‘Mom study history. Whole kingdoms have been brought down because of someone marrying the wrong person. that’s all I’m saying. just please bear that in mind. We were raised a certain way. we came from a certain breed. Why am I the only one that remembers that?’ ‘honey you think too much about that. beaver is happy. don’t pester the boy for that. don’t ever talk this way to your brother.’ ‘mom he eats white bread and yellow mustard for gods sake….’ I’m an idiot I think… ‘honey your bother would eat like that no matter who he married… things like that are not important to Beaver. He doesn’t have the same tastes as you. there is nothing wrong with that. Look at his soul dear. He is more than all of that. He is a real gentleman. You need to see that…’
I do see it. I am just reacting to an unconscious resistance to being common. Probably because our family never lived up to our own upbringing… when our family came to America they came with a lot less than what they left behind. But they did this in order to find freedom and even more prosperity, as so many millions of people did and still do. This was how it was when you left your homeland and came to America I am told. But still they did well. Until the stock market crash of ‘29. My grandfather’s father lost everything and shot himself at the age of 35 leaving his wife and seven children behind. A weak man, and a coward. But still, my grandfather, the youngest, managed to climb back up and became very successful. Ironically he worked for the United States government for forty years as an attorney and judge. If he could only see me now. he would be chasing me around the house trying to hit me… But the family never regained the prestige or the resources that they had back home. that’s the point.
I will never forget my grandfather and grandmother sitting us down one summer day when we were children and showing us our great great great — I don’t know how many generations back — paternal grandfather’s name in the encyclopedia Britannica. This did not mean much to me at that age because I assumed that everyone had family in those big black books…. but later it became something very important to me. He was a famous mathematician who discovered many very algebraic formulas and theorems that are used and taken for granted today. then my grandmother showed us the name of her great uncle also in the Britannica who was a famous composer and musician who is not much remembered today except in scholarly circles. Again, I did not quite get the importance of this until much later. We were too young… but I gathered that it meant something…