Tales of Teancum Singh Rosenberg

My family is an iceberg. There are the generations within memory, the ones I can still assign faces and personal stories to. And then there's the endless mass of ancestors beneath them who I don't know, whose individual stories in more cases than not have been lost to earthly memory and can be read now only out of the angels' books.

For their sake, I remember my cultures.

In the absence of a Mehtab Singh who might be my great-grandfather's great grandfather, I remember the Sikh traditions he would have grown up with. In the absence of a Rivka Gottlieb or Esther Kantor who might be my great-grandmother's grandmother, I reach for the lost world of the Ashkenzim, that people who were once Eastern Europe's Jews.

My family is an iceberg, and their religious cultures take me down below the cold waters. I close my eyes and feel with numb hands for what might have been and what they might have hoped to leave for me.

When I come up for air, do I see the world differently? Have I changed by feeling, even hopelessly, toward what lies below me?

I know this: while I don't learn to speak the languages of the dead, I now speak a richer language to the living.

This is how I wrote "Tales of Teancum Singh Rosenberg."

Strange Dream

In the middle of a long and strange dream last night, someone used the term FOB, which in the Chinese-American community refers to new immigrants who are "fresh off the boat." And in my dream, I told that person that the term doesn't make sense, because in America, you never get off the boat. In America, you're always moving, always in transition, and the past you stand on isn't solid: it's always swaying back and forth under you as the currents change.



I love America. A (cultural) pirate's life for me!

Monkey Oatmeal (part one)

For the past week and a half, my daughter has requested nothing but oatmeal when I make breakfast.

Usually, she wants bananas in it. Bananas magically transform regular oatmeal into "monkey oatmeal" which is obviously desirable, because it includes the word "monkey." She'll also request apples, dates, etc--frozen berries, mangoes, and pomegranate seeds are probably next.

Wondering about her eccentricity today, I remembered an extended period on my mission when I ate oatmeal almost every day (usually with honey, since German stores don't sell brown sugar). My companion started to worry about me. A family we were teaching were disgusted when I told them: oatmeal is something you're forced to eat when you're sick, the father said. It's not something you should do to yourself voluntarily, let alone every day.

Remembering that month, for some reason, made me remember how much Kira's oatmeal kick is also reminiscent of the oatmeal my dad used to make for us, oatmeal with all kinds of different fruits in it. I can't recall exactly whether my mother made us oatmeal with any regularity; it seems more like something rooted into our relationship with our dad, a sort of twentieth-century bonding ritual. I remember him praising bananas, actually, for their high potassium content, healthfulness, and taste. He taught us to love them, and now I watch my daughter finish the unsliced half of her banana even when she's tired and having trouble feeling hungry as we rush her off to school.

And it's interesting the way that thinking about monkey oatmeal reveals the way in which time is better described as having layers than working in a line. Mornings with my father aren't somewhere behind me, they're under me, inside me, layers added in a continuing axis of intergenerational relationships. Kira's current oatmeal fixation isn't an event that will simply pass a way; it's a layer that's being added to our relationship, enriching and reaching down toward other layers and up toward a future when (God willing) Kira will have children and they will do something which will remind her, on a level which perhaps does not fully reach consciousness, that her father once sliced the banana just so with those long fingers of his and he stirred the oatmeal like this and he also waited for her to touch the first spoonful with the tip of her tongue before adding the milk to cool it.

Picnicking

Guest Post by Vilo Elisabeth

It's funny what will trigger a memory, and when it will happen. I'm sitting in the Denver airport, on a layover on my way to Utah for my brother's wedding. It's a little early for lunch local time, but my stomach is still two hours behind in sync with New York, where I had breakfast 4 hours ago. Luckily, the restaurants in the airport are used to problems like this, and are already serving lunch type food. I decide to splurge, and momentarily suppress my vegetarian leanings. I get 2 pieces of rotisserie chicken with a side of garlic mashed potatoes, one of the more expensive items on the menu.
Rotisserie chicken is one of my dad's favorites. He sometimes likes to pick up a small one at the grocery store, especially now that much of the family is vegetarian. He'll spend the next few days working his way through it, eating it by itself or adding it to tacos or another dish. I think of my dad when I order the chicken. But then, while I'm pulling the meat away from the bone I think of his grandfather, my great-grandfather, John Westwood, who we call Pop. I remember eating chicken one time at his house, and him demonstrating to me that there was still plenty of meat left on the piece I was finished with. I am the type to leave scraps here and there, so I don't have to get too messy or think too hard about what exactly it is I'm eating. Pop, however, was a firm believer in savoring every last bit. I smile to myself, remembering Grandma Betty telling us about my cousin Ethan, at age 4 or so, after Pop had passed away, wondering if Pop was able to have a picnic of fried chicken in heaven, since it was such a beautiful day, and that was one of Pop's favorite things to do. Grandma Betty refrained from remarking to Ethan that it wouldn't really be heaven for the chicken involved.
I am glad to have these memories of Pop surface as I get ready to see my family, and witness it expand through my brother's marriage. I wish that Grandma Betty, Pop, Grandpa Art, and Grandma Judy could all be here with us, celebrating. But maybe they'll all get together and have a picnic in heaven in our honor.

A Visit

Got down to the hospital to see Grandma. I told her how I felt about her and grandpa and her brother Carl who used to live upstairs from me and died early in the morning, getting ready to go work in the temple. I told her how Michael and I talked about how someday we will be the older generation responsible for keeping things together and it's hard to imagine ourselves being up to the task. And she reminded me that you don't become the kind of person overnight: it takes time. And then she told me a story she's told me many times before, about how she, as a younger woman, spent some time caring for an elderly relative of hers who was quite cranky and bitter. The experience made her vow to herself that she wouldn't be a cranky old woman: which made her realize that she'd better stop being a cranky young woman first.

I laughed. We talked and talked, told each other new stories which led us back into telling stories
we've already told each other dozens, maybe hundreds of times--and I love the rhythm of it.

Next Friday, she told one nurse, she will have twenty-nine grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

When another nurse asked where she was from, she said "Would you like the short version or the long one?"

Maybe that's one thing we can keep from generation to generation.

Good News

Matt just called again to say that Grandma is awake and breathing fine in the hospital. Everything seems to be fine--they'll hold her for observation (thank God for doctors and their families who let them sacrifice for the rest of us!) and then she'll be able to come home. Things sound good.

After I got off the phone with him, I started sobbing. It's crazy, I'm here alone in an office on BYU campus and I turned off the lights and curled up on the floor while I cried. There's something about the sense of relief that makes it more OK to acknowledge how much something has shaken you.

I believe in God because I believe in the eternity of memory. That when beautiful and profound things happen, like my grandmother deciding to marry my grandfather even in a time when their "mixed race" marriage was illegal, somewhere written on the face of the universe, that stays. I really believe that's not just a good thought, that's how things are. What we do in life matters. The ways we are connected matter and are infinite and eternal: healed and purified relationships are heaven.

This is maybe why I care about history and ethnicity: they are threads that bind us to those who gave life to us, those who shaped our souls with their love.

And if you want to know who I am: I am someone who absolutely refuses to give up on that! I am, or at least want to be someone who never lets the very real and heavy burden of life get in the way of the healing burdens of inherited love.

Vulnerability

A long conference with a student meant I was running late to class today--at 1 pm, when I should have been in the classroom with my ringer off, I got a call from my younger brother saying our Grandmother had just fainted and not gotten up and that Grandpa had called an ambulance and gone with her to the hospital.

I remember something like this happening several years ago--I think they lived in California at that time--and everything came out just fine then. I'm assuming that the same will happen now, but it's still scary. It's not so much a feeling of worry over her, she's a good woman and will be all right no matter what--it's a sense of my own vulnerability in the possibility of her absence.

To think that her presence could suddenly be gone, her memories lost to immediate access, is overwhelming. I've certainly been grateful before that I've gotten so much time with my grandparents; I've tried to soak up what I can from them, to take advantage of the chances to talk. I've known that they are (in spite of all appearances to the contrary) mortal--but I've come to depend on them not to do scary things like this!

The world makes sense to me partly through the strength of my grandparents. I think of all they've done, all they've learned, all they went up against and emerged with more love and richer senses of humor--these are the kind of people who keep the spirit of God in the world. While I realize that my grandmother will still exist no matter what happens, it's difficult to imagine a world in which I don't have direct access to the way she tells her stories, the way she keeps her house, the way she plays games with her youngest grandchildren.

My brother will be ordained an Elder in our church on Sunday: it's a moment in which he is invited to embrace adult responsibilities in the community. I will be married next Friday: that's a moment in which I will accept responsibilities we see as binding (and rooting) us through the eternities.

It seems impossible to me at this particular moment that we will live up to all these responsibilities in anything like the way my grandparents have. Numerous ancient religions used to worship ancestors, to project them as somehow larger than life, and I feel like I can understand why.

Perhaps if we hold tenaciously on to their memory and spirits, the stories can give us access to some of their strength and power. But please God give her much more time to live: I don't want my daughter to grow up without her!