Writer Patricia Hampl looks back at her 'ordinary' Minnesota family
A clear eyed, tender account of life in an 'ordinary' family
By Susan Grimm
Reading
this story of another Mid western city, Clevelanders will find, faultlessly
evoked, much that's familiar - the ethnic groups, the marriage of Irish and
Czech, the old neighborhoods and their rise up the hill, the fears of being
provincial. In other books, award-winning memoirist Patricia Hampl traveled to foreign countries - to Assisi, Italy, on a spiritual quest, to Prague for a glimpse of her ancestral Czech homeland. But in "The Florist's Daughter," Hampl stays home, lavishing her considerable attention on St. Paul, Minn. She is the title figure, but this is her story only in so far as she is a product of her father, an artiste of the loamy greenhouse, and her mother, a wisecracking housewife. The intersection of these two lives has made her what she is. Hampl asks the question of every daughter or son. How exactly did that happen?
She rethinks the photo albums and the facts, edging closer to understanding. Hampl is interested less in the chronology of her growing-up years in the mid-20th century than in those particular moments that have shaped her as an adult.
She resurrects things unnoticed but internalized, things rejected out of hand: "At Birdie's, shiny tumescent fish lay on crushed ice next to mounds of bruised pears. Heavy green flies lofted above the stand . . . I wanted to stop, poke the fish with an index finger . . . But the cool, utilitarian hand of my young mother was pulling me away."
Both tender and cleareyed, Hampl recalls old lives: "She could describe a vestibule for ten minutes, a veritable Proust of the breakfast table where we sat, she with her black coffee and pack of Herbert Tareytons, piercing the cellophane with a pointy red nail."
Hampl's unerring choice of scene and detail portray a stoic generation: "I did the driving, taking him to his weekly appointment with his cardiologist who micromanaged his congestive heart disease like a junk-bond trader, moving the numbers, dumping and acquiring meds in a frantic shell game, always playing the edge."
Our expectations of story are often splashy, but Hampl recognizes that here the narrative is small: "These apparently ordinary people in our ordinary town, living faultlessly ordinary lives . . . why do I persist in thinking - knowing - they weren't ordinary at all? What's back there?"
Hampl invites our re-evaluation of experience that relies on something subtler than scope.
So rather than assembling ultimate tidy meanings, Hampl fills this memoir with the pleasure of a human body in the world, sensual and observant: "The ice, so new, made a particular sound when you first cut it and this sound - not a squeak, not a hiss, but a cello note ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^like heavy silk slowly, intentionally ripped - grasped the heart and made you insanely happy to be alive."
The past is examined, savored, but never quite put away.
Grimm is a writer and critic in Lakewood.