Today, The NY Fishwrap's Eags (Timothy Egan) Provides An Ode To Family In Our Plague Year

Eags (Timothy Egan) brought a flood of memories back to this blogger about living in an intergenerational home in the 1940s. For a good while, after leaving the crib, this blogger slept on a couch. When he reached first grade in elementary school, he slept in his own bed for the first time. Now, at the end-time of his life, this blogger sleeps alone in a queen-size bed. This saga of beds is the summary of family life described in today's essay. If this is a (fair & balanced) account of the domestic haven in a heartless world that is the US in the first quarter of the 21^st century, so be it

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[x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi

[x NY Fishwrap]
Our Life Was Languid — Then My Daughter’s Family Moved In & It’s Been Exhausting And Exhilarating
By Eags (Timothy Egan)


TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below

afternoon ago alone Americans anachronistic brother brought century change clean closet cook crowded daughter exhausting family generations house households kids languid laugh life living marvel meal million moving multigenerational newly nonna norm number pair pandemic parents people percent record rise six somebody thought turn twin unit Whenever whiff world year

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When we lived in Italy some years ago, our family of four would sometimes visit a family of more — a married couple and nonna playing with her grandkids in the garden, an uncle with a mental disability, and the brother who never launched, all living in a modest house of weathered stone.

They argued without filter, finished each other’s stories, and each took a turn at cooking, cleaning or bringing money and food into the home. It was charming, particularly at the big afternoon meal on Sunday, and, we thought, anachronistic.

During the lockdown of 2020, our nest has been a quarantined family of six — our daughter and her husband, their twin 1-year old boys, my wife and myself. It’s been exhausting, kinetic, cramped, and one of the few consistent joys in this awful time.

But as it turns out, three generations living under one roof is not anachronistic; it’s the future. Or, more precisely, a past brought back to mainstream life. Two years ago, the Pew Research Center reported that 64 million Americans were living in multigenerational households — the highest number on record, and an increase of almost 70 percent from 1980.

Last year, for the first time in 160 years, the average number of people in the American household started going up instead of down, to 2.63 people per unit. The pandemic has only accelerated the trend. An analysis by Zillow, a real estate listing company, found that 32 million young adults were living with their parents in April, a 10 percent spike from the same time a year ago.

The anachronism was Beaver Cleaver’s nuclear family, two parents and a pair of non-adult kids. This was the norm only for a small period in the mid-20^th century. With six in our household, we’ve been living the norm of 1790. But that is closer to the way it was for most of recorded history.

Somehow, in a blip of conformity during the 1950s, the multigenerational family came to be stigmatized. To this day, there’s a whiff of class condescension directed at millennials and the younger Gen Zers cohabitating with the ones who brought them into this world.

I grew up in a family of nine, with one bathroom for the kids. Whenever I told somebody about my siblings, it was like the scene in “Good Will Hunting” where Matt Damon names his 12 brothers: “Marky, Ricky, Danny, Terry, Mikey, Davey, Timmy, Tommy, Joey, Robby, Johnny and Brian.”

One of my friends had 14 in his family. Hanging out at his house, kids would fly out of laundry chutes or pop from closets at random, and nobody would blink.

Then, the crowded households were mostly Irish Catholic, Southern Italian and Polish. Now, the rise in extended families reflects the nation’s changing ethnic diversity: 29 percent of Asians live in multigenerational households, 27 percent of Hispanics and 26 percent of African-Americans. Whites are at 16 percent.

At the other end of the spectrum, about 36 million Americans live alone, representing 28 percent of all households. It’s wrong to equate living alone with loneliness, but the forced social isolation of this pandemic has surely taken a toll on the solo.

Our newly crowded house, like the households of so many others, came together very quickly. We were not trying to be demographically trendy. They were here, as a stop between moving from one city to the next, and then we had to shelter in place, indefinitely.

One day life was moving along at a languid pace; the next day every hour was assigned on a grid drawn up by my daughter and taped to the refrigerator. Somebody had to feed the twins — four times a day — change their diapers, cook the main meal, shop, clean.

And because we all had day jobs as well, every square foot of our 115-year-old house was precious, and potentially a makeshift Zoom closet. I marveled at the person I still thought of as my little girl, drawing on the same kind of instinctual strength that had guided my sleep-deprived mother through many a hard day.

The tiny humans learned how to laugh and to make us laugh, danced to three-chord guitar songs, and tried mightily to trash our house. They have no sense of gravity, and would as soon walk off the deck into thin air as eat a dirt clod. Seeing the world through a toddler’s eyes, you marvel at clouds skidding across the sky, a raven’s caw, how good it feels to run through a sprinkler.

Holding both of them while they squirmed was like trying to keep a grip on a pair of newly landed king salmon. The fact that they had no idea that we were living through the worst public health crisis in a century was a palliative to the pain of the pandemic.

And then they left, a week or so ago, moving a thousand miles away to a different time zone. We lost an intimacy that most of the world had known since people formed family units. Our house is still and aimless, three generations back to one, and we are left to wonder how so many of us can live like this. ###

[Timothy Egan is a contributing opinion writer who covers the environment, the American West, and politics at the NY Fishwrap. Egan — winner of both a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 as a member of a team of reporters who wrote the series "How Race Is Lived in America" and a National Book Award (The Worst Hard Time in 2006) — graduated from the University of Washington with a BA ( journalism), and was awarded a doctorate of humane letters (honoris causa) by Whitman College (WA) in 2000 for his environmental writings. Egan's most recent book is A Pilgrimage to Eternity (2019). See all other books by Eags here.]

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