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Wrong Turns and Detours
Dec. 11th, 2007 10:50 amI meant to write the other night about the anniversary of John Lennon's death. I'm winding up writing about a totally different death in my own family.
Life's funny that way sometimes. Death, too, it would seem.
December 8, 1980 will always be one of those "where were you when" days for me, because the event instantly morphed into coverage of the event for me and a pretty cynical bunch of semi-professional journalists that night. (I wrote about it on the 25th anniversary of Lennon's passing, two years ago.) This year, though, the memory that was jogged in me about it was one about a specific fellow cynic in that newsroom. One known, for all that year and not without affection, as "the Rat," for that was part of her name.
You know the type. The overachieving freshman, who quickly picked up the rules and the moods of the room and tried her damndest to fit into them just slightly ahead of her time. She was "staffing" that night when I was on the copy desk, which for her meant writing headlines, marking up AP stories for the composing room and generally being a gofer.
When the bell went off on the AP machine, though? Her tough cynicism melted as quickly as anyone else's, and one of my associations of that night is of it being the first and only time I ever saw the Rat cry.
----
There wasn't enough in that to eke out a full post on Saturday, but I did find myself in a where-are-they-now moment and googled her. I gave up after a couple of possible hits, through a coincidental distraction: a reference to someone definitely not her in the Social Security Death Index.
Handy gizmo, that. If you are pushing up the daisies, it instantly retrieves your date and town of demise and your state of initial SSN issuance. I checked: my parents are there, all details accurate. I quite probably found my only uncle of the same last name. Then it got dicey, as I went to put in the names of the two cousins (one a little older than my sister, the other a little younger than me) who we completely lost touch with more than 30 years ago....
.... and found that the older of the two died, in California (where we'd last heard they were living), not quite four years ago.
Using the home town and date of death, I did a bit more googling. I have a business name, A&B Something-or-other, which matches the first initials of him and the wife I barely remember him marrying before they checked out of our lives. I have its phone number. I am contemplating a phone call or letter to B, who would shock me to my own death if she remembered me from when I was, maybe, 10.
If you are from a large family, none of this may seem a big deal, but my sister and I, along with the one apparently still-surviving cousin (no Michael S's in the death index fit the bill, thank God), are all that's left of an entire generation of our family, at least that we know of. Googling the name is a bitch, partly because of our genetic predisposition to producing name-changing females (I'm the only boy out of eight rolls of the XY die among our parents, my siblings and our own procreation), and partly because of a Very Famous Person Not Related To Us who was an industrial tycoon and got a town named for him and tends to hog all the Google entries.
I need to spend more time, and better quality, with the immediate and adjacent family I do know, but there is a certain fascination in seeing how someone you are still close to by blood and years has turned out after almost a lifetime of absence.
If it were you, would you want to get such a call or a letter?
Life's funny that way sometimes. Death, too, it would seem.
December 8, 1980 will always be one of those "where were you when" days for me, because the event instantly morphed into coverage of the event for me and a pretty cynical bunch of semi-professional journalists that night. (I wrote about it on the 25th anniversary of Lennon's passing, two years ago.) This year, though, the memory that was jogged in me about it was one about a specific fellow cynic in that newsroom. One known, for all that year and not without affection, as "the Rat," for that was part of her name.
You know the type. The overachieving freshman, who quickly picked up the rules and the moods of the room and tried her damndest to fit into them just slightly ahead of her time. She was "staffing" that night when I was on the copy desk, which for her meant writing headlines, marking up AP stories for the composing room and generally being a gofer.
When the bell went off on the AP machine, though? Her tough cynicism melted as quickly as anyone else's, and one of my associations of that night is of it being the first and only time I ever saw the Rat cry.
----
There wasn't enough in that to eke out a full post on Saturday, but I did find myself in a where-are-they-now moment and googled her. I gave up after a couple of possible hits, through a coincidental distraction: a reference to someone definitely not her in the Social Security Death Index.
Handy gizmo, that. If you are pushing up the daisies, it instantly retrieves your date and town of demise and your state of initial SSN issuance. I checked: my parents are there, all details accurate. I quite probably found my only uncle of the same last name. Then it got dicey, as I went to put in the names of the two cousins (one a little older than my sister, the other a little younger than me) who we completely lost touch with more than 30 years ago....
.... and found that the older of the two died, in California (where we'd last heard they were living), not quite four years ago.
Using the home town and date of death, I did a bit more googling. I have a business name, A&B Something-or-other, which matches the first initials of him and the wife I barely remember him marrying before they checked out of our lives. I have its phone number. I am contemplating a phone call or letter to B, who would shock me to my own death if she remembered me from when I was, maybe, 10.
If you are from a large family, none of this may seem a big deal, but my sister and I, along with the one apparently still-surviving cousin (no Michael S's in the death index fit the bill, thank God), are all that's left of an entire generation of our family, at least that we know of. Googling the name is a bitch, partly because of our genetic predisposition to producing name-changing females (I'm the only boy out of eight rolls of the XY die among our parents, my siblings and our own procreation), and partly because of a Very Famous Person Not Related To Us who was an industrial tycoon and got a town named for him and tends to hog all the Google entries.
I need to spend more time, and better quality, with the immediate and adjacent family I do know, but there is a certain fascination in seeing how someone you are still close to by blood and years has turned out after almost a lifetime of absence.
If it were you, would you want to get such a call or a letter?