Next week, our daughter graduates from college.
Earlier this week, I helped prepare my mom’s move into assisted living.
It’s about a five-hour drive each way to Mom’s, not including the time I wasted looking unsuccessfully for an EV charging station that both existed and worked. I made the leap into EV world a little over a week ago—TB will take my hybrid when he starts med school—so I’m learning the ropes. The drive itself is quiet and smooth, which I like, but charging on a road trip is …an issue. I still need someone to explain to me why I could pull up to a gas station I’ve never used before and simply swipe a credit card before getting gas, but a new charging station requires downloading an app, opening an account with a bespoke password and handing over all manner of personal information before I can charge the car. I don’t need separate apps for Sunoco and Exxon.
Anyway.
Mom and TG share a way of being in the world that I can trace through four generations. My grandfather had it, Mom has it, I have it and TG has it. Seeing it at different ages, across genders and generations, is more gratifying than I would have guessed as a younger man. The continuity is reassuring, even if it’s a bit jarring when I see a reaction that I recognize instinctively. And that’s true despite wildly different circumstances. Grandpa dropped out of the ninth grade to work to help his family, eventually getting a union job as an electrical lineman for Detroit Edison. In the early 1960s, Mom convinced him to send her to college—not the usual path for teenage girls in that time and place—by saying that she wanted to marry a doctor and college was where she’d be most likely to meet one. (She chuckled about that for years.) Next week, TG graduates from UMD with all sorts of awards, an honors thesis on Milton and Keats, and a steel-trap mind. Yet, for all that, there’s a discernible personality type running through the generations.
I helped Mom go through boxes—So. Many. Boxes—of stuff that she has accumulated over the years. (For the record, my brother did even more.) She’s moving into a smaller space, so some pruning had to happen. Some stuff was just trash, so that was easy enough, but the family memorabilia just kept coming. We went through a storage unit I didn’t even know she had, several drawers of files and a half dozen or so boxes of old photos. I wound up taking several boxes home with me, as did my brother; we’ll have to sort through them and divvy up the pictures when the dust settles. Pictures from our childhoods are like bulletins from distant worlds. I vaguely remember that world, though everyone seemed so much taller then.
Upon finding some of the older documents, I was struck by how amateurish they looked. They were obviously written on typewriters, which lends an uncanny effect now. Report cards carried handwritten comments. Photos were taken on film, which was expensive, and you didn’t know what a picture looked like until it came back from being developed. That led to a certain imprecision that I don’t see much now. It was an analog time, though nobody called it that. Institutions—banks, insurance companies, schools—were still meaningfully local. The documents reflected that, for better and worse.
Mom always had a strong independent streak. With medical issues forcing greater dependence, the adjustment has been a struggle. She’s not built for dependence. I see strains now that I’d never seen before. She has never been afraid to pull up roots and go somewhere new, but this move isn’t really a choice. That’s new, and it’s hard to watch.
Meanwhile, TG is ready to launch into a world that isn’t ready for her, or worthy of her. I predict that she’ll find a way to reshape it. We’ve been cheering her on since before she knew the word, and we’ll keep cheering until time forces us to stop.
I went to work the next day.
