Why am I here?   What is my destiny?

We ask these questions naturally.   And as we grow up we are given answers.   We sit in our parents laps and we are told how it was the family came to be where it is now.   How it was mom and dad met.   How it was we ourselves came to be.   And when we are young, we do not question them.   They become unconsciously part of the bedrock of our lives.

And sometimes…sometimes…some few of us when we are older, look back upon those answers and discover that they make no sense.

I was born in California, to a mother who had traveled there shortly after her father had passed away. That is the basic fact of my life.   Mom grew up, was born and raised in Greensburg Pennsylvania.   But I was born in Pasadena California, and raised in Maryland after mom divorced dad and moved here.   And it’s only been recently, now in my fifties, that I’ve looked at that and wondered.   She was born and raised in Greensburg, and yet suddenly her and her mother uproot themselves in the late 1940s and move clear across the country to live somewhere they knew practically nobody.   And when she divorced dad, her and her mother moved back across the country again.   And it wasn’t back to their childhood home they moved, but once again to somewhere else that they knew practically nobody.

Well even when I was a small child I often wondered about that.   And always when I asked, I got the same story.

Mom’s father had died she said, from a series of massive strokes, back in a time when medicine could do little for stroke victims.   The event had disturbed her deeply.   She moved to California she said, because she could not bear to live in the house she had grown up in, because the memories of the events of her father’s death were too traumatic.

Mom’s emotional life during that period was rough.   Before her father died mom had loved a man, a navy man, who had gone to war.   It was world war II.   He was Jewish and, she told me, her father had not particularly liked Jews.   But, she said, he had come to know the man she loved and that had changed him.   He had eventually come to like this man, Morris she said his name was, and as time went on approved of their love.

Then one day, so she always said, he had come back from the war changed, disturbed.   Her beloved sailor had been on a ship that was ordered into Nagasaki harbor after the war ended.   His ship she said, became trapped in the harbor briefly due to all the bodies floating in it from the atomic bomb.   She said the sight of it had driven him mad.

So her relationship with her sailor came undone.   Morris’ family, she said, had taken him off to a mental hospital.   She never saw him again.   And then her father had his stroke.   He lingered horribly, for months incapacitated, unable to do anything for himself, unable to speak or even feed himself.   After six months of it he had another stroke and died.

Mom said that afterward her dreams tormented her.   In the way people did back then, before the funeral his body had laid in rest in a coffin situated right in the living room of the house.   Family and friends had held the service for him right there in the house.   That was common in those days.   Mom said that afterward she had dreams of her father rising out of his casket, and walking up the stairs to her room.

After her father was laid to rest, her mother sold the house, and also his nice cabin in the woods in the hills of Pennsylvania.   That cabin was a special memory of hers….of summer months spent there with her father and the family, her dog Jigs, and all her childhood friends from Greensburg.   Sweet childhood memories.   She would tell me fondly of the summer months spent there.   She loved that cabin, and was for the rest of her life sorry that it had been sold.   The new owners had left a fire burning on a stove…the cabin had no electricity…and it had burned down.

But they had to leave Greensburg, mom always said, because she could no longer bear to be in the house she grew up in.   During the war her younger brother, Dean, had found work in California, and so mom and grandma left Greensburg and traveled to California to live near him.   Grandma bought a house in Pasadena, presumably with what she had gotten from the sale of the house and the cabin.   They moved close to where her brother lived.   And one day they traveled to Catalina Island, and there, on the pier in Avalon, she met dad.   They married, and soon they had a son.   Me.

That is the story I was always told.   It is the story of how I came to be.   And now I look at it, and it makes no sense.

My grandfather, who I never met, who mom always told me because I took an interest in electronics and technology that I took so much after him, had two nice homes, and a business.   And after his death they sold it all, and simply left everything they had, everyone they knew, and moved across the country to a new place where they knew nobody but her brother and his wife.   Because mom could not bear to live in the house where she grew up.

Really?

I’m fifty-eight years old now, and now I look at this story and it makes no sense.   Maybe everything happened just for the reasons she said it did…but now that I look at it with the experience of my own adulthood I can’t escape the feeling that some important piece or pieces are missing.   Perhaps to understand my doubt you need to understand something I do and maybe you don’t: what the distances we’re talking about here seemed like back in the day before cheap jet air travel and the Internet.

I am old enough to have glimpsed the last days of the great passenger trains.   When I was a kid, most people didn’t travel by air…that was for rich people.     And in their day passenger air travel would have been burdensome even if you were rich.   Before the first Boeing 707s passenger airplanes were propeller things that took much longer to go from coast to coast.   Nearly everyone back then traveled by bus or by train.   Train mostly for the longer distance trips if you could afford it.   It took days, not hours, to go from coast to coast.   So any sort of travel from the east coast to the west wasn’t just a trivial thing back then.   If you traveled far away, let alone moved, you just about fell off the planet as far as your family and friends back home were concerned.   You might send a postcard or two back home…   Having a wonderful time, wish you were here… You sure wouldn’t phone home.   Way too expensive.   Back then long distance phone calls were an expensive luxury.   Postal mail had two grades…regular and air mail.   You sent letters by air mail if you wanted them to get there in a couple days.   Otherwise it might be weeks to get something from clear across the country.   The highways and the rails where how most people and everything including mail traveled.

So if you went on a cross-country trip you were on another planet until you came back home.   And then it was everyone gathered around while you showed your snapshots and told your stories of the far away place you’d been to.   To actually go live on the other side of the country, well, you might as well have moved overseas.   It’s hard to grasp now, but that is how it would have been for my mom and her mother back then.   When they left Greensburg they didn’t just go move to a neighboring town…they didn’t even move to a neighboring state.   They moved about as far away from Greensburg as they could and still remain in the lower 48.

Now I’m grown up and I look at this and wonder…did she not have any roots there?   I know she had a job there for a brief period at an architectural firm…she used to tell me about working with the ammonia stench of the old blueprint machines.   And…she had friends there.   I know because he spoke of them, but not often.   There were a few she kept in correspondence with.   They were friends she never saw again.   After mom passed away I was given a stack of her old correspondence, but there were no letters to her from her Greensburg friends among them.

And there is this…as I grew up I just accepted the constant tension that was in the family.   It was just part of the background noise.   But she was the apple of her father’s eye…daddy’s girl.   That is the one thing everyone seems to agree on, even the ones who later cut her out of the family.   I have albums of the photos her father took of her…he was, like me, an amateur   photographer.   The photos all show a beautiful young girl, posed in various scenes in and around the house and the cabin.

He loved her very much.   And she loved him very much.   If there is anything I am certain of it is this.   But throughout my own childhood there was tension between her and the rest of her family…all except her younger brother Dean and one cousin.   It was a tension I always put down to her marrying my father, who they all despised.   But looking back on all of it now it just seems to me that the tension had to be caused by more then that.   Something more must have happened to her to make her mother take her away from the town they both grew up in, and had spent their entire lives in.   Whatever caused the friction in that side of my family tree, it started well before mom met dad at the pier in Avalon.

I’m fifty-eight years old now, and while I don’t think of myself as worldly I am old enough now to understand some things better that I could not have while I was growing up.   She had a life in Greensburg.   She had friends, family, community.   And so did her mother.   Greensburg was their home.   They were both born and raised there.   It was where everything and everyone they had ever known was.   And I was told they sold everything, their house and the cabin, and left it all for California.   Because mom could not bear to stay in the house she had grown up in after her father had died.

It makes no sense.   They could have bought another house.   Surely whatever trauma mom experienced she’d have needed her friends.   Surely grandma would have had friends of her own there as well to help her through the death of her husband.   In an age before cell phones and cheap long distance, when letters took days to arrive from the next state over, let alone clear across the country, and when long distance cross-country phone calls were so expensive people would gather around the telephone at the appointed time to wait for the call, to move from one end of the country to another would have been like moving to another planet.   They’d have both given up everything they knew, everyone they knew, to literally start life all over again in California.   Because granddad died of a stroke?

No.   Just…no.   It makes no sense.

I am not on friendly terms with that side of the family anymore…not that I ever really was.   Except for uncle Dean nobody was really nice to me.   I was my father’s son, and they despised him and I was living evidence of that marriage they all hated.   I had his face.   At various times when it was useful to them, and particularly to grandma, I was told I had all his bad traits too.   Did I talk too much?   Well he’s his fathers son isn’t he.   Did I forget to do my homework?   That’s his dad in him.   Was I too proud of something I had accomplished?   A piece of artwork?   A good grade in school?   His dad was vain like that.   Did I a get a bad mark in class?   His dad was shiftless like that.   Stubborn?   His father’s blood obviously.   Whatever I ever did that was wrong, it was always because I was my father’s son.   I got used to it.   By the time I was seventeen and began to realize my homosexuality, I already had a lifetime of training in coping with being hated for something I was that I couldn’t help being. So it wasn’t all for nothing.

The only one who really took an interest in me was uncle Dean.   Mom and he always got along great, and I have lived to regret I grew up on the east and not the west coast where I could have been near him and away from the others.   Whatever it was that was the cause of so much tension in the family, her brother Dean was never bothered by it, or blamed her for it.   Shortly after mom passed away, I took a trip out to California and visited my aunt Cleone, uncle Dean’s wife, and she told me something that shocked me enough to make me pretty much divorce myself, finally and forever from that side of the family.   She said one of my cousins, a daughter of mom’s oldest brother Wayne, an uptight right wing jackass, had told mom after Wayne passed away that mom would not be allowed a grave in the family plot in the Greensburg cemetery.   I put it down to their hatred of dad, but it made me furious.   It still makes me furious to think about it.   So I’ve pretty much disconnected myself from that branch of the family tree entirely.

Whatever they thought of mom, she was a good mother to me, and a thoroughly decent person.   She set a good example for her son.   After she passed away people in the town she had retired to would come up to me…people I didn’t know from Adam…and tell me what a ray of sunshine she was everywhere she went.   That wasn’t an act…I grew up with it, it was her.   It made me absolutely furious how that side of the family treated her…all except her brother Dean and her cousin who lived in the small Virginia town she retired to.   He cousin also loved her very much.   Her older brother and the rest of that family, not so much.   And me…I’m living evidence that mom married a man they all hated.   So I can get no answers from them, and I wouldn’t trust any I got now if I asked.

I had always, until now, put the family static down to her marrying dad.   But now I look at it and it just seems so…wrong…so incomplete an explanation.   Was that really all of it?   I don’t know, but I am certain now that there is something that I was never told, because the story makes no sense.   You just don’t pack up and leave everything, even over such a traumatic experience as your father dying of a lingering illness.   Something happened.

Dad, let it be said, had…issues of his own.   The marriage didn’t last.   Mom loved him to the day she died, but the marriage didn’t work.   Mom divorced dad when I was two, and she and grandma took me and moved back across the country…but not back to Greensburg.   They moved to Washington D.C., to live near mom’s cousin, who was living there at the time.   She got a job as a clerk for the Yellow pages.   We lived in a series of small apartments.   Whatever money they had from the sales of the house in Greensburg, the cabin, granddad’s business, and the house in Pasadena, somehow was all gone.   I grew up in a very low budget household, being raised by a single working mother, in a time when women made about 60 cents for every dollar a man doing the same job made.   Mom’s family in Pennsylvania made no effort whatever to help her out.   It was something I took for granted as a child…but now it really stands out.   I’m having a hard time now believing that was all because of her marrying dad.   They basically shut her out.

But not grandma.   Someday maybe I’ll write about what growing up was like with that cold constantly angry, fire and brimstone Yankee Baptist women in the house.   Somehow she remained a bridge between mom and I and the rest of that side of the family, and a powerful force in it.   She stayed by mom’s side from the time granddad died to the day she died, but at times it seemed to me more to punish her daughter then support her as she tried to raise a kid by herself in a 1950s/1960s world that regarded single divorced women with children as less worthy of respect then prostitutes.   I never saw grandma smile, unless it was at the misfortune of others.   When bad luck struck other people it always seemed to satisfy her somehow.   And I remained a favorite target until the day she died, because I had the face, and the last name, of the man she hated.   Stinking Rotten Good For Nothing Garrett Just Like Your Pap was her favorite name for me.

And me…I grew up with next to nothing, but I never really noticed that until I got older.   I was fed on a bland, low budget diet but I never went to bed hungry.   I often wore hand me downs but I never left the house in dirty clothes.   I never saw mom cheat another person, lie to them or say anything about them behind their back that she wouldn’t have said to their face.   I never once heard her utter a curse word or saw her take a drink or light up a cigarette.   When I was a kid the first time I ever saw someone else’s mother smoking it shocked me…I didn’t think mothers did that.   Mom sat down with me and my homework, tried her best to teach me right from wrong, and always encouraged my creative impulses.   We didn’t have much, but I had what I needed to grow up on:   I never doubted mom’s love.   Never.   Grandmas hate, and the disdain of most of that side of my family, I just accepted as part of the background noise.   The love of a good mother can give a kid all he needs to stand up to whatever static life brings his way.

How her older brother, various other members of that side of the family, and especially her own mother treated her is something that some days makes me livid to think about, and others completely baffles me.   She really was that ray of sunshine everywhere she went, a completely decent person and a good mother.   Some of my childhood friends had horrible parents.   Everyone told me how nice mine was.   Everyone.   It wasn’t an act.   Yet her own family, with one or two exceptions, treated her miserably.   I never once heard her complain.   At least, not when I was there to hear it.   Mostly the family tension was just there in the background.   Always there.   Something I just shrugged off whenever I thought about it.   Mom loved me, that was all that mattered.   The only time it burst out into the open in my presence, was when I was 16 and they discovered she had started seeing dad again.   It was like being in the center of a nuclear blast.     But that incident centered on dad.   That they hated him does not really explain it all.

Something happened.   Something more then just her marrying dad.   Something that made them leave Greensburg and everything and everyone they knew, and when her marriage failed, prevented them from returning.   Something her family, other then her brother Dean and her cousin, never forgave her for.   Probably I’ll never know what it was.   Mom never strayed from the story.   Nobody else did either.

[Edited some for clarity, and add a few details that I missed occurred to me…]