My father died almost forty years ago.  I remember that day well. In those days I usually called home every Sunday just to say hello to my folks and to let them know I was fine.  My father’s birthday, his 58th, was on a Friday, but I chose to wait until my regular Sunday phone call on that Sunday to give him my “Happy Birthday Pop.” I never got the chance.  That Saturday I got a phone call from a relative who was making the necessary phone calls.  She is a health care professional and in the professional way they had taught her she said “I’m sorry to have to tell you but your father has expired.” Expired. Like a parking meter his time was up. This wasn’t a complete surprise, it was his sixth heart attack that I knew of and he had been forced to retire early because of his ill health.  Nevertheless he had been in okay health when I had spoken to him the  previous Sunday.  He had a heart attack while driving on his way home after doing some Saturday morning errands.  My foster brothers were in the car with him when he had a massive heart attack, slumped over the wheel, and managed to slow the car down while it  slowly drifted until it hit a tree. The foster kids were unhurt but for a while they were adamant about not going down that street. He had passed away by the time the EMT’s got to him. I dutifully flew back to New York from California and must have sleepwalked my way through all the funeral rituals.  I have little memory of them.

Eighteen years later my mother passed away from lung cancer (she was a heavy smoker) but that’s another story.  As we were packing up the house after her death I ran into a box containing my father’s medals from World War 2. My father had served in Army campaigns in North Africa and Europe. He talked little about his Army experiences except to tell me to take care of my feet because he said, “when your feet hurt nothing else is right.” Aside from this practical advice he did not talk about the war or his experiences there.  In fact my father wasn’t much of a talker at all.  Oh he was polite and loved by all he met, but when alone he was introverted and content to sit and read the newspaper. It was in fact the newspaper that precipitated his applying for his medals.  He read an article about all the World War 2 vets who were owed medals, but who had never claimed them. By this time his health had started to become an issue and he was forced to spend more time away from his work as a building superintendent in Manhattan.  He was eventually forced into an early retirement. At my mother’s urging he applied for his medals and a few months later (this was the military) they arrived. There were more than a half dozen of them.  Most were campaign and service medals that you got just for showing up. One, however was the Bronze Star for heroic action. He never explained what he got it for, although he looked at it and you could tell that it brought back memories, but ones that he preferred to keep to himself. Later he said that he got the medals so that we kids would know that he once was somebody.  We had never thought otherwise.

Several years ago I tried to find out how the Bronze Star was earned by writing to the designated military bureaucracy, but their form letter reply contained no additional information except the campaign and date it was awarded. I guess it will forever remain a mystery. More to the point “Why do I keep my father’s medals so long after he died?” I have never served in the military. I was of an age to serve during the Vietnam War, but first a student deferment and then a high number in Nixon’s draft lottery meant that I never even got close to serving.  Nor have I ever wanted to serve in the military.  As a kid I never had toy soldiers or GI Joe’s and never even pretended I was in the military. I was part of the generation that questioned American participation in the Vietnam War.  I could not imagine being in a war zone where people were shooting at me, trying to kill me, and I would have had to shoot back. As I grew older I have become more and more opposed to war and cognizant of the toll it has taken on the young men and women of our country. Every time there is jingoistic talk and saber-rattling I just shake my head in wonder.  I understand that the medals and the pomp and circumstance around them hide the ugly reality of war so that young people will continue to serve.

So why do I keep my father’s medals? Perhaps because they were my father’s medals.He wanted me to have them. When I pass on they can be thrown out, I doubt that anyone else will want them. For the meantime they can stay in their cardboard box, a silent link between us that matters to me but that no one else cares about.

Normally I follow the philosophy if you haven’t done a particular physical thing in X time (the exact period has varied but it has become smaller as I’ve aged) then you shouldn’t do it again.  The time needed to get back to my former level of fitness and proficiency has lengthened over the years; it is painful to start up again and and the willpower just isn’t there. So why have I recently begun to work out at the gym again when I haven’t done it for several years? Well for one thing my waistline (never my best feature) has expanded somewhat.  As with most things they don’t get better until you take a stand and I refused to buy pants a waist size larger even though my jeans were getting uncomfortable. Secondly as a former senior colleague reminded me as you got older you exercised less to get better and more to just hold on to the health and mobility you have.  Time steals them from you and adds a few aches and pains for good measure. Going to the gym becomes more a defensive battle than an offensive one. Finally the five months pregnant look does not work for a man in his sixties so for all these reasons I had to to something about my physical fitness. One thing I have learned however is that you don’t decide to go to the gym while you are in bed in the morning.  The bed not the gym always wins. You have to decide the night before or have a regular schedule so that your rationalizing mind doesn’t have a chance to convince you not to go.

Before I retired and moved away my college’s free fitness center was my chosen site for exercise. The old ones were dark, dingy and smelly but there were several periods when I used them frequently.  The latest one is bright, cheery and quite a bit larger.  It has more exercise machines, free weights, treadmills and the latest cardio equipment.  I hated it.  For me to feel myself virtuous in exercising the space itself had to be something to overcome and the new one wasn’t.  The other drawback to working out at a college facility is all the buff, athletic and fit young people who are around all the time.  All of them were more body conscious than I and some were extreme.  The sports team people were bad enough but my college seemed to attract many of the athletic type who had played sports in high school even if they did not in college. They were certainly polite enough not to say anything or look at me in wonder or amusement and I probably earned some street cred when I ran into a student I knew.  However I have eyes too and the difference between fit bodies and my own was painfully obvious no matter how much I trained. To parade my imperfections to all of them required the lack the self-consciousness that I had at the beginning but which I was losing as time went on and the discrepancies got larger.

So in my new retired life I had to go looking for a gym in my new hometown.  I chose a Planet Fitness although it offered fewer of the amenities, personal trainers, classes and free weights than the others.  Instead it had row upon row of treadmills, stationary bikes and elliptical machines and enough Cybex exercise machines for the little muscle training I planned to do.  Moreover the clientele although fitter than I were not the hardcore gym types one saw at the other gyms. At this gym they called such people “lunks” and promised to be a judgment free zone. My first day was hard and I was so sore afterward that I wanted to crawl up into a ball and die.  My son reminded me that I still had a lot to live for so I have been going back every other day for the last week or so. I have my Ipod full of R&B and on shuffle so I spend my time on the exercise bike and the Cybex machines simply rocking out to the return of the sixties or Tina Turner or James Brown. I still have to adjust the resistance on the machines down but not nearly as much as when I was at my college facility. There are more people of my fitness level (which is to say none at all) around and many more approaching or surpassing my age.

The human body’s ability to adapt to the physical circumstances you subject it to, is still amazing to me. If you want a lifestyle that just sits around with little activity, it is quite willing to adapt to that.  If however you want to have a lifestyle with a bit more activity than that, it will adjust accordingly.  It is just these periods of transition that are hardest. Though I miss having woods just a short jog away I must admit that I didn’t take full advantage of them when I had them.  As with most things you don’t miss your water until the well runs dry, but as Darwin showed us it is not the strongest or the fastest who survive.  It is those who are most willing to adapt to environmental changes who last the longest. I am going back to the gym to try to adapt and last long.

In March this year we took a vacation to St. Croix during what would have been spring break at my old teaching institution.  It was my first “spring break” vacation to a warm weather climate after thirty years of being stuck in the Northeast while I was teaching.  Every year I watched students take their well deserved break, many to warmer climes, while I stayed in often cold or snowbound Maine. I usually had to grade papers, to recover from the first two thirds of the semester, to prepare for the next third (which always flew by) and try to squeeze a little scholarship out before students returned, many looking tanned and impossibly healthy. This year however I got to go away for my first ever  trip to the Caribbean.

The choice of St. Croix was not arbitrary but the result of a genealogical puzzle I was trying to figure out. Families are intricate webs of secrets.  Information is withheld, lies are told, feelings are suppressed and secrets are kept, all so people can play the roles actor and audience have agreed upon. My family certainly was. My father did not share the same surname with his siblings and indeed no one else in my family.  He passed away long ago but his birth certificate was among the papers I had come into when my mother passed away some twenty years ago. The certificate listed a biological grandfather with a surname he had passed down to my father and me.  This biological grandfather was different from the man my father’s mother had married a few years later and the only grandfather I had known when I was a child. As I was an adult when I learned this I understood about teen unwed parenthood, you know baby mama’s and daddy’s. My grandmother had a youthful indiscretion that resulted in my father before marrying a man with whom she spent the rest of his life.

My grandmother passed away fifteen years ago at the ripe old age of 94 and my cousin in going through her papers found my grandmother’s baptismal certificate. This contained a shock. The surname of my biological grandfather listed on my father’s birth certificate was the same as my grandmother’s birth surname on her baptismal certificate. This raised all sorts of questions. Was my father the product of some incest between my grandmother and perhaps a cousin?  According to the birth dates on my father’s birth certificate both my grandmother and my biological grandfather were just teenagers at the time of my father’s birth. The only other record I subsequently found about my biological grandfather was the 1920 census which listed him at a hospital in New York City. All of the principals in this drama had passed on and so I was at a dead end in learning more about my biological grandfather. While they were alive they had never mentioned anything about it and in fact kept all information secret from the grandchildren. Perhaps they thought it a family scandal that should be hushed up.  In any event it was in the distant past and not a thing you told your grandchildren about.

My grandmother’s baptismal certificate opened a new path of inquiry however. It showed that she was born in St. Thomas in what were at the time the Danish Virgin Islands.  Her father’s first name was Louis and her mother was Lucy.  Further complicating matters my great grandmother had done the same thing as my grandmother.  She had had a child by a different man than she subsequently married. My grandmother was born in 1902 and my great grandmother had married a different man in 1909.  They migrated to New York City and my grandmother took her stepfather’s surname. I can trace my step great grandfather’s household through the 1920, 1930 and 1940 censuses. When my grandmother as a teenager gave birth to my father her parents stood by them and raised my father in their household when my grandmother married a couple of years later and started her own household. My father of course knew his mother and in fact they had a rather warm relationship the rest of their lives.

Okay I knew something of my father, my father’s mother, my father’s mother’s mother and my father’s mother’s stepfather from the U.S. census.  However I knew nothing about my grandmother’s biological father Louis because there was no evidence about him in the U.S. records or anywhere else outside of St. Thomas. So my vacation in St. Croix was partly to allow me to find out more about Louis and indeed my surname in the Virgin Islands. On St. Croix the library that contains genealogical information is located on a former sugar plantation that has been converted to a museum about thirty minutes outside the capital Christiansted. At the library I found nothing about the Louis I was looking for but I found a mention of another Louis with my surname except spelled with two n’s instead of the one with which I spell my name. Unfortunately according to his birth date he is about 25 years younger than the Louis I seek. I also find that there is only one prominent family with the two n’s version of my surname and they seem to be white. The patriarch of that family was a wealthy merchant and a prominent colonial official who even served as governor of the colony for a month or two. I don’t know if there is any relation between that family and mine.  Given what race mixing occurred during such situations there is no telling if a Sally Hemmings-like situation developed at some point.

We take the short flight over to St. Thomas where there is a Caribbean Genealogical Library that has access to many databases about Virgin Islands genealogy. The library is about 10 minutes outside of the capital Charlotte Amelie  in a small strip mall on a hill. The director there is very helpful and we look at several St. Thomas databases including local censuses in Danish, church records,  property records, baptismal records and finally cemetery records. My wife, the director and I divide up the search with census records checked by the director, property records checked by my wife and church baptismal and death records falling to me.  We confirm the baptismal records of which I already have copies and then proceed to search for my surname in the others.  While we turn up some scattered records with my surname in the property records they are few and far between. By chance I get my ‘AHA” moment in the cemetary records.  There amidst a few other mentions of my surname I find Louis, spelled Lewis.  He is the right age and has died in 1917 at age 40. He died in the same year my father (his grandson) was born in New York City, likely never knowing about him. There is something “circle of life-ish” about that.

So, I returned from vacation not only rested, tanned and relaxed but with several other pieces of the puzzle that is my genealogy. I still do not know how all the pieces fit but I will keep trying to find out. I urge you to find out about yours while the people who you could ask are still alive.  It is much harder to piece it all together when they are gone. Unfortunately we usually don’t get interested in this stuff until we get older and they are gone. And families are well, families.