When your 6’6” son says he and his girlfriend are unexpectedly coming for the weekend, you are naturally delighted because you haven’t seen them for a couple of months.
You also realize that even though you keep your house pretty picked up and orderly, the housekeeping chores you sometimes skip because well, you’re lazy and no one sees that anyway, have got to be done pronto.
You improve the kitchen god’s reign above the range hood by removing the skin of dust. The tops of picture frames — almost out of reach — receive similar treatment. You climb a step stool to clear away a miscellaneous crop of crumbs from the top of the refrigerator, a surface you generally ignore but one that is eye level for your tall son.
Although the vernal equinox and the official start of spring are still two weeks away, a spontaneous visit forces a jump on spring cleaning and brings a spark of joy in these chaotic, bewildering times.
I have dozens of questions about this man, but there’s no one to ask. When I was growing up, he was usually mentioned in whispers and the only thing I knew about him was that he had died. Nothing else.
Arrest photo of Howard Gargan, 1939
He looks like what the Irish would call a sharper, meaning a cheat and a swindler. Turned out that he was. While it was eventually true that he was indeed dead, no one in the family ever mentioned that he had done time in Sing Sing for selling answers to Civil Service exams in New York City in the late 1930s. Evidently if you paid this fellow off, you’d get the answers to the exam you needed to pass to become a subway conductor.
I went down a rabbit hole recently not so much about this man, Howard Gargan, but his wife, my great-aunt Dede, a lively and important presence in my life until her death when I was 21. My grandmother’s younger sister, Dede was a lifelong New Yorker, a working woman who lived alone on West End Avenue. She had no children and as far as I know, never kept company with any man after her husband died. She worked for Rand McNally for 40 years and would send me books because she knew I loved to read. When I was in college, I’d get the occasional $20 bill in an envelope from her, a lifesaving fortune at the time.
I shouldn’t have been surprised and shocked to learn a few years ago from my cousin Tom that there was more to the Gargan story than we were ever told. Coverups and secrets had always been a thing in my family, but this was a new scandal and a pretty big one.
Tom told me that in fact, Dede had divorced Gargan after he was sent up the river. The expression “sent up the river” is literal in Gargan’s case — it means being sent up the Hudson River in New York to serve time in Sing Sing.
I was thinking about Dede after reading a journal entry I made the day she died nearly 50 years ago. I wrote about how sad I was that she had been suddenly hospitalized or, as I rather melodramatically put it, “brutally swept out of her apartment and thrust into a sterile hospital” where she died a few days later. I wrote that Dede didn’t even have “the dignity of putting her things in order, or of doing the things she liked one last time.”
A New York Times archives search turned up several articles about her husband’s arrest and sentencing, including a detail that one of Gargan’s fellow criminals had showed up at Dede’s apartment to threaten her.
New York Times, December 22, 1939
A Google search led to the 1939 press photo taken after Gargan’s arrest, the first and only photo I’ve ever seen of him. As a child, it never occurred to me to ask Dede why there wasn’t a single photo of him in her apartment. No wedding photo, nothing. From this shot, it looks like Gargan might have used a portion of his ill-gotten money for some fancy threads.
Dede had already been dead for decades when my cousin told me about her husband’s shady past. I so wish I had known this story while she was alive, so I could have asked her where she met him, and what her first impression of him had been. I’m curious to know when, if ever, she suspected he was up to no good. Did she get divorced, a rarity for a Catholic woman in the 1930s, or was her marriage annulled on grounds that she’d been deceived? I remember that my great-aunt was a devout Catholic and a parishioner at St. Vincent Ferrer in New York City, but now I’m wondering if she was excommunicated, as was everyone who was divorced.
Did she ever see Gargan after he was sprung from Sing Sing? What did my grandmother and the rest of Dede’s family say? Had they tried to warn her about him before she married him? Did her coworkers at Rand McNally know about her marriage, divorce, and Gargan’s incarceration or was that a dark secret she held? The fact that Howard Gargan was only whispered about makes me wonder if the family harbored a faint disapproval toward Dede for having married a sharper and not having known better.
As I was thinking about writing this piece, I looked through the few photos I have of Dede and came across this battered snapshot that has been sliced in half. I’d love to ask Dede who was chopped out of the picture. But that question, along with all the others, will have to go unanswered.
My great-aunt, Virginia Taylor Gargan, known as Dede
David’s cousin called on Thanksgiving Day with her greetings. She was in her car, so David asked where she was going.
“I’m going to see my therapist,” she said. A beat of silence and the thought, “Oh, gee, things must be really bad to need a session with a therapist on Thanksgiving Day.”
Then she said she’d send us a picture of her therapist. When we received it, we cracked up.
The doctor will see you now
David’s cousin has long been involved in equine therapy for special needs and at-risk kids, although she has curtailed that activity in recent years as she has gotten older. But on Thanksgiving she was on her way to look in on this “therapist” as a favor to the people who regularly take care of the animal.
I should have asked for the therapist’s name in case any of you need a referral. He or she looks like an excellent listener, with a friendly and welcoming expression. Given the chance, I’d gladly confide.
The holiday season can be fraught for some of us — I’m probably speaking mostly for myself here. May we all find “therapy” if we need it in whatever way is most cheerful, helpful, and beneficial to ourselves and others.
I have zero recollection of taking part in a Forbes digital time capsule project 20 years ago, but this week I was among 18,000 people who received an email with their words from November 2005. I wrote that the “world is in a mess,” undoubtedly referring to the violence in Iraq. Twenty years on, our world has arrived at an entirely different definition of mess, one that sickens and crushes me daily.
That day in 2005, I wrote in response to Forbes that I was missing my mother, who had died a year earlier. I recorded my worry about a relative who was struggling with deep depression. I noted that I was reading James Frey’s Million Little Pieces — before scandal engulfed the book. Then, as now, Christopher was about to have a milestone birthday and I wrote about planning a small 10th birthday party at GoKart World.
I also wrote that we hadn’t allowed Christopher to go to a fifth-grade classmate’s “Yucky Boy Party,” much to his dismay. I have no memory of why we found this concept so objectionable that we didn’t let Christopher go. I’m hesitant to ask Christopher what he recalls about this forbidden party, too chicken to dredge up my parenting mistakes at this stage.
I opened another time capsule this week at Farmers and Merchants Bank in Long Beach — my safe deposit box where, along with deeds and birth certificates, I have stored letters I wrote to Christopher every year on his birthday for 12 years. You’re ushered into a small cubicle in the bank to review your safe deposit box contents, and the bank employees probably thought they had a loony one on their hands because I was laughing so much as I read the letters.
The letters gave examples of how sunny and clever Christopher was as a child, as when he asked me as a toddler, with a practicality he exhibits to this day, “Why didn’t they just put some glue on the wall so Humpty Dumpty wouldn’t fall?”
I also teared up, reading the letter I wrote on his birthday in 2001 when he turned 6. I described his childlike wisdom about the unbroken circle of life when he said out of the blue, several weeks after the horror of 9/11, “It will take a long time to get those people back.”
My letter says that when I asked what he meant, he told me that he was thinking of the people who died in the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and Pennsylvania. He said, “It will take a long time for 3,000 more people to be born.” At only 5, he seemed to have some innate understanding that life goes on even in the face of unutterable sorrow. And while we can never get anyone “back” who has left us, new life still gives us the glimmer of hope we seek in any way we can, especially now.
We’re leaving tomorrow for San Francisco where Christopher will mark his 30th birthday this weekend. We’re bringing photos, a small nostalgic gift, and our gratitude for this chance to celebrate.
We’re back from our monthlong trip to Italy, jet lagged, still in the glow of a wondrous journey, and trying, at least momentarily, to pay as little attention as we can to our now-gonzo world.
Most delectable food: Sfogliatella in Naples. Agnolotti in Turin. Marinara pizza in Naples.
Brilliant museums: Capitolini in Rome. Museo Egizio Turin. Ruins in Pompeii.
Favorite walks: The climb to Sant’ Elmo in Naples. Treks to San Damiano and Santa Croce in Assisi.
Most beautiful swim: Jumping into the Ligurian off the coast of Vernazza.
Unexpected: Pisa’s beauty.
Not so fun: Getting up and down four flights of steeply pitched stairs with too-heavy suitcases in a Riomaggiore apartment.
Quirky pleasure: Watching bats, or pipistrelli, flit about in the gathering twilight in Assisi.
Amusing translations: We attempted our few faltering phrases in Italian, which usually made the person we were speaking to immediately switch to English. Then we had fun trying to comprehend their sometimes unusual English phases.
Examples: “Empty croissant” — that means plain, as opposed to filled with almond or chocolate.
“Early Gray tea.” I do like my tea to be punctual.
“Inside the price.” If something is “inside the price,” that means it is included.
“You are having the purple lips” is what Pietro, crew member on a boat in Cinque Terre, said to me before chivalrously offering me his jacket when he noticed that I was cold.
As we’ve traveled through Italy, I’ve been reading “God in Ruins” by Kate Atkinson. The title is derived from the Ralph Waldo Emerson quote: “Man is a god in ruins.”
I’m thinking of ruins not only from this novel, which deals with lives shattered by WW II, but also from hearing Springsteen’s lament, “City of Ruins,” in my head. I’m trying, unsuccessfully, to avoid daily news dispatches about the ruin of our democracy. David said plaintively the other day, “Maybe we shouldn’t go back.”
We took the train from Naples to Pompeii today to tour the ruins where, thousands of years ago, people went about their lives unaware that catastrophe would obliterate everything in an instant.
Last week in Rome we surveyed the ruins of the ancient civilization that once lay beneath the city.
We laughed when we overheard an American woman in a cafe say, as she indicated the tableful of beers and Aperol spritzes, “Would you rather do this or look at more stones?”
We’ll look at more stones before we head back to the U.S. We’ll be thankful that we know to take nothing for granted. We’ll trust that some things can’t be ruined.
Today we arrived in Bologna, Italy’s gastronomic capital. The city disavows any connection to the namesake American meat that was a staple of my grade school lunches.
In my strict vegetarian years — a rigidity I’ve since somewhat relaxed — I never missed eating steak or hamburgers, but I occasionally craved a lowly baloney sandwich. On backpacking trips in the Sierra when meager rations after days of strenuous hiking sometimes weren’t sufficient to get me through the night, I’d lie awake in my tent, ravenous, thinking of yes, baloney sandwiches. I don’t know if these yearnings were a desire to relive childhood or simply evidence of my complete lack of culinary sophistication.
While the thought of eating baloney in Bologna amuses me, I won’t embarrass myself or risk the locals’ ire by asking for any Oscar Meyer products while I’m here. I’ll savor the Bolognese delicacies and be filled with gratitude for these travels with David.
I’m thinking of my father today, born on this date in 1918.
My father and grandmother
I like the fact that in this photo he looks amused, almost happy. I don’t remember him ever expressing either humor or delight. I can’t know what happens to us when we leave this life, but I like to think that wherever he is, my father is now experiencing peace and joy for all eternity.
The Green Side of the Grass 
