Helen Richardson, 1896

When things in this “real  world” – if, indeed, a world depending mostly on virtual contacts and communications can be termed “real” — becomes especially tense and unpleasant, I find it helpful to step back in time.  Not a virtual step, mind you.  These days anything “virtual” is much too close to our present reality.  No, for my sanity I’d rather take a totally imaginary step.  A step based in historical documentation but with myself as a participant in the action.

Lamplighter at Work

This morning my thoughts have been centered on my grandmother Helen Richardson Espy.  She came to Oysterville as a young married woman with the understanding that it would be for only “a few years.” She was a city girl and Oysterville was more backward than she could have imagined.  She hated it and only because of her great love for my grandfather and her devotion to her children was she able to manage.  She remained here until her death more than fifty years  later.  It was not until close to the end of her life that she realized she had grown to love this place, after all.

But it’s the story of her early childhood that I love best.  She was born in Mexico City — her father was attached to the American Embassy there and her mother was the daughter of ex-pats — Southerners who had fled America at the end of the Civil War.  She first came to the United States  in 1879 or 1880 when she was about a year and a half old.

The family lived in San Francisco until young Helen was school age. Her first memory was watching from the window of their house on Montgomery Street as the lamplighter stopped his horse each evening at one lamppost after another, igniting the lamps with his taper.  There were other memories that she jotted down for her son Willard to include in his 1978 book, Oysterville Roads to Grandpa’s Village:

Once a Familiar Sight in San Francisco c. 1890

How I loved to hear the tamale man sing as he wheeled his cart down Market Street, “Tamale, tamale, ’tis good da cheek-in tamale”…There was Sing, the Chinaman, with his long queue and laughing face, and baskets of vegetables hanging one at each end of a pole that he balanced over his shoulder as he dogtrotted from house to house… But I hated it when my nurse took me through the steep hills of Chinatown.  Such smells– such noises– and once there were two little boys asleep in a box suspended by a hook from the ceiling…

My mind leapt forward to my friend Milton Quan’s memory of his mother, Gracie, tethering him and his brother to the flagpole on the beach when they were little.   It was at China Camp (since 1979, China Camp State Park) on San Pablo Bay where he grew up in the 1940s.  Both of us agree that Gracie was a smart and careful mom — the boys could play endlessly in the sand with their toy trucks while they were safely out of the tide’s reach.   I wonder if I could have shared his story with my grandmother… would she have felt differently about the boys in the box…

China Camp

Once again I am reminded that imagination, reality, past, and present have a way of colliding.  A trip back in time provides a lovely interlude but, even still, such a journey is always a reminder that life is full of misunderstandings of one kind or another.  The safest remedy in my mind:  keep your perspective and sense of humor intact for all your worlds — real, virtual, imaginary.  And any others that take your fancy.