2 posts tagged “california”

Somewhere, scattered across collectors' cabinets and musty antique shops, are exactly all of my grandparents' things.

In 1994, when my dad's father died of Alzheimer's, the family faced sorting through Grandpa's Missouri house. Sortings like this are an ordinary part of death. Less ordinary was the fact that Grandpa's house had become a kind of museum over the years. A one-house ghost town.

After Grandma Helen died in 1975, Grandpa went on living in his old Sedalia house just as he always had: leaving all the housework to a woman who no longer lived. He didn't dust. He didn't sweep. He left some styrofoam cups from Sonic stacked in the hutch alongside pieces of china, squeezed between canned goods, all from 1975 or earlier. On one wall was pinned a long, rectangular 1974 cloth calendar from a local business; it hung there every year of my life. By 1994 all the dishes and spoons featured lacework patterns of cracks and grooves. Grandpa never installed plumbing in the kitchen, and he never replaced the curtains that hung instead of kitchen cabinets. The cheap mattresses in the metal bedframes were the same as those that my dad and aunt had slept in as children. By the time I began sleeping in those beds in the 70s, they were already deeply concave from the weight of years of bodies, cavities that grew a little deeper on our semiannual visits. The dresser mirror was so clouded with age that it reflected only mottled blobs. A cheap commercial picture of an anonymous baby, caked with the dust of decades, still hung on the wall. My brother and I played with my dad and aunt's toys, still scattered around the house: wooden milk truck on wheels, metal pop gun, a cracked-face doll.

I had nightmares in that house. Apparently, so had my dad and aunt. My grandparents were not altogether nice people, and my grandmother, in particular, had been mentally ill for years before she died.

When they faced the task of sorting through this stuff, almost all of which dated directly back to their own painful childhoods, my father and aunt balked. And then, they stumbled upon a way out. A buyer for the house approached them, but he only wanted the house if he could have all of its contents, too. All, or nothing. My mother was the only one who harbored any sentiments for the dead (she was not related by blood); she asked if she could take the old treadle sewing machine. "No."  My aunt, who had been tormented in that house, only wanted the brand new phone, a recent purchase for grandpa, and asked to take it. Surely it would have no value for the collector. "No."  He would only buy the house -- the house without kitchen plumbing, with minimal insulation, with only four creaky rooms but full of "original condition" 50s and 60s-era stuff-- if he could have it ALL.

So, they sold it.  Without hesitation and without looking back.

In Where I Was From, Joan Didion explores the tendency in Californian history to "jettison weight"; "keep moving" -- to, among other habits, consign vast populations to insane asylums and prisons rather than to care for them or confront them. She presents this as a trait endemic in Californian history, but perhaps more fundamentally of western migration. Perhaps she's right. Like my grandpa (who jettisoned his own family history), and my father (who sold his as a package deal), that is my own story, too. . . . . And it may be the story of Amarillo, as well--a town that celebrates its  ranching history but has sold itself for a stockpile of plutonium.

I have another book percolating - not a scholarly tome about seventeenth-century American literature. This one is about my home, its idiosyncracies, its spiritual structure, the feel of a place, its effect on the people who live there, and its role in the thing that is America. This would be a different kind of book about Texas--a book I'd love to read.

I don't know how to write this book yet. Most importantly, I don't know where to find the time. Finding the time to write the scholarly book, finding the discipline to become a writer who writes daily, without fail, is a prerequisite to writing anything at all, I suspect. But once I find the time, I will have to find a way into this subject.

I'm reading Joan Didion's Where I Was From now, to see how she works it out. Didion is returning to one of her lifelong subjects: California, and what it says about America.

Thomas Mallon at the New York Time thoughtfully, and appreciatively,reviews it here.  Mallon appreciates that she is revising her view of California and her stance towards it.

But he doesn't talk about form: what a mess the book is. The book, I think, is supposed to be a mess. Her subject of  California, she repeatedly claims, has baffled all who try to make sense of it, but her pages of wandering around the subject do not expose these bafflements in a revelatory way. She leads us through her family history sometimes with the same forcefulness and doggedness (and lack of grace) of an old aunt telling it to the youngsters.

And yet.

And yet Didion remains a powerful voice at exposing American self-delusions, the contradictions of our ideas about ourselves, the ubiquity of the absurd in our lives, landscapes, and language. At times she makes astonishing insights with the dry, and light irony, that she has mastered.