My daughter, Alexis, leaves for a two-week trip to Israel tonight. She is going with a group of grad school students and professors from Hunter College in Manhattan to study some of the Israelis' social programs. Israel has been much in the news of late: Palestinian protests on the West Bank and Prime Minister Netanyahu's visit with the President at the White House and meetings with congress. I selfishly am hoping the Muslim Spring waits to hit Israel until after she returns. Also in the news, my niece, Andrea, graduated with honors last week from the U of M. She has been accepted to grad school in audiology at the U of M.Both Alexis and Andrea worked long and hard to get through college, not just taking classes but working demanding part-time jobs all their way through school. It took both young women longer than four years to get their degrees and both have decided to continue for another degree before heading out into the world of professional careers. Nowadays people debate the value of a college education. Kids with expensive 4-year college degrees are finding it hard to find good paying jobs so they can pay back their huge college loans. Many young people choose to go to grad school while waiting for the economy to change or to make themselves more marketable.
Alexis is preparing for a career in community organizing and is hoping for an internship at the New York Immigration Coalition next year, her final year of grad school. Andi hopes to continue working for a professor of audiology at the U of M who is doing research on second-language acquisition in children. Alexis received a stipend this year for her work at Baruch College and Andi hopes she can have some of her U of M tuition paid as she works on her master's degree.
This week I began to reflect on the respective family trees to which these young women may owe some of their characteristic persistence. I thought about the individuals swinging in those trees who definitely found life a struggle too. Some of these relatives found the struggles to be too much to bear and turned to alcohol to ease their pain and thus spread it around for others to share. Some of the family tree members were colorfully eccentric, others met with tragedy.
The girls share Scottish great-grandparents on their mothers' side. Julia came from Stirling to the US in her early 20s. I have written about her before. She was the eldest of five children and came to the US to get a job so she could send money home to her struggling family in Scotland. She got a job as a nanny for one of the members of the wealthy Pillsbury family here in Minneapolis and sent home so much money that her mother accused her of being a prostitute.
Julia married a fellow Scot, George, whom she met here in Minneapolis, and became a mother of three. She worked as a grinder at Hitchcock Foundries for several decades. I remember that the first thing she did every night when she came home was to take a bath to get the grit off her body. She brought her parents over from Scotland and supported them as well. She had been top of her class in school back in Scotland and I think she had a fairly high IQ. She loved to read and could recite scores of Robert Burns' poems from memory. She was widowed at age 50, moved in with us and became an alcoholic.
Shortly after Grandma Julia became a widow and before she moved in with us, my mother would have my sister Cate and me spend Friday nights with her. We were about 4 and 5, and I remember her putting us in the old claw-foot bath tub on the second floor of her old house. She then would go downstairs and drink "highballs" with a woman who lived with her, named Betty. She and Betty would drink and watch Perry Mason on television and forget that my sister and I were in the tub. The water would get cold, and I remember feeling rather terrified. She told us not to get out of the tub until she came to get us out, so we would sit there for what seemed like hours. My youngest sister remembers walking each day to the neighborhood corner market with Grandma Nanny, as we called her, after she moved in with us. Nanny would buy a six-pack of Grain Belt beer and down it within 30 minutes time.
The cousins' great-grandfather, George, fought in the trenches of France in WWI. He was gassed, and his lungs never recovered. He came to the US from Glasgow after the war and spent his life delivering coal to homes in South Minneapolis. He had a beautiful singing voice, especially when he was drunk, and a beautiful head of red hair. He died suddenly at 52, from a cerebral hemorrhage. The other great-grandfather the girls shared was of English descent. Guy was the eldest child in a large farm family in Western Minnesota. He came home from school one day to find his father had hanged himself from a rope in their barn. He cut his father down and spent the rest of his childhood and teenage years as a farm laborer moving from farm to farm supporting his mother and siblings. With a 4th-grade education, he rose to the position of plant foreman at Electric Machinery in NE Minneapolis. His wife, the girls' great-grandma, Ardis, lost a kidney to rheumatic fever in 1912 at age eight and spent her adult life as a mother and part-time hypochondriac who was always busy creating things covered in sequins for her home. My mother used to joke that her mother-in-law was dying from the moment she met her, but she lived to be 84.
Andrea's Colombian grandparents on her father's side were poor farmers in Colombia who worked hard all their lives to support a family of 16 children. Andi's grandfather bought a small bar after retiring from farming and a bunch of thugs brutally murdered him in that bar. He was in his fifties. Many of the children went on to become well-educated, successful adults.
Alexis had a Canadian great-grandfather on her father's side who was a doctor in Jamaica. When he was 5o or so, he married a young German woman, who was to learn he had fathered scores of bi-racial children on the island. Or so the story goes.
The girls' grandfather, Ralph, was a musical child prodigy who, when he was about 12, was asked by Tommy Dorsey to tour with his big band across the US. Ralph could play the trumpet, sing and dance. Ralph's mother, Ardis, said he could not go, and he proceeded to have a nervous breakdown. He was a talented, tormented and extremely bright man who went on to marry young and immediately had to support a family. (I was born six months later.) He went to night school, part-time, for years at the U of M to get a degree in engineering while he worked full time. He became an alcoholic in his thirties and chose never to recover from his illness. Neither did his wife or daughters. All four of his daughters were estranged from him at the time of his death because of his abusive parenting, and we have no idea where he is buried; nor do we really care.
Both girls have fond memories of their Grandma Lily, who dreamed of becoming a nurse; but no-one in her family encouraged her, nor did they have the money to help her do so. She became a young mother of four girls and worked at her own business as a cleaning lady while she ran the household. Her four daughters all graduated from college and all earned advanced degrees. She didn't have money to help them to go to college, but she encouraged their every step to become educated so they would have the choices she never had. Lily's daughters all hoped her husband Ralph would die first so she could find a life beyond that of a co-dependent caretaker. She died first, at age 70. Lily's daughters also wished she had protected them from their father's abuse, but she didn't.
It's good to know about the characters on your family tree -- the good, the bad, and the ugly -- so you can at least try to make some new mistakes in your own life. Andrea and Alexis seem to demonstrate the trait of persistence that one can find running in the family. Good luck to them. Nowadays, as always, a little persistence is a good thing.
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