Category Archives: Memories

Memories, Travel

Visitations

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                             65  bar rises 29.73  2mph WSW dew-point 49  Beltane, sunny

                                                       Waxing Gibbous Flower Moon

The places I have visited stay with me, sometimes like ghosts, haunting my dreams and intruding on waking life.  Angkor.   Singapore.  Bangkok.  Ephesus.  Delphi.  Santorini.  Rome.  Pompeii.  Venice.  Florence.  Crete.  Delos.  Istanbul.  Bogota.  Cartagena.  Mexico City.  Merida.  Oaxaca. Vienna.  Salzburg.  Paris.  London.  Hawarden.  Anglesey.  Conwy.  Edinburgh.  Bath.  Cities and towns, states and countrysides in the US and Canada too many to name.

Angkor drapes vines over me, inserts vast tree roots into my memories while the howler monkeys and the cicada scream.  It’s hot and it doesn’t let up, just gets hotter, too hot in the midday.  The stone rises and rises, carved by artists capable of rendering the delicate and ephemeral in stone.  The astronomical, astrological, theological pandemonium of it all causes reverberations deep in my soul, beyond my Self and down into my links with the collective unconscious.  I was there when the stone masons cut the block, shaped Vishnu turning the great turtle in the sea of milk.  My hand carved the apsara and fitted stones into the great western gate of Angkor Wat.

Delphi sends music to me, pan-pipes and Apollo’s lute.  The cedar scented sacred way winds it way up the side of Mt. Parnassus past the Athenian treasury, up to the Temple of Apollo where the Delphic Oracle met questioners and answered their questions with questions deep in its subterranean precincts.  Here, too, is the omphalos stone, the center of the world.  The Castalian spring.  All round Mt. Parnassus are echoes of divinity, cries from the Pythian Games, honoring Apollo’s defeat of the cthonic serpent Python, still resound throughout the rocky hills.  The Delphi Oracle still speaks today and she says, “Beware, Stranger, of forgetting your past for in it lie secrets to your future.  Without your past you will wander the earth always an infant in your understanding.”

Merida and the Casa del Balam, house of the jaguar, bring heat, heat so intense that as the afternoon rains came there was no relief, only a suffocating rise in humidity.  To escape the locals do much of their business in pre-dawn and dawn hours, sitting together in the main park around the confidenitales, small curved benches made so dating couples could sit beside each other, yet not touch.  Here Mayan women sell blood oranges in front of the Cathedral, their roots at Chichen Itza and Tikal, not Jerusalem or Rome. 

Hawarden resonates with my genetic past.  On the trains in North Wales most of the people looked like they could be my cousin short, thin, dark eyes and hair.  The town with its residential library (where I stayed) and its brick and stone streets and buildings had Victorian written in its architecture, public and private.  It also had a bookish quality, an Oxford don would not have felt out of place.  The church graveyard, just behind St. Deniol’s Library, had slate markers covered with moss and huge trees hanging heavy bows over the graves.  Behind it the stone building of St. Deniol’s parish church sat calm and iconic.

There are others, many others, but these places live within me, never absent.  They are the great gift of travel and one I cherish.

Memories, Writing

The Generator Failed

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60  bar falls 30.16 0mph NW dew-point 36  Beltane, twilight

              Last Quarter of the Hare Moon 

 This story grabbed me.  See below it to see why.

“MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) – A woman who spent nearly 60 years of her life in an iron lung after being diagnosed with polio as a child died Wednesday after a power failure shut down the machine that kept her breathing, her family said. Dianne Odell, 61, had been confined to the 7-foot-long machine since she was stricken by polio at 3 years old.

Family members were unable to get an emergency generator working for the iron lung after a power failure knocked out electricity to the Odell family’s residence near Jackson, about 80 miles northeast of Memphis, brother-in-law Will Beyer said.

“We did everything we could do but we couldn’t keep her breathing,” said Beyer, who was called to the home shortly after the power failed. “Dianne had gotten a lot weaker over the past several months and she just didn’t have the strength to keep going.”

Capt. Jerry Elston of the Madison County Sheriff’s Department said emergency crews were called to the scene, but could do little to help.

Odell was afflicted with “bulbo-spinal” polio three years before a polio vaccine was discovered and largely stopped the spread of the crippling childhood disease.”

 I learned a couple of years ago that I spent some time in an iron lung during my episode with bulbar polio.  It was a shock to me.   Paralysis struck my left side and lasted for about a year.  I recall one event in an emergency room or an operating room, lights above my body, people in white working on me.  I saw all this from a spot up near the ceiling.  I know this sounds weird, but the memory has permanent residence in me.  The remarkable part is that no one from the family was in this  room.  Just me.  And the medical team.

Seeing this story reminds me of all the others, like me, who were victims of the post-war polio epidemic.  Most of us made it through with little physical aftermath, but some died.  Some still wear braces.  Some required breathing support of one kind or another for their entire life.  It all seems so long ago, but this woman was exactly my age. 

I wrote some today on Superior Wolf, about 1,500 words.  Moving forward.

Memories, Weather +Climate

Turn the Radio On and Listen to the Indy 500

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62  bar falls 29.74 2mph NW dew-point 35 Beltane, Sunny

                      Full Hare Moon

Memorial Day is this weekend and we’re still stuck back in early April.  I can recall other chilly Memorial Days, but none with the degree of regular cool air this year has had.

Since it’s Memorial Day, that means it’s Indy 500 time.  I’ll watch again this year.  The race used to take a liesurely 3-4 hours to run, now it routinely finishes between 2-3.  Though I found growing up in Indiana a strange experience, it left two indelible marks on my character.  I’m still fascinated with those big guys bouncing the orange ball up and down a hardwood floor.  I’m also ready, every Memorial Day, to turn into race fan for a day.

I only went to the race once, with my Dad, in the early 60’s or late 50’s.  The Novi engine was a Dual Overhead Cam Supercharged V8 engine, a monster driven by Jim Hurtubise.  As it came out of the fourth curve, Hurtubise would hit the accelerator for the long main straightaway.  The supercharger would kick in and an internal combustion growl would echo off the seats and reverberate until the car was well past the starting line over half a mile away.  All of us who love the race, loved that engine.  It never won, not once, but it was thing of beauty. 

Most Memorial Days I would go out to the family car with crackers and cheese, comic books and a coke.  I would turn on the radio and settle in to listen.  For the month leading up to the race the Indianapolis Star carried detailed sports page coverage and I saved those pages, too, including them in my cache.  I especially liked the rainy days when I could sit in the car, sheltered from the weather and listen to the roar of the engines as the cars hurtled around the track.

China.  Burma.  A 7.9 earthquake.  A major cyclone with another brewing in the waters of the Indian Ocean.  Unimaginable suffering.  No.  Wait.  Katrina.  Iraq.  Not unimaginable, just far away.  Burma has Pagan, a city with 2,500 Buddhist temples.  It has Mandalay where the flying fishes play.  It has Rangoon, home of a gold topped stupa.  It also has a paranoid junta, more concerned with power than the people.  China’s Sichuan region, home to fiery foods and a unique brand of Chinese culture, mountains (the shan) and proximity to a collision between the Indian tectonic plate and the Pacific.  The folding creates the shan in China and the Himalayas.  It also slips, the enormous pressures of the earth’s mantle put out of joint and indescribable power releases, a spring in the expected stability of the ground on which we walk.

There are advantages to a spot near the center of the North American tectonic plate, far from either the Atlantic or the Pacific.

Garden, Memories

SuperMemo

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62  bar falls 29.71 0mph SW dewpoint 57 Beltane

                  New Moon (Hare)

It rained and the temperature dropped 13 degrees.  Mother nature at work.  In the cool moist air after the rain I planted onions, beets, lettuce and carrots.  I also transplanted 3 daylily clumps out of the flower bed I’m converting to vegetables.  Cool cloudy, preferable moist days are perfect transplanting weather.

The earth smells rich, a loamy scent that arises only after a rain.  My Dad’s Aunt Rella, an early cancer patient, took an atomic cocktail and said it tasted like “the air after a June rain.”  An image that has remained with me all these years.

I just started using a new program called SuperMemo.  It showed up in an interesting article in Wired.  This Polish memory researcher has developed this program that times repetitions of material you want to learn.  This fits some neurological model of the brain.  He guarantees 95% retention if  you use the program faithfully.

I plan to use it learn art history, Chinese characters, horticultural information, folk tale and world history.  And probably, over time, other stuff, too.  This kind of thing excites me.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Garden, Memories

There Are Days, Ordinary Days

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58  bar rises 29.80 2mph W dewpoint 30 Beltane

New Moon (Hare Moon)

There are days, ordinary days, days you can recall, when your life took a sharp angle turn, or created a swooping curve, perhaps dipped underground or soared up, up into the sky.

It seems I remember, though how could I really, the day I got polio.  I don’t know how this memory got shaped or if it got shaped in the way all  memory does, by our selective recollection of snippets of moments, but here it is.

My mother and I were at the Madison County Fair, held every August on the grounds of Beulah Park.  Mom had wrapped me in a pink blanket and we wandered through the Midway.  There were bright lights strung in parabolic curves and the smell of cotton candy and hot dogs.  I looked out from the blanket, safe on my mother’s shoulder, held in her arms.  And I felt a chill run through me.

Years later I was with my Dad, early in the morning.  We sat in those plastic cuplike chairs in a pale green room.  My mother came up in an elevator on her way to emergency surgery.  Surgeons would try to relieve pressure on her brain from the hemorrhage she had suffered a week before during a church supper.  I got in the elevator and rode up with her.  Her eyes looked away from me, but saw me anyway.  “Soaohn.” she said.  It was the last time she spoke to me.  I was 17.

The evening of my first marriage I wandered down a path in Mounds Park where the ceremony had taken place.  I wore a blue ruffled shirt, music of the Rolling Stones carried through the moist July air.  Butterflies landed on my shoulder.

The night the midnight plane arrived from Calcutta carrying a 4 pound, 4 ounce boy.

The third week of our honeymoon, a northern journey begun in Rome, found us at our northernmost destination Inverness, Scotland.  We had rooms at the Station Hotel, right next to railroad terminal.  It was a cool foggy night and we took a long walk, following for much it the River Ness, which flows into Loch Ness.  We held hands and looked at this old Scots village, the capital of the Highlands.  A mist rose over a church graveyard on our right.

And today.  Planting beets and carrots.  Kate taking a phone call.  The news from the lab about Gabe. Now, after this sunny spring day, life will go on, but its trajectory has changed, changed in a profound way, in a way none of us can yet know.

Family, Memories

History Changes the Past

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35  bar steady 30.04 2mph WSW dewpoint 26 Spring

              Waning Gibbous Moon of Winds

History changes the past.  Comic books were bad, bad, bad when I was a kid.  I knew this because my mother told me so.  I could read Tarzan and a couple of others I can’t recall, but never Batman, Superman, or any of the darker comic fare.  Like many kids I hid the Superman and others inside my stacks of Tarzans.  Also, like many in those days, when Marvel comics came out I was a teen-ager and Mom was no longer a taste-maker in my world.  The Fantastic Four, the Incredible Hulk, the Silver Surfer and my personal favorite, Dr. Strange became staples in my library alongside War and Peace, Crime and Punishment.

Only in the past couple of months have I learned why comics were bad.  Fredric Wertham, a German born immigrant and psychiatrist, saw Superman and the superhero ilk as sub rosa evocations of the Übermensch, Nietzsche’s man who transcended morality and who Nazi’s believed justified their crimes. 

Well, all I can say is, that Fredric must not have read a Superman comic.  Superman fought for Truth, Justice and the American Way.  Any kid who watched the TV program could tell you that.  Batman was too troubled to be an ubermensch or an undermensch. 

This history has changed my past.  I always thought it was just a pacifist quirk of Mom’s that she restricted my comic reading, after all I learned from her to carry bugs outside in a kleenex and liberate them.  But no, it was another parenting influence, like Dr. Spock, only this one was a psychiatrist who probably believed Freud had it right after all.  It helps me see Mom as a parent, a person searching for advice on how to raise her children, how to keep them from harmful influences. 

Boy, when I think of the fifties I realize how few really harmful influences seemed available, at least in Alexandria, Indiana.  No  rap.  Few drugs.  They weren’t on our radar.  An STD might have been an additive for gasoline.

I began watching horror and science fiction movies as soon as I could scrape $.25 together to spend on my own.  I don’t know why Mom never stopped me from seeing those.  Or, maybe I didn’t tell her.  I can’t recall and she died when I was 17 so I never got a chance to ask her.

Cinema and Television, Faith and Spirituality, Memories

Cheesy Sci-Fi Movies

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21  bar steady  1mph W dewpoint 15   Spring (yeah, right!)

              Full Moon of Winds

Spent this afternoon and evening watching NCAA basketball and movies.  Watched a medium bad Sci-Fi movie about a blackhole created in a lab in St. Louis.  It’s bad in part because of the acting.  Cheesy sci-fi movies only seem to have enough budget for one take.  It’s also bad because I read the hard sci-fi book from which the concept came and this movie bore no relationship to the very good book at all.  Which is a shame since that book had real science behind it and would have made a good movie.  This one had a beast that came out of the black hole and ate energy.  Hmmm.  So much wrong with that premise, you’d think I’d stop watching, but, no.  I have a low threshold for quality when I want entertainment.

Been kicking around the idea, for a few years, of writing some original theology/atheology, a ge-ology, or something.  The woman who complimented my learning this morning, Lois Hamilton, got me thinking about all this again.  I’ve spent since 1965 getting seriously educated.  In a lot of fields.  I’ve had interesting real world experience in politics, the church, development and working with developmentally delayed adults.  I’ve traveled some, read a lot and learned a good deal about gardening and art.  Maybe I don’t need to anything, but I feel like a bad steward of the work I’ve done and the knowledge I’ve gained if I can’t set it down in some form for others.

Not sure what I want to do, or if I want/need to do anything.  Just pondering, for now.

Faith and Spirituality, Memories

Are You Still Waiting for Your Special Purpose?

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26 bar steep rise  30.39 2mph ENE windchill 26

         Waxing Gibbous Moon of Winds

“Exaggerated sensitiveness is an expression of the feeling of inferiority.” – Alfred Adler

Adler was one of the big three:  Jung, Freud, and Adler, though his name does not ring a bell in the larger public mind anymore.  If Freud was about sex and death, Jung about archetypes and the collective unconscious, Adler was about power.  He was a birth order guy and believed that how power dynamics worked out in relationships and within our own psyche determined our mental health. 

Just checked up on my knowledge about  Adler and discovered a fascinating twist to his point of view.  He believed that each of develops a more or less submerged final goal, a goal that creates significance for us.  This goal compensates for feeling of inferiority.  Don’t know about you, but the feeling I was here for something special, nurtured by mom and dad and reinforced by teachers and friends has cost me big time in life’s journey.  Like alcoholism this striving wastes time and pushes us away from the Tao.  

At this point I am a recovering alcoholic and I feel good about my now 32 years of sobriety, though not overconfident. It’s still a day at a time in reality.  I have stripped away most of the vestiges of fame seeking, break through idea hopes and now seem to have little left in the way of the old drivers that Adler names.  Not none, it’s difficult to let go of the vague, perhaps magical idea that someday, somewhere things will change, but I try to put it context if it arises and then to let it go.

Note from Mary that she’s working away on the revision of her dissertation.  Her advisor is on her case, she says.  Oh, boy, am I glad I’m not doing that.

Kate and I went through our calendar through July.  Next month will be busy for me.

Memories, Travel

An Indiana Farm on Kauai

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                             9  bar rises 30.24  1mph NNW windchill 5

                                                    New Moon

                                   roosteranddoves300.jpg

When I was a boy, say 12 and under, each summer I would visit my Uncle Riley and Aunt Virginia for a couple of weeks or so.  They lived on the farm my grandfather had put together.  It was a couple hundred acres of corn, a few cows, a pig or two, harness-racing horses and chickens, Bantams with the Banty roosters and their mile-high attitude and morning curdling cock-a-doodle-doo.  These memories have a particular smell, a mixture of gravel dust, hay and cow manure.  They also have an increasingly antique feel as they recede further and further from the present day.

Imagine my surprise when these memories came alive all day, every day while we were on Kauai and all because of Hurrican I’niki.  In 1992, just before we first visited Kauai, it was struck by a rare and devastating hurricane.  This hurricane eliminated many resorts, including the famous Coco Palms where Elvis shot his movie, Blue Hawai’i.  Many homes blew away, trees and plants got pushed over and beaches changed their shapes. 

I’niki also opened up all of the many chicken coops on the island.  Once free, the chickens never again came home to roost, but instead have now made the entire island their home.  They are, like the feral pig, wild animals, freed to roam wherever they like in a paradise of bugs and small worms.

The result is that often throughout the day the sound of a Banty rooster crowing reverberates whether you’re on the beach, in the forests, up a mountain or near a river.  The chickens come around pic-nic tables and wait patiently for food.  Local children pick up the roosters and carry them like puppies down to the beach.  As a result, Uncle Riley and his farm came to mind day after day on the most isolated islands in the world, in the midst of the Pacific Ocean. 

Now that was unexpected.

Memories, Our Land and Home, Travel

Back on Central Standard Time

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23  bar falls 29.90 2mph  NNE windchill21

     Last Quarter of the Snow Moon

Gonna get the weather changed back to Andover tomorrow.  Still a little fuzzy.  I stayed up all day to reset my biological clock and it feels like its worked.   I’ll be ready for bed around my usual time.

This was 6:30PM on Hawai’ian Standard Time.  Time to hunt for dinner and begin to wind down from a day of hiking or visiting gardens or beach combing.  It’s always strange, at least to me, that when we return from a place like Hawai’i that it continues, in the same rhythms, after we leave. 

Most of the year I don’t hold the distinct memories of two places in my mind as I do right after I return from vacation, but for now and the next few weeks Hawai’i will be as clear as if it were a short drive away.  This is partly a function of jet travel.  We walk down a jet way on Kauai, wander around a few mostly similar airports, walk down a couple more jetways, then we’re home again.  No landscape passes by as we travel.  There are only vague indications of cultural change.  OK, the banks of slot machines in the Las Vegas airport were not subtle, but you know what I mean.  No changes in cuisine, no different towns, license plates, grocery stores, just the world air travel culture and its modest inflections as we pass from one gate to another.

Getting to bed time here on good ol’ CST.