Good morning, good morning!
I've said before, I miss writing to Auntie Vi every
morning, usually starting with a weather report. In the Midwest, it
changes all the time--it's genuinely interesting.
Once I spent ten
days in Santa Barbara, California: every day's weather was exactly the
same. What do people chit chat about in climates like that?
After I'd replaced my shredded bike tire with a puncture-proof one a few days ago, it snowed several wet inches, and the snow ruckled up into frozen ruts--nasty for biking.
So, back to figuring out the best bus routes to work--I have to transfer, waiting twice on a cold corner, but I have a few route options. Sometimes it's easier to walk the second half, but the terrain isn't good for walking right now, either...
Family: Artichokes & Orchids
GZ wrote a couple fascinating posts this week--her family history, and the history of her life as a potter.
I've told my history here in various ways--88 posts indexed "family"––but thought it might be fun to do a Quick Review.
UPDATE:
Now I've finished writing this post, I want to say I wrap up with my mother's death by her own hand twenty years ago. Skip the last section––"That's All, Folks"––if that's too upsetting.
To start with her side: My favorite maternal ancestor is Uriah Sutherland.
I know nothing about him except his fabulous name. I surmise he left Scotland because of fallout from the Industrial Revolution (the Clearances of small farmers).
He ended up in
southern Missouri, he and a rangy mix of Scots-Irish and other
scrappers who'd crossed the Appalachians before the American Revolution, against British laws to keep colonists out
of western Native lands.
History is numbers, they say, and land. Mix and match.
My father's family came from Sicily in the early 1900s.
When I went to Sicily ninety years later, I could see why people would leave, even now:
the island is a giant rock baking in sunny salt waters.
As they say in Moonstruck, "It ain't modern times in Sicily."
Like Scotland, Sicily's national flower is a THISTLE.
Well,
no it isn't, (it is Scotland's, though), but the artichokes that grow
on the island are thistles, with spikes like horns--they look like a
mace, the medieval weapon.
So--some spikey, scrappy ancestors, on both sides.
What human doesn't have those?
But there are stories of a few tender orchids in there too, who hung on, or didn't.
I'd posted these side-by-side photos just this past summer, both taken around the time of World War One (1913ish).
Top, Missouri
bottom, Sicily
My father's parents came to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on the Great Lake Michigan, where they could get jobs. My grandfather was a cobbler, grandmother a seamstress.
My father hated his violent father and escaped to UM–Columbia (Missouri), where he got a PhD in political science and where he met my mother who was studying music (piano).
I always say they got together to get away from their families. My mother had been raised to be a Southern belle, and in her mother's eyes, my father was a greasy wop.
Perfect exit strategy!
My father had the emotional insight of an artichoke, and my mother was an orchid.
My father always said that at least they made wonderful children together, which was nice of him because he didn't seem to like me much. I reminded him of my mother. She left––leaving us three kids with our father––when I was thirteen.
(I'm more of an artichoke than she was––or, as Marz said, a baby rhino––though I'm feeling just a little orchidish lately.)
Books'll Get You Through
I left too, when I was sixteen (graduated high school early)--took the Amtrak to Denver, where I had NO IDEA what to do. No internet, you remember.
I spent a couple months in the library, reading. A good choice, really.
That's when I stole a book about T. E. Lawrence ("of Arabia"), for which I paid the library back only a few/coupla years ago, and which is why I am now a Friend of the Denver Public Library--they put my money toward that, and I re-up every year.
I remember stuff I did like that when young people act like ass wipes---give them a few years. (Forty?)
I went to see a friend in Tucson--stayed over Thanksgiving (the weather never changed!), and eventually took the Greyhound bus back. I'd miscalculated the fare and after paying it only had enough cash to buy a loaf of white bread at a gas station during one of the bus layovers.
I wasn't ambitious, just wanted to lie on the couch and read, mostly. I still do.
Most of my jobs have had to do with books--three libraries, one publisher (proofing/editing/writing nonfiction books for young people), now BOOK's in the thrift store.
Somewhere in there I got my BA in Classics/Religious Studies, which made my father proud.
My mother---in full-on dramatic, narcissist-mother style (your story belongs to me, and I can improve it)--told people I got an MA in Classical Greek.
"Well, you should have," she told me.
That's All, Folks [content note: suicide]
My mother the orchid took her life twenty years ago--the coroner called on the eve of winter solstice.
I was forty-one. I'd been crazy about her, growing up. She was fall-over-drooling funny, and talk-all-night smart--but she was an expensive person to know. She was sensitive, which caused her to suffer, and she made everyone else pay for it too.
I tried hard to save her, and she thought I should too (not just me, but also me).
I couldn't.
This is why I want to tattoo this reminder on my eyeballs:
YOU ARE NOT THE SAVIOR.
Some years I barely think of my mother and her death, but this year it's on my mind. Maybe it's the number twenty?
Is that why I'm feeling a bit snappish?
Not sure... Truly, it could be plenty of other things!
I've blogged 51 posts tagged "mother". (I'm grateful to my librarian-self that I indexed posts from the very beginning.)
If you're interested, "After My Mother Killed Herself" written six years after her death, is about the time itself.
Trigger warning: suicide, obviously, but it's pretty dry, really.
It's that sort of distanced report that psychologists say can help relieve horror.
Writing it was important for that, I think.
Below is my mother's obit (top left), in my 2003-in-Review photo collage. It is bone dry, written by my sibs. At the time that annoyed me, but now I think it was smart--that step-away-from-the-trauma dryness.
Next to the obit is a photo of me, a few months after my mother's death, holding a vestment for Pentecost (the dove descends in flame). I was working as an assistant sacristan (schlepper of holy baubles) in the Basilica that year, as good luck would have it.
My mother'd grown up in the Church of the Generic Protestant & Ladies Gardening Club, but she and my father raised us with no religion (except Liberal Humanism).
Imagine my delight when I discovered Catholicism: ALL THE TOYS!!!
I always, always want to acknowledge how monstrous the Church/religion can be: I've seen what damage it has caused.
(Plenty of human institutions are monstrous of course, but having God in the mix makes for an extra-special horror show.)
But for me, it has been an art museum, a library, of human stories, and a place where my stories FIT.
There just aren't many places in US culture, with its emphasis on Production and Profit, where I feel my story fits.
I don't even believe in God, but for me, the stories are true.
___________
I've turned comments off--I just don't want to deal with snippets, in my current mood. (Emails are okay, if you like.)
_______________
I always post this when I write about my mother:
or
Call 1-800-273-8255
Outside of the United States, please visit the International Association for Suicide Prevention for a database of international resources.
