Repeating
Twenty-five years ago I was attending a function at Cornell University when I met a pleasant young woman by the name of Nancy. She introduced herself as the wife of my cousin Pete. My mother had three brothers and two sisters while she grew up in the town of Lansing in the Finger Lakes area of New York State. One sister died in childhood during a raging flood. One brother and the other sister had married but had no children. And two other brothers had two and three children respectively. The first one, who had two daughters, had died young due to his somewhat mysterious suicide. One of those daughters had moved to the Midwest and the other had married a local man and the two of them raised their four children locally while running several taverns. Pete was one of those children and he and his brother had inherited one of the taverns to operate for their mother. It was his mother who was my cousin, which made Pete technically my first cousin once removed.
Because Pete and his siblings had all stayed and lived locally in Ithaca, I would bump into them occasionally over the years, but I had never really gotten to know any of them. Nancy and I spent some time talking about my recently acquired house in Ithaca, the renovation of which had caused somewhat of a stir in the local community (as some “carpetbagging New York City person” throwing money at a local project, might do). I had been using a local Cornell student who had chosen to stay in Ithaca beyond graduation to manage the house and he was finally moving on. That left me without a house manager and Nancy had the perfect suggestion to solve that problem, and his name was Pete.
It was easy setting up an arrangement with Pete to manage the house since he was sort of a jack-of-all-trades sort of guy who did most of the work on his own home and could handle most of the required tasks. Those which were beyond him he undoubtedly knew the best local guy who could handle the task. It was a perfectly synergistic relationship and it took no time for me and Pete to become good friends. You see, Pete is as affable a man as I have ever met. He tends towards the short side, but has compensated by being very athletic and lifting weights to the point of being fully jacked, as they say. He is a baseball player who has gone on to coach most of the teams played on by both of his two sons, who have turned out to be equally athletic. Pete is a pleasant man’s man who is liked by everyone who knows him. He has cobbled together a career as a local small business owner, entrepreneur, tavern-operator and part-time member of the local electricians union. Pete is a Massicci of Italian and Czech heritage like I am a Marin of partial Italian and Czech heritage. Everyone in town knows and likes Pete.
Pete and Nancy’s two boys, Pete Jr. and Anthony, are more or less the same age as my youngest son, so naturally, over the last twenty-five years they would get together to play with one another, Pete and Anthony being the athletic country boys and Thomas, my son, being the wanna-be less athletic city kid. We all became fast family friends to the point where I asked Pete and Nancy to join us on many a non-Ithaca vacation. You see, Pete hadn’t grown up to travel the world as I had and I always found it fun to include him and his family on our trips to bring that fresh and wide-eyed perspective to the group. We travelled first out West, where he had never been. Then we started having them join us on our international travels. Their first trip overseas had us all going to Morocco, which was an eye-opening experience for Pete and family, as it would be for anyone. Since then we have gone to France, Italy, Mexico and Ireland. Pete and his family have not only become great family friends, but I think it is safe to say that their involvement in our family travels has greatly added to our enjoyment of the travel. We almost wouldn’t think of going on a family foreign trip without Pete and his gang.
The mainstay and connecting thread of our relationship is our mutual ties to our families in Ithaca and specifically through the house, Homeward Bound, that Pete manages for me. Well, that is all changing now due to the kerfuffle I have been through with Cornell over the possession of Homeward Bound. I have discussed that elsewhere several times so I will not go into those details, but suffice it to say that the connection to the house is coming to an end this calendar year. Kim and I will head east for a few weeks in the summer to enjoy my last visit to the house, which I have available until the end of the year. Already, the University has taken over the management of the house, so Pete has less to do on the property and as we have discussed it, there is the breaking of what has been a quarter-century bond between us. I have reassured Pete that the bond is strong enough to weather that change, but it would be hard not to say that the change in house status is causing us to recalibrate how we all interact.
Both Thomas and Anthony are now engaged to be married in the course of the coming year. That almost represents a coming-of-age of our family ties at the same time as Homeward Bound is going away. During the course of this year, I will be forced to dismantle the house and take out or give away all the memorabilia. It will not be unlike the choosing up of bequeaths after the funeral of some family patriarch, except that no person will have died, just a house. In thinking that all through, the most notable piece of memorabilia is the outdoor statue made of stone and copper that sits in the middle of the back yard. It is a statue of Socrates teaching his students, which always seemed like an appropriate symbol of what Ithaca has meant to me and my family over the years.
I have tried on several occasions to donate the Socrates statue to Cornell, but just like my donation of the house, the large institution that is Cornell cannot seem to get out of its own way to properly accept the gift and take charge of the statue. So, I had concluded that Socrates would travel back west with me this summer. I spoke to Pete about the logistics of moving the beast of a statue and as we spoke it became clear that he felt as strongly attached to Socrates as I did. Pete did not go to Cornell, but he has enough Ithaca in his blood that he intuitively knows the importance of the symbol of Socrates to what Ithaca means to our world. He suggested that I consider donating the statue to the Town of Ithaca. He knows everyone in town so it shouldn’t have surprised me that he knows just the right person who has responsibility for the walking trails that now cover all of Ithaca and the environs. It seems that there is “perfect spot” for Socrates along those paths and there is an openness and willingness to accept the donation and give Socrates a place of honor in Ithaca that seems illusive on the Cornell campus.
People in towns like Ithaca are well aware of the “town and gown” tensions which always seem to exist. My connection to Cornell will always exist, but I think that my donation history with the institution is now forever changed by virtue of the way in which my time at Homeward Bound is ending. But something lost is always attached to something gained and what I have gained over the last twenty-five years is an attachment to the town of Ithaca through my relationship to Pete and Nancy and their family. So, when Socrates finds his new home on the Ithaca walking trails, he will do so with a plaque which dedicates him to the Town on behalf of both the Marin family and the Massicci family. Pete and I will be connected to Ithaca by Socrates for eternity.