My Dearest Son

Sunday, September 16, 1979

My Dearest Child,
On the opposite page, I have taped a picture of myself taken not long after you were conceived.  You will have seen many pictures of Dawn and I by now, but I think this is by far the best likeness of me I have ever had taken, so I include it here. I wore glasses then, too, but as I often took them off to do important work - write, read, talk, so I didn't include them here.

 We all have a mental picture of ourselves, no matter what our actual age.  Our own mental image - who we expect to see in the mirrored surface of a window as we walk down the street.  This picture represents how I imagined myself for years.  I would have been 21 at the time, I think.

Thursday, Sept. 28
My Dearest Son, if that be so,
Today I am frantically working to find you a name.  In less than two weeks, I am told, you will be born.  Are you feeling confined in the womb that has nurtured you for so long? This, my baby, is not the last of these wombs, from which you must birth out.
As to your name  - I am trying to find a name that will convey all the hopes and dreams I have of and for you, yet still give you the freedom to be who you want to be.  Right now I am taken by the name Deror - it is Hebrew for freedom, or free flowing.  Freedom is the most important thing or state of mind we can have and my hope is that freedom will always be paramount among your concerns.
Besides, having a name like Deror will set you apart, your name will have a magic which none of your peers can take from you.  this being apart is a good thing, I think.  It is in this loneliness that creative ability and art comes.
I hope that is not to heavy a burden for you to carry - such a name and such a setting apart.  I think it will be a good one - for we all carry burdens, the rocks we push up hills only to see them fall again and again.  Let us at least be happy in the struggle.  You know that I love you and apropos that is a quote from Rilke:

"All we can offer where we love is this: to love each other; for to hold each other comes easy to us and requires no learning."
                                                                         Requiem

But for now, my love must be nurturing and holding.  And preparing.

The first thing that surprises me is that two weeks before she was due, we did not know Morgan's gender.  How innocent compared to the other pregnancies, miscarriages and births, that we should know so little about what was going on in the womb.  We did have a sonogram, but it apparently showed nothing conclusive.  We still have it, in the fireproof box of course, with the birth certificates and other important papers.  Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like . . . to have a son instead of daughters.  Would I have been a better father, or worse?  A better man?  What would have been my expectation for my son?  It seems like I was already freighting his life with my expectations.  What if he had grown up to be a jock?  or a stock broker?  This short journal is a treasure of what ifs and the gender of my children is certainly an interesting hypothetical topic;  as it was, three for three.  I can only hope that if Morgan, Emica or Breanne had been a boy that I would have striven to give him the same nurture and caring; the same generosity and discipline; the same love, in other words, that I have tried to give to my daughters. . .  and received in return.

A Bourgeois Beginning

Recently I discovered some pages from a journal I intended to keep for my first child.  On the one hand, knowing now what was to come, they seem sad.  But on the other hand, they are an honest reflection of what I was feeling those last heady weeks before Morgan was born.  And, perhaps, there is message for my other daughters. . . or not.  Who knows.

September 7, 1979

My Dear Child,
I am endeavoring to keep this journal for you, that someday you may read it and experience your youth from my perspective as your father.  As much of our childhood as is retained (albeit in our unconscious, very often) just as much is lost from us.  Of my own past I know not as much as I would like.  About my parents, your Grandparents, there are mysteries only hinted at and never made clear to me.
But this is a book for you, not necessarily for me, yet I must begin with our past - yours and mine.  Our name is French and in the form BOUTILLIER was granted to our family in 1593, in Lorraine.  Tradition has it that our family were Huguenots - French Protestants and were expelled from France for that belief. However, another story claims we were given land in New France for helping Napoleon, the latter is rather suspect, as Canada was controlled by Great Britain at the time.  In any case, the family settled in the St. John valley and adjacent Aroostook county - as did the Bakers and Lovelys, your Grandmother's family.
The significance of all this lies in our bourgeois background.  Huguenots were traders and merchants - entrepreneurs who built and strengthened the capitalist system.  There lie our roots in a revolutionary class and we must be proud of that.  We are and always have been of the middle class and can do not otherwise, I fear.  

What makes me sad about this passage is the comment about not knowing, or better - remembering, my own past.  This is true.  It is amazing to me when I get with my sisters and they remember so much about our growing up. . . . I remember very little.  What amuses me is the statement about being of a 'revolutionary class'.  I was being very specific concerning that reference and it demonstrates, I think, an understanding of the role of classes in history beyond the typical characterization of 'bourgeois' as stupid or boring, or anti-revolutionary.  However, it may also have been a recognition that we are what we are and that I was always going to be the middle class son of middle class parents.  We were not going to ever be proletarian, working class in the revolutionary sense that the bourgeois were revolutionary in contrast to feudalism.  But then again, neither was Lenin or Marx.

And now the rallying cry is not "Workers of the World Unite", it is "Save the Middle Class".  What we took for granted 30 years ago seems like a dream today; that an education and hard work could create a secure world to live in.  At the time, I assumed we had a choice which side of history we would fall on, I am not so sure my children feel that freedom to chose between being middle class and working class.  One small step, one missed payment, one lay off and they are in danger of tumbling down into the pit from which it takes generations to claw your way out of.

Image Credit

When a French Name is Not French.

After doing some antiquing in Boutiliers Point, we were on our way West along the southern coast of Nova Scotia.  The weather turned very rainy that day and we weren't stopping long anywhere.  One of the locations Dawn wanted to visit was Lunenburg, since her family is German and we thought the weather might clear and give us a chance to walk around this UNESCO World Historic site.  No such luck.  It was pouring rain when we arrived and we were both too discouraged to get out.  However, this town with its historic downtown and waterfront (which we drove through) and Bluenose Schooner make this place at the top of our list of places to visit on our next trip to NS (and oh, yes, we definitely want to come back.)  On our way out of town, however, we stopped at the tourist center and made this discovery, the Monument to settlers from Montebelaird.  The original Boutiliers, came from this French speaking, but independent, Protestant principality along the French/Swiss border in 1752, at the invitation of the British government.  They were part of a group of German, Swiss and Montebelairdian settlers meant to act as a counterbalance to the Acadian population in Nova Scotia.  The Acadians, celebrated in Longfellow's poem Evangeline,were descendants of the original French settlers.    As such, their loyalty was often in question in British eyes.  The French in the early part of the 18th century still controlled a significant part of the Maritimes from their fortress in Louisburg.  Although the Acadians requested that they play a neutral role in the British-controlled Nova Scotia, eventually, in conjunction with the French and Indian War, as it is known in US History,they were deported from the province in what was known as the Great Expulsion. This photo is of a monument on the waterfront in Halifax that shows the forced migrations of the Acadians.

In 1752, Bouteillers (Boutiliers) arrived from Montebelaird region to settle in Lunenburg and surrounding areas.  They were meant to replace the Acadians and support the British Crown. Hence, in my opinion, the reduced importance of speaking French in the family.  I knew of no relative in our family that spoke French, going back to my great grand parents.  The strong ties that bind French Canadians - language, history, and Catholicism have always been missing from our family heritage.  Now I better understand why. These were folk who were looking to adopt the language and customs of their new Mother country - Britain.  There would have been no harkening back to the good old days in France or Montebelaird.  They would not have been leaving their homeland to extend their country via her colonies but to create a new life in a new land, to create a nation that would become Canada.

So at least now, I have a place to start and a confirmation that our family came to Nova Scotia, not from France (although Montebelaird would be incorporated in 1793 into France), but from an independent nation. And that they were, as always maintained, huguenots- French Protestants.  Now to start making the connections between those settlers and the family branch that wandered into Aroostook County, Maine and became my ancestors.