Our memories of other people are most often associated with the places in which we knew them best—longest, perhaps, for better or for worse, always most vividly; and often we remember their movement and visage, and particular things they wore or ate, used or did. Yesterday, listening to Garrison Keillor's rendition of The Writer's Almanac on public radio, I heard three accounts of people, places and things that brought some of my own memories keenly to mind.
The first is a poem by Faith Shearin, "My Grandparents' Generation." The things the poet remembers her grandparents taking with them, leaving her with something else, poorer or richer, maybe just different, but the overall accounting is one of loss, of missing, nostalgia. Most of all, to evoke what they took is to remember their companionship. How do you remember your grandparents'—or even, if you are of a certain age, your parents'—taking with them? If there is feeling of loss for something taken, is there also feeling of gratitude for something planted, something they left for you to nourish?
At this moment I remember three things—more, much more, but these three will do for now.
First, there is the memory of being held in my father's arms as he was about to go off to war. He is wearing a uniform, and I draw in the smell of his jacket against my cheek, almost as if a light rain had fallen. Then there is an image of my mother leaning against the doorway between kitchen and living room. She holds a cigarette in her left hand, looks to the pots cooking, then, more engaged, to our conversation she wouldn't miss. Finally, I remember an evening with my grandmother. I was living with her on my vacations from college, and had returned home very late. She was still up, writing letters by the light of a goose-necked lamp and a low fire in the grate, listening to Gregorian chants on the phonograph. I had left her that morning a short essay I'd written, and I was anxious for her response. She put down her pen, came to join me at the fireside, and said, "Johnny, your writing reminds me of the writing of your father." We talked on into the night of the father I'd lost and, she knew, longed for, years after his final leavetaking.
Here is Faith Shearin's poem:
My Grandparents’ Generation
They are taking so many things with them:
their sewing machines and fine china,
their ability to fold a newspaper
with one hand and swat a fly.
They are taking their rotary telephones,
and fat televisions, and knitting needles,
their cast iron frying pans, and Tupperware.
They are packing away the picnics
and perambulators, the wagons
and church socials. They are wrapped in
lipstick and big band music, dressed
in recipes. Buried with them: bathtubs
with feet, front porches, dogs without leashes.
These are the people who raised me
and now I am left behind in
a world without paper letters,
a place where the phone
has grown as eager as a weed.
I am going to miss their attics,
their ordinary coffee, their chicken
fried in lard. I would give anything
to be ten again, up late with them
in that cottage by the river, buying
Marvin Gardens and passing go,
collecting two hundred dollars.
“My Grandparents’ Generation” by Faith Shearin from Telling the Bees. © Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2015.
I grew up in many different places. My feelings of home always had a tentativeness, an expectation that it wouldn't last. One of the places I circled back upon, especially in the years of my adolescence and early adulthood, was the island of Manhattan. I liked to walk and imagine the city before it became so tall and thick with human life. So it was with a shiver of almost familiar pleasure yesterday morning that I heard Garrison Keillor tell a story:
"Peter Minuit landed on the island of Manhattan on this date in 1626. Dutch fur traders had been living on nearby Governors Island for a couple of years, and had built a trading post there. In 1625, construction began on Manhattan Island in the form of a citadel, Fort Amsterdam. The Dutch West India Company appointed Minuit Director of the Colony of New Netherland. He arrived on Mannahatta, the 'island of many hills,' to find a small village already in place, with more land being cleared. On the west side of the island there was a cemetery, a small farm, an orchard, and two wealthy estates. Most of the houses were built along the East River, since its shore was more protected from winds than the shore of the Hudson. The main street was built over an old Indian path running from the southern tip of the island north to what is now City Hall Park. First it was called Heere Straat, which meant Gentlemen’s Street, but it eventually came to be known as Breede Wegh — which became the name we know it by today, Broadway.
"But outside the infant settlement near the island’s southern edge grew towering stands of hickory, oak, and chestnut trees. Minuit also would have found grasslands and salt marshes. What would eventually become Times Square was at that time a red maple swamp. A creek ran through Midtown. Where the best eateries now stand, wild game roamed freely: turkey, deer, and elk. The beaches and waterways were teeming with eels, brook trout, and shellfish. And Madison Square Garden was a marsh on the edge of a forest. The island’s population was every bit as diverse as it is today: lying at the convergence of two geographic zones, Mannahatta was home to northern spruce and southern magnolia, migratory birds and tropical fish, more than 1,800 different species in all."
For all the lands I've tenuously held and in which I found a nest, of course there are a great many more I've never lived in. Some I've come to know at least a little and admire as a lingering or recurrent visitor; others I've never seen but have come to feel a kinship for, mostly through reading tales of lives lived there. Of those, first and foremost is the land of Israel. Some of the tales have come to me from my rabbi son, Joshua; many, of course, from the Bible, others through reading contemporary fiction, memoir and commentary, most memorably Amos Oz's memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness, David Grossman's novel, To the End of the Land, and Stephen Mitchell's version of the New Testament, The Gospel According to Jesus.
So there is the third account for which I was grateful in The Writer's Almanac yesterday, Garrison Keillor's noting that it was the 76th birthday of Amos Oz:
"born Amos Klausner in Jerusalem (1939). His uncle was killed by the Nazis, but his father managed to escape to Jerusalem in the late 1930s. His family spoke Yiddish, Russian, Polish, German and English, but Amos was taught only Hebrew. As he grew up, he witnessed the founding of the Israeli nation. In 1948, he helped other schoolchildren fill sandbags to prepare for the siege of Jewish Jerusalem in the War of Independence. When they won the war, he saw hundreds of thousands Jewish refugees stream into Israel. He later said, 'The Jerusalem of my childhood was a lunatic town flooded with conflicting dreams, a vague federation of communities, people, faiths, ideologies, and hopes.'
"He left home when he was 14 to work and study at a kibbutz, and he changed his last name to Oz, which means 'strength' in Hebrew. He began writing poems, and in 1966 he came out with his first novel, Elsewhere Perhaps. Since then, he’s published many more novels, including My Michael (1968) and The Same Sea (2002). His latest novel is called Judas (2014).
"Many of his novels and essays have challenged traditional Zionism, and he’s become a controversial figure in Israel. He wrote: 'Daytime Israel makes a tremendous effort to create the impression of the determined, tough, simple, uncomplicated society ready to fight back, ready to hit back twice as hard, courageous, and so on. Nocturnal Israel is a refugee camp with more nightmares per square mile […] than any other place in the world. Almost everyone has seen the devil.'"