Intervista Me Mucho
I interviewed my paternal grandfather over a week's time when he visited my home in Los Angeles at age 92. I wrote a family memoir based upon that. I wish I had asked him so many more follow-up questions before he flew off to Italy where he passed away several years later.
Nowadays I query my fictional characters to add to their dossier, and still there are unanswered questions. No matter the homework, characters remain as much a mystery as real people. If we're lucky, one way or another, we develop a sense of what's true for a character and what's not.
Last year, I posted a Father's Day blog consisting of of questions from my four daughters. It turned out to be a memorable family experience on all sides, more conversations than interviews - as it should be. We generated way more material than could be summarized here in a post.
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| Zoë Tosi |
One comes from my youngest, Zoë, an artificial intelligence researcher who resides in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Zoë: 1) Was there a sense of community when you were growing up? A sense of a neighbourhood or knowing the people around you? It seems today, that no one knows anyone else or rather if they do it has nothing to do with where they live and there generally isn't any sense of solidarity.
UT - Objectively, my memory is yes. I remember a childhood with my extended family in Boston - Sunday gatherings, neighborhood stores, weddings, feast days and so forth. But I remember feeling like a stranger when my parents moved to 1940s Los Angeles, a patchwork city of people from somewhere else who kept to themselves in their tract houses and automobiles.
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| Alicia Sammons |
To what extent does this quote from Oscar Wilde excerpt from The Decay of Lying resonant with you?
"People tell us that Art makes us love Nature ... that it reveals her secrets to us ... My own experience is that the more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. What Art really reveals to us is Nature’s lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition. Nature has good intentions, of course, but, as Aristotle once said, she cannot carry them out. When I look at a landscape I cannot help seeing all its defects.")
UT - I see Wilde's point, and far be it from me to counter the master, but I disagree. Not that nature of "perfect" - whatever that human conceit means... I find neither perfection or imperfection in nature, just what is. Virtually all of the ugliness I see is man-made, as is the manufactured evils of postmodern society.
Being in a forest grove or on a beach, or viewing the stars unfiltered from a mountainside taking in the vastness feeds me and makes me acknowledge something I can't label other than with some reference to an eternal consciousness beyond and yet within me. I can't clarify this further, but like "nature," it just "is" to me.
Our family Q&A continues, but I'll pause here at the limits of this blog post and of what I can comprehend. Like they say: It's all in the process.
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Comments
And you are so right about the fact that we never find out enough about our grandparents' histories when we have the chance. It never occurred to my grandparents to talk about their lives to me as a child and by the time I began to be interested they'd all died.
Great post. I look forward to the next instalment of family Q & A.