A FOOTPRINT IN TIME

We all leave a footprint in this world. Perhaps it’s a physical imprint, something we’ve created or a place we’ve contributed something to. Sometimes what we leave behind is our impact on others—an idea, an attitude, a conviction that, through us, has touched their lives. Often we leave our mark by how our words and actions encourage or inspire others, how our listening or refusal to judge empowers them. At times, regrettably, we impact others by how we discourage or hamper them. One way or another, we have left our mark.

            Typically what we leave behind are the stories friends and family tell of us. It has often been said that we die three times: when the body ceases to function, when we are buried, and when our name is spoken for the last time. Within a few generations most of us recede from memory, consigned to a leaf on a family tree and fading with the passage of time toward the oblivion of "the ancestors.” But stories can keep us alive long after we are gone.

            I have memories from an early age of my maternal grandparents, Nana and Papa, and stories I still tell of them. Nana scrubbed office floors at night to outfit her ten grandchildren at Easter every year. Papa was an auto mechanic who, like many a good garage technician, could diagnose a problem just by listening to the engine. I recall their physical presence too. Nana was a heavy woman who waddled when she walked, a loving grandmother capable of both tender hugs and disdainful stares of disapproval that live on two generations later as the “Nana look.” Papa, with the swarthy complexion of the dark Irish and deep sorrowful eyes, would sit contentedly on the couch, a grandchild on his knee. My paternal grandmother died when my dad was only eight, so of her I have only a few stories to tell, like the one of dad in his childhood grief crying under the front steps when his mother’s coffin was carried out of the house for burial. My paternal grandfather died when I was just one, but I have known him all my life from the many stories my dad would tell of him, like the time my grandfather lied about his age to enlist and serve in the Spanish-American War.

            I hope to keep all my grandparents alive in the stories of them that my sons tell to their own children, even though they never knew them in life. I know that my boys will pass on to their own children stories of my mom and dad, of whom they have their own fond memories, and I hope that they, in turn, will pass them along to their descendants. 

            In addition to the fading photos of earlier generations, today we have the legacy of videos that will conjure not only our images, but our voices, actions, and mannerisms as well. In all these ways, but most of all through stories, I like to think that my children and my grandchildren will remember me and speak fondly of me from time to time when I am gone. Then, although I will have passed from this life, I will come to live beyond my allotted days every time my name is still spoken.

 

Spaldeen Dreams

This time of year, when the grip of winter seemed broken at last and a hint of spring was in the air, we would dream our spaldeen dreams in the Bronx. Soon it would be time for stickball. The grainy feel of the ball, the pok of the bounce, the thwak as a broomstick sent it sailing the length of two sewers, the bubble gum pink of the rubber, the smells of the City, the taste of summer. All of these were conjured by the 2 ¼-inch rubber ball marketed as the Spalding High-Bounce Ball, but known to every kid on the streets of the Bronx as a "spaldeen."

        Always preferred to the heavier, spongier, and cheaper Pensy Pinky, the Spaldeen was the ball of choice for any street game that mattered: catch, boxball, hit the stick, king queen, stoopball (off the point), I declare war, punchball, and of course, stickball. With hundreds of families living on our block, there were usually enough kids around to form two teams for a game of stickball. When the Spaldeen landed on a rooftop, the kid who'd hit it there had to climb five flights to retrieve it, often firing it back down at his friends from the edge of the roof. How that ball would bounce!

        If the ball rolled down a sewer, though, we rarely had 17¢ among us to buy a new spaldeen, even if we'd called "chips on the ball," so we'd reenact an age-old Bronx street ritual. If you sank the ball in the sewer, you'd open the round manhole cover on the corner while someone ran for a coat hanger from Mr. Abromowitz, the local dry cleaner. You'd shape the hanger into an Easter egg scoop, then your best friend in the whole wide world would hold you by the ankles as you spread out on the ground. Holding your breath, you'd reach down into the sewer to scoop up the Spaldeen before any of the legendary sewer crocs that inhabited the bowels of the Bronx in those days could snatch you into the foul and murky depths.

        We would often go to any lengths to catch a spaldeen and keep the rhythm of a stickball game going, to make the play while the whole neighborhood watched. The lower third of Tiebout Avenue just south of Fordham Road was our infield, the one way  sweep of East 188th Street our contested outfield. We shared it with four lanes of traffic. Many a catch was made bobbing and weaving and dodging and leaping in front of cars to save the game. It was the catch you dreamed of. The cheers of the neighborhood silenced the blaring horns of the horrified drivers. 

        When I think of the sheer madness of it now, all these years later, I'm aghast at the danger. We'd never permit our own children or grandchildren to take such risks today. But those were the days of our childhood in the Bronx 65 years ago, when the streets were our playground and spaldeens were the currency of our fun. Somehow, despite ourselves, we all managed to survive our spaldeen dreams. 

St. Brigid’s Day and the Coming of Spring

The first day of February marks the feast of Imbolc in the pre-Christian Celtic calendar in Ireland. Midway between the winter and spring solstices it heralds the traditional start of spring, a season of rebirth and fertility as Nature slowly wakes from her long deep slumber. Since Christian times in the fifth century, it also marks the feast of St. Brigid of Kildare, long observed by the weaving of a Brigid’s Cross from fresh rushes. These woven crosses adorn many Irish doorways invoking the saint’s blessings on the home. 

            With the coming of Christianity to Ireland, the Church often integrated pagan customs and beliefs into the Christian practices. St. Brigid, as we know her today, is likely a melding of that holy woman with an earlier Celtic fertility goddess, Brid, or Brigid, said to be the patron of healers, smiths, and poets. A daughter of the chief god Dagda, the pagan Brigid was a goddess of the mythical tribe Tuatha Dé Danann, an underground people often associated with the Sidhe, or fairy folk in Irish tradition. 

            And so as the cycle of the seasons comes round once more, spring has come early again to Ireland. The snowdrops and crocuses are up, and the birches and whitethorns, hazel, oak, and ash will soon come into leaf. Here in America, what does it matter that the groundhog might see its shadow or not in the early days of February? As inveterate New Yorkers will know, we still have six more weeks of winter before us here. Yet, in the darkness of the bleak midwinter, the days grow perceptibly longer and the daffodils peek out from beneath the melting snows. Within the soil, seeds are coming to life. Soon enough the snowdrops and crocuses and buds on the trees will start to sprout here too. There is hope of brighter days ahead, as the Brigid’s Cross above the doorway reminds us.

Of Hope and Despair: Gross Île, Canada's Irish Famine Memorial

   

In the early months of 1847, the authorities in Quebec braced for an influx of immigrants fleeing the cholera epidemic that was raging in Europe. They expected 12,000 arrivals, mostly refugees of what would come to be known as “Black ’47,” the worst year of the Irish Famine. Over 100,000 arrived. The medical inspection facility and quarantine station on Gross Île in the St. Lawrence River were woefully unprepared. 

Opened in 1832 to treat immigrants from a cholera epidemic that had struck Europe the previous year, Gross Île (pronounced Gross Eel, meaning Large Island) is an island in the St. Lawrence River near the village of Saint-Antoine-de-I’Isle-aux Grues, Quebec, just under thirty miles upriver from Quebec City. Gross Île, three miles long and one mile wide, was to serve as a waystation where immigrants to Canada would undergo a health inspection before proceeding downriver to Quebec City or Montreal. The sick were quarantined on Gross Île. 

According to British historian Cecil Woodham-Smith, in The Great Hunger, her 1962 account of the Great Famine in Ireland, Dr. George Douglas, the medical officer on Gross Île, had requested £3,000 to prepare the facilities to accommodate the anticipated throng of immigrants. He was given about £300 by the British authorities in charge of the Canadian government. (Canada would not become a self-governing dominion within the British Empire until 1867, twenty years later.) 

As the ice on the St. Lawrence was late to thaw in the spring of 1847, the first of the immigrant ships did not arrive at Gross Île until the middle of May. By the end of that month, Woodham-Smith tells us, forty ships were at anchor in the St. Lawrence stretching for two miles waiting to be processed. The hospital facilities at the immigration depot were overcrowded, and onboard the vessels at anchor, typhus, known as “ships fever,” was rampant. With nowhere to inspect them on the island, healthy passengers were ordered to quarantine aboard ship for fifteen days after the sick were removed. But in the cramped confines and fetid air of the ships, thousands were infected by typhus and never made it to land alive.

By the first week of June, 25,000 immigrants were quarantined on Gross Île and on ships  at anchor. By the end of July quarantine had become so untenable that Dr. Douglas permitted healthy immigrants to be admitted to Canada after a mere cursory check by a doctor onboard the deck of each ship. Some who appeared healthy travelled to Quebec City, but most were shipped downriver by steamer to Montreal. Others were carried by barge on the St. Lawrence to other Canadian ports. 

Authorities estimate that over 3,000 immigrants died on Gross Île in 1847, most of them fleeing the famine in Ireland. Over 5,000 are buried in the Irish cemetery there, many of whom died abord the ships. It is the largest graveyard for refugees of the Great Famine outside Ireland.

        In 1909, a 46’ by 8’ stone Celtic cross was erected on the highest point on the island to commemorate the Irish dead. In 1974, the Canadian government designated the quarantine station on Gross Île as the Irish Memorial National Historic Site. 

Today the Irish cemetery on the island is a short walk through a hilly woodland from the Celtic cross. An eerie silence prevails. Etched into the base of the granite cross are these words:

                                                        

      Sacred to the memory of 

                                                   thousands of Irish emigrants                                                  who, to preserve the faith, 

       suffered hunger and exile,

                                                    in 1847-48, and stricken with                                                                                      fever ended here  their                                           sorrowful pilgrimage.

   

                                                                                                                                                                          

                                                                                                                      

Home for Christmas

 

 

In his story “Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor,” John Cheever depicts the loneliness and misery of poor people amidst the festive displays of the affluent. We don’t need to hark back to the world of Dickens’s Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim to realize that joy to the world is not universally shared, even in our own land of plenty. The holidays are actually far from merry and bright for many in our midst. For the homeless among us, the loners, the alienated, the grieving, and all those far from home, Christmas is often a bleak and lonesome time in a season of merriment, a time when countless people have nowhere to go “home” to where joy awaits them. We would do well, those of us who are more fortunate, to spare a thought at this festive season for those who are not so blessed this year and to share our bounty with them.                    

    

    For most of us, “I’ll be home for Christmas” takes on altered meanings in our lives as the years proceed. In childhood it means celebrating the holiday with all the familiar traditions in the warmth of the family home: holly and ivy are draped, mistletoe hung, the tree is trimmed with the nativity scene beneath it, eggnog and gingerbread cookies are served, and doors on the Advent calendar opened while carols fill the air. Whatever our own family traditions, they are likely the cherished memories that come to mind each Christmas season for those of us who celebrate. But as our circumstances and our notion of family evolve with the years, so does our sense of  “home.”

While our parents are still alive, their home is often still the center of holiday celebrations, time and circumstance permitting. For some that means spending part of the holiday there. For others it’s merely stopping by for a visit at Christmastime. For still others it may mean sharing some cherished time on a video call. In our early years of marriage, we often have two parents’ homes to "come home to" for the holidays. Then, as our own families grow our home becomes the center of celebrating with our own children, our blended family traditions of pfeffernusse and rum balls, stollen and Christmas crackers becoming their own, the Christmas customs they’ll one day remember. Anyway we manage it, “coming home” for Christmas is a joy central to the season for most of us.

Amidst the valued traditions our families reenact each Christmas, we are left, as the years slip away, with the absence of loved ones who are no longer with us, the ghosts of Christmas past. No one in my life has ever appreciated the joys of Christmas as much as my late sister Rose Ann had in her time among us. By making her own decorations each year, stringing the lights, baking holiday goodies, and visiting with family, she embodied the joys of the season and passed on that legacy to her own three children. In her exhilaration my Sis showed us all how to keep Christmas well. 

     Last year my nephew Edmond died well before his time. And just before Thanksgiving this year, we lost another one of our family anchors when my cousin Catherine died in Florida. As with the death of her brother Al many years earlier, it was one of those losses that rocks you to the core, but—as with Sis and Edmond and Al—we found solace in having had Cat in our lives. While the passing of someone dear can sometimes overshadow the celebrations in a season of loss, we may find it comforting to enjoy the holiday in their name, observing the festivities for them as they themselves had done when they were among us. Perhaps we might, in that sense, “bring them home for Christmas” once again. 

The Way We Were

I’m struck these days by the notion that in our memories we become what we remember and not what we forget. Memory is so notoriously unreliable, and yet it’s all we have at times. We recall with great certainty and clarity a moment from the past, for instance. And yet, in fact, that impression may not be what had actually occurred. Memory is always at best just that—an “impression,” an imprint, and like a fading photograph, a mere approximation of what once was. 

I remember with great certitude, for instance, the floral pattern of our living room linoleum when I was a child. Great boisterous roses of mostly pink pastel shades, they were. My siblings, however, may recall other patterns on the flooring entirely, and each of those may differ from each other again. We have multiple impressions, then, each a bona fide recollection in the memory of the beholder. So which is real? Which an authentic recall? Which, ultimately, true?

Perhaps they all are, to each of us in turn, or perhaps, in fact, none is quite accurate. Yet the memory is no less “real” for each of us. 

If indeed, our pasts become what we remember and not what we forget, then, the same may be so of our younger (or even more recent) selves. If we recall ourselves at any earlier time in our lives to have been more pleasant, considerable, patient, diligent, tactful—or less so—that is what we “were” in the past as we recall it, the “me” that we remember. It is what we have “become,” in a sense, to ourselves at least. How close that may actually be to the reality of our earlier selves we need leave to others to affirm. It would be comforting if what we have become in our memories is not too far from the way we truly were. 

A Sense of Place

Wherever we may roam, from the familiar surroundings of home to the alluring paths of foreign shores, a sense of place always accompanies us. Whether it's a place we occupy at any given moment, or one we long ago left behind, we're mindful of our surroundings and their impact on us. When we find ourselves in an agreeable place, we often exalt in the here and now, enjoying the visual and other sensory impressions. If a locale imperils us, though, we may shudder at its sights and sounds and smells. Sometimes we may experience both at once. 

        In a city, for instance, we often relish the exhilarating sights—the bold buildings and dynamic scale of the place, the ambition, the vitality, the style. The sheer sense of being in a place that pulses with the rhythm of possibility excites us. And yet, a city can also besiege us with its dangers, heightening our survival instincts.

        One October some years ago when my brother Chris was still living in the Bronx, he joined my wife and me, along with our two young sons, on a haunted hayride near our home in the suburbs north of New York City. Masked figures jumped screaming from behind trees, some wielding "bloodied" knives in menacing poses, as our hay wagon passed. "Gee, this is great," Chris said rather wryly, "we don't have anything like this in the Bronx." His irony reminded me that, as a native of the Bronx who had been away from the City for far longer than I had ever lived there, my innate "street smarts" kick in whenever I return. Many others though, are quite at ease in the City, at home in their most familiar place. Whether sitting on the stoop enjoying the vibe of the neighborhood, going about their daily lives, or lazing in a park nearby, the din of the nearby traffic is the soundtrack of the place. For them, autumn in New York with its fall foliage, food carts, ice rinks, street fairs, and festive anticipation of the coming holidays is the place to be. 

        

        My awareness of my surroundings when I'm at home in the suburbs is different, of course, from when I'm in the city. At home, I know no greater serenity than sitting on the grampa bench in our flower garden amid abundant blooms and chittering birds, a new growth woods at my back. By mid-autumn, the  astilbe and coneflowers, the yarrow and salvia, coral bells and bee balm and phlox have all gone dormant, while a host of hardy zinnias, dahlias, and marigolds wave their colors defiantly in the air. Soon what leaves are left will be blazing, a palette of reds and orange and yellow. It's a place where my soul is at peace, even if all is not right with the world beyond.

              Wondrously, even on this late October afternoon the temperature climbs near 80° and a balmy breeze drifts by. I sit and watch tired leaves tumble to the ground while the birds who will winter over fatten on the seed and suet on offer at the feeders. As I walk back to the house, the leaves crunch and swoosh underfoot. It's autumn here, in this place, after all.