"Forgive your parents."

What's to forgive?

This was in my Facebook memories, and I must admit, this set me off on a bit of a rant. Probably because my father has been dead a year now. A year ago today was his funeral mass. I can’t say we buried him, because we haven’t yet. Since we were in the middle of packing for the move when he died, we couldn’t find the paperwork for the grave…

Anyway, this meme…

Instead of “forgiving your parents,” how about simply understanding that they probably did the best they could with what they had, and there was nothing to forgive?

My father’s parents were … a train wreck.

His mother left high school to marry a guy right off the PT boat. (So eager to get home, a PT boat crossed the Atlantic. Wrap your head around that.) She was the sickly only child, and survived polio. So she was a spoiled brat who grew up with a depression mindset that you can never have “enough.” This will be important for later.

When dad’s parents married, they moved in with her parents. (It was a multi-family brownstone. Her parents were the first and only owners of the house.) Dad’s father inspected planes, and every holiday drank to excess.

His mother was an emotionally abusive c***. So much so that my father had an ulcer by the time he was ten. But ten-year-olds didn’t know from ulcers, so he understood that pain in his stomach must be hunger.

So my father was overweight for his entire life. But his mother? She kept buying clothing that was one size too small, because “her little baby will lose the weight.” Which caused more stress, more eating, more fat. Repeat on a loop.

The closest Dad had to a father was actually his grandfather, whose body was already failing him— arthritis so bad, morphine was needed. So Dad was the product of one of the first broken homes, really. He didn’t have a sport to get into, no father to toss the ball with, or fix cars with. The things that are considered traditional to do with one’s father.

Dad hid. He hid in books. He hid in music (listening to, playing piano, and singing). He hid inside his own brain, which was already more interesting than the world around him. He spent Christmas when he was 10 years old reading the collected Sherlock Holmes. We still have that volume in our library.

If you wonder why we have so many damn books in the family library, now you know. The collection started when he was 10.

His father walked out on them when my father was 17. This left my father alone with his mother, as well as his grandmother— who referred to his mother as “baby,” up until the day his grandmother died in her early 80s. Read into that what you will.

Dad’s mother didn’t like boys. She wanted a little girl that she could play dress-up with, like a living doll. A few years before her husband left her (she got an annulment based on the fact that if he wanted to be a teenager again at 40, he probably didn't have the maturity to commit to marriage when he was in his early 20s) Dad’s mother adopted the little girl she always wanted.

[The timeline might be wrong— my grandmother told this story framing my father as six. My father gave me the impression he was a teen. So the accuracy of the dates may vary.]

Dad’s mother liked her things. To get even a little distance from her, he bought her a dinette set. It was pretty and shiny. She used it exactly once, but it bought him space.

My father was going to be a doctor. But when he graduated with his BS in biology, he decided that his grades wouldn't cut it. What did he have grades in? Philosophy! So, like every pragmatic human being, his goal was that path that would get him paid. He ended up at NYU, specializing in Thomism at a time when atheist humanism was already considered not progressive enough. One of his professors was Sydney Hook. If you don’t know the name, don’t worry too much. Hook was a liberal atheist back when he could also hate communism.

So, my father went to NYU for school, while teaching in Caldwell NJ, while living in Maspeth, Queens.

If you read the novel “Clerical Error,” it was mostly my father’s book. You can tell where I toyed with it. But it was the story about how he became an assistant pastor in Bed-Sty in 1975. One of his classmates in his philosophy classes during his masters degree in Philosophy was a Catholic Priest.

Cover by my wife

William Rodgers was the first black priest ordained in the diocese of Brooklyn, the year Jackie Robinson entered baseball. Father Rodgers worked Bed-Sty, and needed help. He volunteered my father. So my father lived in Bed-Sty for a while.

If I understand the timeline right, while my father was in Bed-Sty, working with a Catholic priest, his adopted sister was hanging out in biker bars, and was knocked up. Dad's mother and grandmother, proclaiming “What would the neighbors think!” had the problem “go away.” My father didn't hear about it until much later, after the fact.

My father went to a Jesuit high school and loved it so much he joined the Order of Preachers (the Dominicans) as a Layman. He became a eucharistic minister. He was an assistant pastor. You can imagine how well that went over.

My grandmother didn’t like my mother, because my mother had a Sicilian background. Talk about the Civil Rights Act all you like, back then, racial integration meant Irish marrying Italian.

When my parents married, they moved down the block from The House in Maspeth— the same brownstone my grandmother grew up in. She was still there.

In the early 1980s, my father once requested a bedroom set from my grandmother, something for my sister. But no! That set was hers! All mine! My precious!

Apparently, when I was around two years old, I informed my parents that grandma didn't like me. My parents apparently believed me, and they moved to the ass-end of Queens. If you look up the NYPD’s 105th precinct, that was where we were.

Does it sound familiar? One hint.

Yes, Tommy Nolan’s precinct was down the block from me.

In 1993, my grandmother had a car crash and broke her arm. My father immediately took her in, because she was an old lady with a broken arm and two wonky legs. That particular good deed ended with her attacking my mother, and my father, ripping the telephone out of the wall so we couldn’t call an ambulance, and my grandmother declaring that she and her mother had documents printed up for “when” my father divorced my mother.

Yeah, she had held onto said document for the better part of 20 years.

Grandmother was taken away to the hospital. That night, we got a threatening phone call about “her bag.” What bag? We had sent all of her stuff away!

Surprise! Grandma had a special bag she had hidden. Because it was filled with all sorts of random stuff she had stolen from our house—crochet needles, pill bottles (empty) a ream of loose leaf paper, pounds of utterly random crap.

So that was weird.

Fast forward a bit. About 15 or 20 years ago, my grandmother had some sort of incident that put her in the hospital. I think it involved stairs. While she was in hospital, we went into her house to straighten things up.

Remember when I said she could never have “enough”? She held onto every scrap of paper, every bit of clothing. She took plastic bags from the grocery story by the fistful. She couldn’t be a normal person and reuse bags, she took stacks of bags that were never opened. She had them by the pound. She once worked for AT&T, and had two dozen phones, still in boxes, piled behind a headboard, in a small guest room we had to force our way into, because it was so filled with crap. She was a hoarder. Paper plates? Garbage bags? Jackets no one had worn in 20 years? You name it, she had it.

As we threw out bags of garbage by the ton, one of the neighbors called my grandmother. She demanded to be released AMA immediately! My father must be stealing her bed set! (The one he requested for my sister decades ago.) Because he had “obviously coveted” it ever since.

Yes, really. We were robbing her blind! We must have been! There was no other reason for us to be there!

In the basement, she somehow had managed to grow mold on vinyl-covered furniture. And records.

Then there was the china…

That f***ing china…

You see, dad’s grandfather had spotted Macy’s throwing out Japanese Bone China on December 8th, 1941. Something about an incident in Hawaii that had irked them. Anyway, waste not, want not! Dad’s grandfather walked away with two sets of bone china, each a service for 12.

In the early 21st century, we went in search of it just to find it.

We found AN ENTIRE WINE CELLAR FULL OF CHINA. Forget the bone china. There were about 13 sets and patterns. I know because I’m the guy who dragged it all out of there. You see, the china had not been touched in decades. One of the plates was wrapped in newspaper with a headline about Nixon. No, not President Richard Nixon. VICE-PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON. One of the shelves had broken, and came down at an angle. It landed on a stack of plates so high and so tightly packed, the shelf only broke three or four plates.

In order to save this china that she never used, nor hadn’t seen in 60 /70 years, I spent the rest of that summer dragging it out so it could be cleaned up and stored. And I had to do it covertly, so she wouldn’t have me arrested for stealing her precious.

Anyway, I’m getting off track.

EDIT TO ADD:

Going through the comments, I realized that I never finished my grandmother’s story arc.

She died a little over a decade ago. Her last three or four years, she couldn’t recognize people. She forgot a lot. I don’t know if it was dementia, or just getting old. We got her home health aides, because she kept the place so unsanitary, we needed to get professionals in. The few times I went over, she thought I was Dad, and spared me an insult or two, for old time’s sake. Once she thought I was going to kill her, and another time I was going to rob her. That sort of thing. She finally died in the house she was born in.

And, true to her fashion, she left my father nothing.

So, yeah. Given everything my father went through, he came out perfectly sane. He was anti-social, but that just means he met people. He preferred books to people, because books were better friends to him than people were. Who hasn’t been there?

And yes, I’ve had to play catch-up on things that most people find routine. But when one generation drops the ball, it isn’t the next generation that is failed, but the next two.

So this entire meme about “forgive your parents” is nonsense. Sometimes, they do they best they can with what they have. And that’s all anybody can ever ask.

Therefore: What is there to forgive?