Helping grandpa clean out the garage

Grandfathers are notorious for amassing the detritus of their past and carefully curating it in dens, basements, storage sheds, and garages. My grandfather dabbled in many of these categories, but his garage was his own to use and to fill with things he thought would be useful someday or were meaningful to him now.

In about 1993 I helped my grandfather arrange his tools and clean out his garage. There, I found many things that no longer existed in the 1990s. I spotted a cardboard tube with DDT powder for one's roses.  I came across a crank-operated drill press that preceded its electric powered counterpart. My grandfather had painted in black in haste to protect it from the elements. In the rafters were seemingly endless stacks of "Popular Mechanics," mouse eaten, water damaged, and moldy. An old fishing pole and tackle box hung above a peg board containing various screw drivers, hand planes, and other common tools.

A motif to my grandfather's collection was collecting itself. I spotted countless Pringles cans carefully arranged on their sides above me. He kept these for storage. The same goes for all the Old Milwaukee steel cans. Each had its top removed to facilitate its use in holding wood stain and other such liquids that my grandfather used on a regular basis. In addition, he had numerous King Edward cigar boxes, each stacked neatly on a shelf with a label indicating what lay inside. He was a prolific cigar smoker and cigar chewer well into the 1990s when he abruptly quit after his doctor gave him a grave prediction if he kept smoking. He collected many tools, lots of half-finished projects, and scraps of choice wood. Each had a story that he was quick to share with me.

He once was the proprietor of a store; the building still stands across the street from his house. When he closed shop in the 1970s a lot of the left over merchandise ended up in the garage. In one drawer he saved a U.S. history pamphlet that a popular brand used as a seasonal promotion of its bread buns. Another drawer contained a slide rule, which he handed me to use, as if he considered me some kind of math wizard. Like others, he held a common misconception of intelligence as being automatically good at math. Fat chance. Or shall I say obtuse?

Like me, and like many of us, my grandfather attached many memories to the items that filled his garage. And it became a burden to curate all these memory objects, so he paid for my help in arranging things. In the process he shared many memories in story form as if each thing in that garage, no matter how dusty and forgotten still had significance. As tools many had lost their usefulness through the ravages of time and neglect. Projects like this were always fun to me. We shared a similar interest in moments from our past. We managed an array of objects that offered us access to that past. When he enlisted me to help clean out the garage, he invited me on an odyssey of recollection through objects in disarray. The story telling that followed each discovery was a way to put order to this material universe in the garage and to dust off the narrative universe that belched out in sometimes slurred words from beneath my grandfather's well-kept mustache.

Our first task was to dig through the unlabeled cigar boxes to find what lay inside. In one cigar box he had his picture ID from the 1970s. He looked much younger than he did that day. He had his tell-tale mustache, bibs, striped shirt, and a dark blue hat. Also inside I found a stack of small cards, political advertisements my grandfather had printed to support his run for ward alderman. At this time, Collinsville had an aldermanic system. My grandfather was the most famous man in Morris Heights, a small neighborhood perched on the bluff, overlooking the flood plain to the Mississippi. At the end of his street the neighbors could take in the Saint Louis skyline and watch the July 4 fireworks display.

As we dug through toward the back end of the garage I spotted a lot of large items. One item in particular was a very old jukebox. Next to it were various wooden projects, which turned out to be seasonal items, Christmas decorations. Among these was a piece of wood upon which were some large colored bulbs arranged in the iconic Star of David pattern. He told me that he wanted to put a star on the house one Christmas, and that this star was the easiest for him to design.

And that's the story I believe. He was a first generation American. He was a practical handyman. This decoration was probably from the late 1940s to mid-1950s when one thinks that people were less sensitive to the minute details of one's Christmas decorations. In this era and in this small town everything was DIY. Any string of colored lights would do, even if the leg of the cross was a bit shorter than its head. And afterall, my grandfather donated his money and his labor to create the Saint Stephen's Catholic Parish on a parcel of farm land in the town down the road. The priests were no strangers to coming over for drinks, handmade pizza, and poker after Mass at my grandparents' house. They were quite active in the Catholic Church until the end of their lives. My grandfather married into a large and materially successful Italian family. Anyone with a modicum of DIY and business sense could get ahead back then, and my grandmother and her sisters were riding a wave of largesse that their father's business sense afforded for them back in Abingdon, Illinois.

My grandfather did convert to Catholicism. His grandfather was a follower of the Orthodox Church who upon immigrating to a small mining town in northern Illinois remained stubborn in his ways when he found no congregation nor church where he could practice his faith. For my grandfather Catholicism was the 'next best option.' He married an Italian-American woman, and so his religious affiliation only grew with her and her sisters, their husbands, their kids, their jobs, their fish fries, the beer, and all of their collective culinary acumen. 

One evening after cutting the grass my grandfather decided to chat with me about the family name. There, over a fish plate and some flavored drink, he told me that several generations back his ancestors had to change their name. According to the story he told, the village had 'too many Yasheko's.' And so his ancestors changed their name to 'Lesko.'

At the time I accepted this story at face value. Watching an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation I learned that Worf's adopted parents were Slovak like my grandfather's biological ones. The writers and producers of this show used their understanding of Slovak culture to portray that the Klingon heritage of Worf and his Slovak parents were amenable. The original series modeled the Klingons after Cold War Soviet culture. To place Worf in an adoptive home of Slovaks appeared sensible to the writers and producers. The germ of an idea grew that perhaps my grandfather's story reflected the stubborn, pride-filled constitution that remained part of his family. Then I decided that the name was probably made up, perhaps on Ellis Island when my great-grandfather entered the United States. I ran with that one on a hunch, and a rather pedestrian observation of Slovak culture acquired through Star Trek's depiction of Worf's adoptive parents. I was young then. 

Many years later I quit my job. This was a few years back. Shortly thereafter, the economy quit me. My future took on something rather bleak, and I took to sipping beers and reading web pages. In the absence of my elder family, Google became a way to imagine a past through search. It was my adventuring companion. Through it, I could find answers and flesh out a story about a past I never knew nor ever really mattered. When you grow up within three miles of a highway on-ramp you find yourself bled of any cultural heritage as you absorb brand standardization and efficiency dining. That variation on the melting pot reduced the zealous pride of culture to a menu item or brand loyalty. In spite of all this commercialization and its effect on consciousness and identity I still had questions.

A name sticks with you for life. Its sounds are familiar; they call upon you in a crowded room. You learn each word first intimately, then you reproduce them mechanically for life. But a name can be alienating when you see it listed among a bunch of strangers who share the same as yours. When you do search for your name you mistake finding it for finding, perhaps, a long-lost doubloon. When I plugged my name into search, a world of meaning came rushing in. Maybe it was the beer or the suggestiveness of a hangover.

I learned that "Lesko" is the name of a town in Poland, which is highlighted on Jewish heritage tours for its centuries-old synagogue. I also discovered this pop singer from Romania, who shares my last name but none of my obscurity. I learned about a tribe of 'Leskos' that aligned themselves with Russia at some point in that region's premodern history. I spotted a Youtube video under my name, where a group of what look to be Eastern European soccer hooligans are yukking up and singing some boast replete with taking sides and ramming your body into the other side. The last one held open for me perhaps one morsel of understanding. My name had to do with place, perhaps.

What is in a name? I began to consider that perhaps this name meant very little here, among the experimental soybeans and TV-tray sitcoms. And elsewhere it could be simply a very basic unit of Slavic nomenclature. The suffix '-esko' is one of the more common naming conventions in that part of the world. But what of this other word, "Yashesko?"

That word took me one specific place: the Romanian Wikipedia page for a city East of the Carpathians, called Yash. Perhaps, '-esko' was a way in the past to assign people last names that tied them to a place. Could my ancestors be from Yash? What of Lesko then? Maybe this is the name reserved for those who have no place? But a town in Poland has that very name. "Yashesko pogromo" were the words I spotted on the Romanian Wikipedia page. Pogroms are visited upon outsider groups, ethnicities not native or alien to a community with an already self-described insider group. Pogroms often befall two groups in Europe:  the Jews and the Gypsies or Roma.

Then I remembered something from my Aunt's own exploration of her heritage. She took a Bible that was the property of her grandmother, my Grandfather's mother, to a Slavic studies and languages expert. Upon a cursory glance he determined that the Bible was one common among the Gypsies of Slavic lands. This was my best and only lead in a long-odyssey to understand something about my heritage through a family name.

These kinds of journeys tend to be wild goose chases. Names change, and inheritance is a jagged form of self-affiliation. Armed with my information age tools I think I have found something unique to my own experience. I did none of the genealogical work, nor did I pay to gain access to its tools--a database of records. Instead, I let my imagination roam with a narrative stitched loosely across scattered details about a past that I never knew. And it could be best that I don't know my past. Those with a past that outshines their present find themselves taken up by the ghost of an ideology. They are set into a centuries old knee-jerk hatred of another ethnicity and engage in the symbolic guerilla warfare to become ontically prior to all other ethnicities. This is a leveling up game done at the nation-state level to have one's identity co-extensive with that of the nation's. It's a rather violent way in which one's ethnic worldview, as piecemeal and arbitrary as it may seem, becomes the one adopted by the coming generations of a nation.

Does a history need to be preserved if it requires this much violence to sustain?

In the game of chutes and ladders, names are chutes that send you back to the barren, theoretical landscape of ursprung identity. I was pleased to find a rather ambiguous past from which sprung one of many possible paths. I could choose to wander any one of them back.

No particular past beyond that garage offers me much purchase. My present is a vague collection of carried out plans and ritual self abuses. My future is a motley constellation of grandiose visions of self-worth and equally depraved avenues of ruin. And when I want to feel free to start over I can wander again, like the Gypsy that I am.