CHAPTER 1
The Little Things
The little things. The click of your wife's makeup bottles and brushes in thebathroom in the morning, the subsurface sound of them, a kind of music. Theaccompaniments: the older boy's bedroom door opening and shutting in haste, afaucet running, a gust of wind in the eucalyptus, the last rain on the window.The little things are what we remember, what we know, of family life. Of life.
The large events have their place, but even the large events of a family'spassage are assembled from little things. The rush to the emergency room and theway the air feels there and the brave little chin thrust up beneath the mask,the small choked cry and the sound—especially this sound—of the thread beingpulled through the wound, and the way the little hand holds tight to yourfinger. The little things.
Without realizing it, we can neglect the little things.
Though I have never divorced and my vow is for life, I have like most peopleexperienced a broken relationship or two. Grief does not attach itself so muchto the empty space left by the other person, a loss often too abstract to grasp,but to the little things. The vertical space in the closet where familiarclothes once hung. The smell on the pillow or, on the street, a stranger'saccent that conjures up a silenced voice.
When our parents and loved ones die, little things come back. Returning homeafter a death, you find a quilt that wrapped around you long ago, and youremember how the hands felt as they tucked you in. You find yourself startled bythe way the dishes are arranged in your parent's kitchen cabinet; you aresurprised because you know the arrangement, and you did not know it was sofamiliar until you looked at it within the context of loss.
The impression most remembered from my grandmother's death is not of the largefact of her body in the casket, but of coming into her cold kitchen a few daysafterward and seeing the jar of mincemeat cookies, which she often made for meand my brother. In the jar, then, they were covered with mold.
Just as family grief is articulated by little things, so is joy. Here is anexercise: Go through your house when everyone is away and, in the silence, lookfor these little things.
In my house, I see the drawing of Wyoming with the owl in the tree singing, "Ho,ho, ho," and the little wooden toolbox, with the name Matt carved on the side,filled with crayons, some of them peeled. The smell of them connects you intime. The crumbs on top of the toaster, the empty cereal boxes left out, seemsuddenly precious. So do the stacks of games—Candyland, Clue, Monopoly. Eachfamily's Monopoly is stamped with its unique patina of worn corners and stainedChance cards. Little things.
The fishing rods leaning against the corner of the garage, some from my ownchildhood, some bought for the boys. The rods stand tall together. Shelvesfilled with books; most of them old, neglected friends, each with a story totell.
A balsa glider on the stairs. At the top of the landing, a small landscape, astop-time mountain scene painted in oils by the boys' grandfather. Once, twice,the bullfrog in my older son's room harrumphs, because spring is coming; in adistant time, when my sons or my wife or I, alone or together, drive past somestream or pond surrounded by reeds shaking with redwing blackbirds, we will hearthis particular booming sound and in it recognize these years of our familylife.
In the largest bedroom, the smell of a comforter; and in the closet, my wife'sclothing hangs neat and fresh. And all around the room the bottles of roses,which she has carefully dried over seventeen years, all the roses I have given,not one missed. And beside the bathtub a thick, red, scented candle with lots oftime left in it.
Here is the next part of this exercise: When your family is home again, listento them, watch them, wait for the sounds and smells and tilted chins and theshouted competitions between the children and the sighs of the house as it slipsinto sleep. Hold these things. These little things are everything.
Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threadswhich sew people together through the years.
—Simone Signoret
The Essence of Family
Memory, it seems to me, is the essence of family; the longer and deeper thememory, the stronger the family. By stronger I do not necessarily mean better.Just stronger.
I was talking to a friend the other day about memory. We were sharing a feelingthat we both have had, but seldom discuss, that we are the bearers of ourparents, the vessels that hold the images and sounds and touch of them.
"Nobody will ever have the memories of my family that I have," my friend said."Sometimes it gets almost creepy weird that a sound, a smell, will set it off—willalmost bring the spirit back, and at times I do feel the presence of myparents."
But what happens when the vessel breaks, when I am no longer around to remember?Do these ashes of memory disappear?
I am thankful that I can call my brother on the telephone, sometimes late atnight; I am here and he is in Eureka, but we can walk across old groundtogether. Sometimes, walking across this old ground, we see our parentsapproaching. Of course, my brother and I do not see them with the same eyes, butrather with a kind of overlapping stereo vision. At the very least, our sharingbrings into more vivid relief the people and landscapes of the past.
But memory is tricky. Scientists are often amazed at the faithfulness of memory,but their studies have shown memory to be both powerful and fragile, constantlyreshuffling and gradually decaying in the brain. We tend to remember best whatwe have experienced in stress or intense emotion; this means that the expanse ofour memory does not accurately reflect the fullness of our pasts. Moreover,"source amnesia" is common; we can recall a fact or anecdote but cannot rememberwhere we learned it. Source memories are the quickest to decay.
When I think about the fragility of my memory, that it will not only disappearsomeday but that it is already changing, I am filled with both fear and relief.Fear that I may lose my memory; relief that, rather than dying, my memory will,in a sense, lead a life of its own, and therefore can live on without me.
I remember, in the 1970s, sitting at a table in a dimly lit room on the NorthernCheyenne reservation with Marie Sanchez, a tribal judge and firebrand.Surrounded by her family, holding her grandchild tightly wrapped, she told meabout her great-great-grandfather, Little Wolf, the Cheyenne chief who, in thelate 1800s, led his people out of forced confinement in Oklahoma back to theirnative country in what is now Montana. She told how, for thousands of miles,Little Wolf and his people had evaded U.S. soldiers by building sweat lodges,entering them, and emerging hundreds of miles away.
To Sanchez, this story of spiritual transport was absolutely true, historicallyand personally. As she told it, surrounded by extended family and tribe, sheoften used the words "we" and "I," as if she had been a participant in the longescape. This is one of the traits of mythic memory; not trapped in time orplace, it becomes our own. Orally, this story had been passed down for acentury, and it had never lost its power. It had, in fact, lived and grown.
In my culture, though, memory does not live as easily. Most of us are notsurrounded by extended family or tribe; we are more nomadic and fragmented thaneven the most traditionally nomadic tribes, and our personal memories competewith an overpowering, never-ending onslaught of information. As a result, it istoo easy to discount our family memories. Not enough action. The plots areobscure. No name actors.
Still, my memories and yours are unique. There is nothing like them in theworld. Each set is a work of neurological art. If I owned a Picasso, I would notleave it out in the rain. The memories we carry should be treated with as muchrespect. We should find somewhere safe to put our memories, and the safest placeis not in our own vessel, because it will inevitably break.
The way to preserve our memories is to make gifts of them. We make ourcollections of videotape and Kodachrome; we keep diaries; we write familyhistories; we pass on family stories to our children and to what we can musterof a tribe of friends, and we call our brothers and sisters late at night andwalk old ground with them. And the memories, like children with lives of theirown, move on.
Preserving Our Stories
Our stories, our personal stories, our family stories, are our real gold. Ifwe're lucky, as we age, we put our stories in the bank, where they gatherinterest, in deepening meaning.
"As I grew up, I loved listening to my grandparents' stories," a friend, Liz,told me recently. "I was drawn to their calm and intrigued by the scope of theirlives. I remember my grandmother telling stories about my Great-Aunt Ag, whoonce modeled camisoles and ladies' undergarments."
Today, Liz's family members rarely tell stories.
Somehow we assume that if a story isn't in the video store or on TV, it must notbe worth much.
"One evening I was baby-sitting the nine-year-old daughter of a friend. Thislittle girl loves to hear about her mother's life. So she asked me to tell her astory about my childhood, and I was struck with panic. I couldn't think of athing. I know I have stories. But here was a child asking me for something sosimple as a story and I couldn't think of one.
"I learned two things that night. One was that I had lost touch with the storiesI grew up with; and two, I'm not making many new stories. Maybe the lives welead today are mind-numbing, and not the source of many good stories. A lot ofthe stuff of good stories has to do with family life and we have precious littletime for that now."
It's tough to live good stories when you're stuck in traffic.
Author Rexford Brown contends that true literacy is impossible without theability to value and tell our stories. Brown describes a Navajo school, whereone-third of the children come to class illiterate in two languages, English andtheir native tongue, an indirect, storytelling language that is fading from theculture.
At the reservation he studied, a medicine man stood up at a school board meetingand told a story about twins, one crippled, the other blind: the blind onecarries the crippled one, and the crippled one guides them with his eyes; bothof them are looking for signs to give their lives meaning and end theirwandering. Together, they make their story.
The medicine man went on to attack the schools for neglecting the nativelanguage, and for failing to realize that Navajo children have traditionallylearned through experience, not books or videos or computers. And he chastisedhis own Navajo people for losing touch with their inheritance of stories andlegends.
In a sense, all over America, children are losing their inheritance. They'rebused long distances to what amount to educational reservations: schoolscolonized by bureaucratic story-killing language, schools too often cut off fromneighborhood or family. But there are exceptions. "I did find a teacher inKentucky who created a coal curriculum," Brown says. "He took everything back tosquare one, and related every part of the class study to coal and to miners:this is what we know. We know coal. Kids need context."
So do the rest of us.
Mental hospitals and our parks are populated with people who have lost theirstories or their connection to other people's stories. Nonetheless there seemsto be a growing hunger out there. The reaction to the PBS Civil War series is anexample of how starved people are for powerful, authentic stories about realpeople, about ourselves and our legacies. And the new popularity of salons—wherepeople get together to do that most radical of acts, talk face-to-face—suggeststhe hunger.
A college friend, Jewell Scott of Kansas City, told me about a special recentevening, in which her friends' family stories came together. "I was invited to aparty to which each person brought their favorite childhood food. The eveningbegan with exclamations over the various dishes—homemade macaroni and realcheese, salmon patties and apple pie and chocolate chip cookies. One dish wascooked right at the party in an authentic, 1960s vintage, Harvest Gold electricskillet"
"What is it?" everyone asked. They peered into the layers of sliced red potatoeswith shredded cheese and crumbled bacon, crowned with eggs poaching in themelting cheese.
"It's 'potato stuff,'" the cook responded.
The group reveled in the old-fashioned tastes of real eggs, butter, animal fat,sugar, and cholesterol. After the last apple pie and ice cream had been eatenand they had discussed whether it was better to eat well and live long or eat"good" and die young, the talk returned to their childhoods, their families, andtheir feelings about them.
Though they had known one another for years, they had never shared thesestories, and what they learned was remarkable. "Three of us were descended fromcircuit-riding ministers who brought the Gospel to the wild Midwest of the mid- tolate 1800s. One grandmother had lived in the northern plains. From Texas toCanada, these great-grandparents we remembered had seen their world change fromsaddles and shotguns and lonely prairies to electric lights, central airconditioning, and jet travel.
"Our own parents merited our respect for their experiences in the GreatDepression and World War II and for rearing their children through a time ofincredible rebellion against them and their values. As we sat on the redwooddeck, sipping our Chablis and watching a police helicopter cut through thestarlit urban sky, we marveled at the legacies they share and how we so rarelytalk about them."
The group yearned a bit for the simpler days of "potato stuff" and visits totheir grandparents to hear them spin stories of a different time and place. Theywondered whether they would live to be eighty or ninety or one hundred, andlaughed about how many years the evening's meal had subtracted from their lives.
"And, finally, the evening ended without any conclusion to the most importantquestion: Would we bring to our old age a sense of humor, patience and kindnessthat would make us lovable, likable human beings and, someday, thirty or fortyor fifty years from now, would there be any reason for another group of partygoersto remember us and our incredible lives?"
When children are asked to define family, they are more forgiving than manyadults, and more accurate.
Valeria Lovelace, Sesame Street's director of research, asked children to definefamily. Children, in her study, were most likely to identify "Mr. and Mrs. Brownand Billy" as a family. "However, later on in the interviews," says Lovelace,"we said Mr. and Mrs. Brown and Billy live together but they don't love eachother. Are they a family?" Half the children who had earlier identified Mr. andMrs. Brown and Billy as a family now said no, they were not a family. "In theminds of three- to five year olds, when you say 'family,' they don't just thinkabout a configuration, but an expectation of love and caring as well. When theytalk about family, they talk about love. They talk about caring."
