I'm sitting in Bradley International Airport, waiting for my flight away from Connecticut, connecting in DC to get back to Columbus Ohio, where my wife and daughter will pick me up and take me back home. Yesterday was the memorial celebration for my grandparents Jack and Ginny Hogan. We held it in their home of 35 years, on the Niantic river. In order to do so, my mother, Sharon Hogan, and I had to come in last Thursday, and put in twelve hour days cleaning it on Friday and Saturday, with help from my uncle, Tim Hogan, who lives quite nearby, and then later with the help of my aunt, uncle and cousin, Diane, Dan and Katie Hogan, who flew in from Florida. An old family friend also put in a lot of hours. Other than my aunt, Eileen Hogan, who is autistic and lives in a group home near Niantic, there are no other Hogans anymore.
I've been sleeping in my grandparents bed, on my grandmother's side. She hadn't slept there in years, so it was clean. My grandfather's side was heaped with his clothing, and working cap guns, letter openers, papers commemorating his service in WWII, photos of his brother's dog, screws, pencils, notebooks, and that's just the stuff I can put name to. Rings of zig-zag metal that I can't figure the purpose, a fine cast brass thing that fits nicely in a hand, with a swinging sharpened pin, about two millimeters thick and six centimeters long. A milled, high grade steel tube about ten centimeters long with a one centimeter hole. His old social security card, a denture box full of nickels, this is literally just the one side of one bed. There are three bedrooms, and five different storage rooms. Right on top was the sweater he was wearing when I had seen him last, and in the last photo I have of him and my nuclear family and mom; four generations of Hogans in one picture, only happened the one time. I wore that sweater for most of the rest of my time there, it being much colder than I expected, and since it fit me ok.
They were hoarders, but not of garbage. They threw away garbage. They kept things that could still be used. Clothing, glassware, widgets, good pieces of wood, fixable record players, coats missing a button, buttons by the jarful. A huge commercial dumpster was 3/4 full when I got there, my mom and uncle had filled it and had it taken away twice before, during other long visits I couldn't join last fall and in March.
The process of prepping the house kind of sucked.
On the first day I was cleaning the kitchen. The sink was heaped with pans and dishes coated in paint and bacon fat. Every once in a while I'd realize I had eaten off of this plate 25 years ago. That sort of jarring reality would occur just about three or four times per hour, the entire stay.
We needed to move some really nice wooden antique tables, covered with old glassware, inside from where we were trying to hold a third estate sale (no dice, post didn't get views for some reason). We just started heaving glass vases into the dumpster. They had already sold like 20 of them, and there are still 20 more left. We all have to fight the impulse to keep the stuff that's still good, because all of it was still good, that's why they kept it. It's a rich neighborhood, rich people throw away perfectly good stuff all the time. My grandfather would find stuff in dumpsters or thrift stores that was broken and ancient, and restore it. He restored a 40's victrola, full functionality, replicated pieces of trim that were missing, refinished the exterior. This was a four foot tall stand alone with felted amplifying chambers you could open to make it louder and shit. He found it in a dumpster, turned it into a 2k antique. I think they sold it to pay the property taxes that month, some years back.
But in the last years, as his mind failed him slowly, he would nail a few bits of trim to a piece of trash and hold it out proudly, and no one knew what he was going for anymore, so there were lots of those lying around. And my autistic aunt had a few nesting areas that are just a whirl of orange and pink water color on paper glued to pennies and strings of felt necklaces. So there's that to clear out as well. Thousands (really) of plastic plant pots that my grandmother Ginny couldn't throw away. All neatly stacked together and piled carefully in the green house supply room. She gardened a good deal, and was known for it.
They had never replaced the carpet since the house was assembled (modular pre-fab, New England Homes) in 1982. So they ripped the carpet out the week before and after I had a working nook of the kitchen ready to make lunch on, I was set to vacuuming up the dust. I realized my own skin cells from when I visited as a kid, were in that dust. After the bare floors were vacuumed, we had to buy big area rugs to put down, and bring the furniture back in to both give seating for the memorial, and to stage the house for sale, going up this week or next at the latest. Two couches, twenty chairs, three tables, two side boards. We still hadn't gotten to the bathrooms by the end of the first day, and I had only gotten a small portion of the kitchen clean enough to produce food in.
The second day of cleaning was cold and rainy, which fit the mood perfectly. I was tasked with cleaning my grandparents room. All my grandfather's clothes fit me perfectly, two suits, two tuxes and a red blazer, and I got a really classy London Fog coat of his as well. Creepy, but they're really nice and I have to stop wearing that leather jacket to work. I had three piles going, trash, donate, keep.
Everything we threw away still worked. There are two hundred neat little things, metal and wood and operational, well oiled, polished. All of us hated throwing away all that neat stuff, but no one had the space or inclination to own any of it themselves.
My mom hauled off books to the super cute Book Barn in town. I'm not sure how much audience there will be for 'How to Talk to Liberals (If You Have To)' by Ann Coulter, in cute summer town book store in Connecticut. The yoga books my mom bought as a teenager will probably get picked up though. The short stack of Investing Money books my mom found are kind of ironic, but that's another story. There were about two hundred vinyl records, mostly jazz and big band swing that my grandfather liked and a big yard sign 'Hogan Real Estate'. I heaved most of them into the dumpster, thinking about hundreds of hours of effort to record all of them.
My aunt, uncle and cousin came in the second day. Dan started working on cleaning the kitchen sink, clogged with bacon fat and paint, Diane started chipping paint from floor tiles, and Katie was in charge of prepping the AV stuff for the memorial. She started straight away to taping up photos on a tri-fold poster board in the same room where I was chipping paint with my aunt. We all chatted. I learned that my grandparents had been really amazingly beautiful when they were young (see below).
We brought in table clothes, and started taking all the cleaning equipment downstairs and out of the way. I finished cleaning the kitchen, my mother threw away nearly everything we had set out to sell to get it off the front yard. I went to the liquor store (package store, they call them in CT) to get bourbon, rum, gin, a white and a rosé. My grandparents drank bourbon and diet ginger ale almost every day of their retirement, except for a month every year or so, to hold down costs, or to prove they could, depending which uncle you ask the reason. I made sure there would be plenty of ginger ale to go around. My uncles bought a new toilet seat and my mother and I put all the switch caps back on the light switches and outlets since they were taken down to paint for the first time in thirty six years. Dozens of other tedious tasks were completed, nicer vases arranged, paintings hung on over damaged bits of wall, nice towels set up, toilet paper purchased, and on and on. By the afternoon 5 Hogans and two or three of Tim's friends were all actively setting up, tearing down, carrying out or in, all the things necessary to have a memorial, all in the rain.
The morning of the memorial we still had to clean out the breezeway, the main entrance to the house. We started dumping books and shelves straight into the dumpster, and managed to vacuum only just before the first guests arrived, parking in the long, long front yard. 1.15 acres total, I recall a time when grandpa Jack trusted me to get a gas can because his lawn mower was out. I wasn't quite strong enough, and spilled some gas which killed a spot of grass. He used a big riding mower and it took a couple hours to mow the lot. He used to joke that he always figured he would have to take care of the grounds of a large estate, but didn't think it would be his estate. Since he grew up poor, that's maybe not so much of a joke, but he smiled real big every time.
I wore one of his suits for the entire day of the memorial. Quite against the weather stations' predictions of days before, it became sunny with big, beautiful cloud systems and cool breezes outside. My uncle got a good deal on a food truck for lunch by letting them park on his lot nearby for the summer. (He got a good deal on the dumpster by working on the owner's boat, and pulled favors from at least six other people whose boats he'd fixed over the years). People gathered around the food truck, they gathered in the living room near the TV playing a slideshow of old photos of my grandparents and their family,near the TV we had playing a tape of my grandfather's big band, String of Pearls, which he announced for, and sang four songs from an hour long set. I left my heart in San Francisco...Also in the living room was the tri-fold poster board of photos my cousin Katie Hogan taped up, with two big pics of them when they were their prime around 1950, backed by art made by my autistic aunt Eileen Hogan. In the dining table we laid out old high school year books. My uncle Tim designed on the drafting table in the garage a sunroom extension to the house. He and my grandfather built the sunroom according to those plans, which he still has around. In there we set up some swing music, and set their ashes next to a photo of Jack in his sailor uniform at 17 years old, and my grandmother's college degree, on an American flag. In the kitchen we put out a bunch of booze and crackers, and cake for Eileen. People gathered in all the right places.
Classmates of Ginny's came, and found themselves in her college yearbook.
Friends and workers of Tim's came. Old roommates of Jack's and family I've never met before, cousins once and twice removed. I got email addresses, we learned new things about when my great great grandfather Alberto Menghi came over from Italy. Stories were exchanged from as far back as the thirties, in New London, at sea, at such and such house, when they lived here, or there. Maybe 40 people came all up. Many hands were held low to the ground, 'when you were so high...' speaking to me or my mom, and even 'when Ginny was so high' from people who were only so high themselves at the time. It was a very lively event. Sunny, breezy, cool, smiles and laughs and stories and remembering.
After all of those people left, and Eileen had been taken back to her group home by her case manager, Tim texted someone to ask if he could borrow their boat to go distribute the ashes. The friend delivered the boat to us, even. I carried the ashes. My mom, my two uncles, my cousin and I got on, and we motored over out of Niantic River, into the sound, out to a spot very nearby where my grandfather had taken them many times to set anchor and go picnic at a nice beach without road access. I distributed half of Jack's ashes there, in that patch of water. Then we motored around the point to the waters of Ocean Beach park, where Jack had been a lifeguard for his summer job, and Ginny was selling ice-cream for her summer job, and he bought some on a hot day, marking the beginning of two lives shared for 64 years. We saw also the big rock that my grandmother had posed for her casual picture in her college yearbook (below), standing against a post that isn't there any longer. We all said some words, and distributed the rest of their ashes in those waters off of Ocean Beach park. I cried on the way out, and on the way back.
Just as we arrived back, it started to rain, just for two minutes. Just the sky sharing a few drops, to match those on my cheeks at the moment.
The five of us were joined by my aunt at the house, and we all talked and watched the sun set from the sun room and deck. Sometimes it was just my cousin and I, and we connected in new and deep ways while the older generation talked about whatever memories from before we were born. Other times we were all together, all watching the sun set on an era.
We had pizza too, late, while the sky darkened.
I slept pretty badly last night, in my grandparents bed for the last time I'll ever be in that house. My last time watching the lights from across the river, glitter on the rippling salt water, from their bedroom glass doors out to the deck. I probably drank far too much, with an open bar for the whole afternoon and evening, but I was also just consumed by loss. I woke up early, and enjoyed coffee with half & half and Equal and a plain donut on the deck, just like Jack would eat every Saturday morning, dipping the donut into the coffee in bits. Later I woke up my cousin to share the last few minutes with me before I had to go to the airport. We walked down the to beach we both had played on so many times, so long ago, and picked up snails trapped above the waterline at low tide.
And it's all behind me. My mother and uncles will be bagging up more trash this PM before they leave tomorrow. With luck, the house will be sold very soon. It was a beautiful place. They were beautiful people. I miss them a lot.
Your Obedient,
Ian Hogan,
PhD
P.S.
