Invention and Necessity

 

Finding a copy of The New Yorker magazine in the middle of the West African bush never was easy.  In Liberia in the 1970s, it nearly was impossible.  In those days, living 120 miles inland from the coast and being limited to markets and shops that specialized in canned mackerel, Russian toilet paper and beer preserved with glycerin, browsing the newsstand wasn’t an option.

Occasionally I cadged a copy of the culturati’s Weekly Reader from expatriates living in Monrovia who had connections to the embassies or international agencies.  Now and then a Peace Corps volunteer would  have an issue to share, and there always was the possibility someone would step off PanAm 1 at Roberts Field with a copy tucked under an arm.  But in the end, mail from the States was my most dependable source.  The fact that the ”latest” issues might be three months old wasn’t a problem.  A story is a story, after all, and even essays and columns develop a strange, timeless quality when read so utterly out of context.

As the magazines were passed from hand to hand, everyone enjoyed the fiction, dissected articles about life “back home” and rolled their eyes over what passed for pressing issues in the US.  The cartoons were favorites, of course, and apart from their ability to amuse us those cartoons  served another, slightly unusual purpose. The running joke among workers from the States was that when we got to the point of not understanding New Yorker cartoons, it was time to head home to refresh our cultural ties and re-acquaint ourselves with the society to which we’d eventually have to return. One of the first things anyone learned when arriving in-country was that Broad Street, Monrovia, wasn’t Main Street, USA, but those of us who loved Liberia needed occasional New Yorker nudges to remind us of our roots.

 

 Monrovia, Liberia ~ Lizzie Goodfriend

 

Today, no longer living in Liberia and with my copy of The New Yorker arriving dependably in my mailbox each week, I find the magazine still functions as a kind of cultural canary in the coal mine of my life. There are days when I look at the cover or cartoons and think, “What?” 
 
Most recently I glanced at the November 2 issue,  puzzled that a Halloween theme had been chosen for the cover when ghosts-and-goblins hilarity had been over for days.  After a minute or so, I got the joke. The point wasn’t the kids trick-or-treating at the door.  It was their parents who were of interest,  half-hidden in the darkness, their faces barely visible in the spooky light of their Kindles.

 ”Unmasked” ~ by Chris Ware

The Kindle (and assorted knock-offs)  is just one more in a growing list of electronic gadgets, cyber-services and social networking sites multiplying around us at a dizzying rate. Smart phones, mp3 players, GPS devices and game consoles abound, every one of them accompanied by breathless marketing campaigns designed to convince us these products are critical if we’re to fully participate in our brave new e-world. 

The implications are clear.  Without a newer phone, a smaller iPod, a larger memory or more pixels, we’re lost, doomed, condemned to wander forever through the unutterable monotony and blandness of  ~ well, of whatever kind of life there was before the search for batteries, recharging devices and faster connections became part of our daily routine.

Actually, I remember that life.  At the post office, I’d stand in line and chat with my neighbor.  I swapped ice cream recommendations with folks at the grocerty store.  I’d catch the eye of people I passed on the street. When I smiled, they’d smile back.  I had acquaintances, and I had friends, and while I might forget the name of an acquaintance, I always knew the names of my friends.

Today, post office lines are filled with people talking on cell phones. Texters in grocery store lines might as well have “Do Not Disturb” signs posted. On the street, people continue to text.  While friendships endure, “friend” is becoming a verb and “followers”  are piling up, counters in some strange popularity game.

Even on The New Yorker cover, the upraised faces of the children reflect light from the homes of  strangers.  Focused on their “reading machines” and paying their children little mind, the multi-tasking parents are absorbed not in the pleasure and enjoyment of their children’’s experience, but in the pursuit of their own goals.  Like a husband texting while his wife is speaking or a businesswoman taking a cell phone call in the middle of a conversation, they are both ”there” and ”not there”, physically present yet strangely absent.  It may be the greatest irony of technology. Marketed as a means for bringing people together, it can have quite the opposite effect, creating an eerie and  unnerving isolation. 

 

 

Some weeks ago, intrigued by Nora Ephron’s role as screenwriter for Julie and Julia, I picked up her book Wallflower at the Orgy.  Her remarkable first lines seem relevant to my own ambivalance about our emerging realities.

 “Some years ago, the man I am married to told me he had always had a mad desire to go to an orgy. Why on earth, I asked. Why not, he said. Because, I replied, it would be just like the dances at the YMCA I went to in the seventh grade – only instead of people walking past me and rejecting me, they would be stepping over my naked body and rejecting me…”

She goes on to compare the life of a journalist to that of the wallflower at the orgy – watching everyone else having a marvelous time doing every sort of inconceivable thing while she stands off to the side and takes notes.

As I watch the cyber-orgy swirl around me, Ms. Ephron’s description seems apt. Yes, I signed up for Facebook, but I’ve never completed my profile.  Yes, I have a Twitter account, but I do little more than publicize blog postings and track WordPress outages.  I have a cell phone, but not an iPod. I’ve  learned to use a digital camera,  but never have used the camera on my phone.  I work with text every day, but never have texted.  Like Ephron, I’m a wallflower, and perfectly content to watch most of the goings-on from the sidelines.

 “Savage Chickens” ~ Doug Savage

For centuries after Plato mentioned it in his Republic, the truth of his statement seemed self-evident: “Necessity is the Mother of Invention”  Today, for good or for ill, we’ve turned Platonic wisdom on its head, choosing to devote ourselves to the proposition that “Invention is the Mother of Necessity.”  And the gadget-makers have our number. If they invent it, we will come, dollars in hand, ready to invest ourselves in the next, best transformative technology  toy, convinced it’s a necessity for life.

I’m no Luddite, and none of this is meant to suggest that Kindles are evil. Enjoying an iPod isn’t immoral, and texting isn’t a tool of the devil.  All these bits of technology can be blessing as well as curse.  They enable us to do things that would have been unimaginable even two decades ago, and few of us want to go back – least of all me, happily typing along on my blog.

On the other hand, it’s worth recognizing that all of our gizmos and gadgets, all our fancy programs and hyper-linked pages are nothing more than tools.  Since the time of homo habilis, the tool-user has had to learn and re-learn a single critical lesson: we are the ones in control.  We determine how tools will be used, and we are free to determine their value for our lives. Necessity has bred wonderful inventions, to be sure.  But not every invention is wonderful, and even the most wonderful may not be necessary for the achievement of our goals.

 

 

Back in Monrovia, Liberian “blogger” and news entrepreneur Alfred Sirleaf continues to prove the point.  Committed for years to providing information to a city plagued by the consequences of war, high prices, a surging refugee population, no dependable power grid and low literacy rates, he’s found the perfect invention for his task: chalk and a blackboard.

Each day in the heart of the city, he searches through newspapers, makes a few calls and sometimes fires up a generator for television access.  Once he knows what’s important, he begins to post at his kiosk, combining words for the literate and symbols for those unable to read.

 

 

News on petrol prices,  updates on UN peacekeeping forces, pleas to government for responsibility and promise-keeping ~ all of these appear on his blackboard in carefully lettered text.   Referring to nearly everyone in his battered city, he says,

“Those who don’t have opportunity to buy newspaper, go on the Internet, who can’t afford to buy generator to buy TV – I do all the dirty work for them, and I just give them exactly what they want.”

In a nation recovering from the horrors of civil war, dependable news is necessary, and Mr. Sirleaf’s approach to providing it is inventive, to say the least.  From his spot on Tubman Boulevard his one-man operation reaches thousands of citizens each day, armed with little more than a passion for communication, a blackboard and some chalk. 

With all of our gizmos and gadgets, we should do as well.

 

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A Different Kind of Horror

 

Halloween is the season of horror.  Goblins, ghoulies and ghosties skulk around the edges of consciousness.  Television movie channels pull from their graves the remains of plots that refuse to die ~ Psycho, Vertigo, Rebecca – while Hitchcock’s Birds wheel through the air.  The little ones may delight in dressing up as princesses, pirates or warlords, but blood drips and body parts pile up for the vampires, zombies and other assorted creatures of the night who seek to displace chainsaw-wielding psychopaths as the epitome of evil terror. 

Everyone understands ”there’s gold in them-thar dismemberments”, and across the country everything from neighborhood haunted houses to Universal Studios’ famous Halloween Horror Nights in Orlando is trying to take a bite out of the consumer.   We love to be entertained, and we love to be scared when we know it  doesn’t count.  With its witches’ brew of  Dia De Los Muertos skeletons, decorated graves, black cats,  and whacked-out pumpkins, Halloween is our perfect holiday.  All those sugar highs are lagniappe.

 

One of the most unlikely purveyors of horror might be the American poet, Carl Sandburg. He’s not much in favor these days. He’s too common, too plain-spoken.  He wasn’t considered “literary” in his day and today he’d be left out of most symposia and cocktail parties.  But he had vision, and he understood people. Like Whitman before him, he acknowledged his debt to the workers and builders, the families and businesses which knit this country together.

I’ve often thought of Sandburg during this past year, after decades of ignoring his work.  Standing in the midst of the detritus of Hurricane Ike, the first words which resonated in the silence were his,  the introduction to his gripping Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind.  “Yesterday” was gone, indeed, along with Bolivar Penninsula,  a good bit of Galveston and the security of people up and down the coast.  ”What of it?”  asked the woman named Tomorrow.  ”Let the dead be dead.”

Whenever I’ve pitted Sandburg against Faulkner in this matter of the past, Faulkner always won.  Sandburg felt too bleak, too resigned, too dismissive of the possibilities inherent in life.  When Faulkner’s character Gavin Stevens says, ”The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past”, the tone is quite different.  But both men are communicating truth, and it is Sandburg’s truth I ponder today.

In recent months, as economic devastation, social upheaval and political crosscurrents  have surged their way through our national life, I’ve been unable to stop thinking about Sandburg.   He couldn’t have known when he published his works what form his beloved country would have taken years hence. And yet his words are chilling, nearly prescient, as sharp and timely as though he meant to speak them precisely to us, the countrymen and women he never would know.

A Lincoln scholar, a lover of history, a straightforward man of integrity who could touch the hearts of his contemporaries,  Sandburg should speak to us today.  Let the thrill seekers crowd into their theatres or the living dead prowl their haunted houses.  Let the role players smear their blood and the would-be vampires try for a second bite. This Halloween, I’m tired of tricks, and I don’t need the treats. I’d rather  look at my country clear-eyed, and hear the poet speak, and share his unmasked words with those who dare to face our own, unnerving horrors. 

 

Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind

Carl Sandburg ~ 1922

 

The woman named Tomorrow
sits with a hairpin in her teeth
and takes her time
and does her hair the way she wants it
and fastens at last the last braid and coil
and puts the hairpin where it belongs
and turns and drawls: Well, what of it?
My grandmother, Yesterday, is gone.
What of it? Let the dead be dead.

The doors were cedar
and the panels strips of gold
and the girls were golden girls
and the panels read and the girls chanted:
         We are the greatest city,
          the greatest nation:
          nothing like us ever was.
The doors are twisted on broken hinges.
Sheets of rain swish through on the wind
          where the golden girls ran and the panels read:
          We are the greatest city,
          the greatest nation,
          nothing like us ever was.

It has happened before.
Strong men put up a city and got
          a nation together,
and paid singers to sing and women
          to warble: We are the greatest city,
                 the greatest nation,
                 nothing like us ever was.

And while the singers sang
and the strong men listened
and paid the singers well
and felt good about it all,
   there were rats and lizards who listened
   …and the only listeners left now
 are…the rats…and the lizards.

And there are black crows
crying, “Caw, caw,”
bringing mud and sticks
building a nest
      over the words carved
      on the doors where the panels were cedar
      and the strips on the panels were gold
      and the golden girls came singing:
             We are the greatest city,
              the greatest nation,
              nothing like us ever was.

The only singers now are crows crying, “Caw, caw,”
And the sheets of rain whine in the wind and doorways.
And the only listeners now are…the rats…and the lizards. 

The feet of the rats
scribble on the doorsills;
the hieroglyphs of the rat footprints
chatter the pedigrees of the rats
and babble of the blood
and gabble of the breed
of the grandfathers and the great-grandfathers
of the rats.

And the wind shifts
and the dust on a doorsill shifts
and even the writing of the rat footprints
tells us nothing, nothing at all
about the greatest city, the greatest nation
where the strong men listened
and the women warbled: Nothing like us ever was.

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Furnishing Our Stories

I suppose there are as many reasons to blog as there are bloggers.  Curiosity about the world, a willingness to accede to Durrell’s conviction that reality can be “reworked to show its significant side“ and the pure pleasure of shaping words all have played a roll in developing and sustaining my personal commitment to this strange new phenomenon of our time.

One thing I particularly enjoy about blogging  is the response I receive from readers.  Comments have ranged from challenging to congratulatory to caustic, but no matter their form, I always find them stimulating and engaging.   To my taste, good blogs exhibit a certain tentativeness, exploring rather than defining the subject at hand, and good comments reflect the same qualities.  Writers and readers work together, inching their way forward through thickets of allusion and argument to reach provisional conclusions.  Occasionally they unearth a real, if unexpected, treasure.

Some months ago, a faithful reader responded to one of my entries by saying, 

“I like this blog. I prefer the ones where you tell your story within its own context. Not sure how to say what I mean here, other than it’s all you.

Of course the others are all you too, it’s just that I like how you decorate with what you have made, rather than …  Can’t figure out how to say it…”

That’s a wonderful comment: honest, straightforward, vacillitory and thought-provoking all at the same time. Best of all, I think I understand the point.

Consider this.  Some years ago, I knew a woman who had plenty of money and an urge to decorate. She lived in a large, relatively new home perfectly suited to someone cursed with a compulsive need to change the scenery.  As the months and years passed, I began to realize the woman I’d become friends with re-created her environment the way I change shorts and t-shirts – casually, frequently and without much thought. 

When I met the family, they weren’t in Santa Fe but they were living the Santa Fe lifestyle, surrounded by terra cotta and turquoise. Ristras woven from brilliant chilis hung from open beams.  Bookshelves were punctuated with Acoma and Jimez pots.  With its tiled floors and washed walls, the house was restful and redolent of pinon and juniper ~ no detail had been overlooked in the attempt to re-create a beloved environment.

Not even a year later, Texas-Cowboy-meets-Gucci had caught my friend’s attention.  Free-form barbed wire borders and mesquite furniture became the order of the day, punctuated with cowhide pillows, heavy silver candelabra and log-cabin quilts produced by the sweet little ladies of Orvis.  But it didn’t last. After a brief flirtation with the minimalist Scandinavians and a run through Edwardian elegance, she decided it was time for a visit to Provence.

Despite suggestions that all those roosters, mustard-yellow walls and lace curtains were becoming just a bit outré and she might do better with a more subdued look, she was determined to achieve the pinnacle of sunny cheerfulness.   A few thousand dollars here, a few thousand there, and the transformation was complete: new furniture, new colors, new fabrics and new accessories. It looked just like a magazine, but everyone knew it wouldn’t be long before she’d be ready to turn the page once again.

And that’s exactly the point.  The new morning-in-Provence digs didn’t satisfy her at all, any more than Santa Fe or Cattle Ranch Chic or Edwardian Elegance had satisfied her. Each time she redecorated, it was the “look” that was the point, and not the life.  Walking into her home, you would find no memories, no personal touches, nothing that would make you want to point to one thing or pick up another and say, “Tell me about this”.  Her creation was a beautiful house, but it was a backdrop for a photo shoot more than it was a home.  Ask any visitor, “Who lives here?  What experiences have they had?  What do they enjoy? believe? appreciate?” and there would be no way to answer.

While I’ll admit to a fondness for adobe and turquoise, I’ve never had the money nor the inclincation for a total re-do.  Looking around my home, there’s no theme, no sense of good taste run amok. What I have are African masks obtained from people whose names I remember, snuggled up against Ethiopian weavings and cowgirl art. There’s a copper basket filled with rocks from Georgia O’Keefe’s Abiquiu hills, and exquisite oils of poppies and roses painted by the hand of a dear friend. There are prints of the Flatiron, my favorite building, and an antique etching from Harper’s of the 1851 flood on Bayou Teche.

There are Batchelder tiles, Bradley and Hubbard plaques, Benin bronzes and more Ohio Valley pottery than anyone should have. There’s my great-grandmother’s butter paddle and my dad’s 9th grade shop class project.  There are braided rugs from the cabin and my childhood rocking chair, Muslim prayer beads and Victorian yard-longs. It’s not a style, it’s a life: collected, cherished and displayed not to please others but to keep me grounded and help me remember where I’ve been as I journey on to unknown destinations.

In short, I’ve decorated my home with the experiences of my life, and at least one reader is telling me it works in writing precisely as it does in life.  “I like how you decorate with what you have made,” she says, her words an unmistakable caution as much as a compliment.  

In writing as in life, there’s no need to be a slave to fashion, or dependent upon literary versions of House Beautiful to tell us what we need.  None of us is called to buy a style or borrow a voice.  Each of us has our own style and our own voice.  Each of us has our own closetful of furnishings, collected and cherished through the years, waiting to be arranged throughout our stories, essays and posts.  

Santa Fe sentences or French Provincial paragraphs may be fine for some, but if they are not our sentences, our paragraphs, they’ll never help us reach our own quite particular conclusions. In writing as in life, all of the memories and dreams, experiences and hopes that have come to us from the past will do perfectly well to enrich the present and carry us into the future.

It’s only a question of how they should be arranged.

 

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Virginia Throws Open the Window

 

It began quietly enough, with a certain restlessness, a reluctance to re-establish routine, an inability to focus on the tasks at hand.  

I’d been traveling, wheeling across the Mississippi Delta for days, peripatetic as a dream, imbibing the sheer movement, the joys of impulsivity and intense expectation like some heady, intoxicating brew.  Eventually, the party ended and it was time to sober up.  Home again at my desk, I barely could turn to look out the window at the familiar view I love so much.  During our separation it had transformed itself from placid scenery into a token of my discontent, a nagging reminder of how many paths remained to be traveled. 

Back to the Scrap Heap

I love researching the pedigree of  blog awards.  It’s a grown-up, vntary version of the forced march our 6th grade Catechism class made through the book of Genesis.  Just as following those Biblical “begats” back through the generations carried us to wholly unrecognizable worlds, tracking the progress of blog awards can lead to strange and mysterious places, not to mention unusual or quirky companions.

When Andi of AndiLit graced me with the Honest Scrap Award, I did what I often do. I worked my way backward: through Courtney at Everything in Between to In the Mainstream, and then on to Allison Writes, where the easy trail grew difficult. No matter. I’ve never been able to make myself keep going on and on down the path toward the origin of an award, partly for fear I might end up somewhere I don’t care to be, like Armed Females of America, and partly because I fear capture by blogs capable of killing my every spare minute of time.  Stop by Neatorama and you’ll see what I mean.

Prowling and pawing around the Honest Scrap heap, one thing I did notice is that no one seems quite sure what the award means.  As Andi put it, “The Honest Scrap Award is – well, I don’t know what it’s for…”  That sentiment’s been echoed by innumerable bloggers who’ve received the award and it was my own first response to the honor.  My second response was curiosity,particularly since scraps have been an important, if unexamined, part of my life since childhood.

The Banned and the Beautiful

“Flophouse” made me giggle.  I’d never heard such a word, and when I pulled the slim yellow volume from my parents’ bookshelves, admiring the bold red print along the spine and the rough, burlap texture of  its cover, I wasn’t certain at first I’d read it correctly.  But there it was: “flophouse”.

Paging through the book I found it once, twice, and twice again.  I giggled every time I read it, and went running down the stairs to the Big People’s party.

“What’s a flophouse?” I asked my Dad.  “What are you reading now?” he asked in turn, not even bothering to look up from his cards.

What I was reading was John Steinbeck’s  Cannery Row. Unlike another of his classics, The Grapes of Wrath, the saga of Doc and Dora, Mack, Hazel and Eddie never was banned by any library or school board I know of, but in my parents’ household, banning would have been irrelevant. Books were written, and books were meant to be read. If the reader happened to be a third-grader who’d pulled a grown-up novel off the shelves because she was attracted by the cover, so be it. Their assumption was that I’d be interested, or not, and if a grown-up book piqued my interest there was plenty of time to look up unfamiliar words or talk about life in a flophouse.

The Aging of Aquarius

 

As William F. Buckley, Jr. told the story, five days before his mother, Aloise Steiner Buckley, died

one week (had) gone by without her having said anything, though she clutched the hands of her children and grandchildren as they came to visit, came to say good-bye. (When her) nurse brought her from the bathroom to the armchair and — inflexible rule — put on her lipstick, and the touch of rouge, and the pearls, suddenly, and for the first time since the terminal descent began a fortnight earlier, she reached out for her mirror. With effort she raised it in front of her face, and then said, a teasing smile on her face as she turned to the nurse, “Isn’t it amazing that anyone so old can be so beautiful?”

The answer, clearly, was, Yes.  It was amazing that anyone could be so beautiful.

Aloise Steiner Buckley was one of the lucky ones. Gazing into life’s mirror is not always a reminder that we have become old and beautiful.  Sometimes, we see  only that we are becoming old.  The same mirror that reflects the image of a full and well-lived life also may reveal traces of youthful hopes and dreams  turned to ashes by the fires of raging reality.

Whatever the nature of the reflection in the mirror, there never is an undoing of what has been. In an often misunderstood statement from his Requiem for a Nun, William Faulkner put these words into the mouth of Gavin Stevens: “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past”.  Faulkner’s point is uncomfortable as it is true.  The past never simply disappears. It continues to live and resonate, shaping and determining the present in unexpected and unpredictable ways.

Picking Up Mary Travers’ Hammer

 

Honored, recognized, hidden or charicatured, the death of celebrity fascinates us. As if amazed that wealth and fame  present no obstacle to the predations of time, we stand arrested, staring in puzzlement as the lives of those we imagined to be immortal begin to fade against the horizon of history. Sometimes we grieve. More often we become nostalgic or nervous, aware that the passing of this stranger is a marker of sorts, a memento mori, a reminder that our years, too, are passing and the fate of others is our own.

Now and then, the grief is more personal.  When I learned Mary Travers had died, I wasn’t surprised. Her struggles with leukemia have been well documented, and her death at a Danbury, Connecticut hospital at the age of 72 was the natural outcome of a long process.

When she joined Peter Yarrow and Paul Stookey in the early 1960s to begin making music in Greenwich Village, the trio caught on immediately, sweeping into our 1950s lives with an irresistable combination of intensity and cool. Herb Caen, celebrated columnist for the  San Francisco Chronicle, might have been envisioning the lanky blond and goateed guitarists when he coined his term “beatnik” in a  1958 column.

 

Their 1962 debut album, Peter, Paul & Mary, contained two of their biggest hits, Lemon Tree and the multiple Grammy Award-winning If I Had a Hammer. It was one of the first albums I purchased for myself, and within weeks I’d memorized each of its songs. Later generations might learn to moonwalk or play air guitar in their basements and bedrooms, but high schoolers of the ’60s learned to harmonize.

Raise High the Floor Beam, Islanders….

The very definition of ”heart-tugging”  is a toddler or young child standing in front of an adult, arms outstretched, begging to be picked up.  Confused, frightened or hungry for attention, they’ve already learned a key to unlocking the resistant adult heart: the single word, ”Up!?”   Spoken with authority or pathos, it’s a word that brings big, strong arms down to a child’s level, enfolding the needy little bundle of humanity into a blanket of security, raising it in a flash and ensuring its safety “up there”.

The urge to flee upward seems as instinctive as our impulse to run from danger.  On my third birthday, our neighbors decided I should have a pet.  Invited to share cake and ice cream, they appeared at the back door with a tiny black puppy in a box.  It may have been a cocker spaniel ~ I remember black, glistening curls of fur and long, floppy ears.  The pup wriggled in paroxysms of pleasure as Mr. Ramey rubbed its belly and scratched its ears.  I was entranced, until they put the puppy on the floor.  Turning a few quick circles, the creature produced a cascade of wild yips and headed straight for me.     

I don’t know what I was thinking, but what I did became the stuff of family legend.  In two bounds I was onto a dining room chair and up on top of my mother’s prized mahogany dining table, shoes and all.    Down below, the puppy tumbled and jumped, trying to follow.  I screamed in terror, refusing a chorus of entreaties to “be quiet”, ”come down” or “pat the nice puppy”.  Eventually, the well-meaning neighbors collected the pup and made their way home.  I came down from the tabletop after being promised more ice cream, and eventually received a turtle for my birthday.

Labor Day ~ Working (with) Class

 

All of them were immigrants, of course.

A Celtic knot of humanity, my mother’s people arrived from England and Ireland, torn from the County called Down and the Staffordshire hills by their longing for a better life.  Working their way from Virginia to Kentucky and Tennessee, they camped on the Texas prairies and followed the rivers back to Iowa.  They told stories of their patriarch, David, who panned for gold in Colorado and fought in the Civil War from Vicksburg to the Rio Grande.  They clucked over Ina,  David and Annie’s red-haired, purple-clad daughter who carried hand-written manuscripts of novels in her suitcase, married her stepson and disappeared into the depths of a Hawaiian pineapple plantation. 

Later, there was Mabel, heart-breakingly beautiful and my mother’s mother, who fell in love with Ed from Nebraska but never consented to live on that prairie, nor in the efficient if inelegant soddies built from its soil.  A wonderful combination of grit, romanticism and stolidity, they could be any American family, laboring to bring their long-held dreams to fruition.

 Maternal Grandparents and Great-Grandparents

My father’s parents came from Sweden.  Slightly more stolid and far less romantic than the crew pictured above, Ella and Alf didn’t meet until both had moved to Minneapolis in the early 1900s.  After their marriage they continued on to Iowa, where the coal mines offered steady work. They raised a large family, including my Aunt T, adored the few grandchildren who came along, and lived a quiet, predictable Midwestern life.