JUNE 30, 2023 – Blogger’s note: A loyal follower of this series who knows “more of the story” about my mother expressed surprise and curiosity as to why PART I: MOTHER didn’t reveal the full story, as it were. My response was, “Stay tuned!” The structure of INHERITANCE introduces Mother’s family via representative, anecdotal impressions, with stories about Mother and UB (PART III) serving as the bookends to accounts about their parents—Gaga and Grandpa (PART II). The narrative then ensues with PART IV: OLD JERSEY, which recounts my childhood visits to New Jersey and my grandparents’ (and great-grandparents’ (Holman)) get-away on Hamburg Cove in Lyme, Connecticut. All of this sets the stage for PART V: PSYCHE WARD, featuring Mother, followed by PART VI: CLIFF (who saved the family’s bacon innumerable times), which lays the groundwork for PART VII: “UH-OH!” starring UB and giving way, as all stories do eventually, to PART VIII: THE (TORTUOUS) DENOUEMENT. As I said, “Stay tuned!”
(Cont.) When we were young, my sister Nina once said, “Let’s face it. Old people are weird.” In a way she was right. Maybe not weird but certainly the elderly are concerned more about day-to-day living than about an extended vision of the world and their place in it.
Gaga was all about living day-to-day, but I think that had been her modus vivendi since her earliest days, when she and Grandpa were kindergarten classmates. I doubt that she ever harbored great ambition, or envy or jealousy, for that matter, and I don’t think she ever devised broad plans or schemes for her life—or for anyone else’s. She never put on airs or pretensions or acted in any way that wasn’t wholly genuine. Plus, however much you didn’t agree with some of her opinions, she never insisted in the least that any of us should agree with them—except for acting respectfully in the company of others. If she had a number of habits and routines, she was not what I would call an eccentric. Until a broken hip at the age of 100 dispatched her to the hospital where she would die a short while later, Gaga was lucid and in complete command of her mind.
I visited her shortly before she died in November 1994. I happened to be in New York City on business, and once I had dispensed with that, I took a commuter bus to Passaic, where the hospital was located. As the bus crossed from Rutherford over the Passaic River, I approached the driver to ask where I should get off for the hospital. He was very accommodating and perhaps, starved for a little conversation.
“You visiting someone there?” he asked with a friendly tone, as he guided the bus deftly around a corner.
“Yes. My 100-year old grandmother,” I said, hanging onto the pole just behind the driver’s seat.
“Is that so? Well, my great-grandmother lived to be 117,” said the bus driver. “That’s mainly why we called her great-grandma when I was a boy, ’cause she lived so old.” He let out a big laugh. “Yes siree, she was old. Matter of fact,” he went on, “she was so old she was a slave when she was born. Yes siree, she was a slave, born on a plantation down there in Mississippi. Yes siree, she was a slave. She wasn’t set free till she was six years old, yes siree.”
I was astonished. To think that we were in the year 1994, and here I was hearing from a person who had known, who remembered, another person who had been a slave, who had walked this earth before the American Civil War.
The bus driver’s story inspired a history lesson I gave our son Cory the next day out on the sidewalk in front of our house back in Minnesota. At the time, my wife (an actual teacher) and I were home-schooling him in third grade, and given my interest in history and the flexibility afforded me by my boss at work, I had assumed responsibility for giving Cory history lessons every Wednesday morning.
My approach approach was fairly spontaneous, and in recalling the bus driver’s connection with ante bellum slavery, I decided to use the sidewalk as a time-line on which to illustrate the relative chronological distances of various historical events. To keep things simple, I figured that each square ought to represent a century.
“Alright, Cory,” I said. “I want you to stand in this square here and take a step this way and that without going outside the crack on end of the square.” He followed these instructions carefully, and despite his eight-year old stature, he experienced some difficulty in limiting his motions to avoid stepping over the boundaries. “That’s a century,” I said. As the words left my mouth, I thought of Gaga. “That’s how long Gaga has been alive, Cory, and Gaga is a very, very, very old person. Not many people get to live to be that old.”
“Now,” I said, as the lesson of chronological relativity sprang into even greater clarity in my own mind, “if you’re standing in Gaga’s century—that is, if you’re standing in the 20th century, I want you to start walking in that direction until you get to a point where Columbus would have landed in the New World.” A few weeks before, we had discussed that date, so I figured it was a fair test of his knowledge. From the concentration that filled his countenance, I could see the wheels whirling inside his mind. Two or three seconds later, he stepped onto the adjacent square from Gaga’s Century, back to the 18th century and so on, till he reached the 15th century line. He stopped there, looked up at me for a moment for affirmation and then pointed to the far line of the square.
“Here?” he said.
“Yes, exactly!” I said, pleased with myself that I had managed extemporaneously to combine a math question with a history lesson. “Okay, now, Cory, I want you to run back and forth between that line, which represents the time when Columbus came to America, and that square down there, which is how long Gaga has been alive.” He stepped quickly back to “Gaga’s square,” which, of course, was only four away. “Okay, back to Columbus!” I said. He scampered back to 1500. “Now back to Gaga!” Cory showed pleasure in this game, but the lesson was even more striking to me, as I realized that fewer than four squares separated the start of Gaga’s life from Columbus’s first landfall in the New World.
I couldn’t stop the cascade of historical events tumbling through my thoughts. “Wait, Cory. Stop!” I cried out, just as his feet flew over the 19th century and returned to the 20th. “See that line right there?” I pointed to 1900. “That’s when President McKinley was shot. Have you ever heard of President William McKinley?”
“Not yet,” said Cory.
I laughed. “Well now you have,” I said. “He was President during the Spanish American War. It all started when the U.S. Navy ship called the Maine blew up in Havana, Cuba. Anyway, he was President when Gaga was six years old, and he was assassinated, and Gaga saw it happen.” I didn’t know if any of this had registered with Cory, but with this recollection, I astonished myself. Gaga and her parents were attending the North American Exposition in Buffalo, New York on that fateful day in 1901 when McKinley was shot. I remember her relating the story of how she had been in the crowd when the shot rang out and a terrible commotion ensued. (Cont.)
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
