Category Archives: Memories

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

Not Even Gone

Leave a comment

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

Leave a comment

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

Leave a comment

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

Leave a comment

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

Leave a comment

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

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.
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

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

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

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

Leave a comment

Beltane                                                        New (Healing) Moon

photo by sister Mary
photo by sister Mary

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.

hanover cemeteryNowhere 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.