Do you remember how the showers were turned on in the Coffman "locker room"? As you faced the showers, on your right was the stair well. The first five or six steps were down and away the showers. Then there was a left turn and a few more steps the another left and stairs. Then you were facing the dark tunnel maybe twenty feet long that led to the pool. That tunnel usually had several inches of near frozen water on the floor, which you kicked up onto the pallid, boney, naked back of the boy in front of you seconds before the boys behind you kicked it up onto your back. Back to the locker room. To the left were the showers, but straight ahead was an ancient iron railing designed to prevent most boys from falling twelve feet to the unwashed concrete floor covered by several inches of near frozen water. Had you fallen, while you were lying on your back looking straight up, you'd see fifteen feet above you a valve. The handle on that valve was a single bar, like a wrench attached to the valve about twenty inches long. By turning that crank, you turned on the water. To reach that crank, a naked boy had to stand on the lower bar of the railing, brace his legs against the upper bar, and then lean out a yard over the concrete floor fifteen feet below. Then the bar could be grasped and pulled, turning on the water. After cold water turned warmed enough to bear, twenty-five boys rushed into the shower room designed for ten. Most of us huddled in the middle while the big boys claimed positions beneath the ten shower heads. We "showered" in the water that deflected off their bodies, great, hairy hillocks of muscle. One minute later we would race down the gritty stairs and into the unlit tunnel to the pool. I do not remember very many boys being injured between the showers and the pool. Usually the outcomes were limited to abrasions, humiliation, and memories of an experience so wretched that the images blaze forth fifty-five years later.
Moderation in some things
Hesiod said, “Moderation in all things”, but to be more ethically and logically consistent, he should have said “Moderation in somethings.” I am a tolerant person, but, weirdly, the more tolerant you become, the more intolerant you become. To be tolerant of the KKK, Nazis, or overt white supremacists is to be intolerant. I am not a perfectionist and so care little about purity or even logical consistency. That said, my detestation of the KKK, Nazis, and similar assholes knows no limit. Well, almost. Hunting them as you would kill rabid dogs loose in the street would raise constitutional and due process concerns for me.
I was delighted when Obama was elected in 2008 and not just because he spoke in full sentences and was a decent human being. As with no president before, I sought out ways that I could contribute to the success of his presidency. And while my respect and affection for him today are greater than they were twelve years ago, I had serious reservations about his program. Then and now I believe that the drone program was immoral and unconstitutional. For me, he was insufficiently concerned about nuclear weapons, gay rights, racism, and workers’ rights. Even so, I think he was the best president we have had since JFK.
I have similar values and hopes for Biden. I love the man. During the debates, Senator Harris dropkicked his butt clear across the stage, and yet Biden chose her for his running mate. That’s something rare, vanishingly rare, in contemporary politics: Character. (Lincoln had it. Wellstone, too. So does Representative Dean Phillips.) However, I have grave reservations about Biden, which I will not mention here for fear of reviving that history. That said, I am seeking ways that I personally can contribute to his success.
For starters, I am going to moderate my expression of the loathing I feel for all things conservative. I cannot with integrity ignore their violence, their willful stupidity, or their continuing dismantling of democracy. But I do think that the extremity of my hatred contributes to the extremity of their nuttiness. Therefore, I will stand back and stand by. I am will dial back my aggressiveness and, as Joe has asked us, I will turn down the temperature of my own responses. I am going to be more attentive and responsive to the intentions, the fears, and the ideas of conservatives and less to the jerks themselves. I want Joe and Kamala to succeed.
Lessons adoption taught me
I have a biological son and two adopted Asian daughters and have been intimately involved in the care of all three. Two of the important lessons I have learned are these: While adoption is usually presented as a joyful event to celebrate - and it is a process within which there is much joy and celebration - every adoption amounts to the immigration of a war refugee. At the heart of every adoption is tragedy. The family of my Chinese daughter attempted to keep her as long as they could. Because she had at least two older siblings, the time in her life, about five years old, arrived when her parents accepted that unless they abandoned her in the hope that she would be found and adopted, the child would be denied education, health care, the right to own property, sign contracts, and maybe even employment. Emotionally none of that matters to the child. What does matter is the knowledge that her own mother rejected her, creating a life-long stain of worthlessness, of being unlovable. The second lesson I learned was that I had very insight into how life felt and seemed to an Asian girl growing up in white, caucasian Minnesota. How much love and empathy I could deliver was limited however much attention and effort I put into being a parent. That insight extended to include my white son as well. I was born to upper middle-class, white parents in 1951, which might have been the most fortunate year to be born ever. While my son was also born in relative economic comfort and white in a white majority state, I know that my insight into how his life feels to him is also very limited. The beginning of his adult life was disrupted by two great economic failures, an epidemic with a badly botched government response, rising fascism, a botched response to global warming, and careening wealth inequity. The history and prospects of all three of my children are very different from mine, which limits my ability to understand their lives and their ability to trust that I know what I am talking about.
Crossing Over
At three and one half, Rosie crosses over against her will from waking to sleeping. After dressing her in a nightgown, brushing her teeth, and reading her two stories, Little Bear’s Visit and Horton Hears a Who, I am done.
But she isn’t.
She gathers so great a stack of books for her bedtime reading that she cannot lift it. “You may have to take fewer books, Sweetie,” I say to her. She understands and, after extended deliberation, picks two. Then she climbs into bed, puts her feet under her Little Mermaid blanket, opens her first book, and gives me the squinch face. She shuts her eyes tight, moves every feature of her face as close to her nose as she can, and tilts her head. That means the moment suits her and I am released.
I do not leave the room, however. She has taught me that if I stay with her half an hour after tucking her in, she settles down for the night with less fuss. After lying down on the floor by her bed, I open a journal, take a breath, and see what images bob to the surface of my mind. I wonder about Rosie and her friends at daycare and how they can play together so vigorously without saying much to each other. I remember the dead raccoon I saw this morning. I see the body alone on the road in my rearview mirror again.
Before I get the cap off my pen, Rosie announces that when you die, you go to heaven.
“Who told you that?” I ask.
“Robbie.”
“Is your daddy died?” she continues.
“Yes,” I answer.
“Is he in heaven now?”
“Yes.” Everything seems to be in order now and she resumes reading.
I return to my book too. The article I read today about the Titanic comes to the surface. The National Geographic published pictures of the great ship. What a compelling story. All of these years later and people are still interested in it. Just as more than a man was killed in Dallas in 1963, more than a boat sank in April of 1912. Ground was consecrated and icons fashioned in both endings.
“Daddy?”
“Can I have another book? Couple minutes.”
“No, sweetie.”
“Please.”
“It’s time for you to go to sleep.”
“But, I don’t want to,” she protests.
“Yes, but it is time,” I say as I tuck her in and turn out the lights.
I lie down and return to my thoughts. Other ships have sunk. The Arizona. The Lusitania. The Andrea Doria. Only the Titanic persists in my memory, claiming me like the kind words I thought to say to a stranger but didn’t. Nothing about the Challenger pulls on me. Nor the Hindenburg. The name Titanic alone suggests a great struggle, a curse even. The building, the naming, the indifference to the danger, the collision, and the sinking. The story of the Titanic reads like a Greek myth.
I see a photograph of a man with a mustache and a hat, and a black coat standing on the deck, hands clasped behind his back, and I know that he died in the water after midnight on April 14, 1912, in the north Atlantic. I remember a painting of the sinking; the great stern of the ship rises hundreds of feet into the night. That man saw the stern of the Titanic too, towering above him as the terrible waters soaked through his heavy woolen clothing.
Rosie asks for a bottle. She doesn’t drink from it anymore, but ritual makes passing into the night more bearable. After going to the kitchen, filling a bottle with juice, and returning to her room, I place the bottle on the corner of the bedstead shelf, same as every night. Then I turn on the bunny light, open the bedroom door all of the way, and turn off the hall light. I tuck her in again and return to my thoughts.
The tale is true. The Titanic sank. It really happened. If I could walk through time as I walk through space, I could go see the people boarding in Southampton. Up the gangplank they carry their luggage. With great settling in breaths, those living people drop their bags onto the floor of their cabins. They look around at the little room in which they will spend the rest of their lives. Or I could see the radio man receiving the warnings of iceberg and the captain, another living man, ignoring them.
While there is no time or place that I could hear the sad songs of Orpheus, in a time remembered by living people in my own day and at a place five hundred miles east of Nova Scotia, had I been present, I could have heard the great rumble from under the water as the iceberg opened the hull of the Titanic. I could have heard the captain ordering one of his officers to lock the doors to steerage, sealing in the Irish families in the hold of the ship. The shutting of the steel doors made a noise people heard. Men, younger than I am, thinking of home, broke noisily into cupboards containing the life jackets, and handed them to some of the passengers with the same mundane hand movements I used moments ago when I pulled the night gown out of the dresser for Rosie.
Rosie announces that she wants to say something to her brother who is downstairs watching TV. I tell her that it is too late for her now. She is in bed and it is time for her to go to sleep. She begins to cry and protest loudly. I close my journal and prepare to leave. As usual, the threat settles her down. She concedes. I stay.
A father helps a mother into a lifeboat and tucks their two children in beside her. He says that he will get into the next lifeboat, but both of them know that he is lying. His hand clasps hers one more time, sixty feet over the black and waiting water, arms reaching over gunwales before he releases her. As the boat is lowered, he steps back onto the listing deck in the darkness and, amid the shouts of the deckhands and the clatter of tackle and halyards, breathes in the crisp night air. He sees his children in a sunlit meadow.
“Daddy?” asks Rosie and I return.
“Yes, Rose.” I add just enough irritation to my voice to let her know that I expect her to be asleep by now.
“Here’s my hat,” she says, dangling for me in the dark her winter hat with the attached scarf.
“Drop it on the floor, dear, and go to sleep.” She understands and releases the hat.
Outside, the wind rattles the dead leaves on the oak tree. I think about the lone squirrel in the ball of leaves at the top of the big cottonwood. I saw a Cooper’s hawk, catch his mate last month. The hawk carried her to a branch and ate her, leaving only the tail. Staying near, the surviving squirrel watched. As the hawk flew away and the uneaten tail blew across the lawn with the leaves, the squirrel stepped back onto the listing deck in the darkness, breathed in, and remembered his mate.
A waning moon rises. In the north Atlantic, the same moon is nearly overhead. The rolling water breaks and scatters its image. From that surface, eighty years ago, the Titanic dove through the frigid water, plunging through the watery darkness to a distant meadow under the ocean. There it has waited all of these years. Schools of fish swam through the ballroom on the day I buried my father and stepped back onto the listing deck in the darkness and breathed. Unnamed living things have moved through the debris at the bottom of the lightless swimming pool every night that I have put Rosie to bed. The door to steerage remains sealed even as I close my journal.
I hear her steady breathing. She does not cry out as I leave.
Fall of 1991
In the deeps of time and under the innumerable stars
1969 was a year of sea change for me. I left home. I found a community of people with similar values. And I read Meditations by Descartes and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Kuhn. That began a life-long attempt to comprehend what it meant to pursue the truth and to accept that I lived in a culture in history. I can’t not do either of those inquiries. This post is in response to a book I am reading right now: Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul by John Barry. So far it is a history of the duels between Edward Coke and Francis Bacon and between Catholicism and Protestantism. The immediate outcome was the flight of the Puritans to the New World. They failed spectacularly to comprehend the impact of living in history on truth.
Living a delusion
I can’t say I know much about Puritanism and I don’t find myself very strongly inclined to learn more. I am no more likely to study Puritanism than I am likely to study Nietzsche, Bull Connor, or Goebbels. The illusions, the stupidity, and the evilness are visible on the surface. I doubt that I will find anything of value should I choose to delve within.
Even so, I am curious about Puritanism because they are a case study of the theory that a person can’t have just one bat-shit crazy (BSC) idea. A person needs to have a whole slew of BSC ideas to support any one of those preposterous delusions. (I choose the word “delusion” over “illusion” because delusions are usually self-inflicted. All of us periodically fall victim to illusions.) . One of the BSC ideas that prompted the Puritans to flee England was that God was leaving England. They had rejected the Catholic Church partly because they correctly identified how deeply it had become theater. The costumes priests wore. The ceremonies. The adoration of wealth. The smells and bells. Now they discovered that the Church of England was reclaiming its roots in the Catholic Church. Puritans began telling each other that God was sick of England and that He was leaving. They had constructed for themselves a delusion that God had a localized presence that allowed Him to move somehow from place to place, one of the supporting BSC ideas. The stories they told each other posited a god who liked some things, felt one way or another, held values, and did specific things. More BSC ideas.
So here’s my puzzle: What BSC ideas do I hold? Like the Puritans, I live in a culture that creates for me big and little stories to guide my decisions and actions. I live in history too. Believe it or not, I share a great deal of DNA with them. How can I escape the same behaviors? Or can I?
Raining Jujubes
One of the first happy years in my life was 1981. Every year of my adult life I have written new year objectives. New years resolutions are crystal, beautiful and broken easily, while objectives give me the whole year to complete and are, therefore, much kinder to the maker. And 1981 was the first year in which I deliberately sought to be kind to myself. Previously, I had thrashed myself with a long list of harsh objectives like exercise more and stop being such a wimp. In 1981 I set for myself only a single objective: see fifty movies. With modern technology, that’s achievable without getting off the couch. But in 1981, it meant that I had to go to a physical theater fifty times. My son was six in that year, so movies with him were a delight. He and I saw The Empire Strikes Back. I also saw it with my mother. And probably once again by myself. I saw the Rocky Horror Picture Show twice, the first time without any toast, toilet paper, or confetti. Imagine. But for me, the fondest memory of the completion of that objective, for complete it I did, was the excursion to a triple feature at the Suburban World in Uptown. The movies were The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, and Jason and the Argonauts. I remember today, nearly forty years later, that joyful apex of the journey of fifty movies. I sat in the middle of the ground floor of the Suburban, not in the balcony. Memory says that there were about one hundred people in the audience. There was me, at thirty years old, and everybody else, the oldest of which was probably fourteen. The sweetest moment was becoming aware of the steady pelting of candy everybody on the ground floor suffered. That afternoon, thanks to the kids in the balcony, it rained Jujubes, Dots, Good & Plentys, and Bit-O-Honeys in the Suburban World. I laughed out loud at the improbability, preposterousness, and frivolity of the moment, which was exactly what I needed. I had broken through; I began enjoying life.
A bag of potatoes
Occasionally I see posts on FB that assert that capitalism will kill us all. Usually I respond by wishing that progressives would be less hyperbolic in their claims. But yesterday when I was in Cub Foods I walked by a large garbage bin full of food. Blemished but otherwise good food. Apples with dimples. Unusually shaped pears. That sort of thing. On top lay a ten-pound bag of potatoes. I picked it up and inspected it. I couldn't tell the difference between this bag and the bags that were still on display for sale. I briefly considered buying it, but chose not to. And my reason for so deciding? It's ironic. I hardened myself to the waste of so much food because I remembered that waste like this was happening at this moment in tens of thousands of stores around the country. This is not Cub's fault. They didn't make the rules. Consumers get to buy apples without dimples. The problem is that the primary purpose of our food industry is not to feed our people. It is to make money for the shareholders of whatever corporation owns Cub. The way we have chosen to manage our assets - food in this case - our jobs, our money, etc. is an arbitrarily selected system. It's capitalism. None of this would be really problematic were we all being fed. But we are not. 37,000,000 Americans live with food insecurity. The waste and exclusion from services happens across all industries: health care, energy, security, and housing. No, capitalism will not kill us all, but it is killing many of us every day. Guess which communities suffer the worst.
One of my all-time favorite people
Sara Heesen is one of my favorite people on the planet. She totally gets that all of us are going to switch off someday. And if you live long you will certainly spend the last few years of your life physically weaker than you were in your youth and you won’t be able to meet physical challenges as well. It’s true. An aphorism for her: Live as if when you are dead, you will be dead for a long time. She understands how much of a waste of time it is to be worrying about what other people will think of her if she does one thing or another. The sage says that you would be less concerned about what others think of you if you realized how rarely they do. She also knows that not failing very often means that you aren’t trying very hard. She’s all in doing things that are important to her.
She told me once that she felt liberated or even more liberated than she is when she realized that when she dies people will soon forget about her and go on with their lives. (I disagree with her use of the word “soon” in that statement.) . She said that means they won’t remember the times she fell on her face trying to do something a little beyond what she was able to do on that day. Sara is the embodiment of the Japanese saying, “Fall down seven times, stand up eight times.”
One of my prejudices is that if you are really happy all of the time you can’t be very smart and she always seems to be smiling. However it has been my good fortune to know her well enough to know that she is a smart, complex, vital, and responsive to what is going on around and within her, good and bad. I have seen her in doubt and unhappy. In my opinion, much of her internal struggle proceeds from not knowing what a splendid human being she is.
I haven’t mentioned her integrity, her courage, and her kindness, but I stop here.
Conversations with strangers
Adele and I were out to dinner lately with our friends Bruce and Sharon. It was rainy so the men dropped the women at the restaurant and drove to a parking spot several blocks away. During dinner, I went to the restroom. Because standing side by side at urinals is a moderately intimate thing to do, an unspoken etiquette governs our behavior in bathrooms. For starters, men do not talk to one another while peeing. They just don’t. Despite that restraint, the man next to me said exuberantly that he was having the best night of his adult life. I asked what was making his night so wonderful. He smiled broadly at me and said, “The woman I am with.” I congratulated him, wished him luck, and left the restroom.
At the end of the evening, because the rain continued, Bruce and I left the restaurant together to retrieve his car. We had walked only about thirty feet when I noticed that the man who had spoken to me in the restroom followed us out the door. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that the happy-making woman was with him. Because Bruce walks slowly, the couple soon passed us. As they did, the man turned to me and said, “See?” Truthfully, all I saw was the back of the woman, clad in a winter jacket with a scarf over her head, but out of friendliness, I responded, “Yes, I do.”
Bruce was puzzled by this interaction until I told him of my earlier conversation. And while I was happy for my bathroom buddy that he was having the best night of his adult life, I was also puzzled that he thought seeing her for several seconds from behind bundled up in a heavy jacket was all I needed to discover for myself that, yes, she was a spectacular and life-completing woman. I hoped, for her sake, that he was aware of and cherished considerably more about her as a person than I had gathered in a few seconds of walking behind her.