I don't do that. I don't do the costume thing or the visiting bars thing. For one thing, I was so wiped out last weekend that I was in no mood for anything. For another, I don't go to bars (once in a great while), and parties are foreign to me. I don't know. Not the party type.
Maybe I'm just so practical and serious about things that I can't be impractical and unserious once in a while. It's hard for me to be another person, to pretend. I guess I'm too far gone from childhood. It's been a while, you know.
Instead, I have been thinking of those who have gone on before me. That is part of Samhain, too--honoring their spirits and the lives they lived.
Where can I start? How about Nona? That's all I ever knew her by. She was my dad's aunt (I think), and we visited her when I was young and my family was "up north" to visit family. Just a little old Italian woman, always in a black dress, with a bun in her hair. She only spoke Italian, like my dad's side of the family. What I remember most is that I couldn't understand what she said--and that she always has pizzelles around. A lifelong love was born there--the thin Italian cookies, anise-flavored. We have a pizzelle iron now, and my wife makes them from time to time during winter. When I happily munch on one, my mind flashes back to Nona.
My mom has a different memory of Nona. She says she would always serve up some very potent Italian wine that would throw her sensibilities for a loop. Her side of the family is Danish and doesn't have the wine genes.
Then, there are my dad's mom and dad. Both, of course, are long gone. My grandpa had the whitest hair--like my dad did and like maybe I will have someday. He lived on a small farm and I remember it all very well. The machine shed. The chicken coops and barn. The fields around it--when we visited up north, my dad would often take us for a drive around the fields at night, with the brights on, looking for deer. "Shining" deer, I guess you could call it, although we just looked at them. The deer would just stare at us, with the retinas of their eyes glowing brightly.
I'd always make friends with his dogs. Shep was a collie. Rusty was an Irish setter. My grandpa had a little dog of his own, a rat terrier named Mickey. "Mickey, Mickey, Mickey, Mickey, monkey," he'd say. "Ya-ya, Milwaukee," he'd also say. Where that came from, I wish I knew. My dad and mom lived on the farm after they got married, in a little house nearby, and that was where I lived after they brought me home from the hospital. But when my mom got pregnant again, they knew they couldn't stay, so my dad got a job in Milwaukee, about 225 miles away. It was about 1950, and there were plenty of jobs. Many, many people moved out of the U.P. in the post-war years in search of jobs. Eventually, we moved down there, too.
My grandma: She knew English, but had an accent. She had a squeaky voice. But she was very nice to us. Memories of sitting by the cast-iron stove. Their house didn't haver a phone for a long time. But they had electricity--even a TV! Indoor plumbing? That was years away. I pumped the pump many times, getting pails of water for indoors.
My mom's parents lived about a mile or two away. My grandpa was as tall as my grandma was short. He was a quiet man who worked for the railroad and smoked a pipe a lot. He is the one who I heard coughing downstairs at night when we would visit--that's where we usually stayed. My mom likes to tell the story of me and him when I was about one. He had gotten me a cookie, and I was enjoying it on the floor while he read his paper and smoked his pipe. When the cookie was gone, I'd pull on his pants leg. He'd look down at me. I raised up my hands at him, for him to pick me up. He did. Then I pointed towards the kitchen--more specifically, to the cookie jar. He carried me there, I'd reach down and get another cookie. He'd carry me back, and the whole cycle would start over.
My grandma was short and had the funniest kind of sneeze. It was like ah-AH-HAAAAH! They would come down to Milwaukee (the suburbs) to spend the worst of the winter months with us--winters aren't so hard in Milwaukee. It was there that she suffered her stroke, right around New Year's. She got to go back home in March but had another stroke within days and died. One of my first funerals. My grandpa died about two years later. The smoking caught up with him, you might say. You might also say he didn't really want to go on much longer without her.
The next one on the list is my dad. He died about 10 years ago. Cancer. I drove him and my mom about 100 miles for radiation and chemo a number of times. Really, it took just a few months before he was gone. He was a quiet man who had his frustrations with life and health--he worked at a factory and had back problems that they treated with an operation that didn't work as planned. Later, they stopped doing that operation.
He was also shy. Maybe that's something else I inherited. Especially when he was young--he met my mom when he offered her a ride--she didn't have a car and was walking to a girlfriend's place in town. He gave her rides regularly for several months before asking her out for the first time. They had to go through a lot of shit when they decided to get married. He was Catholic, and she was Lutheran, and mixed marriages back then were very rare. Damn religions messing up people's lives. The priest told his family that nobody should attend the wedding. And, being the obedient Catholics that they were, none of them did.
The last on this list is my brother. He was about 15 months younger than me. He loved cars and, later, motorcycles. It seemed that everything in life let him down. He entered the Army for a while and eventually was stationed in England, but it didn't work out. Then he got a job at Harley-Davidson's plant in Milwaukee--but that was at a time when Harley was going through a bad time (the AMF era) with bad cycles, and he said the other workers on the line did sloppy work on the machines they were working on. He was terribly disillusioned by that.
He was obviously depressed. He was the best man at our wedding and godfather for our oldest son. He eventually got a job at a service station/garage northwest of Milwaukee. I tried to get him to move up north, where we lived. He liked to fish, and my dad liked to fish. He also liked the open country. I tried. Maybe I should have tried harder. For on an October night, he must have had one too many disappointments. He got in his car behind the garage and had a few drinks and put some music on his eight-track. And then he attached a hose to the exhaust pipe, and ...
That's about 21 years ago now. Ever since then, I've known that I would be one of the last of my family. Once my mom passes on, it will be, well, just me. I have an uncle here and an aunt there. I have a few cousins who I see once in a great while. But really, there's just my mom and me and my wife and the two boys, who have both grown and moved out of home.
That's my world. That's my universe. Not at all overcrowded. Plenty of vacancy signs. Does that explain why I get lonely quite easily? You know, everyone else seems to have all kinds of family. My wife was one of eight, for instance. I was one of two. Now, one of one. Unique.
I don't mind being out of the ordinary. But not this way. Usually it doesn't bother me. I keep pretty busy with this and that. But once in a while ... I get to missing them.
Anyway ... that's part of the story of how I got from there to here. I have a lot of wonderful memories of the wonderful people who helped me along the way. There have been many good memories. And more to come! Who knows where this road will lead?
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