The fortune of family
My Aunt Mina, my Dad’s sister, Philomena, took me with her when I was abut 10 to the college graduation of my second cousin Vincent Calo.
I had no idea who Vincent Calo was, but was dazzled by the idea that my aunt wanted me to go with her, that she actually wore something other than a housedress and apron and, wonder of wonders, Aunt Mina could drive.
I also got to wear my best cerise colored dress and my black patent leather shoes. Such finery was only reserved for church and special occasions.
This was a special occasion.
My Aunt Mina and my great Aunt Gen lived across the street from us, next door to each other. They held court around the kitchen table in Aunt Mina’s house every morning; hot cups of tea and Dugans crumb cake for sustenance.
With the New York Daily News and the Mirror spread out before them, their scandal shouting headlines in huge fonts, my aunts assessed the state of life in Brooklyn and beyond. Such discussions ended when little ears, such as mine appeared.
Wound around and between politics and outrage at the obvious decline in morality, were the discussions that were accounting sessions where these Irish doyens added up the coins of our family’s doings.
Like pennies and nickels, dimes and quarters, the everyday lives of members of the family which included the Smithwicks, the Swantons and all their permutations were earned and banked, a veritable riches of knowledge, strength and intimacy.
It was the wealth of their world.
Births, deaths, marriages, first communions, confirmations, a new job, engagements, graduations or just gossip were the profits of a large, close clan that stretched from New Jersey, through the home place of Brooklyn to the far frontier of Cazenovia when including the McDowells.
Little ears were welcomed as students of family stories and connections. I learned that Aunt Bec raised “Pop”, meaning Aunt Mina’s father. That Mini Blehl had hair long enough to sit on, that there were serious questions about the validity of a relative’s marriage, that Cousin William had left the seminary.
These corporate meetings generated the wealth of kin, reaching out to help my mother when my father was taken to a tuberculosis sanitarium or when my Aunt Lucy needed help in renovating her house in Coxsackie (another frontier town) or when any kin needed another for whatever reason if only to share a cup of tea.
When Aunt Mina asked if her brother’s oldest girl could go to New Jersey, it was family passing the wealth to another generation.
We sat high up in a very large auditorium and watched the parade of a college graduation.
I had no idea really about what was taking place. I was remembering Aunt Mina’s description of her first cousin, the Irish girl, marrying the Italian boy and thought, in my 10 year old mind that all of the graduates with the suffixes of laude, cum laude, magna cum laude and summa cum laude were one big Italian family.
I could read but had little refence material in that 10 year old mind. But, I was being mentored, groomed to accept my place within the extended family. My aunt had more work to do.
We met the whole family after the graduation, the Calo’s, Galvins, MacGuires, Cullinanes and Downey’s, an exhausting exercise. While the adults celebrated in the living room, I spent most of my time with a boy who was my cousin of some degree. We watched television. I pretended that I knew who Howdy Doody was. I was out of my 55th Street element.
Strange those moments stayed with me.
Family was safety, a security built of blood line currency, spent as needed and replenished in the spending.
But the currency, the coin has been spent by time and space.
My family, all of those who were accounted for on Aunt Mina’s table have scattered. I have only vague notions of the whereabout of any of them.
The moneys of that wealth have fallen from my pockets, lost to what was the daily counting, the visiting, the intimate knowledge. I am left with cousins and their nameless progeny, scattered who knows where.
My children are left with only the headlines that shout of the bad things without the fortune of family as we once had.
The internet has helped as I’ve wandered through Ancestry.com to build a family tree, many names coming back through the years from those times at Aunt Mina’s table, and some, joyously discovered as I found the daughter of that boy from over 60 years ago and that my daughter’s friend who lives down the street from her in Cazenovia, is a cousin.
There is no table, no tea or Dugans. Is it possible to rebuild what was? Is this modern world the antithesis of what was? That intimacy of visiting, knowing, caring is gone.
We try to keep family first, but sometimes instead of a bank account, it’s now spare change.
