Typically when I go on vacation, I try to read something related to my destination. The year that we went to Hilton Head, for instance, I read three books by Pat Conroy. For me, the intersection of story telling and exploring a location provide a means of understanding place more deeply.
This year, however, as we headed out the door to Alabama, I grabbed a copy of John Phillip Santos' memoir, Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation. It's a book about his growing up in San Antonio and the family to which he was born. I'd picked it up at H.E.B. two years ago, when the book was the inaugural selection of One Book, One San Antonio. And I fully intended to read it. However, my then-newborn son, all milk-hungry and wide-eyed at 3 am, and my weary postpartum mind had other plans. I read frothy novels instead, seeking momentary escape from the routine of new motherhood, holding my sleeping boy during our afternoon siesta.
What possessed me to grab the book two weeks ago is beyond me. It's hardly a beach read. It's non-fiction, after all. And it's not part of any particular reading agenda, like my Christmas 2007 effort to read, finally, Jane Austen's collected works. I just picked it up.
And I'm grateful that I did.
Inside this remarkable, exceedingly well-written book—a finalist for the National Book Award and the first book in a long time that I've dog-eared and underlined passages, returning to it again and again—was all sorts of wonderful information and insight into my region on almost every imaginable level. Truly, I could go on an on about Places from many angles, but I want to share a bit...enough hopefully to encourage you to seek the book out. And, for the sake of brevity and thematic consistency, I'll focus my attention momentarily on the horticultural and environmental information contained inside Santos' slender volume.
For starters, I had no idea that there were once subterranean greenhouses near modern day Brackenridge Park. Santos' grandfather worked there, many decades ago. And I found Santos' description of his grandmother and her contemporaries enchanting, as much for what it reveals about who they were as it illustrates what grows most easily in this region:
Their houses smelled of cinnamon tea, marigolds, burning church candles...They tended garden plots of geraniums, squash, tomatoes, cilantro and chile, decorate with stones that were painted to look like Popeye, Olive Oyl and Cantinflas...They healed children, and animals, with their remedios, potions and poultices made with herbs that had names like el garrabato and la gobernadora.
I learned so much from this book...that the cedar that plagues our area (and nasal passages every winter) was planted to support the area's charcoal industry....about Santos' family's attempts to farm and garden on challenging land during rough economic times...that even the Indians that once dwelled on these lands had a rough time getting food to grow consistently...what the wonderful word "susurrated" means (yes, I looked that one up)...what it was like to grow up in a Mexican-American San Antonio home in the '60s and '70s...I could go on.
But I'll stop short for now and just encourage you to read (or listen to) Places (see below). Actually, I think every American should pick it up to learn about an area of the country for which our nation is spending a fortune to erect a wall to divide us from the very people who built my own neighborhood and much of this city with their bare hands. Mind boggling...and a topic for other blogs and sites, frankly.
And yet...would that every community had an author like Santos to articulate its quotidien truths, family secrets...collective and individual origin stories. What might we come to understand about who we are as Americans?
For Further Exploration:
• FREE! Listen to John Phillip Santos read book excerpts at Texas Public Radio.
• Shameless plug for San Antonio Convention and Visitor's Bureau, though be warned they understandably tilt toward the touristy stuff. If you want funky and off-beat, try Virtual Tourist or post a Comment, tell me what you're interested in discovering and I'll try to help.
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