2 Board Alley

Christmas in Berlin, 1966

I was nine the year we lived in Berlin, Germany, in army housing off of Clayallee and a quick stroll to the Grunewald.  Every weekday morning, an army bus would roll into our neighborhood, stop on Luchsweig and load up the American schoolchildren to go to Thomas A. Roberts Elementary School, which was located near the PX and  the American Chapel.

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Now, the place is a razed hole in the ground. Then, it was a stucco, square military house, sharing a driveway with its conjoined twin house, meeting at the carport.  Then, the house was for majors or government workers.  It was generally sturdy, but the sounds of the East Germans flying overhead and lowering the boom on us caused some of Mom's delicate knick-knacks to shudder and shake.   

I wish I could tell you that snow covered the land that winter, but, alas, it didn't. We had a green Christmas, probably overcast, and a on a day shortened by the city's latitude.  

Despite the lack of snow, we managed to have a Froehliche Wienachten in Berlin, including setting our shoes out the evening before Saint Nicholas' Day, hoping that we'd been good enough to merit some fine German chocolate. The saint did not disappoint:  he left a gold foil-covered manger with a tiny sugar Christ  in my graying old sneaker.

This was the last year I played with Barbies and had converted my closet shelving into a series of sets for Barbies' adventures. Because I was an eager reader and probably because I was a foreign service kid, my Barbie dolls lived lives of comic book action and Gothic adventure when they weren't serving milkshakes in their corduroy jumpers.

In Venezuela, my Barbies had the advantage of Spooky, our family cat, whenever they needed transportation.  They'd jump stiff legged onto the back of the sleek and noble coal -colored panther, who often slunk and raced away as he tried to escape the jungle that was my bedroom.  Sadly, In Germany we had no such cat, so Barbie stayed in frozen stride unless I moved her anywhere. Her  adventures were limited to moving up and down the various shelves in my closet.  Christmas, however, widened Barbie's horizon, as under our tree sat a turquoise Barbie airplane so that she, Ken and Skipper could cruise the altitude of the greater back yard, intimidating the East Germans with their own booming flight.  If B and K  wanted to skip off to Africa to be lost in the brush( the fir tree out front), the driveway afforded a long enough runway for a fashion doll to taxi, take off and coast out of my imagination.

Marriage: December Reflections Continued

• Being Married: have been able think about things at a more leisurely pace and have seen qualities in myself that I want to change--like being bossy, introverted and too independent.  None of these qualities are terrible, per se, but when I reflect on my father's two marriages, I can see how too much of them is a bad thing.  And while I have often trod the path of pondering what I contributed to the slow unbinding of my first marriage, I've added my father's  bossy specter to the walk. I know that my parents had a knotty relationship, but so much of our lives were taken up with moving and with my mother's slowly dying that any problems my parents were having between each other was out of my perspective.  Also, I think that because she was so sickly and because they had children, they gradually became more of a team in working around every day home and hearth care.  

    With my father's second marriage, I got see how behaviors repeat themselves and how unhappy one person can make another simply by being. My stepmother was the more overt in her unhappiness and took it out on her stepchildren in different and painful ways.  Even though I was on the receiving end of her woe, I could understand why she was angry.  My father was, in the Venn Diagram of life, a selfless man who could be very emotionally selfish, or who,perhaps, didn't know or realize better.  He spent his retirement with his nose in a book and a bag of candy nearby. 

    The effect this had on me as a young woman was that I honestly believed that all men were passive, chauvenistic idiots who needed a wife's strong guidance and even stronger sarcasm to get through life. In this way, I thought I was a lot like my mother, who was strong-willed and sarcastic, and that it was all for the best.  And with therapy,  I put my mother in the role of family bad gal, even though intellectually I knew that both partners in a relationship are equally responsible for its cultivation. Since my father was my surviving parent, I know that there was always anxiety about losing him impelling me to recall and repress my anger at him (well, maybe not "repress").  Or, at least, to see him as another victim of my mother's anger, which was never repressed as far as I can remember. And my frustration with him always centered around the way he seemed to tune everyone out (and yes, being a single, middle-aged parent of two teenagers and a elementary schooler would make having this ability an act of self-preservation).

   Moving through young adulthood and therapy,  I realized that in so many ways I was like my father, especially in terms of relationships.  I, too, can be insular and emotionally distant and selfish, tuning out everyone. What bothers me is that what may once have been a reflexive, defensive behavior may have become a fixed trait.  Flexibility and forethought in deploying emotion are what I'm after these days.

   What do I have to fear?  Nothing that I can't deal with.  I didn't marry idiots, not at all.  Both men are  extremely intelligent and gifted.  My first marriage didn't work out, and now I am married to someone else, a person who demands that I be present in the relationship, and someone who doesn't need me to manage his life (not that my first husband did or wanted my help).

    In sum, Dad's passing has cut me free from the tension that bound me out of  loyalty and fear. So much of that energy has been rerouted into acceptance and validation of my mother and my stepmother; another packet of energy has been flowing into my sense of myself as I was and as I am.

Who Was Buried in Gramps' Tomb?

And for that matter, where is the deed?

I'm not certain if I'd written about this family funfact before, but as we are planning my Dad's funeral, the issue has come up again.

My father's parents, Joe and Rose Howard, are buried in a Catholic cemetery in Boston.  This we all knew.  Dad had even taken us to visit it once or twice when we were little.

A few years ago, on a genealogically-based trip to Boston, I found out that they are buried with Catherine Cella, my great-grandfather's first wife, and no relation to us.  My great-grandfather, Lorenzo Cella, is buried in another cemetery, along with our great-grandmother( his second wife), one of his sons and a few grandchildren.  This we know because under the large stucco cross at the grave is a footstone with the names and dates on it.  Catherine, by the way, has no head or footstone, which given how poor the family was at the time, makes sense.

But once he'd grown up, my father wasn't too close to his Italian cousins, and so there were no family stories to be handed down about the first wife and why my grandparents are buried with her.  There is also no information about who owns the plot.  One of the cemetery records indicates that Barbara Giustino owns the it, and no one has any idea who she is (if she is still alive--there's also no date indicating when she bought it).

So who is this Barbara Giustino?  A descendent of Lorenzo and Catherine's?  A relative of Catherine?  A friend from the North End? A stranger?

And what did she do with the deed?  And where would I begin to research all of this?

Bolded Class Meme

From Revisionspiral and Parts -n-Pieces, who added this important piece, which I will lazily quote rather than paraphrase because this is Saturday morning and I'm tired so there:

It comes from "From What Privileges Do You Have?," based on an exercise about class and privilege developed by Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, Stacy Ploskonka at Illinois State University. If you participate in this blog game, they ask that you PLEASE acknowledge their copyright.

1. Father went to college
2. Father finished college
3. Mother went to college
4. Mother finished college
5. Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor
6. Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers

7. Had more than 50 books in your childhood home
8. Had more than 500 books in your childhood home
9. Were read children's books by a parent
10. Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18

11. Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18
12. The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively.

13. Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18.
14. Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs
15. Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs
16. Went to a private high school
17. Went to summer camp -

18. Had a private tutor before you turned 18
19. Family vacations involved staying at hotels.

20. Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18 
21. Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them.

22. There was original art in your house when you were a child
23. You and your family lived in a single-family house.

24. Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home.

25. You had your own room as a child

27. Participated in a SAT/ACT prep course
28. Had your own TV in your room in high school
29. Owned a mutual fund or IRA in high school or college
30. Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16
31. Went on a cruise with your family
32. Went on more than one cruise with your family
33. Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up
34. You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family

Here's the thing--I didn't grow up in wealth, but I did grow up in the Foreign Service, and  that's why I was given such a wide exposure to culture and travel.  That family cruise was the way that my family returned to the U.S. from Venezuela.  We stayed in hotels, motels, castles (in Germany!) because we were able to take advantage of  being in Europe or South America. My first airplane trip happened at six months when my mother and I flew back to Cheyenne, for her dental work, but also because she was thinking of separating from my father. Anyhow, what I find interesting about this meme is that although it is class-related, I found myself thinking about generational differences as well.  For instance, air travel was a Big Deal back then.  These days, babies and families travel across the country as regularly as we took trains back then. 

I didn't take any SAT prep courses because they didn't exist in 1973--the most you could have would be a prep book, but a course?  Back then,the idea was that you either had a scholastic aptitude or you didn't.  So why prep for it?

I went to a private Catholic high school for other middle-class Catholic girls--definitely college prep, but hardly Eton. 

Credit cards weren't a mass marketed as they are today.  I don't even remember if my father had a credit card.  And even if he did, the teens in my social class in high school, Catholic, middle- class 1970's, would have never been given our own cards.  We would have been laughed out of our houses at the thought.

I was aware of heating bills, but not because my family was not able to pay them, but because I grew up like many kids, absentmindedly leaving doors open, only to hear my parents cry "Shut the door! We're not paying to heat the entire outdoors!" 

My father was a terrific children's book reader, funnies reader, and, for my sister, puppeteer (using her teddy bear and other stuffed animals to dance through silly plots).  That's not generational or class-related, just his gift, I think.  I mean, my father was a single parent in the 70's, and taking time to make sure that my sister was entertained and loved was something he did selflessly. 

Single-parenting figures into issues of class and generation, and I'm not certain that it is much better for women these days than it was forty years ago.  My experience was of having a single father in the 70's, so we really didn't suffer economically, but we did have the one parent trying to house and feed (hello, Hamburger Helper!) and love three very different children at three different stages childhood.  If we hadn't had a cleaning lady come in every other week, we'd have been buried alive in our crap.  If each of children hadn't had family, friends and teachers who took the time to care about us, we would not have turned out as well as we have today.  I'm not bragging about it, I simply mean that we have been able to get educated, get good jobs and have relatively happy lives.

Dad at Christmas

One of the best things about Christmas this year was that my father came over and spent the day with us at my brother's house.  He sat in that chair for the most part, reading, napping, eating, and, of course, holding CC, the family cockapoo and watch dog.  She is also Dad's number- one fan, and whenever he visits, she leaps in his lap and licks his face.  I suspect that her enthusiasm reflects those golden days of a few years ago, when he lived with them and used to sneak her chocolate, which makes her terribly ill, but which she wolfed down like a good chocolate addict.

He did pretty well during the long day and only became crabby towards the end (as did we all).  My sister-in-law and I took him back to his room, and while she conferred with the staff, I sat down with Dad and listened to him read aloud from Neruda's 100 Sonetos de Amor.  In Spanish.  And then he translated them, too.  I began asking him questions in Spanish to see if he had a stronger memory in another language, but no.  he didn't remember my mother or his mother, regardless. 

But I don't want to end this post on a sad note.  The beauty of the visit was that all three of us children and our families got to spend the holiday together with Dad.  And another plentiful moment was listening to him talk with my sister-in-law on the drive home.  "Look at the size of the moon!  It's beautiful," he said.  Simple comments about the natural world said by someone who can still appreciate it. 

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He Screams Because He Can

My nephew turned one, and according to A.A. Milne, he's "just begun."  But boy can he scream.  He fills his lungs with air and lets fly a sonic pitch that travels piercingly over the telephone. 

He screams because he can.  No one is bothering him; he's not bothered by anything.   He's found a fascinating new bodily function and it thrills him to use it. 

He screams, I hope, for ice cream.