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children who follow. But I think my parents had had enough of
hardship, enough caring for their own parents, who had been
ill and needy for nearly a decade by February of 1981. They
had never had the resources or leisure to travel some of the
decision was simple wanderlust. They needed a change. And
as church musicians they already had long experience with liv-
ing on the margins, at odds with societal expectations. They
thought of moving to San Francisco as an experiment, all of
us together again in a new kind of commune. They didn t see
why not.
We had been a family unit for so long. We were a complete
choir, and a magical number: seven. They couldn t let us go.
Eventually a year or so later with my parents and siblings
ensconced in the Turk Street apartment, I moved with a couple
of friends into the pretty little flat on Russian Hill, where Howie
came to stay every few months, and after that to the cabin in
Alaska. I did not live with my parents until I married, or died. I
had I insisted on a few years to myself. But it was a struggle.
In 1982, my grandfather s incipient Alzheimer s disease flared.
My parents moved him west along with Great-Uncle Franky to
live with them and some of my siblings in a house in Pacifica.
And after the money was gone from the sale of the house on
Revere Beach, for the rest of their lives my parents skirted the
edge of financial doom, a little too old to be working at odd jobs
in cities three thousand miles away from where they had lived
all their lives, three thousand miles from all their musical con-
tacts. For the rest of their lives, they needed or threatened to
A Final Arc of Sky 157
need rescue from one or another of their children but without
ever acknowledging it as rescue.
In 1990, they moved with my sisters Christine and Camille
to western Washington state. Camille and Christine had jobs.
My parents kept house. My father periodically overdrew Chris-
tine s bank account via the ATM card. He had done it once
to me during our years in San Francisco, spent my rent, and
I d never let him have my card again after that. When Camille
married in 1992 and Christine decided she didn t want to live
with our parents anymore, she found and helped them apply for
a one-bedroom, rent-subsidized apartment for seniors. It was
new, bright, and safe, located in a picturesque Pacific Northwest
town, between the mountains and the sea. There was an elevator.
Bernadette and her family who were self-employed moved
to their town to live near them, and my parents saw Bernadette
nearly every day. But as time went on, a snit developed with
their building manager, who became, in phone conversations I
had with my parents, the devil incarnate. She lives right under-
neath us. She monitors our every move. We can t drop the soap in the
shower without her complaining about the noise. It s torture.
My parents could charm the birdies out of the trees, if they
chose. I wondered why they wouldn t finesse the building man-
ager a little, or at least ignore her, so they could continue to live
independently in a place that was clean, safe, and affordable.
Paul and Bernadette bought a house and moved my par-
ents in.
When you re in your forties, you have learned a few things
about yourself and your own family dynamics. As Dad and I
sat together on the sofa in my TV room, as he half looked at
me, not quite asking me if he could live with us, I knew how it
would go if he did.
My husband had also grown up in an East Coast, Irish ex-
158 Jennifer Culkin
tended family, in apartments in the borough of Queens: a lot of
people, a little space, the odd contentious relative in the home.
They didn t have a car at all.
But in Howard s family, the response to similar circum-
stances was a little different. They cultivated independence.
Now well up in their seventies, Howard s parents still live in
an apartment in Queens. They still have no car. They walk to
the local Key Food to get groceries. They bring them home in
a two-wheeled shopping cart they keep folded in the front hall;
my father-in-law with his bad knees drags them up the concrete
stairs in front of the building. They take one, two, sometimes
three buses for shopping and doctors appointments. And when
we bring up the idea of moving them out here to live near us,
they change the subject.
Sitting on the sofa with my father, I could envision it all.
The times we d ask him, for example, not to drive our cars my
father in his seventies was hard on cars, and our ability to repair
or replace them limited but he d sneak the keys out of my
purse when I wasn t looking and do it anyway. Do it deliberately,
even when he had his own brand-new car, knowing it would
cause trouble.
Relishing the trouble it would cause. I think, if I d been
single, I would have taken him in. By the age of forty-four, when
my dad and I were one-on-one, I d learned how to fence with
him. How to defend what was important to me and relinquish
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