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Inheritances for Life
Families and the concept of family, cannot be illustrated by a simple
anything. No poem, essay or volume of volumes can contain my concept of it. And
while foolishly thinking that picking out a couple poems from an English
literature book can illustrate how I relate to my family they could never
encompass the broad spectrum of the evolutionary process that all families go
through each day of this ever-changing world. Family is a very important part of
each of our lives, intrinsic even, but more importantly it is what parents leave
with you, not just in a material sense, that too, but a spiritual one as well.
Spiritual, as in intangible, a way of living life, a way of relating to the
world around you, a schema for interactions with the outside world. I present
now two poems of deep interest to me, that like a picture, capture two key
aspects of what mother and father leave behind.
The first is literally a picture. A poem by Raymond Carver, "Photograph
of my Father in his Twenty-Second Year." "I study my father's
embarrassed young man's face/Sheepish grin" (1.2-3). I too studied a
picture of my father's face when he was younger. Old now, the grin remains there
in his deep wrinkles. The poet, Raymond Carver, remembers his father through his
words as he describes the picture "he would like to pose bluff and hearty
for his posterity/Wear his old hat cocked over his ear, stick out his tongue…"
(2.3-4). As if he sees his father moving in the picture, the father is alive in
his memory, though still trapped on the paper of Polaroid. I too once saw my
father move in a picture, instead of "lean[ing]/Against the front fender of
a Ford" (2.2) he was not quite sitting on a stump, his Distron cap askew
across his forehead. I could see my father walk towards me and smile that Cecil
grin.
Carver could see his father's hands that "limply offer the dead string
of perch/And the bottle of beer" (3.2-3). Here, something in Raymond
Carver's word choice fluctuates. A picture of a father, holding up fish is a
sign of vitality, of life, but for the poet, it is translated as something far
different. "Yet how can I say thank you/I who cannot hold my liquor
either/And do not even know the places to fish?" (3.4-6). There is grief
and resentment in these words, the entire last stanza denotes emptiness as he
recalls how is father's hands "Limply offer the string of dead perch"
(3.2). Dead is an empty word, and instead of "Carlsbad beer", which
seems fuller, the writer uses "bottle of beer" (3.3) resentfully,
suggesting the emptiness he feels. Perhaps his father felt outward appearance
more important than teaching his son how to hold his liquor or how to fish.
Perhaps the writer of this poem is angry with his father for leaving him nothing
he can rely on, his only inheritance that of the material kind. For all that, I
can only rely on conjecture. Fathers and mothers leave behind inheritances of
both material and spiritual natures. Just as this poet, Raymond Carver, knows
the emptiness of his fathers' spiritual inheritance, I know the emptiness of my
own. Though I may lack in one area, there is yet another that qualifies.
A poem, "Mother to Son," written by Langston Hughes belongs to a
class where spiritual inheritance is all there is to offer. "Life for me
ain't been no crystal stair" (1.2) perhaps Hughes' own mother, or someone
else he knew, but that mother leaves her inheritance of a completely spiritual
nature. "So boy, now don't you turn your back/Don't you set down on the
steps" (2.8-9) where one should persevere though all life's challenges and
keep striving and rising to the top. Life isn't pretty and often it's family
that keeps us going through places "Where there ain't been no light"
(2.2). In my case, it is my mother. Sometimes, I wonder which type of
inheritance is most important, spiritual or material. It's both, I realize, as I
see remembrances of my father and stay strong for my mother. Both kinds help one
through life, as both mother and father created life. Both enrich your life when
they are gone, however they know how.
It appears though, that the term 'enrich' is used loosely. In the poem,
"What the Gypsy Said to Her Children," I see an inheritance, the
mother in this poem embitters her children towards others, as an attempt to
separate herself and her family from the outside world. The gypsies have been
known for ages to place themselves outside a town, and isolate themselves from
the population in order to avoid assimilation, and keep the Gypsy customs
intact. They would do this in order to maintain the philosophy that they were
accepted nowhere, and justify why they had to live on the outskirts of town
"the crimson of our tents pitched/like a scream/in the fields of our
foes" (1.7-2). The Gypsy mother confirms that the town they live by hate
them and that one day they will overcome "we will carve them/out of the
granite of their hatred/with our own brown hands (1.15-18). Here the mother is
instilling not only anti-assimilation values, but hatred for others as well.
Unfortunately, this could happen to any one of us as normally we trust what our
parents are saying is correct and true, and generally don't realize that what
our parents have been telling us is nothing but fallacy until we are much older.
Works Cited
Cofer, Judith Ortiz. Bridges: Literature Across Cultures. New York,
McGraw Hill, 1994.
Hughes, Langston. Bridges: Literature Across Cultures. New York,
McGraw Hill, 1994.
Carver, Raymond. Bridges: Literature Across Cultures. New York, McGraw
Hill, 1994.
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