Category Archives: Family

Colorado, Family, Feelings, Friends, The Move, Third Phase, Woolly Mammoths

The 25th Is the New 50th

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Samain                                                                               Moving Moon

The electrician comes today to remove the automatic transfer switch for our generator. Eric at Alpha Electric in Evergreen said they can cost as much as $1,000 to $1,200. Probably saved us the cost of the electrician today and the cost of installing the generator in Colorado.

While we decided to leave the Viking in place (so we can install an induction cooking surface in Colorado), we did decide to take the freezer with us. One less thing to buy out there.

At the Woolly restaurant meeting on Monday Stefan said, “I know you’re focused on logistics right now, but this is a big life change.” He’s right, in a way. The logistics have absorbed, helpfully, a lot of the angst. We could put our worry hats on about things we could resolve like choosing a mover, what to take and what to unload, when to buy a new home.

The larger question of whether this is a good decision or not, oddly, doesn’t really matter. We made the choice to go and accepted the consequences, positive and negative, of that choice. There’s little we can do now to effect that. As a result, the time between deciding for Colorado and now has been filled with making that choice a reality.

We gave ourselves long enough to say our good-byes and that has been a very nurturing, even healing process. It means that when we start our new life in Colorado it will not be with regrets about Minnesota, but with warm memories.

The new life will depend on us and our choices, too. We’re going open to a new place, to new friends, to stronger family relationships.  And, we’re looking forward to being with each other in a different environment. Our first anniversary in Colorado will be our 25th and for those of us of the divorce generation, the 25th is the new 50th.

 

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Politics, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Writing

The Last Presentation

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Samain                                                                                     Moving Moon

A piece on social justice I’ve been writing , a presentation for Groveland U-U on December 14th, has been harder than usual. Usually such presentations form over a period of time, I write them, present them and forget them. This has been my pattern for the 22 years of occasional presentations there.

Two key elements have made this one more difficult. It will be my last, probably my last such presentation anywhere and certainly my last to Groveland. And, it was originally to be reflections of my years of social justice work, mostly in the Twin Cities.

When I tried to do a summing up, a sort of lessons learned, failures and successes as examples, it came out wooden. Too focused on me, too summary, not really coherent. Then, I thought, ah. What is it that creates a need in some of us to work for social justice, to attempt to move the levers of power in such a way that they benefit others?

That one felt too psychologized, too small.

What I ended up writing is no valedictory speech. It’s neither summing up nor 360 205370_10150977727553020_150695969_npsychologizing. It is, rather, about choice, about existentialist living.

It finishes with this:

We’ll end with another instance, perhaps a change that will come into your life as it already has in mine. Grandchildren.

I don’t want to say that grandchildren are at the center of my life because they’re not, though they’re pretty damned important. I do want to say that being with our grandchildren, Ruth and Gabe, 8 and 6, gives me a clear focus on the future, that is, the world in which Ruth and Gabe will grow up, in which they will have children and in which they will grow old.

I know, as you probably do, that it will be a much warmer world and one with more erratic weather and changed food production systems. It will be a world in which the current gap between the 99% and the 1% will get wider. Just taking these two instances, as I look at Ruth and Gabe and, at the same time, at that future, those gazes will inform the political choices I make now. Perhaps that’s true for you, too.

 

 

Family, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Writing

Business and Writing

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Samain                                                                              Moving Moon

Out to Keys for our weekly business meeting. Kate gets decaf, having been up since 5:15 with the dogs. I get caff, having gotten up at 7:00. We go over the weekly numbers, our financial situation and the calendar. Talk about the move while silverware clinks against ceramics and Pam, our waitress in a sequined red t-shirt with Disney characters and her name outlined in the shiny stuff, fills our cups with a two-fisted maneuver, a pot of decaf and one of regular.

Across from us sat a couple, cute trollish in type, older with white hair, jowls. Her with a scowl and him with Coke bottle thick black glasses. They didn’t talk.

Back home after that where we went over our lists of things to do. Mine included deploying the bagster, a final check of closets, sheds, drawers, cabinets, packing the downstairs bath and remaining art. Kate had on hers checks to the painters and the stager among other things.

Downstairs I wrote a second version of my presentation for Groveland on December 14th. It’s title and theme now comes from a short work by Kierkegaard, Purity of heart is to will one thing. A complete refocus.

Now. A nap.

 

Family, Holidays, Politics

The Capital Grille

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Samain                                                                          Moving Moon

The Capital Grille. Aptly named. Could have been (maybe really is) the Capitalism Grille. Dark wood, leather, buck heads with santa hats, clocks telling the time in London, Chicago, Tokyo and somewhere else. Faux paintings of dead white guys like Hubert Humphrey, Harold Stassen (for party balance) and, oddly, one of a Hormel guy who invented a meat refrigeration unit. A large bronze eagle swoops down, behind and through its wings the kitchen is just visible. The bison head, so dark against the wood as to be invisible, surprised Kate when she noticed it, then Anne and me when she pointed it out.

The menu presents mostly steak done in various ways. I had a pepper steak, Anne a Gorgonzola and truffle topped filet, Kate scallops. It was, in its way, a fun place to have a Thanksgiving dinner. The food was good and the people watching excellent.

While we ate our rare (cool center), medium rare (warm center) steaks, thick cuts of dry aged beef and seared scallops, we tried to parse out the table across the way, three tables put together. It could have been a Mafia family. Men came forward and kissed the cheek of an older man at the head of the table. One woman, sheathed in black and affluence, older had her husband carrying a brightly colored tote. She reached in and pulled out a center piece with faux gold apples and ivy, flowers. It had small, battery operated flames for the candles. Another woman brought a potted plant. These were set in the center of the table. When their plates came, they had all ordered the turkey dinner.

A curiosity was the youngish blond on the arm of an older man. She had no ring and ran her hand across his back as she sipped red wine from a large balloon glass. What was their relationship? A date? An escort? Made me wonder.

Why were we all here instead of at home with a football game on in the background? (not the Rose Bowl. I know now. That’s New Years. So take back my male creds.) Had others had their families dwindle in number until cooking at home just didn’t make sense? (our case) Perhaps others were tired of turkey? Or, perhaps others didn’t have time for a full meal at home.

Whatever it was, we filled this hall, a celebration of wealth earned the old fashion way, through stock dividends, ate our steaks and our turkey and scallops in sight of each other, but still separated. I wonder what we were thankful for?

 

 

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Wheel, Holidays, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Holiseason Is Almost Upon Us

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Fall                                                                                 Closing Moon

Fall is in its last days. Samain comes on Friday. The seasons of the year that speak most directly to my soul arrive back to back. Samain, then Winter. Guess that tells you what it’s like to live inside my skin.

The sky today glowered over the landscape, a November sky ahead of its month. It felt like a homecoming to me.

A long while back I chose to identify the period from Samain to Epiphany, as holiseason. It’s a whole season of special holidays, moments and weather. They are distinct, yes, from Diwali to Kwanzaa, Posada to Hanukkah, Christmas to the Winter Solstice, Thanksgiving to New Years, Samain to Epiphany, but their proximity, their charged valence in their particular cultures adds up not in simple sums, but in layered complexity.

Put, for example, Samain’s celebration of the thinning of the veil between this world and the Otherworld in dialogue with the holiday of gratitude and family we call Thanksgiving. To do so reminds me of a small object in the art of the Americas collection at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Nayarit house.

This is a tomb object, excavated from a ninety foot deep shaft grave made by the Nayarit culture of what is now western Mexico. We have little firm information about this object but we can infer from its presence in a tomb that it might convey something about life and death.

It contains groups of people, probably relatives of the deceased, eating and drinking with each other. As groups of kids investigate this ceramic object made between 300 BCE and 400 ACE, they usually conclude that the group above is living and the group below the ancestors. The key thing they also note is that they are eating and drinking together.

Of course this brings up the Mexican celebration known as the day of the dead, also a holiday in holiseason. It could be seen as the living generation celebrating Thanksgiving with each other, yet intimately connected to their ancestors, who carry on their own celebration, one we acknowledge at Samain. Or, one we might acknowledge at Samain if we took seriously the Celtic imagery of the veil between the worlds grown thin, a very similar idea to the one celebrated throughout Latin America, but especially in Mexico as the Day of the Dead.

The most mythic and sacred period of the year approaches. I’m excited about it.

 

 

Family, The Move

Early Bird

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Fall                                                                            Closing Moon

Kate and I got up at 7 am. Drove down to Keys on University for breakfast. Keys was closed. I felt like such an early bird, up before the breakfast place opened. We settled on a sparsely inhabited Baker’s Square, not our first or even second choice since we tend to stay away from chains.

It had a few single men and two couples. The single men looked like folks who lived alone and who needed to get out in the world once in a while. A bit desolate. One moved his fingers in the familiar arthritic dance, flexing each one separately then giving the wrist a slight shake. He looked at his hand with the faint disgust of one whose body no longer serves as well as it once did. Another stared with a grim face at a laptop computer, sitting on a leg curled up.

Kate and I were, as is inevitable these days, talking logistics. What tasks the day held. What things remain undone. What we need to do before I leave on Wednesday for the closing in Conifer.

Kate spent the morning, while I slept, still trying to get back to a sleep equilibrium, packing up canned goods, the products of our gardens over various years. Now I’m going outside to move more hive boxes and honey supers from the far shed, take off the angelic weather vane that I want for our new shed or, perhaps, the garage.

It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood.

Family

50 Years Ago

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Fall                                                                                    Closing Moon

Awoke this morning and looked at my e-mails to see that my sister, Mary, had e-mailed me a photograph of Mom’s obituary. October 25th, 1964. Mom’s been dead 50 years. It is, as Mary said, hard to imagine.

The obit was by Bud Zink, the publisher of the Alexandria Times-Tribune, the daily newspaper which my father served as editor for many years. The obituary said the whole town mourned when Mom died. Mom volunteered at the church, did substitute teaching in Alexandria elementary schools and was well-known and well-loved. In a town of 5,000 you can be known by almost everybody.

Her whole life was her family, Bud wrote. And that was true. Seems hopelessly old-fashioned now. She never learned to drive. Cox’s Supermarket was only a couple of blocks away from home. Downtown just a block further.

Feminism has looked back in anger at such narrow lives, or more accurately, at lives lived that narrowly by sexist fiat. Because I was 17 when mom died, I never had a chance to ask her how she felt about such things. They weren’t in our consciousness yet. Her eagerness to finish her teaching degree, which she was doing in the period immediately preceding her death, makes me think she might have had other ambitions.

In World War II, as a WAC, she traveled to Italy and Algiers with the Army Signal Corps. I still have small framed pictures of Capri where she spent some time during her posting in Italy. So she was a world traveler in her 20’s and for a woman in the 1940’s that was not common. Her horizon must have been broader than I know; she had been exposed to a life different than that of the rural Indiana in which she grew up.

She died 50 years ago and in her death showed me that this most feared and mysterious reality of the human journey is ordinary. Nothing is more ordinary than dying. And in that, perhaps, is its greatest power. That something so final can be so ordinary.

 

 

 

 

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Feelings, Friends, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

Speaking Against

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Fall                                                                                          Falling Leaves Moon

Psalm 90:10 (RSV)

10 The years of our life are threescore and ten,
    or even by reason of strength fourscore;
yet their span is but toil and trouble;
    they are soon gone, and we fly away.

In the middle of reading this long article by Ezekiel J. Emanuel in the Atlantic, “Why I Hope to Die at 75.” The argument so far has a rationale based on increasing life being linked statistically with a longer period of disability and illness. Why suffer yourself and why suffer the costs to your family and society? Why not just die at 75? The Jews believe 3 score and ten is a full life and anything beyond that is bonus time, so from that perspective 75 is within one metrics range.

How you respond to this article is of interest to me, and I’ll reserve my final opinion until I’ve finished, but here is my first response.

Emanuel has a lot of information about these issues as Professor of Health Care Management and Professor of Medical Ethics and Health Policy in the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. I’ll stipulate his data. And, I’ll stipulate that all of us will have opinions on this issue whether well-informed or informed by anecdote alone or, more likely, some combination of the two.

What’s unusual, of course, is Emanuel’s bald claim that he has a limit in mind for his lifespan. The exercising, right-dieting, medically attuned crowd (put me squarely here) are what he calls The American Immortals. That is, a group of folks who want to believe in life everlasting, or at least life lasting as long as possible. This clever phrase says a lot about Emanuel, but is not so illuminating for its target group.

Here’s what I think is wrong with Emanuel’s position. He seems to have an instrumental view of human life, spending considerable time showing how creativity, cognition and overall productivity decline after peaking anywhere along a broad bell curve with its flattened top extending between 30 and 60. After 60, unless you are an outlier, (and he says American Immortals believe they are all, or will be, outliers) it’s a long slump toward vagueness and discomfort.

In other words, as I read him, Emanuel doesn’t want to go into the process of decline. He’d rather phase out before that all gets too far underway. He wants to be remembered as vital, productive, keen. So say we all. But. Life is about more than productivity, creativity, thinking.

It is also about loving, about following the journey where it leads, about mystery. The Great Wheel speaks in analogy about this exact matter, the journey from birth to maid to mother to crone, then across the veil. Or, from birth to youth to adulthood and the third phase. I suppose you could say Emanuel is a latter day Stoic. I can see him in his chair, slumped with his toga around, arms dangling, veins open. As for me, I’m following this ancientrail as far as it goes, not for immortality, not for more productivity, but for life itself.

It is, I think, too easy to make shibboleths of work, of peak performance, especially in American culture. What of the supper table around which sit mechanics and waitresses, toll-booth operators and farm hands? What of the holiday meal with its small table for the young ones, their parents and their parents eating together? What about the grandchild who still wants to hold grandpop’s hand, even though he’s infirm? Life is about more than work, more than vitality, even. Life is not individual only; life is also embeddedness in the lives of others.

 

 

Dogs, Family, Garden

Finished

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Fall                                                                                Falling Leaves Moon

While Kate and Anne worked in the perennial garden, I moved things: the aluminum siding, hoses, plant supports, saws, garden art all into the garage for disposal or eventual packing. We’ve pretty much cleaned up and picked up the outside. With Dehn’s landscaping tomorrow, we can put finished to it for the foreseeable future.

The dogs enjoyed having us outside all day. They’re worn out and sound asleep, snoring away. So is Kate. Me, more of a night owl, not so much.

Family, Garden, Our Land and Home, Weather +Climate

A Family Effort

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Fall                                                                                Falling Leaves Moon

IMAG0651Now all but the leeks and egg plants and peppers are done. The egg plants and peppers are trying to get one egg plant (in the case of the egg plant) and a few peppers (in the instance of the peppers) finished before the killing frost. They might make it, maybe not. The leeks I decided to leave in until the day of the chicken leek pie baking, probably Thursday.

Anne and Kate worked hard all day, trimming up the perennial beds and finally weeding the vegetable beds. I can throw down the broadcast tomorrow.

In the mid-40’s all day the weather was perfect. My gardens would look wonderful if vegetables grew well in the 40’s and 50’s. Working outside in those temperatures energizes me. Even though I’m tired now, I feel good about the day. If I’d worked the same length of time in even the mid-70’s with high humidity, I’d not gotten half as much done. I’m a northern guy.

Kate and I look forward to telling our new Colorado neighbors that we came to the Rockies for the milder winters.