Greetings, friends. (LX)

Greetings, friends. I’m back in Portland finally. The house in New Hampshire is mostly empty and ready for sale.

Today, I want to talk about how we see reflections of ourselves in the lives of our ancestors. This story has two parts, which hinge on the aftermath of my grandfather Sidney’s passing.

I found a box of mementos of my grandfather in my mother’s dresser drawer. There is an academic medal from Seward Park High School for achievement in science. There is also an identity card in his name from the New York City civil defense force, dated 1956. And there is a button with the Red Cross under the words “I Serve”.

When I stop to think about the disaster preparedness training I’ve done in San Francisco, or the disaster recovery work I had the privilege to do in Haiti — there is no mistaking from whence I come by this inclination. The contents of this box from my mother’s dresser drawer make that plain.

And lil’ four-year-old Schuyler with the fourth-grade reading level? That too was, at least in part, thanks to my grandpa Sid.

I never met the guy, remember — we Ashkenazi Jews only name children for deceased ancestors. Had he been alive when I was born, I would have been named for someone else.

But my mother says her father was mad for language, written or spoken. He delighted in word play, in the well-turned phrase. My grandmother’s letter to the principal of his erstwhile high school says as much — she even mentions an award for Shakespeare performance, which is not bad, as I said, for a kid who spoke no English when he came here. As an adult, Grandpa Sid had a poem or song parody composed for every family occasion.

My grandfather loved language the way I do. I wish I could’ve met him.

As Adah and I were clearing out our mother’s workshop a few weeks ago, we found a copy of the Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, the two volume box set with the micronized print and the magnifying glass.

In 1971, the Oxford University Press announced their publication of a compact edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, compressing the 13 volumes of the original OED down to two volumes, in a box set with a drawer containing a high quality magnifying glass. Apparently, when he found out, Grandpa Sid wanted it like nobody’s business.

No wonder. For his entire life, the Oxford English Dictionary was the sine qua non of language scholarship, but how could a working guy like my grandfather ever lay hands on a copy, outside the reference section of the public library? Forget it. But here, finally, after all these decades, was an edition within modest reach of ordinary folks, and, moreover, one that would fit on his bookshelf.

Apparently, Grandma Lenore told him, no way, forget about it, it was too expensive, too extravagant, and, anyway, what did he need with a curiosity like that? Go to the library if you really need to look something up, Sid. My grandmother was not a killjoy by any means. But she had spent her life as a child of immigrants, as the wife of an immigrant, and as a working parent, and these experiences had ingrained into her a certain thriftiness. That was the end of it.

Or so she thought.

Following many years of long and slow decline caused by rheumatoid arthritis, Grandpa Sidney died in 1974 somewhat suddenly, at the age of 64, of complications due to ulcer surgery. After his death, my mother and her brothers helped my grandmother clean out their house in East Flatbush.

It turned out that my grandfather hoarded the printed word the same way my mother hoarded textiles and sewing notions. His study overflowed with stacks of old newspapers and magazines, with unopened books still in their original paper bags complete with bookstore receipts. My grandfather undoubtedly had also kept every letter anyone had ever written him.

And there, in his study, they found, buried under God knows what all else, a copy of the Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, in its two volume boxed set, with the little drawer containing the magnifying glass.

When Grandma Lenore caught sight of this, she instantly broke down in tears. It was as if, my mother later recalled, she had been confronted with evidence that he had been keeping a mistress behind her back the whole time.

Which, I guess, in some sense, he was. Except that my grandfather’s mistress was the Oxford English Dictionary.

I don’t know if my mother ever told me what happened next, but I can only imagine that she hurried off with the dictionary, partly to take it out of my grandmother’s sight as quickly as possible… but also partly because my mother was probably aware that she was going to have to fight her older brother for it, if she didn’t make it disappear first.

Which brings us to a few weeks ago. Adah could sense my delight at finding the dictionary, and graciously agreed to let me keep it. Some gonif had made off with the magnifying glass, probably years ago. I found another one elsewhere in the house, and put it back in the little cardboard drawer. It made me feel better.

So why do I want this thing, this object of familial infidelity, this infernal thing that made my beloved grandmother burst into tears? Aside from the fact that it is an extremely cool artifact, that is.

We seem to see our ancestors, especially the dead ones, “through a glass darkly,” as Saint Paul is supposed to have said once. We can only surmise their true feelings and intentions, as reflected over time, in the objects they left behind, and the reminiscences of those who knew them.

This dictionary, then, and what it meant to my grandfather… and what that meant to my grandmother… feels like an embodiment of one small part of who I am today. We keep these things because they connect us to who we are. For better and for worse.

There was one other memento of my mother’s father that jumped out at me from that box in her dresser drawer. It was a clipping of a poem, perhaps from a newspaper, dog eared to the point of missing some text along the edges. Someone, presumably my mother, had pasted the clipping to a card, and written underneath: “Found in Sidney S. Burnston’s wallet after he died.”

The poem goes like this:

INVICTUS

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud;
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul!

- William Earnest Henley

This poem is best remembered today as a personal favorite of Nelson Mandela. The title of the poem comes from the Latin. It means “undefeated.”

I don’t think life was particularly easy for my grandfather. My grandmother’s letter testifies to how hard he worked to get ahead in America, how hard the two of them worked to raise three children in New York City. But he was human, like the rest of us.

I imagine my grandfather Sidney riding the bus late in the evening, in the sweltering summer twilight, or perhaps the slushy winter dark, on his way home from his second job teaching English to other immigrant, maybe thinking about the compact OED. While the leather of his wallet slowly wore away the edges of this clipped poem… just as surely as arthritis wore away at his joints, and that ulcer at his stomach.

Even then, he was still the same boy who fled the shtetl, who sailed into Ellis Island to receive a new name and a new life. Still the same young man who sought every honor in high school and college and graduate school. Under the bludgeonings of chance, his head bloody, but still unbowed.

I’m glad my grandfather bought himself a copy of the Compact Edition of the OED. I think he deserved it. I only wish he had told my grandmother about it afterwards.

If you’re reading this, I send you my love. More about my grandmother tomorrow.