Rediscovering Roots

It’s the album I keep coming back to. Home and unpacked, gathering ourselves back into work routines and email flow, back in California after a long weekend visiting family in Missouri. My mind keeps turning to the album that we brought back with us, the photos of my parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, snapshots of lives going back almost a century.

The meat market, for instance. My grandfather was a butcher – did Army service during World War II as a meat inspector – and settled with my grandmother in a small town in Illinois to open his own business. It prospered and grew into a small grocery. I’d heard of it in sketchy detail from my mother over the years, but for the first time this weekend I saw it: grandfather (long passed away, died when I was three) smiling in his apron, my grandmother, blocked shelves full of brightly colored cans and boxes. Best I can tell, this was sometime in the late 1940’s or early 1950’s.

Owning a business myself, I can testify to how stressful and difficult it can be at times. But we have it so easy compared to what my grandfather must have shouldered. He worked damned hard and made real sacrifices for his family. I wish fate had given me the chance to know the man.

I come from a place – Florida – that seems to attract in droves people who just seem to want to get lost. Orlando in particular is a very anonymous town, much to its detriment. And growing up there, I didn’t grow up with much sense of my roots, or much value of them for that matter. I didn’t know much about my family history, and what I did know wasn’t always accurate. My wife has said several times that it seems like I emerged from pod at age 25, with an almost complete absence of anything before that. And I could never really argue her point.

Earlier this year we began reaching out to extended family, my last remaining grandparent, uncles, cousins in Illinois, Missouri and Minnesota. We asked questions, shared what we knew, reestablished ties, built family relationships anew. We started to understand some things and piece history together and began to confront cold truths that couldn’t be spun away. We repaired a lot of damage.

So last week, after a considerable amount of time spent discussing it, Kristi and I took a flight to Kansas City to visit my grandmother on her 82nd birthday and to see my uncle and aunt. I hadn’t seen any of them in over 20 years; the last time I’d set foot in Missouri and met any of them, I was 21 years old and just getting started in adult life. Now I’m married, older, with broader perspective (I hope) of people, things and of what’s important.

It was an emotional weekend spent talking a lot about the past, the missing years, and everything leading up to them. Also about the future: future visits, trips, plans, understandings. Again, a lot of time asking and answering questions and putting the pieces back together.

We came back home on a late flight on Monday night, a large cardboard box full of family history tucked under the seat in front of me. Mostly this large collection of pictures, each carefully captioned and annotated, generations of family that I never knew except as names.. and even then, mostly only in the last year or so. Generations of good hard working people, in moments captured looking ahead as well as rooted in the times. The story of us.

Kristi and I drove back from the San Francisco airport in the rain – the first real storm of the season – and talked about family and everything that had transpired over the weekend.

For the first time, Kristi really feels like she has in-laws. I feel like I have roots. It’s a rewarding feeling, a full feeling. Something that’s been missing for so long that it went mostly unnoticed for decades has started to fill in. It’s a good feeling. We’re looking forward to coming back and building on this new foundation.