The other day I received a package from my brother. He had been cleaning out his house, preparing to sell it, and found things my parents must have given him when they sold their house 40 years ago and moved into a one-bedroom apartment.
This material began with my birth and continued into my early adulthood. Some of it I had; some I was familiar with; but some astounded me. I had no idea they had collected it. I felt great delight at having it before me – and great guilt for having allowed disgruntlements and discontents from preventing me from demonstrated the reciprocal consideration and kindness toward my parents that this appreciation of me deserved.
But someone has told me that all children feel they have not done enough for their parents, and all parents feel they have not done enough for their children. And as my brother said, when he admitted sharing some of my feelings, they could not help being themselves and more than we could help being ourselves. (Also when I mentioned my experience to a woman of my age, with whom I chat at the Wrench Café, she thanked me. She saved similar material for her sons and was pleased to know they would receiving it. Maybe, it occurred to me, all parents have this “hoarding” gene and, not being one, I had not known this until what was in my mailbox bit me.)
Anyway, I have a series of pieces I’ve written about growing up in West Philadelphia in the 1950s, which I had intended to re-blog here. Now my plan is to do that but to intersperse them, more or less sequentially, as I work my way through this box.
So many Bob Levins on the Internet; I'm the Bob Levin who writes.