The graynation concept spreads! Here's the first paragraph (called the "lede" in journalism) from New York Times film critic A.O. Scott's review yesterday:
"I've reached the age when my children sometimes ask, 'Dad, what were things like in the olden days, when you were a teenager?' They mean the 1980s, and it's not so easy to explain. The ancient past never is."
I can see A.O.'s tongue bulging in his cheek when he refers to the 1980s as "the ancient past;" I would wager his yearbook pages haven't even started to yellow yet. To our kids, though, it's all relative. They just know that their parents came from a time from before they were born, and what a strange place it must have been. To them, any graynation story is unique, whether it dates from the 1980s or the 1950s (when I was a teenager) or the 1890s, when my grandmother migrated from Belgreen, Alabama, to Haskell County, Texas, in a covered wagon.
I would ask my grandmother, Susie, about those days, and she told me unique stories about that move, and what Texas was like before I was born in 1943, but she never wrote any of it down. It's not so easy to explain, as A.O. says. The ancient past never is.
I think we owe it to our kids, and their kids, to try. Hence, graynation. In the effort, we may well learn something about ourselves. "We shall not cease from exploration," wrote T.S. Eliot, "and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." And we provide our kids bragging power: "My dad shelled pecans with his grandmother, whose parents were alive at the time of the Civil War!"
True story. I sat at the dining room table and shelled pecans with a slender, gray-haired woman whose eyes were icy blue, whose parents and grandparents told her stories about living in the Civil War, and life in the United States in the early 1800s. I could touch a living hand that had touched those living hands. I think that is an awesome transmission.
And through Susie, I experienced something first-hand about 1800s rural life. In all the time that I knew her (she died in 1977), Susie was a country woman living in the city. I, my mother, and her two sisters lived with Susie in her house. My mom and dad were divorced shortly after I was born, and Susie (he says) had a role in it. But that's another story. Right now, I was about to say that Susie saw her mission in life as keeping the men in the fields. I watched her cling to that life, through choice, or lack of choice, even though the men had become daughters who worked in downtown offices, and one small boy who was under foot most of the day and once managed to set the dining room curtains on fire.
There were two real men in her life, two sons, whom I never saw until I was three. One was fighting in the Pacific, the other in Europe. The newspaper every day had battle stories all over the front page. I remember the tension, wondering whether we would win or lose. I didn't worry like they did about the two men. I didn't know who they were. They both made it back, and I was amazed by them, coming into my house. They were huge, of a gruff humor, and totally different from the women.
Susie kept food on the table and everybody healthy. Dinner was on the table at 5 p.m., ready for the girls when they hit the door. I hated it. If it was August and 105 outside (no air conditioning), Susie still poured the milk at 4:45, and if we ate at 5:05, the milk was warm. For health maintenance, she had two principle remedies: Vicks Salve, and black salve. Kids, I've told you the Vicks Salve story a hundred times, so I won't repeat it here. And the black salve is another story altogether (so many other stories). Susie could mend and chop wood and run a ringer washer and kill a chicken in the back yard in the morning and have it fried on the table for dinner. She was the toughest person I ever knew (Dan Fouts, the fabled Chargers quarterback, comes in second). She was a trained schoolteacher, a Methodist, and a church-goer. When we didn't go, she listened to the services on the radio. She never learned to drive.
She was gentle to all people, except, maybe, sometimes, her own. Her daughters could be spiteful and high-tempered. Sometimes she would chase them with a broom. Getting older, I would have liked to learn more about the relationships in that house, but there were some things that nobody would talk about. As the graynation people know, it gets complicated.
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