In light of the many ways the Republican party’s ideals have been perverted and the subsequent “American Dream” being remembered as something negative, rather than all the good it brought, I’ve been considering my own familial history. We’ve been lucky to enjoy our version of the “dream”, but it hasn’t been without difficulty.
Our story begins with an Earnest Santin on the North Shore of Massachusetts. After he secured a wife, a home, and a company, he set out to build a house for the three children they were expecting. What would later become conservation land, after he sold it to the State, Earnest first used to collect wood needed for the house. Nestled at the bottom of the heavily wooded hill, he built a house for his wife Virginia Santin.
They had three children, melding their Italian and Irish families by naming the two boys Earnest and Andrew, and the middle girl Luoann. They promptly raised them to be athletes, because as a near-professional figure skater himself, Earnest took winter sports very seriously.
All of my dad’s stories about him paint him to be a man with hard hands. Literally and figuratively. Earnest was a man adamant about what your handshake says about you and used to make toddler-me try my very best to squeeze his hand to a pulp to get used to the feeling. A man who sharpened all of our figure skates with his home skate sharpener every winter season and sometimes liked to ski off of the roof of the house he built.
I never got the actual account from Ernie himself, but my father and his brother always tilt their faces a little skyward when regaling the tale, as if they can still picture Ernie, poised on the roof, all wiry with knobbly knees, ready to take the slope as it comes. Sandy, named after Earnest the original-roof-skier, shortly became the second Santin to ski off the roof.
While in quarantine, my father, in a decided less bad-ass way, was on the roof cleaning out the gutters. I sometimes think about him on that roof, just a season too early, cleaning the leaves out of the gutters, and looking down at that drop his father and brother conquered. My dad recently fell from that roof and cracked his tibia, and in all my fear I couldn’t help but think of him on that roof my grandfather built and looking at all the land we used to own. Looking out over the ski lift Ernie jerry-rigged into the trees in the hillside, I wonder if he thinks of home. I think of the generations who worked so hard before me, to make this country feel like home and how grateful I am for it.