Take a Picture, It’ll Last Longer

So far I’ve managed to stave of one scourge of advancing age: an interest in genealogy, the bane of librarians everywhere. I don’t have a family, on either side, that shares lots of lore or an interest in the past.

I do have a tiny cardboard box, not even big as shoebox, that’s three-fourths full of family photos. I decided to sift through it recently. Sometimes I go on nostalgia benders. Forgive me. This photo from June 1962 is of my dad and two of his sisters. It looks like they’re going to a prom, though at 21, my father would be too old for that. I don’t think he finished high school anyway.

I could be wrong because like I said we don’t share pasts, especially not romantic tales, but I swear that my mom met my dad through these two sisters. She lived in the same apartment building in NW Portland as they did and they convinced her to come home with them to San Francisco and introduced her to their brother. But if I’m remembering correctly they claimed to be French, not Mexican, using their mother’s supposed French Basque background to their advantage. My grandmother, who died before I was born, had the maiden name of Arregui, which is, indeed, Basque.

The last time I saw the oldest sister (I originally thought this was their mother because she seems older, but I don't she would've been alive, plus there was a big gap in the ten childrens’ ages) was in 1986 on a rare Northern California visit. My sister and I spied a prescription bottle that read Belia. Huh? We knew her as Velia and had no idea it was spelled with a B. She died in the early ‘90s because she wouldn’t get her gangrenous diabetic foot amputated. When I was in college, this story was so absurdly third world that I was distanced from it. I still am, even though it is stored deep in my brain when against better judgment I’m eating some billion calorie foodie-approved artisanal doughnut—or a Denny’s maple-bacon sundae, for that matter. I need my feet!

Names are funny. I always thought my uncle, my dad’s big brother, was named Pete. Not so. When we were grown, my sister and I found his navy peacoat in a closet with the name Alfren written inside. Huh? Pete was just a nickname, something to do with soap with a goat logo. I don’t know. But the uncommon name threw my sister and I into fits of laughter. We joked, “He’s not just your friend, he’s our friend” pronouncing our like Al, as if we had a heavy accent of indeterminate origin. Suburbs are boring, ok?

That’s Pete with a guitar and my dad, young and in trousers in Napa, sometime in the late ‘40s. It’s the only photo I have of my dad as a kid. Technically, I have one other but it has faded into washed-out sepia and white flares.

Names are funny. I always thought my uncle, my dad’s big brother, was named Pete. Not so. When we were grown, my sister and I found his navy peacoat in a closet with the name Alfren written inside. Huh? Pete was just a nickname, something to do with soap with a goat logo. I don’t know. But the uncommon name threw my sister and I into fits of laughter. We joked, “He’s not just your friend, he’s our friend” pronouncing our like Al, as if we had a heavy accent of indeterminate origin. Suburbs are boring, ok?

  

That’s Pete with a guitar and my dad, young and in trousers in Napa, sometime in the late ‘40s. It’s the only photo I have of my dad as a kid. Technically, I have one other but it has faded into washed-out sepia and white flares.

 

This is my mom and dad the year they got married (my mom would probably by mortified to see this—I hope she’s not googling me even though I know she does). My father looks so much older and mature than he did in the photo with his sisters only taken eight year previously. Aviators and a big moustache will do that. By this point, he’d already been married, divorced and had a son that no one ever talked about (the last photo I saw of him was in the early ‘90s and he looked like a beardless member of ZZ Top). My mom was still a teenager, just barely. I’ve never seen a wedding photo of my parents. I know there was no white gown, just a City Hall ceremony. The Manhattan Marriage Bureau’s 2009 revamp actually looks pretty cool.

Out of nowhere I remembered the surname of one of my dad’s sisters, the one above in the pale blue puffy dress, which is surprising since the last time I saw her and husband and her son who was a few years older than me had to have been in the late ‘70s when I was in first grade. We stopped by their apartment in San Francisco and I hung out with the cousin in his room and he had his own television (!). He gave me a choice of things to watch and I picked “monkeys” because I thought it would be a cartoon. It turned out to be live action grown men, “The Monkees,” which I’d never seen and didn’t like but couldn’t verbalize because I’d made the choice. I stick with my choices.

I Googled this aunt’s name and found a brief obituary for the other sister pictured in the sheath dress. I’m kind of shocked that she only died a year-and-a-half ago. At least a decade ago I’d heard that her daughter who is maybe two years older than me and that I haven’t seen since I was in fourth grade when she briefly lived with us (and left behind underwear, specifically a pair of Sylvester and Tweetie bikinis, which I thought were shockingly skimpy since I’d been raised on big granny panties) was still living at home and taking care of her mom who wasn’t well.

The clue gleaned from this short write-up was that Alfren (they misspelled it Alfern) was alive and in Idaho. He’s the only one in the family who has any genealogy inclinations and had at one point reached out to other Arreguis in northern California and had some crazy story about his grandfather being abducted by Indians from a fair in Texas in the 1800s that he sent in a hand-written letter to my sister when we were still teens. I’ve always wanted to know more and figured one day, when I was older and cared about such things, i.e. now, I would get back in touch.

He would be somewhere in his 70s, which isn’t ancient by today’s standards. I mean my grandma is in her mid-70s and she’s very active. But no one makes it out of their 60s on my dad’s side of the family, many lose out decades sooner.

And true to form, I can see that Pete/Alfren just died on March 13. The only evidence being some lame, automated memorial service web page thing.

Neither close nor estranged, just neutral and living on separate coasts, I did see my dad in his medically induced coma. Cancer, heart attacks, diabetes had all taken their toll, but really it was the diabetes that broke everything. I continue to drink (many beers today) eat sandwiches (lobster roll this afternoon) and sweets (none this weekend—I do keep desserts to a bare minimum), which could easily put me in the same position when I’m 61. Oh well. At least I still have feet.

I don’t like thinking about the tubes, forced breathing, clammy arms that twitched in pain despite the sedation. What I’d also like to forget but can’t is his wife wearing the Hairy Otter shirt down to her knees in the hospital cafeteria, even if it was the only comic relief. She turned off the ventilator days after my sister and I returned to our respective homes in NYC and the UK. We spoke very briefly six-and-a-half years ago, how she was donating his insulin to a homeless shelter, how there was no will and how there was not a single thing left to my sister or I beyond the photos in my not-quite-full box (even when my grandpa, my mom’s dad died in the early ‘90s I received a 1.75 liter bottle of peach Schnapps, a grocery bag of generic cigarettes and a shitload of colored pencils—he had a thing for coloring the comics in the newspaper).

What? Not even the bandito flowerpot with the cactus shooting out of his ceramic pants? She said he’d be cremated (everyone on both sides of my family always has gone this route) and that there would be a memorial service on Halloween because it was his favorite holiday (news to me) and emailed (and mail mailed a bubble-wrapped, framed version that’s sitting at the bottom of the box) a photo used during said service. It’s been sitting in my My Pictures folder ever since. I briefly glanced at it at the time and I’ve never had the nerve to look at it since. Part of me wants to delete it, part of me feels tormented by the thumbnail mingling with my pics of meals eaten for over half a decade.

Ok, it’s pretty hilarious and awesome and so very him. I feel kind of relieved looking at it now. A theme park, cargo shorts, edges fading to white. This is my heritage. Another truth is that even cancer and chemo do not cause weight loss in my family. A shot in front of a Tree of Life, whatever that is–seriously, what is that?–at the Animal Kingdom in Orlando? Right before my father was admitted to the hospital, he and his wife were scheduled to take a cruise to Mexico. I don’t think my father had ever set foot in Mexico before, and clearly he never did. But Florida, a Disney compound in Florida, of course. He was American to the core. I hope he ate at Yak and Yeti.

When you see me chasing chain restaurants all over New Jersey when I live in the epicenter of Brooklyn gastronomic hipness, I’m simply following my genes. Battered coconut shrimp, fried bacon-wrapped scallops and sizzling platters are my familiy's legacy. I just hope I can keep both of my feet in the process.

Bizarrely, the most recent photo I have of my father and I together is from my high school graduation in 1990. I’m totally eye-rolling. There’s frayed, purple hair underneath the mortarboard. We only lived in this house briefly, less than a year before my mom moved out with no warning (at 39, barely older than I am now), but I do remember the framed Mount Hood Festival of Jazz poster above the antiquated TV, my gifted Doc Marten motorcycle boots that I tried on in ’98 before moving to NYC and couldn’t get zipped up over my fat calves and sold to crusty punks at a garage sale and saw them wearing the very next day while panhandling outside of my workplace, but I’d forgotten about the poop brown molded carpet and my dad’s semi-mullet. Some memories are best left in the past.