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I am not a show-off. (Sounds like Nixon saying “I am not a crook.”) Certain people reading this will be amused at this, I’m sure. If I have a problem, it goes the other way. I tend to down-play my abilities.
So the question is–before I charge in and tell stories about the matriarchy in which I grew up–Why did I end up knowing so much about my families? There could be several ways in which it may have happened.
Maybe I was born to be a curious person. I was called Question Box, after all. My brain was like a sponge as I’ve said earlier. Being surrounded by those I loved–mostly the women–a chemical change took place in which I was attracted to them in a psychic sense. What word is there to describe it? I’m back to “Why?” again…
There’s a book called Iron John in which the poet Robert Bligh writes about the realities of being a man and how boys grow up to be good men. I read it because I have a son so I wanted to know these things. Robert Bligh writes…and he admits that there aren’t any other words to describe this…that in a farming culture, father and son worked side by side and some magical atoms or sparks or something like that get transferred to the boy from the father’s body.
I can’t think of a better way to console myself in my quest to answer the “Why?” question. Physically I was always close to my grandmother and aunts. My grandmother told me endless stories about our family and her life. I would literally sit at her feet and absorb it. My two aunts–my mother’s sisters–gave me small gifts, showed me things, taught me things, told me their stories. I was a good listener, I’ve been told that so maybe that answers Why? It was like being wrapped up warm against the cold. But it didn’t just include them. My grandmother’s two sisters were close, very close by and their children–my mother’s first cousins–everybody was THERE, IN ONE PLACE. And when my mother’s first cousin Audrey had Maxine in 1950, the same year I was born, the big picture was complete. And–what did we talk about all the time? Becoming women. This was before high school and dating. There was nothing we wanted more than that, to be just like the women in our family.
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I want to get this over with…I took this situation for granted.
When I became a young adult, having been married too young and returning to Pittsburgh, my aunts each gave of themselves to help me get on my feet. The five years–1968 to 1973 were a time of unremitting loss. A lost love, my father dying so young, then a divorce. It was too much.
My aunt Maxine came and gave me every ounce of knowledge she had about how to gain a balanced emotional life. I spent a lot of time with her and she told me facts that then I considered shocking; she wanted me to see my newly found freedom as a second chance to be independent and contented. I followed her path as far as I could go, then left for Philadelphia where I met my husband. So her prescription for living came to be. I knew that she wasn’t pressing me to find a husband. Her path was spiritual but it gave a new kind of strength.
This still doesn’t explain everything. I always was the one “who knew.” As I grew up my mother told me all the facts about any situation that was brewing. Not super-secret, inappropriate information but the facts. And at the end, when my mother was dying and she said “I have a special kind of fun with you that I don’t have with anybody else.” What was I to think? What did this mean? I had the power to infuriate my mother when I was young; what changed?
We sat up late at night, sipping red wine, looking at old pictures and birthday cards, and talking–talking–talking…and I don’t want to leave out my Aunt Martha who told me her stories and how she felt about the Goldings as a family “to be married into.” Even my Aunt Cecil, who took me on that magical tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and her saying that “Leslie, you are going to be just like me.” Why? No answer, no sure answer.
After writing all of this down I just think I was lucky. Lucky to be born when I was, surrounded by magical people.
lgmwriting 