poor georgie’s almanack. december 25, 2020
It was a haunting image. The flag-draped coffin starkly alone in what looked like a deserted cemetery.
Then around noon, December 24, 2020, Christmas Eve, it slowly was lowered into the awaiting grave.
It was cold. Temperature hovering around Zero. A devastating Minneapolis blizzard, on the horizon.
Jerry Rotman, the ebullient, articulate, entertaining, caring, patriot, was put to rest. Because of the pandemic, the funeral played out on Zoom. The former Marine, Ivy League graduate lawyer, the kind of father you want, and a damn nice man. He was my 87-year old cousin.
Louise, his dear wife died earlier this year of Covid related issues.
The country is dying All countries do. All people do. All leave a legacy.
Some are positive.
Jerry’s was, and even today remains, a positive force.
To me, the ultimate test of a man is if he is strong enough to laugh at himself.
A short story.
Jerry knew I was writing a series of essays trying to figure out what was going on in our ancestors’ minds and in their lives. I wanted an explanation for the decisions they made that still affect us today. Jerry said he long had wondered the same things.
So, as a young man coming home to visit his family in Iowa from his New England classes, Jerry decided to go via Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. He wanted to see what his father saw many years earlier as a new world, a new life, was about to begin. He wanted to experience the emotions.
And he did.
Over the phone, even 60 years later I could feel the powerful impact of what he absorbed.
The intensity must have been exponentially more dramatic as he sat in the family living room, next to his father, displaying his heated sensations in great detail. An act of extreme empathy.
Slowly his father reached over and put his warm hand atop Jerry’s and gently whispered in the Eastern European accent he never could lose, “But, Jerry,” he said. “We came through Canada.”
