My mother learned ballroom from my dad but that was just part of a finely-tuned life. She had gone to private schools growing up and then Berkeley and from there the requisite chaperoned graduation trip to Europe where she bought silk slips in Paris and many pairs of thin, soft leather gloves in Venice. She came from a old American family, descended from both Thomas Prence and Edmund Freeman of Plymouth and before that a few centuries of ancestors from England and before that many centuries from France. Her family scroll was 83 generations tall with no unbroken lines. She felt the comfort keenly of such a thick foundation.
Her grandfather had been a scientist and among other things had invented something called the process for coal gasification. He held patents in many countries. I have a stack of them right here on the desk with me. From time to time I open the old yellowed folders and gingerly remove them. The one before me right now is dated 1928 and the country name is typed as "British India". The patent is on large, slightly rough paper. The type indents the page, that old typewriter etching. The details are written with a pen dipped in black ink. A thin green ribbon runs through two holes, attaching together the pages and a deep scarlet seal presses the ribbon safe. This particular patent is for "an improved method of and means for treating oil bearing shales and kindred oil bearing minerals" and it lists my great-grandfather's home in London where he spent much of his time. There are patents here lying with it from Sweden, Bulgaria, Great Britain, Roumania, Germany, Argentine, Belgium and other wonderful places and yes, that is the spelling on some you may have thought I spelled incorrectly. Their spelling is part of the languid, lovely paper and seals and flowing ink, an other world that no longer exists.
My mother married my father on a lark or was it to be rebellious towards her mother. One will never know for sure. My father wasn't exactly what they were expecting. Besides his being a dancer, he had known so much about minerals, having spent much of his time on Mary Blaine mountain with other codgers digging mines by hand, panning for gold that he took a correspondance course and got his license as a mineral surveyor. The license covered the western states. When he wasn't dancing he was out in a desert or up in a forest surveying. For him, my mother was a twenty-six year old unscratched gem. There was no uncertainty there. And that made her feel like the center of the world and that was how she wanted to feel and that was how he made her feel for the next thirty years until he died. They were happily married, against all odds. But who can say what works? Even the experts don't know. Some of the online dating services say it's chemistry, some say harmony, some say just go on a date and see. As odd a match as it was, it worked for them.
My mother took her degree from Berkeley and got a job as an English teacher at a high school near my father's dance studio. Then she became the head of the department and then the head librarian. During the school year my brother and I went to school, my mother ran the school library and my father taught dancing and drew maps of his surveys. Then every year on the first day of summer vacation, we were piled into the car in our jammies at 4 a.m. and took off towards the wilderness. The surveying work was seasonal and Dad had lined up one or two jobs. The jobs would be in the mountain forests of the Pacific Northwest or the deserts of California and Nevada. They were always on private land and usually belonged to some old miner who wanted to make a claim or somebody who had inherited the property from way back and had no idea where it was. Sometimes we would have to leave the car behind and hike the final miles to the place where we were to make camp. Dad didn't allow tents or camp stoves or any of the typical camping equipment. We were lucky he allowed sleeping bags as he didn't use one. It was a pile of leaves for him and an old Army blanket. One year up in Idaho at the snow line we found an ancient iron bed just sitting there in the forest. It even had its springs. Dad said I could have it and I happily laid my thin sleeping bag upon it. He said I needed to watch out for lightning, which happened a lot up there that summer. He said that lightning just loved metal beds and as long as not a single part of my body was touching the actual metal while I slept, I wouldn't fry. He thought that was hilarious. I slept like a hibernating hamster, curled tightly at the bottom of the bag.
