AFTER VISITING FRIENDS, A Son’s Story, by Michael Hainey.

I think that Gabrielle Hamilton, author of BLODD, BONES and Butter, critiqued Hainey’s book up exactly as I would have. “I inhaled this story. Everything you want and need in a book. I started chapter one with my coffee in the morning and then never lade it to work. A beautiful book.”

Hainey was a Young man when his father died. He was never content with the obituary reports. He set out to find the facts surrounding his father’s death. It is a journey of the heart and we are invited along.

I was enthralled from the opening pages., where Hainey explains an old Polish custom:

When a boy has his first birthday, his family sits him in his high chair, and on the tray before him they place three objects - Coin, Shot glass, Crucifix. Whatever the boys chooses, that will be his life.

Hainey learned this from his grandmother.

Recalling another episode, when his grandparents were discussing their ‘old neighborhood’ and when they actually lived in that area, his grandfather’s memory contradicts his wife’s memory.

“No, it was 1917. I know because it was the summer we hanged the Kaiser in effigy.”

“You’re right.” the grandmother states. “There was a parade throughout the neighborhood, and we strung him up on a streetlight in front of Saint Adalbert’s. Lit a big fire out of trash.”

Hainey adds: “And I’m sitting there, thinking: How many people remain who can speak the sentence “It was the summer we hanged the Kaiser in effigy”?

The flavor and pace of Hainey’s writing is reminiscent of Carl Sandburg. I say this in a general way, but also specifically as I recall Sandburg’s poem, CHICAGO (Hog butcher for the world, toll maker, stacker of wheat, player with railroads and the nation’s freight handler …”

Michael Hainey relates that his grandparents ran a corner store in a Chicago neighborhood that was mainly comprised of Poles, Germans and Austrians.

“…Canned good. Boxes of basics. Shelves of staples for the family who washed up on the block. Families of men who worked the slaughterhouses - the Chicago Union Stock Yards. For a good hundred years, there was nothing like it on earth. An entire square mile of Chicago, devoted to butchering cattle and hogs or any other beast a man could ship from America’s hinterlands - our prairies ands plains - turning into canned meat churning all of it into the bounty of America. This was the land of Swift, the Kingdom of Armour. Chicago as the disassembly line. Chicago - how fast and how efficiently a creature could be reduced. Rendered. Broken down.”

Here, I paused, thinking of Henry Ford studying the slaughterhouse disassembly lines and considering how that process might work in reverse - work to assembly an automobile. Speedily. Efficiently. Expertly.

These elements are mere background to the man Michael Hainey became. They aren’t really part of the back story, but they provide a rich example of the man’s writing style.