PEEPSIE

I have a letter in my hand from my grandfather, Richard F. Giersch, to "darling Peeps", then in her late teens. Richard Giersch was a first-rate engineer involved with the invention of air conditioning, and he talks about his projects in the letter. But the burden of the letter is an appeal to his daughter to answer him frankly on a matter of "fact": did he, on her confirmation day in the church(around age 14) tell her that he would KILL her? He then describes his struggles with his wife's "mental attitude" in a "trying period of life". At this time, BB, Lil's mom, was about 50, possibly going through menopause, which was little understood at that time.

The conflict of Lil's parents figured large in her life. There is the often repeated story of teen-aged Lil retreating to the shower so as to drown out the sound of her parents arguing. It is apparent from the letter that Richard was "on the run" from BB from early in their marriage, that her paranoia could turn a harmless expression into a death threat, putting Richard under a permanent cloud. It sounds similar to what happened between me and Muz. Since Richard died in 1952 when I was four, I never knew him, but Lil always spoke glowingly of him as a hero: inventor, musician and adoring father.

My impression of BB, as she visited periodically in the 60's and 70's(dying in 1981), was of this immense dignity floating through the world in a cloud of sweet-smelling emollients and powders, supported by a complicated system of undergarments. She was the aging belle, secure in her social superiority, telling stories about what seemed to me the ante-bellum South(though in reality it was the Jim Crow era). Her feelings could be hurt easily, so leave it to me during one of her visits, in the coltish aimlessness of adolescence, to blurt out "Why don't you go home?" I can still remember that look she gave me, with her swimmy eyes behind thick glasses--there were worlds of disappointment and hurt back there. My remark became a family horror-story, but I wonder now how much it reflected the uneasiness of those visits....not to justify my rudeness!

So, in 1944, as Lil headed into marriage and family fueled by a genuine romance, there was another kind of running away going on: the pointless, endless wrangling of BB and Richard would NOT be carried into the next generation.

TWENTY YEARS

If you count 20 years from Robert J. Watt's death, you arrive at 1959. This was a big year for me, eleven going on twelve, moving from Bracknell, England to Smithtown, New York; and on the cusp of adolescence. We don't do life in 20 year chunks, yet we ourselves felt the weight of the 20 this last fall as we gathered for Mom's show. At the very least, marking time by this method is a tool for interpreting what's really going on.

So, in 20 years, Obi had gone from lonely grief and a family shake-up to a well-launched professional career, a wife, 6 children and the wherewithal to provide an expansive--in some ways idyllic--suburban lifestyle for himself. He loved his work, enjoyed his family, went all over the world, worked with his hands--and drank.

Every generation has a set of lies that it adopts and doggedly clings to, even when the truth starts to protest. In our time, "free" sexual expression is one of those lies. Back then, the lies included "drunkenness is funny" and "smoking is good for you". Obi drank and smoked and started having "incidents" at parties, going out of control. There were driving problems and disappearances, and all this in the light of the threat of being instantly fired if he showed up to fly at Pan Am "under the influence".

Alcohol abuse, like any other dependency, is a symptom of unresolved issues from the past. I know so from my own battles with alcohol in my adult years, and the point is re-enforced by what I have learned from a 12 step program, Celebrate Recovery, this past year. We as a family had a lot of fun in those years of growing up, because both Lil and Obi--as you know first-hand from the grandchildren years--were generous, adventuresome and instinctively nurturing. But how could they know, having swallowed the current cultural lie, that the sterling qualities they had in such abundance would be tainted and twisted by the contents of a bottle?

In Obi's case it seems to me the bottle was his self-medication against all those painful things he endured in his formative years, things which disturbed and threatened him. They were like a black hole you don't dare get close to, because it sucks you into oblivion. During his young adult life, Obi was blessed with his uncle Homer, a successful businessman and world traveler who stood in for his deceased brother Robert. He was a great fellow, who offered Obi some much needed fatherly steadiness, but he too was firmly in the grip of drink.

Obi's formative years were marked by the Depression, which was followed by a terrible war. Many--especially the soldiers--made it a policy to not look back. The past can't be changed, true; but it can change you.