I read the most fascinating story in the NY Times, about Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House, and currently running for the Republican Presidential nomination, about his involvement with his 3 wives.
Gingrich, who went after former President Clinton for lying about his sexual hijinks with intern Monica Lewinsky, was—at that time –engaged in a six-year affair with an aide and cheating on his second wife, Marianne. Marianne was just interviewed on ABC, saying that Newt told her he wanted an “open marriage” that would allow him to be with both women. The aide became Gingrich’s third wife, Calista. (Newt’s first wife, by the way, was his high school geometry teacher, seven years his senior.)
Gingrich responded to Marianne’s recent interview, saying he never said any such thing to wife number two, and that he went after Clinton not for the sexual hijinks, but for lying under oath about the sexual hijinks. A too-fine distinction for the masses, perhaps. I think he went after Clinton because he was in position to do so: It was fun and it moved Newt’s chess piece along the board.
Gingrich was forced to leave the Speakership –and then resigned from Congress altogether —after allegations that he laundered charitable donations through his charitable foundation for his political action campaign fund, and that he had given the Ethics Committee inaccurate information. He was reprimanded and fined $300,000. Many saw it as payback for the vicious way he went after Democratic leaders.
Here’s the thing: I think Newt Gingrich has Asperger’s Syndrome, the mildest and highest-functioning form of autism. My first tip-off was when the NY Times story quoted from an interview Gingrich gave the Washington Post in 1989 in which he “estimated that the union [with his second wife Marianne] had a 53-47 shot of lasting.” This dispassionate application of mathematical odds to an emotional relationship is apparently typical of Asperger’s folks, according to the Asperger message boards.
Folks with Asperger’s can be brilliant, creative, out-of-the-box thinkers and strategists. They tend to be loners and can be cranky and abrupt ( rudely honest) but nonetheless can also be charming and are smart enough to pick up social skills by watching and mirroring other people’s behavior. I have been researching the syndrome for five or six months. Right now I am reading animal behaviorist Temple Grandin’s book “Thinking in Pictures: Life With Autism.”
Grandin says she indeed thinks in pictures and can see patterns more clearly and more quickly because the Asperger’s differently-wired brain isn’t slowed down by processing through the language center. Asperger folks tend to fixate on a couple of interests, issues, or goals. They know everything about what they are interested in, and persevere where a less fixated person might give up and move on to something less frustrating. Grandin believes Einstein; the philosopher Wittgenstein; the artist Vincent Van Gogh, and more recently, Microsoft chief Bill Gates have had Asperger’s. (I won’t say “suffered from” because many so-called Aspies are proud of their superior abilities and not that interested in deep interpersonal relationships. They are more turned inward to what they perceive as a rich interior life.)
Grandin says a person with Asperger’s has the best shot of developing a personal relationship with someone who has highly similar interests and maybe even Asperger's as well.
She writes:”I talked to one lady on the spectrum who met her husband at a science fiction book club. She writes technical manuals and he works in the computer industry. … Their idea of a wonderful romantic evening is to go to a really nice restaurant and talk about computer data storage systems.”
And perhaps that is why Gingrich turns his wives into unpaid advisors and sounding boards, making sure they are always with him, and that their prime interest is strategies for furthering Newt.
I think a member of my extended family has Asperger’s and that has motivated my research. My biggest question is: Can an Aspie really love you? My sense of Asperger folks is that they don’t have empathy because they can’t comprehend what other people are feeling. They have a hard enough time hearing other people and seeing other people’s facial expressions because they so easily experience sensory overload and can’t tune out extraneous stimuli the way “neurotypicals” can. So if a person can’t hear you, can’t see you and can’t “feel your pain,” can you have a mutually supportive, emotionally reciprocal relationship?
And, if Newt’s an Aspie (and even if he’s not), can he be an effective leader if he verbally beats adversaries to a pulp because he doesn’t “feel their pain?” and it seems like appropriate gamesmanship to him? He may have visionary policies and a sense of historical destiny, but can you lead a democracy if you are so detached from the feelings of the populace and so unwilling to acknowledge that your rivals have any redeeming qualities?
Friday, January 27, 2012
Friday, November 4, 2011
My sister Nora's Eulogy
I think my sister Nora came out of the womb talking.
We called her “Chatty Cathy,” after the doll that talked when you pulled her string.
But you didn’t need to pull any string to get Nora to talk.
She was a natural-born storyteller. The stories she told were your stories, all of you gathered here to mourn her. She told these stories because she loved you and she found your lives fascinating and worth sharing with others.
And so …because of Nora --I knew a lot about Shane and Colby, Duane and Amy.. and Juliana, Duane the third and Hope. I knew when Stuie was cracking jokes you couldn’t understand and I got the whole story when DeeDee hit a flagpole at a garage sale. I knew what was up with DeeDee’s nieces and her sister-in-law Marcia and her cousin Janet. I knew about Chris and Keith Schueler’s love lives and career successes. I knew when Rick and Maria landed in Lake Havasu City in winter and when they returned to the cove in spring. I tried to keep tabs on the all the different folks in the Connecticut Connection…Nora knew who they all were, but I needed a big diagram.
I heard second-hand Doc Nesbitt’s medical advice. I heard about Paulette’s decline. I experienced Boots’ final hours and her funeral because Nora told me about them. I knew how bad Hurricane Irene was for Catharine and Jesse Hamilton in Vermont. I heard about Corry Heinrich and her healing oils.
Because of Nora, I knew what exquisite care Rocco took with cars and I knew each developmental milestone Rozzie, Dahlia and Daisy achieved. I followed the reconstruction of Jen Dee’s house and the progression of Nancy Shields’ husband Arne’s illness. Nora always let me know about Ernie and Lori –whom we called Sonny and Cher—and their kids. I learned about a new neighbor, the Forgers and their Dunkin Donut franchises.
Nora once walked back and forth between her house and Tom & Judy Caroon’s to ask legal advice of their lawyer daughter Julianne and relay it back to me by phone. Nora was as proud of Julianne as if Julianne were her own daughter.
I knew how Nora treasured her time this summer with Michael and Patty Peck and how pleased she was when Michael admitted he had had a crush on her when they were teenagers. I heard all about the lovelyJulia Bonaime.
When she lived on William Street in the Cape, I heard all about Sheri Hall, Bud and Ruth Constance, the Youngs, Barry and Amy Davis, the LaMoras.
Nora had married into a large and colorful family, and through her, I knew about the impeccably-dressed Uncle Charlie the undertaker and his wife Flora the former showgirl. I knew about Aunt Hilda and Aunt Elsie. And John’s many cousins –Boots and Judy and Candy, Sally and Tootie, Billy and Debbie Dermody, Judy Dermody Buffum and Chuckie Cummmings – and their richly-patterned lives. I heard about Cousin Cathy’s unexpected death in California, and how sad Nora was that she was alone when she died.
Nora also told me about all the travails of John’s friends:Angelo, Ken from Spicer’s Bay marina, Tony Lawyer, Kenny and Lolly, the larger-than-life and louder-than-life Tommy Gates, Dick Battista, and Bill Fisher…whom Nora set up on dates with a couple of her friends. In the summers before she got sick, she would routinely have ten or 12 people at her dinner table…many of whom I had first met through her stories. And she always had a freshly baked layer cake on the cake plate.
Nora came late to teaching, but she was a natural-born teacher. She loved the collegiality of working with .teachers, principals, aides and superintendents…friends like Marlene and Joe Durgin, Ann Crissley, Cathy Bell, Mike Bashaw, Dr. Slattery, Heather LeVarnway, Amy Booth, Toni Gibson, Bonnie Cooper, Joanne Faukenham. Myra LaClair, Lisa Graham, Bob Hurley, Debbie Eldredge Block, Miranda Urac McKenzie. (Nick said Miranda named her first child after him.)
She was very involved in the lives of her students. Nora would buy clothes for her students at garage sales and the Salvation Army. Her friend Marlene Durgin talked about how Nora once sent flowers to the mother of a student…the mother had never before received flowers.
Nora also told wonderful stories about her very special special ed students. I remember one student would come into school in the morning and immediately strip off all his clothes. Another student with Asperger’s did flawless weather reports in a broadcaster'’s voice.
Nora grew up in a suburb outside New York City in a family dominated by strong women. My mother sang in a deep alto and was one tough cookie. I was the oldest …they adopted my brother Lou, who was probably psychologically damaged when we made him play dress-up with us. Then came the twins,Marian and Margaret. Nora w as the baby of the family for 6 years until my late brother Tommy came along. Nora was named for my mother’s favorite aunt and Nora was my mother’s favorite because she had brown eyes like my Dad. In her twenties, Nora lived with both Margaret and Marian in Tucson Arizona.
Along the way, Nora would add on some sisters-in-spirit…Dee Dee and Maria, Birgitt and Christina Trottier, Carol DeAugusta, Debbie Solensky, Lisa Savage. And she was extremely attached to our Aunt Ann and our cousins, especially Eileen, Kathleen, Tommy, Georgie and Carol Ann .
Nora not only talked early, she sang in her crib, rocking back and forth, usually singing one or another tune from the 1920’s or 1930s that my mother had taught her…Daisy, Daisy give me your answer true…and I love you, Yes I do, I love you.
She always loved music and went to concerts with Marian and Margaret from the time she was a teen until just a couple of weeks ago. She went to many Dave Matthews concerts with Nick and Kendall. She and I and Maria liked going to concerts at the Clayton Opera House. She was scheduled to go to a concert this coming weekend with DeeDee in Long Island. The music choices at today’s service –played by my son and daughter-in-law Matt and Melany—were ones Nora chose for her funeral….Joni Mitchell and John Lennon and Kansas. We can only be thankful she didn’t request Stairway to Heaven and Innagoddadivida.
She even told stories about her pets of the barking, swimming and tweeting variety.
She often told me about her fish who lived in that big tank in her living room. And she was always shocked when the big predator fish ate the small ornamental fish.
Her Airedale Buttercup was her canine soulmate for many years. Nora thought the dog’s full name… Buttercup LaChance..made her sound like a streetwalker. Nora also believed Buttercup was lesbian, a concept I never thought about before in a dog. Nora named her Maltese Sparkle after comedienne Gilda Radner’s dog… Gilda had ovarian cancer too.
On May 4, 2006 Nora called to tell me she has just been diagnosed with stage 3C ovarian cancer. Like Nora, 75 percent of women are not diagnosed until late stage. When the cancer has spread, only25 of women percent survive 5 years.
It was a death sentence. But Nora went for 29 chemo sessions over these past 5 and a half years. She would be so sick for 10 days after chemo that she stayed in the house and didn’t talk to anyone. Each time she recovered, she got up, made dinner, did the recycling, and went out to concerts and the movies and garage sales. She was good to go until the next sickening round of chemo.
When an intestinal blockage of tumor and scar tissue made it impossible for her to eat real food, she hooked herself up to a tube in her arm each night for nutrition. During the day, she walked around with plastic piping that snaked out of her gut to a plastic bag that held bile. Her cousin Shannon made her a hunter-green pouch to hold the bile bag. She turned her disability into a fashion statement.
She was proud to have participated in the national documentary The Whisper about the misdiagnosed symptoms of ovarian cancer.
She wanted so desperately to eat again that she underwent surgery in Boston this May to bypass the intestinal blockage. But the surgeon couldn’t find enough usable intestine, and the operation failed. For 20 months, she lived on liquid nutrition. But every time I talked to her, she would ask, “What are you making for dinner tonight?”
When she joined Facebook, she found another way to keep in contact with old friends, nieces and nephews and cousins, in-laws and out-laws. She was always posting links on political issues, including medical marijuana.
Her step-children Julie and Johnny were her age and were more friends than children.
Julie, one of the most fun times we all had on the river was your wedding reception in the back yard at Rock Beach in the summer of 2005. Nora, Sue, DeeDee and her nieces, Maria, Tom Caroon, Tom McQueeny and Maeve planned and catered the reception. Nick was the bartender.
Johnny, you provided monumental support to Nora and the family in her final years. She often expressed her gratitude to me for what you’ve done. She cherished Max and Sam and Sue, and always let me know what they were up to.
Nick, Mom thought you were a genius from the time you were an infant. We’ve been talking these last few days about all your hi-jinks…impersonating a park ranger, untying a sailboat full of sleeping passengers and letting it float away on the St. Lawrence, setting coffee creamers on fire after Nanny Amoroso’s funeral and causing the evacuation of an entire hotel. You caused Mom a lot of grief but she still thought you were a genius. She was so proud that you have grown into a successful, hard-working and empathetic adult who still retains his crazy, hyperactive, smart-ass, fast-thinking sense of self.
Kendall, your mother loved you so much.. You owe it to her and to yourself to become the glorious, acoomplished and loving woman your mother was. To do that, you get out of bed every day, put one foot in front of the other, ask yourself “What good can I do for the world today?” and pray to your mother for guidance.
John, the greatest story Nora lived in her life was your love story. Like any married couple, you had your ups and downs, but she valued the tender care you took of her. You first met when you took her for a boat ride in 1975. She loved all the boat rides you took her on for the next 36 years, and she was amazed at the house you designed and built for her. Each time you parted, even if it was just while she went to shop at Big M, you kissed each other three times on the lips. She couldn’t do that when she parted this last time, but you know what was in her heart. There will be three kisses waiting for you in Heaven.
She is gone from us, but she is somewhere else: probably chewing St. Peter’s ear off, planning an exquisite meal with Mom, Dad, Tommy, Ann & Achie, Paulette, Arne, Boots and Doc Nesbitt and inquiring about setting up a celestial Facebook account
.
We are better because she loved us and told us one another’s stories.
We called her “Chatty Cathy,” after the doll that talked when you pulled her string.
But you didn’t need to pull any string to get Nora to talk.
She was a natural-born storyteller. The stories she told were your stories, all of you gathered here to mourn her. She told these stories because she loved you and she found your lives fascinating and worth sharing with others.
And so …because of Nora --I knew a lot about Shane and Colby, Duane and Amy.. and Juliana, Duane the third and Hope. I knew when Stuie was cracking jokes you couldn’t understand and I got the whole story when DeeDee hit a flagpole at a garage sale. I knew what was up with DeeDee’s nieces and her sister-in-law Marcia and her cousin Janet. I knew about Chris and Keith Schueler’s love lives and career successes. I knew when Rick and Maria landed in Lake Havasu City in winter and when they returned to the cove in spring. I tried to keep tabs on the all the different folks in the Connecticut Connection…Nora knew who they all were, but I needed a big diagram.
I heard second-hand Doc Nesbitt’s medical advice. I heard about Paulette’s decline. I experienced Boots’ final hours and her funeral because Nora told me about them. I knew how bad Hurricane Irene was for Catharine and Jesse Hamilton in Vermont. I heard about Corry Heinrich and her healing oils.
Because of Nora, I knew what exquisite care Rocco took with cars and I knew each developmental milestone Rozzie, Dahlia and Daisy achieved. I followed the reconstruction of Jen Dee’s house and the progression of Nancy Shields’ husband Arne’s illness. Nora always let me know about Ernie and Lori –whom we called Sonny and Cher—and their kids. I learned about a new neighbor, the Forgers and their Dunkin Donut franchises.
Nora once walked back and forth between her house and Tom & Judy Caroon’s to ask legal advice of their lawyer daughter Julianne and relay it back to me by phone. Nora was as proud of Julianne as if Julianne were her own daughter.
I knew how Nora treasured her time this summer with Michael and Patty Peck and how pleased she was when Michael admitted he had had a crush on her when they were teenagers. I heard all about the lovelyJulia Bonaime.
When she lived on William Street in the Cape, I heard all about Sheri Hall, Bud and Ruth Constance, the Youngs, Barry and Amy Davis, the LaMoras.
Nora had married into a large and colorful family, and through her, I knew about the impeccably-dressed Uncle Charlie the undertaker and his wife Flora the former showgirl. I knew about Aunt Hilda and Aunt Elsie. And John’s many cousins –Boots and Judy and Candy, Sally and Tootie, Billy and Debbie Dermody, Judy Dermody Buffum and Chuckie Cummmings – and their richly-patterned lives. I heard about Cousin Cathy’s unexpected death in California, and how sad Nora was that she was alone when she died.
Nora also told me about all the travails of John’s friends:Angelo, Ken from Spicer’s Bay marina, Tony Lawyer, Kenny and Lolly, the larger-than-life and louder-than-life Tommy Gates, Dick Battista, and Bill Fisher…whom Nora set up on dates with a couple of her friends. In the summers before she got sick, she would routinely have ten or 12 people at her dinner table…many of whom I had first met through her stories. And she always had a freshly baked layer cake on the cake plate.
Nora came late to teaching, but she was a natural-born teacher. She loved the collegiality of working with .teachers, principals, aides and superintendents…friends like Marlene and Joe Durgin, Ann Crissley, Cathy Bell, Mike Bashaw, Dr. Slattery, Heather LeVarnway, Amy Booth, Toni Gibson, Bonnie Cooper, Joanne Faukenham. Myra LaClair, Lisa Graham, Bob Hurley, Debbie Eldredge Block, Miranda Urac McKenzie. (Nick said Miranda named her first child after him.)
She was very involved in the lives of her students. Nora would buy clothes for her students at garage sales and the Salvation Army. Her friend Marlene Durgin talked about how Nora once sent flowers to the mother of a student…the mother had never before received flowers.
Nora also told wonderful stories about her very special special ed students. I remember one student would come into school in the morning and immediately strip off all his clothes. Another student with Asperger’s did flawless weather reports in a broadcaster'’s voice.
Nora grew up in a suburb outside New York City in a family dominated by strong women. My mother sang in a deep alto and was one tough cookie. I was the oldest …they adopted my brother Lou, who was probably psychologically damaged when we made him play dress-up with us. Then came the twins,Marian and Margaret. Nora w as the baby of the family for 6 years until my late brother Tommy came along. Nora was named for my mother’s favorite aunt and Nora was my mother’s favorite because she had brown eyes like my Dad. In her twenties, Nora lived with both Margaret and Marian in Tucson Arizona.
Along the way, Nora would add on some sisters-in-spirit…Dee Dee and Maria, Birgitt and Christina Trottier, Carol DeAugusta, Debbie Solensky, Lisa Savage. And she was extremely attached to our Aunt Ann and our cousins, especially Eileen, Kathleen, Tommy, Georgie and Carol Ann .
Nora not only talked early, she sang in her crib, rocking back and forth, usually singing one or another tune from the 1920’s or 1930s that my mother had taught her…Daisy, Daisy give me your answer true…and I love you, Yes I do, I love you.
She always loved music and went to concerts with Marian and Margaret from the time she was a teen until just a couple of weeks ago. She went to many Dave Matthews concerts with Nick and Kendall. She and I and Maria liked going to concerts at the Clayton Opera House. She was scheduled to go to a concert this coming weekend with DeeDee in Long Island. The music choices at today’s service –played by my son and daughter-in-law Matt and Melany—were ones Nora chose for her funeral….Joni Mitchell and John Lennon and Kansas. We can only be thankful she didn’t request Stairway to Heaven and Innagoddadivida.
She even told stories about her pets of the barking, swimming and tweeting variety.
She often told me about her fish who lived in that big tank in her living room. And she was always shocked when the big predator fish ate the small ornamental fish.
Her Airedale Buttercup was her canine soulmate for many years. Nora thought the dog’s full name… Buttercup LaChance..made her sound like a streetwalker. Nora also believed Buttercup was lesbian, a concept I never thought about before in a dog. Nora named her Maltese Sparkle after comedienne Gilda Radner’s dog… Gilda had ovarian cancer too.
On May 4, 2006 Nora called to tell me she has just been diagnosed with stage 3C ovarian cancer. Like Nora, 75 percent of women are not diagnosed until late stage. When the cancer has spread, only25 of women percent survive 5 years.
It was a death sentence. But Nora went for 29 chemo sessions over these past 5 and a half years. She would be so sick for 10 days after chemo that she stayed in the house and didn’t talk to anyone. Each time she recovered, she got up, made dinner, did the recycling, and went out to concerts and the movies and garage sales. She was good to go until the next sickening round of chemo.
When an intestinal blockage of tumor and scar tissue made it impossible for her to eat real food, she hooked herself up to a tube in her arm each night for nutrition. During the day, she walked around with plastic piping that snaked out of her gut to a plastic bag that held bile. Her cousin Shannon made her a hunter-green pouch to hold the bile bag. She turned her disability into a fashion statement.
She was proud to have participated in the national documentary The Whisper about the misdiagnosed symptoms of ovarian cancer.
She wanted so desperately to eat again that she underwent surgery in Boston this May to bypass the intestinal blockage. But the surgeon couldn’t find enough usable intestine, and the operation failed. For 20 months, she lived on liquid nutrition. But every time I talked to her, she would ask, “What are you making for dinner tonight?”
When she joined Facebook, she found another way to keep in contact with old friends, nieces and nephews and cousins, in-laws and out-laws. She was always posting links on political issues, including medical marijuana.
Her step-children Julie and Johnny were her age and were more friends than children.
Julie, one of the most fun times we all had on the river was your wedding reception in the back yard at Rock Beach in the summer of 2005. Nora, Sue, DeeDee and her nieces, Maria, Tom Caroon, Tom McQueeny and Maeve planned and catered the reception. Nick was the bartender.
Johnny, you provided monumental support to Nora and the family in her final years. She often expressed her gratitude to me for what you’ve done. She cherished Max and Sam and Sue, and always let me know what they were up to.
Nick, Mom thought you were a genius from the time you were an infant. We’ve been talking these last few days about all your hi-jinks…impersonating a park ranger, untying a sailboat full of sleeping passengers and letting it float away on the St. Lawrence, setting coffee creamers on fire after Nanny Amoroso’s funeral and causing the evacuation of an entire hotel. You caused Mom a lot of grief but she still thought you were a genius. She was so proud that you have grown into a successful, hard-working and empathetic adult who still retains his crazy, hyperactive, smart-ass, fast-thinking sense of self.
Kendall, your mother loved you so much.. You owe it to her and to yourself to become the glorious, acoomplished and loving woman your mother was. To do that, you get out of bed every day, put one foot in front of the other, ask yourself “What good can I do for the world today?” and pray to your mother for guidance.
John, the greatest story Nora lived in her life was your love story. Like any married couple, you had your ups and downs, but she valued the tender care you took of her. You first met when you took her for a boat ride in 1975. She loved all the boat rides you took her on for the next 36 years, and she was amazed at the house you designed and built for her. Each time you parted, even if it was just while she went to shop at Big M, you kissed each other three times on the lips. She couldn’t do that when she parted this last time, but you know what was in her heart. There will be three kisses waiting for you in Heaven.
She is gone from us, but she is somewhere else: probably chewing St. Peter’s ear off, planning an exquisite meal with Mom, Dad, Tommy, Ann & Achie, Paulette, Arne, Boots and Doc Nesbitt and inquiring about setting up a celestial Facebook account
.
We are better because she loved us and told us one another’s stories.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
As She Lay Dying
October 25, 2011. It was 46 degrees outside my summer home in Cape Vincent, NY at 8 am this morning. Not bad for the North Country just a month out from Thanksgiving.
I am here out of season because my sister Nora is busy dying in the first-floor bedroom of the home her husband John built for their family 7 miles away in Rock Beach on the St. Lawrence River. I use the term “busy” advisedly. It looks like hard work lying there, her eyes closed mostly. She’s on drugs to ease the pain, but it’s painful nonetheless. Her legs and belly have swelled up with fluid because her liver has been compromised by the ovarian cancer.
Her voice is high-pitched when she speaks. And when she speaks, there are gaps and pauses which I fill with questions and comments. This is a new thing. Nora was always such a rapid-fire talker (we called her “Chatty Cathy” as a child) that I rarely spoke in our conversations.
I feel so badly for her. But I know this is the process. She fought hard for five and a half years. Just last month, she came down to my house in New Jersey and had a wonderful night at a tavern with friends from Bergenfield High School. She had had her hair and make-up done and she didn’t look sick at all. She looked fabulous.
She hasn’t really eaten in 18 months because the cancer blocked her intestinal tract. (She sometimes sucked on Cheetohs to get the taste of the salt.) She’s gotten her nutrition from a nightly drip in her arm. But she’s been a trooper. In May she underwent an operation in Boston to unblock her intestines because she desperately wanted to eat again. That surgery didn’t work out.
She is still on her liquid nutrition, and for that reason, Hospice didn’t want to take her as a client. But Hospice has now agreed to see her, and so a hospice worker will come today.
Her husband John helps her to get up and urinate in a Porta-potty in her room and helps her with her meds. John and son Nick spend time each day working on a junker car for daughter Kendall and a new engine for Nick’s truck. We eat dinner together –sometimes with John and Nora’s friends Dee-Dee and Stuie, who live two doors down. We keep watch.
Is Nora going to an afterlife? If there is no afterlife, that would be okay, I think. There would be the peace of nothingness after the celebration of life in full swing.
But I’ve worked with a couple of mediums when I hosted a talk show. They seem to be reading something. It could be the energy memory in the person they are reading, I suppose.
When my mother was in her last years and suffering from Alzheimer’s, one medium said my late father told her that he and other family spirits talked to my Mom while she slept and urged her to come to the other side. My Mom, being an extremely stubborn woman, resisted. My Mom ultimately died in a nursing home while I was visiting my sister Marian in Arizona. I felt awful I wasn’t there. But it was just like my Mom not to want any death-bed scene.
I do believe there is a fulcrum, a point at which the weight of your life-force hangs in the balance between life and death. Nora seems at that point now. There is nothing we can do but keep watch and bear witness.
I am here out of season because my sister Nora is busy dying in the first-floor bedroom of the home her husband John built for their family 7 miles away in Rock Beach on the St. Lawrence River. I use the term “busy” advisedly. It looks like hard work lying there, her eyes closed mostly. She’s on drugs to ease the pain, but it’s painful nonetheless. Her legs and belly have swelled up with fluid because her liver has been compromised by the ovarian cancer.
Her voice is high-pitched when she speaks. And when she speaks, there are gaps and pauses which I fill with questions and comments. This is a new thing. Nora was always such a rapid-fire talker (we called her “Chatty Cathy” as a child) that I rarely spoke in our conversations.
I feel so badly for her. But I know this is the process. She fought hard for five and a half years. Just last month, she came down to my house in New Jersey and had a wonderful night at a tavern with friends from Bergenfield High School. She had had her hair and make-up done and she didn’t look sick at all. She looked fabulous.
She hasn’t really eaten in 18 months because the cancer blocked her intestinal tract. (She sometimes sucked on Cheetohs to get the taste of the salt.) She’s gotten her nutrition from a nightly drip in her arm. But she’s been a trooper. In May she underwent an operation in Boston to unblock her intestines because she desperately wanted to eat again. That surgery didn’t work out.
She is still on her liquid nutrition, and for that reason, Hospice didn’t want to take her as a client. But Hospice has now agreed to see her, and so a hospice worker will come today.
Her husband John helps her to get up and urinate in a Porta-potty in her room and helps her with her meds. John and son Nick spend time each day working on a junker car for daughter Kendall and a new engine for Nick’s truck. We eat dinner together –sometimes with John and Nora’s friends Dee-Dee and Stuie, who live two doors down. We keep watch.
Is Nora going to an afterlife? If there is no afterlife, that would be okay, I think. There would be the peace of nothingness after the celebration of life in full swing.
But I’ve worked with a couple of mediums when I hosted a talk show. They seem to be reading something. It could be the energy memory in the person they are reading, I suppose.
When my mother was in her last years and suffering from Alzheimer’s, one medium said my late father told her that he and other family spirits talked to my Mom while she slept and urged her to come to the other side. My Mom, being an extremely stubborn woman, resisted. My Mom ultimately died in a nursing home while I was visiting my sister Marian in Arizona. I felt awful I wasn’t there. But it was just like my Mom not to want any death-bed scene.
I do believe there is a fulcrum, a point at which the weight of your life-force hangs in the balance between life and death. Nora seems at that point now. There is nothing we can do but keep watch and bear witness.
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Honoring the Genogram
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.
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.
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.
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