Leavin' on a Jet Plane

The block party looked like such fun last night but we couldn’t go.

Our girl Annie wrote us all an email to say she wanted to see us.

More to the point she wanted to feed us because that’s what Annie does. She knew we were leaving today for Italy and I guess she just wanted to collect all her family members up and look at us all again.

I brought a very old photo album to her place to show them all, a pictorial account of my grandfathers' wedding trip from 1903.

I say 'his' : His bride was along for the ride too of course but because she died at 31 I have trouble thinking of her as a grandmother.

I think of her only as Carrie, who I have heard about all my life. the young mother who died of uremic poisoning in her fifth pregnancy in six years, Carrie with the blue eyes, Carrie who we named our own first child for.

It happens that I have all the letters this honeymooning couple sent home in 1910 and so last night I asked 'our' Carrie if should I take my new silver Sharpie and just carefully print some of the text of those letters inot the book, to illustrate various phrases of the wedding trip based on what they said about it.

"Hmmmm, I don’t think so Mum,” she said in her careful and diplomatic way. “I mean, this is so beautiful as it is, the old black paper, the leather covers. You wouldn’t want to take anything as new as Sharpie to it, would you?"

That’s the difference between us I guess. They are all aesthetically tuned, these three children of ours; they love a thing by leaving it alone. I am historically tuned; I love a thing by learning all about it and trying to pass on what I learned. I want everyone in our family to know our story and well - this album has no markings on it all. You can slide the photos out yes but even they have no writing on the back. Who will remember, I worry? Who will know and remember what happened to us?

That there was this early death and a baby buried in a mother’s arms?

That there was poetry and the Irish Virus which means drinking?

That my father didn’t even ask to see me when I was born and had been gone throughout the pregnancy anyway and then stayed gone for the rest of his life?

Who will remember my grandfather’s sadness? My mother’s willed jauntiness in the face of a society that shunned and feared her as an abandoned woman?

Who will remember and why can’t you write in an album and leave your own imperfect handwriting as part of the record because you will soon one day be dust yourself?

But my judgment is always shaky. And come to think of it my three children do know the story. Annie knows every least detail of it, right down to maiden names and birth dates. Carrie protects the artifacts and reveres them so much you can see it in the way her very hands look as she holds them.

Even our son knows it and talks about it in a very different way: when he was a college senior he did this charcoal at the top here. It is a huge canvas, five feet wide and three feet tall and it depicts the four children at a window just weeks before their mother's death would forever mar them.

He worked from a tiny photo just like the photos in the wedding trip album. In it you can see the shadow of a tree falling over their faces. You can see the shadow of the hat worn by the young soon-to-be widowed father who snapped it. I mean you couldn't think up an image so filled with such foreboding.

This grandfather, this photographer, was not a drinker himself, any more than our abandoned mother or our abandoned aunt who helped raise us and yes her husband drank and left us too so it was deja-vu all over again.

My grandfather was too nervous to let alcohol carry him away. He was like me in that respect and in many other respects and I know this because I lived with him. In our abandoned state we lived with in his house, my sister Nan, and Mom and I, and when he died we had to find someone new to take us and that’s where Aunt Grace and Uncle Jack came in.

Well enough of all this old sadness. I'm getting on a plane with David this evening even though as the classic child-of-a-drinker I distrust fun and fear loss of control…. Still, all of Northern Italy awaits and if a person can’t relax and enjoy 16 days there, I guess she can't enjoy anything.

I'll close with this image of Michael and Carrie from 1899. He is the one with his hands on her mortal head. She is the one already engulfed by waves.

I know but who else knows that the woman next to him perished in the great Influenza epidemic of 1918? I know but who else knows that the man next to her died three weeks before the Armistices, just two months after his wedding day?

And if we didn't - if someone didn't - know all their stories, who would they be to us but strangers on a beach?