My father was a scholar of people. He studied Arthurian literature, Hart Crane, Nina Simone, and William Faulkner, among others. A professor for fifty-one years, he found virtually everything and anything interesting. He came up shocked, for example, when his History of the English Language or Modern Grammar classes didn’t fill. “Who,” he’d ask in disbelief, “wouldn’t find that interesting?”
His fascinations tended to drive our family to far-off lands. He wanted to go to where the thing, the person, the subject was or had at least once been. And we could never catch up with him. Literally. Many of my childhood memories in the late 80’s and early 90’s include his worn brown loafers clicking up ahead in an airport, down a path, around some museum corridor.
To state the obvious: what our parents found enticing and what my sister and I found enticing did not always align. Oddly, at four and eight, the use of chiaroscuro in a Caravaggio painting didn’t impress us as much as, say, a Snickers bar. Because of this, and because—by definition—parents are in a constant state of improvisation, ours developed a compromise. Or bartering system, depending on how you look at it.
When we traveled for long stretches of time—months or seasons—our mother packed the following in our suitcase: a blank scrapbook for the each of us, along with a flower press. She suggested we collect souvenirs from each place we visited: museum, restaurant, park, market, hostel, rented apartment. We scrapbooked cocktail napkins, flowers and weeds, train receipts, postcards, and our favorite: wrappers from candy we had something comparable to in our own country but which, in another, seemed pure magic.
To state the obvious once more: what we’re navigating as a world is unchartered, and it seems every day I witness creativity and innovation from friends and neighbors who are small business owners, parents, nurses.
My father died a year ago exactly from this article’s due date (though I will most likely, true to form, turn it in a few days late). Toward the end of his life, our parents were mostly homebound. We championed the weeks he was well enough to walk from his first story chair rail to the kitchen, to the den. The uncertainty of his illness, his time, must have been so daunting to him—as it certainly was to us, though maybe to some lesser degree.
Though Mom and Dad were in full-on survival mode, the house pulsed with the verve of their creativity, their ability to transfer the daily and the dread into something more, something often romantic. Because it is my habit, the first thing I’d say in a phone call with one of them those days was, “What are y’all doing?” knowing by virtue of circumstance it had to be mainly nothing. These quarantine days mimic those in some ways, our wobbling between surviving and innovating. Only, once I called and asked that same question and my mom answered, “Your father and I are trying to create a new color for the red of this cardinal hovering outside our window.”
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June 29, 2020 at 10:47PM
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Last Train Out: It’s Pure Magic - Greenville News
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