Dancharthos :
Genealogos
Small World #1
Las Vegas, New Mexico
I once wrote a very short short story for a short fiction writing workshop. I had my grandparents run into each other in an automobile accident in Kansas, years before their children married, without knowing who each other was, and only the reader or narrator would figure it out at the end.
Imagine my curious surprise when I found out that both the brother of my grandmother and the sister of my grandfather (separate branches, NOT the two who married each other, no, rather my father's aunt and my mother's uncle), both lived in the same small town on very edge of the prairie below the mountains, not in Kansas like my story, no, but a little ways away, in Northeastern New Mexico, at a town that had already enchanted me and captured my heart the one time I drove through it myself in September of 1980.
Las Vegas, New Mexico. Paula and the baby and I stopped there on September 3rd(?), driving our truck full of stuff toward Chicago to spend a year in the windy city. I remember how the small town struck me as a marvelous ancient photograph, with its two plazas, one Victorian, one Spanish, with its mix of Yanqui and Mexican architecture, adobe walls and wood frame. And the abandoned railroad roundhouse. I remember thinking this is a magical place, probably very boring but it could be a fabulous window on the past....
It would take me almost twenty-two years to learn that my ancestors had spent time there....
My grandfather's sister, Eleanor A. Thomas (1878?-1936?), according to her obituary, "taught classes in social science three years at a state teachers' college" there, before coming to Kansas City in 1907.
My grandmother's brother, William Edgar Holsinger (1877-1915), according to his obituary, married there in 1904.
And not only spent time there, but possibly were there at the very same time as each other... and probably--certainly--never imagining that forty years later, the nephew of Eleanor would marry the niece of William.
I imagine the spiritual gathering in heaven on the day of their wedding, a platonic counterpart to our own shadowy reality, and the twin angels remarking-- Oh, I knew you when, didn't we?
While I silently give thanks for my advisors.
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