Canning the Day Away

I spent much of today not really doing any of the things I was supposed to be doing.

It’s the last week of my summer, after all.

And while there is the inconvenient fact that I still have a laundry-list of tasks that I was supposed to accomplish before the academic contract year started up again, the joy of inconvenient facts is that human beings are naturally wired to erect SEP fields over them and go on about their days. So I did not get anything done on my new class that has to be ready by January. I did not do anything for any of the various work projects that my job would like me to complete, since I am only getting paid to work two days per week and today wasn’t one of them. I did not even consider any household tasks, since none of them have risen to the level of a crisis yet.

Those tasks will still be there tomorrow, of course. They don’t go away. But not today.

Instead, I spent a fair chunk of the day making jalapeño jelly.

If you’ve never had jalapeño jelly, you should. It’s not that hot, usually – the sugar in it does a good job of knocking back the heat so mostly you get the flavor of the pepper – and if you spread it on crackers with some cream cheese it is just the most wonderful stuff in the world. Kim always plants jalapeño peppers in the garden to get me to pay attention to it, so we have them in quantity. We do not need to rely on the various Corporate Jalepeños that are being recalled for contamination with typhus, diphtheria, dancing sickness, malaria, ague, or CRS these days because we have our very own growing right here at the house!

I went out this morning and picked about two pounds (about 900g) of peppers, which to be honest barely made a dent in the supply so I will likely have to repeat this process in a week or two. The recipe calls for 3/4 of a pound and I wanted a double recipe, but I figured once I cut off the tops and removed the seeds it would come to about 1.5lbs and, surprisingly, it did almost exactly.

Cutting them was its own challenge, of course.

Finding all of the supplies was another challenge, since most of them were in the basement. Lots of things are in the basement. Many of them are actually supposed to be there. Sorting through it all to find specific things can be a trick, in part because one is constantly making exciting discoveries and getting sidetracked.

I was smart enough to do most of the processing outside so as not to blister the paint and render the air inside the house hazardous. You never know with jalapeños. They’re not the hottest pepper in the world, but they have quite a range of heat depending on soil, climate, or even just what’s planted next to them. Sometimes they can be rather aggressive.

There’s a lot of hurry up and wait with canning. You have to sterilize your jars (though I discovered that if you process them long enough you don’t, actually). You have to get all the ingredients together into a pot and then boil them for a while. You have to get a giant pot full of water and bring that to a boil. You have to take the boiled ingredients and ladle them into little jars, which takes a surprising amount of time. You have to boil those jars for an extended while, as noted. You have to get the jars out of the boiling water and onto something where they can cool and then get the next batch of jars in, whereupon the process repeats.

They’re all done now – 14 half-pint (roughly 240ml) jars, sitting on my dining room table cooling into jelly.

I have crackers. I have cream cheese.

And I have tomorrow to worry about all the things I didn’t get done today.

The Ghost in the Machine

When you do enough genealogy, you end up with ghosts in the machine.

My brother has joined me in genealogy this summer and it’s been a lot of fun to have a co-conspirator to share these things with. We’ve been pushing back the frontiers of the Italian side of the family – both the Basilicata side and the Sicilian side. We’ve been digging into Italian and Philadelphia records, haunting FamilySearch and Ancestry, and – in his case – calling older relatives to get their stories. We’re having a good time.

Right now, though, the big mystery is Serafina, my grandmother’s grandmother.

We know she married our great-great-grandfather Giuseppe in 1872, five or six years before my great-grandfather Antonio was born, depending on which document listing his birth date you look at. We have the Sicilian marriage record. 19th-century Italians kept surprisingly good records, if you know where to look and how to read them. The marriage record also lists their ages at marriage and the names of all of their parents, so there are a lot of clues for how to proceed if we want to keep moving back in time.

But here is the thing.

One of the family stories that my grandmother told both of us, repeatedly, in slightly different but mostly compatible versions, was that her grandmother died in an earthquake in Sicily. The story goes that she was trapped in a building, calling for rescue, but by the time they could get to her it was too late. In the version my grandmother generally told me, her last words were “Too late, I’m dead,” and then she died. In the version she told my mother and Keith, there were a few things said in addition to that, but not many.

The story continues that my great-great-grandmother’s sister then married Giuseppe, who was apparently not a very nice person. She secretly saved up money from the household budget and used it to send Antonio to the US in 1900. His future wife (Antonina) followed in 1907.

Legend has it that Antonina was the family cook back in Sicily, which would imply that Giuseppe had some money to be able to have a cook. My grandmother said he was a lemon grower, which makes sense – that sort of thing was not unusual in Sicily and you had to own land to do it, which meant having some money. Antonina and Antonio married in Philadelphia pretty much the moment she got off the boat – I found the marriage certificate from the Orphan’s Court, which did not have the wait time for marriages that the Catholic Church would have had at the time. They were married for two decades before Antonio died.

The great irony of this is that my mother grew up with Antonina in one of those tight-knit Little Italy neighborhoods that abounded in eastern US cities in the early and mid-20th century. She and my uncle would go over to her house for meals during the school year when they were kids, and by my mother’s account Antonina was a lousy cook. “Well,” my grandmother told my mother once, “she was better when she was younger.”

So far this is a pretty straightforward story. Serafina would probably be the one who died in the earthquake, and her sister would become Antonio’s step-mother. Except that Antonio’s death certificate lists as the witness providing all of the information: Serafina.

So who died in the earthquake? And who was the step-mother?

The witness on Antonio’s death certificate could be a different, perhaps related Serafina. Italian families tended to use the same four or five names unless forced to improvise by circumstances, and in the small hilltop villages of southern Italy and Sicily the supply of surnames was similarly limited. They tended to intermarry. If this is the case, then the earthquake and step-mother story stays as we know it, and we add another Serafina into the mix.

But there is a chance it’s the same Serafina, who would have been 82 at the time – not out of the question even in the 1920s. In which case either the earthquake and step-mother story doesn’t hold water or Serafina was the second marriage for Giuseppe. They were both 27 when they got married, after all, which is fairly old for a first marriage in 19th-century Sicily.

And that’s where the story stops. We’ve found a fair number of references to Serafina in other people’s research but no actual documents for any Serafina, whether different or the same, and at this point I’m fairly convinced it’s just the same unsupported conjectures being passed from tree to tree. The address she listed on Antonio’s death certificate was not one where she was living in 1920, according to the census – I went to the original documents in that enumeration district and found an Irish family living there. Indeed the whole neighborhood was Irish, which does call into question whether that was an actual address or just something she wrote down to write something down on this bit of paperwork. I come from a long line of people with little to no respect for official bureaucracy so I honestly can’t rule that out.

We haven’t found her in the Italian records after Antonio’s birth. There’s nobody by that name in Philadelphia between 1900 and 1940 that I’ve been able to find (and here is a really good time to note that Ancestry’s search engine does a very poor job of looking for what you ask it to look for, so bear that in mind).

She is a mystery, our very own ghost in the machine. At least for now.

We’re still looking, and at some point perhaps we’ll find her. Or both of them, if they are different people.

And won’t that be a time.

News and Updates

1. Kim and I went over to City Hall yesterday here in Our Little Town and voted in next week’s primary elections. They let you do early in-person voting in Wisconsin and it’s a good way to make sure that no right-wing voter suppression tactics are thrown in your general direction on election day. Remember, folks! If casting your ballot didn’t matter the GOP wouldn’t be trying so hard to stop you from doing it, so get out there and vote.

2. It has come as a great surprise to my family that I have never actually ridden a horse. It’s as if I told them that I have never put on shoes. How can you not have done that? Everyone has done that! Except me, apparently. In my defense, horses were not that common in the suburbs of Philadelphia when I was growing up and getting access to the ones that did exist required far more ancestral wealth than my family possessed. I do not feel particularly deprived by this lack of experience, however, and I have no current plans to change my horse-riding status.

3. My brother has been bitten hard by the genealogy bug and now I have a co-conspirator. We are having a grand time pushing the Italian side of our heritage back into the 19th century together. It turns out that Italy has digitized a surprising number of records that you can have access to for free if you are willing to go to the Italian archives online and translate them on your own. You can also find a lot of them on FamilySearch, which for this purpose is actually more effective than the paid subscription version over at Ancestry. We have made some interesting discoveries, not least of which being that 19th-century Italian families tended to have a lot of children and then gave them all the same five names, sometimes multiple times in a generation. Couple that with the prevalence of small hilltop villages with a maximum of eleven surnames that got traded back and forth as people married, and it gets interesting.

4. We went up to Lauren’s old apartment today to do some spackling and whatever else needed to be done before the lease officially expires next week, but it looks like Aleksia and Anita have most of the move-out checklist well under control so we didn’t have too much to do. We had a lovely time with Aleksia, though, including a Thai lunch afterward. We’ll have to catch up with Anita another time.

5. We also heard from Lauren this morning and so far her latest Adventure seems to be going well. The pictures are lovely.

6. At some point it will no longer be construction season here in Baja Canada and we will be able to get from Point A (defined as our house) to Point B (defined as any example of most of the places we go) without having to go through Points C through L (defined as any of a number of increasingly desperate attempts to find a way to Point B that actually permit travel to occur). Today was not that day. Tomorrow does not look good either. On the plus side, the detour home was scenic.

7. Kim and I also spent an hour on a Zoom call with the Financial People last week. We have a new Financial Person as the old one has gone to wherever Financial People go when new opportunities arise (Houston?) and the new one wanted to go over things with us. There was also another Financial Person beaming in from an office in a whole other time zone because they do Different Financial Things than the more local Financial Person. All of this was so that we could discuss how Kim and I are set up for retirement, which is looming ever closer on the horizon. I gather that we are doing okay in that regard and will likely not have to live on peanut butter and raw oats once we leave our jobs, though to be honest after about fifteen minutes of Finance my eyes started to glaze over. This is why Kim was there, to understand all the things that just sound to me like the human equivalent of an old dial-up modem waiting to connect.

8. I also had a separate meeting with a different Financial Person earlier in the week because apparently I put $100 into a Roth IRA sometime around 2003 and promptly forgot about it and they wanted to know if I was still alive. Yes! More or less! Here I am, in all my glory. The account has been chugging along just fine without my intervention, it turns out, and while I was grateful to this Financial Person for letting me know about it we are going to consolidate it with the other Financial People because clearly I need someone who can keep track of all of these things at once and that someone is not me.

9. I am trying to read an actual work of history – all 789 pages of it – and it is going slowly. It is hard to read about the formation of the American republic while it is being actively torn down by its current government and all the termites who support this regime. But it’s well written and I’m enjoying it whenever I can sit down and focus on it.

10. The cat has been in Cling Mode the last couple of days and we thought she was just being affectionate but it turns out that the automatic feeder was empty and she was just sizing us up as sustenance. And being affectionate, because that’s who she is, but definitely sustenance as well. All is now restored and we may live to see another day.

Comfort and Adventure

There are worse things to be than uncomfortable.

I am a firm believer in comfort, it has to be said. Comfort is a rare and fleeting quality in this world, and people who insist that the only way to live is to get out of your comfort zone don’t seem to take into account how much effort goes into creating that comfort and how quickly it can vanish even in the best of times. It should be cherished, not scorned.

And yet there are times when it is worth it to be uncomfortable.

I am not an adventurous person. I have adventures, because I have learned to say yes and I’m willing to be uncomfortable, and it has been worth it. Some of those adventures are among my most treasured memories.

I have traveled, for example. For someone who once had to have the concept of “cabin fever” explained to him (“you mean I stay in my home with my stuff and nobody bothers me and this is a problem … why?”) I have been to a surprising number of places. Surprising to me, anyway. I’ve seen beautiful and amazing things, been to fascinating places, and met welcoming and lovely people along the way. I’ve had the good fortune to do all that with my family and to visit friends on the other end of those travels. I look forward to doing all of that again in the near future, revisiting old places and exploring new ones. And if there is always some discomfort lurking in the background so far from home, well, so be it. It’s a small price to pay for such experiences.

The experiences stick with me long after the discomfort fades away.

I make a good part of my living speaking in public, after all. That’s what teaching is, at least in part – standing in front of an audience and trying to get them to listen even when they don’t want to do so. It took me a long time to learn how to be comfortable doing that. It didn’t come naturally. And yet now I enjoy it. What discomfort I started with has long faded.

There is a certain amount of privilege in this position, I suppose.

Everybody has operating costs – how much energy it takes to live your life. Sometimes those costs exceed what people have available to get from one end of the day to the other and all you can do in that situation is hold on as best you can, borrow energy from your future, and hope things get better. Sometimes the costs and the expenses line up and that’s a comfortable place to be. And sometimes you have more than you need, and you can spend some of the surplus on things like being a little uncomfortable in a new place or a new situation, in the service of something larger. It is a good thing to have that surplus, and I’m grateful for it.

One of my favorite lines in cinema comes from Lawrence of Arabia. It’s early in the film, still at a point where the director is establishing just what sort of character T.E. Lawrence actually was. There are a couple of men in a tent (the almost total absence of women in this three-hour epic film is one of the most singular things in movie history) and one of them is trying (and failing) to extinguish a match with his fingers. Lawrence then puts it out by squeezing the flame between his fingers. The first guy tries to imitate that and then yelps.

“Oh! It damn well hurts!” he says.

“Of course it hurts,” Lawrence replies.

“What’s the trick, then.”

“The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.”

If you’re willing to be uncomfortable for a bit and able to pay that cost, the world is a more adventurous and interesting place. And that is a lesson worth learning.

Begin New Era

Lauren and I packed the last of her things into the minivan yesterday and moved them out of her apartment. It’s the end of an era.

The 302mies – Lauren, Aleksia, and Anita – spent three years in that apartment. It was a pretty nice place – not the lap of luxury by any means, but a decent enough apartment for three university students. It was across the street from a Kwik-Trip, a critical fact in Wisconsin, and only a couple of blocks from the football stadium. It served them well. But they’ve all graduated now – Lauren twice – and they’re heading off to other things. Not too far off, it has to be said, at least not right away – they all have jobs in the city now, though that happened over a long enough stretch of time and with enough uncertainty in the current labor market that continuing to live in that apartment wasn’t really an option.

We’ve been slowly moving Lauren’s stuff back home to Our Little Town, one minivan-load at a time, because it is a whole lot easier to do it that way than it is to rent a truck and try to get into that parking lot on the day when every lease in the city turns over. Ask us how we know that sometime. Fortunately Lauren is a pretty ruthless editor of her stuff and almost all of the apartment’s furniture was leaving with Aleksia or Anita, so aside from trying to fold a foam mattress into the van it was pretty unproblematic.

I will say, though, that the dolly Kim and I bought back when we were still selling homemade soap at craft shows was some of the best money we ever spent.

The nice part about doing this in multiple trips is that it takes a while so there was time for Lauren bring her friend Olivia down for dinner on Wednesday. The rabbit got involved and there were many tarot readings because why shouldn’t there be. I don’t believe anyone tried to do a reading for the rabbit, which was probably an oversight, but we had a lovely time together anyway. Good food in good company is one of the secrets of life, I think.

Lauren and I unpacked the van yesterday and distributed her stuff around the house and into the garage, depending on the specific nature of the stuff in question. Eventually we went over to the County Fair, a place that used to be our second home, back when Lauren and Oliver were in 4H. It features a wide variety of livestock – rabbits, dairy cows, beefers, pigs, sheep, chickens, turkeys, and goats – and an even wider variety of moderately nonlethal food, most of which can be had for only slightly higher than reasonable prices but you know it’s the Fair and that’s what you do. They also have a booth that has the best fried cheese curds in the county, and in this state that is a highly coveted award. There was a country act filling the night with music. We debated what was the best thing we spent too much money on that turned out to be worth it. We had a good time together.

Tomorrow Lauren will head out for an Adventure and we won’t see her for quite some time, but we’ll be here when she gets back and we’ll look forward to hearing her tell the stories.

All eras end. New eras begin. That is the nature of eras. 

We Are Visited by New Yorkers

Americans have always been mobile. Even in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Americans picked up and moved with an ease and rapidity that astonished outside observers, and with railroads and then cars that pattern only accelerated. Not everyone moves, of course, and I remember someone once telling me that the big divide in American culture was not liberal vs conservative or even rural vs urban but instead was between those who settled down and those who got out, but enough of us do that the pattern still holds.

I’m not sure I buy that as the big divide in American culture, by the way, but it does give one a lot to think about even so.

One result of all that for me personally is that there are altogether far too many miles between where my brother and his family live, just across the river from New York City, and where I live, here in southern Wisconsin. We try to bridge that gap as best we can with phone calls, holidays, and random visits, but the fact remains we are both a long way from each other and a long way from where we started.

Thus it was a grand and glorious thing that Keith, my niece Sara, and her boyfriend Aiden came out to visit us last week.

They drove out Tuesday and made good time despite the GPS taking them through Chicago instead of around it – driving in Chicago, even just on 90, is a chore. Yes, Keith is used to driving in Manhattan, but still. They made it, we plunked ourselves down in the living room to hang out and catch up, and this pretty much set the pattern for the entire visit. It was pleasantly low-key that way.

The cat immediately decided that Keith was friend-shaped and was happy to spend time with him while he was here. For a cat that ordinarily runs from visitors as if they were chasing her with a cattle prod, that was pretty welcoming. She’s mellowing in her old age. I’m glad someone is.

When they told us they were coming to visit we asked what they wanted to do while they were here and they said “chill” so that’s a lot of what we did. We also ran them around a bit, though, because that’s just how we operate.

For example, one day Sara wanted to see the cheese aisle at our local grocery store so we went over and demonstrated the awesome power of Wisconsin cheese. It’s actually pretty impressive just how much cheese that grocery store has on hand on a Wednesday morning when you get down to it. The ice cream section is much the same. Wisconsin does not mess around when it comes to dairy.

We also went to visit Lauren, which was on Sara’s list as well. She and Aiden actually stayed with Lauren for a couple of nights, exploring the city there. We went out for dinner at one of the classic places up by the capitol, which yielded one of the weirder moments of the current year. “Your meals come with fries or salad,” said the waiter. “Huh,” we all said collectively, after a moment’s consideration, “In the current climate the fries are actually the healthy option, so we’ll go with those.” Strange times indeed.

Afterward we walked over to the bar where Aleksia works because they have bingo on Wednesday nights and you have to love that. I don’t remember the last time I played bingo. It might have been at my grandparents’ house. We actually did very well as a table, even convincing Aleksia to join us for a round where we ended up with an extra card and she won too. We didn’t win every round, of course. We tried, though.

Bingo Rage is a thing, people!

We left the younger generation up there but returned on Friday to collect Sara and Aiden and drop off my car for Lauren for a couple of days. This drop-off involved lunch at a restaurant that served fresh ramen, and you have to love that.

At some point in your life a little switch flips over in the back of your head and you think, “Huh. Genealogy. That sounds like fun.” This happened for me in my early forties, and it has now definitely happened to Keith so we spent a lot of time looking through all of the records that I have amassed over the years – a vast and haphazardly organized collection of documents, stories, random notes, photos, and assorted memorabilia that we had fun digging into. I eventually ended up putting all of it onto a jump drive (a desperately slow process for some reason) and sent it home with him and we’ve continued our explorations since then.

You forget, as a trained professional historian, just what a surreal experience it can be working with primary source documents.

Keith is an intelligent man, certainly my equal or better, and he worked as a producer and editor in broadcast journalism for decades. Won awards for it, in fact. He’s very good at looking at a disparate collection of sources and putting together the story they tell, in other words. But unless you’ve trained for it, the sheer nonsense that you have to deal with in historical primary sources – where the information was put down by people whose standards of accuracy were often rather casual and who weren’t getting paid to care about it either way, where spellings of names vary across and occasionally within documents, where dates float around like doorbell buttons in front of a drunk, where transcriptions and translations were made by people working by ear who either didn’t know or didn’t care about what they were listening to, where handwriting styles varied wildly over time even if the person was actually writing legibly for the day – all of that can be a bit tricky to wrap your head around. That’s the fun part, though, and between us we’re actually making good progress. I do need to organize what I have, and perhaps this will be the thing that gets me doing that for real.

One night by request we dragged out the Hitster game from Christmas and spent an enjoyable evening playing Young Folks v Old Folks or New Yorkers v Wisconsinites and everyone won at least once though the point of those games is to enjoy spending time together and singing along with the good songs. 

Sara and Aiden left a day early to go to Chicago and visit Aiden’s uncles there, so Keith and I spent most of the last day doing genealogy and generally hanging out. That kind of unstructured time is rare after you graduate from school, but it’s the best kind of time.

Keith left on Sunday, picked up Sara and Aiden on the way home, and made it back safely despite the greater New York City area nearly being washed out to sea the day before. We’re back to normal again around here, or whatever passes for it in these parlous times. Not sure that’s an improvement, but here we are, getting though the days as best we can.

Still too many miles between here and there, though.

News and Updates

1. We just had a lovely visit from my brother, my niece, and her boyfriend and there will be blogging about it soon, oh yes there will. It has been a summer of brotherly love, it has.

2. The World Cup is over and now I have to get back to my regularly scheduled life, already in progress. I’m not sure how I feel about that. The rest of my life involves things like running errands and figuring out what to have for dinner every night and I’m just not looking forward to that sort of thing. I’m glad Spain won the tournament, even though they were not on my list of top five teams I wanted to win. But they were in the final, and to have had Argentina’s blatant thuggery and official favoritism rewarded with a second straight championship would have been a grotesque injustice. I hope the Egyptians are cheering now.

3. Seriously – punching opposing players after the final whistle? I wouldn’t have put up with that from my kids when they were in middle school. Why is this a thing with people who are supposed to be adults?

4. Also, the fact that tens of thousands of fans booed Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and held up red cards when he staggered onto the field after the game like a junkie looking for last night's cheeseburger warms the cockles of my shriveled heart, yes it does. If it weren’t for the fact that he lives in a hermetically sealed ego bubble surrounded by an impenetrable wall of bootlickers and toadies I would hope he might have gotten the hint or at least have been dismayed but I know he thinks they were cheers and flowers. Mostly people do that for each other, to remind us that we’re a majority and soon he and his minions, cronies, lackeys, and slaves will be relegated to the dustbin of history with the original Fascists.

5. It’s Smoke Season again, the inevitable result of the global climate change that right-wingers refuse to accept as real because it would interfere with corporate profits that will never trickle down to most of them but that’s owning the libs for ya. The air here in Our Little Town has been either Unhealthy, Very Unhealthy, Extremely Unhealthy, or Hazardous for a week now – on a scale where 0-50 is normal and 300 is Hazardous we hit 658 at one point, which is impressive until you consider that Duluth MN hit 1165. Naturally, Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump thinks he can use this as an excuse to impose huge illegal tariffs on Canada because that’s his only solution to anything that doesn’t necessarily involve voter suppression or white supremacism. Truly we live in the stupidest timeline.

6. If anyone’s reading this in 50 years, I just want you to know that this didn’t used to be normal. We never had a Smoke Season until a couple of years ago. We used to have insects. There was such a thing as snow. You could go outside in the summer without protective gear. Hard to believe, I know.

7. It’s been hot here the last week or so – not as hot as it’s been in Europe this summer but hot enough that we pulled the rabbit inside for the week because we know what happens to rabbits if you don’t do that (RIP Hazel). Between the heat and the smoke we’ve mostly stayed inside and I’m glad that we have lives that allow us to do that.

8. I’ve spent a combined two hours on the phone with my internet provider over the last two weeks because they upgraded something that worked just fine and now it doesn’t. At some point later this week one of their tech people will come out to let me know that this is probably my fault, at least from a financial standpoint, but in the meantime here we are. The kicker of it is that the problem has occurred in the one service that we don’t actually use at all, but every time we threaten to cancel our landline the provider panics and offers us a deal where it’s significantly cheaper to keep it than get rid of it. If we cancel that now, I suspect our bill would go up. I am not sure why they are so bound and determined that we keep our landline but so be it.  

9. Apparently I am one of the very few people who managed to get the Wordle on the day they decided that “Pshaw” was a word. They make weird decisions in that game – not as weird as the Spelling Bee, where a couple of days ago there were supposed to be three pangrams and I got three pangrams, all of which were actual words but two of them were “not in the word book” so they didn’t count – but weird enough and what are you going to do about it, really. It’s a free game, after all.

10. Some days the references around here are so pointlessly obscure that I think I may be the only person on earth who will get them. The title of a recent post, for example, was a reference to a single line in a 1970s sitcom so forgettable that even the original network no longer believes it once aired, but it became a tagline in my family and we remember. Yes, my brother got it. He even named the show. I don’t really expect people to get things that obscure, to be honest. Sometimes you just have to keep yourself entertained.