Charlotte Alexander was kind enough to publish this little piece in SLO Review today. It means a lot to me. We grew up with Patrick Moore’s descendants, farmer George Gray Shannon, his wife Barbara and their sons. You can tell from the photo what Mom thought of the Shannon boys. The Irish knit tablecloth is out, and it was normally reserved for Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter.

Michael, the eldest, is now a writer, and he is marvelously gifted. Here are two photos of his Dad, one of them with George holding Jerry in the two-room Branch School hallway, the other, on the family farm, shows George towing the boys and, if you look closely, a dog keeping Cayce company at the rear.

George married Barbara Hall, an elegant woman. She worked at Baxter’s Men and Boys and took care of us every year at Back-to-School time. I did not know for many years that Kaz Ikeda had been nearly arrested, soon after Pearl Harbor, because he was giving a high-school girl, a friend of his family’s, a lift. It was Barbara.

Here are Barbara, on the right, and the Irish-by-marriage Georgie O’Connor, dressed up for the Harvest Festival, Arroyo Grande’s annual salute (more or less, recently) to its agricultural history. Elizabeth and I had the luck to take Georgie’s granddaughter, Kelli, one of my history students, to Ireland with us. She turned out to be the most delightful traveling companion we could ever want.

But the muse for this piece was Patrick Moore’s niece and Michael’s grandmother, Annie Gray Shannon. I’m pretty sure my jaw hit my chest the first time I saw her photo. I tend to show it, shamelessly, with another Irish girl, my Mom, on the left, with Roberta, when Mom—Patricia Margaret Keefe, with roots in County Wicklow— was twenty-two.

If Annie looks a bit too serious in this photo, with her expanse of lace collar and the immense bow holding her hair tight for the photographer, I am sure she had her unserious moments, too. Michael has shared these photos of Annie with her friends at Berkeley. She’s on the left, and these images of her enchant me even more.