In Search of the Good Family

InNn HoweRo
Jone Howord (1935-1996) wos o iournolist who wrote obout the chonging Americon scene. A frequent contributor to [ife, the New York Times, ond Smithsonion, she is the outhor of Pleose Touch: AGuided Tour of the Humon Polentiol Movement (19701, A Different Womon 1197311, Fomilies (19781, ond Morgoret Meod: A Life

(1984). The following selection, odopted

for Atlontic Monthly from

Fomilies,

explores the chorocteristics thot moke conventionol fomilies ond new kinds of fomilies meoningful communities.

it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family. Whatever you \-*call it, whoever you are, you need one. You need one because you are human. You didn't come from nowhere. Before you, around you, and presumably after you, too, there are others. Some of these others must matter a lot to you, and if you are very lucky, to one another. Their welfare must be nearly as impor-

ftall

it

a clan, call

tant to you as your own. Even if you live alone, even if your solitude is elected and ebullient, you still cannot do without a clan or tribe. The trouble with the clans and tribes many of us were born into is not that they consist of meddlesome ogres but that they are too far away.In emergencies we rush across continents and if need be oceans to their sides, as they do to ours. Maybe we even make a habit of seeing them, once or twice ayea\ for the sheer pleasure of it. But blood ties seldom dictate our addresses. Our blood kin are often too remote to ease us from our Tuesdays to ourWednesdays. For this we must rely on our families of friends. If our relatives are not, do not wish to be, or for whatever reasons cannot be our friends, then by some complex alchemy we must try to transform our friends into our relatives. If blood and roots don't do the job, then we must look to water and branches, and sort ourselves into new constellations, new families. These new families, to borrow the terminology of an African tribe (the Bangwa of the Cameroons), may consiqt either of friends of the road, ascribed by chance, or friends of the heart, achieved by choice. Ascribed friends are those we happen to go to school with, work with, or live near. They know where we went last weekend and whether we still have a cold. fust being around gives them a provisional importance in our lives, and us in theirs. Muyb. they will still matter to us when we or they move awayi quite likely they won't. Six months or two years will probably erase us from each other's thoughts, unless by some chance they and we have become friends of the heart. Wishiiig to be friends, as Aristotle wrote, is quick work, but friendship is a slowly ripening fruit. An ancient proverb he quotes in his Ethics had it that you cannot know a man until you and he together have eaten a peck of salt. Now a

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peck, a quarter of a bushel, is quite a lot of salt more, perhaps, than most pairs of people ever have occasion to share. We must try though. We must sit together at as many tables as we can. We must steer each other through enough seasons and weathers so that sooner or later it crosses our minds that one of us, God knows which or with what sorrow, must one day mourn the other. We must devise new ways, or revive old ones, to equip ourselves with kinfolk. Muyb. such an impulse prompted whoever ordered the cake I saw in my neighborhood bakery to have it frosted to say "Happy Birthday Surro gate!'I like to think that this cake was decorated not for a judge but for someone's surrogate mother

or surrogate brother: loathsome jargon, but admirable sentiment. If you didn't conceive me or if we didn't grow up in the same house, we can still be related, if we decide we ought to be. It is never too late,I like to hope, to augment our families in ways nature neglected to do. It is never too late to choose new clans. The best-chosen clans, like the best friendships and the best blood families,
endure by accumulating a history solid enough to suggest a future. But clans that don't last have merit too. We can lament them but we shouldn't deride them. Better an ephemeral clan or tribe than none at all. A few of my life's most tribally joyous times, in fact, have been spent with people whom I have yet to see again. This saddens me, as it may them too, but dwelling overlong on such sadness does no good. A more fertile exercise is to think back on those times and try to figure out what made them, for all their brevity, so stirring. What can such times teach us about forming new and more lasting tribes in the future? New tribes and clans can no more be willed into existence, of course, than any other good thing can. We keep trying, though. To try, with gritted teeth and girded loins, is after all American. That is what the two Helens and I were talking about the daywe had lunch in a room way up in a high-rise motel near the Kansas City airport. We had lunch there at the end of a two-day conference on families. The two Helens were social scientists, but I liked them even so, among other reasons because they both objected to that motel's coffee shop even more than I did. One of the Helens, from Virginia, disliked it so much that she had brought along homemade whole wheat bread, sesame butter, and honey from her parents'farm in South Dakota, where she had visited before the conference. Her picnic was the best thing that happened, to me at least, those whole two days. "If you're voluntarily childless and alone," said the other Helen, who was from Pennsylvania by way of Puerto Rico, "it gets harder and harder with the passage of time.It's stressful. That's whyyou need support systems." I had been hearing quite a bit of talk about "support systems." The term is not among my favorites, but I can understand its currency. Whatever "support systems" may be, the need for.them is clearly urgent, and not just in this country. Are there not

thriving "me$i-families" of as many as three hundred people in Scandinavia? if perhaps by our Have not the )apanese for years had an honored, enduring -to fill gaps in their 6u5tern of adopting nonrelatives standards rather rigid
families? Should we not applaud and maybe imitate such ingenuity?

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And consider our own Unitarians. From Santa Barbara to Boston they have been earnestly dividing their congregations into arbitrary "extended families" whose members are bound to act like each other's relatives. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. plays with a similar train of thought in his fictional Slapstick.In that book every newborn baby is assigned a randomly chosen middle name,like Uranium or Daffodil or Raspberry. These middle names are connected with hyphens to numbers between one and twenty, and anytwo people who have the same middle name are automatically related. This is all to the good, the author thinks, because "human beings need all the relatives they can get as possible donors or receivers not of - these extended families as "one of the love but of common decency." He envisions four greatest inventions by Americans," the others being Robert's Rules of Order, the Bill of Rights, and the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous. This charming notion might even work, if it weren't so arbitrary. Already each of us is born into one family not of our choosing. If we're going to devise new ones, we might as well have the luxury of picking the members ourselves. Clever picking might result in new families whose benefits would surpass or at least equal those of the old. As a member in reasonable standing of six or seven tribes in addition to the one I was born to, I have been trying to figure which characteristics are common to both kinds of families. 1. Good families have a chief, or a heroine, or a founder someone around whom others cluster, whose achievements, as the Yiddish word has it, let them kvell,l and whose example spurs them on to like feats. Some blood dynasties produce such figures regularly; others languish for as many as five generations between demigods, wondering with each new pregnancy whether this, at last, might be the messianic babywho will redeem them. Look, is there not something gubernatorial about her footstep, or musical about the way he bangs with his spoon on his cup? All clans, of all kinds, need such a figure now and then. Sometimes clans based on water rather than blood harbor several such personages at one time. 2. Good families have a switchboard operator someone who cannot help but keep track of what all the others are up to, who-plays Houston Mission Control to everyone else's Apollo. This rolq is assumed rather than assigned. The person who volunteers for it often has the instincts of an archivist, and feels driven to keep scrapbooks and photograph albums up to date, so that the clan can see proof of its own continuity. 3. Good families are much to all their members, but everything to none. Good families are fortresses with many windows and doors to the outer world. The blood clans I feel most drawn to were founded by parents who are nearly as devoted io what they do outside as they are to each other and their children. Their
curiosity'afhd passion are contagious. Everybody, where they live, is busy. Paint is

10

tYiddish, "exclaim proudly especially in boasting about a member of a family."-Eds.

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spattered on eyeglasses. Mud lurks under fingernails. Person-to-person calls come in the middle of the night from Tokyo and Brussels. Catcher's mitts, ballet slippers, overdue library books, and other signs of extrafamilial concerns are
everywhere.

4. Good families are hospitable. Knowing that hosts need guests as much as guests need hosts, they are generous with honorary memberships for friends, whom they urge to come early and often and to stay late. Such clans exude a vivid sense of surrounding rings of relatives, neighbors, teachers, students, and godparents, any of whom at any time might break or slide into the inner circle. Inside that circle a wholesome, tacit emotional feudalism develops: you give me protection, I'll give you fealty. Such pacts begin with, but soon go far beyond, the jolly exchange of pie at Thanksgiving or cake on a birthday. They mean that you can ask me to supervise your children for the fortnight you will be in the hospital, and that however inconvenient this might be for me,I shall manage to do so. It means I can phone you on what for me is a dreary, wretched Sunday afternoon and for you is the eve of a deadline, knowing you will tell me to come right over, if only to watch you type. It means we need not dissemble. ("To yield to seeming," as Martin Buber2 wrote, "is man's essential cowardice, to resist it is his essential courage. . . one must at times pay dearly for life lived from the being, but it is
never too dear.")

5. Good families deal squarely with direness. Pity the tribe that doesn't have, and cherish, at least one flamboyant eccentric. Pity too the one that supposes it can avoid for long the woes to which all flesh is heir. Lunacy, bankruptcy, suicide, and other unthinkable fates sooner or later afflict the noblest of clans with an undertow of gloom. Family life is a set of givens, someone once told me, and it takes courage to see certain givens as blessings rather than as curses. It surely does. Contradictions and inconsistencies are givens, too. So is the battle against what the Oregon patriarch Kenneth Babbs calls malarkey. "There's always malarkey lurking, bubbles in the cesspool, fetid bubbles that pop and smell. But I don't put up with malarkey, between my stepkids and my natural ones or anywhere else in the family." 6. Good families prize their rituals. Nqthing welds a family more than these. Rituals are vital especially for clans without histories, because they evoke a past, imply a future, and hint at continuity. No line in the seder service at Passover reassures more than the last: "Nextyear in |erusalem!"A clan becomes more of a clan each time it gathers to observe a fixed ritual (Christmas, birthdays, Thanksgiving, and so on), grieves at a funeral (anyone may come to most funerals; those who do declare their tribalness), and devises a new rite of its own. Equinox breakfasts can be atleast as welding as Memorial Day parades. Several of my colleagues and I used to rii'eet for lunch every Pearl Harbor Day, preferablyto eat some polit2Buber (1878-1965) was anAustrian-Israeli philosopher and Jewish theologian.

t-5

-Eds.

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ically neutral fare like smorgasbord, to "forgive" our only ancestrally fapanese
friend, Irene Kubota Neves. For that and other things we became, and remain, a sort of family. . . . 7. Good families are affectionate. This of course is a matter of style. I know clans whose members greet each other with gingerly handshakes or, in what pass for kisses, with hurried brushes of jawbones, as if the object were to touch not the lips but the ears. I don't see how such people manage. "The tribe that does not hug," as someone who has been part of many adhocfamllies recentlywrote to me, "is no tribe at all. More and more Irealizethat everybody, regardless of age, needs to be hugged and comforted in a brotherly or sisterly way now and then. Preferably now."

8. Good families have a sense of place, which these days is not achieved easily. As Susanne Langer wrote in 1957,"Most people have no home that is a symbol of their childhood, not even a definite memory of one place to serve that purpose . . . all the old symbols are gone." Once I asked a roomful of supper guests if anyone felt a strong pull to any certain spot on the face of the earth. Everyone was silent, except for a visitor from Bavaria. The rest of us seemed to know all too well
what Walker Percy means in The Moviegoer when he tells of the "genie-soul of a place, which every place has or else is not a place [and which] wherever you go, you must meet and master or else be met and mastered." All that meeting and mastering saps plenty of strength. It also underscores our need for tribal bases of the sort which soaring real estate taxes and splintering familieshave made all but
obsolete.
So what are we to do, those of us whose habit and pleasure and doom is our tendency, as a Georgia lady put it, to "fly off at every other whipstitch"? Think in terms of movable feasts, that's what. Live here, wherever here may be, as if we were going to belong here for the rest of our lives. Learn to hallow whatever ground we happen to stand on or land on. Like medieval knights who took their tapestries along on Crusades, like modern Afghanis with their yurts, we must pack such totems and icons as we can to make short-term quarters feel like home. Pillows, small rugs, watercolors can dispel much of the chilling anonymity of a motel room or sublet apartment. When we can, we should live in rooms with stoves or fireplaces or at least candlelight. The ancient saying is still true: Extinguished hearth, extinguished family. Round tables help too, and as a friend of mine once put it, so do "too many comfortable chairs, with surfaces to put feet on, arranged so as to encourage a maximum of eye contact." Such rooms inspire good talk, of which good clans can

never have enough.

9. Good families, not just the blood kind, find some way to connect with
posterity.t'To forge a link in the humble chain of being, encircling heirs to ancestors," as Michael Novak has written, "is to walk within a circle of magic as primitive as humans knew in caves." He is talking of course about babies, feeling them leap in wombs, giving them suck. Parenthood, however, is a state which some

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miss by chance and others by design, and a vocation to which not all are called. Some of us, like the novelist Richard P. Brickner, look on as others "name their children and their children in turn name their own lives, devising their own flags from their parents' cloth." What are we who lack children to do? Build houses? Plant trees? Write books or symphonies or laws? Perhaps, but even if we do these things, there should be children on the sidelines if not at the center of our lives. It is a sadly impoverished tribe that does not allow access to, and make much of, some children. Not too much, of course; it has truly been said that never in history have so many educated people devoted so much attention to so few children. Attention, in excess, can turn to fawning, which isn't much better than neg-

lect. Still, if we don't regularly see and talk to and laugh with people who can expect to outlive us by twenty years or so, we had better get busy and find some. 10. Good families also honor their elders. The wider the age range, the stronger the tribe. Jean-Paul Sartre and Margaret Mead, to name two spectacularly confident former children, have both remarked on the central importance of grandparents in their own early lives. Grandparents are now in much more abundant supply than they were a generation or two ago, when old age was more rare. If actual grandparents are not at hand, no family should have too hard a time finding substitute ones to whom to pay unfeigned homage. The Soviet Union's enchantment with day-care centers, I have heard, stems at least in part from the state's eagerness to keep children away from their presumably subversive grandparents. Let that be a lesson to clans based on interest as well as to those based on
genes.

Exploring the Text

2. How do you react to the traditional terms Howard

uses that refer to family (clan, tribe, kin, dynasty, blood, roots, patriarch) ?, How do you react to her more contemporary terms (network, surrogate mother, support system, extended family)? What do your reactions tell you about your own idea of family? 3. What is the impact of the sources Howard cites and quotes? Consider her allusion to Aristotle (para. 4), her conversation with "the two Helens" (paras. 7-8), her

illustration from novelist Kurt Vonnegut ]r. (para. 9), and the quotations from the
authors Sgsanne Langer (para. 18), Walker Percy (para. 18), and Michael Novak
(para. 2I).. 4. Examine thii various figures of speech Howard
uses, such as a family member

else's Apollo" (para. 12) and"a feudalism" (para.14). What is their cumulative effect? wholesome, tacit emotional 5. What rhetorical modes does Howard draw on in the overall organization of her essay? Does one dominate? Explain.

"who plays Houston Mission Control to everyone