CASTOFF GENES : More Than a Biological Chain Is Broken When a Generation Discards Its Past
Whoever had once worn the handmade baby dress was by now many years older than the chic young woman who stood scrutinizing it, her sunglasses pushed up on her furrowed forehead. She didn’t use a jeweler’s loupe, but she might as well have, looking over the thing as if it were the Koh-I-Noor diamond. Aaah, she said at last, in disappointed diminuendo. It’s got a spot on it. And she let it drop back down on the table at the Pasadena flea market as if it could not leave her fingers fast enough.
Of course it’s got a spot on it. Somebody made it for a real baby, for God’s sake. It is not supposed to be a museum piece. How did it get here, anyway? How does any of this wind up the stuff of public commerce?
After winter coats and maybe winter pallor, newly minted Californians like to cast off the encumbrances of their pasts. And why not? Americans are self-creators; throw out your old history and assemble one to your liking, piece by perfect piece. The pristine heritage that the young woman at the flea market was looking to buy for herself is only a generation away from the movie-star bios fabricated to transfigure Sadie from Mineola into an object of matinee idolatry.
In thrift stores lately, I’ve run across a half-dozen castoff chogoris, the traditional short silk jackets worn by Korean women, and I get to wondering whether the donors were eager to auto-re-create, to Los Angelize in poly-ethnic L.A.
If a baby dress gets separated from its provenance, it still has a use. Some fashionoid may yet turn thrift-store chogoris into the new hot style.
But who wants photos of anonymous men in uniform, or fading notes from young brides? Like kindergarten finger paints, their value and interest--except maybe to social historians, or unless they bear marquee likenesses or names, like Garbo or Rockefeller--is to the families that created them. Otherwise, they are only orphaned paper, passed from the indifferent living or the powerless dead to oblivion, or to strangers like me.
Who, for example, was Corwin Wickersham, that I should have his 1917 commission to the field artillery, his Croix de Guerre citation from General De Gaulle, his wartime dollar-a-year appointment, rescued from a Glendale junk shop for the value of the frames they came in?
Who was Dorothy Tidmore of Medicine Mound, Tex., that I ended up salvaging her scrapbook: a paper napkin from the Rabbit Hutch Sandwich Shop to remember the field trip in 1935; a letter from a jilted suitor who is sorry “for doing you as I did”; wedding gift receipts (Montgomery Ward throw rug $2.19)?
I didn’t rescue the 1930s oil portrait of a smiling middle-aged woman. Its price at the Pasadena estate sale was $300. That was for the gold frame; the seller, a brisk woman of no relation to the deceased, said you didn’t have to take the painting if you didn’t want to.
How can the “Me” generation be so incurious about its own forebears, its DNA laid out right there on paper?
My great-great uncle Ed joined a Wild West show and shot silhouettes in sheet metal and got as far as Columbus, N.M., trying to join Pancho Villa. His two sons died at Corregidor. My great-great grandmother Fanny Amelia was 6 when her parents were killed at the Battle of Petersburg in Virginia, and all the children followed the refugee wagons north. She gave birth to eight children, adopted four more. None of her boys was under six feet tall, and they liked to walk into town in stovepipe hats to create a stir.
And Abe Lincoln was a 7-month-old baby when my four-times-great-grandfather Archibold inscribed the book I have in my desk. His son Joseph lit out for the Ohio wilderness from New Jersey, and John Chapman--Johnny Appleseed--stopped by his cabin for two nights’ shelter. Chapman helped him start an orchard. My great-uncle Harold used to tell me about playing in its ancient trees, and in the cabin before it fell down in 1912.
With kitchen-table tales and pictures and paper, the chain is maintained. When its links are broken, by rootlessness or carelessness, it’s into the trash or the charity box with Corwin and Dorothy. There are other kinds of extinction than the biological one.
