Category Archives: Memories

Aging, Memories, Politics, US History, Writing

1967

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Winter                                                                 Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

1967.  Anastasia Pydych, a docent friend, has done a movie on 1968 which has a relevance to her father that I can’t recall right now.  A friend of hers, a writer for Rolling Stone, has a book underway about 1967.

When told her I was a sophomore in college that year, she said, “Oh, that’s perfect.  That would have been the perfect time.”  It reminded me of a comment made by one of the interviewees for the Sierra Club policy position, “I wish it could be like in the 70’s, when people had passion.”

We didn’t know it was historic, that year, we were living it.  It was a confusing, wonderful, chaotic, astonishingly hopeful, colorful, drugfull, penetrating, unafraid time.  Long ago, I don’t recall where now, I read that the 60’s happened because there was so many young adults than mature adults, that we, in effect, socialized ourselves.  That still seems like the most cogent explanation I’ve heard for the extraordinary sense of freedom and possibility that swept through my corner of the world, central Indiana.  As people passed through town, Muncie, and as some of us hitchiked around and saw other campuses in other states, we knew personally that it was not just us.  A crazy, heady wind had begun to blow, and the times, as Dylan said, were obviously changin’.

It was in ’67 when the draft became a big issue, right across the country.  And, yes, there is an obvious class bias involved in draft deferments, since those of us in college could get one and those who weren’t couldn’t.  Yes, again, there were many baby boomers, probably most, whose lives went on as they would have anyhow, taking a factory job, going into the military, learning a trade, trying out different jobs, getting married, settling down and raising kids.

That wasn’t the way it felt at the time, however.  In those years we believed, as I still believe, that US adventurism and a naive anti-Communism had caused us to insert ourselves in a civil war centuries old, a war in which we had no self-interest and chose our allies only because they identified themselves as the anti-communists.   Most of us men in college then, at least those of us on the left, saw the draft as a form of indentured servitude, only with a cruel twist, in this case the slaves had to die or kill.  Not a great choice.  Many of us, like me, were selective objectors, that is we opposed the Vietnam War as a stupid meat-grinder conceived in Washington and held in place by machismo gone wild, but we were not conscientious objectors, that is, we did not object to all wars.

That sense of being at odds with the ultimate power of the land, the Federal Government, was a powerful glue.  It stuck us together.  We were more disparate than unitary in our objections to the draft, but we were at one in our objection to the war.

This sense of overagainstness,  a feeling bordering on outlaw, made us courageous and reckless.  It made the days, the hours, we lived focus on experimentation, on analysis, on argument, on planning, yes, but also on relationships, parties, drugs and acid rock.  If the man didn’t understand us, we’d understand ourselves.  And boy we worked at it.

If you’re going to San Francisco…  I missed the Summer of Love and Woodstock, though I did make it to two hot years of the Cincinnati Jazz Festival.  I wish I could get the words to say how it felt then.  We felt free, even called, to challenge anything and everything:  our parents, their values, college administrations and their ridiculous in loco parentis, the draft boards, day-to-day reality, sexual limits, congress, the President, the military.  All of it, each day, every minute.  The times were so intense, so charged, so electric.

Well, here’s the thing.  Kate has a colonoscopy in the morning and I have to drive her.  I’m drawing Social Security and so is she.  This next week is her last week of full time work.  1967 is a long time ago is what I’m saying.  But, boy am I glad I was part of it.  It was quite a ride.

Aging, Family, Memories, Travel, Writing

Warp and Weft

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Winter                                                                            Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

Other blogs seem to have a slant, a bias, a thing.  I suppose I do too in a general way, the idea of ancientrails, the Great Wheel, the garden, a po-mo pagan sensibility, but what I’m doing is more like an online journal.  On a bookshelf I have two rows of journals kept in various forms since 1971, many erratic in the entries, then, as life moved on, I became more regular.  At one point I had several journals.  A diary like one in which I wrote short entries about my day, a spiritual journey one in which I recorded my experiences of meditation, lection divina, contemplative prayer, scripture study, another in which I took reading notes while I studied Islam, the year after 9/11, several more with reading notes from a year + when I gave up writing and took to reading the classics:  Divine Comedy, Faust, Metamorphosis, works of that nature.  During the year I studied Islam I read the Koran twice, once just to see what it said and another time during the month of Ramadan as I fasted and read enough to finish the entire Koran in thirty days, as many Muslims do.  Yet other blank books contain notes on art history, taken over many years of continuing education at the MIA, ideas for novels, short stories, about writing.

Writing is the thread, the weft I have chosen to weave the tapestry of my life.  The warp threads, stronger by far, developed in body and mind, feelings and thoughts as this Self has moved through life since birth.  The stuff of my daily existence has been the weft when shuttled through with the language I learned at my mother’s knee and my father’s typewriter.

So, this blog is just another pattern,  a particular tartan for this phase of my life.  It may pass away at some point, I certainly will, but, as I wrote the other day, the Web may have granted us bloggers a type of immortality.

When Kate I and were on our honeymoon, in late March or early April of 1990, the last phase of our trip which started a block from the Spanish Steps in Rome, we took the train from Edinburgh to Inverness.  Inverness is the capitol of Celtic Scotland, the northern reaches of the Picts.  The river Ness, from the storied Loch Ness, runs right through town.  On a stroll one afternoon, Kate and I made our way to a tartan mill, a place where tourists could go in and watch tartans being woven.

That day, the master weaver changed over from one tartan to another.  What this involved has stuck me indelibly since then.  The master weaver carries in his head the particular combination of colors, of large spools of yarn, that make, say, the tartan of the clan Sinclair.  He achieves that  particular combination of colors and patterns not by computer, not by telling weavers what to do, but by placing, on a huge rack of iron hooks, individual spools of yarn.  The number of hooks across the top of the hook rack, maybe 25 or 25, below each hook came at least 20 more, maybe 25 more hooks creating a large frame of individual hooks slanted up.  By his placement of the spools the master weaver achieved his design for the yarn from these spools fed precisely into the looms which clicked and clacked behind them.

Later than night, after we had finished our meal at the Station Hotel, Kate and I walked along the river Ness, tendrils of mist floating up from it, weaving themselves forever into our memory.

Commentary on the news, Memories, News of the Strange, Weather +Climate

Snow in LA. Earthquake in Indiana. Ice Here. End Times?

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Winter                                                                         Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

Headlines you never expected to see:

Wind gusts topping 90 mph topple trees in L.A. area, blocking roads; snow closes I-15

Magnitude 3.8 Earthquake Rattles Indiana

Whoa.  Earthquake.  Indiana?  What the…   Here’s an example of today’s news coverage.  My old buddy Ed Schmidt made a joke on his facebook page about an earthquake.  Just to be sure I checked google.  Sure enough:

“Officials from the U.S. Geological Survey said an earthquake with a magnitude of 4.2 has been registered in Indiana, just north of Indianapolis near the small (hmmm. where are their fact checkers?) town of Kokomo (46,000+).

(USGS earthquake epicenter map)

No damages or injuries were reported as a result of the quake that hit at 6:55 a.m. central time, officials said.

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Some people in the Chicago area said they felt shaking from the earthquake, though it’s unclear if a 4.2 magnitude quake in Central Indiana could be felt as far west as Cook County…

The earthquake’s epicenter was about three miles beneath a farm field a short distance south of Pingree Grove, near Route 20 and Switzer Road in western Kane County.

That quake was caused by a previously unknown fault line that has not generated any shocks since geologists started keeping track 150 years ago.

In Indiana, Howard County Chief Sheriff’s Deputy Steve Rogers says the department was bombarded by phone calls after the quake from people wondering what had happened. He says some people reported hearing a loud boom.

Indiana University geologist Michael Hamburger told Indianapolis television station WTHR the quake was felt across Central Indiana and into western Ohio. He said the temblor occurred in an area “that’s seismically very quiet.”

The Indianapolis Star is reporting the quake was felt as far west as New Castle, Indiana, and that items shook off the shelf in Martinsville, located in northeast Indiana.”

Meanwhile, here there be ice.  Out, out damned ice.  Be gone.  Snow we can deal with, but ice?  Four-wheel drive’s no good, just slipping and sliding out of control.  Skidding into the New Year may be some people’s idea of a good time, but not mine.

Kate and I had plans to go to the Spectacle shop today and spend year end money left over in our pre-tax medical account.  Will have to wait till tomorrow.  When we go, I plan to get some up to date reading glasses and a new pair of driving glasses with the graduated lens.  Gonna stick with round lenses, not sure why but I’ve come to identify myself with them.  My correction is sort of odd in that I can read without glasses since I have offsetting problems, but now when my eyes get tired or I read a lot of small type, blurring occurs.  In the past, when that happened, I could put on my reading glasses to sharpen things up, but now they’re just enough off that they make things worse.  An aging body is such fun.

We have a grand-dog in surgery today.  Solly, Jon and Jen’s youngest dog, has some kind of digestive tract problem.  He doesn’t eat and has become thinner and thinner.  Hope he comes out of that ok.

Commentary on the news, Memories, Politics, US History

First Amendment

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Winter                                                            Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

Walker stands with national peers in support of artistic freedom.  This is a big deal and I’m proud to be part of a community and an artistic/museum community that supports artistic freedom.

54 years ago I began carrying newspapers for the Alexandria Times-Tribune, a paper route that went west on Monroe Street from Harrison, then fanning out toward the then brand new elementary school.  Learning to fold the evening paper, the Trib was a daily back then, in a square, and how to pitch it in a gentle arc that landed on my customers doorsteps gave me physical pleasure, a manual skill.

My dad was editor of the paper then, so the question of freedom of speech was, at least in our house, not a question at all but a loud proclamation, made every day about 3:30 p.m. when the Trib hit the streets courtesy of myself and several other carriers.

(This artist made the banned movie:  David Wojnarowicz   Four Elements  1990 lithograph on paper  T.B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 1991)

Dad did a couple of things that stuck with me though I imagine he did many more.  First of all when the John Birch Society raised its impeach Earl Warren/US out of the United Nations flag around town, Dad got a copy of its founder’s book, The Blue Book.  In it Robert Welch outlined clearly anti-democratic, plutocratic views.  Dad published relevant portions in the Tribune.  Gutsy in a town of 5,000.   Later, he also published a letter to the editor by a would be English teacher rankled at Dad’s opposition to this coach becoming a teacher of the language.  He printed the letter as received with many spelling and grammatical errors.  Coach did not get the job.

Extraneous sidebar:  the same coach got himself arrested years later in southern Indiana when he stole a bucket of quarters while gambling on a river boat.

You may know the John Birch Society best in its present day position of influence behind the Tea-Party Mad Hatters.  My hometown was and is a hotspot for extremist right-wingers.  Back in the day it was the John Birch Society and the Minutemen, later the KKK and now the Tea-Party.  In fact, the Alexandria, Indiana leader of the Tea-Party got arrested for drug possession last week.  My old buddy, Ed Schmidt, alerted me to that piece of news.  Ed was mayor of Alexandria for a couple of terms.

Muzzling critics, whether political or artistic, cannot be countenanced in a society built on a free exchange of ideas.  The need to speak truth to power demands that we go out of our way to listen to voices on the margin, to open ourselves to what might be unpleasant messages or messages wrapped in unpleasant containers.  The freedom they’re saving just might be your own.

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Memories, Myth and Story

Good-Bye, Ike

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Winter                                                      Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

The oldest cousin on my mother’s side died on Christmas Eve.  Isaac, Ike, Jones always had a special place in the family as the first child of my mom’s five siblings.   The last of mom’s siblings, my Aunt Roberta, died several years ago and we cousins became the older generation.  Now, for the first time, death has invaded our numbers.

Ike’s death was, in many ways, a blessing.  A victim of a nasty spinal condition that left his head permanently inclined forward, Ike suffered a bad fall in March and never really recovered.  In the end his lungs gave out.  We weren’t close, perhaps he was the most distant of all the cousins, but he’s still family, part of us and now part of our memories.

No one really knows what death, the most shrouded ancientrail is like.  Does life just wink out with the last breath, the last heartbeat, the last brainwave?  Jews believe the spirit stays around the body for a few days, thus the careful and personal treatment a corpse receives in traditional Jewish practice.  My friend, Gyatsho, believed that after 49 days his soul got a new incarnation based on karma and the attitude near death.  Many people in the obituaries believe the dead meet Jesus, or go to heaven, or greet family and friends who died before them.

You never see it in the obituaries but some believe in a place of eternal punishment, the last fork on the ancientrail leading to hell.

I have no idea what happens after death though the most likely thing to me is extinction.  We simply become no more as a Self, eventually dispersing our elements back to the universe from which they came.

The Greeks, it seems to me, had the most cogent idea; that is, we live in our deeds, our family, our legacy.  Even so, for most of us, the legacy will not amount to much, perhaps a generation’s remembrance at Thanksgiving meals, family reunions.  Then, we’ll become one of those sepia photos  a later generation will pick up and say, “Who was this?”

Or, perhaps not.  It’s possible that the internet has become an engine of immortality, allowing our words, pictures, even our consumer habits to live on, perhaps in the cloud?  In this case perhaps my great-grandchild will access Ancientrails much as you do, reading of one life, at least the bits and pieces that end up on a page or in photographs.  What might we call this?  ByteLife.  CyberMemory.  Life in the Cloud.  SiliconeForever. (no, wait, that’s those breast implants.)  Life According to Electricity.

Faith and Spirituality, Holidays, Humanities, Memories, Myth and Story

Light and Dark

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Samhain                                            Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

The holidays.  Important for personal reflection, even have the ability to transform a life as we lay our lives alongside the possibilities suggested by Thanksgiving, Chanukah, Christmas, the Winter Solstice, New Years.  Birthdays, anniversaries, too, can reach into the deep part of your self, we can call it soul, and help you see yourself in the other.  Maybe, they let you see in there, too.  Holidays are a time out of time, a break in the straight ahead, up and at’em busyness of career, family, school.

There is, though, a dark side to the holidays.  All moments of possibility contain paths that lead not to transformation but to destruction, temptation, agony and pain.  The dark paths often emerge when the vulnerability and self-intimacy of the holiday intersects old ways of being, often ways learned in family settings, banished most of the year; but, as family and holiday conjoin, the vulnerability allows the past to rise quickly, to overwhelm.

This is as the Tao teaches us.  Even the dark side of the holidays offers a chance to become new, a chance to take the past and place it in a new frame, a way of understanding that puts the past in its own place and leaves the future open, perhaps even better for the relocation.

Darkness is not, in itself, bad.  Nor is light, in itself, good.  Too much light prevents our ability to see.  “Light is the enemy of art,” as the curator of the Thaw wing of the Fenimore museum said.  Darkness nurtures and heals, is a time for sleep, for seeds to germinate.  The holidays bring a special charge to the light and the darkness in our lives.  Our task is to open ourselves to what each has to offer us; to take it in and accept the possibilities.

Aging, Art and Culture, Asia, Bees, Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Friends, Great Work, Memories, Retirement

Not Stepping In The Same River Twice

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Samhain                                                      Waning Thanksgiving Moon

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.  You, too, tiny Tim.

Stayed up late last night reading a novel about a Chinese detective in Chinatown, NYC.  Not sure how it happened but China has become my favorite country, much like Germany used to be and Russia before that.  Instead of Buddenbrooks I read Romance of the Three Kingdoms, instead of Steppenwolf I read Chinese mysteries.  No more War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, though I could read them again, I choose, as I always have, to plow new ground, read things I have not read before.

I tend not to read things twice, except poetry.  A big part of reading for me is the journey to somewhere new, following a trail with no known ending, a similar joy to the one I find in traveling, especially to countries where the culture disorients me, leaves me little room for my old ways.

New disciplines give me a similar boost:  art history, Latin, writing, vegetable gardening, bee keeping, hydroponics.  I’m sure I miss something in my search for the novel, which may explain why I find living in the same house for 16 years, driving the same car for 16 years, being married to Kate for 20+ years soothing.  As Taoism teaches,  life is a dynamic movement between opposites, the new and the old, the familiar and the strange, the taxing and the comfortable.  The juice flows as the pulls of masculine and feminine, life and death, youth and age keep us fresh, vital.

My buddy Mario uproots himself and moves along the earth’s surface, finding new homes and new encounters.  He changes his work with apparent ease, finding new friends and new experiences as he does.  Brother Jim, Dusty, constantly challenges his present and his past, leaving himself always slightly off balance.  Both of these men take the juice and mold it into art.

There are many ancientrails through this life, including intentional disorientation, familiar surroundings, ambition, compassion, politics, nurturance, keen observation, delight, dance.  The key lies in finding yours and staying with it, getting to know it and to be it.

When you can, you will find every day (well, most days) are Thanksgiving.

Aging, Cooking, Family, Memories, Weather +Climate

Thanksgiving Eve

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Samhain                                                      Waning Thanksgiving Moon

Grocery shopping this morning, the day before Thanksgiving.  Like traveling by air on a holiday.  Like going to see the Tower of London in July.  Like shopping on Black Friday.  I went early though and it wasn’t too bad.  There was the man with one turkey in his cart, a shocked disorientation on his face, his white hair wild.  A woman with black flats, a wool skirt below the ankle and a helmet like cloth hat strapped under her chin.  A woman and her mother, mom in a white faux fur coat, shiny cloth pants and dangly ear-rings with zircon or diamond but I’d bet zircon.  The clerk from Nevis.  I had a farm near Nevis.  Oh, where?  On Spider Lake.  Oh, a friend of mine has a resort on Spider Lake.  Did you find everything you were looking for?

The message board had advertisements for guys offering snow plowing services.  I memorized a number, 227-9899, and called for a free estimate when I got home.

Sleepy now, Latin this afternoon and evening, Thanksgiving tomorrow.  A restaurant meal for us this year, Axel’s Wood Roast in St. Paul.  Annie’s coming up.

Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Great Wheel, Memories

My Friend

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Samhain                                                   New (Thanksgiving) Moon

Thursday night around 9 pm I went out to the mailbox to drop The Book of Eli in the mail back to my buddies at Netflix.  It was not a cold night, a slight chill, but the night was clear.  From nowhere in our house can we see the eastern horizon, neighbor’s houses and woods block our view, so it came as a surprise to me to see an old friend there when I opened the mailbox and glanced to my left.

Orion’s brawny left shoulder and his glittering belt had begun to emerge.  Back a long while ago, the winter of 1968 and 1969, my last year in college, I worked at the magnalite corporation as a week-end night watchman.  I had a round leather clock with a shoulder strap and a key hole and every hour I had to walk a circuit in the factory, find a key hung from a metal chain, insert it in the clock, turn the key, remove it and move on to the next station.   I had no protective duties, rather I served at the leisure of magnalite’s insurance carrier who insisted on hourly inspections when the plant was empty.

When I was not on my ten-minute round, I spent time in the guard shack at the entrance to the parking lot.  I often divided my time between studying and dozing off since I had the 11:00 pm to 7:00 am shift, but when I left the shack for my rounds or to wake myself up, Orion was there.  Being in a large factory complex alone, at night, on the weekend, is lonely duty.  I liked it for that reason, but I found Orion’s presence companionable, and it gradually grew into a friendship.  He and I could talk.  We both stood watch in the night.

Since those days, now 41 years ago, each fall when Orion rises, I greet him as an old friend, a true snowbird, one who returns when the snow comes and leaves as it does.  My old college friend has come for his annual months long visit.  And I’m glad.