Telling a family tale...a celebration of 90 years...

How does one go about memorializing a family history that sprawls well over a century? In our attempts to do just that, my family and I carried off a rather impressive celebration of my Granny's 90 years, one of which she was tremendously proud.

Every free moment for the last six weeks, the women in the picture to the left went to great effort to ensure that our video memorial to my grandmother and the rest of our family was comprehensive, tasteful, technically correct and included everyone...my Granny's father and mother, her five brothers (all dead now) and her lone step-sister (tottering, but still living), all six of my grandmother's children, every one of her 20 grandchildren, at least a sampling of her unknown number of great-grandchildren and each of Granny's five great-great grandchildren. Along the way, my aunts, my mother and I laughingly re-learned our sense of family and love of one another.

My Aunt Joyce (shown first from the left in the picture) acknowledged the family structure we share. Joyce is Granny's fifth child and her only daughter, the lone girl born into a pack of five strapping sons. I (third over) am the Granny's oldest grandchild; the female child who for 13 years headed the motley army of 14 grandsons born after me until the Goddess brought a pair of little girls who will forever be too young to belong to our exclusive club.

Joyce and I burned an entire Sunday piecing together a video montage revealing the life of her two wild sons, their baby mamas and their legitimate and illegitimate children. Joyce's chapter was fittingly set to Sawyer Brown singing, "I'll take the dirt road, it's all I know." Joyce's reaction to seeing her personal history played out in this way was not surprising, given the reactions I've not only witnessed but have felt myself in response to our attempts to tell such a large family tale: She cried, bitterly reflecting that her legacy of four husbands may have "fucked up" her boys. I could only try to comfort her during our hour phone conversation at the end of a long day. Perhaps she did fuck up her boys. But as the family tale told: what's done is done. We realized no choice but to live as well as possible with what we were.

Joyce also experienced an appreciated epiphany. Any effort as prodigious as our deserved to be recognized, she said as her tears momentarily lessened, and suggested that we call ourselves TTLC Productions. This acronym cleverly includes our alternate names or nicknames. T is for Trese = Teresa (me), the head of technical production, graphics and printing. T is also for Tuter = my mother (to the far right), an only child who assimilated my father's large family to become a daughter-in-law more cherished than some of their own. Mother's nickname, Tuter, was bestowed upon her at 14 and most of the family calls her by this name. Mother's years of high school yearbook production served her well. She may not know how to use a computer or the State of Oklahoma's copy of Adobe Premiere, but she knows a great deal about design and theme done the hard, old-fashioned way. Mother is a persistent historian with (I re-discovered) a great sense of taste. She was the power behind my mouse, planning the project, structuring it and handing me the scanned images, poetry and sequences I needed to build chapters memorializing each individual family and much more. Lou = Louise (third from the left), my favorite aunt, the one who my father's younger brother resisted marrying because she had a son from a previous liaison. Thanks to the Goddess that Jimmy gave in because Louise is smart, funny and loves each of us. She also has a great knowledge of country music and provided an unerring sense of which songs the pictures and video clips would be most appropriately set to. And the "C" in TTLC? Joyce's first name is Cleo. She is named after Granny's youngest brother, eventually a devilishly dashing soldier after his mother died birthing him, leaving him to be raised by a wet nurse until his father could remarry. Using the name bestowed upon both she and her long-gone uncle, Joyce was the essence of the family and surprisingly verified the names attached to every old photo.

With no intention other than creating a birthday video, we made something much larger. We became and will remain TTLC Productions, four women on equal footing reflecting a much larger dynasty. For a few weeks, my world narrowed with surprising appreciation to the the company of my family. When I suggested that each of us come dressed for a party pic as our favorite character, their response told me it was the right thing. Joyce rightfully chose to be a cowgirl, looking damned good at 62 in Daisy Duke cutoffs and a leather vest. Joyce laughed at me when I nagged her about not tearing my carpet with the jingling spurs attached to her knee-high cowboy boots. Lou showed up as a biker babe, her dew rag and leather boots a tribute to the miles she has logged sitting behind my uncle on his big Honda. Me, I was a farmer like my brother and my mother's own father, wearing worn tennis shoes with my overalls and turning my Oklahoma ballcap around backward. Mother chose the character of an Oklahoma Roughneck in honor of my father and his father. We teased her about looking like a femme safari leader in her tin-pot hard hat, her steel-toed boots, lunch box and thermos. But she was technically the most accurate, as she is most times. I clearly inherited my need for perfection.

When we ventured outside to have Ann snap our digital image on a warm afternoon in late April, we could barely stand for the picture due to laughing. Children playing in the street ran home after spying the REAL, LIVE .40/.40 rifle that Joyce kept banging me in the head with. Traffic down Main Street stopped to stare. When Joyce asked Ann if she was embarrassed to be taking our picture, Ann responded that it wasn't her who should be embarrassed. Back inside and still laughing, I worked the digital magic of Photoshop, branded the picture and we had our "company" logo. It made for a lot of laughs at Granny's party, enlarged to 16 x 20 and emblazoned on my teeshirt. For that moment, and perhaps forever after, my family and I were blood kin and Sisters of the Spirit.

The four of us pulled off an incredible affair on June 14, 2008, at the Chickasaw-owned
Community Center in tiny Alex, OK. Most of our known world was in attendance, when the subject of our efforts....my dear Granny, Joyce's mama, and the mother-in-law of both my mother and my Aunt Lou...showed up for her 90th birthday party. Just to add to our preparations, Granny chose her own way of doing things. My oldest cousin, Mike, come from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, on the back of a Harley said later that he was surprised when Granny asked him at the last moment if she could ride with him. So Mike nervously strapped a tin-pot helmet on Granny, mounted her on his large motorcycle and slowly traversed the two miles into town, fronted by the Alex police and followed by a convoy of cars and bikes the likes of which we only see at funerals. Only this time, the flashing lights and cavalcade was not a homage to a life departed, it was an incredible celebration of 90 years of hard and tough living that is still evolving.

Standing outside the Center watching, I was again almost overwhelmed by an encompassing sense of family and heritage. I yelled at Mike to "drag" Main Street before pulling into the curb with Granny. This old and wrinkled woman who waved to all assembled as she perched on the back of that Harley, looking for all the world like a football queen crowned at a small town homecoming, is MY Grandmother. As she turned 90, I and the rest of our family became her legacy. As her oldest grandchild, I felt myself to be our family's second generation representation of the feminine, as sparse as I may be. Granny is the standard I will have to meet, the adventure I have lived and hope to live, the history I came to know as I spearheaded the effort to record her life. I found myself thinking that all the hours spent creating the memorial were well worth it. I felt love.

And it only got better. Granny was photographed over and over as more than a hundred family members and friends crowded the Center to partake of a delicious cake, sip cold punch and mull over the quietly playing video and black and white photos we scattered about the place. The cake was made up in the form of a quilt to match the real, hand-crafted quilt stretched out on a wall. Granny's children had the quilt made for her, each of their names stitched into blocks surrounding her name followed by 1918 and 2008. It was beautiful and paled only beside the life-size cut-out of my Grandmother and Grandfather in their prime, both in their 30s, gazing adoringly at one another. We had to turn the cut-out to face the wall during our party preparations because each of us kept catching the thing in the corner of our eyes, hearts jumping to think that my Grandfather (Paw Paw) had somehow rematerialized after being dead 30 years.

Hung behind the life-size cut-out and on the opposite wall from the quilt was the tin placard my mother gifted me with after I prepared the video for her father's birthday, just past in April. Painted upon the tin with a kind of country look are the words Families Are Forever.

And so they are, I realized as the party wound down after three hours, most friends departed and only the closest of those and the family remaining. I stood in front of the 50 or so people gathered tiredly at the tables and spoke a few words about what it was like to record a life as long and lively as Granny's. I acknowledged TTLC Productions and told our story while everyone roared with laughter. And then, assembled, we watched the video together. And lived every frame of it.

Directly related women are scarce in this world, I was reminded, particularly if you don't count my daughters. I sat between my oldest cousin (Mike, the one who rode Granny on the Harley) and another male cousin, who looks like Sylvester Stallone but has managed to stay out of prison and is on the marginal up and up. My brother was across the table where I could make eye contact with him. My children were close to him and my father's youngest brother was nearby while my uncles sat at the rear of the center. It didn't take them long to move closer to the TV, where Granny sat alone and close, so she could hear.

The baby pictures of everyone from Granny's oldest son to a few of her great-great grandchildren made everyone chuckle. But I had promised both laughter and tears. The tears began with the grandchildren's section, the one I authored completely on my own that contained all the old video. There we were, me at barely one year of age, in living and breathing (if obviously analog) color, racing about and clapping, rescued handily by my grandfather when I nearly took a header off the porch. But it was the next video that tugged at the heart. The 46 year-old man sitting beside me was shown in a onesy at maybe ten months, my father and his father sprawled on the floor, trying to get Mike to walk. He wouldn't and dropped into a fast crawl when steadied on his tiny feet. But all that changed when a black-haired whirling dervish entered the picture and opened her arms. Mike took his first steps, recorded on video, toward me. Ever the opportunist, apparently, I took a moment at two to smack a kiss on the side of his blonde head. As I kissed him on video 45 years ago, I turned to him last Saturday and asked if he wanted another kiss. He pointed to the same cheek and I bussed him there as the family cried.

It went on and on, back and forth from laughter to sobs, the artistic abilities of TTLC Productions well rewarded. The entire tribe sniffed and dabbed their eyes in response to the tribute to my grandfather, entitled This is the last cowboy song...A requiem to an Oklahoma Roughneck. They roared at our inate redneck nature set to Jerry Jeff Walker singing Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother. And they cried yet again as Alabama sang I believe there are angels among us as pictures of all of us, grayed and older, played on the screen, interspersed with pictures of Granny and our next, much fresher, generation.

I was personally rewarded. My family took up a collection for me and enclosed $200 in a wonderful card. But I was also rewarded on many other levels. Many of my family members had forgotten their love for one another. That was remembered on Saturday, from Granny to my oldest uncle (almost 80); from me to the youngest child present.

Joyce called me last night after we spent a Sunday in personal introspection. We talked for a couple of hours. She does not want to lose touch. She wants to keep the light burning. So do I.

And my uncle wrote...

Teresa

Just wanted to let you know how much DiAnn and I appreciated all the work you put into this collection of memories of Granny,Papaw and each member of our family.

This was not only a celebration of Granny's 90th birthday but a celebration of the family as a whole.

Your dedication to getting everything together and the quality of the finished product is superb. All of us should appreciate the time and abilities you extended to accomplish this video.

Everyone may not realize what you provided to each of us at this time, but in years to come this documentation of our families, and extended families, will become more and more precious as we decrease in number.

I could not, nor would I attempt, to put a monetary value on the collection of memories, sad, happy and just outright outrageously funny at times, but please accept our heartfelt thanks and appreciation.

And in my spare time, what little of it there was over the last months, I wrote...

The Matriarchs

In the beginning, you were softness and light.
We knew you only as Mother,
Never thinking of your separate soul and arch desire.
But when I grew, I recognized a likened life:
It seems you are the poet who haunts
My quiet and darkened hours.
You are the Shamaness who sees beyond her roots and years.
You are the Keeper of the flame and tribe,
The heartbeat and the storm,
The birth and blood progression.

You are the Mother knowing well the spell
To keep our whole world safe.
I saw your vision in the oceans,
In the Circle of the Dancing Stones,
In the House of the Catholic God.
And returned to the rolling prairie
To the cadence of Spirit and Sod.

Grandmother,
We count our lineage rugged, hard and put up wet.
We trace our ever after
Through wolves, the moon, black gold and tears.
We honor our men and brothers,
But we sing unto the female soul.
We are sisters to the rocks and wind
The matriarchs;
Generations of unerring friends.

Teresa Ann Moore, June 2008