My father's family came from Wales and so it was that my daughters decided they wanted to study the little country for a couple of different homeschool international festivals. It was no small thing for us to research and acquire some semblance of authentic Welsh costumes, learn words and phrases in a language that is considered endangered, and then to decide how best to present more than 1,000 years of history on a display board that measured no wider than 48" across.
Somewhere in all of this, I wanted my daughters to learn about my father's family and to gain some appreciation for their heritage and their place in line.
So it was with great joy that I listened to them tell a panel of judges today about their Welsh ancestry, the meaning of my maiden name, and how their great-great-great-great grandfather wrote books of autobiographical poetry about his boyhood on a farm along the southern Welsh coast.
As part of our study of famous people from Wales, I introduced my girls to Dylan Thomas, the renowned poet who died much too soon at the age of 39 after many hard years of brawling with his equally bellicose wife, drinking to excess and living on the edge of poverty at most points.
I remembered reading Thomas' most famous poem, "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" when I was in college, but I never bothered to research either the man himself or any of his other works. Alas, I attribute this laziness, this willingness to be spoonfed only half the meal, to my public school education where the teachers had neither the time nor the inclination to compel a deeper study of interesting things.
Dylan Thomas was born in 1914 in Swansea, the same town out from which my ancestor lived on his farm. Today it is the third largest city in Wales. In Dylan Thomas' day, it was an industrial town, dreary and without much to encourage him to return once he left home for good.
In reading for the first time Thomas's most famous prose piece, "A Child's Christmas in Wales," I was taken aback by his use of beautiful and unusual words. Even more, I found myself chuckling at the stories of mischief that only young boys can make.
Why hadn't I read this story before now? Why, at 43, is it just now coming to the fore of my literary life?
We have a common denominator, Dylan Thomas and I, and I am only sorry I didn't appreciate this fact sooner.
It's never too late, though, and so I leave you with one of my favorite excerpts from "A Child's Christmas In Wales." Do yourself a favor and Google the whole story. It's not long but it is deliciously wicked, sentimental, colorful, descriptive, and inclusive of words you won't commonly find anywhere else.
"It was on the afternoon of the Christmas Eve, and I was in Mrs. Prothero's garden waiting for cats, with her son Jim. It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas. December, in my memory, is white as Lapland, though there were no reindeers. But there were cats. Patient, cold and callous, our hands wrapped in socks, we waited to snowball the cats. The wise cats never appeared.
Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, it snowed and it snowed.
But here a small boy says: "It snowed last year, too. I
made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea."
"But that was not the same snow," I say. "Our snow was not only shaken from white wash buckets down the sky, it
came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow
grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely -ivied the walls and
settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunder-storm of white, torn Christmas cards."
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