Holidays are a mixed picture

Albert John Blasi lifts his daughter Babs and me a long time ago.

“What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.”

                                                                        – Karl Lagerfeld

“You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.”

                                                                               – Joan Miro

AUBURN, Maine — I took a sentimental and pictorial journey through the past 30 years of my life.

The pilgrimage began after I started poring over worn-out photo albums over the past five months. I viewed hundreds of vintage pictures during an odyssey filled with tears, laughter and revelations of an era where over a dozen Italian relatives lived on one block.

This Italian enclave endured for decades before families starting spreading out across the nation. I miss the food, home-made wine and the company of my relatives, who made each Christmas Eve a night to remember in Revere, Mass.

There was no Facebook, Snapchat or Twitter, which I now look upon as a blessing since I discovered life was pretty damn good without social media. I can't shake those wonderful moments, but memories also trigger a daily dose of longing — especially during the holidays. 

Closure is nonsense for those of us with common sense.

Way back when

It was hand-to-hand combat when discussing politics in the backyard of my grandfather’s home, which was right next door to our house. Gatherings were huge, the booze sometimes ran like water, and voices grew louder as grown-ups sparred with each other over sports, weather and politics on hot summer evenings. My favorite argument occurred one evening when my dad admonished adults that the Beatles were partially responsible eroding society in America. 

My father was young and already set in his ways, but I thought the four mop-tops — Paul, Ringo, George and John —were a smash and could do no wrong in the world of Rock and Roll. The British Invasion was a hit as bands like The Who and Rolling Stones took Americans out for a walk with their innovative sounds.

An obsession begins

For five years, over a half dozen of my mom’s photo albums sat buried under stuff in a packed closet. I sifted through plastic bags filled with old pictures and then inserted them into new albums.

I neglected the photos after my father passed away, and the four of us had the unenviable, melancholic task of cleaning out our parents’ home, which, sadly, was sold in 2015.

Being a witness to Alzheimer’s diabolical and unrelenting progression knocked the life out my soul. Perusing through those old photo albums became unbearable for me after we buried four immediate family members in four years.  

But the passing of time and a year’s worth of grief counseling gave me the courage to extricate those boxes filled with my past and examine over 500 photos, including some that were nearly 70 years old —without slipping into a mind-numbing depression.

Those pictures are slowly fading away just like aunts and uncles who are no longer with us. I knew these photos needed rescuing and tender, loving care.

A notion is born

Before I sifted through this jumble of photographs, I decided to give my three sisters hundreds of never-seen-before pictures of their children that we had taken for over the past two decades. I estimate that I have 3,000 pictures locked up in 70 albums that are stored upright on large, home-made Spruce book shelves. I needed to make room for more recent photos, and I eventually tossed out 500 after they were deemed as poor quality.

So I carefully dug through each book and extracted pictures of my sisters’ children.

I finished the project in two months, but I was on a tear and I set my sights on those priceless, abandoned photos in the back of the closet, knowing time is now at a premium in our lives. Each grizzled photo album featured pictures of my grandparents at a backyard barbecue, trips to Pennsylvania, Niagara Falls, Washington D.C. and visits to New England cemeteries to find lost relatives on my mother’s side of the family.

Before I began, I needed to delicately remove each photo from the wax paper that held them there for over four decades. Peeling away each photo was an arduous task, but I discovered a method to speed up the process on the Internet. Heating an iron-made spatula with a blow dryer allows the spatula to cut through the wax without damaging the photo.

There are 513 photos that needed to be scanned and developed so someday they will take the place of the originals. Let’s hope they come out OK after some serious enhancing on my computer.

I needed to complete this project, which became an unusual obsession for me, and now this endeavor has taken me to the holidays.

After all, T’s the season to speak of loved ones in the past tense as we all fend off those winter blues in New England.

Darkness comes quick in the hinterlands, and with the early winter twilight, depression is at its mightiest as it makes the rounds, jabbing away at your fragile soul like a feisty pugilist looking for an opportunity to land a devastating right hook.

Thanksgiving and Christmas double team and overwhelm us with the past. The Ghost of Christmas Past slips back into our deepest recesses, resurrecting fond memories.

So it is easy to lament the passing of time in the cold dark of winter and wishing you could have one more conversation with your parents. But you realize that people drift away like the melting spring snow and there is not a damn thing you can do about it.

Picture this

I do a majority of my work as a sportswriter and photographer at home. One of my three bedrooms serves as an office and a pictorial history of my family fills the walls. There are at least 50 photographs of lives well lived that stare back at me.

This cavalcade of enlarged photographs is like taking H.G. Wells’ time machine out for a spin every day.

I look at them when I pause to come up with another original sentence or touch up an action shot. Sometimes, I wander off in the past for a few minutes before I return to the blank page.

It is a privilege to know where I come from, but there are people who have never been surrounded by loving and kind relatives and friends like I have. Few have lived in a neighborhood with relatives occupying one street.

That is why these old, knocked-around photos are important to all our children and the generations to come in our family tree.

The passing of time has a way of sorting out priorities in life — and it explains why those endearing photographs deserved my attention and soothed my longing for those I loved and lost over the decades.

For this fortunate son, the stories of my father continue

The caption reads: “Umpire Mike Caira listens politely as Revere coach Al Blasi dramatizes his clam that Arlington’s Ron Valeri was out trying to steal third base during yesterday’s game. Blasi lost the argument and Revere lost the game,2-1. 

Editor’s note: This is a poem by Diana Der-Hovanessian called “Shifting Son.” It is a poem that has never left me and now has more meaning since my father’s death.

SHIFTING THE SUN

When your father dies, say the Irish

you lose your umbrella against bad weather.

May his sun be your light, say the Armenians.

When your father dies, say the Welsh

you sink a foot deeper into the earth.

May you inherit his light, say the Armenians

When your father dies, say the Canadians

you run out of excuses.

May you inherit his sun, say the Armenians.

When your father dies, say the Indians

he comes back as the thunder.

May you inherit his light, say the Armenians.

When your father dies, say the Russians,

he takes your childhood with him.

May you inherit his light say the Armenians.

When your father dies, say the British,

you join his club you vowed you wouldn’t.

May you inherit his sun, say the Armenians.

When your father dies, say the Armenians,

your sun shifts forever

and you walk in his light.

LEWISTON, Maine — It appears the positive impact of my father’s legacy as a great baseball coach and an adept teacher will follow me like my shadow for the rest of my life.

His dedication to teaching and his community was what made him an icon in Revere, Mass. — and the endless stories about the big man with a deep voice and reassuring smile are still bandied about well beyond the borders of Massachusetts.

I have always been proud my father’s solid reputation and integrity because I loved the guy. He played baseball and other sports in the U.S. Army during the occupation of Germany in the mid 1950s. He missed the Korean war by a year, but instead of lugging around the M1 Garand rifle, he carried a bat and glove during his two years in the service.

He passed nearly five years ago and his absence still hurts like the nagging pain of a human joint ravaged by arthritis. Alzheimer’s was merciless when it claimed him, and anybody who is forced to endure “The Long Goodbye,” well, my heart goes out to you.

When you care about someone that much, there is no letting go.

The other night, I was assigned to cover a mixed martial arts event at the Androscoggin Bank Colisee. Fighters come here to mix it up — and these free-for-all battles are not for the faint of heart.

I was introduced to a man by the name of Nick Disalvo, who is a co-promoter, lawyer and a 1995 graduate of Revere High School in the Bay State

I was stunned when I learned he was one my father’s students and a player for the RHS baseball team. I shook Disalvo’s hand.

“I loved your father and respected him,” Disalvo told me.

“Yeah, I still miss him. The emptiness never leaves,” I said.

We spoke in a darkened Colisee as workers rushed to get the ring ready for the amateur fighters. We shared memories of my father for 30 minutes. Mr. Disalvo went on and on about my dad and how he taught Disalvo the game. 

Whoever thought I would be discussing my late father with one of his dedicated ballplayers in the middle of Lewiston, Maine.

I didn’t want him to stop talking about my dad. Every story Disalvo shared about my dad brought him back to life.

Disalvo’s kind words about Albert John Blasi quelled my fading grief and eased my pain. I was grateful to Disalvo for his reverence for my dad.

Everybody who played for Big Al always has a story to tell — and hearing their appreciation for my father never gets old.

He has been dead for nearly five years, and yet his influence on his students and players continues to this day.

I once read that you are never really dead until the last person who knew you dies and your influence on the living stops.

I know I have not heard the last from his players or students because Albert John Blasi, a big man with a kind heart, coached the RHS baseball team for 43 years.

And they still talk about him to this day, which makes me a fortunate son who was raised by a father who loved his family, school and community.

Giving thanks for some wonderful memories

“Traditions are our roots and a profile of who we are as individuals and who we are as a family. They are our roots, which give us stability and a sense of belonging - they ground us.” 

                                                                                        — Lidia Bastianich

AUBURN, Maine — A holiday tradition vanished with the death of my father.

But when you are the survivor, you long for the custom that brought you closer together with a parent.

I was fortunate to be raised in Italian neighborhood with nearly a dozen relatives on one street. Thanksgiving meant a stream of cousins and uncles, a smorgasbord of home-made food and booze — particularly fine wine.

There were traditions within traditions and one was rooting for your high school during Turkey Day football games across the state of Massachusetts. 

For nearly 50 years, you would find my father and me at a wind-blown, frozen football field watching Revere High School confront the Winthrop Vikings on a brisk Thanksgiving morning.

Spending a cold morning at Harry Della Russo Stadium or Winthrop’s ocean-side field was the prelude to a dinner for 20 relatives all vying for sumptuous meals and share a shot of Anisette to take the chill out of those football fans returning from the game.

During the games, we lamented about the cold and spent a couple of bucks on hot chocolate. There were adults who were seen reaching inside their jackets for  their flasks filled with rye or brandy.

I envied them. I found hot chocolate didn’t stop the shivers triggered by the biting cold. But a belt of brandy might be just what the doctor ordered in sub-zero temperatures.

Back in the day, the Div. I teams from the Greater Boston Area drew big crowds. The game gave former RHS football players like me a chance to catch up with former classmates as well as hang around my father — Albert John Blasi.

Big Al coached the Revere Patriots baseball team. He believed in supporting the football team and the game gave him the perfect excuse stay out of my mother’s way in the kitchen. My father did not find slaving over a hot oven a palatable way to spend the morning. Making soup or salad was the extent of his culinary skills.

Those talks in the car before we got to the field were precious to me. I watched my dad flip around the AM dial looking for other high school football scores as we raced home for a round of pasta, fish and Turkey.

Thanksgiving Day mornings watching high school football came to a slow stop when age caught up with my dad and the death of his close friend, Robert Marra. My father and Mr. Marra were fixtures in the stands. Both are no longer with us and a tradition disappeared with them.

The memories are sometimes painful, but I know I was lucky to have those significant moments with a father who loved his family and community. Going to a high school game would not be the same without my dad.

Thanksgiving traditions sometimes fade away with time, but those memories of my father standing in the cold watching a game come alive every holiday.

For that, I am thankful.

Climate change is just warming up

"The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction."

                                                                                                                  — Rachel Carson

AUBURN, Maine — The searing, summer heat and intolerable humidity that you’ve been experiencing in the Pine Tree State is a frightening preview of global warming.

Nature sent us another movie trailer featuring the cataclysmic repercussions of climate change. From California to the Mid West and as far as Maine and Quebec, the high temperatures are killing some of us.

You won’t have to wait for the movie when it premieres. It will be an Oscar winner, but we won’t be around to enjoy this horror film with a harrowing end for generations to come.

The heat wave claimed the lives of 70 people in Quebec and most of Maine feels like Miami at noon in July. In the coming years, certain areas around the globe will become unlivable and rising oceans will gobble up coastlines around the world. Everett, Mass., will end up becoming the new Revere Beach. 

Just ask the good citizens of low-lying south Florida during King Tides. The water gets higher during each event and no pump in the world will keep that part of the state afloat.

The next generation depends on us for their survival! It will be your children who will wake up to a world with no clean water to drink. Food will become scarce because humans have polluted the soil. 

A lack of resources means more wars.

According to a National Public Radio report, the western part of the United States is two degrees hotter and that means the snowpack in the mountains melts quicker leading to longer and more intense fires. 

If you dismiss these dire warnings from Mother Nature, you do so at your own peril. Expect serious consequences from an overpopulated planet that is beginning to look like one giant garbage scow.

The earth is ailing and we are the cancer ravaging our fragile home. We are the most destructive force on the planet and, well, the earth will pay us all back by whittling down the herd through starvation, crop failures, intense heat and polluted air, water and land.

“In nature, nothing exists alone. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.” Rachel Carson, author of “Silent Spring,” said.

Too bad we ignored her when her book was published in 1962. Many tried to silence her even though she was ahead of her time.

One of the latest headlines is from the Washington Post: 

"Temperatures near or pass all-time records in Europe as another heat wave blasts the continent."

A really terrifying report came from CNN about a California fire said: 

Carr Fire in California is so hot it's creating its own weather system

Your children will suffer in the coming decades because the naysayers and uninformed leaders in governments across the globe didn’t act to find cleaner fuels and end the polluting of our drinking water and food-providing oceans.

There is no deity to rescue us from catastrophe or another celestial body that is habitable in the Solar System — unless you have the cash to pay for a space suit, a ticket and a rocket that can ferry you to Mars.

Good luck with that.

Man has yet to step foot on Mars, but if we do, we will probably soil the Red Planet, too. We are indeed a destructive species — and large nations like the United States and China, — two industrial powerhouses — are responsible for most of the pollution.

“There is no Planet B,” French president Emmanuel Jean-Michel Frédéric Macron said several months ago. Our U.S. president just brushed off Macron’s remark, but that’s not surprising from a another careless leader.

As far back as 2014, the Portland Press Herald reported that climate change was indeed hurting the population and its animal life:

“The climate has warmed in Maine and Vermont more than in every other state in the past 30 years, a shift that scientists say is evident in the species of birds and fish that are moving into or out of northern New England.

“The six New England states, along with three of their neighbors in the Northeast, accounted for nine of the 10 states that have had the largest increase in annual average temperature since 1984, according to an Associated Press analysis of temperature records from the federal government’s National Climatic Data Center.”

I was listening to Maine Public Broadcasting the other day about climate change and how this seemingly endless heat is affecting Mainers. Experts agree that heat waves come and go, but this scorcher has intensified due to global warming.

One caller said his tomatoes were not turning quickly because of the hot temperatures at night.

This is true because my tomatoes remain green despite the warm sun. I have been gardening for nearly 20 years and I have noticed that frogs have disappeared and bees are scarce. 

Our planet is being stripped of its natural resources by greed, ignorance and neglect.

Think about that every time you refuse to put out a recycle bin or look your child in the eye.

DNA results are in and I am a mongrel like any other human being

My uncle and World War II hero B.J. Murano, Uncle Rocky and his wife, Helen and B.J.'s wife, Eddie.

My father, Big Al, (left) and my mom, Louise (red shirt) and our neighbor Maureen at a Columbus Day Parade in Revere, Mass.

My father, my son and I stand during a Columbus Day Parade in Revere, Mass., back in 1997.

A proud father with his daughter and son in 1962.

“There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.”    

                   — Helen Keller

“If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.” 

— Pearl S. Buck

                                                                                                     

“We all grow up with the weight of history on us. Our ancestors dwell in attics of our brains, as they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our bodies.”

— Shirley Abbott

AUBURN, Maine — After receiving my DNA results from ancestry.com, my perspicacious son, Anthony, pointed out that all my ancestors exist in my spit that was just tested in a lab.

To me, it was a profound statement from my son. He continues to meticulously chart our family tree and has given me a new appreciation of who I am and how I got here.

When we look back at our biological history, I think we forget that humanity is composite of our ancestors who have given us life — and their traits — for better or worse. 

Evolution (only science works for me) has been kind to us — for the moment.

The saliva test was a Christmas gift from Anthony and it really is the gift that keeps on giving. I found there is an endless parade of fourth and fifth cousins out there and some have contacted me. My son has taken his quest further and reached out to living relatives around the globe.

We are all probably related (although we don’t like to admit it), but these conclusive results haven’t stopped us from killing each other over ancient hatreds, race and pride.

When the findings arrived, Anthony and I reviewed the breakdown of who I am and we found our ancestors come from all over Europe, the Caucuses and the Middle East.

According to Ancestry’s ethnicity estimate, my ancestors are from these regions:

Europe South 50 percent (no surprise there)

Southern Italy

From your regions: Caucasus, Europe South, Middle East

Europe West 24 percent

Caucasus 15 percent

Low Confidence Regions

Great Britain 4 percent

Middle East 2 percent

Scandinavia 2 percent

Finland/Northwest Russia < 1 percent

Ireland/Scotland/Wales < 1 percent

Iberian Peninsula < 1 percent

My ancestors’s biology is tucked away deep inside my DNA. Take the test and you will find we are all mongrels and the thought of being a purebred is absurd.

The DNA results arrived in time for the holidays, which can be a painful time of year for those who continue to grieve for lost loved ones.

I miss my parents and Christmas isn’t the same without them. I was raised on a street where nearly dozen Italian relatives lived and all had a hand in my upbringing. But their life force still courses through my veins and they will be with me this holiday and for all eternity.

Exchanging spirits and cooking enough food to feed a battalion of hungry soldiers was just a few ways my family celebrated the Yuletide. It was a two-day event on McClure Street and it featured a Christmas Eve supper with super-sized servings of fish, and for an encore, there was an afternoon Christmas meal featuring pasta, ham and turkey. You didn’t eat for days after gorging yourself in the afterglow of the holidays. 

But my neighborhood is filled with new faces, and those people I loved and cherished, are now wonderful memories of my past. The holidays resurrect those fond recollections and are a source of joy, pride and sadness for me.

But you have only two choices when confronting the holidays and loss: Close the shades in your room and disappear into an abyss of depression — or go forth and enjoy those special moments with your child and wife that only exist for a brief instance in the universe.

It is not a comfort to me and doesn’t ease my grief, but my DNA made me realize that my parents live on inside me. I begrudgingly accept that life is ephemeral, and if you live long enough, your loved ones and close friends fall away like the passing seasons.

But I made a promise to myself to make every day count, including the holidays.

My DNA test also revealed that I am related to England’s King Richard the III and Edward the I, who was also known as Edward Longshanks.

I sometimes feel like a royal, but my throne is a recliner in my parlor. 

I am also grateful to an ancestor, Middlesex County New Jersey Militia Capt. John Payne, who squared off against King George’s Redcoats. Anthony’s careful research of Payne led to our admittance to the Sons of American Revolution this year. He also went on to prove through our DNA that we are indeed related to Payne.

So I will raise a toast to my ancestors and my family and enjoy another Christmas with all of them.