Microwunderkammer

 Parental artifact #6–small tapestry from Guatemala

A cute little souvenir my mom bought on our family’s trip to Central America in the mid-70’s. This is a typical product for the tourist market, based on traditional techniques and styles. It came from one of the markets that are as much for the tourist trade as anything else. I have lots of good memories from this expedition, which was purely a vacation. Aside from reminiscences of a fun time in far-off lands, this item leads my thoughts in two directions.

The first is that it is really very evocative of my mom and her attitude towards sex. It’s always weird thinking about one’s parents with regard to sex, but let’s face it, if they didn’t have some experience with sex, we wouldn’t be around to be embarrassed by the topic. my parents were pretty typical of their generation, so sex wasn’t much talked about. I can’t speak for my brothers, but I don’t recall getting the talk about the birds and the bees from them. As we cracked puberty, we were given a book called “What is Happening to Me?”, and we had sex ed from school. The combination leaves one with a rudimentary understanding of the plumbing, a slim understanding of the mechanics, and pretty much no understanding of the psycho-social issues.

Which is not to say that my mom was a Victorian prude. In our travels, she was always, and obviously, titillated by overt displays of male nudity or sex—such as the Namba-wearing tribes of Papua-New Guinea, the manly Masai, the very male kangaroo hunter in an Aboriginal X-ray painting, an elephant that on first sight was five-legged but was actually a rutty bull, the seamless kangaroo-leather coin-purse that could only be made from males. All these things evoked some girlish giggling from her. “Girlish” really seems to be the word, I can’t really find a better one.

So we get to Guatemala, and find that mating cattle are a common motif in the native weavings. This makes sense: the fertility of animals that are a major part of a family’s wealth would be something to celebrate. For my mom, it was appealing art, reminiscent of a place, and an amusing thing. So she bought the tapestry, framed it, and hung it in the living room along with the kangaroo-hunting Aborigine, a batik elephant from Ceylon, a Navajo rug, a mola of birds from Panama, a bark-paper print from Fiji, and other souvenirs from her travels.

After nearly fifty years on that wall, the tapestry is now here on our farm in Roseburg, Oregon, prompting a second stream of thoughts. I’m writing this in snippets, as I am spending most of my day pimping goats. I walk to one corner of the farm, where the bucks dwell, and select a specific animal, scanning his microchip, to be sure I have the right one (Duva arranges these assignations in advance). I drag him halfway across the farm, at which point he senses that there are does in heat, whereupon he drags me the rest of the way. I tie up the buck, get the appropriate doe, and let them reenact the scene on the tapestry. The does usually are in heat for a day and a half, during which time they get bred three times a day. There are more than thirty does to breed, so there is a lot of walking back and forth, and a lot of waiting for “what comes natch’rly,” and a lot of time to think.

Sometimes I think about how odd it is that my life has taken me here, to a point where the success of breeding animals is almost as important to me as it is to the Guatemalans who started weaving cows and bulls into their tapestries. I start skipping back and forth over decades: thirty years ago, and I was on a path to a career in research in the biological sciences, just like my dad, and his dad, and like my mom’s mom and dad, and his dad too. Ten years ago, I left a job teaching college students and quit academia. My dad was already in the twilit fog of Alzheimer’s disease, and my mom was following. I don’t know if they really understood that their son, the PhD, was no longer in academia. I don’t know if they would really wholeheartedly endorse this course. I don’t know if my mom ever looked at this tapestry and connected it to what I now do for several weeks every year.

No matter. It is now, as it was forty years ago, appealing art, reminiscent of a place, and an amusing thing. It also reminds me of my mom, being giggly and girlish. If it brings our farm luck in breeding in the future, so much the better.