AN HEIRLOOM FROM THE FLIPSIDE

Grandfather Valentino wearing his grandfather’s war medal from 1848

A family heirloom rediscovered.

I ran across a photograph of this family heirloom the other day. The first photograph is my Italian grandfather Valentino Martini wearing the medal sometimes in the early 1900’s; perhaps his wedding day in 1915. I forgot about this medal until someone on the flipside suggested there was an “important photo of a man wearing a hat, holding the back of a chair.” This is the only photo like that I am aware of in our home — when my wife showed the medium the photograph, the medium said she got “chills from it.”

So I looked closer at the photograph. He’s not wearing suspenders, but a medal. I recognized it as a medal my father kept in a safety deposit box for decades. When the box was emptied, and the movers moved the contents of the house, one of the movers stole the medals in that box (and my parents jewelry and diamonds.) So somewhere in a pawn shop in the Windy City rests these three medals and diamond rings. I did my best to recover them — but one day while accessing my father and asking about these things, he said “they are where they need to be.” So I let it go.

However, the conversation with the medium prompted me to look again at this photograph of my grandfather Valentino. He’s wearing the medal that was in a safe deposit box, along with my Irish grandfather Edward A Hayes “National Order of the Legion of…