Category Archives: Memories

Aging, Humanities, Memories, Writing

Scribo, ergo sum.

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Spring                                           Awakening Moon

An outside day today.  Planting onions, garden planning and repair.  I’m itchy to get back to learning more Latin and translating the Metamorphoses, but the rhythm of nature waits for no one.

Writing is always an exercise in self-disclosure, no matter what kind of writing you do.  The subjects you pick, the ones you don’t, the style you use, the one you avoid, the words you choose, the ones you don’t know all reveal inner workings most folks prefer to keep to themselves.  Even with my modest public writing–this blog, sermons, the Sierra Club Blog last year for example, I’ve gotten the occasional emotional jolt that comes when the inside becomes the outside.

If you click on the comments about John Lampl, you’ll see an example of what I mean.  This comment came right out of left field, a comment about a post I’d written a year and a half ago about events in my life that happened, let’s see now, 36 years ago.  36 years.  What’s amazing about that is the rocket ride back to feelings of the past, that particular past, I went on when I read the post.

To gauge the difficulties of those years is like comparing a Caterpillar 73f to a Tonka Truck.  Today is a Tonka Truck life in terms of angst.  Those days I bled angst from every pore.  I married a wonderful young woman, Judy Merritt, at the height of the sixties, 1969.  We got married on an Indian mound in Anderson, Indiana, received two pounds of marijuana as a wedding present and recessed to I’m So Glad by the Cream.  Butterflies landed on my shoulder.  Really.  Five years later my alcoholism had grown worse–ironically during my time in seminary–and I pushed Judy away.  No wonder Johnnie was there to catch her.

There is, too, an inescapable amount of self-absorption in writing.  I’ve kept journals for years, I have three bookshelves lined with them.  The last five years I’ve kept much of my journal-type writing on line in this blog and its Frontpage predecessor.

This post made me wonder why I do this.  Not from an, oh my god why did I ever do this perspective, but from a Why do I do this point of view.   The easiest and probably the truest explanation is that it is just what I do.  I write.  I write about politics, about fantasy worlds I create, about my life, about thinking through the liberal faith tradition, about art.  My dad wrote.  I write.

Scribo, ergo sum.

Commentary on Religion, Commentary on the news, Memories, Politics, US History

Poison Fruit

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Spring                                        Waxing Awakening Moon

Spring has sprung, then it sprang back.  23 today.  Not prime gardening weather yet.

The conservative embrace of right wing populists has begun to bear poisoned fruit again.  They referred to Obama and African-American congressmen as niggers, Barney Frank as a faggot and phoned in death threat to several members of the House who switched their votes on health care reform.  The great irony of the moral majority, Christian right, tea-party tea bags is that by all normal political calculation they should vote Democrat.  They are, in the large part, blue collar folks, some living on minimum wage, many no doubt eligible for the health insurance provisions just passed by Congress, but conservative strategists have intentionally chosen to underwrite their social prejudices against people of color, homosexuals and folks with a college education in order to collect them into the party’s ranks.

This is not a deal with the devil; it is the devil making a deal.

I know these folks because I grew up with them in Indiana.  They first came to national notice in Indiana when 30% of the Hoosier electorate voted for George Wallace for President.  They were first and second generation folks from Appalachia, Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama and Tennessee and worked in the automobile and other heavy manufacturing centers in the Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio area, the area long since identified as the rust belt.  Union workers in the 1950’s and 1960’s, these constituencies voted a straight Democratic party ticket in line with their economic self-interest.

After LBJ and the passage of the Civil Rights Act, George Wallace made an independent run for the Presidency aiming himself squarely at southern Democrats, the diaspora of southerners working in the north and those other bigots nationally willing to sign up.  This came to the attention of Kevin Phillips, then a strategist for Richard Nixon.  He conceived of the moral majority, corralling the Wallace voters and conservative Christians, sometimes the same group into a winning base for conservative Republican politics.  This was the time of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robinson.

Right wing populism has a long and unsavory history in the US.  The KKK, anti-semite, homophobes, anti-Darwinists and love it or leave it patriots are just a few examples.  The Southern Poverty Law Center has made a career for Morris Dees and his compatriots filing suit against various organizational expressions of these folks.  When economic insecurity marries the all-too human propensity for discrimination, a violent firestorm will result.  It is no different now than it was in the post-Reconstruction days, the days during the Great Depression or the years after passage of the Civil Rights act.

True conservatives should be ashamed.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Memories

The Colosseum of the Soul

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Imbolc                                                Waning Wild Moon

Fake Nostalgia for a Pre-Therapy Age Past

“I can tell you one thing,” he announced, as I recall. “Back in my day, you didn’t have young kids going around talking to shrinks, yakking about their fee-ee-ee-lings, getting all doped up on medications.”

This article in the March 8th NYT made me think, or better, recall.

In early October of 1964 my family was intact:  Mom, Dad, Mary, Mark and me.  We had extended family on both sides that we saw regularly, Mom’s more so because she was Indiana born and Dad’s less so because of his Oklahoma origins.  After my bout with polio when I was a year and a half, our lives had settled into a usual routine of those years, the late 50’s and early 60’s.

Mom stayed home, doing volunteer work for the church and being available to us, the kids.  She did occasional substitute teaching, but it was rare.  Mary and I moved our way through our small town school system where we were known and knew everyone else at least by sight. Mark was still at home.   Summers were long idylls of bike riding, game playing and lazy reading.  Dad worked at the newspaper, coming home with ad layouts from time to time, marking them up with a ruler and a thick pencil.

Of course our lives had the usual family dramas, the deaths of grandparents, an aunt’s long term confinement in a mental health facility, but for the most part things were calm, normal.

In late October of 1964 my 46 year old mother was dead and our lives would never again be normal.  Grief has its own rules, its own storm sewers of emotion and they track in and out, colliding with the needs and fears of others.  Our small family suffered and suffered a lot, both from the grief, the natural grief that follows an untimely death of a parent, Mom, and the sudden compression of the family into a new, undefined life, a life defined by loss and uncertainty.

Life happens as it does and we relate to the changes as best we can.  That was true then, true long ago in the past and will be true in the future.  I have wondered though what our lives, our mutual lives, the lives of the survivors in our family might have been like if we had access to even the most basic of therapeutic assistance.  If we could have, if I could have, for I can’t speak for Mary, Mark and Dad, grieved Mom’s loss and then moved on with my life, rather than heading toward a ten to fifteen year period where emotional ups and downs, too much drinking, too much smoking, too little in the way of sound relationships eventually forced me to do what I was unable to do in those horrible months following her death.

This is not a regret, for it is not what happened, rather it is a what if.  It is a what if informed now by many, many years of therapy, therapy that helped me see myself as I really am, accept myself and my feet of clay, feet not so different from everyone else’s. Analysis, Jungian analysis, that in the end gave me a place to stand that was my own, not a place over against the grief and the abandonment of those years.  Analysis that afforded me a chance to live into my own Self, live my own life and find, now, in my 60’s, a way of life that has a measure of peace and more than a measure of contentment and happiness.

I agree with the author of the article referenced in the beginning.  It was not a better time, those pre-therapy years.

Family, Memories

Remembering Dad

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Imbolc                           Waxing Wild Moon

The year moves forward, sun higher in the sky, temperatures inching upward, some snow melting, though  piles of slowly melting hard pack, driven to curbs and driveway ends, darkens and begrimes the landscape.  A bright February sun catches a light snowfall, refracts it in mid-air, giving the day a sparkle, as if a glitter queen shook her hair in the heavens.

The winter olympics continues, too, with this sport and that.  I liked ski cross.  It looked fun.

Today is the anniversary of my father’s death in 2003.  The dead, to paraphrase somebody, are not in the past;  they’re not even dead.  No, nothing metaphysical here, I’m referring to the fact that those important to us take up lodging in our memories, in our inflections and in our perspectives.  We sometimes see the world literally through their eyes, hear things with their ears, interpret something with their sensibilities.  This happens during their lives, of course, but it also continues on past their temporal death.

(The Woolworth Building.  It opened twelve days after dad’s birth.  It was the tallest building in the world until 1930.)

If I see a  person with too much flab (me, these days, for instance), I can hear Dad say, “He likes his groceries.”  In quick train there is, too, his advise about weight loss, “Push-ups.  Push ups away from the table.”  I can feel his scowl when pictures from the sixties appear in the newspaper or on tv.  He didn’t think much of the politics or the movement persons of those days.  Unfortunately for our relationship, I was one.

When I sit down to write, especially here, I feel the ghost of my father, Curtis, hovering over my shoulder.  He is a benign angel in this case.  I fancy my writing style here takes a certain amount of its defnition from his frequent  column, “Small Town, USA.”  When I’m in the other room, working on the novel, I’m reminded of his ambition to charter a boat, sail the coast of Mexico, then write a book about the trip.  He never made it, WW II got in the way.  He never wrote a book either.

So, according to one school of Jungian thought, I write books to fulfill my father’s dream.

He was a man of his times, liberal in his  social politics, virulently anti-communist and suspicious of both patriotic zealots like the John Birch Society and the anti-patriots like myself of the 60’s and 70’s.  His father abandoned his family, Dad never did.  He was there, day in day out.

So, his body no longer walks the earth, but his mind, his dreams, his biases and his humor still does.

Family, Memories

Memories

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Imbolc                              Waning Cold Moon

Night again.  Lying on my desk here are some items sent to me by my cousin Kristen.  She’s a devoted genealogist and packrat.  Right now she’s redistributing some of the things gathered from various sources over the years.

This packet from her includes an obituary in a Shelby County newspaper for my mom:  Mrs. Ellis, 46, Dies in Hospital.  A small card with a stained glass window covered with white lilies has moms name inside, Gertrude  E. (Trudy) Ellis.  It also contains the name of Karl M. Kyle funeral home, which sat catty-cornered from our house on Canal Street.  Ed Grant did the service, the same Ed Grant who had the early morning study sessions on the Screwtape letters that seemed so adult and intellectual to me.  This was all 46 years ago.  That’s strange.  46 years later these documents of a family disaster have come home.

A small package of photographs show mom in uniform.  She was, an enclosed brief news piece says, a private in the Women’s Army Corps.  This notice said she had arrived at Allied Headquarters in Algiers after having been left behind with sprained ankle.  She looks happy, formally dressed, but ready, eager.  In another photograph she leans against an iron railing at St. Peter’s dome in the Vatican State.  The year, the back of the photograph says, is 1944.  In this one she stands behind a jeep, posed again in her uniform, now in North Africa.  Still 1944.  She sits at a table with sharp bands of light falling on a wide checked pattern on the table cloth.  She’s half hidden behind a carafe while a friend seems to be speaking to her and smiling.  In the last one she a friend, Paty, lean against a small iron fence.  They both have on long pants that come up to their waist, blouses with two pockets in front.  Here the writing indicates Paty and me, Rome, ’45.

Shards of a life, pot shards with a piece of her life’s design.  How to fit them into a whole?  How to place them in the life of the woman I knew?  I don’t know Paty.  I’ve still not been to North Africa, nor Algiers.  I have a hard time imagining my  mom as a single woman in uniform traveling Italy, going to Capri, then onto Algiers.  She spoke often of gay Capri.  She loved the song Three Coins in the Fountain and recalled the Trevi fountain with fondness.

She was my mother for only 17 of her 46 years.  We talked about the war years, of course.  Mom and dad met at the end of the war, both having served its entire duration or pretty close.  Those were conversations all predicated on the assumption that there would be plenty of time to flesh them out, a life time.  But the life, her life, was cut short.

A photocopy from 1934 completes the material.  This one talks about Benjamin Keaton, my first ancestor to live in the Morristown, Indiana area.  It has several oddities.  I’ll cite two here.

It starts with these two paragraphs:

Thomas and Rebecca Young Keaton, the grandparents of Aunt Zelda Haskett, were born in Philadelphia.

The United States capital at that time was in Philadelphia, and Rebecca, then a small child has often related to her children how her mother carried her to the window to watch the presidential parade go past at the time George Washington was inaugurated president.

Later, this note about Benjamin.

On the 14th day of December, 1837, Benjamin Keaton and Mary Spurrier were joined together in the holy bonds of wedlock by a minister who was a stranger and soon after took his departure.

Memories, Sport

Thrashing in the Desert

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Samhain                                     Waning Wolf Moon

Oh, my.  The day after the Viking’s thrashing in the desert, the mauling in the sand, the collapse in the sun brings…not much.  Favre admitted they got outplayed and that he, in particular, succumbed to old ways, win it himself by throwing, throwing, throwing, avoiding the question of open receivers and the running game.

A fan’s emotional response to their team’s victories or losses has been studied and found to have a link to mood in the days and weeks after a game or season are over.  No surprise there, I guess.  Still, it’s funny, isn’t it?  If I go to the Guthrie and see a weak play, I don’t feel bad about myself.  I think they may not have rehearsed enough or cast poorly.  If I go the Chamber Orchestra and there’s a few squeaks and chirps, flats and sharps, I don’t drive home wondering how that could be and how, in a visceral way, it reflects on me and the whole Twin Cities, Minnesota.

Now I’m not saying I feel bad about myself because the Viking’s lost, but I feel a slight down note today, a mild OMG.  Why is that?  It may be that the theater and music fit well into my upper middle class, educated lifestyle, entertainments that have an intellectual side honed over decades.  I have a critical reaction to them, a reasoned and analytical response, more like a newspaper movie critic than a fan.

Neither baseball nor basketball engage me, hook me, the way football does.  It’s surprising basketball doesn’t hook me because it certainly did when I lived in Indiana.  When the Alexandria Tigers played well, especially in the sectionals, I felt great.  When they lost, I felt bad.

Now, football.  As I watch a game, my body often moves empathically, curving around a defensive player, lowering a shoulder to get past an offensive linemen.  There is a distinct emotional connection, an emotional connection not related to how I analyze the game, but to the men, these giants and superstar athletes.  When they hurt, so do I.  When they jump up and down, so do I.

Maybe that’s it.  The boy who ran the bases in a pick-up baseball game or who played flag football with fervor comes to the fore, the line between watcher and the watched blurs, crosses over the line.   He does not analyze the game, or the play or the theater.  He merely feels dejected if he loses or happy if he wins.  Why?  Why is not a question he wishes to answer, knows how to answer.  He feels.  That’s it.

Family, Garden, Memories, Sport

The Day So Far

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Fall                                       Waning Blood Moon

Over to Joann Fabrics this morning to pick up some butterfly brocade for a dress Kate will make for Ruth.  As the only guy in line to have fabric cut, I had a chance to observe the female of the species in one of her traditional habitats.  The woman in front of me had on a pink fleece and nice pink bow in her hair.  She also stood about thirty feet behind the cutting counter, making those of us behind her stand right smack in the aisle where people pushed their carts.  I see this same behavior sometimes at traffic lights where someone (gender not at issue) chooses to wait three car lengths behind the next car.  What’s up with that?

When I got home, I plucked the decorative squash from the vine, then went over to the black beans still on the vine and gathered them into one of our large woven harvest baskets.  That’s the end of the harvest.  As the WCCO weather guy put it in the  paper this morning, the growing season is over.

After this I made a sugar cream pie, a Hoosier recipe I learned.  It’s a childhood favorite and it pops up in my need to have box once in a while. It has four ingredients:  flour, sugar, butter and cream.  Easy to make and no nutritional value at all.  But boy is it tasty.

Spent a couple of hours watching the Vikes beat the Rams.  They looked pretty good.  Won 38-10.  Tavaris Jackson passed for a touchdown late in the 4th quarter.  That’s a hopeful sign.

Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Memories

Estranged

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Fall                                   Waxing Blood Moon

Tomato picking and compost bin rebuilding, the bulk of the morning.  To keep our young pups from celebrating life by knocking down the straw bales out of which I designed this compost bin a wire fence now encircles the bales, with an other, shorter wire fencing material for a gate.

The day started chilly, but has warmed up to 69.  It’s one of those fall days when the Andover H.S. Marching Band can be heard carrying pompoms and the thud of padded football players in its wake.  As this sound comes across the fields of vegetables and the cul de sacs between our home the football field, I become at once both younger and older, thrust back to Alexandria High School and Friday night football while by necessity comparing that time with the present.  It’s not an unpleasant feeling, just a bit strange.

Caught episode 1 of a Harvard class on Justice taught by Michael Sandel.  It’s well worth the time.  Sandel’s teaching style combines the Socratic/law school method of hypotheticals with analysis of responses.  The engagement of the students makes it obvious Sandel is a teacher as well as a philosopher.  I only want to comment on one, striking observation he made about philosophy.  “Philosophy,” he said, “is not about something you don’t know; it is about making you look at what you know from the perspective of a stranger.  Philosophy creates an estrangement from our own experience.”  This is so true, as is his follow-on comment that once you gain this insight you cannot go back to the naive state.

Every hour of every day I see my self and the world through the lens of philosophical analysis, the lens fitted over an anthropological  camera body.  The two together make the world a strange and exotic experience at every turn.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Memories, Politics

Black Swan

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Lughnasa                            Waning Harvest Moon

“The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.” – Alfred North Whitehead

Whitehead captured my inner sense of reality and did it over and over.  I’ve told many times the story of my mystical experience of the unity of all things after having left a philosophy class studying Whitehead’s process metaphysics.  The sensation moved up inside me, breaking free of an inner barrier and releasing itself into my conscious awareness.  It was as if I had touched, heart to heart, the essence of the universe and learned we shared all this, all of it.

That moment still informs my umvelt, my self-world, and has left me at ease with many variations on the theme of human/universe interrelationships.  I suppose it solves the question of life after life in that the kind of literal interweaving that made tactile sense to me in that one moment suggests the enduring nature of all things, in all things, a sort of value-free ongoingness.  How that would feel or what it could mean for, say, consciousness is not clear to me, nor does it need to be.

This reminds me of my Black Swan story.  A man wrote a book, a management/leadership type book that those groupie CEO’s read and absorb, sort of cotton candy for the narcissist in them all.  In this case a Black Swan is any infrequent, unlikely event that, when it happens, changes everything.  The Great Recession has Black Swan notes.  So does the meteor strike that created the Chicxulub crater and wiped out the dinosaurs.  Anyhow, you get the idea.

I had a Black Swan enter my life with a crash in 1963 when my family visited, as we often did, Stratford, Ontario to attend the Shakespeare Festival.  During some non-theater going time, I had the opportunity to strike out on my own and I chose to go to the Black Swan coffee house, a charming little place alongside the Avon River.  The folk music revival was in full voice and a folk musician was on the Black Swan’s tiny stage that afternoon.

During the performance I heard the first critical remarks about the United States and, in particular, the Vietnam war which had just begun to get noticed.  The actual content does not stick with me, instead what does is the electric shock, outrage in fact, at having my  country criticized.  Of course, we were in Canada, somebody else’s country and they were under no obligation to genuflect at the altar of American exceptionalism.  And they didn’t.

This was a transitional moment for me, a moment when for the first time, I realized the US did things that others found repugnant, even abhorrent.  Those were the still young days of the expanding civil rights movement and the first shock waves that would become the movement.  And it happened for me first at the Black Swan.

Here’s an odd note I found looking up the Black Swan:

The 19th Black Swan Revival at Knox Presbyterian Church in Stratford
“The Black Swan Coffee House Revival pays homage to the original Black Swan event of the 60s and the Perth County Conspiracy (does not exist). All proceeds go directly to Stratford/Perth Shelterlink, the organization responsible for the revival and an active member in supporting and fighting for homeless and at risk youth in Perth county.
Good music, good times, and a worthy cause…a night to remember folks!”

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Health, Memories

Surgery?

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Lughnasa                        Waxing Harvest Moon

This was a doctor day.  Kate and I went to see a spine surgeon she has seen before.  She leans now toward some surgical intervention since the various palliatives:  drugs, nerve root and facet joint blocks, exercise and stoicism no longer provide sufficient relief.   Surgery is the last option and in the case of matters spinal one usually chosen as such.  Her surgeon is positive about the chances for success, success measured as a substantive reduction in pain, though not cessation.

We stopped at Burger Jones for a delayed lunch.  3200 block of West Lake Street.  If you want a trip back to the late 50’s early 60’s, but updated with booze and choices in shakes and burgers you didn’t have back then, Burger Jones is the place.  Fun.

Long nap.  Just now getting roused for the remainder of the day.

Liberalism and the liberal tradition is much on my mind since  have to write a sermon for the 6th of September.  Reading, reading, reading.   Thinking.  Pondering.  Like that.