Father's Day in the DNA

How would your grandfather (or even great-grandfather) have remembered his father? For most in this country, it would have been the memory of another country. 

My grandfather was born in 1884 in east-central Italy, under the rule of King Emmanuel. He would have remembered a life of farming. His grandfather would have become a father around 1840, perhaps not in rural Italy, and perhaps served in the war with Austria. 

Why did the grandparents of boomers have to emigrate? In the 1880s, Italy was in reunification and was in a more liberal period. Perhaps it was similar to what's happening in America now. And what led them to believe things were going well post-Civil War in America?

If you keep stepping back in time, generations remembered previous generations as being from other countries or regions. It is logical that the accumulation of stress from emigration over the centuries is enormous and perhaps encoded in our DNA.

For most American millennials, their grandfathers remember only post-World War II America. My grandfather became a grandfather in January 1944 at age 64, almost postwar. He'd been here since 1905. On Father's Day in June 1944, he would have been remembering his father in Italy and perhaps stories of the Austrian War--and glad he dodged the bullet of fascism under Mussolini.

As an enthusiast of Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture, I'm also reminded of his history and the huge contribution he made. He was an American-born child of Welsh immigrants living in post-Civil war rural Wisconsin making a name for himself in a post-fire Chicago zeitgeist, then not fleeing the country but rather leaving his wife and six children for an affair with the wife of a client--then spending quite a bit of time in Europe (a "spiritual hegira")--all the while people were leaving it for the U.S.

It's hard not to admire the prairie-style houses as an expression of individual self-expression and defining the spirit of American freedom that many grandparents wanted to find here. His descendants remember him today in different ways. Whatever the sentiments, he would have been a grandfather to admire for his escape to freedom, which makes you think whether that kind of freedom is the one we should want. Most do want it, which is why they always wanted to come to America.

Father's day is a day to not only remember and honor your fathers, but to think about how they would have remembered theirs, and what they had experienced.