Fresh Kills _ Grandparents - Day 19

Grandparents - Day 19

Awaking out of a mind experience of trees in a forest, near a small quiet waterfall and the sounds of birds, I begin to reconnect to last thoughts.

It was perhaps that later in life, when I myself matured, that I saw my parents’ lives in segments.  For my father who did shift work, he was around in the daytime occasionally in childhood memory.  But mom’s time on a timeline, I see starts and stops, segments of time, of a life lived differently at times.

And I am reminded of my father’s mother who I never met.  I heard the story from my maiden aunt who related the story that grandmother was a wonderful seamstress.  That she would go downtown, look in the fanciest department store windows like Strawbridge and Clothier’s or John Wanamaker’s and study a dress or even a winter coat and from memory could start from scratch and build, replicate, that article with a professional look and style. 

And my maiden aunt who made it all the way through the Catholic high school system had been particularly grateful for being able on a yearly basis to be in fashion with the other girls, who mostly were an upper caste of Catholics, who could and did afford their daughters the luxury of a high school education instead of being forced by economics to consign them to some millwork jobs designed for young women.

That from my aunt I got the story that my skilled seamstress and housewife grandmother had wanted to become a doctor. That she read it was possible to do such a thing in some fancy woman’s magazine of the late nineteenth century.  That her father was a well to do man who ran a large blacksmithy shop set up in a coal mining town in upstate Pennsylvania.  He had the means to finance his daughter’s doctor dream but he refused to give his daughter that right and entitlement.  He was a survivor of the famine and he came into modest wealth by luck and hard work in the new land.  His mind however never left the old sod.  His two oldest sons got pushed into the seminary as a way to make a statement about making it in the new world and a return of favors to his deity.

So in building my reconciliation of myself to the things of my mother I also judge against the possibilities of her life, I measure against those of another female ancestor, which in a way is unfair.

My mother grew up in great poverty in north Philly. That her grandparents owned a dozen or two rental properties were the basis of having a roof over her head through the depression.  Her father, my grandfather, a rather gentle man when I knew him through my childhood, was a man who had been beaten and left for dead by the local Irish mafia when he refused to throw a fight as a prize fighter as a man in his young twenties.

He somehow survived with a gold plate in his head to replace a piece of kicked out skull. To add insult to injury, the state revoked his boxing license.

It was always when my grandmother, my mom’s mom would want to nag or sarcastically ridicule my pop-pop that she would use the timeline reference of that was before or after you “lost your boxing license” line. “Remember?”

So mom got raised in rather typical north Philly, Kensington style poverty of living in a ten foot wide row house that in her case housed herself, her sister, her parents, an uncle, and an aunt and her husband in a three bedroom, one bathroom house.

That her meals most nights was a mile or more walk to her grandmother’s house to be one more soup plate on a big family kitchen table.

Pop-pop was not a bootlegger but he was a distributor of bathtub gin during prohibition in between occasional long haul trucking jobs found here and there.

All in all, he did not find regular work until WWII which brought his manual labor skills back into demand by the war effort.  From there, he worked until he died.