The coming of winter

Friday, January 17, 2020

We anticipate snow for tomorrow – not much, at least here, since the temperatures will rise and bring this part of the state mostly rain.

This has been a long week, starting with doctors, jury duty, and a council meeting, and ending with me filing tax documents with my two employers.

Not to feed into the paranoia of the climate change nuts, the weather has been mostly mild – considering we are already month into winter and we’ve seen only a dusting of snow, and a few brief freezes, one which we are to suffer this morning. Last Saturday it was 65 degrees.

This is 2020, an unbelievable moment I never thought I would live to see – the roaring 20s – and a century after my grandfather’s graduation from high school, and the altered world our family took from the high hopes he and our family expected.

I have time now to explore family history, and so get a glimpse into the hopes and dreams of people who I know by name and whose stories I have collected through my mother, grandmother and uncles over the years.

All these people become real when you see their names in print, and their stories told by objective sources, and each has a unique personality that even family lore neglected to supply.

My family reflects the history of this part of the world from the end of the Civil War, but particular, the 20th century, their dreams and aspirations reflecting those of the typical Italian immigrant family, filled with the awe and the flaws we see in many families who survived that time.

This is my way of keeping them all alive since I am the last of the family with a memory of their deeds, or even their connections, and having news clips appears to verify the tales I was told and shape them into real people in my life.

As we plunge into the twenties, I wonder just how my grandfather felt when he did the same a century ago – the big difference being that I am old now and he was young then, and I see the accumulated years and the result of his dreams he could not, and perhaps feel a bit less optimistic about the future.

He could not have foreseen the sudden death of his father, and how that death robbed him of college and his dream of becoming an architect. He could not have predicted the sudden collapse of the stock market just as he and his brother started their business, and how they would have to scrimp and save for more than a decade, coming out of their personal depression only at the death of their mother in the midst of world war.

He became president of a construction company in the late 1940s only to suffer his first of a series of heart attacks, forcing him to change professions – his siblings dying off in a series of similar events until his own death in 1966. His closest brother, Henry died in the early 1970s and his last sister, in 1980.

This cluster of deaths is typical of my family with my grandfather’s children mostly dying within the same decade, leaving me the last with any memory of any of them – and this everlasting sense about the unfairness of life.

I want often to go back in time to see them all again, to appreciate them, to meet those who I never met or met when I was so young, I have no memory of them. I can only resurrect them through news clippings and the stories my family told me and write them down when I can so that when I pass on, they don’t vanish completely.