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My father's father was a high school Latin teacher and he moved his wife and children to Portland, Oregon where he eventually became a high school and middle school principal. As a child, I visited the house they lived in and remember it as large, with much solid, dark trim on banisters and mantelpieces, dark red carpets, an upstairs with a porch where my father slept growing up, and a mysterious attic full of books and esoteric treasures which drew me like a magnet in spite of my apprehension of dim and cobwebbed places. Above all, it was dark, self-contained - as they were. They were an intellectual family which prized education and the correct employment of the English language (or any other languages they studied). All of them went to institutions of higher learning and all three brothers achieved Ph.D. degrees. They went out into the world in their different capacities, though rarely did anyone from the outside world disturb their insularity at home. Inside this boundary, the family dynamics produced six adults who learned to cover fragility with a veneer of impatience which ranged from amused sarcasm to deadly bitterness. My father, I believe, may have been the most sensitive, and most cynical, of them all. |