This is a photograph of two of my close blood relations. The man is my younger brother, Richard
Neville Fleming, born December 2, 1941.
The woman is his niece, our eldest granddaughter, Sophia Elizabeth
Fleming-Benite, born June 19, 1993. They
are standing outside a perimeter fence of the White Sands National Monument in
New Mexico on January 22nd.
Our latest ludicrous government shutdown lasted only three days,
but one of them happened to be January 22nd, so that the monument
itself was closed.
Like most
family photographs this one will be of interest only to a small circle of
people who actually know the subjects of the photograph and the circumstances
in which it was taken. But—as is also
doubtless true of thousands of other such
photographs--it might, were it able to be given voice, prove to be an
eloquent testimony to currents of social change in post-War America so powerful
as to merit the adjective “revolutionary.”
Rick, as he
is known in the family, was born to two parents with high-school educations and
chronic financial challenges, children of the Great Depression. He spent the War years, while his father
fought in the South Pacific, with his maternal grandmother in Denver. After that he lived intermittently on a farm
in Arkansas and in numerous places in the West and Southwest to which his
parents took him in their peripatetic, rather quixotic, and (it must be said)
futile search for prosperity. The
permanent results of traumatic birth injury conspired with an unsettled life,
and he never finished his public schooling.
He has lived for many years in Las Cruces, N.M., the last place our parents landed. Before his
retirement he worked on the maintenance crews of New Mexico State University.
Sophia was
born in California, half a century after Rick.
Both her parents were Ph. D. college professors. At the age of five she moved to New
York. She grew up on Washington Square
and attended excellent schools. She
spent her four high-school years in Paris at a demanding and prestigious academy,
at which she excelled in her academic work, became fluent in French, and
generally exploited the resources of a great world capital. She returned to America to attend Johns
Hopkins, to which she was a successful “early action” applicant. There she took her degree, with distinction,
in the Department of Psychology and Brain Sciences. Though the job market for new graduates was
not robust three years ago, she immediately secured a dream job with one of the
glitzy, fast-moving social media outfits.
Her first assignment was in New York, but she was soon transferred to
the mother ship on the West Coast.
This is not
a tale of two cities, but an abbreviated account of two members of a single
American family. There is more to
“diversity” than is sometimes acknowledged by our cultural arbiters. It’s more diverse. Sophia is at heart a New Yorker, and at
length concluded that she had sufficiently imbibed of the lotus slurpies of
Venice Beach. She has resigned from the
world of nineteen-year-old entrepreneurs and is returning to New York to take
up a challenging executive position in a very different though equally
innovative enterprise: one that deals with solid real property rather than
evanescent pixils. She has always wanted
to do a leisurely continental road trip, and here’s her chance. She had a yard sale, crammed her remaining lares and penates into a big car, and took off some days ago in a vaguely
easterly direction, with the second stop being Uncle Rick in Las Cruces. What a lovely young woman!
Realizing
that a long drive could be a lonely drive, Sophia has lined up several other
visits with friends along the way—a way that includes Marfa, TX, Austin,
Dallas, Little Rock, Memphis, Nashville, and Washington. Those are only the stops I know about. Her plan to avoid solitude likewise exploits
the madcap nature of her family. Her
young sister Cora will fly out to Dallas (or is it Austin?) to hang out for a
day or two in Austin (or is it Dallas?)
And her grandfather, who has clearly lost his mind, will next Monday fly
out at the crack of dawn to Little Rock, where in theory he will get into Sophia’s
passenger seat to be driven north to his old stomping grounds in Baxter County
and an overnight with a cousin. We then hustle across to Memphis (Graceland
being a must), and the following day on to Murfreesboro in Middle Tennessee,
the site of a significant Civil War battle and—of more immediate relevance—the
home of our friends the Dixons, whose daughter Katie vastly enriched the social
cachet of the Flemings by marrying our son Richard. There Sophia and I shall part, and I shall
return from Nashville to Newark on Thursday while she speeds ever eastward
through the Cumberland Gap and into some state or another that borders on the
Atlantic. In telling you all this I am
under no illusion that it is comprehensible, let alone engaging, but I hope to
explain in advance why there will be no timely post next Wednesday. I mean, what the hell? If you can’t let your hair down a bit in your
eighties, when will it ever happen?
