Never let them holler calf-rope
Last night, I told Luke he could ditch the knife and fork and eat his barbequed chicken with his hands and it flashed me back to the big chicken dinners we used to have at my grandparents’ house in Danville, Virginia. We mostly ate fried chicken there, with corn pudding, snaps in fatback, and mashed potatoes with gravy. There was a white tablecloth and monographed silver knives and forks, but we ate the chicken with our hands, my grandfather always bullying us to eat more. “Come on now, just one little drumstick. Don’t tell me you’re hollerin’ calf-rope already. You hardly ate a bite.”
I tried to explain all this to Luke and was met with the glazed gaze of teenage incomprehension. And who can blame him? He’s never been to Danville. He never met my grandfather. He has no idea what it means to holler calf-rope. That world I once knew, the big, noisy Bourne clan gathered around the table at my grandparents’ house eating chicken with our hands, is a great big blank to him.
This has been on my mind since my father died in April. I’ve mourned his death, and that of my mother two years before, in all the usual ways, but my parents lived good, long lives. Their deaths aren’t tragedies. When my dad died, I was almost happy for him. He was ready to go, and he went on his own terms, without a lot of fuss and bother. Four months later, though, I’m left with an unsettling absence, a blank space in the canvas where once there was a bright dab of color.
It was the same when my grandfather died twenty-five years ago. He grew up on a farm in Whytheville, Virginia, driving a plow mule and hauling water from the well. His grandfather had fought in the Civil War. One time when we were driving around Whytheville, he pointed to Interstate 81, a vast six-lane freeway that bypasses the town, and said, “That used to be the road where I rode my horse to school.”
When he died, I thought: Where does all that go? The old farm is gone, the house, the plowshares, the dirt road where he and his friends rode their horses to school – it’s all gone, but where? What happens to the worlds we knew, the worlds that mattered to us, when we die?
It goes up the spout, is the short answer. But there’s a longer, more complex answer, too. After my mother died, my father spent two years transcribing and editing her diaries. The project seemed more than a little mad. Mom kept a diary off and on for fifty years and the thing runs to 800,000 words. But Dad was convinced that her nightly jottings would one day be invaluable to scholars of the late twentieth century and paid someone to transcribe the handwritten journals, and then edited them and wrote a glossary giving context on every person named in the entire journal. He also wrote a short book of his own, a biography of my mother using her journals as its primary text.
I have all this now, both the physical journals full of my mother’s handwriting, and the digital files of the journal, the glossary, and my father’s biography, and I’ve read enough of it to wonder at my father’s certainty about its historical value. Mom is never less than clear-eyed and thoughtful, and there are a few beautifully drawn portraits of our family, but at the end of the day it’s a daily diary of a woman who was very, very busy doing other things than writing for history. It’s a private document and should probably stay that way.
But I also get it. My mother was the love of my father’s life, and he didn’t want the world she knew and cared about to go up the spout. He spent two years reading and editing her diaries to make sure that, when he was gone, her memory wouldn’t die with him. He succeeded, too. The diaries now sit on a shelf in my living room and I have passed several long evenings reading my mother’s take on my own childhood. And if there’s any justice in the world, Luke, who has great memories of his grandmother, will hold onto the journals after I’m gone. She’ll be gone, but still present.
A number of the people reading this newsletter also knew my father and are invited to his memorial at the University of California at San Francisco on Monday, Oct. 2. The university will be holding a Symposium in his honor from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. that day. Before that, we will be holding a celebration of his life for family and friends from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. If you want to attend either or both events, please respond to this email and I’ll let you know the particulars.
Before Dad died, I had set up an event for my debut novel Blithedale Canyon at Book Passage bookstore in Corte Madera on Saturday, Sept. 30, at 1 p.m. That event is still very much on, and I’m looking forward to seeing you all there. And of course, you can still buy Blithedale Canyon at Book Passage or online at Amazon, Bookshop, or Indigo in Canada.
If you’d like to read my mother’s prose when she wasn’t writing in her diary, please pick up a copy of Somewhere a Phone is Ringing: The Collected Stories of Nancy Bourne. That book might just be the one that keeps my mother’s reputation as a writer alive for years to come.