Margotlog: How to Make a Comment
Here's where the generation divides: Those who think it's easy as pie to leave a comment on a blog, and those who pause, scratch the proverbial pate, and give up. Do not despair: my mother learned to drive way over 50. You too can drive a blog comment. First, write your comment in the box. Then where there's a scroll down option, select either Anonymous or Name/URL. Type your name, but IGNORE the URL business. It's unmentionable. Some of us aren't really sure what it stands for. SO IGNORE. Push Post. You'll be greeted with a bunch of letters on drugs. Try very hard to decipher them and type them in simple non-drugged letters. This is somebody in Goggleland's idea of a drug test. When you've passed this, and you'd be given the same "opportunity" if you ordered tickets on line, push Post again, or maybe you don't even have to do that. You'll see in yellow highlighter a message that you're comment's been posted.
Try it. I'll love it!
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Sunday, August 29, 2010
The Swedish Connection
My Swedish grandmother was the most hidden of my family relatives. First, she died before I was six months old. Second, the name we were taught to call her wasn't really her own, but derived from her husband's nickname: Papa Max, my mother's forceful and successful German father: Papa Max.
His huge portrait in elaborate gilt frame hung over our piano in South Carolina, one of the many items of grandeur my mother brought from North Dakota when he died. No one can deny that he was handsome in a gentlemanly, substantial way: with his sandy hair and clear blue eyes, steady mouth and creamy shirtfront. Not the kind of businessman to stuff a cigar in your mouth, but one whose probity and forsight you could count on.
But there I go again, following my mother's lead and talking about her father. To study Mama Max, we had to visit the big house in North Dakota, surrounded in those days by shady elms and spruce spearing a cloudless sky. Her portrait, uncolored--for they were photographs--hung in the gloomy parlor with its dark furniture and antique tales--the princes in the tower, for instance, or seamstress Mimi dying in her garret without Verdi's sublime arias.
My mother rarely spoke of Mama Max; in fact she attributed only two traits to her: that she took naps, as did my own mother; and baked delicious cinnamon rolls. My mother was a mediocre cook, never venturing into anything involving yeast. Even as a child, wandering the huge North Dakota house on the long summer afternoons, I tried to give substance to Mama Max, pulling open the stuck drawers of her curved-leg bureau and feeling around in the back, or staring at the family photo albums where she appeared surrounded by my mother, her twin brother, and their two older sisters, enjoying picnics at Lake Elsie. A tall woman with a quiet smile and a halo of grey hair. Their father never appeared in such outings, as my mother called them, either working at the store or driving the countryside conferring with his tenant farmers.
Mama Max was Swedish, not German like Papa Max. I had to move to Minnesota before that meant anything more than a word. A few years ago I looked up her family Olein on the internet and discovered that they'd immigrated from Sweden in the 1880s and settled in Fargo. Even now, I can't remember their homeland--Smaaland? Varmland? But the internet did confirm that she had arrived as a child, with two older sisters. I already knew that her parents would soon die, leaving her to be raised by those sisters, the ghostly Aunt Anna and Aunt Hulda who moved to the west coast when their job was done. Dead before I was born, they were occasionally mentioned in my mother's sparse renditions of Augusta's childhood.
So she had a name Augusta, and it turned out, a profession before my grandfather discovered her, teaching in a country school, and brought her to Hankinson to be a mother to his orphan daughter. For he had made a first marriage to the furniture store owner's daughter, but she died giving birth to their child, and he, a young up-and-coming businessman, now part-owner of the store, needed a wife to raise their family.
It's hard, if not impossible, to apply my contemporary notions of married affection and women's lives to someone as effaced as my Swedish grandmother. So I simply affect fiction, and slip my hands into her capable ones as I approach the sink and stove. I think of her as my guide to household economy in the little province of homemaking. Conserving and saving, we pour water from drinking glasses into a pitcher for flowers; reuse soapy suds several times, even stopper the sink to rinse off dishes. Into a glass jar go vegetable and fruit peelings, limp lettuce and moldy lemons for the compost bin. I'm not her equal with pastry--my pies almost tasteless, my rolls dumpy and heavy. But her old-fashioned kitchen with its ice box and rain-water sink remind me that her large vegetable and flower garden lay across the backyard; farms for eggs, milk and meat only a few miles away. When the thresher ran over a rabbit's nest, Papa Max rescued the babies and let my sister and me raise them with eyedroppers of milk until they ran away.
The earth connection, and the need to preserve, conserve, reuse, lay right outside the door. You spent money carefully, though during the agricultural depression which preceded the Great one, she promised my mother, a freshman at the University of Minnesota, a new coat with money saved from her housekeeping allowance. This I now read in her letters which have come to me, gentle, full of teachers' gossip, for she took in boarders once all her children were gone. These single women protected her, as I pieced together with help from my travels with my own daughter to Germany and Italy. In the memoir about those travels, Falling for Botticelli, imagination and intuition weave a fabric to cover the gaps in lives barely mentioned in the public record.
Even now for Mama Max, I feel a melancholy affection. I'm glad that she evidently enjoyed my ebullient father and my mother's early married happiness. In quiet moments I pull her to me to soothe occasional ills and to remind myself that gentle strength and sociability can sustain through hard times.
His huge portrait in elaborate gilt frame hung over our piano in South Carolina, one of the many items of grandeur my mother brought from North Dakota when he died. No one can deny that he was handsome in a gentlemanly, substantial way: with his sandy hair and clear blue eyes, steady mouth and creamy shirtfront. Not the kind of businessman to stuff a cigar in your mouth, but one whose probity and forsight you could count on.
But there I go again, following my mother's lead and talking about her father. To study Mama Max, we had to visit the big house in North Dakota, surrounded in those days by shady elms and spruce spearing a cloudless sky. Her portrait, uncolored--for they were photographs--hung in the gloomy parlor with its dark furniture and antique tales--the princes in the tower, for instance, or seamstress Mimi dying in her garret without Verdi's sublime arias.
My mother rarely spoke of Mama Max; in fact she attributed only two traits to her: that she took naps, as did my own mother; and baked delicious cinnamon rolls. My mother was a mediocre cook, never venturing into anything involving yeast. Even as a child, wandering the huge North Dakota house on the long summer afternoons, I tried to give substance to Mama Max, pulling open the stuck drawers of her curved-leg bureau and feeling around in the back, or staring at the family photo albums where she appeared surrounded by my mother, her twin brother, and their two older sisters, enjoying picnics at Lake Elsie. A tall woman with a quiet smile and a halo of grey hair. Their father never appeared in such outings, as my mother called them, either working at the store or driving the countryside conferring with his tenant farmers.
Mama Max was Swedish, not German like Papa Max. I had to move to Minnesota before that meant anything more than a word. A few years ago I looked up her family Olein on the internet and discovered that they'd immigrated from Sweden in the 1880s and settled in Fargo. Even now, I can't remember their homeland--Smaaland? Varmland? But the internet did confirm that she had arrived as a child, with two older sisters. I already knew that her parents would soon die, leaving her to be raised by those sisters, the ghostly Aunt Anna and Aunt Hulda who moved to the west coast when their job was done. Dead before I was born, they were occasionally mentioned in my mother's sparse renditions of Augusta's childhood.
So she had a name Augusta, and it turned out, a profession before my grandfather discovered her, teaching in a country school, and brought her to Hankinson to be a mother to his orphan daughter. For he had made a first marriage to the furniture store owner's daughter, but she died giving birth to their child, and he, a young up-and-coming businessman, now part-owner of the store, needed a wife to raise their family.
It's hard, if not impossible, to apply my contemporary notions of married affection and women's lives to someone as effaced as my Swedish grandmother. So I simply affect fiction, and slip my hands into her capable ones as I approach the sink and stove. I think of her as my guide to household economy in the little province of homemaking. Conserving and saving, we pour water from drinking glasses into a pitcher for flowers; reuse soapy suds several times, even stopper the sink to rinse off dishes. Into a glass jar go vegetable and fruit peelings, limp lettuce and moldy lemons for the compost bin. I'm not her equal with pastry--my pies almost tasteless, my rolls dumpy and heavy. But her old-fashioned kitchen with its ice box and rain-water sink remind me that her large vegetable and flower garden lay across the backyard; farms for eggs, milk and meat only a few miles away. When the thresher ran over a rabbit's nest, Papa Max rescued the babies and let my sister and me raise them with eyedroppers of milk until they ran away.
The earth connection, and the need to preserve, conserve, reuse, lay right outside the door. You spent money carefully, though during the agricultural depression which preceded the Great one, she promised my mother, a freshman at the University of Minnesota, a new coat with money saved from her housekeeping allowance. This I now read in her letters which have come to me, gentle, full of teachers' gossip, for she took in boarders once all her children were gone. These single women protected her, as I pieced together with help from my travels with my own daughter to Germany and Italy. In the memoir about those travels, Falling for Botticelli, imagination and intuition weave a fabric to cover the gaps in lives barely mentioned in the public record.
Even now for Mama Max, I feel a melancholy affection. I'm glad that she evidently enjoyed my ebullient father and my mother's early married happiness. In quiet moments I pull her to me to soothe occasional ills and to remind myself that gentle strength and sociability can sustain through hard times.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
My Mother - The Passionate Traveler
My mother was the most passionate traveler I've ever met. Possibly because during childhood and college, she rarely went far from the small North Dakota farming town where her father, as she used to say, was "the big fish in a small pond." Let's hope she never bragged about this to the town's s other residents, though her family's sense of superiority may have left her immune to its sting. As far as I can tell, she didn't yearn to escape her town as a girl, yet once she took to the road, she almost immediately developed a passion for the past. The more medieval and aristocratic, the more tasty and picturesque the better.
Swoon: her senior college photograph (University of Minnesota, circa 1929) captures her inward anticipation along with the quiet beauty which no doubt appealed to my father. They couldn't have been more opposite: she the last born of a hard-driving German businessman and his graceful Swedish second wife; he the second of four Italian-American boys from Pittsburgh, rascally Lothario with music in his soul. By the time I was conscious enough to study these two pillars of my childhood, they'd developed their differences into a religion: she quiet and hard-driving (except for her naps) and my father dithery and constantly in voice. By that time, I was a teenager with my own carping agenda, thus not to be trusted.
My father spent a year between high school and college studying the violin in Ferrara, Italy. Not only was he blessed with social charm and a gift for languages, but his father, the lapsed Catholic from outside Naples, constantly brought home visitors from the motherland. These were often less affluent relations or unlettered workmen who'd left Italy between the wars for the riches of America. All this primed my father to find travel between the American east coast and Italy a rather common affair. He wasn't in love with travel per se, but with the smells and tastes. the sounds and histories of Italy.
When my parents moved to Charleston, South Carolina after World War II, they encountered an entirely alien romance of aristocracy and defeat, poverty and pride, which, along with soaring summer temperatures, they tried to escape every summer. These early childhood trips introduced me to them as travelers: my father at the wheel, my mother beside him, heading north though Carolina and Virginia, where my father insisted we stop for every historical sign (he'd recently been transferred from teaching European history to American and South Carolina topics and he needed to tool up). Backseat songs, fighting, and playing games with my sister, munching on celery and carrot sticks from the food pack, and following the flight of summer birds into towering clouds--all this set my own contemplative notion of travel. I was not in charge, and the world slipped by outside my window. Other summers when my father remained at home, we took trains halfway across the country to North Dakota. Trains were even more delicious than cars because we slept over the rhythm of wheels, washed in the hissing spiggots from tiny roommette sinks, and flushed the toilet to the rails flashing by--a terror I revive now on Italian trains. Death, a la Anna Karenina, except down a toilet's funnel.
Recently I've read my mother's letters from her first European voyage across the Atlantic when the guns of World War II were already taking aim. She was entirely absorbed by shipboard romance--doing her nails for dinner at the captain's table where my father had gotten them invited. Then in Florence, finding an English-speaking druggist who could sell her a sedative for my father's stomach. And finally as she lay seasick in their cabin, my father and the captain discussing the distant fireworks of war as the ship passed through the Straits of Gibraltar. Beauty, the excitement of the unfamiliar, and the sense that real life drudgery entirely superceded by distant alarms from which motion and change protected her--here is the essence of her love of travel. Later she would swoon over sweets and snails, over romantic histories and vistas. She would propell my father to Asia, where they were both truly alien and he not particularly interested. But through it all would flow her fascination with what is old yet new, and with motion that both protected and put her in danger. That excitement rarely existed over the kitchen sink. Though she could imagine it, listening to "La Boheme" as she dusted.
Swoon: her senior college photograph (University of Minnesota, circa 1929) captures her inward anticipation along with the quiet beauty which no doubt appealed to my father. They couldn't have been more opposite: she the last born of a hard-driving German businessman and his graceful Swedish second wife; he the second of four Italian-American boys from Pittsburgh, rascally Lothario with music in his soul. By the time I was conscious enough to study these two pillars of my childhood, they'd developed their differences into a religion: she quiet and hard-driving (except for her naps) and my father dithery and constantly in voice. By that time, I was a teenager with my own carping agenda, thus not to be trusted.
My father spent a year between high school and college studying the violin in Ferrara, Italy. Not only was he blessed with social charm and a gift for languages, but his father, the lapsed Catholic from outside Naples, constantly brought home visitors from the motherland. These were often less affluent relations or unlettered workmen who'd left Italy between the wars for the riches of America. All this primed my father to find travel between the American east coast and Italy a rather common affair. He wasn't in love with travel per se, but with the smells and tastes. the sounds and histories of Italy.
When my parents moved to Charleston, South Carolina after World War II, they encountered an entirely alien romance of aristocracy and defeat, poverty and pride, which, along with soaring summer temperatures, they tried to escape every summer. These early childhood trips introduced me to them as travelers: my father at the wheel, my mother beside him, heading north though Carolina and Virginia, where my father insisted we stop for every historical sign (he'd recently been transferred from teaching European history to American and South Carolina topics and he needed to tool up). Backseat songs, fighting, and playing games with my sister, munching on celery and carrot sticks from the food pack, and following the flight of summer birds into towering clouds--all this set my own contemplative notion of travel. I was not in charge, and the world slipped by outside my window. Other summers when my father remained at home, we took trains halfway across the country to North Dakota. Trains were even more delicious than cars because we slept over the rhythm of wheels, washed in the hissing spiggots from tiny roommette sinks, and flushed the toilet to the rails flashing by--a terror I revive now on Italian trains. Death, a la Anna Karenina, except down a toilet's funnel.
Recently I've read my mother's letters from her first European voyage across the Atlantic when the guns of World War II were already taking aim. She was entirely absorbed by shipboard romance--doing her nails for dinner at the captain's table where my father had gotten them invited. Then in Florence, finding an English-speaking druggist who could sell her a sedative for my father's stomach. And finally as she lay seasick in their cabin, my father and the captain discussing the distant fireworks of war as the ship passed through the Straits of Gibraltar. Beauty, the excitement of the unfamiliar, and the sense that real life drudgery entirely superceded by distant alarms from which motion and change protected her--here is the essence of her love of travel. Later she would swoon over sweets and snails, over romantic histories and vistas. She would propell my father to Asia, where they were both truly alien and he not particularly interested. But through it all would flow her fascination with what is old yet new, and with motion that both protected and put her in danger. That excitement rarely existed over the kitchen sink. Though she could imagine it, listening to "La Boheme" as she dusted.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Margotlog: Family Politics
It's rained overnight and the air is fresh. Up early the cardinals chip-chip as they come to the feeders. The most beautiful of the backyard birds, yet the most shy, they arrive in the twilight hours, as if wanting to hide their beauty, or hoping to avoid the swarms of sparrows. Or simply preferring semi-obscurity.
I've been musing about women and politics. Tis the season. The family politics of my girlhood in Charleston were fraught with tension. My father, the Italian-American from Pittsburgh, never muted his opinions. He was bitten by rabid racism and paranoia during the 1950s and 60s, convinced that Commies were poised to invade or Northern radicals were sending their "nigger lovers" down to subvert the American (read Southern) ideal. I know, his phrase sounds hateful to our ears, as it did to mine in those days, yet he spewed the term with little compunction. Most of the time, my mother sat silent, occasionally complaining, "Oh, Leonard." I, on the other hand, argued with him: "Daddy, you don't know what you're talking about: They are not poised to come down on us!" In fact, he did know, except that Charleston was rather subdued compared to Montgomery or Selma. Charleston had no actual civil rights demonstrations until the late 60s, and its gentry class did not spout racial diatribes. My father was by far the most vociferous local racist I ever heard. Which was part of my objection: Why couldn't he act more gentile? Why did he have to disturb our Sunday dinners with denunciations.
I knew no blacks except Shorty, the janitor of The Old Citadel who took our Woolworth Easter chicks down to his farm on Johns Island when they lost their pink/blue/or green fluffy feathers and sprouted wings. Yet my perceptions were direct and unclouded: I saw the poverty of black families when I walked to school or rode the bus--children with torn and dirty clothes, old women trudging to the back of the bus carrying heavy shopping bags, unable to sit in empty seats close to the front because of segregation. Their stoic, yet obvious weariness made me very ashamed of being white, of being unable to jump up and give them my seat. Even though no one articulated this for me, I intuited that even had I made that gesture, they would have ignored me.
So many Southern women black and white, I have since learned, quietly or openly resisted racism: they fought for anti-lynching laws, they trained at Highlander Folk School and with Rosa Parks started and sustained the Montgomery Bus Boycott. They quietly continued relations with families across the racial divide with whom their kin had been associated for generations. Many white Charlestonians had black relatives, though they may not have known or admitted it. David Ball's Slaves in the Family brought this to light, admitting that the black relatives he traced around the country sometimes wanted nothing to do with him.
Recently I've enjoyed reading Kathryn Stockett's The Hands because the secret connection she imagines between a very independent Southern young woman and the African-American women who work as maids for her friends beautifully transgresses the distance and fear that tainted the intimacy of so many white and black women who raised white children. Whether her story is truly fiction or might actually have happened, I can't say. All I remember is that in the homes of my well-to-do white Charleston friends, a black woman almost always presided in the kitchen and gave orders on cleanliness, deportment, even on language which I received only from my mother.
Stockett's tribute to the African-American "help" of her childhood is one of the most honest description of this deep affection and dependence I've ever read. But it's from a white point of view. To begin to grasp what that relation meant to black women we have to read Toni Morrison or Alice Walker or see Tony Kushner's play "Caroline or Change." These works portray the resistance and toll of black women's subservience even to decent white mistresses. Though I've indulged a romantic version of an "across the divide" relation between Southern black and white women, these works knock that notion hard.
Then I withdraw into the twilight of a kind of beauty that chooses to hide. In my case because I don't have the tools to navigate a Southern white woman/black woman connection in broad day. I'm not afraid of what "the public" would say or do, seeing us together; I'm aware of a centuries-deep gulf that makes real intimacy hard to sustain.
I've been musing about women and politics. Tis the season. The family politics of my girlhood in Charleston were fraught with tension. My father, the Italian-American from Pittsburgh, never muted his opinions. He was bitten by rabid racism and paranoia during the 1950s and 60s, convinced that Commies were poised to invade or Northern radicals were sending their "nigger lovers" down to subvert the American (read Southern) ideal. I know, his phrase sounds hateful to our ears, as it did to mine in those days, yet he spewed the term with little compunction. Most of the time, my mother sat silent, occasionally complaining, "Oh, Leonard." I, on the other hand, argued with him: "Daddy, you don't know what you're talking about: They are not poised to come down on us!" In fact, he did know, except that Charleston was rather subdued compared to Montgomery or Selma. Charleston had no actual civil rights demonstrations until the late 60s, and its gentry class did not spout racial diatribes. My father was by far the most vociferous local racist I ever heard. Which was part of my objection: Why couldn't he act more gentile? Why did he have to disturb our Sunday dinners with denunciations.
I knew no blacks except Shorty, the janitor of The Old Citadel who took our Woolworth Easter chicks down to his farm on Johns Island when they lost their pink/blue/or green fluffy feathers and sprouted wings. Yet my perceptions were direct and unclouded: I saw the poverty of black families when I walked to school or rode the bus--children with torn and dirty clothes, old women trudging to the back of the bus carrying heavy shopping bags, unable to sit in empty seats close to the front because of segregation. Their stoic, yet obvious weariness made me very ashamed of being white, of being unable to jump up and give them my seat. Even though no one articulated this for me, I intuited that even had I made that gesture, they would have ignored me.
So many Southern women black and white, I have since learned, quietly or openly resisted racism: they fought for anti-lynching laws, they trained at Highlander Folk School and with Rosa Parks started and sustained the Montgomery Bus Boycott. They quietly continued relations with families across the racial divide with whom their kin had been associated for generations. Many white Charlestonians had black relatives, though they may not have known or admitted it. David Ball's Slaves in the Family brought this to light, admitting that the black relatives he traced around the country sometimes wanted nothing to do with him.
Recently I've enjoyed reading Kathryn Stockett's The Hands because the secret connection she imagines between a very independent Southern young woman and the African-American women who work as maids for her friends beautifully transgresses the distance and fear that tainted the intimacy of so many white and black women who raised white children. Whether her story is truly fiction or might actually have happened, I can't say. All I remember is that in the homes of my well-to-do white Charleston friends, a black woman almost always presided in the kitchen and gave orders on cleanliness, deportment, even on language which I received only from my mother.
Stockett's tribute to the African-American "help" of her childhood is one of the most honest description of this deep affection and dependence I've ever read. But it's from a white point of view. To begin to grasp what that relation meant to black women we have to read Toni Morrison or Alice Walker or see Tony Kushner's play "Caroline or Change." These works portray the resistance and toll of black women's subservience even to decent white mistresses. Though I've indulged a romantic version of an "across the divide" relation between Southern black and white women, these works knock that notion hard.
Then I withdraw into the twilight of a kind of beauty that chooses to hide. In my case because I don't have the tools to navigate a Southern white woman/black woman connection in broad day. I'm not afraid of what "the public" would say or do, seeing us together; I'm aware of a centuries-deep gulf that makes real intimacy hard to sustain.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Freshman College - Arrival
Arrival doesn't begin to describe what happened. For almost a year, Gelsey and I had searched for colleges. We traveled east--where our families lived--and visited six (or was it seven?) campuses in a week. From Middlebury, Vermont--stately trees, huge rocks, great tavern--to Haverford outside Philadelphia where her dad had gone. She aced them all. Then out of the blue, at almost the 11th hour, she chose Carleton, 45-minutes south of St. Paul. Neutral and supportive, I was secretly relieved. We'd had enough dislocation when her dad and I divorced and I moved from Minneapolis to St. Paul (only across the Mississippi, but the effect was enormous, especially the two years I subjected her to an unsatisfactory live-in arrangement.) We didn't want half a continent separating us now.
The effect of Carleton was Love at First Sight: my own college, Goucher outside Baltimore, had been field-stone modern. I loved Carleton's huge old trees and red-brick buildings, iconic collegiate. It didn't matter that Gelsey was housed in the only modern, ten-story building on campus. We liked her roommate, another midwestern blondie. After several hours of lugging up boxes and clothes, their room was crammed. But there sat Harry the Bear on her bed (or did she leave him at home, a sign of maturity?) Taking a break, I stood in the hallway. What was a guy doing coming out of the lavatories? Patting me on the back, Gelsey soothed, "It'll be fine, Mom. Remember, you went to a girls school." Right, and guys were allowed in the dorm only during Sunday visiting hours.
I knew she'd handle it. In fact I had an enormous confidence in her ability to adjust. Hadn't she mastered packing to move over the river every two weeks to her dad's? Plus she was a good companion, charming and thoughtful. Even if she and her roomie didn't turn into friends, they'd survive. My second husband and I left them while we checked into a nearby B&B where we had a rollicking time with another college couple--their son eventually became one of Gelsey's best friends, a connection that lasted until they graduated.
I visited the campus frequently, where she put me up in the guest house From my little cot by a window, I could almost hear her sneeze. It helped that she and her women's singing group practiced in the guest house parlor. Those first few months, perhaps even the first year, we seemed touched with magic. From the midst of class, she wrote charming notes, "Momissima," or "Mommy dear," sweeter and cuter than anything I'd heard her last year of high school. Until we traveled together the summer after her freshman year, our angst and tension seemed to have evaporated into a golden glow.
Now when I look back, I think of a word from Tony Morrison's novel "Beloved"--rememoring. It captures the memorial I construct to the mother-daughter connection, to Morrison's magisterial work of evoking mother-daughter love which persisted through escape from slavery, and a mother's attempt to protect her daughter even through death from that return. Gelsey and I suffered nothing so radical but the tug and tearing apart, the silliness, charm, angst and worry that lay ahead did sometimes feel ultimate.
The effect of Carleton was Love at First Sight: my own college, Goucher outside Baltimore, had been field-stone modern. I loved Carleton's huge old trees and red-brick buildings, iconic collegiate. It didn't matter that Gelsey was housed in the only modern, ten-story building on campus. We liked her roommate, another midwestern blondie. After several hours of lugging up boxes and clothes, their room was crammed. But there sat Harry the Bear on her bed (or did she leave him at home, a sign of maturity?) Taking a break, I stood in the hallway. What was a guy doing coming out of the lavatories? Patting me on the back, Gelsey soothed, "It'll be fine, Mom. Remember, you went to a girls school." Right, and guys were allowed in the dorm only during Sunday visiting hours.
I knew she'd handle it. In fact I had an enormous confidence in her ability to adjust. Hadn't she mastered packing to move over the river every two weeks to her dad's? Plus she was a good companion, charming and thoughtful. Even if she and her roomie didn't turn into friends, they'd survive. My second husband and I left them while we checked into a nearby B&B where we had a rollicking time with another college couple--their son eventually became one of Gelsey's best friends, a connection that lasted until they graduated.
I visited the campus frequently, where she put me up in the guest house From my little cot by a window, I could almost hear her sneeze. It helped that she and her women's singing group practiced in the guest house parlor. Those first few months, perhaps even the first year, we seemed touched with magic. From the midst of class, she wrote charming notes, "Momissima," or "Mommy dear," sweeter and cuter than anything I'd heard her last year of high school. Until we traveled together the summer after her freshman year, our angst and tension seemed to have evaporated into a golden glow.
Now when I look back, I think of a word from Tony Morrison's novel "Beloved"--rememoring. It captures the memorial I construct to the mother-daughter connection, to Morrison's magisterial work of evoking mother-daughter love which persisted through escape from slavery, and a mother's attempt to protect her daughter even through death from that return. Gelsey and I suffered nothing so radical but the tug and tearing apart, the silliness, charm, angst and worry that lay ahead did sometimes feel ultimate.
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Margotlog: It's a Misty Moisty Morning
It's a "Misty Moisty Morning of real Chicago weather," my mother used to recite, except we weren't in Chicago but Charleston, South Carolina, and my mother, the Midwesterner, couldn't help herself. Midwestern weather and geography overlay her view of our life in The Old Citadel. Curled up together on the sofa, she read my sister and me the "Laura and Mary" books. The Ingalls' overland sleigh rides became real with her quick addendum about Papa Max, her North Dakota county auditor father who'd "give his horses their heads," she'd say, "and let them carry him over the snow-covered fences home." Not until years later did I glimpse that reality in my own overland (well, highway) snowy travels across Minnesota to writers-in-the-schools residencies. Just as my mother lived far more of her life in Charleston than she did in North Dakota or Minnesota--she graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1929 and immediately went east--so I have spent twice again as long in the Twin Cities as I did in Charleston.
Yet every summer, with that bliss of the unattached mind, I order Eudora Welty's quintessentially late summer Delta Wedding on audio disk from the library and take it north with me to our "big water." The huge expanse of Lake Superior easily carries me wherever I want to go, and though I've never visited the Yazoo Delta or Jackson, Mississippi, where the novel is set, I picture them with my Carolina eyes trained to wide expanses of marsh, and the occasional lone plantation house, a sentinel among its fields.
This morning, standing in my St. Paul kitchen staring out at fog, I muse on inherited geography and our preferences for certain locales. We rarely had fog in Charleston except in winter. Yet today, I can almost spy the battlements of The Old Citadel, rising out of the mist. That block-long complex of medieval-looking barracks and classrooms used to house the cadets who, famously fired the shots that started the Civil War. John C. Calhoun, great secessionist, still stands across Marion Square where my father in his Citadel uniform used to take me to admire the great orator's cloak.
With a daughter's detachment, I saw around the adjustments my parents made which allowed them to live for over fifty years as Yankees in a changing Carolina. I sneered, openly, at the politics my father adopted, and was rebuked. Eventually the enormous clang and strife of civil rights quieted, my father died, and my mother lived on, happy with her huge garden in Wappoo Heights, in a house with a Southern wrap-around porch. Visiting and caring for her, I remembered the early experiences that linked me to this climate and soil. Her house became an icon of everything the family had tried to stuff into its piebald identity. Yesterday, reading Eudora Welty's The Optimist's Daughter, I found myself alive again in my mother's upstairs bedroom, ready like Welty's optimist's daughter, the lone survivor of her family, ready to put my hand to the bureau and draw out my North Dakota grandmother's letters. Another version of connecting across the miles and years.
Yet every summer, with that bliss of the unattached mind, I order Eudora Welty's quintessentially late summer Delta Wedding on audio disk from the library and take it north with me to our "big water." The huge expanse of Lake Superior easily carries me wherever I want to go, and though I've never visited the Yazoo Delta or Jackson, Mississippi, where the novel is set, I picture them with my Carolina eyes trained to wide expanses of marsh, and the occasional lone plantation house, a sentinel among its fields.
This morning, standing in my St. Paul kitchen staring out at fog, I muse on inherited geography and our preferences for certain locales. We rarely had fog in Charleston except in winter. Yet today, I can almost spy the battlements of The Old Citadel, rising out of the mist. That block-long complex of medieval-looking barracks and classrooms used to house the cadets who, famously fired the shots that started the Civil War. John C. Calhoun, great secessionist, still stands across Marion Square where my father in his Citadel uniform used to take me to admire the great orator's cloak.
With a daughter's detachment, I saw around the adjustments my parents made which allowed them to live for over fifty years as Yankees in a changing Carolina. I sneered, openly, at the politics my father adopted, and was rebuked. Eventually the enormous clang and strife of civil rights quieted, my father died, and my mother lived on, happy with her huge garden in Wappoo Heights, in a house with a Southern wrap-around porch. Visiting and caring for her, I remembered the early experiences that linked me to this climate and soil. Her house became an icon of everything the family had tried to stuff into its piebald identity. Yesterday, reading Eudora Welty's The Optimist's Daughter, I found myself alive again in my mother's upstairs bedroom, ready like Welty's optimist's daughter, the lone survivor of her family, ready to put my hand to the bureau and draw out my North Dakota grandmother's letters. Another version of connecting across the miles and years.
Friday, August 20, 2010
Mother/Daughter Food Fights
Margotlog: Mother/Daughter Food Fights:
Tension over food: there's the pout, the hands on hips, the storming from the table, the "You can't run my life." Why do mothers and daughters pitch their battles over the plate? I know: it dissipates with time. A thirty-something doesn't usually fight her mom over what she orders at a restaurant. But teen years? Early teens to late twenties? Gelsey and I fought over food until I thought I'd lose my mind. Her favorite ploy when I was poor (recently divorced, trying to start a free-lance teaching and writing career): she'd order a lovely full-course meal, then pick at it while I sat opposite, watching all those dollars go down the drain. Strutting her power; refusing to acknowledge we might have a common cause here. She hated my scrimping.
She'd grown up in plenty before the divorce. After divorce, we fought in the aisles of Target--I wouldn't spend tens of dollars on name-brand jeans. But the extravagant food order, then the glum pick-pick was far worse: we both knew what she was doing, and she wouldn't let me bag the remains to take home.
In a 12-step group I attended, another mother of a teen talked about her daughter's anorexia. Eating nothing, nothing at all, as she glowered at the dinner table. The father, irate across from her, churning up steam. Hearing this, I vowed to leave Gelsey alone. If she didn't want to eat with us, preferred the kitchen table and her own batch of mac and cheese, I acquiesced. After all, I'd dragged her into a blended family somewhere along the way. She now had a step-brother and step-sister. We all were tense, a few of us snarky.
Maybe that was one of the reasons I began feeding stray cats. They'd congregate on the deck, snowy Minnesota mornings, not crying or yowling, just waiting, their body heat melting the snow under them. Some were beautiful: one male with huge green eyes and orange and white swirls on his sides. Some were horribly damaged: the matted and scarred black male with crooked tale. Eventually when it was sufficiently tamed, Gelsey and I took it to the Humane Society. It limped and was clearly ill.
Maybe coming together in our love of cats helped us soothe the tension and uncertainty of our human connections.
Tension over food: there's the pout, the hands on hips, the storming from the table, the "You can't run my life." Why do mothers and daughters pitch their battles over the plate? I know: it dissipates with time. A thirty-something doesn't usually fight her mom over what she orders at a restaurant. But teen years? Early teens to late twenties? Gelsey and I fought over food until I thought I'd lose my mind. Her favorite ploy when I was poor (recently divorced, trying to start a free-lance teaching and writing career): she'd order a lovely full-course meal, then pick at it while I sat opposite, watching all those dollars go down the drain. Strutting her power; refusing to acknowledge we might have a common cause here. She hated my scrimping.
She'd grown up in plenty before the divorce. After divorce, we fought in the aisles of Target--I wouldn't spend tens of dollars on name-brand jeans. But the extravagant food order, then the glum pick-pick was far worse: we both knew what she was doing, and she wouldn't let me bag the remains to take home.
In a 12-step group I attended, another mother of a teen talked about her daughter's anorexia. Eating nothing, nothing at all, as she glowered at the dinner table. The father, irate across from her, churning up steam. Hearing this, I vowed to leave Gelsey alone. If she didn't want to eat with us, preferred the kitchen table and her own batch of mac and cheese, I acquiesced. After all, I'd dragged her into a blended family somewhere along the way. She now had a step-brother and step-sister. We all were tense, a few of us snarky.
Maybe that was one of the reasons I began feeding stray cats. They'd congregate on the deck, snowy Minnesota mornings, not crying or yowling, just waiting, their body heat melting the snow under them. Some were beautiful: one male with huge green eyes and orange and white swirls on his sides. Some were horribly damaged: the matted and scarred black male with crooked tale. Eventually when it was sufficiently tamed, Gelsey and I took it to the Humane Society. It limped and was clearly ill.
Maybe coming together in our love of cats helped us soothe the tension and uncertainty of our human connections.
Margotlog: My Mother Travels Solo for the First Time
Margotlog: My Mother Travels Solo for the First Time: "MotherLode, MommyLore, MamaLog Years ago when I was pregnant with my daughter, my mother took her first solo trip “aboad.” There ..."
Margotlog: Mother/Daughter Food Fights:
Tension over food: there's the pout, the hands on hips, the storming from the table, the "You can't run my life." Why do mothers and daughters pitch their battles over the plate? I know: it dissipates with time. A thirty-something doesn't usually fight her mom over what she orders at a restaurant. But teen years? Early teens to late twenties? Gelsey and I fought over food until I thought I'd lose my mind. Her favorite ploy when I was poor (recently divorced, trying to start a free-lance teaching and writing career): she'd order a lovely full-course meal, then pick at it while I sat opposite, watching all those dollars go down the drain. Strutting her power; refusing to acknowledge we might have a common cause here. She hated my scrimping.
She'd grown up in plenty before the divorce. After divorce, we fought in the aisles of Target--I wouldn't spend tens of dollars on name-brand jeans. But the extravagant food order, then the glum pick-pick was far worse: we both knew what she was doing, and she wouldn't let me bag the remains to take home.
In a 12-step group I attended, another mother of a teen talked about her daughter's anorexia. Eating nothing, nothing at all, as she glowered at the dinner table. The father, irate across from her, churning up steam. Hearing this, I vowed to leave Gelsey alone. If she didn't want to eat with us, preferred the kitchen table and her own batch of mac and cheese, I acquiesced. After all, I'd dragged her into a blended family somewhere along the way. She now had a step-brother and step-sister. We all were tense, a few of us snarky.
Maybe that was one of the reasons I began feeding stray cats. They'd congregate on the deck, snowy Minnesota mornings, not crying or yowling, just waiting, their body heat melting the snow under them. Some were beautiful: one male with huge green eyes and orange and white swirls on his sides. Some were horribly damaged: the matted and scarred black male with crooked tale. Eventually when it was sufficiently tamed, Gelsey and I took it to the Humane Society. It limped and was clearly ill.
Maybe coming together in our love of cats helped us soothe the tension and uncertainty of our human days.
Margotlog: Mother/Daughter Food Fights:
Tension over food: there's the pout, the hands on hips, the storming from the table, the "You can't run my life." Why do mothers and daughters pitch their battles over the plate? I know: it dissipates with time. A thirty-something doesn't usually fight her mom over what she orders at a restaurant. But teen years? Early teens to late twenties? Gelsey and I fought over food until I thought I'd lose my mind. Her favorite ploy when I was poor (recently divorced, trying to start a free-lance teaching and writing career): she'd order a lovely full-course meal, then pick at it while I sat opposite, watching all those dollars go down the drain. Strutting her power; refusing to acknowledge we might have a common cause here. She hated my scrimping.
She'd grown up in plenty before the divorce. After divorce, we fought in the aisles of Target--I wouldn't spend tens of dollars on name-brand jeans. But the extravagant food order, then the glum pick-pick was far worse: we both knew what she was doing, and she wouldn't let me bag the remains to take home.
In a 12-step group I attended, another mother of a teen talked about her daughter's anorexia. Eating nothing, nothing at all, as she glowered at the dinner table. The father, irate across from her, churning up steam. Hearing this, I vowed to leave Gelsey alone. If she didn't want to eat with us, preferred the kitchen table and her own batch of mac and cheese, I acquiesced. After all, I'd dragged her into a blended family somewhere along the way. She now had a step-brother and step-sister. We all were tense, a few of us snarky.
Maybe that was one of the reasons I began feeding stray cats. They'd congregate on the deck, snowy Minnesota mornings, not crying or yowling, just waiting, their body heat melting the snow under them. Some were beautiful: one male with huge green eyes and orange and white swirls on his sides. Some were horribly damaged: the matted and scarred black male with crooked tale. Eventually when it was sufficiently tamed, Gelsey and I took it to the Humane Society. It limped and was clearly ill.
Maybe coming together in our love of cats helped us soothe the tension and uncertainty of our human days.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
My Mother Travels Solo for the First Time
MotherLode, MommyLore, MamaLog
Years ago when I was pregnant with my daughter, my mother took her first solo trip “aboad.” There I sat stewing in Minnesota while she flitted along the Rhine, across the Alps into Italy and back to Austria. Her letters, sent “round robin” from my sister to my father to me, oozed food ecstasy. “All my calories,” she wrote before the opera in Vienna, “in a torte from Demels, the famous pastry place.” Just like her, I thought, worried about my own weight-gain as I rode my bike to my last graduate-school class before the baby was born. “Food first.”
But what really ticked me off wasn’t calories. I wanted my mother to ask what was happening to ME. Instead she had cut loose, come untethered, and was having the time of her life, while I counted calories against a change I couldn’t begin to measure.
Eventually my daughter and I traveled some of the same route, across Germany and Italy. It was the summer after “Gelsey’s” freshman year at Carleton. A trip full of carping and teasing, tugging against a closeness which I’d never developed with my own mother. We encountered shocks and surprises which neither of us expected. I saw through my resentments against my mother to the beginning of acceptance. Today I’m calling the memoir, “The Monster Bag.” I’ve also titled it “Falling for Botticelli,” because though food for my mother and me was the argument of choice, for us, it was art.
Thus I begin this blog: MotherLode, MommyLore, MamaLog because mothering and daughtering in all their aspects catch me where I’d at. Politics, home cooking, earth watch, I listen for my connections to what other daughters and mothers are saying. Once bitten, the relation spreads through the blood.
Years ago when I was pregnant with my daughter, my mother took her first solo trip “aboad.” There I sat stewing in Minnesota while she flitted along the Rhine, across the Alps into Italy and back to Austria. Her letters, sent “round robin” from my sister to my father to me, oozed food ecstasy. “All my calories,” she wrote before the opera in Vienna, “in a torte from Demels, the famous pastry place.” Just like her, I thought, worried about my own weight-gain as I rode my bike to my last graduate-school class before the baby was born. “Food first.”
But what really ticked me off wasn’t calories. I wanted my mother to ask what was happening to ME. Instead she had cut loose, come untethered, and was having the time of her life, while I counted calories against a change I couldn’t begin to measure.
Eventually my daughter and I traveled some of the same route, across Germany and Italy. It was the summer after “Gelsey’s” freshman year at Carleton. A trip full of carping and teasing, tugging against a closeness which I’d never developed with my own mother. We encountered shocks and surprises which neither of us expected. I saw through my resentments against my mother to the beginning of acceptance. Today I’m calling the memoir, “The Monster Bag.” I’ve also titled it “Falling for Botticelli,” because though food for my mother and me was the argument of choice, for us, it was art.
Thus I begin this blog: MotherLode, MommyLore, MamaLog because mothering and daughtering in all their aspects catch me where I’d at. Politics, home cooking, earth watch, I listen for my connections to what other daughters and mothers are saying. Once bitten, the relation spreads through the blood.
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