Our Roots Are Deep with Passion by Lee Gutkind

Author:Lee Gutkind [Gutkind, Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59051-774-1
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2015-05-11T16:00:00+00:00

The small Connecticut town my twin and I grew up in was called Bethel. Think of Mayberry, RFD, television’s version of Anytown, U.S.A. There was a brick town hall with an ice-cold water fountain and, next door, a greasy spoon named the Doughboy, after the lichen-colored statue on the town green. There were two barber shops, Patsy’s and Chris’s, each with a revolving candy-striped pole. At Mulhaney’s variety store for a dime you could buy a fudgesicle or creamsicle from the freezer case, which opened to exhale a cloud of frost in your face. Add the dreary ruins of a halfdozen abandoned hat factories, their cold brick smokestacks upthrust into the low New England sky, and voilà: my hometown.

When my parents moved to Bethel in 1957, Bethel had a population of just under 8,000. Though some residents commuted to New York City—two hours away by train—most worked in the local factories and stores. My father was an exception. He was an inventor, his laboratory a crumbling stucco shack at the bottom of our driveway, which rose up a steep incline after passing under the swaying manes of six huge willow trees. Everyone in my family called it The Building, as if it were the only standing structure in the world, let alone in Bethel, Connecticut.

I loved to visit my father there. After school I’d jump off the bus, charge under the willow trees, and knock timidly on his door. I’d find Papa working in a cloud of dust at his typewriter, or at the drafting table, or wiring a circuit, smoke from his soldering gun rising in arabesques up into the blinking fluorescent lights. If especially lucky I’d find him behind the lathe, the metal-darkened fingers of one hand curved over the smoothness of the spinning chuck, his other hand manipulating an array of dials and levers, like the engineer of a locomotive, guiding the bit that sliced through metal, spewing out steamy turnings—“curlicues” George and I called them—of aluminum, copper, and brass.

This was my father whom I would not have traded for all the fathers in the world. Though he was born in Milan, you would never have guessed it, since he spoke better English than Walter Cronkite, albeit with a faintly British accent—mid-Atlantic, someone once called it, conjuring an island-sized nation halfway between Europe and here, with its own flag and customs. Its chief export commodity: eccentric fathers.

My father’s was no ordinary immigrant’s trajectory. He first came to the States at the height of the Great Depression, in the mid-thirties, when he was twenty-two, having spent many youthful summers in England, where he embraced that country’s culture and language. He earned his Ph.D. in engineering at Harvard, then took a job with what was then the Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C. On a trip to Italy he met my future mother. A flurry of romantic letters across the Atlantic led to their engagement and to a provincial Italian girl’s brave migration to a new world with all its uncertainties.

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