|
Just Some Thoughts: Women Of Two Centuries
My
brothers and I called our father's mother, Grandma Mac. Her real name was Grace Dickson McMahon. Born in August 1879 in
San Francisco, California, she was the daughter of Fremont Dickson of Pennsylvania and Maria de Leon of Mexico. Not much
is known about her early life, but after she married my Grandfather Edwin, they settled in Sonora, CA and by 1900, at the
age of 21, she already had borne the first two of her eleven children.
Two thousand miles away, around the time that
Grace was six, my other Grandmother, Mary Alice, was born in Charleston, South Carolina, to Beauregard Cornelius Heidt and
Mary Helen McInnes. She married my Grandfather James Avery Finger in 1912 at the age of 26 and bore him three children, two
sons and a daughter, my mother.
These two women had more than just thousands of miles separating them. In many ways
they couldn't have been more different. My California Grandmother was born into a state still wild by Eastern standards and
still reverberating from the shock waves of the Gold Rush. Indeed, her husband's father had come to California in 1858 in
hopes of finding gold and was captured by Indians and held captive for two years. My South Carolina Grandmother, on the other
hand, grew up in what was considered a genteel society, could trace her roots to at least as far back as the Revolutionary
War, married a doctor and had a nanny to help raise her three children.
What these two women did have in common though
were lives devoted to God, family, responsibility and community. Grace was Catholic and rearing her children in her faith
was of supreme importance to her; Mary Alice was Episcopalian and church attendance every Sunday was a ritual that was never
missed. These two women also believed in personal responsibility. Each of my father's siblings had responsibilities in that
busy household and from their youngest years learned how to look after and take care of each other. In my mother's family,
one learned early to accept responsibility for one's actions for, as my Grandmother often told my Mother, "If you make your
bed hard, you will have to lie in it." There was no accepting of excuses in either of those lady's families; each family
member had to pull his or her own weight. These were good lessons to be learned on both sides of a continent that would soon
be caught in the quagmire of a Great Depression.
As their children grew, these woman also devoted much of their time
to their communities. During the Depression, Grandmother Mary Alice sometimes accompanied my Grandfather on his housecalls
in the poorer neighborhoods and willingly accepted jars of preserves, chickens, whatever the people could afford as payment.
Grandma Mac made a point of visiting the sick and needy throughout the Sonora area.
These strong moral women bridged
the gap of two centuries, combining the best qualities of their 19th. Century beginnings with those of the new. I hope I
have inherited at least part of what was strong and good about them to take with me into what seems will be a most challenging
and perilous 21st.Century.
|
