A cousin's view of cousins

Evelyn had a way of seeing people and her world through fairy dust and magic. Nothing was ordinary with her and she delighted in everything.

In 1972 she wrote my brother:

Cousin is a lovely estate. And we are all cousins, so time and distance and the natural unsureness of the unknown can't touch us. Through no act of our own except being, we have received this gift.

[Cousins]George [Flynn] and Alice [Flynn Burns] and Rose and I corresponded briefly when we were children and we talked about and wondered about our exciting family in the East. [New Hampshire]

Imagine our bedazzlement one day many years later to receive an air mail letter from George. He was crossing country on his way to China, and wanted to meet his Cleveland cousins.

He was the first of our father's family to come into our lives. For Mama and Rose, he was the only one they had the delight of meeting. But what a first! We thought he was the most beautiful and wonderful person in the world. He had just come from being intercollegiate boxing champion of the world [MIT] and he showed us the engraved gold watch he had been awarded. With his bursting grin and Irish charm he devastated us.

Four years later he came again bringing with him Larry, his glamorous bride. We thought no one but Larry could possibly have been good enough for him.

It was my Mother's dream that I should know my father's people. I had friends in New York and visited them every summer and your darling Aunt Alice [Flynn Burns] invited me to Nashua for two days on my eastern trip in 1938.

George had paved a royal way for me. He called Rose and me the "two little peaches" and I walked into a George-made world. Alice and Ralph and mother Burns found me at South Station. It was one of the sublime moments of my life.

Alice took me everywhere, to Lynn where I met Mamie [Flynn Guerin] and Agnes [Mamie's daughter] and to Lowell first to meet Elizabeth [Flynn Sullivan] and then to Julia and Johnny's [Flynn]. The only one I had heard of was Elizabeth: she had sent me many beautiful gifts when I was a baby.

With Julia and Johnny [Julia's son] it was instant and undying love. All I remember of their house was the picture of "The Boy with the Torn Hat", but oh, their faces and their welcome.

Julia wrote to Jack [her husband], who was working in New York at the time, and said his cousin Evelyn had been there and would be visiting in Jackson Heights. This glorious man, tired after a rough day's work and in pouring rain, combed the area trying to find me. This too I shall never forget.

Alice told me many lovely and interesting and sad things about the family. Her mother had died in April of that year [25 Apr 1937], so I was just too late to meet your grandmother.

Alice worshiped your father with a total dedication. As I remember the story, he bought her her First Communion dress and paid her tuition at the business college and I'm sure provided his beautiful little sister with many luxuries she would not otherwise have had.

So your father was introduced to me through the loving eyes of your Aunt Alice, and of course I remembered him for what he was, and was really in awe of him. But I met him twice, and he dispelled my shyness with immediate grace. Surely he was someone to be proud of!

Each member of the family is unique and infinitely loveable. They were all of superior intelligence, marvelously endowed and aware - even those with limited formal education could take a high place any place anywhere.

Each one deserves a volume, but I mustn't wear you out. I will say about Jim [Flynn] that no one could have been dearer or more generous. He loved Massachusetts and New Hampshire. He knew all the secret woodsy roads and he showed me places that even Thoreau might not have uncovered. He had a special feeling for the old grave yards and he knew the history and the "guts" behind the heroic people who lay there. He would stand over a plague-ridden doctor's grave, for instance, and with the tears running down his face would say, "God, Evelyn, that was a man!"

The women were all spectacular. They combined the tenderness and compassion of the true woman with the daring and brute accomplishment of the pioneer man.

Margaret [Flynn] Harley is the historian of the family. She is living in New York with Phyllis [her daughter]. Undoubtedly you have her address. She is a deep student and was young enough and old enough to sense the mystical qualities of her mother and to be interested enough to preserve tid bits of information about Uncle Dan [Coffey] and others who died before I came upon the scene. Her life has been so steeped in tragedy that a lesser person would have given up long ago. One of her hobbies is collecting the poems that are cut into ancient tombstones.

There are no words to tell you how wonderful Julia and Jack have been - not just to their family, but to all the god forsaken little people who fell in desolation on their doorstep. They are the Great Lovers.

Oh, Henry, you can be very grateful God sent you into such a family. Their like will not be seen again. It was a special blessing to me to have come to know them all, to love them beyond time, and to try to live up to them.

The above photograph is the only one I have of Evelyn. I have no idea when it was taken. It struck me that I used to wear my braids in the exact same way, and our Aunt Alice wore braids wrapped about her head into her old age.