Nontraditional Families #5: Lois Bassen
The relevant dichotomy might not be between traditional/non-traditional families but between happy/unhappy ones. At checkout yesterday at the local supermarket, I waited behind an anxious stranger whose coupons weren’t making enough of a difference. She chattered with the friendly red-headed cashier and included me in her despair over bad economic times and teenage children who don’t appreciate things as much as past generations did. Then she shocked both cashier and me by revealing bruises on her upper arm as she removed too costly white bread from her order – “It’s not healthy, anyway,” she said – and confessed that her daughter hit her.
When I was a child, how many traditional family secrets did I know? None that Nancy Drew (loved the series, ditto The Hardy Boys) could’ve investigated: (1) my mother refused to marry my father until he’d changed his ethnic surname; (2) retarded Great-uncle was hidden under the basement stairs when we kids came over to visit Great Grandma; (3) none of us were allowed to meet (another) Great-Uncle Sid & Uncle Pete until the youngest boy cousin turned 14; (4) the greatest shame was The One Divorce in the Family of WWII hero and his 1st wife (of 3) Norma.
Norma. Normal. Traditional.
Two generations later, what is normal-traditional? Even the same first line of ANNA KARENINA can be translated differently. (“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” "All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.") Tolstoy’s premise about happy families warrants skepticism as well; I doubt they’re alike at all. The human family has chimpanzee first cousins. We’re all related through our first land ancestor, the lungfish, straight (?) back to bacteria in some bubbling volcanic pool. Since something like water has just been located on the Moon, who knows, we may have distant relatives there. A more expansive, possibly cosmic, definition of tradition is called for. Are the following the words the ones we want to live by?:
Who, day and night, must scramble for a living,
Feed a wife and children, say his daily prayers?
And who has the right, as master of the house,
To have the final word at home? The Papa, the Papa! Tradition.
GOLDE & MAMAS
Who must know the way to make a proper home,
A quiet home, a kosher home?
Who must raise the family and run the home,
So Papa's free to read the holy books?
The Mama, the Mama! Tradition!
SONS
At three, I started Hebrew school. At ten, I learned a trade.
I hear they've picked a bride for me. I hope she's pretty.
The son, the son! Tradition!
DAUGHTERS
And who does Mama teach to mend and tend and fix,
Preparing me to marry whoever Papa picks?
The daughter, the daughter! Tradition!
Thus, Nancy Drew suspects, the call for these meditations by The Externalist.
Lois Bassen just won the Atlantic Pacific Press 2009 Drama Prize, and in the past a Mary Roberts Rinehart Fellowship for an alternative history novel, German Sabbath, about the successful assassination of Adolf Hitler on the day after the Night of the Long Knives, June 30, 1934. She has been published in many lit magazines (Kenyon Review, American Scholar, etc.) and online (Minnetonka, Conteonline, The Externalist, etc.). A Vassar grad, she has been married for 42 years, has two adult daughters (a doctor and a teacher), and recently moved from NYC to Rhode Island. She is a prizewinning, produced, and published playwright (Samuel French, MONTH BEFORE THE MOON, NEXT OF KIN at New York's ATA, 2 other plays in OH, NC), and commissioned co-author of a WWII memoir by the young Scottish bride of Baron Hajime Kawasaki (THISTLE & CHRYSANTHEMUM).
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