Category Archives: Memories

Memories, Minnesota, Weather +Climate, Woolly Mammoths

A Snowman Will Want to Be Inside

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Yule                                                                                      Stock Show Moon

You wanna find Stock Show weather? Go to Minnesota this weekend. Friend Tom Crane sent me a link to the Updraft blog of MPRNews. “Thought you might want to know what you’re missing,” he said.

Weather January 16, 17 2016

Paul Huttner, the meteorologist for the Updraft blog, repeated a Minnesota weather nostrum often used at times like these: “The only thing between Minnesota and the North Pole is a barbed wire fence.”

In Minnesota, not often, but often enough, you realized the weather could kill you. No winds necessary. This will be one of this times.

Colorado, at least for us so far, doesn’t produce weather like this. If you go higher in altitude, then yes, you can find extreme winter cold, but even at 8,800 feet nothing like this. Can’t say I miss that bitter cold. though looking out the window from a warm house, over a snowy frozen landscape has its charms.

Friends, Memories, US History

Coming Together. Thinking Back.

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Mabon                                                                    Moon of the First Snow

getting ready for the picture

The 50th high school reunion. Friend Tom Crane sent me an article by a historian who graduated from Hopkins High School in 1964. Tom’s sister was in that class and he was in the class of 1966 which has its 50th next year.

John H. Johnson, a U.S. historian who teaches a class every year at Northern Iowa University on recent American history, saw several themes of the recent past reflected in his class. Overwhelmingly white. So was mine, just look at the picture. Located in a well-to-do suburb of Minneapolis. Mine, a small town of 5,000, mostly factory workers, about 60 miles east of Indianapolis.

float5

Like Tom and Johnson’s classes, my class of 1965 had little direct experience with the politics of the early 1960’s with the exception of the strong UAW presence in town. The latter meant that fundamental economic/political issues like fair wages, good benefits and retirement packages got attention.

Alexandria, Indiana’s class of 1965 came before the rise of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem feminism and unlike Johnson’s classmates its women did not go on to break glass ceilings. Most married, had children. Some worked, of course. A few, a handful, went on to college and developed careers, but they were the exceptions. Alexandria was a town where many parents had not graduated from high school; or, if they had, the high school diploma was a terminal degree. Also unlike the Hopkins experience.

the edge of town, Alexandria

There was, as Johnson described, a historical rift between male classmates who had served in Vietnam and those who fought against the war, but unlike the Hopkins instance the vast majority of military age men went into the service and most saw active duty in Vietnam. As far as I know, I was the only visible anti-Vietnam war protester in my class. We did not, as Johnson talks about happening at his reunion, discuss the war and its stateside opponents.

There was, though, the exchange of concern among myself and many of my Vietnam Vet classmates over my recent bout with prostate cancer. And, I did say at the reunion that I believed our presence there together showed the futility and stupidity of America’s currently polarized politics. We cared about each other because we knew each other from childhood, our politics did not interfere with that sense of community.

I imagine there’s a good book to be written about early baby boomer’s 50th reunions. They represent the coming together of people who were both together before the 1960’s turned U.S. history on its head and who left high school to become agents of that very change.

 

Beyond the Boundaries, Faith and Spirituality, GeekWorld, Memories, Myth and Story, Science

Not Even Gone

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Mabon                                                                     Moon of the First Snow

It is so beautiful here around 5 a.m. when the sky is clear, which is most mornings. The stars leap out of the sky, reminders of the power they had when the only light pollution was an evening’s campfire. Orion stands high in the south, moving toward Black Mountain. The Big Dipper disappears behind the roof of the garage in the east, but the pointer stars are visible, showing the way to true north. Cassiopeia, that unhappy queen, extends her jagged W, a slash of stars.

Time travel has been with us since the first human looked up in wonder at the stars. What we see unaided and what we can see with telescopes comes to us from the distant, distant past. So distant that the miles come in units of time. Perhaps, in a way, our lives are like the heavens, still shining after long years, even after death, radiating out from our small sector of space-time to the far away future.

So you might go out and look at the stars and consider the bright lights in your life, still strong and beautiful, wonderful. And remember that someday, you too will shine for others. Not gone, not even absent.

Memories

Antiques

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Lughnasa                                                                   Elk Rut Moon

Orion continues to greet me as I go to the garage to let the dogs out in the early morning, usually around 5:15 am. While in Indiana, I drove past what I think was the factory where I worked as a security guard and first became on intimate terms with him. It was 45+ years ago and the corporation for which I worked has gone bankrupt. They made cookware. Those long nights in the guard shack, 11-7, punctuated by hourly walks with the leather clock which recorded visits to each station with a key, gave me plenty of time to look at the night sky in wonder.

(Just to make me feel even older, I found this picture under the heading antique security guard timeclocks.)

Sure, I studied some, but reading philosophy while sleep deprived was not easy. The weekend stirred a lot of memories, not least seeing the factory where Orion and I quietly kept watch.

 

Memories

Ghost Town

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Lughnasa                                                                    Elk Rut Moon

Well...
Well…
Worked here two summers
Worked here two summers
where dad and I worked, former Times Tribune Building
where dad and I worked, former Times Tribune Building
site of former high school, junior high
site of former high school, junior high
mom and dad
mom and dad
I worked here several years
I worked here several years. (empty)
Conroy's Barber Shop, Stern Tailors and Greyhound Bus Station Late 1950's
Conroy’s Barber Shop, Stern Tailors and Greyhound Bus Station Late 1950’s
A few brick streets remain
A few brick streets remain
the edge of town, Alexandria
the edge of town, Alexandria
Friends, Memories

The Reunion

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Lughnasa                                                                     Elk Rut Moon

A few pictures from the reunion weekend. Actually, quite a few.

Tomlinson

1st Grade. I’m second in from the left on the front row.

Junior YearJunior Year, 1964. Second from right, 5th row

getting ready for the picture
getting ready for the picture, 62 years after Tomlinson and 51 years after our junior year

float3float5

On the Float
On the Float
at the banquet
at the banquet
the pig roast
the pig roast

 

 

Health, Memories, Travel

Straight Across the Middle

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Lughnasa                                                                       Labor Day Moon

postopdaze350Just 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.

Class of 1965 Float (2)
From the 45th

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

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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.
class officers freshman year, Alexandria H.S.

freshman year

 

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

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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

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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.