Wednesday November 24, 2004 – American Gothic

Wednesday November 24, 2004 – American Gothic

We have this picture of my mom and dad taken over ten years ago when my youngest daughter R was graduating high school. They had driven up to attend the graduation in their 1970 vintage Lincoln Continental hauling an Airstream trailer that has been all the way to Alaska and back, not to mention on countless trips between El Paso, Texas and Brooklyn, Mississippi, where my grandmother’s home was until it burned to the ground over twenty years ago.

In the picture my mom and dad are standing side by side. My dad has on a light colored western shirt with the collar button and a bola necktie around his neck. He’s looking directly at the camera. Standing beside him is my diminutive Filipina mother, her head barely topping his shoulder also looking directly at the camera. Both have serious looks on their faces, though my father has the slightest hint of a smile, mostly seen in his sparkling blue eyes. My mother’s expression is that of the Sphinx, mysterious and enigmatic yet wise—though it can be piercing when she turns her gaze on you.

Every time I look at the picture, I’m reminded of Grant Wood's painting "American Gothic" though the painting depicts an Iowa farmer and his daughter. I think the reason the picture of my mom and dad conjures up the painting is the pose, man and woman side by side. In Wood’s work you can see that the two people captured on canvas are related. In the photo of my mom and dad, you see the resemblance that comes from two people being together for so long a period of time, close to forty years when that picture was taken. In their younger life, my mom took care of my dad. In their later years, it is my dad who has taken on the role of caregiver. Life has a way of evening out the load just as in my parents’ picture the two appear to share similar features.

Looking at the photograph, you can see in my father the prototype of the American man. He’s tall, an inch or two shy of six feet. He is slender and sinewy with arms and neck, tanned copper from a lifetime of working in the sun—a mechanic most of his life in the military and afterwards in civilian life, repairing diesel and gasoline engines. In the photo, he has graying and thinning, light brown hair, which still covers most of his head but cut military style—a 20-year tour, most as a sergeant in the Army, leaves habits that follow you through life. His hairline is receding though it remains forward enough to keep his high forehead from suggesting a growing baldness. His Aryan face—his father was a full-blooded, right off-the boat German, shows the first sign of age in ever so slightly drooping cheeks and chin. He has a well shaped, rounded classic Cro Magnum head, ears close to his skull, and a Germanic nose, situated in the middle of a square face that curves down and inward to form a rounded chin.

My petite Filipina mother, who I resemble far more than my father with our full lips, slightly flatten nose, brown eyes, and brown skin, nevertheless, inexplicably bears features that resemble those of my father. Perhaps it’s the way each holds their heads or their posture, or the expression on their faces. Whatever it is, I’m struck by it when I look at that photograph. My mother is from the outskirts of Manila in a little town called Agoo La Union and was a strikingly beautiful young woman with her long black hair and her engaging smile. I can easily see how my father was smitten with her. However, beneath that beautiful exterior is a willful woman, who I believe is far more courageous and brave than many men. She’s demonstrated that character on at least two occasions that I can remember and I’ve been in awe of her ever since. She taught me what I know about taking risks.

My father met my mother during the last days of the Second World War while he was on duty in The Philippines. The Army was still engaging entrenched Japanese resistance still in the islands. They began living together shortly after they met and my father became close to my mother’s large extended family of brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles—her parents had both died by then. How my mother and I came to this country is another story, but we did in the last half of the 1940s a couple of years after I was born. My mother must have felt right at home in Mississippi, Georgia and North Carolina, the states my father took her through in the first few years of their marriage. All three were hot and humid in the summer and seldom saw terrible cold winters—a pretty good description of The Philippines or so my mother tells me.

What is captured in that photo of my parents which is hinted at but not seen is the lifetime of struggle the two of them went through to get to that point in time. The serenity and bliss that emanates from their frozen pose had been forged by years of struggle: the pawnshop providing a lender of last resort in cash strapped times—in the absence of credit cards that are ubiquitous today, picking up and moving every three years at the whim of the Army, cross country trips in a 1953 Oldsmobile without air conditioning in the summer… My parents lived by their wits: my mother managing the household and caring for four children, my father making sure that there were meals on the table, a roof over our heads, and clothes on our back.

What that photo does imply is a bond that has been forged by those decades of living together, arguing, making up, coping with the thousands of small heartbreaks that fill any life. You see in that picture two people, but if you were to see them in their element back home in El Paso you would see an interconnected community of people that comprise the world of my father and mother. The community resembles an organic being with each contributing their part to the community to make it stronger than any individual within it. By the time that picture was taken, my dad and mom had been away from El Paso for a good week and the stress of being on the road that long living out of a Airstream was beginning to take its toll.

A day after that picture was taken, the two of them hitched up the Airstream and made their way back home. They have been back to visit on more recent occasions, but not in the Airstream. Mostly, we visit them now though my father still harbors the dream of him and my mother hitting the road and going where their whim takes them.