blogofages

FAMILYSPEAK

                My younger daughter struggled to come up with a metaphor for a potentially draining, suck-the-air-from-the-room experience.  “I know,” she said at last.  “It would be like traveling through Europe with Joanie!”  She paused, then said, “Nobody outside our family would know what that meant, would they?”

                Not if they were lucky.  Joanie, a family friend, has long resisted advice to Switch To Decaf.  She’s a Type A plus plus plus perfectionist who would color-code our suitcases and have them all facing in the same direction.  She doesn’t get jet lag, she gives it.  And my daughter didn’t have to say anything else.

                Families communicate in a sort of shorthand, or “short-speak.”  Made of experience and legend, tall tales and short nights, it’s a language within a language.  I call it Familyspeak, and no two Familyspeaks are alike.

                                                                 Ect.! Ect.!

                Sometimes Familyspeak follows us from childhood.  My oldest daughter read early, earlier than she could hear some of the words she was reading.  She read the term “Etc. Etc.,” and pronounced it “Ect Ect.”  So that’s how we say it at our house.  Puzzled outsiders may correct us, but we sail right on.

                My younger sister brought home a crayoned portrait of the First Thanksgiving from kindergarten.  She announced confidently that these were the “Pilgrins,” and they’ve been “Pilgrins” in our family ever since.  Hey, if you survived that first winter, wouldn’t you be grinning?

                Landmarks also lend themselves to Familyspeak.  For years, Dave, the girls and I traveled to Grandma’s house over the river, through the woods and down a side road dubbed “Carl and Carol’s road.”  “Carl” and “Carol” had a nice ranch house boasting a double garage, with “Carl” over one bay and “Carol” over the other.  They also had a shrine to some apparition of the Virgin Mary, with a statue of Our Lady and a bunch of kneeling children.  Worth noting: we never met either Carl or Carol.  I think I may have seen Carl one time, hosing down the statues, but we were going by too fast to wave.  When Carl and Carol sold out and a new family moved in, the shrine came down and the names came off the garage.  But our family continues to call it “Carl and Carol’s road,” which is a real perk when we’re trying to give someone directions.

                Familyspeak is nicknames, memories, instant recognition.  When my nephew was 7 or 8, he and my husband Dave watched “The Longest Day” one Memorial Day weekend.  Dave explained D-Day to him as my sister and I prepared the barbecue.  We were chopping vegetables when my nephew ran into the kitchen shouting, “Mom! There are ‘nums’ on the beach!”  “Nums on the beach” has followed him the rest of his life.  So far.

                If you have to explain it to an outsider, it’s Familyspeak

                                                       Bernardston

                Familyspeak is one word that can conjure up a thousand images.  For us, the premier example of Familyspeak is one word: Bernardston.

                Back when we had more nerve than sense, we packed up the kids and took an aging vehicle out to Western Mass for a children’s missionary convention.  We brought minimal money, expecting to be fed exotic foods as we learned of our work abroad.  Right town (after a three-hour drive), wrong weekend.   We hit a fast-food outlet and began to head home.  We proceeded to get lost and hit a traffic jam of people coming home from a balloon festival.  The car died on an interstate highway, and we and it got towed to Bernardston, a tiny town in Western Mass. 

                The tow truck brought Dave and the car, and the state police brought me and the girls to Bernardston.  It was probably a pretty nice town when everything was open and you had some means of escape. 

                On a Saturday afternoon in late October, it left almost everything to be desired.

                Whatever looked like a business was closed, except for the garage and an adjacent general store.  The girls and I fell on this like starving pilgrims – Light! Sound! Stuff! – while Dave dickered with the mechanic.

                It was clean, warm and safe.

                Four hours later…

                The glow had faded.  I had read every comic book on the rack, aloud, to my girls as we sat cross-legged on the scuffed wooden floor.  We scraped our pockets for enough coinage to buy snacks.  We took several short walks, shivering our way along the deserted main drag, scuffling through the leaves.  The library closed at 3 p.m.  A library would have made it bearable.

                Dave emerged with the grim news that our car wouldn’t be ready until Tuesday, if at all.  He was allowed one phone call, and he made it collect to our pastor.  That good man peeled himself away from his weekend guests, drove in the gathering darkness to a town he’d never been to, and loaded his car with Baileys.  Nobody talked on the way home.

                That was Bernardston.  At least for them.  I was the only one available to go and get the car on Tuesday, and the only person available to take me on the two-hour drive was my now ex-brother-in-law. If Dante’s Hell had a mobile home, this guy would be the drapes. 

In summation: more than the car broke down over Bernardston.  And when one of us says “Bernardston,” no explanation is needed.  Or wanted. 

                We can laugh about it now.  Sort of.

                                                            Words and pictures

                My father, who died in March, was a hoarder, an archivist, a maker of memories.  A professional photographer for many years and a gifted enthusiast before, he documented every possible moment, including a few that probably shouldn’t have been.  When he died, I was charged with copying old photos for cousins and posterity.  As I looked at black-and-white snapshots of “people and things that went before,” I felt humbled by the people I came from and grateful to him for this legacy.

                There were pictures – and there were words, 60 plus years of Familyspeak.  Ask me some time about “The Surprise Cabinet” or “The Moose Club Play.”  (Don’t ask.)  (Please ask.)

                And when we had our last conversation, I clutched his hand as though touch alone would bring him back.  The words came with effort, but I could see it all in his eyes, a lifetime of Familyspeak.  It was part of his legacy to us, and ours to him.

 It’s our words as well as our pictures that fill up our memory cards, and make us who we are.