Memory and memorials

Sunrise this morning

The nights are getting longer here in Portugal, and we have had quite a bit of rain, which is not the cold endless rain of England, but wondrous and welcome and leaves shiny puddles for us on our daily walks, and tiny spears of grass happily leaping up everywhere, and beauteous clouds!

Being close to soixante-dix (70) I kind of watch my memory, and find, like Billy Collins in his wonderful poem Forgetfulness  , that there are things that slip away, that hide in some corner of the databank of my brain, only to pop out unexpectedly when I'm lying in the bath late at night.  

(Soixante-dix is french for 70.  In our Portuguese classes we are learning numbers, and like English and Afrikaans and Spanish, the other languages I know, Portuguese numbers follow a pattern: cinquenta, sessenta, setenta,  ... (fifty, sixy, seventy etc..  But French is so strange, they make you do calculations for some obtuse reason.  So 70 is sixty + ten, and it gets even weirder, because 80 is quatre-vingt!  Four times twenty!  And ninety is quatre-vingt-dix!  Four times twenty plus ten!  And it gets even worse but I won't go on.  Apparently it is based on the vigesimal or base-20 system used by both the Mayans and the Celts.  Like four-score in ancient texts? )

Information Age

Most of us are probably ADD nowadays, due to the constant technological bombardment, especially by the little computers we carry around in our pockets messing with our brains, so forgetting things is fairly normal, but I do find words not coming to me when I want them to quite frustrating.  

Pregnant with the twins

I think it all began during my first pregnancy at 23, and there is substantial evidence that pregnancy and motherhood affect our brains because of a variety of elevated hormones in pregnancy, and little sleep for years after.   ( I LOVE sleeping for 8 or 9 hours every night now!)

The years of being a student before I had my first child is a time bathed in sparkling light, my own Belle Epoque, when I was drunk on knowledge, philosophy, language.  And my clever mind could memorize poetry and remember vast tracts of books and images in order to write copiously from my memory for numerous 3-hour exams, quite easily and well.  

Emma aged 1.

When Emma was a year old I went back to university to finish my post-graduate teacher's diploma and really struggled with studying and exams.  It was like hitting an unanticipated brick wall at times during those last six months.  

Our lives consist of epochs, and generally we stumble from one to the next, mostly unaware how our lives will change but taking the grand leap into each epoch with faith in the NEXT THING.  How else to explain all the strange things we do as intelligent animals?  

Having my children was a different kind of golden, and each epoch has momentous events.  I'm in the autumn or winter epoch right now, which is so strange how suddenly it comes upon you.  

And memories are like that too, I think.  We have sunny memories of happy endless days, ecstatic blue-skied moments, and charred memories of terrible hours, agonising seconds that stretch forever, hurtful times.  We can somewhat choose which happy things we remember, but the sad or hurtful or terrible things seem to stay stuck fast in some room of our minds forever.  

The other morning Emma sent me a video that had popped up on her phone courtesy of Google, of the little granddaughters singing Happy Birthday to a cousin, when their speech was still quite newly fashioned.  It is only really nine or so years ago, but time is a funny thing.  We both had ready tears watching the sweetness of those little characters, who are now gawky tweens.  

Little Jess on my lap

Children grow so fast in adult time, and although mine are all most definitely adults, their little gossamer-haired heads, their perfect features and their cuddly bodies climbing on to my lap are still perfectly real in recollection.  

I never want to forget those memories.  I want to die before I don't know my loved ones.  

My mother and grandmother were exceptional ordinary women.  As most of us are.  Women do so much in history but are mostly not memorialised with statues or days or streets named after them.  So many men became famous because they had all the time and space in the world to themselves, they didn't have to be bothered with all the washing and childcaring and ironing and cleaning and making and cooking and all those other present participles which women are still doing every day.  

Before good contraceptives, and still sadly in much of the world of today, women just fell or plummeted into this role of primary carer/cook/washerwoman etc. just because they had sex, voluntarily or in-.  And their lives as creatives, their potential for study, for future professions, just came to an end.  

Granny Gracie with her two
small daughters, Joan and Nora.

An article in the newspaper about
the first women in the WRAF. 
Grace Hewitson was my
grandmother.

My British grandmother went to Art School in the early 20th century, I have her portfolio, such exquisite draftmanship and painting ability.  She played the violin, was one of the first Royal Airforce women to work in signals at Suttons Farm Airfield during the First World War in England, was well-educated and beloved of her siblings, her father, an esteemed major in the Army, and her spirited mother.  A South African RAF (Royal Air Force) pilot on leave during the war was invited to her parents' house, quickly proposed marriage, and soon after the end of the war, off she went to South Africa, where she immediately had two daughters, longed for her mother and siblings, never played the violin again, never drew another line. 
 

My gorgeous mother with Timmy

My mother Joan, Gracie's eldest daughter, married an RAF mechanic whom she met when his torpedoed ship was diverted to Cape Town during the Second World War, and then Joan promptly had a daughter herself, and then miscarriages until a son, and then accidentally, years later, me.

My mother with all of us.

She was incredibly intelligent and mathematically sharp, helped my dad study, teaching him maths, gettin him through all his exams to become an electrician and then a refrigeration and airconditioning engineer.  

When I went off to school she found a job at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, working for the professor of Pathology.  He discovered her profound intelligence and empathy and enquired about putting her forward for a scholarship  to study medicine!  But it was rejected because she was too old, the board who decided such things thought it would be a waste.  She was 39!  

I remember my granny, she was a small woman with delicate hands, the best giggle, who spent a lot of her life in pain, but who was always interested in us and loved us.  I loved her.  

I remember my mother.  She still lives inside me.  She was a large beautiful complicated woman with a huge heart who spent much of her later life in pain, but always loved greatly, her children, her friends, all her relatives, and also clouds in a field, seagulls, England.  I still love her.  I still miss her grand encompassing love.  

Great-grandmother Nora

But I don't know my great-grandmother, except that her name was Nora and she looks rather lovely and serious in old sepia pictures, and I know she was most likely a good mother because her three surviving children were allowed to become themselves.  

Plaque at St Stephen's Garden of Remembrance.

So there is a brick in the garden of remembrance at the little church in Pinelands (the same one where I rejected god as a small child).  My sister arranged for it to made and engraved and installed,  remembering our parents.  But that is my mother's only memorial, and she is mentioned under my dad, and in 50 or so years no one will know who she was.

We are these beings, these vivacious spirits, with all our magnificent feelings and passionate experiences, our desperate challenges and substantial successes, our writings, our photos, our paintings, our many many meals made and dishes washed up, the scraped knees bandaged, the hurt child restored, the manifold makings of the enormous landscape that is a life.  

And all this will be gone and unremembered, along with the majority of people who have lived on this earth.  And maybe this is as it should be, millions of lives lived well or poorly, over and forgotten, generation after generation, after all we are just animals like hummingbirds, elephants, fruitflies.  

But I will light a candle tonight for all my women ancestors, known and unknown, a small memorial.   

Georgia!

And here is a large charcoal drawing after Georgia O'Keeffe's flowers.  She was also a "badass", as one of my sons once noted after walking enchanted through an exhibition of her long prolific life. 

She made a whole lot of charcoal drawings which I had not seen before, and although I am not so fond of charcoal, I did enjoy the messy-handed drawings I made this week.