"You don't choose your family. They are God's gift to you, as you are to them." ~Desmond Tutu.
“What greater thing is there for human souls than to feel that they are joined for life - to be with each other in silent unspeakable memories.” ~George Eliot
“Family life is full of major and minor crises -- the ups and downs of health, success and failure in career, marriage, and divorce -- and all kinds of characters. It is tied to places and events and histories. With all of these felt details, life etches itself into memory and personality. It's difficult to imagine anything more nourishing to the soul.” ~Thomas Moore
“The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life.” -Richard Bach
For Eleanor Scola, 1912 - 2007
Some people share genetic history yet this does not make them family. Others walk into our lives through marriage, friendship, circumstance, tragedy, or death, sharing no lineage yet through the power of a shared history and connected at the heart, they become family.
I don't need any cheek swab of skin cells to prove my grandpaternity. Dickie, who I called Gigi (rhymes with Twiggy) until her death last week at the age of 95, was my grandmother. She was married to my grandfather of no relation, James “Doctor Jim” Victor Scola, who was more a friendly stranger, actually. Help me here—I need PowerPoint presentation as a visual to understanding the Family Hermes/Scola/Goward/Tewksbury/Martin. I can’t keep track—and I love ‘em! How could I expect you to, really?
Oh, by the way, thanks, Scott, for your startling diction as a baby. Why was I the only one still calling her by her baby-dubbed moniker? I remember calling her Dickie exactly once. It didn't flow from my tongue, this adult term of endearment. I remember Gigi raising an eyebrow and suppressing a small smile. It felt wrong when I said it, like I'd said, "Heya, Toots!". Gigi, she was and will be forever more. Amen.
Eleanor "Dickie" Mendum Hermes Scola came into the Hermes family via marriage to my grandfather, Otto Edmond Hermes, in 1947. After my grandfather died in 1957, Dickie remarried a dear friend of her's and Otto's who had recently lost his wife. Dr. James V. Scola gave Dickie the last of her surnames and became her dear companion for over 40 years.
One of my fonder memories of the Cape was an afternoon spent in a rubber raft and then body surfing with Gigi’s sister, Dot Evans. I was probably 12 or so, and I thought it was SO cool that the magical character with an infectious laugh would want to spend time hanging out with an awkward adolescent.
I remember asking Mom & Dad very excitedly, “Does this mean Scott and I have a cool new Great Aunt & Uncle?”. I think the response was along the lines of “Well, not REALLY, but we seem to make up family as we go…so if you’d like to think of them as that, sure! We love Dot & Brad!” What is family if not love?
So where does this leave us?
I had a step grandmother and a step-step grandfather on my paternal side. Is there such a thing as a step step? Didn't matter to Scott and me. They were just our grandparents—we didn’t need to see pedigree like the stiff-bloomered Daughters of the American Revolution. They were every bit the grandparents that "Grammie" Phyllis Goward Tewksbury Martin and "Grampa" James Leo Martin were on the maternal side. They spent holidays with us, Dr. Jim made bow ties for us, Gigi always making Christmas breads, cookies, pies, playing tag, going fishing, taking an intense interest in all we did.
Actually, come to think of if, Grammie was the only "true" grandparent in the bunch. You see, Grampa was first married to Grammie's sister Dottie (my Great Aunt) and after she passed, he married Grammie, his sister-in-law, and went from being my great uncle to becoming my Gruncle -great uncle grandfather.
Mom held enormous affection for Grampa--after her dad John Tewksbury committed suicide when Mom was only three, Grammie's sister Dorothy 'Dottie' Goward and her husband Jim Martin, were constant sources of strength, support, and love for Mom, Grammie & Charlie during some very trying years. He was her father figure growing up and Dottie was like a spare Mummie. What an embarrassment of familial riches!
When Grammie & Grampa got married in 1964, Mom was thrilled beyond belief, and immediately bestowed upon Uncle Jim the name of power, love, and respect—he became her Papa.
It's a really beautiful thing that all these amazing, strong, individuals, whose lives were woven together through periods of great loss and sadness, were able to transcend these losses and go on to some of the most beautiful and enduring moments of their lives. They became family. Our family. My family.
“So a Goward was a Tewksbury, a Tewksbury a Martin. The Martin was a Goward, too, two sisters and an uncle. A Mednum was a Hermes until became a Scola, a Scola who was no relation, and yet He was my grandfather.” to the tune of “I Am The Very Model of A Modern Major General...”
Isn't the Hermes genealogy like a fun crossbreed of a Gilbert & Sullivan patter song with an intense sensation of a brain freeze. Why bother with semantics and flow charts--they were all just my much-loved family.
It was a mix of emotion traveling out to Gigi’s funeral. On the one hand, I was so happy that she could finally be at peace, separated from a failing body. I don’t really think of death as sad. Well, not for the dead, anyway. It’s sad for us schmoes left behind. We miss people taken from us in inflexible terms. But I have to believe that we go on, energy is neither created or destroyed—it’s just good science.
At Mom’s funeral, I was so struck by my Uncle Charlie’s telling of the experience of Mom’s death being like she had boarded a ship, and we wave from the shore, in intense grief, crying, saying, “There she goes…” but on a distant shore there is a group of familiar, loving faces, waving excitedly, saying, “Here she comes!”
I was saying to Scott, I can just picture Dickie setting up her beach chair at Bank Street beach, her receiving a 'welcome to the party' with Mom, Dad, Otto, Dr. Jim, Virginia, Marguerite, Uncle Tommy, Peggy, Aunt Carol, Grammie, Grampa, Dottie, Gay, Paul, Bruce--that's getting to be a sizable bunch of fun folks! Heck, I bet Scamper, Snoopy, Muffin, Happy Cat, Stinky, Blackie, Chinky, Billy, Spot, and numerous other loved creatures are hanging around, too.
So, winding up, I am so grateful for Dickie and all the other beautiful loving souls who banded together and became our family. I am particularly thankful for the unconditional love that our family affords. It must have been hard for Dickie & Jim and Grammie & Grampa to understand our so-very-different generation. They came from an upbringing of etiquette, reserve, respect, church, handwritten notes, Benny Goodman and blind parental obedience. They sacrificed for their children, saved a lot, rationed food and goods, deferred doing many niceties, and worked at one job until retirement (with a pension…) They survived wars and depression, atomic bombs and segregation.
We, on the other hand, had a generation or two wedged between us and them, generations that discovered drugs, sex, rock and roll, civil disobedience, questioning of authority. Hippies, Black Panthers, war protesters, punks, piercings, and tattoos. Immediate gratification, The Me generation, the Automatic Age, Sexual freedom, The Age of Space Travel, the Internet, endemic potty mouth, the shrinking of the globe, and a world of dangerous new epidemics and terrorists threats.
But they loved us all the more, even if they did not understand us. I think it was precisely this reason that they got a charge out of us. We were like strange, non-threatening creatures from the future, opening doors to new worlds for ourselves and in doing so, for them as well.
One of my deeper regrets was the way that our modes of communicating kept us from being in the close touch we both desired. I remember telling Gigi it was so hard for me to sit down and write a note, that I would much rather call or email—I wanted the personal, immediate response of interacting with a loved one. You don’t hear laughter in a letter.
Gigi, having survived the depression, seemed to get deep personal agony from a long distance call. As happy as she was to talk to me or to Scott, it was always a brief, “Well, this is costing you a lot of money, calling all the way across the country…Bye!”
Once, I even offered to buy her a computer so that I could email her. It was politely declined. It wasn’t the computer, per se, which Gigi was opposed to. It was new technology, which I’m sure she thought she wouldn’t use enough to warrant having. But she did like my writing. I was very touched to find my Africa and India emails printed out in a special folder when we were packing up her apartment.
One of my last conversations with Gigi was when I was in Ridgefield last Fall. She pulled me aside and said, “Craig, where is your book? You are a gifted writer. I want you to promise me a page a day. In less that a year, you’ll have a book! You have a message, and you’re witty. Promise me? Page a day?”
Unfortunately, it’s taken me until today to break through the writer’s block that life lessons and circumstance had afforded me in the last few years. But I think I am regaining my voice.
This humble five page entry, Eleanor Mendum Hermes Scola, aka just my Gigi, is for you. I love you very much and feel so deeply fortunate that you were my grandmother, a loving stepmom to Dad and to my Mom, a friend. You were a truly unique New England gem. I’ll miss you very much.
Say hi to everybody at Bank Street for me.
