Category Archives: Memories

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.

Faith and Spirituality, Memories, Weather +Climate

Home and Heart

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winter-solstice-08cbe2.jpg1  bar steep rise 30.42  WSW0   windchill 1  Winter

Waxing Crescent of the Wolf Moon

Oh, man.  To get the trash out I had to blow the snow.  Underneath the snow is ice.  The snowblower with its knobby tires spun out and the only reason I stayed on my feet was the firm grip I had on the snowblower.  Never before had taking out the trash had a hint of danger to it.  Tonight it did.  After the snowblower and I went slip sliding away, I still had to roll both the trash containers down the long slope of our driveway.  Risky business.  Made it ok.

In doing research for Homecomer I looked back over many of my sermons for Groveland and noticed that I’ve written several that deal with home as an idea.  Home has a certain poignancy for me, since my estrangement from my father and his subsequent marriage to a woman who made the problem worse.  The town and the house where I grew up seem faraway to me, as if the warm and comfortable feelings associated with home got eaten away by the acids of my family quarrel.

The rightness or wrongness of it all has long been moot, yet the hollowness with which I’m left when it comes to home and nuclear family must have lead me to consider this theme.  It is a rich concept, one with so many layers and metaphorical possibilities that I have not tired of it.

Perhaps out of this search of mine for home I’ll  find ideas useful to others.  The current environmental crisis both has its roots in and is made more intractable by our American sense of mobility, of looking over the next horizon for a new frontier.  This makes it hard to learn about the home that greets us each evening.  Well, more on that in Homecomer.

The cold has come again and that will make the sleeping even better.

Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Memories, Myth and Story

At 50, What Next?

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3  bar steep drop 30.16  0mph  NE  windchill 3  Samhain

Waning Gibbous Moon of Long Nights

My brother Mark asked me my thoughts on turning 50.  This April 11th he has his 50th.  By then it will be, as it always is, twelve years since I had that birthday.

Twelve years ago is a long time and when I first started to answer Carl Jung came up.  He should have, but not in the positive way I had in mind.  I began that piece by reflecting on Jung’s notion of life’s  two halves:  an external, career and family half followed by an interior, reflective and calmer half.  Hmmm.  But that was the upbeat spin.

How Jung came into my turning 50 is less philosophical.  In 1996 I shifted my credentials from the Presybterian church to the Unitarian-Universalist.  In 1997, my 50th year, I had to take an internship to qualify for recognition.  I did.  Unity Church Unitarian (no relation to the Unity movement) in St. Paul and First Unitarian in Minneapolis both offered me internships.

It felt good to be wanted in a professional capacity again.  I had given myself 5 years to make it as a writer (with no real idea what making it meant) and I failed.  No sales.  Not even any bites.  Instead of the romantic I’ll stick with it no matter what I decided to go back to the trade I had learned.  I felt a need to earn money and to have recognition as a skilled and valuable person.

This whole episode was a mistake and a big one.  I crowned it with accepting a position as minister of development at Unity, essentially a fund-raising position.  I hate fund-raising and everything associated with it.  But I said yes because I was asked.  Pretty desparate.

That was how Jung came in.  Early on I could see I’d made a mistake but I needed to understand why.  What did it mean?  My long time analyst John Desteian, a Jungian, and I worked on it.  In the end we decided I had regressed, rather than moved forward.  I had regressed by returning to safe territory.  John said that most regressions occur because we have to go back and pick up something we needed.  In this case I needed to be reminded how much I’d wanted out of the ministry six years before and why full time ministry was a bad fit for me.

It felt wonderful to leave after the fund-raising goal had been met, an increase of 10% over the prior year.  I did it, but I did not want to do it again.

I came home and save for one brief relapse when we needed money I learned my lesson.

What was the lesson?  That the world of work and achievement had come and gone in my life.  Now I needed to pursue life itself.  That did include writing, whether I sold anything or not.  I have not.  It meant I needed to face life as myself, not as a role or job holder.

So, Mark, turning 50 for me meant a need to go back and relearn a lesson I had not grasped completely the first time around.  I don’t know what turning 50 will mean for you.  Perhaps reflecting on the expat life?  Perhaps following some abandoned or long cherised dream?  Maybe you’ll tell the story of South East Asia as only someone of your particular experience can.  Who knows?  I can tell you this.  Pay attention to what happens around this time because it has deep meaning for the rest of your life.