Part II, Day 11: On Inheritance

From today's reading from Your True Home, the Everyday Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh:

Our Inheritance.

We contain all the beautiful qualities and actions of our ancestors, and also the painful qualities.  Knowing this, we can try our best to continue what is good and beautiful in our ancestors, and we will practice to transform the violence and pain passed down to us from so many generations.  We know that we practice peace not only for ourselves, but for the benefit of all our descendants.

I used to say to people that my sister, Mira Bartok, and I are lucky because we got some of the best traits in the family gene pool, and none of the worst.  There are writers and painters and pianists and skilled gardeners and farmers and bishops and rabbis and tailors in our ancestry, but in that mix, often from the same people, are afflictions like paranoid schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, alcoholism, arrogance, and cruelty.

Hans Herr: Do I have this man's DNA?

Lately I've been reconsidering our inherited ratio of violence and pain to beauty and goodness.  I know now that the generations of people who came before us also had a lot to teach us about endurance and strength and faith, and I'm grateful for what they gave us.

Take Hans Herr, for example.  He's the patriarch on our father's side.  Born in Zurich in 1639 and persecuted for his religion, he came to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania in the early 18th century and founded the first Mennonite Church in North America.  He was 70 when he and his fellow bishops and church members and family fled Europe. They sought the help of William Penn when they looked for land, and when they arrived in the New World they had to leave behind all their worldly possessions and many of the people they loved.

Seventy must have been old in 1710.  Imagine starting over in a new country at that age, having enough faith in your beliefs to go to jail for them, to risk death for them, to leave your country for them, and then finally to travel by sea to a place where no one speaks your language, or truly wants you there, or comprehends your fondness for excessive facial hair.

Our father, his great-great-great-great-great (give or take a few) grandson, tried to disavow his ancestry and become a new man.  He told our mother that he was the descendant of Hungarian gypsies, and well into our thirties my sister and I believed that we were half-gypsy.  We would probably still believe this were it not for our half-brother from our father's first marriage, who hired a detective and came looking for us and gave us a peak at the family tree.

We had to wonder: why had our father created a more romantic story for himself?  What was he running from, and why?  His novel, Journey not to End, opens with the narrator being liberated from the camps in Belsen. What drew him to that story instead?

What's not to like about theologians and, as it turned out, Indiana chicken farmers?  In a way, Mennonites and poultry seemed as exotic to me, when I heard all this, as Hungarian gypsies.

The other story our father told, but not to us as small children, was that he may have been the product of his mother's illicit affair with a Jewish man, a traveling salesman.  He liked to tell his friends he was half-Jewish, perhaps to distance himself from the heavy Protestantism.

But maybe he really was the love child of the wandering Jew?  I'll never know.  If he is, I guess I don't get to keep the top Mennonite as my patriarch.  I live among the Amish, and it would be nice to have something in common with them.  Either way, I still get chickens.  By all accounts, our father grew up on a farm.

My father's life itself, like the novel's title, was a journey not to end: it took him from Indiana to Chicago to Los Angeles via somewhere in the European war fields, and then it ended with him dying alone, at age 60, in an apartment in New Orleans, with nothing in his possession but his VA card, five suits, and maybe (we'll never knew for sure) his upright typewriter, unfinished manuscripts, and passport.  It's highly likely that Hurricane Katrina carried his bones from the unmarked pauper's grave where he was buried off to sea.

I found out about Hans Herr, and the half-brother's family tree, just before I got tenure, when I was looking to make a life for myself up here in the North Country, a poor farming county in the far north of the empire state.  To go from thinking of myself as someone with a genetic predisposition for wandering to someone with deep roots in this land, from before it was even a nation . . . It was a marvelous thing to chew on, and I haven't finished yet.

That's me as a baby with my mother pointing to my favorite painting of my father's.  My mother and I called it "The Schmoes"

Philip Smith, master tailor.  Now: What was his surname before Ellis Island?

My young parents

On my mother's side in Belarus, there were rabbis and tailors.  My second-cousin's son Michael just sent us this picture of our great-great grandfather in his atelier.  Maybe I've added an extra "great," I don't know.

My grandmother, who was born to the Smiths, worked as the credit manager at a chemical company in Cleveland--probably one of the companies who opened their effluence straight into the Cuyahoga River and caused it to set fire.

She was good with numbers, good with bookkeeping, both of which are skills I lack.  She also played the piano, like her father had played the violin, and that gift was passed on to our mother, who would have been a concert pianist if she hadn't been stricken with mental illness and lost everything she had. 

Mira Bartok, Norma Herr, and me

But now, when I look back on our mother as a young woman trying to balance motherhood with being a wife to a writer and painter--a man who also had a serious drinking problem and who had made up a romantic life for himself to run from what he saw as drudgery, Middle American drudgery--I can't help but admire her for fostering in us, her daughters, a passion for the arts.  And while I resented our father for abandoning us to pursue his dream--wandering and writing and painting--it gave me a map for a radical way to live that wasn't readily found in Cleveland, Ohio, circa 1970s.

Who else, but from our parents, did my sister and I inherit the crazy belief that literature and art were more important than wealth and security?

Among all the crimes I accused my parents of in my worst hours, back when my mode of being was to define myself against the family I had come from, was never that they told me not to have dreams, to just go settle for something, anything, rather than pursue a life that challenges me to try and fail and pick myself up and risk failure again day after day. 

One of the ironies in our story is that my sister thinks, now, that there actually were gypsies in our ancestry.  Our mother's father, who always told us he was the youngest of 13, and was born in Macedonia, and dropped out of school in third grade to go to work, may have been from a family of Roma.  The brothers and sisters all set sail from different ports around the Mediterranean.  They all have different stories on their passports about their origin: that they are Turkish, or Bulgarian, or Greek, or Macedonian, the last of which is hybridy anyway.  I don't know if we'll ever know who these people really were.

Our grandmother married our grandfather because she was pregnant, not because she loved him.  She lived in fear of this crude, angry man who kept a rifle in the attic that we all thought he might use on us.

Chickens from Deep Root Farm

But now, when I think of him, I remember how he confessed to me once that he had a lifelong fear of chickens.  He said that when he was a child working on a farm, a chicken tried to pluck his eyes out.  I picture him now as a young boy cowering in the chicken coop, and I want to go into that coop and protect him.

Our father told our mother that his parents expected him to become a stockbroker or a minister, and that he worked his way through college plucking chickens.

Actually, we later found out, he served in World War II, and he went to college on the GI bill.

When I re-read Thich Nhat Hanh's meditation on inheritance, I think of all the different people and qualities that have come through my blood.  Story-telling in many forms.  A love of music and literature and painting.  Fear.  Religiosity.  Stubbornness.  And a love/hate relationship with poultry.

Sometimes I wish I could channel some of these people and their talents on command.

My sister plays fiddle and piano and harp and ukelele and my claim to fame, musically, is that when I dance around the house by myself, I seldom miss the beat.

In home ec, when we switched from cooking to sewing, I got a D.

Zoe and me, photo by Tara Freeman

In my family line there is also sweetness and generosity and tenderness.  My maternal grandmother's mother, I was reminded again recently by family friends, was the most kind and loving woman that anyone in their circle knew.  I only met her when I was a baby and I'm glad our lives intersected, however briefly.

And from my grandmother to my mother to both my sister and me is a straight line, a great passion that hasn't weakened with each generation and if anything, has grown stronger.

A mad love for dogs.

Part II, Day Seven: Bunnies

Chapter One
The first time I knew for sure that Zoe was a real animal, and not just a cute puppy, was when she killed and ate the bunny.

That June there were so many of them running around the yard, it was like they were having a convention.  She liked to chase them, but even though she was fast, I thought she would never catch one.

And then she did.  Before I knew what was happening, she had one about the size of her head in her mouth.  She was mercifully fast.  I heard it scream, but then it was dead.  Down it went, down her gullet.  She ate that thing, whole.

I gaped in horror, crying her name, but unable to move.  It was like I was watching The Exorcist.

Later she found a little warren of them underneath the iris patch.  I tried to stop her, but that would mean not letting her off the lead in our yard.  She pulled them out when they were the size of mice and ate them, one by one.

I used to love rabbits as a child and I wanted to keep one as a pet.  It made me sad to see those bunnies die.

In time, I got over my horror.  Knowing about Zoe's taste for bunny meat helps me remember where she came from.  I call myself her "mommy" because I'm over the top in love and love makes us do crazy things, like anthropomorphize our pets.  But she reminds me when she can that she is the descendant of wolves.

And she reminds me that dogs are predators, not prey, just like we are, but with different dining habits.

Although when she was very small, she would look up at the sky at circling turkey buzzards and pull at the lead hard, asking to go home and into the house where she felt big.

Chapter Two
The first diet I ever went on was at the end of a giant feast on Easter Sunday at my grandparents' house.

We had just moved in, and it was awful.  Our mother had lost her job as a secretary and I was trying to get her diagnosed at the public hospital.  My sister and I liked the back yard of the house, but we missed our freedom.  Our grandfather yelled at us all the time, and we never knew what would set him off.  Our grandmother would cheer us up by taking us downtown to Cleveland's shiny department stores to buy us cute outfits.

The message: some people you just can't do anything about.  The mentally ill mother.  The bullying grandfather.  But a cute outfit will do wonders to lift your spirits, especially if you are slim and pretty and look good in everything, as our grandmother told us we did.

Grandma was Jewish, but we weren't allowed to observe Passover.  She was an atheist, and Grandpa was Greek Orthodox.  He went to St. Theodosious church, near the Cleveland West Side Market, and we celebrated Easter by coloring eggs, getting baskets filled with chocolate eggs and a bunny and jelly beans, and then we would all sit down to a roast lamb dinner that he would cook with garlic and potatoes, with green beans on the side. 

I was 13 and I weighed 108 pounds.  I decided that Easter that I was fat.  I decided that those eight pounds had to go, that 100 had a better ring to it.

I didn't starve myself, but I started counting calories.  If I managed to get through three meals that added up to no more than 1,000 calories, I was "allowed" to have some of the chocolate Easter rabbit that had been in my basket that year.  I made that thing last for weeks.

In the end, I only lost about three or four pounds.  There really wasn't much to lose.

The best part of this period in my life was that I taught myself how to do yoga in one of those 30-days-of-yoga books that made the rounds in the seventies, and I stopped drinking soda for life,(which we Midwesterners called "pop"), and I learned that the thing to do when you are anxiety-ridden from your dysfunctional family and you can't just go in the living room and kick everybody out so you can do yoga is to take your dog on a long walk.

Ginger, the collie/shepherd mix, was my best friend.  I told her all my secrets, every one of them, including the names of the boys I had crushes on, and the kind of TV family I wished I could bring her up in.

We would walk up Grapeland Avenue, and then over to the elementary school.  On the way there, during the era of the diet, I would stop and flirt with a boy named Phil Lowell.

I was with my friends from Cleveland last summer and we found a picture someone took--who had a camera then? and why would they take our picture?--of me talking to Phil Lowell.  I was struck with three realizations.  One, that he was a very handsome boy, who looked more like a man than a boy at fourteen: tall, dark, and handsome, with a strong jaw, he was probably shaving already.  Two, that I was just right, not fat at all, and not too thin, and I looked more Russian than I remember, because back then I was trying to look like Marcia Brady from The Brady Bunch.  I looked a lot like my grandmother, whom I loved, but who couldn't protect my sister and me from all the chaos in our lives.  And three, I was sad, very sad, that whoever took the picture didn't include the dog.

I was a textbook case of a girl who needs something, just one thing, in her life she can control, but I'm glad now that I didn't lose too much weight.

What saved me was that chocolate bunny.

Chapter Three
Yesterday I went to the grocery store and bought a white plush bunny for Zoe to play with and a chocolate bunny for my husband and me.  For Sunday lunch we're having roast lamb.  It's not that I'm capitulating and returning to my grandfather's traditions, which were heavy on the meat and fats, but more that my husband has made me appreciate his, and the smell of a lamb cooking no longer makes my stomach turn.

Dr. Thompson, the vet in Vermont who does acupuncture, told me that in addition to eating more turkey and fish, Zoe should eat rabbit.

I laughed when he told me that.  And I told him the story about Zoe's killing spree.

When we lived in France, my husband and I ate rabbit every week for Sunday lunch.  It was our favorite meal.  We'd cook it with cabbage and white beans and pancetta and mustard sauce.  I've heard it's also good with olives and pinot noir.

If they sold it here in the North Country, I would buy one and my husband and I would split it with Zoe today.

Maybe we can send Zoe out to hunt for us, but I doubt she would share.

Zoe sees the white bunny on the carpet and gets very excited.  She loves plush toys wildly.  I take many pictures of her chewing it, trying to dismantle it, but it doesn't have a squeaker so she loses interest soon and wants to go outside.  Out into the yard, where animals that run and hide and make noises live.

At this stage of my life, I'm very grateful for all my appetites.  I hope they never fade.

And I'm grateful for Zoe's too.

Namaste, gentle readers.  And may you feast on many tasty things today, whatever your traditions tell you are good to eat.

Day 76: On Sister Love

On this day, February 21, thirty-five years ago (plus a tad more), long before she was known to the world as Mira Bee, a baby named Myra Jean was born.

She had an older sister who was very cute and very nice and very smart, but also just a wee bit bossy.

The two little girls had a mother, who was a musical genius, and a father who was a talented painter and novelist.

Unfortunately, the father was an alcoholic and the mother suffered from paranoid schizophrenia.

The two sisters banded together to become their own island of girl-mightiness that could withstand the storms ahead.  They wrote stories and poems and plays.  They drew all day until their fingers grew knobby with callouses.  They climbed trees.  They read and read.  They turned snapdragons in the garden into talking creatures, and they sought out verdant places where they would time-travel back to a bucolic imaginary land and life they called Olden Times, where the older sister was always the prairie mother making them big pots of soup, and the little sister was always the dog or the horse.

Little Myra Jean grew up to be talented in too many things to list here: playing the piano, fiddle, ukulele, and harp; writing poetry, memoir, Facebook missives, radio pieces, kids' books, and short stories; speaking foreign languages (especially Italian) and giving commencement speeches, cooking all kinds of cuisine that features olive oil, gardening, keeping orchids alive, growing apple trees (the secret, she reveals, is to ignore them, but the avid orchard keepers in her community get jealous), painting, drawing, and illustration, salsa dancing, throwing a great party, making friends, being an amazing and inspiring stepmother to two lovely girls, and fixing broken stuff, including rare Italian pottery, the girls' mother's glasses, and relationships that seemed irreparable.

As a child she was an animal first--not just a horse and a dog, but the mythical beasts from Russian fairy tales and Icelandic myths, and other creatures her older sister has forgotten.  On the property of their rental in Indiana, where they lived before and during their parents' divorce, little Myra Jean found three dead rabbits and she carried them back to the yard.  Picture a small three-year-old girl like the one pictured here hauling these carcasses back to their house.  They may have been bigger than she was.  Did she want to adopt them as pets?  Or bury them?

Although she was bitten by a dog once, when she and her sister were walking to elementary school in Cleveland, she is a lifelong lover of dogs.  She would grow up to become her sister's dog's aunt.  At first she would resist referring to herself as her dog Sadie's mom, especially when Sadie's identity in the animal kingdom was unclear (some thought she was a reindeer, for example) but once she did, there was no turning back.

Like her immature older sister, she just liked watching her dog snap her head toward her in an eager way when someone said in a really sappy happy excited voice, "Where's Mommy?"

She has survived many things: her parents' divorce, poverty, her mentally ill mother's attacks, the bizarre behavior of her mother's father (hoarding, gun-worship, insults, meanness), the industrial Midwest before the Clean Air Act went into effect, the disco era, the Reagan presidency, really bad medical care that included an unnecessary lung operation and unnecessary surgery for carpel tunnel, a divorce.  She was in an airport trying to get home at the onset of the Gulf War.  She fell on the ice and suffered a concussion, then, before she had healed, she was hit by a giant truck, suffered brain trauma, had to relearn the alphabet, still has nerve pain, gets exhausted and overwhelmed, but wrote and illustrated a beautiful, heartbreaking, life-affirming memoir called The Memory Palace that is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.  In the writing of that book, she helped many people face their troubled pasts.  Including her older sister.  She brought attention to the still much neglected and misunderstood plight of the mentally ill and the homeless.  She has raised money to issue journals to all the women who seek refuge in the same shelter our mother did, and her advocacy work has inspired many people to donate money and time to this shelter and probably others.  And through her blog, Mira's List, she helps people from all around the world believe in themselves as artists.

Never once through her many misfortunes did she feel sorry for herself.  Even after the accident, she would visit her older sister and offer to plant her flowers for the balcony on the studio: snapdragons, of course, were always in the mix.  She would focus herself completely on the task at hand, modeling mindfulness, even when her brain was in disrepair.

She has frequently been swarmed by bees.  We're talking a freakish degree here.  Like a biblical plague of locusts.  What do these bees have against our Mira Bee?  Do they object to the way she has used their name?

She has the sense of humor of an eleven-year-old boy.  Because her husband, Douggie Pee, does too, their relationship works.  But sometimes there are too many jokes about biological functions for the other people who have to watch.

If she and her sister had more time to spend together, they would go back to France and relive the vacation they shared there this past May.

They would eat more cake.  If fact, if it were possible to just fly there for the day, this is the place, in Rouen, in Normandy, where they would be sharing Mira Bee's birthday cake.

If Myra Jean/now Mira Bee could have anything in the world, it wouldn't be great fame.  She would like a little more wealth, but only so she can carry on as an artist and thinker and all of the other things listed above.  But beyond that, it would make her very happy to have her own baby echidna, the egg-laying mammal that people affectionately call a spiny anteater.  (The fact that something spiny that eats ants is described as such with affection is the key to Mira Bee's universe.)  Mira thinks she looks like one.  But she also thinks her sister looks like one.  She would also be happy with a puggle, spawn of the echidna.

To have a sister is a rare thing, a lifelong source of learning, a songbook, a source of shtick, of codes and private references and gags and secrets and dreams.  Her older sister is always dreaming that the two girls are going somewhere--last week it was on a rowboat to India--and that she has to protect the younger one from harm. And yet having a younger sister--this particular younger sister--saved the older one's life.

Happy birthday, Mira Bee, and happy sister love to all of you so lucky to have one!