28 July I was on the phone with my Mom yesterday, and we were talking about my Da, as we sometimes do. I think it started because she saw a TV show or a movie or read a book or something that he would have hated (forgive me for not remembering every little detail--you know, like the actual subject of our conversation), and then we just started talking about him, and she said something that I'd never thought of before. O, wait, no, I remember, we were talking about WWII and the Americans and how even after the Americans liberated Belgium, an uncle of hers still couldn't stand the Americans, because "they only did things that would benefit them," to which I replied, as only is proper, that they'd be speaking German in Brussels today if it weren't for us, and then we talked about how her grandmother, Bomma, had said to Mom, with a sneer on her face, "Why did you have to marry that German Jew?" and how she had answered that he wasn't Jewish, but Catholic, that his mother was Irish and his father was German Protestant, and that Bomma refused to believe her. "He's a Jew!" she insisted. Now, of course I have heard the story about Bomma thinking that my Da was Jewish before (Mom always said, though, that Bomma would have hidden Jews from the Germans, because they hated the Germans must worse, but by golly she would have made them appreciate it every single minute!), but actually I had never known that Pop (my grandfather) was Protestant.
"He was Protestant?"
And it was like an explosion in my head. I mean, I know that my parents were people before I was born, that they weren't waiting around for me to define them, but suddenly I had this picture in my head of my father, the 6th grade drop out who never went to high school, twenty years old, fifteen (nearly sixteen) years younger than I am now, running an elevator and marrying a most likely equally uneducated Irish girl and living in a little apartment in the Bronx in 1935. My father was an amazing man. He was whip-smart and completely self-educated. He hated school, so he left, but he read more than anyone I ever met, except for me, and he just learned everything he wanted to from the library. He was a very talented writer, but he never had the follow-through to do anything about it--he used up all of his follow-through on his acting, I think. It's astounding to think of him back then, who he was and who he became. I miss him dreadfully, of course, but I wonder what it would have been like to know him back then. If we had just met, not as family, but just as people, would we have been friends? I'll never know, of course, but it's interesting that how I keep him in my head has expanded just a little, because of my mom saying that one little thing, that he was once a twenty year old elevator operator who married an Irish girl.
Do you know who your parents were before you met them? Kim wants to know what is the most appalling thing you have ever done to your hair? And we're still talking about accidentally writing or talking like other people (see my answer revealed!), being slobs, our top ten songs, inconveniences, conversations, and Hugh Jackman (anyone see him on the Tonight Show the other night?).
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