A Recipe for Community Building:
Misfortune, rescue, & healing laughter
When my straight-laced sister would visit after having run off & married her fiancé’s best friend & set up housekeeping with him & his family in neighboring Canada across the Great Lake Erie, her visits home were joyous occasions. Our apartment having only 2 bedrooms meant I’d end up on the couch while she, along with her husband & kids, would reoccupy her old bedroom, complete with all her old furniture, which included a double bed.
Why a double bed for an individual young woman? Because the plan had been for her to marry the guy downstairs, with whose parents our parents had jointly bought the 2-family dwelling in an inner-city working-class neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio in 1952. The bed was to be their wedding bed. This was known in those ancient times as “planning ahead.”
Things worked out differently, however. On trips to Canada for ethnic events & friends’ weddings, my sister met & spun the head off a guy from Hamilton, Ontario who happened to be her fiancé’s old buddy from the Displaced Persons Camps (refugee camps) in post-World War 2 Germany.
On one of these happy reunions with me & her parents, she arrived with 2 kids, a girl just a little over a year old & a baby boy of just a few months. The kids slept on the top mattress which was…
