I did a BUNCH of projects this weekend that I could write up and that would be instructable to flesh out this blog entry, but since this is my first week at this, I would like to effect some Sunday story time and save those projects to be written up this week.
It's Oscar night, and normally, I don't care, but tonight, we went to an Oscar party at an amazing house in LaMesa that felt just like Hollywood with the miserable narrow winding roads and impossible parking and all...but San Diegans have clearly thought some things through and made those BMW-commerical-look-at-the-amazing-handling stretches one way. The view was incredible. The show was fun, I laughed out loud four times in a room with 30 people it who were not laughing. Apparently, I am not the life of the party, but I am proud of myself for having the confidence to crack up all alone (with backing from Joe). In all fairness, these are movie people and there was a very subtle joke just for the Breaking Bad fans in the room and I guess we two were the only ones.
Instead of nattering on about a project or the awards show, for posterity, I want to recount what I know about my grandfather and grandmother, whom I have never met. Dewy-eyed aunts, uncles, and cousins who knew them passed down stories about them at summer gatherings when it was dark outside and the bottles were nearly empty and I fought to endure the persistent mosquitoes in the Berkshires or in Maine to hold on for one more vignette. From them I learned my "Grampa Timmy" died in a boating accident when my father was just 16 years old and that picture of my dad talking to a bald older gentleman wearing a glow stick crown around his tanned scalp was a time when the story was retold. My grandmother passed away in her 60's of breast cancer during a time when cancer was an affliction that it was impolite to discuss. They left behind drawings, paintings, and stories that give little windows to who they were. I have collected as many of them as I can. Each one is small and the details are fragile, open to exaggeration and editing from telling and retelling and also as time goes by.
I'll start with a little one.
My grandmother came from good stock in the Washington D.C. area. Her father (like mine, who was her son) was a banker. He wore starched shirts and dressed conservatively and acted prudently (and yet for some reason also kept a pet monkey in the house...I have seen a photo, but I don't know all the details). Her mother was a Mayflower descendant who, legend has it, had a pair of pomeranians who would walk under her skirts with her and jump out at people. Though this sounds like an exaggeration, the house was generally regarded as a wildlife sanctuary.
My grandfather was the son of a pair of German doctors in Rothenburg ob der Tauber who left him an orphan in his teens during the early 1900's (as I understand). He came to live in New York City with his Uncle Robert and Aunt Edna. I know little more, except that when he returned from his service in World War I, he pursued a dream to follow the artistic footsteps of Paul Gaugin and explore the Marquesas Islands. During his time in the Marquesas Islands, he picked up the name "Timmy" which I know from the way my Japanese instructors pronounced my maiden name was probably a corruption on the pronunciation of our shared last name: Schmidt.
My grandmother met this charming Timmy Schmidt in the 1920's at a party in New York after he returned from his fairly unproductive painting sojourn to the Marquesas and Tahiti. I don't know how much time elapsed, but they agreed to marry.
Another family legend has it that to obtain the marriage license, my grandparents presented themselves to the City of New York using their legal names, Marian Bradford Olds and Oscar Friedrich Schmidt. Upon learning her groom's true name, my horrified grandmother cried: "Oscar? Oscar is the name of a *seal*! Why, if I had known your name was Oscar, I never would have agreed to marry you!" However, she had already agreed and so they did.
This happened before there was an Academy Awards (though just barely) and I wonder if she would have reacted differently if she could have thought of my grandfather as a statuesque man, made of gold instead of the circus seal from popular cinema.
I'd like to thank the Academy...perhaps over time they changed her mind somewhat that Oscar is not such a bad name after all.
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