When your parents die, everything comes back to you.
Not just your mental images of growing up but the physical evidence, as well – all the pictures, cards and letters you ever gave or sent to your mother and father. They saved them, of course.
Laid out in scrapbooks and photo albums, or hidden in boxes and piles of papers, you find your earliest “artworks,” your first scribbled words, your grade-school report cards, band concert programs, swimming awards, senior pictures, college class schedules.
You also inherit your family portraits – the Christmas pictures that hung in your parents’ front hallway like before-and-after shots in a weight-loss ad, with each year’s edition showing more children, different hairstyles, new eyeglasses or other signs of advancing adulthood.
So it wasn’t surprising that when my Aunt Mary Lou died at the age of 91, her modest apartment in Denver’s Capitol Hill bequeathed a similar allotment of memorabilia: old family snapshots, postcards, newspaper clippings, road maps with red-pencil tracings over recommended routes.
What came as a total shock, though, was the discovery of an artifact of such stunning personal significance it took my breath away. It was a telegram announcing my birth.
The document, yellow with age and fragile as a childhood memory,showed up last month while my three sisters were looking for mementos to lay out at a simple memorial service we arranged to have on top of Mount Lindo, the promontory with the lighted cross southwest of Denver. Our aunt had asked that her ashes be scattered there because she had enjoyed watching many New Year’s Eve fireworks displays from the spot.
“John Arthur born Wednesday,” the vintage message began, in all- capital letters printed on thin strips of paper. “Bette and baby doing very well. Johnny.”
In tiny blue type below the Western Union logo, it was stamped 1945 Jan 25 AM 2:18.
My father, who was five years younger than his only sister, sent it from Springfield, Mass., my mother’s hometown, where my parents were living in the waning months of World War II. Daddy, a chemical engineer who later would answer a calling to become a Methodist minister, had spent the war on the home front helping develop plastic versions of such critical items as whiskey-bottle stoppers, whose cork was more urgently needed for life preservers.
My aunt, a secretary who settled in Colorado after the war and loved the mountains so much we thought of her as the Queen of Kinnikinick, was living on South LaSalle Street in Chicago at the time. We think she had been detailed there temporarily by her superiors at the U.S. Justice Department in Washington – where, on the night after Pearl Harbor was bombed, she had found herself typing up the names of countless Japanese-Americans she later surmised were sent to internment camps.
The telegram, which my sisters presented to me at a family picnic after we said goodbye to Mary Lou, would be of little value to anyone else except perhaps a collector of antique paper goods. But to me it seemed absolutely priceless.
Birth certificates and conventional printed announcements are rather impersonal and after-the-fact; this little missive conveyed the news of the blessed event with an excitement and tenderness that my stoic, Midwestern-born father never would have expressed in person.
Beyond this, it served as a poignant reminder that the most precious things in life – love, friendship, family ties – can’t be bought. They can only be bestowed.
As a writer, I have a love-hate relationship with paper. My desk is inundated with reams, piles, bins of the stuff. But this is one piece I will keep on top of the stack for the rest of my life.
Staff writer Jack Cox can be reached at 303-820-1785 or jcox@denverpost.com.
