The past ain't through with us

I never met my grandfathers. One died before I was born and the other died when I was too young to remember. Obviously, that sucks. Huge revelation I know. Our older relatives are conduits to the past and I often feel cheated that I didn't get to spend any time with my grandfathers. I didn't get enough time with my grandmothers either for that matter. And for whatever reason, I never really knew much about them, or my family as a whole. I knew the basics, but I never looked into it much, I think partly because I didn't have much connection to the past besides my grandmothers for a short while.

Recently I have become more interested in learning about my family history. There are many reasons for this (we did a heritage project with the kids at work and it motivated me to learn about my own heritage; spending time with my girlfriend's grandmother; watching my nieces grow up and wanting to build the connection to the past and future generations; the existential dread of getting older and understanding my minimal significance in the grand scheme of things) but the fact is I just want to know more about who I am. It's always about me.

Anyways, a few weeks ago, my mom gave me a newspaper article about her father. It's from The Hartford Courant, published on May 5, 1953. I reprinted it below. This would have probably been one of the feel good stories a newspaper ran to keep people's minds off segregation, Korea, and the inevitable nuclear war with Russia. I found it fascinating because, like any news article, it serves as a snapshot of a moment in time, even if it is a "fluff piece."

Most of all, I like it because it sheds light on the type of man my grandfather was:

The Human Touch, by Bob Zaiman

When Nick Farr first started operating the Frances Soda Shop on Ashley Street about 15 years ago, he inherited a gang of the neighborhood high school kids. The little store had been their hangout under the previous owner and, after meeting Nick for the first time, they knew right away that he was the type of guy who would permit them to continue using the place as headquarters.

They were a nice bunch of kids, not a "wise guy" in the bunch. Most of the time they would lounge around the booths talking about sports and girls and the rest of the things that interest boys in their teens. Sometimes when the talk ran down, they would go over to the magazine rack and pore through the latest issues. They never bought any of the magazines but Nick Farr didn't mind--as long as they replaced them neatly after they were through reading. 

Business slowed down in the latter stages of the evening and then Nick began to join them. There were about 15 boys in the group and it wasn't long before Nick became a sort of a senior member. On nights when the gang went bowling, they took Nick and let him compete with them. If they had problems, they would talk them over confidentially with Nick. He developed into a "big brother" for the Ashley Street crew.

Friendship Lasts

Well, the years sped by, and the boys grew into manhood but they still came around to see Nick and to chat with their old buddies. The strong bond of friendship between the soda shop owner and the boys never weakened. 

Seven weeks ago, the old Ashley Street gang received some shocking news. Nick Farr had been taken seriously ill and would be unable to work for some time. They called a hasty meeting in the soda shop to figure what they could do to help their hospitalized friend.

"Somebody has got to take care of the soda shop," one of them announce. "Nick's wife has three small children on her hands and she can't handle it."

They all agreed that the most important thing to Nick in his hour of need was to keep his business operating. And, right then and there, six of them volunteered their services. Not one of them had ever worked in a soda shop before but they knew the general routine and besides, Elva, the personable girl who worked for Nick, could advise them when they were stumped.

All six members of the old gang had steady jobs during the day, which meant they could only help out at night but that worked out fine since Elva took care of things from 7am to 7pm.

Share Night Shift

And so, seven weeks ago they started working the shop, each taking a different night. They didn't ask for or expect any money for their services. They were helping out a friend who had once taken care of them in the past. 

Barney, Victor, and Fred Castellani, three brothers who lived across the street worked all day on their mason contracting business, were eager to do their bit. So were Tom Glynn, a Hartford Gas Co. employee, and James Leary, who works at the Hamilton Standard Propeller firm.

Ray Lavery, the sixth volunteer, lives in Manchester now but he didn't let that stop him. He made the trip to Hartford on his scheduled work night and took his turn behind the counter, handling the sales of cigarettes, magazines, camera supplies and the dozens of other items in Nick's store.

Nick is out of the hospital now, but he is still unable to work. It will probably be another two months before he will be allowed by his doctor to spend even a few hours in the soda shop. Meanwhile, the six old friends are carrying on for him and they vow that they'll stay there until Nick is completely recovered.

Getting the story of their inspiring and unselfish act was like pulling teeth. They didn't want any publicity.

"There's nothing unusual about what we're doing," they said. "Anybody would do as much for a friend."

Despite what the men said about their actions, they clearly went above and beyond what most people would do for a friend. It's obvious that my grandfather made a strong impression on these individuals for them to go to such lengths to help him. It induces a sense of pride to hear that your family members made a positive impact on the people in their lives; I felt a similar sense of familial/genetic pride at the retirement parties for my parents. Not to mention, the respect and accolades my family members receive work out great for me because all that goodwill usually extends my way without me having to earn it.

One of the best parts of this article is the language. The writer states, "not a 'wise guy' in the bunch" in complete earnestness. It's fantastic. The entire situation is almost inconceivable. What is a soda shop? Nowadays it would take place in a chain yogurt shop, except it went out of business after 6 months and the boys never got to know the owner who ended up dying because he couldn't afford proper healthcare. Dark times. Makes you yearn for nuclear bomb warnings.

I am grateful for the men who helped my grandfather in his time of need. I'm grateful for the Hartford Courant for writing the story and my mom for sharing it with me. I've always recognized the importance of history but I often didn't apply that to my own life and family history. As I get older I realize, if our own family doesn't even care about us after we pass, who will? It's the responsibility of the living to preserve the spirit and memory of the dead.

Besides, the dead tell us a lot about ourselves if we just listen.

That sounds overly supernatural. I just mean that you can learn a lot about the present from learning about the past, and you can learn a lot about yourself from learning about your family, and I like doing both, and that's about that.

I Love You All...Class Dismissed. 

O, Death

Kno - Death is Silent

I don't fear death. I certainly don't want to face it any time soon (I don't have a death wish or anything) but I have come to terms with my own inevitable demise.

On the other hand, when death is in the vicinity of my loved ones, it's harder for me to accept. I've been very lucky to not have lost many friends or family, but even when death takes a friend's family member or a friend of a friend, I start to question the wisdom of the universe's routine of granting sentience to beings just to snatch it away so mercilessly. I'm quasi-Buddhist so I get the whole yin and yang, need-the-dark-to-appreciate-the-light philosophy, but fuck all that. Death fucking hurts. Life would be just fine without death, I'm sure.

When I am far enough away from death, though (or rather, when death is far enough away from my friends and family) I can see the beauty in it. If we can separate ourselves from the pain a little and take a lesson from it, it does make us appreciate our short time in existence. But more than that, as my favorite author stated, when it comes down to it, there are fates far worse than death.

We've probably all considered this notion after watching countless tv shows and movies featuring a person in a coma and the family deciding whether or not to maintain life support. I remember as a kid thinking, "keep that shit on motherfucker!" (I listened to a lot of Wu Tang as a kid). Some point in college, it evolved to, "The answer all depends on whether or not the practical value of keeping me alive outweighs the practical value of removing life support." (I read a lot of John Locke in college.) Now, my official stance on it is: "Let me go." Basically, if I've missed two or more episodes of Boardwalk Empire, pull the plug.

As I said before, I don't fear death...but I'm terrified of any kind of brain damage. It's almost an obsessive fear. When I get headaches I start to think about my brain splitting and having to speak like Sylvester the Cat for the rest of my life.

"Sssufferin ssstroke victim."

Cut off all my limbs and I think I'd have a strong desire to still live, but mess with my brain? Just get it over with and kill me.

I'm exaggerating a little, but it's an honest fear. And its a very good likelihood. Every year, 795,000 people in the US have a stroke, and 135,000 of those stroke victims die. Fuck.

Then there's traumatic brain injuries: 1.7 million TBIs every year in the US alone. You gotta be out of your mind (no pun intended) to play football and suffer concussions regularly. I'm not trying to forget my name at 55 years old. Even if I avoid high contact sports, there's always the possibility of a car accident or a hard fall, both of which I've had. Fortunately I only broke some bones and not my brain.

What really concerns me--and strangely fascinates me--is that my mind will just snap one day. It has always fascinated--and concerned--me how little control we have over our brains. The brain is an organ, and just like any other organ it can malfunction. There have been times where I've felt on the constant verge of breakdown. I have studied (to some extent, I'm certainly no scholar on the subject) the way the brain works, and the scientific consensus is that we really don't understand the brain that much at all. It's very easy for someone's brain chemistry to change and cause an alteration in that individual's personality. A particularly vicious knock to the head, or a parasite, or a virus, or even the ingestion of certain substances can change a person's identity, the essence of an individual. Just think about the last time you got really drunk. You become another person for a while, to the point where it's almost a viable excuse to say "I must have been drunk" when our bad decisions come back to haunt us.

Even if we are perfectly sober and healthy, we still have less control over our own minds than we believe (which is weird in itself because our minds are the mechanism that allows us to "believe" so you'd think it would know best). One of the biggest functions of the brain is memory, which helps us create a vision of ourselves. Unfortunately, memory is tenuous at best. That link is to an article describing all the bizarre things that affect our memory, and that's just the start of the list. So this ability of ours, which is so important to identity creation, is very weak, and as we age, or if it is afflicted with certain diseases, it gets even weaker. Great.

Memento was like a horror film to me. How can you live with no memory of yourself, or your life, or especially (like in the film) with no memory of the past at all?

That shit scares me. What if I just wake up with no memory one day? It could happen. Or what if I wake up crazy? That happens all the time, too. Even Oprah almost suffered from a nervous breakdown. What if I go into work one day and see Nick Jake's 607th bandana and I just lose it?

I sympathize with people who have mental breakdowns. I never sympathize (or condone, obviously) those who harm other people, but I can understand. They're not thinking straight, that's the problem. A lot of them don't understand what they're doing at the time or the ramifications of their actions. I've read too many true crime books about all types of killers to think that they are much different from the rest of us.

That last fact scares and comforts me (I've mentioned that paradox is my favorite word before, right?). The majority of us are living on the verge of crazy. We all do our best to suppress it, and some do better than others. Sometimes external factors cause a snap, sometimes our own personal decisions and mistakes lead to a breakdown, but either way, it's a reality we all could face a lot easier than we assume.

The world is fucking crazy, and if we really paid attention and contemplated all the fucked up things happening in the world for very long, we'd probably all go insane. That's the beauty of human nature. We persevere, we carry on, despite it all.

We prepare for the worst and do our best to understand the realities of life, but that doesn't make life easier. It just makes it tolerable. And that's the most we should ask for out of life. That part of Buddhist philosophy I have completely bought into: life is suffering. A lot of people hear that and think it's really depressing. I think it's a beautiful philosophy, because it means that if we are lucky enough to have a life that's anything but constant misery, we should be thankful for it every second of every day.

Then again, it's hard to maintain that thankfulness. I always thought a particular scene from The Sopranos was the perfect summation of the human existence (not the scene where Christopher gets high on heroin and sits on Adriana's dog, but that one too, I suppose). Tony was recovering from being shot, and he goes to Dr. Melfi's office to tell her he's becoming depressed again. He knows that life is precious, now more than ever, and he knows he should appreciate every moment, but it's just so...well, I'll let him tell it: "This isn't painful. Getting shot is painful. Getting stabbed in the ribs is painful. This shit isn't painful. It's empty... dead."

It's the mundane, endless minutiae of life that gets people. It's why people turn to drugs and alcohol, or any addiction really (and just like with mental breakdowns, it's much easier to become an addict than we all assume). The monotony of life is what drives people crazy. There is no purpose to life in and of itself, we have to do our best to give our lives purpose. Life is suffering, so we do what we can to ease that suffering. I have learned to focus on the positive, and I'm mostly successful in that endeavor. I keep up with the horrible shit (aka "the news") but I balance it out with pictures of puppies, and stories about Malala and heroic acts from average people. Positive psychology scientists (those exist!) believe that  it takes a 4:1 or 5:1 ratio of positive emotions to negative emotions to keep you balanced, so it's important to get a good dose of positivity throughout the day.

And it's important to spread positivity throughout the day as well. Any little way you can. Never underestimate the power of a simple, kind gesture. Sometimes people just need somebody else to hear their stories.

CHiPs saves the day again! California Highway Patrolman Kevin Briggs, aka "The Guardian of The Golden Gate," convinces Kevin Berthia that there are alternatives to ending his life. Berthia is one of hundreds of people Briggs has saved. 

There are people who may be beyond the point of no return, especially if drugs and alcohol are a part of the problem, but it's worth at least trying to help. Otherwise, one day we may be the ones on the wrong side of the bridge, with no one to hear our stories.

Man that's pretty dark. Sorry. Did you know that it has been scientifically proven that optimists live longer? Here, I'll end it with a picture of a dog pulling a kid on a skateboard:

He should really be wearing a helmet though, he could crash and...shit. Sorry!

Epilogue: As I revised and prepared to publish this post, I read a facebook post from a friend of mine. He had just decided to randomly talk to a guy who looked upset. The guy was very depressed and talked about his problems for about an hour. He had been headed to a bridge to jump, but telling his story to a friendly stranger made him change his mind.

And that is the shit I live for.

I Love You All (it's not just a tag line, it's real)...Class Dismissed.