Reflections in a time of Change: A Memoir

By C.R. Galluzzo

C.R. Galluzzo had written a memoir regarding his father's passing when he was thirty-eight, and his father was sixty-six. The death was a catalyst to have the author examine how he would live the second half of his life. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: CR Galluzzo LLC
• Release date: Oct 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781955205702

Book preview

Reflections in a Time of Change

Copyright © 2021 by C.R. Galluzzo

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

ISBN

978-1-955205-71-9 (Paperback)

978-1-955205-70-2 (eBook)

Table of Contents

Chapter 1   The Plastic Mary

Chapter 2   A Wise Man’s Folly

Chapter 3   The Crossbar

Chapter 4   Running the Runoff

Chapter 5   An Unexpected Firing

Chapter 6   The Flame

Chapter 7   The Canal and the Divers

Chapter 8   A Long Time Later

Chapter 9   The Stand

Chapter 10   On Top

Chapter 11   My View from the Top

Chapter 12   A Walk in the Abyss

Chapter 13   Reborn

Chapter 14   The Report Card

Chapter 15   A Son Without a Father

Chapter 16   Return to Mt Scott

This Book is Dedicated to

The Memory of

SALVATORE ROBERT GALLUZZO

Prologue

A Father and Son

So now I will tell you how I became the man I have become. In reflection, this came from a mosaic of events and people and experiences over many years, which made me this way, but there was one moment, one singular event, which made all the disparate parts of the mosaic come together to form a picture I would eventually understand. It was the moment I learned my father died.

In the spring of 1992, my father died one day after Mother’s Day in Oregon, full of promise and envy. I was 38 years old. It happened while he was driving back from training at the Lake Oswego High School track for yet another athletic event. His heart just stopped. A car following said he just slumped forward before his car veered to the right. When they pulled him from his overturned car lying unnaturally in the bramble of blackberry bushes in a ditch off the side of Country Club Boulevard, the unexpected nature of his passing did not matter. My father died at the age of 66.

I got the call at work from my wife, Dot. I was in my Intel cubicle in a leased building made for the start-up Supercomputer Systems Division. I was the manufacturing manager back then. The day was busy, and until that moment, I had been out on the floor with priorities to set and problems to solve, and then back at my desk, there was the call. I am the eldest of eight children. My mother started first by calling me when I was on the floor and then other sisters and brothers. There was my next younger sister Mary and then Ken and then Gina. She got ahold of David fifth in line, but he hyperventilated at the news and could not talk. She decided to call Dot, and my wife answered. She told her the news. My mother told Dot she heard an ambulance in the distance and instinctively knew it had something to do with him. I remember seeing a picture later in the Lake Oswego Review of the site of his passing on Country Club Boulevard with just his legs showing spread apart with his running shoes on and paramedics covering the upper half of his body.

I told Dot I would meet her at my parent’s house after picking up our kids from grade school. Hanging up, I made arrangements at work and then drove to my old home. It was hard driving to a home I knew growing up. We lived in this Lake Oswego home since I was in the fifth grade. It was much better and bigger than the home on Taggart street in SE Portland, where I came after birth.

The house in Lake Oswego was on Chandler Road. It was a big ranch house with a daylight basement facing the golf course. My brothers Ken and David and I slept in the downstairs daylight basement bedroom. It was the farthest room from my parents’ master bedroom. When I was growing up, I remember jumping out the window in the middle of the night, sometimes with brothers and other times with friends, and sneaking out on the golf course. It was mostly with my guy friends, but as I got older, we met girls on the golf course. I swear that the golf course got more action during the night than it did during the day. I liked that house a lot. When I was in college, I remember being away and smelling the distinctive downstairs.

As I drove to my mother’s house, I reflected on the promise and envy which defined me back then. Engaging in what I committed to doing while aware of advantages enjoyed by others was who I was at 38. It was the promise of what I had committed and my envy of everything else. Married, kids, big mortgage, onerous job, trapped not doing what I thought should be my purpose. My father’s passing changed all of that. There was me in my thirties before he died and then a different me after. The change did not happen all at once. It took some time, but it started with that one unexpected moment of my father’s passing.

When I got to the house, I parked in the semi-circular driveway in front. Years before my father constructed the driveway and fences in front of the house, concealing the door to the laundry room and the master bedroom, people confused the house for a triplex. I walked through the front door past the slate entry my parents remodeled into the living room with the big picture window overlooking the deck and the golf course beyond. My mother was the only one in the room talking over the phone with my brother Ken, third in line. He was driving.

Just pull over, said my mother. Just pull over; there is something I have to tell you.

My mother was the underappreciated rock of the family. Dad was the sociable vice president everyone took notice of. My mother was more introverted and worked behind the scenes. Together they made an effective pair, but she was the rock.

There is one picture of them before a company event standing on the backyard deck. There was him with his tuxedo with the ruffled shirt and her with a pink dress, both of them smiling and looking like they had everything going for them. They did. Seeing the picture, I remembered my mother had a very clear hair coloring strategy. She knew her mother went white at a young age, so my mother decided to lighten her naturally brown hair lighter every year until it went totally white, and then she would go natural. At the time of that picture, she was platinum blond, and she looked good.

Dot came to the house shortly after my mom’s conversation with Ken with our two daughters Andrea 11, and Jamie, 9. My children both came through the door, their eyes red-rimmed from crying. Dot and I married in our early twenties and had both kids before thirty. It was 12 years before the next sibling married, so our daughter’s cousins were much younger. My two daughters were the only two grandchildren old enough to know my father.

Dot and I met in 1973 when we were both freshmen in college. I am only three months older than her. She is five foot three trim yet muscular and a strong woman both physically and emotionally. We fell hopelessly in love that spring of our freshman year. Adjusting to the hard reality of a long-term relationship came our sophomore year. We engaged our junior year and married after our senior year before we did our necessary final two terms for Dot and a final year for me at college.

Others siblings and spouses showed up, and we all focused on things needing to be done. I had a laptop computer from work, so I worked on the obituary for the local paper. It was all mechanical, and there was focus and separation in this. Others did other things, often crying one minute and laughing at memories the next. Neighbors came by. My mother eventually had enough and retired to her bedroom.

A few days later, I stood with my family and friends in the church’s vestibule before the opening of the Catholic funeral mass. The casket was open, and Jamie asked me to go with her to look as she was curious. We walked up, and instinctively I placed my hand on my father’s bald forehead, which I regretted as the figure I touched was not my father, but a replica seemingly made of wax. Jamie took notice and did not try. Others came by and looked. Some cried. Others just shook their heads back and forth. Eventually, the casket was closed.

The priest came with one altar boy holding the Paschal Candle, a big ornate candle with a gold rim below the wick, and another holding the big cross. They led the procession into the church to complete the receiving of the body with the family following. I walked behind the casket in slow, measured steps holding Dot’s hand and each of us holding the hand of a daughter. My extended family was before us and behind. Ahead were pews full of people. I found I could look through them as I walked, nodding in one direction and then the other. This seemed a proper thing to do. As I walked into the church of my youth for my father’s funeral after such a long absence, I felt it was like my own personal sacrilege. My father wanted me to stay Catholic as an adult, but I would not. I could not. Now I was here in a Catholic church at his funeral. Before he died, I wondered how he felt about my gross irreverence to a Catholic church so important to him.

My irreverence to this hallowed place was getting stranger as I knew the whole routine. I was once an altar boy and, on occasion, a funeral altar boy for many years.

The Catholic funeral mass gives thanks to Christ’s victory over sin and death. It commends the deceased to God’s tender mercy and compassion, and it sees strength in the Pascal Mystery of Jesus’ passion, death, resurrection, and glorification. The root of the word paschal is to perform a ritual dance around a sacrifice, and the Catholic definition of mystery is something that cannot be grasped by human reasoning. Such is a Catholic funeral mass.

When we reached the front of the church, I sat behind the pallbearers with my family. I continued to breathe in a way to keep it all tight