Brooklyn, the lap of my ancestors

My son Adam and I sit in his windowless Brooklyn living room, the night nearly over. I mention I've done my ritual walk-by on Degraw Street, past the handsome brick four-story brownstone Number 366, where Catherine Atlakson, my widowed great-great-grandmother lived in 1888 and 1889, according to the City Directory, with her son Theodore, my own father's namesake. There's even a photo of the place, passed from hand to hand down through the generations. A little boy and girl are in front, perhaps Catherine's first grandchildren, Andrew, and his sister Madeline. Not far from Degraw is 12 President's St, near the north border of Red Hook, where Catherine and Aanen Atlakson lived as Norwegian immigrants after they arrived in 1848. Their house, or flat, would have had the view of the East River and Governor's Island, and just to the north, the inlet out to the sea. It's now a playground.

Walking Brooklyn, trodding around upon this spot of the earth where my ancestors lived, brings me some strange, specific comfort, like sitting on your grandparent's lap where you know you're safe, and about to be spoiled and made over. Today, walking back to Union Street, where Adam lives, I ran my hand over the black rod-iron grillwork in front of the brownstone, just a little, to say 'hi.'

Adam is perplexed by my intense genealogical leanings, which have leached into the psyche of his father. In a couple of days, some second cousins on his father's side are arriving in Michigan from California. "Just because we have some miniscule genetic overlap doesn't draw me feel connected to relatives," says Adam. "As humans, we have more in common with the nematode earthworm."

He's right. All life on earth, from bacteria to human beings, have at last 25% of DNA in common. The DNA of a nematode worm is 75% similar to that of humans.

I have an argument for that. True, it's not the pulsations of DNA calling to me from that past that connect me to my ancestors in Brooklyn. Instead, they are part of the story I am continually creating about who I am, where I come from, and the legacies I am consciously or unwittingly playing out in my own life.

Partly, I owe my sense of adventure from Catherine and Aanen who left the impoverishment of Norway, for America, crossing the North Atlantic with their four children. Catherine would bury six out of seven children born in the US, the last a seven year old little girl named Caroline. Those are the facts, culled from a Family Bible.

This is what I have invented. This sad, anguishing set of losses would convert to an overabundance of attachment to her remaining children, my great-grandfather especially. You can see this in a photo of Catherine. It might have been taken on her 50th birthday. She looks, thin, and worn out, widowed four years earlier, her last child in the grave for three years. Theodore sits protectively at her side, their hands entwined.

Theodore, as the oldest son in New York would continue to care for his mother until her death in 1899. His occupation is listed as 'beltmaker.' He would marry Amelia Jung, a German-American, and live on DeGraw where eight children would be born, my grandmother Florence among them.

Life would go downhill for Theodore and Amelia. My grandmother passed on stories of poverty, the family falling on the graces of the Salvation Army then a Filipino son-in-law tugboat worker, working in Hoboken silk factories as a young adolescent, her father's love for beer, his institutionalization in a State Mental Hospital before his death. Amelia would come to live with Florence after her marriage to another Filipino in 1916. My great-grandmother would die suddenly of a heart attack in Philadelphia, in 1925, at age 68, and that point forward in time would mark the end an era, one that still calls out to me.

Will I ever stop yearning to live in New York City? Maybe I should deconstruct these longings into a single strand of psychopathology: I'm displacing my urge to create-- which is often at odds with my need to care for others--with an obsession for a city full of creators. I believe erroneously that being in the right place, will bring out my creativity, and free me to write. On the other hand, wouldn't living in New York unbridle the shame and alienation I developed living in Grand Rapids, as the daughter of a Filipino-American. But would I be free of feelings that by now are internalized? No, I would face the same struggle Philip Roth ascribes to the writing process: frustration, humiliation, even torture. (I can relate to all of that, having just had a third book proposal go down, even as yet another book agent took the proposal up enthusiastically.) I once dared to write a short story, even dared to submit it to a contest, and was chosen to have a fiction editor critique it. He was shocked this was my first piece of fiction, remarking that I had a lyrical gift, and should keep going. I didn't. I went to Rwanda instead, a place that was way, way more certain to accept my other talents, as a psychologist, and project manager. As I retract from Rwanda now, to write more fiction and non-fiction, I am willing myself to enter a deeply uncertain, frightening place occupied by artists. At age 65, it's the water's edge, all over again; forcing myself onto a great ocean, staying convinced I have the courage to, as Andre Gide put it, 'lose sight of the shore.'

The birth of an obsession

Over three days, I have plundered purses, closets, couches, pockets, trunks, drawers, coffee shops, and cars for my huge wad of keys and plastic discount coupon cards, jammed onto my red climbing clip adorned with a Vera Bradley plaster-covered fabric swatch. And now, my 4th Kindle has disappeared as well, chock full of novels. It doesn't help a rip, but I have vivid images of my keys and Kindle, and I can even feel them in my hand. My latest search, in a local coffee shop where I was SURE they were in a lost and found box, has failed, and now comes the steady drip of anxiety. If I don't turn it off, I will begin an even more thorough search back in time and space. This will take up time I don't have, and begin to feel ridiculous. Everything can be replaced, and not even expensively. Why am I letting these lost items drive my day? The answer lies buried deep in the winter of 1959, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and the story begins with the United States Treasury's School Stamp Savings Program, a hold-over from War Bonds. Parents got little booklets with blank squares to be covered over with purchased ten-cent stamps, usually in a strip of four stamps. Once the book was filled, a patriotic mother like mine, who well remembered War Bonds, and her brother fighting Over There, would turn the booklet in for money. I was 11, in the sixth grade, wore mittens, and loved playing in the snow on the way home. Who wouldn't? There was so much of it. The snow was so deep, and the snow piles from shoveling sidewalks so huge, that children cavorting home from school on icy, snowy sidewalks could barely be seen by mothers peering out of living room windows. Only their little wool caps, which moved mysteriously along as if disembodied from little heads. I had the stamps in my hand, having scooped them off the table manned by the Stamp Lady who showed up on Friday afternoons. When I reached the side door, all frosty-breathless,the stamps were gone. My mother immediately frisked me for the Saving Stamps, plundering my pockets, and my navy cloth gym bag. My wan must-have-dropped-them comment sent her into a rage, and she ordered me back to school, to trace my steps. She closed the side door with a bang, leaving me shocked and speechless on a late afternoon, the dusk unspooling quickly, the snow turning a dusky blue-grey. I half ran back toward school, my head down like a dog looking for food. School was at least 12 long blocks away. I'm sure I was crying, and sniffling. The sidewalks were icing over. I dreaded running into schoolmates like snowball heaving boys. When I reached the school, the door to my wing was locked, and the hall was darkened. A light was on in the principal's office, at the front of the building, but I dared not face another authority. Instead I ran back home, my head down once again, blood-hounding the sidewalk with my eyes, stepping around fresh dog poop and pee left by early evening walkers, finding only a ball-point pen, and candy wrappers. My memory ends there. I don't know what happened when I got home, only that I assumed MY WHOLE LIFE that my mother had been trying to teach me a lesson about the importance of money. It didn't work. Probably because she went too far shaming me, I am not good with money, nor with minding my stuff. I do though churn up mounds of misery when I lose something. I retrace my steps meticulously, with about as much success as quarters in a slot machine. Stuff, but not shame, just disappears.

Chances are good

Striding onto the gym floor this morning-- the only way I can stay fired up-- a too too thin man in a white tee shirt and navy pants, half-smiled at me. I kept going; who is this? When I looked back from my rowing machine, I saw it was someone I know. His wife I had heard, has serious colon cancer, and so I left my station to talk to him, add my concern, offer some support. 'Well, she's better now that pre-op chemo and radiation are done. All of us will probably get cancer, you know, and at least she's very fit. Still, chemo and radiation really did a job on her.' Despite it being a Friday, I worked out hard today, partly because this story stuck, partly because someone our family is very close to, a 34 year-old young woman is struggling with brain cancer. It felt right to get into the pool for laps, where I could suspend myself away from reality, get into a womb state. But in the shower I cried. When I got home, I felt compelled to check out my gym friend's gloomy pronouncement. looked up the odds of getting cancer in one's lifetime. According to the American Cancer Association, based on 2009 statistics, the odds of developing or dying from cancer of any kind are one in two for men (44.81%) one in three for women (%38.1). Those are high odds. No one really talks about this. Instead, we choose to focus on the odds for particular cancers where the odds are much, much, lower. Like 1 in 182 are the odds for women developing brain cancer, 1 in 21 for colon cancer. My mother had colon cancer, and outlived it. Everyone without cancer thinks they can escape it, or beat it, and people who've had cancer would prefer not to talk about it. What can anybody do, beside give up smoking, stay active, and get cancer screens? Genes figure big. When I moved onto the gym area this morning, I think I knew who smiled at me. But facing him meant facing cancer, and I needed a a couple of seconds. I'm still in great denial about the real possibility that I'll get cancer, or Rob will, or someone I'm really close to. But why focus on it now? It feels entirely inadequate and embarrassingly out of scale, but I'm going to send encouragement cards today. One of them, all sparkling and silver is about the beauty of a snowflake, and inside it reads, 'if only time could stand still.' For these two women, I'm sure they would agree.

Things like aging, happiness , wealth are relative notions. “I’m leaving MedFit and going upstairs to the regular gym,” my mother told me recently on Facetime, “because there are too many old, very disabled people where I work out, and they take too long at the machines.” My mother just turned 90. A friend broke in on a conversation several of us were having about new adventures. “Striving? You know at this point in my life, I have no more aspirations. I’ll be perfectly happy if I could just do more of what I like: reading and writing the occasional poem.” This friend is 64. I am driving up-country in Rwanda with a local friend, to deliver his extended family potatoes, rice, and money to pay for their single electric bulb. He’s a project manager for a Swedish telecom firm, rents a modern four-room house on a severe slope reached by a heavily riveted road. “I am lucky to have means, because I can share more,” he confided. He provides tuitions for seven young family members, in addition to his two kids.

My Dad's Quarrel with Dying

I have taken to reading poetry everyday. The hope is that I will rekindle my capacity to invent metaphors. It’s a needed skill for fiction writing, one of my goals this year. And so I chose Wild Metaphors by Edward Hirsch, a book bought in an earlier decade. So far, each poem is about night, and death, too too dark for me right now, as the anniversary of my father’s death looms. But maybe it’s a good thing to read these poems, since the images go straight to my grief, and him. This morning I had a silent weep in the early hours of the morning, as the sun rose, shrugging off its persimmmon coat, then a tangerine one, and now, in its full naked glory, is standing on the horizon saying, ‘Move! Be!’ I cried because of these lines from “Poor Angels:” While the body sits glumly by the window Listening to the clear summons of the dead Transparent as glass, clairvoyant as crystal… Some night it is almost ready to join them. Oh, this is a strained, unlikely tethering, A furious grafting of the quick and the slow: When the soul flies up, the body sinks down And all night-locked in the same cramped room- They go on quarreling, stubborningly threatening To leave each other. I cried because my father, so quick on his mind and so graceful in his body, became trapped by the crippling diseases of the very old, and suffered so. He never gave up the quarrel between life and death, and clung to life, gently scolding us for asking him to sign a living will, a week before he eventually died: “Well, if there’s a chance I’ll make it, I don’t want them to not help me.” We were crowded around him in a wheelchair in his new room at the rehab facility, with the Hospice five-point document on a bedside tray in front of him, trying desperately to give him back the control he desperately wanted. We wanted to save him from being readmitted to the hospital, hoping he could die elsewhere. Who among us would tell him that his life was just about to end?