The Writing on the Walls: Memories of Joanie and Chris

The Writing on the Walls: Memories of Joanie and Chris

I have written some memories of the remarkable couple that was Chris and my cousin, Joanie, each of whom I knew a little for a brief while and each of whom died tragically young in their mid-thirties, leaving behind eight beautiful children.

A lot of studies have been done on memory which indicate memories actually change and decay with age. Therefore, I begin this story with a disclaimer; memories may actually tell you more about the one remembering than they do about those remembered.

And, too, I can remember Joanie's voice as if I had spoken to her yesterday, and I can surely remember the essences of conversations we've had, but with few exceptions (those actual quotes which follow), I cannot remember the actual words from those conversations 30 years ago and more.

And yet, I do not think I'm totally mistaken in my perceptions...

Although I was only three or four years older than she, Joanie was one of my "younger" cousins growing up. The thing I remember most about her as a child was her reputed intelligence. Aunt Mary always noted that Joanie, (unlike myself), and unlike her nineteen siblings (yes, my aunt and uncle had twenty single birth biological children) who all sported impressive verbal chops, was also good at math! The possession of such a rarefied aptitude in our family was thought to herald a brilliant future at, you know, figuring things out.

But Joanie was also raised to value family and spiritual integrity over worldly aspirations such as status and prestige. Thus, Joanie's gift with numbers was celebrated only anecdotally - a special idiosyncrasy to add to the constellation of Joanie's many other qualities. Indeed, in my mind, Joanie seemed to be a real rockstar of a Kelly!

I can remember hanging out in the barn with Joanie and her sisters and brothers who all seemed to harbor secrets my brother-less and slightly envious self found to be thrilling. Their collective aura of cryptic teenage omniscience was reinforced when, upon walking upstairs in their house, one could discern writing scrawled directly on the walls. A moment's inspection revealed the graffiti to be no ordinary vandalism, but pure poetry! But who was the author? I don't even remember what the words said, but the sight of them astonished me no less than would have the sight of petroglyphs carved into the pink wall in the girl's bathroom stall or in finding a sanskrit illuminated manuscript underneath my pedal pushers in my dresser drawer.

The writer of the poetry remains a mystery to this day. In fact, none of the cousins I recently queried seem to remember the writing on the walls at all. Thus, I have become quite convinced the bard was none other than Joanie herself.

In addition to being the possessor of what I imagined to be an esoteric intellect, I also found Joanie to be physically beautiful as well. She had long, straight, brown hair, high cheekbones and intense, deep-set, blue eyes. The Kellys were very poor in material things, of course, so Joanie's clothes were well-worn, but she wore them well. And besides, it was the 60's and 70's. Joanie was never out of style in jeans and t-shirts or peasant style blouses and dresses; in short, she cut the figure of an exceptionally lovely flower child.

Of course, Joanie did not follow flower child protocol. She had very strong views on things and the Catholicism with which she was raised would always exert a tremendous influence on her character, even when she underwent a "rebellious" phase as a teenager. My memory of this, however, is only as reliable as 30 year old confessions from Joanie or reports from second and third party sources can be.

Although the drive to the Kellys only took a couple hours, it seemed as if my cousins lived in another time and country; thus, we did not visit them nearly often enough for my taste. I remember one trip which included a harrowing drive in the snow down a narrow, winding road through mountain rock cuts. It seemed as if our car would go careening over the cliff at any moment!

Just a few months ago, Theresa described the area near their house as having been the site of a ghost town. Indeed, all the buildings - including their house - which I recall as having been denuded of paint, seemed to all be in the process of reclamation by nature. In short, I found the land, the buildings, the poetry on the walls - to be nothing less than enchanted.

As happens, our teen years flew by and like many others from rural, socioeconomically challenged milieu, most of us could not wait to leave home, fall in love and get married. I married before the age of twenty, as did many of my cousins, including Joanie.

My husband and I bought a trailer and lived in "Jackson's Trailer Court" for a year or two before moving it to twenty acres we eventually bought further out in the country. The property had been the site of an abandoned hippie commune that burned to the ground. The farmers who had been neighbors to the "long-hairs" in residence reported scandalous "goings on" there, including goats roaming freely through the house to serve as Satanic midwives to she-hippies who frequented skinny-dipping parties and were perpetually giving birth to - good god - more miniature hippies!

These rumors only imbued the property with a greater ambience for me - property which included three distinct habitats: mature forest, meadow, and, best of all...hippie steeped wetlands. I relished exploring the grounds and would sit by one of three ponds with binoculars in hand observing the aviary of birds from all three ecosystems that shared the land with us: baltimore orioles, bluebirds, great blue herons, little green herons, flickers, warblers, cedar waxwings and on and on. Needless to say, it was a melodious plot and I was one happy amateur ornithologist!

It was at this point in time that Joanie would enter my life again - not merely as a younger sister in the Kelly clan this time, but as a young newlywed who just moved to my hometown!

It began with a phone call from Joanie to me to announce her new residence. Her husband, Chris (who just so happened to be from the Bronx!), had just landed a job at DuPont, one of three local industries in town. DuPont was reputed to be "the best place to work" around. It was the cleanest factory and DuPont employees - even those who worked in production - enjoyed good salaries. If I remember correctly, Chris was a computer programmer, so he fared even better than others I knew.

Still, I worried a little bit about how my cousins would fare as newcomers to Towanda. I knew the locals frequently resented "city people" invading their territory. But Chris was not just any city person, he was a non-Caucasian city person! Most shocking of all was that he and Joanie were a mixed race couple! I honestly believe that Chris was the only black person in Towanda at the time and I am certain that he and Joanie comprised the solitary mixed race married couple.

This fact made me only love and admire Joanie all the more for her courage in being true to herself and to her new husband. Likewise, I admired Chris from the start for the same reasons as well as his courage in starting a new life in a place that could be so hostile - even racist - to outsiders.

What an enrichment it was to get to know Joanie better and Chris for the first time. Chris was a tall, soft-spoken gentle man and one of the things that impressed me the most about Chris was his humility. Although he was from a comparatively well-to-do family from the big city, he never looked down on the provincials that we truly were. In fact, he even took my husband and me to stay a few days with his parents in NYC. It was our first time in the city!

Our roles had reversed, as this time, Hugh and I were the outsiders. I remember that Chris was really proud to show us around. When he drove us into Manhattan, we heard lots of loud bangs which we found unnerving to say the least. Since we were always told how "dangerous" the big bad city was, our first thought was gunfire! Without calling out our hillbilly naivete, Chris simply chuckled good-naturedly and reminded us what day it was: the fourth of July!

He took us to the Bronx Zoo, the Museum of Natural History, to his parents' lovely condo and introduced us to White Castle hamburgers! Chris's parents were just as gracious as Chris was. They showed us the utmost hospitality and took time to share with us stories about their lives in the city as a teacher (his mom) and postal worker (his dad).

In addition to the NYC trip, Chris and Joanie and Hugh and I got together on a few occasions to have dinner or go driving on the mountains or hiking out on our property which Chris and Joanie loved as much as we did. Whether we met at our trailer or in Chris and Joanie's apartment, the atmosphere was always very relaxed with a "what's mine is yours" sort of ethic always prevailing.

One time, Chris asked to brush his teeth in our bathroom. "Sure," I said, "go right ahead." It was then I realized he didn't have his own toothbrush, but wanted to use mine! I knew that he would have been perfectly happy to share his toothbrush with me, so how could I refuse him the implement I stuck in my mouth twice a day to remove plaque from my teeth and anaerobes from betwixt the papillae and taste-buds on my tongue? "Go for it," I said, and he did!

Indeed, Chris was the kind of person who would have given you the shirt off his back if you needed it, and it was this total unconcern for "things of this world" which always imbued both Chris and Joanie with this aura of actually being "not of this world" even when they were very much with us. In retrospect, it would be easy to believe that they had stepped down from the very ether to coexist with those of us mortal beings who were much more attached to the stuff and the "goings on" of the material world than they were.

At this time in their lives, Chris and Joanie did not drink or smoke or express any desire to attend parties - not ever. They felt no desire or need to impress others with their appearances, their possessions or their "achievements." They were content to live quietly and simply with each other, their ADORABLE baby boy and "another one on the way." Their purpose in life was to live the life they believed God wanted them to live. And so they did with as much courage, patience, faith, humility and integrity as I have ever seen.

As I already mentioned, Joanie was unattached to material things, but she was positively passionate about life and her values. She was "pro-life" in the biggest sense of the word. It caused her great pain to live in a world in which abortion happened, but it also caused her great pain to live in a world in which any living thing suffered. For Joanie, all life was precious - even animal life. She was not a vegetarian, but would not hesitate to help an animal in need if it was within her capability to do so. Neither she, nor Chris, hunted, and although she supported those serving in the military (she would have brothers who would do so), the thought of war or any kind of violence also caused her great pain.

The current debate over gun control prompts me to wonder WWJD? ("J" for Joanie, not Jesus here!) In all honesty (as in I am not just writing this to bolster my own politics), the thought of Chris and Joanie being gun-owners today is all but unfathomable to me. To imagine either of them packing heat would be about as absurd as seeing Gandhi with a Bushmaster slung over his shoulder exchanging pleasantries with Ted Nugent. Just wouldn't have happened!

But it was the thought of abortion which disturbed Joanie the most. She spoke of it EVERY time we were together. I must admit that while I admired her conviction and her willingness to speak out, her obsession with abortion could be exhausting for this listener. The simple truth is that we had different views in this regard. While the thought of abortion greatly disturbed me, too, I also felt great compassion for young women who experienced unwanted pregnancies for one reason or another. I know Joanie also felt empathy for these girls, but it was her opinion that the horror - and guilt - of abortion would only make their situations harder. I disagreed that this was always the case and/or felt that the undue horror and guilt some girls experienced were culturally imposed upon them. I subdued my own opinions, however, in deference to Joanie's all-consuming conviction. After all, my whole family felt so strongly about the issue, I feared their wrath or my own father's displeasure were I to come out as a heretic, blasphemer, feminist and LIBERAL!

This conflict within me - the part that wanted to express my very strong opinions vs. the part that wanted to keep the peace - would become so great, I would eventually estrange myself from people I loved, but with whom I strongly disagreed about too many things. I am now wishing I had had the strength of character to have been able to express my views at family gatherings and let the chips fall where they may. Instead, I just found it easier to avoid any potential drama and my own guilt that would be sure to follow.

Of course, Joanie's pro-life stance also sprung from her love of children and what I saw as her desire to emulate her own mother whom she clearly loved to pieces. I remember her affectionately joking about Aunt Mary, "My mother is crazy. Who has twenty children? Nobody does that!" (I think Adam was born by then, but I could be wrong). Of course, Joanie would go on to have eight children of her own in a time when having two children - if any at all - was the norm!

In contrast to Chris and Joanie, Hugh and I were very much part of the world. I have to admit that the words "selfish" and "hedonistic" would not have been completely out of place in a sentence containing our names. We had no intention of having children immediately and were very much into partying with friends, experiencing new things and acquiring worldly knowledge. I had been attending college part time and when I was 24, Hugh and I would go off to the university full-time.

This was very difficult for Joanie to understand. "Why would you want to move away when you worked so hard to acquire your land?" In Joanie's mind, we already had it all - more than any person could possibly want, in fact. Although we lived in a trailer and I worked as a secretary and my husband as a factory worker, we were rich compared to many others in my family, so she was right. Still, I was intolerably restless. My ambition, my curiosity and desire to learn new things and meet new people could not be suppressed, so Hugh and I moved three hours away to go to college and Chris and Joanie moved away to to a new life, new job and new burgeoning family in Texas.

Thus, the brief time we lived in the same community came to an end and, tragically and regrettably, I would never see Joanie or Chris again. A lot of concentrated life happened in the years immediately following our moves. Hugh and I moved away from home for the first time, we began college as non-traditional students, I began a new job as a teacher, my father got sick with cancer and died and, at 34, I had a baby boy of my own. I had imagined that Chris and Joanie had become equally immersed in their new lives and since neither Joanie, nor I, were good at writing letters we completely lost touch. If only we had facebook and e-mail back then!

In many ways, however, Chris and Joanie do not feel any farther away today than when we were sharing chuckles, food and toothbrushes. Although Joanie was my cousin and we shared many traits as members of most extended families do, in many respects, there was always a part of Joanie that was completely inaccessible, mysterious and, yes, ethereal to me. And her husband, Chris, was exactly the same way.

Why do tragic things happen to good people in the prime of their lives? Nobody knows the answer to that. But I do know that even if I was never moved to completely emulate Chris and Joanie's lives or subscribe to all of their religious beliefs, these two people affected me in deep and profound ways. Each of them embodied a level of decency and humanity that is rarely seen. Even today, when it is easy to despair of the seemingly omnipresent evil in the hearts of my fellow human beings, I think of Chris and Joanie and know that goodness itself prevails long after the the body has perished.

The proof of that is evident first and foremost in the lives of their children: children both sensitive and strong enough to endure tragedy that would break many - if not most - other children. Children who have grown up with the talent and potential to continue their parent's legacy of world-changing good will. Credit for this must be given, not only to Chris and Joanie, but to their grand-parents, aunts, uncles, and other family members who took their nieces and nephews in and raised them as their own sons and daughters. Indeed, Chris and Joanie's goodness is evident in the voices and gestures of their sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers!

It is also evident in Chris and Joanie's PIONEERING examples of exceptional love and conviction in the face of racism, hate and ignorance. Because of their union, the path has been made easier for other people to follow: for ALL of us to more freely love others regardless of ethnicity, nationality, religion or any number of superficial and divisive externals that alienate us from each other. One could argue that Chris and Joanie's non-traditional union has helped pave the way for people to accept other non-traditional unions, including those within the LGBT community.

In sum, Chris and Joanie's goodness was never, in my view, exactly of this world. And that is exactly why it endures.

Indeed, this goodness, this love of theirs, is what will always be my PERFECT memory of the writing on the walls!