Memories of Dusky Days

Let not fair June be squandered! 

So I took the dogs and headed on a 75 degree day to picturesque German Village, their first time in Schiller park. They were in hog heaven with all the new smells -- it being practically a dog park given how many fellow dog walkers were circling. Max extended himself heroically in what (for him, a Nordic dog) was a hot day. 

We went by the statue of the German poet Schiller, erected on a July 4th day long ago in a spirit of German and American patriotism. We walked by the old houses built in the 1800s and I thought about how today’s beauty-nihilists are hypocritical - many of the same people who create and support ugly modern art were living in these architecturally beautiful residences. Beauty is their secret vice. 

Some of the porches in the more modest homes remind me of Aunt Mary’s in Hamilton, Ohio. She was the only person I knew as a youth who lived in a home built before 1940 and thus had no spirit of modernism to it. 

She lived in a “German city on a river”, a twin of Cincinnati in my imagination. Funny that both are named for empires: Hamilton coming originally from England (via Alexander Hamilton) and Cincy from the Romans.  Hamilton means “treeless hill”, of which there are few in Hamilton (St Clair Ave?). Cincinnati means “with curly hair”. Originally Cincy was named “Losantiville”, meaning “city opposite the mouth of the L.” (“L” stood for “Licking River” that joins the Ohio River from Kentucky). Historian Lewis Collins called Losantiville “a pedagogical and unmusical name” and wrote, “The invention of such a name was positively cruel in [founding city father] Mr. Filson.” 

Mary’s house was built in 1926. Others on the street are said to be 1930-1940 builds.  Mary was born in 1913 so the house was not old by her standards; our house is similarly contemporary to me (I was 5 when it was built and Mary was 13 when hers was). If she bought it in, say, 1953 at age 40, then the house was like buying a house built in 1997 today. Hardly “old”. And yet to my eyes, who had only lived in houses built in the ‘60s, Mary’s house seemed antique to say the least. Especially when a lot of her 1970s-era furnishings were decidedly not 1970s-furnishings. More like 1930s?

It’s funny that my “great aunt” was, in experience for me, less a great aunt than an aunt, and less an aunt than a grandmother.  Influence can’t be measured by a genealogy chart, that’s for sure.