Category Archives: 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.

Anoka County, Family, Garden, Great Work, Memories, Minnesota, Our Land and Home, Retirement, Sierra Club, The Move, Third Phase, Writing

A House With A History

June 23, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Summer Summer Moon

Why not write a history of this spot, this hectare? An ecological history. It can start with the glaciations, consider the flora and fauna since then, focusing in more tightly once the first nations began to arrive, then even more tightly as Minnesota began to emerge.

Another starting spot would be today, or from Kate and mine’s presence here. How we decided to be here, why. Go over decisions we made early on like hiring a landscape designer at the beginning. Recount our twenty years, the good decisions and the bad ones, the easy ones and the hard ones. The other historical and geological material could be worked in as backstory.

It would be good for people to view an average approach to the land, one which changed over time (though its roots were indeed in the back to the land movement) and which took advantage not of a particular approach, but of many. An approach that is dynamic, changing with new knowledge, the seasons, aging, new plants and new desire.

The flavor of “Return of the Secaucus 7” with some Scott and Helen Nearing, Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry thrown in, too. Ah, perhaps it could be a sort of third phase update of the movement years, an upper middle class idyll moving against the grain of upper middle class lifestyles.

Not sure whether to pursue this or not, but it could be interesting. Might even help sell the house. A house with a history.

A structure based on the Great Wheel might be interesting.

Aging, Cinema and Television, Family, Feelings, Memories

A Hole

June 19, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Summer Moon

Sometimes these moments reach out, grab a part of you unexpectedly. Evoke a feeling long forgotten. In unusual places. Kate and I went to see How to Train Your Dragon 2, better than the first installment and worth seeing for any proud Scandinavian. It’s a touching story, dramatic and funny by turns with a quality of animation that shows how far we’ve come since Bugs Bunny and Woody Woodpecker. If you have a kid in your life, see it. If you have a kid left in your heart, see it.

Here’s what got me. Spoiler alert. Hiccup, the lead character, a boy just grown into young manhood (since his youth in the first picture) meets a mystery figure who loves and helps dragons, just like he does. The surprise is that she’s his mother, thought dead. There was a scene where this animated mother reached out and hugged her 20 year old boy for the first time since he was in the cradle.

A sudden wave of longing swept over me. For a second it was my mother, met again, reaching her hand out, a hug, the smell of her hair. The feeling rose from somewhere long forgotten. To be hugged by my mother. I miss it. Still. At 67 and her having been dead for 50 years this October. It reminded me of the hole I’ve lived around, never filled since her death and of the simple joys not possible for all those years.

It’s not regret nor nostalgia nor something I even wish for, just a hole, the hole that death leaves. And yet in its own way it was affirming. I loved my mother and I know she loved me. I know, if we found ourselves together, even over this long span of years, that she would hug me and caress my cheek. Kiss me. Tell me she was proud of me. That was her way. And, thankfully, I’m sure she would be proud of me.

Colorado, Dogs, Memories, The Move

Boards Darkened With Soil and Sand and Oil

May 27, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane New (Summer) Moon

Continued the deconstruction of the dog feeding stalls. Jon’s design was elegant and well executed. He put love into it for those dogs. That was in the time of the Irish Wolfhounds Morgana, Tira, Tully and for a brief while Scot (who died too young of hemangiosarcoma). It was also while the whippets Iris and Buck were still alive. (I think, my memory of the exact co-residence of our dogs is a bit fuzzy.)

As I removed the bones of the stalls and the doors into them, I stood inside the wooden structures, each about two and a half feet wide. It was then that memories began to surf my mood. The wood inside these crates has darkened, oil and sand and soil rubbed off on them while an eager animal ate their breakfast or their supper. There were, too, tooth marks on some of them, probably a dog frustrated with waiting for food or to be released back into the yard.

Their big furry heads would stick out of the sliding feeding doors, looking up with that quizzical where’s my food look that dogs have perfected through long years of living with humans. Those days the panting of the Wolfhounds filled the air with a sweet odor and the sound of them eating gladdened my heart. That time is long past, but the boards in the stalls look like stalls in barns, places where animals have been, pressing up against them and leaving the permanent record of their existence.

Commentary on Religion, Family, Memories, Sport

A Secular Sabbath

April 6, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Bee Hiving Moon

Sundays have a certain slowness to them, as if time itself moves languidly, the urgency of the workweek drained out. Of course, that’s an inversion of the real phenomena which happens not on Sunday but in the mind when it finds itself in a Sunday way.

Back when I was a small town boy, Sunday meant shining my father’s shoes in the morning before church. While complaining about it. I mean, thirty-five cents for dipping my hands in black shoe polish? Then, off to Sunday School with one teacher or another followed by the Sunday service sitting in the family pew (not reserved, but held for us anyhow by long tradition) under the watchful eye of Jesus praying, his hands on a large boulder, in the Garden of Gethsemane. This was stage right from the pulpit on the west side of the sanctuary.

Afterward, at least for a long time, we would often get in the family sedan, Mary and I in the back, mom and dad up front, and drive over to Elwood (our most bitter athletic rivals, but that didn’t matter to mom and dad) and go to Mangas’ cafeteria. It had those tubular rails with an upraised one at the back to hold your formica tray as you passed by the offerings in small dishes. I remember most the swiss steak, which I loved, and mashed potatoes with butter pooling yellow in the middle.

We would eat, then go home where the rest of the day disappears from memory.

Later, as a city rat, church was a work related experience since my city time is almost exactly coterminous with seminary and my career as a minister. So, I would head off to work on Sunday morning, usually in this church or that since I worked for the Presbytery (a geographical jurisdiction) and when I finished, again Sunday afternoon sort of disappears from memory.

As an exurbanite, I fell into the Sunday afternoon NFL maw for several years, but as of late the Viking’s have cured me of that experience. That means now Sundays have neither church nor the cafeteria nor football and what is left is the residue of passivity Sunday represented in its small town and football eras. No wonder my inner world moves more slowly on Sundays.

It’s my secular sabbath. And I think that’s a good thing.

Commentary on the news, Memories, Minnesota, Politics, Third Phase

20-20-20

April 5, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Bee Hiving Moon

Continuing the city theme from the post below. I live in the exurbs now, just two or three miles or so north of us corn fields begin and our development is a small cul de sac of homes that jut out into a working truck garden. The MUSA line, the intended sprawl container of the Met Council, runs a mile south of us. Beyond it a city cannot extend sewer connections. That’s why we have a septic system and our own well.

But before I lived in the city. First Minneapolis, then St. Paul. In fact, over dinner with Kate, I realized I spent roughly 20 years in a small town, 20 years in the city and now have spent 20 years in the exurbs. Those 20 years in the city were where I found my milieux. The mix it up, bare knuckle politics of neighborhood economic development, labor organizing and straight political work appealed to my middle adult need for agency.

The varieties of problems, the mix of people, the different communities, the history rushing into the present all exhilarated me. In the city years I wanted, needed to make change, get things done, improve life. And through fortunate relationships with many active folks I had a chance to participate in some interesting and worthwhile projects.

In the exurban years I’ve retreated, pulled back into my own work, writing, learning, gardening, sharing life with Kate and the dogs. It was time to do that, to pull back. That’s even more clear these days.

Here’s an example. A number of young activists, the age of my city years, especially environmentally focused activists lobby for urban density. They want to tear down parts of old neighborhoods and build apartment buildings. These are the same folks who advocate for bicyclists, mass transit and against urban sprawl. They look at the city and say the way to stop sprawl is to keep people in the center city. How do you do that? Build up.

In my years in the city we stopped apartment buildings, advocated neighborhood level decision making and tried to make communities stronger through increasing economic development. These are different times and I understand the arguments of those who want denser urban areas. Not only do I understand them, but I agree with them. But fulfilling those policies often means riding over the protests of folks in the neighborhood.

This is one of those instances where momentum and the needs of the time have shifted thinking. I can approve from afar, but I wouldn’t be able to wade into the politics. I’d be too conflicted. In that situation it’s best I’m removed from the scene. Out here tending our garden.

Family, Feelings, Memories

24 Years and Still in Love

March 10, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Imbolc Hare Moon

Sometimes, not often, but sometimes an event matches its purpose. Tonight’s anniversary dinner was such an event. We arrived at the Nicollet Island Inn at 6 pm, the same place where, 24 years ago, we spent the night before boarding a PanAm (yes, PanAm, can you imagine?) flight for Rome.

The host knew it was our anniversary, took us to our table after complimenting us on our glasses and our colorful garments and pointed to the bouquet on the table. “You are loved,” he said to Kate. “24 years and still in love?” Yes, we nodded. “Wonderful. Have a great evening.” We did.

We thanked our taste in classical music, our seats at the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra for bringing us together. We looked at the things that could have gone badly like Kate earning a lot and me earning much less, then nothing. I said, “I think the thing we’ve done, all along, is nurture the best in each other. I don’t see how you can ask for more in a relationship.” Kate agreed. Somehow we have seen the highest and best in each other, staying out of each other’s way in some instances, stepping in with a helping hand at others.

(in Pizarro’s dining room, Lima, Peru)

Kate ordered the scallops; I went for the tenderloin. We both ate less than half, saving some for tomorrow. I set aside my low carb focus to have a chocolate tart for dessert. We finished smiling. Kate slid over and put her arm through mine.

Added to the bill were two Nicollet Island Inn mugs, memories of the evening of our 24th.

Next year in Hawai’i!