Rivulets

17 July 09

My friend O.V. wrote me the other day about how now that he and his wife have their baby boy he feels — not in a morbid, but rather, in a liberating way — that it’s safe for him to die. Not too soon, of course. What he meant to say is that he’ll now live on through his son. And I think he feels some relief in that assurance. By living on he didn’t mean only by blood line, but by story line, the family lore, the memories and tall tales and history that is something larger than our own period of living, yet to continue it must be carried on by our children, just as we’ve carried, and cared for, the stories of our parents and grandparents.

I don’t know if I described that properly. Another attempt: should my writing go nowhere else, it’ll have been worth all the effort that Ada might someday read my journals and know something more of our lives and her history; her back story, as they call it in novels. From my writing, and the family remembrances we recall to her on long drives and mountain hikes and evenings staying up late, she becomes our tale-bearer, our story-carrier. Our memories will be retold and thereby outlive us.

I believe that’s what O. meant. He’s a writer also and I know he thinks along such lines. All the published books in the world are great, but without readers, they’re merely tombstones on the shelf. Similarly, what becomes of the family history if there are no children to pass it down to? The image of a stream trickling out onto an arid plain comes to mind. A child is a dashing river, into which you can never pour too many stories, good or bad, factual or fiction, so long as there is truth to them.

I like how Steinbeck puts it: fiction is a true story about something that didn’t happen. But that’s another idea for another day. Or is it? I think of all the fireside stories my nutty grandma used to tell us when as kids my sister and I used to stay with her at her cabin: bears that came around in the night and ate children whole; a great aunt who died because she’d never fart in public and so got her intestines in a terminal tangle; her insane brother who should have been in a state hospital but instead sat in his wheelchair in the front yard masturbating and babbling at passersby; how the marijuana plants she was growing on the front porch were just for looks and how she was growing them as a favor for her Mexican friend who liked the smell of them; how our grandpa was in fact gay and she had proof of the men he ran around with . . .

I don’t know if I can sift any truths from these tales, but I remember them well, and perhaps the larger truth I learned as a kid was that sometimes people tell you crazy things that shouldn’t be believed on the whole, and sometimes those people themselves are crazy, and sometimes the crazy person is your grandma, and the love you feel for her shouldn’t be confused with the troubling things she might say and do.

But confusion there is. A good history always contains a dubious or dark or debated strain, doesn’t it? Anyhow, I’m not sure my grandma was too concerned with family history or the teaching of any larger truth. She was getting her kicks shocking her grandkids with gritty lessons, Grimm’s-like cautionary tales about masturbation, insanity, homosexuality, drug use, and the cruelties of social mores. She was at once hazarding us against being, and telling us it was alright to be, crazy.

She did teach me something about story, though, whether she intended to or not. Story and family lore. And so long as I have a say in it, my long-gone, gone-in-the-head grandma will continue coursing through this world.