Between the living and the dead

Ever since I studied history at Berkeley in the late 1960s I have been fascinated by a human being's ability to transcend what separates the living from the dead. In fact, in my disseratation for my undergraduate degree in history, I used a conversation between a well-researched historical figure of 18th century Europe and a well-known student of the 60s in the US as the medium of my thesis. The paper, however well-received then by the faculty at Berkeley, was considered "wooly/fuzzy/muddled" in Europe. Attitudes have changed since then, and nowadays this approach (the blog is a given medium) is "house-broken" in European intellectual circles, and well 'on its way' even in some European academic insitutions.

In 2005 the Swedish-Finnish writer Monica Fagerholm published a novel entitled Den Amerikanska Flickan ['The American Girl'] that opens onto the mysterious death of an American woman/girl who came to Sweden from San Francisco in 1969, and the subsequent Americanization of Scandinavia. We know a little about Finlandization, likewise the Cold War, but from whose perspective? Perhaps all things and everyone are related? The book was well-received in this neck of the woods, but has yet to be translated into English. Fortunately I have been thrown out of Monica Fagerholm's own blog into the briar patch of intellectual encouragement where I grew up, poked out of the nest and under the wings of my initial mentor, my paternal grandmother. Thanks ladies.

In 1996 my paternal aunt, Virginia Ryan Shores, gave me her mother's (my grandmother's) diary written in San Francisco during the Second World War. She also gave me some yellow 'legal pads' containing my grandmother's poetry. Over the years, I have often thought about 'corresponding' with my grandmother, the most well-educated, responsible (economically and ethically), creative and thoughtful woman in my life whose needs and desires were far from craving. I thought that I might 'converse' with her - in the tenor of my first major academic paper. I know that she loved to sing too, and that the timbre of voices can mature agreeably - even for our surroundings - as we grow older, if we are prepared to work at it.

I believe that "Mago", as we called her (go Ma, backwards, and abbreviation of grandmother) had a very common, however, undocumented perspective on World War II. She was waiting, for her children to return from the eastern respective western fronts of the war where they served. Aunt "Ginny" was in Pearl Harbor when it was bombed in December 1941, and "Dad" was on his way to France. Mago was expectant, hopeful. She waited. She didn't go to church on Sundays, but to the "Crow's nest", a lookout from the hills of San Francisco, where she and many like her could watch the ships and aircraft carriers as they sailed in under the Golden Gate Bridge, and were moored along the San Francisco piers. Perhaps her most sustaining hope was that her daughter, with whom she had been having difficulty exchanging mail due to the war, had managed to come home, however unexpectedly. Curious? then visit: Living with Gerdie's diary