Photo Corners headlinesarchivemikepasini.com
A S C R A P B O O K O F S O L U T I O N S F O R T H E P H O T O G R A P H E R
Enhancing the enjoyment of taking pictures with news that matters, features that entertain and images that delight. Published frequently.
Sometimes Your Heart Breaks
5 March 2024
Sundays, while everyone else is resting, we drive over to the old house and go through a few more drawers. That's something we would never have done when Mom was alive. But it's our job now.
The contents of each drawer are either added to one of the piles saved for individuals or shuttled off to the to-be-shredded file cabinet. One way or another, everything must be disposed of.
We had been thinking about Marcus Aurelius this particular Sunday morning. He was a Roman Emporer and a Stoic philosopher rolled into one. In his Meditations he observed that the pursuit of fame was misguided given that everyone who would admire you would themselves shortly die:
Short then is the time which every man lives, and small the nook of the earth where he lives, and short too the longest posthumous fame, and even this only continued by a succession of poor human beings, who will very soon die, and who know not even themselves, much less him who died long ago.
After our experience putting together a family tree in HTML and CSS, we came to the conclusion that it is hard for anyone to appreciate ancestors older than the ones they knew. Perhaps great grandparents at the most. And hard for older people to connect in any meaningful way with people younger than great grandchildren. And even then it ain't easy.
So on the family tree site, we provided for a way to tell the story and present photos of any particular person. To go a little deeper than dates and places and relations.
And on Sunday, going through a drawer new to us, we had to stop and sit down. We'd discovered another story from the past.
There was a handmade, brown cloth wallet about passport size with three sprigs of Edelweiss in needlepoint on the cover. Holy cards were tucked into the front pocket and a paperback in Italian with a prayer for each day in May to the virgin Mary. Tucked in with it was an envelope of funeral cards with some pressed Edelweiss.
We'd seen the Edelweiss before. Grandma had kept one in the book she won in third grade which an aunt had bequeathed us. So these were more of her Edelweiss. Over 100 years old.
She was in her early twenties, skilled with a needle and thread, when she emigrated to Wyoming where she married her childhood sweetheart in 1921.
Next to the cloth cover she must have made for herself was a thick but compact leather bound book with elegant gold tooling. La Sposa Cristiana it says on the spine. The Christian Wife.
Inside there was an inscription written by "your traveling companion," a fellow named Albino Tavasci, who it seems was on his way to get married in Montanta:
In segno di riconoscenza e perenne ricordo lascio a te questo libro.
"As a sign of gratitude and everlasting remembrance I leave this book to you," he wrote.
If our research is right, he was about her age, a few months older, when they made the transatlantic sea voyage together. They would have hit it off as fellow natives of the province of Sondrio in Lombardy.
He married Maria Anna Fogliani in 1924, in Butte, Silver Bow, Mont. and they had a son and daughter. In 1935 he was living in Asti in Sonoma in 1940 he was in Novato in Marin county. He died in 1985 in Santa Rosa.
She died in 1976 in Oakland, Calif., after raising two girls and a boy. Her husband died in 1957.
Doubtful she ever saw him again or even kept in touch. They knew very little about where they were going. Rock Springs in Wyoming. Silver Bow in Montana.
But she kept that gift of his all the years of her life. She had never known her father. Nor did her husband know his. Tavasci was perhaps the kindest man she had ever known, grateful himself for her company, reassuring the girl from the mountains with her pressed Edelweiss that the ship rolling violently in the waves with no land in sight would get them to America.
She never forgot him. And now, in turn, we can not forget him either.