Today is the day I find myself smack up against that well-known tune. You know the one. The song from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band that we grew up listening to somewhat dismissively, aligning with the embedded lyrics: “many years from now.”
Well, friends, many years from now is now for yours truly.
Perfect timing1, as this past week was spent visiting my father in the hometown, driving along the country backroads, steeped in nostalgia. A tour of ye olde salad days. Fond and not-so-fond memories clashing for top billing. Some of them involving my grandfather, known to me as Opa, and to the village at large as “Old Doc Freisinger.”
It’s likely that my love for reading—and later, writing—found its start nestled in my grandfather’s lap.
Looking at this picture, you’d guess the old man is well into his sixties, but, nope. Opa is a mere fifty-five in this photo2. As of today, I am nine years older than the man in this photograph. Yikes!
My Opa was a rare breed. Forced out of Austria after Anschluss, he worked as the house physician at State School (NY State Training School for Boys, founded by Eleanor Roosevelt), before establishing his private practice. In addition to practicing medicine, Opa was a composer and a visual artist, finding solace in painting alpine- and animal-themed portraits. He built my father an elaborate railroad village for his Lionel trains, spanning three ping-pong tables, and when our family returned to America in 1967, he presented my sister and me with a handmade dollhouse as big as a washing machine.
But, in addition to his artistic nature, he had a hell of a temper. My father tells of epic screaming matches between his parents (Oma was quite the force, herself.)3 I recall slamming doors. German swear words. But never launched my way. The only time Opa ever scolded me was, looking at my unkempt fingernails and declaring them “claws,” he gave me what amounted to my first manicure—peppered with shaming admonishments to clip and file regularly.
Ah, but back to the present. No visit home is complete without a cursory stop at the family plot, where Helmut and Erna are “resting” eternally.
And I know, underneath this marker, Opa’s bones churn due to the typo on the headstone—an apostrophe sloppily mis-chiseled into the rock. In a way, I feel my work as an editor is an attempt to rectify this boo-boo. Reclaim Opa’s legacy as an exacting, excruciatingly obsessive artist. Also, I (mostly) keep my claws clipped and filed.
Opa died at sixty-six, while undergoing a heart procedure (he’d had several heart attacks by then)4. My eighty-seven-year-old father, who is struggling with health issues himself, is well-aware that his generation left many a widow in their wake. In the journal where he records the ingestion of his various pills, he’s penned a list of all his old friends, marking their individual passing with a cross. “Only a couple left,” he laments.
Oh well. Happy birthday to me.
Also, it isn’t lost on me that only half the Beatles made it sixty-four. So there’s that.
It also being Father’s Day and all.
I know this because I am two-and-a-half here, on a trip to the States from Austria, where we were living at the time.
No wonder I tend to write about domestic discord above all else.
Oma, however, lived to 102! Was it spite?
Happy Birthday, Suzy! And I'm the same age now as your Opa was in that photo. It feels youngish to me, lol. And welcome back to the area (I'm just on the border of your salad days roaming)!
Happy birthday, Suzy. Love this telling of the family stories.