This is a photograph of my father and my first cousin, Diane, in front of my aunt's house in Lodi, New Jersey, circa 1950, three years before I was born. My father crouches down to get into the picture and he smiles his warm smile while gripping a pipe between his teeth. He wears a leather jacket and a pork pie hat popular at the time. I can see the front end of his car in the driveway in front of my aunt and uncle's little brick house. The house had to be fairly new because the bushes in front are small and I remember them taller than the house.
The world before I was born is the same world as the world after I die. I don't exist in either of these worlds and I am very curious about both. I was always mesmerized by the line by Theodore Roethke: "The dead love the unborn." It sends a chill up my spine. In the photograph my father is newly married to my mother and they are living a block away in a house of their own. I would never get to know that house because they moved soon after I was born to another house in the suburbs. My mother hated Lodi because she thought that the schools were rowdy and low class and all her life she dreamed of an upper-class life. My father worked his whole life for one company, Western Electric in Kearny right after World War II, and then in the modern, black-glass, 20-floor office, in downtown Newark on Broad Street until he retired in 1986--45 years!
That pipe in his mouth, plus all the cigars, and other bad habits he acquired over a lifetime, would end up giving him cancer of the esophagus just after he turned 80. He made it to 81, but that last year was a year of suffering. No one should have to suffer the way he did. It broke my heart. My cousin, Diane, asked me for a copy of this photograph recently because she loved my dad so much and because he was so good to his nieces and nephews--they all loved him and he was fun, did crazy things with them and they always had a good time.
They are all gone now, all the uncles, all the aunts, all the mothers and the fathers, and it is just us cousins now who have moved into the green room for the river Styx, to wait for the boatman Charon, to row us to the other side.
My Uncle Rudy worked at that Western Electric plant his whole life too.
ReplyDeleteIt was time of hats then. It makes me recall the Collins' poem "The Death of the Hat."
Once every man wore a hat.
In the ashen newsreels,
the avenues of cities
are broad rivers flowing with hats.
The ballparks swelled
with thousands of straw hats,
brims and bands,
rows of men smoking
and cheering in shirtsleeves.
Hats were the law.
They went without saying.
You noticed a man without a hat in a crowd.
You bought them from Adams or Dobbs
who branded your initials in gold
on the inside band.
Trolleys crisscrossed the city.
Steamships sailed in and out of the harbor.
Men with hats gathered on the docks.
There was a person to block your hat
and a hatcheck girl to mind it
while you had a drink
or ate a steak with peas and a baked potato.
In your office stood a hat rack.
The day war was declared
everyone in the street was wearing a hat.
And they were wearing hats
when a ship loaded with men sank in the icy sea.
My father wore one to work every day
and returned home
carrying the evening paper,
the winter chill radiating from his overcoat.
But today we go bareheaded
into the winter streets,
stand hatless on frozen platforms.
Today the mailboxes on the roadside
and the spruce trees behind the house
wear cold white hats of snow.
Mice scurry from the stone walls at night
in their thin fur hats
to eat the birdseed that has spilled.
And now my father, after a life of work,
wears a hat of earth
and on top of that,
a lighter one of cloud and sky--a hat of wind.