Torn Photograph, Sepia Stained: The El Salvador Memoir

In preparing to teach the advanced nonfiction course at Penn, I read and re-read and remember. I re-enter the mind-space that took me here, to the first page of my Salvador memoir, Still Love in Strange Places.

The tear runs like a river through a map, hurtling down toward his right shoulder, veering threateningly at his neck, then diverting south only to again pivot east at the fifth brass button of his captain's uniform. Below the tear, two more brass buttons and the clasp of his hands, and below all that, the military saber; the loosening creases on his pants; the shoes with their reflections of the snap of camera light. He is one of three in a sepia-colored portrait, and someone had to think to save his face. Someone had to put the photo back together—re-adhere the northeast quadrant of this map with three trapezoids of tape so that his left hand would fall again from his left elbow and he would still belong to us. We suppose he is the best man at a wedding. We suppose that it was eighty years ago, before the matanza, before he was jailed and then set free, before he saved the money to buy the land that became St. Anthony's Farm.

“Did I ever tell you what my grandfather did the year the farm first turned a profit?”

“No.”

“He threw the money into the air, the bills, and they got caught up with a wind.”

“And so?”

“And so he ran after those colones through the park. Chased his own money through the leafy streets of Santa Tecla. Imagine that.”

I do. I am often imagining that. Imagining that I know him—this man whose likeness is my husband's face, whose features are now borne out by my son. His are the sepia eyes that passed through me. His is the broad nose, the high cheekbones, the determined mouth, the face not like an oval or a heart, but like a square. He died long before I'd ever meet him, but I carried him in my blood. Just as the land carries him still, remembers. Just as St. Anthony's Farm will someday, in part, belong to my son, requiring him to remember what he never really knew, to put a story with the past. Words are the weights that hold our histories in place. They are the stones that a family passes on, hand to hand, if the hands are open, if the hearts are.

“You look like your great-grandfather.”

“I do?”

“Yes. Come here. See? That’s him, in the photograph.”

“Him? My great-grandfather?”

“Yes.”

“But he looks so young.”

“Well, he was young once. But that was a long time ago, in El Salvador.”

We remember. We imagine. We pass it down. We step across and through a marriage, retrieve the legacies for a son.

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Nothing but Ghosts, An Excerpt on Launch Week

...I finally found them down where a wedding was going on, or had already happened, my mother sitting on a bench, my dad beside her, both of them watching this bride and her groom at the edge of a pond where the water was so still I could have sworn it was a mirror. I saw my mom pull a flower straight out of a tree. I saw her stand, take the flower to the bride, and bow her head. I saw her go back to the bench and sit down with my dad and ask him, "Would you marry me again, Jimmy? Would you?"

"In a heartbeat," he said, "and you know it."

"I wouldn't take any of it back," Mom said, and maybe I don't know how you put regret inside a painting, maybe I can't figure out Miss Martine, maybe I can't really save my dad from sadness, but maybe so much time goes by that you start to understand how beauty and sadness can both live in one place.

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Love Equals Money ?

No doubt this will make me unpopular. Certainly I've been unpopular before.

But.

I'm hearing a lot these days about folks out of work and about the impact of such losses on family, on love. I'm feeling the quiet out there and also the quiet within, where work at my own marketing communications firm has slowed considerably and projects that were once sure things have been thrown off of their tracks. I get worry. I get wondering what tomorrow will bring. I get sitting down at 4 AM with the finances and the taxes and the bills and jiggering things around to make the many pieces fit. Simpler meals, more carefully made. Shoes worn until the soles are left behind on the pave. A house that feels emptier as less comes in—but also roomier, perhaps, also more accommodating.

But what I don't get (and here's where you start to hate me) is the level of animosity I'm finding, in some places, toward those who have lost their jobs. Spouses furious with spouses. Disappointments stomped out in public. Quotes like this one, found today in a Newsweek story titled, "Men Will Be Men:" When money goes, love flies out the window. Spoken by an interviewed man clearly living a whole lot of char and hurt.

Does it have to be this way? Must love be contingent on funds? Can't love also be the time that is spent just being together, finding a way? We're not going to get these days back. Not ever. Can we really put love on hold until the coins start clattering in?

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Jean and Iryna Paulovich

Last night we drove to New Jersey to see our favorite professional ballroom dance couple, Jean and Iryna Paulovich. I've written of them here before. Of Jean, who has taught me to take it slow in salsa, to be late in rumba, to soften the knees in the paso, who says—not often, but enough to keep my hopes alive—"Yes, Beth, this is it." Of Iryna, who sometimes teaches with Jean, who can walk you all around a song and explain, "Now you are on a corner waiting. Now you notice the guy. Now you walk toward him, lazy, not that interested. Now you agree to dance with him. You sigh."

They held a party last night—for their students, for themselves. They extended roses; they danced. But more than anything they exemplified what a marriage can be—so full of passion for an art; so full of respect, one for the other; so happy for the chance to create, to yield a good something together.

We watch ballroom all the time on TV—those forced seductions, those assembled two-minute passion tales. What a grand thing it is, then, to see two people who deeply love each other, dancing through and for that love. To see dance the way dance is meant to be.

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