Stories – Adam Wolfson 3/7/16
Most of the things I know about my family, I know from stories. Not my immediate family, of course. I know what one would typically expect me to know about my parents, given I live with them. For anything further back than a decade or so before I was born, though, stories are the primary medium of exchange. Stories are how people pass along information that they’re not specifically trying to teach.
I don’t know a lot of stories from my mother’s side of the family. I don’t have many surviving relatives on that side, and my mom wasn’t ever that close with her family anyway. The only one that really ever stuck in my head was the way my mother’s father died (my Grandfather I suppose, although I never really thought of him that way). He was a doctor, and he died of pneumonia. Apparently at first he thought it was just a cold, and even when it started to get worse he didn’t have it checked out because, well, he was a doctor himself. By the time his pneumonia finally got bad enough for him to get it checked out, it was bad enough that there wasn’t a lot that could be done. Normally the treatment would have been penicillin, but he was allergic to the stuff and whatever they used instead apparently didn’t work. He died long before I was born, though, so I’m not personally broken up about it.
I know a few more stories from my dad’s side. Many of them involve Harold “Geep” Courlander, my great Grandfather. He fancied himself an inventor, and was apparently a bit of a card. Some of his “inventions” included the electric flyswatter (a flyswatter taped to a power cord) and the alligator hunting kit. The alligator hunting kit consisted of a pair of binoculars, a pair of tweezers, and a box. It “worked” as follows: first, the user was to turn the binoculars around and look through them backwards at the alligators. The alligators having become very small, user was then to use the tweezers to deposit them in the box. Geep was also a writer, and one of the more fraught narratives of my family’s history was the legal battle between him and another author who plagiarized his work.
There are other stories. My father’s family spent a few years living in italy when he was a young, although there aren’t a lot of stories from that time. One of my favorite stories, largely because it’s funny, is the one about the cucumber. As a teenager my father was trying to remove a cucumber from its vine. After several unsuccessful attempts, he returned home to ask if there was a trick to it, whether it needed to twisted or bent in a certain way. His response was lactonic: “just pull harder”. This story led to the creation of the family phrase ‘a cucumber problem’, denoting any problem most easily solved by the application of greater force. There is the story of my Grandfather Alan Wolfson (not the same one as the doctor) discovering a key chemical component of decaf instant coffee. I don’t know a lot of detail about what happened, but it reminds me that my Grandfather was a chemical engineer at one point, which can be hard to remember since he’s had three careers. These stories don’t really comprise a strong ethnic identity the way some people’s do, but I do think that the contribute majorly to what you might call the character of my family.
Those are just the stories that I’ve heard in the course of by everyday life with my family. For the purposes of this assignment I asked my parents for any stories they knew of could look up from further back, and I got quite a few. Although the Wolfsons specifically only go back a few generations to ellis island (before that they were the Akbars, from Latvia), it turns out that I have ancestors on both sides of my family who have been in America for quite some time. According to a family tree my mother put together a few years ago, one ancestor on her side was here long enough ago to (allegedly) lend Paul Revere his horse for the famous midnight ride.
On my father’s side the most interesting ancestor I now know of was Jacob Courlander, who somehow managed to serve as an officer on both sides of the Civil War at the same time. Apparently he was a peddler who routinely traveled back and forth between the two sides anyway, and he simply alternated between serving in the two armies. He must have been fantastic at maintaining a cover story, especially considering that it’s suspected he had two families complete with wife and children, one on each side. Several generations later there was David Courlander. He, like my Grandfather, apparently had several careers. He became a painter near the end if this life, and several of his paintings are currently kept (although not displayed) at the Smithsonian. My family also has one in our living room. He painted in a style called primitivism, which involves simple or deliberately crude seeming images. This came as a great surprise to me when I found out. I had been looking at that painting nearly every day of my life, and I had always assumed that he just wasn’t a very good painter (not knowing of his success). My mother’s uncle Frank Sanderson invented the fountain pen, although he later sold the patent. Her Grandfather Melton Sanderson nearly invented the hanging file, but his design was to heavy and bulky to be practical.
It’s sad, in a way, that I hadn’t heard some of these stories up until now. The ones I listed first, that I learned just as part of growing up in my family, help inform where I come from. As I said earlier, they give a sort of sense of the character of my family, which certainly has had an effect on my character. The stories from further back, the ones I had to ask for, aren’t quite the same. Intellectually I know I’m related to these people, but they feel like strangers. My family has been reinterpreted and reimagined by what my parents chose to pass down. Such is the power of stories.
