A few days later, John and Darla drove up from Florida after spending a month in St. Augustine—a trip I would have found arduous—but they arrived on our doorstep with smiles, their overnight bags, and Katrina, their Coton de Tulear.

Darla handed me a plush bathmat with the words “Squeaky Clean” and a copy of Jeanette Walls’ Half Broke Horses. “I was needing a new mat for our guest bathroom,” I said, and told her I knew I would enjoy the novel, having loved The Glass Castle. Somehow, Darla always knows the exact right gift—not just for us, but for everyone she knows. Intuitive shopping is her super power.

We spoke in whispers—it being a tad past nine and Bob already retired—while Katrina padded through the house, finding the food and water bowls that I had set out. I wondered if she remembered them from her last visit.

“This house smells like Nana’s house,” John said, nose lifted. We both knew that Nana’s house represented the very best moments of our childhoods. I blushed, realizing that my ovearching life goal has been to make a space where others would feel as at home as I had been at our Nana’s. This, I thought, was my super power.

What was that smell, we wondered, trying to pick it apart. “Do you use Calgon bath salts?” John asked.

“No, no bathtub here. Windex and fried onions, perhaps.”

“Remember that face cream Nana kept in the downstairs bathroom with her makeup?” And we drifted down memory lane, thinking about our grandmother special smells and our days as children on her acre of paradise.

The next morning the five of us sat in our yellow dining room and when our plates were empty, it was time for show and tell. First, John went out to the van to fetch a small alligator head that Darla had picked up for someone back home in Pennsylvania.

Next, Bob gave a tour of his gorgeous orchids. Like Bob, Darla wears the green thumb in their house. She, too, has a few orchids.

Show and tell is boring for little dogs, but Katrina is made of patience. She lay down in our living room, bathed in orchid lights, and waited for a good smell to appear, or for her people to move toward the door.

We soon said our goodbyes on the lawn, promising to drop in on each other as often as possible, no matter for how long or short. We’ve often enjoyed John and Darla’s hospitality and were pleased to return the favor. They are the kind of hosts who leave chocolates for their guests, and post “Welcome, Camille and Bob,” on their refrigerator.

After their van had vanished down the road, I went inside to strip the bed and looking out the window, wondered when I’ll get around to finishing washing the others. Maybe next week, I thought, and turned my attention to other, less productive pursuits.

My family was very pro-Carter. So much so that my mother joined a bus full of college students headed to Washington DC for his inauguration. Here is the article she wrote about that day.

INAUGURAL TRAVELER FINDS HOPE FOR AMERICA

Janice Illo

The Slate – Shippensburg University’s weekly newspaper

February 1, 1977

It was around 7 am as I sleepily found a seat with my two young sons on one of the five Shippensburg State College student buses headed for the Presidential inauguration in Washington.

Questions and thoughts began awakening me as I watched each pair of eyes search for a seat. What were they thinking? The year 1976 was such a whirlwind, the first Presidential election after Watergate; the Republican and Democratic conventions running neck and neck with the Olympics; Carter, running all the way on hope and just making it ahead at the finish line; and all within the setting of the country’s exploding Bicentennial celebration.

I began talking with these eager, knowledgeable, young people as they headed to add a live historical experience to their knowledge. As we talked, I was interested to learn that the group was mostly made up of students majoring in elementary education, government or social welfare.

The students were soberly optimistic about the next four years and were realistically aware that the term may have its dangers. They all agreed that anything could happen, with the assassinations of the 60s still etched in their minds. The hope was strong in them, though, as they talked about what the new President might accomplish.

The group was a happy one and a delight to be with. Their quick eyes detected everything of interest that passed by the bus windows. Their witful comments made the ride speed by. As the bus paused for a light on Constitution Avenue, cheers rolled through from end to end as each one caught sight of a pretty, slight, fully uniformed police woman at the wheel of a police car full of robust policemen.

We arrived! Some of us had the good heads to get tickets to enter the Capitol gates. Others stood outside, including me. We even forgot to bring my son’s invitation. I wasn’t sorry, though, for there was much to see among those thousands of outside people.

We climbed the icy steps of what looked to be a law building to get a better view. The day was bright and clear but cold. An Indonesian family sat huddled on an icy step in a sleeping bag.

Another man was wrapped in a green blanket.

A well-dressed man wore a plastic bag over his head with a hole cut at his mouth.

Men were shouting and holding up hats and gloves for sale. Steam poured forth from thermoses. Newsmen were in and out, getting their captions.

It was 11 a.m. when the band struck up the first song, “Praise the Lord.” This triggered the young boys and girls to scramble into the trees. One girl looked ready to join them but her mother held fast to her pigtails.

The people, as they stood around with their banners and signs stating their ideals and prides, were happy but not jubilant. They were hopeful, but somewhat reserved. There was peace and a disarming trust everywhere.

In front of us, young men walked up and down with a sign saying “Stop Nuclear Weapons and Power.” In back of us, a man quietly wore his sign of “Total Amnesty.”

All kinds of “Home State” banners waved. Even a figure of Abraham Lincoln turned out, looking so real that everywhere he stood people asked him to pose for a picture.

It was a few minutes until noon and “America the Beautiful” was filling our ears. Everyone was silent now as the Presidential swearing in took place. That man we chose stood earnestly on the Capitol balcony in what looked to be his traditional green. The only distraction of the moment was the shield he stood behind, and the gunned guards standing on each nearby roof reminding us of the all too real problems of our society.

Then the distraction left our minds as our new President’s words echoed back to us. Words such as: “Spiritual strength of our Nation;” “love and mercy to all;” “a new beginning and spirit;” “learn, laugh, work, and pray together;” “to be true to ourselves we must be true to others:” “we will work to eliminate nuclear weapons on this earth;” “pledge perseverance;” “cannot be indifferent.”

As I looked around me the faces seemed to have an attitude of introspection, the realization of the littleness of one man to do all and the awareness of the nitty-gritty of each ones own responsibility.

It was like the bottom beginning instead of the usual climax. We left the grounds thinking this man will hear if we will speak.

Our steps quickened as we headed for the parade. Many of us stopped off at the open legislators’ buildings to thaw and to eat. The lobbies were like picnic grounds as people sat on the floor near the heaters and opened their box lunches.

Friendliness was most prevalent as people warmed their toes in the sunny spots. In spite of the crowds there was no disorder anywhere, just friendly warmth.

Highly refreshed, we set off again for the parade. Everyone was smiling. Three well-dressed middle-aged business-type men handed us a camera asking one of us to take their picture in front of the Commerce of Labor sign. Click, and we were on our way again as they waved a thank you.

The parade was upon us now, and true to his ideals the President and his family stepped out of the limousine and walked with the rest of us.

All the while, a big peanut with a Jimmy Carter head walked along the sidewalk. Tiers of unicyclists equipped with a crutched participant showed this was a celebration that nothing could stop.

The next hours were a sight to behold; a patriotic Mardi gras spiced with circus overtones. The fifty states sported floats and bands. Tennessee’s barn and square dancers and a real chicken perched on its roof; South Carolina’s smoking train; Alaska’s Husky dog team, and Georgia’s peanut balloon.

Our Pennsylvania float was a source of pride, with its two eagles and the words “Committed to the Spirit of a New America” moving to the rhythm of Shippensburg’s own College Raiders.

Even Colonel Lindberg’s first plane, the Curtiss J N-4 “Jenny” was there.

The students couldn’t see much of the Inaugural Ceremony from where they stood and didn’t catch other details of the day, such as Amy stopping to tie her shoe in front of the parade. Some even had to jump up to see the parade over the heads of the people. Nevertheless they learned a whole lot that day about the very real presence of America and the ever flow and exchange of ideas among its every walk of people as they stood among signs and comments that they agreed of disagreed with.

I thought as I took notes on the bus, “How lucky I am to be able to decide in a moment to write a newspaper article about my surroundings and be free to do it.”

What a wealth we have here if we will use it. Let’s “Keep Freedom Ringing.”

There are six of us. Born to John and Janice who have now passed on. My parents married in 1953 and chased my father’s career across New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York for nearly two decades. They finally settled in rural Pennsylvania—a place my father referred to as “the armpit of the universe.” I had recently turned sixteen and this was my eighth home.

I stayed in Pennsylvania long enough to earn a high school diploma and began my own wanderings. My brothers also scattered, some leaving the state altogether, and as my parents aged, we coordinated annual reunions, cumulating in two final gatherings, one in 2021 to bury my mother, and another in 2023 to put my father to rest.

Family visits have since become catch as catch can, sporadic and incomplete. And as my appetite for travel waned, I started nudging my brothers to come visit me and Bob in North Carolina.

John and his wife, Darla, have driven down to see us a couple of times, and earlier this year Jim and Kathryn said, “We’re really coming down this time.” They would drive down from Massachusetts, we would meet at the beach, and Joseph would fly in from California. Then we would all drive back to our humble abode.

So Bob and I got to work spiffing up our house. I fluffed and dusted while Bob, as per usual, did the heavy lifting, spending days painting the guest bathroom.

Bob and I were the first to arrive and quickly slipped into relaxation mode. He had booked a beach house with three beds for two nights.

Former pilot, Jim, had never been to the Wright Brothers National Memorial, so we went. The forecast for our one full day in Kitty Hawk had been for rain, but we lucked out and it stayed dry.

We began our tour in the visitor center learning about the Wright family and the history of aviation and gaping at a replica of Wilbur and Orville’s ground-breaking invention.

Bob and I had visited the Memorial two years ago with our friends Henry and Kelly.

Henry was Bob’s high school roommate at TASIS, The American School in Switzerland. Like brother Joe, Henry and Kelly live in San Francisco.

But, back to 2024. Here are Joe and Bob standing outside the visitor center with the flight path and a small airstrip in the background.

I was struck by the parallels between Wilbur and Orville Wright and my brothers, Joe and Jim. Both extremely intelligent, born four years apart, and avid bikers—the Wright brothers ran a bicycle shop before pursuing flight.

Two of my brothers, Bob and Jim, acquired pilots licenses early in life.

We climbed Kill Devil Hill for the exercise and to put ourselves in Wilbur and Orville’s shoes, imagining for a moment what it might have been like to launch ourselves into the air on faith alone.

I watched my brothers with pride, both so healthy and curious, thinking about Wilbur and Orville’s supportive older sister, Katherine, and made a promise to myself to follow in her footsteps.

To complete our foray into the Wright Brothers experience, we drove to the sculpture park on the other side of the monument.

At the visitors center, the hard copy urged us to stay on the trail lest we puncture our footwear with prickly pear cactus.

We drove four hours inland the next day and Spot got to meet the gang.

I picked up the mail and found a package of hand-harvested wild rice from Amy Armantrout which the five of us later ate atop steaming bowls of stir fry garnished with daikon steaks from our garden.

Joe’s birthday was coming up on December 4, so I baked a cherry pie and we sang to him.

Later, after Joe returned to California, Jim, Kathryn, and I visited the Raleigh Executive Airport. Jim seemed to know each model plane by sight and was savvy enough to look up them up online. “That’s a 1957 Piper Cub,” he’d say, or “That’s just like the plane I used to fly.”

That evening we hosted a small dinner party with some of our neighbors and the next morning Jim and Kathryn left before dawn to begin their twelve hour drive home.

Cards, letters, and phone calls are great ways of keeping in touch, but nothing can replace sharing time and space together. Now, when we talk on the phone and I tell Jim or Kathryn that I’m at my desk or in the garden, they have a mental image of me in that space in the same way Bob and I can picture their kitchen and yard after visiting in July.

As Bob and I were leaving Lake Mills for Chicago, we decided to stop at Rock Lake Cemetery and pay our respects to Cousin Patty’s family. We drove in and immediately realized were never going to find Aunt Lois and Uncle Dick among twenty-five acres of markers.

So we called Patty for help. Lucky for us, she was free and willing to come over and show us around.

I listened to Patty’s stories about her parents, her younger brother, and her older sister. I was a fly on a tree with a camera, picturing myself in Patty’s shoes.

Patty’s younger brother died when she was nineteen years old. I could not get my heart around the magnitude of this tragedy. I tried and failed to imagine losing one of my precious brothers before I had found my footing in life.

I stared incomprehensibly at Patty’s sister’s tarnished white plaque, realizing that I am a lucky outlier, a seventy-year-old woman who has not lost any brothers or cousins.

Bob’s father, Bill, had two siblings, Patty’s father, Richard, and Becky’s mother, Mary. Patty’s mother, Lois, passed at the age of ninety-five in February and her father left this earth in 2010.

Both Patty and Steve told us how Lois was able to walk up the stairs to their place without holding onto the railing. They said it wasn’t until recently that she complained she was no longer able to pull on her socks while standing up. Ever since hearing that, I think of Bob’s Aunt Lois each time I’m tempted to sit down to put on my socks.

We had a second grave to find, this one on Aunt Mari’s side of the family. We spotted it right off, looming in the distance not far from the Armantrout plots.

Patty had told us that Mari’s son Scott had spared no expense on his memorial, but we were unprepared for what we found. The three of us stared at the towering black monument, stifling giggles and sighing.

Scott got cancer as a young boy but lived into his fifties, consuming every day as if it were his last. He came from money, so that helped. Bob says Scott always had the fastest motorcycle and the fastest boat on Rock Lake, so it made perfect sense that he would have commissioned the largest headstone in Rock Lake Cemetery.

Patty and Bob obligingly posed next to the polished granite, dwarfed by Scott’s legacy.

Our appetites wetted with family history, we decided to find Bob’s parents. Bob looked up his father on Find a Grave, made a phone call, and drove us the short distance to Helenville.

Zion Church Cemetery was a small, well-tended roadside park surrounded by autumn corn. The church was long gone.

Bob had no trouble locating the Armantrout markers.

Here lay his oldest brother, Rich, and his parents, Bill and Alice. It’s no secret that Bob’s family did not approve of his divorce. They were unable to accept me, and eventually Bob grew tired of hearing about it. Communication dropped off. Bob’s father called to tell Bob his mother had passed, but no one reached out to him after his father and brother died. It occurs to me that memorial stones represent the weight of a lifetime, whether short or long—all the complicated relationships and unspoken truths.

I don’t know what was going through Bob’s mind as he stood before the graves. Estrangement is hard on everyone, especially the survivors. I want to believe that he got some closure while standing near these markers on a beautiful fall day.

Bob’s Cousin Patty and her husband, Steve, came to see us on Maui in 2002 and in North Carolina last spring. It was our turn to go see them.

Steve and Patty lived in what used to be Patty’s parents house for much of their married life, but recently moved to smaller digs next door Their son, Tom, and his family have moved into the big house.

Patty and Steve’s deck comes with a brilliant view of Rock Lake. You can see their boat dock from up there, too.

I enjoyed meeting Patty and Bob’s cousin, Becky. She drove over from a nearby town to see us and hang out lakeside.

I couldn’t get over the sunsets. “This is spectacular!” I said. “They’re all great,” said Steve. I tried to imagine living in one place with such a view for forty years or so. Imagine!

The next day we put on our bathing suits. Gideon caught the football while jumping from the dock time after time, as tireless as a Labrador.

The weather was unseasonably warm. Patty couldn’t recall it ever being this nice this close to her birthday.

Aubrey was equally athletic with her leaping, twisting spins.

Bob delivered on his promise to get into the lake.

Something he had not done for at least thirty years. As children, he and his brothers would come to Lake Mills from Ghana in the summer to spend time with their cousins.

Old times, new times. Memories are made from repeating memories.

Cousin Kathy brought her little dog.

Steve, not-yet-retired, enjoying some downtime.

Tom kept us entertained with his quick jokes.

I was taken by Aubrey, such a bright light.

Sisters!

Kathy and I are nearly the same age.

Charlie stopped by after dinner to see his Uncle Bob. Patty and Steve’s third child lives on a Caribbean Island, so we did not see her.

On the way out of town, we stopped at the cemetery where Patty’s family are buried. Stay tuned for more on that story.

I saw your childhood home last month and have been dying to tell you. Not the home you lived in when I was young—the one you lived in when you were young.

But as you know, life gets in the way and I am only now finding time to write this letter. I meant to sit down and write after we got back from New York, but there was an impromptu road trip to Colorado, and then Dad’s funeral which I know you attended in spirit.

Anyhow, thanks to a day-trip to Greenpoint with our cousin, I have a much better sense of what your life might have been like fifty years before I was born.

Long before you were my Nana, you were a rising star on the vaudeville scene, and before that you were a little Polish girl who came to America to join her family in Brooklyn. Just saying those words makes me puff up with pride. My Nana, the beautiful ingenue!

When I was a child, I assumed that you had always been a grown up. It never occurred to me to try picturing you as a little girl. But after walking through your old neighborhood—in your footsteps—I began to envision you as a young girl with her whole, magical life ahead.

I know, I know. I can hear you laughing. I always could make you laugh. I know your life was just as much struggle as glamor.

Anyway, to go on with my story, Bob and I met my brother, Joe, and our cousin at the East River Ferry on East 34th Street.

Our cousin has long been interested in the Polish side of the family, and has been to your childhood home in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood several times. He would serve as our guide.

The ferry deposited us onto the pier on the Brooklyn side of the river. To our left, we could see the pilings from the old pier you would have used to walk into Greenpoint after arriving at Ellis Island from Poland.

You’d probably be appalled at the construction going on in your old stomping grounds. Greenpoint is now the third most expensive Brooklyn neighborhood! And I can see why, with all the lovely shade trees and cute little shops.

It was a short walk from the pier to the house you and your family lived in more than 100 years ago at 156 India Street.

It was a chilly morning and I was glad I’d packed a hat and gloves, but the trees were all leafed out and despite an occasional sprinkle, we didn’t get too wet.

We learned about how your aunt brought you to the States to join your parents and older siblings.

Bob found this 1940 photo of 156 India Street. You would have been long gone by then. Didn’t you leave home when you were fifteen to work for an Irish family? And then, unhappy with the way they treated you, get your start in the theatre?

James and Kathryn met us on India Street—they had driven their car to New York—and James got out and walked over to Green Street with us.

One of the houses on this block was where your aunt’s family lived.

After our little walking tour, we went over to Karczma, arriving before they opened for lunch, and so a few of us made some important phone calls. These days you can call anyone from anywhere and so, if you have a demanding job like, say, pastor of a church, you are always in demand.

When Father/Brother Joe heard the noon bells from nearby St. Anthony’s church, he took a moment to pray with James and Kathryn.

Once inside, we ordered lunch and some of us celebrated with a beer.

The food was delicious! Fried pierogi, potato pancakes with mushroom sauce, white borscht in bread bowls, mashed potatoes, grilled salmon with dill sauce, fried buckwheat kasha, and green salad with freshly chopped peppers, tomatoes, and cucumbers.

We had stopped at a bakery and bought a long, poppyseed bread roll which we shared outside the restaurant after we ate. It was very good, Nana, but I like yours better.

A few of us walked the one and a half miles from the restaurant to Calvary Cemetery in Queens across Newtown Creek. Our guide pointed out the locations of some of the factories that your brothers and cousins would have worked at. Lucky for you, you made it onto a chorus line at one of the nearby Vaudeville houses and didn’t have to work in a factory.

Calvary Cemetery is the largest cemetery I’ve ever been to. Three hundred and sixty-five acres! Jamie and Kathryn met us at the main entrance.

We dove in, searching for the first grave which happened to be your daughter’s, the little girl who would have been my father’s older sister.

I am so sorry you lost little Rita when she was only five months old. No wonder you told me, “Cookie, Cookie, don’t have kids. They’ll break your heart.” Then, come to find out, your little sister Sophie also lost a baby, little Virginia, twelve years later and had her buried with Rita, something our cousin learned when he took over care of the grave.

I can only imagine your pain. And I think I understand why you did not tell me anything of these two deaths. Too hard to put into words that a young girl could understand.

Naturally, we took pictures, but mostly we stood quietly, trying to come to terms with the losses you and your sister suffered and shared.

Finally, we came to your parent’s grave, where another one of your aunts—the mother of the Wallace (Wolosz) orphans that you and Grandpa helped raise—is buried.

And then we dispersed. Bob had already taken a subway back to our hotel near Times Square, making himself look as little like a tourist as possible. James and Kathryn began their long drive home, and Joe and I took the ferry back across the river where he got into his car.

I chose to walk the thirty minutes uptown. It felt good to be a pedestrian among so many others, many of them caught up in their private thoughts like I was. Rather than feeling small and alone, I felt connected to the sidewalk sea of humanity, big and safe, and part of the great protoplasmic flow. I am a New Yorker at heart. It’s in my blood. I know you will understand.

Love, Cookie

Bob and I last visited the island in 2011 and were unsurprised to find it, mostly as we’d left it, a rare gift in a world roiling with change. Today, we were here to meet brothers Bob, Joe, James, and James’ wife, Kathryn, for lunch at Artie’s.

When Ann Somnitz, a flamboyant woman who worked with Grandpa Frank on Broadway, heard that Frank’s son, John, was looking for a place to move his tidy family of four, she knew the perfect place. And so my father, John Illo, rented the house at 393 City Island Avenue from 1958 to 1962. I had just turned four, and my little brother, John, was about to turn three. They called it “The Farm” because it sat on an eighth of an acre, and my mother intentionally kept half the backyard wild for butterflies and such so we could experience nature.

The neighborhood kids often came to our house to play and get their clothes caught in the pricker bushes. Our best toy was a steel water heater which we rolled across the flat upper lawn in our bare feet like circus performers, developing our bravery and balance. We’d walk the heavy cylinder back and forth until it veered off course and slid down the hill into the belly of the yard, and then everyone would heave-ho it back onto the level dirt near the house.

My brother, Bob, was born while we lived in that house, and a few years later, Joe. We all slept upstairs while Mom and Dad slept in their bedroom behind the living room. I became my mother’s “Centurian”—an extra set of eyes to tell her when my siblings were flirting with danger.

Once, John and I were playing down the street at Ellen Goulden’s, and her little sister dropped a big rock on John’s forehead. I looked at the little hole that rock had punched through his skin and ran home to get my mom. Ellen ran for her mother, too. Back then, nearly everyone had a stay-at-home mother standing by to rescue their little darlings from themselves.

My mother asked me to stay put and flew out the door to take John to the doctor. I flung myself across my little bed, terrified he might die, wishing I’d seen that rock coming, and prayed one rosary after another until they returned. Happily, John survived.

Artie lived next door, and we all played together, but he and John were closest. When Artie grew up, he took over his father’s pizzeria across the street and turned it into a steak and seafood restaurant.

These were the heady days of penny candy, and we lived across Ditmars Street from one such purveyor. Imagine getting a chewy Mary Jane, a jawbreaker, or a tootsie roll for a penny! At Peck’s, they kept the candy in big, glass jars with the hole at eye level so you could reach in your hand and grab what you wanted after spreading your pennies out on the counter.

The movie theater two doors down from 393 is now a grocery store, but back in the day, Mom and Dad would take us there to watch family-friendly movies like Disney’s That Darn Cat.

Bob and I arrived at the restaurant early and took a stroll down Ditmars Street. I lingered near the tall back fence encircling what used to be my backyard, peering down the side at what used to be old man Ryan’s house. Mr. Ryan was a grouch who didn’t mind telling us kids to stay out of his lumber pile. As kids, we’d watched the moon landing and gotten it into our heads to build a rocket ship, so when we noticed some spaceship-worthy 2x8s crying out for a trip to the moon, we started dragging them off.

We walked the few short blocks to the end of Ditmars, where the island turns to marsh behind a low, concrete wall.

Here was where the swans lived when I was a child, substantial birds with snakelike necks that threatened us with their flashing eyes and sharp beaks. But we saw no devil eyes there on this day.

Adjacent to the marsh was a field where Dad took us to fly a model plane with a gas engine tethered to a line like a kite, the grassland now populated with trees and brambles.

I remember my mother sitting on the Ditmars stoops with the other women, all in bright dresses, laughing about grown-up things. One time I walked up with a preying mantis on my shoulder, and it jumped onto one of the ladies, scattering them all off the stoop.

While we waited for my brothers to appear, a young man named Joey came out to wipe down the outside tables. We asked if he knew my childhood friend, Artie, and he said yes, that he was Artie’s cousin and that Artie had sold the business and retired to Florida.

And then my brother, Bob, walked down the sidewalk—early like us.

After Joe, James, and Kathryn arrived, we ordered some food. While waiting for our entrees, I called brother John and laid my phone on the table. He told us how he and Artie used to play with wooden blocks on the floor of the restaurant kitchen to the slow, crooning hum of the industrial fan.

I ordered eggplant parmesan, which is better than steak or seafood in my opinion. James had brought each of us a packet of old family photos, which we passed around, doing our best to keep them out of the pasta sauce.

Needing to work off lunch, we walked up to the church after dropping Bob at his car.

I was raised Roman Catholic, so the church was central to my young life. It’s where I said my first confession, received my first communion, and got myself confirmed.

John and I started kindergarten at St. Mary Star of the Sea School on the block behind the church. I remember playing with our schoolmates on the asphalt yard overlooking the bay, the hot lunches, and the black-robed nuns who tried to teach us right from wrong.

Before we left, we walked to the island’s far end to stare through a chain link fence at the sound. I don’t know about you, but when I look across open water, I see time itself—past and future—as if the shore were a seat in a time machine.

City Island is where I started coming to terms with life, walking the edges, learning to swim in the buoyant waters, and standing on the prow of my ship in my unique space and time. It feels good to return here and find things reasonably similar to what I learned the world should look like as a child.

We had met a couple of hours earlier at Our Lady of the Visitation Church for the viewing and funeral mass—a replay of my mother’s funeral eighteen months ago. As is the custom among Roman Catholics, it was an open casket, and for some reason, my father had on eyeglasses. He was inordinately proud of his eyesight, the kind of man who would rather die than let you catch him wearing cheaters.

After Father Joseph led the rosary, the coffin lid came down, and the guys from Fogelsanger-Bricker Funeral Home wheeled my father up to the front of the church for mass.

When mass was over, I grasped the polished wood handle and walked my father’s shiny casket from the church to the hearse with my brothers, Jim and Bob, our cousin, Brian, and our nephew and niece, Brandon and Aphia. It was as pretty a day as you can want for a funeral, clear and crisp, as lovely as the day we buried my mother.

The guys from Fogelsanger—Justin, the Kung Fu black belt, an older man, and a young girl in training—hovered like bees, reaching out to help and steady as they probably do at all their funerals. No one wants to see a coffin dropped, least of all the guys in charge.

I was a first-time pallbearer and found it heavier than expected, heavier, someone said, than the box they’d buried Mom in.

And then we took Dad for his last ride through town. I’ve always loved a parade, so I sat straight in my new, blue Tesla, bought with my father’s money, giddy with closure, resisting the urge to smile and wave, wondering what true feelings lurked beneath my bubbly exterior. I’m the oldest now, I thought. The unrestricted head of the family. “Isn’t that nice,” I felt my father hiss from the car ahead.

We parked at Spring Hill Cemetery, stepped out, and tucked our fingers through the smooth wood to move the casket from the hearse to a bier atop a hole next to Mom’s grave.

The good fathers conducted the graveside service while I stood in the sun beside my brother, Michael. We had a nice view of the proceedings, our brothers and their wives, kids, and grandkids under the red canopy, and my Bob working the angles with his Sony mirrorless.

Bob joined us, and we discussed the viewing, which Michael had not attended. Michael was surprised to hear about the glasses, agreeing that Dad would have been mortified. He had asked the director to give his father a professorial look, and noted that the glasses probably also hid a recent oddness where you could kinda/sorta see Dad’s eyes behind his eyelids.

“Here’s a fun fact,” he said. “Dad’s not wearing any shoes.”

I hoped to see them lower the casket into the earth as they did at my mother’s burial, but that didn’t happen. Finally, people began to leave, so we got in our car and drove back to the church to eat and mingle. I read my eulogy, and eventually, we all went our separate ways.

The next morning, before driving back to North Carolina, Bob and I returned to the gravesite for a look-see. We found the sod replaced with the casket flowers atop the parched grass.

I crouched down to snap a photo, hoping that my father had truly reached his final home in his bare feet and glasses, and that’s when it happened. Emotion flooded in as I pictured Mom’s white coffin inches from his. This is how we all end up, I thought, tears smarting.

I thought of their sixty-eight years together, all the pain and joy, the ups and downs, their legacy—three generations of people all destined to die—the promise shining in their great-grandchildren’s eyes, the whole circle of life swirling around in my head.

I wished I hadn’t been so joyous the day before, so all about myself hefting Dad’s coffin, playing the big girl, happy for the closure, no more feeling like I have to reach out to my father, trying to connect. I stayed there close to the earth for a while, smelling the raw soil underneath the yellowing sod.

I didn’t feel brash or joyful now. I felt small, squatting near the sod, small, and old, and tired.

My 97-year-old father died on Sunday, May 21, we buried him the following Saturday, and this is what I read at the reception:

John Peter Illo never learned to swim in water, yet he swam at odds with the cultural flow, cross grain to the tide. “My little brother was either born 100 years too early, or 100 years too late,” my Uncle Frank said, hoping to soothe my teenaged exasperation with my father.

Dad thumbed his nose at authority when it was not fashionable for his generation to do so. We picketed against the Vietnam war, he with his students and me with my school mates.

One time he stood with me on the curb outside our house on Hollywood Avenue as I waited for a ride to Washington DC for a massive anti-war rally, and I thought, I hoped, that Professor Illo would add dignity to our pimpled high school gang. But he shied away at the last minute and I watched him recede in the side mirror.

He was coddled from infancy by the woman who later coddled me. Nana cherished every one of his breaths, getting up before he woke to remove dust that might aggravate his asthmatic wheeze.

She liked to tell me, “Johnny was so clean that his teacher told me she always knew when he was coming without turning to look. ‘He smells like soap,’ she told me.”

As a child, my father read the dictionary and liked to blow things up. He set the hill behind his mother’s house on fire more than once, and watched the fire engines roar up Mountainside Avenue in a fit of dust.

He was dapper, even after developing a taste for second-hand clothes. I remember complimenting him on his suit one time. He eyed a sleeve and said, “25 cents. I paid 25 cents for this.”

Dad had a great, roaring sense of humor in the early days, laughing with his older brother on Nana’s back porch, beer sloshing perilously in their frosty mugs. He drew cartoons at the dining room table, The New York Times precisely folded to his left while Mom assembled the evening meal. He sometimes saw his own letters there and found recipes—his reenactment of their Chicken Tandoori an act of genius.

He carried me and Johnny around on his shoulders and piled us into his 1954 Ford sedan for picnic lunches at a place we called “The Boulders.” At dinner, he’d point to the window and say, “Look!” then top off our milk glass. “Whaaa?” we would say when we turned back to the table and found our glass full again. “It’s a magic glass!” he’d say.

John’s father, Frank, was beloved by many, unhampered by his illiteracy, a kind man with an inventor’s brain who ran all eleven Shubert Theaters in New York City. Nana didn’t think much of Grandpa’s inability to read, so my father became hyper-literate. He taught his Polish mother to read English and later went on to become a PhD-ed English professor.

By the time I came into the picture, he had begun collecting books. I watched in awe as he constructed book cases in the back yard. He filled aluminum pie pans with water and set them on the hissing radiators in winter to keep the leather bindings from cracking. I watched him use rubber cement to fix loose pages and torn covers. I stood in the eerie red glow of his dark room watching him tong black and white glossies from one pan of chemicals to another.

As I reached double digits my father was drowning in a tide of bills, kids, and politics. Our moments of connection grew sparse, sparks flew, and my attempts at connection were met with anger, or worse, silence, until he disappeared completely.

My father, a man who lived in his mind—a scholar, a reader, a writer—struggled to stay on the shoals of the spectrum and eventually let the cool water pull him under.

His longtime habit of lurking in doorways became more pronounced. In an old photograph, Nana and Uncle Frank are looking at something on the dining room table while he stands in the doorway, hands clasped at his naval, his right foot in the living room.

I remember looking at family photos with his cousin Tommy. Tom pointed to a photograph and said, “See how he is the only one not looking at the camera? He’s like this in all the photos. Your father was a ghost. He’s telling us, ‘I’m not here,’ He was always somewhere else.”

We often stood, each in our own doorway, the room between us tumbling with stacks of books and photographs, shared ideologies, arguments, and accusations, he thinking, “Where did she go?” Me thinking, “You were never really here.”

~*~

If you only have time for one defining memory, what will it be? What if, in a flash, you realize you’ve reached the end and it’s not like in the movies, that your whole life is not going to do a replay behind your closed eyelids? For me, that one defining memory might be this:

Thirty-four years ago, I drove to New Jersey for my Nana’s funeral, walked in, and spotted my father across the room. His eyes met mine, our feet already moving, our arms coming loose. We held each other and drew a long, deep breath.

Spring Song may well have hung in my Nana’s home. At some point I stumbled on a print and brought it home. Rumor has it that the little girl is Glücklich’s blind daughter and that the the child has her eyes closed in the original painting.

A robin sings from a bare birch branch cast in muted light with only a muddy hint of spring. The girl is wearing a brocade jumper laced in green, sitting on a bench, her face turned towards the bird.

In Spring Song, I see the spirit of my Nana and am filled with gratitude for her and for my happy childhood days at her house. As I drift off to sleep at night, I look at the little girl and see myself as the pampered little girl. I feel the spirit of my childhood as it connects with Nana’s childhood, she as much the little girl as I am and the two of us connected in a sense, to all the little girls of the world.

Bob took a photo of a Blue Heron as we were canoeing down the Myakka river in the early ’90s, and later painted it in watercolor. It is one of his best early works, definitive proof that he does have artistic talent despite what he heard as a child from the adults in his life.

There are several ghosts in this one. There’s the spirit of my mother’s intrepid cousin Beverly, and of Bob and I at that heady moment, pivoting to leave Colorado, madly in love and ready to eat the world. And there’s the tug south, that yearning for the tropics, a spirit which will never die.

How cold it was in Colorado the day we left for Sarasota—15°F below—and the car wouldn’t start so we called a tow truck or a cab. How fresh the thick Florida air from Beverly’s screened porch, teeming with spring, no ice or snow in sight, only alligators slipping from the shallow beaches where they’d been soaking in the sun.

Beach Birthday, by Bob January, 2022 depicts the Topsail beach Bob chose for celebrating his birthday. It highlights a moment in which Bob is sitting on the veranda gazing out at the waves and at his wife lying in the sun after a swim.

The spirit of this picture is my love, Bob, the barefoot boy who speaks Twi and identifies with the fish. The man who transported me to four different tropical islands to live in heated splendor. This is us at our best, relaxed, with salt water licking at our ankles.

Tall Boy’s portrait of Little Corn Island’s cliffs has of course, captured his spirit, his quiet presence, towering and just. And by extension, his wife Maribel and our months there in Nicuargua, our Thursday snorkels, the ruined coke boat, the beans and rice, the pistols, the coconut palms, and the dogs.

The etching of Seabiscuit holds the spirit of my cousins Frank and Mark, and our childhood together in the neighborhood they shared with our Nana. It invokes memories of summers on the lawn, of playing pick-up-sticks on the dining room table after Sunday dinner, and of the Stone Church Fair where my little cousins bought this print with me in mind because they knew how much I loved horses.

Seabiscuit summons those sublime and safe years, all the magnificent food, the strawberries and cream beneath the shade of the big oak, the chocolate chip cookies, tetrazzini, poppy seed bread, potato leek soup, and English muffins drowning in butter. Here are the night crickets, our skinny beds beneath the looming screens, the dogs chasing through the leaves to the top of the hill, and the drone of a lone motorcycle near midnight.

Here are the roses and the tomatoes, the chives, the living room dancing with light from the prisms, the jade plant on its own table, the porcelain swan, wings arched over a keepsake bowl on the cutout shelves between Nana’s green chair with its matching dial phone and the dining room table where stories were told and olives placed on fingers.

This photograph of Jesse in his green halter—the halter Julie brought me the day I brought him home as a two-year-old—tied with the end of a lead rope for riding, conjures Jesse’s spirit. He is turning to look back, ears focused on something about to happen, coat shining with summer, his eye as deep as a well. Here I see the spirit of Bob and I galloping across the fields, eyes stinging from the wind, in a gait so smooth we could have passed a glass of wine between us. I see pride, solace, joy, and freedom.

We called him the wonder horse, the best there ever was, and god bless Julie for giving him the greatest gift, a fine home after we decided to leave the country for Belize. Julie welcomed him, pampered him, and gave him a beautiful, long life. Jesse was my first horse—a childhood dream realized in my thirties. I trained him myself and he was the envy of my friends. There wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do for me. If I told him to step off a bridge, he might have done it. And he saved my life at least once.