Fresh Kills _ Back to Earth - Day 31

Back to Earth - Day 31

I am becoming aware, awaring, of my ability to put off the unpleasant and or in this case the  surprising.

“I know you” rings in my ears and that look in the eyes of her crystalizing a thought.

“I know you.  You are Stanley”.

“Who? What?”

“You remind me of Stanley. You look like him.  You sound like him”

“Um”

“How old are you…Stanley was born in April 1943, he was adopted out of Philly.  His mother was Irish…”

From that and a little more discussion, a closure with many of the open ended questions of my mother’s life seemed to fall into place, even if I had not had time in the almost a year since I had heard this story, to check out the facts.

In fact in my anal retentive PC way of looking of the whole matter, if my mother had had a child out of wedlock, she certainly wasn’t the only Irish girl in Philly.

“You look just like him. You sound the same too…”

In the confusion of the moment, I missed some of his background like maybe he studied to be a rabbi.  Was he a rabbi now?

“He sells cell phones and contracts.  He can get you a good deal…”

I hadn’t followed up.  My wife and her friend drifted apart when my wife changed jobs, got a better paying one in the city once I had arrived back in New York.  Everything here had gotten tremendously expensive, especially housing.  I could look back to the late seventies when Manhattan was still an American city.  Now it had become a global city like Hong Kong.

It was on the thoughts of Stanley and mom I was giving a few moments of thought to when the plane hit and interrupted the energy of my thoughts.

It is perhaps that unbalanced, incomplete energy, on which I was jettisoned here and now survive.  It is perhaps in forty days of incubation I can mutate that energy and take it with me.  Until then I am stuck in Palooka Ville.

In a way, I had read stories over the years about adopted people who sought out their natural parents. I was no doubt good filler human interest newspaper stuff.  But I did not want to climb a mountain of bureaucratic paperwork to find a person who only sounded like he might be a ten year older half-brother version of myself.

But I have not repeated the background information to myself that made this possible half-brother (that’s a weird term, so tridentine, so constantinian, so mercantile and so religious). Marriage is after all just a property contract. That the rich and royalty needed for centuries and it was not until the rise of the middle classes, that the peasants wanted property contracts, marriage, just like their betters. How bourgeois.

My last thoughts were of the energy of mom’s complicated, many compartmentalized sections of life.

Another quick tangent. 

This all started when I went to visit an uncle in western Pennsylvania who was dying of lung cancer.  That uncle was the husband of mom’s only sister. When aunt May started to relate the facts of her life to me to refresh our acquaintance after many years of absent separation, she mentioned Ed.

Ed was mom’s fiancé during world war two. There was the story that he went down to the local draft board, same place I had originally registered at, in Kensington and volunteered for the draft after Pearl Harbor.  He went on with his civilian life waiting to be called up.  After about a year he went back to the draft board and asked why nobody had contacted him.  They looked up his records and he was listed as dead in those records?

“Dead. I am not dead.”

They corrected the records, inducted him shortly thereafter to be a mechanic in the U.S. Army Air Corp.  He went off to war and was killed on a famous Philly ship, the U.S.S. Morrison, the ship of the Four Chaplains. A lot of Philly boys died on that troop ship that went down at the statistical height of German U-Boat activity in the Atlantic. 

The Four Chaplains made a good war human interest and or war department propaganda story in that four chaplains, two Prots, one Pape and one Rabbi, who gave up their life jackets to service men and went down with the ship. Sad story all around.

Well anyway, there had always been an animosity between mom and her sister, her only sibling.  There was that air of love hate between these two sisters and there was a love hate thing with her parents too.  In retrospect it just might have been the poverty of her youth that she hated her parents for.  And the sisterly rival between the older poverty princess of the family and mom being the youngest and the one who got stuck with all the dirty tasks around the house.

I saw a clipping of mom’s picture in the Philadelphia Inquirer on July 5, 1934.  She had the previous day been dressed up as George Washington in a Four of July celebration in North Philly.  Mom was tall for her age but in a way she had somehow been talked or been brow beaten into dressing up as a man and she did not like the way I think she felt that life in general had seemed to make a victim out of her every step of the way.  It is all attitude. But jeez.

Ed as it turned out had been my dying uncle’s best friend before the war which is how he met mom through my aunt’s dating Ed’s best friend, my uncle by marriage.

In terms of the open facts and open dialogues that sometimes flowed over in family discussions or situations, I had always thought that the tension between herself and her sister was the fact that Aunt May was lucky enough to get and keep what she wanted most in her husband.  Mom got screwed.

That she might have been pregnant and maybe waiting to get married to her soldier I do not know. That there was no D.N.A. testing back when, that she had no property contract, marriage, to the dead service boy, meant that she was shit out of luck regarding an insurance policy made out to his parents.

That single motherhood was possible but it held that low class caste stigma of sans marriage. That adoption for a child born out of wedlock was a possible option and source of tension with her parents who being the poor whites in the slums, somehow thought that they were not that low to allow unmarried motherhood into their poverty digs.

It all made sense in some strange kind of energy way.  I was wondering then and now if on a psychic energy level, I always knew the truth. Or did I?

Sitting there across from her in Arizona on one of our lunches together, I knew about Ed as a fiancée, I did not know about him as a possible lover and father of a possible half-brother.  I did know that in Battery Park, he did have his name carved on a monument, on the waterfront, dedicated by JFK back when.

In a way I was trying to give her some closure on Ed, the man who might have been my father.  But in reality, if he lived, the basic me would never have come into existence. Strange thoughts. Strange energies.

No closure on the Ed I knew.  Now no closure on the Ed I might have known through a possible unknown sibling.

I have often wondered why the system in Arizona passed mom onto a Jewish home.  Was it the tyranny of chance?

Or was there that weird human energy of Jewish son who wondered about his birth mom through the years and was somehow connected to her in some unseen dimension on a mortal plane?

Whatever.