Optimism

I was replying to a post on the Destroyer Club earlier, and realized, after reading it through for errors, what an optimist I sounded. Which isn't a bad thing. I didn't realize when I started how upbeat I felt about the future. Not my personal future, necessarily, but humanity in general.


How did I get to be an optimist? It certainly wasn't from my father's side, at least not the ones I've met. My father and his mother were the gloomiest people I know. Bad times were always ahead, anything good was in the past (and wasn't that good looking back on it).

I remember one time when they were reminiscing about when my father and his sister were small. They lived in government housing, attached houses which were tidy brick buildings that are still standing in my city. Kitchen and parlor downstairs, two bedrooms upstairs. My grandfather was a cook who would have had trouble making ends meet in a nonsubsidized apartment.

Back in the forties, it was a close knit community, mostly French-Canadian and Greek. The women kept everything scrupulously clean and there was little crime. Families would walk downtown to one of the movie theaters, stay for the double feature, and think nothing of walking home through the dark streets and the North Common close to midnight. My grandmother and aunt used to travel to Church for novenas; it ended earlier than the movies, but in winter it was after night fall.

To get back to the memory, my father and grandmother were talking about hot summer days. Some of the residents in the housing would hire buses and organize trips to the beach. Everyone chipped in for transport, and everyone brought along big hampers of food and sang songs on the bus.

I was enjoying the story. It was fine up until then. But then...the sun was too hot, everyone was too noisy, sand got in the food and the bathing suits, it was a pain cleaning up the kids after they got back. The fumes from the bus made my father sick, and he didn't enjoy the beach anyway.

Sigh.

Now, my mother.

My mother's father was kicked off the police force on trumped up charges just before the Great Depression hit. He worked driving a cab, among other things. He started up more than one newspaper, trying to expose the corruption and take down some of the people who had framed him. He kept his lawsuit up in the court system throughout the decade, until he was finally exonerated and reinstated with full back pay owed and promotions granted.

They never went hungry, but money was tight. Days went by when all they had to eat was oatmeal and molasses. A few times they had to vacate their apartment very quietly, in the middle of the night, wearing several layers of clothes and taking only what they could carry. My aunt Jane was a severe diabetic who needed to keep to a strict diet. Most of the food budget went for hers. Sometimes it wasn't enough. Once, when things were particularly hard, my grandfather went to a priest to ask for money. He got it, but the priest asked him not to come back. He was in with the city's politicians who had had my grandfather kicked off, and said he didn't want trouble.

My mother loved to tell me about her childhood. For her, it was a mostly happy time. She didn't romanticize the poverty, but she said she liked molasses anyway. Christmas presents during the Depression were usually what could fit in one stocking; maybe a little toy and one orange. She'd talk of her friends and the games they'd play, the barrel slats they'd use to sled downhill in the winter, the potatoes they used to swipe and roast in holes in the ground. She remembered moving into a large, run-down Victorian house that a friend of her father's had let them move into rent free because he couldn't find anyone who could afford to rent or buy it. She called it the haunted house and talked of going to sleep in a room with a skylight, and how she'd watch the bats swooping overhead. And the fireplaces children could walk into without bumping their heads.

It isn't a puzzle really, where I got my optimism. It isn't surprising I can feel pessimistic about some things; most people are a mixture of both anyway, I think. I'm just amazed, growing up with my father carrying his little black rain cloud with him wherever he went and spreading the gloom, that I didn't get the optimism sucked out of me.