Elegy for a beloved Phillies fan, and a way of life
It is always a blow when a family member passes away, even if you know it was time and he/she had been suffering for far too long. My grandfather was the last member of our immediate family living in southeastern PA and had been suffering from a battle with dementia. Next week, many of us will be going there for his funeral.
It is very surreal to think that we are not only saying farewell to our grandfather, but also to an entire chapter in our family’s history and way of life. Hundreds of years ago, my grandfather’s ancestors came to Pennsylvania not far behind William Penn to escape religious persecution for being Quaker. For hundreds of years, our family lived in the area outside Philly and had farms.
There are so many fascinating stories about their farms. Our Quaker ancestors’ farmhouses were part of the underground railroad. It is amazing to think how these people who had escaped religious persecution then helped others escape slavery, offering one of the first truly free stops north of the Mason-Dixon. In the farmhouse where my mom lived as a child, there was a famous artist living nearby who would stay there and paint scenes of the surrounding nature. Nearby were the polo clubs of some of America’s first aristocrats, and the Brandywine battlefields of the American Revolution. So much history.
But when my mom was young my grandparents had to sell their farm. My grandfather had studied animal husbandry at Penn State, but it was no longer a viable occupation. So they both went to work in a chemical factory — factory work not really being a viable profession anymore for my generation. Things were not easy. Work was hard to come by, he had to learn new skills and find ways to support the family. He did eventually get a computer — one of those that you had to flip a switch to turn on and it mostly got used for playing solitaire. He loved the Phillies, Penn State and telling us the same stories about the local area’s history over and over again.
How quickly things have changed. His grandchildren live in seven different cities, and many of us have jobs our ancestors — even just our grandparents — who worked in farming for so many centuries could never have imagined would exist.
It is strange to think about how things can go on unchanged for centuries, and then within just a few years, radical economic and social change means upheaval in our entire way of life and our traditions.
Whether it was our ancestors coming to the new Pennsylvania for religious freedom, or all of us leaving the farming tradition and the region to spread out across America (and even come back to England from where our ancestors fled!) to take up new jobs doing everything from teaching ESL to designing websites to being an actuary and more, there are periods in history when our way of life and our families go through transformations that are truly astounding when you take a step back and look at them in perspective, considering just how short a time period — two or three decades, the blink of an eye historically — we went from being farmers to everything else imaginable.
I am sad to say goodbye to my last grandparent, and to the place and way of life he and our ancestors knew for hundreds of years, but I am glad to be part of a strong family that has kept records and passed down stories along the way to give us a sense of where the journey started and how truly remarkable that evolution has been. And we still stick to some traditions — my brother and cousin are also PSU alumni, our new home towns have gained a few more Phillies and Eagles fans, and there are a few more people out there lecturing sandwich shops around the world on how a “real” Philly cheesesteak should be made!
