September 2, 2010 - Breakfast

Yesterday I went through old yearbooks on the web. I kept finding family. I found my father, my mother, my grandmother, and her father, Harry, whose senior picture as captain is reproduced here. The 1908 yearbook language is all college code: everyone has a nickname in quotes. "No one could say how the room was flooded but 'Hockers' Trabman was seen in the vicinity." Things like that. Jocularity and sentimentality were the full range of the appropriate. There are no women except in jest.

Harry, or, apparently, "Bobby," was the captain of the (Penn) State College football team in 1907 and 1908, an all-around, all-star athlete. He must have been tough; this was in the era when players were often killed.

Given the importance of the sport to the growing nation my great-grandfather was likely a little famous, but not Harvard/Yale famous, or Bradbury Robinson famous. I'm sure he was mentioned in a number of newspapers and small-run newsletters with titles like Collegiate Gridiron Observations, and he obviously mattered to the fellows at State, for there aren't many full-page pictures of this size in the yearbook. If I gave even the tiniest shit about football I might be more interested. That said, the guy is responsible for one-eighth of my genes, so there's a local angle.

In that era there was no NFL; there weren't even any "college" films of the sort where young men in raccoon coats played pranks. That had to wait for a few decades. All glory, he must have known, would be constrained to his undergraduate years. His last two seasons were 6–4 and 5–5. Not embarrassing, but not particularly historic.

He studied to be a mining engineer and became one. He married and moved to Montana; my grandmother either came along as an infant or was born there. She told us that she remembered her mother trading fish with the Indians. I don't know why Harry wasn't involved with the War (I'm not even sure he didn't serve). Perhaps mining was an essential wartime industry.

Somewhere in the '10s or '20s something bad happened in one mine--some sort of collapse or crash. They put him on a train, which rattled him until it finished the job of ruining his legs, and after some time in hospitals they moved back east. He went to work as an architect--his father had been some kind of general contractor--and spent the rest of his life in arm braces. He died young, perhaps in his 50s. I understand he was an oddity in the town, being out and about while crippled. More proper to stay in a wheelchair with a lap blanket. That's all I know about Harry.

Yesterday I kept looking at that picture of my father, the one that looks almost exactly like me. One-half of the genes. He's the man who taught me to eat.

When I first started writing, in my 20s, all I wrote about was family. I wanted to figure it out. How you pass things on, what gets passed on. What it means to look alike. Why we were always fighting. I experienced family as a kind of Stockholm syndrome; I was looking for a way to escape, to get away from the situation and no longer feel a hostage. You'd think I would have had enough yet in October they will mix [Wife] and I in a dish and we'll try, with some real desperation, to start this thing over. To keep the ball rolling.

As this process drags on I'm waiting, waiting for an epiphany of love and responsibility but instead we keep getting nurses calling us to say, "I'm sorry, but." Partly the regret is due to selfish apelike desire, but it's easy to rationalize it because it's not for more food or for sex, but for a place to put all this love. A child will be a place to store it. Living proof that love is real. If I was brave I would put it somewhere else, like into my writing, or by taking in foster children or providing a porch for lost souls. But I'm not brave, so I hoard these feelings and hope I will be able to redeem them. I am sure that if I was thin I would already be a father. That is one fantasy, that there is some great untapped vein within me; I need only do enough work and when we finally do tap that vein angels will fly up out of the darkness and perch in the trees. You go down into the mine the ex-captain of the football team. Later you're on a train with your wife and daughters, headed back to Pennsylvania, on arm braces. Ah.

Researching a piece I plan to write I found that one of the competitors from The Biggest Loser was a graduate of my high school. That sent me on another quest and I found all the photos from my high-school yearbook for 1991, the year ahead of me. I saw the photo of one friend who was a good teen poet and handsome as hell. I never heard from him after graduation, so I searched for him, his full name. He's a physical therapist in Philadelphia who works with stroke victims. I clicked one more link and saw that he had graduated college in 2005--so perhaps it was a second degree, or maybe he dropped out the first time. The head shot was of a very big man who'd hit about 350 or 400, bald with hair tufting out the side of his head. That head had once been angular but in the more recent picture it's sort of soft and pyramidal. A huge, wide grin. He looks happy in the picture. I wonder how he's doing. I won't write him, though, because what would I say?

Weight: 308.25 lbs