The Provocation of Memory
New Year’s Day Evening 2010
Our here on the tundra where I live people plunge into an icy lake on New Year’s Day
Wearing only a swimsuit they dive into the icy waters….and emerge teeth chaterring and exhilarated….. And so it is with memory…memories…I dive into the past, ready to withstand the shock or realization that all this happened and now I also emerge exhilarated from deep waters to tell you these tales of long ago and how they relate to the moment I am in.
On New Year’s Day evening we are taken to Vienna via a beautiful program on TV. The minus below temps and the unyielding frozen ice mountains lining each side of the street are forgotten. We leave to visit my mother’s place of birth via TV show and memory.
There in the Music Hall where my mother sat we have a camera’s birds eye view of the richly carved balustrades and opulent statues that rest like indolent cosmic being, gods of some sort high above the audience and musicians. There is a sculpture of a marble woman that the camera rests on….I see it as a muse and a good omen for the New Year. Yes, I will let this marble muse of an indolent wise woman guide me as I gaze upon the televison set and plunge into my mother and father’s memories. Surfacing with a few insights of how I came to be watching new years now in 2010.
Strauss’s ineffable melodies weave around us. Light, nostalgic and beautiful. The house is full. Once upon a time, a long time ago my mother sat there, in a box or in the audience listening to these very melodies. She grew up in Vienna and was born there in 1921. Don’t ask the exact date It’s cloaked in mystery. Every time we check in at the hospital or the clinic we just go along with the fake one her mother put on the birth certificate so long ago .It’s a long story…………we don’t try to change it.
My mother was not raised with religion. She says proudly that she was raised on Opera. So this was her life. To sit listening to music under the ornate ceiling of the decorated Music house in Vienna.
The music cuts away to let Julie Andrews show us the amazing desserts of Vienna.
Demel’s. We see mouth watering close-ups of desserts made with precision. Cakes coated with chocolate frostings that are folded around like the rich cloak one would wear to the Opera. Small round cakes have chocolate dribbled over them. Colorful sugar concoctions are folded around and around…then pressed into a mold that transforms into
An array of candies. So that’s how they are made!
Whipped cream and history. Violet candies made as they were for an empress. Rich fruited delights for a king. Layers of sweets and then glasses of champagne.
Then as the music plays we are treated to the rich spectacle of the beautiful dancer in her frothy red dress dancing on toe among the marble statues of the art collection. Perfection and art and dance marry. Dancing, dancing along. Later a flock of pink cotton candy ballerinas perform on point with their handsome dancers lifting them up high. We too are lifted up high and forget winter.
At last the Blue Danube is played with such depth and emotion. As the music swirls around us we take a visual journey down the Danube….watching its eddies and flows with aplomb…..watching…as it moves through the small towns of Austria that my mother pronounces with ease and the perfect German inflection.
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My dad leans over the table, his false teeth slightly ajar as he tells us in great detail how he packed fresh tomatoes in crates for 10 cents an hour. He was walking along somewhere in Jacksonville east Texas with his brother Dan carrying a Tom Swifty book in his hand. A man called out…”do you want a job?” and so he gave the book to his brother and started working. 10 hour days in the hot shed, packing tomatoes. All day long he watched to make sure the crates were packed just right. Finally he got paid. He looked in the envelope and saw three crisp new dollar bills. Three long days of work. My dad thought they were fake and started to cry…His mother told him they were new bills and that he had earned his weeks pay.
One story leads to another. He’s a Texan you know. He relates a tale of how our great grandfather lived in Tennessee. He had three huge bales of cotton that he wisely put in a dry cave. After the Civil War was over he sold those bales of cotton for a fortune and moved to Texas. He was the father of L. R. Futrell, my grandmother’s father.
So, I say to my father. I am sitting here listening to tell me this because of three bales of cotton that stayed dry in a cave, that did not mold?
And I tell you now, it’s all true and it all happened. My mother later heard beautiful music played on the radio as the Nazis took over Vienna in 1938. She and her brother have recently published a small memoir that describes that time and their subsequent lives. There’s a family photo of her in a white dress, hands at her side as everyone around her salutes the Nazis in a large public address.
My dad left the South and later spent time in Japan. Those stories fill him as well. My parents met in California and later moved here to the Minnesota tundra.
There I sit watching the Vienna Music program, holding onto the tales of my dad’s upbringing in East Texas and my mother’s upbringing in Vienna. I am the weaver of stories, the teller of tales. I am the listener, the spinner, the one who takes the raw material of these lives and spins it into a story for you. I sit here on the humble bench by the lowly fire listening and imagining. Letting memory fill in the story line between the tales I hear. Come reader, listener, vagabond of tales. Come, come sit down beside me here in the old stone cottage on an island far away. An island of memory so far away in time. I relate these fragments of stories to you. I am the teller of tales, the weaver of stories. That’s all I have are stories…
I use cotton thread to pass across the shuttle of tales today. As I weave these stories a Viennese waltz plays. I am here to tell you these stories because of three bales of cotton stored in a dry Tennessee cave. I am here because of three bales of cotton stored in a dry Tenneesee cave.
