The
oldest clearly-defined story that survives in the oral history of my family
dates back over 200 years, to the time of the Napoleonic Wars in western
Europe. The story goes that one of my ancestors saw the conquering French
troops marching through his hometown in Alsace. Among the juggernaut of Napoleon’s
soldiers, he saw one man set aside and flogged. He asked his mother, “Why are
they whipping him?”
“Because,”
she replied, “he wet the bed.”
The
boy who saw that march and that whipping was my grandmother’s grandfather. His
name was George Stich. He was born more than half a century before Germany in its
modern form came to be, but he spoke German and I’m sure he would’ve considered
himself a lifelong German but for two accidents of history and family. First,
Alsace is one of the patches of Earth that has pinballed back and forth between
nation states at a dizzying rate throughout history. Second, he left Europe
permanently in his early adulthood to escape the Prussian draft.
He
settled in the Midwest of America, helping first to carve the Ohio and Erie
Canal as another immigrant laborer who spoke no English before making a more permanent
home. In my youth this seemed like the old country, a place where regular
people came from and old people lived. Certainly not a place for pioneers. History
shows how much of human perception is relative. He had a son, Oscar, late in
life who Anglicized the family name a bit, and that son had a daughter late in
life, my grandmother, Doris Virginia Stitch. More than a century separates her
grandfather’s birth and her birth on March 3, 1925.
I
don’t know if my grandmother’s house had electricity on the day she was born.
If it did, it hadn’t been connected to the grid for long. If it didn’t, it was
a typical rural home in southern Illinois in that time. People in that part of
the world farmed, though I don’t know exactly what. I’m ashamed of how little I
know of the living memory of my family.
A
quirk of the Stitch family house in those days was that it was on the direct
path between the Goodyear-Zeppelin factory in Akron, Ohio, and the Navy’s main airship
base in Moffett Field, California. For a few romantic years my grandma saw the Los
Angeles, Akron, and Macon, airborne aircraft carriers that were some
of the largest objects yet made by humans that fly, shuttling along that route
between maintenance and deployments. In some ways, even the deep past can seem
high-tech.
My
grandmother’s youth spanned the Great Depression, and her adolescence and young
adulthood took place in the shadow of World War II, the worst self-inflicted
wound in human history. Having lived through one year of the COVID-19 pandemic,
it’s difficult to imagine the procession of misery that sprawled over that decade
and a half. I suppose people got used to it after a while.
It’s
during that time she made a leap of faith, hope, and love, and married my
grandfather, an Army Air Force officer, where he served training new pilots in
southern California. Compared to the Soviet Union, Germany, Japan, France, and
Britain, America’s toll of blood and treasure in the war wasn’t so bad. Still,
so many couples married young like my grandparents only to see their lives
together truncated by fortune. Whether it was fortune or the will of something
greater, my grandparents had many more decades of marriage and life together
left after 1945.
For
a while she moved around the country with my grandfather’s service. He served
in Texas, Kansas, and Alaska, and further afield in Brazil, Germany, and
Britain, before leaving the Air Force so they could settle back in Illinois. During
those wild young years my uncles were born. In the later steady years my
father, my mother, and my aunt were born.
After
watching the birth of my three children I understand better, in my gut as well
as my mind, how much can go wrong as we come into the world. My father didn’t
breathe at first. He came out blue and needed to be resuscitated. I didn’t
think much of that story, and the insanity my grandmother must have lived
through in those terrible moments, until the same thing happened to my elder
daughter.
Like
many mothers in every era, my grandmother shouldered most of the burden of
raising her four children. The histories that follow the great men (and some
women) throughout the ages don’t give a full accounting of what’s important in
the human story. So much of the work of the human project has been the work
done, mostly by women, of shepherding the children’s learning and growth. It’s
a sinful thing we do, ignoring this work and pretending that the leaders we’ve
erected statues of are what matters most of all. Remember the caretakers.
By
the time I was born my grandparents had retired to California. That was one of
the only states west of where I lived, and therefore was cool as far as I was
concerned. It didn’t hurt that Paso Robles was a beautiful town with a beach
half an hour away. As a child I never associated them with the “old” part of
the country. I always wished we could’ve spent more time in that house on the top
of Cherry Street Hill.
I
grew up, and when I was 26 my wife and I brought our first child to that house
at the age of one month. It was a heavenly feeling, cuddling our little share
of the river of life in that quiet place that brought me a sense of refuge as a
child. The house I took my son to had broadband wireless internet, in addition
to electricity. I felt young, since objectively I was, but also wise, as though
my new little family might be able to absorb some of the accumulated wisdom of
my grandmother’s decades of marriage and motherhood by osmosis in that place. I
don’t know if that happened, but it was fun watching the deer and the scrub
jays.
A
few years ago she left that house, and my grandmother now lives not far from
where my parents live. My parents still live in the house where I went through
adolescence. Each trip there feels like a journey through time as much as
space. The geography is a link to that past part of my life. Likewise my
grandmother connects me to a world that no longer exists visibly, but is in the
core of this world today. Her memory is a bridge between these times.
The
debt of gratitude I owe my grandmother for the work she did raising my father,
my uncles, and my aunt, the way she opened her house and life up to my brothers
and me, and the way she led and cared for this part of my family with quiet
heroism through the 20th Century boggles my mind. I’m grateful for
the way, in her, the past, the present, and the future are linked together.
Happy
birthday, Grandma.
