First and foremost, Winston Churchill. I have a huge affinity for the man who saved Britain from the "Huns". When most Britons were calling for peaceful relations with Germany, Winston saw the danger and tried to rally his countrymen to do something about it. He did this a fell from grace, was on the outs with his constituency and nearly lost his wife in the process. He struggled with bouts of depression, he called it his "black dog" and he learned to be a writer (he was prolific: writing articles, speeches and even a biography) to overcome a lisp and stutter and gave the world some of the most memorable speeches of the English language. While he once told a servant he could speak to him any way he chose because he was "A great man", i doubt he ever truly believed it.
I would also like to meet Anne Frank. However while I'm sure she is interesting, her voice has been heard and I would like to meet her mother and sister. While Anne and her father had the benefit of being heard after the war, Edith Frank and her elder daughter Margot, were silenced forever. According to history Margot was always every one's favorite, the Frank Girl that got noticed, now she is the one that we know the least about. We know even less about her mother. Edith had found her identity as a housewife, and identity she had to give up when she moved into The Secret Annex, and those duties were usurped by August van Pels, the matriarch of the other family in hiding. Shelley Winters apparently played her to the tee in the movie. Since history is always from the perspective of that which is written, I wonder what these two women would say today. In fact, I would like to have a conversation with the other 5 inhabitants of the Annex.
I would like to meet Mary Magdalene, the fallen woman. Was she really the wife of Jesus? Was she a whore, or the pretty younger daughter who was sold as a child bride to a wealthy landowner? Did she love the Roman she had her affair with? Did she believe in Jesus or did she follow him because no one else would have her. A Biblical Belle Wattling. Would she like the fact that she is the Patron Saint of the Penitent? Was she sorry, or just glad that someone, a man saw her for what she was. Imagine what you would do if you had been sold to a man three times your age, to be his play thing. After his death (sometime when you were in your late teens or early twenties) she was expected to stay on her plantation and die with him. Then came the Roman solider, a Centurion, an officer. Was he her lover or was she fulfilling another obligation. I'd like to think she did what she had to do to survive and regretted little.
I would like to meet Katherine of Aragon, the youngest child of Ferdinand and Isabella. She was sent to England as a child, to marry a Tudor prince who was frail and died before he could become a man. She then married his brother, fell in love, only to be tossed out on her ass so that he could marry one of her ladies in waiting. Did she die loving him, one of England's most famous kings? Did she forgive him for betraying her? In her day she was the most educated woman in Europe, did she realize her own power? Again pushed to the side, we know little of what she said and felt. She deserves a voice.
I would like to meet my great-grandparents. I'd love to know who they were with out the veneer of reverence they have acquired after death. On my father's side, I knew them only as men and women in their eighties and nineties. Sharing memories they had acquired as part of the Greatest Generation were not what they wanted to talk about. My great-grandmother was a mover and a shaker in Texas City, widowed after the 1947 disaster killed her husband. They had been upper middle class and she did not want to associate with my grandmother's in laws. Sharecroppers who ended up living in the back of a church. I have heard that my great-grandfather who was killed hung the stars and moon. I'm sure this must be true. I know my great-grandmother must have been a lot to handle. I know because I see bits of her in me. Anyone who can put up with either one of us must be special.
I know literally nothing about my mother's grandparents. I know my mother's Grammy (the Original we'll say) was German. So German she grew up speaking it at home, only to lose it later in life because the man she married didn't speak it. They were hit hard by the depression. They raised to kids, and he died young, before my Grammy got married and started raising her own family. I met the Original Grammy, in December 1982. She was keeping a promise she had made to her doctor. She was staying alive just long enough to meet her great-grandson. Three days after we left Austin shortly after my first Christmas she died, having done what she said she would do. My mother's paternal grandparents are even more of a mystery. They were considerably well off, raised 4 kids. Three girls and a boy. "It was like having 3 mothers," Grandpa would say. His father was an accountant, born in a county in Ireland that I cannot find on a map. His wife was born in the part of the Low Countries that changed hands so often you couldn't keep track. She was sent here to go to school and grew up speaking French and English. They both died younger.
As an adult, as someone who might establish his own family one day, I would like to know them not for who they are said to have been, but for who they were. What were their thoughts, motivations, dreams. What idiosyncrasies of theirs did I inherit? Am I a whole from their parts? Would they be proud?
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