Wednesday, August 7, 2013

There They Go

I'm named after my godparents.
My godmother died about a month ago, three days after her husband of about 59 years. I suppose a case could be made for this being an example of when a longtime spouse expires, the other follows suit. As one might expect from a relationship of that duration, they sometimes encountered a rocky path. She apparently told him at one point that if he didn't stop drinking, she'd leave. He stopped. But that brings to mind an enduring image from three-plus decades ago of him walking down the street to their shore house holding a bloody towel to the side of his head. He left the house astride a moped and returned needing plastic surgery. I didn't make the connection at the time between the Budweisers and the blood. I chalked it up to a perilous turn on a sandy shore road. When we took their boat out on the bay, he would let me dictate the speed, much to the chagrin of his wife. I remember him from that time as jovial; he became more subdued after he stopped drinking.
She, on the other hand, appeared to possess a pathological need to know everyone's business. To such an extent that they had a scanner in their living room that monitored police radio traffic. I didn't think much of it, until I did. 
I spent much of my early life, and into adolescence, with these people. My mother and I. Church, Christmas, down the shore. Church. They always had a shore house, and we always went there. Slept there. Played hockey on the frozen bay, which doesn't freeze anymore. Winter, summer, whatever. My "cousin" and I playing our Coleco videogames, which consisted of vertical hyphens of red flashing lights on simulated football fields or basketball courts. 
When we irritated our parents, they told us to "go play in traffic." At which point we'd go out and do something like spray-paint a basketball court on the street. 
Our parents had an affinity for a particular newspaper cartoon called "The Lockhorns." Clippings adorned the refrigerators. I didn't really get it at the time, the locking horns representing the spousal tug of war, the man often depicted with a drink in his hand or in various states of inebriation. We had a live-action Lockhorns playing out on the stage right in front of us.  
While down the shore, our parents ensured no dereliction in our religious obligations. According to my mother, attending Catholic mass before 4 p.m. on Saturday didn't count against the weekly quota. Apparently a window existed in which one had to profess one's piety and, well, you rang up another strike on St. Peter's scorecard if you fell outside the window. Don't fuck with God's tight schedule. You had better get to church between 4 p.m. Saturday and 5 p.m. Sunday. No matter if you organize your coupons during mass. 
Uncle Frank, a onetime contractor, built our boyhood church. The church in which my cousin and I served as altar boys. And he built my childhood house. Someone used to call that house around Christmas each year saying he was Santa, and my mother told me I would get off the phone and say that Santa sounded an awful lot like Uncle Frank. Well, that's when he was drinking.
I think I was choking on a lifesaver once, and he pulled the car over and hung me upside down and slapped me on the back until I was free and clear. I can't ask him or my godmother or my mother anymore if that was how it actually went down. We were riding in one of their Lincolns at the time. They had the cars of the moment, they had the shore houses, they had the boats. They gave us a color TV once, to replace the Zenith black and white. A big deal.
Somewhere along the line my mother and Aunt Fran fell out. Perhaps because they both worked together in a doctor's office. Too many women in too small a space. Alliances form. Alliances fracture. Does it matter now? Dead. The posturing and the cattiness no more. The picture that emerges from their deaths involves a generation taking its leave. I guess I can understand a little more now why older people obsess over obituaries and funerals.