Harvey and the ache of losing family heirlooms
“Iam heartbroken now,” my brother texted. I knew before I enlarged the picture what he’d found in the ruins of his flood-ravaged home: Daddy’s violin.
No one had mentioned it during the first days of Harvey. We just wanted our brother and sisterin-law to get out with their lives intact. To heck with “stuff.” But we knew it was there.
“That was one thing I hoped to save. Daddy left that to me when he died, and it meant so much to him,” Chris wrote.
As if we didn’t remember.
In his photograph, the old instrument was falling apart, maybe warped and definitely waterstained. The ebony wood of the neck had popped loose. The whole thing seemed to have snapped open at the seams. The only thing holding it all together was the curvaceous case lined in soggy purple velvet.
Across our region, the magnitude of all we will mourn from the catastrophe of Harvey — the loss of lives, especially, and entire homes, with their histories — is still as hard to grasp as the statistics that are piling up.
Most of the stuff that washed away or fell apart doesn’t matter at all. But some things do matter. Things that tether us to our family histories and remind us we’re human, and that sometimes being human is joyful, and sometimes it hurts like hell.
Every family affected by Harvey, and by floods or fires any time, anywhere, knows the ache of lost heirlooms. Worthless yet priceless. Maybe it’s the ruined wedding pictures. Maybe it’s a broken china plate.
Seeing the old violin unleashed a flood of memories.
Our Daddy liked to say that his four kids — Chris, Fred, Penny and I — were as different as the oddball mix of furniture he kept in the living room of the house we grew up in on Rosewood Drive.
But he made sure we all shared music. Starting band class in the fourth grade was as much of a family passage as our first communions. We all kept it up through high school, even college, in our individual ways. Clarinet. Flute. Trombone. Trumpet. Guitar. Piano.
Daddy spent some of his childhood at an orphanage in Galveston. Nuns taught him to play the Hopf violin that his grandfather had brought from Sweden to Galveston in the late 1800s. Daddy’s father had been a musician, too — a trombone player in John Philip Sousa’s Marine Band.
I’m pretty sure Daddy loved that violin as much as he could love anything.
When the Dickinson house flooded the first time, with Tropical Storm Claudette in 1979, Daddy and Mama had to leave in a boat with three teenagers and my 90-year-old grandmother in tow. They stashed whatever they could far above the brown, snakeridden gunk before they left. They came home a week or so later to a colossal mess. Miraculously, the violin survived.
A decade later, Daddy was dying, and he called us home one day for a family meeting. He gave each of us something to remember him by. Chris got the violin.
Chris and his wife, Therese, eventually bought the house, too. So the violin never left. And flood waters came back early Sunday — again, four feet — enough to topple all the furniture, including free-standing cabinets that held valuables. After a harrowing 12 hours, a dramatic water rescue and a day of figuring out what to do next, they had a loaner truck and a nice place to stay, with friends.
Wednesday morning, after Chris saw wispy clouds in a brilliant blue sky, he texted a picture with the caption, “Thank you Jesus.”
The water had receded on his street. He and Therese got to the house early to survey the damage and gather valuables. They hadn’t expected the house to flood again, so they had left in a rush, carrying almost nothing.
Chris was attached to a lot of the ‘toys’ he had to leave behind. Things like fishing gear and stereo equipment, a camper. And there were other, more meaningful things, like mementos from his daughter’s childhood.
But he went for the violin first.
Any one of us would have done the same.