The Laugh Survives

From left to right: brother Paul, dad, brother Jack, Pappy, and me. Circa 1966?

The Stevens family is a threadbare and quirky quilt. It is beloved, lovely and warm, but perhaps not always the finest needlework and maybe a tad stained. This is probably true of every family except, perhaps, the Norman Rockwell clan. Idealized families seldom exist as wholesomely as Mr. Rockwell painted them.

Except for Pappy.

"Pappy" was my paternal grandfather and his real name was James Ogle Stevens, Sr. He was born on April 10, 1909 in Eastport, Maryland to Alta ("Grandma") Grimes and Robert Stevens.

I was always curious about Pappy's middle name. Ogle is not a common name and doesn't sound particularly lofty. Family lore says that he was named after two early governors of Maryland but we don't know why. Sure, the Stevens have been in Maryland for maybe four hundred years but what did these Ogle governors have to do with the Stevens?

The two governors were Samuel Ogle, who served several terms as colonial governor of Maryland in the mid-1700s, and his son, Benjamin Ogle, who served as governor from 1798 to 1801. Samuel established the colonial Belair Mansion in Bowie, Maryland, which Benjamin later inherited and the irony of having this pedigree—even if only by marriage—in my otherwise plebeian Stevens family makes me smile.

It seems most likely that when Alta married Robert, they decided to give their firstborn son the middle name Ogle as a tribute to Robert's deceased first wife, whose family was directly descended from those two governors. I wish that Pappy or Grandma were still alive so that I could ask them about the motivation for saddling a kid with the name Ogle but I think that guessing is the best that we can do.

It is ironic that the man who seems to have been named for such an aristocratic lineage was as earthy as they come. Pedestrian in all the best ways. He was a big bald teddy bear of a man and one of the things that I remember about Pappy is his laugh and his whistling. He not only loved to whistle but was really good at it. He was a lip virtuoso, capable of trills and vibrato that made the rest of us sound like amateurs. And it fit him. He was as kind and carefree as you could imagine and just seemed to flit about whistling and laughing and saying something kind or amusing. He loved good comfort food, fishing, and puttering around doing some creative project or other.

He was politeness personified and he was without defensiveness or oversensitivity and if his lack of hair came up as a topic, he would put his hand on top of his pate, rub the shine a bit, pop his eyes open in mock surprise and mouth a big "oh!" as if it was coming as a surprise despite the fact that he claimed that he was well on his way to being substantially bald in his twenties.

Neither of my parents came from wealthy backgrounds and they started to build their version of the American Dream in the fifties. My dad worked his way up to vice president of Blue Cross of Maryland and my mom raised three kids and took care of a home in the idyllic Stoneleigh community in Towson, Maryland. It was lovely for a couple of years.

But my parents divorced in the mid-sixties, at a time when divorce still carried a strong social stigma. When marriages ended, families often retreated to their respective corners, and relationships that had once seemed permanent could become casualties of the "new arrangement." Unfortunately, that sometimes included relationships with the grandchildren, who had nothing to do with the divorce and were already struggling with the loss of the family they knew. Our American Dream derailed right along with my parents' marriage, and it was painful to see how attitudes and relationships changed on so many fronts.

Some family members and friends did change, including our grandmother, Nana. But not Pappy. The warm and happy grandfather we knew never changed. Whatever had happened between the adults, we were still his grandchildren.

Pappy called.

He invited us for summer vacations in Florida and took us on our first trip to Disney World. That meant a great deal to kids who were otherwise feeling an awful lot of rejection and confusion. His consistency and his definition of "what makes a family" carried us through. His warmth and love never faltered or changed one iota. A piece of paper couldn't dissolve his family. His smile, his laugh, his hugs, and his love of family transcended divorce court.

Pappy was the heart of the Stevens family. Years later, I sometimes hear him again in my cousin David, who inherited Pappy's teddy-bear appeal, his joie de vivre and, remarkably, his laugh.  I wish there was a way to write about his voice but the best I can do is to describe it as deep and casual and somehow joyous. Pappy died before the advent of the iPhone, and silent 16mm films are the best way we have to reconnect with him. But they can't give me his voice or his laugh.

David is now a grandfather himself. His grandchildren call him "Happy"—perhaps wisely, since "Pappy" is a pretty formidable appellation to live up to.

Families come apart. Names get lost, marriages end, branches separate, and even the reasons a boy born in 1909 was given the middle name Ogle eventually disappear.

But somehow a laugh survives.

Maybe that's the best kind of inheritance.