Families Are Verbs and Not Nouns
I’m reminded of this every Christmas season
What does it mean to be a member of a family?
That’s my dad and mom on their honeymoon in Chicago in 1948. I came along in 1949, my brother Peter in 1951, and Pat three years later.
My dad died in 1993, mom in 2017.
Last week Spotify brought my parents back to me through the Ray Conniff Singers’ We Wish you a Merry Christmas album. I listened on a hot dog-sized speaker we bought in Romania two years ago.
Sixty years ago two delivery men hauled another sound system up the 25 steps you see in the photo below.
As I held open the screen door, the delivery guys rotated the box to a vertical position, lifted it through the entryway, and carried it to the living room, just inside the first-floor window on the left. After taking the box off, they lugged the stereo console to the wall it would dominate for five decades.
In 2015, just before he put mom in a memory care unit, my brother Pat pulled the huge hi-fi down those steps to the boulevard where it would be snatched in a matter of hours by metal scavengers.
For fifty years, it was a Gardner Christmas tradition to listen to the Ray Conniff album on that stereo as we opened presents on Christmas eve.
So family means tradition and continuity. But not just that.
No seatbelts
In the summer of 1952, my maternal grandmother Florence was driving with three-year-old me in the front seat and my mom in the backseat holding Peter.
When a car slammed into the driver’s side of my grandmother’s car, I was ejected out the windowless passenger seat door to a soft landing on a boulevard and my brother Peter catapulted out of my mother’s arms, through another open window, to a hard landing on a cement curb.
Florence, Dody, and I sustained minor injuries. Peter’s left leg required several operations and a long rehabilitation.
Seat belt laws were more than a decade coming.
But there were other kinds of belts
As the three Gardner boys were growing up, our dad, on at least three occasions I can remember, threatened his belt as punishment.
I once climbed up a bedroom chest of drawers and pulled it down as I jumped off. My dad ran into the bedroom and when he saw I was alive and uninjured started his belt routine.
This included: clenching his curled tongue, moving both hands to the belt buckle, and retracting the tip from the buckle.
He never pulled the loosened belt from its loops. The belt pause likely saved my butt. But the fact my dad, a gentle, kind, and decent man, threatened the belt suggests where American culture was at that moment on corporal punishment.
Today’s Gardner clan
Gardner’s today still have Ray Conniff, but they all routinely buckle up and do not threaten with their belts. As America changed, Gardners followed suit.
In The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity, Kwame Anthony Appiah wrote
Identity is an activity and not a thing. And its the nature of activities to bring change.
I like the idea of my Gardner identity as a verb and not a noun. I can change with the times and I can use my agency.
Take another look at the photo of my family’s house and yard. That stone garden monstrosity was installed by the person who bought the house from my mom. It replaced a steep grass terrace my father taught me to mow up and down using ropes as a pulley.
Throughout the 1950s, my dad mowed the front yard vertically, using the rope system. Around 1960, mowing became one of my chores. I hated using the ropes. They would get tangled. One day, while my dad was at work, I experimented with going across the lawn, horizontally, without the ropes. I worried the mower or I would tip but that didn't happen.
A new Gardner mowing method was born, with me as the creator.
Families need tradition and change, continuity and agency.
