Tag Archives: Memory

The Flood

The Flood – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

In the last week, I’ve learned about the impermanence of things after a flood struck our house. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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In the last week, I’ve learned about the impermanence of things after a flood struck our house.

I had just finished writing last week’s blog post titled “Olympic Optimism” when I started to hear the beeping noises around our house. This usually was a sign that the power was being tripped in some place, or that one of our smoke or carbon dioxide detectors needed new batteries. I checked outside, it’d been raining for a while so perhaps the power lines behind our house had suffered some damage. Seeing nothing in the back, I turned to my left toward the door to our basement garage and opened the door.

Our garage tends to flood anytime there’s a heavy rain, but it will barely be enough water to cover the soles of our boots. Still, it’s often enough water to require work cleaning up the mess. We live in an old house; it’s century mark will come in two years, and the stone walls of our basement garage, common for houses here in Kansas City built through the middle of the last century, tend to seep water when it rains like that. This time though, there was something different about the water that I saw, for it could not have rained so much as to produce a flood some 8 inches deep to the point that the car charging in our basement was partially submerged. I shouted to my Mom, who was finishing her lunch as we prepared to go out for the afternoon, and she came over to me quickly at the sound of concern in my voice. The sight of it all gave me a sort of thrill at first, as I thought about how dramatic this all looked. 

I gently walked down several steps, not touching the water itself as I was sure there could be live wires submerged in that pond. I looked past the car and saw our trash and recycling bins on their backs floating in the surf. The entire basement was submerged, no part of it beneath that 8 inch mark was dry. I returned up the stairs, and went into my room where I kept a pair of snow boots that rise to a bit below the knee, and laced those up, figuring they were better than my usual shoes and went out onto our block to see what the damage was elsewhere.

As it turned out, the entire block on our side of the street had flooded. The city engineers arrived a while later and confirmed that the water main which they had replaced a year before had broken and flushed all of this sewer water into our basements on the downhill side of the block. The further down the hill, the worse it got. When we have disasters like this on my block, we develop a sense of solidarity. I remember the microburst of high winds, thunder, and rain in Spring 2018 that struck our street and toppled many of the trees on this block, crushing several cars beneath them, and causing considerable damage all around. We all banded together, and even some friends from neighboring blocks came to ours, as we learned which guys in which houses kept chainsaws handy. This time, we frequently wandered into the street at the same time, conferring how the damage looked in each other’s basements. There were other houses that had it a lot worse than us, for one our driveway neighbors’ basement was finished until this flood. Yet it wasn’t a difference between mopping up an inch of water in ours compared to several inches in theirs.

The damage from this flood was severe, destroying nearly everything that was on the floor. Thankfully, as of writing the car was deemed to be safe by its manufacturer, but so many other things were lost in the flood. Some of the last physical memories of my Donnelly great-grandparents were lost as my great-grandfather’s blanket chest partially flooded. I took photos of all the pictures we had to throw out, my eyes were the last ones to look upon the originals. Hereafter, we will have my digital copies, but it’s still not the same experience. My Dad lost plenty of power tools that he had collected over the last three decades and beyond. Many of my Mom’s personal mementos, her crafting goods, and gardening tools were lost as well. There was an old heavy wooden side table that my Dad bought in college which was ruined, and some wooden stools that I remembered from our first years in Kansas City that were also deemed unsafe. I found camp photos from my Boy Scout years in the 2000s that needed to be thrown away, all ruined by the flood.

In the days after I found myself drained of energy, beleaguered by a sense of uncertain loss. All of these things, I suppose, were tangible memories that I expected would survive until their materials degraded. We historians are able to study far older objects than the ones lost in this flood because they have survived long after their makers have returned to dust. Just two months ago, I was sitting in the Department of Manuscripts at the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s Richelieu building in Paris holding a volume that contained André Thevet’s handwritten translation of the Travels of Benjamin of Tudela. For the first time in the five years that I’ve studied Thevet, I got to feel paper on which he wrote his own name, on which the impressions of his hand and his thoughts could be seen. Thevet himself is long gone, his tomb in the Convent des Cordeliers likely destroyed during or after the French Revolution, yet there in that grand room I was able to touch something he touched, something upon which he left a part of himself with his words and ideas.

Any hope of experiencing that with these objects left by my great-grandparents, grandparents, parents, and by my younger self that were on the lowest level of storage in our basement are now gone. The experience spoke to me of the impermanence of the physical world, how as Persephone said to Orpheus in the Jim Henson retelling, “everything dies.” This past weekend, I found myself yearning for my childhood again, hoping that I might restore in my mind some of the memories of these artifacts that they might imprint themselves in my thoughts before my memory of them slips away. I could remember how those two wooden stools, light brown in color, felt when I sat on them for too long doing my homework or during meals. I could remember taking that camp photo with the couple hundred other Scouts from around Greater Kansas City and beyond, and how we all gave at least a half-hearted effort at the official photo before giving our all at the silly picture to come. The flood widened the gulf between this present time and all those things which embodied the memories of my past and my family’s past going back to the turn of the Twentieth Century. It made 2024 feel far more removed from 1924 than I’ve yet felt.The one good thing to come out of this flood, if anything, is that we can start anew and learn from the mistakes that led to such widespread damage this time. I expect there will be a next time, that same water main breaks at least once a year, though this is the first time it flushed sewage into our basements. I suspect we will not store anything on our basement floor ever again. Everything will be raised off the floor by at least 10 inches or more. I even suggested installing metal ramps strong enough to hold the car so that it too would never be susceptible to a flood like this again. That is the way of things: we are a reactive people; we see a problem and we don’t prioritize it until it hurts us. I wish we could be more proactive and avoid more of these problems, yet the trials and tribulations of life require that we learn from our experiences, and how can we measure the good moments of life if we haven’t experienced the bad?

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Living Memory

Living Memory – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, a consideration of how memories survive as stories. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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The Header Image on this Week’s Post is of the RMS Carmania, which carried my great-grandfather to America in April 1914.

A few weeks ago, when I visited Mount Carmel Bluffs and the Motherhouse of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary (known more commonly as the BVMs) in Dubuque, Iowa I was struck at how even though it had been 8 years since my last visit and 14 years since the last time I was there for a family funeral, the memory of those relatives, my great-aunt Sr. Therese Kane in particular, still lived on in the sisters who came up to us throughout the day telling stories of times now long past and all the people they knew who lived in those moments. It had been so long since I’d seen Sr. Therese that it felt strange to still call her “Sister” as we all did in the Kane family when she lived.

That visit to Dubuque was in honor of Sister and my grandfather’s cousin, Sr. Mary Jo Keane, who died in April only a few weeks after having moved into her community’s retirement facility called Mount Carmel Bluffs. At her wake I noted to the attending sisters, relatives, and friends that she was one of the very last in my family who knew her parents’ generation who came to Chicago from County Mayo in the first half of the last century. Moreover, she was the very last person living who attended my great-grandfather Kane’s funeral in 1941, the last one who could tell some of the stories she heard as a child of life in Mayo at the end of centuries of colonial rule.

At Sister’s funeral lunch in 2009 I remember hearing Sr. Mary Jo, my grandfather, and their cousin Fr. Bill McNulty telling these stories about their parents, some of which I had never heard before then, of how hard it was for them to come to America, and of the trouble they faced in Ireland that led to their immigration. Some of these stories were still in the air at Sr. Mary Jo’s funeral lunch, told by my cousin Rosemary, yet as that first generation born in America leaves us so too their stories begin to fade away.

In the last week I slowly began to acknowledge the news of the lost submersible Titan which left St. John’s in Newfoundland for the wreck of the RMS Titanic and upon its descent beneath the surface was never seen again. At first, I acknowledged it was happening yet didn’t pay the story much heed, yet as my parents began to give it more attention and talk about it over dinner, I slowly started paying attention more. The Titan‘s mission to take tourists down to the remains of the Titanic 2.5 miles (3.8 km) beneath the surface of the North Atlantic is as much an act of nostalgia as any pilgrimage or historical tour can be. For $250,000 passengers were brought to the ocean floor to see the great ship as it rests slowly decaying away with the passage of time. I’ll admit the idea of seeing it for myself is intriguing, though even before the Titan was reported lost at sea, I doubt I’d ever take that opportunity to visit the Titanic.

One disaster resulted from fascination in another disaster. The sinking of the Titanic is a curious event for me because it is just on the horizon of what I consider recent events to my own life. Many of the last survivors––who themselves were old enough to remember the event––died around the time I was born, 80 years after the ship sank into the cold North Atlantic. What’s more, the generation of young immigrants in their 20s and 30s who left Ireland for America at the time of its sinking included my Kane great-grandparents who arrived in this country in 1914 and 1920 respectively. The Titanic followed the same course that my great-grandfather’s ship the RMS Carmania sailed between Cobh (then called Queenstown) and New York two years later in April 1914, and there is a point in my mind where it’s clear that had circumstances been different, had he sailed at age 20 instead of age 22, he very well could’ve been on the Titanic.

It’s always been strange to me to talk with people for whom recent memory is far shorter. When I started teaching at Binghamton University I expected my students, all New Yorkers, would have more vivid memories of 9/11 or perhaps had families who were directly involved, yet these students could tell me little about it, saying they were either too young or had not been born yet when the attacks took place 22 years ago. I think to my own early childhood, to my understanding of world events as the happened right before my birth in December 1992, and I at least have known a fair deal about events like the 1992 Presidential Election or the Fall of the Soviet Union in August 1991 for most of my life. I thank an insatiable curiosity and old Saturday Night Live re-runs for much of what I know about those events. Still, for most of my childhood memories of people who lived in the nineteenth century persisted, and so for me my great-grandfather Thomas Kane, who died 51 years before I was born, feels today closer than might be expected of someone who was born 100 years before me.

On Monday night this week I found myself diving deep down rabbit holes reading about Titanic survivors. It’s rather morbid to say that someone’s sole distinction is that they’re the last Titanic survivor of a certain demographic, that’s certainly something I’d have trouble being proud of. My reading led me to the story of an Englishwoman named Millvina Dean, who was a 9-week old infant at the time of the sinking, who was on her way to Kansas City with her parents to start a new life here on the prairies. 

The Washington Post reported in 1997 on the completion of her long voyage when “85 years after setting out for Kansas City” she finally arrived here to meet cousins long separated by the waters of the Atlantic. The article in question mentioned where her uncle who the Dean family was planning on staying with lived, on Harrison Street, leading me to old city directories to see where on Harrison. The most likely address is at the corner of Harrison St. and Armour Blvd. on the eastern side of Midtown near where many of my maternal Donnelly relatives lived in the 1910s. Ms. Dean herself died in May 2009, I remember reading about her death when it happened; and on the centenary of the sinking of the Titanic, I noticed the date come and go. There was a story that weekend on CBS This Morning, yet for me the main emotion was a strange feeling of an event which had always been there in the edge of memory of the people I knew fading ever further into the distance, less a lived event that my relatives read about in the papers when it happened and more a historical event.

In time all our lives will reach that threshold, our memories recorded will survive as relics of people, places, and moments long past, and those that were only spoken or thought yet never written down will fade away. There is so much I wish I knew about the immigrant generation in my family, I’ve seen pictures, heard stories, been told I look like my great-grandfather Kane in a striking way, yet beyond those things I’ve never really known them. We are fortunate in our time to have so many audio and video recordings of our world, to an extent that our memories will hopefully survive long after we are all gone. The democratization of these technologies is a gift, it means that when future generations want to yearn for the early 21st century they will have the cornucopia of our recorded memories to relive. For older generations, we are left with visions of the past defined by movies, talking and silent alike, which the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote about this week, her own father almost boarded the Titanic on his Atlantic Crossing from Ireland. Like the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss seeking the most remote of peoples in Brazil, to get an idea of what first contact was like in 1500, we are left with less recognition of the spirit behind these historical events the further they move away from us, until in a tragic ending to our story they are ancient history to us.

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