🎧 237: For years, I tried . . .

Preface

FOR YEARS, I tried to avoid writing this book. If the choice had been mine alone, I would never have written it. Recently, however, events beyond my control forced me into writing it and forced me, in the writing of it, to confront a moment that ranks high among the unsettling moments of my life, the moment that, I think, marked the end of my overextended egocentric period and so, perhaps, the end of my youth: the moment when I learned that my maternal grandparents were involved in — virtually the creators of — the animated erotic jewelry industry.
     The discovery came — actually it was forced upon me by two informants — on the day of my grandmother’s funeral, three years after my grandfather had died. That morning, May Castle, my grandparents’ friend of longest standing, gave me a box, inscribed to me in my grandmother’s hand. Inside the box were twenty-two pieces of erotic jewelry and erotic sculpture. With them was an account, just a few words, written by my grandmother, of my grandparents’ involvement with erotic arts and crafts. I read it quickly, breathlessly, but I had many things to attend to that morning, and I didn’t have much time to think about what it meant before I left for the Episcopal church, where the funeral service was to be held.
     Sitting in a pew at the church, half attending to the service, I began to consider my new knowledge. You can imagine how it affected me. It shook me. Not only had I never known anything about this interest of my grandparents’, but the whole notion was so far removed from my idea of them — their personalities, their interests, their talents as I supposed I understood them — that I couldn’t even imagine where it might fit. Eroticism, I realized with some embarrassment, had never played an important part in my mind’s eye’s version of my grandparents’ lives. How I had misjudged them! I had belittled them, diminished their lives in a way that I wouldn’t have wanted mine diminished. Eroticism certainly played an important part in my life; how could I have been so thick-headed and arrogant as to ignore the likelihood that it was as important — or, to judge from the evidence they had supplied me, even more important — in theirs? I was ashamed of myself. I was also flabbergasted. I was struck, with a suddenness and force that felt like a physical blow, by the realization that even now I was wrong in my understanding of them. I had, in the course of an hour or so, come to think that eroticism had “played an important part in my grandparents’ lives.” That couldn’t be anywhere near the truth. If what my grandmother had suggested in her note was true — and the carvings she had included testified that it was — my grandparents had played a leading role in the development of the erotic imagination of their times! It was much too much to handle all at once, at such a time. It was as if my grandmother had in her posthumous letter introduced me to two people I had never met before, people who had been hiding inside my grandparents, people with genitalia. Who were these people? Why did my grandmother want me to meet them?
     When I was a child, I called my grandparents “Gumma” and “Guppa.” Originally, the names were just mispronunciations of “Grandma” and “Grandpa,” of course, but as time passed they became terms of endearment, and I continued to use them long after I was able to say “Grandma” and “Grandpa” clearly. I shifted, uncomfortably, to something like “Gram” and “Gramp” for a brief time during adolescence, when childhood leftovers embarrassed me, but I soon returned to “Gumma” and “Guppa,” and once back never strayed again. I think that underlying my persistent use of my childhood names for them was an assertion that my grandparents were, and would always remain, the Gumma and Guppa I had known when I was a child. My Gumma was large and soft, generous, enduringly pretty, pleasant, devoted to the domestic arts, the provider of huge beige-and-white meals — biscuits, boiled onions, chicken, cream sauces, and potatoes prepared in a thousand ways, the best of them a German potato salad that filled the house with the pungency of vinegar and bacon — an amateur logician and mathematician, occasionally a repairer of jewelry, a reader of best-selling novels, mostly historical ones. My Guppa was small and quick, apparently always either amused or puzzled, a talented and hard-working salesman, a tireless home handyman, an amateur inventor, a happy tinkerer. Now, after so many years, and after it was too late, Gumma was, it seemed to me, asking me to get to know them as someone else entirely, as what other people called them: Herb and Lorna.

In Topical Guide 237, Mark Dorset considers Names, Pronunciation of and Growing Up (Slowly, in an Autobiography or Memoir) from this episode.

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