Here's To Broken Homes

For as long as I have given it any thought, I have always assumed I would never know much about my maternal grandfather's history. My mother, the youngest of his children, always said she knew virtually nothing other than that he was orphaned at a very young age and that there was some family connection with the Cleveland, Ohio area. I came to believe he had been born in the Cleveland area, been orphaned somewhere or other and ended up in Nebraska, who knows how? According to my sister, Rosemary, my mother used to speculate that her father had come to Nebraska on one of the orphan trains that transported as many as a quarter million orphan children westward at the end  of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries.

Then my sister, Roberta, using an online subscription site called Ancestry.com, recently discovered a gold mine of information going back to my great grandparents marriage in Poland and their arrival in the US in 1873. She learned the basic outline of my grandfather's family history, and we now know that his parents did settle first in the area of Berea, Ohio and that the entire family was living in Howard County Nebraska by the time of the 1880 census. My grandfather was born in Nebraska in 1883, and both of his parents died in 1886. Roberta learned the name of the family who became my grandfather's guardians, Peters, which just happens to have been my grandmother's maiden name. Roberta says, however, that my grandmother was from a different Peters family. (I was disappointed; she was pleased. I wanted the soap opera story of my grandfather marrying his guardian's daughter.)

At the same time, a second cousin of ours who lives in California, whose existence was unknown to all of us, and probably using some of the same online resources, did the same thing. This second cousin, Diane, then started a Pilakowski Family Group on Facebook which is in the process of becoming a fascinating clearing house for collecting information and filling in the historical gaps in the family record.

Now, believe it or not, all of that is a lead in to the title of this post. My original intention was to record some of my memories of my grandfather, Stanley Pilakowski. I planned to begin by stressing that what I write are only my personal memories and probably have very little to do with the real person that was my grandfather. I was, after all, only 13 years old when he died in 1958, at the age of 75 (I have always thought he was in his middle 80s when he died) and, leaving aside the more profound question of whether anybody can truly know anyone else, how can a kid of that age know his grandfather? Especially a grandfather as taciturn as I remember Stanley to have been (again, I stress, that is just my memory).

Then I reflected on kids today who seem to me to be much more aware of the issues adults deal with than I ever was. I always think of a Brazilian friend and her two sons, Lucas and Caio. When I first met Monica in 2005, her sons were 15 and 13. Monica had gone through an unpleasant divorce from an unpleasant husband and had a long history of bi-polarity that had forced her to give up her teaching job and may have even required hospitalization at one time or another. (Note that, even though the divorce had been unpleasant, the boys retained a relationship with their father as well as with Monica.) One of the sweetest things I have ever seen a fifteen year old do in my life was when that first visit was over and everyone was taking leave. In that muted, mildly-melancholic moment, Lucas, who was already taller than his mother, stood with his arm around her waist and unobtrusively leaned over and kissed her on the top of the head as if to say he understood everything she was feeling. (I am in the way of an old guy who repeats his stories. I can't swear I haven't posted something about this story before.)

It is probably a stretch to say that Lucas's development into a sensitive and virtually ideal teenager was the result of his parents' divorce and his mother's mental issues, but I think it is reasonable to say that his empathetic qualities were given an opportunity to develop early because he wasn't shielded from the world of adult issues.