2.12.10
The "no name" was the name of restaurant in the North End of Boston my parents used to visit with other couples. I'm not quite sure if that was its real name or a pet name my parents had given it. They like to do that--draw on their feelings about a place, a person, or each other and affectionately baptize it or the other with a nickname. It's a little bit like that poetry technique of describing a part of something to capture the essence of the whole. The House of Pizza down the street from them has become the "5 Star," because the food is so good, the nickname dripping with irony because it is, after all, just a pizza joint manned by a salt of the earth waitress and owned by a huge Italian guy to whom my father calls himself "Rico." You bring your own wine. I think the whole thing captures the dichotomy of my family and the joy of my father--a common man done well, who has lived in the same town for his entire life, just moving out to the shore line and building himself a magnificent house. Growing up in this motion towards wealth with our souls still firmly planted in our Irish Catholic morals, values, ethics, and yes, sense of guilt, our family is unique to a lot or the people I've encountered who fall on either one side or the other quite squarely. And it REALLY makes it hard for me to know who to vote for. This quandary is deepened by my decades of travel through the mental health system.
You see, I've encountered more types of people than most anyone in my family but my father. When you are mentally ill suddenly all the mentally ill become your peers. You have that in common. You may not have wealth or financial hardship in common, you may not have ethnic background in common, you may not even have diagnosis in common, or IQ, or education but you have suffering, a very particular kind of invisible suffering, in common. Suddenly, sitting about the nurses station of an inpatient unit, killing time and holding on to a frozen orange to distract you from the storm in your head, you become friends with the other people sitting there doing the same. All other divisions just fall to the wayside and you can discover the most beautiful things about people that you would otherwise never have encountered in your life.
And it is in this environment that I've found many people like myself. People with family of means who live simply, on a tight budget either instituted by their family or by their own sense of pride, wanting to make it as much on their own as they can. Or maybe their families have disowned them.
Then there are people quite unlike me. People who are homeless or on the brink of being so . Then the other side--people whose families, steeped in "old" money, have financed exclusive private pay treatment for them. Either way, we're all living at the same halfway house in the end. Boundaries of means are washed away by illness and the struggle to recover.
I'm so glad I've met all these people. I'm so glad, that me, a societal mongrel, has carried on my father's tradition of being firmly planted in the salt of the earth. On the other hand I am so proud of him for making his dreams come true, for being unfettered by caps on his creativity and his outlandish capacity for hard work and building the life he wanted for him and his family. But it leaves me wondering, which side of the ballot do I mark? I really don't know.
I think that is all I will write today.