the pursuit of proverbs 31.30 (+ one who loves distance driving and semi-colons)
It burns in my soul like few other things. And it has for as long as I can remember. In kindergarten, while all the other boys were afraid of cooties, I was tackling girls on the playground so I could kiss them despite the fact that they did not, for one second, care for that sort of thing. And now, going on 23-years, I’ve been awkwardly and unsuccessfully (so far) chasing her down.
My Grandfather was the Grandson of an Austrian immigrant who came to Western Pennsylvania by himself at 19 years of age just before the turn of the 20th Century. Francis Karl Schrott was born December 1, 1928, fought in Korea and retired from the struggling U.S. Steel industry just before its out and out collapse in the mid-80s. He bought his first house in 1959 for $15,000 and lives there to this very day. His story is nothing out of the ordinary for middle-twentieth-century life in post-War America — substitute his name with any other and not much changes.
In ‘52 and ‘53, he came home from Korea, met Anna Ramach (a Czechoslovakian immigrant who emigrated through Ellis Island with her family as a child) and married her. The engagement ring (with all five diamonds still in tact) that he gave her nearly sixty years ago is pictured above and to the left; one of their few remaining wedding day photos to the right. My Father was born in February of ‘55 and when my Grandmother became pregnant with her would-be second child (against doctor’s recommendations), she died in ‘57.
Something was certainly started in those tumultuous fifties for our family — a legacy, undefined, was slowly emerging. My Grandfather eventually re-married and my Father’s relationship with his step-mother was less than warm. He was a trouble-maker and drug-dealer, engaging in the very activities that would lead him to meet my mom. In the fall of the bi-centennial, he gave my Mother the very same ring that Francis gave Anna twenty-some years earlier. Like the glass slipper, it fit perfectly and didn’t even need the standard re-sizing. They were married in September of ‘77.
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