Wednesday, April 20, 2011

It's done ... !

Sent the invitation list off today, and once the problem was pinpointed and resolved -- got into the rhythm of this great honor.

It was so helpful to have had a chance to tour the campus of the California College of the Arts on Monday; to meet a member of the board; lunch with faculty members; visit the studios filled with young artists at work.  It all fell into place, finally.

I feel far less intimidated by events, and am ready now for the celebration!

Yesterday at the request of the National Institute for Artists and Disabilities I led a delegation of service worker volunteers from Belarus and their translator on a tour of some of our park sites.  They were accompanied by their US State Department hosts.  It felt great to feel confirmed in my role as a representative of an important federal agency.  There is a system of national parks being created in their country so the interest in our park-in-development was high.  I felt a real connection with the group despite the language barrier; though that was minimal since several were able to cross over into English now and then with relative ease.

Were I to have a chance to live some of those early years over again, I'd surely want to have several languages at my command.  Though, as I recall, I had a group of visitors from Japan about six months ago, and that also worked out well.  Maybe what happens between people at the non-verbal level trumps verbal expression. 

Now that the pressure is off -- maybe I can just bask in the glory of it all, and try to get into my paper hat for the festivities on May 12th and 14th.

Maybe I should think about buying a new dress for the occasion.  I thought that I'd outlived the Age of Acquisition.  It has been years since I've felt the need to even think "fashion."  But there are some lovely things hanging in my closet that I've had no occasion to bring out for a very long time.  There was a time ... maybe just once more?

A woman can always gear up for fashion, right?

Maybe I'll try for a new hair style ... do you suppose?

That is if we can still find enough hair to style!  Maybe it's time to just cut it all off and face the truth that there are just so many hair follicles to each lifetime, and at 89 I've outlived my allotment.

Monday, April 18, 2011

Mystery solved ... .

and ... had it occurred to me to stop for just a few moments ... I might have known why I couldn't create that guest list for the commencement ceremony.  It was due two weeks ago.  After spending days pushing the envelope to the back of my desk -- and at one time slipping it into a drawer so that it would be out of sight.  I finally separated out the form for cap and gown measurements, slipped that into the envelope, and dropped it off in a FedEx box in the Civic Center.  But the request for the guest list was missing from the packet.  I agonized through an enclosed note, and felt terribly guilty, but nothing moved the task forward -- not one inch.

Then today in a casual conversation with Julio, the answer was revealed.  It was so obvious.  How on earth could I not have guessed?

I've outlived most of my guest list.  And the time to allow the sadness that this realization should have elicited was missing.  The brutal truth of that sentence was the thing that I couldn't face.  Small wonder that this simple task was so difficult to complete ...  .  It was a time to mourn, and something deep inside wouldn't allow me to move on until I'd done so.

On the drive home I stopped my car on a nearby hilltop where the din of afternoon traffic is lessened -- and let the tears flow unashamed; let myself miss all those who would have made that list; lingered over each name as it surfaced.  Up came my sisters, my parents, Papa George, my dear Aunt Vivian, Gil and Eve, my eldest son, Rick; Mel and Bill; close friends and relatives long gone, and with the tears something vitally important was released.   Tomorrow I can face what is now a mere clerical task.

I'll complete the list -- made up of my sons and daughter, grandchildren, nieces and nephews, those few remaining old friends, augmented by the many good younger souls who have become central in the living of these incredible recent years; new friends;  those with whom I work; some city staff people -- some very young folks for whom I'm "Miss Betty," (and loving it!), and then I'll move on.

If I could only remember to just stop and listen ... for my inner voice.

It's always there in the quiet.

Maybe I just need more stillness.

Sunday, April 17, 2011

 "Gate posts" -- my commencement address has arrived; clear and true ... .

Yesterday I woke to clarity and self-confidence.  Not sure what brought this euphoric state about, or even if one can rely upon its staying power --  but the words have lined up as if by magic.  I know their meaning, and that there is little need to try to organize them further.  Over the days to come -- between now and the day of commencement -- they will continue to sort themselves out and deepen.  They are relevant to this graduating class, I believe.  The title; "Thumb prints, gate posts, and bookends," is the key that opened the door into the connections not only to my past, but to the arts. As suspected, they were there all the time ... sitting behind my eyes waiting for me to settle down and listen to myself, maybe ... .

Funny; I hesitate to say much more about this lest this fragile wisp of security will disappear and the awful uncertainty of the past weeks will return.  And if I write them here ...  I'm not at all sure ... .

Maybe it suffices to say that those "gate posts" are key to one of the family stories about my great-grandmother, Mammå, a precious memory from childhood -- one of the many stories told by Papa George as we tied the beans to their poles and dug up the carrots and gathered the melons in that little kitchen garden after my parents and we 3 children arrived in Oakland from the New Orleans floods of 1927.

My impression of what romance meant was formed very early in childhood.  It was the Civil War story of Leontine sitting high in the branches of a pecan tree watching the Union soldiers marching past on that dusty road from Donaldsonville.  She must have been very young, perhaps 16 or 17, and from her photographs, quite pretty.  I knew that she was barely 5 feet tall, so the exciting tale of the soldier, Corporal George Allen of the Louisiana Colored Troops, stepping out of the line long enough to coax her down from her perch then re-joining the march carrying her on his shoulders for a few miles was not hard to believe.  He would later become her husband and father of their dozen or so children.  This would be the standard for love stories that Hollywood would have to meet in order to gain my little girl approval.  And it was true.


That the child, Betty, heard such lovely stories far earlier in life than those of the unspeakable brutality of slavery or the great Civil War that brought it to an end means that I had little awareness of my great-grandmother as being enslaved; nor do I recall making the personal connection until studying American history as an adolescent.  But the intellectual connections rarely mean as much as the emotional imprinting, and there is little memory of making those linkages.  If the elders of the family spoke of such times, they must have done so in creole, a patois of French that dominated speech in our homes during those years, and placed such conversations out of reach of the children.  Perhaps it was just too painful.  They could hardly have not been scarred by such memories, but I can't recall feeling a personal relationship to that tragic history until I was a young mother, when I, too, held it at arms length from my own children ... until the Sixties.

I do remember the dark stories told by Papa George when we were working together in the garden and he was talking to himself and letting me listen; which happened on occasion with some grownups.  Those stories usually involved the Ku Klux Klan and his younger brother, Uncle Albert, suddenly leaving under the cover of darkness for parts unknown -- never to return (the family later learned that he'd escaped to Kansas City); and the many bloated black bodies that floated up in the river from time to time -- bound wrists to ankles -- and the lynchings ... but the listening was terribly hard, and the nightmares ... .

I only remember MammÃ¥ as the family matriarch; celebrated by the elders as the aunts and uncles made up the delegation who would make the annual trip back to St. James Parish each year for her birthday.  Southern Pacific railroad family passes enabled this important family ritual to continue for decades since most uncles were Red Caps or Porters during the Great Depression. Wonderful stories about their childhood in that little cabin across from the levee of the Mississippi -- where my grandfather, and my mother and her siblings and so many others were raised -- fueled most grownup conversations and colored my childhood memories, and surely provided the foundation for how I relate to "the World."

Let me live with my gate posts a little longer before sharing... .

Photo: Leontine Breaux (Braud) Allen in midlife.
Bottom:  Uncle Herman Allen and his wife, Marie Gaudet Allen