Category Archives: Family

Family, Travel

Expatriate Kin

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Beltane                                       Waxing Planet Moon

Expatriates.  Both my brother (see below) and my sister live the expat life in Southeast Asia, Mary in Singapore and Mark in Bangkok.  I’ve only been over there once, in 2004, for one month, they have both been there over 20 years.  That’s a long time to live in another culture, to live politically disenfranchised from the community in which you work and have your home, to live in a place where the familiar cues of home are either non-existent, weakened or have a different meanings, to live far from the places where you grew up and the people you knew then, including family.

On the other hand it gives you an opportunity without parallel to become a global citizen, to take in the lifeways of persons whose basic assumptions about life are different than your own.  It gives you a chance, if you take it, to get to know yourself much better, for the you that you are stands out in bold relief in places radically different from your own.

It exposes you to the kind of danger Mark experienced over the last few weeks when his host country, a place he lives in because he loves it there, turns feral.  Not only that, the wild citizens set up the zoo right outside his soi.  Scary.

The expat life interests me, but I view it from a distance.  The closest I come to it is the life of a Hoosier in the Gopher State.  Sometimes it can come pretty close to that expat feeling, except I felt like an expat in Indiana, never in Minnesota.  Except when they crank up the music for hockey or start hauling those ice-fishing houses out.  Then, I feel a bit lost.

Family, Politics

Bangkok Dangerous

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Beltane                                                    Waxing Planting Moon

From my brother, Mark Ellis.

He was there:

Dear Charlie, I mailed you a letter today from my neighborhood post office. That sounds very banal. However, it represents the end of the long siege of Bangkok. The Post Office, although it was only about 200 yards from my soi, was in the Red Zone. It was shut for a long time. It was open today, for the first time in a while. It felt very good to go there and mail a letter. I know it sounds simple, but the positive feeling was profound. I walked around to see all the destruction yesterday. Charlie, it was very senseless. These Reds burned a TV station on Rama 4. They burned and attacked the ground floor of the Thai Stock Exchange on Soi Asoke. They destroyed the Metropolitan Electrical Office on Rama 4,in Klong Toey. They destroyed several Bangkok Bank branches on Rama 4. They destroyed a Tesco-Lotus shop. They destroyed and looted a 7-11. They hit another bank on Rama 4. I went to Silom, which looked okay. I went back up Rajadamrai. Apparently, bombs were found near Rajadamri Station, the morning I walked by it. I took a left, past the destroyed Zen Department store. It looked like a bomb had gone off there. I walked up Rama 1. Siam Square’s shops were burned down. I walked up to Victory Monument. Center One, a shopping center and Watson’s was totally destroyed. I walked up to Din Daeng intersection. The Police box was burned down. Backhoes were burned. Electrical junction boxes were destroyed.  A bank had been set afire on Ratchaparop Road. There were burn marks in the road where tires had been burnt. I walked up Ratchaparop. I took a left at Makkasan and walked home. Charlie, it was totally senseless violence. I am afraid that CNN and BBC ‘s coverage was not balanced. The Red shirts flipped out. They are a leaderless mob. Further, provinical halls were burned down in: Ubon Ratachatani, Mukdahan, and Khon Kaen, all in Isan. Some trucks were burned in Chaing Mai. It was totally unreal. I feel sorry for the poor peasants who died supporting Thaksin. The Isan people are really nice. Some of them have been terribly mislead. They do not represent all the peole of Isan or Chaing Mai. I hope this violence stops. Regards,Mark

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Friends, Humanities, US History

Baby boomers, angels or devils?

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Beltane                                           Waxing Planting Moon

Baby boomers, angels or devils?  As part of the bleeding edge of the boomer generation, born in 1947, and step-parent to a Gen-Xer who often articulated his frustration with us all, I have had the full boomer experience plus listened to and read many critiques:  self-involved, cowards, greedy, idealistic (in a pejorative sense), hypocritical.  You might summarize it by this phrase:  Not the Greatest Generation.

Were there the yuppies who only provided the then current manifestation of suburban oxford cloth striving?  Of course.  Were their Vietnam War era protesters who were cowards?  Sure.  Did many who critiqued Emerson’s notion of the establishment end up part of it and indistinguishable from those there before them? Had to be.  I’m sure if we did a generational breakdown of the folks involved in the latest banking scandals we would find many boomers among them.  Greedy?  Hell, yeah. Clinton and Bush were our Boomer presidents.  Uh oh.  Did many boomers have dreams of a back to the land paradise that devolved into something much less?  Oh, yes.  I had the Peaceable Kingdom, for example.

All these critiques are valid.  And they would be valid for any generation.  They only express the ongoing critique of American culture as materialist.  It is a critique based in fact.

History will be kinder to the Baby Boomers than the keyhole history used to validate sweeping criticisms.  Why?  Because as a generation we sacrificed ourselves and our lives over and over again.  We provided allies to and were a direct part of the Civil Rights struggle.  When our country interfered in a millennia old civil war in Southeast Asia, using as a rationale a bankrupt understanding of communism, we stood against it.  When women began to push back against the leftists of the day and the whole patriarchal culture, we again provided allies and were a direct part of the struggle.  While many of us blended back into the cultural establishment we had critiqued, which is no surprise, many of us stayed out.  We joined the Peace Corps.  We worked in community organizing, community based economic development, community health clinics.  We stood in solidarity with working people and were working people.  We supported the poor and were poor.

We put our own beliefs and our own received values again and again into the alembic of radical critique.  We changed our hearts, transvaluated our values and moved on to the next struggle.  Yes, we were then and are now guilty of idealism, of believing we need a more just, verdant and peaceful world, as the NPR sponsor says.  Our lives have not been easy, they have often been painful estranged lives, wandering from one inner journey to another, searching always searching, traveling this ancientrail, then another.  This is the stuff of epochal change, of shifting the zeitgeist.

Has that change always gone in the direction we intended or hoped?  Never does.  Has much of the change we sought produced the conservation reaction we saw in Reagan, the Moral Majority, the Christian Right?  Yes, but always remember Alinsky, the action is in the reaction.  The view of history is long.  Once the reactions have settled down, as they may be beginning to now, it will become more obvious that baby boomers paid with the coin of their own lives to gain both victories and defeats.

We rode and shaped a shift from a manufacturing based economy to a knowledge based economy, from a white majoritarian male world to a world with an appreciation for difference, a world in which women have surged ahead, a world in which war no longer stands for glory and is questioned at every turn,  a world in which the world matters.  These are not bad things.  They are good things.  Very good things.

Were we responsible for them?  No.  Did we act as the agents of the change? Yes, we did.  We shaped and were shaped by the chaotic, violent, bigoted world into which we were born.  When the last boomer is dead, our legacy will be a different set of problems from the ones we inherited.  That’s the way culture and history works.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Family

The I Get Big and Strong Story

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Beltane                                    Waxing Planting Moon

In this month’s Atlantic an article investigates teen-age girls and the hook-up culture they now must navigate.   Written by the daughter of an early feminist the article identifies the reason girls swim in this often self-destructive ocean is the Boyfriend Story.  Teen girls today, as teen girls yesterday and of years ago, want to find a real, true, pure love–the Boyfriend Story.  Never having been a teen-age girl and not having raised a daughter, I don’t feel qualified to assess the accuracy of the author’s premise.

It did get me to wondering though.  What’s the story that propels teen-age boys?  It’s not the Girlfriend Story, I know that much for sure.  It might be the I Get Big and Strong Story.  In this story the hero does not seek real, true, pure love, but the vehicle for becoming a man, usually a career focused drive, different in substance and in direction than the Boyfriend Story, but a story that puts teen-age boys on life’s highway like deer in front of an oncoming 18-wheeler just as surely as the Boyfriend Story puts girls on the same highway, facing down the same oncoming truck, just one carrying a different load.

I remember high school, hoping good grades would make the I Get Big and Strong story happen for me.  If that wasn’t it, maybe it would be acting.  I did Our Town and had to learn to walk like an adult.  If neither of those worked out, it could be leadership.  The class president had to amount to something, didn’t he?

The I Get Big and Strong story is a not we story, it is an I story.  As the teen-age girl runs up on the shoals in search of a partner, the teen-age boy hits the rocks alone while fending off the competition, making himself bigger, faster, stronger, smarter, cleverer.

What do you think?  What is the boy’s equivalent of the Boyfriend Story?

Dogs, Family, Humanities, Politics

In 80 Degree Weather You’d Do It, Too. If you fit.

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Beltane                              Waxing Planting Moon

Vega the wonder dog continues a puppy habit.vegainwater Even though she’s quite a bit bigger now she can make herself small enough to fit in the rubber water bowl.  This means that when I fill it up, it soon empties.  I have to go buy a smaller bowl, one she can’t use for cooling off.

In other dog related news I bought two sprinkler heads to replace the ones purloined by either Vega or Rigel.  They have a high degree of energy and intelligence.  That makes them inquisitive and with dogs this size that means destructive.

I spent the morning on Ovid, translating verses of the Metamorphoses, 11-15.  This is a slow process for me because I have to look up each word, discern which of the possible words it probably is, determine its possible declension or conjugation, then go back and try to put all this together in an intelligible English line.  Latin poetic conventions make this difficult since words that below together are sometime split apart by as much as a verse.  Also, Ovid, like Shakespeare loved neologisms so sometimes the word he’s used is the only time it was ever used in Latin.

Don’t get the wrong impression though.  When I finished this morning, I whistled and sang, a sure sign I feel good about what I’ve just done.   It’s a fascinating process for me.

Kate has a big month taking shape.  She leaves on Tuesday for San Francisco and two continuing medical education conferences which will take until June 6th.  On June 30th she has hip surgery.  She needs the surgery, her hip is painful for her and painful for me to watch.

The violence in Bangkok continues and some of it happens right outside my brother’s soi, a sort of side street with no exit that is peculiar to Bangkok’s urban design.

Final Sierra Club legislative meeting for the 2010 session tonight.  There will probably be work upcoming related to next year’s session, but for the near term future, that work will come to a close.  No more weekly meetings.  Happy hour after this meeting.

Family, Friends, GeekWorld

Our Servants

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Beltane                                        Waxing Planting Moon

A business meeting took most of the morning.  Our new pull behind wagon for the lawn tractor has come in and I need to go pick it up.  Also, I have to purchase two sprinkler heads, both to replace ones dug up and removed by Rigel.  She does not like the sound of that water in the pipes.  Of course, I also have to solve the problem at its source, the irrigation timing itself.

Yesterday there was no power at all to the wall to which the irrigation clock connects, therefore, no irrigation.  After a number of moves, a tripped GFI switch on the west wall of the garage turned out to be the  culprit.

I often marvel at the number of electro-mechanical servants we have.  The irrigation clock controls twelve different zones allowing us to water different sections of our property at different times and with amounts appropriate to the area.  If we need to go somewhere, we hope in a metal cabin, turn a switch and an internal combustion system comes to life to move us along on our journey.

When we have food that needs long term storage, we put it in a metal box that provides temperature cold enough to keep it frozen.  Food that doesn’t need that level of refrigeration go into either our upstairs or downstairs refrigerator.  Though both cooking devices we have in the kitchen run with gas, if we need an even heat we can use the convection feature in the oven, or we can use the toaster oven.  The microwave cooks foods in a manner inconceivable when I was a boy.  A blender and food-processer save long bouts of stirring with spoons or paddles while an electric mixer will kneed dough and work with flour.  There is, of course, the dishwasher as well.

When we want entertainment, we turn on one of the hd tv’s which receive their programming through a cable attached to our house.  The same cable brings in broad-band internet service which connects our three home computers to the world–quite literally.  These computers allow us to send mail, buy almost any retail product, research all manner of topics, read the news, even watch movies and tv shows if we were so inclined.

That’s not all.  If we want to talk directly to friends or family near or faraway, we can pick up a small phone, independent of any lines at all and call toll free, all amazing from the reference point of my childhood.

In addition of course we have the lights powered by electricity in every room of our home and in outlying sheds as well.

Now, go back over this list and imagine the number of servants it would take to water the property with the kind of precision and control I achieve by pushing a few buttons.  Think of all the work in the kitchen that would require either a cook or a stay at home parent.  The internet and cable tv afford us opportunities that were simply not available in my childhood, global reach and multiple forms of entertainment–at home.

Staying connected with friends and family has become casual, not requiring long trips or extended conversations via letter.

Then there’s the matter of all those candles.  Replaced by light switches.

And, oh yeah, how could I forget in Minnesota:  the furnace and the air conditioner.

This is, truly, an age of miracles.  But, the miracles come at a cost, don’t they?

Art and Culture, Family, Great Work, Politics

A Gray Monday

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Beltane                                Waning Flower Moon

Business meeting.  Over to a flooring store to schedule the replacement of carpet in the small bedroom that will become Kate’s long-arm quilting room.  Lunch at Chili’s where the music was so loud I could barely hear myself think, literally.  When my one ear gets crammed full of noise, I find processing  thought difficult. Would be a good hell for me.  Lots of interesting conversation happening next to a loud waterfall.

Grocery store, too.  I’ve done regular, that is weekly, grocery shopping since seminary days when I used to cook for the whole floor of students.  Most of the time I’ve enjoyed it, something about being able to make choices and the diversity of a supermarket.  These days though I’ve begun to find it a nuisance, a repetitive task with little to commend it.  Maybe that will change, or perhaps I’ll be able to reframe it.

How bout that world out there, eh?  Oil pumping into the Gulf where it has begun to tar birds, clog up the wetlands and ruin shrimping and oyster farming.  Volcanoes in Iceland wrecking havoc with airplanes.  Snow in Minnesota in May.  A frost, too.  Gov. Pawlenty’s cruel cuts in the state’s budget overturned by our Supreme Court–with two weeks left in the legislative session.  Big fun at the capitol.  Enough snow on the East Coast over the last winter to confuse the debate in the Senate over a climate bill.   Not to mention the usual run of human misery and suffering.

I’m impressed right now with a political approach that takes into account particulars, that is individual suffering, the Gulf shrimp, the passengers and airlines troubled by the Icelandic ash plumes while acknowledging the need for universal abstractions like equality, justice, human rights.  I’m impressed with this approach because it doesn’t exist.   More on this at another point.

Art and Culture, Family, Health, Humanities, Letters

Transformations

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Beltane                                       Waning Flower Moon

A calmer day today.  After the bee work I planted bok choy and monkshood, finished raking the potato patch level, dead-headed tulips and daffodils.  A productive day.  The stuff I protected last night survived the frost well, though some of the coleus got nipped a bit the night before and I forgot three coleus plants in the park.  They don’t look great, but I think they’ll survive.

I said the other chapter 14 in Wheelock was half way through the book.  Not quite.  Chapter 20 is halfway.  It’s still a steep learning curve and that’s what I like.  Even the 9 verses of the Metamorphoses I’ve translated have already given me a deeper appreciation for the whole project Ovid set himself.  He correlates the painful and often vindictive transformations he records in the book with the kind of transformations the Gods have made to the whole of creation.  A dark thesis.

Kate’s hip is giving her fits.  I’m really glad she has the surgery scheduled for June 30th.  Won’t come too soon.

Aging, Family, Holidays, Memories

Mom

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Beltane                              Waning Flower Moon

Already down to 33.  Bound to head lower.  Glad I covered all the tender plants.

Mother’s day has little resonance for me.  Mom has been dead now for almost 46 years, meaning she’s been dead as long as she was alive.  I passed her 17 years ago.  It feels strange to have lived into areas of life which my mother never experienced:  near retirement age, grandkids, dealing with the inevitable losses of friends and loved ones other than your parents.

It’s not that I didn’t love my mom.  I did.  It’s just that home faded away for me the year after she died.  I went off to college, then got involved in the political radicalism of the 1960’s and became estranged from Dad.  In essence that meant I became estranged from Alexandria, Indiana, too.  I grew up there from age 1 and a half on, experiencing those magical years of pre-teen life when the world has not much larger compass than your street, your friends, your parents, but after age 18 I returned only very occasionally, for ten years, not at all.

Of course, Mom was important in my life.  She loved me and believed in me.  She and my aunt Virginia nursed me back to health after a serious bout with polio.

What we remember and what actually influenced us, of course, are not always (ever?) true to the lived experience, but they are true for our psychic life and I have a particular memory of Mom that was formative.  One year a garden spider built a web over the window in our kitchen, the window next to the kitchen table where we ate breakfast.  All spring and summer Mom and I watched that spider, watched her repair the web, spin up her prey, eat them.  What I recall most from that was the sense of wonder, of awe that came off Mom in gentle waves.  She also took insects outside in a kleenex and let them go.  I do, too.

I also remember times when she took to me an ice-cream parlor when I got straight A’s on my report card, which was all the time so I got a lot of ice cream, but more than that, I had the attention and time with Mom.  I was close to her side of the family, the Keatons, growing up and have continued my close connection with them over the years.  In part it was my way of staying connected to Mom, to her values and to the people and places that shaped her.

But Mother’s Day?  Nope.  Doesn’t work for me.  Too much Hallmark, too little real sentiment.

Art and Culture, Family

A Man of Exile, A Poet of Human Dignity

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Beltane                                          Waning Flower Moon

The first hours of today I put together an ArtRemix public tour for this Friday.  The learning curve is still steep, but I’m beginning to get a feel for contemporary art.  The Until Now show has many fine pieces, but the ArtRemix showcases genuine leaders among contemporary artists:  Kehinde Wiley, Yinka Shonibare, Sharon Core, Meyer Waisman, Ai Weiwei, Nam Paik to name a few.  Getting my head and heart around this new work has been a lot of fun.

Kate and I had a business meeting, planning for her surgery and getting ready for her trip to San Francisco at the end of May.

After that I had a nap, then drove into the MIA for a lecture by Siah Armajani.  He’s a local artist, having lived here since the early 1960’s, but his reputation is global.  A former philosophy student and teacher as a well an artist and architect, he spoke today of his journey as an artist:  “From 1968 to 2000 my art was functional, available, public and open…It is best typified by the Whitney Bridge for the Walker Art Institute.  After 2000 my art became forward, closed, non-available and personal.”  Why?  He said that in the early years he tried to hid his emotions, feelings, his angst and political opinions.  He wanted to be anonymous.  After 2000 he wanted to show his feelings, his emotion, his political positions and his angst.  The work best typifying that stage of his work, in his opinion, is his piece in the Until Now show.  It is an homage to Giacometti and Theodore Adorno.  This is the last of this work, rooms, and he will begin soon to work on his next project, tombs.  (this work is similar in conception to his work in the Until Now show.)

He’s funny, brilliant, creative and a bit sad.  He wore a tweed jacket over a plain black shirt, black slacks.  I happened to park behind him and saw him get out of his black Audi sedan.  There’s more to say about him, but I’ll reserve that for later.

The gallery in which his installation sits has two other very powerful pieces.  One a video installation of women walking through a wall of water and the other a sort of reliquary to a living Indian poet, Gieve Patel.  Here’s the first line of a few printed out in this work:  We shall not find a tragic end beyond the mountains where the ancient gods are buried.  I believe that, too.