My dad used to say, "Everyone knew Dad, and liked him." His name was Andrew Christian Strobel, born in nearby Ramsey, IL and a farmer north of Vandalia. "Christian" was the first name of his maternal grandfather, a German immigrant. Andy spelled the family name Strobel or Stroble. Fatefully, the second spelling was the one used on my father's birth certificate, giving me a surname slightly different from all my other relatives. Dad pointed out his own birth location, a long ago farm house on the north side of the creek just north of Vandalia along what's now U.S. 51, east of the road, on property now part of the Vandalia Correctional Center. I wrote about the Strobel family at this site, which has genealogical links and another picture of Andy.
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Mom's father also died before I was born, so I felt a certain empty place in my childhood: the two men could have been my "buddies" to do things with, but their lives and mine did not overlap. Andy in particular seemed "under erasure," as Derrida would put it, because this photo (mildly creepy, through no fault of Hazel's, yet also warm) was Andy's ongoing presence but it also signified his absence.
Somehow this didn't make me feel melancholy; it just was the way things were. Every child has to learn for the first time an obvious fact: that the world existed before he or she was alive. The picture was a way that I, a small child, learned of family before me---and of former years of the hometown which has always been such a strong part of my sense of identity.
Nevertheless, I think of childhood activities, like fishing for crawdads in the stream, that we missed doing together. What would he have taught me about life?
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