A Moment in Time with Rubella

Recently, I told my mother how I had accidentally fallen asleep next to my son's crib waiting for him to fall asleep, and had a stiff neck in the morning as a result. Convinced that we are overindulging him, she replied, "The only time anyone ever slept next to my crib was when I had German measles! Grandpa slept on the floor next to my crib because I was so sick!"

I asked how old she was when this happened, and she said she was really young - obviously still in a crib - and that she thinks it's her earliest memory. 

As a parent, I'm not terribly concerned that she thinks we're Doing It Wrong (TM). As an historian, I am very interested in the historical moment that this memory represents, one that probably couldn't be repeated today.

It was probably around 1961, assuming my mother was around 2. A vaccine for rubella (German measles) wouldn't come out until 1969. My grandfather was not exactly a modern man, in the sense of doing much of the care-giving work of parenting. My first instinct was an "Awww . . ." at the thought of my tough-as-nails grandfather being so concerned about his sick toddler that he'd sleep on the floor. But then I remembered something about rubella; it's not typically very dangerous for the kids who have it; it's dangerous for pregnant women and their unborn babies. According to the CDC,

Rubella is a contagious disease caused by a virus. Most people who get rubella usually have a mild illness, with symptoms that can include a low-grade fever, sore throat, and a rash that starts on the face and spreads to the rest of the body. Rubella can cause a miscarriage or serious birth defects in an developing baby if a woman is infected while she is pregnant. 

Grandpa was sleeping on the floor because Grandma couldn't. She was likely either pregnant with my uncle, or was keeping away out of an abundance of caution in case she was pregnant. Perhaps limiting contact with women of child-bearing age was just a general recommendation for kids with German measles.

That was 1961.

This is 2016. Old-fashioned men like my grandfather are a vanishing breed. Rubella is a vanishing disease. Men sleeping on the floor next to their toddlers' crib provoke fewer "Awwws" and more "You're Doing It Wrongs." Even pregnant mothers don't have to worry about getting rubella from their sick kids, when both mother and child have been vaccinated against it.

The moment has passed.

A living heirloom is better than a dead one

Does a family tree grow better in potting soil or perlite?

Am I mixing up my hobbies?

Or just combining them?

Wait, there's an "heirloom vegetable" pun to be made here somewhere!

My late grandfather's house is for sale, and with it, of course, the various improvements he made on the property as a life-long gardener. And since a living heirloom is better than a dead one, my mom and I recently made cuttings of his fig tree, in hopes of keeping its descendants in the family.

I'm not sure that anyone is positive about where Grandpa's fig tree came from, but the consensus seems to be that he probably got it from my grandmother's cousin Mike Rossano.

I spent weeks reading up on how to root fig trees from cuttings, and what I gathered was:

It's so easy, anyone can do it!

Everyone who's ever done it has used a unique method.

And everyone's method is the only method that works this well!

The house will be sold by the end of the month. These cuttings are my only chance to have a piece of this tree. I was terrified of committing to the wrong method and losing them forever. (I do not respond well when you threaten my heirlooms . . . of any variety.) My mom? Her cuttings are still in the damp paper towel she put them in over a month ago! She keeps meaning to do something with them . . . If only I could be that relaxed about heirloom plants.

I took four cuttings for myself. I live on a teeny tiny piece of property with no room for four fig trees, but I was leaving room for error.

I put one cutting in a plain jar of water. I had read that rooting cuttings in water leads to weaker, more delicate roots, but I figured I'd give it a try, as that's the only method of rooting cuttings that I'm familiar with.

I put two cuttings in pots of perlite.

I put one cutting in a 50-50 mixture of perlite and potting soil. This mostly because I ran out of potting soil and had to cut it with perlite.

Several weeks out:

I'm lucky enough to have an active toddler in the house to rip my cuttings ("BIG stick!") out of their pots every so often so I can check whether they have roots or not. The one in potting soil and one of the ones in perlite have been subject to this treatment. Neither one had roots yet when last we "checked," prior to moving them out of reach.

At least they still look alive. The other one in perlite, safely on the dining room table out of harm's way, looks positively dead, and may in fact be rotting from the bottom up. I'm days away from resigning it to the compost pile.

And the one in a plain old jar of water has nice little white buds under the water where roots should be forming, and - get this - green leaves showing up on top! But its roots seem to have stopped growing once the leaves appeared, so I need to troubleshoot before my only thriving fig gets too big to sustain itself.

Figs, Day 1

Figs, week 8ish

Do you keep any living heirlooms?

Labeling Photographs: Memory and Mourning

Have you ever wondered why some of your inherited family photographs are impeccably labelled, and others are unfortunate blank canvases?

My maternal grandfather recently passed away, and I inherited a handful of photographs. Not the real old kind, just a few pictures from my parents' wedding through approximately my 8th grade graduation. Almost all were unlabeled, and the ones my grandmother had labeled were vague or incomplete. "Gail's wedding" or "July 16, 1997."

Luckily, I was able to identify the people and places in almost all of them, and could give at least an educated guess as to approximate dates. So when I got home from my mom's house the other night, I set right to labeling the pictures.

I found myself being more specific than usual, with places in particular. I realized that the impending sale of my grandparents' home, the home where my mother grew up and where my cousins and I spent so much of our childhood, was driving me. Scribbling the street address, over and over, on the backs of 4x6 prints, somehow made me feel like I was doing my part to keep the memory of Grandma and Grandpa's house alive. (I was there only days earlier. The race to "keep memories alive" can be premature or even irrational.)

But this influenced my labeling throughout the collection. I added street addresses to pictures taken in my current house, in my parents' house, anywhere I recognized. I was aiming for consistency, yes, but I was also imagining a future where we've moved out of the home we love and have only pictures to remember it by. A future where I've passed away and my children struggle to remember the address of the apartment in NYC where we spent the first years of our marriage. Or where my kids - who will only ever know the apartment my in-laws downsized to - can't picture them living in the big house in the suburbs where my husband spent his happy childhood. Will addresses on the back of photographs change any of that? Not by much. They can't bring back a grandfather, unsell a house, or give my son any real memories of the apartment where he spent the first 10 weeks of his life. But they can make me feel like I tried.

I wonder what my kids, my descendants, the strangers who find my albums in a thrift store will think when they see how well-labelled some - but not all - of my pictures are. I can't imagine that they will even begin to follow my thought processes.

Have you ever though about what motivated the people creating the records you use?

Family History through Song: Abbatte i manine

My grandfather, Frank Gatto, passed away on October 7, 2015. He was 88. My son was 17 months old. I'll be forever grateful that they had the chance to know each other.

Grandpa was a bit of a one-trick pony when it came to babies. He sang the same Italian clapping song, to every baby, every time he saw them.

These days, whenever my son sees a picture of his "Pop," he starts clapping his hands. I love that there's such a physical way for my not-quite-verbal toddler to tell us he remembers. (Of course, I had to run out of the wake in tears the first time he did it at the funeral home.)

As far as we could tell, the song was mostly nonsense. After spending 8 years studying Italian and a semester abroad, I could pick out a few words here or there, but couldn't make sense of the whole thing. Neither could any of my other relatives, no matter how much Italian they'd studied. (Grandpa was the last native speaker in our family, but spoke a Brooklyn-ized dialect.) Grandpa translated the lyrics as "Clap your hands/Daddy's coming home/He's going to bring you candy."

As best I could pick out, Grandpa's song went like this:

Abbate i manine
Cadame ne tata
Annuzhe a lica bette
A do e da li da!

Clearly, that translates to:

Clap your little hands
Something Something [papa?]
Something Something Something
Something Something Something

But in the past month, as we've spent a lot of time clapping hands in memory of Grandpa, I finally googled, and learned that there are apparently dozens of variations on this song sung in Italy. They typically mean pretty much what Grandpa claimed: "Clap your hands/Daddy's coming home/He's bringing candy/And [Baby's name] is going to eat it all!"

The last line, where you sub in the child's name, appeared consistently in the versions I found online but is missing from Grandpa's. This may explain why the last line of Grandpa's song sounds so particularly nonsensical.

The online version that I liked the best came from Yahoo Answers user Antony96, who says that he is from Bari (as is my family) and gives the lyrics to the song he knows as:

abbatte i manine
ka vène papé
annushe i bonbon
è tutte è tutte è tutte ( u nome d'a menénne) l'ò mangé!!

It's the closest version I've found to my grandfather's version. The second line starts with "ka," which isn't, to my knowledge, an Italian word, but which is what I always heard when Grandpa sang. Same goes for "annushe," a word I'm not familiar with but which my grandfather clearly sang. It is, somehow, incredibly validating to know that all these years, we were wrong when we thought Grandpa was making up or mangling the words.

A few of my cousins have talked about trying to learn how the song "really" goes, but I will proudly sing it the way I always knew it, and I will teach it to any future kids and grandkids I have that way, too.

Grandpa wasn't singing nonsense, he was singing dialect.