After a death, appreciating how a cousin lived
Questions about how a union handled an unsigned letter at Adirondack Park Agency
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I received an email Thursday from John’s sister, Amy, that he had died suddenly from a stroke.
I’m 64 and he was about nine years older, one of an older group of my large clan of first cousins.
He was on a ship at the time, traveling with his wife, Lettie, from Madeira, a cluster of islands in the North Atlantic, to Morocco.
He was a writer and a college teacher of writing and literature who, I’m sure, energized and entertained his students.
In photos of him not smiling, he looks sensitive and professorial, but I remember him smiling — slyly — or singing as he strummed a guitar or reciting poetry or smiling while he laughed, his shoulders shaking and his eyes squinting with pleasure.
His father, my Uncle Enzo, was an Italian immigrant, and John was very connected to his heritage, visiting Italy often and setting his novels there and regaling his listeners with Italian phrases slipped into his conversation.
When I was a teenager and John was in his 20s, he was famous among the cousins for showing up for family gatherings every summer with a different girlfriend on his arm but the same guitar under his other arm.
About 11 years ago, we celebrated his mother Maggie’s 85th birthday a year late with a big party near the Charles River in Cambridge. Somehow, afterward, I found myself with John in a blues club in Boston where the Muddy Waters Band was playing — not Muddy Waters, who died in 1983, but his band.
During a break, I told John I was a Muddy Waters fan, and he said he would take me to meet the band members, who were milling around on stage.
“What?” I said. “No, I didn’t mean like that. Do you know them?”
“No,” he said. “It’s fine. They’d love to meet you. Come on.”
“No, really,” I said. “I can’t do that.”
He cajoled me out of my chair and onto the stage and began to banter with one of the band members and introduced me.
“This is my cousin, one of your fans,” he said.
I was overwhelmed with self-consciousness, but also acutely aware of my surroundings and every passing second — embarrassment does that. I think John felt that awareness frequently, but without the embarrassment.
Reading some of the hundreds of expressions of grief and appreciation for him online, I came across one from an Italian cousin, who called him “the most generous person in the world.”
It takes a generosity of spirit to expose yourself and make yourself vulnerable, again and again, and to do it cheerfully.
I think more and more these days about what makes a good life. Sharing yourself with the world is surely part of it.
Poem
Speaking of giving, here is a poem by Hudson Falls poet Richard Carella:
Gift
Art gives order to Chaos, which Chaos neither
asks for nor rejects:
and will (eventually) destroy; meanwhile...
Art feels good.
Indivisible
The activist group fighting for civil rights versus the autocratic Trump regime is hosting a rally on Saturday, April 5 in Albany. Click on the previous sentence to go to the website for details.
Adirondack Park Agency update
Since my earlier columns on what I believe to be an effort by a handful of aggrieved workers to undermine the executive director of the Adirondack Park Agency, Barbara Rice, I’ve been pestering officials of the Public Employees Federation for details about the letter of complaint one of their field representatives, Martin Blair, sent to the agency’s commissioners.
Blair presented the letter as having been endorsed by 20 unionized APA employees, and that claim has been repeated multiple times in stories in the Adirondack Explorer magazine, but I’m skeptical. The letter was unsigned. Rob Merrill, a spokesman for the union, told me a few weeks ago the employees didn’t sign because they feared retaliation, even though it’s the union’s job to protect its members from such retaliation. But other explanations for the absence of signatures are possible — that some non-union employees were counted, for example, or that the count itself was inaccurate or both.
Merrill agreed aspects of the letter were problematic, such as Blair’s failure to make sure all of the union workers at the APA had a chance to review it before it was emailed to the commissioners. But since that first conversation, Merrill has not returned my numerous calls and messages and nor has Blair nor Barbara Stransky, the union’s regional coordinator. On Friday, I put in a couple of calls to Katie Vorwald, the union’s state director of field services but also got no response.
I’m left to make my own conclusion that the handling of this letter was all wrong. If I were a union worker at the APA who was happy in the job and with management, as some have told me they are, I’d be angry at the union for going behind my back. A union is supposed to represent all the workers in its shop, not an aggrieved faction. Unions are supposed to empower workers, so they feel confident in speaking up and don’t need to keep quiet about problems or hide their identities. Unions are supposed to foster solidarity and take responsibility, but PEF’s handling of this letter has ducked responsibility and fostered divisiveness.
Spring light
The morning light has a special quality this early in spring, although it could be I’m just appreciating the sight of warm sunlight after months of cold.
Such a touching eulogy for your special cousin, who cherished and lived his Italian heritage so fully…and touched so many lives with his authenticity.
Love the poem and the skunk cabbage.. the true harbinger o spring as you walk through the woods.
My sympathy on the loss of your cousin.