that watered up as she spoke of studying piano, Latin, and German as a girl in upstate New York. How she was drug from there to funky, Irish Magazine Street in New Orleans....it still remains a very foggy story.
And I listened because I was hungry to know....
I had a huge need for knowledge....
There were also things I would have been happy not to know, and I got a lot of that from my mother's sister, Roberta.
Roberta, was a family historian of sorts.... She collected the scandal, the dirt, the failures, the short-comings, the weakness that can be found in any family....and she fed it to me in doses too large for me to wrap my brain around whenever she got the chance.
"Bobby, don't tell anyone I told you this....." My mother would have been furious.
It was like something she was called to do....
At eleven, I was not ready to hear that my mother and father never married....that they were first cousins....that this made my grandfather my uncle....
All this and more just shook me....hard.
Roberta thought anything that was really important, God would reveal to her or give to her as a gift.....the same went for Mibby and Junior. So, she let my two cousins ditch school fairly early.
No diplomas, just tongues and healing services under a revival tent.
It's too bad she didn't take the same view concerning the education I was receiving in her living room.
I hurt when I think of Bert's kids.... As adults, they struggled many times in brutal poverty.
I wanted the world to open up for me....I had so many questions....and I searched without a clue of where to look.
I just knew it was out there.....
We called my sixth grade teacher "Prof", and he was full of all sorts of bits and pieces....none of it organized. And that may have made it even more interesting.
Our class would bounce from fact to fact....one subject over-running another....maybe bleeding over one another....
And then at home there were the Readers' Digests...magazines with little blips of information that teased and taunted me.....between corny things like "Humor in Uniform" and "Life in These United States".....
The library....something on a very large scale was there that I wanted.....
Nobody in my family ever went to the library.... not my mother, my aunts, my uncles, my cousins.....nobody. Nobody checked out books.
Nobody but me....
I wandered that library the same way I went through the tall, downtown bank buildings whose upper floors housed the offices of doctors and lawyers.....
The whoosh of the elevators as my stomach dropped out on the floor....and then the long hallways with names painted on the doors.
Behind those doors were the sounds of typewriters, people talking, dentists' drills, coughs....a hum of importance that I felt a part of just because I was there....close.
At about 10 or 11, I wandered into all the chrome and glass of the main library branch on Loyola Avenue for the first time.......the information desk that offered me no information seemed endless.
The main branch of the New Orleans Public Library....multi-storied. (Some puns come out of nowhere.)
Cold....
The elevator went to the basement with doors indicating periodical storage, rare books.... and the upper floors with endless open stacks. Thousands and thousands of books.....
And that was the frustration.
I knew that these shelves, somewhere, held important things for me, but I had no idea where to begin the search....or who to ask for help.
It took years for me to figure all this out.
I got a library card, and for a time, just checked books out....just to check them out....just to be able to leave the library holding books.....to be seen holding books.
People would know that I thought books were important.....would know that I wanted to know.
And there was the sense of importance I felt in returning these books.
Emma remembered bread plates and individual butter knives.... For me, it's my memories of trying to function, trying to pull together a world out of dysfunction.
And maybe Aunt Bert had something...maybe anything that really is important, God will reveal to us or give to us as a gift....like the hunger I had to know.