FlashNano25 Day 5: Running is a family trait

 FlashNano 25

Day 5

Prompt: Tell a family story. Fictionalize as needed. 

 

I tell people that I was destined to become a marathoner because the talent runs in my blood. I say my mother’s uncle was a runner. 

Like all my mother’s stories, the story about this uncle was heavy on emotional tugs, though a little light when it came to the facts. I’ve done my best to research the truth but haven’t found any sort of paper trail. I’ve asked cousins and most shake their heads at me as though to say, “What the heck are you talking about?”

Back in the day, “runner” was another word for messenger. See the joke? See how, when I tell people that I have marathon blood gushing through my veins, because my uncle was a runner, I’m playing with words? It’s kinda funny, right? 

Here’s the tugging on your heart part that my mother told with much more emotion than I am capable of conjuring.

My uncle was a messenger for the Irish Republican Army for a few months, weeks, days -- I'm not sure, in the decade before World War I. He was a child, still a baby in some ways, only ten years old when he was caught by British soldiers, arrested, and given the awful choice of jail or deportation. I can’t even begin to imagine how terrified he must have been and how inconsolably devastated his parents were. 

Today, ten-year-old kids don't even go to the corner store by themselves. Yet 115 or so years ago, my great uncle was dashing over bogs, fields, mountain tops, doing his utmost to help his family, friends, countrymen. 

My uncle chose deportation. He immigrated to the U.S., Massachusetts specifically, where some of his older siblings already lived, sent earlier, one at a time, by impoverished parents desperate to give their kids more than what they had. 

In Massachusetts, my uncle lived with my aunt, a housekeeper, and then with my grandmother, a governess. Brutally torn from the aching arms of his mom and dad at such a pivotal age, my uncle died a spiritual death the day he set sail for America, my mother said. He spent the rest of his relatively short life mourning for home, a shell of who he could have been. 

And here I am, making it all into a big joke, each time I bring up that running is in my blood.