In the Labyrinth

Wily Rascal: My Grandfather, Pierre Menager

 

 

So my maternal grandfather Emmanuel Pierre Menager was something of a coyote trickster -- an itinerant artist, a womanizer (an occasional bigamist) but nonetheless, a rather magical person when he showed up our house. Though I suspect my parents -- especially my father was less than pleased (despite the fact that Pierre was an amazing cook). Pierre always needed money -- and even though they were broke graduate students, my parents always sent some. Here is a photo of my brother and I with Pierre during an early visit in California. My parents must have mailed or given him the photo. And he mailed it back with a short message -- an address and an amount. (And yeah...that would be me up there rocking the pig tails at about 2 years old.)

The Joy of Seeing Her Face Every Now and Then. That lipstick!

 

 

I figured it was high time to post some pictures of my mother, Jeanette, and found this one of her just after I was born, as well as a strip of photo-booth pics taken when I was just a wee one. I've also included a photo taken just after my birth as I was the first baby of the New Year in Santa Monica that year, so this photo appeared in the newspaper. I love how young and glamorous she looks wearing what was probably a fabulous red lipstick just hours after delivering me. Even as a young woman (and she sure is young here, I think all of 22 or 23 years old when I was born), she looks so sure of herself, with just a bit of attitude. Awesome. Love you, mom.

 

 

 

More Field Drawings: Darjeeling, India 1964. Tibetan Lhamo Performances.

I posted a few field drawings of my mother Jeanette Snyder yesterday, and wanted to add some more of them because I think they are charming -- and remind me of the days when field researchers lugged heavy tape recorders, cameras, and note books, just in case all that heavy technology failed, leaving only the sketches and notes. You can see many more of her photos and her article about this day at the Journal of Mythic Arts.

 

Not Gone...Just Working On Life Stuff

It's been a helluva a month or so working through the events following my mother's death. It hasn't been horrible -- just time consuming as we work through the details. My mother went out like a rock star -- on a farewell tour. Her ashes were collected and there was first an event in Toronto for her husband of many years and all their friends who loved her over the last forty years or so she lived in Canada. An urn of ashes was packed up, and the family traveled for a second memorial to be held in Oregon, Wisconsin at Deer Park, a Tibetan Buddhist retreat house. There friends and family gathered, spoke about her, prayed and chanted over her, walked the huge Kalichakra Mandala and said good bye.

A second urn of ashes and family then traveled to Valley City, North Dakota for a one day whirlwind. A meeting with the lawyers to effectively transfer the ownership of the farm, a wonderful funeral in the 19th century cemetery on the corner of our farm. (Being buried by farmers produced some humorous moments -- the retired pastor and avid gardener remarked when the little rectangular grave intended for her ashes was exposed, what great soil it was -- black and fertile all the way down the four feet. One might have thought we were planting a tree.)  Then a tour of the farm to view all the fields, the stand of trees that shelters deer, fox, and a den of ravenous coyotes. After that, lunch with the family that has known my family for three generations and continues to farm our land and theirs, which circles around it. And after that, a meeting with the banker to to take out a loan against the farm and settle my mother's considerable debts.

There was a 4,000 mile drive in four days, there were nights in hotels, meetings with other family members in between on the road, processing a sudden influx of papers -- my parents' love letters, my mother's Fulbright notes on her trip to India in 1963, photographs, letters of tax delinquency for my great great great grandfather, a huge collection of my mother's paper dolls from the 1940s in excellent condition, photographs, photographs, and more photographs, some jewelry, and clothing.

And my mother still has one more journey to make. Her husband will travel with her ashes to South Africa -- a place where she lived for almost 10 years and loved very much. She will be scattered in the ocean and in a nature preserve that was her favorite. And then, I shall sense her in the world, in the air, in the water, in the rain. Just like my father who was similarly scattered in in several countries.

I feel as if I am neck deep in research for a story that is writing itself...or that was already written a century ago and I am just catching up to it now. Amazing, funny, tragic, full of grief, and joy. So...it will take me a little time more to begin again with my ordinary life. My office is full of piles of papers, photos, farm records, letters, and just...stuff. I will be back, maybe now more often to talk of other things, and to share some of the great finds. But I am not sure it will be regular for at least another month or so, until I have somewhat contained this sudden and bursting burden of history. It's awesome stuff, it demands my attention, and it is a daily source of revelations about the family, and my own small part in it.

Photo by Gil Snyder. "Snyder Farm." The original stone wall of the barn, pieced together from field rock by my great-great-grandfather Andrew Wedin in the 1870s.

My Mother's Face

A little indulgence here -- as I go through the family photos (there are a lot of them, expect to see them over the coming months -- this is a novel slowly unfolding). I was struck how much alike were these two "glamour" head shots -- the first of my mother at about 20 (maybe even a wee bit younger judging by her hair style). She had left the farm at North Dakota to go to school at Berkeley (at 16 years old) and then a year later at UCLA. Her mother, Jeanette Westergaard was working as a script writer in Hollywood (under the name of Mahoney...another long story) and thought her daughter needed up-grading. Hair, make-up and glamour shots, washing out the farm girl face. My photo -- taken twenty years later was a promotional photo for the theatre. I was, at 16 playing the role of "Sandy" in Muriel Spark's "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie." Hence the photo for the playbook.

This second pairing is funny -- the same photo of me (different version) but my mother at forty -- and I realized with some humor that we are both wearing the same sweater. I can't remember now who owned it first. We lived together more like roommates rather than mother and daughter so it's possible that we would have shared this rather nice sweater. I think we both liked the slight ruffle at the neck. I have no idea who took this photo of her, but I love it. She was strangely ageless, and here, without make up and with those 70's bangs, she looks more like the North Dakota farm girl again.

Breathing In, Breathing Out.

 

 

My mother, Jeanette Marie Snyder, passed away early this morning, and though I am very sad to lose her, I am relieved that her long-suffering with cancer has also passed. And she picked a remarkable day for it is also the date on which Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare died. And it is the feast of St George -- which, according to my daughter -- is celebrated in Barcelona by exchanging roses and literature. Perfect, and to add a Tucson twist, we will drink a few celebratory shots of tequila.

It has been a long journey for her -- and the last month was really hard. She was of the "do not go gentle into that good night" sort of woman, so it was a slow dying, with moments of angry rebellion, and then finally, with enough morphine to remove the pain, a more peaceful but still determined resistance to cast off the mortal coil. I know this about her -- she was stubborn. Even as her systems shut down, her heart was still strong. I awoke yesterday morning with the image of her, somewhere in her head, conversing with a group of confused angels, refusing to leave until she had fully explained to them the intricacies of Tibetan culture...a last and long lecture...to get out all she had wanted to say and write about these last years. Only when she was done talking, only when the light of understanding reached those heavenly and patient faces, would she then rise and go with them. I loved that about her.

Pierre, Rosalea, and The Pink Adobe

When I was about five years old, (in the late-fifties) we went to Santa Fe to visit my grandfather, the artist Pierre Ménager. As well as being a wonderful painter and sculptor, he was also a fabulous cook...well he was French. But he cooked a mixture of Southwest and Creole -- especially as a portion of the Ménager family had migrated to New Orleans. Pierre took us to a lovely small restaurant, the Pink Adobe, where we had lunch. It was before the opening of the lunch hour (or maybe it was in between the end of lunch and the start of the dinner hour), so the restaurant was quiet and empty except for Pierre, my family, and the owner of the restaurant Rosalea Murphy. Even at five years old, I was smart enough to realize that Rosalea was someone very special to Pierre. I have fond memories of that day, sitting in a bright sunlit room of the restaurant, bellied up to the bar as plates of fabulous food appeared. Rosalea spoke directly to me in that way that certain adults who are genuinely charmed by small, precocious children do -- with interest and kindness. At the end of the meal, she presented me with a gift of a few cat figurines that were part of a large collection of other cat figures. I still have them and treasure them as a memory of that day.

I didn't know until later, of course, that Pierre actually worked with Rosalea, co-managing the restaurant -- sharing his own cooking ideas with hers, designing and painting menus. His art was scattered throughout the restaurant, along with hers and the works of other artist friends. I didn't know until later -- much later-- how fashionable the Pink Adobe became as a restaurant (and still is!) -- which makes that quiet afternoon spent just in the company of my family and Rosalea an even more special event.

But I didn't learn until just today that Pierre and Rosalea were actually married. Even my mother didn't know. It was assumed in my family (and even cousin Earl who is the family historian and knows the most intimate details of generations of Menagers) that it was more of a "union libre." However, Earl found two articles -- one from the Amarillo Daily News, April 3, 1947, stating: "Mr. and Mrs. Pierre Menager, operators of the Pink Adobe, and daughter Priscilla, arrived here today after being shaken up in a forced landing of the plane, 4 miles from Lubbock, Texas yesterday.  The Menagers were flying a chartered plane from Santa Fe to San Antonio and made a forced landing in a field near Lubbock. They continued by bus to San Antonio, where they were called because of an illness of Mrs. Menager's mother." (Ok, that little paragraph by itself is worth a chapter in a novel.) A second article in the Albuquerque Journal, May 18, 1952, mentions an art show of Southwest art at Ramage Book Center in Albuquerque that included "an imaginative study of Santa Fe's Oldest Church" by Rosalea Menager." (Hats off here to Earl who finds all these tiny gems tucked away in archives.)

So I took a chance and emailed Priscilla, Rosalea's daughter and a terrific artist working in native clays and minerals, and inks on handmade paper, and I asked her if they were indeed married. Yes! she wrote back, they were married. We will be getting together over the phone in the near future to talk a lot more about those days. I am especially curious to know what she remembers about Pierre. It really is like seeing a light turn on in all sorts of corners of a dark house. I keep having to readjust the narrative of my grandfather's life every time I encounter someone who knew him (and everyone seems to have favorite Pierre stories!).