Search of the Family

Mrs. Ferguson Calamity Day/Blizzard Bag Assignments 1-3English X

� of �1 8

Assignment #1 Target: Read closely, looking for what an author states explicitly vs. what is implied

1. Read Jane Howard’s essay, “In Search of the Good Family. Write a single sentence reaction to your understanding of what she’s talking about.

In Search of the Good FamilyInNn HoweRo

Jone Howord (1935-1996) wos o iournolist who wrote obout the chonging Amer-icon scene. A frequent contributor to [ife, the New York Times, ond Smithsonion,she is the outhor of Pleose Touch: AGuided Tour of the Humon Polentiol Movement(19701, A Different Womon 1197311, Fomilies (19781, ond Morgoret Meod: A Life(1984). The following selection, odopted for Atlontic Monthly from Fomilies,explores the chorocteristics thot moke conventionol fomilies ond new kinds of fomi-lies meoningful communities.

ftall it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family. Whatever you\-*call it, whoever you are, you need one. You need one because you are

human. You didn't come from nowhere. Before you, around you, and presumablyafter you, too, there are others. Some of these others must matter a lot - to you,and if you are very lucky, to one another. Their welfare must be nearly as impor-tant to you as your own. Even if you live alone, even if your solitude is elected andebullient, you still cannot do without a clan or tribe.

The trouble with the clans and tribes many of us were born into is not that theyconsist of meddlesome ogres but that they are too far away.In emergencies we rushacross continents and if need be oceans to their sides, as they do to ours. Maybe weeven make a habit of seeing them, once or twice ayea\ for the sheer pleasure of it.But blood ties seldom dictate our addresses. Our blood kin are often too remote toease us from our Tuesdays to ourWednesdays. For this we must rely on our familiesof friends. If our relatives are not, do not wish to be, or for whatever reasons cannotbe our friends, then by some complex alchemy we must try to transform ourfriends into our relatives. If blood and roots don't do the job, then we must look towater and branches, and sort ourselves into new constellations, new families.

These new families, to borrow the terminology of an African tribe (theBangwa of the Cameroons), may consiqt either of friends of the road, ascribed bychance, or friends of the heart, achieved by choice. Ascribed friends are those wehappen to go to school with, work with, or live near. They know where we wentlast weekend and whether we still have a cold. fust being around gives them a pro-visional importance in our lives, and us in theirs. Muyb. they will still matter tous when we or they move awayi quite likely they won't. Six months or two yearswill probably erase us from each other's thoughts, unless by some chance theyand we have become friends of the heart.

Wishiiig to be friends, as Aristotle wrote, is quick work, but friendship is aslowly ripening fruit. An ancient proverb he quotes in his Ethics had it that youcannot know a man until you and he together have eaten a peck of salt. Now a

283


� of �2 8

284 cHAPTER 6 . coMMUNTTY

peck, a quarter of a bushel, is quite a lot of salt - more, perhaps, than most pairsof people ever have occasion to share. We must try though. We must sit togetherat as many tables as we can. We must steer each other through enough seasonsand weathers so that sooner or later it crosses our minds that one of us, Godknows which or with what sorrow, must one day mourn the other.

We must devise new ways, or revive old ones, to equip ourselves with kinfolk.Muyb. such an impulse prompted whoever ordered the cake I saw in my neigh-borhood bakery to have it frosted to say "Happy Birthday Surro gate!'I like to thinkthat this cake was decorated not for a judge but for someone's surrogate motheror surrogate brother: loathsome jargon, but admirable sentiment. If you didn'tconceive me or if we didn't grow up in the same house, we can still be related, ifwe decide we ought to be. It is never too late,I like to hope, to augment our fami-lies in ways nature neglected to do. It is never too late to choose new clans.

The best-chosen clans, like the best friendships and the best blood families,endure by accumulating a history solid enough to suggest a future. But clans thatdon't last have merit too. We can lament them but we shouldn't deride them. Bet-ter an ephemeral clan or tribe than none at all. A few of my life's most tribally joy-ous times, in fact, have been spent with people whom I have yet to see again. Thissaddens me, as it may them too, but dwelling overlong on such sadness does nogood. A more fertile exercise is to think back on those times and try to figure outwhat made them, for all their brevity, so stirring. What can such times teach usabout forming new and more lasting tribes in the future?

New tribes and clans can no more be willed into existence, of course, thanany other good thing can. We keep trying, though. To try, with gritted teeth andgirded loins, is after all American. That is what the two Helens and I were talkingabout the daywe had lunch in a room way up in a high-rise motel near the KansasCity airport. We had lunch there at the end of a two-day conference on families.The two Helens were social scientists, but I liked them even so, among other rea-sons because they both objected to that motel's coffee shop even more than I did.One of the Helens, from Virginia, disliked it so much that she had brought alonghomemade whole wheat bread, sesame butter, and honey from her parents'farmin South Dakota, where she had visited before the conference. Her picnic was thebest thing that happened, to me at least, those whole two days.

"If you're voluntarily childless and alone," said the other Helen, who wasfrom Pennsylvania by way of Puerto Rico, "it gets harder and harder with the pas-sage of time.It's stressful. That's whyyou need support systems." I had been hear-ing quite a bit of talk about "support systems." The term is not among myfavorites, but I can understand its currency. Whatever "support systems" may be,the need for.them is clearly urgent, and not just in this country. Are there notthriving "me$i-families" of as many as three hundred people in Scandinavia?Have not the )apanese for years had an honored, enduring - if perhaps by ourstandards rather rigid - 6u5tern of adopting nonrelatives to fill gaps in theirfamilies? Should we not applaud and maybe imitate such ingenuity?


� of �3 8

HOWARD . IN SEARCH OF THE GOOD FAMILY 285

And consider our own Unitarians. From Santa Barbara to Boston they havebeen earnestly dividing their congregations into arbitrary "extended families"whose members are bound to act like each other's relatives. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.plays with a similar train of thought in his fictional Slapstick.In that book everynewborn baby is assigned a randomly chosen middle name,like Uranium or Daf-fodil or Raspberry. These middle names are connected with hyphens to numbersbetween one and twenty, and anytwo people who have the same middle name areautomatically related. This is all to the good, the author thinks, because "humanbeings need all the relatives they can get - as possible donors or receivers not oflove but of common decency." He envisions these extended families as "one of thefour greatest inventions by Americans," the others being Robert's Rules of Order,the Bill of Rights, and the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous.

This charming notion might even work, if it weren't so arbitrary. Alreadyeach of us is born into one family not of our choosing. If we're going to devisenew ones, we might as well have the luxury of picking the members ourselves.Clever picking might result in new families whose benefits would surpass or atleast equal those of the old. As a member in reasonable standing of six or seventribes in addition to the one I was born to, I have been trying to figure whichcharacteristics are common to both kinds of families.

1. Good families have a chief, or a heroine, or a founder - someone aroundwhom others cluster, whose achievements, as the Yiddish word has it, let themkvell,l and whose example spurs them on to like feats. Some blood dynasties pro-duce such figures regularly; others languish for as many as five generationsbetween demigods, wondering with each new pregnancy whether this, at last,might be the messianic babywho will redeem them. Look, is there not somethinggubernatorial about her footstep, or musical about the way he bangs with hisspoon on his cup? All clans, of all kinds, need such a figure now and then. Some-times clans based on water rather than blood harbor several such personages atone time.

2. Good families have a switchboard operator - someone who cannot helpbut keep track of what all the others are up to, who plays Houston Mission Con-trol to everyone else's Apollo. This rolq is assumed rather than assigned. The per-son who volunteers for it often has the instincts of an archivist, and feels drivento keep scrapbooks and photograph albums up to date, so that the clan can seeproof of its own continuity.

3. Good families are much to all their members, but everything to none.Good families are fortresses with many windows and doors to the outer world.The blood clans I feel most drawn to were founded by parents who are nearly asdevoted io what they do outside as they are to each other and their children. Theircuriosity'afhd passion are contagious. Everybody, where they live, is busy. Paint is

10

tYiddish, "exclaim proudly especially in boasting about a member of a family."-Eds.


� of �4 8

286 cHAPTER6 . coMMUNrrY

spattered on eyeglasses. Mud lurks under fingernails. Person-to-person callscome in the middle of the night from Tokyo and Brussels. Catcher's mitts, balletslippers, overdue library books, and other signs of extrafamilial concerns areeverywhere.

4. Good families are hospitable. Knowing that hosts need guests as much asguests need hosts, they are generous with honorary memberships for friends,whom they urge to come early and often and to stay late. Such clans exude a vividsense of surrounding rings of relatives, neighbors, teachers, students, and godpar-ents, any of whom at any time might break or slide into the inner circle. Insidethat circle a wholesome, tacit emotional feudalism develops: you give me protec-tion, I'll give you fealty. Such pacts begin with, but soon go far beyond, the jollyexchange of pie at Thanksgiving or cake on a birthday. They mean that you canask me to supervise your children for the fortnight you will be in the hospital, andthat however inconvenient this might be for me,I shall manage to do so. It meansI can phone you on what for me is a dreary, wretched Sunday afternoon and foryou is the eve of a deadline, knowing you will tell me to come right over, if onlyto watch you type. It means we need not dissemble. ("To yield to seeming," asMartin Buber2 wrote, "is man's essential cowardice, to resist it is his essentialcourage. . . one must at times pay dearly for life lived from the being, but it isnever too dear.")

5. Good families deal squarely with direness. Pity the tribe that doesn't have,and cherish, at least one flamboyant eccentric. Pity too the one that supposes itcan avoid for long the woes to which all flesh is heir. Lunacy, bankruptcy, suicide,and other unthinkable fates sooner or later afflict the noblest of clans with anundertow of gloom. Family life is a set of givens, someone once told me, and ittakes courage to see certain givens as blessings rather than as curses. It surelydoes. Contradictions and inconsistencies are givens, too. So is the battle againstwhat the Oregon patriarch Kenneth Babbs calls malarkey. "There's always malar-key lurking, bubbles in the cesspool, fetid bubbles that pop and smell. But I don'tput up with malarkey, between my stepkids and my natural ones or anywhere elsein the family."

6. Good families prize their rituals. Nqthing welds a family more than these.Rituals are vital especially for clans without histories, because they evoke a past,imply a future, and hint at continuity. No line in the seder service at Passoverreassures more than the last: "Nextyear in |erusalem!"A clan becomes more of aclan each time it gathers to observe a fixed ritual (Christmas, birthdays, Thanks-giving, and so on), grieves at a funeral (anyone may come to most funerals; thosewho do declare their tribalness), and devises a new rite of its own. Equinox break-fasts can be atleast as welding as Memorial Day parades. Several of my colleaguesand I used to rii'eet for lunch every Pearl Harbor Day, preferablyto eat some polit-

t-5

2Buber (1878-1965) was anAustrian-Israeli philosopher and Jewish theologian. -Eds.


� of �5 8

HOWARD . IN SEARCH OF THE GOOD FAMILY 287

ically neutral fare like smorgasbord, to "forgive" our only ancestrally fapanesefriend, Irene Kubota Neves. For that and other things we became, and remain, asort of family. . . .

7. Good families are affectionate. This of course is a matter of style. I knowclans whose members greet each other with gingerly handshakes or, in what passfor kisses, with hurried brushes of jawbones, as if the object were to touch not thelips but the ears. I don't see how such people manage. "The tribe that does nothug," as someone who has been part of many adhocfamllies recentlywrote to me,"is no tribe at all. More and more Irealizethat everybody, regardless of age, needsto be hugged and comforted in a brotherly or sisterly way now and then. Prefer-ably now."

8. Good families have a sense of place, which these days is not achieved eas-ily. As Susanne Langer wrote in 1957,"Most people have no home that is a symbolof their childhood, not even a definite memory of one place to serve that pur-pose . . . all the old symbols are gone." Once I asked a roomful of supper guests ifanyone felt a strong pull to any certain spot on the face of the earth. Everyone wassilent, except for a visitor from Bavaria. The rest of us seemed to know all too wellwhat Walker Percy means in The Moviegoer when he tells of the "genie-soul of aplace, which every place has or else is not a place [and which] wherever you go,you must meet and master or else be met and mastered." All that meeting andmastering saps plenty of strength. It also underscores our need for tribal bases ofthe sort which soaring real estate taxes and splintering familieshave made all butobsolete.

So what are we to do, those of us whose habit and pleasure and doom is ourtendency, as a Georgia lady put it, to "fly off at every other whipstitch"? Think interms of movable feasts, that's what. Live here, wherever here may be, as if wewere going to belong here for the rest of our lives. Learn to hallow whateverground we happen to stand on or land on. Like medieval knights who took theirtapestries along on Crusades, like modern Afghanis with their yurts, we mustpack such totems and icons as we can to make short-term quarters feel like home.Pillows, small rugs, watercolors can dispel much of the chilling anonymity of amotel room or sublet apartment. When we can, we should live in rooms withstoves or fireplaces or at least candlelight. The ancient saying is still true: Extin-guished hearth, extinguished family.

Round tables help too, and as a friend of mine once put it, so do "too manycomfortable chairs, with surfaces to put feet on, arranged so as to encourage a

maximum of eye contact." Such rooms inspire good talk, of which good clans cannever have enough.

9. Good families, not just the blood kind, find some way to connect withposterity.t'To forge a link in the humble chain of being, encircling heirs to ances-tors," as Michael Novak has written, "is to walk within a circle of magic as primi-tive as humans knew in caves." He is talking of course about babies, feeling themleap in wombs, giving them suck. Parenthood, however, is a state which some


� of �6 8

288 CHAPTER6 . CoMMUNTTY

miss by chance and others by design, and a vocation to which not all are called.Some of us, like the novelist Richard P. Brickner, look on as others "name theirchildren and their children in turn name their own lives, devising their own flagsfrom their parents' cloth." What are we who lack children to do? Build houses?Plant trees? Write books or symphonies or laws? Perhaps, but even if we do thesethings, there should be children on the sidelines if not at the center of our lives.

It is a sadly impoverished tribe that does not allow access to, and make muchof, some children. Not too much, of course; it has truly been said that never inhistory have so many educated people devoted so much attention to so few chil-dren. Attention, in excess, can turn to fawning, which isn't much better than neg-lect. Still, if we don't regularly see and talk to and laugh with people who canexpect to outlive us by twenty years or so, we had better get busy and find some.

10. Good families also honor their elders. The wider the age range, thestronger the tribe. Jean-Paul Sartre and Margaret Mead, to name two spectacu-larly confident former children, have both remarked on the central importance ofgrandparents in their own early lives. Grandparents are now in much more abun-dant supply than they were a generation or two ago, when old age was more rare.If actual grandparents are not at hand, no family should have too hard a timefinding substitute ones to whom to pay unfeigned homage. The Soviet Union'senchantment with day-care centers, I have heard, stems at least in part from thestate's eagerness to keep children away from their presumably subversive grand-parents. Let that be a lesson to clans based on interest as well as to those based ongenes.

Exploring the Text

1. Identiftthe sentence in which Jane Howard first states the thesis of her essay. Thennote the places where she restates her thesis, and discuss whether you find the rep-etition effective.

2. How do you react to the traditional terms Howard uses that refer to family (clan,tribe, kin, dynasty, blood, roots, patriarch) ?, How do you react to her more contem-porary terms (network, surrogate mother, support system, extended family)? Whatdo your reactions tell you about your own idea of family?

3. What is the impact of the sources Howard cites and quotes? Consider her allusionto Aristotle (para. 4), her conversation with "the two Helens" (paras. 7-8), herillustration from novelist Kurt Vonnegut ]r. (para. 9), and the quotations from theauthors Sgsanne Langer (para. 18), Walker Percy (para. 18), and Michael Novak(para. 2I)..

4. Examine thii various figures of speech Howard uses, such as a family member"who plays Houston Mission Control to everyone else's Apollo" (para. 12) and"awholesome, tacit emotional feudalism" (para.14). What is their cumulative effect?

5. What rhetorical modes does Howard draw on in the overall organization of heressay? Does one dominate? Explain.


� of �7 8

Assignment #2: Answer questions 1 and 2 (above) with a complete paragraph for each response.

Assignment #3: Write two-three paragraphs analyzing what point Howard is attempting to make and how she makes it.


� of �8 8

Documents

Search of the Family