Remembering Parents at Christmas

With my parents in Virginia in 2014.

When I was a kid in the 1960s, Christmas was a big deal at our house in the Washington D.C. suburbs. We set up the tree in our 1950s-style basement with its linoleum floor, brick fireplace, knotty pine paneling, and, down the hall, a cinder block fallout shelter in case we had to weather a nuclear attack while waiting for Santa. By the time Christmas Eve arrived, there was an enormous pile of presents under the tree—my parents always went overboard, and their generosity was augmented by grandparents so that we were beside ourselves with excitement by Christmas morning, waking at an ungodly hour to rouse our parents and start the long-awaited opening of gifts. My parents loved surprises, so we never knew what great thing we might get. It seemed magical. We were a fortunate bunch.

Last summer, I met my three siblings, Kim, Clark, and Emily, all of us now in our 50s and 60s, at our family cottage north of Traverse City, Michigan to scatter our parents’ ashes, saving a few for other places that were important to them. My father died in September 2019 just before covid shut everything down, and we never had a formal memorial. My mother died in the spring of 2024, and it took us a year to find a time when we could all get together. It was a week of laughter, cocktails on the patio overlooking Grand Traverse Bay, and good meals, but it was also melancholy as we read love letters that my parents exchanged before they had us. We visited Bellaire, where my grandmother was born and is buried beside my grandfather, and we revisited places that were expansive to us as kids but now seem smaller. We told stories about our teenage years, marveling that we never ended up dead or in jail, and we went through a huge wooden trunk of my grandmother’s, full of photographs and letters from when she was a teenager herself in the early 1900s.

Cocktail hour at the cottage last summer. Emily is reading love letters that my parents exchanged before we were born.

My father was born in Dearborn, a suburb of Detroit. His family built the cottage “up north,” as they say in Michigan, around 1950 and spent summers there for years afterwards. His father worked for the Pierre Marquette Railroad but died of cancer at age 52, before I was born. His mother, Nelle, was an English teacher, earning undergraduate and master’s degrees in Michigan. Going back even farther, Nelle’s father, Clark Densmore, was an attorney in Bellaire and a passionate advocate for women’s education and suffrage, though he and his wife, Hattie, had nine children, which probably caused some suffer-age on Hattie’s part if not for them both.

My father, Ed, with his parents, Ken Driese and Nelle Driese (nee Densmore).

My mother, on the other hand, was born in Enterprise, Alabama: the deep South. Her father, “Mac,” worked on the Pan American highway and eventually owned a furniture store in downtown Enterprise, a small town known for its Boll Weevil Monument, lauding the pest for forcing a switch from cotton to peanuts, which turned out to be an economic boon. When we were kids, men sold soggy bags of boiled peanuts on the streets of Enterprise (delicious), and the air smelled of peanut butter thanks to a processing plant on the outskirts of town. My grandmother always had cats around the house, and for her whole life, my mother was seldom without pets (mostly cats). We’d visit Enterprise in the summer, driving south in hot, un-air-conditioned Buicks, fussing at each other unbuckled in the back seat, eating at Howard Johnson’s, and sleeping at Holiday Inns that my parents found in a big newsprint publication that listed all of them in the U.S. They’d find a payphone and call ahead for a reservation once they knew how far we’d get or how much longer they could stand to be in the car with us. 

My mother, Barbara McCall in Alabama with pets.

In Enterprise, we walked into town in the hot Alabama sun from my grandparent’s house on Crawford Street to dust furniture at my grandfather’s store in exchange for soda money and to watch the monkey that hung around (literally) in the rafters of an adjacent feed store. My grandfather had a big, cluttered office in the back of the store that smelled of cigars. He’d take me to lunch at The Enterpriser, where I ordered shrimp cocktail and chocolate milk, both of which I like to this day.

My Mom's father, Oscar "Mac" McCall with me and my sister, Kim, at the furniture store in Enterprise.

My parents met in Northern Virginia where my siblings and I were eventually born, my father there for his first engineering job after graduating from the University of Michigan and my mother to teach high school English with a degree from William and Mary. When I was born, they lived in an apartment in Falls Church, near where my dad worked. My mom quit teaching to raise the four of us over the next thirty years, and she must have done a good job, because we all thrived. Of course, my dad had an important hand in that too, but he worked hard as an engineer, so my mother dealt with day-to-day parenting. There was a lot of it with four kids. We adored our dad, and I’ll always remember lining up on the living room couch with my siblings to watch out the window for his arrival home from work every evening, excited to see his sportscar pull into the driveway, usually in time to join us at the dining room table for a meal somehow cooked by my mother while she juggled everything else.

All of us in front of the Northern Virginia house we grew up in when we gathered to help our parents move to the Chesapeake Bay when they retired in 1996.

My dad’s companies designed equipment for the federal government, some of it classified. He rose into management, becoming the president of Scope Electronics, a company that he and friends had started in a garage. When Scope was purchased by another company, he consulted for a while and then worked for E-Systems, a descendant of the company he had first worked for (Melpar) after college, until he retired. It seems remarkable that he earned enough money to support our family comfortably, put four kids through college, and still retire with few financial worries, but those were different times.  

My parents retired in 1996 and bought a big old house (Point Breeze) on the Chesapeake Bay near Gloucester, Virginia, living there until my dad’s death. Despite the humidity and the bugs, they loved the house on the bay, even after Hurricane Isabel flooded their main floor while they waited it out in the attic, waves sloshing around in their living room, their house transformed into an island. The storm washed away the boathouse that came with the property, and they never replaced it or bought a boat, despite living on the water all those years. 

The original boathouse at Pt. Breeze, lost to Hurricane Isabel early in my parents' retirement and never rebuilt, though the dock was repaired.

Their main activities were working on the house and property and visiting with friends and neighbors. My father had a well-equipped woodshop, and he loved building things or using his tools for house projects. He played tennis avidly well into his 70s. They were both collectors, my mother of antiques and decorations, my father of tools and books. Their house was beautifully decorated (a gene I did not inherit), but drawers and closets were crammed with treasures from a thousand outings.

My parents wading in the Chesapeake Bay in front of their house.

My mother stayed on the Chesapeake for a few years after my father died despite declining health and our worries about her in such a big house by herself. She increasingly relied on her kind neighbors to help with appointments and minor emergencies. In 2022, she reluctantly moved to assisted living near my youngest sister, Emily, in Austin, Texas, where she seemed less anxious with Emily and her husband, Joe, nearby to visit and bring her treats and with regular attention from the staff at her apartment. She never really embraced Texas though, and if asked I’m sure would have said that she preferred Virginia. She spent lots of time on the phone, chatting with friends, her social life diminished to long-distance phone calls and dinner conversation in the dining room downstairs from her apartment.

I sat in our Silver City courtyard on a warm New Mexico evening a few days ago grilling chicken and roasting chili peppers that Ellen grew in her garden and felt sad that my dad never knew that I moved from Wyoming to New Mexico after all those years and that my mom was never healthy enough after we moved to visit. My dad would have loved sitting with me while I grilled, and I missed having the chance to make small talk and show them around this new place. I was lucky to make it into my 60s with both parents alive. Losing your parents when you’re my age is expected, but not without grief.

Grilling Anaheim chilis in New Mexico. My dad loved to grill as much as I do.

I get embarrassingly nostalgic when I hear Christmas songs that we grew up with. Maybe the worst (best?) are melancholy tunes from the Charlie Brown Christmas special that we gathered around the TV to watch every year. I sometimes play them on Spotify during the holidays when I’m driving around, and I think about that basement and the tree loaded with gifts, my parents coming down the stairs to see their kids hovering around the tree, thrilled with expectation. It seemed like nothing would ever change and that our parents would live forever.

My parents in Boulder, Colorado in 1997 on a rare visit to the West. 

Attic Life

My dad and grandmother "Out West" probably in the late 1930s or very early 1940's. His family lived in Dearborn, Michigan but loved to visit the Tetons.

(click photos to view larger)

Last summer, while helping move my mother from the Chesapeake Bay to an assisted living community in Austin, Texas near my sister, my three siblings and I sat in my parents' sunroom sorting pictures and letters before the house was sold. It was painful to cull family photos, and there were thousands of them. Letters were even worse.

My sister, Kim, and me with my Grandfather, Oscar McCall, at his furniture store in Enterprise Alabama. 1960s.

Generations of photographs ended up in my parents’ attic, where it was too hot in the Virginia summer to work, so we hauled decaying bins downstairs and sat, each of us with boxes for keepers and garbage bags for tossers. At the end of summer, the house sold, we left Virginia with photos of ourselves and our kids. I became the keeper of the family archive because I had enough room in the back of my Subaru.

My great-uncle Henry Driese (3rd from left) was a railroad engineer for the Pere Marquette Railway in Michigan. He died long before I was born, but my grandfather (also Ken) worked for the railroad too, and my father (Ed) loved trains all of his life. This is one of many prints in a box that I brought back to Wyoming with me.

This summer, Ellen and I are tackling our own attic, sorting and tossing, preparing to move to New Mexico after over twenty years in our Laramie house. Like my parents, we’ve accumulated extended family histories and our own: photos of Bei growing up, letters from friends and family, journals, artwork, climbing magazines, books, diplomas, annotated calendars.

Ellen and Bei in Baja, California around 2003.

Me and Bei at the same spot.

In Sally Mann’s autobiography, “Hold Still,” she begins with boxes in her own attic, lamenting:

“They had come to my attic in stages—first from Larry’s parents and grandparents and then from my father and mother—and they had not been opened since the deaths that necessitated boxing up a life. In them was all that remained in the world of these people, their entire lives crammed into boxes that would barely hold a twelve-pack.” 

-Sally Mann from Hold Still

Years ago, Ellen received a box in the mail from the nuns who had cared for her Uncle Bob in his later years. It’s been in our attic ever since, the last belongings of a man who lived a full life, married, worked for Boeing, but never had kids. By the time he died in his nineties, he had no other family, and Ellen had stayed in touch, so she became the keeper of his things and the carrier of that burden. 

A photo from Uncle Bob's box, carefully labeled on the back as the "interior view of C-97 mockup taken April 17, 1945." Back in those days, the entire cabin was first class! We've come so far.

Part of what we are saving for Bei are photographs and documents from before she was old enough to form lifelong memories—her early childhood, the year spent in China when she was five, her adoption. I’m certain that some of her “memories” come directly from these images rather than from actual experience. 

“Photography would seem to preserve our past and make it invulnerable to the distortions of repeated memorial superimpositions, but I think that is a fallacy: photographs supplant and corrupt the past, all while creating their own memories. As I held my childhood pictures in my hands, in the tenderness of my “remembering,” I also knew that with each photograph I was forgetting. --Sally Mann from Hold Still

Our memories can be as much formed by photographs as captured by them, and photos are an interpretation by the photographer rather than perfect rendition of a moment. Discarding an old photo is like erasing a memory.

Bei with Naxi men in Baisha, Yunnan when we lived in China. She was probably 4 when this was taken and I'm sure she doesn't remember that day except as it is captured in this image.

Recently, I sorted a banker’s box densely packed with letters from old friends spanning my life from college well into the recent past. Despite being dirtbags in our 20s and 30s, we were prolific writers, before emails and texts replaced letters and post cards. In those days, I was immersed in rock climbing culture, and the letters capture adventures with friends in Yosemite, Indian Creek, Europe, Thailand, and a hundred other places. They also remind me of how bonded we were--sleeping on each other’s floors, lamenting failed romances, and reveling in our freedom before dispersing in our 40s. I recycled some of the letters and kept others. They'll mean little to Bei and I’ll be unlikely to read them again once they're back in boxes in whatever attic we own next. But throwing them away felt like excising part of my life.

An enthusiastic letter from Larry Scritchfield back when we were getting ready to attempt to climb The Zodiac on El Capitan (we got stormed off 5 pitches up). 

The late David Roberts, in his book about his audacious ascent of Mt. Huntington in Alaska as a young man in the 1960s, wrote:

“A man’s best moments seem to go by before he notices them; and he spends a large part of his life reaching back for them, like a runner for a baton that will never come. In disappointment, he grows nostalgic; and nostalgia inevitably blurs the memory of the immediate thrill, which, simply because it had to be instantaneous, could not have lasted.” David Roberts from The Mountain of My Fear 

On El Capitan, Yosemite. 

There’s more to it for me than nostalgia, and I’m far from disappointed with the path I’ve taken, but fear of mortality gnaws a little as I look back at youth from my mid-60s. Milan Kundera wrote: 

“To be mortal is the most basic human experience, and yet man has never been able to accept it, grasp it, and behave accordingly.” -from Immortality

"Behaving accordingly" might be exhausting, and maybe our photographs, letters, and other of life’s flotsam, carefully stored in our attics, is an effort to be just a little immortal, remembered for a while longer than we would be without that evidence that we were here. 

 

Jane Shilling, writing for The Daily Mail while decluttering uncertainly after her son left for college observed: 

“When you write letters, either by email or on paper, you write, without knowing it, your life story, and one rarely emerges well from the account. But it is the human condition to be ridiculous and I may as well embrace it...Cupboard space is precious in a house as small as mine. But so are memories. And just at the moment, I can’t decide which I need more.” 

Cupboard space and memories are precious in our house too, so we’re taking the middle path with our things, recycling some and keeping others. Maybe if we leave our children just enough (if they choose to open the boxes) to learn about what we were like before we were their parents but not enough to overwhelm their attics, we’ve done the best we can.