Читать книгу Livin' la Vida Barroca. American Culture in an Age of Imperial Orthodoxies онлайн

5 страница из 84

Preface

Until quite recently, Irish-Americans tended to marry late, a practice that, in turn, created extraordinarily long generations within many families of that ethnic group. I grew up sharing every Sunday dinner, and in the summer a great deal more than that, with three grandparents born in 1890.

Spending time together in our family was mostly about talking, or if you were young, listening and using your imagination to create movies in your mind out of the word-pictures that flowed non-stop from the mouths of Gram, Grammy and Banky, my uncles and aunts, and their never-ending retinue of show-up-at-the-backdoor friends. Their stories became my stories and thus I, like them, came to view all that occurred from 1895 onward as an integral part of my own life experience.

I do not know how common such customs were among other Americans of my generation. What I do know is that by the time I graduated from college in the early eighties, very few of my classmates and friends were actively laying claim to this tradition of historically minded alchemy.