« Busted!!! | Main | Chandra and Her Georg – Part I »

Friday, 07 September 2007

In Search of My Father’s America

By Marti

Lately these days, I seem to come across the word "place" in my readings. Place blogs, sense of place, ebb and flow of place.

I grew up as a first generation American in a small town in central California. The place of my parents was Spain but in 1923, my father decided to seek his fortune in the United States as did so many immigrants.

In 1932, my mother also left Spain to become a seeker of a new place and arrived on Ellis Island. Both of my parents used to tell stories about traveling throughout the United States. They would tell of the many places that they had seen either by work or by glances out of a train window.

"Who sent you?" my father would say as he laughingly told one of his countless stories of all of the jobs he held in America. He never said the United States, always America. "Who sent you" was in reference to his job as the keeper at the door of a speakeasy in California in the 20’s. He had memorized the phrase because he knew very few words in English.

My father was a contract shepherd whose first job was in Idaho. He tended sheep, at times on foot with his dog and other times, on horseback. He later moved to Nevada, again as a contract shepherd.

In Utah, he worked for a time in the copper mines but after hearing about the climate and the vastness of California, he decided to seek his fortune in the golden state. In California he plucked chickens, guarded the front door of a speak-easy, made cheese for a local creamery, served in the army from 1940 - 1941 and finally worked as a janitor at my high school, the local bank and the drug store in my hometown.

"I ate a lot of oatmeal and bread," my mother would say as she told stories about boarding a train from New York and riding it all the way across the country to California to work in her sister and brother-in-law’s French laundry. Mother had a sponsor with her until Chicago and then she was on her own.

She crossed this country with no knowledge of the English language and relied on smiles and gestures to mime what she would like to eat on the train. She would say, "I arrived in California with a lop-sided view of the world." Her lop-sidedness was due to a permanent crick in her neck from gawking at the incredible and, at times, strange scenery that met her eyes whenever she looked out the train windows.

Giving up the place of your birth to begin a new life took such strength and courage but both of my parents kept the memory of their first place in their hearts and by recreating holiday traditions, cooking special foods and playing many flamenco records on the old phonograph.

My father would say that he had given up one country for another but all countries are special in their own way. "Spain is a great country, but America has so many interesting places that I wish I could see," he would say. This was an especially poignant comment for we never owned a car when I was growing up. This did not deter us from our yearly vacation to San Francisco because we traveled by train, an adventure in the 1950s.

As my husband and I were getting ready to enter a new phase in our lives, semi-retirement, my father’s words came into my head: "America is full of so many interesting places." When we sold our California home in 2002, we took my father’s words to heart and decided to travel and see some of these places - sort of living the RV lifestyle without the RV.

We undertook this journey with the hope of discovering "a sense of place." Our intent was to live in several places, getting a feel for the geography, the land, (we garden everywhere we live), the people and if we were very fortunate, a sense of the way of the community.

From the tropical splendor of Maui, to the snowy mountains of Washington and now to the heat and beauty of the Texas Hill Country, we have lived in many different places. What I have discovered about a sense of place is that you can travel the country, seeing, touching, tasting, talking to people, participating in their community events and come to know something about each one.

The most important discovery of all, however, is that place truly resides within your heart and soul and memories.

Posted by Ronni Bennett at 02:30 AM | Permalink | Email this post

The comments to this entry are closed.