The neighbor’s wife and all the children came by today; as it’s too cold and there’s too much snow, rather than going to the big city, she and decided to merely go dine at the bar in town.
Swede, the cook of Norwegian derivation, was there.
I didn’t keep track of all the dishes, but the neighbor’s wife had
cotoletta alla petroniana, one of the twin 12-year-old daughters had
prosciutto di parma, the other twin had
acquadella o latterino fritto, the 10-year-old son had what I had, the 4-year-old son had
pansotti alla genovese, and the 9-month-old infant daughter had parts of all what her mother had.
I had my usual, a hamburger well-done, pressed down hard on the grill so as to squeeze out every drop of grease, French fries done on the grill instead of in the fryer, and a side-dish of sour cream.
The neighbor’s wife and I had coffee-with-milk; the children all had milk, and excepting for the infant, more than just one glass of it.
For dessert, the other five had
cassata siciliana, while the eager young lad and I had big dishes of vanilla ice-cream.
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We’d drawn names for “big†Christmas presents this year, as we had in the past. I’m of course not part of the family, but I’ve been in on this for more than a decade. It’s always supposed to be a secret, who draws whose names, but somehow the eager young lad had learned that I had his name.
What he didn’t know, because he’s not aware yet that adults know it all, know everything, is that I knew he had my name. If I expected something decent from him, I’d better give him something decent.
I’d discussed it already with his father, the neighbor; I want to get him a firearm that a kid can be competent with, but at the same time, it’s considered an adult firearm, and adults use it. I have no idea what that’d be, but the neighbor and I, as soon as the weather moderates, are going to go around to see some people and their offerings.
Oh my. franksolich purchasing a firearm.
<<<avid supporter of the Second Amendment, but prefers to own an alternative means of self-defense that can actually be more lethal than a mere gun.
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“Oh, I’m so sorry, I forgot,†the neighbor’s wife said when we all were half-done with dessert. “Today’s one of those unhappy anniversaries for you.â€
Yeah, I said, but it’s no big deal, as it was a very long time ago; on this very day, when I was 23 years old, my grandmother died. My mother, her oldest daughter, had died five years previously, and after that, my grandmother had become the most important person in this life, as I had strained relations with the older brothers and sisters, who’d been hippies and were still Democrats.
My grandmother spent her entire life in northeastern Pennsylvania.
“It was weird, how that worked out,†I said.
“It was in March of that year that my aunt, the youngest daughter of my grandmother, wrote me, saying ’grandmother is dying; you’d better come.’
“This aunt was a registered nurse, and a very good one, and had taken care of my grandmother for years.
“I was too young to have ever known my grandmother as a competent person; as far back as my memory goes, she’d always been senile, and a little bit silly. But a cousin of mine, a year younger than me, and I just naturally ’took’ to her even when we were just toddlers.
“My grandmother was very ancient; she was 89 when she died. Born into a very large family of Slovakian-Judaic immigrants, she’d never had more than a second-grade education. For whatever reasons now long ago lost to history, a German immigrant who was a college graduate (in civil engineering) fell into love with her, and they got married.
“It was a great marriage, as stable and fulfilling as Hell.
“My grandfather was undeniably the one who wore the pants, but that never bothered her, or anybody else. They had six daughters, and at the tail end when my grandmother was middle-aged, a son.
“My grandfather of course had wanted sons, but being deprived of that until near the end, he instead raised his girls as if they were boys. They did all the girl things of the time and place, but they did most of the boy things too; baseball, tennis, hunting, fishing, the hard subjects in school.
“They pre-dated the womens’-libbers by at least a generation and a half; they were all independent and had careers--not mere secretarial or file-clerk stints--before they married. After marriage, they either stayed at home or continued in their careers, whatever worked out. They all married well, and those marriages, every single one of them, lasted the lifetimes of the partners.
“This was a solid, rock-ribbed Republican family-values family.
“I don’t remember much of it, being too young at the time, but anyway, in 1964 my father was a Rockefeller man, and my mother a Goldwater woman. That gives you an idea.
“I suppose they were middle-class, given his income and his status as a professional engineer, but for whatever reasons, they lived in a coal-town, where all the other inhabitants were miners. This was the family that had indoor plumbing, a nice car, and a good office job, but nearly everyone with whom they associated were coal-miners. Everyone was equal in the eyes of God, and so thus in their eyes too.
“It was on a summer Sunday morning when my grandfather was asked to go down into a mine, to inspect something everybody was nervous about. He descended into the bowels of the earth, looked at it, gave his judgement, and then came back.
“However, never having been a coal-miner, he didn’t know how to breathe while down there, and inhaled a particle of coal, causing pneumonia. This was during the height of the second world war, and penicillin wasn’t yet in popular use. He lay under an oxygen tent for three months before he finally died, in middle-age.
“By this time, about half his daughters were competent young adults, and they took over the care and maintenance of my grandmother and her younger children.
“It appears most thought of my grandmother as some sort of incompetent, and so while they of course treated her with dignity and respect, they really didn’t pay much attention to her, personally. That was for her grandchildren to do, especially two of her grandsons.
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“So it was in March of that year my aunt wrote me, ‘grandmother is dying; you’d better come.’
“Well, I was young and insensitive at the time, and so wrote back, ‘yeah, I’ll come, but I’m not yet sure when.’
“Then my aunt wrote again in June, ‘grandmother is dying; you’d better come.’
“I wasn’t ready to go, I said, but I’ll come sooner or later, trust me.
“Then my aunt wrote again in September, ‘grandmother is dying; you’d better come.’
“Hold on, hold on, I protested, ‘I’m really busy right now, but I’ll come.’
“Finally the first week of December, I received a new letter; ‘Come. NOW.’
“I dropped everything and immediately went. The airplane couldn’t fly fast enough to suit me.
“I arrived there this very morning all those years ago; she died in early evening, my cousin and I holding her in our arms, her soul flying away to God as if a bird quickly and deftly escaping a snare.
“While the body was being wrapped, someone commented, ‘you know, she sure lasted a lot longer than what could’ve been expected.’
“The physician, who was still at the bedside, said, ‘yes; it was almost as if she was waiting for someone, before she went away.’â€
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“It was then,†I explained to the neighbor’s wife, “that I became acquainted with one of the most hideous, depraved customs of people who have no sense of decency and courtesy.
“Around here, and in all other parts of Nebraska excepting blue-collar working-class ethnic neighborhoods of Omaha, we don’t have ‘wakes;’ they’ve never been part of our culture, part of our lives.
“This was the first--and only--’wake’ I’d ever seen. It was squalid, tawdry, bad taste.
“It was unspeakable. Here, my aunt was all tired out, worn out, and death of course is an occasion for solemnity, contemplation, prayer, and mourning. But she wasn’t going to be left alone.
“My grandmother was very old, and so everybody knew her. Barely had the corpse been carried away to the funeral home, before people were flooding inside the front door, loudly demanding to be fed and liquored. It was a reasonably-size house, but there was standing-room only.
“I was appalled. What the fu--dge was going on here? How come all these people were acting like barbarians, savages, primitives? They were eating like pigs, and making drunken sailors look models of sobriety.
“I
could not believe it. I was horrified.â€
to be continued
