I may have mentioned here or on one of my other Web sites that my rockstar grandmother passed away a couple of months ago. In fact, it was just a few weeks before my daughter was born. I spent the last five months of Grandma’s life hearing that she really wanted to live long enough to meet Veronica Rose. Alas, Cancer is an Asshole, and it picked her off right before VRose saw the light of day.
Mom is going through Grandma’s effects now and dropped off a box of assorted papers at my house for lack of a better place to put them. I’ve found some really wonderful things in this box, including this short note written – presumably – by Aunt Dotty in collaboration with a young Maury, who later became my grandfather.
The envelope says:
To be opened by Maury on his 19th birthday.
And the letter inside reads:
June 7th 1922
Maury has just told Aunt Dotty that he’ll be a big doctor, and will have an automobile and will give the people such medicines that will make them well so quickly they’ll not know they were sick. Aunt Dotty has promised she will not tell anybody; it’s to be a surprise.
And below that in different handwriting:
Maury would still like to be a big doctor.
At nineteen, Maurice.
Isn’t that wonderful? And sweet, and hopeful. No, I won’t say how it turned out. Life is at once beastly, wonderful, fickle, beautiful and complicated. It’s also short. Just in case you needed a reminder.
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This is a thing of breathtaking beauty, both the artifact you have and the loving way you described it. You are wonderful to share it. God bless Maury.