Not Sweating the Small Stuff

Mark Twain / Samuel Clemens (1835-1910) and Knowing My Grandfather

Mark Twain (1835-1910) - Humourist, Lecturer, Satirist and Writer

My mother used to tell me that her father never went to the theatre - this was her usual set up for the story we all knew was inevitably coming!

My grandfather was a Rhodes scholar who became physician and lecturer in medicine, leaving the house at 6am and returning after midnight - for his four hours of sleep. So for his grandchildren he was totally remote. He used to visit us perhaps once every few years - in his big big glamorous American limo (the child's perspective), which he changed over each year and was his only concession to worldliness. Though he also allowed himself a month's fishing a year - with his wife ...



... his children being parked with the cook in an old guest house he'd bought in the country ...


I have often wondered over the years about this famous and mysterious person. But I could never manage to bring anything specific about him to mind to work up his personality or his outlook on life. So I suppose I profiled him according to profession and socio-economic class.

Then my mother died a few years back and I was given a series of photographs her father had taken of aboriginals on the way to one of his fishing trips ...





... which seemed out of type - my curiosity was again piqued.

And today I got another an unexpected insight.

I was watching a doco on Mark Twain, author of 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' and 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer'. And realized what an incredibly quirky irreverent self-deprecating iconoclastic funny guy this writer was.

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.

I have never taken and exercise except sleeping and resting.

I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hands and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.

I have been through some of some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.

I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.

And then I remembered the point of my mother's story - that her father had only ever ventured out once to the theatre - to hear Mark Twain on a tour of Australia in 1896.

And I suddenly understood something of my grandfather's character. To venture out, he must have had a strong empathy with the writer. And been in some ways like-minded. So different from the conventional elite guy I'd profiled up - great to have this new and much more exciting construction!