The Pursuit of Permanence- Searching For a Legacy to Shape
First written 12/26/15
His hands were what initiated this little journey of thought. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t noticed them before—they had reached across the counter to jot something down several mornings a week over the decade I had known their owner. On this particular day though, I was struck by what I saw. Bones like gnarled tree roots wrapped in tissue paper skin, they were both rugged and fragile. The passage of time, so normally abstract, found physical form before me, unlocking waves of both wonder and discontent.
The hands belonged to Albert Rossi, resident historian at the Hotel Hershey. At 85, he was just weeks away from retirement (his third, as he would tell it), first as a public school teacher, then later as a hotel chauffeur, before settling into his present 12-hours-per-week gig giving tours.
The marriage between the man and the hotel could not have been designed more perfectly. Hershey was integral to who he was, and in turn and over time, Al became a core element of Hershey. People drop in regularly at the hotel to see him: former students, neighbors, fellow church members, friends of his children. Tourists on return visits come up for a meal and to tell him what a memorable role his tour played in their first trip. It’s a beautiful cross-section of the influence one man has had on a place and its people.
I often find I struggle when staring down the daunting task of crafting a life’s worth of achievement. I look at the third of my life already passed, and though I’ve done and seen quite a lot, I lack a sense of accomplishment on a grander scale, and I carry a fear that it won’t come in time.
Albert has lived, by many measures, a rather unremarkable life. He resides down the street from the house he was born in. A member of the Silent Generation, he watched the War from the sidelines, and reached adulthood in a period of stable prosperity. He humbly toiled in the teaching profession, influencing many, but never claiming his moment in the limelight. His offspring and theirs all achieved modest success, but never earned our era’s gold standard of significance: a personal Wikipedia entry. Had his story ended there, I’m sure he would have been satisfied. His funeral would have been well-attended, and family and friends would have oft recounted the positive influence he had on their lives. If my life followed a similar path, it would be ungrateful for me to be dissatisfied.
It turned out though that Al had an encore in store. As a chauffeur, he crossed paths with many of the rich and famous, but it was always from the driver’s seat of a Lincoln Town Car. It was his move to the hotel lobby as a tour guide that elevated his stories to canon, as they intertwined with the vibrant backstory of Mr. Hershey’s grand dame on the hill. Over a thousand tours later, and he has managed to do more to share our little corner of history than any individual but Hershey himself. An appearance in a History Channel program and two nominations for “hotel historian of the year” from Historic Hotels of America gave him a piece of the recognition he deserved but never sought.
I went along for Albert’s final tour. Ten years had passed since he had first led me through those halls as a wide-eyed trainee, and though I had already committed most of his facts and stories to memory, it still felt important to be there. I was witnessing the final act of something significant, that lifetime achievement I was in search of. He had been an employee for almost half of the hotel’s life, though his employment there stretched back nearly to the beginning, as a part-time busboy at age 15. His best story had to do with that period of life, as he was clearing a table in the dining room when news broke that Japan had ceded defeat; the war was over. As champagne popped, a joyous celebration ensued, etching a memory in one young man’s mind that he would retell 70 years later.
Those 70 years spanned many milestones of varying importance for both Albert and the Hotel as their paths diverged and came back together. Somewhere during that period, I was born and began my own journey. At that point, Al’s hands had already been weathered by 56 years of labor, yet his story was far from over. At the end of that last tour, another 29 years having passed, I gave the old man a hug. As he smiled, face caked with layers of time, his eyes shone through, present as ever. I realized with his 96-year-old sister as example, he could very well last another decade, caring for his wife, taking morning swims, and visiting family. At our goodbye, I turn inward, wondering what those next ten years could bring me. I must not waste time, but also must find joy in that time well spent. I cannot labor over a life worth writing about, when I still have no idea where that life will take me. In the meantime, I shall keep my focus pure and simple, on the people that matter, the places that shaped me, and the things that fill me with wonder.
Midway through writing this, I looked into my mirror. Smiling, I admired the extra wrinkles that have started to form around my eyes with newfound appreciation. My story is well underway, and I can’t begin to understand how what has already transpired will affect my later chapters. But then I looked down at my hands. They looked young, untested, yearning for material to grasp and mold into something that can stand the test of time. I’ve got a long way to go, and I couldn’t be more thrilled about it.
**on Tuesday, November 30, 2021, Albert passed away. His obituary can be found here