Category Archives: Memories

Ropes Slacken More

August 29, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa College Moon

At the State Fair yesterday. Realized, as with the garden, how much my thoughts of next year and the year after were tied up in what I did today. I no longer went through the Agriculture building with a keen eye for new information, stuff I wouldn’t have found otherwise. Say, a new apple. Maybe a new way to compost or treat troublesome weeds. A different method for keeping bees healthy.

Also, that building where local groups like the Sierra Club present information, help you connect to networks in state. Didn’t even visit it.

That’s why, when Kate and I both realized we’d gone as far our legs were going to carry us, we hit the skyride for a trip over the fairgrounds and back to the express bus lot.

Still, there were memories there, of years volunteering at the DFL booth or the Sierra Club booth or, long ago, as a State Fair chaplain (mostly monitoring lost kids. though, come to think of it, I wonder how folks would feel about that these days?). Cheese curds. Foot long hot dogs. I can even remember drinking beer at the fair. That’s reaching pretty far back into my Minnesota past.

The sense of pulling back, pulling away, of not-quite any longer a full Minnesotan took something from the fair for me. It was not mine in the same sense it had been before. Not as much a shared experience, like the weather, that helps define Minnesota. Not shared fully because part of me has gone ahead to the mountains. To the Great Western National Stockshow.

The circus tent has considerable slack in the ropes. The rings and the bleachers have been packed. The moment when the elephants are called to strike the big tent? Not yet. Not for a while. But we don’t want to let them wander too far away. They will be needed.

Back to the packing. The end of book packing for right now (the bookshelf immediately beside the desk will remain loaded until this room has to be vacated for staging.) is in sight. Perhaps today. Then there are files and art objects, office supplies, novel manuscripts. Still a lot to do, but a lot less than existed three months ago.

Humanities, Memories

A Madras Sport Coat?

August 28, 2014 Charles 1 Comment

Lughnasa College Moon

In 1965 Gentlemen’s Quarterly had an off to college issue for the young man. As a result, a navy blazer, charcoal slacks and several oxford cloth shirts ended up in my closet along with a madras sport coat. There was, too, an oxblood pair of casual dress shoes. None of this had been part of my wardrobe before.

It felt, what did it feel? How to describe it? It was costume for the new role, the away from home, out of town guy. Choosing this clothing was more important than the clothing itself. The act of shopping, getting measured and fitted, deciding on cuffs or no cuffs, stripes or no stripes and the radical choice of a madras sport coat. First. A sport coat! Second. Madras. Au courant.

This was about shedding the t-shirts, plaid shirts and cotton pants of high school, putting high school behind me, or, perhaps better, leaving the high school me behind. Wanting to. Needing to. This was a boy leaving home, wanting and needing to become a man. Whatever that meant.

It meant being ready. And of course I wasn’t. We never are when we make these transitions. Kate and I sat behind a young girl today, maybe 13. She had blond hair, neon sneakers, khaki shorts and a pair of fashion sunglasses. I watched her as she leveled her shoulders, threw out her chest just a little and ran her hand through her hair. All while looking bored. Or unsure. She was between being a girl and wanting desperately to be a woman, or at least an older girl.

That was me. Wanting desperately to be a man, at least a young man. Not. A. Boy. It was this navy blazered, charcoal slacked, blue oxford dress shirted, oxblood shoed young man who wanted a liberal arts education. He wasn’t sure quite what that was but he had come to believe that he needed one. That’s why he had chosen Wabash, a private liberal arts college. The emphasis at Wabash was not on vocational training but on learning, about developing the ability to think and becoming saturated with the Western intellectual tradition.

What happened to that young man and the need for navy blazers is another, more complicated story, but he never let go of liberal arts. Never. Not even now. It was the one aspect of that transition from boy to man, from secondary education to higher education, that did not get set aside or changed or abandoned.

And you know, I don’t recall ever wearing that madras sportcoat.

Dogs, Memories

Fallen

August 25, 2014 Charles 1 Comment

Lughnasa New (College) Moon

It fell out of a book. Wouldn’t have meant much to somebody else, a polariod, slightly faded, with a golden haired dog looking through a gate, his head on the bottom supports. But for me it was another one of those Olympian bolts. Tor. God, I loved that dog.

Tor used to sleep on the corner of the Persian rug, right by the edge of the large glass-doored bookcase. When I got up in the morning, when I went to bed at night, he was there. It was with him that I first started consciously stopping, getting down on his level, rubbing his head, telling him how much I loved him.

The shortness of the Irish Wolfhound’s life span awakened me to the brief time we have with those we love. Awakened me to not waste the moment by passing by, too busy, ignoring the thumping tail. Those brown eyes turned up.

So consider this, for this moment, my coming to you, on your own level. My hand touching you, with the only gift we mortals have, presence. Me to you. Tor taught me this.

Memories

Go, Cave Men

August 23, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa College Moon

Looked at the world college and wondered, where does that come from? Here’s the answer from Lewis and Short, the OED of Latin dictionaries:

collegium: persons united by the same office or calling, or living by some common rules, a college, guild, corporation, society, union, company, fraternity

(The Sodales Augustales or Sacerdotes Augustales, or simply Augustales, were an order (sodalitas) of Roman priests instituted by Tiberius to attend to the maintenance of the cult of Augustus and the Iulii in 14 AD. see Wiki. picture below)

September. Lots of schools start in September. It’s no accident that Mabon the second of the harvest festivals falls in September. In a largely rural America children were needed at home during the growing season, so school ended in May, late, and began again in September, when the harvest was…I started to repeat this nostrum, but then realized it didn’t make a lot sense. The fall harvest extends into September and the growing season in many parts of the country starts in early May, so I looked it up and found this:

“Why does the American school year start in September and end in June? It’s something of a mystery. Did children once “bring in the harvest” on the family farm all summer in the distant rural past?

Historians at Old Sturbridge Village, a living history museum that recreates an 1830s New England farming village, say not. According to the web site and schoolmistress there, farm children went to school from December to March and from mid-May to August. Adults and children alike helped with planting and harvesting in the spring and fall.”

This makes sense with what I know of agriculture and horticulture. Will need more research. Don’t have the time right now because I’m going out to harvest, especially raspberries. No school for me.

September always found me excited, a pleasant feeling of anticipation. That was never more the case than my freshmen year of college. I was off to Wabash College, a private all-men’s school in Crawfordsville, Indiana. Wabash was my fantasy college, brick buildings, leafy walkways, odd traditions. At that point in time it was also exclusive, very difficult to get into though that has changed.

(Freshmen had to wear the beanie, or “pot” as it was known on campus, everywhere. This made it easy for upper class men to identify you and make you do small chores for them, like carry their books.)

Leaving for Wabash meant that my adult life was about to start and I couldn’t wait. So, this month’s moon is the college moon.

Great Wheel, Memories, Minnesota

Cheese Curds

August 22, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Lughnasa Moon

State Fair. A Lughnasa festival writ large. Texas and Minnesota, 1 & 2 in terms of state fair attendance. So Minnesota’s is big. And filled with the improbable from seed art to deep-fried pickles on a stick. Princess Kay of the Milky Way gets immortalized in butter, meaning there is an occupational niche for, yes, butter sculptor.

(Antrim, Ireland. Old Lammas Fair.)

The cows and the pigs and the horses and the chickens and the llamas and the rabbits and the pigeons and the sheep are all here in the city now, rooted out of their familiar stalls or sheds or fields, loaded in wagons and driven into the concrete jungle that is St. Paul, or Falcon Heights if you’re going to be picky.

The DNR has the great pond with Minnesota fish, right across from the giant slide where the gunny sacks serve as seats. Along the street that runs to the main entrance and you hit cheese curds fried and politicians hoping to avoid being fried.

Then there’s machinery hill where, like the livestock, farm machinery comes into the city for a few days. The tractors seem at home there, a place they belong as much as in the field following the gps to the other end of the furrow.

And the people, walking arm in arm, carrying a WCCO bag, a bunch of colorful brochures and printed information from the DNR, colleges, that wonderful gizmo the hawker made seem magical. They might be eating honey ice cream, purchased at the bee exhibit run by members of the Minnesota Hobby Beekeepers Association.

Carried above the noise and crush of the crowds are ringing bells, flashing lights with their lustre lost in the daylight. The Fair’s id, the Midway. Riding, swooping, throwing, carrying big soft bears no one would buy. Where pointlessness is exactly the point.

It’s all underway right now, through Labor Day. This one will be our last as Minnesota residents and we’re going, probably on Monday. I’ll be headed for the cheese curds.

Anoka County, Memories

Nowthen

Gallery August 16, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Lughnasa Moon

Well. While at Osaka, our local sushi joint, Kate noticed a TV featuring nude bowlers. No, I don’t know why, but Kate went on to point the relation between sushi, raw fish, and nude bowlers, human flesh in the raw. There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than can be counted for in your philosophy.

Before this nude experience, we attended, for the second year, the Nowthen Threshing Show. Here are a few photographs:

Steam engine power take off running a rip saw and a planer at a temporary sawmill.

An old filling station. Compare to the Edward Hopper below.

The theme this year was the world of steam.

We watched the engineers bring this five piston diesel engine to life. It has a huge armature just out of the picture to the left.

This was a surprise, but an artful one. Kate and her much admired red glasses.

Family, Feelings, Memories

What Lies Beneath?

August 3, 2014 Charles 2 Comments

Lughnasa Lughnasa Moon

Clearing out files this morning. When I came to a group of dog related files, vet records, pedigrees, lure coursing material, I got stopped for a while. In Sortia’s file, our second Irish Wolfhound, a black bitch that weighed 150 pounds, I found a letter from the University of Minnesota Veterinary Hospital. Sortia was euthanized there against our wishes during an overnight stay.

(Rigel and Vega taking the sun on our new deck)

Though the care our dogs have gotten at the U was usually exemplary, this event prevented us from saying good-bye to Sortia. Reading this letter about the incident brought it back to me in a flash. A wave of sudden sadness and deep grief gripped me for a moment, so strong that I had to put down the file and sit back while I stabilized. This feeling surprised me, came up strong from dead stop.

I also had an unexpected response a few weeks back while watching How To Train Your Dragon II. In a reunion between the lead character, a young man, and his mother whom he thought dead, a wave of yearning swept through me. I wanted my mother to hug me. She’s been dead 50 years this year and I can not recall a feeling this strong about her in decades.

Here’s what I’m wondering. Do these strong feelings lie waiting for the right triggers, somewhat like PTSD? Or, do they swim around in the neural soup, always this strong, but engaged in another part of our psychic economy? How many of these knots of emotion exist within us, still tied to their original sources, and what significance do they have?

I may not be saying this well. As a general rule, I’m not in the grip of strong emotion unless something political is going on or I haven’t had enough sleep. Politics taps into something primal, as if a god within wakes and demands action. (I use this analogy with some reservation because I don’t believe my politics are divinely inspired, but it gives the right tone to the depth of my political feelings.) Being sleep deprived makes me irritable and far from my best self, so anger comes more easily then.

Now, maybe strong emotion could ride me more often. Maybe I’m missing out on some part of life that flies those colors with some regularity. But as a white middle-class guy, educated and with northern european ancestry, friends and spouse of the same, my emotional range is muted and these events, like the ones I describe, are rare.

No conclusion here. Only questions.

Memories

You Can’t Go Home Again

July 25, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Summer New (Lughnasa) Moon

In the spirit of Heraclitus and Thomas Wolfe:

Clarification on hometown lost. It was I who lost the Alexandria I described. I lost it and so did many of those who lived there when I did, but those who live there today, who have chosen it as their home or remained through the changes I describe, may have a different view. They may not view it as lost, but as home.

Family, Memories

Back Home Again, Upon the Wabash

July 17, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Summer Most Heat Moon

Took my fellow Hoosier, sister Mary, out to International House of Pancakes, a chain redolent with Indiana memories. They even seem to hire Hoosier like waitresses, thin and cheerful, like blue-collar librarians. I had country fried steak and eggs, but Mary had a special, blueberry cannoli. An improbable breakfast item, but there it was and Mary liked it.

After IHOP, we drove through northern Anoka County, winding past wetlands, sod farms and older country homes to the Green Barn. There I picked up 6 bags of woodchips and loaded them in the RAV4 so I can complete the deck work today.

Northern Anoka County has that northwoods feel. In fact, the boreal forest reaches its southern most extension near here. This rural ambiance is not really found in Singapore, a modern city-state. Mary did say that there are farms in Singapore, farms raising organic vegetables for local grocers and restaurants.

Memories, Politics, US History

Be the Change or Change the System?

July 2, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Summer Most Heat Moon

1968. Martin dies. Bobby dies. The Chicago riots at the Democratic National Convention. Local boy Hubert challenges Richard (enemy’s list) Nixon and Nixon wins with a knockout 301 electoral votes. This brought Spiro (nattering nabobs of negativism) Agnew into office, too. Oh, what a time it was.

On the outside, including certain rioters at the Chicago convention who would become famous as the Chicago 7, was a massive, incoherent largely college student uprising known as “the movement.” In those days there was a split within the movement about whether to engage the political system, the establishment (a term borrowed from American thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson), through protests and (usually) alternative candidates for election like Dick Gregory, or, to drop out.

Tune in, turn on, drop out was a favorite mantra of those who contended the establishment was too corrupt to change and instead must be ignored while a new culture was built. This was the time of communes and the back to the land movement. The split within the movement identified hippies who wanted to live together in a participatory democracy, often rural, but not always, and radicals, who thought protest and work in congress could bring an end to the Vietnam War and usher in an era of peaceful, socialist-style politics.

These two groups, the hippies and the radicals were, within the movement itself, seen as opposite, if not opposing camps. At its core it was a political equivalent of the debate within Western Christendom between quietist monastics who retired from the world into a life of prayer and contemplation and the engaged church which tried to influence the lives of people in their worldly home.

Today the camps divide less obviously but they cluster around, on the one hand, folk who might have a “Be the change you want to see in the world.” bumper sticker, and on the other, those who have a 99% button or a Sierra Club hiker on their car.

I never understood the conflict myself. I became a committed back to the lander, purchasing a farm in northern Minnesota while remaining, at the same time, committed to political action. It still seems to me that living the change and acting politically go together. They are points on a continuum of belief turned toward action, not dialectical opposites.