Communing with the dead: reflections from a landlocked sailor

Port Townsend, Washington, 14 December 2021 – It’s only been three months since we left Caro Babbo at Northern Enterprises in Homer, Alaska. They have been a long three months.

In those months, Jennifer and I flew from Homer directly to Berlin, Germany; I sailed a boat from Port Angeles to Oakland; I worked on my house in Atlanta and hosted a dinner for six; I made a new friend or two and collated and scanned the first of the dozen or two boxes of papers and photographs from my parents’ house.

The first box contained more than 1000 photographs, the majority from the 1920s through the 1940s. Until we get into the 1950s, everyone in any of those photographs has passed; I knew almost every one of those people. By the time we get to the 1950s and 60s my cousins and I are being born. For the most part, we are now older than that aged population whose lives I see progress through the decades of photographs as the pictures enter the 60s.

My father’s parents were in their 50s when I was born, my mother’s mother was 65. In this first box of pictures, I mostly see my parents as a courting couple, my mother from ages 19 until her middle 20s, my father two years older. Intermixed, because the photographs had become shuffled, are courting pictures of my father’s parents.

I was terrified of my father’s father. He was loud, and perhaps my fear was communicated to me by my father: his father physically abused him. Perhaps, I could feel his reticence around his own father.

My own mother was a force to be reckoned with. In these photographs, which are predominantly taken by my father’s family, I see her in the context of my father’s family. She was the first of the women who stayed. She was the youngest of 10 children, of whom only three made it to adulthood. Her own father, while still married to her mother, had another family in the same neighborhood.

Johnny Cash’s line, I grew up tough and I grew up mean echoes as I write this. She was not mean, but she certainly was tough. When my father was probably in his late 20s with two young children, his father let down his guard around my mother and backhanded my dad. I don’t know my father’s response. By then he’d spent two years in the military overseas, and had told me that his dad was no longer physical. But in this instance his dad was.

My mother, I am told, said to my grandfather, without raising her voice, that if he ever did anything like that again, he would never see his grandchildren or his son, ever. As I got older, I learned that my mother avoided confrontation by agreeing to whatever was recommended to her, and then doing whatever she pleased. In the photographs of her, the faces of people around her tell her story.

It is the pictures from the 20s through the 40s, before my parents met, that tell me who my paternal grandparents were. I see pictures from their courtship, where they are clearly in love, and, while we don’t think of our grandparents, who I knew as obese people in their 60s, in this light, there is not quite a hunger, but a sexual component to a couple of the selfies.

My cousin Cara tells me that my grandmother was pregnant when she married in 1925.

Cara tells me the pregnancy was not accidental. Clara, born as Immacolata, was the third girl of 13 children. The girls needed to marry in order of birth, and Clara had no intention of waiting that long. Pregnancy was the way to hop the line. Or so the story goes.

As a male child, I could not know Clara as a woman, only as my grandmother. In college, I courted a woman who knew my grandmother as I knew her. Once we married, as my wife, she became part of the community of married women. She returned to me after hanging out with that community during a family gathering, shocked and laughing. Clara told the most filthy jokes she’d ever heard in her life.

The pictures move forward through the years, with pictures of my uncle Nick, their firstborn, being preeminent in the early years of their marriage. My grandparents, and their own siblings, my father’s aunts and uncles, age as the years pass. My grandparents were socially active and there are numerous banquet pictures of my grandmother in finery. My aunt Marie, who never married, starts showing up in those banquet pictures as an ingénue becoming more mature as those years progress.

There are pictures, both promotional and candid, in my grandparents’ delicatessen at East 117th and Second Avenue in what was then East Harlem, later Spanish Harlem, then the barrio and I don’t know what it is called now.

It wasn’t until I had worked with these photographs for a week or two that the weight of my family’s lives became noticeable. That they were all gone was one aspect of the weight. But the impermanence of life and my own mortality began to weigh. That everyone did not start to visit me in my dreams, surprises me. There was, in fact, only one visitation, and that he hasn’t visited me more often is a wonder. 

My dad visited me. He was wearing a blue shirt and was probably 10 or 12 years younger than I am now. I hugged him in a fashion that is popular for men to greet these days, something we never did. The realization that this wasn’t something we ever did, and could never have done, was a sharp moment, faster than any realization ever actually happens: my arms collapsed towards me as I said the words ‘‘you’re dead’’  faster than they can be said or read, faster than I can generally create thoughts. And, of course, I snapped awake and lay there until the alarm went off.

It’s coming up on two years since he has passed, enough time for me to admit to myself that he’s gone. My mother is gone 14 years, my father’s mother almost 40, my mother’s mother, almost 50, my father’s father 53, and his oldest brother, the firstborn star of so many photographs, died at age 41, 55 years ago.

In a few of the photographs, my aunt Marie, the ingénue of the banquet pictures, holds a 16mm Bell and Howell movie camera. All of that footage is gone. Perhaps gone when the family business was sold. I have some distant memory that those film reels were stored in the store’s basement under a flight of stairs. No one at the time, more than 50 years ago, would have given any thought to any personal belongings that might have existed. The family was reeling from the loss of both the patriarch and his heir to the business.

Working quietly in an office shuffling photographs and staring at the screen separates me from the world of the first 21st century and embeds me in the same period of the 20th. I feel the weight of their lives, but more the experiences of my own at the same ages. For me, it is not my successes, but my failures that weigh. Not my business failures or where I made bad business decisions, and there were many, but my interpersonal failures, where because of naïveté, or arrogance, or my inability to see any viewpoint but my own, I hurt people or embarrassed myself, or worse embarrassed them. The weight increases as I realize that I have probably about 17 years left if I fall squarely on the bell curve of the life expectancy of my predecessors.

I want to be doing something. Not doing something is my own fault. I’ve gotten lost in these last three months not producing anything really: I haven’t been writing, I haven’t been sailing, though I have made numerous attempts to cure the latter, I suppose I have not been trying hard enough.

I guess I’ve started. I’ve written this and gotten a post up and out. I’ve started a course on music theory, something I’ve wanted to do since I was in high school,* and Jennifer and I are going away from our full house of people for three days.

The weight of the dead is lifting before I dive back into the pictures next week. Eventually, the ratio of the passed to those still with us will shift and I will look at myself and my cousins as we were when we were the age of all our collective children and now their children.

The last of the next generation is leaving his teens, the first is in her forties. This next bunch of albums will take me through the youth of my siblings and my cousins and perhaps will show my first sailboats and the friends and girlfriends who sailed with me: an age of awaking and setting our life courses, which diverged as we fledged to re-coalesce as we approach the same distance from the end as we were then from the beginning.

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* Thank you, John Barry, for recommending the music theory course.