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11. Ancestors
- University of Wisconsin Press
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219 11 An ces tors At the end of the 1990s, I spent an hour every week in a brown- stone par lor floor in the West Thir ties, not far from Port Au thor ity bus ter mi nal. The apart ment be longed to Ca role, a trans plant from Iowa a few years older than my mother. She was a ther a pist who spe cial ized in al co hol ics and crea tive blocks. I be longed to the sec ond cat e gory. After only a few months, it was clear we had broken all the rules, crossed the boun dar ies of the therapist-client re la tion ship. One day I told her about a week end spent with my father roam ing Con nec ti cut ce me ter ies. When she heard the name of the grave stone we were look ing for, she leapt from her chair—“Ste phen Noble!”—re turn ing sec onds later with the scroll of a fam ily tree in her hand. She’d rec og nized the an ces tor, and within a few min utes had fig ured out that we were seventh cou sins twice re moved. After that we dropped the pre tense of ther apy. Hav ing found in my father not just a re la tion but one who shared her ge ne a log ical ap pe tites, she grew pro tec tive of him and lost all inter est in the ex hu ma tion of pa ren tal dys func tion. If it came up, she changed the sub ject. Most of the time we drank cof fee and talked about nov els, Civil War his tory, old photo graphs, and the proper way to hang a cur tain. I kept pay ing her, though—I re fused to stop be cause I liked the guar an tee she’d be there every week, a pot of cof fee on the trunk in front of the couch. Al though she was no good at re la tion ship prob lems or money trou ble or fam ily drama, she had a knack The Return 220 for get ting me back to work: “Clear the deck,” she’d say. “Paint your cup boards, clean your stove. Start fresh.” All fa mil iar ad vice, very mid west ern, the kind of ad vice my mother would have of fered if I had let her. On other sub jects she was equally wise. Once, when I went on too long about my fail ures—the slug gish days at the desk, the lack of money—she gave me a hard look and said: “But you’ve lived in this city for more than ten years on lit tle money; you’ve found places to live and made friends. You’ve sur vived here. Isn’t that suc cess?” Ca role was un apol o get i cally do mes tic, un apol o get i cally nos tal gic. Along with her coun sel ing busi ness, she kept a base ment shop where she sold da guerreo types and old post cards from the nine teenth cen tury. We both liked to talk about the Mid west: her sum mers liv ing on her grandparents’ farm out side of Des Moines, and my own child hood on Lake Win ne bago. “The prob lem with most peo ple,” Ca role said, “is they don’t grow roots.” Once she even dem on strated her phi lo so phy. Slid ing from her chair, she got down on her knees and pressed her hands into the car pet. “Like this. You need to dig in.” At the same time, she had the American pas sion for the road, and in the years be fore she moved to New York with her part ner— a mys ter i ous man who some times peeked his head through the slid ing french doors— they’d moved all over the coun try in an old RV trailer, driv ing from town to town, from road side antique shops to county fairs, buy ing photo graphs and cook ing their meals out under the stars. Ca role be lieved in signs and por tents. She be lieved you could change your life. It was Ca role who en cour aged me to go to Lake City in the first place, and...