After a bit of counseling from Mr Snarky and Best Tech Guy, I am doing something this semester that I never thought I would do. I am taking an online-only course. That’s right kids; I’m taking a class over the internet. I know people do this kind of thing every day, but because I am the biggest snob you know, it makes me feel like I am taking a correspondence course. Someone is going to send me a certificate in Shorthand at the end of the semester. Except not really. Because I am not taking the class for credit. I’m auditing it. I’m auditing an online-only course. Egads. What has the world come to?
It is an online-only course offered by Marjorie Garber (or rather, by Professor Garber’s TA). For those of you not rubbing shoulders amongst the name-dropping set in Cambridge, she is one of the two big Shakespeare thinkers at Harvard. Translation: she is one of the leading Shakespeare scholars of our time. And I am taking her class. Sort of. I am sort of taking her class.
I am taking her class because I am considering writing my dissertation on Shakespeare, and I thought it would be amazing to follow her course in my “spare time.” [Those quotation marks were inserted ironically.] The class is called Shakespeare and Modernity. It’s about how every age has considered and interpreted Shakespeare in a way that is relevant to its time. And so far, it’s delightful. She is delightful. I say that with a hint of surprise because I am always skeptical about a professor who lists her own book as required reading. But I have to admit, after two lectures and 20 pages, I am hooked. She had me at the Introduction. She says, “it is at least as true that the Shakespeare we create is a Shakespeare that has, to a certain extent, created us” (Shakespeare After All, 2005, page 3).
This particular quote may not seem earth shattering to some, but it struck a chord with me as I’ve been thinking a lot about the people in our lives who shape who we are. I’ve been thinking very specifically about my Sicilian grandmother. My feelings for my Gram have changed as I’ve grown up. The ways she has influenced me have also changed as I’ve grown. As I go through the varying stages of my life, I look back with a different perspective. Each new perspective lends itself to a new set of feelings that influence my behavior differently.
Hold on, let’s go back to Shakespeare. The quote—the quote means that Shakespeare, as our ancestor, told every story there was to tell. He wrote it all down: love and hate, war and peace, vengeance and forgiveness. His is the lens through which we interpret our own lives. And we do that because he came first. Something is Shakespearean because he wrote about it; he wrote about everything. Ergo, everything about our lives is Shakespearean. I have no idea what people did before Shakespeare explained the world to them. But I do know that, because of his ability to describe—not to judge, simply to describe—just about everything, Shakespeare has become a guide for life, in particular for understanding how simple deeds can have complex results.
On a personal level, this same argument is made when we talk about nature versus nurture, being the product of our childhoods or a product of our experiences, and when we talk about being like or unlike family members. We talk about being like or unlike our parents in particular, or in my case, a grandparent who was a major player in my life when I was little. My Gram was a dynamic woman. Tiny in figure, but enormously influential, there was never any doubt that she was in charge of all of our lives. We lived and died by her words. Her approval was like rain in the desert.
I’ve been thinking about her for many reasons that I will get to eventually. The connection to Shakespeare (I swear there is one) is this idea of reinterpreting our notions of a story, our remembrance of it, and its meaning as we grow older. Romeo and Juliet was my fav when I was a teenager (big surprise). As a woman approaching middle age, (ugh, that hurt to write) I am more inclined to pick up Antony and Cleopatra. The stories are the same at their core. One is about a teenage love affair and the other is about a middle age love affair. The latter is more relevant to me now as I am older. Because, let’s face it, teenagers are silly and because, let’s face it, I’m getting older.
We grow older and as we do, stories from our past take on different meanings. Shakespeare and my grandmother mean different things to me now as a grown up. I analyze Shakespeare for class. I analyze my Gram because, well, because I can’t stop myself. Cut to the action.
I heard from a friend the other day who chatted me up over instant messenger. He wanted to know why I haven’t written in so long. Mostly I’ve been too busy or too tired. I’ve been too busy because of work and too tired because of family drama, and not the good kind. My aunt died. It’s sort of a long and complicated story. Suffice it to say, she wasn’t related by blood. In fact, she hadn’t been married to my uncle for years. We hadn’t kept in touch since their divorce. But I was devastated. She was dear to me when I was a little girl. And I was gutted by her death. In my sorrow, I began to recollect and analyze every memory that floated, ambled, or forced its way into my head. A lot of those memories included my grandmother.
My Gram wasn’t nice to my aunt when she and my uncle split up. I loved them both and didn’t understand why they were getting divorced. I understood what a divorce was. I was a tween when they split; my parents split up years before. But no one explained to me why they were breaking up. No one let me call her up and ask her. My grandmother, in typical fashion, made up a story that placed all the blame on my aunt and spared my uncle any responsibility. Don’t get me wrong; I adore my uncle. He is wonderful in every way that matters to me. But as a grown-up person with a husband of my own and experiences and opinions of my own, I think it’s safe to say he’s not perfect. He musta’ done something wrong. But my Gram was having none of that.
She wasn’t just old school; she was old world. Her beliefs about marriage and parenthood were downright archaic. She took care of la familia. Had she been born a man, she coulda’ out godfathered Tony Soprano and Don Corleone. The Simpsons’ episode, The Italian Bob, I swear it was written about her. The part where Marge is translating, and she exclaims (something like), “Wait! Vendetta means…vendetta!” I have often said of my Gram, She invented spite. Seriously, they even do Ridi Pagliacci in the middle of the episode. (My maiden name is Pagliaccio for those of you new to the show.) Okay, the Simpsons thing may be a stretch. Let me put it this way, there was a gentleman that lived down the block called Old Man Genovese. (Yes, that Genovese family.) And even he was scared of my grandmother. He respected my grandmother, and he steered clear of her.
What did she mean to me, her oldest grandchild by 10 years and the first girl in her family? I remember thinking she was awesome. I craved her approval like a tulip needs the sun. I wanted to please her. I spent every summer before high school with her and the summer after my freshman year of college. We were very close, although in retrospect I didn’t know a lot about her life. She spoke Sicilian when she wanted to hide things from me, which was frequently. But that didn’t matter. I didn’t understand the words, but I intuited her power over her husband and three sons. She had an unmistakably commanding presence.
Then I remembered that she was kind of awful to me. She was awful to my mom. She was awful to my aunt. I could do no right in her eyes. Nothing I did was good enough. I didn’t try hard enough in school. I wasn’t a good enough daughter to my father. It was never enough.
And then I remembered when she died. I remembered all the people. Hundreds of strangers turned up during visiting hours at the funeral home. Scores of people sought out any member of her family—her husband, her sons, and her grandchildren—to tell us how she helped them, how she changed their lives, what she meant to them, how kind she was. They described a woman I did not know.
When my friend IMed me the other day, we got on the subject of social networking. He said he hadn’t spent any time on Facebook recently because all of his friends’ posts made him feel sick. He was “sick of wasting time on the site” and tired of “mentally filter[ing] out ‘stuff that doesn’t matter’.” And then he said, “I was sick of using up space in my brain accidentally remembering crap.” And I thought, Whoa, is that possible? Can we “accidentally remember” stuff? Do we have the capacity for remembering things that simply do not matter, things that are wholly unimportant? What the heck does it all mean?
When my aunt died, I asked myself a lot of questions about the things I remembered, what they all meant and why it mattered. Disconnected from the action, the memories have become stories. These are the same memories and the same stories I’ve been telling myself for years. But now, they mean something different to me.
Mashing up the drama, tragedy, family memories, and reinterpreting Shakespeare, I have come to the conclusion that my Gram was not the person she claimed to be. Rather, she was not the person she encouraged me—her first grandchild, her first granddaughter, the daughter she never had—to be. She told me to always defer to my grandfather, my father, and my husband in my thoughts and actions. Replaying the same old stories in my head today, I realize that she had an archaic view of the world that was not aligned with the life she was living. She was more in charge of her life, her family, and her career than any person I have ever known. She did not defer to anyone about anything ever. She never said, I don’t know. And she sure as shit never asked, What do you want to do? She scoffed at feminists, preached deference to men, and ruled like a queen. And she was not just any queen, she was a Shakespearean queen. She was as generous in her love as she was in her scorn. A terror in her own right, she fought tooth and nail to protect her family and her loved ones. Like Margaret of Anjou, the oft overlooked dowager queen in Richard III, she did not hesitate to wage a war when her son was slighted after all other parties had negotiated peace. There were days when I thought vengeance was her job. Somehow she balanced that with her real job; she was a pre-Kindergarten teacher. She was a nursery school teacher with a mouth like a sailor. She “taught me” how to swear, and I am damn good at it too. She was a complex contradiction, and we loved her despite that fact, in spite of it, because of it.
Looking back on it all now, I like to think that, also like old Queen Margaret, the inheritors of her title have learned how to take care of their families with more poise and grace than she managed. We are the better for having learned from her actions rather than her words, tempering those actions to exceed modern expectations of what women can and should be. She never did as she was told, and neither will we. In fact, I’m rather proud of the fact that I am choosing not to do as she told me, but rather as she did. And I can do it all with better balance because of the battles she fought for us. I can take care of my family without trampling over other people. I can be generous without being a tyrant. I cannot however write a blog post without being verbose, but we can’t be good at everything.
As I reexamine my relationship with my Gram from this new perspective, I realize that it’s time to let it all go. From now on, I will tell stories about her without wondering what it all means. The stories are the same. The stories will mean different things to different people at different times. But the lessons are the same. Life, as in Shakespeare, doesn’t require judgment. It’s like they say in Grosse Point Blank, “Some people say forgive and forget. Nah, I don’t know. I say forget about forgiving and just accept.”
I can accept that my Gram was incredibly generous and an incredible bitch without judging her. Just as I can write my dissertation on the tempestuous Margaret of Anjou and have fun doing it.
Postscript
In honor of Mr Snarky’s birthday (which is tomorrow), I threw a dinner party Saturday night. We were expecting a lot of guests and needed extra place settings. For the first time since my grandfather died three years ago, I unpacked a box full of china that came from my grandparents’ house. As I was setting out one of the plates, I snapped a picture and sent it to my dad, asking if he recognized it. He replied a few hours later that he had never seen it before.
The next 48 hours were spent fretting and wondering at the immaculate condition of the plates, feeling passed over as the recipient of plates no one ever used, and agonizing over the slight. (My Gram had a tendency to buy dishes from the secondhand store for us to throw out at New Years, in a sort of out-with-the-old ritual. I considered these might be for such a purpose.) My random outbursts punctuated our weekend until Mr Snarky suggested that I make up a story about the plates that made me happy.
In the end, I didn’t have to make up a story. This morning, Dad sent me another note. It said, “Getting to where I remember better from when I was a kid than from an adult. When we were kids, we used to run thru the house back-to-front playing whatever. The flooring in the dining room was wood, different than the concrete flooring in the back. So, we used to shake the whole room, most especially the china cabinet, when we ran thru. Mom used to holler at us that we were a gang of _____ (insert Italian word that I forgot meaning roughnecks, cowboys, vandals, barbarians, or some such) who were going to break all her precious stuff. I do remember her taking out a china plate one time and saying that she had been saving it for a daughter. I remember because I suggested that she trade Joe for a daughter, and then not pay so much attention to what me and Elliot were doing.”
For those of you who have never rubbed shoulders with these characters, this many not seem like much. Translation: The story and the plates were a gift.
Visualizing Shakespeare 