Fall Waxing Harvest Moon
Gave Liberal II this morning. Lot of conversation, a little consternation. Best piece was a conversation with Ian Boswell, the music director. We discussed the limits of rationality and the integration of reason and soulfulness that great music represents. He pointed to the late sonatas of Beethoven. This has given me food for thought for Liberal III: The Future.
Fall Waxing Harvest Moon
Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit, and the only means of making concrete the purpose of its varied quickness and stillness.
Mark Rothko
Another brush stroke about contemporary art and the future of liberal thought. Given Mark Rothko as the exemplar of the link between liberal thought’s future and the radical rethinking of Western art he represents for me I will extend the metaphor one large leap further. The future of liberal thought has a cathedral. It is in Houston, Texas and the photo at right is of its exterior. I’ve not visited it, but it is on my list and it stays in my imagination as a sacred place of the always contemporary spirit.
The interior is a quiet space, reserved as the website says, “as an intimate sanctuary available to people of every belief.” Funded by Houston philanthropists its interior contains multiple canvases painted by Mark Rothko, hence its designation, the Rothko Chapel. It is not its dedication to people of every belief that makes it a cathedral to the future of liberal, rather it is Rothko’s commitment to seeking truth through a leveling of old forms and the bravery to rethink and rexperience something so fundamental as art. This chapel gives form to a new way of finding the future, a way, a tao, that does not flinch at change, takes nothing for granted, perceives no one, no institution, no book as a final authority save the open and always unfolding book of our universe.
Imagine your inner cathedral lined with the somber, blue paintings. Imagine a small black tiled floor and a simple leather cushion set on a metal plate. Now go and sit upon the cushion, clear your mind and your heart and allow your Self to speak to you through the painting. Whatever it says to you is the path you need to follow.
Here’s another way of thinking about this. Each progenitor of a new faith tradition, from the Buddha to Lao Tse, Jesus to Mohammed, each had a liberal approach to the questions of human spiritual longing. Each one. They were in their historical moment, raised in a particular faith tradition, taught its comprehensiveness, its completeness, its sufficiency. They each went deep into their faith tradition and found it wanting. They did not step back and say, no, these are thoughts that must not be; they did not say, no, our tradition will reveal itself to me if I only wait longer. No. They did not leave on their shoulders a cloak that no longer fit, a cloak that had, in fact, come to chafe. Each of them, from Abraham to Zoroaster, stepped out from beneath the overhang of the past and dared commit themselves to an alternative, an uncertain future.
This is our responsibility, the great possibility that lies before as liberals approaching the holy wells of human understanding. We, too, can throw off the cloak of former beliefs that has come to chafe and replace it with a walking staff for the way is long. In the old Celtic Christian faith, the Christianity that preceded Rome in the British Isles, the monks had a form of spirituality called peregrenatio, literally wandering around. The walking staff of personal responsibility will keep you company as you wander on the way, traveling from hut to hut, open to the hospitality available where ever you come to rest. This is the future of liberal thought and it may be your future.
Fall Waxing Harvest Moon
An idea keeps nudging its way forward and I want to get just a bit of it on paper, or in print, or bytes.
The Future of Liberal Thought. Is equivalent to the struggle over the last century and especially since WWII to define what art is. That is, a shaking of the foundation, eliminating beauty and traditional forms like painting and sculpture, at least as they had been perceived, to run out in the desert of unknowing. Saving art by killing it. If you meet the artist on the road, kill him.
The paintings that capture this notion for me are those of Mark Rothko. Compare this piece to the Mannerist, Baroque and Neo-Classical works. Is it of the same tradition? Does it have the same aim, the same desire? What of the artist? What was he thinking? Or, was he thinking at all?
Just so. Consider. The Holocaust. The Armenian genocide. WWI. WWII. Korea. Vietnam. The Great Depression. Mass starvation, drought, despair. The cold war. The rise and fall of the United Soviet Socialist Republic. Quantum mechanics. Relativity. Godel. Wittgenstein. The decoding of the human genome. The discovery of planets in other solar systems. Manned flight to the moon. Men and women shuttling regularly between earth and the heavens.
The death of God.
Well. How do we approach the questions of meaning, the questions often called religious questions? How do we approach them in light of scientific, cultural, political and economic changes? Are these changes so momentous that they demand a break with our religious past, a break similar (the same?) in kind to the radical artistic movements of the 20th century? I think so.
Anyhow, this is where I’m headed. More. Later.
Fall Waxing Harvest Moon
60 pink daffodils have a new home in the soil surrounding two cherry trees and a pear tree. These trees are the first ones visible out our kitchen window, so the blooms will cheer us up as spring begins to break winter’s hold next year. Bulb planting relies on, requires darkness. Beauty, like Snow White, goes to sleep beneath the autumn sun and lies as dead all winter long. With the kiss of the sun prince flowers emerge. Perhaps the years I’ve spent planting bulbs in great numbers, as many as 800 in some years, triggered my affection for darkness. In the first few years of daffodils, hyacinth, tulips, snowdrops and croci I often thought of those bulbs, covered in snow and cold, waiting out the winter in their castle of food and nascent stalks, leaves and flowers, a feeling similar to the one I get now when I’m at work in the garden and a bee, a bee from Artemis Hives, alights on a flower near me. Both of us, insect and human, have valuable work to perform in the garden and we labor there as colleagues in every sense. The patience and persistence of the bulbs beneath the snows and cold of December and January has always touched me, a sweet feeling, a well-wishing for them in their lonely underground redoubts.
That’s part of the darkness focus. Another, earlier part, came when I began to feel uneasy with spiritual metaphors that took me up and out of my body. Heaven. Prayers that go up. God being out there. The minister lifted up above the congregation. A sense that the better part of existence lies beyond the body and this moment, somewhere high and far away. I began a search for spiritual metaphors that took me down and in. Jungian psychology helped me in this search, but the clincher came after I had decided to study Celtic history in preparation for writing my first novels. A trip to north Wales and two weeks in a residential library there tipped me to the existence of holy wells, springs that had sacred meaning to early Celtic religious life, long before the arrival of Christianity. Here was a metaphor that went down and if used in meditation, could stimulate a spiritual journey in the same direction, no longer trying to get out of the body or up and far away.
The spiritual pilgrimage that began from that point has led me on an inner journey, into the deep caverns and cathedrals of my own Self, traveling them and finding the links between my Self and the larger spiritual universe, the connection not coming on an upward path, but on the ancientrail of Self-exploration. I do not seek to go into the light, but into the caves.
Fall Waxing Harvest Moon
I have begun to accept that I will never read everything I want to read. Books sit stacked up on the floor in my study; they lie on top of rows of other books on bookshelves; all my 
bookshelves are full and many have books piled on top of them. Each one I want to read. Some I want to use only as reference, but most I want to read cover to cover. The books range in topic from fairy tales and folklore to basic scientific texts on biology and geology, from philosophy to theology, art history to renaissance life, china, japan, india and cambodia to single dictionaries and the multiple volumes of the OED and the Dictionary of Art. Of course there is fiction, too, and poetry, works on historiography and works on the enlightenment. This doesn’t count the 90 books I now have on my kindle, many fiction, but many non-fiction, too.
When it comes to books and learning, I seem to not have an off button. Maybe it’s a pathology, an escape from the world, from day to day responsibility, could be, but I don’t think so. Reading and learning feel hardwired, expressions of genes as much as personal choice. So it’s tough for me to admit that I have books here, in my own house, that I may never read. A man has only so many hours in a day and I find spending any significant amount of them reading difficult.
That always surprises me. I love to read, yet it often feels like a turn away from the world of politics, the garden, connecting with family and friends, so it takes discipline for me to sit and read for any length of time. Instead, I read in snippets, chunks here and there. Even so, I get a lot read, finishing the Romance of the Three Kingdoms took a lot of dedication, for example. One year, I put the books I finished in one spot after I finished them. I don’t recall the number or the number of pages, but it caused me to sit back and wonder how I’d done it.
Sometimes I fantasize about stopping all other pursuits, sitting down in my chair and begin reading through the most important books, the ones on the top of my list. Right now that would 
include the histories of Herodotus and substantial commentary. The Mahabharata. Several works on Asia art. A cabinet full of books on the enlightenment and liberalism. Another cabinet full on calendars and holidays. I will never do it. Why? Because I do have interests, obsessions maybe, that take me out into the garden or over to the State Capitol and the Minnesota Institute of Arts, the homes of the Woolly Mammoths and our children. Kate and I will, I imagine, resume at least some of our SPCO attending when she retires and there will be travel, too.
This relates to an odd self-reflection occasioned by Lou Benders story of my first day on the Ball State Campus. According to him, there was a picture of the Student Body President, I reached out and touched it and told him, “I’m going to do that.” Three years later I ran and lost for Student Body President. The year was 1969. Recalling this, I wondered if my intention, my ability to clarify my direction had waned. Had I defocused, living my life with no clear intentions, drifting along, letting life happen?
Then I recalled the moment I told Kate I wanted to write, the moment four years ago when I realized I had to put my shoulder behind the Great Work, creating a benign human presence on the planet, the moment I began to pester Deb Hegstrom for a spot in the junior docent class of 2005, the time when Kate and I decided to push our property toward permaculture-the harmonious integration of people, plants and animals in a specific spot in a sustainable way. No, I’ve not lost my ability to focus. Not at all.
This life, the one I’m living now, is the one I’ve chosen to live, a life Kate and I have made together. And that feels good.
Who knows, maybe I will finish these books? Who knows?
Fall Waxing Harvest Moon
Let’s try darkness again. In Taoism the familiar Taiji makes my point about the essential and complementary nature of light and dark. Taoism gives equal weight to the yin and yang* represented in the taiji, the small circle of yin within the yang and of yang within the yin, emphasizing the Taoist belief that all things contain their opposite to some degree. So, one part of my argument simply notes that light and dark are both necessary, necessary to each other, nothing apart from each other. In the Taoist taiji they represent the dynamic movement of heaven to which all things must conform.
In our Western cultural tradition, though, light has taken precedence over darkness, both in a physical and in an ethical sense. Jesus is the light of the world. Persephone goes into Hades and the earth mourns her absence until her return when it blossoms into spring. Eurydice dies and Orpheus goes to the underworld to retrieve her. Dante’s Divine Comedy finds Dante wandering, lost in the dark wood of error, before he begins his descent, guided by Virgil, into the multiple layers of hell. The traditional three-story universe also reinforces these ideas: Heaven above, earth, and the infernal regions below. Milton’s Paradise Lost follows the rebellion in heaven and the casting out of Lucifer, the Morning Star, into hell where he builds his enormous palace, Pandemonium. Our common sense understanding of death involves hiding the body beneath the earth. Why?
Coming out of the spiritualist tradition represented by Camp Chesterfield (see below) death involves a transition into the light, the spirit world. Ghost Whisperer, a TV program, uses the trope from this tradition, as dead souls are led into the light. It is, perhaps, no wonder that darkness, night and the soil come off badly in our folk metaphysic: up and light is good; down and dark is bad.
I wish to speak a word for the yin, symbolized by the moon, the female, the cold, the receiving, the dark. The moon illustrates the taiji perfectly. In the dark of night, the moon, yin, reflects the sun’s light, yang, and offers a lambent light, neither yin nor yang, but the dynamic interplay between the two. So we could look for art that features the moon as one route into the positive power of darkness.
Also, any seasonal display in a work of art, whether of spring, summer, fall or winter can open the question of each season’s value, its role in the dynamic of growth and decay, emergence and return. This can lead to a discussion of the importance of the fallow season, the season of rest, the earth’s analog to sleep. This can lead to a discussion of sleep and its restorative powers.
Art work of mother and child, or especially, mother and infant, can stimulate a discussion, in this context, of the womb, of the fecund nature of the dark where fetuses and seeds develop before their emergence into the world of light.
Similarly, death focused works of art can open up a discussion of birth and death as dynamic moments of change, yin and yang of human (or animal) development. This could lead to conversation about the Mexica (Aztec) belief that life is the aberrant condition and that death is the vital, regenerative moment; we are here, goes one Mexica poem, between a sleep and a sleep.
Winterlight festivals represent a western imbalance focused on the light, the yang, and a tendency to cast the yin in a negative light, something to be avoided or eliminated or held in check. As I said previously, this is understandable given the pre-historical science which made the return of the sun doubtful and therefore terrifying. Many of these festivals are, too, our favorites: Christmas, Deepavali and for a different traditional reason, Hanukkah.
In my own faith tradition, roughly pagan, I look forward to the dying of the light and celebrate as my most meaningful holiday, the Winter Solstice. Of course, I also celebrate the return of the light that begins on that very day, but first I immerse myself in the long night, the many hours of darkness. This affords me an opportunity to acknowledge the dark, to express gratitude for its manifold gifts. In this way my idiosyncratic faith has a ritual moment that honors the taiji, utilizing the cues given by the natural world.
To find art that emphasizes this aspect of darkness I plan to walk the museum from top to bottom, searching for images and objects that can help our visitors understand that when they celebrate the festivals of light that darkness is the reason for the season. I would appreciate any thoughts or ideas.
*In Chinese culture, Yin and Yang represent the two opposite principles in nature. Yin characterizes the feminine or negative nature of things and yang stands for the masculine or positive side. Yin and yang are in pairs, such as the moon and the sun, female and male, dark and bright, cold and hot, passive and active, etc. But yin and yang are not static or just two separated things. The nature of yinyang lies in interchange and interplay of the two components. The alternation of day and night is such an example.
Fall New (Harvest) Moon
Just back from the Sierra Club. A real dilemma for me resurfaced here. I manage the legislative process for the Club, as I said, and in that role I organize the legislative priority setting process, its fine tuning and the work of the committee and the lobbyist while the legislature is in session. This means I do not have to have a very deep knowledge of the particular issues since my role has a mostly administrative/managerial focus. Thus, in a meeting like the one this morning with a legislator, where ideas get floated and possibilities discussed about a particular matter, in this case, broadly, energy issues, I simply don’t have the details and background necessary to contribute.
As Kate said, I like to participate and have intelligent things to say, but in this context, I didn’t feel like I had a anything to say. This is disempowering for me. The obvious solution, to learn more about each issue, runs into my other intellectual pursuits, like art history and Latin and liberal thought. Dividing time so I have enough to do solid work in those three areas has not left me with enough left over intellectual energy to dig into the scientifically and often politically complicated waters of particular issues. The fix here is not obvious to me and has me questioning my role. We’ll see where this goes.
Fall New (Harvest) Moon
OK,I made this up. Photocentrism is a focus on the virtue of light that, by implication, puts darkness in a negative or bad relative position. Just because I made it up, however, does not mean I’m joking. The context: the docent annual meeting today and the presentation of a new December of the month called Winterlights. I agree that Winterlights is a complex noun that has a rich associative feel. I even agree that the celebrations in what I have long called holiseason–Thanksgiving to January 6th, the traditional 12th day of Christmas, Epiphany (visit of the Magi to Bethlehem), and the date for the celebration of Christmas in the Eastern Church–offer an unparalleled opportunity to learn from other cultures about matters deep in the human psyche: Thanksgiving, Advent, Deepavali, Hanukkah, Posada, Winter Solstice/Yule, Christmas, Western New Year on January 1, the 12 days of Christmas and maybe Kwaansa, though its constructed nature makes me a bit shy of it. Eid al Adha, the Muslim holiday that marks the end of Hajj by celebrating the Irbrahim and Ishmael story, falls in November this year, but not within holiseason itself, so I’m going to leave it out of this discussion.
The festivals or holidays of light, in particular Deepavali, Hanukkah, Winter Solstice (although is a special case as we shall see) and Christmas (more for what it replaces, Saturnalia, than what it celebrates itself) do have a common thread. Deepavali, Winter Solstice and Christmas all relate to the despair felt in subsistence agriculture communities when the light of the sun seemed as if it would wink out and perhaps disappear altogether. This fear, of the Sun’s final rising, put its mark on well-known pre-historical landmarks like Stonehenge, Chichen-Itza and the great Newgrange dolmen in Ireland. Without a knowledge of the physics and celestial mechanics of the earth’s orbit and the sun’s central place in our solar system, it was frightening to consider the possibility that this time, this winter, the gradual diminishment of daylight might proceed all the way to an apocalyptic darkness. No light for the crops. No crops for the animals. Cold all the time.
What to do? According to theories of sympathetic magic, like produces like, so the logical response to oncoming darkness was a bonfire, a torch, a brave manifestation of light and heat in hopes that the sun, since it is like light and heat, will either be rekindled or seduced into rising again. And these practices work. Each time the bonfires were lit, the torches paraded, the sun did not disappear, but returned to once again start the growing season and stave off starvation and freezing for another year.
All of this makes sense, granting the scientific understandings of these early peoples. As cultures grew more sophisticated and astronomical knowledge became a bit more advanced, however, it did put out the lingering fear that the darkness would one day come and never leave. So holidays that focused on light, especially, but fire, too, became integral parts of the cultural and religious traditions of many peoples.
They all leave out one important thing, though. The virtues of darkness. I first became aware of the following arguments when I began to research the goddess, the great mother goddess. I won’t get into here the debate surrounding the contention by some that a great mother goddess preceded the monotheistic, patriarchal deities of the Abrahamic religions, though I’ll tip my hand enough to say that I don’t find the evidence compelling.
What I found out about darkness surprised me and changed my mind about how I view it. Darkness is as necessary as light. Seeds start growing in the dark soil, away from light and even after they penetrate the surface, their roots continue to press their way into the surrounding nutrient-filled earth. Mammal babies live their first few months of life in the moist, nourishment rich environment of their mother’s womb. (OK, not in the marsupials and the platypus and the echidna’s instance, but you get the drift.) Darkness creates the time of rest and restoration for us and for many animals. It is when we sleep and when we dream. Darkness is the natural condition of space, attenuated by billions of stars only in what amounts to a small total area of the vastness of the universe. Light itself requires a degree of darkness to create vision. Anyone who’s ever been in a whiteout where snow and sky mix to create a vertiginous world with no up and down, no distinguishing characteristics understands the problem well. Or consider a bright, very bright light and its affect on your sight.
This argument can be cast as a feminist one in which the light represents patriarchy and the darkness the creative agency of women. It can also relate to anti-racism work in that we tend to equate darkness, blackness with evil, with corruption and decay. This denies the regenerative, restorative and generative nature of darkness and narrows our conceptual world in literally dangerous ways.
How could this relate to Winterlights? Without this kind of background the celebration of light has a sinister side as well its assumed positive one. The celebrations of light only make sense in terms of the deep cultural background and when we go there we need to understand the fear that created these holidays has also unbalanced our appreciation of the other state, darkness. I’ve not given it any thought, but I imagine there works of art that make darkness a central theme, that could be used to help put the other holidays in a balanced perspective.
Hanukkah is a special case here in which the focus does not seem to be on the Winter Solstice but on a cultural achievement by the Maccabees, the expelling of the Greeks. It does however 
share a darkness dispelling theme with the others.
There is more to say here, much more, but I’m hungry. Catch you later.
Western Hotel, Camp Chesterfield, 8 pm.
This was my day to poke around here at Camp Chesterfield, the reunion over and a day remaining on my stay in the Western Hotel. I picked a poor day. Instead of the usual worship services held today thee was a blessing of the animals. Before that I went back to the gift shop, which has an unusual collection of books and items for sale.
Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World, by Robert Dale Owen seemed the most substantial work on spiritualism, so I picked up a copy. Written in 1860, a California outfit named Health Research has produced a facsimile edition. Most of the works on spiritualism were from the late 19th or early 20th century, the prevailing zeitgeist here at this 124 year old Spiritualist center. It will make for interesting reading.
I looked through many other books, including a series by Alice (?) that fills a bookshelf. A couple of the books interested me: White Magic and Esoteric Knowledge (actually 6 separate volumes), but at $27 or so a copy, I decided to pass. Besides, the book store plans to go online next month, so I’ll have access there whatever titles I want. Most of the ones that intrigued me were by presses I suspect even Amazon doesn’t carry.
Why do they intrigue me you might well ask. In part because this small subculture has shown durability over the centuries, persisting and now beginning, it seems, to thrive again. They tap into the universal hope that something persists after death, that death is not final, rather a transition to the Spirit world, or the non-physical plane. As a writer of fantasy novels, I like to use religious world views grounded in living or once living faith traditions. Not much has been done with Spiritualism and it carries such a strong overlay of Victorian and Edwardian sensibilities, that it makes a good setting for a novel.
As I made away across the grounds from the Western Hotel, the direction of transition in spiritualism, I passed a prayer grotto, a large marble angel, a setting of busts honoring creating of major faith traditions and a setting of concrete tables with two wooden chairs. These last I imagine were at one point the site of outdoor readings.
Just beyond the chairs and concrete tables was the cathedral. That’s what they call it. This is a rather modest cathedral, though it has two ranks of movie style seats and a large stage upon which a pulpit sits. The décor is simple, plain plaster, a couple of small stained glass windows and a statue of Jesus off stage right.
I began with a critical attitude. The nearly bald older woman in the flowery chiffon dress couldn’t pronounce Assissi or covenant, both coming out garbled at best. She also started the service with a CD of a 9/11 fireman singing God Bless America followed by the pledge of allegiance. Peculiar way to start a worship service unless in a militia camp. Then she read a brief bio of Francis, butchering the words yet again.
Once came she came down from behind the pulpit and discarded her professional persona for animal lover, the service got in synch. She loved each animal, from Great Danes to Italian Greyhounds and lively kitties to one brought forward in a roller bag because, as her own said, “She has severe arthritis.”
Our nearly bald celebrant said, “Well, I can identify with that.”
Animal after animal came down, got a sprinkling of holy water and a St. Francis medal and a dose of love. The celebrant assured us that the water and the medallions had been blessed by Fr. Justin. From a traditional theological perspective this was peculiar at best.
One of the Great Danes, almost as big as our Irish Wolfhounds, took it upon himself to lap noisily from the basin holding the holy water. A sanctified stomach.
As a couple of people came up with names of pets who had died, there were asked when the transition had occurred. They were then assured that St. Francis greeted each animals arrival, as did, in one case, another cat who had died—transitioned– in the last year. The grief and the joy which met all the animals or their owners who talked of loss was real and consoling and honoring.
Seeing the animals up there, participating in the service, made me realize how infrequently we give active attention to the sacredness of animals and the human-animal bond. This all felt more authentically spiritual than many services I’ve attended.
I shed a few tears for Hilo and Emma, both recently deceased—transitioned. It was an affecting time and one that convinced me of the sincerity of this unlettered woman who spoke of spirit and transitions.
I hope to get a Tarot card reading before I go, though because this is Sunday it seemed awkward to call people. I’ve got tomorrow morning yet.
Fall Waning Back to School Moon
October 3nd, Western Hotel, Camp Chesterfield 8:35 am
Had breakfast again in the Maxon Cafeteria, just east of the Western Hotel. It was late enough that the crowd here for John “Medicine Bear” Doerr’s workshop, Becoming a Spiritual Warrior, had already eaten, so I dined alone. Oatmeal and bacon.
A good nap after the laundromat yesterday followed by a quick visit to the gift shop here at the Camp. It reopens at noon today. Lots of interesting books and gee-gaws from a wide range of religious traditions. I’ll spend some money.
Big doings last night at the south room of the Norwood Bowl. A cement block addition to the bowling alley, the south room has a parquet dance floor, seating for around 70 which we filled 
and a kitchen area;/wet bar raised above the dining and dancing floor by about three feet. It was a perfect space for this event.
Having the homecoming parade float and the impromptu meal at the Curve on Friday night, the Historical Society meeting yesterday morning followed by the tented champagne brunch at Steve Kildow’s place before this sit down meal allowed a lot of mixing and story telling to happen over an extended time. It made for a real sense of having gathered together again as a class.
Toni Fox, a self-described “a bit plump but still cute as a button,” was an early crush of mine. By early I mean first/second grade. She’s retired now and set to go on a 1940’s train ride to Memphis with her now cancer free husband. Louie Bender worked his charm on the ladies as he always did, vying at times with Toni for the attention of the crowd.
Jerry Ferguson, an old buddy with whom I apparently had more good times than I recall, and I had a lot of laughs remembering crazy stuff we did. Jerry remembers, and others did too so I’ll take their word for it, that we painted 1965 on the water tower. He said, “I turned to you and you were high-tailing it for the truck. I yelled, Charlie, what are you doing?” “Man with a shotgun,” I shouted over my shoulder. Tom Urban got behind the wheel of Jerry’s green pickup, we dived in the back and Tom drove across the railroad track. Tony Fisher said, “We could see the whites of the engineer’s eyes.” Big fun. Lucky I survived childhood.
Tom Friend was there. He played coronet in high school and had a way with the ladies like Louie. Tom lived near the Nickel Plate tracks north just off Harrison.
Frank Johnson and Susan Mahoney, high school sweethearts and married since college, live in Fort Wayne. Frank had a benign brain tumor, quadruple by-pass surgery and prostate cancer. “I’m getting all the bad stuff out of the way before retirement.” He should be almost bullet proof. Susan, who looks like she did in high school, now works in admissions for a private school. They attend 1st Presbyterian in Fort Wayne, a congregation that tasted blood about 4 clergy ago and have continued to chum the water with each new pastor. A typical pattern for churches that succeed in ousting a minister, usually to devastating affect on the congregation.
Larry Stafford workdd for GM at Guide Lamp for 42 years until they shut down five or so years ago. Now, at 63, he’s out of a job and trying to find something new, “But, Charlie, there just aren’t any jobs out there. I got my associate degree in information management, too.” A tough spot.
Tony Fisher sells insurance in Liggonier, Indiana. A couple of years ago he won $2,000 dollars at an insurance convention, money for a trip. He chose New York City. “I didn’t know Central Park was so big you could drive through it. I saw Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, Ground Zero. I always wanted to see them. Course I also saw the wax museum and Ripley’s Believe or Not, too. I’d go back.”
Traveling is on his to do list. He wants to go Las Vegas for “all the glitz and glamor” and he also intends to take the South Bend to Chicago train and see the Shedd Aquairum and all that stuff. “Ive gotten interested in that stuff as I’ve gotten older.”
Steve Kildow, who paid for and hosted the champagne brunch yesterday worked at GM and lost a good bit of money when GM’s stock tanked. Looks to me like he compensated for it in other areas.
Old groups that hung out together 45 years ago reformed, catching up in the years since 1965 and reliving the ones before. Memories were the token of exchange over the weekend and each person came with a full account and left even richer in them.
A photographer took shots of the whole class, then broke us down by feeder schools: Orestes and Cunningham were outside Alexandria’s city limits, Tomlinson and Clarke were for the southern and northern parts of the city for elementary school. I didn’t even know Clark existed. We were only in Tomlinson and Clark for first and second grades then we merged at what is now Thurston Elementary.
Miss Thurston would come in to the lunch room, go student by student, rapping each on the shoulder, “Now Charles Paul. Eat your peas.”
Toni Fox recalled that when we went to Tomlinson the school took us home for lunch because the school was on Highway 9 and we couldn’t walk home. I didn’t remember that.
Richer Howard told me the saddest story of the evening. Richard Lawson, a good buddy while I was in High School, went to Vietnam and came back disabled. He married, had a couple of kids. A divorce took him hard and he lost his job, became homeless. Richie gave him money now and then.
It got to the point where Richard was living out of his car. He had a stroke and that made getting around difficult. During a recent very cold winter he had returned to his car, opened the door, then slipped and slid under it. They found him there the next morning, blue and solid.
Richie also told a tale about Richard. Richard joined the Navy after his discharge from the Army. Richie got a call at 3 am, “Hey, Richie. What’s you doin’?” “Sleeping.” “Hey, man. How do you cook a turkey?” “What?” Turns out Richie and some other sailors had washed up on the shore of Spain somehow and a farmer gave them a turkey, but non of them knew how to cook it.; Richie put his wife, Becky (Ellis, no relation), on the phone and she walked him through the steps.
There were, as there always are, those who couldn’t come. Ronnie Montgomery I missed most since we had stayed in contact through college. Zane Ward and Larry Cummings, part of the poker playing crew, I’ve not seen since high school. Zane runs the junk-yard and Larry has bait shop in Arkansas.
Jerry said Jack Staley has his own engineering firm specializing in heating and cooling systems. Jack has the controls for Budweiser’s beer storage warehouses in his basement in Indianapolis. The warehouses are in St. Louis. Mike Taylor, the only African-American in our class, who moved before high school, also became and engineer specializing in high-end kitchens.
Willard Grubb, another poker player, is a pharmacist nearby.
We’ve had deaths, mostly cancer and brain tumors, but a heart attack whiled driving, too. That was Rodney Frost, the guy with whom I had my one and only fist fight. Mike Gaunt, my doctor’s kid, died a couple of years ago. One of the pretty girls in our class, Sherry Basset, died in 1989. Two died in Vietnam. I don’t whether 20 or so is a lot or a little for a class of 120. Since we’re all 63, the number will grow faster between reunions now.
The woman I met here yesterday from Bogota said that one of the things she admired about Americans was their loyalty to groups. “Coming all the way from Minnesota for people you knew 45 years ago. In Colombia it’s just go and live your life. That’s it.”
There were, too, the objects and places to which memories adhere, the house on the corner of Harrison and John that has the stone wall running along the sidewalk. When Mom and I would go downtown, I walked up the flat mortared slope and then along the top, watching my mom from high above. At the point where some steps broke up the run of the wall, I always looked in the yard and so the big doghouse built for their St. Bernard. The hill, which felt so big back then, down which I rode my skateboard. I got pulled over by the police and ticketed for being in the street. At city hall I looked up the ordinance and found that wheeled vehicles were required to be in the street.
Those two numinous blocks of Monroe Street where I lived from age 4 or 5 to age 12 were the terrain of magic for me, where nights became playgrounds for hide and seek and kick the can, where a field nearby became a fort, a hide-out, a place of refuge, where Mike Hines and I performed our experiments where explosion was the mark of success.
In 1957 Mike and I were out back in our backyard, we lived across the alley from each other. We looked up and saw three silver shaped objects high in the late afternoon sky. To my recollection this was September or October. We watched those objects for a while, then they went behind the moon. That’s right, behind the moon. Mike and I reported this to my dad who wrote a small article in the paper about it. This was the time of the UFO’s and Mike and I saw some. Nothing ever came of our sighting.
Mike left the US during the Vietnam War for Canada. According to Toni, who saw Mike’s sister Susan not long ago, he’s still there.
Some of us had grown up on the same street together, then gone to elementary, junior high and high school together. We passed from children to youth to teen-agers together. Those memories, those years together in the same place are a powerful bond, one not broken by time or physical separation. We proved that all over again at this weekend.