Instead, he found bitterness and a lack of understanding that ingrained in him a casual prejudice fueled by his own inertia and passionless marriage. It was hard for us to watch her hip, smart, educated parents from the city, the first to attend college in their families, go down so deeply into alcoholism and madness, but like so many of their "silent generation", they refused to admit the seriousness of their illnesses to anyone, so they could condescend to the people stuck in the ghetto, who they wanted to see as having so much less than us.
We'd find him puttering in his garage during summer breaks from school, sweating in the heat and avoiding his wife inside the house. He'd made a little workshop for himself there, so he could paint tiny military figurines in exacting period detail, while he expounded upon his favorite topics like the Etruscans, always delivered in the exact same way: "Girls, have I ever told you about the ancient Etruscans? They were a very advanced civilization that pre-dated the Greco-Roman time period. Most people don't know that." Ah, okay. It was better than the usual power struggles between her parents, with their tense silences and chain-smoking drunks that'd go on for days. We'd go on beer and cigarette runs for them just to get the fuck out of the house.
With a little encouragement, her father would go on to describe Etruscan burial mounds and their sophisticated societal hierarchy that would inform and inspire the later governments of the much more famous Greco-Romans. We found it touching that he clung to Italy's historical underdogs out of some sense of loyalty to them and their almost-forgotten world, like any real historian would. Though her parents never made it out of their personal struggles with addiction and mental illness, I can still see him in my mind's eye working in his garage, at a time when the whole world was opening up to us from between the pages of our college textbooks, in the cold mountains of an upstate New York winter. Ta, Charles. Thanks on that.
