March 20, 1996. Aunt Kitty (Katy Belle Stafford Farrell) called from South Carolina regarding our recent letters (we sent 9 letters down there months ago) inquiring about our relatives on the Stafford--Babb side of the family. She weighs 88 lbs now and is in a wheelchair. Naomia is paralyzed on her left side from her recent stroke and is in a wheelchair. Bill has lung problems and skin cancer. Mae (L.D.'s widow) has had eye surgery as recently as last Thurs. March 15. Cancer. It will take 6-8 wks to heal.
Aunt Kitty sounded real good, says she drinks Ensure every day. Her daughter, Dell Rose Pye has a kidney infection. Dell passed papers around to all of the cousins at the Christmas gathering on Dec. 3, 1995 asking them to fill in all of their children's names, bithrdates etc.
Naomia's papers that Kitty has been waiting for for years ("the ones we made copies of in Ky (Fulton Ky/Martin Tn) when we went on a visit to some of Will D's cousins who had a lot of papers and we went to a Library or something").
Kitty is told Jerry Buchanan has those papers at his home in Louiville, Ky. His phone # is 1-502-893-0230. His wife's name is Karen.
Aunt Kitty remembers her maternal grandfather (Albert Newton Babb - ("did you know I named one of my babies (d.) after him? Johnny Albert.") she remembers Albert N. Babb living out in the country, 3 miles from town when they (the six Stafford children-after their father died) had to go live with him. She remembers having to walk 3 miles to school and 3 miles back. There was a lot of land. He was known to have owned a big farm. There was a house way at the back of the land, she thinks it was probably the original house on the property and she is pretty sure her Mama and Papa (Lula & Will D.) lived in that house when Naomia and L.D. were born. Also on the road to Pappy's (Albert) house about a mile away was a little white house where she (Kitty) was told she was born. Bill was born in the house in town that Lula died in.
Kitty remembers Albert's mother, but doesn't know her first name or her maiden name. "She was just called great-grandmother Babb and was a very tiny woman who was bedridden and had a lot of silver hair." She used to let Katy Belle brush her hair. Kitty remembers her potty chair that was padded and had a curtain-like skirt around it. This lady would be great-great grandmother to Nancy,Danny & Judy and great-great-great grandmother to Steve Griesinger, Brian Griesinger, Barry Griesinger, Daniel Stafford, David Stafford, Joe Mann, Melissa Mann, Kathryn Mann and great-great-great-great grandmother to Ben Stafford, Chris Griesinger, Summer Griesinger and Brianna Griesinger, Matt Griesinger and Nicolette Griesinger.
Lula and Will D. did live in a number of different houses. Will D. had sisters who lived in Dyersburg, Tennessee and Willard used to go visit some of his cousins that lived there. These were cousins that Katy Belle didn't know. So Will D. might have come from Dyersburg. Might have been born there. Also Lillian, Finas, Dewey and Nancy, Danny & Judy's father Willard might have been born there. The reason I say that is that on my (Nancy's) birth certificate it says my father (Willard) was born in Middleburg, Tn. When I asked Aunt Kitty if she knew of the truth of that, she said, "No...not Middleburg...but it could have been Dyersburg."
She tells me she remembers her grandmother Katy Penelope Adams Babb as having two sisters. They were called Aunt Jane and Aunt Julia, but she doesn't think they ever married. She remembers Katy Adam's father as being named Arder Adams. She says that Katy Adams Babb died before World War I ended because her two sons Raymond and Herbert went to war and she died before they came home. When they came home Herbert was what they called "shell-shocked" and was in bed most of the time. She remembers he was in an upstairs bedroom at Pappy's (Albert) house and that she used to take water and food up to him and that's when she decided she wanted to become a nurse. "Of course I changed my mind later," she giggled, "but that's what I thought at that time."
She read me a wedding announcement of Pearl Halfacre and Albert N. Babb. "Miss Pearl Halfacre and Mr. Albert N. Babb were married on Thursday, June 24, 1920 in Clinton Kentucky. They reside in their home in Martin Tennessee." Aunt Birdie and Aunt Lamon were still at home. They were teenagers. Kitty was born in 1921. So that disputes what my father (Willard) always said. That Albert only married Pearl in order to have someone to help take care of the six orphaned children. Lula didn't die until July 19 1926 and Will D. on July 16 1927.
Eunice Babb Davis is a sister to Birdie Mae Babb Phillips and Lamon Babb (?? married name), also a sister to the twins Lula Babb Stafford & Beula Babb Higgs. Eunice is also a sister to Raymond Babb, Herbert Babb and Charlie Babb. Eunice has passed away. She had two daughters: Sue and Hazel. They married brothers. Sue Bell used to own a restaurant in Martin Tenn called "The Hearthside". Naomia's daughter Patsy Buchanan Green (103 Spike Point Ct. Goose Creek S.C.29445) may have Sue's address because there was a picture she had that Patsy wanted. Hazel Bell has gone to Memphis Tennessee to live near her two children. Hazel is the age of LD & Naomia. Sue might be able to give us Hazel's address. Birdie Mae Phillips died in 1995.
Now on my maternal side. William Dewey Huggins (father of my mother Doris) was one of nine children. I'm not sure what order, but the names are: Edna Huggins Tuck
Lucy Huggins Sanders
Maimie Huggins McKelvy
William Dewey Huggins
Elora Huggins Wren
Viola Huggins Gearin
Lois Huggins Danner
Charlie Huggins
Leota Huggins
William Dewey Huggins married Mattie Lue Terry.
Joe McKelvy & Mattie Terry Huggins married 20-30 years after their spouses died.
Elora and Viola were twins. Elora married Tom Wren. Viola married Jack Gearin.
Lois married Grady Danner.
Charlie Huggins' wife's name was Lucy I think.
Leota was a midget/dwarf. She never married. She was called a "change of life baby."
Now info for my paternal side: Thomas Stafford married Sara Victoria House. They had: Will D. Stafford
John Stafford
Isam Stafford
Lucy Stafford King
Becky Stafford Usman
Sara Victoria House Stafford's brother was A.V. House. He had a son named Frank House??
Sara House and Thomas Stafford's son Will D. Stafford married Lula Babb and had 8 children: Dewey Stafford (d 3da)
Lillian Stafford Collins
Finas Stafford (d 3yr)
Willard Houston Stafford
Naomia Stafford Buchanan
L.D. Stafford
Katy Belle Stafford Farrell
Will D. Stafford Jr.
Lillian married C.R. (Clarence) Collins and had Barbara Ann Collins Rowe Grant and Tommy Collins. Barbara had two children: Kevin Rowe and Kim Grant. Kim had a son about 1993. Tommy Collins married Faye ? and had Donna and about 4 other children. He married Mary ?.
Willard married Doris Huggins and had Nancy Stafford Griesinger; Danny Houston Stafford; Judy Stafford Mann.
Naomia married Carleton (C.B.) Buchanan and had 6 children. Patsy, Jerry, David, Carol, Gail, Joy.
L.D. married Mae Truitt and had 4 ? children: Pamela, Ronnie, Larry
Katy (Kitty) married Charles Farrell and had 4 children: Kenneth, Kay, Dell, Sylesia.
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Click
Page - CW 221 NMC Gilda Povolo Nancy Griesinger
REMOTE CONTROL
Clara gazes at the stilled picture on the television screen. She closes her eyes. Moments before children had been playing on the screen. They were on a playground swirling about on a merry-go-round. Happy twirling children, arms waving, going round and round. Now stillness. Frozen little creatures in a still-born picture, as if the tape has gotten caught on something.
Clara turns the volume down. She won't need to hear the sound until he comes home. Not until he comes ambling up the walk, empty lunch bucket in hand.
She puts the remote control device in her apron pocket.
She wants to zap the world. Silence all the voices. Wants to close her mind as well as her eyes. She wishes, with all her heart, she could click the world off. Wishes she could use the remote control to silence him, stop him in his tracks, drown him out. If she could have him there in front of her now frozen like the children on the screen maybe she could breathe again. Even live again.
Clara wants to drown in whatever sea of information she can find. She longs to die there somewhere inside that box.
She roams through channels, her brain like a magnet, trolling for anything magical.
When he is at home she mashes the buttons hard, pauses a moment, stops.
No! She moves on.
Like a butterfly, she flits from place to place. A humming bird taking minute sips of the world. She roams the tube, an unsettled creature.
Her husband listens to the infernal zap, click, buzz, between sound bites of human voices being blipped out of existence.
"Can't take much more," his jaw clenches.
"Damned odd programs," he thinks,."Damned odd woman."
PBS at five-thirty in the morning, full of philosophy, human behavior.
"Brought to you by a grant from the Katherine B..." something or other.
The room, black as pitch, welcomes the screen's gradual light. A picture of Stonehenge illuminates the set. Fluorescence washes over her. She watches in the purple darkness, and wishes she could see her self bathed in artificial light.
She is cruising the channels, looking for romance and wisdom in pin dots, seeping sieve-like from the screen. Knowledge, is everything.
She has been seeking knowledge her whole life, but she is lazy. What she really wants, is to learn by osmosis. Television has become her textbook. So she scans it night and day, and relishes the feeling of power, and control.
Perhaps in conversation with educators, she remembers thinking, if she listened carefully, something would rub off. One day, she was sure, if she stayed attached to a better class of person, she would awaken and feel whole, filled with witty sayings and profound statements. But in social situations she sat on the sidelines, motionless, as if watching a play.
No matter. She was content to sit...and watch.
She learned a great deal from TV. Zap!
Over to commercial programming.
EYE WITNESS NEWS! "There are political ramifications...." CLICK.
"Mylanta!"
Old NBC programs. "Witt-Thomas." Reruns of comedy shows. Blip!
He moves at a snail's pace. Tiptoes behind her. Out the corner of her eye she sees a flutter of white shirt tail. She stares straight ahead refusing to acknowledge his presence.
The commentator's voice. Something about love being a vapor. She laughs. The high pitched cackle he hates. Subtitles for the hearing impaired. She turns the volume down and keeps her eyes glued to the set. She is under the spell of the screen.
He walks past her and glances at the box. Faded film, brown and dull, flickering, showing people from the sixties in bell bottom pants and Afros. Sassoon blunt cuts swing past the camera. He doesn't look at his wife. She hopes he is on his way out. He hopes she is gone when he comes home.
There is nothing to indicate to either of them that she will be dead by midnight.
She watches hour after hour with the sound off. She can fill in the sound herself. She's been doing it for years, needing only the picture...an image of a longed for life.
Zap! Zap! Zzzappp.
She listens for his heavy footfall on the porch, and turns the sound up. It keeps him from talking to her. He talks anyway.
"Turn the thing down!" he shouts.
She pushes the volume higher and watches the trail of green daggers growing at the bottom of the screen. "Turn it down!" He screams.
CLICK. More green slashes. She pushes the sound higher. CLICK. Click!
She hears him heating a can of soup, spilling the crackers. She sighs.
"He never cleans up his messes," she whispers.
She clicks to PBS. An English drama. He glances into the room where she sits. A few more green lines on the bottom of the screen. The sound is at full tilt now.
He stirs the soup.
In his head he hears something odd. A snapping like electrical wires, loud like the snapping she makes with that device. "Remote control," he whispers, and opens the kitchen drawer where she keeps a few tools.
He stands behind her. She knows he is there. He raises his arm above her head. The sound in his brain drones on, the clicking and zapping fusing together, a thousand times, over and over, the clicking in his brain...
He buries the hammer in her skull.
After he finishes his soup, he places a blanket over her dead body and unplugs the TV. He stands, for a moment listening to the stillness in the house, then ambles off to bed.
"He never cleans up his messes," He smiles at her words.
His sleep is sound this night. The silence embraces him, holds him. This night there will be peace. In the morning he will call the police.
REMOTE CONTROL
Clara gazes at the stilled picture on the television screen. She closes her eyes. Moments before children had been playing on the screen. They were on a playground swirling about on a merry-go-round. Happy twirling children, arms waving, going round and round. Now stillness. Frozen little creatures in a still-born picture, as if the tape has gotten caught on something.
Clara turns the volume down. She won't need to hear the sound until he comes home. Not until he comes ambling up the walk, empty lunch bucket in hand.
She puts the remote control device in her apron pocket.
She wants to zap the world. Silence all the voices. Wants to close her mind as well as her eyes. She wishes, with all her heart, she could click the world off. Wishes she could use the remote control to silence him, stop him in his tracks, drown him out. If she could have him there in front of her now frozen like the children on the screen maybe she could breathe again. Even live again.
Clara wants to drown in whatever sea of information she can find. She longs to die there somewhere inside that box.
She roams through channels, her brain like a magnet, trolling for anything magical.
When he is at home she mashes the buttons hard, pauses a moment, stops.
No! She moves on.
Like a butterfly, she flits from place to place. A humming bird taking minute sips of the world. She roams the tube, an unsettled creature.
Her husband listens to the infernal zap, click, buzz, between sound bites of human voices being blipped out of existence.
"Can't take much more," his jaw clenches.
"Damned odd programs," he thinks,."Damned odd woman."
PBS at five-thirty in the morning, full of philosophy, human behavior.
"Brought to you by a grant from the Katherine B..." something or other.
The room, black as pitch, welcomes the screen's gradual light. A picture of Stonehenge illuminates the set. Fluorescence washes over her. She watches in the purple darkness, and wishes she could see her self bathed in artificial light.
She is cruising the channels, looking for romance and wisdom in pin dots, seeping sieve-like from the screen. Knowledge, is everything.
She has been seeking knowledge her whole life, but she is lazy. What she really wants, is to learn by osmosis. Television has become her textbook. So she scans it night and day, and relishes the feeling of power, and control.
Perhaps in conversation with educators, she remembers thinking, if she listened carefully, something would rub off. One day, she was sure, if she stayed attached to a better class of person, she would awaken and feel whole, filled with witty sayings and profound statements. But in social situations she sat on the sidelines, motionless, as if watching a play.
No matter. She was content to sit...and watch.
She learned a great deal from TV. Zap!
Over to commercial programming.
EYE WITNESS NEWS! "There are political ramifications...." CLICK.
"Mylanta!"
Old NBC programs. "Witt-Thomas." Reruns of comedy shows. Blip!
He moves at a snail's pace. Tiptoes behind her. Out the corner of her eye she sees a flutter of white shirt tail. She stares straight ahead refusing to acknowledge his presence.
The commentator's voice. Something about love being a vapor. She laughs. The high pitched cackle he hates. Subtitles for the hearing impaired. She turns the volume down and keeps her eyes glued to the set. She is under the spell of the screen.
He walks past her and glances at the box. Faded film, brown and dull, flickering, showing people from the sixties in bell bottom pants and Afros. Sassoon blunt cuts swing past the camera. He doesn't look at his wife. She hopes he is on his way out. He hopes she is gone when he comes home.
There is nothing to indicate to either of them that she will be dead by midnight.
She watches hour after hour with the sound off. She can fill in the sound herself. She's been doing it for years, needing only the picture...an image of a longed for life.
Zap! Zap! Zzzappp.
She listens for his heavy footfall on the porch, and turns the sound up. It keeps him from talking to her. He talks anyway.
"Turn the thing down!" he shouts.
She pushes the volume higher and watches the trail of green daggers growing at the bottom of the screen. "Turn it down!" He screams.
CLICK. More green slashes. She pushes the sound higher. CLICK. Click!
She hears him heating a can of soup, spilling the crackers. She sighs.
"He never cleans up his messes," she whispers.
She clicks to PBS. An English drama. He glances into the room where she sits. A few more green lines on the bottom of the screen. The sound is at full tilt now.
He stirs the soup.
In his head he hears something odd. A snapping like electrical wires, loud like the snapping she makes with that device. "Remote control," he whispers, and opens the kitchen drawer where she keeps a few tools.
He stands behind her. She knows he is there. He raises his arm above her head. The sound in his brain drones on, the clicking and zapping fusing together, a thousand times, over and over, the clicking in his brain...
He buries the hammer in her skull.
After he finishes his soup, he places a blanket over her dead body and unplugs the TV. He stands, for a moment listening to the stillness in the house, then ambles off to bed.
"He never cleans up his messes," He smiles at her words.
His sleep is sound this night. The silence embraces him, holds him. This night there will be peace. In the morning he will call the police.
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Chalk
July 16, 1997
There are very few students who think I have a brain. Most walk past me and see only my square shape. Some don't even notice my color, or that I have a sexy aluminum chalk tray running along my bottom, or a shiny garland of metal framing me, and God knows, they never give me credit for retaining any of the lessons that have been rubbed, or engraved, if you will, into my flat surface. They see only what they have been trained to see, and most of them can't even see beyond their noses.
Most likely they have never given me a second thought even when we are in the most intimate of situations, such as when they are sliding a cold finger of chalk over my beautifully flat body.
We chalkboards do have brains. Highly developed ones, I can tell you, and we communicate our wisdom to those who will listen. We do not speak aloud, which we think is quite vulgar.
Sure, you'll hear a squeak from us now and then when some juvenile scrapes our face on purpose. Everyone flinches at that sound, and we flinch at the pain (imagine how deeply embedded those bits of chalk go). But those occasions, thank God, are rare.
There was one student, many years back, of whom I was very fond. We seemed to be in sync, that fellow and I. He loved to take care of me, and his touch left me wanting more.
One day, after he had finished erasing all the gibberish that had been pressed into my pores, I simply glowed for him. I know I shouldn't have done it, but I couldn't help myself. I could feel an effusion building within me when he did the erasing, and this particular day I didn't try to hold the words back.
I blushed for that young man more profusely than ever before and allowed my formerly hidden messages to ooze forth. The feeling was wonderful. It felt as if a fever of facts had broken loose. They melted out of my pores, those long forgotten lessons, and beckoned to him.
He saw the blurring words appearing just below my epidermis: quantum physics, algebra, poetry, football plays, recipes. Yes, I had been used for everything!
He saw the old information, bubbling up out of me and I radiated until I was spent. This profusion of thought pouring out of my interior scared him. He stopped staying after school to erase me, and I heard he had dropped out to become a fiction writer. I hate to think of him living such a silly existence, when facts are the only real thing, as far as I'm concerned.
I guess I'm getting old. Wake up stiff and dry each day. In some places, my top layer has been rubbed away and these awful grey splotches show. I can feel time catching up with me. Every day, I seem to be losing my luster, and when someone rubs a piece of chalk on my face I want to scream. It doesn't feel pleasant like it used to. And another thing, they tell me there's a new kid on the block. I'm beginning to feel out of place.
This new kid is white enamel they say, and a slick son of a gun to boot. He's never even seen a piece of chalk. Wouldn't know what to do with it if he had one. The students use a set of colored, felt-tipped pens when they skate along on his surface. He must be brain dead I think. Sure, sure, the information looks pretty, on the surface, but don't you see? The point is, this board doesn't have an opportunity to feel the grit of chalk in his pores. He doesn't have the pleasure of giving himself over, leaning into the warm rubbing, the way nature intended, and therefore no text is retained. He might as well be dead.
If I could yank my bolts and frame away from this cinder block wall I'd take off. I'd run away to be with the Gypsies, or portables as some call them. That's the life! Oh man! That's the life!
First written for Mr. Shumsky's class. Used also in Gilda Provolo's class
There are very few students who think I have a brain. Most walk past me and see only my square shape. Some don't even notice my color, or that I have a sexy aluminum chalk tray running along my bottom, or a shiny garland of metal framing me, and God knows, they never give me credit for retaining any of the lessons that have been rubbed, or engraved, if you will, into my flat surface. They see only what they have been trained to see, and most of them can't even see beyond their noses.
Most likely they have never given me a second thought even when we are in the most intimate of situations, such as when they are sliding a cold finger of chalk over my beautifully flat body.
We chalkboards do have brains. Highly developed ones, I can tell you, and we communicate our wisdom to those who will listen. We do not speak aloud, which we think is quite vulgar.
Sure, you'll hear a squeak from us now and then when some juvenile scrapes our face on purpose. Everyone flinches at that sound, and we flinch at the pain (imagine how deeply embedded those bits of chalk go). But those occasions, thank God, are rare.
There was one student, many years back, of whom I was very fond. We seemed to be in sync, that fellow and I. He loved to take care of me, and his touch left me wanting more.
One day, after he had finished erasing all the gibberish that had been pressed into my pores, I simply glowed for him. I know I shouldn't have done it, but I couldn't help myself. I could feel an effusion building within me when he did the erasing, and this particular day I didn't try to hold the words back.
I blushed for that young man more profusely than ever before and allowed my formerly hidden messages to ooze forth. The feeling was wonderful. It felt as if a fever of facts had broken loose. They melted out of my pores, those long forgotten lessons, and beckoned to him.
He saw the blurring words appearing just below my epidermis: quantum physics, algebra, poetry, football plays, recipes. Yes, I had been used for everything!
He saw the old information, bubbling up out of me and I radiated until I was spent. This profusion of thought pouring out of my interior scared him. He stopped staying after school to erase me, and I heard he had dropped out to become a fiction writer. I hate to think of him living such a silly existence, when facts are the only real thing, as far as I'm concerned.
I guess I'm getting old. Wake up stiff and dry each day. In some places, my top layer has been rubbed away and these awful grey splotches show. I can feel time catching up with me. Every day, I seem to be losing my luster, and when someone rubs a piece of chalk on my face I want to scream. It doesn't feel pleasant like it used to. And another thing, they tell me there's a new kid on the block. I'm beginning to feel out of place.
This new kid is white enamel they say, and a slick son of a gun to boot. He's never even seen a piece of chalk. Wouldn't know what to do with it if he had one. The students use a set of colored, felt-tipped pens when they skate along on his surface. He must be brain dead I think. Sure, sure, the information looks pretty, on the surface, but don't you see? The point is, this board doesn't have an opportunity to feel the grit of chalk in his pores. He doesn't have the pleasure of giving himself over, leaning into the warm rubbing, the way nature intended, and therefore no text is retained. He might as well be dead.
If I could yank my bolts and frame away from this cinder block wall I'd take off. I'd run away to be with the Gypsies, or portables as some call them. That's the life! Oh man! That's the life!
First written for Mr. Shumsky's class. Used also in Gilda Provolo's class
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