Most meaningful memento
(Updated July 10th, 2012)
In the new novel The Sandcastle Girls, an old newspaper photo sends an American journalist back through her family’s history to learn about love, loss, and a wrenching secret that’s been buried for generations. Author Chris Bohjalian explains how an old photo of his family inspired him write the novel and explore his Armenian heritage. Have you ever found on old photo or letter that sparked your imagination? Last week, we asked Red Roomers to blog about the time they had done just that.
A few entries stood out:
- The ongoing chore of going through thirty years of old boxes turns devastating as author Charles Ray relates in "When Memories in the Attic Turned into Nightmares."
- While the newspaper article member Maria Andreu discovered wasn't old, the way she describes the effect it had on her is too important not to recognize, especially since she posted "The Newspaper Article That Changed My Life" the day after Independence Day.
- In "Old Spice," member Patricia Anne Goldrick uses vivid descriptions and specific detail to evoke both a time and place—Canada in the mid-20th century—and relationships—her and her parents.
These bloggers will receive a copy of The Sandcastle Girls, Chris Bohjalian’s novel of the Armenian Genocide that explores how our ancestral past informs our contemporary lives.
I hope you'll read all the entries in this blog challenge and let your favorite bloggers know in the comments what you liked about their posts. All of Red Room's past topics are collected here. Thanks as always for blogging!
–Huntington W. Sharp, Senior Editor, Red Room
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Connections
Memento: Aunt May's boxes
In 1992, I recieved four boxes of my great-aunt May's letters, diaries, and photographs. I was a year into a gruelling separation from my parents, spurred on by increasingly disturbing memories of sexual abuse and emotional lies. My father's controlled script greeted me and I was told, in a letter despite my "no contact" insistence, that since I was "the family historian" it was deemed I should have the boxes. The irony of being the Family Historian when my own history of incest was vehemently denied was not lost on me -- and yet I was (am) the Family Historian precisely for that reason. A care for history becomes deeply personal when one's own story is so negated.
An exploration of the boxes yielded reams of tedious diary entries, and letters to her mother and sisters. Yet sifting through I found a hand written reply to my aunt from President Truman and presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson. Born in 1900, I discovered that May had been a conservative anti-Unionist until sometime in her late 20s or early 30s, at which point (probably due to a rare master's degree for a woman of her generation) she became a progressive, and subscribed to The Progressive magazine, for a very long time.
My aunt never married. The oldest daughter of an alcoholic father and martyred mother, she worked teaching college and then high school all her life. Her money went in part to support her mother. In the early 20s, while she was in college at Hastings Teacher's College in Hastings, NE, I learned her mother had taken a restraining order out against her father. I didn't even know restraining orders existed in the 1920s, much less that a woman could actually use one. I was reminded that much of the Temperance Movement of that time -- so often regaled as disastrous by current historians -- was in fact drive in large part by women sick of the domestic violence and other upset caused by the drunk men in their lives. I am not sure my aunt was ever involved in Temperance, but she was a devout Calvinist Presbyterian all her life, and for each family woe she covered, she went on, repressively, with statements following about how "grateful" she was for her "loving parents" and what a shit, essentially, she was, for thinking otherwise.
Finally, I learned that during her 30s she had an affair with a married man. It is painful to read this because in hindsight, and having learned these lessons myself, it is obvious he is weak willed and will never leave his wife. I think this crushed my aunt's already fairly bitter heart. I brighten when I see, during this period, that she went abroad to England. She appears on a ship's manifest. Good for her. And for me, the manifest is a breath of pre-war romanticism that helps me to think her life was not all lost to disappointment. She was ahead of her time in many ways, and like many members of our family, too smart for her own good. It would take until my generation, and the work therein, for our emotional selves to begin to equal the prodigious intellects bestowed us by whatever genetic fate we seemed to have incurred.
Old Love Letters
My mother never threw anything away, including the numerous letters she received from early nineteenth century suitors. How formal, yet how flirty they were. One, from a New York City actor seemed especially enchanting. My Mom doubted him for his unstable career. Meanwhile, she had the guy who became my father on the hook, and he, having been born a farm boy, was striving to become a small town lawyer while threatening to backslide. Mom wanted a proper urban professional for a husband, not some farmer who'ld "come in all smelly from his daily chores". Well, letters went back and forth while she played the game. The actor pled he'd change his profession if only she would have him. Oh he was so charming! In the end, she convinced my loving pop to stick with lawyering. She chose him and spurned the actor. We looked the latter up on ancesters.com and found he ended up as a chicken farmer in New Jersey. I plan to write about my mom and all her asperations in the day when women had no vote and virtually no careers beyond mothering and homemaking.