A Family's Passage
Book Details
Author(s)Dick Snyder
PublisherDick Snyder
ISBN / ASINB006GWPAWY
ISBN-13978B006GWPAW6
MarketplaceFrance 🇫🇷
Description
Time frames life. Incidents fill the frame. As in a mosaic, only the perspective of distance allows me to see childhood as being a series of identifiable inputs which, I hope, contributed to the fashioning of a mature, sensible soul. Telling good stories about frivolity, identifying adventures, and reflecting upon my failures permits a narrative of goals, options, and choices. Those tales illuminate the process by which I moved toward, but did not find, maturity. They can also reveal the foolishness of youth, the now-outmoded mores of an earlier time, and the still-sensitive effects of slights suffered a half-century ago.
This book is a series of 30 incidents strewn throughout 6 years, written to the purpose of both memory and insight. Each essay is about 700-1500 words complemented by remembrances written by my siblings: Joseph Snyder, Rosalie Pritchett and Joyce Hopkins. In sum, these essays constitute the matrix of our family’s passage from dimly lit dilemma to an illuminating stability.
Wherever one looks for adventure, one finds the community. Whether it is the subway culture of New York City, the Norwegian Lutheran envelopment of Westby, Wisconsin, the disciplines of Texas football, or the friendly nosiness of Taft, California, the community makes its mark. Taft, the home for Chevron’s operations in the huge oil pools of the Sunset-Midway Fields, is the canvass for my story.
With pleasure, I note that the stories of my youth reveal the compassion of my community as well as its discipline of deviation. While never knowing exactly how this happened, I can now recognize in the mosaic those colors with which the people of Taft gave substance to my life even as I sought, somewhat blindly, to define it.
In our family, the years following my father’s death gave us passage to the unknown: survival as a family, development of job skills, learning lessons of social behavior and, for me, a psychology of behavior which tested my teachers, friends and siblings. I share my story with all who might enjoy the larger picture, and hope that each reader finds bits of themselves in the segments filling the frame. Ruminating reflects life, and sometimes, if one is lucky, it helps define a lifetime.
Dick Snyder, A Family’s Passage: 404 Van Buren Street, 1946-1952, Taft, California.
This book is a series of 30 incidents strewn throughout 6 years, written to the purpose of both memory and insight. Each essay is about 700-1500 words complemented by remembrances written by my siblings: Joseph Snyder, Rosalie Pritchett and Joyce Hopkins. In sum, these essays constitute the matrix of our family’s passage from dimly lit dilemma to an illuminating stability.
Wherever one looks for adventure, one finds the community. Whether it is the subway culture of New York City, the Norwegian Lutheran envelopment of Westby, Wisconsin, the disciplines of Texas football, or the friendly nosiness of Taft, California, the community makes its mark. Taft, the home for Chevron’s operations in the huge oil pools of the Sunset-Midway Fields, is the canvass for my story.
With pleasure, I note that the stories of my youth reveal the compassion of my community as well as its discipline of deviation. While never knowing exactly how this happened, I can now recognize in the mosaic those colors with which the people of Taft gave substance to my life even as I sought, somewhat blindly, to define it.
In our family, the years following my father’s death gave us passage to the unknown: survival as a family, development of job skills, learning lessons of social behavior and, for me, a psychology of behavior which tested my teachers, friends and siblings. I share my story with all who might enjoy the larger picture, and hope that each reader finds bits of themselves in the segments filling the frame. Ruminating reflects life, and sometimes, if one is lucky, it helps define a lifetime.
Dick Snyder, A Family’s Passage: 404 Van Buren Street, 1946-1952, Taft, California.
