Spain: remembering
Maybe our most potent memories are of what we have anticipated rather than what we have “lived” in the conventional sense, since for such recollected fantasies the imagination is doubly involved. In this sense I "remember" Spain, as I see it now for the first time.
It was not until two decades after her death that my grandmother’s birth date – the 11th of September, 1893 – would acquire its notoriety. My mother was not so lucky. As she noted dryly to those adolescents who yearned for a 4x4 convertible to mark their coming of age, her own 16th birthday present had been Pearl Harbor. Even those listeners who recognized that these words did not denote a kind of necklace would have trouble imagining their significance for my mother at the threshold of her adult life, for it was not the habit of her generation to be expansive about emotional events. Imagined in retrospect, the expedition of all the young men to distant fronts must have devastated families whose memories of World War I were still raw. Among the young patriots was the only remaining male in my mother’s life, her brother Allan Joseph.
For in my mother’s case, the day the world changed came in January 1929 when, at the age of three, she lost her father to pneumonia. His death, a prelude to the collapse of the stock market and the Depression, left a widow to provide for four children, of whom my mother was the youngest: Eleanor, Margaret, Allan (or AJ), and Ann Rita. Nell Cunningham survived thanks to some properties she owned, and she would ride around with the children in a horse-drawn buggy collecting rent. With the blessing and aid of the pastor, she also took in boarders, carefully scrutinized for the moral traits that make a good tenant – and a good husband. Thus into the Cunningham family came Herman Lorenz, of St. Louis, Joseph Alexander McGrorty, of Detroit, and my father, William Jameson, from a farm in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, sent to Nashville to study mortuary science at Gupton Jones. Whether Nell’s strategy was apparent to her daughters is now unknowable. Like her mentally handicapped brother who lived in the basement of Westmoreland Avenue, some things were not meant for daylight.
Deprived of a father’s attention, a mouth to feed in a nearly destitute family, fiercely courted by rival sisters, my mother learned quickly, and could never unlearn, the peril of expressing emotion. She was never heard to complain about her youth, one of shrinking possibilities and constant disappointments. True, some dreams were abandoned, but others merely deferred. She completed her Bachelor’s degree, for example, going to night school, and at age 50, graduated from college in the same week as I did – a coincidence I was not charitable enough to appreciate at the time.
Other dreams would be realized vicariously.
It is trivial to remark that with age we come to resemble our parents. What is less evident is that our family legacy is nowhere more apparent than in the rebellions we wage against it.
My mother had an enduring passion for European high culture, perhaps owing to the peculiar circumstances of family standing: the Timothys and Cunninghams were recent Irish Catholic immigrants in a region dominated by better established Protestant families and heavily populated by an uneducated somewhat fundamentalist rural population. Among my mother’s investments in our education was a book introducing masterpieces of world art: this was ingeniously marketed as a free binder which was shipped immediately and then installments purchased thereafter at regular intervals, with cave art one month followed by Egyptian art, Greek art, the Middle Ages and so forth. She was faithful at Saturday afternoon broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera, sponsored by Texaco, which filled our tiny living room with grand arias from La Traviatta and La Bohème as Mimi sat and ironed. She insisted on piano lessons for her five children, before the first of which she had taught me to play with her a duet on La dona e mobile. She had taken French in high school, and would translate words that she recognized, pointing out connections she saw with words we knew from the Latin Mass or the Latin hymns we sang at church. The name of her uncle, Wilson Cunningham, was pronounced with a reverence that derived partly from his clerical status, and partly from his having studied for the priesthood in Rome. He was described as “brilliant,” by which it was meant that he could speak languages.
Ill-suited to commerce with the dead, my father traveled throughout the middle of the country for many years, first as a salesman and then as a sales supervisor for Cleveland Cotton Products. One of the highlights of the bi-weekly airport run was the chance to drop by the desk of Avis Rent-a-Car, whose marketing campaign was producing lapel buttons with the message “We Try Harder” in different languages. With every trip to the airport, the world became a bigger place and my notion of language became more complicated.
One weekend morning, my brothers and I were astonished to find foreign coins in our front yard – first one, then five, then some two dozen pieces, all with unfamiliar graven images and mysterious inscriptions that evoked tropical shores, medieval castles, and distant pagodas. Under our mimosa tree, Thailand. By the honeysuckle vine, Argentina. Greece and France in the ditch beside the road. How had this cache found its way to our yard, alone among all the yards of Dellrose Drive? Was piracy involved? Shouldn’t the FBI be notified? Our parents’ detachment in the face of these extraordinary findings merely confirmed their lack of imagination, and I was probably 40 before the evidence of their complicity imposed itself.
Robert and Edward Weiskopf, the owners of Cleveland Cotton Products, were ahead of their time in many respects. They promoted employee retention through scholarships for dependent children (an innovation which would reach SUNY – an educational institution – three decades later). Even more exceptional was their decision to begin holding annual sales meetings in Europe. The announcement of a trip to Spain aroused anxious euphoria in my parents. Such an unhoped for chance! But a new wardrobe would be required: this was Europe, and those who were called to travel had certain responsibilities.
My parents’ enthusiasm was boundless. To the swift exasperation of those who had not been called to travel, they detailed the beauties of Alhambra and the bustling market of Tangiers, where my mother bought for me a small red leather purse. She also brought back a statuette made of olive wood, representing a tall slender man of noble bearing holding an open book. She said he was Don Quixote.
Don stands now on the file cabinet in my office in Buffalo, having gone everywhere I’ve gone. I visited his country in memory of anticipation, my parents’ anticipation of their trip, and the vague powerful anticipations they created for me as a child. In Madrid, at the Prado, I walked through rooms dedicated to Goya’s “dark” style. These images are famous for the direction they anticipate in 20th-century painting. But to me they spoke of the past, for one of the most famous ones, depicting the execution of Spanish patriots by a French firing squad, had figured in the Masterpieces of World Art, where its lugubrious subject and unreal luminosity fascinated our childish imagination.
I remember the day it happened. I was invited, at 16, to spend a summer in France. My father said decisively, “You’re going.” But how would we pay for this? and what about Camp Marymount, my childhood paradise, where I hoped to return as a counselor? But the authorities had spoken; there was nothing to discuss.
The Europeans to whom my parents surrendered me flattered themselves at having rescued a talented native from oppressive surroundings. My debt to them is real. Yet now I see clearly how much my parents had already opened the door to the world and pushed me towards it. And how my mother had awakened my curiosity for that frightening technology through which people gain access to each other's thoughts: language.
My mother struggles now to maintain appearances, losing a valiantly fought war against a most anachronistic disease that attacked her past before turning its ravages to her future. I have a lot left to remember, and time is not on our side.
It was not until two decades after her death that my grandmother’s birth date – the 11th of September, 1893 – would acquire its notoriety. My mother was not so lucky. As she noted dryly to those adolescents who yearned for a 4x4 convertible to mark their coming of age, her own 16th birthday present had been Pearl Harbor. Even those listeners who recognized that these words did not denote a kind of necklace would have trouble imagining their significance for my mother at the threshold of her adult life, for it was not the habit of her generation to be expansive about emotional events. Imagined in retrospect, the expedition of all the young men to distant fronts must have devastated families whose memories of World War I were still raw. Among the young patriots was the only remaining male in my mother’s life, her brother Allan Joseph.
For in my mother’s case, the day the world changed came in January 1929 when, at the age of three, she lost her father to pneumonia. His death, a prelude to the collapse of the stock market and the Depression, left a widow to provide for four children, of whom my mother was the youngest: Eleanor, Margaret, Allan (or AJ), and Ann Rita. Nell Cunningham survived thanks to some properties she owned, and she would ride around with the children in a horse-drawn buggy collecting rent. With the blessing and aid of the pastor, she also took in boarders, carefully scrutinized for the moral traits that make a good tenant – and a good husband. Thus into the Cunningham family came Herman Lorenz, of St. Louis, Joseph Alexander McGrorty, of Detroit, and my father, William Jameson, from a farm in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, sent to Nashville to study mortuary science at Gupton Jones. Whether Nell’s strategy was apparent to her daughters is now unknowable. Like her mentally handicapped brother who lived in the basement of Westmoreland Avenue, some things were not meant for daylight.
Deprived of a father’s attention, a mouth to feed in a nearly destitute family, fiercely courted by rival sisters, my mother learned quickly, and could never unlearn, the peril of expressing emotion. She was never heard to complain about her youth, one of shrinking possibilities and constant disappointments. True, some dreams were abandoned, but others merely deferred. She completed her Bachelor’s degree, for example, going to night school, and at age 50, graduated from college in the same week as I did – a coincidence I was not charitable enough to appreciate at the time.
Other dreams would be realized vicariously.
It is trivial to remark that with age we come to resemble our parents. What is less evident is that our family legacy is nowhere more apparent than in the rebellions we wage against it.
My mother had an enduring passion for European high culture, perhaps owing to the peculiar circumstances of family standing: the Timothys and Cunninghams were recent Irish Catholic immigrants in a region dominated by better established Protestant families and heavily populated by an uneducated somewhat fundamentalist rural population. Among my mother’s investments in our education was a book introducing masterpieces of world art: this was ingeniously marketed as a free binder which was shipped immediately and then installments purchased thereafter at regular intervals, with cave art one month followed by Egyptian art, Greek art, the Middle Ages and so forth. She was faithful at Saturday afternoon broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera, sponsored by Texaco, which filled our tiny living room with grand arias from La Traviatta and La Bohème as Mimi sat and ironed. She insisted on piano lessons for her five children, before the first of which she had taught me to play with her a duet on La dona e mobile. She had taken French in high school, and would translate words that she recognized, pointing out connections she saw with words we knew from the Latin Mass or the Latin hymns we sang at church. The name of her uncle, Wilson Cunningham, was pronounced with a reverence that derived partly from his clerical status, and partly from his having studied for the priesthood in Rome. He was described as “brilliant,” by which it was meant that he could speak languages.
Ill-suited to commerce with the dead, my father traveled throughout the middle of the country for many years, first as a salesman and then as a sales supervisor for Cleveland Cotton Products. One of the highlights of the bi-weekly airport run was the chance to drop by the desk of Avis Rent-a-Car, whose marketing campaign was producing lapel buttons with the message “We Try Harder” in different languages. With every trip to the airport, the world became a bigger place and my notion of language became more complicated.
One weekend morning, my brothers and I were astonished to find foreign coins in our front yard – first one, then five, then some two dozen pieces, all with unfamiliar graven images and mysterious inscriptions that evoked tropical shores, medieval castles, and distant pagodas. Under our mimosa tree, Thailand. By the honeysuckle vine, Argentina. Greece and France in the ditch beside the road. How had this cache found its way to our yard, alone among all the yards of Dellrose Drive? Was piracy involved? Shouldn’t the FBI be notified? Our parents’ detachment in the face of these extraordinary findings merely confirmed their lack of imagination, and I was probably 40 before the evidence of their complicity imposed itself.
Robert and Edward Weiskopf, the owners of Cleveland Cotton Products, were ahead of their time in many respects. They promoted employee retention through scholarships for dependent children (an innovation which would reach SUNY – an educational institution – three decades later). Even more exceptional was their decision to begin holding annual sales meetings in Europe. The announcement of a trip to Spain aroused anxious euphoria in my parents. Such an unhoped for chance! But a new wardrobe would be required: this was Europe, and those who were called to travel had certain responsibilities.
My parents’ enthusiasm was boundless. To the swift exasperation of those who had not been called to travel, they detailed the beauties of Alhambra and the bustling market of Tangiers, where my mother bought for me a small red leather purse. She also brought back a statuette made of olive wood, representing a tall slender man of noble bearing holding an open book. She said he was Don Quixote.
Don stands now on the file cabinet in my office in Buffalo, having gone everywhere I’ve gone. I visited his country in memory of anticipation, my parents’ anticipation of their trip, and the vague powerful anticipations they created for me as a child. In Madrid, at the Prado, I walked through rooms dedicated to Goya’s “dark” style. These images are famous for the direction they anticipate in 20th-century painting. But to me they spoke of the past, for one of the most famous ones, depicting the execution of Spanish patriots by a French firing squad, had figured in the Masterpieces of World Art, where its lugubrious subject and unreal luminosity fascinated our childish imagination.
I remember the day it happened. I was invited, at 16, to spend a summer in France. My father said decisively, “You’re going.” But how would we pay for this? and what about Camp Marymount, my childhood paradise, where I hoped to return as a counselor? But the authorities had spoken; there was nothing to discuss.
The Europeans to whom my parents surrendered me flattered themselves at having rescued a talented native from oppressive surroundings. My debt to them is real. Yet now I see clearly how much my parents had already opened the door to the world and pushed me towards it. And how my mother had awakened my curiosity for that frightening technology through which people gain access to each other's thoughts: language.
My mother struggles now to maintain appearances, losing a valiantly fought war against a most anachronistic disease that attacked her past before turning its ravages to her future. I have a lot left to remember, and time is not on our side.
posted by amerune at 8:43 AM
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