It’s All Relative

 

 

Figuring out family relationships can be difficult.

When I was a child, we weren’t allowed to call adults by their first names. I don’t know whether or not it was the same in other households, but even my parents’ cousins could not be addressed by their first names, except in the case of a couple of them who were teens when I was growing up.

To complicate matters, there were neighbors who were particularly close friends with my parents. Those people were also addressed as “Aunt” and “Uncle”. Although I knew these people were not actually related to me. In the neighborhood I had Aunt Gertrude and Uncle Ken, Aunt Florence and Uncle Ralph, Aunt Francie and Uncle Frank and Aunt Peggy and Uncle Bob, in addition to the usual Mr. and Mrs. by which we knew the rest of the neighbors.

For some reason, Aunt Florence and Uncle Ralph fluctuated between that and Mr. and Mrs. C, where it stayed once I hit my teen years. The same thing happened with Aunt Peggy and Uncle Bob. But the others remained Aunt and Uncle until they died.

At my mother’s insistence, we called her cousins and my dad’s by Aunt and Uncle, and although we knew they weren’t actually aunts and uncles, it rendered our relationship to them a mystery.

My mother’s family wasn’t that difficult. Her mother had died earlier in the year my parents were married, so we never knew her as a grandmother, and my mother’s father died when my second oldest brother was 2, so my eldest brother was the only one who ever knew him. She had an aunt and an uncle that we knew (not married to each other, however), and only 5 cousins, four of whom we seldom saw. So it wasn’t a grand stretch to call the one cousin of my mother’s whom we did know Aunt, although we knew both she and her daughter were actually cousins, just not like my other cousins somehow.

My father’s family was a bit more difficult. He seemed related to the entire Irish diaspora in America, owing to his mother’s brother and four sisters and his father’s nine or so siblings who lived, even though one was the requisite nun, and one other never married. So, there were those aunts and uncles – real ones, albeit great (or is it grand?) aunts and uncles – and their mostly adult children, whom we were required to refer to as “aunt” and “uncle” even though in reality they were first cousins once removed (I am quite conversant with the first, second and third cousin/once, twice and three times removed differentiations, in case anyone ever needs that information). Again, the exceptions were the teens.  I considered them my “extra” cousins: Eileen, Phyllis, and Kay. There were others, but I didn’t know about them; and some of them I only met once I was an adult. There were scads of them. But then, we were Irish Catholic, so…

And it is through my paternal grandfather that I’m related to the actress Andrea McArdle. She is a second cousin.

Andrea played Annie on Broadway, and in the 1980s played Judy Garland in a made-for-TV movie that I watched with some people who were friends at the time. During the program, they remarked several times on her resemblance to me. Personally, I don’t see it. Even when I met her when she was in a play at the Bucks County Playhouse – my then reporter boyfriend (now IT husband) interviewed her and then introduced us – I didn’t see any physical resemblance.  But we are both left-handed.

My father once told me about one of his cousins who studied medicine in Mexico, and decided to stay there once he learned he’d have to do some of his internships and residencies over again if he wanted to practice in the US.

Said cousin apparently decided to visit the Philadelphia cousins, but he took a rather long route to get there. He went up the West Coast, diagonally across the country, and up the East Coast before arriving in Philadelphia.

What was so amazing about the trip is that he stayed with a different relative every night of his journey. My father didn’t doubt he could do that; he simply wondered how he found them all.

Things have changed significantly since I was a child. Many children seem to call adults who aren’t their parents by their first names. Our friends refer to us to their children as Aunt and Uncle, but I’ve never quibbled about what anyone called me, as long as it wasn’t obscene. I’ve never felt like an adult, so it doesn’t bother me if children call me by my first name. One or two of our neighbors have referred to me as Miss Cathy when talking to their children or grandchildren, and I’m fine with that. Most people only know me as Shadow’s mom (our dog).

The only time any children were required to call me Miss or Mrs. was when I was teaching school or later, when I was an OT in the schools. Beyond that, I’m on a first name basis with most people.

As an adult, I’ve met second and third cousins (and the once-removeds) in the UK and Ireland. Since the majority of them are my peers or younger, I’ve used first names.  I have met a parent or two of some of them. I’m not really sure what to call them, since they’ve been introduced as “my mother,” or “my father”. I generally have conversations and leave names out of it. I suppose at some point, if the need arises, I’ll be directed to the proper thing to call them.

It’s a good thing that social greetings have loosened up. I have 12 first cousins on my mother’s side (I had 17, but our generation has reached that point, and cancer has taken others), and 18 first cousins on my dad’s side. It’s also a good thing that I haven’t participated in the offspring parade. I can’t imagine having to tell children that there are 30 people and whatever spouses they might have at the moment, that they have to call Aunt or Uncle in addition to their real aunts and uncles.

As a small child, I didn’t realize grandparents were actually related to one parent or another, since I only had one set. I was simply amazed that one of my friends had an extra grandmother! My mother laughed when I referred to the woman that way, and explained how she was related to my friend, and the reason I didn’t have any “extras”.

I can’t imagine what life is like with some children: Parents who divorced and remarried, some who already had their own children, the Exes of the adults, the children of those Exes, and so on. I can’t imagine how they keep track. In some families, it’s more confusing than being related to the entire Irish diaspora.

 

 

Back to the Future

 

Children love to hear stories of when adults were children themselves. Often the stories are as difficult to believe as imagining that adults were ever children, even when presented with photos as proof.

A neighbor boy who used to watch my dad doing wood carvings in our front yard in summer once asked my dad what TV shows he watched as a kid. My father, who was born in 1921 and was raised in the ’20s and ’30s, replied that they didn’t have TV when he was a child.

Our neighbor, who wasn’t old enough for school at the time, couldn’t imagine what anyone would do without TV.

My father explained that when he was a boy, there were shows on radio like the ones on TV, only without pictures, so everyone could imagine what was going on from the sound. Imagination at that level – or perhaps at all – was probably beyond the boy’s understanding.

I had a similar experience with a student when I worked in schools. Said child couldn’t imagine a TV in black and white with only 3 stations. Worse, there was only one TV in the house. He wanted to know if the cable stations were in color, and was shocked to learn there was no such thing as cable at the time.

“What if everyone wanted to watch something different?”

“My parents had the final say on what the family watched. If you didn’t like it, you could go off and play with your toys. Or that might be your ideal time to do homework.”

Add to the fact that besides the shows being in black and white, the controls were all on the set itself, with no remote. In later years, those of us who were children at that time joked that we were the remote.

It got me thinking about how things have changed just since I was a child. Okay, it’s been a very long time since I was a child – last century, as the kids now like to say.

Many things we take for granted now didn’t exist then.

My parents, both born in the 1920s, were also born at home, not in a hospital. That was something my generation in America found peculiar. Married near the end of the war, they moved into a rural suburb of Philadelphia.

Our neighborhood was relatively newly built as year-round homes when they moved in. Our street ended at the end of our property, the only house on our side of the street. There were a scattering of summer homes on stilts that were only occupied part of the year.

There was a train station within walking distance along a not-pedestrian-friendly main road, which allowed my father access to his job in the city. In bad weather he drove our car to the train station.

The village was more built up by the time I, the third and youngest child, arrived. But there were still farms nearby. The people who lived behind us had a rooster and chickens as well as an outhouse, and there were water pumps scattered throughout the neighborhood for the summer homes.

When I was growing up, we had only one car, just like many of our neighbors. My mother didn’t drive. Thursday night after dinner, we all piled into the car to go to the grocery store to shop for the week. If my mother ran out of anything between shopping trips, she’d send one of us to the local corner grocer, considerably smaller than, and eventually put out of business by 7-11, Wawa and Cumberland Farms. In those days, a parent could send their child to the store for a pack of cigarettes, and no one thought a thing of it.

The milkman – and it was a man – delivered milk to the house, the dry cleaner came to the house to deliver dry cleaning and pick up the next week’s items, Charles Chips trucks stopped at their customers’ houses to sell tins of pretzels and potato chips – the only kind of chips anyone knew about at that time – and Freihoffers’ bread had a truck  that came around to sell the variety of types of bread they made. (I never heard of bagels as a small child, and didn't actually eat one until I was well into adulthood.)  There was also a traveling huckster who sold fruits and vegetables around the town. So, the many women without cars, many of whom didn’t have drivers’ licenses, having moved from the city, where trains, trolleys and buses were plentiful, didn’t have to worry about feeding their families or getting their husbands’ suits cleaned.

Amazon, along with several grocery store chains, now has a food delivery service.

But emergencies were something else.

In those days, 9-1-1 didn’t exist. Indeed, when I was a child, some people still had party lines instead of a private phone line while the telephone company built the post-war wiring and capability to give every home its own number.

But doctors made house calls. A mom without a car would have to rely on neighbors and friends with a car at the house to take them and their child to the hospital in case of serious injury. Most  people would only call an ambulance if someone were dying.

Our cuts and scrapes were treated with Merthiolate or Mercurichrome – as the names imply, containing mercury – and a bandage. We were then patted on the head and sent back outside to play. We were often told, if we came in injured, to stop crying, we weren’t dying.

Cuts and scrapes weren’t given more thought than to clean them up, stop any bleeding, and put a Band-Aid on it. This was especially true for adults.

One Saturday, my mother was playing badminton with my dad and my brothers – I wasn’t old enough to be included. It had rained the day before, so parts of the yard were muddy. She’d also been raking earlier, and the rake was still out, leaning against a tree. While playing, she slid on some mud and fell on the rake, gouging her leg.

She stopped to clean the mud off her leg, wash it and put antiseptic on the wound, followed by a bandage before she went back to the badminton game. A stupid accident, but nothing to make an issue of. No thought was given to getting a puncture wound from a muddy rake with heaven knew what mixed in. She had thoroughly washed the wound with soap and water, and it was bandaged, so she’d done what she was supposed to, as far as she knew.

In the days before synthetic drugs, the tetanus shot was made from horse blood. My mother was allergic to horses, so didn’t get tetanus shots. Now she had to get the shot before she died – early signs of lockjaw had begun – and to suffer the allergic reactions long enough for the shot to take effect before she could get any treatment for the allergic reaction. My mother was lucky to have survived.

Accidents that can now be avoided by the proper protective gear were common. Everyday things presented potential injuries beyond the lead paint on baby furniture.

One day I was telling a child I knew about how I broke my nose in the car at six. I was sitting in the back passenger side seat of a two-door car. My father had just dropped my brother off at Little League. My brother had been sitting in the front seat, but now it was empty. As my father approached the intersection, the light turned yellow. When he realized he wouldn’t make the light, he slammed on the brakes. I served as the crash test dummy, hurtling forward as the front seat back collapsed forward. And I landed nose first on the metal dashboard.

The wonderful 21^st century child I was telling about this wanted to know if I had my seatbelt fastened. I explained that in 1961, the only place seatbelts existed were in airplanes, unless it was an option for the very expensive luxury cars of the wealthy. Ours wasn’t even a new car. Nor were there locking seat backs in two-door cars. Or padded dashboards. I was lucky we were on a 35 mph road or I might have been thrown through the windshield. Alas, my pug nose turned into something I haven’t liked since.

Some of our toys wouldn’t pass muster now, either. I had a device called a Vac-u-form. It consisted of a rectangular metal base. The top was divided in half. On one side was a platform where plastic molds were placed; on the other side, was a heating plate. Above the heading plate was a flip arm where plastic squares were secured above the heating plate. The heat of this machine was similar to a burner on the stove. It would have cooked cakes much faster than the Easy Bake Oven that was popular at the time. But it wasn’t for baking. Instead a plastic square was heated above it for about three minutes, then flipped over onto the mold. At the same time a handle was pumped to create a vacuum, and suck the plastic into the shape of the mold. Then, after a few minutes’ wait, the plastic form could be removed and cut out. There were molds of boats, half ½” balls that were glued together to form a whole ball, and a variety of designs that could be made into decorative pins.

The directions to this item included a statement that an adult should supervise any child using this, but by the time I was 10, I was considered intelligent enough to use it unsupervised – although there was always an adult in calling distance. Other than a few melted plastics that weren’t mounted correctly and a couple of burns on fingers, nothing bad ever happened to me when using it. But it was taken off the market not long after it was introduced. I never knew anyone else who had one. Thinking about it now, this could probably be considered a ’60s forerunner of the 3-D printer.

Our unsafe world taught us that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Still, we of the generation of Rocky and Bullwinkle, the Flintstones and the Jetsons had plenty of room for imagination. Now, finally, the robot maids promised by the year 2000 might soon be in a mail-order store near you. 

 

People Are People

 

 Note: I don't know who wrote the comment for August, but it didn't make any sense. The comment was about being left-handed, and that somehow being a bad thing. I am proudly left-handed and it hasn't caused me any undue problems. In fact, I feel that it has made me better at problem-solving. However, the August post had nothing to do with handedness.  

 

“People are people, so why should it be you and I should get along so awfully…”

This Depeche Mode song has resonated with me since the first time I heard it in 1984.

I am a contemporary of Ruby Bridges. She is a year older than I. I admire her and her family, and am deeply sorry for the difficulties and outright horrors she experienced in school.

Even though she didn’t entirely believe it or live it, my mother taught me that you shouldn’t judge people based on race, religion, gender, ethnic background or, by my own extension, sexual orientation.

I know she didn’t live it. Every time I pointed out something my parents allowed my older brothers to do that they didn’t let me do, I was told, “That’s different; they’re boys.” It was never that they were older. All you had to do to qualify was to be a boy.

I assume she wanted me to be better. Whether or not she realized she had her own set of prejudices, despite what she tried to teach me, I don’t know. Perhaps she assumed that, just living life, I’d pick up the same prejudices she had somewhere along the line. I didn’t. I took to heart what she taught me. And I hated the “Do as I say, not as I do,” philosophy.

Of course, it’s all very well, coming from a lily-white neighborhood, where everyone on my block attended either the Catholic church or the Methodist one on Sundays to say, “Don’t be prejudiced,” or “I’m not prejudiced.” The idea is never tested; it’s only a theory.

My mother’s first-generation Scotts-Irish mother was Protestant, but since she had married someone who was a first generation but of Irish Catholic descent, part of the marriage agreement was to raise the children Catholic. That particular grandmother (I never knew her; she died the same year my parents married) did an excellent job of keeping her promise, and even had a good friend who was a priest. Granted she was Episcopalian, which some people jokingly refer to as “Catholic lite,” (no offense intended to any faith), which probably made things a little easier, given the similarities of the two faiths. (I’ve been both.)

When my grandmother was on her deathbed, her priest friend asked her if she wanted to convert. She did not, or at least she didn’t think it was honest to do so on one’s deathbed, considering she’d lived her life in a different faith.

I attended the local Catholic school. Two tests of what my mother said she wanted for me happened there.

In the first instance, I became a rebel at six by refusing to believe what the nun who taught our first grade class – impressionable 5 ½ to 7 year olds – told us in Religion class. According to her, only Catholics could go to heaven.

First of all, there were the tales of my Protestant grandmother, whom everyone said was a saintly woman. Even her priest friend said he wished he was as sure of his place in heaven as she was of hers.

Second, I could not believe in a God who created an entire planet of people, most of whom would be relegated to eternal damnation. It simply made no sense.

Fortunately, several years later, when someone in my class asked a question of a visitor to our class about why someone would be another religion when they knew it meant they would spend eternity in hell, the teacher was so upset and embarrassed by the question, especially since the guest in our class was of a different faith, that she told him he was wrong, and where did he ever get such an uninformed idea? The entire class proceeded to tell her that we had been taught that very thing by Sister Attila the Nun in first grade.

The teacher quickly, with all due apology, escorted our guest out of the room. After lunch, one of the parish priests came for a visit to disabuse us of such a notion. He told us that the church never taught that. So, I was back on good terms with God after that.

Two years after that first grade teaching, when the Civil Rights movement was getting into full swing – shortly before the JFK assassination – we had our first black family attend our school. There were three boys. One was in first grade, one in second, and one in my third grade class.

My third grade teacher thought nothing of doing what is now called peer teaching, but which had no name at the time. I was in the first reading group. Until that year, we only had three reading groups. But that year we had a fourth. It consisted of three or four boys, one of whom was our new black student.

Another student and I were assigned to help the fourth group with their English assignment, since the teacher couldn’t quite get through to them.

I had two of the boys, a boy who disliked me as much as I disliked him, and our new student. The first boy stood as far away from me as possible, and at one point said he understood the points of the grammar lesson, and returned to his seat. I continued to work with the new boy, and suddenly I saw his face brighten as he actually finally understood what I’d been trying to teach him. I was glad.

He looked at me and said, “When I grow up, I’m going to marry you!”

My reply was, “Well, I don’t think my parents will let me marry you.”

Stop right there. It isn’t what you think. Yes, it was prejudice – my parents’ – but not because he was black. I couldn’t imagine my parents allowing me to marry anyone from the fourth reading group!

I only learned that my parents expected me to pick up their prejudices several years later. When I was 12 or 13, the movie, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner premiered. The film ratings had only just started, and that film had an R rating, so none of us was old enough to see it. We were also too young to be allowed to date. However, my teacher that year used dating and that film as a pretext to gauge racial prejudice in our class.

She explained the premise of the film, and then asked would we date someone of another race. Most of my classmates who answered the question gave what I considered the lame excuse, “Well, I would, but my parents wouldn’t let me.” They wanted to sound aligned with the times (1967), I suppose. I don’t recall anyone saying they wouldn’t, but I imagine there were at least one or two who felt that way.

I had finally had enough of what I considered bigotry hiding behind adults. I raised my hand and told the teacher my parents wouldn’t have a problem with it, and told her what my mother had taught me.

I was proud of myself when I came home and told my mother. She was horrified. I couldn’t understand why. Her response was, “What will their parents think of us?”

Well, who cares? I thought what my mother had taught me was more aligned with Christian teachings than bigotry. As far as I know, there were no repercussions.

The “Who cares?” attitude came from years of being told, when I was denied the opportunity to do what everyone else was doing, “And if everyone else jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you jump in after them?”

I was always – and probably still am – considered a dork. I took in the strays, the kids no one else wanted. I didn’t always necessarily want them, either, but I usually stood up for them against what others were saying or doing.

Case in point, in our final year of elementary school, a new set of twins, a boy and a girl, were coming to our class. They moved in next to a girl in our class I didn’t particularly like. The new girl would be in our class, and the boy would be in the other eighth grade.

Well, this mean girl came in one morning filled with venomy gossip about the new girl. She already disliked her. She proceeded to turn everyone against this as yet unmet student: she was fat, she smelled, she had bad breath, she stood too close when talking to people, she wasn’t very smart, etc. This mean girl wasn’t exactly a confection of perfection herself, and it just made me angry that the new girl wasn’t even given a chance.

So, when the new girl arrived and everyone avoided her like the plague, I introduced myself and chatted with her. I think she was so grateful that anyone gave her the time of day that, from that moment, she clung to me as a lifeline. It didn’t matter that what the mean girl had said was mostly true. It was too unkind to turn people against her before they met her.

She wasn’t my favorite person to be around, but she was far better than the petty, self-righteous classmates who lived to make fun of others.

By the time I reached university, I had a whole new set of people to form an alliance with.

University was a seismic shift from what my life had been up to that point. I lived in a dorm that was, at the time, an experiment: a co-ed dorm. When I mentioned to my parents that I’d signed up for a co-ed dorm, their reaction was, “Oh, that’s nice.” The rest of my relatives were somewhat less than enthusiastic about the idea, immediately assuming sex and drugs and rock-n-roll.

“Your parents are letting you live in a co-ed dorm?!” (I was 18.)

“Well, I come from a co-ed family,” was my usual response. (I come from a very sarcastic family.)

Not satisfied with the fact that I wasn’t embarrassed by their questioning, my relatives and others would often try to drive their intention to embarrass me home further.

“I understand there’s a lot of sex going on in the co-ed dorms.”

That got old fast, along with asking if my roommate was a guy. The way the dorms were set up, either one floor was girls and one guys, or in the case of the L-shaped buildings, one wing was girls and one was guys. We had to have separate bathrooms, after all. It wasn’t Amsterdam.

So, I would explain that, no, people generally didn’t even date people from their own dorm, since that seemed almost like incest. That shocked them. I don't think they knew I knew that word.

One woman who wasn’t a relative decided to butt in on the discussion. She said she wouldn’t allow her daughter to live in a co-ed dorm. She lived in a no-visitation dorm, to which I countered, “I understand most of the women in those dorms are lesbians.”

While not very PC at all, I wanted to make a point that she was making unfounded judgements about me, my dorm, and what does or does not go on at college campuses.

I used to tell people I went from an all-girls’ Catholic school to a co-ed dorm. To everyone else, it seemed shocking. To me, it was simply a point of growth. But there was another point to be made. Of the first 10 people I met in college, half of them were gay.

It didn’t bother me. How could it? I grew up with cartoons starring Snagglepuss, the pink, theatrical lion, and Gene London hosting a children’s program.  My parents even watched Liberace on TV. Even though I didn’t understand as a child what the subtext was, I knew they were not like the people I knew at the time. They were different. And they were interesting.

One of the major interests of most college students is drinking. I attended college in Pennsylvania, where the drinking age is 21. At the time the drinking age in New York, New Jersey, Delaware, West Virginia and Ohio, the states adjacent to Pennsylvania, was 18. Penn State, the university I attended was in the center of the state, or as the brochures stated, “Equally inconvenient to all parts of PA.” Going to a nearby state wasn’t a possibility just for a drink since they were all at least 4 hours from the school.

But, there was a gay bar in town.  Except on the weekends, they didn’t card (for the uninitiated, that’s requiring proof of age identification with photo). So, I met several people and made new friends with a population I hadn’t been acquainted with before. And unlike the whispered comments of the ignorant, they didn’t have horns, didn’t try to “convert” me.

I’m sure I asked embarrassing and ignorant questions in my effort to understand who they were and how they were somehow “different.” My new friends were patient and gracious. They answered my questions, referred me to novels I should read to gain a greater understanding. And they weren’t different. They were people just like me. They included me in their plans. They didn’t care what my sexual orientation was, and I didn’t care what theirs was. “People are people.”

One of my roommates got “burned” by trying to date someone from our dorm who was a friend of mine. I tried telling her he wasn’t her type, so she assumed I wanted to date him. I hadn’t been given permission to out him, so I simply tried to steer her in another direction. When she found out he was gay, she not only shunned him, she immediately asked any guy I introduced her to if he was gay. Totally rude. Needless to say, I had more problems with roommates than with anyone else I encountered in college.

I defended a gay couple in my dorm who roomed together and minded their own business. I didn’t know them well, but I believed they had a place at the table. A bigot, who must have been very insecure in his own sexuality came around with a petition to have them thrown out of the dorm simply for being who they were.

He made the mistake of knocking on my door, and he got an earful of what I thought of bigots. I also told him if he ever bothered me again, I’d report him.

Naturally, he tried to spread it about that my roommate and I (the aforementioned burned girl) were lesbians. Anyone in the dorm who actually knew either of us or cared had a good laugh about that one.

I have continued to take people as they are throughout my life. I like them or not based on who they are as people. I’ve met many people of different faiths, races, genders ethnic backgrounds, socioeconomic statuses and political viewpoints who are simply lovely people, and just as many who aren’t. No one group holds the golden ring. People are people.

I may not have turned out quite the way my parents expected, but then, I never really did the things they expected me to do. And I didn't jump off the Brooklyn Bridge after my friends.