Where we come from

A couple weeks ago I was in San Diego for my grandma’s funeral. She passed away in early April, a few weeks before her 89th birthday. Along with getting to spend time with extended family that we don’t see very often, we got to go through a lot of old photos from my grandma’s life as we knew it, and then the ones she lived long before that — the young wife and mom, the cheerleader, the toddler with her hair blowing in the wind reading a book on a porch in South Dakota.

We all hear stories about where we come from but artifacts make them very real.

Because her husband (my papa) died over thirty years ago we learned a lot about him too. We came across his payment from a commercial fishing job he had when my dad was young. I would’ve been chain smoking too.

He’d soon join a marine supply company. For the next thirty years he sold supplies to boat builders and the growing surfboard manufacturing industry in San Diego, forty years before I’d touch a surfboard.

Grandma was a huge baseball fan. In Perreira lore is a saying the baseball is the family religion. I doubt it comes from my grandma herself, being a devout Catholic. Nonetheless, she and papa were evidently big enough fans to go to the Dodgers-Yankees World Series game in 1981.

We also found a note she’d handwritten in her later years that said,

My dear children, grandchildren, and great-granddaughter:

When I die,

don’t be sad

’Cause then I know,

I’ll be with dad!

Burma Shave!

My dad explained to us what this was. Burma Shave was known in the middle of the 20th century for its clever use of out-of-home.

Grandma’s sweet and cosmological use of it was reminiscent of Mastercard’s Priceless. The campaign started in 1997 with this spot (one of my all-time favorites) and is still going as a brand platform.

The memetic offshoots we’ve seen since are endless.

We’re unlikely, for sure. Miracles even; that grandma’s family survived South Dakota winters and made it to San Diego was a huge win, evolutionarily and climatically.

I learned a few years ago that my biological grandfather on my mom’s side had sold OOH space in Burma Shave’s heyday. I believe in randomness too much to put much weight in destiny, but I do believe our pasts unconsciously nudge us in certain directions. In our bones, some things feel more natural than others.

Where I sit today feels like a natural output of where my family comes from. What are we aside from our history and the potential it helps us identify?

Maybe where I am is just an expression of something more core? Making ads and riding surfboards are frivolous and ephemeral quests. Baseball is a leisurely joy. The desire to chase those kinds of things is a legacy I’m proud to carry.