Category Archives: Memories

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.

Family, Health, Memories, Weather +Climate

Fall

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Lughnasa                              Waning Green Corn Moon

Even though summer seems to have arrived, or returned this week, I can already feel social rhythms beginning to change.  Fall has begun to peek up over the calendar.  Ads for school supplies have begun to appear.  I remember getting a  mimeographed sheet (remember mimeographs?) in elementary school of the things we would need:  lined paper, #2 lead pencils, paste, a paint set.  Those are the things that remain in my memory.

They achieved totemic value for me.  These simple items carried the promise of learning, of new areas to explore, a new year away from home and in the company of other kids, at least for most of the day during the week.  Mom and I would go to Danner’s or Murphy’s 5 and 10 cent stores.  To this day I love going into office supply stores.  They bring back that anticipation and wonder.

Many of our vegetables have matured and others are well on their way, the harvest season has begun as the celebration of Lughnasa marks.  The angle of the sun has begun to change and the days have continued to grow shorter since the Summer Solstice.  At the Autumn Equinox we will be halfway between the Summer Solstice and the Winter Solstice.

Jon and Jen have started their new school years, back with the elementary school kids in Aurora, Colorado.  There’s news in their family, too.  Jon has partial shoulder replacement surgery this Wednesday, still fixing a skiing injury now three years old.

Gabe has had 13 bleeds in the recent past, including a spontaneous bleed on his back and a swollen hand.  In trying to get factor into him he has suffered many sticks.  He has small veins.  He will get an internal port on August 27th so he can  receive factor infusions prophylactically instead of acutely.  This should give him a normal childhood and relieve the anxiety for Jon and Jen.  There is, though, one potential problem.  It is possible the body will develop antibodies against the factor.  That would make things tougher.  A balancing act.

Kate’s going out there on Wednesday and will stay through Saturday.  We go see a neuro-surgeon tomorrow morning, still trying to track down more effective treatments.  She’s done very well with this degenerative disc disease, but it has not been easy.  She’s tough.

Aging, GeekWorld, Memories

The Declutter Genie

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Lughnasa                            Waxing Green Corn Moon

This morning a few more items got moved out of the computer room and a space for not currently needed electronic accessories created.  I’m still not sure why the declutter genie has landed on me, but she’s buzzing me pretty hard.

I remember, long time ago, in the early 1970’s, a hoarder.  Community Involvement Programs had hired me as a week-end and night time staff person.  In return I received a minimal salary and an apartment.  C.I.P. provided independent living training to recently deinstitutionalized persons.  This was a time when states all across the country began to shut down their state hospitals.

C.I.P. got mostly developmentally delayed adults though some of our clients also had an M.I. diagnosis.  This guy, whose name I don’t recall, never threw anything away.  He lived in one of the apartments in the Mauna Loa building, one the same as the one I had.  In his he kept grocery sacks, magazines, food wrappers, junk mail, gift wrap.  While wondering what to do about him, I read an article on overloading therapy.  In this case instead of insisting on the hoarder cleaning things up  you give them more and more things to hoard.  The idea is similar to desensitization therapy.

It may be that I’ve hit my overload point.  I’m a hoarder of a certain kind.  I buy books, lots of books.  I keep them; I keep almost all of them.  I’m reluctant to throw out magazines.  In both instances I think, what if I want to look something up.  Then, there are the files and research, gathered over many years.  And, too, the computers.  On this desk right I have three desktop computers, each a different generation.

I also hoard knowledge, stuffing it in, stuffing it in until it feels like my head could not hold anymore.  Then I add something else.  In all these cases I operate from the just in case principle.  Just in case I ever need to know more about the pre-Raphaelites, Chinese history, linguistics, American political philosophy, water politics, philosophy, the Renaissance, the middle ages, Taoism, Chinese literature, poetry I read and learn.  I also watch movies in the same way, television programs, too.

Now the upside is that I gain a broad knowledge base and have a few areas where I have some real depth:  biblical studies, theology, certain areas of history, gardening, perhaps some aspects of art history, politics.  It has always been my dream that at some point a gestalt would appear, a synthesis of all this learning.  Some insight, some new understanding.  Maybe they’ve come and I didn’t recognize them.

A long time ago I took a test to see what my strengths are.  My top strength was curiosity and interest in the world.  My second was love of learning.  So, you might say that this is not hoarding at all, rather it is an expression of my core personality.  Whatever it is, in terms of books, papers, stuff, I’ve got too much and before Kate retires next year I’m gonna get rid of a lot of it.