All posts in the ‘ Real People ’ Category

“Write about something different next week,” my sister Lee suggested. Okay, I won’t write about Mr. Patch this time, although I haven’t abandoned him. Here’s another elderly Indian gentleman—and teacher—who was hiding in my files: On the back of this photo, I had written “Guru Pillai,” and the names of the four students, including me, far right. I didn’t date the picture, but the year was 1959. These days, if you know just a little about someone, you …Read More

I’m still immersed in the letters of the Brahmin schoolteacher in Chennai with whom my dad corresponded for many years. Mr. Patch could be crusty. I guess he figured that his advanced age gave him the right to be so, and temperament played in as well. “I am in the habit of making no mental reservations of any kind,” he wrote. “I speak as it comes out of my mind.” One issue on which he was very outspoken …Read More

Hooray! A photo of Mr. P. A. Thiruvenkatachari and my dad hung on the wall of my dad’s study for three or four decades, and I thought it had disappeared when my sisters and I cleaned out my parents’ house. But today, in the Woodman papers in the Colby-Sawyer College archives, I hit pay dirt! Many thanks to college archivist Kelli Bogan for digitizing this! Here’s Mr. Patch, with my dad, in an undated photograph taken at Patch’s …Read More

You fall into the role of family archivist gradually, without quite realizing what’s happening. My relatives think I love smelly old paper that makes your fingers wrinkle, and photo albums held together by decaying rubber bands. Actually, I do love that stuff—for example, my grandparents’ account book from their first three years of marriage. How else would I know that they were Bull Moose Republicans and ate tripe? Five years after my dad’s death, I’m still going through …Read More