Connections Across Generations

In 1989, I was a young teacher at a high school in Queens, NY, having recently arrived from Ireland where I'd been born and raised. About six months into my time there, I was hailed by one of the boys I taught and he said, 'Mr. O (for that's what they called me), my mom knows your mom.' I thought it unlikely but asked for his mother's maiden name and said I'd check with my mother the next time I was in touch with her. In a subsequent letter to my mother I explained the exchange and in her response, she informed me that, back in the late 1950s, because she had nice handwriting, this boy's mother had asked her to write out her documents and letters of introduction as she prepared to emigrate from rural Ireland to America. Thirty years later I was teaching that woman's son.