Category Archives: Memories

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.

Aging, Family, Memories

Grandchildren on the way

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Summer                  Waxing Summer Moon

Grandchildren.  Those living links to the future who know us and whom we know.  In my case Ruth and Gabe.  Three years old and one year old.  They are on their way here right now, probably someway in the Twin Cities.

Grandma Ellis, Jennie, was a school teacher.  I knew her a bit.  I liked her.  She understood young boys.  I have three memories associated with a visit I made to her house in Oklahoma City when I was 9 or 10.  In the first I took apart a clock Grandma no longer wanted.  She realized I wanted to know how it worked.  Later I tried to knock wasps out of the air with a bug bomb.  In my mind it was a dogfight, fighter to fighter.  If so, I got tagged and plummeted to earth with a huge swollen left hand.  The last memory involved a sinkhole that appeared in the alley behind grandma’s house.  It was big enough to hold a car.

What this means to me, these memories as central to my experience of my grandmother, involves the humility to realize my grandchildren may not remember me for who I am or what I have done, but for what happened when they visit.  Do I accept it and recognize the experience, validate it?  My grandma Ellis did.

I’ve written elsewhere about my namesake, grandpa Charlie Keaton.  He rode the rail at the Derby every year and loved horses and harness racing, too. Again, I remember him making syrup from water and sugar.  He also cooled his coffee in a saucer and drank from the saucer.  He wore green underwear with a flap in the back.  Those are my memories of grandpa.

Grandma Keaton, Mable, was a different story.  Either she suffered from bi-polar disorder like most of her children or she suffered some mental problem associated with child birth.  I remember her as a shuffling, almost mute older person.  Within in our family lore she famously fed a 13 year old growing boy half a weinie and two tablespoons of baked beans for lunch one summer during an extended visit.

Thus, my grandparent memories are thin soup, memory wise, though as the oldest in our family at least I have some memories where my brother and sister have few if any.

Memories, Travel

Riding into the Mist of Memory

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Beltane Full Dyan Moon

South Passenger Lounge, Union Station, Chicago, Ill. 4:00 pm 6/13/09

Kate and I left home at 10 till 7 this morning. After an on-time arrival we are here near South tracks Gate D. We board the Cardinal around 5:30 for Indianapolis.

So far Kate does not seem too worn down by the ride, although her hip has begun to bother her a bit. We met a

Interrupted in Union Station by travel demands.

Now pulling out of Lafayette, Indiana (Purdue) at 9 pm on the Cardinal. Or, is it 10:00 pm? In Indiana you can never be sure what time it is. I have a life long case of chrononemesia, never quite knowing what time it is in other parts of the world.

The trackage here, as on much of Amtrak’s routes, causes the train to sway and buckle, then settles down for a time only to bounce up again. I hope the stimulus money goes in part to better laid track and more trains.

The Cardinal is full as was the Empire Builder. It’s summer of course, always a busier time, but this is a route that usually has a lot of room. Not today.

We met a lawyer pair at dinner, a prosecutor and a law clerk for a family court judge. We talked dogs, writing and jurisprudence. I also learned that Jerry West is not considered a good guy in his home state of West Virginia. He doesn’t take care of his momma apparently. Or, should I say, allegedly.

At lunch we met Dominic, a soft spoken man from Spokane, Washington on his way to NYC. He said he sleeps in his roomette and when he wakes up he goes to eat whatever meal is availalble.

Over breakfast we met a woman from Anoka who had just completed her master’s degree in nursing. She will be a nurse practitioner, a very skilled job. Kate struck up a medical conversation which left me happily watching the Mississippi River glide by with its unglaciated ridges and valleys.

I finished a James Patterson summer read, the name of which I can’t recall right now only moments after finishing it. I’m still working my way down the list of first books I bought when I got the Kindle three weeks or so ago. It’s traveled with me to South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. Now to Indiana.

Now we roll along in the dark, past the corn and bean fields. Being here always draws down the misty days of youth, so real, yet so long ago, so well remembered yet so changed in memory. Can we ever know who we were, let alone who we are?

That boy, the one who saved his paper route money and bought a transistor radio, rides a train from his faraway home back home. The boy who fished in Pipe Creek, who played poker on school nights through high school brings another worlds memories back with him. The boy who shot out the insurance salesman’s window with his slingshot slides back into the strange world we all leave one day on the ancient trail of adulthood. It is not a two way trail, there is no going back, save in fragments.

Those fragments we recall often carry the scent of shame, a burden of grief or those too brief flashes of ectsasy. There was the time Diane Bailey pulled my pants down in front of my friends. My mother picks up the heavy phone set, listens and tears well up in her eyes. Grandpa died. There was, too, that afternoon when I sat in my room, my 33 rpm record player sending out to me for the first time the leitmotifs of the Ring. All these things and so many more, some mundane but most soaked in the incendiary flame of hot emotion float into my heart as this train, this Cardinal dives further toward Indianapolis, further into the world left long ago.

Memories, Travel

The Last Steam Engine

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Beltane Waxing Dyan Moon

South Bend, Indiana Room 5, car 2901 at the junction of Eastern and Central Time

Outside the train with his family is a young boy I encountered about 4:00 a.m. with his head down in the toilet. He looks better now, smiling and happy to be on friendly ground.

The train carried me through western Pennsylvania and northern Ohio, brushing Lake Erie, as I slept. The sound of a train’s horn becomes a machine age lullaby, the slight rocking of the train a metal nanny rocking you to sleep. I realized on the way down that this has an older association for me. Our home on Canal Street in Alexandria, Indiana sat only a couple of blocks from the Nickel Plate Railroad’s tracks. Each night at midnight the nation’s lasting functioning steam engine came through town and sounded its horn where the tracks crossed nearby Monroe Street.

It feels good to be headed north where 70 is a more normal high during the day, not at night. The heat and traveling alone began to wear on me on the last day in Savannah. I chose a refueling option with the rental car that made it optimal to bring the car back empty. Near the time I decided to go the airport to drop off the car I began looking for a seafood place for a last lunch. None appeared. Even with the air conditioning on the heat beat against the car. Wanting to shed the responsibility I drove to the airport and by the time I got there I was hot, hungry and bit nervous about my nearly empty gas tank.

In part this was a reflection of my desire to be quit of this place and, like the young boy, to be back on friendly ground. Back now in the Midwest, riding through Indiana on the way to Chicago, I have gotten there. The train makes travel simple, so I can focus on enjoying the ride.

Memories, Travel

Cumberland Gap

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Beltane Waxing Dyan Moon May 30th, toward evening

Capitol Limited, traveling through the Cumberland Gap

We passed Cumberland, West Virgina 15 minutes ago. The train stopped near the Union Rescue Mission. Nearby a man with a sleeveless t-shirt, a gut and a gray beard shrugged. Beside him a four year old boy with no shirt mimicked his shrug. Exactly.

The Cumberland Gap is a true piece of Americana, the first straightforward path through the Appalachia’s. Until its discovery the west was difficult to reach for all but the most determined. We went through a long stretch of no phone service, maybe 100 miles in western Maryland.

At supper I met a guy who works for the Bosch company. He says the company has a charitable foundation. No big news there. If it works the way he said it does, though, the reality amazes. He says each year the foundation divides up the profits. The company is wholly owned by the Bosch family. They get 2-3% of the profit. The board which helps them manage gets the same. The rest, 94% or so each year, goes to the foundation for charitable work. Last year the profit was $67,000,000,000. That’s one hell of a lot of money. Or, at least it was before the bank bail-outs.

A weird thing on the way to the metro to the Smithsonian. I saw a guy that looked a lot like my Dad. He a Red Skins hat on and a Hawai’ian style shirt, but he had the Spitler nose and Dad’s distinctive cheek bones and squarish face. He looked enough like him to make me look twice.

I forgot about him. Then,while I ate lunch at the Smithsonian Castle Cafe, he came through the hallway beside the table where I sat. This second encounter caused my imagination to leap into high gear. What if it was Dad? Why now? What would we say to each other?

There was a moment where I pushed myself all the way into that scenario. I allowed myself to imagine actually encountering my Dad father, after all these years. What would our conversation have been like? A frisson of fear shot through me. Dead Dad, after all. I realized the conversation we’d had would have been much like the one’s in life. Interesting, but somehow disengaged, distant.

It didn’t occur to me at the time, but I would have asked a question or two about the afterlife.

The train just went around a curve, still here in the Cumberland Gap. I could see our engines and the other cars ahead of us. The sleeping cars come last in the train. I imagine that cuts down on traffic in the hallways.

I’ll sign off now as the sun sinks down below the Appalachian mount just ahead of us.

Family, Memories, Weather +Climate

The Post Office Was Gone

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Spring                Full Seed Moon

The folks at the Strib have asked those of us who blog for their weatherwatchers page to write up a storm story or two, a reminder of the forces of nature coming at us in the next few months.  As I’ve thought about this task, my own patronizing wonderment at folks who live on fault lines, in the path of hurricanes, or build homes in fire prone forest areas came to mind.

So, I’m going to start with a proper dose of humility, admitting that I, too, live in a place where nature can play havoc and let loose the dogs of war from time to time, yet I stay where I am.   After all we frequently get those 20 below zero or worse bouts of cold weather, often driven further down the temperature scale by high winds.  In the summer tornadoes and hail storms pound our area, so much so that we have a new roof and new siding after a bout with hail and tornadoes touched down within two miles of  our home, pretty damned close if you ask me.  That’s not to mention the weather that can and has punched us up the worst:  derechos.  These straight line winds reach speeds in excess of 58 mph.

Sorry about all those sarcastic comments southern California, west coast of Florida, San Francisco.

I’ll write one story today and few others over the week.

The first storm memory I have comes not from Minnesota, nor from Indiana where I grew up, but from Oklahoma, where I was born and still have family.   In 1956 or 57 my parents sent by Greyhound bus from our home in Alexandria, Indiana to Mustang, Oklahoma, then a rural community a good ways from Oklahoma City.  My uncle Rheford had the post-office attached to the front of his house and served as the rural mail carrier for the Mustang area.

Uncle Rheford and Aunt Ruth had, as many Oklahoma homes still do, a storm cellar located in the back yard, a dug-out with a cement floor and heavy barn doors covering the entrance.  During calm weather, most of the time, the storm cellar serves as a root cellar and a place to store canned goods, so it always smelled of stored produce and damp earth.

A few nights after I’d arrived, around 3 in the morning my cousin Jane came into my room, shook me awake, “Come on, Charles Paul, we’ve got to go to the storm cellar.”  Her urgency and the hour got me up fast.  I followed her out into rain and wind, crossed the few feet from the back door to the storm cellar and hurried down the four or five steps into this small, artificial cave.  My Aunt Ruth and two other cousins were already down there and Uncle Rheford followed quick behind Jane and me.

Uncle Rheford closed the doors with a thud, threw a large cast-iron bolt to lock them and put a cross piece into two metal brackets made for that purpose.  He also grabbed a chain and passed it through two eye-bolts, big ones, sunk into either door.  The end of the chain went around and hooked into another bolt that was part of the cement floor.  A little too sleepy and a little too young to be awed by all this preparation I sat down on a bench near a basket of potatoes.

The wind came.  The tornado must have passed right over us or very close because those heavy barn doors bowed up, called from their position by the voice of the storm.  The chain thrummed tight and the air left the cellar.  Then, just as it had come, the wind passed on by, the doors slumped back to their usual shape, slack came into the chain and sweet air rushed back into the cellar and to our lungs.

I don’t recall now how long we were in the cellar, probably an hour or so, maybe more.  After we got out we came up to a wet, distressed scene with leaves, tree branches, parts of buildings and machinery scattered in the  lawn.  The big surprise though came when we looked around the house.  The post-office, basically a long addition to the side of the house that faced the road, was gone.  Disappeared.  The rest of the house was intact.

In the days that passed I saw straw driven into telephone poles and other flotsam thrown up on the shore of this small Oklahoma town.  From that day forward I have always heeded instructions to go to the basement, remembering that night in the storm cellar in Mustang, Oklahoma.

Memories, Politics

More on Newspapers

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“Gardening is an active participation in the deepest mysteries of the universe.”  Thomas Berry

I knew there was some reason I liked gardening.

My father edited a small-town daily for a long time.  It, like many of its kind, disappeared after the Canadian newsprint crisis in the early 1970’s.  I know what it means to lose a newspaper, for the jobs associated with it to leave town.

Citizens have much less information about government and business, the particular governments and businesses that affect their daily lives.  This lack of information makes democracy much more difficult.  It allows those who would abuse and misuse the public trust less likely to get caught.

I’m for any form of organization that meets the challenge, though I have reservations about L3C status, not for the Strib, but for the probability of its misuse.

I’d jettison the presses and the rolls of newsprint, phase out the circulation staff and go strictly online.  I’d charge for this service in a way that reflected those saved costs.

Disintermediation is only a problem if you’re not taking advantage of it yourself.

Family, Memories

The Acid and Whitehead Days

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Imbolc     Waxing Moon of Winds

A week of constant preparation, meetings, thought has come to a close.  Tomorrow Kate and I will celebrate our 19th anniversary.  We’ll have dinner at Osaka, then drive into Orchestra Hall to hear the Wynton Marsalis Jazz Band interpret Theolonius Monk.

Back in those days, the acid and Whitehead days, a group of us went to Cincinnati for the Cincinnati Jazz Festival.   Herbie Mann.  Thelonius Monk.  John Coltrane.  We stayed on Mt. Adams where the streets have names like Celestial Avenue, Paradise Lane, Seraphim Street.  We smoked a lot of dope and drank in the jazz.  Since then, I have considered those artists the main line to my soul, especially Coltrane.

Bed Time.  Good night.

Memories

Fading Into History? Pt. II

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11  rises 30.11  NW0  wchill11   Winter

Full Wolf Moon

My sister wrote to say that Dad was 82 when he had his stroke.  He worked until then as the circulation manager for the Times-Tribune.  He loved newspapers and he was a depression era guy, work work work.  He took newspapers to the racks in retailers where those who did not have the paper mailed to them could pick it up.

Therein lies the second phase of this story.

The great Canadian newspaper shortage, which I imagine none of you remember, drove the cost of newsprint beyond the reach of many small town dailies.  It happened to coincide, at least as I recall, with the rise of the offset printing process.  Offset printing eliminated the Linotype and the Heidelberg.

Photosensitive sheets became the print from medium.  These could be handled with no lead and the printer’s ink from before came in a less viscous form, less perfume, too.

Offset printing is the modern method of printing, but its dominance of the printing world spelled the death knell for many small town papers.  The capital costs of getting out of the letter press era and into offset was more than most could bear.   The result?  Printing became centralized with many small town newspapers printed in one location.  In the case of the Alexandria Times-Tribune this meant the paper came off the press in Elwood, some 8 miles away.

In most small towns the daily paper’s time had come an end.  In the best case the papers became weeklies with a small reporting and advertising staff–often the same people–working out of a storefront office.  In the worse case they became shoppers, thin to non-existence news surrounded by page after page of advertising.  The shopper made money, but it was not a newspaper.

The rest of the story will come later.  I have to get ready to preach.  Bye for now.