“You’re beginning something pretty important, and it will be forever.”
On this day in 1954, actor Denzel Washington, professional wrestler Lanny Poffo, and magazine editor and morning news anchor Gayle King, were born -- as was yours truly. Shortly after seven in the morning, at Saint Ann's Infant and Maternity Home on Cleveland's east side, I came into the world. About two weeks later, already settled into the second floor of a modest duplex apartment, I received my first letter.
Saint Susanna Rectory
500 Reading Road
Mason, Ohio
January 8, 1955
Master David Lawrence Alexander
875 Helmsdale Road
Cleveland, Ohio
Dear Davie,
Before this letter arrives, you will have been welcomed many times. I wish to add my voice to the chorus of welcome however.
You're beginning something pretty important, and it will be forever. You've got a big job to do, and that is to save your immortal soul that the Good God has given you. Dad and mother will help you in that, and will consider it their most important duty and privilege, which of course, it is.
But God will likely expect more then usual from you. You see, you have very good stuff in you, and that makes His investment pretty heavy and serious. So you'll have to do more than most others because of your rich endowment.
But despite the fact that you mommie and pop are pretty high class folks, even they have their shortcomings. Take dad for instance. Somehow or other, dads have a way of wishing their sons were big guys before they are. And so they treat them kinda rough some times. If he gets to throwing you up in the air and catching you, just to make you rough, you better explain to him that you do not approve. The first way to do that is to cry real loud. Sometimes that does the trick; but not always. Then you have to use stronger measures. For instance, sometime when he has a nice clean shirt on, and he gets a bit rough, just throw up on that nice clean shirt. That, Davie, will do it! If even that doesn't cure him, I guess you'll have to write me for further suggestions.
And now, Davie, if there is any time that I can help you to straighten out either dad or mom, just drop me a line, and I'll be glad to do what I can for you. And be sure to give them my best regards, and congratulations too on your safe arrival.
Faithfully yours,
[Father] Charles J Murphy
I still have the letter somewhere, amidst a host of memorabilia, papers, magazines, pamphlets, photographs -- things that seem worthless to anyone but whomever collected them. They are the things that trigger the memories, that tell the story, somewhere between the lines that are their pages, and the dust that collects thereupon.
My Favorite Year
Life has its own challenges at the age of sixty and beyond. One is past the point of building a life, and the focus is on how to spend its last years gracefully. This year, at the age of sixty-two, I am officially eligible to collect Social Security. However, I'd have to quit working full time in order to do that, and my benefits would be reduced.
But there will be no retirement at the end of this year. In fact, 2016 has probably been the best year of my career. After more than thirty years as a professional graphic designer, I made the decision seven years ago to switch to videography. One condition was to also serve as a photographer. Another was to risk failure, but that was less certain than the risk of mediocrity. Three and a half years ago, I was officially reclassified, from being a "Visual Information Specialist GS-1084" to an "Audiovisual Production Specialist GS-1071." And with the most recent evaluation, I went beyond a "Satisfactory" rating of "3" to a "Highly Satisfactory" rating of "4" on a five-point scale. When I was in college, I wanted my graphic design career to specialize in multimedia. The only problem was, the thing that I wanted to do hadn't even been invented yet. The merger of art and technology took nearly four decades for me. Far from slouching into obsolescence, I am at the very height of my career. A prediction of two years ago is continuing into fruition.
While the year has seen discoveries, and rediscoveries, there were sacrifices that had to be made, disappointments endured. They will be the subject of a piece to be released as the year draws to a close.
“You’re beginning something pretty important, and it will be forever.”
On this day in 1954, actor Denzel Washington, professional wrestler Lanny Poffo, and magazine editor and morning news anchor Gayle King, were born -- as was yours truly. Shortly after seven in the morning, at Saint Ann's Infant and Maternity Home on Cleveland's east side, I came into the world. About two weeks later, already settled into the second floor of a modest duplex apartment, I received my first letter.
Saint Susanna Rectory
500 Reading Road
Mason, Ohio
January 8, 1955
Master David Lawrence Alexander
875 Helmsdale Road
Cleveland, Ohio
Dear Davie,
Before this letter arrives, you will have been welcomed many times. I wish to add my voice to the chorus of welcome however.
You're beginning something pretty important, and it will be forever. You've got a big job to do, and that is to save your immortal soul that the Good God has given you. Dad and mother will help you in that, and will consider it their most important duty and privilege, which of course, it is.
But God will likely expect more then usual from you. You see, you have very good stuff in you, and that makes His investment pretty heavy and serious. So you'll have to do more than most others because of your rich endowment.
But despite the fact that you mommie and pop are pretty high class folks, even they have their shortcomings. Take dad for instance. Somehow or other, dads have a way of wishing their sons were big guys before they are. And so they treat them kinda rough some times. If he gets to throwing you up in the air and catching you, just to make you rough, you better explain to him that you do not approve. The first way to do that is to cry real loud. Sometimes that does the trick; but not always. Then you have to use stronger measures. For instance, sometime when he has a nice clean shirt on, and he gets a bit rough, just throw up on that nice clean shirt. That, Davie, will do it! If even that doesn't cure him, I guess you'll have to write me for further suggestions.
And now, Davie, if there is any time that I can help you to straighten out either dad or mom, just drop me a line, and I'll be glad to do what I can for you. And be sure to give them my best regards, and congratulations too on your safe arrival.
Faithfully yours,
[Father] Charles J Murphy
Sixty is the new forty.
Parade magazine recently broke the big news of a generation, that life really begins, not at forty, but at the age that everybody with an unpublished thought claims only seems like forty. Or something. We examine it more closely as we read the signs of The Times. For example, there's the one in New York ...
I remember turning forty. I had been divorced two years earlier, and was only then getting used to the solitary life on my own terms again. I wouldn't return to that era even if it did buy me another twenty years on this earth below. The office environment had become thoroughly dysfunctional, my supervising official was an alcoholic and a sadist who made my life absolutely miserable, and who fooled everyone with a title (rather easily, I'm sorry to say) into thinking nothing was amiss. They would learn differently only five years later, and my view of management was forever changed (the details of which will find a proud place in my memoirs, or my retirement luncheon, whichever comes first).
I remember turning fifty. Sal and I were sitting in an Irish bar in Cincinnati. We were in town for her to meet my family. My life, for the first time in what seemed like … well, ever, was more or less where I wanted it to be. And where I was, was a helluva long way from forty.
I remember turning sixty. Or at least I will. But how, exactly?
It is when reading the New York Times piece, that part of you wants to say, oh, cry me a river already! And then you remember that you're actually talking to yourself. Yes, "my generation, born between 1946 and 1964," really didn't want to end up like our parents; old, in the sense of being "old-fashioned," confined to the rocking chair and decrying "these kids today." But you really can't help it, because "these kids today" really are a pain in the ass. You see it in the workplace. Not only do they not show much respect to their elders, but they really don't see the point of it. They are younger, brighter, prettier, more enlightened, and in many cases, they outrank you. What more could you ask of a generation?
At the place where I work, I am older than most of the people I see in the office, in the hallways, in meetings. The exceptions are almost all of Senior Executive rank, which I try not to think about, since over the years, people who couldn't organize a sock drawer have assured me that I have no future in management (and looking at them, I can see why). I have a son who's older than one political appointee or another, any one of whom could very well feel obliged to explain to me how the world works. It doesn't actually happen to me personally, but I know it happens to others. Alas, many of the Enlightened Ones will be replaced in two years, by those who appear even younger, but who are not, because I got older.
To reach sixty is to know that your own mortality is just around the corner. People get heart attacks at this age. Even the annual issue of Esquire magazine, the one devoted to maturing through the decades of life, concedes that after your fifties, "you're on your own." For me, going back to "the Latin Mass" was a sign of getting on in years, when after seeing "folk Masses" consisting mostly of aging adolescents trying to hang on to the unattainable, one is even less tolerant of anything with the appearance of novelty. Who wants to remember, or be remembered for, the things that pass like leaves in the wind?
Finally, and as can be discerned from the above, to reach sixty is to no longer care so much what others think of you, secure in the knowledge that, even if you had to, the die that is you has been pretty well cast by this point, and the world is going to have to live with it, if only for a little while longer.
The above being said, one can enter the later passages of life gracefully. Witness a certain Phyllis Tucker-Saunders of Newark, New York, for whom time will not slow her down. And there are so many others, who can look in the mirror and say, well, at least I still have my health. I can say that as well, up to a point. I have a herniated disc that got a good dose of Cortizone back in 2011, and there is the occasional flare-up of arthritis in my knees. I cannot walk for great distances without a cane, and even a minor back injury prevents me from being able to stand on a moving bus. So I have a cane with me, and I have to sit down.
And I'll still take to the hills around Mount Rainier when I tour the northwest. It's harder now than a decade ago. Still ...
On the other hand, people keep telling me (and without any prompting) that I really don't look sixty. Sal assures me of the same thing -- with my hat on.
The Road Not Taken -- Yet
It is the point in life when the light at the end of the tunnel that is retirement looms ever larger. They tell you to start planning for the inevitable, and so I shall. The soonest I would ever retire from the government is the end of 2020, when I will have just turned sixty-six. But even then, I imagine I will continue working for several more years.
And why wouldn't I?
When I was in college studying graphic design, I wanted to pursue an academic minor in multimedia. But even though I learned to use simple video equipment, and made a couple of animation films, what I really wanted to do with my life hadn't been invented yet. In the coming year, I will return to my studies in web design and development. I also found the sort of curriculum that is suited for my needs, not to mention my budget. Between that and a growing aptitude in video production, and I can finally say I have reached that goal of forty years ago, the marriage of art and technology. My next few years in my evolving profession could very well be my finest. I was always a late bloomer anyway.
And so it was, that after the Latin Mass today, for which I was the Master of Ceremonies, the sacristan dragged me to the rectory basement to help her bring my present upstairs. I tried really hard to act surprised by what I found as a turned the corner, really I did.
And so it goes, turning yet another corner, on to the next decade.
It was George Bernard Shaw (or Oscar Wilde, depending on who you ask) who once said that “England and America are two countries separated by a common language.” This may be true enough even among Americans. Our regional accents are the result of more than two centuries of settlement and immigration, where the primary influences were of one people or another from the "old country," whichever country that was for them, and in whichever part of America they settled.
If we want someone else to repeat something we didn't quite make out, we would say "Come again?" or "I'm sorry?" or "Say what???" In the southwestern part of Ohio where I grew up, along the edge of the "German triangle" (the corners more or less being Saint Louis, Chicago, and Cincinnati), the response of "Bitte?" became "Please?" I don't believe I ever heard it anywhere else. I lost that quirk of speech within a few years of moving to DC. Saying "eye-ther" instead of "eee-ther," and/or "nye-ther" instead of "nee-ther" took a bit longer. I still remember when I was but a little “schnickelfritz” (a term of endearment that somewhat literally translates as "mischievous boy," but is equivalent to "little rascal") and hearing some of my Dad's aunts or uncles speaking with a slight guttural sound to their voice. This would have been common to the French accent as spoken by their grandparents, who mostly came from the Rhineland region of Alsace-Lorraine. When I addressed him, I'd call him "Dad" with a slight "y" tone to the vowel, to sound just a little like "Dayud," whereas my East-Coast-born-and-bred son just calls me plain old "Dad" (when he isn't accidentally calling me "Dude").
Even now, whenever I return to "Cincinnatuh," I start speaking like a native within a couple of days. And yet, even in an era of constant migration, where the suburban flight has peaked, and people are moving back into the cities (as in an article and illustration from Business Insider), New Englanders still speak of having to "pahk the ka" before going into the store. And way down South, they still make "shoo-fly pie" and say "y'all," except in urbane, sophisticated oases like Atlanta.
What a country! Let's hope we can still get along without screwing things up.
Thirty-five years ago today, I was awarded my degree as a Bachelor of Science in Design from the University of Cincinnati. Looking back on that evening, I can still remember ... how little there was to remember.
I had made a decision during my junior year, in lieu of any prospect of an academic minor in multimedia, to enroll in two film classes. One was a "Film Design" class in my own graphic design department, the other was an "Introduction to Film Production" course taught by the fine arts department. In the former, I did an animation in Super 8 format, while the latter was more ambitious, requiring a one-minute live action or animation piece in 16mm. I got an A in the fine arts class, but the sum total of workload was more than I could handle, and my academic advisor allowed me to take an incomplete with two of my courses. The price of the department's indulgence came a year later, when I did not graduate with the other twenty-six students in my graphic design class, but had to finish during the summer quarter.
We assembled on that August night in the basketball arena on campus. There was the usual jocularity amongst the tasseled masses, of course, to listen to a keynote speaker whose name I forget to this day. (My already-departed classmates were treated in the spring to the "boy mayor" of Cincinnati, one Jerry Springer. I met him once. He was just as obnoxious back then.) At the end of the proceedings, we were to line up and receive our degrees. It was then that the students from the College of Design, Architecture, and Art, were directed the other way, to the back of the room, where a folding table was being hastily assembled for the dean of our college, who arrived with an assistant, each of them carrying a cardboard box. Our names were called, and we received our "sheepskins" in about as unceremonious a fashion as one could imagine.
When it was over (such as it was), I met my brother Steve and sister Mary, and we headed uptown to Pleasant Ridge, to my Aunt Marge and Uncle Bill's place on Grand Vista Avenue. Their house was just down the street from where a scene from "Rain Man" was shot in 1988 starring Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman -- yeah that's it in the picture -- but that's another story. Anyway, we arrived at the porch, and Mom came out. That's when ...
She hugged me and gave me a kiss on the cheek.
Now, Mom's parents were not much with familial affection, especially Grandpa, not because they were cold, but it was just their way. It tended to rub off on Mom. In fact, Dad tended to be more affectionate towards us kids than Mom. The thing is, she had never done that before that I could remember, and I don't know what I did to make her start then and there.
It certainly wasn't relief that the expense of college was over. I paid half my way through college through my internships, and Dad financed the other half. While other kids went to Florida on spring break, I spent my breaks doing production work for a free-lancer named Tom Newsome. He taught me a lot that I didn't learn in school. I also got to be a teaching assistant that summer, in lieu of Independent Study. I learned a lot there too, like how being a teaching assistant wasn't all it was cracked up to be. I put my plans for graduate school aside.
And with that, the tradition of an anticlimactic college graduation was begun, one continued by my son Paul earlier this year, when he graduated fere cum laude from the über-prestigious Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta, with a 3.4 grade point average. Naturally, he carried the tradition a step farther than me. he didn't bother showing up. (My GPA was 3.0, by the way. Don't ask.)
At the end of the day, I might have been better off considering the experience I gained from both the delay, and the circumstances that caused it. I was aspiring to a specialty that was yet to be invented, one that I only could conceive in vague terms, and would only be realized with the advent of the personal computer, the graphical user interface of the Macintosh, and the advent of the internet. With a bit more nerve, I could have been Nick Selby before there was a Nick Selby.
Whenever I walk to Suffern
along the Erie track
I go by a poor old farmhouse
with its shingles broken and black.
I suppose I've passed it a hundred times,
but I always stop for a minute
And look at the house, the tragic house,
the house with nobody in it.
The place now known as Milford, Ohio, has been someone's home for thousands of years.
During the time of Christ, it was occupied by the mound builders of the Adena people. By the end of the first millennium, it was home to a settlement of the Hopewell Nation, a once-great empire that flourished along the Ohio and mid-Mississippi River valleys. By the time of the European incursion, the nations of "the Woodland period" were forgotten, and the area had already long been the hunting ground of the Miamis. By the dawn of the twentieth century, rows of corn covered the fields east of a village first settled in 1806, carved out of a parcel awarded to a Revolutionary War officer.
John Nancarrow had never personally set foot on the land ... but, that's another story.
By the mid-1950s, the rural expanse to the east of Milford would become the site of homes to families of men, most of whom were just out of the Service. With its developers only aware enough of the land's prehistory to use it as a marketing device, a development known as Indian Knolls was built on the hill overlooking the cornfield below, which had already been developed as Clertoma Village. The streets of both developments were all named for the indigenous nations of the continent long vanquished by the white man -- Choctaw Lane, Mohawk Trail, Powhatton Drive, and so on. The houses were all virtually identical cookie-cutter starter homes, distinguished by exterior finish, but all of the same floor plan, with three bedrooms, one bath, a tiny kitchen, and a separate dining area, all totaling about 850 square feet, not counting the unfinished basement. It was typical of many such communities based on the model that was Levittown, New York. But near a small town in southwestern Ohio, and for only $15,000, a piece of the American dream could belong to a man with a decent living wage, and a family on the way.
I never have seen a haunted house,
but I hear there are such things;
That they hold the talk of spirits,
their mirth and sorrowings.
I know this house isn't haunted,
and I wish it were, I do;
For it wouldn't be so lonely
if it had a ghost or two.
In the summer of 1956, one such young couple with a toddling son, and a daughter as a babe in arms, bought a piece of that dream at 29 Winnebago Drive, and life began from there.
To those who lived in the old and established part of the town, the new development was known pejoratively as "Crackerbox Village." What manner of progress what this? Who were these upstarts, tearing down their quaint drive-in movie theater, replacing it with something called "Rink's Bargain City"? Emerging from the surroundings were not just one, but two new shopping centers, each with something called a "supermarket." It occurred to those firmly planted, that the days of the old A%P store downtown were numbered. Over time, the ancien regime came to accept the inevitable, but for years after it came, they resented this crass intrusion on the picture-postcard setting their new neighbors called home.
I can tell you my very earliest memory in detail. It was a cloudy Saturday, perhaps in the spring. I was about two or three years old. I was walking from the steps of the back porch towards the driveway. My father was washing the car, a muted lime green 1953 Ford sedan. I remember little else of that day, but my consciousness would appear to begin at that moment. I wonder where it was before. But in the months, in the years that followed, many other families with children arrived. The streets, the front yards, and the places in between were their domain. Summer days found them playing baseball in the street, Halloween nights were teeming with hundreds of them in costume, and the Christmas season was ablaze with a wonderland of multi-colored splendor. Everyone knew their neighbors, even those who went each their own way.
It was about 1964. I was playing in the yard with other kids -- so many other kids there were back then -- at a house down the street from mine. The husband and father of the house was a Southern Baptist minister. I didn't give such things very much thought, which is why I was surprised to see his name listed on the mailbox near the front door as: "Rev and Mrs Firsten Lastname." My reaction was a natural one for a precocious little boy, I suppose: "Hey, Beanie, this says your dad's a priest. I didn't know your dad was a priest. How can he be a priest if he's ..." Suddenly the front door opened, and an insistent lady of the house emerged: "He's not a priest, he's a minister, and he's just as important as your priest!" Boom! The door slammed shut, and that was that. Hey, I was nine-and-a-half years old. What the hell did I know about anything? This was the early 1960s, and the times were still relatively innocent. But tensions derived from cultural differences, and the co-existence in the face of the melting pot that was our little world, were still lurking in the dark corners. Children learned to put aside the differences that made adults uncomfortable. America elected a Catholic president, his cohorts in the faith could not be seen proselytizing through the children, and the Freemasons who lived among them could not be seen resenting these self-assured "Catlickers." Eventually these differences subsided, or at least were buried in polite company.
This house on the road to Suffern
needs a dozen panes of glass,
And somebody ought to weed the walk
and take a scythe to the grass.
It needs new paint and shingles,
and the vines should be trimmed and tied;
But what it needs the most of all
is some people living inside.
By the end of the 1960s, families grew in size, or in expectations, or both, and were leaving behind their humble abodes, with grand visions of four-bedroom split-levels, formal dining rooms, and half-acre lawns gracing the hillside out beyond the village limits. The years came and went, children came of age and sought their fortunes, older couples passed on to Florida, or passed from this life. The trees grew taller, some homes added garages, patios, and other extensions. "Crackerbox Village" was taking on a character of its own. One family, namely the Reverend and his wife and children, moved from the house down the street to the house next door. There were summer nights before the days of central air conditioning, when the windows in our bedrooms were left open to the screens and the cool breezes. My brother and I had the little room at the end of the hall. My bed was near the door. Mom and Dad would want it shut, but I wanted it open at a 45-degree angle, enough to use the full-length mirror to see the goings-on at the other end. As I drifted off to sleep, I could hear the Reverend and his family and friends, gathering around the upright piano, and singing hymns from the Old Baptist Hymnal.
Meanwhile, with each of us ending our grade school years, our parents eschewed the free education at the public high school at the edge of town, for a Catholic high school in an upper-class neighborhood closer to the city. It was a ride on a public school bus ten miles away, but it may as well have been ten thousand miles, as the kids from Milford brushed off the taunting of would-be city-bred sophisticates living near the school, about being a bunch of hicks from a small town. It got old after four years. Fortunately, it was over by then. Time went on, and the place we called home remained.
It was September of 1977. I was interning at a public television station in West Virginia when I got the call from Dad. He had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis only seven years earlier. Procter and Gamble gave him the consideration worthy of a loyal and dedicated company man, transferring him to a less stressful position away from the headquarters building, to the local district sales office. He had been working half-days for several months by now, but it only delayed the inevitable. Come that Friday, on his fifty-second birthday, he would leave on full and permanent disability. I remember Mom's first reaction, that of Dad being in the way all the time. But while Dad ruled the roost, Mom ruled the rooster, and one of the signs of a successful marriage is the ability to renegotiate what one might call "the balance of power" when fortunes change. And so, in many respects, Mom became the "man of the house," taking a more visible role in certain decisions, and being the "handy man" when things needed fixing. Growing up on a farm, pitching hay and driving a tractor by the time she was twelve, all this had prepared her for this role.
If I had a lot of money
and all my debts were paid
I'd put a gang of men to work
with brush and saw and spade.
I'd buy that place and fix it up
the way it used to be
And I'd find some people who wanted a home
and give it to them free.
By the end of 1980, I left the town where I was "bread and buttered," not for the nearest city, but for one far away. Destiny led me on a very different path from the other three siblings, as I left the city I knew, the town outside of that city, and the house we lived in, for another city. I would return once or twice a year. It seems foolish to imagine it now, but I honestly expected things to stay just as they were when I left. Life doesn't work that way, and those we leave behind are no exception. Our parents get older, our siblings move on, our friends drift away, or we make new ones upon returning. After my marriage fell apart in 1990, I would return more often. I went from annual visits to coming home three or four times a year. Making a social life of my own in Washington proved a challenge, as I found the city to be brimming with self-important people who couldn't give you the time of day without checking their schedules. Cincinnati gave me solace, an escape, the illusion that all would be well without much suffering. I would arrive at the house, and within an hour, the phone would ring, and Mom would hear a woman's voice. It was for me. It always was. I went dancing, to parties, to nightclubs. I made new friends introduced to me by old ones. It went on and on.
At the 1990s came to a close, it was clear that the house we lived in would not accommodate a man becoming increasingly disabled. Getting through the hallways on a wheelchair, going to the bathroom, taking a shower, all proved more difficult. Mom and Dad considered their options, including moving to another house that was better equipped. The chapter that was ours on Winnebago Drive would have come to an end, but not for the decision to subject the house to an extensive renovation. While they moved to a two-bedroom apartment nearby, the kitchen, dining, and back patio areas were completely transformed. A master bedroom with a wheelchair-accessible full bathroom were added. In the process, Mom got the dream kitchen she never imagined she could ever have. The wall that separated one of the bedrooms from the living room was torn down, making way for a larger "great room" which combined a living and formal dining area. After more than a year, and repeated delays, Mom and Dad moved back in.
All was reasonably well for a few years, until January of 2001, when Mom woke up one morning and had a minor stroke. As she was in the hospital, however briefly, the four of us considered what was once an unlikely possibility, that Mom could meet her demise before Dad. Being independent, and having Mom take care of Dad at home, even with some assistance from the family, was beginning to take its toll.
It was then that my own relationship with the house changed. I was coming less often. After more than twenty years away, I was finally making a life for myself back east. It was just as well. Even if I were to stay at the unaffected end of the house, with my own bed and bathroom, it was nonetheless considered likely that I would be in the way. I could no longer stay at the house we lived in. In fact, if I came to visit, I had to call ahead.
Yes, you read it right. I had to call ahead to visit my own parents.
Now, a new house standing empty,
with staring window and door,
Looks idle, perhaps, and foolish,
like a hat on its block in the store.
But there's nothing mournful about it;
it cannot be sad and lone
For the lack of something within it
that it has never known.
That took a while to sink in. My siblings were very matter-of-fact about it, of course. They lived with it every day, and could not understand how one of their own who did not, would react any differently. It's one of those things that, if you have to explain it, you can't, so I didn't. But in fairness, one or the other did open their home to me whenever I was there. Meanwhile, as a geriatric nurse, Mary could advise them on their care, and accompany them to the doctor. Steve had charge of their financial and other affairs, and eventually took over the upkeep of the house, with the assistance of the grandsons. Pat had a very promising career as an administrative assistant to the general manager of a regional transit authority, when she was discovered to have a rare form of cancer, one that only four doctors in the entire country could treat. Fortunately, one of them was in Cincinnati, and she beat the odds. But it was the catalyst for considerable soul searching, and with her husband as a successful sales representative, she gave up a career to look after Mom and Dad. At first, she would come in the morning a couple of times a week to help Mom with Dad's "activities of daily living." As the years went on, she was driving across town at least five times a week. Dad's slow deterioration was being joined by Mom's, as both were slowly falling apart, each in their own way.
Then in September of 2011, it happened. Mom started down the basement stairs, lost her balance, and fell to the bottom. Bleeding from a cut to the head, and a broken neck, she crawled up the stairs to the telephone and dialed 911, while Dad sat helpless in his Lazy-boy. She was taken to the hospital, and into intensive care, while Dad was looked after full time. Mom had to go into rehabilitation, and the family could not care for both in separate locations. A retirement community with a skilled nursing wing was found north of the city, and Mom and Dad were together again. But in the year prior to the accident, it was clear that the current arrangement was coming apart at the seams. Steve would "pop in" every evening after work, and qualified in-home care was difficult to find, and even more difficult to oversee, especially with a woman more accustomed by this time to giving orders than in taking them.
The long goodbye for our father was also coming to a head. I would be in Washington for three weeks, and hurry home for one. I stayed alone in the house we lived in. I awoke at 6 in the morning, went to gym for an hour, and occasionally visited friends. But social calls were few and far between. Most of the time, I was visiting with family. I would go to Skyline Chili for the occasional dose of "comfort food," and the fellowship among strangers that I forgot how much I missed. Old neighbors, old classmates living nearby, all provided a revisiting with my past, a time that time forgot. I would retire at nearly midnight listening to Chopin's Nocturnes, only to be up again six hours later to the sounds of Mozart.
I was also busy making preparations for a funeral Mass. I knew what Dad would have wanted, and I knew how to bring my influence to bear in getting it. Thankfully, the parish was very accommodating to our wishes. Guidelines from the parish were reviewed by the family, and an assessment was presented to the siblings as part of the proposal. In the end, as with everything, there was consensus.
But a house that has done what a house should do,
a house that has sheltered life,
That has put its loving wooden arms
around a man and his wife,
A house that has echoed a baby's laugh
and held up his stumbling feet,
Is the saddest sight, when it's left alone,
that ever your eyes could meet.
Then, in February, the call came from Steve. Dad was leaving sooner rather than later, and how quickly could I get there? Twenty-four hours, I told him. I arrived on a Tuesday. By Friday evening, Dad stopped taking water. By the evening of Monday, I got the call at the house; it was time. As all were present, and Dad was taking his last desperate breaths, I laid my hand on his forehead, and said the ancient commendation for the dying, the Proficiscere: “Go forth, O Christian soul, out of this world, in the Name of God the Father almighty, Who created you; in the Name of Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God, Who suffered for you; in the Name of the Holy Ghost, Who sanctified you, in the name of the holy and glorious Mary, Virgin and Mother of God; in the name of the angels, archangels, thrones and dominions, cherubim and seraphim; in the name of the patriarchs and prophets, of the holy apostles and evangelists, of the holy martyrs, confessors, monks and hermits, of the holy virgins, and of all the saints of God; may your place be this day in peace, and your abode in Holy Sion ...” There was no movement for a few minutes. I checked his pulse. While waiting for the nurse to confirm what we all knew, I continued: “Subvenite, Sancti Dei, occurrite, Angeli Domini, Suscipientes animan ejus ...”
We could not keep Mom in the house we lived in. No amount of live-in home care would endure her cantankerous nature, and the charge over her own domain. The day after Dad was laid to rest, we moved Mom from the skilled nursing wing into her new one-bedroom apartment on the other side of the complex. She cried when she walked in, seeing the furniture in what seemed as a transplanting of her own abode to another, more accessible place. There were activities during the day, three meals prepared in the dining room, and Mass on Saturday night. Pat or another family member visited her every day. As the months went by, and she awoke "with the chickens" to do her crossword puzzles in the morning paper as she had done for years, she became accustomed to her new surroundings. The question then became, what to do with the house we lived in.
In the wake of Dad's passing, friends and neighbors had come to call. One of them was the man whom we once knew in childhood as "Beanie," the preacher's son, whose father lived next door. His mother had passed away only recently, and his father was getting on in years. For the young man and his wife to live in the same house with him was becoming a challenge. As I gave them a tour of the house, especially the addition in the back, their interest was piqued. And now, several months later, they approached Steve with a proposal.
I would come to stay at the house when I was there; for Father's Day, for the sixtieth wedding anniversary in June, for Mom's first Christmas without Dad. Eventually the cable television was disconnected, and so was the wireless connection. I had to bring the latter on my own, in the form of my iPhone. There was nearly sixty years worth of memories to go through over the past year, nestled in the many corners of the house we lived in. Mom was an incurable packrat, the destination of first and last resort for any school or Scouting project. Everything was meticulously organized, to the point that belied just how much of it there really was. I have to give credit to Steve; for a guy very much "in charge" of things, he managed the process with remarkable collegiality. With a complete inventory of furniture, books, personal records, photographs, and the like, there was consensus all around, and a desire that each of us achieve our satisfaction without the expense of another.
Among other things, I got the silverware, and my paternal grandmother's old clock, now being restored to its former glory.
So whenever I go to Suffern
along the Erie track
I never go by the empty house
without stopping and looking back,
Yet it hurts me to look at the crumbling roof
and the shutters fallen apart,
For I can't help thinking the poor old house
is a house with a broken heart.
There were three visits to Milford in as many months; three round trips of a thousand miles each, as if to say in stages the long goodbye to the town I left behind so many years ago, but which never left me. I drive through its streets, I visit the places I frequented. My conscious mind sees them as they are now. And yet, there is a land of shadows, one in which I see them as I did growing up. Each house cannot be remembered by who lives there now, but who lived there then. It could never belong to those of the present, not in this place that I visit, a place ever present, but never to be seen again.
It was late last month, on a Saturday morning, that I gathered what I could into my 2005 Scion XB, and prepared for the nine-hour journey back to what was now the only home I could call by that name. On this date, after nearly fifty-seven years, with the deal having been signed, sealed, and delivered, the house we lived in at 29 Winnebago Drive is now the home of the Reverend Daryl Poe, pastor of New Harmony Baptist Church, and his devoted wife Jacqueline. Daryl had a long and distinguished career in law enforcement, moving from one assignment to another across the Buckeye State over the years -- a police department here, a sheriff's department there -- before answering the call to follow in his father's footsteps. And so, those who are of the Southern Baptist tradition have a new home, as does the man who serves them. But however beloved it was by those who did so before, however much it is by those who do so now, it is, at the end of the day, not really a home to either.
No, there is another ...
“Let not your hearts be troubled; believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And when I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.” (John 14:1-3)
Life goes on, at the house we lived in.
“The House with Nobody in It” was originally published in Trees and Other Poems, a collection of Joyce Kilmer, by the George H Doran Company, New York City, in 1914.
.
For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect; but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away. (1Cor 13:9-10)
I remember what it was like as a boy, starting right about the fifth or sixth grade. There were all the usual changes, to the body, to emotions, and so on. The metamorphosis known as puberty was underway. It was the height of the "Carnaby Street" look, the transition from mods and rockers of the "British invasion," to the Haight-Asbury look of "California Dreamin'" (a nefarious influence from which my family was safely insulated, but that's another story). But beyond the whims of fashion, our age group formed a subset of its own, one that was comfortable neither with children nor adults.
When did adulthood happen? When adolescence ended. In fact, by the time I was nineteen, my maternal cousins divided into two groups at family reunions. There were the ones my age who were already married or at least hooked up (and no, I wasn't), and the pre-teens who thought I was already over the hill and wanted nothing to do with me. That was when I heard a voice say, today you are a man, my son.
I responded, to hell with all this, and didn't return to family reunions for seven years.
But there was an upside. I discovered that, when it came to the company we keep, and the friends we make, age is irrelevant in real life. That has never changed. The generation that came after me is another story.
When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways. (1Cor 13:11)
There have been plenty of magazine and newspaper articles, to say nothing of their equivalents online, about the prolonging of adolescence. It is more than college graduates moving back in with their parents because they can't find a job. There is also an alleged trend of men playing video games well into their twenties instead of trying to meet women, or some such thing.
If you review the Catholic book market this year, you will find books coming out written by single women, on trying to find a man, on being content with the single life while not admitting you're trying to find a man, on what to do with a man once you find him, and so on. There are no such books for men. Maybe we're too busy playing video games to read books. (Actually, it's something else, another subject for another day.) In my parish work, I meet many young men and women well into their twenties. It seems the traditional form of the Roman Mass is very popular with them. (Who knew?) Sometimes when I approach them for conversation, especially if it's a mixed crowd, they will, and only for a moment, give me that look, the same look they would give were they still in junior high. They could be married. One of them could have a babe in arms. It wouldn't matter. Their first instinct is hardwired into their DNA: I'm one of ... THEM.
We of the "baby boomer" generation grew up not wanting to be like our parents. We were going to be so open and honest about sex. We raised a generation of children who don't want to be like us, whose parents would have rather the schools talk to them about sex. They want to grow up. They want to stay where they are. They want to be in their mid-twenties forever, when life is all about new discoveries, new transitions, and no parents telling them what to do, unless they have to move back in with them.
For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood. (1Cor 13:12)
There is so much I want to tell them when they give me that look. Then again, maybe I should just ask them ...
“What the hell are you looking at?”
... and they might have an answer.
IMAGE ABOVE: At a farmhouse in Brown County, Ohio, in the summer of 1973. The author is at the bottom row, second from the right. From the Rosselot Family Archives.
“You’re beginning something pretty important, and it will be forever.”
