Not Far From the Tree
Fictionalized Memoirs
by
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Meredith, I feel as if each of my granddaughters is living a slice of my life, as if there is an ulterior plan to resolve the complexities and incompletes of my life. With every e-mail exchange, which starts with your search for answers to your dilemmas, I find myself embracing a moment of my past, each of you and your situations reminding me of my own. I get to thinking about the people who came into my life. Much like the people in your lives. They come into your life. They stay awhile and then they’re out of it. They leave reminders so that they never disappear entirely. And when you gather up all the reminders and remainders, you have little pieces of your life, like a jigsaw puzzle. Of course, to get the complete picture, you have to gather up reminders of your journey into the lives of others and fit them in also, like the tongue-and-groove shaped pieces in a landscape puzzle. Endless shades and shadows to fit in to complete the picture. So many of these pieces. You get weary of twisting and sorting them and you leave them on the table to go on to something less frustrating. Then the corner of your eye catches a shadow lingering before it slips into the grove of trees and you’ve caught a glimpse of someone who meant something important to you once and you wonder why he didn’t stay or why you didn’t let him stay, and why he’s there to remind you of a part of your life. You search for the pieces of memory of that time. If you don’t, you won’t have the complete picture. You return to the puzzle.
How does all this apply to you? It’s about people who influence you. You talk about your dad, Meredith, and how interaction with him has influenced your decisions. Fathers, Meredith, can’t possibly know the extent to which they affect a daughter’s life. At either end of the scale, if they care or if they don’t care. My father? I’d have to start with my father who must have looked at his penis at some point in his youth and wondered what children his semen would spark into life. He had such a zest for life that he would have reveled in the thought that his progeny would be born in a country that offered liberty to pursue dreams, to be the incarnation of his dreams, who would be able to express the creative force that spurted from him. His highly potent semen dispersed itself in six children and two more who didn’t have the chance to express their part of his dreams. For some unaccountable reason, I seek out the piece of life’s puzzle that will show me why, as I fit the pieces of my life together, I feel I have to account for my father’s reason for living, how the ancillaries of his blood stream fed my zest for life. Of course, this suggests that I might be living out a part of someone else’s life--my father’s. I think that is so. It accounts for one of the men in my life, a very significant one, not to be confused with a ‘significant other’ that is so much the way of things these days, because it never reached that point. But why am I skirting the truth? Andrew, never shortened to Andy, resembled my father in appearance, like that of a burgher in a Vermeer painting, and had some of his traits--like going into a food store and selecting a scotch salmon, even though it was terribly expensive, because that was what tempted him at that time. Or buy rare oils for a salad dressing. Or a fresh baked pie of boysenberries and rhubarb because it reminded him of boyhood farm days and kitchen aromas.
Excesses of appetite? No! The richness of it.
A rather circuitous path, from fruit pies to my father to Andrew who had a passion for more than fruit, a passion for a woman sitting across from him who felt herself slipping into blue ponds, clones of her father’s eyes and felt herself slithering towards his body as he speared a flesh-colored slice of salmon, dappled it with capers, rolled it on his tongue teasingly like foretaste and foreplay, evoking thoughts of aftertaste and afterplay, who licked and savored delicacies with one mind on the insistent taste of food and another on enticement to other ecstasies. Torrid!
Andrew, I learned as we spent more and more time together, had had his affairs. I couldn’t be jealous of past indulgences. I could rage when he saught to catch the eye of a woman at an adjacent table. But I’m going off on tangents. It may make me wonder about my father. I have no proof that my father had affairs, but to hear my ranting jealous mother, every button he marked on a customer’s coat was an invitation to open her hidden charms to him. I’d like to think he did. He worked hard to provide for his brood but he never lost that exhilaration that came with a new day. Never lost the longing for nature’s paint brush on urban doorsteps or window sills. Flowers bloomed at our house, if nowhere else on the grimy city streets. If I am to think of his legacy, it would be that he imbued me with a wonder and curiosity to taste life, to enliven my environment.
But let’s get back to your dad which is your concern now. Of course, he’d like to control your life. If he can influence you to come back to The States and follow career pla
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About the Book
Inspired by acceptance of several articles about email correspondence with her three college students who chose colleges in different areas of the
She shared many intimate thoughts from her granddaughters who asked her to share her life experiences with them. They asked for counsel about their own dilemmas. Each was caught up in a contemporary perplexity that affects women seeking a career and good marriage. These awakened her won feelings and thoughts that she shared with them. A strong bond exists as a consequence.
Events are placed in historic prospective which make the book a personal documentation of a changing society, of turbulent times. They are woven together by family ties and loyalties.
About the Author
Esther C. Gropper, at 85 still an active writer, educator, lecturer, was a savvy woman of her times who used email long before it became a common communicative tool. When her granddaughters were pursuing career preparation in Esther, a woman of her times – changing times of mores affecting career choices, marriage, family, careers and most significantly, how to successfully juggle these aspects of a contemporary woman’s life. Esther began to relive the experiences of childhood, romances, the liberated life, some of which she shared with her granddaughters. Some took off in fantasies. What evolved is a composite of an emancipated empowered woman that left the lingering questions: Was it worth it? The result is the fictionalized memoirs of Not Far From The Tree.