Roy Agonistes

Conscientious parents find hope in the proverb that “train[ing] up a child in the way he should go,” hopefully guarantees, “when he is old, he will not depart from his [upbringing].” However, parenting is like the DNA lottery, nature and nurture combine in unpredictable ways. The best of intentions often go awry. So, what if a child is not brought up with direction, has no parents, or has no coherent upbringing?  In nearly every case he (she) will certainly “depart.”

The core of the word “agonistes” is the word “agon,” i.e., struggle. That sums up Roy, my mother’s brother. As I examine his tortured life I contrast it with my own, mine is such a blessed opposite. A fault line, the result of alcohol, lack of a religious center, and recklessness, runs through both my parent’s families. But to simply examine a broken life, like a poorly tended plant if not cultivated, in order to show what happens, is a waste of time. It’s obvious.

Why not gaze into the interstices, i.e., the spaces inside the context of a flawed, failed life to find whatever light there is—and Emerson said there is light everywhere; shed enough of it on what one writer called the “blackness of darkness” and we will find something fine and redeemable, in the most broken of people. I want to sell you on my Uncle Roy.

Roy grew up in the chaos of the collapsing marriage of my grandparents. The earliest family story has Roy, sitting in a highchair, screaming, “Damn it, Mama, bring my coffee lolo!” All of this as my grandmother drifted into a backdoor affair with her brother-in-law-soon-to-be-husband.  Roy, stringy and erratic, was living on coffee and pasta and certainly had found my grandpa’s cache of cheap wine. He started drinking early and was a confirmed alcoholic at 17. Newly divorced and newly married, grandma sent Roy to live with my folks in Bishop in 1944. We did not hit it off.

I cast the first stone:  a rock as big as I was, right through the windshield of the dream car he was building on the days he chose not to attend school. He grabbed me from the kitchen table where I dawdled with a cup of what Mom called Calcetose—a magic calcium mix that guaranteed big leg bones [that didn’t happen as you already know]. The cup rolled off the table as Roy took me outside and tied me to a stray chair. With a blowtorch in hand, he said, “You little $#*!— this time you won’t forget, because I’m going to burn your toes off—one at a time. You’ve thrown your last rock.” Actually he was wrong again. I perfected David’s art and brought several Goliaths down in my neighborhood over the next 10 years. It was a threat, of course. He put the torch away and the rest of several months, or even years faded and blurred into time.

I have no answers for such questions as, “Where were your parents?” or “What was Roy doing home?” And, later, “How did he get a hold of a .22-rifle and kill a dozen of pathetic, hoarding-widow Carter’s cats?”  With trembling voice, she would ask Mom, “Haaaave you seeeen any of myyyy kkkkkitties?” Now, Mom had Roy and the Mojave winds. But in those days, folks’ families lived together. Three cousins, my grandpa Frank, my Dad’s mother, and Roy, would live with us on and off over the years.  More than one person occupied a room; people “grabbed” the couch at night.

My generation has few options when age invades. Our children have grown up obsessed with privacy and delegated space. Carolyn and I never imagined us now, as we are now:  She, in another world, and I, living with a gem of a daughter, who bought a house with a parent in mind. She was either behind or ahead of her time. Beware grandchildren, the days of living together as families are coming again. The silly American obsession with the luxury of bounteous Lebensraum [living space] is about to end. 

Roy left high school, did a stint in the army, experiencing only the muck and mindlessness of a soldier’s view of Korea. He returned and, like all our extended family, migratory crows, settled in Bishop. Roy married Shirley—the wrong woman at the wrong time. Instead of collapse, like grandma’s marriage, which had begun when she was 15, Roy and Shirley fell apart—and quickly.

That night of their breakup remains clear. Roy and Ernie [another orphan Mom and Mary Jane had brought into the family circle], dressed, strangely in white shirts and pants—Roy with a GI L-shaped flashlight on his belt. They were taking the lusty, listless Shirley Hall back to Del Mar. “I’m afraid I might kill her,” he told Dad. “Take Ernie, Roy, and come back to work in a couple of days. You and Frank can live with us in Larry’s bedroom.” Family first—again. I took a daybed, fell asleep, listening to my grandpa’s wine-induced heavy snoring—and thought nothing of it. Mom? Now, Roy and grandpa—and the Mojave winds.

Two memories float through my mind … one riding with Roy on the liquid fuel route and one of those “street fight” lessons in the living room.

Plagued with itchy measles and quarantined from school, I “took the route” with Roy, as we used to say. He sang something about the “Cliffs of Dover,” perhaps a WW11 song, alive, again, with song and jokes—and terrible [but often funny] language. “Watch this &%$#! dog when I fill this tank. This #$%& will come full tilt around the corner to attack my rear. That’s when I turn his face into a snowman with this propane,” which is what propane does:  Freezes then melts and leaves at least second-degree burns. GRRRRRRRRRR. Spray—a full nozzle. YYYYYYYYYREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.

“See what I mean? That *%$#@! never learns. Remember that, Larry. Don’t be like me and never learn a damn thing. I run in circles, drunk.”

Lesson learned.

Nights after work, restless Roy would tease me and Gene, my brother. He often said words he told us not to tell Mom. Gene committed the unpardonable. He squealed. The next night, wrestling and joking with Roy, I told Roy that Gene had “squealed.” He grabbed him, pinned him. “You’re damn lucky I don’t have my switch blade. Instead, I’m going to give you the ‘mark of the squealer,’ a curse on you in the whole neighborhood." Gene screamed a healthy, sincere scream as Roy drew a jagged line from the corner of his mouth to his cheek. We both imagined blood. For some reason he simply walked around the house crying [he was 5-years-old] until the “cavalry arrived.” Mom gave him a hug and so did Roy. Street fight and a valuable lesson [?] learned. 

Roy and Frank followed us to Escondido and became part of the destruction and reconstruction of “Thompsonville.” Many a day while sitting in the store, he would talk and joke. No one was even close to Roy’s wit. Now my son, Marcus, carries the good-wit DNA, without the bad language. He’s brilliant and, like Roy, never forgets, so when he sees an opening, he will take it.

Sunday evening my brother, Gene, misdialed my Marcus, thinking he was talking to his Mark. Instead of setting him straight, Marc rode the conversation, and Gene, seamlessly playing the other Mark. I won’t elaborate, but my Marcus-Roy has fooled Gene, taunted him every bit as much as Roy ever did. A kinder, gentler, Christ-centered “Roy” lives on in the quirky humor. Ask Gene.

In Escondido, Roy even sobered up, took a job driving a cement truck, paid bills that people had thrown in the "dead bill bin"—literally. In fact, they thought Roy was dead.

But how long can an alcoholic work around alcohol? It would be like putting the fat boy in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. The laughing stopped; the eyes became bleary. Cheap wine [40 cents a pint]. He yelled at Mom while Dad was looking, restlessly for “another endeavor” in Ventura, California. Now a senior, and now the “Dad” again, I took over. Roy slumped over the kitchen table, then, from nowhere, he had a knife, a Mexican-made knife. Laughing in a drunken stupor, he threw the knife at me—which stuck in the doorway.

My Goliath friend, Jim Berguam, loaded Roy in the car, and took him back to an all but abandoned trailer on grandma’s property, where her second husband lived even though she had died four years earlier. “I’ll be all right,” he said. “The rats are as big as beavers. I’ll have to shoot the *&%#-*%&$! with my .22 rifle.”

A few years later, Roy died of a heart attack while working as a cook on a large fishing boat off the coast of Washington, where he is now buried in a pauper’s grave.

Now in my late Winter Years, I see Roy clearly and graciously. In fact, he was often a point of reference for “funny.” My folks remembered other Roy antics and we reveled on summer evenings, talking about those Roy-Frank years in Thompsonville.

But who are we to judge? “For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged.” Looking for the best deal in town, take this one. It’s the only deal in town in these uncertain times. “We can only forgive and repent,” said the scholar-great, Hugh Nibley. And for me, that sums it up.

Roy struggled, “lost,” then, in the end, will win.

Violence in Thompsonville - Part II

I end with the infamous attempted robbery of our little country market.  A wave of other kinds of violence washes over me as I write.  Too much pain, though.  An uncle who continued his alcoholic insult to his brilliant brain.  A beautiful girl who killed herself out of alcoholic despair; physical abuse.  Now we children have even come to piece together the puzzle of Thompsonville’s  violence.  Close quarters; little opportunity for modesty; long, hot summer nights; the relentless Santa Annas; the dead-end hopelessness for many.  Abuse—of another kind—dark, destructive, too painful to contemplate.

But people need a place to be.  My folks reached out with patience and tenderness.  Every alcoholic, every “busted” and going down, downer was still a human being—and a lesson.  They were our books and our parents, two well-read high school graduates, pointed out the lessons.  “See, Mike, how sad it is, when Marge asks every single day if the ‘mail has run,’ when we know she has never received a letter in all her years here.”  And then Marge buys a six-pack of beer at 10 in the morning and heads back to her lonely trailer.  And the Santa Anna winds.  Empathy.  Human suffering.

While in junior college, serving a stake mission, I was away more, but acutely aware of the real university of my life:  Family and Thompsonville.  Nothing prepared me, however, for the possibility of killing someone.

The event is simple.  Sundays, ET runs the store alone. I return from church, walk in the door and see a man with a gun.  “Run, son!”  I run to a telephone pole; I look back in time to see Dad leaping over the counter, locked in a death grip with a man a head taller.  A bullet goes through the window, a second well above the pole.  I hesitate, but in an instant, the man jumps in his car, under the steady barrage of Coke bottles, several exploding on the hood, then the departing trunk.  Mom and I converge, expecting the worst.  Dad, face taut and white with fear and anger, calls the police.  Robber apprehended 15 minutes later at the end of Highway 78.

“Dad,” if I had come in, we could have . . . .” Looking at me, he said, “yes, easily, the two of us.  Then I would have killed him.  That’s why you did the right thing.”  The lesson?  Obedience.  No death.  A lifetime of gratitude for our family and especially for Dad.  “It was the principle,” he said, “not the 60 dollars. No man is allowed to steal from another.  If things like that happen, we have no civilization.”

Violence in Thompsonville - Part I

The early 50s remain among the most exciting for me. Dollie turned her back on the high desert oasis and the background music of the daily sirocco.  We headed south, to Escondido, a Cadillac paradise of rolling hills, filling up with orange and avocado groves.

The Korean War, one of those “dirty little wars” that we never declare.  In fact, it was never called anything more than a “police action,” pitting inexhaustible numbers of suicidal Chinese soldiers and North Koreans, who, under Stalin’s sinister nod, invaded Soul, South Korea.

My brother Gene and I were nurtured on the war.  My essential war vocabulary [such critical knowledge] came out of a ritual reading of the Los Angeles Times each morning over burned eggs and toast.  Gene and I mastered the MIG 15 vs. F-86 “kill” ratios.  We cut out the daily scorecard in the corner of page 1.  Dad and the dictionary defined such important new words as “atrocity,” while Gene and I absorbed a whole panoply of weaponry:  T-34 tank, bazooka, M-1 rifle, the old and unreliable “Tommy Gun,” along with a now arcane geography:  Chosen Reservoir, Pusan Perimeter, Inchon, Pork Chop Hill, etc.  

One of my most emotional moments came when I open the Times, astounded, overjoyed to see an artist’s illustration of a plane that would change the police action in the air war:  The Super-Saber, the F-100.  Surely our kill ratios [which the paper said ranged as high as 15 [us] to 1 of  “them,“ [who, we later learned, were Russian and North Korean pilots] would climb. Gene “flew” around the house, fly swatter in hand, killing MIGs.  His kill ratio was 445 to 0.  Democracy was safe.

Meanwhile our new business endeavor proved to be a kind of economic Mulligan’s soup:  6 apartments [mostly Marine wives from nearby Camp Pendleton], a noisy tin service station [Rio Grande gas at 17 cents a gallon], our house/shack, propane, and an old-fashioned trailer park.  Those were the days when a trailer was 10-35 feet long, 8 feet wide, without a bathroom/shower.  We provided a laundry room, and what we blithely called the “utility” room.

With 20 trailers and the apartments always full, we founded a new village:  Thompsonville.  Dad stocked the random shelves with groceries, lowered the gas an astounding pit bullish 1 cent, eager for a “gas war” with the boys down the road.

This rich cross-section of people of every walk of life became our university, observed insightfully and generously by my parents.  Mom proved to be a “good little business gal,” as Dad complimented her.  The wind, mid-summer whipped us about—yes, the dreaded Santa Annas.  But every day the sea breeze from Del Mar, a mere 17 miles away, wafted over our little community. The reprieve that eased Dollie’s nerves, and kept us “outside,” where she wanted us to be as long as possible, out of the house, “under-foot,” as she put it.

Our first encounter with “violence” was occasional fistfights with the “trailer park” kids, as we called them. Dad, like a boxing referee, stayed between us and the “paying customers.”  A few years later, Gene would make history by taking six of a swarthy group of “Junior Marines” across the street to a ground water-fed pool about 4 feet deep.  “We’ll trow you in,” they threatened in some kind of eastern accent.  Gene, now lifting weights and playing endless rounds of “Conflict,” a board game, “begged” them to try.  They had one wooden gun and a vintage WW2 helmet among them, but he was “steamed” for an encounter.  Fortunately, he didn’t have to “kill” all six and there was no drowning.

Gene’s on-going antics soon turned inward.  Carol, our sister, always fighting for a place at the trough with three brothers, now rode a fast Western Flyer.  As she rode away, having called Gene a challenging name,” he self-narrated the “kill.”  With broom in hand, he muttered, “I just may be able, . . . just might.”  The broom sailed into the front spokes.  She tumbled head over handlebars, recovering by the end of the day with what the cowboy movies defined as “flesh wounds.”  Sad.  And she never got revenge.

The Gene-led onslaughts continued.  Legend has the “death machine” as a true trebuchet.   Recent research proves the “attack” on little Jimmy Lail’s trailer was led by Gene and Michael, our younger brother, now grown up enough to play “Conflict” and throw water balloons. They did not machine-launch, but Mohawk-style infiltrated Lil’ Jimmy’s 3x3 yard and blasted his trailer and him head-on.  Banzai.

In a panic, Lil’ Jimmy [5 feet tall, a dishwasher at Chico’s] banged on our door.  It was 8 o’clock—nearly midnight by my parent’s pre-geriatric biorhythms. “Someone’s having a ball, ET, throwin’ water balloons at my trailer.  And they hit me on the shoulder [possible wound-velocity, here] while I was sneakin’ over here.”

And there was other violence---serious violence.  Fist fights between Marines over the same wife; three “natural” deaths, a lot of beer-inspired threats over the miniature yards and fences.  An ET-enforced clean-up of the Conover’s yard, which involved two pickups and a dozen verbal threats from both daughter and father.  As we loaded, Dad hummed, “Cruising Down the River on a Sunday Afternoon,” a primo melody on the Friday night “Hit Parade” television show with Snookey Lanson.

When “Little Joe”[everybody got a name; my mother was usually the name-giver. Always bestowing a kind of motherly tenderness] had not appeared for three days, Mom worried.  He lived on two Hostess fried pies a day, and then walked the railroad tracks across the street with his dog.  Gone till dark, we figured he was following the tracks down to “Dago” [San Diego  in cool talk].  Dad broke through Joe’s screen and fell directly onto the bed.  Little Joe was dead.  The coroner looked in the door.  “We have a ripe one.  Bring a tank.”  The moment that hot summer afternoon never left me.

Others died:  “Captain” Clegg, a slow death, without family or money.  Mom nursed him the two days and nights to death’s door.  He passed, pith helmet in place.

Or “Captain Bair,” described dramatically and entirely hypothetically by Dollie as an “old captain from an old ship.”  While his wife lay dying inside of cancer, he put Cal, his stepson in a pup tent in the yard.  Nights he drove while Cal moved “smudge pots” around the city streets in repair.  The violence culminated with the Captain’s systematic whipping of smudgy-faced Cal with a garden hose, in front of all of us children.  When we told Dollie, she waited till mid-day, while the one-armed captain lay in a beer induced afternoon “coma.”

She called his sister in Maine, bought a 25 dollar Grey Hound ticket, made him three lunches and clandestinely drove young Cal to the bus depot.  Escape.  Justice.

The next day, we watched what Mom called a “conniption fit” as the now broken and slaveless captain ranted and raved. “Can you blame a man for going hostile, Dollie?!” he screamed.

Silence.

Dort Palifox, a fragile-looking Philipino, could open beer bottles with his teeth.  He died suddenly in his diminutive living room [or killed himself] when his 300 lb. wife, Dorothy, “up and left,” as we said.  He looked even smaller dead.

Because of ET’s generosity, the charges [“put it on my tab”] sometimes got out of hand.  It was amazing how irresponsible, misdirected people, living on a minimal salary could lose control.  That frustration surfaced—occasionally.  A “long, tall drink of water,” as Mom described Eddie French,  a six foot giant, who seemed to live on beer and Town Talk white bread, refused Dad’s quiet request for payment of a burgeoning stack of charges.  Suddenly hostile, Town Talk challenged Dad. “You little…you feel safe behind that counter telling me when to pay what I’m never gonna pay.”  Dad sprang up like Michael’s Christmas Jack-in-the-box.  “Let’s go over to the tracks, big guy, that’s neutral territory.”  They walked across Highway 78, Dad a foot shorter, but Mom noticed what I was not there to see:  The always-ready channel locks in Dad’s back pocket.  I told you he was never without pliers.  Channel locks are grown-up pliers, heavy on the end.

When they squared off, Town Talk suddenly walked away.  “What would have happened, Pop?”  “Son, I had my handy pliers; he woulda been gummin’ his food the rest of his life.” Playing Man could be Fighting Man.  A violent man lay buried deep in Dad.  

He  became a Mormon “not because I think I can do what the church expects,” he said, in his honest, kind, existential way, “but because I knew my children and Dollie could live it.  Mormonism will save my children from the alcoholism that has and is killing 9 of my brothers, sisters and my dad.”

Integrity.  A goodness we never felt good enough to challenge.

Godparents

For most of us, one set of parents is sufficient.  Perhaps the Lord knew it would take two additional people to raise me.  In 1941, Jack and Mary Jane Nielson moved to Bishop to teach music.  My parents soon afterward joined the LDS church, and that joined them to the Nielsons.

Mary Jane, who was soon pregnant, suffered through a stillborn birthing. There was no hospital and no time to get to LA.  Mom helped the doctor, but there was nothing anyone could do in those days before ultrasound and pre-natal check-ups.  On the table, still dazed and damaged, Mary Jane took the news with a hardy soul: “We’ll manage; we still have Larry.”  At that moment, I became adopted, swept under a second umbrella of love—and discipline.

The poignant memory of helping Jack build and cast the headstone for the child would not flee from me.  It was my first encounter with death, which seemed to be the smell of wet cement, a small square of it, inscribed with a child’s name, which I don’t remember.  I never saw the grave.

In a miraculous way, Jack filled the vacuum my dad created. Buried in a new business adventure [liquid gas] and often drawn away by the sirens of fly fishing when he had a break, Dad left me [unconsciously, I think] to Jack.

Jack was a Renaissance Man.  He played several instruments and brought half a dozen home over the years for Dad to "learn."  Dad, of course, was not focused enough to take lessons or even master the art of reading music.  He was a “play by ear man,” filling the house with the sounds of clarinet, saxophone, guitar melodies, and, in time, a piano he purchased.

But it was Jack who made me a pair of skis, spending hours cutting, soaking, bending, and even creating bindings.  Then as soon as we had 5 inches of snow, he pulled me behind his car in vacant lots and down empty streets.

My first of two fishing trips in Bishop was with Jack.  I yanked with gusto a 5 lb. trout out of Crowley Lake.  A few weeks later, Jack, Mary Jane, Dad and I went back up to Crowley Lake with the boat Jack had built.

My dad, who had never water-skied, rolled up his khakis and buzzed behind Jack, who drove, while the rest of us cheered.  He never spilled; was barely wet.  Mom?  Home with my brother, Gene I guess, listening to the wind.

My first day of kindergarten, I walked the two blocks to Jack and Mary Jane’s, and from there, Jack and I went off to school.  Every day.  Occasionally, he would take me down to a dank basement at the school where supplies filled the shelves.  I can still remember the smell of the raw cement, the smell of wood pencils and the faint odor of paper and glue.


Mary Jane was tall, black-haired and beautiful.  She took care of the choral work at the elementary school, so she and Jack and I were often in school functions.  Larry, the ersatz child, riding shotgun.  No other babies came to them.


My memories of Mary Jane are fleeting, yet poignant.  With her at JC Penney’s, I saw and heard for the first time the elaborate aerial wire change system.  No cash registers:  The clerk relayed the money in a small plastic jug to the lady “upstairs” behind the glass.


With Mary Jane nearby, Larry stayed on a short leash.  She actually had a pancake turner [a spatula today] but never used it. One look from those fiery eyes and a pat on the purse [where the pancake turner lay hidden], and I was on target immediately.

We were often all together.  Dad, lying on the floor, his favorite conversation posture, the lights low, Jack and Mary Jane and Mom sitting on the couch or in a rocking chair.  Always talking and laughing.  We were two families, together, safe and snug in our little wind-swept village at the foot of the mighty Sierras.

One Easter, I went with them to Gridley, California, where  they both had parents.  My first trip anywhere except Del Mar to see Grandma.  Later, Jack and I would drive 10 miles to Manzanar to help Grandpa deliver liquid fuel to that infamous retention camp. I saw a sea of light-brown faces.  Twenty years later, I learned what Manzanar and retention were.

The other day, I wrote of those intervening angels who enter our lives and change us or save us.  I know Mom’s sister-relationship with Mary Jane saved her.  Later, when we moved within 15 miles of her blood sister, Irene, she missed her “real” sister, Mary Jane even more.  Irene could never find the time to visit—not once.  We did the visiting, always finding her puffy-eyed, feeling her way through an alcohol fog.  That situation and Mom’s growing affection for spiritual things froze all chances of an enduring relationship with her sister.

And Jack was my other father.  He filled the gaps Dad couldn’t fill. He was the one who, after we built our first home, came over and followed through, doing the stuff Dad would never even see: thresholds in the doorways, handles on doors, a latch here, a bracket there.  He was the Great Finisher.  Yes, he played a critical role as one who helped me along the way as one of many “authors and finishers of my faith” [Paul].

Mary Jane drove down alone to LA for my wedding in the LDS temple.  Jack was ill.  But I had two mothers, a royal, rare gift.  Now that they are gone, they reside in a better place together.  I'm sure they get together occasionally and talk about the "Bishop days."  Maybe even the wind.


I hope my Godparents miss me half as much as I miss them.

Homo Ludens [ET Playing]

One of my Dad’s dominant characteristics was his playfulness.  In fact, if there was any “play DNA” in us it came from him, not from my mother, Dollie.  I knew this as a child, long before I found a sophisticated study of the role of play in culture in Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, Man Playing, while preparing for a graduate class.

Nearly 14 years ago my dad’s [ET, his “real name”] life ended at the Teton Lakes Golf Course, just as he had wished.  In the middle of what he loved to call a “medium wedgy” about 80 yards out from the Third Hole, sitting just behind those massive, sometimes frustrating Cottonwoods, he took his last happy swing at life and died before he hit the ground.

Huizinga taught me two things about Dad’s obsession with play: [1] play is fun [OK] and is an “escape from the ordinary pattern of life.”  In other words, though we move into play we discover another order, i.e., rules and boundaries, etc.

Because Dad and Mom began their life [1939] in Bishop, California, at the foot of the Sierra Nevada Range, Dad entered a man’s ideal playground.  It was high desert country graced with the Owen’s River, which flowed out of Lake Crowley, its source in the Nevada Range.  The Owen’s River cut across Bishop, then entered the state’s longest aqueduct, carrying precious water to thirsty LA. The Bishop joke was “when you drink a glass of water, somebody in Los Angeles goes thirsty.”  LA owned the water rights to Bishop, and that meant they owned a little town that could never grow.  It was all about water—and still is.  So I grew up betwixt two worlds as the oldest child:  Playing Man and Frustrated Woman—frustrated with her nerves, with the constant Mojave Desert wind, and Playing Man.

Dad could manage a canoe with a fly rod where no other fisherman would go. He shot ducks, skied famous Mammoth Mountain in the early 40s when it  had only a tow rope.  He ice skated, played golf [mornings at 5 except Sunday], bowled, played tennis [he won the city championship for his category twice in Bishop and once in Escondido].  He even learned to fly airplanes:  BT-13s, towing gliders, a Cessna and later a Beechcraft his brother owned.

The airplanes nearly changed the marriage—for the worst.  Dad, no one could ever explain how—entangled the Beechcraft in some electric lines just outside the approach to the airport.  Somehow, he did not stall or crash.  Safe Landing.  Trouble at Home.

He and Bob Simon, [Simon held the altitude record for gliding for many years], often glided together up in the high Sierras.  One day, gliding alone, Simon floated into trouble.  A vicious downdraft, instead of a thermal, smacked his glider into the Rocky Mountains.  That ended Bob's life and Dad’s infatuation with gliders.  Trouble at Home.

Dad rolled the Beechcraft into the hanger, so to speak, attended Bob’s funeral, then promised Mom an end to further flight.  “I had to cut his wings,” she laughed later.  And he laughed with her, bemused at how many crazy things he had done while she kept her shoulder to the wheel at home—listening to the wind.

The deeper, personal question here is why I’m not Homo Ludens. Yes, handball with English faculty friends, a little junior varsity baseball in high school and a summer, then even a couple of years of golfing with Pop, but nothing after 4 p.m.  And never at night.  Why?

I think the tears and occasional arguments between my parents spooked me away from play.  As the oldest, I had responsibilities at home with a mother who relied on me.  Don’t let this drift into Maudlin Land.  True, it was my mother who would say to us, usually late afternoon, “Ok, stop; you’ve had quite enough fun for one day.”  Play was a quantity, not a quality.

It was guilt, was it not?  I simply could not “escape” into another world,  a world besides the “ordinary” one I was living in, even though I loved the friendship, the bantering, the competition [to some extent].  My son-in-law, Ron, says I’m “no fun at board games because I don’t care enough to win.” Yes, Ron, it doesn’t seem to matter.  Why?  I don’t know.

My siblings are pretty good players, I guess.  No, I retract-- my brothers and my sister do not play either.  Maybe I carried something into my marriage I didn’t know I had.  Yes, BOREDOM, you say.  That too, but I guess I had engrained the drill too late or too early, depending on your view.  I realize now that no backpack guide or aerobics instructor would have me.  “No pain, no gain.”  Forget the gain, I guess.

I close, however, by encouraging play.  My son can play; my grandchildren and sons-in-law are great players.  Here I am in my sixth year of retirement.  But still, I do not play, though I wish—sort of, that I did.  I think it might have made me a more interesting person.

But I don’t play...yet.

Things Fall Apart; The Centre Cannot Hold [W.B. Yeats]

Here we go again.  President Obama worked for about 15 months and then began running for 2012.  The other candidates who lost never stopped running.  I’m overwhelmed by the sheer complexity of the budget impasse. And who can get their head around 300 million dollars a day for two wars we are losing?

For this reason I excommunicated myself from politics and all politicians. That solemn occasion took place the day President Obama flinched and listened to General Betrayus.  35,000 troops did not leave Afghanistan. Instead, we added that number to the bare mountains and lush opium fields of what has always been in history a political and military Black Hole.  Bush began the war by consulting the biased Bernard Lewis and questionable Shiite, Ahmed Chalabi, whose personal political motives remain suspect to this day.  Who knows who advised Obama?

Again, do our presidents read history?

I have come to question the integrity of just about any politician I can think of; could it be the spiritual death of all the would be “Mr. Smiths” who want to go to Washington?  Salaries increase without debate; they enjoy the best health insurance in the world and a fat retirement for life.

The sheer complexity of the issues challenges even an old housecat with time to sort out the issues.  Study the “budget” problem.  Try it; stick your toe in the swirling swamp water.  You can’t see the bottom because the people who can “solve” such issues haven’t the guts to clear the waters.  The more mud, the more opacity, the better.

The main artery of our now moribund body politic is greed, a sense of entitlement.  The ad hoc Allen Simpson Committee, comprised of both Republicans and Democrats, put together a package of “solutions” that met the December deadline.

Simpson, retired now, was one of the most well-read members of Congress, representing for years the vast state of Wyoming. Yes, just when you thought that Nazareth of the intellect would not send forth a Native Son, Simpson arrived.  The parameters for the committee?  None!  “This will let the American people decide if they want to fix this self-created mess,” he promised in a PBS interview.  Both Social Security and taxation on high incomes were on the table.  Oil, gas and corn subsidies as well.

The results?  Silence.  Not a single candidate wants to talk about those taboo subjects.  What of military cuts or getting out of two wars we cannot win? 

Solution?  Leave the Arabs to each other and they will take care of their own business.  They hate us, but no more than Sunnis hate Shia.  Did George Bush ever even know the difference?

Another painful Solution?  We have to raise taxes and redesign Social Security:  Raise the retirement age; lower benefits for those whose retirement  reaches 60 thousand dollars a year.  In order for the many who have less, the few who have a lot, must settle for less.

All would feel the pain; life might not ever again be what it has been the last 20 years.  Middle class folks like me should live on a $300 Social Security cut each month.

The solution rests on the principle of expecting less. We need a smaller, affordable American  Dream.  Pay now [our generation] or pay later [my grandchildren].  I remember the howls when little Jimmy Carter called our dependence on Arab oil “the moral equivalent of war.”  More than 40 years ago we could have made that difficult choice to declare our independence. My dad kept saying, “this is our chance, this is our chance.” And we did nothing.

I am wondering aloud why George Clooney calls his new film, The Ides of March?  What’s coming?

See now why I had to leave the cage fighting to those who are still interested in and believe in the American political process?  Such study and discussion pricks my liver, as an Elizabethan would say.  Politics brings out my sometimes-dangerous cynicism.  Scott Samuelson once called me the “most delightfully cynical person” he knew.  


Nothing delightful today, was there?

Books I Have Reread

In my winter years, traveling lighter forced me to bring only a few of my paper and ink friends to Austin.  Several boxes [1,000 books], keep each other company in my rented home in Rexburg.

I spent so many years reading books for the first time that I never believed I would live long enough [and forget so much] to actually begin rereading my library, once I retired in 2005.

Francois Mauriac, France’s “Man for All Seasons,” said of rereading: “If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads but what he rereads.” Mauriac, a man of both mind and heart, opposed French involvement in Vietnam.  Again, shackled to a follow-up president who didn’t/couldn’t[?] read history, we found ourselves up to our necks in snakes, which made Vietnam an ongoing metaphor for all the other wars we would go out into the world and try and lose.

Johnson and Westmoreland could not finish what Kennedy started [and here I just assumed he read history books after swimming in the White House pool.]  Let me return, then, to books that reflect my “ heart.”

Sorry, I digress again.  Mauriac also disliked Albert Camus, that always popular but overrated favorite of restless, uprooted Existential undergrads. Who would want to read the likes of Samuel Johnson and John Donne before graduating?

You might expect at least a short list of my constant friends.  That would bore you and call unnecessary attention to me, T.S. Eliot’s “old man in a dry season.”  My choices?  One disgruntled student said he didn't like the “Old, thick books," required for my course.

Remember, there is a second, third, etc. reason for rereading.  We simply forget what we've read.  However, when I heard of a French journalist who had been kidnapped in Lebanon, with nothing else at hand, read War and Peace 17 times.  I am guessing he was rereading for more reasons than simply fearing he would forget. Reading keeps us sane.

Now I enjoy the wandering months.  Yes, I have a bibliophile’s Wanderslust. I simply follow the desire where it leads;  those moments when I simply “follow my bliss” [Joseph Campbell].  Nobel Peace Prize winner, Swede Tomas Transtromer’s poetry trilogy is in the mail from Amazon. . . .

What we read ends up being what our hearts need.  This assumes you’re centered enough to know those often evasive inner needs.  Reading cures and assuages our uncertainties; reading assures us, says C.S. Lewis, that we’re not alone.

And like medications, one person’s book just may kill you, while another suffers the same ailment and recuperates nicely reading the same lethal print.  In other words, I don’t expect two of my grandchildren who are fluent in reading and speaking Spanish to ever read Gabriel Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude.  And yet they will always be my special angels.

The choice is theirs—and yours.  At this point there’s plenty of space in my wobbly oblong circle of life and eternal life for this greatest of contemporary writers and Columbia’s reading gift to the whole world.  There is, in fact, space enough for all—an eternal landscape which will encompass the rich diversity and style as numerous and rich as there is sand on all the ocean shores.

"The Beauty of This, Son..."

Pop and me

My dad, Elmer Taylor Thompson, dumped the name about the time he could understand that  “Elmer” was the person the family meant when they asked him to go help run the cows or chase a pig back into the pen.  “I’m going to be ET,” goes the story from his mother, the diminutive Sina Messersmith Thompson.  She weighed 100 pounds, loved to talk about politics and family matters, and cook for her large family—11 in all.  She drank coffee but never touched liquor, and the closest she got to swearing was the puzzling phrase, “I swan...”

Dad lives on in our minds and hearts because of  his wisdom and humor.  One of his  favorite phrases was, “the beauty of this son,” which was usually the cap on a repair project that consisted of a coat hanger, pliers, a jack knife, a piece of string, and “electrician’s tape,” the all-purpose precursor of the now ubiquitous grey Duct Tape.  [He was MacGyver before his time.]

Dad confessed privately in one of his letters, his usual rambling meditations about what he called “the human condition,” that his “real” dream was to have been an inventor.  He had dreams, but the less important ones never came true.

We never saw him build anything amazing from scratch.  His specialty was repair.  The issue was ingenuity—the Oakie challenge, the shoots and blossoms of what we loosely called “Yankee ingenuity.” A little glue, some electrician’s tape, a piece of coat hanger--and the toilet flushed.  Cost? 2 hours, 20 cents worth of supplies and the joy of once again “beating the system.”

Dad always carried pliers, a jack knife, a scripto mechanical pencil, which he would only “loan” a desperate child trying to finish fractions.  When he gave you money or handed you the pencil, he was painfully reluctant—but he always came through.  He taught us the value of things.  Looking fondly and intently, he would say, “I’ve had this pencil for three years.”  Opening the wallet was a ritual—slowly, carefully, as if he were memorizing the particulars of a dollar bill, saying farewell to a real friend, a painful parting. He was amazingly generous, but somehow the ritual always gave one pause. “Do I really need to buy this?”

His summit of the Mount Everest of repair projects was a middle-of-the-night leaking toilet—once again.  He took a tennis-ball can, put a fish hook in the ball, and placed the can over the drain-hole. All quiet on the Western Front. “You see the beauty of this son..."


[Publisher's Note:  Editor is out of town until the 25th, so posts will be sporatic until my return.  Stay tuned.]

Things a Schlemiel Like Me Has Never Wanted to Do

my grandson, Cam, "iceblocking" in Texas

• Go to Disneyland.  Hugh Nibley says, “Disneyland is the perfect example of hell.”

• Play Tackle Football.  Remember, my calves are too small…and I’m a bleeder.

• Go to New Delhi, India.  I like my cows on the table, grilled.

• Climb Mt. Everest.  I lived in Rexburg for 44 years, and I’m still thawing out.  I’m terrified of heights; the Manwaring Center 2^nd floor was pushing it.

• Wash windows on a skyscraper.  See “Climb Mt. Everest” above.

• Track a Tornado.  If you already sense my fear of helplessness, imagine me, in a Ford 500, face pressed to the windshield, whirling at 300 mph in the eye of a storm.

• Go on a Cruise.  We all know those massive flu epidemics have been going on for years…but Kathy Lee Gifford was under contract to keep it on the DL.

• Go to the Gobi Desert.  Snakes.  Sand.

• Crunch Numbers.  Too late…just when I mastered the sliderule.

• Eat Dollie’s fried eggs.  Have you ever eaten leather with salt and pepper?  Didn’t want to, but had to.

• Camping.  Snakes.  Dirt.

• Go fishing [even with you, Bruce].  Snakes.  Water.

• Be more than 100 yards from a bathroom.  Ask Allen Keele, who in 1982 said, “Today on the BYU campus, I have found bathrooms I didn’t know existed.”  I’m still working on my Fodor’s Guide to Bathrooms Everywhere.

• Play Rugby.  I am nervous about blood.  I don’t want to get hit, either.

• Play Cricket.  I don’t understand the rules.  And a wooden ball spinning through the air makes me nervous.

• Being Locked in an airplane bathroom…just before impact.

• Getting stuck in an elevator.  Helpless, even with a possible Fodor’s Guide to Bathrooms Everywhere.

• Go directly from the fairgrounds to Taco Bell, without washing my hands.

To be continued…

Conversation

In Samuel Johnson’s novella, Rasselas, a small group of people escape an ideal world of Eden-like safely, isolated from the whirly-gig of “real” life spinning around them:  War, famine, disease, taxes—oh yes, politicians. Those folks in every capital who fish in troubled waters and only where there’s money.

The truth-seekers in Johnson’s novel wander throughout the known world in their adventure.  Along the way, they find a hermit whose self-imposed exile promises peace and solitude.  Instead, he discovers boredom and loneliness. He begs them to allow him their company.  “I am in much need of conversation and the companionship of other humans,” he confesses. Johnson, who hated the darkness of night often himself wandered aimlessly through the London streets, awaiting sunshine and sanity.  He slept much of the day, then arose, devouring books and writing articles till dinner hour at the tavern, where he happily joined friends, bound by common admiration—and conversation.

Johnson, who flourished in the 18^th century, probably enjoyed conversation more than any other literary great in all of Europe.  He sat at the end of a long table in The Dancing Wolf, drank gallons of tea [no liquor, however] and much like Lincoln, held forth for hours.  Boswell, his famous biographer, spoke of a typical night at the tavern the night before:  “Johnson tossed and gored some half a dozen tonight.”

The eccentric  Johnson was each night what we call a "Bevo" [UT Longhorn mascot] to “Goldie”/Oliver Goldsmith.  No one else, however, was allowed to pummel the little fat fellow.  Sweet.  The often slovenly Johnson usually arrived attired in an old robe and a pair of slippers, and led the conversation, quoting verbatim from the classics and the numerous newspapers strewn across the table.  It was the age of the coffee/tea house and the newspaper, so Johnson’s disciples considered it an honor to converse, even if injured on occasion.  Perhaps, shaving before departing for the tavern they thought,  “Tonight, I would rather be gored by Johnson than simply ignored.”

The joists and bearing-wall of a night’s conversation with Johnson demanded risks and wounds.  These men of letters gathered each night really define the word “conversation.”

In those days until the mid 1800s, the word “intercourse,” was used instead of the later word “conversation.”  As time changes, words change.  "Conversation" may have taken over, but the deeper Latin and then Old French roots, though confining the older word, “intercourse,” still carried the aura of intimacy with it.  Now the exchange of words can continue to suggest words of warmth and feeling, as well as stimulating ideas that sometimes move into new intellectual spaces, to new perspectives, welcoming us to host new ideas.  The night I finished Catcher in the Rye, I was not quite the same.  The impulse to share that experience was so strong, I wondered Hinkley Halls looking for a conversation.  Fortunately E. Mark Bench was a night owl as well, so we sat on the floor in my room and “talked the book” for a couple of hours.

Gentleman, do not forget that women love words.  Only an idiot male does not know that our Venus gals like words and we boys from Mars cut to the chase—the fewer the words, the better, unless, of course, the conversation is about  bowling scores or that 9^th inning homer Kurt Gibson hit years ago.

When we courted them, we could never stop talking, continually risking run-ins with frustrated fathers who waited.  Then when they said yes, the honeymoon over, we returned to our “shack” of choice, off-campus housing.  And . . . . yes, we quit talking to them.  Boys, we all know the helplessness of that moment when she says, “talk to me, . . . say something.”  The Kama Sutra says “seduction begins early in the morning and continues until the moon shines brightly.”  [Legal Disclaimer:  Yes, I went there, folks, although I'm not formally recommending this or any other book, for that matter.]

Shortly before leaving my beloved 15^th ward in Rexburg, I assured the brethren in priesthood meeting that it is acceptable to say, "I love you," in any room of the house.  The kitchen, where both of you touch each other’s soapy hands, is always a sweet moment to discuss how the children and the Hausfrau are holding up; or conversing while bathing the babies.  Those  bouncing cherubs inspire words and stir the desire for the full intimacy of conversation.

According to Johnson the word “conversation” ranges wide over the linguistic and cultural plain.  Whenever, for example, Paul or Peter use “conversation," they use the word in its widest sense:  How we conduct ourselves.  Today the more specific use of the word should help us realize that “how” we discuss and use our language in general, mirrors our lives.  A person who resorts to swearing every third word betrays a narrowness in language and shallowness of character.  “Watch your language," should still mean something.  And that goes for women.  “Let her not,” says William B. Yeats, "Consider beauty a sufficient end, / Lose natural kindness and maybe / The heart revealing intimacy” of which God’s daughters are so capable.

Johnson promote “kindness.”  Anything that drifts south may turn out to be argument; such ego-driven, adrenalized verbal exchange can lead to anger.

I remember Jim Haeberle nearly jumping through me and out our bay window when I casually mentioned that I thought there was more to the Constitution than the Fourth Amendment.  Words can hurt; they are sticks and stones.

Without realizing it, I was perilously close to what Johnson calls “honest conversation.”  These word bouts often drift into argument.  Literary critics describe the psychic distance between you and a film, book or a conversation as reader response theory.  Some words are close to people’s hearts—like the word “gun.”

Lots of  homicides  begin with an “innocent” Bud Light and end in a knife fight.  Actually, 65% of all murders occur among friends and family.  I’ll bet a lot of divorces begin with what both partners call “honest talk,” which morphs into high-pitched accusations, parries and thrusts and all of a sudden the “D” word [divorce] is ricocheting around the kitchen walls.  Unknown Thomas Fuller says that, “defining what you can help and what you cannot help keeps people from throwing things.”

For Johnson, the most facile kind of conversation is what he calls, “weather talk.”  This level of chatting rarely reaches the second level.  “We are in haste,” Johnson says, “to tell each other, what each must already know.” Johnson, however, misses the human/humane impact of a smile and a friendly chat with, say, a harried clerk.  I always tried to say something nice or funny when I shopped at Winco over in Idaho Falls.  For some reason the clerks were usually dragging bottom.  My dad, who always defended the tradesman, would quickly bring grace to bear.  One time I said, “boy, she was on one in there today.”  My dad had followed up my utter silence in the store with a kind remark about “being on your feet all day.”  She smiled.  Such chit-chat may not be Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, but we are reaching out with our energy, one human sensitive to the difficulties of another human.

President Eyring cautions us to “look into the eyes of those you greet each Sunday and try and detect the pain, the heartache, the worry that often hide behind a cursory ‘good morning.’”

Years ago, I read of a man who each Christmas season paid the toll fee for the anonymous car behind.  They would always pass him up, waving, smiling.  I know my toll example is obsolete, but any form of “Paying it Forward” just might keep someone from coming home, taking fear and loneliness and exhaustion out on a child, beloved wife or a dog.

Surely there must have been at least one conversation [or a thousand] today that kept someone from jumping off a bridge.

Finally, Jacques Barzun’s definition of “true conversation” has helped me to gauge my friendships.  Are they moving from the surface to the deeper intellectual-spiritual selves we are?  Are we engaging one another and, as Barzun says, “truly sifting opinion?" [Lora says it's always been impossible for her Dad to stay on "Level 1."]

This blog over, let me thank you for listening.

Thank you for this conversation.

Angels Unaware

History is replete with moments of intervention.  As children at play, we were always the "white guys," of course, who were engaged in the noble enterprise of spreading American Progress across the untamed wilderness.  We often found ourselves bogged down, surrounded by savages,  that relentless threat to our Western European Order and Goodness.  At the last minute they arrived—yes, the US cavalry, spiffy in blue and yellow; once again they saved the day.

Even today that “cavalry” moment remains as a metaphor in our lives:  The email inviting us back to work, the promotion and a warm handshake from the boss, the divine intervention that puts the "Lord’s Cougars" over those pesky Redskins once again.

This human dynamic of survivor and rescue-angel helps me piece together what I believe is the divine pattern in all our lives.  In films it’s “fate,” or “serendipity.  For Old Son” [my dear friend, Alan Keele, suggests a better blog title-- “Old Son Shines.”] Thank you, friend, because this meditation is a sunny piece, hopefully evoking a miracle moment in our lives that helped make us who/what we have become.  Have you noticed these angels are most often an anonymous bystanders?  Of course, relatives, friends or family members step into the middle of our personal tsunami and pull us out, gasping for breath, to safety and warm sand on the beach of deliverance.

Few of us, for example, would find the summer of 1766 of importance, unless as a family history researcher you finally find great grandfather Jose Gomez’ birthday was that very day:  June 22^nd, in a little village outside Monterrey. For you, 1766 has become personal.

For us few, “we happy few” that day in June was the moment Henry and  Hester Thrale found an emotionally prostrate Samuel Johnson in the throes of a nervous breakdown, desperately gripping a very confused Minister Delap’s leg.  The Thrales, who had known this giant, awkward, terribly scarred genius for more than two years and just happened to stop by for a short visit, scooped him up without comment and rushed him to their rolling estate, Streatham Place.  In the words of W. Jackson Bate, they “did more than ‘contribute’ to the restoration of his health.  They made it possible."  No, Mr. Bate, they did even more:  They saved for hundreds of thousands of reader-disciples over the next 250 years the finest mind in the Western World.  Scholars will want to arm wrestle me over this statement, but all the literati agree Johnson was the most brilliant conversationalist in all of Europe. The guy selling papers in his Times Square stand may not know all the words, but he knows the sentiment of, say, Johnson’s remark about a second marriage after a tempestuous first marriage that only Sophia and Lev Tolstoy’s uncivil war could match: “A second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.”

Usually these lifesavers, angels of intervention, remain virtually unconscious of their heroism, or, certainly, of the long term, eternal impact of such rescue on the “saved” and those who are and become part of that survival.

What about the guys who put together the technology that saved the Chilean miners?  How will survival echo through their progeny in a 100 years?  Is there a journalist, poet, doctor or the finest plumber Santiago will ever know awaiting arrival on Mother Earth?  What of the team that developed the technology to rescue “Baby Jessica” and the brave soul who climbed through that plastic tube [allow me this pause to hyperventilate; I don’t even trust elevators] to pluck her to safety?  And what of the man who, while battling terminal cancer, developed the P-51--the airplane that won the war.  Yes, we are skipping over the 36,000 airmen who died in the war and the thousands who returned, scarred, scared and never the same.    

What about the now nameless African American who reached over the seat and restrained [my violent Other Self wanted him to knock the man out with one blow] the terrorist with the dynamite underwear?  He said or sort of whispered his almost apologetic heroics.  His style reminds us of the guy walking home from work who sees a burning apartment, steps under the window and catches a flying baby dropped to miraculous safety by a valiant mother willing/hoping at least the child would live.  A dozen times I watched that YouTube “catch” so perfectly executed.  “Oh, I don’t know," he echoes the airline passenger Knight in Armor who constrained the guy with the Fruit of the Loom bomb.  “I saw someone in trouble and just kind of figured I needed to make a soft, cradle-like catch.”  Don’t tell me about The Catch [Willie Mays made].  And our too-soon-to-be-forgotten angels?  They disappear into the crowd, for, as they say, they were just "taking care of business.”

We must in those “midnight moments” of which Neal Maxwell spoke, meditate on the downstream effect of someone’s survival who is now in your life.  Let your mind unwind like a spool of thread, asking yourself as you inventory those people in your life how different and blessed you are because of them.  What if, as Emily Dickinson says, they had been “subtracted” from your life by some “rude arithmetic?"  

There are two ways to do this:  Keep it personal and heart-felt; or, count the cost, with what John Stuart Mill called Utilitarianism. All ethical/physical acts of courage boil down to arithmetic:  The greatest happiness for the greatest number.  Here’s one for you...

You see a house burning; knowing the floor plan, you realize the nursery is on the first floor, where a baby sleeps; the rented apartment is on the second floor, where the local Catholic priest resides, ministering to a small flock of people in spiritual need. You can only save one.  Which one?   Why?

Now in my winter years, I play this meditation game several hours a day.  Some might call it a form of prayer, pondering or just a wave of healthy daydreaming.  How many people changed my spiritual direction?  Saved me from intellectual starvation?  Who entrusted me with thousands of students over 40 years?  And where are they now?  Three are on the BYU-I faculty, but I wonder about the hoards of now nameless humans, the less brilliant, perhaps, the restless and sometimes the lost. You never know as a teacher. The brightest, the one who always looked bored, ended up researching for the Supreme Court.  How do we know?  On a bitter-cold night in the Wyoming Wind River country in a little farmhouse, does a woman reach for Anna Karenina and say, “Yes, I’m in the mood to follow this woman once again.. all the way home.”

My list grows.  I want to slip into the late 40s where I could surmise thickness in terms of the Sears Catalog.  But  alas. . . I would have to settle with an analogy using RAM or BYTES, etc.

Before turning to the bell lap of this meandering meditation, I am blessed to speak as an intervener.  During the Christmas holidays in 1947, my brother Gene and I walked over to the annual set-up of a giant Colorado Spruce, brought down from the imperial Sierra Nevadas 40 miles away from Bishop, where we were growing up in a Huck Finn world.

We huddled around a small fire, feeding it with odds and ends of lumber from the project.  Looking down, I saw his pants aflame.  I grabbed him, rolled him over a couple of times and patted out the fire.  He suffered terrible burns on his leg but he was never close to death.  Someone else would have saved him, perhaps faster.  Over the years, however, I have thought about Mother Nature’s “rude subtraction.”  What of the echo effect of his life?  On family? On students?  On fellow church members and neighbors?  On me? What of that brother who wrote both study guide and all the quizzes on Homer’s Odyssey when little Lonesome Dove’s wings were broken again? 

What then is the impact value-loss when people in our lives now had not ever been there?  I know we’re not quite on the verge of Christmas and Bedford Falls, but give it a thought this week.  How much richer is your life because of someone else?  We could begin with the absurdity of measuring parental impact. Yes, sometimes for more bad than good.  I just read that Steve Jobs never could square with a dad who apparently did not claim him, leading, I guess, to adoption. Wow!  Is there a message to those who grow up in what we these days so off-handedly call a dysfunctional family?

Trace the centrifugal pattern of impact on rescue-angel and survivor, a sacred synergy,  and the countless thousands who reap the legacy of courage, that moment, for example, when a self-effacing pilot drops an airliner onto the Potomac, like an autumn leaf floating slowly down to a slow-flowing brook.

Our inner ring moves to siblings, then extended family, then beyond, to dear friends.  To the guy who brought the huckleberry pie when the days were dark, or the neighbor couple who showed up that April day we decided to settle Carolyn in an assisted care facility?  Or poet-scholars who wrote to me and called me and walked the precious miles around the campus, deep into TS Eliot—and the Red Sox.  What of that couple in another state who often pulled into  the driveway in time to offer a little Balm of Gilead; or the couple who choose to grace Carolyn’s funeral in the middle of a move to another state.  Let’s don’t forget the tons of Relief Society-inspired food.  What of the emails, of books, of those small, intimate study groups which ranged from a duet to a half a dozen.  What Matthew Arnold called the “sweetness and Light” filled our hearts and minds, quietly uniting us in a kind of collective gratitude for the men and women, though often plagued by Babylon who blessed generations with their words.  However, looking back now, years later, the groups seem to have been more about the readers than the readings.

Here the list begins to unravel into the eternities.  And what of the hundreds of prayers, or of those nameless drivers who still say, “I passed your house and thought of you;" “we talked about that time you. . . ” Then the struggling with this project, which is an exercise of your patience, and the kind comment from a life-long colleague:  “Larry’s in the halls again.”

Perhaps that’s what we all hope or at least expect/suspect about eternity. Forever to engage in the endless project of creating poems and reading them.  Remember, there must be an audience, a congregation for a poem or a speech to happen.  What other eternal projects?  Edifices, sculpture, art and music [yes, there will be music constantly], and athleticism and craftsmanship of all kinds. And First and Last:  The story of “Christ and Him crucified," as Paul assures us; a world where, as Emerson says, “All [is] in All.” 

Dollie's Kitchen Sounds and Smells

My earliest memories of childhood begin in the kitchen, for that was my mother’s headquarters, where she cooked, barked out orders, shared her deepest feelings and, finally, where she presided--over us and her kitchen machinery: a gas stove, with accent on the broiler, a small twin-sink affair, along with a “drainer,” which remained full of drying dishes or wet dishes waiting to dry.  No dishwasher.  It was the 50s, and we would always linger behind the rest of the world we saw in places like Life Magazine and our crummy little black and white Mentor television.  Our storage cupboards were narrow and shallow, but we owned a little country market, so we simply ate “out of the store.”  I remember, in fact, the night in 1954 [think of the date!] when Dad announced that in one month we had eaten $350 worth of food OUT of our little store—not counting mom’s frequent “other store” visits for “fresh,” food, one of her several food fetishes.

When I began bringing Carolyn home after sacrament meeting Sunday evenings, we always convened in the less than spacious kitchen.  Dad sat at one end of grandpa’s butcher-block table, while mom sat at the other.  Ambient odors of a variety of Mediterranean blends of food swirled around us, while we talked, something my folks loved to do, usually in near darkness.  “Turn off that ball of fire,” Dad would say.

Mom, Margaret Marie, but “Dollie” to everyone, sprang out of rich fertile soil in Del Mar, California, a mile from the ocean.  Fiery, sporting short coal black hair that never greyed, her Basque blood boiled easily, so she was quick with tongue and hand.  She owed her disposition to two earlier generations of Basques who had left the Pyrennes Mountains in the late1900s to settle in Santa Barbara and then later in Del Mar.  Her mother, Lucy Jauregui, was bilingual; my great grandmother, Maria, who lived 92 years, never learned English.  When we went for candy to her cottage next door, mom or Grandma Lucy translated.

So, when Carolyn entered our kitchen, she smelled food she’d never heard of, cooked in ways she had never imagined.  Chili rellenos, artichokes, black-eyed peas, navy bean soup, stuffed flank steak, twice-baked potatoes, lamb chops, calves’ tongue, liver, and always a lovingly yet vigorously, no, loudly tossed salad.  And I mean tossed.  Fold in Dad’s standard Oaky diet, and you have biscuits every morning, hash browns, eggs, grits, sausage, orange juice, and any other red meat mom had not cooked sometime that week.  Mom cooked rich, she cooked loud, she cooked fast, and she cooked a lot.

Unfortunately, most of the exotic smells (mostly garlic) have left me. Carolyn could follow me only so far into my mom’s Mediterranean cuisine. No more lamb, artichokes, tongue, etc.  You get the point.  Add graduate school and a child...all three of us on a shaky budget, and you have a recipe which consisted solely of casseroles, powdered milk and stew.  However, my favorite Dollie food survived---lentils.  Only Heather and I ever partook of that sacred “porridge” for which a hungry Esau had sold his birthright.

Now a quick note on the sounds of our kitchen.  Only three. The daily slamming of the broiler drawer, in which quietly burning toasts awaited the rigorous scraping of a butter knife.  No one ever thought of buying a toaster.  I think they had those by 1954, didn’t they?  The third sound?  Mom would passionately deal plates of all colors and sizes, like a deck of cards.  It was Vegas, so we chipped a lot of dishes.  About every six weeks, Mom would send Michael and Carol down to Funk’s, an all-purpose junk yard, where they would, with the uncontrolled glee of 8 year olds, buy up a menagerie of "dinnerware" that looked like it came right out of one of those tents at the Barnum & Bailey Circus.  An elated Dollie would come into the kitchen, smiling, “Oh, good, kids. What the hell--they’re only dishes, and they are cheap, and there's a lot of them for now."

There were two cardinal rules in the inner sanctum: Don’t enter the kitchen before Dad had eaten his breakfast and never—never—ask, “what’s for dinner, mom?”  These were the days before CPS [Child Protective Services], an agency I praise.  But I lived in a time when a child could be spanked and the parents would not be jailed.  I agree with Brigham, who, contrary to the crazy notion that he might have had a temper with his children, probably, according to Eliza R. Snow at least “spared the rod too often.”  I received two half-hearted swats from my dad’s belt, while Mom contributed maybe a dozen or so slaps, pretty firm taps, with whatever might be handy.  My brother, Gene, ended up on the end of a broom once.  She had a vicious swing, so I guess there was no “wrong” end.  My sister, Carol, who for some strange reason began “throwing fits” and holding her breath when she didn’t get her way [a typical four year old’s reaction] got a wash basin full of “dirty” water,  full in the face.  That ended the swooning.  My youngest brother was never spanked by anyone at any time in any place.  What does this mean?

I do not do justice to my mother.  Complex, plagued by what the 50s called “bad nerves,” she was often a victim of a “nerve-changing” experiment: thyroidectomy and Miltown.  Taking Miltown in those days was akin to carpet bombing all of Vietnam, except Vietnam was all your nerve receptors.  One pill, and it was “so-long, baby,” for at least 10 hours of numbing sleep.

Here, I leave Dollie unfinished, my portrait incomplete. Any bitterness in such a family?  None.  We started teasing her inconsistencies as soon as we were in high school.  She laughed harder, grew sweeter, found some medical help.  She slowly drifted from her Catholic, Basque roots, took Mormonism head-on, and experienced what Alma called “being begotten of God.”

She was the woman in the nursing home, suffering mini-strokes from time to time, who knew everyone and wept at their often painful departures.  She was the one who kept a list of those who needed prayers.  She wrote their maladies in detail in a large notebook and then sat for an hour every morning and “worked through her list,” as she would say.

There were a few times, as a young teenager, however, when she totally confused me.  But by the time I was 17, I realized she was becoming a saint.