I woke up after yesterday's Leadership Academy at the Center for Ecoliteracy humming with ideas for a memoir. Doug and I talked themes this morning-- something like blue blood goes rogue, he said. I said, "i'm thinking something like the Hummingbird Diaries-- a series of short essays, creative non-fiction about where I am now, how i got here, and most of it about the family: Grandpa's life." Grandpa Campbell worked as the CFO for the Manhattan Project and then as the US Comptroller General for Eisenhower. He left his wife with five boys to marry his mistress, a Standard Oil heiress. I want to write about the contradictions of their lives: eccentricity born of wealth and privilege played out in awesome nature in Cooperstown, NY and Florida where my heiress grandmother and my grandpa showed me it's not about the money ; for her it was simplicity, place, watercolors, lilies by the boathouse, an old pilot boat called the dirty bird, cobwebs, bats. huge turtles that came up from the lake and laid eggs next to the tennis courts, but also sculpture, gardens, woods, Leatherstocking Falls, fossils in the slate, forgotten graveyards in the hills. It was not Grey Gardens, my grandmother was an artist who still lived in the social world. But like Grey Gardens, there is something similarly compelling about Werf, how she ditched wealth, divorced it, de-emphasized it, having hay parties instead of expensive catered events under pristine white tents. And maybe it was because she never went to school. She was raised by governesses, on boats, on horses, in the Old World between England and the US. while my grandfather was growing up in a poor Scottish family in New York City rising to power with scholarships and strategic alliances. And my dad was influenced by all of this. Raised by a willful mother in New Cannan with 4 brothers and his own hen house. Unpack most white American families and you will find similar themes. We were wrapped up in the weapons industry, the big oil industry, first the depression fears that turned into institutionalized racism, then the cold war fears that made industry and consumerism into a kind of salve. The fact is money did matter especially when you didn't have it.
ok -so there is also this Roland Barthes thought i had. like making it the Hummingbird Mythologies. How myths in my life, family myths, cultural myths can be unpacked and demythologized. I once wrote about the buttes of Monument Valley in Westerns like My Darling Clementine. They signified illusions of American Romanticism- illusions of the endless frontier to colonize/the endlessness American innocence. Of course pretty close to where atom bomb testing took place. At home in the 80's and 90's another romantic family myth: Diane Von Furstenberg meets jackie o, my mom as jackie o (not jackie kennedy.) how obama made my right wing mom almost liberal, how if you keep moving the sand from the sand bars off the Atlantic coast the beach will keep rebuilding itself and old the beach houses will be saved at no small expanse to the purse or the eco system.
i want my story also to be about the way i fell in love with natural objects even when mom was trying to get me to go glam, buying me handfuls of Diane Von Furstenberg dresses to cure my broken heart and help me find a rich husband. How after failing to land the rich Swiss guy at 33 I woke up realizing i wasn't going to get what my mom has. That's when I started categorizing people as feral, outdoor, indoor/outdoor or just indoor cats. And decided i might just end up going feral.
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