Pygmies in the Mist: Part Deux

I come from a family of amateur writers. From my great-uncle Bud to my aunt Francine, a poet 20 years in the making, my family has striven for generations to join the ranks of Fitzgerald and Hemingway. I clearly recall one of my first experiences with the unappreciated writing of my relatives. My family and I dug through boxes in my Grandmother’s house which held the belongings of the deceased Uncle Bud, a World War II veteran who enjoyed embellishing the truth. As I dug through the medals and photographs and pages of old manuscripts, I came upon a bound story with an intriguing title: “ Pygmies in the Mist.” Apparently, he had unsuccessfully attempted to publish the story, a tale of an African tribe of pygmies attempting to escape a cloud of mist. My grandmother swears publishers had not selected it as they simply could not recognize creativity and genius. She, too, likes to embellish. My grandmother, however, trumps “ Pygmies” with her own novel which has yet to grace the shelves. She and her reverend joined creative forces to produce the precursor to Fifty Shades of Grey (a la science fiction). Critics (my mother) found the novel “offensive, yet exploratory.” On the other end of the spectrum, my Aunt Francine writes an annual Christmas poem which serves as her crowning achievement of the year. Surprisingly, the public has celebrated my Aunt Francine’s work the most; she published her work in a Christian children’s magazine and received $25--four years ago. As each generation of my family has seen its own amateur writer, I suppose my family, particularly my grandmother, has prepared me to realize that role. When I visited my grandmother as a four-year-old, I would sit at the kitchen table with her as she drank her "splash" of wine and we would talk. As we chatted, she would make up tales of a little girl who lived in New York City. She gushed over the little girl's life and how she wrote, painted, and sold hats in Central Park. She shook her head when she shared that the little girl walked on the grates in the sidewalk and would fall down them. Her face lit up magically when she told of how the little girl turned into a swan one afternoon. After she told me each tale, I would smile up at her and tell her, “Someday, Grandma, I will write the stories and you will illustrate them. Everyone in the world should hear our stories.” In response, she would always gaze down at me sweetly and tell me that she truly believed me. We shall see.  Maybe, someday, my family will finally produce a Hemingway or a Fitzgerald. Until then, we must navigate the literary world like my Uncle Bud’s pygmies, constantly searching for the place in the forest where the sun shines and the mist lifts and we can finally see.