I began the blog Legacy of a Courtly Curmudgeon, in honor of my dad, because I realized that, having had no children myself, I was the end of his family line. While I believe in immortality, the kind with God in heaven, there remains a very human bound part of me who would like there to have been some evidence of my dad's existence here, on this earth. And of my mother. So that was the idea behind that blog. Now, because of my computer awkwardness, I am going to merge it with this one, out of necessity--to house a memory of them on the internet, in whatever form into which it will evolve.
One of my undeveloped interests since my career's cessation has been archiving. Naturally, there are the well known ones, like the Library of Congress, or one of the many big libraries in various cities where the papers of the famous or otherwise historically significant are housed. But I have always been fascinated equally with the stories of what I suppose one would call the "regular person", like my dad, like me. As I recently cleaned out the apartment of a friend, I saw that she had very old photographs of the family of a woman whose estate she had administered, long since dead herself. My friend must have had no one to give them to. Now I have them, and I add them to my own photographs and the photos of others I have assisted, to my personal inventory. There is no real place, that I have found so far, that would want them. If they have a particular significance, say, as those of a priest, I could pass them on to the Catholic Archivists (there are some) because the life of that priest is part of the history of the Church. But with my friend's friend, my elderly friend herself, dad, and me. . . .our photos, our mementos, our writings are bound for the trash heap once I am gone.
Years ago, I suspect I might have mentioned in one of my blogs, I went to a memory exhibit at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. Aside from a focus on Alzheimer's and its effect on families and the sufferer, there were smaller exhibits on individuals and their family mementos, and a book in which the guests could write to leave their first memories (often not independent memories but the result of family storytelling when a child was young). I suppose there began my more intense interest in keeping things that bespoke the life of an individual who owned them. A friend once derisively (in my view) asked me whether I thought my writing was worthy of the kind of treatment one might give to a great figure. He did not ask it quite like that. He was asking it in a joking nudge. I was hurt nonetheless. He is a writer. He writes scripts, by which I presume, he has hoped to be remembered as well as to make money. It is not about worthiness, I should have said, if I had thought of it, but about a person, a time, and a place. A marker of existence. A connection to others who exist with and before and after. It is how community memory, how history itself is made. In some fashion or another, I have come to believe, we are all of some interest to the next generations, to history itself. Some may have more gravitas than others to be sure, but every being has had a story, long or short. Anyway, one aspect of this new chapter on the blogosphere will be a form of personal archiving. This person. This Djinn. This Djinn's family. This Djinn's friends. Ok, this Djinn's cats too! I shall start with some photos, with more to follow. There will probably be no order to the entries on my family and friends. There might be a bunch of photos. There might be one of dad's stories. Or his letters, or the letters of an old friend, some still alive (with appropriate reductions if anything too personal was discussed) some now gone to their rewards. I am not sure. I am playing it all by ear, or fingers in this case. So, today I went through a few photos, mostly of me, but also of my family. The first.
Indeed, the awkward age started early! Right after birth, which this photo of presents. Long before I ever saw it, my dad regaled me with his view of my less than sterling looks upon my entry into the world, in particular the shock of black hair. I hate to agree, but I do, and note that I look stunned at the very least. I am told that I did not have much room in utero so that, as commonly happened in such cases, I wore leg braces for a number of months to keep me from becoming pigeon toed. Naturally I remember none of this. I read or heard somewhere that babies usually have blue eyes when they are born. Mine appear to be as black as my hair. Not a pretty picture. I hope you will agree that things improved a bit.
He was born in Ireland and I am told was not a man of many words, until he was drunk. He lived for a time in the boiler room having been banished there by his wife for reasons that have never been revealed given the entrenched secrecy of my family. My father once was summoned to go drinking with the old man, who in the crowded bar announced he had sailed to Copenhagen (what that had to do with anything I cannot say) and challenged every man in the place to a fight. Happily, it seems no one took him up on the challenge, but out cold from drink, my father carried him back to the boiler room. Whether my Grandfather's request to my father that he not tell my mother of his shameful behavior was a sign that my mother had a favored place in his heart, I will never know. I was his first grandchild, the only one he would ever see. He worked a second job at a meatpacking plant, named Wilson, and he was convinced that I should be given a great deal of meat and orange juice in order to thrive. I know so little else about him, and so far as I know this is one of only three photographs I have of him.
Oh, this is a favorite, but not necessarily because of the photo itself, but where I was when it was taken. My Uncle Frank was a bus driver in the Bronx, and his route was along Woodlawn. My dad took me on a jaunt to join Uncle Frank during a break, when his bus was "laying over". That's Djinn at the wheel. Dressed to the nines and ready to drive! My favorite was using the lever on the right of me to pull open and shut the door, endlessly. I road many buses after that, so many that I avoid them assiduously these days in California, but never in the driver's seat!
To conclude the beginning of the archive Djinn, I leave you with a rare photo in which my mother and father appear sort of together. This in Monticello, New York, just off Sackett Lake Road, in what was once known as the "Borscht Belt", the locale for many a grand hotel with the best comedians, the Laurel, the Concord, all gone long ago. My Aunt Rita and Uncle Ben (the upper left) owned a little summer place with two large bedrooms, one tiny one off the kitchen and the cutest nook you'd ever see for breakfast. I spent a number of weeks up there over the years, but it was unusual for all the sisters and in laws to be there together, even for a day. We called it "the country" although it was oly 90 miles from the heart of New York. There I saw my first cow, and deer. It was rural life itself compared to the concrete world back over the George Washington Bridge. My father is in between my cousin Barbara (who died far too early at the age of 35 in 1992) on the chaise lounge basking in the sun. My unsmiling mother in the middle, seated, is wrapped up from head to toe, looking severe as I would know her to be through most of our short relationship. Next to her is Grandma (yes, I agree the hat looks silly to our modern eyes), wearing one of her indistinguishable house dresses, but comfortable in her bare feet. She had bunions on those feet. One could not help but stare at them. Next to Ben and Rita is my Aunt Kathleen, our maiden aunt. In the distance is my Uncle Ben's rambler. I remember one year cleaning it or one like it as it sat in that very spot. As I attempted to remove the debris from the mat under the steering wheel, I remember wondering what it would be like for me to drive. And the idea of becoming old enough ever to do that seemed too remote for imagination.
Likely the person taking the picture is the other sister, Teri. So much comes up within me in looking at this photo.
Happy family? You'd think so, as you would I suppose, think of any family pictured like this in millions of albums gathering dust on shelves all over the world. But no, not particularly. Perhaps a tell tale sign is the two women who are grossly overweight, my mother and her eldest sister, Kathleen. I would learn of other things as life progressed, some things I may never mention here, but common in their terribleness. The secrets of sadness had begun long before this picture was taken in the early 1960s.
I was home sick on my first alone visits to Monticello. I can remember, maybe it was the weekend this picture was taken, lying in in the bed next to my cousin Barbara's wishing my parents might see I wanted to go home. My mother would be hard about such things. I chose to be there I either heard her say or imagine her to say, so I would have to go through with it. Of course, in just a short time, I became reasonably content. Aunt Rita allowed me a latitude that my mother never did. I did not have to have perfect curls in my hair. My sneakers could get dirty. I could indulge my intense love of running around with all the kids that gathered on that lawn from morning till the summer dark. I can remember running so much that getting a glass of water inside the house felt like pure joy itself. Oh, more there will be in these pages of Monticello. The other day I was sitting on the patio of a friend who lives in the hills of Studio City. There was this sudden scent of summer. Can't explain it. Warm air with grass, or something like that. Something buzzed in a nearby tree, and I was vaulted back to some otherwise indistinguishable summer day under the big maple tree that edged the dirt road by the Sackett Lake house. I was lying on my back looking at the veins of individual leaves. And I had nothing in my mind except those leaves and being purely content with cushion of the grass on my back. I must have breathed deep as I just did in writing this memory of myself, somewhere between age 10 and 14, doing nothing, being nothing and simply content.
Maybe that's why I so enjoy being on a patio or a terrace or a back yard of a church, for it brings that contentment with it again.
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