Archive for October, 2010

it wants to be

Posted: October 26, 2010 in give
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In grade school I had friends who were alcoholics.  Swede was one. He was a really big man, and  he always wore bib overalls and couldn’t stay sober  long.  I never thought of him as in any way scary or weird or even much different from me.  I’d hear from my dad that he or some of the others were drunk again or gone or back but I really only ever saw him at our camp, under the supervision of my dad, doing his program, trying to recover, working, taking a moment to talk to me.

Swede had a family, but it wasn’t like mine. They didn’t want to see him. You can do enough to your family often enough that after a while they are done with you. After that, other people may come to believe in you and to care for you but not your family anymore. The bridges get burned, as they say, and there is no way back, only forward, without them.

The alcoholics were like big kids to me,  One of them taught  me my first chords on the guitar, C, F and G.   Yesterday I played the guitar after lunch. I still play C, F and G although now I’m much more fond of C2, F2 and G2 thrown in here or there for a bit of dissonance. And I much prefer songs in D or E with lots of partial chords and minors and 4ths and 2nds and a few notes of the melody line here or there. But an alcholoic  gave me my start and it now occurs to me that he is still a part of me when I play, my link to him through a few chords that keep coming back as a part of the different songs I play.

When I was older my dad said something to me that got me going. He said, “The men I work with won’t become middle-class. They aren’t going to integrate back into society, get jobs, have families again, go to a middle-class church. But we still try to help them. They are human beings, and they deserved to be  cared for even if they never change.”

I’ve given this some thought. I wonder if sometimes “good” people help “bad” people thinking  that the bad people will become good people so  that the good people will feel good about what they have done to reform the bad people.  Maybe, but this seems like it might be a recipe for giving up, when the helping doesn’t work. And it seems a bit self-interested. Mostly, however, it’s a messed up way of thinking because there aren’t really good and bad people, just people who all have both the good and bad working pretty hard in them and on them.

I’m not so much for giving up on anyone anymore,  but I wonder if I’m much for helping either. Exceptions do arise.

This morning I found a three-foot long stick pole lying on the floor in my bedroom with six-inch piece of white ribbon attached. My cats drug it into the room in the night.

On the floor I also found a broken off two foot piece of ribbon. I knew what belonged with what, and so I tied the two foot piece of ribbon to the six-inch piece of ribbon and to the end of that I tied the receipt we got from eating chicken wings at Pat and Oscars last night.

So this morning we played, and the white Pat and Oscar’s receipt zoomed around the room, zipping through the air and making sudden turns, popping at the end of the ribbon, and the cat tails whipped through the air, and I laughed as the wild fur flew.

It’s good to give the cats what they want and need because it’s what I want and need too. Megan was tired afterward and lay on her back, liked beached seal, with her black legs sticking straight up in the air and the white tips of her paws looking gloved and elegant. Then she got up, picked up the receipt from the floor and carried it in her teeth to me. “More fun, please.”

Whatever is  separated or incomplete needs to be put back together. Space “wants,” as the architects are given to say, to become,  something. The pieces beg, to the observant mind, to fit together.

There are hard times.  60 Minutes reported the other night that if you count the unemployed and those who have quit looking for work and those who have had their hours cut, the percent in California is around 22%. That’s a lot of people. People who were pulling down big bucks a few years ago are going to soup kitchens to eat. We Americans now live in the presence of absence. It seems only proper to tie things back together, to fix what is at hand, to make an effort to offer something, more than once.

The other day at Costco I picked up a twenty-five pound bag of rice and threw it in my cart. I found it lying at the edge of one of the wide isles of the store, on a pallet with a bunch of other bags just like it. That’s a lot of rice. I put it in the back of my car and took it down to the food pantry at my church.  It will go back out of the food room repackaged, in smaller bags, to go into the homes of people who don’t have jobs or don’t make enough money at their jobs to have enough to eat. The rice from Costco “wants” to belong in the mouths of the people with not enough to eat.

The other day a woman came by the office and asked if I would help her with the rent for the apartment where her family lived.  She needed $150 to complete the payment. If they didn’t pay, they might have to move, to something smaller or perhaps back to New York. The money was in one of my bank accounts, and more than that.  In the past, I have only made my own house payments from my bank account. But something different seemed to me like the thing to do, to put two things together, her payment and my money,  and so I made the arrangements, and she took a cashier’s check to her property manager the next day.

For lunch today I bought a dark green pepper in the market and brought it home. I cut the top off, put it in a pan and gently cooked it until it blackened in a few spots and softened nicely. I ate it with a left over Mexican casserole that my wife had made a few days ago. The pepper was mildly hot, perfectly soft, slightly bitter with that delicious green pepper essence, a capsaicin marvel. I loved the way the cooked pepper squished between my teeth and the way the bitter, hot green goop bit at my tongue. It’s so natural, such a given for me, that I plan and shop and cook  and consume what I want.

In the afternoon I drove down to the bowling alley to pick up my daughter Roz and her friend Steve.  I didn’t want to do this, but it wanted to be done and so I did it. Steve came out of the bowling alley with his ball in his bag over his shoulder and his tongue sticking out between his teeth. He looked exactly like a big wookie from the Star Wars  movies, gangly and kind of scary but so good-natured that I wasn’t afraid of him. I’m mostly not afraid of him except when he charges and rams me with his untempered enthusiasm.

Steve doesn’t talk, at all. He signs. Roz interprets, kind of.  I take them home every Monday, as if I were the disabled community’s shuttle bus, taking the disabled adults home from bowling. Roz can’t drive; she never will, because of her seizures. I think as I drive her home, “I’m so selfish  not to want to driver her around. It’s something I should never say anything about. She doesn’t want it to be this way. She wants to be able to drive, like her sister.” I think about his and resolve to be a better person.

But I’m not. I spent the morning shopping, at Target for my favorite kind of coffee, and at a department store for my favorite kind of undershirts, black, mostly cotton with just a touch of spandex to make them stretchy and comfortable. It ‘s interesting how normal it feels to buy these. I drive them home in my luxury car to my beautiful house and hang them in my closet full of nice clothes that I like. It’s not that there is something intrinsically wrong with this; its just that buying things for other people is not as normal for me as buying things for myself and this is starting to muck with my head a bit.

April told me last week that she didn’t have a couch in her living room and that she and her kids were tired of sitting on the floor. I told her I’d see what I could do. Afterwards, I thought about her sitting on the floor, and her divorce which is coming final this Christmas and her bipolar condition and her lack of enough food to eat and her empty house. It sucks, totally. There is an old couch at the church, sitting in a room we aren’t using. On Saturday I told April that I had a couch for her. She squealed like a little girl and gave me a big, spontaneous hug. One of the church members will deliver it to her house this week.

I sit and think about what an unselfish life looks like, what a meaningful life looks like. I don’t really know. On Sunday, after church, a woman came by. She walked with cane. Her eyes were deeply set in her head, back in caves, tragic and grieved. She said that her husband had died last week, suddenly of an aneurism.  They had been married thirty-eight years. She wanted to have his service at the church. His friends from the auto parts store would come. I checked the calendar; we couldn’t do it. The church was scheduled with activities on the weekend she had told her relatives to come. I gave her the name of a friend of mine, a pastor who I thought might be able to  her out. I prayed with her and helped her step down from the office to the parking lot. She tottered off across the black asphalt of the parking lot, old, sick, grieved, bent and hunched, making her way to a house where just being there would remind her of how much she is now alone.

On the guitar, songs can be played in a very simplest way using chord progressions. Taking any major scale (Ionian mode) the first, fourth and fifth intervals, when used as roots, form major triads. So in the key of D, we play D, G and A  and this progression becomes the backdrop to sing many songs on. To the western ear, this progression works, begins, creates expectation, resolves. One chord feels right as it follows the other.

I’m wondering now, when we eat, does it follow, as one chord follows another, to give  people who don’t have enough to eat, something to eat. And when we buy something for ourselves, is the next chord that wants to be played, to buy something for someone else. Do these things follow one another. I look around. It’s a bit confusing now, how I live,  how I want to live. There are, it seems,  bits and pieces of things lying around me that go together and want to be together. I’m still working on putting them together.

Tonight I heated up and laid out dinner for my wife and daughter. We ate hot vegetable soup and fresh bread. After dinner we relaxed together, with the cats. A friend stopped by and she sat on the couch and talked with us.  It seemed like the most common thing in the world, to have enough to eat and to have a couch and to be full and to be together, not alone.

It’s not.

Maybe it wants to be.

playful

Posted: October 19, 2010 in play
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Men chiefly miss the most important criteria for picking a wife — the thermal factor. Before marrying my wife, Linda, I checked her radiation level. They were high, so I proceeded toward the ceremony. Since the vows, I’ve only had warm nights.

My wife always keeps me cozy, and I usually try to keep her laughing. The two go well together.

In one season of our life, when I wasn’t coming home from work on time, I told her I had a solution. I would hire a husband named Brad to come home each night at five o’clock. He would say “hi,” listen to her day, pick up the house, do any dishes in the sink or any other small chore she asked him to do, and then he would slip out the back when I arrived. One rule – Brad wasn’t allowed upstairs in the bedroom.

I haven’t seen Brad lately. I think she fired him. I’m expected home again at night. It’s probably better.

I have a deeply held belief: laughing is esential to good living, and a husband and a father should do anything for a laugh. So I pretty much do.

When Linda and I first married I made her cry, once or maybe more. But I didn’t panic. When the tears came out, I took my fingers and gently pushed them back up toward her eyes. “Go back,” I commanded, and she laughed as she cried. Laughing and crying have actually gone together for us, in tandem so to speak, through our whole marriage.

I’ve worked at it. Trying is at least worth something.  If I want to convince one of my daughters to do something they don’t want to do, I often begin, “I read a study that said…” and they begin to holler and hoot. “I read a study that children who rub their father’s back, tended to live 10.5 years longer than those who don’t.” It doesn’t work, and yet it does. They laugh.

But it’s hard to be droll, all the time, so we got pets.

Last week, I kicked the small chip of ice that fell from my cup across the tile and into breakfast nook. It skidded along the floor like an ice hockey puck and came to a stop in the corner. Before it could even think about melting it was had.

Into the corner my black cat, Shanaynay, bounced. Up on to the wall she went with all four paws, off the wall she glanced, onto a second wall of the corner she bounced, then twisting in the air she landed facing and swatting the ice with a velvet paw. Nice!

Playful!  It is an excellent way to live. To fly through the air, to bounce off the walls, to spin on the way down, to swat at life between your paws, to have a little fun, to make someone else laugh – it’s good. Even the cats know that.

My daughter Laurel skyped me from Spain yesterday. She told me that she had a fine salad that day sitting at an outdoors café with a friend. The local feral cats provided the entertainment.  Two kittens wandered into the patio; the waiter threw one a wine cork, and the game was on with some skittering, some back arching, some stiff-legged bouncing and some super cute, kittenesque, mock fighting.

Nothing like a wine cork and a kitten to liven up the place. Who needs to have a home to have fun?

One makes the best of it pretty much everywhere, in Spain, in California, everywhere,  by some bouncing, swatting and a bit of jesting. I try to live a life of wit, but I’m not sure how I came by any skill in the therapeutic art of humor. I grew up in a home where jokes didn’t win many accolades. We were a bit of a serious crowd, we white, Germanic, Protestant, displaced Californian Haspers. There was a lot of religious devotion, hard work, serious book reading and a good bit of discipline, but not many witticisms in my family.

I only remember my father telling one joke. “What happened to the general who went in all directions?  A bomb hit him.” At the punch line my dad would burst out laughing, every time, just the same, as if it were the first time he’d heard this, and we would laugh too, at him, laughing at the exploding general.  If a person isn’t funny but they think they are, they are, a bit. Laugh, and at least part of the whole world might laugh at you.

A good family collects and stores humor. It is stored in the form of family stories, family jokes, famous family phrases, favorite movie quotes, favorite children’s books, family noises and family smells.

 It often begins with, “Remember the time when …”  The other day to my mom I  said, “Remember the time we went camping and the storm came up and we threw everything back in the trailer and it wasn’t properly hooked up to the car and it the tail tipped down to the ground from the weight and everything slid out in the mud.”

She remembered and we chuckled a little. While it was tragic at the time; later in the retelling, it has became part of our family’s comic history.

But there wasn’t enough of those comic moments for me within the context of family outings, so I went out on my own or with my two brothers for additional play and fun. We found a tree that had fallen down in the woods across the road from our house. It was lying on the ground but still alive, its branches now growing up vertically from the trunk. It became our fort, the “fallen tree fort.” There was something magical about walking on the trunk of the tree with ease, swinging around a branch strolling blissfully to the top of the tree and back. Adults didn’t know about it. It was our secret, and we acted out a fantasy life there in this hidden home.

 We found another tree closer to the house with a net of grape vines in the top. It was a crow’s nest of vines, and once up inside it, you could lay down, in the top of the tree, and no one walking by knew you were there. It was a safe spot, lying in the sky, peaceful, free from intrusion, a lazy boy’sworld. And so in this way, by means of trees, we achieved another world for ourselves, a playful, free, happy world away from adult concern with clean bodies, neat rooms, and finished homework.

It was a bunch of fooling around.

Growing up my brothers and I loved to fool around. We fooled around with clay and made red clay rocket ships and put little yellow clay men inside and then threw them against the floor with all our strengthm and then opened them up to see if the rocket men had survived the flight and the hard landing on Mars. We were thrilled when they were squished, and if they were not we threw them hard again until they either were or they achieved the status of hero for surviving so much.  Were were simply mimicking and expanding upon reality. On the morning of February 20, 1962, John Glen rocketed 100 miles into space in Friendship 7, a tiny 9 by 6 foot space capsule. I was twelve years old.

 Boyhood play is often just a bunch of reality-based fooling around.

We also fooled around with little plastic, green soldiers, WWII soldiers with green carbines and green bayonets and green grenades in their green hands. We built trenches in the dirt for them and little shacks of twigs and we posed them on their flat green bottoms in battle positions. Then we threw fire crackers in to the trenches, Black Cat firecrackers, and then like medics we went back down to the fields see the devastated huts and blackened little green men.

To us it was fun, it was play, it was reenactment, it was living the life of the men in of our time. My dad was in World War II. Play mimics reality, minus danger, sort of. I remember the day I picked up unexploded ordnance. It was curious, inspecting the thing, until it went off between my fingers. My fingers were still there, but they were so interesting at that point with the powder burns and the tingling tips.  But that was part of the fun; the play wasn’t entirely safe. In fact our  best fun never was entirely safe, jumping out of trees and riding our bikes crazy fast, like the day I hit a rock coming home on my bike and pitched hard over the handle bars and took a beating in the dirt and came away with some serious road rash. It was scary and painful and later, it was fun to recount.

Fooling around, I grew up with it, and then found it again as an adult when my wife brought home a brilliant children’s story from the library where she worked, How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen. In this story, Tom’s Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong tires of young Tom’s fooling around and brings her friend Captain Najork and his hired sportsmen to challenge Tom to three rounds of womble, muck, and sneedball to teach him  a lesson. It’s great fun as Tom wins every contest against the serious adults by doing what he is best at — fooling around.

The story is full of good fodder for home fun. Like Tom, at home we like to do some fooling around, to “womble and muck” a bit, and tell each other at the table, like Tom’s Aunt commanded him, “Eat your greasy bloaters.”

It has always seemed to me, and it still does, that serious things go down smoothest with a joke wrapped around them. And it seems to me that when we are thinking at our best, we are laughing at our most. Horace Walpole got the sense of this when he wrote that, “The world is a tragedy for those who feel, but a comedy for those who think.”

I like a droll bit of sarcastic and insightful humor, sometimes. It’s great commentary on life.  Cats are like humans; they are both born blind, but different too; in a few weeks cats recover their sight.

Mr. Mark Twain was good at feline humor and dark sarcasm. In his notebook in 1894, he penned the memorable quip, “Of all God’s creatures there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat.”  But if Mark Twain were crossed with a cat, it might improve the cat, a least it might come out witty-sarcastic.  I would like to have sat with Twain when he was alive and in good spirits and laughed a bit. We all need a wry friend.

One of my best friends in earlier years, Pat Chism, was Mark Twainian. He once told me, “Don’t do anything for your kids, then they won’t expect anything from you.” He could get away with this, because he was a pretty decent father. I used to tell him, “I like you; I’m my worst self around you.” He took it as a compliment. His humor was contagious, and I always caught it in his presence. At his funeral I was one of the speakers and I mostly told jokes, stuff from his life. This honored him and everyone knew it. I told him just before he died, “When you go, I want you to look back, like Elijah did on Elisha, and cast a double portion of humor upon me.” He either didn’t, or he did, and it bounced off.

Religion needn’t leave the laugh line out, for God himself is, I think, the grand jester. Someone told me recently, “I think that God is whatever we want him to be.” Shortly after hearing that, I am almost sure I also heard God’s characteristically contented and unflappable chuckle.

God has a sense of humor; consider the zebra, the baboon, the giraffe, the slime molds and all the jellies in the oceans. Consider you; what a crack up!

God thought up all the things that make us laugh – the physical humor found in all the ridiculous shapes, the hilarious ways of falling down, the cartoonish faces, the stiff legged mock fighting, the playful biting, the fake boxing. God invented all the verbal humor,  the endless plays on words, the syntactical ploys, the catchy punch lines, the unexpected juxtapositions. There is more fun from God. Consider sex, that fresh spring of a good deal of the humor of the world. God thought it up. It’s funny; jokes about it are pretty much universal.

Once, on a family outing to the San Diego Zoo, we walked up on a giraffe doing the unthinkable in public. He butted his wife in a place on her body that he really shouldn’t have been touching in public, and she let loose a steady stream, and he took a long sip as if from a drinking fountain, and then he raised his mouth and fashioned an expression that combined serious scientific analysis and pure, erotic ecstasy. It was a moment. Several families stopped and watched with us, in shocked embarrassment, and then we all snickered and muttered things like, “Stop it,” and “Don’t do it,” and “Hide the children’s eyes,” and “Wow, what was he thinking?” It was hilarious. I went home and googled it. Normal, for a giraffe; he was testing her fertility. In all actuality, God made him do it.

Jimmy Demarets remarked about our passions, “Golf and sex are about the only things you can enjoy without being good at.” Billy Crystal quipped, “Women need a reason to have sex. Men just need a place.” It goes on and on. I think God is laughing at it a good deal too.

Some religious men act like God is uptight about sex all the time, against it, not amused at our romantic antics. God must have a good laugh about that too. God doesn’t want sex misused, for harm, us going at it outside of marriage, but this is the same way any moral inventor wouldn’t want her or his invention to be turned to something that would damage the very people it was intended to benefit.  

Really, humor is a great protection. One can only survive being human and having religion, and going to church, by laughing a lot. Once Christmas Eve, during a candle light communion, I was passing the bread, a gold plate filled with broken crackers, the body of Christ, when the event happened. The music was playing softly, the candles flickering beautifully, and then a little, old lady near the end of the row, instead of taking a piece of cracker from the bread plate, instead dumped a whole fist full of change into it.  Her husband elbowed her and whispered, “It’s not the offering!”  But she was clueless. And after that, instead of receiving the body of Christ, people were picking dimes out of the communion plate all the way to the back of the church.

I just kept smiling; it was one of my favorite Christmas communions ever. She had the right idea. Christmas is best celebrated by giving. Whatever the reality for her, church is always a good place for laughing.

Truthfully, my favorite spot in church is either up front, making people laugh a little or sitting back with my wife doing some gentle quipping so as to make her laugh.  When we dabble in humor in a public setting, we refer to it as some “mocking and scorning,” but it’s really just some gentle punning to keep from being bored out of our minds.

For good mental health each institution of society should store up a repository of idiosyncratic humor, laughing at itself, laughing with itself in order to survive the boredom and even perhaps the toxic politics and dangerous personalities.

In one season at work I took to hiding my trash can from the janitor. He’d find it and then hide it from me. We got creative, the best spots above the dropped ceiling tiles and nested inside another trash can of the same size, with the bag over the top edge. Only by the weight, could you tell there were two. That was the best hide, and when my secretary and I found my can in another can, after weeks of looking, we had a good hoot over the whole thing. Survival, and fooling around – fun.

Work, home, family, church – they are all best served up with a laugh. This isn’t always possible, but I’ve come to think that as much as it’s possible we will do well to giggle, snort and guffaw as much as we can, and to fool around with reality the best we can.

We’ll be better for it. If not, we will have at least had some fun.

family

Posted: October 11, 2010 in family
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Yesterday I watched Henry II re-imprison his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine in the tower. It was Christmas of 1183.

It is interesting, Henry’s decision. You can see it too by watching the movie, The Lion In Winter.

Eleanor, Henry’s queen, played by Katharine Hepburn is brilliant. When Henry II, knife in hand, threatens to kill their three sons, she eloquently rants:

“Of course he has a knife, he always has a knife, we all have knives! It’s 1183 and we’re barbarians! How clear we make it. Oh, my piglets, we are the origins of war: not history’s forces, nor the times, nor justice, nor the lack of it, nor causes, nor religions, nor ideas, nor kinds of government, nor any other thing. We are the killers. We breed wars. We carry it like syphilis inside. Dead bodies rot in field and stream because the living ones are rotten. For the love of God, can’t we love one another just a little – that’s how peace begins.

For the love of God, can’t we love each other just a little? Good question for the family?

While it is noble of the queen to take responsibility for the problems, the truth is that she and Henry and their sons were very much products of their times. The succession of power deal was something they inherited, and it mucked with the softer family values of kindness and gentleness. They might have been a nice family, Henry, Eleanor, John, Richard and Geoffrey, like TV’s Addams family, but they had the dilemma of deciding who ruled next. In other words, they had to figure out who to hate, band against, betray,  bash, banish, imprison or kill, and who to crown the next worthy ruler of England. It was the ongoing problem of the English monarchy – who do we love, who do we murder? Think Henry the VIII and his six wives.

The kings of England were only relieved of this complexity when Charles I was beheaded on Tuesday, 30 January 1649, and the English Parliament took over the job of loving and murdering.

It got me to thinking – what creates the rules for a family’s use of knives and of towers?  Power struggles for royal succession don’t help. Favoritism either. Towers not much. Violence not much at all.  I know a girl who grew up with a bigoted mother. This girl is an amazingly open and accepting woman. She overcame the family knife. A family legacy is partially a choice.

I think about my own family.

When we were in grade school, my little brother and I played baseball with a golf ball one day in the field in front of the house, the field with the fire flies and cow paddies. What a cool idea. A golf ball hit with a wooden bat travels fast and far. I remember one of my drives to deep center. “It’s deep, way back, way back – gone. A home run.” I also remember another clothesline drive back to the pitcher’s mound. I swung, the ball sprung off my bat on a straight line, the pitcher, my little brother Lars, was down. I ran towards him. He was holding his mouth. We were in the car. We were back at home. He was lying on the couch with a blanket over him. His face was swollen; his teeth were broken; his jaw was wired closed. It was a moment.

I’ve told this story before. I’ve used it as a prop, an item in a series giving evidence of growing up crazy with my two brothers. It fit into the line, “I grew up tough. I shot my big brother. I clubbed my grandma unconscious in the laundry room, and I broke my little brother’s jaw with golf ball.” It’s gotten a few laughs.

But the golf ball incident isn’t really funny, and it remains for me as somewhat ambiguous. “We all have knives,” remarked Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine. The golf ball was one of my knives.  It was an accident, of course. But by it I harmed my brother. It was stupid to play baseball with a golf ball. My brother and I made a decision to play together, but I was older. And yet, I never imagined that he would be struck, and I didn’t want him to get hurt. I loved my little brother then, I still do now.

In the family, we make choices. Stuff happens. People crumple. They hold themselves. We hold them. It doesn’t change what happened. Every family has a history of violence or harm or disruption and every family must travel forward with a legacy both good and bad. But interpretation and re-interpretation is an important in dealing with our narratives.

What if the golf ball had carried a little higher? I have never really thought of this before, but perhaps I didn’t want to. We don’t think much of “what if …”, and we don’t unpack our family stories that often. For many of us, these stories remain largely unexamined, left in the semi-rational closets of our minds, un-actualized and un-interpreted. Could the result have been worse? Yes, it might have been worse if the ball had hit him square between the eyes, or square in one eye?  I am very grateful to God that this didn’t happen.

But the incident doesn’t stand alone in my childhood. We did so many foolish things growing up. We also played baseball with rocks. We jumped off a high bridge into the river, flying down through the air, plunging into the fast brown water. And we did lots of fast driving in cars, over this bridge and around the country, and some drinking and driving.  We could have killed ourselves. A number of young people in my high school did so, destroying themselves and their friends in alcohol related accidents.

Life isn’t safe, but we who survive into adulthood with our siblings have much to be grateful for. I think the family, even broken, is something to be grateful for. I think the family, even with a negative narrative, has something to be thankful for. My little brother and I survived. But we had so many good moments growing up together. We swam together, road bikes together, played ping pong for hours on end together, ate together, water skied together. How many times did we laugh together? I’m not sure but it was enough that the good thoughts outweigh the bad. My brother called me last week to ask for my advice on what telescope to buy. I enjoyed sharing my expertise with him. Family is precious.

I remember shooting little spring load guns at each other in the hall, firing little round silver balls down the hall into each other. We shot each other, we laughed when we took a hit between the eyes; we fired and laughed again. It’s family, both the hits between the eyes and the laughing.

I re-watched The Godfather again the other night. It’s a superb movie! Scenes stick with you: the famous scene where Michael Corleone is present at his nephew’s baptism juxtaposed with the scenes of his gangsters carrying his orders to murder his rivals. The camera is stationary, coldly objective, with short close ups and mid-shots — the water running down the fragile baby’s soft head, the bullets ripping into the soft bodies of the rivals. Michael renounces Satan as he murders the families of others. Coppola edits for us the holy and unholy in one person. We see that violent cruelty and tender love can exist in the same man at the same moment. It is an interpretive stroke of genius. It is life as we know it in the family.

I spoke with a twelve year old girl last week. She has to make adult-like decisions about her family. Why? Perhaps, she is the most responsible, mature person in her family. I’m not certain. She was wondering something fairly significant for a young girl —  where to live. It was an honor to witness her wise sensibilities concerning her family. But what was this — twelve and parenting herself? This is not unusual. There are an estimated 10 million children in sub-Saharan Africa orphaned by AIDS. They have no biological parents. They remain. And what shall they make of this? And we?

What do we each one do with what has happened to us in our families and in our communities?

I believe that every community has a tower, and every family has a knife. Every family has a sense of succession, an inheritance, even if only social and psychological. Each family is in danger of being put in a tower by other families living nearby them, and they are in danger of  locking some of their own family members in a tower. To understand this, we must choose to see this, and we must think more about this. And we must process the destructive past; we must move away from it and move toward it again. We must go exploring.

I grew up white in the Midwest in the sixties. I was an inheritor of the dominant narrative of America. Succession to the throne was a given. We never questioned our right to go anywhere we wanted, to eat anywhere we chose, to become anything we desired. My parents were actually poor, but I didn’t know it. Their Christian work didn’t pay well, but there were perks, free housing, free food and some vehicles provided for us by the Christian campground my parents ran.  I had as much or more stuff than the farm kids that lived near me, and so I didn’t have much of a sense of class consciousness.

One thing sat in the back of my mind that discriminated. We were from Southern California living in Missouri. My parents had a past with avocadoes and tacos. They had lived in Los Angeles. They were more cosmopolitan than rural, more aware of diversity than uniformity. They were displaced persons. They tried to join the local Southern Baptist Church. They were told that they would have to be re-baptized. Their Presbyterian baptisms wouldn’t work. They decided not to join. We were outsiders. I never forgot that. And I think as a result I have never had much of a stomach for intolerance, for narrow-mindedness, or sectarianism. But I love church. I love the church. I believe that the church is part of how God shows himself to us. It can be made into a tower, to lock people in, and to lock people out, but when it is at its best it is an open family, open to more and more siblings, able to absorb and adopt and love all different kinds of people.

I believe that we were meant to live kind, tolerant lives, accepting  differences in the church and in our families. But we must not get too sappy about this. Jesus said that he came to bring a sword to the family, that family member would rise against family member, in conflict over Jesus. And this has happened. The conservatives should not claim Jesus as the poster boy for family values. Jesus disrupted the family. He said that his family wasn’t simply made up out of his nuclear family but out of anyone who would follow him. But he loved his family too. He made provision for his mother to be taken care of after he died.

It’s something to try to understand. I’m sorting it out. Whatever conflicts and wounds occur in our families, I believe strongly that we must take responsibility for our choices. I am a devotee of Soren Kierkegaard. He believed that, “Wherever there is a crowd there is untruth.” He believed that in the end we are individually responsible for what we chose. We will stand alone in heaven to answer for what we have done. I believe that too. I believe that we are responsible for how we treat family, and how we interpret our families once all is said and done. It can get rough.

Once my father was asked which of his sons was better at public speaking. He quickly indicated that it was my older brother. I will never forget this. I was standing within hearing distance when he said it, but he didn’t know I was there. It stabbed me, unexpectedly and hard. I make my living by writing, teaching and speaking. It is my identity. The same is true for my older brother. The same for my dad too, at one time. “And the award goes to, the older brother!” For me it was, in part, a kind of succession. It felt a bit like the law of primogenitor or the divine right of kings. The older recieved the nod, the blessing, the oratorical crown. It was competition, and it was preference. It was Henry II and it was Eleanor. It was a knife, and it was none of these things but merely a poorly thought out response on the part of my dad.

I spoke to my dad about this later. He too was wounded by what he had done. He apologized to me. It was a very painful moment for both of us. I forgave him. I still think of it sometimes. It still wounds me a little. But I am largely over it. I forgive him, as he must forgive me for the mistakes I made growing up. We are good, different not prefect in unity, but good. I choose to love my father. He is a good man, and he was a good dad to me.

My daughter Laurel is very smart; my daughter Rosalind is smart too, but in  a different way. Rosalind has brain damage, and she can’t read very well, but she is smart with her heart. Rosalind has a good life, but it is painful, her limits, and yet it is beautiful, her uniqueness.  Our family has space for the differences. As a father, I have made a conscious choice, along with my wife and my daughter Laurel to do no violence to the close juxtaposition of contrasts in our family. A family is a place where significant difference should be able to exist without judgment. A family is, I believe, a place where certain comparisons simply should not be made.

My daughter Laurel is studying in London this semester. She visited the holocaust museum there. This week she sent me a poem that she had written.  It’s a poem about her sister.

The Unforgotten Crime

Honey Nut Cheerios

tumble into my older sister’s bowl,

twinkling round O’s matching her big blue eyes.

We laugh loud and I pour her milk,

insurance against the chance of an embarrassing spill.

 

I am her prevention policy against frustration;

I spoon her sour cream, set minutes on the microwave,

and towel- dry the glass dishes;

a dropped plate

often results in crystal shards and tears.

 

My own eyes well up as I trudge through the breathing rooms,

still with their secrets.

I pass Hitler,

and the smell of burning books wafts to my mind as

faded yellow Stars of David on blue breast pockets droop

behind smudgy glass panes.

 

I glance to my right, and a gleaming white table

rests haughtily on its haunches,

taunting me, sinister

and slick,

clean white metal hiding dirty black deeds.

 

The dark room propels me forward,

betraying me,

forcing me to stumble unwillingly towards my foe.

I stand before this thing, and –

I read it.

 

“Mental retardation…genocide rehearsal…unfit for society…sterilization…experiment… T-4…

Murder.”

 

The words blur together and I turn

to the table,

its dead red eyes reflecting

children’s screams and their naked

exposure to white-coated probing,

 

flashing cameras and sharp instruments,

scientists taking detached notes and

emotionlessly practicing their

cruel sciences under the guise of research and –

I see my sister’s face in the scared eyes of the littlest ones.

 

Sobbing, I sit on a bench in the darkness and grieve,

while those sterile and sightless scientists

sit next door, still and silent in their frames,

the horror of their actions forever frozen.

 

Would you have thought differently, I ask them,

if you poured her cheerios every morning?

Laurel read me this poem the other day as we were talking with each other on Skype. At the last line the eye wiping began and didn’t stop for a few minutes. I couldn’t really say anything for a short time. Hitler was so messed up. He knew not a thing about my daughter Rosalind.

They wouldn’t have done what they did, the murderers, they wouldn’t have done those experiments on our family members, they wouln’t  have laid precious ones onto cold tables and into unmarked graves, they wouldn’t have done any horrible thing they did if the differently abled ones had  been their sons and daughters and they had poured their Cherrios and they had had the courage to even begin to understand what being a human family really means.

What is a family? I am still trying to figure that out myself.  I confess and grieve that my family and all of our families are places where the sacred and the profane exist side-by-side. In me and my kin, the holy and the unholy co-exist. The character of Michael Corleone is not an abberation, although he is an extreme. There is a bit of Henry II and Eleanor in all of us.

But I am beginning to believe that the family can choose to be a place that moves away from violence in every one of its twisted and damaging forms. And I believe that it can be a place that allows for differences to exist side-by-side without judgment. And I believe that it is wisdom to chose to forgive what should never have happened. Think Rwanda and Burundi — some families there have forgiven the unthinkable in their neighbors.

“For the love of God,” cries Eleanor with anguish over her family,  “can’t we love each other just a little?”

I believe that we can.