keeping in touch with the thoughts of our family, all over the world!
Christmas came early for me, and I have a huge family portrait in front of me, a study in the myriad ways the adventure of Onorato and Mary ramified and multiplied beyond anything any single person could ever grasp in a single view.
My mom was a great help in enabling me to put names on faces. For the entire right-hand side of the portrait, under a grove of trees in the summer, mom a little girl between 5 and 6, I didn’t need any help. These were the people I grew up with, looked up to, the very first extended family which in my case too would ramify beyond anything I might have imagined when I was dreaming of Rosemary Marriage at Saint Mary’s grade school. John and Mary, Tom and Mayme, Tommy and Agnes, Amadeo and Nina. Most of the adults in this portrait are smiling. One is not. Uncle John looks like he’s contemplating murder in the first degree. But of course it’s his own shyness, and inwardness for anyone who took the time to uncover the man’s vast culture. Tom Jenkins has a wry smile on his face, as if he’d said a few hours earlier: this is gonna be a fine day, and as they’re few and far between, let’s take maximum advantage of it! Tommy Castas looks short but wise in the world’s ways, and Amadeo is clearly the most handsome man of the bunch. The smooth operator: one understands how Nina could have fallen for such a guy!
Uncle John can scowl up a storm, it will make no difference: his spouse has a smile for the ages that never went away! Mayme has just broken into something that might have been a smile; it hovers on the cusp, so to speak. Agnes is in her glory, she looks like she’s spent the last two weeks at a holiday resort, soaking up sunshine. And Nina has the most material going to make a dress now draped over her body, leaving only her strong arms to embrace the light of late morning or early afternoon in Westville. I wouldn’t want to be on the jury voting for the most beautiful pair of legs in the front row. (On the left hand side, the women are allowed to be seated. On the right hand side, the women seem to be wary doers who would no sooner accept a chair than die right there on the spot!) Between Mary, Mayme, and Agnes, it would be a tough choice. Maybe that explains the scowl on John’s face. To see how much the women enjoy this sort of thing. Tom Jenkins seems attuned to that. There’s only one child on this half of the portrait. Mary Ellen Jenkins. Scowling of course. A case of expectations way too high to ever find an outlet. How amazing to see and stare at the uncanny ressemblance between Mayme and Mary Ellen. A painter friend has agreed to paint a portrait of Mayme, but when I showed her photos of my mom, she said she couldn’t guarantee a clear distinction between the two women, and advised me to drop the project altogether. “You’ve got the living icon,” she said. My mother would scowl at that. Anything, but not a living icon!
On the other side of the picture are faces and stories that have been told in chronicled form, and that’s a bit thin for someone whose expectations are as high as mine. So I’ll do a bit of scowling myself to have missed out on all those other adventures. I’m trying to make up for lost time now. Forgive the folly of that! What a beautiful day it was. And my mother’s scowl is like she was saying something that would waft across the Atlantic, 77 years later: my scowl is my signature for the world outside. If you want another side of it, you’ll have to talk to me. Otherwise, just walk on by! Lucky the man who decided to tarry! He would agree, but that too has been known to make her scowl!
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b.t. Wall
December 22nd, 2009 at 7:22 am
Season’s greetings to all.
I come in peace.
To be precise, I come as a “friend of the family.” Both the family in general—as an ideal, an archetype of human experience—and this particular family.
I announce my peaceful intentions in advance because it seems to me that that is something an “outsider” should do—but also because this site has seen more than its share of discord.
When I first started logging on to ‘Family Matters’ it reminded me of a traffic accident: a high-speed pile-up complete with loss of life and blood on the pavement. As a passer-by, I felt I should avert my eyes from a scene of such evident tragedy…and go on my way.
But now I have changed my mind about that. For one and only one reason. Collins (as we call him here in France) is my friend. And my friend is (obviously) in need of assistance. He has bitten off more than any six people could chew—so it’s not so strange that what comes out of his mouth is sometimes garbled.
Let me say quickly what I think he is trying to do here—so that you will understand what kind of “assistance” I intend to provide.
–First of all, it is worthy of note that he has bungled this blog badly. Noteworthy because, in general, I know of no one who is better with people than Collins. Through our long years together I have seen him win over complete strangers time and again—Arab taxi drivers, French restaurant waiters and high school geometry teachers—when I was completely at a loss how to even begin. So, as I say, it attracts one’s attention that he has done so badly here what he ordinarily excels at. Let’s call it the spit-in-the-eye aspect of ‘Family Matters.’
–Secondly, when I think of the humiliation he has brought down upon himself I can’t help but recall movie scenes of Nazi prison camps: just prior to “selection,” the Jewish inmates were required to run naked around the grounds in order to demonstrate their fitness to further serve their masters. It seems to me that Collins is doing something similar here. He is exposing himself in an almost obscene way in order to show his readers that no effort in the pursuit of his goal (putting Humpty Dumpty back together again) is too shameful; he will refuse no service, however demeaning. Let’s call it the spit-in-the-wind aspect of this blog.
–Lastly, a short story. And a confession. About family and what “matters.” When my mother died, I did not return to the States for her funeral. I had been there to see her just a few weeks before her death, we had said our provisional good-byes—and I was willing to let them stand for a final good-bye as well. Of course, not without some guilt…but when one is separated by an ocean from loved ones, one learns to swallow guilt like some foul-tasting childhood medicine. Several weeks later, though, I had the most unusual dream. In the dream I met my mother. And sobbed—wailed, really—tears of loss and regret. We kissed each other a hundred times: big blubbery kisses of love and apology. And then she smiled on me—blessed me, as she did every day of her life with me–and went on her way. Well, my dream is a kind of model for ‘Family Matters.’ Collins has provided a psychic place where all can meet—and share tears of separation and longing and memory and communion. And he is first in line to do so. Let’s call it the somewhere-over-the-rainbow aspect of this site. This space—‘Family Matters’—is a kind of church, a place to celebrate the pilgrimage we have undertaken together. Whether you come here to worship—or only to gawk (like the tourists in Notre Dame, oohing-and-ahhing at the stained glass windows)—I would suggest that you at least take off your shoes. For this is holy ground.
My “assistance,” then, will be in the form of interpretation—another one of Collins’ gifts, that he has apparently abandoned here. I won’t say: “What Tom meant to say was….” I will simply provide him a sounding board from time to time so that he won’t flail about so much, striking out blindly, as he sometimes does, against the unresponsiveness he feels. And I will attempt to provide those of you on that side of the pond a deep appreciation–shared or unshared–of our mutual friend.
And again I say, “Peace on earth to men of goodwill.”
Janet Jenkins Martin
December 30th, 2009 at 6:52 pm
Stumbled upon some familiar names - Collins and Wall…so blessings to the both of you from “across the pond” as you would say.