Joanne O Connor
Special to The Citizen
Maybe I was 9. Itâs possible that I was 10 that spring afternoon when I was alone in the house with my mother and she called me into the kitchen, sat me down in the chair under the wall phone and told me what I knew was coming, what I dreaded to hear: that there was no Easter Bunny. Told ya, OâConnor. Grow up already! my Peacock Street friends Timmy and Patty snapped at me. All those years of the tangible proof of his existence were now squashed.
My mother Mary was an orphan. She was born in 1928 in Olean. Her father, William, died of TB when she was 5 and her mother, Geraldine, the following year from what might have been a brain tumor. And of course a broken heart. There is a photo of my 6-year-old mother sitting at the graveside service in tears. Why would someone take a picture like that? But there it is, tucked away in the Galvin scrapbook. After the second funeral, Mom and her older brother, Jimmy, went separate