Virgin Atlantic: Flights of Mind, Between Then and Now, Here and There

The Launch
To the mind of someone who's traveled very little, speaks, reads and writes only one language fluently, and lived her entire life no further than about 200 miles from the place in California where she, her mother, two brothers, step-father and step-grandmother were born and raised (and where her step-grandfather, maternal grandparents and great-grandparents grew up, raised children, lived, worked, died and were buried) the experience of watching a first-born child board a big ol' jet airliner, called Virgin Atlantic, and seeing that plane take off down an airport runway, lifting her daughter up, up, up and away, "into the wild blue yonder," on her way to a year of college in Ireland, is a most dramatic, nearly traumatic, event.

Measures of Time Between Old and New Patterns
To imagine, think or say that such a parent, standing in awe of her child's audacity, is "provincial" may be a fair assessment, but might obscure another view of reality.  For, once upon a time, within the circumscribed, microcosmic social and geographic spheres of the San Francisco and Monterrey Bay Areas, a large portion of the wider world's languages and cultural features seemed as permanently and securely ever-present and full of vitality as the contours of the earth and seasonal patterns of the weather.  In addition to the most frequently heard sounds of American English, there were meetings, minglings and overlapping of Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese and other sounds, styles, subtleties and differences of language and customs.  Variations within the human orchestral arrangements were as naturally present and unforeign, in and around our neighborhoods, as the forms, patterns and designs created by orchards, farms and strawberry fields; footprints of an occassional wild bobcat along irrigation ditches; creeks full of trout, salamanders and crawdads; redwood forested mountains; particular kinds of birdsong; clean, white-sand, wild beaches at the edge of the Pacific; mission-style churches and public buildings; the scent of fruit tree blossoms in early spring, the bitter taste of unripened green fruit in early summer and the sweet stickiness of ripe and falling fruit in late summer and early autumn.

Until they began to disappear, these diverse and seemingly permanent ways of life were taken for granted by most of us residents, and were perceived as though always having been there.  A wealth and rich variation in sounds and spirit, a depth of rootedness and intrinsic beauty conferred on families who lived amidst them, were probably not consciously noticed or appreciated.  Every family member, every friend of my parents I'd ever met, lived in the San Francisco/Monterrey Bay Areas, and most of them in the Santa Clara Valley or Santa Cruz Mountains.  Yet I can recall none who ever mentioned or commented on these aspects of the immediate world surrounding us. 

Known and Unknown Worlds
As a child, my known world extended from Monterrey in the south, San Francisco to the north, eastward as far as Oakland and Stockton, and west to the Pacific.  With few exceptions, it was through my mother's mother, that wider vistas, other worlds, gradually began to appear, not from traveling to other places nor from a TV screen, (we didn't yet own one) but from photos in her National Geographic magazines, and from stamps on letters sent from far away places, given to my grandmother to give to me, for my stamp collection, from her friends and co-workers at the cannery.

There were the known, tangible world, people, things and ideas all around me, and other, as yet, unknown worlds, peoples and ideas.  The latter seemed distant and remote.  Somewhere out there, among the remote and unknown, during my childhood, was my biological father.  I had not yet met him.  His existence was never mentioned at home, and only occassionally, at her home, between my maternal grandmother and me.  She raved about how handsome she remembered him being, and about his beautiful, wavy, black hair. But the relative degree of silence and secrecy about him only added to a sense of mysterious possibilities:  In the mirror, I would sometimes see aspects of my image as Mexican, or, with a slight pulling at the outside corners of my eyelids, my image in the mirror appeared Chinese.  All were acceptable possibilities from this child's eye perspective.  I liked them all.  I found them all pleasing, though my stronger hope, which eventually proved to be the reality, was that he would turn out to be more familliar and more similar to my own mother, step-father and grandparents, than to other parents in the neighborhood.

Naming and Mapping the Territory;  "Bilingual, Bicultural Families"
Such terms and concepts did not exist in the world I inhabited then.  Even now, as an adult, I don't think I could comfortably place the words in any context within my personal past.  I'm sure my neighborhood friend, Janet Baretta, probably spoke some Italian, if not at home, at least around her grandparents, who lived, when I first met them, in San Francisco then later down the street from us; and my friend, Darlene Yamashita, probably spoke Japanese at home with some members of her family; my grandmother's next door neighbors, Mary and Nat, occassionally spoke Portuguese at home; and I know my friend, Margaret Magdelena, spoke English and Spanish.  But, for some reason, which I can not quite put into words, I would find it almost strange, and from some perspectives even humorous, (no matter how accurate or precise the terms may be) to refer to any of these families I grew up with as bilingual or bicultural.

Daily Contact wtih Many Cultures
These were simply friends, families and neighbors.  We children played, talked, rode bikes and went to school together; joined Brownies and Blue Birds, Girl Scouts and Camp Fire Girls; took ballet, tap, violin, horn, piano lessons; went to Mass, Buddhist Temples, Presbyterian Sunday Services.  My step-father went trout fishing and deer hunting with some of their fathers.  My maternal grandmother (as well as my step-grandmother) worked side-by-side with some members of these families in the Santa Clara Valley canneries and packing houses.  My mother's mother bought most of her groceries around the block, at a Chinese super market, Dick Lee's, and the rest of her groceries at another store, Hyde Park Market, a couple of blocks from her house.  None of this was foreign, strange or unusual.  None of this required special distinctions or descriptive terms. 

Re-entry into America
When my daughter returned to California on the big ol' jet airliner from Ireland, it was only long enough to tell me and her brother that she had fallen in love and would be flying away again.  I begged, pleaded with her not to go, hid her passport, (she got another) hid her backpack, (she found it) refused to drive her to the airport (she got someone else to drive her there).  But, in the end, her brother and I drove the 150 or so miles to the San Francisco Airport, met and stayed with her  'till it was time for her to board the plane, hugged and kissed her good-bye, and watched her fly away, fearing we might never see her again.  She was off to Germany to join her new beloved in his home territory.  She returned to California a year later, rented an apartment in Santa Cruz, finished her Senior year of college and graduated with honors from University of California at Santa Cruz.  Then, within days after graduation, off she flew again to Germany, and returned to America the following year, as a married woman, to settle in Seattle, with her new husband.  That was 1995.  Now, April, 2006, almost 11 years later, I am a proud, delighted grandmother, i.e., "grammy," to three beautiful, "bilingual/bicultural" grandchildren, aged four, two and three quarters, and one.

Children of the Future?
I've suddenly become a grandmother, and yet, in many ways, I'm still a child myself.  In a variety of ways, I find my own spirit of adventure, discovery, play, poetry, awe and wonder rekindled and re-awakened by my children's and grandchildren's lives.  Most of all, I am grateful and delighted to be a part of this beautiful Seattle branch of our family that my daughter and her husband have created.  And I'll continue to learn as I go in what ways such distinctions, as "blilingual/bicultural" and "provincial," become manifested in our family and in this ever-changing, ever-the-same, old/new world, where, in the dawn of this 21st Century, commercial space travel, talk of colonizing Mars and exploration of Saturn and its moon, Titan, have already begun to give new flights to our minds and to our ways of perceiving the distances "between then and now, here and there."

[A little footnote on distinctions, uniqueness, precision and yardsticks of measurement; found at http://www.munnecke.com/eclectica.htm, under "Health and the Devil's Staircase"]: 

"President Clinton, in his January, 2000 State of the Union speech, said that Americans, based on their genetic sequences, were 99.9% the same.  Had he chosen to use amino acids as the yardstick of similarity, he could have claimed 100%.  Had he chosen hair color, the number may have dropped to the low teens.  Had he chosen fingerprint patterns, he could have made the case for 100% uniqueness.  The same species viewed with different yardsticks reflect wildly different comparisons." 

"If we follow the edge of [an] island on a map with a dividers set to 1000 km, we will find one length.  If we set the dividers to 100 km, we will measure a longer length, because the segments spanned by the dividers measure greater detail.  If we move to progressively smaller scales to 10, 1, .1, .001, .0001 km, etc. we will find a progressively longer coastline.  The length of the coastline varies with the length of the yardstick we use to measure it."   

Sharon K. Cook-Gordon-Spellman has been a year-round resident of the western slopes of the Sierra foothills, near Nevada City, California, since 1972. Her monthly column for the BBFN newsletter is about the joys, trials and tribulations involved with being a grandmother of three bilingual children.

© Sharon K. Cook-Gordon-Spellman

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