• Tag Archives Mark

  • Feeling the Burn

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                        New Bee Hiving Moon

    As the day draws to a close, many of the matters seem to have come to some resolution.  My brother will be coming here to live with us for awhile.  We’ll see what he needs when he gets here.

    I’ve figured out a way to calm the doggy waters with crating two dogs, letting the others in or out, then crating the others.  Sort of a shell game, but it does the trick and has prevented any more teeth baring episodes.  We’ll see how it works tomorrow.

    After the episode where I got bit, my adrenalin was so high I had to sit for a while to calm my body back down.  I haven’t been that far into fight or flight for a long time.

    Tai Chi has begun to burn.  My thighs.  The lesson tonight, Guard Left, involves co-ordinating several parts of the body and some of my body parts resisted the lesson.  I’ll get it eventually.  I’ve needed, for some time, a physical discipline, one beyond the resistance and aerobic work I do just to stay healthy.  Tai Chi will teach me, I can see now, better balance, flexibility, body awareness and grace.

    The old Burch pharmacy at Hennepin and Franklin in Minneapolis is empty now with Art Smart art work by kids and adults hanging in the windows that used to advertise drugs and cosmetics.  Over the pharmacy is a warren of rooms, offices for the Nancy Hauser Dance Studio, another for another dance company, an odd shaped room with various couches and chairs, some comfy, some designy, a threadbare carpet, windows with no blinds and a small digital sign overlooking Hennepin.

    There is a dance floor, made of a composite material screwed to the floor in 4 X 8 panels.  It has a pinkish pastel pearl cast and serves the two dance groups, a Karate club and the The Great River Tai Chi school.  Tonight as we practiced a dance rehearsal was underway across the hall, so music with a big beat kept intervening with my Taoist serenity.

    This is the city at its finest.  A decrepit building put to good use, providing creative space and space for strangers to meet and try out new activities.  I’m reading a book about cities now and it wants, so far, to celebrate cities for just this, people jostling up against one another, offering their passions to others, ideas sparking and new institutions being born as old ones die.

    When I walked out past the Lowry Hill Liquor store and saw the lights of downtown and felt the Walker just blocks away, I agreed.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Asia Dogs Health 📎and tagged

  • Then Bang, Things Happen

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                               New (Bee Hiving) Moon

    You know how things go along for a long time and nothing happens, then bang, things happen?  Sollie and Rigel got into it again and in breaking them up Rigel bit me.  Not bad, a scrape really, but it bled, around and below the right side of my right knee.  I had been using the knee to separate the two.  This is out of hand at the moment and I’m not sure what to do next.

    In addition I have a family member in crisis, a faraway crisis, so it’s difficult to tell what’s exactly going on.  That means trying to do my part from 12,000 miles away.  My family, and I may have not mentioned it here before, my mother’s family to be precise, has a history of bi-polar disorder.  One of my Aunts was hospitalized most of her life, another for several years and a third in essence starved herself.  My mother never showed signs, but she died at age 46.  Although afflicted from time to time with melancholy, I’ve never manifested the bi-polar symptoms, nor, at least up until now, has either my brother or my sister.  That’s not to say that we haven’t had struggles of various sorts, the kinds brought on by life, but deep depression, no.

    This may be a referented depression; that is, one occasioned by a definite external circumstance, but it’s so difficult to say without being there.  And even then…

    When I was in analysis, with a Jungian, we discussed nuclear families and John, my analyst, said, “You have an atomized family.”  It was true.  After my mother died, our lives began to spin apart from each other.  I left home first and eventually moved to Minnesota.  Mary next, ending up after a stint teaching at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, in first Kuala Lumpur, then Singapore, where she has lived now for many years.

    Last of all Mark left home and moved first to San Francisco, then in 1988 took off on a round the world trip.  After crossing Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railway, working on a kibbutz in Israel and harvesting olives in Turkey, he found his way to Southeast Asia, too.  Bangkok.  He has been there ever since, more or less, teaching English as a second language.  We have ended up far apart, physically, and distance imposes its own psychological barriers.  It’s just not as easy to see each other, help each other.

    Now that both Mom and Dad are dead, we have our own worlds, Mary at the National University of Singapore, me here in Andover and Mark in Bangkok.  Once in a while Mary comes home, I’ve been over there once, but it’s difficult to stay really connected.

    Now something is wrong.  And I’m not sure what to do in that case either.


    📂This entry was posted in Dogs Family 📎and tagged

  • Wanderers

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Winter                                                                  New Moon of the Cold Month

    My brother, Mark, is a traveler, a wanderer, a planet.  He can’t sit still, a powerful urge to move comes over him, an urge with plenty of family reinforcement.  Dad took to the road all the time, as often as he could, as long as he could, even if it was to run down the story of a river that went underground only to pop up somewhere else.  He hunted down the ordinary extraordinary.  Mark takes the sensibility a step further.

    He has crossed Russia on the trans-siberian railway, picked olives in Turkey and worked on a kibbutz in Israel.  When he finally hit Southeast Asia, over twenty years ago, something clicked.  This was a place he could use as a base.  And he does.  Teaching English in Bangkok, but setting out for journeys into Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam.  He reminds me of the writers who took off on tramp steamers to see the world.  Now, he’s antsy again, wanting to move, needing to move.  Who knows where he’ll go next?  He doesn’t.

    Mary, my sister, travels a lot, too:  Tibet, India, Dubai, the Caribbean, England, Greece, Malaysia, Indonesia.  She, too, has a base in Southeast Asia, Singapore, or Asia Lite as she likes to call it.  She teaches, too, at the National Institute of Education, Singapore.

    They both have lives that are very exotic compared to Andover, Minnesota.  I’m glad to have their vicarious adventures in my life.


    📂This entry was posted in Family Travel 📎and tagged

  • Expatriate Kin

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    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.


    📂This entry was posted in Family Travel 📎and tagged

  • Bangkok Dangerous

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    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


    📂This entry was posted in Family Politics 📎and tagged

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

    Posted on by Charles 3 Comments

    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.


    📂This entry was posted in Dogs Family Humanities Politics 📎and tagged

  • The Colosseum of the Soul

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                                Waning Wild Moon

    Fake Nostalgia for a Pre-Therapy Age Past

    “I can tell you one thing,” he announced, as I recall. “Back in my day, you didn’t have young kids going around talking to shrinks, yakking about their fee-ee-ee-lings, getting all doped up on medications.”

    This article in the March 8th NYT made me think, or better, recall.

    In early October of 1964 my family was intact:  Mom, Dad, Mary, Mark and me.  We had extended family on both sides that we saw regularly, Mom’s more so because she was Indiana born and Dad’s less so because of his Oklahoma origins.  After my bout with polio when I was a year and a half, our lives had settled into a usual routine of those years, the late 50’s and early 60’s.

    Mom stayed home, doing volunteer work for the church and being available to us, the kids.  She did occasional substitute teaching, but it was rare.  Mary and I moved our way through our small town school system where we were known and knew everyone else at least by sight. Mark was still at home.   Summers were long idylls of bike riding, game playing and lazy reading.  Dad worked at the newspaper, coming home with ad layouts from time to time, marking them up with a ruler and a thick pencil.

    Of course our lives had the usual family dramas, the deaths of grandparents, an aunt’s long term confinement in a mental health facility, but for the most part things were calm, normal.

    In late October of 1964 my 46 year old mother was dead and our lives would never again be normal.  Grief has its own rules, its own storm sewers of emotion and they track in and out, colliding with the needs and fears of others.  Our small family suffered and suffered a lot, both from the grief, the natural grief that follows an untimely death of a parent, Mom, and the sudden compression of the family into a new, undefined life, a life defined by loss and uncertainty.

    Life happens as it does and we relate to the changes as best we can.  That was true then, true long ago in the past and will be true in the future.  I have wondered though what our lives, our mutual lives, the lives of the survivors in our family might have been like if we had access to even the most basic of therapeutic assistance.  If we could have, if I could have, for I can’t speak for Mary, Mark and Dad, grieved Mom’s loss and then moved on with my life, rather than heading toward a ten to fifteen year period where emotional ups and downs, too much drinking, too much smoking, too little in the way of sound relationships eventually forced me to do what I was unable to do in those horrible months following her death.

    This is not a regret, for it is not what happened, rather it is a what if.  It is a what if informed now by many, many years of therapy, therapy that helped me see myself as I really am, accept myself and my feet of clay, feet not so different from everyone else’s. Analysis, Jungian analysis, that in the end gave me a place to stand that was my own, not a place over against the grief and the abandonment of those years.  Analysis that afforded me a chance to live into my own Self, live my own life and find, now, in my 60’s, a way of life that has a measure of peace and more than a measure of contentment and happiness.

    I agree with the author of the article referenced in the beginning.  It was not a better time, those pre-therapy years.


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality Family Memories 📎and tagged

  • First Monday Woollies

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                   Full Dark Moon

    When I left for the first Monday Woolly dinner, the moon hung just above the tree line, silver and luminous.  As I returned, it had retreated to a high point, moving away from the horizon toward the open sky.  There are so many nights when the moon outdoes the best human artists can do, so many nights when the moon joins with planets, other solar system neighbors, to create a scene of light against the darkness of space, and we stand feet on the ground, looking up from our home into the vastness from which Earth came and to which it shall return.

    Mark Odegard has a job with the river.  He came into Christos tonight wearing a sweatshirt with the US Army Corps of Engineers logo, the mark of his employer at Lock and Dam #1, a spot from which he watches the economy swing through barge traffic, for example regular 2 a.m. barges loaded with steel filings from a company upriver in Fridley have begun to pass through his lock headed for the smelters in St. Louis and New Orleans.  The Great Recession had suppressed steel sales so the filings had piled up in Fridley, the filings came in but none went out, finally though, just in the last couple of weeks the price of steel has begun to go up and now the rush is on to move the filings before the river freezes and the locks become unusable until spring.

    This is shift work and Mark rotates through days, evenings and nights every 9 days, 7 days on and 2 off, his body clock taking a beating, so much of one that he has come to know the pleasures of the couch, his creative urge quieted by the shifting hormones his body deploys in the interest of managing his unusual sleep cycles.

    Stefan comes with news of children’s woes.  Taylor in Hollywood.  Melina in frat houses at the University of Minnesota.  Frank says Mary has eased into her retirement and spoke of his grandson who has continued to attend school, caddy and play hockey while undergoing chemotherapy and radiation for sarcoma.  Warren tells the unbelievable story about which he will write more of the dairy farmer in Clearwater County who was arrested and charged with false imprisonment for using a chain to restrain his wife, a victim of Alzheimers.  Scott’s daughter is about to give birth, perhaps not only to a baby, but to a new life as a parent, a changed life from her recent past.

    On my account the tale was of Kate, of her recovery, the toughness of this Norwegian I love and the gradual return to a daily routine, walker and cane at at the ready, but moving unaided with surprising agility.

    When we meet, we Woolly Mammoths, a dense net of past and present walks into the room and sits down, the lives of not only ourselves, but of our families and our friends, their troubles and their delights, our worries and our loves, these times together transform us from solitary males, culled out from the herd, into members of a hardy clan able to stand shoulder to shoulder, backs to the north wind, protecting the little tusks from the cold.


    📂This entry was posted in Woolly Mammoths 📎and tagged

  • A Yellow Moon

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                        Waxing Green Corn Moon

    A yellowed moon hung in the sky tonight, almost full.  It made the drive back in from Minneapolis a delight as it sailed in and out of view.

    In tonight for the Land Use and Transportation Committee meeting.  What a dynamic group!  They are still fighting the Stillwater Bridge issue after all these years.  They also have transit oriented development on their agenda as well as a new issue called Complete Streets.  In essence Complete Streets wants street planning to have all users in mind (pedestrians, bicyclists, cars and the handicapped in particular)

    A crisp meeting that ran on time.

    Thunder has begun to roll in so I’m going to have shut down soon.  After the Sierra Club meeting, I drove over to the Black Forest where the Woolly’s first monday meeting had just begun to wind down.  I saw Mark and Frank and Stefan before they left.  Warren and Scott stayed and we talked about Moon, Scott’s 95 year old Cantonese mother-in-law who lives with them.  She’s having a show of her calligraphy and painting at the Marsh.  It goes up on August 16th.  There will also be a book of her work available at the show.  Amazing.

    China tour tomorrow for 7-8th graders.  I added a tour this Friday of Chilean students connected with St. Johns who want a tour of American art.


    📂This entry was posted in Great Work Politics Weather +Climate Woolly Mammoths 📎and tagged

  • Woollys, Grandkids

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                     Waxing Summer Moon

    Tomorrow we get the full on Summer Moon.  We’ll have a warm, but not hot night with a brilliant satellite.  No good for astronomy, but great for moon viewing, a favorite activity among the Japanese.

    Woolly’s met tonight at the Black Forest.  Mark, Stefan, Bill, Tom, Frank and myself showed up.  Mark got the dam site job.  He reports next Monday morning to Lock and Dam #1, the first official lock on the Mississippi River.  The job runs until the river ices over and the barges cannot come.  Stefan’s been giving himself fits over his children.  A potential liability of parenthood.

    I showed off the Kindle.  I’m a fan.

    Jon, Jen, Ruth and Gabe are back from a weekend in Chicago.  There was a Bandel family reunion with rooms at the Doubletree and visits to Grandma and Grandpa, Ruth and Gabe’s great-grandparents.  They are back here for four days, then they strike out for home in Denver.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Family GeekWorld Great Wheel Woolly Mammoths 📎and tagged