Tradition

Returning to Portugal for a visit has both the effect of skipping forward and watching only the high points of a movie (I’ve now reached the rueful age when I can ask my mother “tell me which of my elementary school classmates died since I’ve last been here) and the effect of re-examining my childhood by viewing it as an adult and an outsider.

To an extent I suspect I was always an outsider. Like many of my SF/F writing and reading breathren I was a stranger in a strange land, forever moving amid familiar landscapes that might be dear but didn’t become any more understandable for knowing them very well.

But now I am faced with various things that would probably never have come to mind had I stayed and lived here – things like, now that I visit as my own sons are almost grown – realizing that things I viewed as imutable and the laws of the Persians and Medes, were not only not “family traditions” as something my parents decided to do and continued doing because they liked them, but also that they have not continued once I – the youngest child by 9 years – was out of the house.

Nothing particularly important, mind, but things like cleaning the house from top to bottom on Friday. Or holding Sunday dinner for all the various spread-out relatives in my parents’ house. Or…

It occurred to me today to wonder whether that’s part of the difference between first borns and second and subsequent children. I don’t know about you, but when we got married, we were making it up as we went along. I will say even now we’re not very good at falling into a routine, witness the fact we move every seven to eight years. But after we’ve been in the Front Range for almost 20 years, we’ve developed favorite places and places we do so and so at at such and such a time.

My first son probably still remembers when we were learning our way and making things up as we went along (possibly. He was born six years into our marriage) but to his brother these partake the way of imutable and sacred laws.

A lot of the certainties of my childhood seem to have been the same and my grandmother’s death, and my moving away by themselves changed a lot of them.

It makes me wonder about larger societal traditions and what I could romantically call “the memory of a people.” My sons, despite my explaining things, have picked up some funny notions about their ancestry and their ancestry’s habits from what I don’t say but do. And what I do is often dictated by circumstances that have long since ended.

I’m reminded of a story my host mother told me. There was a woman who had learned from her mother to prepare leg of lamb. She cut it in half lengthwise, put it in two separate baking dishes and cooked it according to what she thought was family tradition. One day her mom was visiting and the woman assured her she was still preparing leg of lamb the old way. As mom watched, she split the leg lengthwise and her mom said “What are you doing?” “Well, mom, I’m breaking the leg in half, as you always did.” To which the mom says, “But that’s only because I didn’t own a baking dish large ENOUGH.”

I wonder how many of the day to the day routines that become “the way we do things” are the result of not having dishes large enough. Which is why I like to reexamine things periodically, and make sure I haven’t become ossified. Even if it disturbs the children.

*Crossposted at According To Hoyt*