Growing Up In Time

One of the things I liked about Portugal was both the sense of “deep time” – there were marks, structures, customs going back sometimes thousands of years.  There were stories of my ancestors in the same place I grew up going back hundreds of years.  There was a connection, a sense of belonging to the region and the region to me – and the (perhaps illusory) ability to know what life had been like long before.

A lot of this was illusory.  I used to think that the pine forests, dark green, hemming in the village, had been there forever.  But they hadn’t.  Areal photos on the net show the scars of buildings and villages and roads amid what remains of the forest, and I bet the rest (more at the edges) had them to.

I should have known this, since one of my favorite things on weekends was going for walks with dad and finding ruins with Latin inscriptions.  (Usually of the sort that went “This land given by Emperor Trajan to xxxx for completing a term of service.”) and also since the forest in the lower village – close to my parents’ house, instead of my grandparents – had roman mines still extant.  Heck, from the terraced look of land around there, I suspect a lot of the rest of it was fields in Roman times.  But the mind doesn’t always correlate these disparate bits of information.  I used to love that forest and to feel like it had always been there, that my ancestors had seen it and walked through it.

I know this is going to sound stupid, but it gave sort of a bolster at my back.

It also made me grow up with a sense of seeing not just in space but in time.  A place I sat down in was a nice flagstoned courtyard, and also it had been a threshing yard for centuries, and also, judging from a structure in the corner, it might once have been the access area to a little private chapel.

I don’t know if you can get what I mean, because in the states it goes back at most three or four hundred years, which feels like yesterday to me – and the fact that it feels like yesterday to me is part of the way this feeling molded me.

But it wasn’t just the stones or the remnants of buildings.  it was the customs that came through that felt old, in varying degrees.  May day when we went to gather may flowers – branches with little yellow flowers that grew wild – and put them on every opening of the house so ill luck wouldn’t come in.  Where did the custom come from?  I don’t know.  I also have clue zero where the custom of putting a red ribbon around a child’s wrist on the first day of spring, to prevent sunburns during the year.

More conventional customs, like saint-day feasts I knew where they came from.  They’re obviously medieval in origin.  Or at least parts of them, not necessarily the parts I liked best – I liked the rides and the cotton candy, neither of which, I think, could be medieval.  But the set-pieces were much older.  Each saint feast for instance had a special kind of vendor setting up stalls.  This was often a seasonal produce.  Watermelon for a spring feast, chestnuts for a fall one.  But it could also be crafts.  Pottery was, for reasons known only to people long dead, the domain of St. Benedict, the patron saint of broken crockery.  Before you mended crockery you prayed to St. Benedict. (And the fact that a crockery mender came by once a week tells you a lot about the relative wealth we have now.)  There was also usually a procession mid day.  This procession involved people dressed as saints, usually in payment of a promise.  If it sounds unbearably corny, well… it was.  But most of the people who got dressed (in payment of an adult’s promise) were kids, so it was like mini-Halloween for them.  (Beyond the fact Portuguese dress for Carnival, not Halloween.)  And at night there would be a fireworks display.

Why did this give me a sense of deep time?  Well… there was one a month – at least – within a ten miles radius from April through October.  And the pieces that came from long ago were … repetitive and a little lame.  It gave me the impression of how boring life must have been then, that these were the high points of people’s existence, and people lived from feast to feast, each with strict customs and set pieces.

Another thing that gives you a sense for how boring – beyond calm.  Well, often it wasn’t calm at all.  Even my grandmother’s stories from HER grandmother talk of famines (though that was probably the Napoleonic invasions.)  But it was still boring – life could be in the past is what everyone in the village did on Sundays when I was little.  They sat on their stoop, up and down the main street.  And when I say stoop I mean stoop, since most of the houses didn’t have a porch or any sort of garden up front, unless they’d been built in the seventies.

Actually families would bring chairs out and people would sit in front of their doors on Sunday afternoon.  The women would crochet or knit, the kids played and the men smoked.  And they watched.  What did they watch?  Their neighbors, starting with those around them, of course, but also those odd ducks who walked somewhere.  This usually included my family who walked up the length of the village to catch the streetcar to my maternal grandparents.  It also included any young couples who might be going to a show or a feast in a nearby village.

Yes, that was the ONLY entertainment, and less you imagine a crowd thronging the sidewalks, well, there really weren’t sidewalks (traffic was so rare, people just walked up the street itself) and people might walk by every ten minutes.  In between you talked about the people who’d walked by before.

It might not be any different from clicking through channels on the tv, but it couldn’t be summoned on command, which made a difference.  Oh, also, vendors would walk down the street selling sweets – mother-in-law’s tongue was this long, rolled up waffle, like a waffle cone without the ice-cream – and chips “fried potatoes English style.”  This livened up things about like an ice cream truck driving through a suburban American street today.  If you’re having trouble picturing these men, they carried on their backs long metallic, cylinders – somewhat like a small water heating tank – painted white, with a lid that opened to dispense the treats.  They took the bus from village to village.

I know it sounds deprived and boring, but it was fun.  However, it gave me the impression of another time, when entertainments were yet fewer and lamer.  When anything at all happening was fun.

This ties in with writing of course.  You might think the current “sound bite style” is sad, but try reading an early novel, in which people meander about nothing in particular, and entire novellas on unrelated subjects are put within the novel.  Then try pictures the level of boredom needed for putting up with it.

Of course, like most humans, I prefer life to be more interesting than that, if not terminally so.  But I try to bring this sense of bucolic peace, of need for excitement, with me into my historic or fantasy worlds.

And in all this, what do I miss most?  I miss walking into the woods with my dad and everything being so quiet, except for bird song and the tiny winding ribbon of my brother’s transistor radio (the only one in the village.  He usually took off to study in a clearing in the woods, and in the silence it could be heard for miles.)

About ten years ago Dan and I and the kids got lost in the Portuguese mountains – hills, really but they call them mountains – and came out on this road in the middle of a pine forest.  As we got out of the car, I found again the silence of my childhood broken only by the tinny sound of a portable radio.

I had the oddest sensation of being back in time and that, should I walk towards that sound, I would find my brother as a teenagers, sprawled on the clearing, doing his school work.

I didn’t follow the sound, of course.  I don’t know which would be worse, finding I really could travel back in time, or finding some stranger listening to his portable radio  (Which, I hasten to say, I know is what would happen.  Intellectually.)

But for a moment, for just a moment, I got back a piece of a place and time I wasn’t even aware of loving when I was there.