Looking Back

When I asked on Facebook for suggestions on what to blog about (what can I say?  A daily blog which by necessity stays away from most politics and current events is a challenge) a couple of people suggested I blog about what my upbringing made me or perhaps it was (the wording was ambiguous) how the writer is made by his/her past.  A friend interpreted this to mean what I liked/missed about Portugal.

The last is understandable, as I suspect I often give the impression of “I’ve shaken the dust off my sandals, and I wouldn’t go back for a million dollars.”  Well, this is actually true, in a way, but it’s not intended to reflect badly on Portugal.  It’s more a matter of post-divorce feelings, when one member of the couple says “it just wasn’t right” or perhaps “It wasn’t so and so, it was me.”

This doesn’t mean there weren’t things about Portugal and my upbringing that I loved, things that made me uniquely what I am.  I have, in fact, had a couple of misguided people (one of them a colleague – eh, in a sense) who have got upset now and then at how much I talk about my past in Portugal, as though, they think, it were some sort of universal experience.  And I am, let me add, forever afraid I talk too much about Portugal – an experience most of you can’t really share, which puts me in the position of the old traveler and/or soldier describing experiences that can never be brought successfully forward, except through fiction.  (And I know I write very few things set in Portugal, but that’s something else.)

The reason I talk about it, particularly in non-fiction is to explain why I have what might strike some as a weird set of opinions/beliefs.  Life experience doesn’t explain what I believe, any more than it explains why some of us have a compulsion to write but it might allow some people to either count it in or discount it.  Say, I had a rabid dislike of dogs (let me assure you this isn’t true, although I am afraid of loose dogs, while I’m walking because of a past experience in which one tried to attack my kid in his carriage.)  If you knew that as a child I’d been attacked by a vicious dog (I wasn’t) you’d be more likely to discount that opinion one way or another.  So if I blogged that all dogs should be shot (again I don’t think this.  I like dogs as much as I like cats) you could go “Oh, it’s just because she never got over that incident in her past.”  Which is why I tend to give, perhaps, too much background on how I feel about things.  Well, that and because I often feel as though history classes in the US are ruled by “Speak no evil about foreigners” which has allowed at least two generations to grow up thinking the US is uniquely evil (rolls eyes.)

Anyway, that is one reason I tend not to talk about Portugal, unless I’m using it to justify some belief/idea/experience.

The other two reasons are more…  Complicated.

The first is that, unlike the divorce analogy above, I did not choose Portugal and I don’t think we were particularly compatible, culture to human type of thing.  This is hard to judge, of course.  I mean, I grew up there; the language was the first I learned; the “how things are done” the first I embedded.  So, it’s difficult to separate “this is me” from “this is me who was born and raised in Portugal.”  But if it can be established that some people feel like they were born the wrong gender, I felt, as far back as I can remember, slightly uneasy about who I was and where I lived.  This eventually – when I had experience of other countries – gathered into “I’m an American trapped in a Portuguese body.”  (Before that, I just thought I was crazy.)

This is no reflection on Portugal, anymore than someone feeling like a woman trapped in a man’s body is not saying being a man is bad.  OTOH that person might be the last one who can propound on men’s issues.  And I am probably the least likely to speak both dispassionately and competently on Portugal.

Not that there weren’t parts of Portugal I loved – specifically the little village (hamlet, really) I was raised in, and, in varying levels of attachment, the slightly larger town we were attached to, up to and including the city of Porto, or at least parts of it.  For a long time, trying to explain my feelings about my origins I said “I’m not really Portuguese, but I AM from Porto.”

Note the tense of the verbs above.  Does this mean I’ve fallen out of love with those regions?  Not… exactly.  The thing is those regions no longer exist as I remember and if I spoke of them now, I would have no clue what I’m talking about.  Not only have I gone on an unavailing photo safari to try to record things I remember from childhood, but I got lost THREE TIMES in the village where I spent 22 years.  No, honestly.  The roads are all different.  Some alleys have turned into roads.  Some roads have disappeared.  The village in which the ONE building over two stories was built when I was 14 – and at five stories got called “the skyscraper” or “the apartments” – is now mostly stack-a-prol cement buildings.  The school I attended has been replaced with a much larger cement box.  The little “the train stops here if it feels like it” train stop is now a station with announcements over PA, electronic schedules and ticketing machines.  This in 25 years.

I’m more likely to find my way around Stow Ohio, where I was an exchange student for my senior year of highschool – mumble – years ago than to find my way around my native village.  The changes are unimaginable.  And while I’m conscious they needed to happen – we were the “well off” people, if not the most well off, and we didn’t have running hot water.  A lot of the people in the village had no water at all and needed to go to the public fountain, Roman style.  The public laundry facilities PROBABLY dated back to the Romans with some changes.  Etc.  The country needed to be pulled kicking, screaming and biting to the Century of The Fruitbat, or at least The Milenium of the Constipated Weasel.

The way it’s been done, with a whole lot of top-down and “your betters know what’s best for you” which has not only depopulated the interior and led to all the stack a prol buildings, but also led to a collapsed birth rate (people can’t afford to have kids) annoys the living daylights out of me.  However, it must be said it doesn’t seem to annoy the living daylights out of the natives, and how they choose to live is ultimately none of my business.

Yes, I do get rather upset that they choose not preserve the village in amber to match my earliest memories and put brass plaques all over saying “Sarah A. Hoyt made a mudpie here.”  “Sarah Hoyt got in a fight here.”  Mostly because it’s a waste since you know and I know in a hundred years they’ll be doing that, and recreating my childhood home in every detail, but what can I do?  People are like that. [Ed. Note – I AM JOKING.  I AM VERY MUCH JOKING.  I CAN’T MUSTER EVEN SELF CONFIDENCE, MUCH LESS NARCISSISM.  But it is true the only reason for my annoyance is that it inconveniences me.  And that’s not a real reason, and I know that, since I’m NOT the belly button of the universe.]

And having spent all this time whining about why I don’t blog about Portugal more, I’ll have to leave what I loved about growing up in Portugal till tomorrow.  And hopefully my reminiscences won’t bore you to death.