Beltane and the Summer Moon
Sunday gratefuls: Mary. BJ and Sarah. Ruth and Gabe. Ivory and Ruby. Dependable transportation. Up the hill, down the hill. Rapid Transit Denver. Brown Machne Yehuda hotel, Jerusalem. Sadot hotel, Tel Aviv. My son’s and daughter-in-law’s big apartment. Murdoch. Korea. Israel. Water. Ode and the mushroom spores. Luke and Leo.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: The Wide World
One brief shining: To have a brother and a sister in far away places like Hafr, Saudi Arabia and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia extends my life into other cultures at an intimate, everyday level as does a son and daughter-in-law in Korea and trips for myself to Korea and to Israel, we are many we are one.
Fathers. Yes. We all have one so… Even if it is a Hallmark moment it’s a legitimate celebration. Unless you think the oh so ordinary, so mundane fact of biology is ho hum. But it’s not. Not really. Yes, we all have fathers. But none of us have the same fathers. Not even siblings. Each relationship between father and child has its own unique stamp created by gender, timing in the child’s life and the father’s life, timing in the zeitgeist, location on Earth, cultural and linguistic and genetic peculiarities.
My father Curtis and I for example. Dad’s own father, Elmo, led a chaotic here and gone again sort of life finally disappearing into the wilds of 1920’s California, leaving Dad and his siblings in the care of Jennie Spitler, his mom, and Dr. Jonas Spitler, his grandfather. Not great training for the role.
Dad went to Oklahoma State University and graduated with a degree in journalism, his profession for his lifetime. After brief jobs in Duncan and Watonga, Oklahoma, the family-Dad, Mom, and me-moved to Alexandria, Indiana where he remained for the rest of his life.
He stayed true to his family. Always providing. Always working. Not following Elmo’s scoundrel pattern. Props to him. He also followed the strict upbringing he had under his grandfather, a country doctor and farmer within the German heritage. In that sense the Spitler side of our family with Hessian mercenary soldiers as its starting point in revolutionary America influenced us much more than the Welsh and Irish Ellises.
That strict Germanic sensibility fell afoul of the 1960’s for both of us. He was for me a distant father emotionally unavailable and only mildly engaged in my life until the death of our mother at my age 17. Then we stumbled through an uneasy closeness occasioned by mom’s disappearance from our lives. It was not well done on either one of our parts.
We parted abruptly in 1968 when he demanded I cut my hair and I said no. And he said cut your hair or leave. And I left. Both of us stubborn and unyielding.
I wish now that we had healed that rupture in our lives but we never really did. I saw him from time to time, but we never established an adult father and son relationship.
He wrote well, worked hard, and hung in there for all of us. Given his particular circumstances a difficult but real advance generationally. Props to him again.