Soul Mosaic

We were on a typical Sunday visit to Bridgeport, Stratford, actually, where Dad’s parents lived. It was always an uncomfortable time. We’d have to be dressed up, which meant not really being able to play or do anything fun, not that there was anything fun to do there anyway. The only saving grace was the TV set because Grandma could get all the New York City TV channels we could not. So we could at least watch old movies and programs like “The Thunderbirds. But there were strict rules in her living room, and God help you if you broke them.

For one, we couldn’t touch the TV. If we wanted to change the channel, we’d have to ask an adult to do it. If you were even in the vicinity of the TV set and she walked in, she would start yelling. The living room itself was equally uncomfortable, with plastic runners across the rug and plastic sheets on the couches so we couldn’t mess anything up. Also, forget about bringing a snack in there or touching the candy in the dish on the end table. And don’t touch any of the hundreds of her knick-knacks scattered around the room. One time, one of us accidentally broke one of her statues, and Dad actually hid it so we wouldn’t get in trouble.

But on that morning, all of that fun would come later. For right now, we were marched outside to say hello to Dad’s grandfather — my Grandmother’s father — who was usually referred to as “Little Grandpa,” because he was shorter than Dad’s father, who was “Big Grandpa.” Little Grandpa was very old at that point, and mostly stayed out on the patio in good weather, or upstairs in his room in bad weather, as he and Big Grandpa did not get along much.

On this particular Spring Sunday morning, he was sitting outside. So, we dutifully went up and said hello and stood there lined up like robots in front of him as Dad talked with him. Little Grandpa didn’t say much that we could understand. He had no teeth, didn’t speak much English, and just kind of sat there nodding his head at us. But there was one thing he would always say, every time we saw him. He would shake his head, point a finger at us, and look at us very seriously, as if he were about to deliver a sage bit of wisdom that would save our lives. He would draw himself up, raise his voice, which was very raspy, and say in a Slavic accent, emphasizing each word slowly:

“You…lucky…you…got…Richie!” Richie was my father’s nickname.

He would then shake his head again, fold his hands, and look down at the ground, I guess satisfied that he had told us this.

I was never sure what to make of it. Did I really trust a toothless old man who spent most of his time drunk? And given Dad’s alternating good and bad moods, I wondered why we were so lucky. But being a kid, I remember thinking, Well, he is an old man, and an adult, so he must know something. He must be right. I also wondered, if we were so lucky to have Dad, how bad were his brothers to live with?

So we just smiled and agreed, “We lucky we got Richie.”

But to this day, I’ll be damned if I know why…or if it was true.

Of my two parents, there is no question that Dad was the interesting one. And I mean that in a kind and grateful way. Whatever else I will say about him in this book, like all human beings, even ones who do horrible things, he also did good things. No one is *just* evil. And maybe it’s because of those things that it was so hard to know what to make of him, or to even know I should stand up to him.

It was no accident or twist of fate that I started mapping our house in the radio room. He called it his radio “shack,” because apparently that’s what all ham radio operators called their “space.” And while the room had many things jammed into it, the REAL draw for me was that counter covered in radio receivers, transmitters, boosters, wires, coils, and that precious Morse code key.

I loved playing with Dad’s ham radios…when he was not home, of course. I would have been in trouble if he’d seen me flipping switches, spinning dials, and changing frequency settings.

So I have been busy posting several short pieces over the last couple of months, pieces that make up the first sections of my memoir-in-progress:

– The Introduction

– Packing for the Journey

– The End of an Era

All of those musings from the recent past catalyzed this book effort. And they set the stage for what I am about to write — “The Old Country” — aka, revisiting my past.

It is not easy to figure out what made up my younger self, much less how to share it in a story. There were the effects of so many things that influenced me — the time period, culture, place, people, things done to me, all of them ingredients for the “stew” that was me.

Add to that, one other major ingredient – my own nature. Why did I not quit? Why did I fight back even when it felt hopeless? What about the times of mistakes and despair? How did I extract enough emotional nutrition from all those solitary details and moments I loved in life, and why was I able to love anything in life? Lastly, how did I hold onto or regain that elusive quality — hope — when there should have been none? Yes, I am a stubborn person. But stubborn was never enough for this.

So that quest is the focus of the Old Country.

But sharing my past is not the most important part. Everybody has a past filled with things that happened to them. The key is — “What does it all mean…and what can it give to others?”

As I wrote those early pieces, order started to emerge from the chaos, and a book structure emerged.

Crossing the line?

I always thought of this very early memory as the first time Dad crossed a line with me.  I assumed that up until that moment, there had been a time, “BA,” “before abuse,” a time I was safe, loved, and cherished properly.  Many years later, though, I would learn the truth.

As to the strength and intensity of this memory, especially given my age at the time, it says something that the details of my experience in that car that night, remain sharp over 6 decades later.

It did take painting the images that had been stuck in my head all these years though, to finally be able to tease apart the flood of inputs from that moment–images, actions, physical sensations, and nervous reactions, all mixed together — and to see that moment from “outside my head,” as an adult.

What I remember — The Torrington Creamery

The yellow streetlight was a fuzzy glow as we rounded the curve. Looking up at the car windows, I could see the tops of trees…I remember the empty branches. And I had the sense it was fall because I did not have a heavy winter coat on, and because it was already dark, even though it was early evening — just like it is in October or November after the clocks change.

The radio was a murmur in the background, and the steering wheel glowed slightly from the dashboard light. We were in that same light blue, 1954 Chevy Belair 2-door sedan, and I was sitting on the cloth front bench seat. Directly across from me was the radio–I was too short to see above the dashboard.

Seeing “her” not the gray tones…

It’s one of those typical 1950s black-and-white photos found in our family albums, before the 1960s brought cheaper color film, Instamatic cameras, and those Polaroids where you could see the picture right away.

These always came across as ancient history — like something found in a history textbook rather than a real moment out of a someone’s life. Even as I know it is about 1957, it could have easily been judged as earlier, except for the car. Only the car gives a clue as to the time period…if you know enough about 1950s cars. And as far as “mood,” it’s hard to tell much unless you really study the shades of gray.

My early life was shrouded in enough shades of gray already. I wanted to see the real “me” from that time…get as close to the living, breathing, in-the-moment me as I could. Close enough to feel my cold breath on that winter day, and hear my laughter of delight sitting so big and proud on that car hood.

The details of a photo…

“What do you do when the person you are dependent on for safety becomes the source of danger?”

Dr Becky Kennedy on parenting and how trauma happens

https://www.hubermanlab.com/episode/dr-becky-kennedy-protocols-for-excellent-parenting-improving-relationships-of-all-kinds

57 xxxx Avenue, Torrington, 1955-1957

In one respect, I wish I could go back in time to 1955-1957 and be a fly on the wall in this apartment. But maybe it’s better I can’t. Whatever went on at 57 xxxx Avenue is something I will never know because I can’t remember…consciously. But my body seems to.

This was the first place my parents lived when they got married, and it was my home for the first two years of my life. It’s always been almost an afterthought, a place mentioned in passing by my parents without much significance, because the place I really considered my childhood home would be a house my grandfather purchased across town. But this was the first home.

Google Maps Street View

A few years ago, on a quiet afternoon, I thought I would revisit that first home, just to see what the place looked like now. I knew the address and that it was on the west side of town, but that was about it. But, one of the benefits of the digital age is that if you have an address, you can instantly “travel” almost anywhere in the world via an online search and get a street view.

With no notion one way or the other about what to expect, I typed in the address and hit return. The view was off by a house or two, so I adjusted the image and closed in on “57.”

What the body remembers

However, even before the house was totally in the frame or I could form a conscious thought about it, as soon as I spotted the porch and the number 57 on the post, my body reacted…and not in a good way.

I just wanted to take a moment, before continuing the story, to share the Introduction for the book, something to set the stage for how my own unique, “ancient-history” story can still be a universal way to view a life and search for answers…

Introduction

Sketch and photo by author

So, as will become obvious in this book, I am a “split-personality” writer — always torn between my science brain and my “dreamer-artistic” side. I am also an aging Baby Boomer, with my childhood being circa the 1950s-1970s — ancient history to most people now.

The world I grew up in — a small New England immigrant factory town that was heavily ethnic and Catholic— is long gone. The stories I tell out of that culture will be very foreign to anyone reading this book now in the 21st century. As I was told by an editor one time, if I write a novel now and set it in the years of my childhood, it’s considered “historical” fiction. So in that sense, my personal origin story in this memoir is partly “historical” memoir.

But it is also universal, because all of our origin stories are “historical” and unique. The reason to share them is that those stories are the clues to who we were…and became…and why. Those cultures and details are what we are made of and what we had to work with.

So many people have asked me, “Why did you stay so long being abused in that house?” “How did you get out?” “How could that have happened?” — and other similar questions.

For that matter, I have asked myself those same questions…and other, more self-hating ones.

The easy answer is to just say…”It’s complicated.”

But that gives nothing to the reader, and it leaves me with only questions and no answers.

The Old Country

While my Grandmother was born here in the US in 1902, she spent most of her childhood and early adulthood in a small farming village in “the Old Country,” — or “Old Countr-r-r-y” as she called it because she rolled her Rs strongly — which was eastern Slovakia. And she still spoke mostly Slovak with my mother, which we kids only understood a bit of. When she talked with us, she always apologized for her poor grammar and explained that she spoke “Broken English.” We grew up assuming this was a special form of English. It was a smattering of English and Slovak words delivered in her Eastern European accent with her rolled Rs. To this day, I so miss her and her way of talking. It warmed my heart.

One particular afternoon, I had gone to visit her in her convalescent home and shared that I was taking a vacation trip to Germany. My Grandmother went quiet, then looked at me with an expression of total confusion and surprise. Shaking her head, she said to me in her broken-English style: “For what you go Old Countr-r-ry? There’s nothing there!”

I was kind of surprised at her reaction because I was young and just excited at the idea of going to Europe. It was my chance to travel somewhere new and have an adventure. I couldn’t understand why anyone would question the idea of such a trip. So I brushed off her comment with the arrogance only a “know-it-all” 20-something can have.

The missed story

I so wish, now, that I had asked her more about what she meant. I assumed it was her typical reference to what she and many other immigrants back then would say, that her life here was so much better than what she left behind. But it could have been something else.

Maybe all her family had been wiped out in World War II. Who had been there? What happened to them? Maybe there was nothing there anymore because it had all been destroyed. Whatever it was, I realize now that I had lost a precious opportunity to learn what she could have taught me. Instead of slowing down, looking deeper, and asking her, I rushed to judgment and missed her truth.

Wrong conclusions

All my life, I have always viewed my life in one way. I was abused. I stayed too long. I was ashamed of that stupid younger part of me who “should have” known better, and I spent the rest of my life making sure I never ended up like that again. I could excuse the young child part of me, and knew most people would view her sympathetically. But that older teen and young adult? I despised those parts of me and decided they weren’t worth talking about…they didn’t “deserve” recognition for their “failures. I was deeply ashamed of those parts and figured if anyone else ever knew, they would feel the same way, too. So for decades, except to a therapist, I never spoke of those years and never told anyone just how long I had been stuck in that house. Instead, I just moved on, pretended my past was fine, and privately fought to get back as much of my life going forward as I could.

In case anyone reads that description and picks up on what seems like heavy doses of self-hate and self-judgment, along with an appalling lack of compassion or self-love…you wouldn’t be wrong. I always saw my value as moving forward, being “strong,” and never being “weak or stupid” again.

The new lab experiment: Back to the Old Country

Finally, I came to understand that to move beyond that self-fate, I had to go back to my Old Country — my life — because there was most definitely something back there. Maybe there were answers to questions…or even more questions with no answers, but whatever was back there, I wanted…and needed…to see it. If I ever hoped to unravel that Gordian knot inside me and heal, I couldn’t do it by hating parts of me. So I had to go back there.