The Ice Cream Cone

My impression of families is that we don’t need to scratch very far beneath the vernier of propriety and respectability of most families to find the unsavory scandal. It’s as if all of our families are just one interview or two away from becoming Jerry Springer fodder. I know, it’s disheartening.

We would all like to believe that our family of origin was/is the best. In fact, that’s actually the case for young children. When we are very young, we believe that ours is the ideal family. Forget the alcoholism, the marital violence and abuse, the infidelities and other peccadilloes. We all want to believe that ours is a safe environment where we are loved, cared-for, and safe.

It isn’t so, of course. And it is only later in our development that we meet contemporaries whose families are unlike our own – sometimes better and sometimes worse than what we have always known. That’s the way it is for most of us, I think.

I knew my maternal grandparents. Grandfather was an algebra teacher; Grandmother was the manager of the household. Despite their idiosyncrasies, they were both kind, intelligent, and generous people. I knew my paternal grandmother, but she died while I was still in grade school. The family story was that she had died of bone cancer after some kind of injury. It was all bullshit, of course. Kinetic physical injuries do not cause cancer, but a lifetime of heavy smoking does. And smoking-related lung cancers often metastasize to the bones making them vulnerable to pathological fractures. Alas.

I never met my paternal grandfather, but in my mid-adolescence, I learned that my father was born out of wedlock. Grandmother was an aspiring burlesque starlet, and her lover was a member of the troupe’s orchestra. My father was subsequently raised by a single mother, and later, by her extended family that included a number of uncles who cared for him. Eventually, while he was still in primary school, my father met his father, he said. His father took him to the town square to a spot where he spent a short time enjoying an ice cream cone. That was the extent of his relationship with his father. If he ever again saw his father, my father never spoke of it.

Since then, I have met folks who reported that a grandparent or great-grandparent had fled from one state to another after committing (or being accused of committing) murder or some other crime. There were stories of aunts or uncles who had given birth to children outside of wedlock, and other misdeeds too.

As I said at the outset, we needn’t scratch the surface too deeply in a family tree to find the unsavory.