Desert theater

The town of Ouarzazate (WAR-zah-zat) lies on the other side of the High Atlas mountains from Marrakesh, a spectacular and hair-raising four-hour bus ride away. When I could remind myself to leave the driving to the CTM driver -- and he was very cautious and competent -- I luxuriated in the scenery. The rock formations alone are in a rich variety of hues, and the vegetation, especially now during the wheat harvest, is gold, deep green, orange, purple, white, and crimson.

Ouarzazate itself is of modest interest. It's the Hollywood of Morocco, with a couple of film studios specializing in desert locations. It also boasts an 18th-century qasbah, the Taouirt Qasbah, which belonged to the Glaoui family, a Berber clan which acquired short-lived wealth and notoriety by collaborating with the French to subdue the rest of the Berbers.



We used Ouarzazate as a launching point for an excursion south into the canyons and desert. Our hotel -- Bab es Sahara (Gateway to the Desert) -- connected us with an agency, and soon we were in a minivan driven by Lhacen, and accompanied by only one other tourist, a Dutchman named Mark, whom the driver called "Hollandi."



It was fortunate that I had decided against renting a car myself, for I would have had to pull over every ten minutes to take photos. The route towards the Dadès Gorge reminded me somewhat of the approach to Petra in that the iron-rich soil is a camaïeu of reds. The interplay of shades with the wide range of geological formations provides a backdrop for the amazing qasbahs which dot the landscape. These are magnificent structures built by Berbers, some dating from the 17th century and perhaps earlier, most now crumbling. In them lived or still live groups of families, and their function, like that of their European analogs, was defensive. In some cases one can see a dramatically perched abandoned qasbah on a peak, with hideous rectangular concrete constructions springing up across the valley. Families are moving out of the qasbahs, explained Lhacen, where everything is "mshrouk" or "communal," in favor of single-family dwellings.



One of our guidebooks complains that the precious work of restoration of these fragile structures is being left haphazardly to private financing, particularly foreign financing, while the Moroccan government appears oblivious to the urgency of timely intervention. I admit to a painful twinge at the prospect of their disappearance, and yet the Moroccan government can scarcely be blamed for prioritizing health care, education, and economic infrastructure -- the city of Buffalo makes the same decision with regard to the grain elevators. Moreover, it seems parochial to assess all responsibility for preservation to the Morrocan nation itself. I remember that after US and coalition forces had allowed the looting of the museum in Baghdad, some reactionary pundit -- I think Ann Coulter -- , declared that it was too bad that "their" museum had been damaged, but that she didn't think any of what was stolen or destroyed was worth the military cost of defending this stragegically insignificant site. Does she not understand that the writing on those stone tablets was part of her history, our history, as well? With decorative patterns of Berber architecture turning up throughout the Islamic world, in Andalusia, in Latin America, what can it mean to say that a restoration project has "foreign" financing?

So we slept in a family-run auberge in the mountains, facing a Berber qasbah called Aït..., and wandered along a mountain stream which alimented family farms. This idyllic existence seemed almost completely free of contact or influence from outside. At one point my son and I wandered a few miles up the road in search of a small store we thought we had seen from the car window. Coming across a group of older people, we inquired. Communication was a bit tricky because for all but the elder of the group, Arabic was as much a foreign language as was French. One of them understood that we were looking for a "supermarché," and said, "We don't have that here in the mountains." When we clarified, they debated among themselves, and at length one of them speculated that there was such a thing two kilometers down the road. She was right, but it was funny to think that for these folks, even very short distances take you into unfamiliar territory.



The next morning we travelled to the Gorges Todra, a deep reddish canyon through which there flows a mountain stream. It is inexpressibly beautiful, both verbally and photographically, since the dramatic contrasts in lighting make it difficult to capture (though of course I tried). Here and for the rest of our excursion, we encountered locals accustomed to commerce with tourists, who had some notion of how to market to our various cultural idiosyncracies.





In the case of Americans, the marketing strategy plays to the value we attach to work -- we are always informed about the intensive hand labor involved in production -- and to what Baudrillard described as a yearning for something real, and a related nostalgia for an imagined bygone era before the triumph of the simulacrum -- a surviving remnant from the reign of the authentic.



These predilections -- shared by European but not Asian, African, or Latin American visitors -- underlie intricate campaigns to which we are statistically receptive. And which the sales force personnel themselves do not always understand: Abdellatif was our guide at the Sekoura Qasbah, costumed for the occasion (though I think invraisemblablement) in the gold-trimmed blue djellabah of the Touareg. He explained the function of rooms and tools, advanced implausible etymologies (the one for misharabia was particularly lame), and pointed to vacant bee hives, whose inhabitants had fallen victim to a local mosquito eradication campaign. Resorting to the tip-enhancing technique of showing the tourist something not on the official circuit, he bade me peek through some slats and see the reconstruction work taking place on an attached structure. "Notice," he said, "that they are using concrete." The government requires that all restoration work be done with the authentic pisé mixture of straw, stones, and mud. But in fact the workers and contractors -- no doubt with tacit official complicity -- are using concrete for the structures, then covering it over with pisé. Similarly, the interlaced palm fronds which traditionally formed the waterproof layer of roofing now serve only to conceal plastic sheeting, which Abdellatif said lasts for ten years. (I wondered what archaeologists would say, centuries from now, about a society which had shunned a cheap, plentiful, durable construction material in favor of some other material whose only advantage was the mysterious value of "authenticity.") After the tour and our tea, we went to rejoin our driver, and caught sight of Abdellatif in jeans and an Ecko tee-shirt speeding away on his motorbike.



As we approached the desert, the touristic enticements became more sophisticated. We saw a demonstration of the khetarra, an underground oasis irrigation system developed in the 17th century and still in use. We were offered various tribal artefacts, fossils, carpets, and drinks. When we reached Erg Chebbi, Moroco's portal to the Sahara sand dunes, we rode on genuine dromadaries and slept in a real nomad tent. But my photos of the setting, below, conceal the concrete/pisé auberge patio where I'm standing and the parking lot behind it.





But as I lay looking up at the very real and vast darkness that night, ignoring the cell phones of our "real" nomad hosts, I thought the sky had not been so brilliantly populated since Camp Marymount. Shooting stars hurtled across the sky into oblivion. And I thought of my favorite Georges Brassens song, Histoire de faussaire, as I let my disbelief evaporate and gave in to the authentic pleasure of pretending.

Se découpant sur fond d'azur
La ferme était fausse bien sûr,
Et le chaume servant de toit
Synthétique comme il se doit.
Au bout d'une allée de faux buis,
On apercevait un faux puits
Du fond duquel la vérité
N'avait jamais dû remonter.

Et la maîtresse de céans
Dans un habit, ma foi, seyant
De fermière de comédie
À ma rencontre descendit,
Et mon petit bouquet, soudain,
Parut terne dans ce jardin
Près des massifs de fausses fleurs
Offrant les plus vives couleurs.

Ayant foulé le faux gazon,
Je la suivis dans la maison
Où brûlait sans se consumer
Un genre de feu sans fumée.
Face au faux buffet Henri-deux,
Alignés sur les rayons de
La bibliothèque en faux bois,
Faux bouquins achetés au poids.

Faux Aubusson, fausses armures,
Faux tableaux de maîtres au mur,
Fausses perles et faux bijoux,
Faux grains de beauté sur les joues,
Faux ongles au bout des menottes,
Piano jouant des fausses notes
Avec des touches ne devant
Pas leur ivoire aux éléphants.

Aux lueurs des fausses chandelles
Enlevant ses fausses dentelles,
Elle a dit, mais ce n'était pas
Vrai, tu es mon premier faux pas.
Fausse vierge, fausse pudeur,
Fausse fièvre, simulateurs,
Ces anges artificiels
Venus d'un faux septième ciel.

La seule chose un peu sincère
Dans cette histoire de faussaire
Et contre laquelle il ne faut
Peut-être pas s'inscrire en faux,
C'est mon penchant pour elle et mon
Gros point du côté du poumon
Quand amoureuse elle tomba
D'un vrai marquis de Carabas.

En l'occurence Cupidon
Se conduisit en faux jeton,
En véritable faux témoin,
Et Vénus aussi, néanmoins
Ce serait sans doute mentir
Par omission de ne pas dire
Que je leur dois quand même une heure
Authentique de vrai bonheur.

Marrakesh, expressed

Marrakesh is a raucous sprawling metropolis, both a great Arab city and a capital of Berber civilization; a mecca for historians and culture tourists as well as a non-stop circus for the curious, local and domestic. We stayed just off the Jm'a el Fna' in the Hotel Afriquia, a place Reham remembered from her trip last year as being tolerable and cheap -- and she was certainly at least half right.

 

Like most, we do not live in the host country on the same parallel that we inhabit in the US. Without our stay in Ouijda, we would not have interacted with Moroccan counterparts whose daily professional and social lives resemble our own. There is some benefit to this unintended displacement, since at home we are very well sheltered from realities that poor people endure every day, and oblivious to their intelligence and effort. Language plays a role in this reshuffling of the hierarchy, since a poet laureate who spoke no Arabic or French would be functionally inarticulate and illiterate, deprived of his verbal arsenal, enduring all the practical disadvantages and social stigma attendant to that state.

Our own footing was precarious because, unlike every man, woman, and child of Marrakesh, we had neither car nor motorbike, and we do not have the skill to be pedestrians in this environment. Moroccan pedestrians step into the path of an oncoming taxi and it takes evasive action. I think that the Morocan pedestrian must never deign to take notice of the taxi's existence -- the same goes for relations among drivers. A person who pulls out obliviously is forgiven and spared. But if you look as though you have waited and calculated and timed your move out in front of a driver, this impertinence will be punished. Your hesitation and prudence will never lead cars to slow down to let you cross, but if you cross the street without looking at all, you will be perfectly safe.

Observing the traffic, as I had occasion to do for long minutes at a time, I caught myself laughing at the sight of veiled women riding motorbikes. I have laughed at versions of this same joke for years -- in the Jordanian desert, when I saw camels being transported in a pick-up truck, or when I saw men in djellebahs using computers or talking on cell phones. I realize eventually that the hilarity of these scenes reposes on the the assumed incongruity of "their" traditional lifestyle with "our" latest technology. The fact that I continue laughing is a real indictment, and I'm reminded how hard it is to unlearn habits of thinking about ourselves and other people.

We've made some cultural blunders, the most egregious one in the difficult area of mendicant relations. In general, when we have small change and the beggar is not a strapping young adolescent, we give a dirham, and when we don't, we apologize and say something polite, like "May God give you." (I might add that these are learned behaviors, and that our native upbringing might have inclined us to express outrage or cynicism.) One evening we made the mistake of asking a cafe waiter if we could stay at our sidewalk table to eat dinner. Against his better judgment perhaps, he hastened to acquiesce. While we were thus engaged in the ostentatious display of wealth, we were approached by a very, very old man who stretched out his gnarly hand. "I've got it," I said to the kids, thinking I had a one-dirham coin, but pulling out instead a ten-dirham coin (worth about 80 cents), which I could not then put back. I gave it to him, and his face lit up. He embraced me, and while he had me in his grip, began to sing. Reham took out her camera, while Ghazi hesitated between hilarity and mortification. I thanked the man, said "May God give you rest," bid him farewell and dropped other hints. After an eternity he left, extolling my generosity. I glimpsed smiling expressions on the faces of the local people drinking tea at nearby tables or passing by.

Ten minutes later, a small swarm of seven-year-old boys surrounded the table. Their poverty was not fake, but as their livelihood requires, they adopt particularly needy expressions when making the "ask" ( as our development officers would say). They pointed to our food and drink, and then began touching the bread and signaling that we should give them our soda and bottled water. We refused and told them to go away. One of them snatched Ghazi's Coke, but in the haste of his get-away, dropped it on the ground. We were angry. Ghazi shouted at them a bowdlerized version, learned from family, of the very serious insult: "Damn your religion!" (The euphemism literally means "Damn your chicken!") I adopted my mother-in-law's sternest intonation to say what I imagined she would have said: "Kelb!" ("Dog!").

Immediately , the gang of thieves became children again, frozen against the wall, fearful, confused about how to respond to this escalation. We had wounded them, using weapons we scarcely understood, and delivered blows out of proportion to our trivial loss. We instantly lost the sympathy of the onlookers. One of the adults told the children to go their way. We paid hurriedly and went off to the main square, our minds heavy.



Jma' el Fna is part state fair. It has open air dining at dozens of stalls, including speciality stands for snails and for goat's head soup. You can get fresh orange juice for pennies any time, and foreign travellers will be aggresively encouraged to get henna tattoos or to pose for photos with the Assaoui dancers, the snake charmers, or the poor little macaques paraded around on chains. The more interesting area of the square is off to one side, and there you find merchants dealing in magical potions touted as cures for infertility and other ailments. Crowds gather around belly dancers -- these are men dressed in women's harem outfits -- and around animated story tellers. Indeed Jma' el Fna' has been designated some kind of world heritage site for oral traditions.

We took in this entertainment as well as the historical sights for a few days, but took a break in the middle to spend a day south of Marrakesh. Hiring a driver recommended by the Office du tourisme, we went down the Ourika valley and then up into the foothills of the Atlas mountains. We climbed up the waterfall trail at Sitti Fatima, led by a nimble and sure-footed young Berber man from the village. Strong, too, as I was thankful to discover when I lost my footing going up a very step and wet incline.




This taste of the Atlas left us eager to see more, and of that, more in the next post.

Second stage

We left Ouijda by the overnight sleeper train ("couchette") for Rabat, and upon arrival, had to board another train for the small seaside village where I had been able to find accommodations. While we waited for our room at La Felouqua to be ready, we rested on the beach. Ghazi proved once again that his complexion genes are all Irish. Reham worked on her tan and read, and I wandered around the reef marveling at the variety of life forms and habitats.

We spent a very short time in Rabat itself, but liked the medina, especially the Rue des Consuls. After a very good discussion with officials at AMIDEAST about a study abroad program in Rabat, we left for Casablanca, where we stayed a couple of days at the Hotel Bellerive on the corniche. Here too, we stayed so little time that we couldn't do the city justice. We spent a little time in the souq, found a terrific restaurant near the central market called Le Buffet, lounged on the beach a little, and had a memorably nasty meal at Pizza Hut, whose latest feature was Pizza Shawarma.




Before leaving, we visited the enormous mosque built by and named after the late King Hassan II. It is apparently the largest mosque in Africa, indeed the largest in the world outside Mecca. It was certainly very lavish. We were there on a Friday , and so decided not to tour the inside. The steep price of admission contributed to our reasoning, but I suppose the government is trying to recover some of the construction and maintenance costs for this gigantic facility.

 


From Rabat we took a CTM bus south to Essouira, the place Reham most wanted to see. Along the road, through beautiful countryside, we passed groves of the argan tree, and I saw a variation on the ubiquitous stone fences: these had brambles planted on top of them, and sometimes cactus. Using an online hostel site, we had booked a room at the Dar el Bahar ("House of the Sea"). We made our way from the bus station past the Jewish cemetery and the beautiful new French-designed housing project to the medina, which is something of a maze. The place was immaculate and beautifully appointed, each room furnished with local artisanal blankets and bedspreads and with paintings by local artists.



It was a lovely place, though I can't say we were entirely comfortable there. The proprietor was gracious, but she and her staff manifested a certain je ne sais quoi that I ascribe to the French and to those most thoroughly colonized by the French. Let us simply say that it was not a customer-centered establishment. The views of the ramparts, however, were breathtaking.

The light at Essouira is apparently always mysterious. Perhaps for this reason Orson Welles chose the city as the location for his production of Othello. Something about the hot wind blowing off the desert encountering the cold Atlantic water... it was very appealing. The souqs were fun to explore, and in the spice market, we received the first offer for Reham's hand of this year's travels.





The suitor owned a shop which sold various culinary and medicinal herbs and potions where we had gone searching for the special black soap needed for the hammams. He and his girlfriend (?) made us something they called thé royal which included five ingredients: anis, and four others that I forget. He professed to find Reham the most beautiful girl he had ever seen and the only one he could love. He let us know that his portfolio was quite diversified: he had properties in the old city for sale, and offered to demonstrate how quickly he could sell our credit card numbers. I believe that he dabbled in other questionable industries as well, but we did not press him for further information. As tea was being prepared, I ducked out of the shop to go get Ghazi, whom Reham and I had left on the beach playing hacky sack with two local kids. When we reached the shop, the owner produced a document in Arabic -- an engagement contract -- as earnest of his intentions. Reham had been finding this whole campaign very entertaining -- she had negotiated her own car and domestic help -- but all three of us felt the game edging towards a point where we could tire of it. We alleged group dinner plans and rose to take our leave, responding to the suitor's query that we were staying at the Casa del Mar -- technically not a lie -- and left the neighborhood, puzzling over what had been the intended outcome of the scam, or whether the shopowner had simply been having fun, as we had been.

Reviving curiosity

It is theoretically possible to travel abroad and, hearing English widely spoken, conclude that language study in English-speaking countries is not a practical necessity. Yet this is not in fact the consensus at the JFK arrivals terminal. Travellers who venture off the tour bus even briefly yearn to communicate with the people who live in the countries whose monuments and natural wonders they've come to admire. It is widely recognized that travel abroad is one of the best ways to motivate language study, hence the importance of even short excursions for high school students. What struck me during this summer's trip was the way in which travel reawakens all curiosity, not just linguistic.

We began our travels in mid-May with a brief stop in Spain so that our visit of Morocco could properly start with a tour of Alhambra.



From Granada we took a bus south to Almeria and from there a ferry to Melilla, a Spanish possession on Morocco's eastern Mediterrannean coast. We walked across the border into Morocco amid jostling crowds of people of every age and condition ferrying contraband by means of the most improbable conveyances: a refrigerator on a hand cart pushed by an old man along the rubble, shrink-wrapped 48-pack bundles of paper towels balanced on either side of a creeking bicycle, soft drinks by the dozens being ported on the heads of women with babies slung over their backs. Then there were other products we could only guess at, as these were transported swiftly along clandestine parallel passages through rotting buildings. Access to these passages was allowed by the stern and watchful customs inspectors who saw to it that proper respect was accorded to them, if not to the government they represent.

Two taxi rides later and we were in Ouijda (pronounced WIDGE-da), where we were received like royalty by our friends and former UB students Larbi Touaf and Soumia Boutkhil. Larbi and Soumia had returned to Morocco to take up full-time tenure-line positions shortly after the birth of their son Nassef in summer 2001. Their cordial hospitality allowed us to glimpse family life here, to grasp something of the distinct features of Moroccan society, and to taste Moroccan cuisine as prepared by a family. It was also a very great pleasure to see them again as friends, especially now that they are parents.



Our favorite item in Moroccan cuisine has been harira (particularly in Ouijda!), a soup which has a meat and tomato base and is flavored with cilantro. We have enjoyed a spread like peanut butter made with argan oil, meat-filled pastries called pastillas, a griddle-cooked bread called msemmin, the well-known couscous, far better here than in France, as are the Moroccan pastries. We've tried a variety of tajines, and I'm still trying to figure out what constitutes its basic recipe. The word may mean something as generic as casserole, and seems to refer to an earthenware dish: a plate on a short pedestal, and a conical lid with a small rounded disk at the top which serves as a handle. We have seen even omelets served, piping hot, in this dish, and they are everywhere for sale as souvenirs. Fresh fruit juices are everywhere available. Coffee is available but not apparently a very imporant drink; mint tea is the national beverage.



Larbi and Soumia arranged for me to give a presentation on the Litgloss web project and to meet with campus officials -- the dean and associate dean of the faculty of arts and humanities -- to discuss a university partnership with UB. There are many potential areas for joint research and teaching. Both Buffalo and Ouijda are border towns -- Ouijda is a twenty-minute car ride from the Algerian border. All of the northern Mediterrannean region of Morocco is indeed something of a frontier. From a hill overlooking Melilla (known here as Melilia), Larbi showed me the massive separation wall surrounding this Spanish town through which we had arrived. "Wow -- so this is the wall separating Melilia from the rest of Morocco," I said, to which he replied, "No -- this is the wall separating Europe from Africa." In Ouijda, on the campus of Mohamed I University itself, there is a camp of sub-Saharan Africans hoping for passage to or through Morocco, and in the hillside forests overlooking Melilia (and apparently also near Ceuta/Septa), there are sub-Saharan Africans who have been in hiding for generations. Thus (among many to be mentioned later) border / migration studies is an area for research collaboration between our two universities, and could include work on human rights (what is the legal status of people living in these semi-permanent transitional encampments?) and the political use of refugees -- Morocco is negotiating free trade status with the EU, and the vigilance it exercises over its borders is a card to be played. When free trade is established in 2012, the contraband traffic across the border with Melilia will adapt or disappear.

The same cannot be said for the black market in gasoline: since Algeria is an oil-producing country, gas is significantly cheaper there than on the other side of the frontier. So for miles and miles along the highway, runners in stolen stripped-down cars ferry gas in 40-litre bidons piled into their trunk and back seat. The prevalence of this contraband gas makes it impossible for regular gas stations to stay in business -- in some towns there simply are none -- and consequently the entire population is dependent on gas trafficking for personal use, mass transit, and agricultural equipment and transport.





The highlight of our stay in northeastern Morocco was an excursion to the Cap des Trois Fourches, a small peninsula which juts out into the Mediterranean near Nador.



The excursion was organized by two members of the science faculty at the University of Mohamed I and had the organizational backing of the local French cultural services. The tour leaders -- a geologist and a biologist -- seemed to have trained in France, and they desribed the mission of their excursions as being the promotion of "la culture scientifique," meaning general knowledge and understanding of science among non-scientists. There were about 20 people on the outing -- high school teachers, a banker, a journalist, a former pilot and his family, some young women in a group, and then L&S&N and their Buffalo guests.



The excursion was brilliantly designed to arouse curiosity about the extraordinary local geological formations at precisely the moment when the desired explanation was available -- JIT Gen Ed, we might say. The same was true for the botany lessons -- the specialization of the biologist was phytopharmaceuticals.

On this wonderfully choreographed excursion I again felt what I have often observed: that in my case, at least, it is not merely linguistic ignorance that travel makes me regret, but ALL my lacunae. Off the coast of Rabat, a few days later, I wandered onto the most extraordinary reef, where in pockets formed millions of years ago -- or so I think -- there now live colonies of sea urchins. How I regretted the incurie of my youth, when I might have learned what I needed to complete my admiration of this enchanting scene.



And history! and economics! I reach to recover what I ever knew of the Almoravids, but alas, there is nothing to remember, for during that lesson, as during so many others, I was not curious to know what the teacher had been assigned to require.

I remember the sidelong exchange of regards narquois among high school classmates when the program of the day was to learn how to read the indicateur du chemin de fer, than which no more ridiculous and futile learning could be imagined by the contemptuous class. Surely proper pedagogy begins by creating or reviving the relevant curiosity. Tired Gen Ed instructors across the disciplines could do worse than to send their students abroad in their first semester to rescue them from a learned indifference.

It is reported that infants are able to discriminate between thousands of sounds, and that the acquisition of language requires us to lose interest in the myriad phonetic nuances we might have cared about in order to notice only those which are phonemic, that is to say, functional. I wonder if this narrowing is assumed to be necessary in all areas of learning... and if the deadening of our curiosity isn't a terrible waste?

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.