Is what the post that I started working on for tonight is going to need. So, you get this.
I think that I wanted to do documentaries before I really knew what a documentary actually was. What I knew was, I didn’t want the stories to go away, to die with those who had told them. My fear now is that they have faded and changed with age and the unfortunate result of that age.
I didn’t do a very good job of keeping track my self. Procrastination I guess. But the stories are important. Like any story, there is fabric and texture. Elements, to some degree that are who I am and a part of who I have become.
To me they have been the truest part of my life. Pure in their content and to me clear in the intent. Simple tales of life and love.
There is a line in the movie “Adaptation”, “change is not a choice”. One can certainly participate in change, but it often is not a choice. Very often it is presented to you before you even realize what is happening.
For me those stories also represent a different time. A time before everything changed. Young innocence trusted and believed that love was unconditional.
I try to think about them and what was important at the time they were being told. They had no real significance to that exact time other than they made us laugh. They were stories of humor; adolescent adventure and pranks only siblings can play on each other. Stories that mark an era and time of dearth and longing. Longing for more or just enough to get to the next day.
My only connection to what shaped those who came before me are hidden in those tales. Tuck away in the minds that have faded. Gone with those who have already left this earth.
The images are all yellow now. But they are the true keepers of the stories.
The Green Parrot was a restaurant in Columbus KS. My Aunt Irene and her husband Levi Runyon “ran the restaurant” Grandma used to say. With the rest of the family they left Neodesha to help them.
Driving into Columbus Kansas even for me has a certain familiarity about it. Maybe it’s because those who came before me walked here, lived here and loved here.
Even after 75 years after the fact I can imagine what it looked like, smelled like and how the people existed. I have a feel for the pace of the traffic, the colors, the texture…the air.
The texture or core of the story is that these two people fall in love and in the strangest reality develop an unconditional love for each other. The kind of love usually reserved for that of parent and child. This love produces children who don’t necessarily love unconditionally. They have somehow learned to love with conditions attached. Basically not gleaning any of the love that their parents lived or exhibited.
They married on October 14, 1933. Best guess is that they met sometime around 1930-1931. Marguerite’s sister Irene and her husband Levi ran a restaurant in Columbus Kansas called the Green Parrot. Gerald was born in Miami Oklahoma, where they got married but grew up in Columbus.
Gerald was born on June 22, 1911. Marguerite was born in Neodesha KS on July 14, 1915. Their story is truly a great love story.
