Everyone Wants To Be Heard....

My Neighbors and Friends: Jerry and Ed Bernier

We all want to tell our stories, and we all want people to listen.

Being heard is a basic survival instinct, and most of us want and need to survive.

In response to my post titled We Must Be Allowed To Tell Our Own Stories, my neighbor and friend, Ed, wrote this poem:

"Ed's Tale"

based on a poem by Nikki Giovanni

titled "Nikki-Rosa"

childhood remembrances are always a drag   

if you’re from a French family in a valley full of Scandinavians, Selah, WA

you always remember things like living in Selah 

with no inside toilet (yes we didn't have an inside toilet until 1944, 5 years after my father finished building the 16' x 32' wood frame house using lumber from an old house he dismantled on our property, and we were 5 kids and 2 parents.) We heated in the winter with a pot-bellied wood stove in the linoleum-floored living room and cooked on an ancient wood-fired kitchen range.

and if you become famous or something

they never talk about how happy you were to have   

your mother, father, brothers, and sisters

all to yourself and

how good the water felt when you got your bath   

from one of those

corrugated iron tubs that Mom put down on the kitchen floor and filled tea kettle by tea kettle so we three boys could bathe each Saturday night.   

and somehow when you talk about home   

it never gets across how much you

understood their feelings

as the whole extended family of grand parents, 8 uncles, 3 aunts, mother and father, and we five kids got together at least once a year

and even though you remember

your biographers never understand

your father’s pain as his father and 9 sons lost everything in the depression and he had to go to work for the WPA at 12 Cents an hour plus a bag of flour once a week, but he didn't give up on his dream and neither did we.

Yes, we were taunted for being poor, and often left out of things other kids did because we didn't have any "party" clothes, just simple cotton coveralls, one pair of shoes per year, and maybe a couple of cotton shirts your mother sewed together using empty flour sacks (yes, that happened)

And though you were  poor it was not poverty that

concerned you, nor was the fact that your father was out of work for months on end. What made a difference was that your grandfather, grandmother, 8 uncles and 3 aunts, plus your parents and sisters

and your brothers at Christmas got together once a year at Christmas.  Though not once in your childhood did you have a "birthday party, your mother baked a soggy chocolate cake for the occasion, and Uncle Maurice and Uncle Sidney stopped by and gave you a $1.00 bill and said, "Don't spend it all in one place."and I really hope nobody ever has cause   

to write about me

because they never understand

what it means to be brought up poor, no, poverty-stricken yet to succeed in live beyond any childhood expectation, being happy all the while.

My neighbor and friend, Ed, I hear you!

Everyone Wants To Be Heard......