Category Archives: Memories

Aging, Asia, Family, Memories

Growing Up

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Lughnasa                                        Waxing Harvest Moon

Mark’s (my brother) days here will end on September 16th provided the Saudi visa process works and it’s on track, though a track with a terminus very near his flight date.  He flies from Minneapolis to Chicago, Chicago to Amman, Jordan and onto Riyadh.

He will spend a few days in Riyadh in an orientation program for new teachers at the English Gate Academy after which he reports to his teaching post.  He asked for Hal’in, but his assignment is not yet certain.

We sat on the couch tonight, after having watched some TV, and did a favorite family thing, trading memories of when we were young, especially memories we did not share.

I told him of climbing up on a chair to find, to my dismay, a door knob above a shelf I could not see over at age 3 or 4.  It looked like a big eye looking back at me.

In the basement of the same place, an apartment building where I lived with Mom and Dad, there was a coal chute. (“Coal?” Mark asked, a bit wide eyed at this ancient heat source.) The coal room connected to the big pot-bellied furnace through an augur that would turn on whenever the thermostat called for more heat.  In other words unpredictably.

When I was down there with Mom while she did the laundry, I would play.  Until the coal augur came to life.  It was loud and came on with surprising swiftness.  The furnace would hiss as the new coal fed the fire.  Made me think of a dragon.

Mark remembered sleeping in Mom and Dad’s bedroom until he was 5 or so, then moving upstairs in our house on Canal Street.  When I went off to college, he took my corner room, the one with a window facing west and another facing south.  Out that west facing window, at midnight, a Nickle Plate train would rumble down the tracks, and sound its warning signal for the crossing on Monroe Street only two and a half blocks from our house.  Mark remembered the train, too.

I’m not sure why I recall this and I don’t know if it was true, but I believe the last steam engine in US pulled its train through our town, sounding its steam whistle every midnight.  Right there on Monroe Street.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Memories

Fall-ing

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Lughnasa                                                  Waxing Harvest Moon

As August slides away and the sky shifts its colors toward deeper hues, an inner barometer detects higher emotional pressures.  The atmosphere weighs more, cuing those momentary pauses, breaks in attention.  It may signal a storm ahead, but more likely the prediction carries gray skies and mist, perhaps early morning fog.

Melancholy comes calling this time of year, an acquaintance, maybe a friend, of long standing.  Mom died in October, 1964, 47 years ago, a year longer than she lived.

Her death came at different moments in life for all of us.  Mark, 5 at her death, has few memories of her; she lingers in his past as a faint spirit, an enigma.  Mary, 12, has more, a young girl heading into adolescence, becoming a woman, missed the guidance a mature woman could give as she made that critical transition.  At 17 my life had already begun to pull away from the family, in my senior year of high school, the last, college plans in the making, I had her longest of all, only a brief time less than Dad.

When that dark angel comes, and he comes for us all, finality is the hardest lesson to absorb.  No more mom.  No more.  Memories, yes, but memories fade and change as life goes on and here all three of us are, 47 years later.  47 years.  A lifetime.

Why a friend?  How could melancholy be a friend?  Well, in this way.  As life patters on, this event following the other, we can become accustomed to its rhythms, lost in its small decisions and its casual absorption of our energy.  So lost, in fact, that we forget the Self that carries us forward, the Self into which we live and which lives itself into us.

Melancholy can turn us away from the day to day and cause us again to walk down the stairs leading to what Ira Progoff calls the Inner Cathedral.  We often forget this quiet place within, our own sanctuary, and melancholy can call us to visit it again.

So, yes, melancholy can be a friend of the Self, a guide back into the depths and resources of your Self.

Memories, US History

As the 10th Anniversary Comes

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Lughnasa                                                         Waning Honey Extraction Moon

BJ came today.  She’s a New Yorker and has been since she attended Julliard many years ago.  Over lunch today Mark asked her about 9/11.

She told her story and Schecky’s.  She was in New Jersey and saw the burning building across the grasslands.  At first she and her friends thought it was an accident.  Then the news became clear.  Schecky was at home at the Beacon Hotel, 74th and Broadway.  He’d been asleep, woke up, turned on the TV and thought the scenes he saw were a strange disaster movie.  As he clicked the channels, it was the same movie on all of them.  Relatives had left messages on his answering machine, “Are you ok?”  He thought, why wouldn’t I be?

BJ, who had come to New Jersey by train, found a fellow musician with a car and the two of them spent seven hours trying to get her back to Manhattan, eventually driving far to the north to the Tappan Zee bridge and finding a back way into the Bronx.  Her friend lived in Brooklyn and BJ took a subway back.

Over the next six months BJ said folks looked each other in the eyes on the streets and in the subways, trying to connect.  She rode a bike in Central Park, she had begun training for a race, and she said the atmosphere there was extraordinary.  Like the end of the world might be coming and folks needed to be out with other people.

She spoke of playing music at St. Paul’s Chapel, where many of the rescue workers came for rest and food, part of a volunteer effort by the city’s musicians.  She was also angry that no monument was in place and that so little work had been done on the buildings that would replace the Twin Towers.

 

Aging, Humanities, Memories

See You In September

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Lughnasa                                                            Waxing Honey Extraction Moon

The end of the day.  The time when the season turns on a pivot toward fall and away from the Solstice.  My mood has shifted to melancholic.  Not sure why.  Maybe the end of the day, the time of year.  It is around this time in the year when I turn melancholy, a sort of seasonal affective disorder, perhaps more related, to the nearness of the school year.

No, not because of any negative associations with school.  No, maybe because I’m not going back to school.  Not anymore.  School was good to me.  I got lots of strokes from lots of folks, school was feel good time for me.  Yes, I had some troubles that happened during school, but they were extra curricular, the school part, that always grooved.

Well, not quite always.  That first year at Wabash I encountered German.  German and I did not get along.  I found myself near mid-semester and staring at a D.  A D!  I graduated at the top of my high school class.  I didn’t get D’s.  But I was about to get one.  So, I dropped it.  Not my finest hour academically, but it did save my bacon.  Why was I taking German?  I wanted to read philosophers in their own languages and German seemed like a good place to start.

Other than that first semester at Wabash, school was fun.  I enjoyed learning, studying, taking tests, writing papers.  Weird, huh?  Now when See You In September begins to play on the oldy stations, my nostalgia meter hits a high.

Hmmm.  Just occurred to me.  This may be the way successful athletes feel when the school year starts, in those day after their career has ended.  Those were the best years of my life.  That sort of feeling.

No.  That’s not it.  Those weren’t the best years of my life.  These are the best years. Right now.

It may explain why I keep throwing myself into things like the docent program, learning Latin, Tai Chi, always going for the burn that comes from conquering a learning curve.  That life long education idea really took hold in me.  I believe in it, body and soul.

Though I do, each year when the evening’s cool, the leaves begin to change and parents start packing their kids up to take them off to college, I wish, a part of me wishes, I could go along with them.

Here’s something a bit strange.  The song that always comes to mind for me at this time of year is See You In September by the Happenings.  Here’s a youtube version filmed on Lake Calhoun.

Family, Memories, Politics, US History

Political Heartbreak

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Mid-Summer                                                           Waxing Honey Flow Moon

“My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.” – Adlai E. Stevenson, Jr.

Stevenson was my first political heart break.  My dad and I were for Adlai.  Dad probably had his reasons, mine were because Dad was for him.  That might have been the last political agreement we ever had.  Anyhow, I watched the Eisenhower/Stevenson returns on our television, a still rare phenomenon in Alexandria at the time.  The returns took until the wee hours to come in and staying up late delighted me.  I was, what?  5 at the time.

The more I’ve learned about Stevenson, a Unitarian, since then makes me wonder how Dad could have liked this guy and been so far adrift when it came to the Vietnam War.  Stevenson was the real deal, a man I’d still be proud to support.  We haven’t had a candidate like him, perhaps with the exception of Obama.

Death of the Liberal Class, by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges, a book I’ve just begun, had me gnashing my teeth by the end of the first chapter.  In a good way.  In that chapter he gives an astute analysis of the role of the liberal class in a culture, its necessary role as assurer of at least incremental reforms, and why America’s liberal class began to wither early in the 20th century until it is now virtually dead.  I suppose he’s right about needing a liberal class, I mean his argument makes sense to me, but the other point he makes, the way the liberal class of the FDR era right through today bankrupted itself through a mindless anti-communism and a venal capitulation to so-called free market economics, makes me mad.

Hedges’ political analysis seems spot on to me and it makes me want to get back in the struggles for economic justice and the true equality that only economic justice can bring.  If you want peace, work for justice.  As a long time convert to the New Left analysis, an anti-corporate, pro-union, anti-war, pro-working class movement, I worked most of my adult life on jobs issues, economic development, affordable housing, civil rights, single payer health care and radicalization of the Democratic party.  There have been some victories along the way, there have.  There have been many more losses and in today’s political climate, the matters that concern me most outside environmental ones have all but disappeared from public debate.

This makes me sad, but not defeated.  It makes me angry, but not rageful. It makes me unhappy, but not despairing.

We need again, a call to revolution in this country, not a tea-party, grab mine, forget about you revolution, but a neo-socialist movement that recognizes government’s role in insuring that no one goes broke due to medical expenses, than no one goes to bed hungry and that everyone has a bed, in a form of housing affordable.  Let’s get to work on that. Now.

Art and Culture, Memories

Northern Park II: The Morning After

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Beltane                                                          Waxing Garlic Moon

“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” – George Bernard Shaw

An apt quote for another run at Northern Spark.  There was a lot of self-creation on display in Minneapolis last night, from the sperm and egg crew (seen here in the orange light of a 2011-06-05_09111sodium vapor light) to the freshmen of Washington High wandering around in the park for the Battle of Everyouth to many other, very varied events.

The organizer of Northern Spark also nailed it on the way night changes everything.  The whole event felt special, almost like a secret only the hundreds, maybe thousands, of us who knew.  It changed, for example, the context of the Voyeurism and Surveillance show at the Walker.  The first time I saw it I went in daylight and left in daylight.  This time I went into the exhibit at 11:15 pm and left near midnight.

How many people took the challenge to stay up all night?  No idea.  I got home at 1:00 am.  And felt pretty damn proud of myself for having lasted that long.  Geez, geeze.

While I sat at the Walker last night, looking at the IDS, couples wandered past, many in the early stages of their relationship.  I thought back.  When did I first come to the Walker on a date?  Must have been 1971.  How long ago was that?  OMG.  40 years.  How did that happen?

Anyhow, I went on and calculated that I was the age of many of these couples then, 24.  I had no idea where my life was going.  Seminary was a brand new experience and I still thought I’d probably get out after the first year.  It was so much fun to be out then, the promise of life and of the night ahead.

It surprised me to learn that I didn’t feel much different being out now at 64.  I still anticipate the life ahead and the promise of the night.  Well, except for the niggling fact that 1 am meant more to me than it did to my companions out at Northern Spark.  It meant I’d better be home.  Not because I particularly wanted to be, but because my body just doesn’t handle late, late nights the way it used to.

I didn’t get up this morning until 10:40, for example.

Oh, and back to the George Bernard Shaw quote.  I agree that life is not about finding yourself.  But I don’t agree that we are an act of self-creation alone as he implies.  We come into the world a Self, a larger than our self Self, a Self filled with opportunities not yet expressed, not yet plumbed.  Life is living into the larger, richer Self, a process of co-creation, not an ego only show.

Aging, Art and Culture, Asia, Commentary on Religion, Memories

A Long Time Ago

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Beltane                                                                              Full Last Frost Moon

Down to United Seminary for Leslie’s last leadership and development class.  The time with Leslie there was good; we developed a good rapport, even a friendship over the 9 months of conversations and I’ve come to care about what happens with her ministerial development.

The Seminary itself has all kinds of odd resonances.  Here are three.  uts-library

I parked in a parking spot near a side entrance, a parking spot I had used many times in the years in which I was a student at UTS.  When I got out of the car, I looked up at the library, my favorite part of the Seminary.  I could see the corner where my desk had been.  It was my desk because whenever I needed to study and remain at the Sem, I went to the same corner desk on the third floor, as far back in the stacks as the shelving went.  From my desk I could see New Brighton and Highway 694 to the north, as well as the student housing where I’d lived my junior year (first year) in 1971.

When I went into the room where the many interns and their mentors gathered, a lot of memories flooded back.  This was the old chapel, a lot of sermons, worship services, morning prayer services happened there.  In my junior year I organized an arts festival, a week long celebration of various mediums focused most on film.  This was 1971, long before even vcrs, and I discovered a foundation in Wisconsin, founded by, of all people, Albert Camus’s widow, that had both the films and film rights to many early Ingemar Bergman movies.  I arranged for four of them to be shown at UTS, including one I had not seen before, the Ritual*.

Attending the night I showed the Ritual was Dean Louis Gunneman and his wife.  At the time the Dean was 70 and his wife a distinguished lady of similar age.  The Dean had been instrumental in the creation of both the United Church of Christ denomination and United Theological Seminary.

During the scene of simulated cunnilingus the Dean rose in his elegant way and with his wife on his arm, left the chapel.

S’ing Long Lin, a Taiwanese native of Mandarin descent, was a tall lean Chinese man of perhaps 30.  I vividly recall the look on his face when I translated 20 degrees below zero–which it was that morning–into centigrade.  Quite a moment.

Rotten Tomatoes

*The Ritual is an alternate English-language title for Ingmar Bergman’s The Rite (Riten). Made for Swedish television in 1969, this short film was Bergman’s revenge against those who opposed his management of the Royal Dramatic Theatre. The storyline involves three actors whose recent production has been judged obscene by the powers-that-be. Bergman deliberately obscures the “controversial” quality of the production itself, forcing the viewers to assess their own opinions over what is obscene and what isn’t. Intending to shock and provoke his audience, Bergman was appalled that many viewers laughed at The Rite, misinterpreting it as a satirical comedy.

Aging, Memories, Politics

Women. Still Advancing.

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Spring                                                          Waning Bee Hiving Moon

During my first years of seminary the women’s movement, already rolling when I left college in 1969, had begun to pick up a solid head of steam.  Half of the women in my class (one), went to consciousness raising with the wives of male students.  By the time I graduated from sem in 1976 the entering class was mostly female.  At some point in the 1980’s there was actually a junior (first year) class that was all female.

Kate is a pediatrician only recently retired. My ex, Raeone Loscalzo, runs Women’s Advocates, the nations oldest provider of shelters for abused women.  In terms of traditional marks of male success both of these women have out achieved me by a long way:  more money, more prestige.  This would have been strange and aberrant when I grew up; now, I’m happy to say it only reflects the increasing ability of women to lead lives based on their ability and not limited by sexist stereotypes.

Among the many cultural changes our generation has nurtured, none was more wrenching and more life changing than the women’s movement.  It is a great joy to me, at this stage of my life, to see the advances women have made, really in a short time.  It is testimony to the hard work, the steel will, the insightful analysis and the dogged persistence of women at all ages and stages of our culture.  It is no easy thing to leave the cocoon of stereotyped safety for the responsibility of life on your terms.  But look at the huge number of women who have achieved it.

That’s why this excerpt from a news article reveals only the present crest of this still moving wave.

WASHINGTON – For the first time, American women have passed men in gaining advanced college degrees as well as bachelor’s degrees, part of a trend that is helping redefine who goes off to work and who stays home with the kids.

Census figures released Tuesday highlight the latest education milestone for women, who began to exceed men in college enrollment in the early 1980s. The findings come amid record shares of women in the workplace and a steady decline in stay-at-home mothers.

Aging, Cinema and Television, GeekWorld, Great Work, Memories, Politics, Travel

I Want To Like Nuclear Power

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Spring                                                                                    Waning Bloodroot Moon

Japan.  Nuclear power.  Climate change.  Not a pretty picture.  I don’t know about others, but I want to like nuclear power.  Its non-carbon emitting energy production has a potential role in staving off the worst effects of global warming.  However.  With no place to store the waste permanently, the waste gets stored temporarily near the reactor in which it was used.  This seems safe.  Look at Prairie Island.  After all these years, still no trouble.  Then again.  How many years do we have to have in a row with no trouble?  25,000 or so, I believe.  That’s a long run.

That’s not all.  Situations develop, human error, mechanical failure, maintenance scrimping, natural disasters with unforseen confluences, say an F5 tornado and a once in a century flood.  Could happen over the span of over 25,000 years.  Probably will.  Three Mile Island and Chernobyl had become objects in the rear view mirror, errors, mistakes, but over with.  Until Fukushima.

Now, suddenly, they begin to look links in a chain, a nuclear chain.  Remember Godzilla?  Them?  The 50 Foot Woman?  Radiation.  Now there’s radioactive iodine in the sea.  I want to like nuclear power, but I’m having a hard time.  The stakes of mistakes seem too high.  At least for now.

Wish somebody would get a good fusion reactor goin’.

Aging, Asia, Cinema and Television, Commentary on the news, Great Work, Memories, US History, World History

Elemental

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Imbolc                                                                     Waxing Bloodroot Moon

August 6th. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Rendering the friendly atom a deadly enemy.  Since that time, mutations became a favorite meme of  scary movie in the 50’s and early 60’s.  Since that time movies like On the Beach, Fail Safe, Doctor Strange Love, the China Syndrome have dealt with one scenario or another based on the catastrophe inherent in nuclear fission and nuclear fusion, even in peacetime uses.  Since that time Chernobyl and Three Mile Island became synonyms for danger, making even the nuclear generation of electricity scary.  The cold war and the DEW line and the Strategic Air Command, missiles in silos and on submarines heightened our awareness by putting a continuing military face on the nuclear threat.

The grim possibility highlighted by the doomsday clock since 1947, the minutes to midnight decided by the board of directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago.  (Ironic like the photograph below because the first splitting of the atom occurred below Alonzo Stagg Stadium on the University of Chicago campus.  Some jinn just won’t go back.)

Those of us born after the end of WWII have lived ever since with the threat of nuclear annihilation.  That threat continues to this day. The most chilling photograph out of 8.9 earthquake and tsunami ravaged Japan was not the dramatic footage of the flood waters carrying burning buildings inland or the ships carried ashore or the fearful Japanese racing away from destruction, no, it was this one.  Thick with irony, unintentional in its resonance with over 65 years of military, cinematic and domestic horror, this scene, a scientific response to a scientific disaster–not the natural one–chilled me the first time I saw it.  It still does.