Glimpses of family life and the wonderful experience of home

Ti Gong

Despite the onset of evening earlier in these winter days, I haven’t varied the time of day I regularly walk to the neighborhood park and back.

Consequently, the last few evenings have afforded me the chance to peer into the open and lit windows of several houses (respectfully, of course, from the sidewalk as I passed by), reminding me of those times, almost 60 years ago, when the train I was taking from Davenport to Washington, D.C. during my freshman year at Georgetown University there, wound through several small towns, affording me views of warm light flooding out into the night and, once in a while, the small figures of distant family members passing across those windows.

Now, as then, I both took comfort from glimpses of family life and the wonderful experience of home but also felt a twinge of the old sadness — appeased now at last — when, for most of my life, I had not created such a reality for myself.

Dad once told me about how important it was for him to find — and create — a home. The more I came to understand his childhood (and how I wish now that I had listened more closely and asked far more questions), the better I understood why.

As was not uncommon at the turn of the 20th century, Dad was one of several siblings. He had three brothers and three sisters, although one of the girls died young in her early teens. When Dad was around 8, his mother died, apparently of pneumonia.

He remembered them moving from outside Iowa City to a place inside the town, bouncing along on one or more open wagons during a snowstorm. It may be that his mother caught a bad cold then that later morphed into pneumonia, something often fatal in those years before antibiotics.

A few years later his father died, in circumstances that left Dad to wonder if his father had not taken his own life. As a consequence, the children were “farmed out” to relatives who could provide these now-orphaned children some care, the girls to people in Minnesota and the boys to relatives in Iowa. Dad was placed with — was it the Cronin’s? — on a small farm just outside Oxford. (We have a photo of him on the porch of the farmhouse there, standing jauntily by a tricycle, dressed in what was then a rather stylish outfit for a young lad.)

They obviously did a fine job raising my father, for he turned out to be a remarkable man. One of his driving goals was to create (recreate?) a true home, which he did a few years after marrying my mother in the late ‘30s.

That house on Pine Acre Avenue in Davenport still stands, although no longer owned by anyone in our family.

I remember my many years there with great warmth and affection; thanks to my father and mother I had a wonderful home, and my childhood was happy and full of boyish adventure.

Until I was 54 years of age (the year my father died), I still slept in my childhood bed on those occasions when I came back from Des Moines (where I had lived from 1981 until 2004) to visit Dad and my stepmother Mabelle (Mom having died of cancer too damned early in 1971; she was only 58).

In Dad’s footsteps

So how did it come to pass that I, too, was so desirous of finding/creating a true home? Certainly, a prime mover would have been attempting to follow in Dad’s footsteps and to realize in my adulthood the kind of warm, safe, and welcoming place that I had known as a young boy.

But it was also because, as the years went on, it seemed less and less likely that I would be able to do that.

From my middle 20s on, whenever “the family” gathered, I felt like the odd duck out. My sister and brother both married early and soon had children. But I didn’t. Moreover, for much of that time, I was not even in a relationship.

Moreover, my long-term common-law type marriage of 13 years failed, and then my first marriage fell apart after only five years. Now I was 50 years of age! Good grief! Not only was I apparently unable to sustain a working relationship, but it seemed I was further than ever to finding that home for which I longed.

These were the years, family members may recall, when I just didn’t “show up” at planned gatherings or on holiday occasions or, on those few times like I did — remember the “family reunions in Davenport? — I struggled to stay around any longer than an hour or so.

I know my behavior puzzled and even angered many in those days. From the outside, it looked like I had been relatively successful in politics and in work and that my inability to attend gatherings was an act of willful “dissing” of others. But that wasn’t what was going on at all!

I was time-crushed at work, exhausted on weekends, and played out with my personal failures.

By the time Karen called me at IPERS to interview me regarding some legislation of which I had been the lead sponsor in the House 20 years before, I had come to accept that I was destined to be alone for the rest of my life, truly “homeless” in the sense that while I had a house to live in, it was nothing like the home I remembered from my youth nor the one I had hoped to create for myself.

And then, as the fictional world likes to put it, everything changed. With Karen I was able to find, build, create, and share a home at last. So now, when I pass a brightly lit window in the gathering dark of a winter night, I smile in sharing with the spirit of those inside, no longer yearning for it as something irrevocably lost or forever unattainable.

May all of your homes be as rich and full!

Greg Cusack is a retired US statesman from Iowa. He now lives in Oregon.