This is a story about a wake and a matchmaking opportunity.
My friend Joanne’s mother Madeline died the day before Palm Sunday. Joanne is my friend from high school at the Academy of the Holy Angels. My friend Ann –who’s been my friend since first grade at St. John’s in Bergenfield –called me from North Carolina to make sure I knew about Madeline’s passing. Ann is married to Joanne’s cousin Brian, the son of Madeline’s sister.
My husband Jim attended the wake on his own early in the afternoon. He is kind of a celebrity and he actually is a very energizing presence at wakes. It’s one of his gifts.
My 17-year-old son Tom and I arrived later, having just spent time helping to set up my son Matt’s and daughter-in law Melany’s new household in Sparta.
When you step into a wake, you immediately do a kind of triage, scanning the room for the relatives of the deceased and other connected people you may have known in the past. My high school friend Louise Cook came up to me, and pointed me in Joanne’s direction.
Joanne was seated in the middle of the room, holding court. Truth to tell, Joanne is a kind of celebrity by force of her personality. She has always exuded an outsized dynamism. She was Miss School Spirit at Holy Angels. She is a flashing, rotating ball of jokes and laughter and twinkling eyes and heartfelt compliments. She was kind enough to include me –a true nerd—in her social circle in Fort Lee when we were teenagers. That was where I met my first boyfriend, Jim Forte.
Joanne pointed out others who had been in our long-ago circle of friends: Lucian and John DeLuca and Jim Cook.
I offered condolences and asked about her mom’s last days. Madeline had Parkinson’s and was a shell of herself in the last few months. But, said Joanne, “She always rallied on Sunday, the day she would visit her sisters at the old house on Summit Avenue.” It was the house where Madeline was born. When she could no longer go to her sisters on Sunday, they came to her.
I had just been talking about genograms –family trees of family dynamics – with my niece-in-law Jane Marie, who is pursuing a doctorate in social work. I believe we all come into the world with our own idiosyncratic spark of divinity, but we are poured into the mold of family. We are shaped by our parents and our siblings, our grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, our spouses and our children, and by our family story. (And those who believe in reincarnation believe we repeat those patterns over many lives and many centuries.) When you are at a wake, you are looking at and honoring a genogram during a rite of passage.
Joanne’s mother Madeline was a tough mother when we were in our teens. She had the Irish-American gift of “telling it like it is” (remember Maureen O’ Hara as John Candy’s mother in the 1991 film “Only the Lonely?”). Madeline had a throaty chuckle when she might say something completely on point but potentially devastating to the immature adolescent ego. She kept maybe 10 boxes of Entenmann’s cakes in her kitchen at all times so that none of her family would become alcoholic. Madeline felt sugar and carbs would deter the Irish urge to imbibe. (Nobody drank, but Joanne says the Entenmann calories were no good for her figure.)
And she really was a great beauty, always well-coiffed and well-dressed.
My own mother was equally tough. She once told me I could get a fever in my brain that would take away my intelligence, which she knew was the only thing I had going for me at the time.
But my mother was more tomboyish, so I never really had to try to match up to the whole “being-a-lady” thing. (Although she was furious that I didn’t want to wear nylon stockings when I was in the eighth grade and she accused me of “not wanting to compete with other girls.” I still don’t like to wear hosiery.)
At the wake, Joanne introduced me to her daughter Tara. This is where the matchmaking opportunity comes into play.
I first met Tara when she was in a stroller and was less than a year old. I was pregnant with my second son Mike.
I remember Tara at age 3 when Joanne came over to our house for dinner, and in her typically exuberant way, remained chatting until late in the night. Tara said, “Joanne [not Mom, Joanne], it’s time to go. Right now.”
The last time I saw Tara was at her First Holy Communion party at age 7.
But here was Tara, at age 25. She was in graduate school for social work. She had presence and was unafraid to interact with her mom’s friends. Like her grandmother, she was a straight shooter. She seemed to have a sense of humor and a sense of fun.
She was still bossing her mother around. “Mom, we are going out to dinner IMMEDIATELY after we leave here.”
She was beautiful, with a very mobile expressive face, like the comedic actress Katherine Heigl.
And I thought of what Joanne had said to her daughter Tara after Joanne read some funny blog entries from my son Mike about my son Matt’s wedding. Joanne wrote me and said, “I was very touched when I read Mike's blog on the wedding rehearsal. He writes beautifully, just like his mother. After reading Mike's blog on the rehearsal, I told Tara, ‘I want you to marry someone like Mary's son, Mike.’"
Hmnnn, I thought, looking at Tara. It would be nice if Mike and Tara met. My son Mike the law student is funny and caring. He likes to talk and brooks no fools. But I have no idea about how to stage a meeting. It would never have occurred to me to do this.
My mother always fancied herself a match-maker. Deep in her dementia, when she no longer remembered her four daughters were already married, she asked every doctor who treated her, “Are you single? I have a girl for you.”
I mentioned how Tara and Mike might like each other to my husband Jim. I swear he has Asperger’s, the inability to interpret social cues and social norms, because he immediately called Mike and said, “Your mom wants you to go on a date with Joanne Quinn’s daughter Tara.”
When he told me he had told Mike this, I said, ”Do you have no filters? You don’t just blurt this out. You set up an ‘accidental’ or group get-together and see how things go.”
Now I’m stymied. And Tara specifically ordered me not to write about her. Oh, well.
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
KNOWING YOU'RE HOME:TOM
It is something I have been saying a lot to my number one son and my number three son in the past several months.
“You’ll know when you find the place that’s home,” I’ve said.
Number one son Matt and his bride Melany have been house-hunting since the ground was buried in snow. More on their search in another post.
My number three son Tom, a high school senior, has been engaged in the college application process since September (if you don’t count the prep courses and the tutoring for two rounds of the SAT’s last year.)
I’ve been through this process twice before with my two older sons. As I’ve said before, it’s more work, more torture and more suspense than giving birth.
In September, we had a consultation with a private college counselor, Deb Shames of Upper Saddle River, NJ, to develop a list of colleges and universities to which Tom could apply. I felt confident we could handle the rest of the process…filling out the common application online, getting teacher recommendations and writing the all-important college application essay.
But Tom had taken the SATs twice, and was not able to crack 500 (out of 800) on the Math portion. I figured this was going to be a deal-breaker at many schools, although his writing and critical reading skills are excellent, and he is a fine student in many subjects.
Deb talked to Tom about his interests in creative writing, political comedy, journalism and history. She’s a big proponent of Loren Pope’s book “Colleges That Change Lives” (www.ctcl.org.).
With her suggestions and some others from Don Bosco school guidance director, Father Brendan Kilroy, we decided to have Tom apply to 16 schools: American, Bard, Catholic, Chapman in California, Emerson, Fairfield, Fordham, Goucher in Baltimore, Knox in Galesburg, Illinois, Lawrence in Wisconsin, Providence, St. John’s in Annapolis, Skidmore, Syracuse (where Tom’s brother Mike had graduated), University of Iowa (renowned graduate writing program), and Ursinus.
I was amazed to discover that a number of colleges allow you to say, “Don’t look at my SAT scores, ” including Smith, NYU, Wake Forest and Middlebury. (You can see the full list at www. fairtest.org.)
My oldest son was desperate to go to Holy Cross after he toured the college early in his senior year. But he was deferred from early decision, and ultimately did not get in there. So my strategy has become: We’ll visit a college once you are accepted.
We did, however, tour a number of colleges with Tom in the Washington, DC area in early December. When we arrived at St. John’s in Annapolis, he was given a letter telling him he was accepted. He flushed beet-red.
He stayed overnight in the dorms and went to one of the college’s vaunted seminars, when 20 students around a table pursue a discussion based on readings. There are no lectures here.
“Mom," Tom told me later, “One of the students came to Seminar in bare feet. The temperature outside was about 20 degrees. But I have to admit, he was a great contributor to the discussion.”
St. John’s has a fixed curriculum. All freshmen take the same courses, including Greek, and choir (heavy on Gregorian chant.) All sophomores, juniors and seniors also take the same set of courses. There’s no dropping a course and replacing it with something else. They’ve been doing this since the 1930’s.
Oh, and there are no textbooks. You read from the original Great Books. To study geometry, you read Euclid.
He liked St. John’s (and immediately put up the St. John’s poster with its stack of Great Books). But he worried that with a total enrollment of 400 students in Annapolis (another 600 on the Sante Fe campus), he could be limited socially fast.
And this is a school that de-emphasizes grades, doesn’t generally test, and doesn’t require research papers. Students write one long paper each spring. Tom wanted more writing.
On this trip, we also toured Goucher, which started out as a women’s college in 1885 and moved to an expansive campus in Towson in 1942. Goucher’s unique requirement is that every student do a period of study abroad. Tom really felt at home on campus. I don’t know whether it was the beautiful new student union building, or the cafeteria offerings or the fact that there were malls with Applebee's just off campus. Oh, and you can board your horse at Goucher. (Not that we have a horse.)
We also toured Catholic University (beautiful campus, nice admissions staff) and American University (big emphasis on getting political and governmental internships).
Tom was accepted at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois on December 20, and offered a merit scholarship of $10,000 a year.. He had also been accepted at the University of Iowa. (I joked to him, “There you pay your tuition in corn.")
We arranged to fly out to see the University of Iowa one weekend in January and then to drive the 100 miles to Knox College.
Iowa City turned out to be a pretty happenin’ place. The Hotel Vetro, where we stayed, had as modernist a sensibility as any boutique hotel in Manhattan. The floors were polished concrete, windows were floor to ceiling, and the bathroom with its big soaking tub had a barn-style frosted glass door that slid back and forth on a track. From our hotel windows, we looked down on street scenes of pedestrians making their way through snow in and out of coffee houses and eateries.
The campus of the University of Iowa was the city. We walked up and down streets in the freezing cold, and ducked into the university library and the student center. It was very quiet because it was winter break.
We drove out to northwest-central Illinois on Sunday. The town was founded by Reverend George W. Gale, a minister from New York State who wanted to create a college to educate ministers who would spread the gospel to the prairies. The college opened its doors in 1841, and was the site of one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
On Sunday, Tom insisted we eat at a sports bar in town called “Crappy’s.” The food wasn’t crappy.
On Monday, Tom attended a number of classes. His assessment? He really liked the school, but it was in the boonies. “But you’re a train ride away from Chicago,” I reminded him.
On the drive back, it started snowing 30 miles into our return trip to Iowa City. In the final 70 miles, we passed no fewer than 25 cars that had spun off the road into ditches, along with one truck snaked into a chain-link fence on the side of the highway. My fingers were white-knuckled on the steering wheel.
When we (finally) got into Iowa City, city streets hadn’t been plowed either. “They like to do only one pass-through with the plow,” said the Hotel Vetro clerk. “So they wait for the snow to stop.”
Back home in New Jersey, we received notification from Ursinus College that Tom had been offered a $10,000 annual merit scholarship.
One of Tom’s friends had been dismissive of Ursinus. Since when is a 17-year-old suburban prep school kid the authority on colleges, I asked Tom. On the other hand, one of Jim’s partners had graduated from Ursinus.
“We’ve got to tour Ursinus, Tom,” I said.
We arranged to meet our son Mike, who lives nearby and attends law school at Villanova. Ursinus was another beautiful campus with venerable red-brick buildings co-mingling with shining new buildings, including a sports complex. This was the school that offers freshmen the chance to live in the dorm room where J.D. Salinger lived the one semester before he dropped out of Ursinus. Tom wasn’t impressed.
By mid-December, Tom had been accepted at St. John’s, Ursinus, Knox, and University of Iowa. By the end of January, he was saying his top three schools were St. John’s, Goucher, and Knox. By mid-March, he had also been accepted to Catholic (with a $14,000 scholarship), Goucher, Emerson in Boston (which Jay Leno attended), and Fairfield in Connecticut. He was deferred from early action at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, a very good school no one ever heard of.
My husband kept saying he had a gut feeling Tom would go to Providence College. (Jim thinks he’s psychic. The rest of the family knows he’s not.)
At some point in February, on a sunny Sunday when the whole world was dripping melting snow, Jim offered to drive us to Bard College, about an hour north of us on the New York State Thruway. We wandered through the campus, particularly the library. Afterwards, we stopped at a sports bar, where Tom said he had the best cheeseburger he’d ever eaten.
Tom then asked me to book him a real tour of campus. We toured early in March and chatted with a well-spoken associate admission director who looked just like Sigourney Weaver. (“Loved you in Aliens,” I wanted to say.)
Tom loved Bard’s emphasis on creative writing and creative endeavors of all kinds, including performing. The school also requires a three-week writing course for freshmen in August, called the Language and Thinking Program. And all seniors have a required senior project, which is bound into book form and kept in the library.
The students seemed quirky and free-wheeling. But the student body was large enough that Tom felt he wouldn’t be limited to the same small group of quirky folks.
The associate admission director said the college would send out acceptances and rejections the week of March 28.
“And they are all letter-size,” she said. “No big packages for acceptances and letter-size for rejections, the way other colleges do it.”
Tom decided that Bard was his first choice, but calculated his chances of acceptance as very low. "The Fiske Guide says Bard is highly selective," he said.
As March wound down, Tom got more acceptance letters, a few wait-list offerings (Fordham, Syracuse, Skidmore, Lawrence) and one rejection, from American. He also was offered a $15,000 annual merit scholarship to Chapman in California.
On Wednesday March 30, the mail brought a letter-size missive from Bard. I could feel cardboard inside. Was it a return postcard for the wait-list?
I waited until 2 pm, when Tom usually gets home. But he didn’t pull up the driveway. I ripped open the envelope. The cardboard was an ornate red sleeve that proclaimed in gilded letters:“Congratulations!”
I texted Tom, only the second text I’d ever done. U got into Bard.
Tom pulled up at 2:03. I walked to the driver’s window.
“What did I do wrong?” he asked.
“You were accepted at Bard!” I said.
“Very good, very good,” said Tom. He is very laid-back.
Applying to college is not only a drawn-out series of steps and forms and fees. It's a psychological process as well, for both child and parent. Like a pregnancy, it all seems so unreal in the beginning. You’ve always been together, living in the same family, bound by genes and proximity and shared history and stories of crazy uncles and aunts who were the bong queen.
And now you are taking steps to separate, to wake up on your own in the morning, find your own meals, do your own laundry, live your own life, be your own person.
Come back to the womb, the mother wants to shout. Let’s do this all over again. It was something, wasn’t it?
Here, by the way, is Tom’s college application essay. I think it's why he got into so many schools, despite his Math SATs.
There’s an old saying that goes,”Hire a teenager –while he still knows everything.”
Sarcasm aside, I could identify with the sentiment. I felt that nearly 12 years of classroom education had given me a broad and deep comprehension of the world around me.
My teachers spent years sharing their knowledge and perspectives and teaching me how to see society as a product of mathematics, morality, history, literature and science – the cornerstones of knowledge and civilization. My knowledge base gave me an unshakeable confidence and a sense that little was beyond my grasp.
And then I volunteered with Alzheimer’s patients at a Potomac Homes facility, and found myself in an existential crisis. What is the use of knowledge if you can’t get at it because of gunk in your brain? Who are you if you can’t remember who you are or what you’re doing?
My venture into the hazy minds of the nation’s elderly began as innocuously as one would expect. My mother drove me outside the building and with a sigh of good luck, let me off. I casually glanced at the surrounding buildings and approached the entrance. When I was buzzed in, the exterior gate burst open and immediately there stood before me a sight I would surely never forget: A 65-year-old woman in footie-pajamas. Unaware footie-pajamas were produced for anyone over 6 years of age, I was compelled to pay her a compliment. After all, they were the first and finest adult footie-pajamas I had ever seen. Looking her straight in the eye, I said “Miss, if I may be so bold. I should think you may very well be the best-dressed in this house.”
Unhesitatingly, she responded with a warm smile and an overwhelming hug. Before I could say another word, I was treated with what seemed like an endless flow of compliments. Told I was both “a beautiful daughter” and a “handsome son” and even in some cases “a wonderful mother,” I knew suddenly what these animated ladies lacked in accuracy they more than made up for in their desire to connect.
I pushed open the door with one hand and entered the house, my other arm occupied by the woman who had greeted me. As I entered the living room, an eclectic mix of smiles was cast my way, welcoming me into their realm. Having spoken with the house manager, I plopped myself and the woman in the footie-pajamas down on the couch. As if I were the missing link, the women surrounded me, studied me, prodded me, and bombarded me with questions. Eager to rise to the occasion, I answered their questions enthusiastically, even if I didn’t know the answer. Knowing that many of the answers they desired were embedded in a sorrowfully unavailable history, I painfully concluded my obligation to their momentary satisfaction superseded any to truth. Theirs was a world of uncertainty and I could make them happy, if only for a little while. The most common questions shot at me were “Who am I?”, “Are you my son?”, and “Where am I?”. Respectively, I would answer “A wonderful and charming woman,” “ No, I’m not handsome enough,” and “Right here with me, the luckiest kid in the world to have a moment of your time.”
Sweet beyond all measure, the house was a haven for my rapidly expanding ego. Indulged with praise and acclaim from every member of the house, I began to feel almost unworthy to be among such affection and warmth.
This is not to say there weren’t hostilities and power plays, subtle or outright. The lady in the footie-pajamas, Gladys, would often pick fights. Claiming she was the boss of the house, Gladys would threaten anyone who would approach me, saying “I run this place and I’ll have them kick you out lickety-split.”
When I would ask why she was being so hostile, she would say “Because you’re my daughter,” to which I would reply “Sounds reasonable.”
Over time, the antics and wit of these sharp-tongued women began to wane in amusement as stark reality set in for me. Deprived of many of their memories and much of what some would call identity, these women challenged my understanding of the human being. Slowly, I began to grow confused over what exactly constitutes the core of personhood. Like a painting broken down into tiny pieces, I studied their mental profiles in the hopes of gaining some defined sense of humanity.
I asked them questions about current events they’d been told about but couldn’t remember. I queried them about a past that was at best a tenuous string of random events. I began to pity them. I began to dread that condition. I began to fear what they represented – the slow deterioration and prolonged death of the mind. School hadn’t prepared me for this physical and psychological draining away. If the condition of the immortal soul was dependent upon the character of the mortal mind, how could the soul be eternal? And, in the here and now, what is the self if you can’t remember the last 5 or 10 years of your life, or who or where you are?
I became angry and frustrated by the lack of answers until one day I finally realized that I could deny their mental stability but I couldn’t deny the fact that they were eagerly and happily partaking in questioning me, like scientists with limited tools. Despite what I said or what I confessed, they looked at me in the same admirable light, giving me the same caring and considerate compliments, and loving me regardless of who I was. I realized the disorder didn’t wear away their personality; it winnowed away what wasn’t their personality. Time and their condition allowed them to revert to who they really were, not bound by lies or past, but liberated into the ever-present. These ladies were not to be pitied. They were to be enjoyed as they enjoyed everyone else.
My time at Potomac Homes put me in crisis, but ultimately gave me a new comprehension and admiration for the human spirit. Experience was my teacher; hardened thought and preconceptions needed to be burned away, unlearned.
Good schooling can give you the tools to mine experience for truth and to be of service to others. I look to college to delve further into great thoughts and great minds, while understanding that the experience of curiosity and concern for and connection to others are the greatest tools for lifelong learning---even if you’re a little hazy about who you are.
“You’ll know when you find the place that’s home,” I’ve said.
Number one son Matt and his bride Melany have been house-hunting since the ground was buried in snow. More on their search in another post.
My number three son Tom, a high school senior, has been engaged in the college application process since September (if you don’t count the prep courses and the tutoring for two rounds of the SAT’s last year.)
I’ve been through this process twice before with my two older sons. As I’ve said before, it’s more work, more torture and more suspense than giving birth.
In September, we had a consultation with a private college counselor, Deb Shames of Upper Saddle River, NJ, to develop a list of colleges and universities to which Tom could apply. I felt confident we could handle the rest of the process…filling out the common application online, getting teacher recommendations and writing the all-important college application essay.
But Tom had taken the SATs twice, and was not able to crack 500 (out of 800) on the Math portion. I figured this was going to be a deal-breaker at many schools, although his writing and critical reading skills are excellent, and he is a fine student in many subjects.
Deb talked to Tom about his interests in creative writing, political comedy, journalism and history. She’s a big proponent of Loren Pope’s book “Colleges That Change Lives” (www.ctcl.org.).
With her suggestions and some others from Don Bosco school guidance director, Father Brendan Kilroy, we decided to have Tom apply to 16 schools: American, Bard, Catholic, Chapman in California, Emerson, Fairfield, Fordham, Goucher in Baltimore, Knox in Galesburg, Illinois, Lawrence in Wisconsin, Providence, St. John’s in Annapolis, Skidmore, Syracuse (where Tom’s brother Mike had graduated), University of Iowa (renowned graduate writing program), and Ursinus.
I was amazed to discover that a number of colleges allow you to say, “Don’t look at my SAT scores, ” including Smith, NYU, Wake Forest and Middlebury. (You can see the full list at www. fairtest.org.)
My oldest son was desperate to go to Holy Cross after he toured the college early in his senior year. But he was deferred from early decision, and ultimately did not get in there. So my strategy has become: We’ll visit a college once you are accepted.
We did, however, tour a number of colleges with Tom in the Washington, DC area in early December. When we arrived at St. John’s in Annapolis, he was given a letter telling him he was accepted. He flushed beet-red.
He stayed overnight in the dorms and went to one of the college’s vaunted seminars, when 20 students around a table pursue a discussion based on readings. There are no lectures here.
“Mom," Tom told me later, “One of the students came to Seminar in bare feet. The temperature outside was about 20 degrees. But I have to admit, he was a great contributor to the discussion.”
St. John’s has a fixed curriculum. All freshmen take the same courses, including Greek, and choir (heavy on Gregorian chant.) All sophomores, juniors and seniors also take the same set of courses. There’s no dropping a course and replacing it with something else. They’ve been doing this since the 1930’s.
Oh, and there are no textbooks. You read from the original Great Books. To study geometry, you read Euclid.
He liked St. John’s (and immediately put up the St. John’s poster with its stack of Great Books). But he worried that with a total enrollment of 400 students in Annapolis (another 600 on the Sante Fe campus), he could be limited socially fast.
And this is a school that de-emphasizes grades, doesn’t generally test, and doesn’t require research papers. Students write one long paper each spring. Tom wanted more writing.
On this trip, we also toured Goucher, which started out as a women’s college in 1885 and moved to an expansive campus in Towson in 1942. Goucher’s unique requirement is that every student do a period of study abroad. Tom really felt at home on campus. I don’t know whether it was the beautiful new student union building, or the cafeteria offerings or the fact that there were malls with Applebee's just off campus. Oh, and you can board your horse at Goucher. (Not that we have a horse.)
We also toured Catholic University (beautiful campus, nice admissions staff) and American University (big emphasis on getting political and governmental internships).
Tom was accepted at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois on December 20, and offered a merit scholarship of $10,000 a year.. He had also been accepted at the University of Iowa. (I joked to him, “There you pay your tuition in corn.")
We arranged to fly out to see the University of Iowa one weekend in January and then to drive the 100 miles to Knox College.
Iowa City turned out to be a pretty happenin’ place. The Hotel Vetro, where we stayed, had as modernist a sensibility as any boutique hotel in Manhattan. The floors were polished concrete, windows were floor to ceiling, and the bathroom with its big soaking tub had a barn-style frosted glass door that slid back and forth on a track. From our hotel windows, we looked down on street scenes of pedestrians making their way through snow in and out of coffee houses and eateries.
The campus of the University of Iowa was the city. We walked up and down streets in the freezing cold, and ducked into the university library and the student center. It was very quiet because it was winter break.
We drove out to northwest-central Illinois on Sunday. The town was founded by Reverend George W. Gale, a minister from New York State who wanted to create a college to educate ministers who would spread the gospel to the prairies. The college opened its doors in 1841, and was the site of one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
On Sunday, Tom insisted we eat at a sports bar in town called “Crappy’s.” The food wasn’t crappy.
On Monday, Tom attended a number of classes. His assessment? He really liked the school, but it was in the boonies. “But you’re a train ride away from Chicago,” I reminded him.
On the drive back, it started snowing 30 miles into our return trip to Iowa City. In the final 70 miles, we passed no fewer than 25 cars that had spun off the road into ditches, along with one truck snaked into a chain-link fence on the side of the highway. My fingers were white-knuckled on the steering wheel.
When we (finally) got into Iowa City, city streets hadn’t been plowed either. “They like to do only one pass-through with the plow,” said the Hotel Vetro clerk. “So they wait for the snow to stop.”
Back home in New Jersey, we received notification from Ursinus College that Tom had been offered a $10,000 annual merit scholarship.
One of Tom’s friends had been dismissive of Ursinus. Since when is a 17-year-old suburban prep school kid the authority on colleges, I asked Tom. On the other hand, one of Jim’s partners had graduated from Ursinus.
“We’ve got to tour Ursinus, Tom,” I said.
We arranged to meet our son Mike, who lives nearby and attends law school at Villanova. Ursinus was another beautiful campus with venerable red-brick buildings co-mingling with shining new buildings, including a sports complex. This was the school that offers freshmen the chance to live in the dorm room where J.D. Salinger lived the one semester before he dropped out of Ursinus. Tom wasn’t impressed.
By mid-December, Tom had been accepted at St. John’s, Ursinus, Knox, and University of Iowa. By the end of January, he was saying his top three schools were St. John’s, Goucher, and Knox. By mid-March, he had also been accepted to Catholic (with a $14,000 scholarship), Goucher, Emerson in Boston (which Jay Leno attended), and Fairfield in Connecticut. He was deferred from early action at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, a very good school no one ever heard of.
My husband kept saying he had a gut feeling Tom would go to Providence College. (Jim thinks he’s psychic. The rest of the family knows he’s not.)
At some point in February, on a sunny Sunday when the whole world was dripping melting snow, Jim offered to drive us to Bard College, about an hour north of us on the New York State Thruway. We wandered through the campus, particularly the library. Afterwards, we stopped at a sports bar, where Tom said he had the best cheeseburger he’d ever eaten.
Tom then asked me to book him a real tour of campus. We toured early in March and chatted with a well-spoken associate admission director who looked just like Sigourney Weaver. (“Loved you in Aliens,” I wanted to say.)
Tom loved Bard’s emphasis on creative writing and creative endeavors of all kinds, including performing. The school also requires a three-week writing course for freshmen in August, called the Language and Thinking Program. And all seniors have a required senior project, which is bound into book form and kept in the library.
The students seemed quirky and free-wheeling. But the student body was large enough that Tom felt he wouldn’t be limited to the same small group of quirky folks.
The associate admission director said the college would send out acceptances and rejections the week of March 28.
“And they are all letter-size,” she said. “No big packages for acceptances and letter-size for rejections, the way other colleges do it.”
Tom decided that Bard was his first choice, but calculated his chances of acceptance as very low. "The Fiske Guide says Bard is highly selective," he said.
As March wound down, Tom got more acceptance letters, a few wait-list offerings (Fordham, Syracuse, Skidmore, Lawrence) and one rejection, from American. He also was offered a $15,000 annual merit scholarship to Chapman in California.
On Wednesday March 30, the mail brought a letter-size missive from Bard. I could feel cardboard inside. Was it a return postcard for the wait-list?
I waited until 2 pm, when Tom usually gets home. But he didn’t pull up the driveway. I ripped open the envelope. The cardboard was an ornate red sleeve that proclaimed in gilded letters:“Congratulations!”
I texted Tom, only the second text I’d ever done. U got into Bard.
Tom pulled up at 2:03. I walked to the driver’s window.
“What did I do wrong?” he asked.
“You were accepted at Bard!” I said.
“Very good, very good,” said Tom. He is very laid-back.
Applying to college is not only a drawn-out series of steps and forms and fees. It's a psychological process as well, for both child and parent. Like a pregnancy, it all seems so unreal in the beginning. You’ve always been together, living in the same family, bound by genes and proximity and shared history and stories of crazy uncles and aunts who were the bong queen.
And now you are taking steps to separate, to wake up on your own in the morning, find your own meals, do your own laundry, live your own life, be your own person.
Come back to the womb, the mother wants to shout. Let’s do this all over again. It was something, wasn’t it?
Here, by the way, is Tom’s college application essay. I think it's why he got into so many schools, despite his Math SATs.
There’s an old saying that goes,”Hire a teenager –while he still knows everything.”
Sarcasm aside, I could identify with the sentiment. I felt that nearly 12 years of classroom education had given me a broad and deep comprehension of the world around me.
My teachers spent years sharing their knowledge and perspectives and teaching me how to see society as a product of mathematics, morality, history, literature and science – the cornerstones of knowledge and civilization. My knowledge base gave me an unshakeable confidence and a sense that little was beyond my grasp.
And then I volunteered with Alzheimer’s patients at a Potomac Homes facility, and found myself in an existential crisis. What is the use of knowledge if you can’t get at it because of gunk in your brain? Who are you if you can’t remember who you are or what you’re doing?
My venture into the hazy minds of the nation’s elderly began as innocuously as one would expect. My mother drove me outside the building and with a sigh of good luck, let me off. I casually glanced at the surrounding buildings and approached the entrance. When I was buzzed in, the exterior gate burst open and immediately there stood before me a sight I would surely never forget: A 65-year-old woman in footie-pajamas. Unaware footie-pajamas were produced for anyone over 6 years of age, I was compelled to pay her a compliment. After all, they were the first and finest adult footie-pajamas I had ever seen. Looking her straight in the eye, I said “Miss, if I may be so bold. I should think you may very well be the best-dressed in this house.”
Unhesitatingly, she responded with a warm smile and an overwhelming hug. Before I could say another word, I was treated with what seemed like an endless flow of compliments. Told I was both “a beautiful daughter” and a “handsome son” and even in some cases “a wonderful mother,” I knew suddenly what these animated ladies lacked in accuracy they more than made up for in their desire to connect.
I pushed open the door with one hand and entered the house, my other arm occupied by the woman who had greeted me. As I entered the living room, an eclectic mix of smiles was cast my way, welcoming me into their realm. Having spoken with the house manager, I plopped myself and the woman in the footie-pajamas down on the couch. As if I were the missing link, the women surrounded me, studied me, prodded me, and bombarded me with questions. Eager to rise to the occasion, I answered their questions enthusiastically, even if I didn’t know the answer. Knowing that many of the answers they desired were embedded in a sorrowfully unavailable history, I painfully concluded my obligation to their momentary satisfaction superseded any to truth. Theirs was a world of uncertainty and I could make them happy, if only for a little while. The most common questions shot at me were “Who am I?”, “Are you my son?”, and “Where am I?”. Respectively, I would answer “A wonderful and charming woman,” “ No, I’m not handsome enough,” and “Right here with me, the luckiest kid in the world to have a moment of your time.”
Sweet beyond all measure, the house was a haven for my rapidly expanding ego. Indulged with praise and acclaim from every member of the house, I began to feel almost unworthy to be among such affection and warmth.
This is not to say there weren’t hostilities and power plays, subtle or outright. The lady in the footie-pajamas, Gladys, would often pick fights. Claiming she was the boss of the house, Gladys would threaten anyone who would approach me, saying “I run this place and I’ll have them kick you out lickety-split.”
When I would ask why she was being so hostile, she would say “Because you’re my daughter,” to which I would reply “Sounds reasonable.”
Over time, the antics and wit of these sharp-tongued women began to wane in amusement as stark reality set in for me. Deprived of many of their memories and much of what some would call identity, these women challenged my understanding of the human being. Slowly, I began to grow confused over what exactly constitutes the core of personhood. Like a painting broken down into tiny pieces, I studied their mental profiles in the hopes of gaining some defined sense of humanity.
I asked them questions about current events they’d been told about but couldn’t remember. I queried them about a past that was at best a tenuous string of random events. I began to pity them. I began to dread that condition. I began to fear what they represented – the slow deterioration and prolonged death of the mind. School hadn’t prepared me for this physical and psychological draining away. If the condition of the immortal soul was dependent upon the character of the mortal mind, how could the soul be eternal? And, in the here and now, what is the self if you can’t remember the last 5 or 10 years of your life, or who or where you are?
I became angry and frustrated by the lack of answers until one day I finally realized that I could deny their mental stability but I couldn’t deny the fact that they were eagerly and happily partaking in questioning me, like scientists with limited tools. Despite what I said or what I confessed, they looked at me in the same admirable light, giving me the same caring and considerate compliments, and loving me regardless of who I was. I realized the disorder didn’t wear away their personality; it winnowed away what wasn’t their personality. Time and their condition allowed them to revert to who they really were, not bound by lies or past, but liberated into the ever-present. These ladies were not to be pitied. They were to be enjoyed as they enjoyed everyone else.
My time at Potomac Homes put me in crisis, but ultimately gave me a new comprehension and admiration for the human spirit. Experience was my teacher; hardened thought and preconceptions needed to be burned away, unlearned.
Good schooling can give you the tools to mine experience for truth and to be of service to others. I look to college to delve further into great thoughts and great minds, while understanding that the experience of curiosity and concern for and connection to others are the greatest tools for lifelong learning---even if you’re a little hazy about who you are.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
When did our children get older than we are?
It was April 5, 1981, a Sunday. I was working for Channel 5 News in New York City and heading to a shoot with my camera crew when the voice of the assignment editor crackled over the radio.
“Mary, your mother called,” he said. “Your sister had the baby.”
“Which sister?” I asked.
“What?’ he replied.
“Which sister?” I reiterated.
“Dunno,” he said.
Margaret and Marian, my identical twin sisters two and a half years younger than I, had gotten pregnant roughly the same week on two different continents. Margaret was in Portugal with her husband Greg. Marian was living in Tucson with her husband Michael (or “Benny”, as we call him) and her toddler son Michael.
By the time they were ready to deliver, Margaret and Marian were both in Tucson. As it turned out, Marian gave birth first, to Louis Rocco (named after his maternal and paternal grandfathers).
On April 9, Margaret gave birth to her first child, Hannah Leah, named after her maternal great-grandmother Hannah Hickey.
Margaret and Marian roomed together at the hospital. There was some sibling rivalry, as I recall. Baby Louis initially had some problems, as I recall, including a big bump on his head. But those issues resolved.
We Amoroso girls have always been wild for babies, and there was much rejoicing over the double blessing of two new family seedlings.
Louis and Hannah didn’t really grow up together. Hannah’s family lived in Romania for two different periods, because Hannah’s dad had diplomatic postings. And they moved to the Washington, DC area, since Greg worked for the Department of State.
Louis’ family lived mostly in Arizona, though there was a 5-year period when they lived in Northern New York so that they could be near Marian’s family.
Many of us were in Maryland for Hannah’s graduation from St Mary’s College in 2003. I remember Margaret introducing us to her new in-laws from her second marriage.
My own firstborn, Matthew, who joined the pack in 1982, became very close to his cousin Lou, and they traveled through Europe together in their early 20s. Matt moved to Phoenix to live with Lou for a short time.
Lou went to work in the restaurant industry. His strong work ethic and sunny disposition have helped him advance.
After college, Hannah went back to school at Johns Hopkins to get her bachelor of science degree in nursing. She works as a surgical nurse and has had graduate training in nursing informatics (using computer technology in nursing).
Hannah lives with her boyfriend Brad in a beautifully renovated rowhouse in Baltimore. Louis patiently waded through the process of buying a “short sale” home outside of Chandler, AZ and now owns a hacienda with pool that he purchased for half its original price.
I have gotten to spend time with Hannah in recent years at my house during the holidays and at Margaret’s house in Maryland for Hannah’s twin nieces’ birthday party in May. Hannah is smart and drole and feisty, and she is the great beauty of the family (although her sisters are right up there in the looks department).
I have seen a lot less of Louis, because he is so far West. But he was here for my son Matt’s wedding, and I am happy to report that he remains a sunny, easy-going guy with awesome people skills. This is the boy whose mother insisted he was potty-trained when he was only two and who peed on my rugs. I guess it added character to the rugs.
And now Louis and Hannah turn 30 this week. They are both responsible and full of life, and are on track to put their elders into nursing homes when we dodder off into the sunset.
Happy birthday, you full-grown flowers of our family.
“Mary, your mother called,” he said. “Your sister had the baby.”
“Which sister?” I asked.
“What?’ he replied.
“Which sister?” I reiterated.
“Dunno,” he said.
Margaret and Marian, my identical twin sisters two and a half years younger than I, had gotten pregnant roughly the same week on two different continents. Margaret was in Portugal with her husband Greg. Marian was living in Tucson with her husband Michael (or “Benny”, as we call him) and her toddler son Michael.
By the time they were ready to deliver, Margaret and Marian were both in Tucson. As it turned out, Marian gave birth first, to Louis Rocco (named after his maternal and paternal grandfathers).
On April 9, Margaret gave birth to her first child, Hannah Leah, named after her maternal great-grandmother Hannah Hickey.
Margaret and Marian roomed together at the hospital. There was some sibling rivalry, as I recall. Baby Louis initially had some problems, as I recall, including a big bump on his head. But those issues resolved.
We Amoroso girls have always been wild for babies, and there was much rejoicing over the double blessing of two new family seedlings.
Louis and Hannah didn’t really grow up together. Hannah’s family lived in Romania for two different periods, because Hannah’s dad had diplomatic postings. And they moved to the Washington, DC area, since Greg worked for the Department of State.
Louis’ family lived mostly in Arizona, though there was a 5-year period when they lived in Northern New York so that they could be near Marian’s family.
Many of us were in Maryland for Hannah’s graduation from St Mary’s College in 2003. I remember Margaret introducing us to her new in-laws from her second marriage.
My own firstborn, Matthew, who joined the pack in 1982, became very close to his cousin Lou, and they traveled through Europe together in their early 20s. Matt moved to Phoenix to live with Lou for a short time.
Lou went to work in the restaurant industry. His strong work ethic and sunny disposition have helped him advance.
After college, Hannah went back to school at Johns Hopkins to get her bachelor of science degree in nursing. She works as a surgical nurse and has had graduate training in nursing informatics (using computer technology in nursing).
Hannah lives with her boyfriend Brad in a beautifully renovated rowhouse in Baltimore. Louis patiently waded through the process of buying a “short sale” home outside of Chandler, AZ and now owns a hacienda with pool that he purchased for half its original price.
I have gotten to spend time with Hannah in recent years at my house during the holidays and at Margaret’s house in Maryland for Hannah’s twin nieces’ birthday party in May. Hannah is smart and drole and feisty, and she is the great beauty of the family (although her sisters are right up there in the looks department).
I have seen a lot less of Louis, because he is so far West. But he was here for my son Matt’s wedding, and I am happy to report that he remains a sunny, easy-going guy with awesome people skills. This is the boy whose mother insisted he was potty-trained when he was only two and who peed on my rugs. I guess it added character to the rugs.
And now Louis and Hannah turn 30 this week. They are both responsible and full of life, and are on track to put their elders into nursing homes when we dodder off into the sunset.
Happy birthday, you full-grown flowers of our family.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Finding Hannah
The family tree is a project you inevitably have to tackle when you have children. I made several forays into ancestry.com a couple of years back when my daughter Maeve had to do a family tree. A couple of days ago, my cousin Kathleen wrote me to say that her daughter Alexandra had to do a "heritage project" for her senior year of high school. Kathleen remembered I had been bugging her mother, my godmother Aunt Ann, for family information about our mothers' side of the family. Now that Aunt Ann has passed, Kathleen was hoping I still had some info.
I pulled out paperwork that had been languishing on a shelf, most notably, our maternal grandmother Hannah's 1891 birth certificate from Templeglantine, County Limerick in Ireland.Our mothers' sister, Aunt Peggy had kindly sent it to me several years back.
And I found myself on the hunt on the Internet once again. I can get pretty lost in genealogical research:It is indeed reaching through the mist to find forebears in other decades, other centuries. I also called Aunt Peggy, the last surviving of Hannah's children, to help fill in the blanks. Here's what I found.
Hannah Casey was born August 3, 1891 in Templeglantine, a village in County Limerick. Her father was Patrick Casey, an agricultural laborer. Her mother was Mary Connors Casey.
According to the 1901 Irish Census, Patrick (40) and Mary (35) had the following children: Ellen (12), Johanna (9—our grandma Hannah Hickey)), Catherine (7), John (4). Father-in-law Maurice Connors and mother-in-law Mary Connors were also living with them.
According to the 1911 Irish Census, Patrick and Mary had living with them Catherine (17), John (14), Patrick (10) and Bridget (7). Father-in-law and mother-in-law (age 90 and 85) were still with them and the grandparents could not read or write, but they spoke both English and Irish. In 1911, Patrick and Mary Casey had been married 27 years. The Census indicated they had 9 children born alive, and 8 still living. (There is no indication of Mary Casey, who became Mary O’Connell, mother of Father Dave, Father Jack and Father Francis, or of Nora Casey (born about 1894).)
Aunt Peggy Lapinski, Hannah Hickey’s daughter who is now 87, recalls Aunt Nellie Casey O’Halloran (her husband had a bar at 92nd Street and 3rd Avenue); Aunt Katie Casey (Bridie Flavin’s grandmother, very religious, all of a sudden she would break out in the hymn “Amazing Grace” ); Aunt Nora Casey (who between her first husband Mr. Mahoney and her second husband Pat Toomey had something like 13 children among them),;Aunt Mary Casey O’Connell; Aunt Bridie Casey (she came to America, had an unhappy marriage, left her husband and went back to Ireland); Uncle Jack Casey (who lived in the Bronx, but took all his kids out of school and went back to Ireland as well), and Uncle Patty Casey (married to Aunt Beatrice.) And, of course, Hannah Casey Hickey.
Her husband Michael Hickey was born May 27, 1894 in New York City. In the 1900 Census, he was listed as age 6, living with his father Michael Hickey who was born in Ireland in November of 1870 and immigrated to the US in 1891;, and with his mother Margaret Hurley Hickey, who immigrated to the US in 1886. (Hard to read her DOB, but it looks like March 1865.) Father Michael was a longshoreman. Father and mother had been married 8 years. Their address was 243 Madison Street in Manhattan. (That’s the Lower East Side near the end of Canal Street.)
Aunt Ann McGuire said Margaret Hurley Hickey died in 1912, but I would place it more between 1900 and 1902. My mother said Margaret Hurley Hickey was bending over to change the ice in the ice box when a whalebone in her corset pierced her heart. (I have a portrait of Margaret Hurley Hickey, which hung for years in Hannah Casey Hickey’s front room. Margaret Hickey looks just like Aunt Ann McGuire.)
The 1910 Census shows a Michael Hickey living on 44th Street in Manhattan in his second marriage with a wife named Mary. They are both about 38 and have been married 8 years. He is a coachman with a private family; she is a laundress. No sign of son Mike, our Grandpa. (There are A LOT of Michael Hickeys in NYC in 1910. But this one seems to fit for Great-grandfather.)
The new stepmother and young Mike didn’t get along and at some point he left his father’s house. A Mabel Hurley, age 40 is running a boardinghouse at 241 East 32nd Street in Manhattan in the Census of 1910. Her sister Elizabeth Hurley and brother John J. Hurley live with her, as do 9 boarders. No sign of Mike, who would be 16. But my mother Mary Hickey Amoroso said that the new stepmother chased out young Mike and he went to live in Auntie Hurley’s boardinghouse. That’s where he courted Hannah, who was nearly 3 years older than he. He would drop down notes on a string and a hanger to the window of her room.
How did they meet? Aunt Peggy Lapinski says young Mike Hickey drove for Bloomingdale’s and Hannah Casey worked as a domestic in charge of linens for Jay Gould, probably Jay Gould II, son of the first Jay Gould, a robber baron of the mid 1800s.
They married around 1918, when Hannah was 27 and Mike was 24. (She always shaved her age on the Census survey.)
The Census of 1920 has Hannah and Michael married and living on Lexington Avenue and 96th Street. He is a chauffeur. No children. The Census indicates Hannah arrived in US in 1915. We have a passenger listing that shows her arriving in New York October 23, 1916. (A Nora Casey arrived June 26, 1916).
The Census of 1930 shows Hannah and Michael living on 96th Street with five children: Michael (9), Mary (8) (my mom), Margaret(6)(Aunt Peggy), Patrick (4) and Helen (1). No baby Ann yet. Grandpa is listed as a commercial chauffeur. (Aunt Ann said he was a chauffeur for Bloomingdale’s and American Meter Company.) When he lost his job, he became depressed and violent and ended up at Rockland Psychiatric through WWII. I remember him as the grandfather who sat in the far corner of the kitchen in the railroad flat at Lexington and 96th Street, and played his harmonica. Through the window behind him, clotheslines stretched out like tentacles to other buildings.
The 1930 Census places great-grandfather Mike Hickey and his second wife Mary at 8th Avenue and 118th Street. He is 59 and lists his occupation as steamship company but he seems to be unemployed. Mary calls herself a housewife.
The Census of 1930 also shows Hannah’s sister Mary O’Connell (age 36) living with her husband David on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan. The following children are listed: David (15), John (12), Madeline (8) Catherine (6), Leonard (4), Bill (almost 3) and Theresa (1). (David, as a Dominican priest, organized my adoption to Mary and Lou Amoroso and officiated at my wedding in 1979.)
Aunt Peggy says the O’Connells lived on 69th Street in Manhattan. Once they won a live pig in a raffle at church. They had to bring the pig home and stash it in the bathtub until they slaughtered it.
Peggy remembers a cousin Eileen O’Connell who worked for many years at the Mayflower Hotel in New York. Cousin Will O’Connell died during World War II in Guam the exact same day that roving reporter Ernie Pyle was killed April 18, 1945 in Japan.
Aunt Nora Casey Toomey lived in a brownstone at 292 Hoyt Street in Brooklyn with her many children from three marriages. St. Agnes Church was right across the street. The Hickey cousins loved taking the subway to her house. “It was like the country,” said Aunt Peggy. “There was a tree in the backyard.”
Aunt Nora was an incredible cook and baker. Aunt Peggy said that during World War II, when supplies were limited, Aunt Nora made a delicious cake with tomato soup. She also rolled nuts in cream cheese. People rushed to buy her cakes at bake sales.
Her husband Pat Toomey worked for the New York subway system. (So did Patty Casey, according to Aunt Peggy. Patty Casey also worked as a bartender.)
Aunt Nora’s son Jack Toomey died at Anzio Beach in World War II. He was my mother’s favorite cousin. “I loved Jack Toomey,” she would say plaintively decades later.
After Great-Grandfather Michael Hickey’s second wife died, his son Mike Hickey and daughter-in-law Hannah managed to get him a 6-room apartment right across the hall in their building at 1512 Lexington Avenue. I think my mother told me they called him “Red Mike.”
Red Mike would invite the ladies in, throw open his cupboards to show them his wide array of dishes and kitchenware, and say to the ladies, “All you have to do is take off your hat and move in.” He also had a piano in his apartment.
. “He talked like a dockworker, loud and bossy, “ said Aunt Peggy.“He’d go to the door of his apartment and bellow across the hall to my mother, ‘Coffee.’ One time Momma got mad and when he came through the door of our apartment, she took a broom and hit him across his can.”
He had what they call a railroad apartment (as did Hannah Hickey and her brood), where you walked straight through one room to get to the next. So each room (with the exception of the first and the last) had doors on both ends. Red Mike took off all the doors, chopped them up, and burned them for firewood.
Pretty much the whole building was Irish, and a lot was family. Nana Hickey was on one floor. My parents Mary and Lou Amoroso were apparently on the third floor after they married. There were two different McGuire families: the second-floor McGuires (little Mrs. McGuire) and the top-floor McGuires (big Mrs. McGuire, Aunt Ann’s husband Ackie’s mother.)
“Ackie’s mother worked as a nurse, and his father worked two jobs, so –unlike a lot of young men at the time—Ackie did chores. He was embarrassed and tried to hide it, but I’d see him hanging out the laundry,” said Aunt Peggy. “I’d say to him, ‘You’re going to make someone a good husband someday.’ ”
When Aunt Peggy and Uncle Walter (we called him Uncle Whitey) married, they moved into an apartment right next door at 1510 Lexington Avenue. There was a man with a violin next door who would open his window and play the most amazing Irish diddies.
“We’d all hang out the air shaft and clap and stamp our feet,” Aunt Peggy recalled.
For sun-bathing, there was “tar beach.” The girls would slip into their swimsuits, grab a towel and head to the roof for some solar rays
Nana Hickey had some trouble adjusting to her daughters’ choices in husbands. Mary Amoroso married an Italian-American, which seemed to Hannah Hickey like a kind of miscegenation. Aunt Peggy married a man of Polish extraction.
“Momma would say, “Can’t you find someone of your own kind?” ” Aunt Peggy recalled.
Nana Hickey was very social and very kind. People fresh off the boat from the Old Country knew they could find a place to sleep at Hannah Hickey’s. She had 6 children and people might sleep 3 to a bed.
And then there was Nellie Kimmey. Nellie was a widow living with her in-laws when she came to visit with Hannah Hickey over a cup of tea. Nellie headed home to find that her in-laws had packed her possessions and put them outside their front door.
Nellie went back to Hannah Hickey’s in a panic.
“You can stay here,” said Hannah.
Nellie Kimmey lived with Hannah and Mike Hickey for 40 years. She was still there at Lexington and 96th after Hannah died in the mid-Sixties.
I pulled out paperwork that had been languishing on a shelf, most notably, our maternal grandmother Hannah's 1891 birth certificate from Templeglantine, County Limerick in Ireland.Our mothers' sister, Aunt Peggy had kindly sent it to me several years back.
And I found myself on the hunt on the Internet once again. I can get pretty lost in genealogical research:It is indeed reaching through the mist to find forebears in other decades, other centuries. I also called Aunt Peggy, the last surviving of Hannah's children, to help fill in the blanks. Here's what I found.
Hannah Casey was born August 3, 1891 in Templeglantine, a village in County Limerick. Her father was Patrick Casey, an agricultural laborer. Her mother was Mary Connors Casey.
According to the 1901 Irish Census, Patrick (40) and Mary (35) had the following children: Ellen (12), Johanna (9—our grandma Hannah Hickey)), Catherine (7), John (4). Father-in-law Maurice Connors and mother-in-law Mary Connors were also living with them.
According to the 1911 Irish Census, Patrick and Mary had living with them Catherine (17), John (14), Patrick (10) and Bridget (7). Father-in-law and mother-in-law (age 90 and 85) were still with them and the grandparents could not read or write, but they spoke both English and Irish. In 1911, Patrick and Mary Casey had been married 27 years. The Census indicated they had 9 children born alive, and 8 still living. (There is no indication of Mary Casey, who became Mary O’Connell, mother of Father Dave, Father Jack and Father Francis, or of Nora Casey (born about 1894).)
Aunt Peggy Lapinski, Hannah Hickey’s daughter who is now 87, recalls Aunt Nellie Casey O’Halloran (her husband had a bar at 92nd Street and 3rd Avenue); Aunt Katie Casey (Bridie Flavin’s grandmother, very religious, all of a sudden she would break out in the hymn “Amazing Grace” ); Aunt Nora Casey (who between her first husband Mr. Mahoney and her second husband Pat Toomey had something like 13 children among them),;Aunt Mary Casey O’Connell; Aunt Bridie Casey (she came to America, had an unhappy marriage, left her husband and went back to Ireland); Uncle Jack Casey (who lived in the Bronx, but took all his kids out of school and went back to Ireland as well), and Uncle Patty Casey (married to Aunt Beatrice.) And, of course, Hannah Casey Hickey.
Her husband Michael Hickey was born May 27, 1894 in New York City. In the 1900 Census, he was listed as age 6, living with his father Michael Hickey who was born in Ireland in November of 1870 and immigrated to the US in 1891;, and with his mother Margaret Hurley Hickey, who immigrated to the US in 1886. (Hard to read her DOB, but it looks like March 1865.) Father Michael was a longshoreman. Father and mother had been married 8 years. Their address was 243 Madison Street in Manhattan. (That’s the Lower East Side near the end of Canal Street.)
Aunt Ann McGuire said Margaret Hurley Hickey died in 1912, but I would place it more between 1900 and 1902. My mother said Margaret Hurley Hickey was bending over to change the ice in the ice box when a whalebone in her corset pierced her heart. (I have a portrait of Margaret Hurley Hickey, which hung for years in Hannah Casey Hickey’s front room. Margaret Hickey looks just like Aunt Ann McGuire.)
The 1910 Census shows a Michael Hickey living on 44th Street in Manhattan in his second marriage with a wife named Mary. They are both about 38 and have been married 8 years. He is a coachman with a private family; she is a laundress. No sign of son Mike, our Grandpa. (There are A LOT of Michael Hickeys in NYC in 1910. But this one seems to fit for Great-grandfather.)
The new stepmother and young Mike didn’t get along and at some point he left his father’s house. A Mabel Hurley, age 40 is running a boardinghouse at 241 East 32nd Street in Manhattan in the Census of 1910. Her sister Elizabeth Hurley and brother John J. Hurley live with her, as do 9 boarders. No sign of Mike, who would be 16. But my mother Mary Hickey Amoroso said that the new stepmother chased out young Mike and he went to live in Auntie Hurley’s boardinghouse. That’s where he courted Hannah, who was nearly 3 years older than he. He would drop down notes on a string and a hanger to the window of her room.
How did they meet? Aunt Peggy Lapinski says young Mike Hickey drove for Bloomingdale’s and Hannah Casey worked as a domestic in charge of linens for Jay Gould, probably Jay Gould II, son of the first Jay Gould, a robber baron of the mid 1800s.
They married around 1918, when Hannah was 27 and Mike was 24. (She always shaved her age on the Census survey.)
The Census of 1920 has Hannah and Michael married and living on Lexington Avenue and 96th Street. He is a chauffeur. No children. The Census indicates Hannah arrived in US in 1915. We have a passenger listing that shows her arriving in New York October 23, 1916. (A Nora Casey arrived June 26, 1916).
The Census of 1930 shows Hannah and Michael living on 96th Street with five children: Michael (9), Mary (8) (my mom), Margaret(6)(Aunt Peggy), Patrick (4) and Helen (1). No baby Ann yet. Grandpa is listed as a commercial chauffeur. (Aunt Ann said he was a chauffeur for Bloomingdale’s and American Meter Company.) When he lost his job, he became depressed and violent and ended up at Rockland Psychiatric through WWII. I remember him as the grandfather who sat in the far corner of the kitchen in the railroad flat at Lexington and 96th Street, and played his harmonica. Through the window behind him, clotheslines stretched out like tentacles to other buildings.
The 1930 Census places great-grandfather Mike Hickey and his second wife Mary at 8th Avenue and 118th Street. He is 59 and lists his occupation as steamship company but he seems to be unemployed. Mary calls herself a housewife.
The Census of 1930 also shows Hannah’s sister Mary O’Connell (age 36) living with her husband David on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan. The following children are listed: David (15), John (12), Madeline (8) Catherine (6), Leonard (4), Bill (almost 3) and Theresa (1). (David, as a Dominican priest, organized my adoption to Mary and Lou Amoroso and officiated at my wedding in 1979.)
Aunt Peggy says the O’Connells lived on 69th Street in Manhattan. Once they won a live pig in a raffle at church. They had to bring the pig home and stash it in the bathtub until they slaughtered it.
Peggy remembers a cousin Eileen O’Connell who worked for many years at the Mayflower Hotel in New York. Cousin Will O’Connell died during World War II in Guam the exact same day that roving reporter Ernie Pyle was killed April 18, 1945 in Japan.
Aunt Nora Casey Toomey lived in a brownstone at 292 Hoyt Street in Brooklyn with her many children from three marriages. St. Agnes Church was right across the street. The Hickey cousins loved taking the subway to her house. “It was like the country,” said Aunt Peggy. “There was a tree in the backyard.”
Aunt Nora was an incredible cook and baker. Aunt Peggy said that during World War II, when supplies were limited, Aunt Nora made a delicious cake with tomato soup. She also rolled nuts in cream cheese. People rushed to buy her cakes at bake sales.
Her husband Pat Toomey worked for the New York subway system. (So did Patty Casey, according to Aunt Peggy. Patty Casey also worked as a bartender.)
Aunt Nora’s son Jack Toomey died at Anzio Beach in World War II. He was my mother’s favorite cousin. “I loved Jack Toomey,” she would say plaintively decades later.
After Great-Grandfather Michael Hickey’s second wife died, his son Mike Hickey and daughter-in-law Hannah managed to get him a 6-room apartment right across the hall in their building at 1512 Lexington Avenue. I think my mother told me they called him “Red Mike.”
Red Mike would invite the ladies in, throw open his cupboards to show them his wide array of dishes and kitchenware, and say to the ladies, “All you have to do is take off your hat and move in.” He also had a piano in his apartment.
. “He talked like a dockworker, loud and bossy, “ said Aunt Peggy.“He’d go to the door of his apartment and bellow across the hall to my mother, ‘Coffee.’ One time Momma got mad and when he came through the door of our apartment, she took a broom and hit him across his can.”
He had what they call a railroad apartment (as did Hannah Hickey and her brood), where you walked straight through one room to get to the next. So each room (with the exception of the first and the last) had doors on both ends. Red Mike took off all the doors, chopped them up, and burned them for firewood.
Pretty much the whole building was Irish, and a lot was family. Nana Hickey was on one floor. My parents Mary and Lou Amoroso were apparently on the third floor after they married. There were two different McGuire families: the second-floor McGuires (little Mrs. McGuire) and the top-floor McGuires (big Mrs. McGuire, Aunt Ann’s husband Ackie’s mother.)
“Ackie’s mother worked as a nurse, and his father worked two jobs, so –unlike a lot of young men at the time—Ackie did chores. He was embarrassed and tried to hide it, but I’d see him hanging out the laundry,” said Aunt Peggy. “I’d say to him, ‘You’re going to make someone a good husband someday.’ ”
When Aunt Peggy and Uncle Walter (we called him Uncle Whitey) married, they moved into an apartment right next door at 1510 Lexington Avenue. There was a man with a violin next door who would open his window and play the most amazing Irish diddies.
“We’d all hang out the air shaft and clap and stamp our feet,” Aunt Peggy recalled.
For sun-bathing, there was “tar beach.” The girls would slip into their swimsuits, grab a towel and head to the roof for some solar rays
Nana Hickey had some trouble adjusting to her daughters’ choices in husbands. Mary Amoroso married an Italian-American, which seemed to Hannah Hickey like a kind of miscegenation. Aunt Peggy married a man of Polish extraction.
“Momma would say, “Can’t you find someone of your own kind?” ” Aunt Peggy recalled.
Nana Hickey was very social and very kind. People fresh off the boat from the Old Country knew they could find a place to sleep at Hannah Hickey’s. She had 6 children and people might sleep 3 to a bed.
And then there was Nellie Kimmey. Nellie was a widow living with her in-laws when she came to visit with Hannah Hickey over a cup of tea. Nellie headed home to find that her in-laws had packed her possessions and put them outside their front door.
Nellie went back to Hannah Hickey’s in a panic.
“You can stay here,” said Hannah.
Nellie Kimmey lived with Hannah and Mike Hickey for 40 years. She was still there at Lexington and 96th after Hannah died in the mid-Sixties.
Monday, March 21, 2011
J.D. Salinger slept here
The New York Times had a column today about Ursinus College’s clever use of the fact that author J.D. Salinger spent a semester there in 1938 (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/21/education/21winerip.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1&sq=Ursinus&st=cse&scp=1=). The college in Collegeville, PA sponsors a creative writing contest and awards the freshman winner a scholarship and the right to live in J.D. Salinger’s old room for freshman year.
My 17-year-old son Tom—who wants to major in creative writing or journalism-- was accepted to Ursinus. We toured the college in January and hooted when we heard about the contest to award J.D. Salinger’s room.
“They probably haven’t changed the sheets since Salinger slept there,” my law school student son Mike said.
Times columnist Michael Winerip took the notion a step further and asked prior occupants of the J.D. Salinger room which author’s room they would most like to sleep in. They picked Dave Eggers, Bret Easton Ellis and Cormac McCarthy.
An interesting question. I asked around.
\
My 28-year-old son Matt said he’d most like to sleep in Michael Lewis’ room. Michael Lewis is the rogue financial journalist who’s looked at the gambling inherent in various financial markets. He also wrote “The Blind Side,” the story of ghetto kid Michael Oher who was adopted by a wealthy family and became a big football star.
My 24-year-old son Mike said Ernest Hemingway. “Somethings tells me his room would be in a cabin in the woods, or in a room above a bar, or in a hotel in a war-torn city,” Mike wrote.
My high school senior son Tom said Kurt Vonnegut “because there would be some weird s..t in that room.”
My high school sophomore daughter Maeve said the French social commentator Montesquieu or the metaphysical poet John Donne, “because they’re smart.”
I would like to live in poet Emily Dickinson’s room. In some ways, I feel as if I already have.
Dickinson seems to have had agoraphobia. She was reclusive, seldom going out in public through her adult years and keeping up friendships through a torrid correspondence by mail. She got to the point where she would stand in the upstairs hallway and listen to the conversation of guests downstairs in the parlor, but she would not go down and participate in the conversation. There was a lot of scandal and drama in her close-knit family—her brother Austin had a longstanding affair (Emily apparently never met her brother’s mistress), her mother had a paralytic stroke that made Emily and her sister Lavinia caregivers for a number of years. But Emily was not part of the give-and-take of the greater community.
Her home, particularly her room, was her eggshell. All that she needed for sustenance and for creativity was inside. Within her room, she luxuriated in the life and playfulness and intimacy of her own mind.
I have to fight off my own tendency toward agoraphobia. I feel I have pretty much everything I need for a rich and fulfilling life, between my own thoughts, the written words of others, and field reports from my family in their walks of life. Add music and trips outside to see the sky and the moon and the water in the stream rushing over the rocks, and trips to the recycling center to see what other people are casting off. You have a daily kaleidoscope of experience to be grateful for.
Imagine if Emily Dickinson had the Internet, that thing with digital feathers, the richness of so many minds in a virtual reservoir invented by an American vice-president in a time far in the future. She could only hope.
My 17-year-old son Tom—who wants to major in creative writing or journalism-- was accepted to Ursinus. We toured the college in January and hooted when we heard about the contest to award J.D. Salinger’s room.
“They probably haven’t changed the sheets since Salinger slept there,” my law school student son Mike said.
Times columnist Michael Winerip took the notion a step further and asked prior occupants of the J.D. Salinger room which author’s room they would most like to sleep in. They picked Dave Eggers, Bret Easton Ellis and Cormac McCarthy.
An interesting question. I asked around.
\
My 28-year-old son Matt said he’d most like to sleep in Michael Lewis’ room. Michael Lewis is the rogue financial journalist who’s looked at the gambling inherent in various financial markets. He also wrote “The Blind Side,” the story of ghetto kid Michael Oher who was adopted by a wealthy family and became a big football star.
My 24-year-old son Mike said Ernest Hemingway. “Somethings tells me his room would be in a cabin in the woods, or in a room above a bar, or in a hotel in a war-torn city,” Mike wrote.
My high school senior son Tom said Kurt Vonnegut “because there would be some weird s..t in that room.”
My high school sophomore daughter Maeve said the French social commentator Montesquieu or the metaphysical poet John Donne, “because they’re smart.”
I would like to live in poet Emily Dickinson’s room. In some ways, I feel as if I already have.
Dickinson seems to have had agoraphobia. She was reclusive, seldom going out in public through her adult years and keeping up friendships through a torrid correspondence by mail. She got to the point where she would stand in the upstairs hallway and listen to the conversation of guests downstairs in the parlor, but she would not go down and participate in the conversation. There was a lot of scandal and drama in her close-knit family—her brother Austin had a longstanding affair (Emily apparently never met her brother’s mistress), her mother had a paralytic stroke that made Emily and her sister Lavinia caregivers for a number of years. But Emily was not part of the give-and-take of the greater community.
Her home, particularly her room, was her eggshell. All that she needed for sustenance and for creativity was inside. Within her room, she luxuriated in the life and playfulness and intimacy of her own mind.
I have to fight off my own tendency toward agoraphobia. I feel I have pretty much everything I need for a rich and fulfilling life, between my own thoughts, the written words of others, and field reports from my family in their walks of life. Add music and trips outside to see the sky and the moon and the water in the stream rushing over the rocks, and trips to the recycling center to see what other people are casting off. You have a daily kaleidoscope of experience to be grateful for.
Imagine if Emily Dickinson had the Internet, that thing with digital feathers, the richness of so many minds in a virtual reservoir invented by an American vice-president in a time far in the future. She could only hope.
Friday, March 18, 2011
Roots, Snakes and Magic Hands
My husband called on his cell phone Sunday as he was taking his daily walk on the road past our front lawn.
“There’s sewer water on the lawn,” he said.
I went and checked and ,indeed, a clay chimney-shaped pipe that protrudes from the lawn was spilling out dirty water.
I knew what this was. This happened once before, maybe six or seven years ago. Tree roots invade the pipe and cause blockages. You snake it out and the water goes through. But I couldn’t remember who did the work for us
The next day, I called a plumbing company we’ve used before that advertises in the yellow pages as handling main sewer lines. I had no idea who to use.
The guy came. He tried to pry open the sewer cover at the base of our driveway near the road, but couldn’t get it open. He tried to clear out a white plastic PVC pipe that protrudes from the lawn some 30 feet up from the base of the driveway but couldn’t. He noted another protruding plastic pipe 50 feet up from the first pipe.
“Are you sure this isn’t a septic system?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “It’s city water and city sewer.”
He said, “I can try snaking out the line, but I have only 110 feet of snake. It’s maybe 175 feet from where the water is leaking out by the house to the sewer cover at the base of the drive. If the blockage is located more than 110 feet away, I’ll have to call another man and a truck.”
I jerry-rigged a heavy-duty extension cord for him from the back deck to overflowing clay pipe. He hooked up the snake –a spirally metal tube 8 feet in the length –to an electric-powered drill, and began feeding it down the throat of the pipe. The black water spilled out as he rotated the snake and drew it out to add more lengths of tubing. But the water did not go down.
I watched him, as he lengthened the snake to maybe 40 feet. He kept feeding and rotating the tubing, but the water didn’t budge.
“This isn’t working,” he said. “Too many roots in the pipe. You’ve got to replace the pipe in the ground under the lawn. It will take two men and a backhoe.”
“How much will that cost?” I asked.
“Six thousand,” he said. “I can do it this week.”
“I have to talk to my husband,” I said. The time-honored ploy to avoid committing to repair people.
I talked to my husband. He didn’t know any more than I did.
“Should we get another bid?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I replied.
“Well, I guess we better get it done,” he said. “We don’t want to pollute.”
I set up the appointment to dig up the lawn and replace the pipe for the following week, since I was going to Boston on Wednesday to go to my sister’s colorectal surgical consult. Nora, who is an ovarian cancer survivor, has a blockage in her intestines. (Another blockage of waste material … Is the universe trying to tell me something?) She’s been living on liquid nutrition administered through a tube and a port in her body, but she wants to get the intestines unblocked so she can eat real food again.
As I sat in the waiting room with Nora’s husband John, a real mechanical whiz, I told him the story of the sewage seepage and the fact that I was going to replace the sewer line under the lawn.
He said, “ I wouldn’t do that. I would try another company to snake out the root blockage.”
John, who helps take care of our summer house properties in Northern New York, had just gone through the process of snaking our sewer line for the summer house in the village of Cape Vincent. (Once again:Is the universe trying to tell me something?) . Our summer house basement had backed up with two feet of water. John called a company that snaked out the sewer line. He watched the water in the basement recede immediately,
Nora got good news from the surgeon about the practicality of unblocking her intestines. I went home to cancel the appointment to put in a new main sewer line and to call another company to try snaking once again.
The woman from Roto Rooter went online to look at the outlines of my property ( and my long front lawn and driveway) on Google Earth.
“I’ve got a gut feeling we can fix this,” she said after hearing my story about the failed snaking. “It sounds to me like the first plumber was looking for a big-paying job. I’ll send out my guys tomorrow morning, so they have plenty of time to investigate and act.”
An hour later, a Roto Rooter truck pulled up in my driveway.
“I thought you were coming tomorrow,” I said.
He said, “ I wanted to scope the place out today.”
I showed the Roto Rooter man the metal sewer cover in the front of the driveway, the two plastic PVC pipes pressed into the front lawn, and the clay pipe overflowing with dirty water very close to the house.
The Roto Rooter guy shone a flashlight down one of the PVC pipes in the ground.
“This looks like a clean-out pipe,” he said, referring the the pipe one could send a snake down to clear out blockages. “But it should have a cap to block debris from getting into it.”
“We’ve owned this house 17 years, and these plastic things have never been capped,” I said.
He yelled into the PVC pipe. “Listen to that echo,” he said.
The Roto Rooter man got a hammer from his truck and asked me to bang on the metal sewer cover at the base of our driveway.
I banged, and he put his ear down very close to the PVC pipe 30 feet from the sewer cover.
“I can hear the banging through the pipe,” he said, “That means there’s no blockage between the sewer cap and the first PVC pipe, because a blockage would interfere with sound transmission.”
“Try the second PVC pipe,” I said. I liked being part of the mystery-solving team and I like banging on metal.
He put his ear down by the second PVC pipe, and I banged on the sewer cover. Eighty feet from my banging, he could clearly hear the sound through the pipe, which meant that long stretch of pipe was clear.
“So the blockage is between the second PVC pipe and the clay pipe,”said the Roto Rooter guy. “ No more than 30 feet. That’s good news. We’ll snake that area tomorrow.”
We were saying farewells when the Roto Rooter guy said he wanted to try one more thing. He took, his 8-foot length of spirally metal snake tubing and he jabbed it by hand into the throat of the clay pipe where the dirty water was spilling. He jabbed and he stirred by hand, no power drill. In no more than 15 seconds, the water dropped down in the pipe. We moved to the next clean-out pipe—the PVC pipe 30 feet away-- and we could hear water rushing through. The clog was broken.
“You have magic hands,” I said..
I suggested he come back the next day to do a thorough snake-out anyway. He said he would bring his pressurized water blower to move any debris in the pipe down to the city sewer line. And he would cap the two PVC clean-outs.
I called my brother-in-law John to tell him the story and thank him for his cautionary advice.
“Call me anytime,” he said.
“There’s sewer water on the lawn,” he said.
I went and checked and ,indeed, a clay chimney-shaped pipe that protrudes from the lawn was spilling out dirty water.
I knew what this was. This happened once before, maybe six or seven years ago. Tree roots invade the pipe and cause blockages. You snake it out and the water goes through. But I couldn’t remember who did the work for us
The next day, I called a plumbing company we’ve used before that advertises in the yellow pages as handling main sewer lines. I had no idea who to use.
The guy came. He tried to pry open the sewer cover at the base of our driveway near the road, but couldn’t get it open. He tried to clear out a white plastic PVC pipe that protrudes from the lawn some 30 feet up from the base of the driveway but couldn’t. He noted another protruding plastic pipe 50 feet up from the first pipe.
“Are you sure this isn’t a septic system?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “It’s city water and city sewer.”
He said, “I can try snaking out the line, but I have only 110 feet of snake. It’s maybe 175 feet from where the water is leaking out by the house to the sewer cover at the base of the drive. If the blockage is located more than 110 feet away, I’ll have to call another man and a truck.”
I jerry-rigged a heavy-duty extension cord for him from the back deck to overflowing clay pipe. He hooked up the snake –a spirally metal tube 8 feet in the length –to an electric-powered drill, and began feeding it down the throat of the pipe. The black water spilled out as he rotated the snake and drew it out to add more lengths of tubing. But the water did not go down.
I watched him, as he lengthened the snake to maybe 40 feet. He kept feeding and rotating the tubing, but the water didn’t budge.
“This isn’t working,” he said. “Too many roots in the pipe. You’ve got to replace the pipe in the ground under the lawn. It will take two men and a backhoe.”
“How much will that cost?” I asked.
“Six thousand,” he said. “I can do it this week.”
“I have to talk to my husband,” I said. The time-honored ploy to avoid committing to repair people.
I talked to my husband. He didn’t know any more than I did.
“Should we get another bid?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I replied.
“Well, I guess we better get it done,” he said. “We don’t want to pollute.”
I set up the appointment to dig up the lawn and replace the pipe for the following week, since I was going to Boston on Wednesday to go to my sister’s colorectal surgical consult. Nora, who is an ovarian cancer survivor, has a blockage in her intestines. (Another blockage of waste material … Is the universe trying to tell me something?) She’s been living on liquid nutrition administered through a tube and a port in her body, but she wants to get the intestines unblocked so she can eat real food again.
As I sat in the waiting room with Nora’s husband John, a real mechanical whiz, I told him the story of the sewage seepage and the fact that I was going to replace the sewer line under the lawn.
He said, “ I wouldn’t do that. I would try another company to snake out the root blockage.”
John, who helps take care of our summer house properties in Northern New York, had just gone through the process of snaking our sewer line for the summer house in the village of Cape Vincent. (Once again:Is the universe trying to tell me something?) . Our summer house basement had backed up with two feet of water. John called a company that snaked out the sewer line. He watched the water in the basement recede immediately,
Nora got good news from the surgeon about the practicality of unblocking her intestines. I went home to cancel the appointment to put in a new main sewer line and to call another company to try snaking once again.
The woman from Roto Rooter went online to look at the outlines of my property ( and my long front lawn and driveway) on Google Earth.
“I’ve got a gut feeling we can fix this,” she said after hearing my story about the failed snaking. “It sounds to me like the first plumber was looking for a big-paying job. I’ll send out my guys tomorrow morning, so they have plenty of time to investigate and act.”
An hour later, a Roto Rooter truck pulled up in my driveway.
“I thought you were coming tomorrow,” I said.
He said, “ I wanted to scope the place out today.”
I showed the Roto Rooter man the metal sewer cover in the front of the driveway, the two plastic PVC pipes pressed into the front lawn, and the clay pipe overflowing with dirty water very close to the house.
The Roto Rooter guy shone a flashlight down one of the PVC pipes in the ground.
“This looks like a clean-out pipe,” he said, referring the the pipe one could send a snake down to clear out blockages. “But it should have a cap to block debris from getting into it.”
“We’ve owned this house 17 years, and these plastic things have never been capped,” I said.
He yelled into the PVC pipe. “Listen to that echo,” he said.
The Roto Rooter man got a hammer from his truck and asked me to bang on the metal sewer cover at the base of our driveway.
I banged, and he put his ear down very close to the PVC pipe 30 feet from the sewer cover.
“I can hear the banging through the pipe,” he said, “That means there’s no blockage between the sewer cap and the first PVC pipe, because a blockage would interfere with sound transmission.”
“Try the second PVC pipe,” I said. I liked being part of the mystery-solving team and I like banging on metal.
He put his ear down by the second PVC pipe, and I banged on the sewer cover. Eighty feet from my banging, he could clearly hear the sound through the pipe, which meant that long stretch of pipe was clear.
“So the blockage is between the second PVC pipe and the clay pipe,”said the Roto Rooter guy. “ No more than 30 feet. That’s good news. We’ll snake that area tomorrow.”
We were saying farewells when the Roto Rooter guy said he wanted to try one more thing. He took, his 8-foot length of spirally metal snake tubing and he jabbed it by hand into the throat of the clay pipe where the dirty water was spilling. He jabbed and he stirred by hand, no power drill. In no more than 15 seconds, the water dropped down in the pipe. We moved to the next clean-out pipe—the PVC pipe 30 feet away-- and we could hear water rushing through. The clog was broken.
“You have magic hands,” I said..
I suggested he come back the next day to do a thorough snake-out anyway. He said he would bring his pressurized water blower to move any debris in the pipe down to the city sewer line. And he would cap the two PVC clean-outs.
I called my brother-in-law John to tell him the story and thank him for his cautionary advice.
“Call me anytime,” he said.
Friday, March 11, 2011
The Gang's All Here
On Sunday, I went to a ladies’ lunch with women I’d worked with at my newspaper back in the day. Two were still at the newspaper. Two had moved on to the NY Post. One is now teaching at a local college and I am not doing much of anything except helping my number three son get into college and working phlegmatically on some fiction pieces.
These are women I’ve known since my 24-year-old son Mike was an infant. Women whose pregnancies I remember. And now a couple of them are empty-nesters. We are at the stage where, as my friend K has just done, we help our young adult children move into their apartments, arrange the furniture, maybe even paint the walls.
As we ate eggs and fruit and coffee at the Governeur Morris Inn in Morristown, we provided, in Facebook parlance, “status updates.”
Actually, we talked about Facebook. Some of us were on it. Some of us weren’t. (B talked about how she was a “Luddite” about the new online world. Nice word choice..she was always a good writer.) O said she had seen horrible, vile things on one of her sons’ Facebook “wall” (nothing he had written, but an interchange between two of his friends) and so she insisted that he “friend” her so she could see what was going on. My teen-age children refuse to “friend” me.
We talked about how we shudder at the insipid sweetness of some of the messages. (“Love you, honey.” "You are the best!") We are all journalists, so we think of ourselves as kind of hard-edged. We also talked about how, as the Baby Boomers have come to Facebook in the past couple of years, the younger generation has migrated off, to a certain extent.
I was asked, as the only mother with a married child, how to behave as “mother of the groom.” J was upset with her own mother-in-law, who had recently failed to host the rehearsal dinner for J’s 42-year-old brother-in-law.
“Well, that is the one thing you’re supposed to do,” I said. “As parents of the groom, we hosted the rehearsal dinner and the post-wedding brunch. And we contributed some money. My son and daughter-in-law made all the decisions, which was how it should be. They even helped us pick the rehearsal dinner site.”
I noted that one of my friends whose daughter is marrying in May said that the new wedding contribution formula is not 99 percent the bride’s family, but now one-third bride’s family, one-third groom’s family, and one-third the couple.
This was a group where sons predominate, and they clucked a little at that formula.
We talked about the apparent rootlessness of some of our children who’ve graduated from college. It is a stage of life where there is no clear path to move on, and the poor economy and high jobless rate only muddy the waters further. Some of my friends said they told their children they would pay for college, but not for graduate school.
O said that her oldest son –in the middle of college—had decided to go to boot camp and join the California Highway Patrol. She displayed a photo of him, handsome and sober-looking in his uniform. He assists disabled cars, deals with drunks, and escorts lost pets off the highways. He makes a very good salary. She said he’s been interested in firefighting and law enforcement and community service since he was 3. It warmed the heart of every mother around the table to hear about a young man who’s pursued his dream and found his place.
I asked about B’s husband. An investigative reporter on our newspaper, he was the older man entranced by a younger woman when they married some 20 years ago. He always had great energy and enthusiasm. At age 73, he still teachers aerobics classes.
B said she had recently interviewed Jane Fonda, also 73, who talked about how good the sex is with her new partner. We didn’t have much to say about that.
We had talked about my bio-siblings (children of my birth-mother) who came to my son’s wedding. S told me about a story she had done on New York lawyer Seymour Fenichel who ran a baby-selling adoption business starting in the ‘70s and whose now-grown adoptees are searching out their roots through a Facebook forum. “I read that story,” I told her. “It came through an adoption listserv I’m part of.” You can tell S lives her stories.
We talked about the state of local journalism. My friends said the precipitous decline of newspapers seems to have eased somewhat. My old newspaper is even hiring to replace reporters who have left. Rupert Murdoch’s New Corps iPad app online newspaper is hiring.
But the atmosphere at work is different, they said. There used to be a great sense of camaraderie, of fun, of constant conversation. Now the new reporter hires may be “mo-jos”—mobile journalists, who work out of their cars. My old newspaper moved out of the building it owned, decommissioned the newsroom.
“It’s like working in the insurance industry now, everyone in his own cubicle,” said one of my friends.
These are women I’ve known since my 24-year-old son Mike was an infant. Women whose pregnancies I remember. And now a couple of them are empty-nesters. We are at the stage where, as my friend K has just done, we help our young adult children move into their apartments, arrange the furniture, maybe even paint the walls.
As we ate eggs and fruit and coffee at the Governeur Morris Inn in Morristown, we provided, in Facebook parlance, “status updates.”
Actually, we talked about Facebook. Some of us were on it. Some of us weren’t. (B talked about how she was a “Luddite” about the new online world. Nice word choice..she was always a good writer.) O said she had seen horrible, vile things on one of her sons’ Facebook “wall” (nothing he had written, but an interchange between two of his friends) and so she insisted that he “friend” her so she could see what was going on. My teen-age children refuse to “friend” me.
We talked about how we shudder at the insipid sweetness of some of the messages. (“Love you, honey.” "You are the best!") We are all journalists, so we think of ourselves as kind of hard-edged. We also talked about how, as the Baby Boomers have come to Facebook in the past couple of years, the younger generation has migrated off, to a certain extent.
I was asked, as the only mother with a married child, how to behave as “mother of the groom.” J was upset with her own mother-in-law, who had recently failed to host the rehearsal dinner for J’s 42-year-old brother-in-law.
“Well, that is the one thing you’re supposed to do,” I said. “As parents of the groom, we hosted the rehearsal dinner and the post-wedding brunch. And we contributed some money. My son and daughter-in-law made all the decisions, which was how it should be. They even helped us pick the rehearsal dinner site.”
I noted that one of my friends whose daughter is marrying in May said that the new wedding contribution formula is not 99 percent the bride’s family, but now one-third bride’s family, one-third groom’s family, and one-third the couple.
This was a group where sons predominate, and they clucked a little at that formula.
We talked about the apparent rootlessness of some of our children who’ve graduated from college. It is a stage of life where there is no clear path to move on, and the poor economy and high jobless rate only muddy the waters further. Some of my friends said they told their children they would pay for college, but not for graduate school.
O said that her oldest son –in the middle of college—had decided to go to boot camp and join the California Highway Patrol. She displayed a photo of him, handsome and sober-looking in his uniform. He assists disabled cars, deals with drunks, and escorts lost pets off the highways. He makes a very good salary. She said he’s been interested in firefighting and law enforcement and community service since he was 3. It warmed the heart of every mother around the table to hear about a young man who’s pursued his dream and found his place.
I asked about B’s husband. An investigative reporter on our newspaper, he was the older man entranced by a younger woman when they married some 20 years ago. He always had great energy and enthusiasm. At age 73, he still teachers aerobics classes.
B said she had recently interviewed Jane Fonda, also 73, who talked about how good the sex is with her new partner. We didn’t have much to say about that.
We had talked about my bio-siblings (children of my birth-mother) who came to my son’s wedding. S told me about a story she had done on New York lawyer Seymour Fenichel who ran a baby-selling adoption business starting in the ‘70s and whose now-grown adoptees are searching out their roots through a Facebook forum. “I read that story,” I told her. “It came through an adoption listserv I’m part of.” You can tell S lives her stories.
We talked about the state of local journalism. My friends said the precipitous decline of newspapers seems to have eased somewhat. My old newspaper is even hiring to replace reporters who have left. Rupert Murdoch’s New Corps iPad app online newspaper is hiring.
But the atmosphere at work is different, they said. There used to be a great sense of camaraderie, of fun, of constant conversation. Now the new reporter hires may be “mo-jos”—mobile journalists, who work out of their cars. My old newspaper moved out of the building it owned, decommissioned the newsroom.
“It’s like working in the insurance industry now, everyone in his own cubicle,” said one of my friends.
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