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Moments of Glad Grace is a moving and witty memoir of aging, familial love, and the hunt for roots and belonging. The story begins as a trip from Canada to Ireland in search of genealogical data and documents. Being 80 and in the early stages of Parkinson's Disease, Joe invites his daughter Alison to come along as his research assistant, which might have worked very well had she any interest -- any at all -- in genealogy. Very quickly, the father-daughter pilgrimage becomes more comical than fruitful, more of a bittersweet adventure than a studious mission. And rather than rigorous genealogy, their explorations move into the realm of family and forgiveness, the primal search for identity and belonging, and questions about responsibility to our ancestors and the extent to which we are shaped by the people who came before us. Though continually bursting with humor, Moments of Glad Grace ultimately becomes a song of appreciation for the precious and limited time we have with our parents, the small moments we share, and the gifts of transcendence we might find there.… (altro)
Fabulous memoir - illustrates contained, week in Dublin researching with Parkinson’s father , and sky story, does ancestry make us who we are, story vs genealogy. Useful to reflect on for my family history / memoir book
When her Dad asked her to take a trip with him ton Dublin with purpose of researching the family's genealogy Alison jumped at the chance. She wasn't interested in genealogy at all, but her father was 79, suffered from Parkinson's and she knew this would be the last trip they would take together.
There is so much more to this memoir than one would expect from the title. It is a touching and beautiful story about a father, daughter relationship. We learn tidbits of Irish history along way, and meet quite a few quirky people in various locations. It is told with warmth, tenderness and humor and shows the concern Alison has for her father's condition.
She brings up an interesting point in their search for their family's story, what happens if you find something you would rather not know about those who came before? Or conversely, what if you find nothing at all? I'm not into genealogy, though I know many who are and I think they would find this book interesting. All in all, this is a well told memoir and one that shows how important it is to appreciate the moments we have with those we love. ( )
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When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
-W. B. Yeats
Dedica
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For my family, both blood & soul.
Incipit
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The customs officer has the face of a merry alcoholic who also enjoys his pie.
Citazioni
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[In the National Library of Ireland]: The natural light singing down from a ring of arched windows around the dome is enough, is more than enough. It is vaulted light within a poetry of rounded space, as uplifting as it is illuminating. (p. 65)
[In the National Library of Ireland]: Reader Handling Rule #10. Do not moisten a digit to aid in page turning. (p. 71)
My own intuitive take on the subject [why ancestry research is so popular] is that we've become so scattered and uprooted, cultural tumbleweeds, no longer gathered in the sorts of communities or tribes that are woven into land, story, art, food, song, and ancestral wisdom the way we would have been - all of us - once. And it only makes sense that if we have become separated from all that bound us to the land and people who sang us into existence that we should yearn for our biological music of origin, a connection and reunion of sorts, a wholeness we might never have consciously identified as being missing, but which answers a vague yet unrelenting ache. (p. 91)
I also loved the physicality of the letters themselves, the palpable existence of them held to the face and smelled. For there is something wonderful about words set down by the dancing hand, something substantial about ink, something solid about a medium that requires forethought, words that cannot be erased and rewritten, deleted, edited, or otherwise regurgitated but which must be composed before they are written. There is something intimate about pages that are leaned upon, touched, folded; something exhilarating about envelopes that are licked, bundled up and sent across seas, packed into sacks flung onto trains, and unpacked in rooms that rattle with a different frequency of human electricity and song.
I love that I cannot connect to everything, everyone, everywhere, all the time, ... [without wifi, etc] (p. 132)
The nights were hollow, empty of traffic, noise, but sewn with living silence, the stillness that allows quiet life to sing. (p. 170)
... my sudden awareness of how much he [ornithologist] heard that I did not how attuned he was to beings [birds] I did not even register, to lives and dreams I had no awareness of, no connection to at all. (p. 170)
Ambition, avarice - they're all celebrated now, aren't they? They're what you need to be a politician, to get ahead, it seems. I'll never understand why we celebrate in our leaders qualities that we wouldn't put up with in our own children. That's some kind of collective madness, so it is." (p. 192)
... the concept of genetic memory, that our genes are carriers not only of physical traits but psychological ones as well: memories, knowledge, intuitive responses, and traumas. (p. 195)
I want to be someone who accepts what life serves and carries on without complaint, someone who is forever reaching for the next taste of joy. I want to be someone so filled with curiosity and determination that I trundle around foreign cities looking for obscure pieces of a puzzle that might help me understand who I am, and still be game for Zumba when I'm eighty. I want to giggle and scurry and speak only well of people, ... and Just Let Things Go. I want to lack self-consciousness, to be curious and open-minded, to listen and nod, laugh at every opportunity, and to have all the time in the world for love.
Perhaps this is what a legacy truly is.
Ultime parole
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Moments of Glad Grace is a moving and witty memoir of aging, familial love, and the hunt for roots and belonging. The story begins as a trip from Canada to Ireland in search of genealogical data and documents. Being 80 and in the early stages of Parkinson's Disease, Joe invites his daughter Alison to come along as his research assistant, which might have worked very well had she any interest -- any at all -- in genealogy. Very quickly, the father-daughter pilgrimage becomes more comical than fruitful, more of a bittersweet adventure than a studious mission. And rather than rigorous genealogy, their explorations move into the realm of family and forgiveness, the primal search for identity and belonging, and questions about responsibility to our ancestors and the extent to which we are shaped by the people who came before us. Though continually bursting with humor, Moments of Glad Grace ultimately becomes a song of appreciation for the precious and limited time we have with our parents, the small moments we share, and the gifts of transcendence we might find there.
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