My Mother

Since I didn't post about my mother on Mother's Day, I thought I'd do so know.

My mother was a very interesting person, though she appeared to be very ordinary--certainly to me.  The earnest second child in a family of eccentric siblings, she skipped two grades in school, got her teaching degree from Oregon Normal School (now Western Oregon University), and returned home to teach in a one-room school east of Tillamook.  Then, early in the Depression, she met a dashing mill worker her father didn't approve of who swept her off her feet.  Within a few weeks she was married to a man who quickly became more demanding and less charming and who was not on speaking terms with her father.  Marrying Murl Peterson would stand as the single reckless act of a ruthlessly temperate woman.

Of course I didn't learn all of this until my mother was in her late eighties and my father was dead.  But it helped me to understand why she had always insisted that our family and her marriage were perfect and why I was not allowed to turn a heating pad past "medium."

Years later I tried to talk to both of my parents about how confusing my childhood had been, with a father who didn't seem to want me around and a mother who kept telling me how wonderful our family was. My father was surprisingly gentle and responsive.  He didn't understand what I was getting at, but he tried to engage me.  My mother, with whom I had always felt infinitely safer, would have nothing of it, kept changing the subject.

Bessie Priscilla Barber Peterson was an incredibly generous person and mother who managed to reserve a part of her soul from the domineering men whom she loved so deeply.

My Father

I don't ordinarily blog about highly personal matters, but here goes.

I had a great time with my father, Murl Peterson, until around the age of three.  I remember the exact moment that everything changed.  I told him he was the greatest dad in the world and, instead of telling me that I was the greatest kid in the world (which is of course what I was fishing for), he looked out the car window.  I figured there was something wrong with me.  Only much, much later, did I learn of the deep scars my father carried from his own childhood, of being tied up and beaten by his own father and constantly criticized for becoming a working man (mill worker, longshoreman, fisherman) instead of a minister.  My dad was the life of the party with lodge members, co-workers, and hunting buddies.  But family made him really nervous.  He carried around so much hurt and anger, and he knew that this anger could be very damaging.  So he tended to keep his distance from those he most loved--though he was great with babies and dogs.

I was too frightened of my father to challenge him directly, so I punished him in suble ways.  I became a vegetarian.  I steered away from carpentry or other practical matters that he excelled at--and wanted me to excel at--and focused on the arts and humanities.  One of my more diabolical digs at him was giving him a  very complex book on the history of black families in the U.S.  It was my way of saying "I am not you.  Deal with it."

But many years later, when helping my widowed mother to move, I found the book, saturated with tobacco smoke, the first half heavily creased.  My dad had tried to follow his youngest and most peculiar child for about 200 pages before giving up.  But he tried, even when I did not want him to.

Thank you, dad, and I'm sorry I didn't know you better.

Jeffrey Tayler, Facing the Congo

Of the many accounts of African travels I have been recently reading, the one I have most enjoyed is Jeffrey Tayler's Facing the Congo, as it is a wonderful example of how spending time in Africa can change one's reasons for being in Africa.

Tayler's began his trip--like so many people from the U.S. do--as a sort of self-actualization/adventure trek.  He was moving well into his thirties in the mid-1990s, had gotten out of the Peace Corps and found himself in Russia without a sense of direction.  Reading Naipaul's A Bend in the River convinced him that he, too, should explore the Congo River.  On the flight into Brazzaville, "my past fell away, as if into an abyss; ahead, for me, was only the Congo."

But it turns out that the Congo River Basin was a place where a lot of people lived, people with their own agendas who would make their own claims on Tayler.  This begins to occur to him as he is traveling up the river on a crowded boat packed with desperate people, people whom he befriends and occasionally helps, even as he keeps reminding himself that he must hoard his possessions--which represent more money than most Zaire residents will earn in a year--for the float down the river.  The best quote in the book, at least for me, is when a powerful friend of Tayler's tries to explain why the people on the boat believe that he must be up to something more profitable and nefarious than simply going on an expedition: "we Africans don't like adventure."

As the life of his guide and others continue to impinge on Tayler's life, the author eventually realizes that "I had exploited Zaire as a playground on which to solve my own rich-boy existential dilemmas."  He goes home transformed, but not in the way he had hoped for.

Anani School in Nima, a very diversse area of Accra, has a new website.  I had the pleasure of visiting Anani twice in November and came away extremely impressed by the dedication of Principal Kofi Anane (whose father started the school) and its teachers and students.  The students are from all over West Africa.  Many speak better French than English.  The school puts a great deal of emphasis on the arts, particularly music, and language.  Many of the students are from poor families and are able to attend the fine school--which sends the great majority of its graduates to junion high school and eventually on to high school--because of scholarships.  Here is a link to the website, which has more photographs of the school and information on how to support the fine school and its students.

http://www.ananischools.com/