Things Are Seldom What They Seem

Things are seldom what they seem. Last weekend, before I noticed the light moving imperceptibly towards the equinox, we were visited by an ice storm. This event in early February will not be the last appearance of winter. This is, after all, New England. But it made a great impression and has stayed with me. The words ice storm are two of the most fearsome in the English language. Unlike snow which generates a variety of cheerful pastimes, ice is isolating. It comes down as freezing rain with that characteristic brushes-on-a-snare drum patter, covers everything in sight and remains until the temperature decides to climb. This time, it coated not only the steps, the driveway, and the road, but also every twig on every limb of every tree, as well as every blade of straw that once was grass. In the aftermath of the storm, the sky was robin’s egg blue and the sun was strong, but the ice fought back. The ice on the trees and grasses refracted the sunlight so that sparkles of red, blue, green, orange, and yellow flickered like Christmas decorations. I caught myself floating downriver into this lazy simile and took a step back. It’s not nature that imitates the garlands and tinsel you can buy in Marshall’s in December. It’s Christmas that learns its tricks from the ice sparkling in the forest, the same ice that seems so treacherous. It carries both the beautiful and the dangerous on its slick surface.

Things are seldom what they seem. This winter, warming myself at the hearth of the flaming ceramic logs in the propane stove, I decided to engage the services of a professional genealogist to help me find out more about my maternal grandfather who died very young in 1924. With her help, I am unearthing passenger lists, census records, marriage and death certificates. I was very energized when I began this project, but now I notice an unexpected sadness washing over me. The more I imagine the dislocation my fourteen year old grandfather must have felt when he left Iasi in Romania in 1886, the more it hurts my stomach. I’m not even sure why.

Somehow, he made it to the passenger ship Lincoln, sailing from Hamburg to Liverpool and then to the SS Baltic from Liverpool to New York. The ship manifests list four people I’ve never heard of traveling with Grandpa Louis in addition to his parents, Jacob and Raizel, and his brother and sister. Those four people, a 30-year old woman with three children, all have Grandpa’s surname. It’s an out-of-body experience. It has something to do with all of them approaching me out of the foreign damp, remaining phantoms, vague presences that I can’t sit down next to over steaming tea in a glass, an oniony bialy. Grandpa is like the colored lights bouncing off the ice. I can’t capture him. I can’t have him. He’s not a pile of powdery bones. He’s someone who once lived in Iasi and on Ludlow street, hungry and tired, cursing and crying. A darkness at the dinner table according to my mother.

How fluid our lives are. At night, the storm is nightmarish, frightening. The next morning, the sun reveals the entire spectrum of colors waiting to be liberated from the ice. The same ice. You think you know at least the broad outline of where your family came from and who they were; then four people sidle out of the shadows and change the entire arc of your history. I’ve decided, because it’s in my best interest, that my great-grandfather Jacob, did not have a second wife and more than one arrangement of children. Are you following this? I’ve decided instead that he had a brother who came to New York ahead of his family to scope out a job and two rooms in a fourth floor walk-up. But who knows? I have no idea. Maybe he died in Romania. Third cousins are slippery, elusive. They flicker on and off. Sometimes, they light up reliably like electric lights and sometimes they appear only in intervals of magic when the sun hits the trees at just the right angle. Now you see it, now you don’t.

Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.