Weather: We’re finally MELTING! Temps above freezing and no snow in the forecast for a while. Whee! Spring is on the near horizon!
The impetus for writing this blog is bittersweet. I’ve been doing some genealogy work, picking up where my dad left off. He had filing cabinets full of hard copy, handwritten correspondence and tons of badly Xeroxed documentation– just folder after folder of family info for relatives so distantly related I’m going blind just trying to follow the threads. Thank the benevolent deities my dad had impeccable handwriting, thanks to all his years training in drafting.
I’ve been slowly uploading his info into Ancestry, trying to get a digital record of all his work, before the paper starts disintegrating. I wish he were here to consult with on some members of the family (Dad passed in 2006), since there are a lot with similar names and multiple marriages, resulting in a lot of children. Ook. Very convoluted. Plus add in several countries worth of documentation: Denmark, Sweden, Finland, England etc. I don’t speak the Scandinavian languages and my mum, who is Danish, is helpful, but also not available 24/7 to translate. (Time to get my language skills shored up!) So, it’s been getting to be more of an effort the further back I go. Dad had records back to at least the 1500s on several lines of the family. Fascinating, and frustrating, by turns.
Anyway, I had just brought home some more documentation from my mom’s house to start compiling and filling in the blanks on some relatives, when I came across a folder for my dad’s father, known as Grandpa Ted. He passed in 1978, so I was only 11 years old at the time. My grandmother had passed when I was six, so I really never got a chance to discuss family stuff with them or have the kind of talks about their past that you could have when you were in your twenties and knew the kind of follow-up questions that could garner all the interesting facts.
So finding this folder was a gold mine of info. My Grandpa had worked most of his life as an engineer, but had found a second sort of career in retirement as a weaver. He made tapestries in wool thread, that he dyed himself, on a loom that he built himself. With little training, he produced several wall hanging rugs, often depicting the mission churches that populated the countryside in New Mexico, where he and my grandmother moved when he retired. He also did a few pieces for local businesses. I have several of his rugs hanging in my house right now. They’re beautiful and intricate and the work is so detailed it sometimes blows my mind.
We grew up surrounded by these rugs. My mom still has several hanging in her house as well. But I never really gave much beyond their surface beauty a thought.
In this folder, in the dusty box I retrieved from my mom’s house, there were articles about his work, interviews with him, at length, talking about how he got into weaving, how he created the threads and the loom. I could hear him talking in a long forgotten memory of the sound of his voice. I got, as expected, teary eyed.
You see, I keep finding these little bit of info about my family that I didn’t know growing up. Information that would have been a comfort and a support of my creative impulses, that always had made me feel weird and outside the norm with my peers and what was expected of me. I just found out recently that my grandmother’s father (My great grandfather) was a mason. My dad was always a fantastic graphic designer, although he made his career in business instead. My mom is an artist in her own right, although she will wave off any compliments on her work.
I think the reason I titled this piece “Missed Opportunities” is because I sometimes feel a deep seated anger at the course that my life has taken, and how all these people have left my life before I was ever able to ask them about things that could have helped me figure out that being an artist wasn’t weird, or a fool’s pursuit, or was perfectly understandable considering the sheer amount of DNA in my system that came from creative people. I look now back at my family tree and it is literally rife with musicians, writers, artists of so many different disciplines, yet I grew up believing that creativity was fine as a hobby, but not a serious pursuit. Missed opportunities, that still ended up appearing, repeatedly, as I keep coming back to art and creative outlets, because that is the only pursuit that brings me joy and peace of mind. So many resources that I can only access second hand now. I miss them all, and I can only hope that even if my path has been divergent and obstacle strewn over the years, I am doing their memories proud.
If you feel the need, in your bones, to make things, to create– DO IT. Start as a hobby. Try it on. If you’re meant to do it, you’ll keep at it. It’s taken me until I was in my 40s to find my niche, but I have it now. And I won’t let anymore time pass as I keep working. Will I be good at all of it? Probably not. But my grandfather was an engineer for most of his life, and ended up a weaver in his later years. Maybe I’ll follow in his footsteps, and be a late bloomer. Thank the gods for my dad’s diligent recordkeeping. It’s just given me a huge boost to pursue what I love. And for that, I will always love him.
Miss you, Dad. Miss you, Grandpa. Hope my work does you proud.