— in which Dorn subjects the reader to family photos.
athleen has been watching shows about Swedish Death Cleaning, or as they say in Sweden, Din mamma är norsk grisuppfödare. For those of you for whom this blog post is your first foray into the internet in several years, Swedish Death Cleaning is the new housekeeping meme, taking over from Marie Kondo’s The Unbearable Magic of Tidying Up, or whatever it’s called. It’s a uniquely Third-Age-and-up concept that starts with the premise that by your age you have filled your house to the brim with useless stuff.
When you pass away (that’s the “death” in Death Cleaning), your kids have to get rid of it all. They have no use for it, and are not bound to it as you were by habit or sentimental attachments. So if you really loved your kids (the premise continues), you would do them a favor and relieve them of this unpleasant bit of posthumous housekeeping. Throw it out now, and everyone wins!
We’re not zealots, but we have been cleaning out stuff that we’ve kept for so long it’s hard to imagine life without it, especially as it will never break or wear out, because we never actually use it. A case in point is the large collection of photographs we’ve accumulated over the years, documenting weddings, births, graduations. And vacations, oh so many vacation photos.
Our most recent pictures are online, stored somewhere in the cloud. It wasn’t that long ago (in Third-Age time) that we were storing all our pictures on CD. Remember those heady days when digital photography first replaced film, and your camera could suddenly take thousands of images at a time instead of just 20 or 30? You could take hundreds of shots of that mountain goat, or sunset, or halloween costume, secure in the knowledge that when you got home you would discard 99% of them and just keep the one or two perfect gems. Yeah, right.
For sheer cubic footage, our photo archive is dominated by film-based, printed-on-paper pictures, and the most treasured of these were always carefully mounted in a Family Album. Kathleen’s been saying for years that we should get a good quality scanner and, if we can’t bring ourselves to just throw away most of these pictures, then at least digitize them so they don’t take up any physical space, and throw away the redundant paper copies. I finally gave in, and found that she was right (as usual).
So I have been scanning in our photos, one Family Album at a time. I say one at a time, but actually I’m still scanning the very first Family Album. It’s our oldest, containing pictures of Kathleen’s childhood and long-departed relatives. Back in those days, every photograph was the culmination of someone’s hard work and planning, so I’m expecting many fewer “should-never-have-bothered-keeping” photos than I’ll find in our later Family Albums.
Here are some highlights I’ve come across to far. This is Kathleen’s mother Rose, somewhere around 1920. Kathleen tells me she heard that back in the early 20th century, itinerant photographers with ponies would prowl the streets of Brooklyn looking for children to pester their tired parents for a picture on horseback. It was the in-person, on-foot equivalent of what we Third-Agers will remember from the commercials-disguised-as-cartoons that hypnotized us every Saturday morning, or the Tik-Tok clickbait that today’s kids must navigate. Will the children never be safe?
This is Rose’s lifelong friend Rosemarie Carbone in 1930. She’s noted for two things: first, years after this picture she became godmother to Kathleen’s brother Joseph. Second, she’s related somehow to the Carbone spaghetti sauce empire that’s still going strong today. There’s a whole saga in there I’m sure, but I don’t know any of it.
Kathleen sometimes recounts stories that her maternal grandmother “Nanny” used to tell her when she was very young and they would do chores together. Mostly they were about people that Nanny knew. She told the story of their neighbor Maria, who worried that she would never get married. Every night Maria would pray to St. Catherine (Nanny would pronounce it “Kat-a-RINE”), the patron saint of old maids.
(Interesting side note: Catherine was a 4th century saint who was sentenced to die for her faith by being placed on a revolving torture machine. She was saved from this fate when the torture wheel miraculously broke. So they just beheaded her. I don’t know exactly what the torture wheel did, but I can imagine it was pretty grisly, given that they named the “Catherine Wheel” firework in its honor.)
Maria (Nanny’s story goes) had a St. Catherine statue, before which she prayed dutifully, but to no avail. Finally, in frustration one day, she said the good italian girl’s equivalent of “screw it!”, and threw the statue out the window. Soon she was summoned to the door by an angry knocking. A young man was there, red with fury, carrying in his hands the pieces of the broken St. Catherine statue. “You nearly killed me with this! It just narrowly missed my head!” Apologies were made, tempers were cooled, and eventually, Maria married this young man. “And” (Nanny would beam), “he owned an entire apartment building!”
This story is too good to be true!, you may think, but no, it’s real, and here’s the proof: Maria’s wedding photo. That’s her, third from the left.
Below is another shot from the Family Album. Young Kathleen is with her parents (in the top row), her Aunt Josie, and her paternal grandparents Giuseppe and Vincenza. Kathleen was almost named Vincenza, she says, but happily avoided this fate when her mother fixed on Kathleen instead, to prevent fighting over naming rights among relatives (not the grandmothers themselves, they were too genteel for that).
Giuseppe was by all accounts an awful man, but he did provide some of the genetic building blocks for Kathleen and our kids, so I’m grateful for that. He also had the foresight never to bother getting naturalized when he immigrated from Italy, right around the turn of the last century. By Italian law, this means that his descendants, even though born in the United States, are eligible for Italian citizenship, and need only demonstrate their relationship to Giuseppe to be recognized by the Italian government as citizens.
I’ve been working (very slowly) on getting Kathleen’s italian citizenship recognized. This is for purely selfish reasons, you understand: by another Italian law, anyone married to an Italian citizen can themselves apply for Italian citizenship! I can see myself in my sun-baked villa in Sienna, with grape vines and chickens running around, enjoying my breakfast of espresso and a cornetto in my coffee-stained white t-shirt, ready to sit around the piazza with the other old men watching the world go by. Crazy, you say? Yes, crazy come una volpe!
I would write more on my quest for a new foreign identity, but I suspect I could stretch it into a blog post all its own some day, especially if I actually make any progress. So I’ll end my exploration of our Family Album here with a little puzzle. I’m sure you’ve realized that the title of this post, “Flamy Malibu”, has nothing to with what I actually wrote about. That’s because that isn’t really the title. It is in fact an anagram of the title. Can you possibly guess what the true title is?
Thanks,
Dorn
5/2/2025