Family Pictures--Second Batch

The pictures my brother sent are from my mother's family. A bunch had water damage but there are some good studio shots of her brothers and some snapshots of her sister.

I know less about her family so this won't be quite so long.

Her mother, Allie, was the longest lived of my grandparents, lasting into her nineties. Her husband had died when my mother was about sixteen or seventeen (yes, an echo of my own loss of my mother at the same age). There were five children.

Sam was the oldest and he and my mother were very close. She was just a year younger. He would come home from school and tell her everything so that when she started the next year, they promptly moved her ahead a grade. She ended up graduating from high school at about fifteen. Sam apparently lost an eye at an early age, something to do with sewing scissors, so of the three brothers, he was the only one to not serve in World War II.

Close meant writing letters then, and unfortunately none of those correspondences survive. My mother wrote letters to her siblings often. I can still recognize her hand when I see it. Sam lived in Florida and was an accountant. Oddly, I'm not aware that he had children, but he may have. I never met any nor did I meet him.

Then came my mother, Magdalene ("like Mary Magdalene in the Bible" she would say) and after her was Alfred (I think). Alfred was known as "Bozo" as a kid and was apparently something of a cutup. There was an often told story about how he nearly cut his foot off chopping a skunk out of a tree stump. Cut off his foot or not, it seems the craziest of stunts. He had huge standout ears and a great smile.

He served in the infantry in the Pacific during the war, participating in three or four landings. He came home with what we would now call Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome and hid out for the better part of three years in the attic room of his mother's house. His mother would lock him in at night because she was afraid of him. Eventually he used his GI Bill benefits to get a degree in civil engineering, and with that in hand set off to see the world.

I remember a visit from him when I was about nine or ten. He had been in Brazil doing a mapping project prior to some highway construction. He brought my mother back a deep honey colored topaz in an emerald cut that was nearly an inch long. There were things for us kids and he played with us. He was a sweet engaging man.

He went off to travel some more and eventually met and married a Latina woman from Central America, and had three children. He settled outside of San Diego and I visited in the eighties. Raised a Southern Baptist, I suspect Alfred was as lapsed as his sister, but his wife was a Seventh Day Adventist and he willingly supported their upbringing in that religion.

Marian was the sister. She may have been older than Alfred. My image of Marian is what I thought of when I read the character "Hilly" in "The Help." One of the pictures we got from my brother shows her sitting movie star languorously on a divan in something that looks like a full length negligee. Another her son, Allen, is labeled "Allen in his new tux for Cotillion." She was apparently that kind of girl. She married in succession the two richest men in the town.

She always struck me as tightly wired and edgy. We stayed with her for a bit just after my parents separated. The story goes that she had a nervous breakdown in the late thirties maybe early forties and that her mother's response was to read the Bible to her. My mother apparently snagged her away and got her to treatment. I would not be surprised if it had been electroshock therapy, which was commonly used at the time. My sister reported that when she went back to live with Marian, that she was "starved." Quite probably an exaggeration, but Marian was notoriously stingy. When the youngest brother needed some help, she didn't participate.

Her son, Allen, became a mortician, I think partly at his mother's urging because of the income potential. Alas, the cotillion dreams were not to be realized as at some point in his young adult life Allen "came out." My sister, who had "come out" to me (significantly) on a Father's Day in 1978 used to see him often in the city where they both lived. Counting my father that makes three, and I'm not so sure about cousin Johnny.

The last child was son George, about ten years younger than my mother. He ended up serving on sub chasers in the Atlantic during the war and the Navy sent him to Dartmouth after the war. He ended up getting at least one graduate degree in Engineering, worked for the Air Force for a time until the work he was doing became part of NASA and he became a fairly senior manager in Huntsville. He would call every year during the holidays to catch up and was always advising me to get a job with a good company that I could stay with for a career. Not sure he appreciated the world that employment has become.

I miss his calls. He died only about three years ago about a year after Alfred and Sam. I knew him better than the rest because I lived with him for a while in the fifties. He married late, an older woman with two sons who were and apparently still are hellions. Thaddis died before him leaving him with a developmentally disabled son of their own in his twenties. He had another son with her as well. In his retirement he still went to the office for NASA liftoffs and played a lot of golf.

He was kind of a fussy man. He had some kind of digestive issues and Thaddis was always preparing him special things or watching out for what he ate in restaurants. But he had a playful streak. I remember him learning how and teaching us boys how to strike a match from a paper matchbook with one hand, "in case I ever lose a hand." It was easier before they moved the striking surface to the back. The irony--he smoked his whole life and Thaddis did not, but a form of lung cancer not related to second hand smoke is what took her.

When my mother was ill and was obviously going to end her days in nursing care, he stepped in. My brother went to live with him and he made arrangements for my sister and me. Maybe not the best arrangements but at least we would be with family such as it was. He then went around the state where we had lived cleaning up my mother's trail of debt. My father had paid no child support and we had lived for four years on her meager salary and credit. George was a mench. I know I never thanked him enough.

I know other families have similar fractures as mine but sometimes this feels like such a loss to me. In the eighties I did go around and visit a few of them, notably George and Alfred and their families. A few years ago my brother organized a Thanksgiving at George's. My wife and I couldn't go because things were tight and we had just been traveling expensively for my graduate program. My younger son went. I wish now that I had.

I think the estrangement has its root largely in my father's family. He had a problem early on. There was another oft told story of falling off of the train on the way home from prep school, often told along with the one about sister Nancy falling off of a porch after drinking "Zombies." Our culture clearly had something of a different relationship with alcohol in the forties and fifties, probably dating back to the end of prohibition. It was as if the whole culture was self-medicating. My parents had two martini evenings at home fairly frequently. They all avoided it and then Magdalene was stuck with it. Not surprised that she might have felt she got sold a bill of goods. He was a charming fellow. But his parents didn't deal with it at all, and his sibs except Nancy avoided him.

Physically closer to his family, we saw little of it, not that I would have wanted to have a relationship with Frank, and I wasn't any more comfortable with Nancy and her "boyfriends'" drinking than with his. Mother's family was spread over the continent and beyond and there was no money for travel. When I did finally see them as an adult, I was often a little uncomfortable and out of place, probably not as communicative and engaging as I might have been. In the end George's patience and duty was a little glue to keep me in touch.

Now my sibs are across continent. I have broken the connection fairly completely with my second life out here on the coast, and my sister isn't speaking to anyone anyway, while there are other things that keep my brother and me from having much of a relationship.

Bittersweet to think of them.

Family Pictures

[Warning--this is long and the first of at least two...]

Within the last couple of weeks we finally got around to hanging the pictures of family along the stairwell to the top floor. It's where we had them in the old place, and we had gone back and forth a bit on whether to do it here. In the end we decided to do it and we like the result.

Top to bottom it starts with my family antecedents, a great-grandfather and great-grandmother, my grandfather, my parents and then my children. Then comes the same kind of sequence of my wife's family and it ends with blended family weddings of our children, and finally the grandchildren. All various frames, different kinds of pictures, really nice.

Funny thing that I get a bunch of old pictures from my brother this week that he had found in a stored suitcase. These were mostly my mother's family. I think we will add a couple to the wall.

Made me think about family history and be aware that while I know some of it, I don't know much, and what I do know I ought to record. Here seemed like a good place. They are all gone now.

I'll start with the tribe on my father's side.

As the first-born grandson, I was named after my grandfather. In effect, my father's bid for his father's love. The old man was a doctor, a graduate of Johns Hopkins around the turn of the century. His wife "Daisy," was a diminutive woman of strong will. A DAR member, my salient memory of her was the time at five or six when I broke a china figurine bouncing a beach ball in her house. Not a fun memory. I'm not sure she was the loving mother or grandmother type.

Daisy and Harold had four children, and according to family stories she had four or five miscarriages before having her tubes tied to prevent further occurrences. They had Frank, then Nancy, then twins--my father Edgar and his sister Cynthia. Obvious practitioners of the right of primogeniture, they provided an Ivy League education and offered medical school to Frank, who had no interest. Frank married something of an heiress and ran a boatyard and lobster pots as well as a small farm in Maine and in the end did quite well for himself from selling off the family land. My father yearned to have gone to medical school but he got shipped off to boarding school instead of having a college education paid for.

Younger sister Cynthia was the princess. One of the pictures hanging on my wall is of the four of them in a posed shot. Frank in a suit and tie is in the center with Nancy in a dark dress leaning in almost tentatively from one side (I'd guess him to be early teens and her a bit younger). On the other side, Cynthia is seated crossed legged on a table almost odalisque style wearing a frilly white frock. My father, in a dark suit with knickers and a White Peter Pan collar with a bow, is seated in front.

Nancy has an almost haunted look, while Cynthia appears serenely confident.

Cynthia went on to marry one of her Swarthmore professors, while Nancy did nursing work with the Red Cross during the war and had a succession of men in her life until she married late to a merchant seaman. She seemed happy then until he predeceased her by a number of years. My father didn't have much good to say about "the drunk," however.

I think the whole family had issues with alcohol. Nancy and Edgar were out-and-out alcoholics. Drink lubricated every evening I spent with Cynthia and her husband, though I can't say I saw them really drunk, unlike my father and his older sister.

In-law relations struck me as more strained than most. My mother resented Cynthia, whom my father seemed to nearly worship. Sentences would begin "Cynthia says..." and my mother would seethe. I would hear the same line in my later teens when living with my father. He would call her whenever he had difficulty with me. Some years later after my moither and father were gone, when visiting Frank and his wife, Helen made a comment to the effect that "Maggie (my mother) thought she was getting the doctor's son...," implying that she was some kind of gold digger. Going to Helen and Frank's daughter's wedding, Mother complained about the cramped and shabby room we had for our five under the eaves of the Harriet Beecher Stowe house, while Cynthia and her husband and two children stayed in the family manse.

Some years later that daughter, about eleven years older than me, Cynthia--"Little Cynthia" in the family practice--told me about her father Frank. [An aside, my mother decided to use my middle name to call me by because she didn't want me to be "Little Harry" all my life--thanks, Mom.] I had taken my younger son down to meet her in Florida and had taken Aunt Nancy with us. Late one evening the two of them were very intent on trying to get me drunk, which I managed to resist, and then they proceeded to tell me how Frank had raped his younger sister Nancy when she was just fifteen, and had apparently tried to rape his own daughter at the same age. "Little Cynthia" was not so little and fought him off according to her. He had a long career as a serial philanderer, bragging of his conquests to his daughter and his wife. I guess she didn't have that much luck marrying the doctor's son either.

Frank had a son about a year younger than me. Johnny wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer but he seemed a happy go lucky kid with a lot of charm. At twenty-six Johnny blew his brains out with his father's shotgun in the middle of the living room of their brand new house. That's all I ever knew or heard about it.

When I was growing up we saw Nancy much more than any of the others. She lived in New York City and we were in the suburbs, so a couple of different ones of her men were also part of the gatherings. My mother at some point told me that she was very particular about cleaning up the bed linen Nancy used, that she was concerned about "diseases." Whatever. For the most part I think Nancy tried to be a good aunt and have a good relationship with us kids.

There were, however, none of my father's family to be seen or heard from after my parents separated and started the long march to a divorce. At the time divorce was very difficult in Connecticut where we lived. Adultery was the only basis, and it took five years. When my mother became terminally ill, it was her brother who stepped in and managed things, taking in my young brother, finding a place for my sister with his other sister, and sending me to live with my father in a two room apartment with his male "friend." When my father finally got a job--he had been seriously ill and then unemployed for two or three years--and was about to move us ("friend" included) to Boston mid-school year, a teacher stepped in and offered to let me stay at his house to finish my year. It was a real gift, because I was in a great magnet style school and Boston's public education system had seen far better days at that time.

I survived the year in Boston with my father and his "friend," Don. [I'm not being sarcastic about their relationship. They were lovers. It is just that my father never talked to me about it and never acknowledged the truth of it in my presence.] That summer I got a job and packed up and left. My mother had died in May and the last straw for me was being sent to the funeral to "bring back your sister and brother" to live with him. My mother's brother would have none of it, of course, so I got screamed at on my return for my failure to do as he had demanded. Yeah, like I was going to drag my younger siblings into this situation.

Christmas that year I was invited to celebrate with my father's new wife, Leone (#@!!???) and my sister and brother. I hitched to get there. It was well out in the burbs. The "friend," Don, had been discarded and in his place was a whiskey-voiced woman who had been my father's real estate agent in finding a home for his little family. They were separated a month later after racking up a $750 liquor bill. He was in the hospital having smashed through a glass front bookcase and raked his wrists. She had the two kids, since he had declared them wards of the state. They weren't very careful about foster parents in those days. My father was soon back with Don, and my sister was back with her mother's sister. The step/foster mother had made her miserable so that she would be left with my brother, then about nine.

During the year or two before I went back to live with my father, his father died and there was some serious infighting among the siblings about how to handle the inheritance and the land. Each was supposed to get something, but somehow Edgar and Nancy got pretty well squeezed out with Frank ending up with the lion's share and Cynthia getting the only thing she wanted, a cottage on the shore. My guess is that Edgar and Nancy were in such financial straits that Frank bought them out with lowball offers. Lovely people, just lovely.

I was pretty much estranged at that point. It was clear I could count on nothing from them and managed to start college a couple years after high school and then get accepted to a place where I got excellent scholarship help. However, on graduation I get this angry note from Nancy that started out with a congratulations and then launched into a bitter "now maybe you'll stop being so selfish and do something about your brother." Given how toxic they all were to each other this seemed highly ironic at best, and of course none of them had done a damn thing to help me.

Over the next couple of years I had to rescue my father from the floor of his apartment where his new "roommate" had left him after getting him drunk and then stealing his disability check. The first time we had to take him in and my wife had to lose some work as I was brand new in a job and could not. Cynthia came with her "help"--a package of three pairs of underpants while we were losing income. We got him placed in a nursing home, but he ended up not staying because he "wasn't like those people," and probably because he couldn't get a drink. Soon he was back with the new roommate and sure enough I get the call from Cynthia to go and get him. I said I could not. We had one child and another due any minute. She took him in but entertained me with repeated telephone calls that I "had to take him" and putting her husband on the line to cajole me. The two lines that stick were something about she "shouldn't have to deal with him again," [yeah, I knew all about that!] and "you have to take him. We have to go up to the cottage this weekend." To which I suggested it would be nice if my wife and I had a cottage to go to. End of any such conversation for a long time to come. What I did do was arrange with a lawyer pro bono to set up a conservatorship to receive his disability checks so the "roommate" couldn't pull that stunt again.

I think I only saw him once or twice after that before he died in the early seventies. The lawyer told me not to come to the hospital to see him, that he was in a coma and that the hospital might try to make me pay the substantial bill. I regret a little that I did not. His ashes were scattered at sea.

There are two pictures of my father on my wall. One shows him obviously at the tiller of a sailboat. The only piece of the boat that can be seen is the main sheet in his right hand as he gazes off to windward to see what's ahead. He loved to sail. Ironically he never taught me, but when I did learn I often thought of him when I had tiller in hand. He was proud that he had earned his first small sailboat by swimming the mile across and then back between the point and an island across the bay in the frigid Maine waters. He's a handsome and intent young man in the photo.

The other picture is of him in choirboy robes looking positively angelic. He had a pretty face with thick hair with a widow's peak as a boy. He had early male pattern baldness, so I often thank my mother's brothers for their genes. He had a beautiful voice and enjoyed using it. Mine is not so good or as trained but I have his habit of singing snippets of songs during the day. When my wife and I made an impromptu trip to New York a few years back to catch the Broadway revival of "South Pacific" it was, for me, a bit of a pilgrimage. The musical had been iconic for my parents and I can remember when I was in second or third grade seeing him perform "Nothing Like a Dame" with a men's singing group. He was good with his hands, doing delicate work on furniture and the like.

I realize now that while he made victims of his own children, he and his sister, Nancy, were victims in their own family. Sometimes I'm not sure what I feel or what to think that they are all gone now, but I am glad I have the pictures and glad I have them up on the wall to see.

Acting

During the last few years I have taken some acting classes at a local studio. It was partly to help me with my screenwriting and partly because I have enjoyed acting at earlier times in my life.

So I took a basic sequence of three courses that ended in a scene study course where we got to put on the scenes we had worked on in class. The teacher asked us in the first session or so what kind of character we would like to play. My response was pretty quick. I wanted to play a "bad guy," someone like the Roy Cohn character in "Angels in America." Well, when she handed out the scenes we would work on I was Roy Cohn. The scene was when we first begin to see that he is really sick and it is between him and the young Mormon lawyer. Roy is in bathrobe and slippers and cursing up a storm at his "dumb Mormon hick" young friend. It's the first part of the meltdown.

I was partnered with a young guy who worked at Microsoft. He had lots of energy and was very excited about the idea of acting. He'd even been cast in a small production locally that a friend of mine directed. Raj (not his real name) was apparently a little difficult to direct according to my friend. And when we worked together he always kept changing the blocking and positioning himself differently than what I expected.

A couple of things about acting. First of all it is not "pretending," it is acting or doing or being. It is about interacting and reacting. The simplest scene has been described to me as two people trying to get past each other to the exit on the other side of the room and at the same time trying to prevent the other from doing it. In my earlier basic scene study class I had been given the assignment to be a security guard in a museum at closing time trying to evict a student desperately studying a painting for her final paper due the next day. You get the idea. Real conflict, conflicting objectives. When actors are working on something like this, they work off of each other.

My partner and I worked assiduously to prep the scene. In our final class before performance we were all running our scenes for our teacher. When it was our turn we started out fine and at some point I ended up at a desk downstage right, and my dumb hick Mormon friend decides to wander way upstage just before I have a really critical line to deliver to him. If I do it, he has positioned himself so that I have to turn my back to the audience. I look at my teacher and say "I can't..." And she says to deliver the line to him and give it to the audience anyway. So I did. Face forward without turning at all, but with every thought I could muster, I shot the words at Raj standing ten feet behind me.

One of my classmates said later that she didn't think that could be done. The teacher had a few words for my acting partner before the performance next time and he went back to our original blocking.

I learned a couple of things. One was precisely what "upstaging" means. It's a quite literal term. But second that you don't have to let it happen and you don't have to confront it. You just have to find the way to work in that moment that gets the job done.

Robo Calls and Scam Artists

Maybe I should feel sorry for the folks who work in phone bank boiler rooms. I suspect many are just trying to eke out a living in these hard times, but I find myself more angry than sympathetic.

The robo calls you can hang up on but you can't make them stop coming. The ones with a live person on the other end you have to deal with if you want to ask them to stop calling, though I wonder how well that works.

Since I'm here a lot I get a lot of them.

Today I got one of the social engineering type. Supposedly my computer was sending messages that it was in some kind of distress and this firm (vaguely named "System Solutions") was calling to help me out. I could not get a name or a supervisor's name nor could I get a clear explanation of what the inquiry was about. The caller asserted that he had recently been in Redmond and in other ways implied that he was associated with Microsoft.

He tried to sound reasonable and when he began to ask me questions about my computer I asked if "my computer is sending you messages why don't you know all of this already?" He just had to check some things. Would I turn on my computer and check some things for him? Yeah right. I should have asked for his phone number and told him I'd call back, but I was too annoyed. A little web research on "System Solutions" and "scam" turned up this:

"A new scam has been making the rounds recently – scammers calling through the phone and posing as people from Microsoft, scaring victims into paying for bogus services and stealing their credit information. These fraudsters can be very persistent – so it's important to always be alert and informed."

It's a fearful time. Times like this and these people seem to crawl out of the woodwork. One of the damn robo calls was offering "to help with [my] IRS debt." Scare tactics all the way. You have an infected computer. You owe the IRS. And on and on.

It's enough to make me more of a curmudgeon than I already am.

Give a Shout for the Underdog

It's as American as apple pie. "Let's drink to the hardworking people. Let's drink to the salt of the earth."

We like the underdog. I have a stronger tendency than most to root for the underdog. All it took was bootstrapping myself out of my toxic family situation and being a Red Sox fan for years.

Rant Warning

I said I wasn't going to talk about politics, and I'm not going to get into party politics, but at some level any public issue is political.

I've been watching the Occupy Wall Street with some interest. Back in the day I did a little demonstration time myself. While I get decidedly uncomfortable with some of the crazies that such events attract, this "movement," as it is beginning to be called, has more of a focus than some media would care to admit. Our local alternative paper published this link: http://www.businessinsider.com/what-wall-street-protesters-are-so-angry-about-2011-10?op=1

You might check it out. Some very interesting charts.

Another place to do a little research is on the SEC EDGAR website. You can read the annual corporate filings called 10-Ks. Pick a couple of random large coporations and when you are in the document search "executive compensation." What you find will make you ill or at least throw up your hands in despair. The provision for golden parachutes and the like pay out in the event of almost any termination, with the possible exception of criminal indictment, and pay out handsomely. Unlike the employee who don't get a raise unless they perform, the standards for executives is completely different--entitlement on a grand scale. Can you say "Let's loot this place and screw the little guy?"

Truth is while I am by no means wealthy, having been a wage slave most of my life, I am better off that the bulk of the 99%. I suspect our income even reduced as it is by my semi-retirement may be in the top third or quartile. I am one of those who almost made it to the "promised land" offered by America's so-called social mobility. I also still buy a lottery ticket every so often.

"The rich get richer" hasn't been truer since the Gilded Age, and there's no Teddy Roosevelt in sight. And some spend their energy trying to scare us about the bugaboos of big government and taxes when the really big dogs on the block are the Corporations which are now free to outright own Congress. Not that corporations are necessarily bad. I've worked for at least a couple that could be termed positively enlightened.

But the magician's sleight of hand has us focused on the ideological dialogue and how taxes are "stealing" and that any questioning of the way things are is "class warfare," and so on. Any suggestion that the tax burden should be distributed differently is met with cries of "socialism" and rants against "social engineering." I haven't quite gotten yet how DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act) and "nation building" after at least one war we maybe should not have started in the first place isn't "social engineering" on a grand scale. But I guess maybe my "social values" is your "social engineering," and vice versa.

I keep wondering where all that "job creation" is that certain tax cuts were supposed to help promote. I keep wondering how the same people that trashed a lot of value in my retirement savings got a bailout AND huge bonuses.

I wouldn't want to be rearing children now. My parents could say with some truth that this was the land of opportunity, and that I would be better off than they were. I'm not so sure that my children can say that to theirs.

I grew up going to public school. I went to good ones and bad ones, twelve of them, and managed to get a fairly decent education. Of course at the time there were whole classes of people excluded from that system by race or being differently abled, but the experience and the quality of it seems different now from what I can see, and I think we all lose something because of that. I remember being at a university alumni luncheon where everyone was talking about the community they moved to in order to have their children in good schools, or the private school their young scholar attended. I made myself quite popular by saying something to the effect that "don't we all have a stake in a good public school system." (Please note the sarcasm.)

The so-called 99% are upset partly because the thing that extreme wealth confers is the ability to stack the deck in favor of themselves and their issue. They have access denied to the rest of us. As long as there was a chance that mobility could take us there, most folks probably didn't begrudge this. But the game of Three Card Monte is just about over and the illusion of mobility is wearing thin.

Maybe it never was a society based on fair play, but we thought it was. It's how we got sold the American Dream.

I've lived it and gotten a piece or two, but I think the door is closing. Something is broken and I, for one, see nothing on the horizon, that offers a hope of fixing it.

Sorry if this one seems so bleak.

Time

Part of the reason I started posting these essays, if they can be called that, is the growing sense I have that there is a finite amount of time left me. That thought makes me look back at my experience to see what I can see and to think about it.

If you have been reading these you know that one of the questions that has been up for me has been about what difference I have made and the value I have added (or, I suppose, subtracted).

But I have also been aware that I have some thoughts simply about the passage of time itself, and of my subjective experience of it.

In my teens and probably into my early twenties it always felt to me as if time were crawling far more slowly that I wanted it to. The four years of high school felt interminable. The five of college almost as long. Looking back those periods seem to me the smallest of blips. The last twenty-some years I have spent in this new city, a place I would never have imagined ending up by the way, seems to have gone by in a rush.

Thinking of it another way, I remember thinking in the mid to late fifties that what had happened a mere dozen or so years before was ancient history. WW II was something you saw images of on "Victory at Sea," and even though I was born during it (265 days after Dec. 7, 1941--compare that to the normal human gestation period) it felt to me as a youngster like something from another century. Looking back the same amount of time now takes me to a figurative "yesterday" in my subjective experience--the end of the Clinton administration.

I guess it is a little like how a ski slope seems so much steeper looking down from the top than it does when you look up at it. The difference is twice your height, a matter of perspective.

Similarly, I can remember thinking of people much younger than I am now as "old," but people I know of that age now, or even a bit younger I tend to think of as contemporaries, and forget completely that they have no experience of things that are vivid for me, like JFK's election.

What's that line? "Time keeps on slippin', slippin', into the future..."

It is so highly subjective. Fascinating to me.

"Put a Woman in Your Life..."

'enry 'iggins had it a bit right, but he mellowed beyond his soliloquy about how a relationship with a woman condemned one to be "rearranged" like the furniture.

There have been four women in my life with whom I have had what I would call significant relationships, other than my mother of course. Two of them I married. Two, I wanted to. There was another I married that I wouldn't put in the same group as the four who each, I think, made some big differences in my life.

The first was my first serious relationship and was someone from a very different background. I learned a lot from her about a different culture that had been hidden to me, and about family.

The second bore my children, a seriously significant change in my life, and one, that despite the occasional doubts and worries, I have no regrets about. She was a good mother and a better wife than I deserved. (It is possible that each of these women was in some way better than I deserved.) I think what I learned from her I had to learn afterwards. Buried in my own incompleted angst, I pretty much tried to suppress the crap out of her and reflecting back she had to have more dignity and more endurance than anyone should have had to in order to stay as long as she did.

The third was an intense three year long-distance relationship with a woman who was seven years my senior. Very successful, articulate, full of energy. A lot of the time I wondered what she saw in me. I wanted desperately for her to say yes to a marriage date, and it was a constant point of tension and difficulty during our last year or so. I think I learned what it was like to have someone in my life who would stand up to me and not accept what I tried to do when I was less than my best with her. But she had her own idosyncracies (as do we all) and was not about to surrender to any relationship. She had taste and style and contributed that to me in the little time we had together.

Then came my abortive second marriage, too soon, too very much on the rebound. My only saving comment is that I was probably a much bigger disappointment to her than she was to me. The divorce was vicious and financially damaging, and took longer than the marriage to unravel. I did learn something, probably to the chagrin of the woman who has been in my life for the last twenty years--not to trust the appearances of a relationship. I was living in Professor Higgins' nightmare.

I seem to have saved the best for last. We have many things in common and some really pleasing differences. Her extroversion is a delightful anodyne to my reclusive introversion. I think she is the smartest woman I have ever been with. Not one degree but she may be better read than 99.9% of the population. We both seem to recognize that it would not have worked for us had we met early on. We both had a lot of growing to do as adults before we could be fit for each other. So the timing, for once, was right.

I have a small regret that we have not had the high romance that I remember from earlier relationships, but I have come to think that may not be a bad thing. Robert Johnson ("He," "She," "We") writes in one of his books about "over the oatmeal" love--that simple daily appreciation that we are here and have each other in our lives.

I do sometimes wish I had more of the vigor of youth. Even a reasonably healthy "not quite so old guy" isn't what he was at thirty-five or forty, and we didn't meet until I was forty-eight. I sometimes think she might feel cheated by that.

What we've learned together is how to manage a good married life. Our tastes are blessedly similar. We pretty much blew the mind of a contractor redoing our old kitchen when we zeroed in on two choices for our granite counter top in about fifteen minutes. He'd planned at least an hour. And even when there are differences, we've developed some quick and simple ways to check where we each are and quickly come to a workable agreement. I'd like to think that my process skills are the bigger part of that, but I think her adaptability and willingness to engage may contribute more.

We've built a good life, with more yet to come.

Choice

Someone I know, who will go undescribed beyond that, has become a "Christian" rather late in life. I don't or wouldn't have an issue with that except that he has become fond of making pronouncements that he has fairly obviously introjected from his church or pastor if not a certain media outlet.

"This is a Christian nation."

Wince.

And "Being gay is not organic. It is a choice." Double wince. So what does "organic" mean, I ask?

"I'm being kind. It's more than just genetic. It is a choice."

And I'm thinking that if you have any gay friends I hope like hell you don't say that to one of them who spends more time in the gym than you do.

I've done a little research into the various studies and it is pretty clear to me that while there may not be a "gay gene," that there is a genetic component of some kind. Some of the studies of brothers where the frequency of homosexuality is higher among the younger brothers of older brothers suggests that there might be something in the hormonal transactions in the prebirth environment that has an influence. Boys get made in the womb as zygotes begin as female and a sequence of hormonal events connected to the XY chromosome creates boys. That is probably highly unscientifc and oversimplified, but that is what happens. A womb that has delivered boys is a different environment that one that has not. Of course nothing is as simple as nature or nurture and is much more likely to be nature AND nurture.

But my friend the "Christian" will have none of that.

I wish that believers could secure their own solace in belief and not feel so compelled to require that their beliefs be imposed on others. Seems to me that that hardly matches up with the message of Jesus' love for humanity. It's about controlling others--surely one of a human being's most fruitless wastes of time.

It seems to me that we have choices about how we behave, about how we treat others, about how we live up to or don't live up to our own aspirations.

What we don't have choices about is who we are.

Who we are, including our sexuality, is something we have to discover.

My "friend" believes the "homosexual lifestyle" is damaging and toxic. I wonder if his "Christian" life style wouldn't look damaging and toxic if he were a member of a hidden minority routinely castigated by a dominant majority, as well as assaulted and jailed for their "Christian" beliefs.

I alway have to end up asking why do heterosexuals feel so threatened? And I should limit that to heterosexual men. I don't hear the same things from women, never have. I suspect women appreciate more than they are willing to tell their believing men what it is to be oppressed and abused simply because of who they are.

Needless to say I can only stand one conversation with this person every few years. I'm done with it for a while now.

Religion...

The subtitle might continue... "Losin my..."

I was reared by a lapsed Southern Baptist and a fifth or sixth generation unchurched Unitarian. I don't think there's such a thing as a lapsed Unitarian. BOMFOG and all that--Brotherhood of Man, Fatherhood of God--and years of struggling with an almost doctrineless inclusivity, to remain one of the smallest of Protestant sects, yet claiming as their own five American Presidents. Small chance there will ever be another one.

My parents' solution to the what will we do about church for the children was to have us attend the closest more or less middle of the road Protestant churches. They were never much involved and we moved often enough so that in one place it was Methodist and another Presbyterian, until my parents split up and we moved with my mother to her hometown in Kentucky. Up until that time I had been a good student in Sunday School as I was in school. I remember winning a prize for memorizing the books of the Bible. I asked for and got a Revised Standard Version for my thirteenth birthday.

In her hometown we had to attend the Baptist church. Her mother expected it. This is the woman who explained that the racial slur was really "Nigra" and wasn't a slur at all, and had stood her other daughter who was having what was called then a "nervous breakdown" in a corner and read the Bible to her until my mother had spirited her away to a treatment facility. Aunt M remained a nut case for most of her life, marrying the richest two men in the town in succession, and when my sister came to live with her in desperation at 15 or 16, locking her in the basement and nearly starving her. Good Baptists all.

The Baptist minister ran the town. The sermons seemed interminable to me and I was at first mystified, later intrigued, and at last appalled by the "call." The call to be saved. What sealed it for me was seeing his sons go down to the altar for the laying on of hands on repeated occasions and knowing that they would be bending or breaking norms or laws as they saw fit as they tore a path of terror through the town. Seemed to me that this being reborn in Christ stuff was a free pass to be a shit to fellow human beings.

Yet something about church appealed to me. When we moved to another town I started going to the Methodist church which seemed more reasonable. It didn't have all the "Jesus Saves" crap. I hung out with the youth group, sort of fitting in, and enjoyed our forbidden jaunts to a roadhouse outside of the dry town where the kids would dance.

Going to live with my father, he suggested that I try a Unitarian Church when I was looking for a place to go. One of the good things he did for me. It was at least a place that encouraged you to think. At the time there was a great comparative religion curriculum for teens and I ate it up. The young people's group was copacetic and mellow and often lots of kind of crazy fun.

Later, I became pretty involved in my church as an adult, but Unitarian congregations are pretty idiosyncratic so I tended to drop in and out and for the last twenty years, mostly out. I don't like the congregational politics much and it's hard to avoid. "Liberal Religious" churches seem to be constantly battling with fracture and dissolution. I wonder if it is the same in the more orthodox ones.

My religious education wasn't complete until my first serious girlfriend who was Jewish took me home to visit her family which featured a VERY Orthodox grandfather. The girl and her mother coached me so that I could "pass" enough to prevent a major uproar. In the process I learned enough about Judaism to have a great appreciation for it. Twenty years after that during a tough transition in my life friends took me to services with their "Neo-Hassidic" Rabbi, a delightful and wise man.

I don't believe in a god even I can recognize. I remember sitting on a deck overlooking the Big Hole River in Montana a few years ago reading Dawkins and getting it quite clearly that the typical indocrination of children into a "faith" is child abuse. So in a way I can thank my parents for their casual compromise. I was exposed but not indoctrinated.

Yet for all that, I get that there is something there. I can't listen to a Bach Magnificat without being moved. I love the "Messiah." The music and art created out of that inspiration are some of the most beautiful things we can experience. And at the same time I have that thought I know that some of the world's most inhuman behavior has been in the name of religion. Even those acts by regimes that disavowed religion are in an odd reversal still about religion. And our world remains torn apart in the name of religion.

I hate the division that so many seem to want to make between the spiritual and the secular, as though one is bad, the other good.

I remember looking up at Michelangelo's ceiling. I should have been moved, but I had waited in a three hour line and was jammed hamhock to butt with a cattle-car-like crowd replete with hoards of Japanese tourists trying to take illicit photographs of it. So I wasn't moved. merely tired and annoyed. Yet in another almost as crowded gallery was nearly brought to tears by my first sight of Botticelli's "Primavera." The one religious (Michelangelo), the other with pagan antecedents. Go figure.

I grok connection. I get that that is what the driver is. We want to be connected. We want to be connected to each other. We want to be connected to meaning. We want, hoping for something we cannot know, to be connected to something bigger. To be simply human somehow seems not quite enough. We know... correction... I know I am not quite enough and have never been, at least not all by myself.

So is it at bottom about relationship?

Teaching Again

I'm teaching again.

A colleague from a company I worked for invited me to join her and some others teaching online for an East Coast university, fairly well known. I've taught before, but this is my first "virtual' teaching experience. It has been interesting. It's also been surprising how much I learn about my students even with the limitations of the medium. We have webcams but don't use them that much as basically it's just a head shot of the person who happens to be speaking at the time and not all of my students have cameras.

I'm doing it part-time, which is just fine with me. The prep takes time and it's taking some imagination and effort to create surrogate means to do the group process stuff that I used to do in live classes.

I have taught before, both part-time, and for a year, full-time. The full-time gig featured three classes a week, two sessions each, of 60 undergraduate students. 180 final papers to grade was a serious overload. And undergrads at the time seemed a little more difficult than the grad students I have now. I remember being stunned when student after student came in to negotiate grades. A sampling of the pitches:

"Coach says..."

"My father is giving the daughter who has the best GPA a car..."

"My car insurance rates will go up if I don't get a better grade..."

It would never have occurred to me to even try to negotiate a grade in college. I could usually figure out why I got what I got, took it as a lesson, and then moved on.

I do try to take the grade element out of the equation as much as I can as it seems to distort things. My objective is that we learn as a team and I ask them to help each other and share their results with one another. Some get it. Some don't. Student norms about competitiveness and collaboration are interesting to say the least. Not unreminiscent of the ways that people behave in the workplace.

Makes me wonder if we aren't losing the art of collaboration.

Personally, I have been reflecting on my own learnings in the process. I think I am more patient with students than I normally am. I know that I work at trying to make sure I understand them and what they are asking or talking about, It is probably a little disconcerting to some of them that I routinely ask at the end of each class what worked and what didn't, and make changes based on their input. I do a midcourse correction exercise and suggest that they could do the same with any team they work with. They've had some good ideas.

And yes, there are some who work the system. One of the features of the online tools we use is a log of how much time individuals, including me, spend in the course. This term I have two who have spent more time than I have in the course. I also have two who have been in it barely more than the actual class meeting time. The first two are doing very well in terms of the quality of their output. the latter two, not nearly so well. 一分耕耘，一分收穫  (Copy that into your Google search box.)

The classes have been very diverse. More women than men, at least a couple for whom English is a second language. I have had students born in the Ukraine, Jordan, and China, and probably a few other places I don't know about. I've had one active duty military who flew in for his first class from somewhere east of wherever you are reading this. My guess is they are mostly late twenties or thirty something. They're doing a Masters or certificate program for professional career reasons, for the most part.

One curious thing about teaching online is that with the exception of "Professor"--and I still cannot quite get used to being addressed that way--status differentials dependent on visual cues are minimized. I think it is one of the positives of the medium.

Gotta go get ready for today's class now...

Resistance...

"When they poured across the border,
I was cautioned to surrender.
This I could not do.
I took my gun and vanished."

This one is going to be a little roundabout.

The text is from a song by Leonard Cohen, "The Partisan."

I had known his music but not him. Anyone who has listened singers from Jennifer Warnes to Johnny Cash has heard covers of his songs. I finally caught up because of a cartoonish super hero movie that came out two or three summers ago that used Cohen's rendition of one of his most covered songs, "Hallelujah!" for a love making scene. The movie wasn't particularly good, but the song caught me and I downloaded "The Best of..." album to my ipod and played it pretty much constantly for the next few weeks much to my wife's annoyance.

This week in the graduate class I teach online we were studying a case that featured issues around feedback and resistance, and I got into a conversation with one of my students about someone in a case she characterized as "stuck in his ways" and having to be coerced to perform, and by extension of course to a supposed many such unmotivated employees. I spent some time, I'm not sure very successfully, asking her to look underneath her diagnosis, to answer the question "why?"

So, as I have often done in my work, I myself began to reconsider the issue of resistance. I remember reading many years ago an article by someone well known in my field to the effect that "there is no such thing as resistance," that what we experience as resistance is actually a rational response to change that brings with it the prospect of loss. While I think this was mainly a device to do the same thing I was trying to do with my student--consider the causes of what we see as resistance--I do remember the article as a useful thing to keep in mind in such instances.

Of course in any serious consideration of the idea, one has, I think, to look to the laboratory at hand, one's self, to do the inquiry justice. Which led me this morning to think about the song quoted above. Nominally a narrative tale of a partisan in "resistance," it seems to me a very useful allegory for the self in resistance.

"When they poured across the border,..."

When I get assaulted by feedback dissonant with how I experience myself... when my borders/boundaries are penetrated by criticism...

"I was cautioned to surrender..."

A more conservative and cautious voice inside of me says to give up to it...

"This I could not do...."

But ego, good old ego, says "no." For preservation of self, I cannot do that...

"I took my gun and vanished...."

Which is one way certain to avoid the penetrating event and not have to deal with it. I think of how often I may have done that. Probably lots more than I want to admit... taking my gun and vanishing.

Interestingly, later in the song comes this line:

"... the frontiers are my prison..."

This is, I think, the consequence of being unable or unwilling to take what our environment and the people in it tell us about us and consider it and integrate it. The self cannot grow and its frontiers/boundaries become our prison.

 Saturday morning with 11 months to go to 70...