Twenty Year Itch

I never intended this blog to be strictly a “Farrago Reminisces” venue, but it seems to have evolved into it on its own.

My elderly father has decided to sell the “summer cottage” he bought in 1977, gutted, spent ten years of mostly solitary labor fixing up, and then moved into with my mother in 1988. He can’t take care of the house or himself any more, so he has moved in with one of my sisters.

A few weeks ago a few of my siblings (I have six) boxed up a bunch of stuff and brought it to where my father is living now, and I visited last weekend. My sister placed a bunch of papers on her kitchen table and told me that I could go through and take anything from the pile that I wanted, and the rest was going to be thrown away.

This pile was mostly letters to and from me when I was in the Air Force over twenty years ago. I had kept everything that was sent to me, a trait I apparently learned form my mother, as she kept a memento of just about everything I did, up to and through college! When I changed duty stations from Montana to Germany I sent home a box of stuff I didn’t need, and in it were all the letters I had received from everybody whoever sent me something.

At some point before she died in 1993 (because if she had done it AFTER she died…well, that would just be CREEPY!) my mother assembled all of the letters to and fro from my first two years in the Air Force, plus everything she received from me when I was in Germany and in college, in roughly chronological order.

And there it sat before me on the table, along with my birth announcement, a photo of me at age four in the local newspaper stealing candy from the “Easter Bunny’s” basket, my high school graduation “snatch ‘n grab” photo, programs from just about every high school concert and play (plus a couple of community theatre performances) I was in, and local newspaper announcements of my two major achievements in the Air Force, namely completing basic training and not being kicked out.

I took these things home and a week later I opened the bag and reorganized everything. Then, because I had nothing else to do, I opened the first letter, sent to me not by anyone in my family, but by someone from the community theatre with whom, maybe three weeks earlier, I had just finished doing a play.

There was the confusion in my family over my new mailing address. Everybody missing me. How strange Christmas was without me. How my parents were coping, as I was the last kid to leave the house, and now it was just the two of them. Christmas of 1983 was the coldest in the history of Chicago, and quite a few other places in the US, but my Jeep CJ-5, being the only vehicle in the family with a manual transmission, was the family’s savior because, with all of the vehicle batteries laid to waste by the bitter cold, my father and one of my brothers-in-law were able to push start the Jeep, and then use it to jump the batteries and start the engines of the other cars.

There was a letter from my youngest sibling, six years older than I, yet to marry at the time, though he and his girlfriend had just set a date, detailing their ordeal on that cold, cold Christmas. I don’t think he has ever written a longer letter, before or since that one.

And there were the letters from a girl I was dating at the time – if two can be “dating” when one is over a thousand miles away for eighteen weeks – who dumped me the day I came home on my first leave.

And there were my letters, my loneliness, my fatigue, my fear of the new life I had just thrust myself into, and the progression of my growing self-confidence as I was molded into the Air Force’s image of an airman.

I only got about halfway through the pile before I realized it was very late, and I was neglecting Mrs. Farrago again. I read one last letter, one last sibling telling me how much I was missed, relating how my mother was telling everyone about all of the excuses my father was making for not taking out the garbage (which, until the day I left for the military, was my job), and it struck me how special it is to have a family who loves me, who experienced a huge void when I left, and who did their best to keep me informed about life back home, and to keep my spirits up in case I felt like giving up.

It certainly didn’t feel like it at the time, but I was quite inundated with mail during basic training. I didn’t get as much mail as some guys, but I got more than others. And even though each letter pretty much told the same stories as the one before it, each was still an interesting slice of my family’s life. Each was still an interesting slice of my life, as I was brought back to 1984 to re-experience some of the same emotions I felt then.

As I re-bagged the stack of envelopes and papers, it occurred to me that I had done just what I had expected twenty-some-odd years ago when I first stuck them in an old shoebox in my dorm room: I pulled them out after a long time. I read them. I quietly reminisced, and, quite unexpectedly, I mourned on some levels for the passing of those days, for the passing of loved ones, for the demise of friendships that could not stand the stretches of silence, nor the tug of life in opposing directions.

And now I reflect on one of my earliest posts on this blog and realize I have learned of yet another fold in the pox that is the “Mid-Life Crisis”: memories you can’t relive but only revisit; people you’ve dismissed (or who’ve dismissed you) who you can’t really get back into your life.

And you feel ever more so the inexorable creep forward that you can’t reverse, nor can you stop and yet remain of this earth.