2000 ICONS AND A FLUFFY WHITE CAT

2000 Icons and a Fluffy White Cat


By Carl Kozlowski



Try as I might, I'll never be able to block out the image of my father standing with a shovel, digging furiously through the rose garden in front of my grandma's house, hoping to act fast enough to keep us from stopping him. He was a man on a mission on that gloriously sunny yet sad morning in January 2004, as family members bustled in and out of the house that my grandma had shared with her brother and housemate for the past 54 years in the San Diego suburb of Santee, California. Her husband, my mom's father, was killed in the Battle of Normandy in WWII and so she packed up with my mom and her brother to start anew in the promised land of California back in 1950.



Meanwhile, inside, my brothers and I scoured under the house's carpeting for yet another mound of money – wrapped clusters of Benjamins stuffed into long-forgotten corners of the house by these two sibling survivors of the Great Depression, in a seemingly foolish (yet presciently sharp, considering the state of the economy these days) attempt to hide it from both the banks and the tax man. We had come across pile after pile of them so far, yet as tempting as it was to take just one little roll of $20s from its hidden perch in a coffee cup that hadn't been used since 1973, we knew in our hearts that that was still stealing.



And worse, it would have been stealing from our beloved grandma and been compounded by being swiped under the now-omniscient eyes of my deceased, beloved uncle. I've always really believed that the moment someone dies, they take on the God-like power to see everything we're doing. Talk about Catholic guilt.



And yet indeed, it was Catholic guilt that not only kept me from grabbing enough greenbacks to look like I'd just won a game show, but also Catholic guilt that was compelling my father to dig away in the front yard just six years after having quintuple-bypass open-heart surgery. For dad was trying to fulfill his cosmic Catholic duty to bury any religious trinkets he had discovered and couldn't find a new home for.



Strangely, we are told to burn American flags when we try to dispose of them, despite the fact most of us would fight to the death to prevent them from being set alight in any other situation. And just as strangely (likely more so), my dad was now attempting to bury the deitized detritus my uncle had somehow secretly acquired throughout his 84 years on God's green earth, traveling coast to coast by car and across the planet to Japan by a troop transport plane in WWII.



Funny thing was, Uncle John didn't seem particularly religious during his time on earth. I remember he would at best drive us grumpily to church on Sunday mornings during our childhood summer visits and sit grousing throughout the hour-long ordeal we called the Mass. And at worst, he'd just keep popping open beers at home on holy days and then tell us to figure out our own way to church if we really felt the need to celebrate Jesus' Ascension on a Tuesday.



My dad, meanwhile, seemed to be Uncle John's polar opposite. Raised amid the draconian, all-powerful influence of the church in Poland – which also spawned the most powerful Pope in the modern age – he had even joined a seminary himself for six months as a young man before his sister Jola stormed the barricades and helped him face down their father and the priests in charge and let them know he really didn't feel the calling to be a priest. But even though he never completed his priestly studies, he often acted like he did – with crucifixes and iconic statues discreetly placed in nearly every room of our house and a daily required Rosary session each night.



So imagine my dad's shock – and frankly, all our shock – when my dad started cleaning out Uncle John's drawers after his death and found a collection of religious statues, pictures, prayer booklets, and crucifixes that could put Pope Benedict's collection to shame. The Legion of Mary could stock up for eternal battle here, and if he really wanted to, my Dad could have called in the Vatican Exorcist team and given them enough good-luck goodies to spare them even a taste of Satan's presence for the next 20 years.



It just went to show that you can't judge a person's spiritual status – their most private internal feelings - by their outward appearance and sometimes even their personality. Uncle John had earned the right to be a crusty, sometimes angry, sometimes hilariously boisterous old man – earned it on the battle fields he fought on in Japan, while working on the post-atomic-bombing cleaning crews that did their best to minimize the damage wrought by the worst bombs ever used by mankind.



He had a severe hip injury that prevented his ability to work throughout the last 54 years of his life, an injury that was always there even as he managed to hide the pain it caused by gritting his teeth while telling a story or by popping another beer open (sometimes doing both), and most of all by disappearing into his camper each day to block out the world for a few hours of rest while listening to the latest baseball games on the radio. Uncle John chose to keep that camper and live in it nearly all year round, perched out on the driveway or on the street in front of his house – as if always ready to roll, hit the road and move on at a moment's notice. Yet he never would move, except on his solitary drives into the desert “for a few days' rest” or to the sleepy and forgotten C-grade gambling town of Laughlin, Nevada, and then every couple years on a long-ass drive across the country to see us in Arkansas while on the way back to visiting the town he was raised in: Johnstown, Pennsylvania.



A man gets to know himself on trips like those, facing only himself and his God, with only his angels and demons to keep him company along the way. So who were we to wonder and judge his relationship with the Lord, to assume it was distant or nonexistent just because he didn't thrust his views and practice of faith out into the world with as much zest as our father? Even as it was odd and embarrassing to see my father turning the dirt and dropping in Ziploc baggie after Ziploc baggie of religious figurines (they were baggied because even though they were to be buried, they also needed to be pristine), it was also strangely satisfying to know that my Uncle John had taught him a lesson from beyond the grave.



But the clearing out of religious nuggets and discoveries of O.G.-quality money stashes were just part of the larger, deeper process of helping – nay, making – my grandma move out of the home she'd lived in for nearly five and a half decades. It was the house where she and her brother, Uncle John, had raised my mom the best they could after grandma's husband and my mom's father was cut down far far short of his time while heroically fighting in the Battle of Normandy. And in summer after summer of nation-spanning treks from Little Rock, Arkansas, to visit them as a child, that house had taken on a life of its own, embodying its own share of the forces of nature that were my grandma and Uncle John.



And now we were picking it apart, readying it for the next family to come along, a family we didn't know and had never met yet which had come into the picture and were ready to move along, move along my grandma in the hopes of launching their own 50 years of dreams and memories there. It wasn't personal, it just was the way things happen. One owner dies, others take over eventually.



My mother was heartbroken over her decision to move her own mom out of her house and tell her she couldn't handle life on her own. Grandma was the kind of tough yet loving woman who had chosen to never remarry after her husband was killed, even though she was beautiful and might have had dozens of suitors lined up at her door. She had known he was her soulmate, and it was enough to have had him even for a short while.

But perhaps in response to having lost that which was most precious to her, Grandma had turned her home into a de facto museum dedicated to every aspect of her daughter, my mom's,life. In her attic, my folks found dozens if not hundreds of boxes, filled with the graded tests and homework papers of seemingly my mom's entire school career. The garage , meanwhile, was Uncle Johnny's turf – and there my dad found thousands of little things, down to screws and nuts and nails , all meticulously organized into drawers . In the backyard was an ugly pile of scrap metal that Uncle Johnny had insisted for years would be worth hundreds of dollars whenever he got around to selling it – he was just letting it “grow in value” even though we warned him it was just an eyesore. Sure enough, it got cleared out and was worth almost nothing.



But that was the thing I learned, time and time again, in the countless little moments that week – and at the times like this when I look back as well. I learned that there is more than one way of determining value in this world, that what might seem to most is junk might be one particular person's stored treasure. That might be sad or eccentric to an outside eye, but if it doesn't hurt anyone else, we should learn to just let the “treasure” be theirs. While they might see some things that are eyesores as beautiful, so too do they often find beauty in the forgotten things that really SHOULD be seen as beautiful: like the school papers and projects and report cards of a child.



One of the things that most concerned my mom about my grandma's mental state at that time, after six weeks of displaced living away from her grown-up home and back in her childhood's, was that grandma kept mentioning seeing a big white cat – on the front windowsill, meowing at the back door, dashing through the garden out back. My mom never saw the cat herself, and kept wondering if my grandma had fully lost it and and was now seeing things that weren't there. Combining that concern with the fact her mom was over 85 and now living on her own with numerous other bad habits including an unbelievable coffee addiction, which doctors eventually figured out was a staggering 17 cups a day.



But as we packed up the last of the moving trucks to move Grandma back to the Deep South with us, I took one last look around the house for my mom – kind of like checking under the beds to make sure you don't leave anything behind in a hotel room, but also for my own emotional closure.



As I wandered under the trees in grandma's backyard, and through the tomato and grape plants lined up in neat rows, I found that it can be easy to see things that others might not – to see memories drift in and out of sight, of days past planting with my grandma or picking the resulting fruit with my uncle, of running through that yard. But I saw one last thing that I cannot ever forget.



I saw a big, fluffy white cat sitting on the back doorstep, meowing and scratching to come in. It seems my grandma really saw that cat after all. That's not to say she could have handled life on her own on any real level; she was getting frail with age regardless. But it did make me realize more than ever that our reality isn't just what we see, and our fantasies sometimes are more real than we could ever imagine.



That cat, like me, wished it could get back into that house.. And like me, it never would again.