Category Archives: Memories

Straight Across the Middle

September 8, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Labor Day Moon

Just realized this is two months post surgery. A good sign, I imagine. Forgetting. Not dwelling on what was, but living. Yes, there’s that super sensitive PSA next week, but I can’t change what it will be. Right now my gut tells me it will be fine. That’s enough for now.

Tomorrow morning the little gray Nissan Sentra will shift drivers from Kate to me. She’s on her way home right now from Tetonia, Idaho. The reunion for the Alexandria High School class of 1965 starts on Friday and it will take two days to get there. I-70 runs from Denver through Kansas, then Missouri and Illinois. It hits Indiana at Terre Haute, home of Larry Bird and the Federal Penitentiary where Timothy McVeigh was executed and where Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will die, too. After that the memories just keep on coming.

The drive, a long one at 17 hours, is the same duration as a drive from London to Budapest. The hours on the road are a time for contemplation and listening to audio books. Kansas, Missouri, Illinois and Indiana do have a subtle beauty, but it is scenery I’ve seen many times before.

These are the years of memory and so many in that little town. So many.

Friends, Memories, Third Phase

Compassion for the Young

September 2, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Labor Day Moon

Next week, on Tuesday, I’m leaving Shadow Mountain for the familiar plains and fields of the Midwest. My 50th high school reunion. Not so long ago it seemed unlikely that anyone could be old enough for a 50th high school reunion. Now. Well.

A friend on whom I had a long schoolboy crush, Tony Fox, has been posting a countdown on Facebook. She came up with some photographs from the Spectrum, our yearbook. These are from our freshman year, 1961. That’s me on the left.

class officers freshman year, Alexandria H.S.

This photograph caused a shock of recognition when I saw it the other day. 54 years later I still find myself in this pose from time to time. The look. Also very familiar. Still.

And yet there is the question of my relationship with this 1961 version. My cells have changed over completely at least 7 times. The narrative that I have or that I am includes this young man, yes, but how? Am I his literal descendant as we tend to think, or am I only a thought, a continuously updating Self that is really brand new from moment to moment?

This photograph raises in me a lot of compassion for this young guy, knowing as I do now what the future, especially through his teens and twenties, holds for him. He will be tested in ways the innocence captured here cannot comprehend.

High school. A complicated time. As were the teen years themselves. Soon to come roaring back for a couple of days in mid-September.

Beyond the Boundaries, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Memories, Original Relation, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Science, Third Phase

The Now and the Not Yet

August 31, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Labor Day Moon

A curious bifurcation. Friends comment on how well my life’s going. I’m not feeling it. Kate says look at the big picture. That’s what they’re seeing. Time with grandkids. Settling into the mountains. Healthy dogs. Cancer season mostly over. Loft getting put together.

When Kate suggested I look at the big picture, I replied, “It’s not in my nature.” My comment surprised me. What did that mean? “It’s not in my nature.”

In the moment I meant the larger trajectory of my life always gets swamped by the quotidian. The generator, damn thing. Rigel’s cast. Aimlessness. Sleep. That’s what gets my attention, my focus. It’s the way of generalized anxiety. Yes, I can back off from the day-to-day, know that these things are transient and the bigger things more lasting, but I get dragged right back in. Gotta change our home insurance before October 31st. Like that.

But more to my question, what is my nature? What does that mean? I mentioned a while back I’m reading a book called How Forests Think. In it Eduardo Kohn makes a strong, a remarkable case for animism, identifying animism with the Selfhood of living things. Self, if I understand Kohn right, is the gathered experience of not only an individual tree, dog, human, but of the evolutionary and genetic inheritance each individual bears. In this sense my Self is the culmination of human adaptation over millions of years, specific adaptation in the instance of my particular genetic family and the moments since my birth that have shaped who I have become in dynamic interaction with those genetics.

I’ve always had a strong view of Self, that emergent being/becoming we each are. (BTW: we, in Kohn’s vocabulary, includes all living things) Thanks to many years of Jungian analysis I have tended to articulate Self in relation to Jungian thought as an entity rooted in the collective unconscious, born of the struggle between persona and our genetic tendencies, or, said another way, between our adaptative responses to the world and our animal inheritance.

It is in this sense that I meant it is not in my nature. Over time, thanks to events subtle and gross, I have learned to focus on the thing not finished, the matter with something left to do. That moves attention away from the completed, the resolved. Things like settling into the mountains, presumptively cancer free, time with the grandkids recede, get placed in the room marked o.k. for now.

So my nature is the sum of me, the skin-bound memories (another Kohn term) and the adaptative ancestry from which I descend. Here’s an interesting point about genetics and adaptation that Kohn makes, they are future oriented. That is, the adaptations that stick are, in essence, bets on a future that will require them. So, though they come from the past and manifest in the present, each adaptation represents a subtle reorientation of the species to a time imagined, in the most physical of senses, to have similarity with the near past.

Colorado, Family, Great Work, Memories, Our Land and Home

Stained Fingers

July 28, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Summer Recovery Moon

Jon and I went to Paxton Lumber Company yesterday, checking out exotic and not-so-exotic woods for material to extend the surface of the shorter shelving units. A couple of the ones I really liked were $20 and $19 a board foot, padauk and wenge. At those prices one board, thick, was in the $300 range. After looking at ash, white pine, and douglas fir, all of which I liked but were too close to the birch veneer on the bookshelves, we settled on black walnut.

Not only will the black walnut contrast with the birch veneer, black walnut trees were common in my hometown of Alexandria, Indiana. I have fond memories of stepping on the green acrid smelling husks of walnuts as they fell from those trees. We teased out the walnuts tucked inside and took them home, fingers stained with a greenish-yellow paste that had a bitter lemony taste. A part of my childhood. Also, black walnut trees were part of the old forest which dominated the landscape of the midwest prior to westward expansion. So those boards of the midwest will rest on birch veneer, redolent of the boreal forest in Minnesota. But the bookcases they constitute reside here on Shadow Mountain among lodgepole and ponderosa pines.

We ate lunch at Park Burger in the Hilltop neighborhood of Denver, a wealthy area with tear-down lots filled now with house reminiscent of Kenwood in Minneapolis. I had a Scarpone burger with pancetta, provolone and giardiniera. It was delicious.

Jon’s skills as a woodworker were evident as we selected the particular walnut boards. We matched their color, thickness and rejected some with too deep fissures or splits. He knows the woods and their characteristics. He also knows the places where exacting cuts can be made, straight. One place has a table saw as large as a small room.

Once again the joy of returning home from Denver’s 94 degrees to Shadow Mountain’s 77 with 23% humidity. The nights have been warm of late, making sleeping more difficult and pushing those ceiling fan purchases higher up on our priority list.

Beyond the Boundaries, Faith and Spirituality, Health, Memories, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Travel, US History

Week II Post-Surgery

July 22, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Summer Recovery Moon

Week II post surgery. My energy improves daily though I’m not back to full stamina. The surgical stigmata, six wounds where the robot’s arms pierced my skin, are healing nicely. It no longer hurts to lie down on them. An unpleasant, but anticipated side effect of the surgery, temporary incontinence, seems to be clearing up much more rapidly than I’d imagined it would. And, most importantly, I’m presumptively cancer free, the only question being possible microscopic metastases. I test for that in early September.

The tomorrow wall has crumbled. I can now see into the future again. Yesterday I made Amtrak reservations for my 50th high school reunion in September. The overnight California Zephyr runs from Denver to Chicago and then a short ride on the Cardinal to Lafayette, Indiana where I’ll pick up a rental car and drive the rest of the way. I do it this way because the Cardinal gets into Indianapolis after midnight and this allows me a good night’s sleep, plus I can gradually re-enter Hoosier space driving familiar highways back to Alexandria.

camp chesterfield2 — The Trail of Religion

Again this time, as I did for the 45th, I plan to stay at Camp Chesterfield, a Christian Spiritualist center. It’s a quirky, old, interesting place. And, it’s cheap.

The loft is ready for its second round of construction, more shelves, then more shelving. I’ve abandoned my attempt to get the books properly organized as I shelve them because I need to clear space for more shelves. I can sort and organize as much as I want come fall.

My psyche has not caught up to my body’s healing pace. Though the tomorrow wall has fallen, I still find my days somewhat chaotic, not sure what to do, then what to do next. We’ve had a continuing drip, drip, drip of other matters: cracked tooth, dying boiler, Kate’s very painful back that contribute. All those seem to be moving toward resolution. I’ve even found a plumber for the generator install, a niggling thing still hanging on.

I’ll find my psyche back to its usual eagerness over the next week or two. I look forward to it.

Again, gratitude to all of you who sent notes over the cancer season. It matters.

Family, Memories

Summer Haze

June 15, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane New (Healing) Moon

Summer as a boy meant trips to Morristown, Indiana to visit grandma and grandpa Keaton, Aunt Virginia and Uncle Riley, and their kids Diane, Richard and Kristen. Charlie Keaton, my grandfather, pictured in a post below, was a horse trader. He made his money, as I understand it, by driving around in his car, listening to the stock reports from Indianapolis, and buying up cattle and other livestock, then selling them for a better price in the stockyards.

He loved horses, was a railbird at Churchill Downs and owned his own harness horses which he kept on the farm about three or four miles outside of Morristown. He lived in town in a big house. Set on a corner lot it had a wraparound porch, large trees that shaded it, so it was always cool, even in the humid southern Indiana heat.

Uncle Riley continued the harness racing tradition after my grandfather died. Richard picked it up from Uncle Riley.

Morristown, more than Alexandria, where I grew up, is a place where I have roots. Even though Mom and Dad’s graves are in Alexandria, it feels like a temporary place, someplace I was for awhile before moving on to my real life. Morristown, on the other hand, has that summer morning haze off the river feeling, a place where my people lived and where they still live.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Hanover Cemetery where the first row of grave markers are Keatons and near them are Zikes. Charlie and Mabel are there. Uncle Riley and Aunt Virginia. Aunt Barbara. Uncle Paul and Aunt Gertrude. Aunt Mary. And many more.

The farm, the one that grandpa won on a wager at the horse track, is just around the bend and up a slight rise from the cemetery. Keaton farmland runs in back of the cemetery and to the north of it.

What positive feelings I have about Indiana come from this small town, Grandpa’s big house, the farm and this cemetery. They represent, they are, for me the spot where family and place have the most coincidence.

Literature, Memories, Writing

Knausgaard

May 31, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Closing Moon

Reading Karl Ove Knausgaard’s, My Struggle: Volume I. This book hits me as his memories call up my memories. His father memories call to mind my own, distant father, somehow unknown and unknowable. As he sat at the kitchen table, ruler and fat pencil in hand, mocking up an ad for the Times-Tribune’s Thursday edition, the big one which made us paperboys groan as they weighted down our green canvas bags, I would watch him, wonder why a man of his intelligence would spend time doing this.

His mind (Knausgaard’s) roves around ideas and art and writing in ways I recognize, having traveled many of the paths on which he walks. He wonders about his visceral reaction to art, why one painting moves him and another doesn’t, why so many of the ones that do come from a time before the 20th century. He plays with epistemology, speculating on how confident we can be about knowing the world; it is there, as David Hume said when he kicked the rock and said, “I refute it thus,” referring to Bishop Berkeley’s world of perceptions only, yet the world is not so easily known, forming itself from colors, for example, that represent not what color something is, but exactly the color it isn’t.

And, too, he is Norwegian. So he describes the inner workings of a Scandinavian mind and a culture that references lutefisk, fjords, cold and snow in the way a Hawai’ian might mention taro, palm trees and the hula.

My Struggle is not for everyone. It is personal, microscopic, intimate, plotless, meandering. If you need a narrative that hangs together in the usual way, this is not it though there is a continuity, a sort of modest stream of consciousness, more like blocks of consciousness, that do connect one with the other.

Recommended.

Memories

From the Archives, Ten Years Ago

May 29, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Sunday 5/29/05

Ought 5. 40 years after high school ended. High school seems so long ago. Minneapolis and St. Paul, Hubbard County, Lindstrom, Appleton, Connersville, Crawfordsville, and Muncie. So many places, so much life frittered away. Yet I feel content. Odd, isn’t it?

I’ve spent lifetimes as a drunk, as an administrator, as a scholar and a drifter. As a lover, and a fearer, an advocate and a hermit. From this vantage point I think of two things: John Desteian’s remark that it is a tragedy I had no students, and Kate’s comment last week about myEducation of a Docent having the virtue of being “existential”, by which she meant rooted now, rather than in a future ambition. I don’t know whether to evaluate these notions as critical, pejorative or as statements of fact. Perhaps they are both.

This is my 58th Memorial Day and I feel at ease. Not because I have accomplished much, though I feel I’ve met the criteria of having won not just one but several “victories for humanity.” “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.” – Horace Mann I know the end point of this Pilgrimage, though not its epilogue. Perhaps I will not be at ease tomorrow, things change, but today I am calm.

Feelings, Holidays, Memories, US History

Summer’s Gateway

May 26, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Closing Moon

Beltane marks the start of the growing season and the Celtic summer on May 1st. Meteorological summer doesn’t start until June 1. The summer solstice isn’t until June 20th/21st. Even so, we have just passed through our cultural gate to the summer season: Memorial Day and the Indy 500.

Yesterday bike riders began to show up in greater numbers, a fact that encouraged a lot of barking here on Shadow Mountain. There goes another one. Woof. And another one. Woof. The doggy equivalent of OMG.

Decoration Day, as it was called when I was a kid, was also the end of the school year. 12 years in the Alexandria, Indiana school system left me deeply imprinted with its meaning. First, we had the last day of school. The student’s equivalent of OMG. Then, we had the Decoration Day parade which ended at the cemeteries on Highway 9. After that, bliss.

Each year since, even today, the day after Memorial Day feels different. Lighter. My heart fills up with possible small adventures: hikes, road trips, movies, long evenings outside with friends. Too, U.S. history becomes more important to me, so I often pick up a Civil War book or something about slavery. This year I imagine they will be about the West.

So, let’s go play!

Memories, Minnesota, Politics, US History

Peek-A-Boo

March 3, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Imbolc Black Mountain Moon

Reading in the New York Review of Books about FBI surveillance of the anti-war movement. There was paranoia about the Feds all the time, with new folks coming under suspicion. The times were rich with focus, focus that made sense and focus that did not. The two were sometimes hard to separate.

Anyhow, the article reminded me of the funniest instance of FBI surveillance in which I personally participated. Back in ’72 or ’73 a bunch of us conceived the idea of a human chain around the Federal Building in St. Paul. There may have been a court case then, I don’t recall, but we showed up bright and early, joined hands and made a circle around the building. OK, almost the whole building. We didn’t have enough to close off the loading docks.

Anyhow, the Kellog Square apartments were under construction across the street from the Federal Building. They were mostly complete, several stories of apartments with glass windows facing the street. All of the apartments, up, I don’t know 20 floors, were empty. No curtains on the windows. No furniture. No renters yet.

Except. About six stories up, one unit had curtains. And, peeking between the curtains were cameras. The lenses were visible to the naked eye. Once we noticed them we waved, of course.

Very subtle of the FBI to hide behind curtains. In the only apartment that had them.

Oh, those were the days.