• Tag Archives Mary

  • 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

  • The Buddha

    Posted on by Charles 1 Comment

    Lughnasa                                   Full Artemis Moon

    No.  Not that Buddha.  A small, bald, slightly pudgy baby Buddha.  That was what we called my sister when she was still an infant.  Mary had an inscrutable baldness going for her.  Now she lives in the land of the Buddha, the oldest Buddhism of all, Theravada, and has long since shed her Buddha appearance.  She’s traded the robes, or the diapers, of the Buddha for academic regalia, Indiana for Singapore, North America for Asia.

    She’s been over there a while now, a long while, living a good part of her adult life on the Malay Peninsula, first in Kuala Lumpur and now in the Air Conditioned Nation of Singapore, a city state like days of old.

    The life of an ex patriate had no texture, no reality for me until first Mary, then Mark ended up in Southeast Asia, both spending at least two decades there, plus a little.  That left me the only stay at home, still rooted in the Midwest.

    As things go, however, I developed an ongoing interest in Asia art and from that Asian history and, in particular, Chinese philosophy, so we all share a common fascination with the Far East, though mine is more bookish and museum oriented while theirs is everyday life.

    Mary has gone faraway and built a life in a land with lifeways and assumptions often very different from our own.  It’s an impressive achievement and as she nears her 58th birthday I wanted to acknowledge it.  Happy Birthday!  Dr. Sis.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Asia Family 📎and tagged

  • Congratulations, Mary Ellis

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                            Waning Grandchildren Moon

    A big shout out to sister Mary.  She got her degree!  Dr. Mary Ellis.marygetsdegree670 How about that hat.  She owns all that regalia now.  This was in Singapore last week.

    Heard an interesting theory today on Favre’s ankle angst.  Allison’s husband thinks Favre has plans to come back after the first game of the season.  Why?  It’s against New Orleans.  New Orleans is the home team for the Mississippi fan boy.  Who knows?  I do know this.  Favre’s played football for many, many years.  At this point he knows his body very well and he knows/has known the impact of the ankle surgery.  In addition this is a guy who makes split second decisions on the field, about football.  He’s not indecisive.  My guess at this point is that his wife is leaning on him to quit.  He has enough money, a pick-up truck, a dog and a farm.  What more does a country boy need?

    Spoke with a docent who taught political science at U of Wisconsin in Eau Claire.  Neither one of us have a clue what’s going on in this election, either at the state or federal levels.  These are peculiar times in American politics, unlike any I have seen.  Right wing nutjobs in ascendancy within the Republican party.  An African-American President.  A recession that will not die and unemployment that will fall away.  Environmental catastrophes and congress can’t even consider a bill on climate change.  Health care legislation at the Federal level challenged at the state level.  Arizona comes out as a state of anti-immigrant bigots.  A California judge overturns prop 8 in California prohibiting gay marriage, a decision that will almost certainly send this lightning rod issue all the way to the Robert’s Supreme Court.  I know I missed a few things.  Who ever said politics were dull?

    Kate spent the day with her sister Anne going to quilt shops in the southwestern burbs.  She got home about 7:00 and went almost straight to bed.  Exhausting.

    Tomorrow more gardening and maybe bees.  Probably bees.  We’re getting set to order extracting equipment.  That means I gotta keep these lil buggers alive and producing for years to come.  Artemis Hives.


    📂This entry was posted in Asia Commentary on the news Family Politics Sport 📎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

  • 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

  • Ordinary Time

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                      Waxing Wolf Moon

    Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin to attend February Tea Party Convention.  That should be fun.  Seeing these two damsels of the right dancing to the tune of the real wierdos would be entertaining for anyone interested in politics.  I’d watch a 2-minute video just to see them on stage together.  They could discuss hair and glasses and kissing GW.

    Mary left this morning on the 7:38 Northstar headed for the airport.  The strange action of the international date line has her leaving on Monday and arriving home on Wednesday, coming here she left on Tuesday around 6 a.m. and got here Tuesday at 11:00 a.m., something like that.  Both ways the flight involves 21-24 hours.  And I find daylight savings time confusing.  Under any circumstances the air temperature will double when she gets home, perhaps a bit more.

    Ordinary time has slipped back into the house for the moment with family gone and the leftovers much reduced.  I worked on MIA business a bit this morning and will spend some time today getting the Sierra Club legislative committee focused for a December meeting.

    After that I can continue my declutter campaign.  It goes pretty well.  My study has remained clear and I’ve removed several things from it, some in anticipation of the arrival of my Anthro computer desk.  On it will go the Gateway I bought in the summer.  I plan to use it only for art history research and creative writing.


    📂This entry was posted in Art and Culture Family Holidays Politics Writing 📎and tagged

  • Another Quiet Pleasant Valley Sunday

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                   Waxing Wolf Moon

    Da Vikes!  Again.  36-10 over da Bears.  The game had little drama, but a good spread of offensive plays, defensive plays and solid special teams play.  There was a series of downs in the red-zone where penalties created a one-step forward, two-step backward that didn’t look good.  There was, too, a 77 runback by Johnny Knox, but the Bear retreated gradually from there to go away with only a field goal.

    Mary has done some laundry, a task she does not do open as evidenced by her admission that she first tried to start with the dryer.  She heads back tomorrow after a short trip here.  It’s been good to have her here, a quiet time, a wind down from the four years of dissertation work.


    📂This entry was posted in Family Sport 📎and tagged

  • Mary and Joseph (but, no Jesus)

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                        Waxing Wolf Moon                 Thanksgiving

    Joseph and Mary are here.  Mary came in to the train station in Anoka.  It was a very East Coast scene with folks waiting for others in the parking lot, a mist shrouding the street lights.  Joseph’s flight experienced a delay at Milwaukee and didn’t get in until 9:35 p.m.

    Let the cooking begin.


    📂This entry was posted in Family Holidays 📎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