Imagine your life being connected to a National Monument...

[HereSince1628]

Last edited Tue Aug 4, 2015, 03:34 PM - Edit history (1)

Well, a funny thing happened to the life of the SO.

The SO grew up, shall we say, in modest means. The child of a woman whose husband, a WWII medic and postwar railroad maintenance man was killed by a train.

She lived at the south end of a block of very working class row houses, divided into 3 cold water flats each heated by an oil or wood stove. Hey, this is the late 40's through the 60's, no hot water, no central heat... hmm. No, not the sort of place where A/C and color tv made early appearances.

Her grandfather, a Slovak immigrant a fruit peddler and sometimes painter, had come to own this address, not on the other side of the tracks, but 'between the tracks' that bounded the west and eastside of a very working class neighborhood named Pullman. His dream was to rent the 3rd floor to a border, and to put a deli in the basement.

But, life happened, and he lent his widowed daughter and her child (my SO) the first floor...roughly 350 square ft.

The SO was -very- ashamed of this place. Three families ended up living in a space that, properly should have been devoted to 1 family, and perhaps, a border.

The nuns at nearby Holy Rosary Irish had conceptions about people who lived in these places. A proper postwar family had a finished basement...with a ping-pong table. If you called such a place a home, you'd have a chance in life. No father? No finished basement? Well, girls, we invite you to become a School Sister of Notre Dame.

Ever humiliated, the SO wanted out. OUT!!! And she found a way out of that 3 room cold water flat. Out to University of Chicago and then University of North Carolina...and into a career as a college prof. She swore she'd never go back. She swore she'd never tell colleagues where she came from...and she didn't.

And then a VERY weird thing happened. That old embarrassing neighborhood decaying against even more decaying old factory buildings...

By GOD! It became a United States National Monument!!!!!!!!

We went back yesterday. First of the month there are tours conducted by volunteers who still live in Pullman.

And very very strangely, this couldn't be more coincidental...the volunteer leading the half of the group we were divided into...LIVES IN THAT OLD END OF THE ROW HOUSE THE SO GREW UP IN!!!!!!!

Really! So after a walk about, the SO got a chance to go back inside that building that could not be acknowledged, that represented the shameful origin of her past.

What a DAY! And as if ordained by fate, yesterdays storms and tornadic weather passed by to the north...

The SO, after 50 years, re-connected to her roots and got to bury her shame.

Her roots, By GOD!!!!!!, -ARE-a National Monument!!

Thank you, Pullman Civic Association and President Obama.

[Kali]

1. what a great story

hope your SO is enjoying the lighter feelings

[HereSince1628]

2. I think she is better ... for the first time she's not flatly negative about her origins.

We've had long discussions in the past, unsuccessful attempts to get to her to measure the distance she's come as success, rather than a reaction to the random injustice of being born into such circumstance.

I was first in Pullman ~20 years ago, long before it was really seen as 'a special place'. Even while attempts had begun to save it, your arrival was announced when the conductor would call out "Bum Town!" for the 115th street stop. Burnouts and shuttered doors and broken windows were in abundance.

It was easy to see how that was a place to run away from, rather than a place for her to say with any pride, "My story began here". Yet it had. And her story is just fine. Advanced degree, college prof, author, officer in professional organizations, traveler to every continent on the planet except Antarctica... all usually told from the point of view of running away from the geographic focus of her matriculation into American life.