Skinny Malink

Well, you all know I have been wanting to lose five pounds for the last decade. Laugh out loud.

I now have an added incentive. Sometimes these things just smack you upside the head. It just happened to be something I was looking over again the other day.

When my Granda Lennon arrived in America in 1925 from Liverpool he was an employee on a ship. He was discharged in New York City. The passenger manifest stated that he was 20 years old. That he stood five feet and seven inches. And that he weighed 3 pounds more than I do at this very moment.

Okay, now either Patrick was one “skinny malink” (an Irish term my mom used for real thin folk) or I have my work cut out for me! I can only hope that when he returned to his homeland of Ireland for good in 1935 that he had filled out a little.

The other thing I can hope for is possible errors at the immigration port. I think we all know there has been more than one mistake made during processing at those busy places. Any Greek person named Brown, formerly known as Bakalakis, can attest to this.

There were a few errors that I noticed.

One was that he was twenty years old. He wasn’t. He was born in 1907. So either he needed to up his age to gain employment, my math stinks or someone typed in twenty while looking the other way.

The other thing listed was that his race was English. My grandfather was an Irishman. He might have been living in Liverpool (like the other Lennons that all trace back to Ireland) when he boarded this ship but he was born in County Louth, Ireland. The document also lists his nationality as British.  I repeat. He was an Irishman.

Anyway, I am thankful for these errors.  Gives me hope that I don’t have that much work ahead of me.

I mentioned my grandfather’s weight and age to my husband. Didn’t even occur to me that they were about the same height. Of course, he had to say, “Yeah, I weighed the same when we first met.”

I wanted to grab the malink by the nape of his skinny little neck.

So, back to the drawing board. I perused the passenger list once again. Of the thirty people discharged that day in the port of New York there was more than one skinny malink.

I think I have my work cut out for me.