For those that don’t want to click and read the whole thing… it’s basically observations after the ‘91 wildfires. Most of it is about the roles played out by sex in the family with this disjointed bit at the end.
Credit the link quoted:
Another interesting detail is the rapidity with which long-forgotten family ties reasserted themselves, and local ‘friendships’ proved to be weaker than might have been assumed.
Oakland firestorm survivors had marched well into the brave new world of social alliances. Extended families had long given way to nuclear. Many nuclear families were broken down yet further, and most victims felt their closest ties lay with nonrelated friends…
But our new bonds, mere decades rather than millennia old, disclosed their lack of shared and culturally reinforced rules. Friendships bear no understood schedule of obligations, no course of expected action, no set of proscribed emotions… Friends did not, or could not, offer aid or comfort. Friends grew impatient, proved unsympathetic, disappeared.
But the salience of family - previously discounted by many progressives if there was ideological conflict within their own - returned swiftly and with great strength.
What were maintained for most were the links that lie more deeply rooted in our society: blood kinship ties. Like clans gathering, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, cousins arrived. Relatives sent family heirlooms. A cousin replaced my vaporized silver vase, a gift from my father’s long-dead, beloved cousin, with a creamer and sugarer of her mother’s, though her mother was not my blood kin. Siblings returned borrowed property, sent money, and took in children… Extended families, such as they were, embraced their own, stood up and were counted in both presence and presents.
The whole piece is worth a read. It’s a fascinating story if nothing else.
Make sure you have family close, and a spouse you can rely on.
Yeah this is a stretch… and one person’s or a small sample observation. Without reading the book this is quoted from. I’m picturing a very homogeneous sample who were coming from a place of privilege (for the record I hate that phrase but will use it as it’s pretty well understood). I mean if the author is worried about a creamer and sugerer after losing their house I’d call that privilege.
This sounds all rather hmm… trying to find the right word…contrived maybe? I’m going to go out on a limb here and imagine that local friends were in the same boat as the writer and didn’t have time to spare on silver vases.