In the Labyrinth

In Memory of My Mother: Tibetan A Ice Lhamo: The World Beneath the Tents by Jeanette Snyder

In 1964 my mother, Jeanette Snyder, then a graduate student in Tibetan Studies at the University of Washington, received a Fulbright Grant to study Tibetan theater in India, Nepal, and Sikkim, countries that had welcomed the flow of Tibetan exiles after the 1959 uprising. As a child, awaiting her return in the States, I loved her letters so full of fabulous descriptions of India and heroic, non–motherly sorts of adventures. During one of her  visits, I asked her if she would recount for the blog her early experiences seeing Lha mo, the Tibetan opera she had come to study. What a pleasure it was to venture together into the basement, unpack the boxes of notes, field drawings, and photographs and listen to her recall her exhilaration at that first performance. While she took quite a few photographs, all I have of her at that event is this undeveloped image of at the far left, her turned away face, chin resting in her hand, and the sweep of her braid. I can tell she is smiling. So here is the article she wrote for Journal of Mythic Arts in 2005. — Midori Snyder

I sat in Glenary's Tea Room, dawn just breaking, wolfing down my substantial English breakfast in preparation for the day long event to come. Outside the window the trickle of Tibetans dressed in their best, carrying aluminum teapots filled with chang(beer), packets of snacks and lunch, cushions, umbrellas, babies on their back, toddlers in hand, and the occasional little dog tucked into the chest fold of a robe, had increased to a steady flow moving up along the high street beneath my window. I gulped down the last of my tea and grabbed my camera and tape recorder, eager to join the excited throng headed in the direction of the Darjeeling Tibetan School grounds.

The Himalayan Range was bright in the distance and the day promised to be fair. It was spring 1964 in Darjeeling, India, and I was on my way to experience my first live performance of A lce Lha mo or lha mo. The name lha mo is most commonly explained by Tibetans to have originated from the portrayal by actors of the many female roles of goddesses or "lhamo" that are found in the plays. A lce means "elder sister." Read More > > 

 

**And here are two  more posts with Jeanette's field drawings and notes.: Bittersweet Afternoon Under the Tent and More Field Drawings

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, Tex 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!).