It’s been eight years. It feels like longer some of the time, but most of the time it feels like just yesterday when you were writing stories with me at your kitchen table. Folding printer paper in half, marking the paper with beams of color to accompany the nonsense written across the page. Now here I am, an aspiring writer, writing without you, without the one that made me the writer I am today. I have these little, unclear memories of you from my childhood, ones that I cannot seem to put into words. Now grandmom struggles to do the same. Her Mild Cognitive Impairment has stolen some of the precious moments but still, her face lights up whenever anyone brings up your name. Her eyes sparkle the same way they did when she used to look at you. You loved each other so much.
1951.
Kathy Coakley and her girlfriends went to Wildwood NJ. They rented a house that was way too expensive for sixteen-year-olds to afford. They told the tenant they would mail him the money they couldn’t afford at the time, but never did. The girls met in high school and called themselves “the sorority girls'' as a joke. To this day, they call themselves that. One day, her girlfriends brought a few guys over. One of them liked one of the guys and begged my grandmom to go on a double date with some guy she didn’t know. He was from Chicago, born three years before her. His ginger hair and freckles revealed his Irish roots almost immediately, and his smile could capture a whole room’s attention in just a moment. James McKenzie. His name sounds almost like Irish royalty. He looked like it too, with his pale skin that got sunburned after just a few minutes in the sun. Sunglasses shaded his eyes but couldn’t hide his freckles and rosy cheeks. Years ago, she told me about how she had to sit on his lap in the car the first day they met, how she thought it was so funny that he ended up being her everything.
I asked her who said I love you first. She couldn’t remember but instead replied with a classic grandmom zinger. Yeah, I wouldn’t have said that.
1961.
August 26th to be exact. Just three years after they met, the two stood at the altar ready to spend the rest of their lives together. She was only nineteen and he was twenty-two. Her dress was simple and elegant, the bottom of it just reaching the floor. A pearl necklace lay across her chest showing off her collarbone. He wore a white suit jacket making him look like the poster child for the early 60s. They took their honeymoon in Miami. She wore a number of bathing suits and little white sunglasses in most pictures. He wore short shorts and a t-shirt finished off with a pair of RayBans.
1962.
The newly wed couple moved into a row house on Upland Street in West Philadelphia. It was one of those with a three pane bay window and a rundown set of stairs leading to a porch with chipping paint. It wasn’t anything special, in fact, it wasn’t special at all. It was all they could afford while he finished up college which took years. He picked up various odd jobs to support her which extended his graduation date. Just ten months after the wedding and after they had settled into their home, she gave birth to her first child. It was a boy named James Jr. And just like that, they had a family.
Little James Jr. was the bookworm. The whole family would be watching football downstairs and he’d be reading a book in his room. He’d come downstairs just to yell at them for yelling at the game.
1963.
Next came Danny boy. My dad. He grew up as the bad kid. He wore a leather jacket and always seemed to get into trouble, like when he got caught drag racing by the church or when he went down the shore without telling his parents. But now, he’s the nicest guy you’ll ever meet.
1965.
After him came Paul. He tended to wander away at any chance he got. Grandmom had to tie him to his little brother’s stroller just to keep him from wandering away at the beach.
1968.
Next in line was little Kenny. He had an easy personality, making him the nice one. He always seemed to know the most obscure statistics about sports. He also got bloody noses all the time for no good reason.
1970.
And last, but most definitely not least, Phil. The baby. People underestimated how strong he was, he was a tough kid despite being the youngest in the family.
At the time, birth control wasn’t in the cards. It’s no surprise that she had her five kids by the time she was 28. Five boys in nine years. Just thinking about it makes me tense up.
1970s.
By the time all the kids were born, they were living in their house on Spear Ave. in Ardsley Pennsylvania where she still lives. Both grandmom and grandpop did a wonderful job raising their kids in that quaint house. Because of the times, the kids would run around the neighborhood alone and my grandparents wouldn’t worry. That’s just how it was. Simple and maybe a little too trusting. The only rule for the kids was that they be in earshot of the house so they could hear when grandmom blew the dinner whistle. At 5:30 every night she’d blow the whistle for them to come inside for dinner and if they weren’t there, then they would get in trouble.
She would make dinner every night. She never liked having leftovers, so she figured out the exact science of feeding a herd of five hungry boys without having an abundant amount of food. She never kept soda in the house, except for her little stash of Coca-Cola that the kids were told not to touch. When it came to snacking she would have an even allotment of food ready for the boys when they got home from school. On Sunday nights, the whole family would gather around the TV to watch Walt Disney together. Only on these nights would they have dessert and it was usually ice cream. The boys would fight about who got more ice cream prompting grandmom to come up with a solution, one that we use in my family now too. Whoever serves has to choose last. She had never seen such even scoops of ice cream in her life. She created systems that gave order to an otherwise chaotic life with five young boys.
Eventually, she got a job at Bambergers, a department store. When that closed, she went to Bloomingdales where she worked for years. Once she started working and the kids were home alone after school, she had to restructure her routines. She would write up a list of tasks for each kid before she went to work and would expect them to be done when she got home. Clean the dishes, put dinner in the oven, vacuum the living room. She knew they waited until the last minute and would have to scramble around the house before she got home, but it worked, everything ran smoothly despite the clamour five boys could cause two working parents.
She never regretted having five boys and was never unhappy without a girl. By the time she had Paul she had given up on that hope for a girl but not in a negative way. She was more surprised than anything.
1990s.
When her kids grew up and started having kids of their own, she begged for them to have girls. The family went almost fifty years without one. By the third grandchild, the first girl was born and the family was in awe. That little girl was my sister, and from there, five more girls were born in the family. Grandmom and grandpop’s love grew even stronger as the family grew. He had a special place in his heart for his grandchildren. Now that he had retired he could dedicate much more time to them than he had with his own kids. He always made time for his kids, make no mistake. Both of my grandparents changed my relationship with family. Most people tell me they hate their family and never talk to their extended family. I am always shocked by this because of how close my family has always been. I’ve always taken it for granted.
All the cousins and aunts and uncles would go to my grandparents house often for pizza nights or just to see each other. The cousins would usually congregate in the basement with the massive collection of toys to play with. They had a dollhouse with wooden furniture and mismatched dolls. They had a checkout counter and bins and bins of toy food. My favorite was the horse ranch with a long row of stables and a box of miniature horses. I remember them being beautiful. We found tiny white fences from another playset and used those with the horses too. Eventually, they would call the cousins up for pizza and we would squeeze into two tables, all ten cousins plus the adults. Sometimes we would share seats. After dinner, my grandpop would sit at the piano and play for us. All the cousins would stop running around when he did that. We couldn’t help but sit and watch him play.
Because there were so many cousins, birthdays were quite a challenge. Getting everyone together to celebrate each birthday was almost impossible. I’m not sure who came up with the solution, but I do remember all the memories. We had a birthday party for all the cousins every summer at my Uncle Phil’s house. We would spend a whole day outside and campout at night to celebrate our birthdays. The adults coordinated the food and the birthday presents and all the activities for the day. We would run around the backyard playing on the swingset, running through a sprinkler, doing potato sack races, and even tractor rides. We would sit in the back of my uncles tractor and ride around the backyard like it was a roller coaster. The adults would just watch and smile. It was the best thing wasn’t it, grandmom told me.
I remember sitting on grandpop’s lap. I think there’s a picture of that somewhere. Grandmom would always bring donuts and coffee in the morning and the kids would devour them in just a few seconds. I never noticed grandmom trying to portion out our food the way she did with her own kids. She always kept us well fed at her house and never let us leave without offering a cookie from her cookie jar on the top shelf of the cabinet next to the sink.
My grandparents were no strangers to partying. Even after their kids grew up, the two would go on dinner dates and drink and talk. My grandmom told me that a little bit of alcohol always helps. Drinking makes us free to talk, she said.
Both were loyal to their Irish sides. My grandpop used to watch The Quiet Man, a classic Irish movie, every St. Patricks Day late at night on the TV downstairs. He and his friend Kathy Caine found out they both did this every year and thought they should all do it together. Thus, the infamous Quiet Man parties began. Each year, on the Saturday closest to St. Patrick's Day both families would gather. Everyone would watch the movie and drink and eat good Irish food. They would play the movie and halfway through would pause. It just so happens that halfway through the movie is a wedding scene. After the first year it became tradition to pause and recreate the wedding scene with one of the couples before moving on with the rest of the festivities. Then came the trivia game. Someone created an intricate game board with buttons that light up when you hit it. St. Patrick’s Day falls around NCAA brackets, so they decided to use a bracket to decide the winner of the trivia game. The whole party was quite the event and has lived on for years and will continue to live on.
2011.
Their 50th wedding anniversary party. The whole family and friends gathered at a venue about twenty minutes away. I don’t remember much from that day because of the thousands of Shirley Temples my cousins and I ingested in just a few hours. We danced the whole night which was common with our family. At most gatherings, we’d end up dancing and singing as carefree as could be.
The five boys came up with a rap for the happy couple. Mc Jimmy Jam, Llcool Dan, Pauly Paul, Special K, and Flava Phil. Quite the bunch. It was one of the last times we were all together and happy.
2012.
When grandpop got sick, life moved slower but faster at the same time. Watching him suffer was the hardest. But he passed in a matter of only four months. When he was sick, my uncle interviewed him. He lost the ability to articulate much of anything when the cancer came. I’ve tried to watch the interview several times but cannot seem to watch past the first few minutes. I want to talk to my grandmom about her life while she still has most of the memories.
Despite his trouble with the brain tumor, he had so much life within him, that light never died. We were all there at his last Thanksgiving. My cousin and I sat at the kids table eating pieces of butter just to see what it tasted like. The adults were chatting away. But my grandpop rose, looking like he was going to give a speech. Instead, he smacked his ‘whatever’ button from Staples and let out the biggest laugh. I can still hear that laugh bellow in the back of my brain.
On his last Christmas, he sang. I loved when he sang. Sometimes grandmom would join him, but this time it was all him. He stumbled over his words and struggled to communicate even his basic needs, but somehow, when he opened his mouth to sing, everything was clear as day. I can’t remember what song it was, but that wasn’t what mattered.
Grandmom handled his sickness as well as anyone could expect. She stood by his side helping him until the end. She made sure to show her love for him while holding back tears. He died an hour before my birthday. My family told me that he did that on purpose. I think he did too.
At the funeral, all the cousins put yellow roses into a vase. The yellow represents friendship, remembrance, and endless love. We all cried. I couldn’t even look at my grandmom. She chose “Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World” to play during the funeral. She said that it reminded her of him, not because it was his favorite song, but she found meaning in it. This is the beginning of my new life, she said as she stood alone at the end of the funeral.
Years later one of the cousins recorded a cover of that song at the funeral. He lives on in all of us, everyone in the family.
Grandpop, you will continue to live on in my writing and you will never be forgotten.
Ever.