Childhood

This is a photo of my mother, Mary Allen, when she was about five years old. She was born in Rock Hill, S.C., which was her father's home town, in 1930. He, my grandmother, Mary Allen, and her little sister moved to Morehead City, N.C., my grandmother's home town, when Mary Allen was six years old. The photo must date back to 1935 or 1936.

And here's a photo of my grandfather, Joseph Allen Miller, who was born in 1899, and his sister Annie Ray. I knew Aunt Ray, as we called her, but I never knew Joe Miller. He died in 1939. Aunt Ray passed away in the 1990s at the age of about 95. She lived in Rock Hill (near Charlotte, N.C.) and we drove down there to visit many times while I was growing up in the 1960s. It was like another world compared to coastal North Carolina. People in each place had a distinctive accent, for example, and the two ways of talking  were completely different from each other. We actually had trouble understanding each other. And in S.C. they lived on a farm, while in N.C. we lived in town.

Ancêtres

These two ancestors of mine were Ida Lawrence Willis (1865-1935) and her husband Benjamin Willis (1853-1924), my great-great-grandparents. They were married in 1878 and had 10 children. Benjamin was killed when the horse pulling his cart along the street in downtown Morehead City bucked and threw him to the ground. He hit his head on a stone and didn't survive. Ida and Benjamin's first-born was Howard Closs Willis (1879-1935), who was my mother's grandfather. My mother said she remembered him. To her, he appeared to be a very elderly gentleman sitting in a straight-backed chair with a blanket on his knees, though he was only about 55 years old at the time of his death. My mother was only 5 years old in 1935. Howard's wife Millie had succumbed to influenza in the great 1918 epidemic.

The other children born to Ida and Benjamin were Ada, Prudence, Maude, Eva, Allena, Eugene, Early, George, and Harold. I personally knew three of them and a fourth lived in Morehead City through the 1950s — I must have met her at some point, but I have no memory of it.. The last of Ida's children to die was my Aunt Eva (Eva Agnes Willis), who had married a man named Emmitt Willis. They had one son, Gordon, whom I remember as well but he died before his mother did. Aunt Eva was 83 years old when she passed away. They say she was a notorious skinflint, enjoyed a good tipple, and scared the neighborhood children because she was so stern.

Paris still

What a busy day I had yesterday. I'm going to stick to my Paris theme for this blog post. I haven't had time to think of anything else.

Above is a wider view of the photo I published yesterday.

And here is the one I was thinking of that shows both the Eiffel Tower and the Tour Montparnasse in the same frame. It's busy here, as you might imagine. I'll try to keep blogging but it's hard to find the time and the inspiration right now.

Fuzzy but fun

When the plane I was on took off last Friday from Paris CDG airport,

I had an unexpected view of one of France's best-known lankmarks.

The tower was quite a distance away and I had to zoom the lens fully

to get this kind of photo. It's not very clear but does it matter?