European Triptych: France, Eastern Europe and Germany--Off We Go!

Plattsburgh, NY

November 11, 2017

Latitude 44˚ 58’

Here I go.  The European Triptych--equal parts in France (Paris and Western Front), Latvia and Lithuania and German (Christmas Markets) then back to Paris via Christmas Markets in Strasbourgh.

I am deliberately going out of my comfort zone--not only in places to visit but with language.  I have become too comfortable in Mexico and the Spanish speaking world.  Plus, in talking with a 73 year old friend recently, I've come to hear once again how easy it is to stay home in the your 70's, how difficult it is to get out.  I don't want that to happen., so I have to help that along.

I am a strong advocate of the Little Engine that Could.  "I think I can, I think I can, I think I can."  I have no doubt the little engine will ultimately said, "I knew I could, I knew I could, I knew I could."

I have a violent headache, am anxious and nervous, and afraid.  Which is the very reason I'm heading off into all parts previously unknown.  I do not want to lose the ability to travel solo.

Air Canada to Paris tonight.  Paris tomorrow.

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Here I go...

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People Remembered: Aunt Minnie Doyle

October 1, 2017

Our Aunt Minnie wasn’t really our aunt.  In my memory, she was a tiny lady who lived upstairs from my Great Aunt Ceil and Great Uncle Frank Loughan.  Ceil was the sister of my grandmother Maude Butler Ladue.  Minnie was somehow a distant cousin and I have never I figured out the connection.

She died fifty years ago today, three days after my best friend from high school died at the age of 16.  She was 91.  Why this disparity?

Aunt Minnie was Minnie Doyle.  She was born in 1876, the year the US celebrated its centennial.  She was related to us through Joe Ladue who made millions in the Alaskan Gold Rush only to lose it all later.  Oddly, Joe Ladue was not related to any of the Ladue’s on my side of the family but through my grandmother’s line—the Butlers of Beekmantown. 

I only ever remember Aunt Minnie as an old woman.  She was tiny with gray bobbed hair.  She lived upstairs from my great aunt and uncle in a tiny apartment.  She’d been widowed since the 1930’s.  In my memory, she was always a happy woman, satisfied with her lot in life, never bitter, always pleasant.  I’d often wander over to visit her on Brinkerhoff Street during a lunchtime break from high school.  I’d bring my lunch and just sit with her. She was a happy person and made others around her happy.  She was loved by everyone. 

She never adapted to television. I can still see her sitting in her small rocking chair, a small radio next to her on a stand.  She loved The Yankees and could always talk about how they were doing.

At some point, while I was still in high school, she made a decision to leave her apartment and move into a newly built nursing home.  She probably had nothing except Social Security and possibly a pension from her long-dead husband.  I’m sure she signed everything over the Sacred Heart when she moved in.  For two years she shared a room with another woman.  In those days, I’d cut through Riverside Cemetery on my way to visit here and if there’d been a recent burial I’d snitch a few flowers and bring them to her.  She always laughed at how the flowers came into her possession.

Sometime in the mid-summer of 1967 she fell and broke her hip.  She was probably 91 at the time and the only place for rehabilitation was in the hospital.  Just before I left for college I stopped in to visit here.  I was too young to understand fully what I was seeing.  She held my hand and didn’t want to let go of it when I left.  I had no idea then about fear of death or the loneliness of old age. I was 18 and off to college in Troy and on a new adventure.  It was the last time I saw her.

She died three days after my best friend’s death.  The funeral was in Plattsburgh, but she was buried with her husband in Schenectady.  My parents came down to Albany for the burial.  They met me after the burial and that was that.  Aunt Minnie was gone as was my friend David—both within a three-day span.  I simply moved on with my life.

Periodically, if I’m in the Schenectady area, I’ll stop in the cemetery.  I’m left with more questions than answers.  Who was her husband and why is she buried there?

It doesn’t matter.  What matters is that our lives crossed for 18 years.  I’m a better person for having known her and I’m a better person for having seen what a good old-age can be.  It’s hard to think of myself at 18 when I’m now 68—far closer to being the person Aunt Minnie was when I knew her.  Let go.  Be who you are.  Embrace the age you’re at.  Try to be more like her than some crotchety old man. 

Thanks Aunt Minnie.  I’m not there yet, but when I am I want to be like you.

People Remembered: David Heath

September 28, 2017

I’ve been thinking of my childhood friend David Heath lately.  Fifty years ago today he died.  16.  Dead within two weeks of a diagnosis of leukemia.

We had been friends all through high school.  In early September of 1967 I left for college.  He stayed behind a high school senior.

The first weekend of the school year, the weekend after Labor Day, I came home.  We went to a football game.  Two weeks later I went to his wake.

David.  Someone in the neighborhood introduced us.  His family had moved north from the Albany area when we’d just started high school.  Our families became friends and he and I did all sorts of things you do when you’re in high school.  We were always at each other’s homes.  His father taught me to make fried peppers and onions.  I still have photos of us swimming at the Oxbow in Cadyville during that summer before college.

I’d only been at school for a few days when my mother called to tell me that David had gotten sick.  A day later he was in the hospital.  The dominoes fell rapidly.  Within a week he was in a coma.  A diagnosis of cancer had come in.  On the 28^th Mom called to tell me he’d died.

I was 18 and had lost all my grandparents.  I was no stranger to death.  But this was different. This was my friend.  My contemporary.  He was only two years younger than I.  I came home.  Went to his wake.  Thought of the football game two weeks earlier.  The next day—the 30^th—it rained.  His funeral was at the Methodist Church.  I never saw his family.  He was buried near Albany.

I went back to college, moved on with my life.  At 18 the grieving process is different.  My cognitive/emotional development was not fully matured.  There are things that are just impossible to understand at that point in life.  I’d visit his parents when I returned to Plattsburgh.   His mother was clearly in a far deeper grief. I think she appreciated my visits.  I don’t know.  We never really talked about that.  I’d just listen and tell her I missed my friend, which I did.

The following spring, I tracked down the cemetery but it would be years before I went again.  Ten years after David died, 1977, I wrote his parents.  “I haven’t forgotten,” I wrote them.  But, like most 20 somethings, I moved in with my life and never contacted them again.

Sometime well into the 1990’s I went back to the cemetery and saw that his father had died.  I went through a new level of grief because I noticed that his father was my age then when his son had died.  He seemed so much older to me when I was 18.  By now, the emotional/cognitive process was fully in place and I could see what loss this was for his family.  Their only son.

The last time I visited, in the mid 2010s, his mom had died.  His sister and I the last surviving members of a small family.  Life’s circle.

I’m more able today to embrace mystery.  Why did he die at 16 and I why was allowed to live 50 more years? Why have I had four lifetimes to his one?  There are no answers, and that’s ok.

Fifty years!  All death is loss and it always diminished us in some way.  For me it deprived me of the possibility of a lifelong friend.  There’s never a September 28^th that rolls around when I don’t think of him.

Thanks, David.  It was wonderful to have called you friend.

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