Healing: At-One-Ment

In an earlier blog, “The Haunted Lake,” I suggested writing, reading, loving others and actually reaching out, physically and emotionally, to help us and others heal. We are trying to sort out the bad fish, the ever hungry carp that eats up the sweet memories that live in the deep Lake Austin of our sub-consciousness and consciousness.


There’s something in the human touch.  Pick up a baby and see. I ask you, isn’t there something eternal in a handshake, an embrace? I see Darwin, he who changed our world forever, dying, lying quietly, his huge hand in Emma’s, “my love, my precious love.” The other side of earthworms and apes.


I want to convince you that Terry Warner’s credo, “who we are is how we are with others,” lies at the heart of connection with Self, with God, and, of course, with others.


I’m willing, as well, in the spirit of tolerance, to suggest that a number of what I will call God Concepts seems to help us as humans who are respectful  and loving of our neighbors.  If it helps to substitute Energy or what one scientist calls “Empowered Selfhood free of all the trappings of organized religion,” so be it. Having read all of the works of the popular Stephen J. Gould, I came to admire his mind and unequivocal belief in a biology-dominated view of the world.  That was his Weltanschauung.  I could picture him reading late into the night, working through his probably battered copy of Darwin, finding fascination and peace, because it worked for him; Darwin met his needs, as the Prince of Biology does for many others in the world.  And they are kind, respectful people.


And what we have in Adam Gopnik’s study of Darwin the man is a sensitive, humane peek into Darwin at home, which was often his laboratory. He tested earthworms with his daughters’ help at the piano. Which tones on the keyboard would the worms respond to? Let’s see. Let’s turn this into a family home evening. You graph the responses, Anne, I’ll arrange the worms, etc.

We must find space for all of God’s children, regardless of their ”godliness or ungodliness.” Strangely enough, the so-called “demons” often turn out to be “angels.” We reach only a few meters of the inner Darwin as we watch him watch by his daughter’s bed. A death-watch and much sadness.

How Darwin was as a Victorian father, husband, and gentleman-scientist tells us who he was as a humble human being. A neighbor worth knowing and loving, like my own Darwinian neighbor.

At the risk of being glib with such words as “godliness” or “holiness”  or "sinner," I’ve been willing to use those words conscientiously and with conviction, whatever the price.

I do call your attention to a blatant paradox. I speak for tolerance, but my own spiritual journey, which began when my parents became LDS in 1942, continues in that landscape. So when I finish, calling for a Oneness of All in God, I raise questions about an abundance of “God Concepts.” Here I include science with its rainbow connections and its own set of rules.

I believe in the ultimate plurality of happiness. We will reside where we are happiest and best suited.  For example, I cut a wide margin for Muslims, who in the other World, continue living in what the Koran calls “the meadows of the gardens.” Datepalms, mosques, Koranic studies—an endless oasis. And they will be happy, free of the repugnant idea of an Intercessor, Christ, free to follow Allah. Some may decide on a lane change, and become Christian or  perhaps even LDS. One thing for sure: The repressive, often violent mistreatment of women and others will cease forever.  Of the so-called 40 virgins and the abundance of wine I have no insight or answer.

My perspective, then, family and friends, is shaped and informed by my LDS theological convictions. And my interpretations. Clearly and happily, some would say are, without authority.  Some of my own grandchildren, independent of orthodoxy or dependent on orthodoxy, as they are in their rich variety, will beg to differ from Old Son. Bless You!

I have often presented my own mother in the spotlight of these now 45 blogs, presenting her honestly and openly but with an abiding, eternal love. She is, in my mind and soul, becoming what she was destined to be. And I will not be surprised at her Glory when we meet.

Prescient, like her mother, Lucy, Mom was sensitive to things of the Other World.  What she felt and heard was mere silence to me.  My folks spent nearly 20 summers in my brother’s apartment or with us, or even in their own apartment.  As I approached the podium one Sunday to teach a Gospel Doctrine lesson, Mom told me later, her eyes filled with tears, "I remembered in a flash all the unkind words, the belt once in awhile, the irritability and the yelling, and I whispered, 'I’m sorry, Father.'"

“Hush--you gave him the Gospel,” was the quiet, penetrating response. There she sat, on the third row of a generic LDS chapel. Not Notre Dame, not Easter morning.  Just another Sunday . . . .

The film Five Corners charts Harry’s [Tim Robbins] path to peace and forgiveness. Watching Martin Luther King’s famous Washington DC speech, he decides Vietnam was enough war, the civil rights movement a cause worth giving one’s life to, even if it means teaming with a group of African Americans on their way to a very dangerous Mississippi. The rub, of course, is that Harry’s father, a cop, has been killed by an African American recently. Meeting the threatening Heinz, fresh from prison, he tells the psychopath [the great John Turturro], “I love you, Heinz.” See how that gives Heinz pause, later, and saves Harry’s life.

No, Cain, we are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. We are care-givers, nursing the countless wounds of our family, the community, the human family. We are volunteers in a giant hospital. The wounds, the illness are within and without.

Estranged, alienated, Entfremd, we look forward to the day when we are One.  The Haunted Lake becomes Walden Pond, surrounded by trees and laughing children on a warm Saturday afternoon in Concord. Free at last, thank God, we are all free at last.

Atonement: Yes, two become at-one. The cross and the garden are now part of our own personal landscape.

PS:  I will now take some time off to rest for a spell. Be safe, my beloved friends and family.

Home Remedies

We live in an age when you see enough ads on television to prescribe your own medicine.  Never have so many known so much about medicine, illness and their own bodies. We know what's new for our medicine cabinet before we even get to a doctor's office.

While your wife seeks out Bath and Body Works for a magic bottle of aromatic peppermint body lotion that promises calm nerves, you can get a full body scan and walk away knowing your body is full of potential land mines. The Life meter says you have 22 months and one week. Quickly, mortgage your house and head for a Total Health and Happiness Clinic somewhere in Florida.

Off to an army of smiling white coats, garden hoses, pliers and a long thin thing that looks like a vacuum hose. Don’t worry, all equipment, made in China by high school dropouts, are stainless steel—and guaranteed to hurt like hell.

Your own your way to the now mythical 82, where, bleary-eyed from your third cataract operation, leaning on your third new knee you can watch your 600^th game of T-Ball game. Batter up!

Such cynicism. I am sorry. I intrude on personal, sacred stewardships. And I am dangerously light minded when I speak so flippantly of our sacred journey Home. Take your time, dear friends. Back to something less heavy. I want to make you laugh. It’s often my lonely way of embracing you, my friends and family. If I make you laugh in a good way, I show you I love you.

Medicine and illness in the 50s? Very different. What about a lower middle class kid? The son of two well-meaning high school grads whose medicine cabinet was bursting with, oh, your great grandfather can guess: hydrogen peroxide, baking soda [stored in five different locations], an army-green bottle of Listerine [marketed I guess by the CIA], a half gallon canister of Vick's VapoRub, wood alcohol, and assorted bandages.

The rest of the medical supplies were in the kitchen, or, in the case of excessive bleeding, a handy cobweb in the far ceiling corner little Dollie could never reach. No thoughts of a broom with a cleaning cloth on the end. I had to wait for Lonesome Dove to teach me that. And then watch. But I loved being watched. She was our champion "watcher," her green eyes smiling, happy someone else was making progress on spiderwebs and dirty dishes. This morning I would gladly both wash and de-spider web the house to have those green eyes following my every adroit and stallion-like moves.

You laugh about spiderwebs?  It’s a fact. The day of  my little accident, a Piute woman was visiting Mom. She knew everyone in town, so it was not unusual to follow her into Black's Market and end up in a level 2 conversation with a logger or a miner from a place we called the Venadium. She was always reaching out and the greater the need, the longer and stronger her reach.

Anyway, I cut my arm open, as, kids often do such things. Maybe I picked up the wrong end of Mom’s Bowie knife that served as potato peeler and carving knife. The Piute lady, round, sweet but unsmiling, who for some reason, only looked at Mom in the eyes, grabbed a chair and reached for Nature’s Blood Clot. Her soft brown hand swathed my bleeding arm in, yeah, you guessed it, a spider web. The blood stopped immediately, allowing me to scamper into the Bishop summer—to play cowboys and "Indians." This time I chose to be an “Indian” and suffered the immediate consequences. Down I went with 16 Winchester 76 bullets fired by the “good guys,” those ever-ready boys in blue.

Allow me a slight shift for a second here. My sister-in-law, Jennifer once said my parents “worshipped sleep.” I do know that the kitchen closed at 6 [for Dad and Mom, that is] and the yawning started halfway through Frosty Frolics or Lawrence Walk. By 7:30 you’d better find a place to be—to be very quiet. The phone hung free, the line dead. We were officially cut off from the outside world--until 4:30 in the morning, when Dad was up and ready to go. Strangely enough, no phone calls ever came quite that early.

The television separated my folk’s room by 2 inches of either plasterboard or cardboard. “Turn that thing down!” Time for Big Brother, Larry, to issue commands: “Scatter guns,” a line, I think I picked up from an old Lash Larue movie. Or was it that mechanical toy, Bob Steel? The most important thing was to clear the decks by 7:30 at home. As Gene and I moved into adolescence, Dad solved this obvious conflict of circadian rhythms by giving us each a trailer of our own. "There are your new bedrooms, boys," he said.

Gene, fearing imminent war with both China and Russia, stocked his domicile with enough aspirin and bandages to cover Gettysburg. “Quit going out to the store for medical supplies," Mom said.  Senor Boflis [a name which endless research has not uncovered] has started his own Botica.


But Gene's pharmacy houses roughly the same medicine in the house. For Dad, everything came down to baking soda, that Oakie panacea for bunions, sunburn, even “boils.”  The list of ailments rendered harmless by the muscle man holding a hammer was endless. 


Now we were set for the atomic bomb. We knew how to "duck and cover." Gene's Botica was stacked to the ceiling with aspirin, and Dad had a 10-year supply of baking soda.  Seldom sick, he resorted to this Oakie panacea  for "tired feet" [from golfing?] and brushing his teeth.  He didn't even have to borrow a tube of Colgate from Senor Boflis.  

Remember that playing Man [homo ludens] was also Repairing Man.  He loved the notion of saving 22 cents on the toothpaste. "The beauty of this, boys," he would say, while folding a towel deliberately, even the Marine corps. way that made us proud, "is that you are getting better cleaning for practically nothing." Take a cheap shortcut, beat the “system,” emerge triumphant and free of The Man.  Did he ever add up Senor Boflis' inventory?  Or those gallons of orange juice?  Or all those Snickers "for weight gain"and strength?

And now Dollie. Her first-aid kit was about the size of an old-fashioned cigar box. In the 40s and 50s they built those little containers out of real wood. Three of them were large enough to hold 900 marbles I won at the height of my marble powers, in the 8^th grade. Then one day, Gene shot them into space, hoping to kill a bird or two, slung into oblivion by his new Whamo slingshot. 

If Uncle Roy had been around, he could have come up with some form of Mafiosa torture yet unknown to civilization. And I might have used it. I can still see those gems, made for variety and class. Such marbles disappeared, along with the game, around the mid-fifties. Nibs, anyone? Remember: "shooters go."

But real sickness called for her little boxes of her cure-all medicine: Vick's VapoRub. A simple sleep-disturbing cough was worse than, say, Malaria, or what Dollie called  a “bark,” a dress rehearsal for a firing squad because it took so long. Lying in bed, tracking the ceiling cracks, you knew she was coming. You piled into bed at, say, 6, and then buried your face risking a Desdemona-like death. If you slipped, lost focus and surfaced for air, you were doomed. Mom’s bare feet hit the well-worn linoleum floor---kkkkkaaaaaathmpppp. Then the fast-paced—no, the near running to your bedside.  You want me to say, “so she would climb in next to me, hold me to her breast and hum one of her half-finished Spanish ballads.” Sweet.

However, not true. She brought with her Ponce de Leon’s elixir. “Here, put a finger full in each nostril and then . . .swallow a finger-full.” In spite of the label, we could have been ahead of our time, though it’s been quite awhile since I've seen someone eating Vick's VapoRub. Shhhhhhhh. Perhaps word on the street already precedes me.  It could be some kind of “upper” or "downer." But it worked, and you knew it, as you drifted into a vapo-fog--swaddled in VVR.

The Vick's water boarding was only to be outdone by a torture invented by the Kiowa Indians, back before the ever-ready US cavalry was even invented. Yes, the infamous onion poultice. Once again, the philosophy of medicine in those days was "what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger." Sounds like chemo to me.

The sound of angry, sleep-interrupted bare feet hitting the floor was easily outdone by the sound of surgical instruments in The Kitchen. Out came the heirloom frying pan, the Bowie knife cutting and peeling the onions.  I can still hear the paper-like crackle of onion skins flying around the counter, The top burner explodes into action; soon it warms the onions into a 50s version of Amoxicillin or a  Z-Pack. Then came the swaddling cloth: a worn, faded, paper-thin cotton diaper. No babies anymore, but they played a backup role as “rags”--an all-purpose piece—cotton for all seasons.  Dollie rolls the onions onto the waiting cotton diaper, then, smack! down on your chest, close to your mouth, nearly on your nose. “Now lie there—and sleep!” Oh yes, sleep. Breathing onions. Today onions may abound in Lora’s salads but never, oh never [sounds like a hymn I know], have I touched a fried onion.


In moments of turmoil and self-pity my nose can conjure up the reek of leeks.

This training in do-it-yourself medicine was not lost on me, I assure you. Ask my brother Gene. Isaiah Berlin, in his study of Tolstoy, says the "fox knows many things; the hedgehog knows only one thing." I was a hedgehog.

Somehow Dad and Mom were gone—probably visiting Uncle Gene, searching for another dream. Dad, who was a financial prophet for everyone but himself, wanted his brother to buy 40 acres of vineyard next to us for $40,000.  No deal.  Do you know what 40 acres of ground is worth in Escondido today?

Parents gone, Larry takes over. And there is trouble; there was always trouble. The Guardian Angels swing into action. Gene first drops a glass bottle of milk and then steps on it. This is no flesh wound from a Randolph Scott matinee. We have blood everywhere. Sissy hides in the corner; Michael keenly observes my first real ER experience. Curious fellow. Gene screams loud enough to even wake up Jimmy Lail, the hapless victim of earlier ambuscades at the hands of my brothers become Katzen-Jammer Boys. The Terrors of the Trailer Park.  He shudders and stays down low in his trailer, waiting for an ambulance.

I have to work fast before Gene passes out watching his own blood pooling on the linoleum floor. I put him on the sofa, call for reinforcements. Michael is not strong enough to hold his hands down. He sits on Genet’s flailing arms [Gene became French Canadian the last time the folks left; it soothes him--he finds his roots[?].  Carol sits on his legs, her face turned. I grab the round carton of salt; you know, the one with the little girl carrying an umbrella.

It Rains Salt. We're into something from Gone with the Wind.  I can hear that shattered Confederate in butternut, crying, "Don’t cut; Don’t cut!" We don't even have a saw.  Later in college I would learn about Okham's Razor, which translated into Texan means, "keep it simple, stupid." We settle for salt.

Carol heroically offers to stuff a recycled diaper into Gene’s mouth. Equally heroic and disgusted, he turns aside—and continues to scream. The salt, now starts taking the shape of a miniature Mt. Saint Helens. It does its work. We save his foot, and he proudly bears the battle scars today.  He tells people it was Cold Harbor. Or was it The Battle of the Wilderness?

So here we have a living, albeit painful example, of Yankee Ingenuity, the roots of our courageous pride as Americans.  The spirit of Ben Franklin and our own forefathers lingers here. "Home Remedies." Do our grandchildren even believe that there is any kind of remedy at home?  Our home?  Don't we need a professional?  A clinic?  A Workshop?  Counseling? Sylvan Learning Center?  More name brands in our closets?  Yet another "App" for a screen?


A courageous pride. Our roots. You, my grandchildren, who will read and understand this only when you are in your late 30s.  You will realize you need to dig deep and find that gutsy and for the most part happy past your great grandparents knew.  And we found the remedies . . . because we had to.

Your legacy and . . . mine.  

Playing Amigos

Those of us, who moved from one town to another, know the pain of waving goodbye, and the pain again, of saying hello to strangers.

But I have a feeling that may be an Eternal Life’s Pattern. Are there dozens of so-called “airports” in our endless journey? My Dad always felt moving was progress, which didn’t always mean making more money. It usually meant making the same amount of money doing something different.

When he walked away from Petrolane Corporation’s offer to stay and run Mountain Gas in Bishop, they offered him more monthly salary than he would ever make again, playing corporate businessman, opening their own store in the morning, publishing business cards but with his name.

But Dad insisted on being his own man.  His dreaming of "black swans," made me think of Willie Loman, that painful version of the American Dream. However, Pop was sometimes bigger than life for me and loved by everyone. They affectionately called him The Little Giant. He dreamed like Willie but he knew enough about life to ignore alcohol—except in small packages, say, a can of Bud Light, sitting in the storeroom with Sam Powers, his gentle giant friend, who painted Camp Pendleton army green buildings 8 hours a day and then wandered out to the store to be with Dad.  He would fill a car once in a while with 18 cent Rio Grande Regular and once, he even condescended to play upstart Gene, my brother, a game of checkers.

Not this time. This was not the Battle of Little Big Horn with Uncle Gene as Custer. In less time than it took me to snatch yet another Snickers and gobble it down, the board was clean and The Terror of the Junior Marines was “on the canvas,” as Sam whispered, "It's ovah," his Maine accent still stuck on some words.

It was clear, though, that when I stood up; or, leaned forward, to be honest, and told Dad that I was “not going into business,” I really meant it.

I wanted a salary, security, and safety. I would take Dad’s sage advice and redefine the American Dream. Unlike Nick, in The Great Gatsby, I would not even look across the harbor for the Green light—because there would be only the White Light of God—but no Green Light and no Daisy.

Strange.  I always wanted to be someone else’s man.  By the time my mission in Germany had ground to a 30-month halt, I was looking for a way to be a perpetual student. I liked the “student” rhythm. And at Ricks College that’s what I found. I wanted a salary, a desk, some books and friends to spend my life with. It all happened—well, nearly. I am writing this at 2 in the morning from Austin, Texas, anxiously awaiting the sound of rain. Nothing.

Think of it, though, children. You knew of a man, your grandpa, who slept lightly on Sunday night, not because he had the Monday “blues,” but because he couldn’t wait to be in the classroom, teaching, loving the ideas, and loving the often bewildered but laughing students.

Paradise Regained.

Good people surrounded me, driven by the same sweet compulsions. Ricks was, the cynics say, "The Lord’s College." Well, if you describe a place where there was no political infighting, struggle for rank, or special recognition, a place where everywhere you walked, you just might walk into a colleague who would see you in the temple within the next week. "Then," as Jerry Seinfeld would say, defining yet another human phenomenon: "I think we’re talking about a preeeettty special place."

We shared the hall with the nursing college, so Barbara Quirl was always ready to bandage a thumb or offer the latest on bi-polar disorder, an especially Mother Nature designed torture rack for our home. She drew and then surgically quartered Carolyn’s brain on a regular basis.

Down the hall lived Don Decker, who sneaked into the Marines at 16, traveling to Hell and back by way of Iwo Jima. That meant our daily ritual of handball was Iwo all over again. Craggy faced, he had the heart of a lion—a Good Lion—and the students and those of us who knew him, loved him. I think he read Homer’s Odyssey 50 times and certainly knew dozens of pages by heart—not by head—by heart.

Next door to him was Don Hunter, part time dairyman, poet, teacher, temple sealer, father of 8 children [I think] and a gem of a wife, who really made all of the above possible. He is not only the only guy in Idaho [the whole US?] to have read all of Henry James, but to have both finished The Ambassadors and then walked around the Rexburg winter to think it through.

Don Hammar, our large, deep-voiced Norwegian Viking had the most strength; a stellar member of the handball quintet, he had a vicious serve, the only one of us, really, who could make the ball dance. If you managed to get it back, you had a chance. He was weak in the ankles, so our only hope on his good days was for an ankle to bend like a rubber band and send the gentle giant to the floor. He also had the lowest threshold of pain, so that caused problems and created rare opportunities for the “Dons” to win the Most Critical Point in The Universe! Yelping like Aztecs, Hunter and Decker jumped over The Fallen Viking’s anguished body, supine on the hardwood.  I apologize for Decker and Hunter, Old War-Scarred Warrior. Remember your Aztec history: Death to the losers!

Let me further intercede on behalf of their failings because they were young. In spite of Hammar’s groans, Decker thought only of entrenched Japanese, Hunter of a possible easy point.  It would make milking the cow easier that night.

Bill Conway and I usually tried to stay out of the way of the two Peterbilt trucks and drag the raging Hammar to shore.

Conway was the clinician, expert in self-analysis of posture, swing, follow-through, and body position. I think he knew all of the rules. But his game, for all the soul-searching, didn’t seem to change all that much. He won and lost about as much in the end as he had in the beginning.  One Eternal Round.

I simply aimed for the front wall and was notorious for the infamous “dinker,” a return that slowed to 2 mph and died a slow death in one of the two corners.

Decker would quietly—no very loudly--respond that “most of your shots are so lame they’re not worth going after.” I think he wanted the hard black little ball to bounce with vigor off the ceiling and the four walls. The court was, after all, a box.

If he and Hammar had bazookas, I was carrying a .22, an apparent weapon of choice in our family. Ask my Uncle Roy.

Conway and Hunter were better at playing position and won a lot of games with cunning. I was usually too bogged down in protective gear: goggles, sweatsuit [which hid my imposing calves], headband and wristbands. I looked like a mummy and moved like one. Mummy speed.

Looking back, I was the Court Jester. When Conway or Decker, especially, raced to the back or head-on for the dying duck dinker, I would yell a distracting “troubles!” Troubles? I was working on something beyond the handball court. Fishing for larger, cosmic questions was my business. Trouble at home?  In Denmark? At the office, which a student had set afire?

It rarely worked, but the pause and the stutter it occasionally created made my day. Conway and Hunter kept a four-year score sheet, each claiming “total victory,” something Nixon would bark, or some other politician or general.

Surprisingly, neither Hammar nor Decker seemed to care once the game ended. The dead lions were removed and Nero went home. Actually, I secretly kept score and have the numbers to prove that I WON MORE GAMES. SSSSHHHHHH.

Bill Conway, an accomplished machinist and wood-worker, rebuilds airplanes and mills blocks of metal into diminutive steam engines. A Man for All Seasons. Here is a man who taught a superb Shakespeare class, complete with a much-borrowed test bank and then spent Saturdays rebuilding century-old lathes in order to mill custom-designed engine parts. And now he paints landscapes.

Don Hunter still writes a little poetry, woodworks in his shop, identifies birds of all feathers, and paints. He even went back to school to take painting classes after three LDS missions, after one in Mexico where he labored as a 19 year old. With Spanish-speaking Nita, they served as presidents in Mexico, in humanitarian service in Panama, and as temple president and matron in Santiago. As Brigham said of Jeddy Grant’s funeral: “He served more than a 100 years in the Lord’s church--in less than 35 years.” [Hunter is now 82.]

Don Decker exited this world in grand, Greek epic style:  Failing to belt up to demonstrate a “simple maneuver” on a dangerous cliff in the Grand Tetons, he slipped, falling to his death in the 80s. ”He awakens,” says Hunter, in a eulogy-poem, “to a view of the Tetons/And he will know where he is.” Fearless in the face of death, like my Dad. “Tough minded,” William James calls them.

Yes you will arise, Donald Decker. We still miss you and your warrior spirit, a leader in God’s Army in Another Place.

Don Hammar, another Renaissance man, pours cement, can do finish carpentry and feels at home as a cuisine-artiste of some renown. In fact a friend, with some aplomb, some, I say, asked if Don would be cooking my funeral dinner. Don has cooked for those who mourn. At my wife’s funeral, he couldn’t fix my broken heart, but he and Joan sure “fixed” a lot of grateful people’s stomachs.

But before the funeral there were other cuisine encounters. One day he stopped by with a fresh huckleberry pie. I was trying to paint my daughter’s room. “You have more paint on you than on the walls,” he laughed his hardy laugh.  He came into the house, grabbed a little paint rag and began to paint without protective gear: no face mask, no coveralls, no paint rag the size of a the sail of the Pinta [or Santa Maria]. Mozart’s Concerto for Clarinet—the theme song for Out of Africa—played quietly while the winter snow flew and fell. He moved across the ceiling with the roller, covered the walls, and never even had to dob a stain on his clothes from the wet paint.

“Don,” my daughter, Alison asked, “can you show me how to make your cinnamon rolls?”

"Sure; turn on the oven to 400 and we’ll wait."  Back to painting and humming. IT WAS A MOMENT. Mozart and the smell of baking rolls filled the house while snow flittered out of the dark Rexburg winter skies.  In an hour or so we were on the verge of baking greatness, and DaVinci had come and gone.  Now that’s a keeper.

Hammar, in spite of chronic injuries, apparently lived through the handball phase and is doing better these days. No handball, a sport only for the young, but still teaching, wondering if I’ll return this month so we can drive to Kilgore about 3 in the afternoon, ski out 5 miles and make it back before midnight. Afterwards we could eat an entire huckleberry pie.

He was brilliant enough to get into medical school at the University of Washington, but I could never convince him that it would likely take as long to ski back as it took to ski out.

You ask, where is your brother, Gene, your walking companion for 20 years? Well, it was “quick and dirty,” as they say in Idaho. My brother slid into my cross-country skis, fell on his face in a couple of feet of snow, brushed himself off and never looked back. When President Hafen asked what the difference might be between us, Gene said, “Larry’s the compulsive; I’m the obsessive.”

And here we are at 2:30 in the morning; Gene sits in his office, his computer clicking, obeying his regular-army, quick-moving index finger, preparing for a class he’s taught 508 times. I’m up at this wretched hour, unable to sleep, writing about eternal friends who came marching into my dreams. They and all my dear friends, God’s kind gift to me, live within my mind and heart.

Scott Samuelson, the Rookie, arrived too late for the handball epoch. After 5 years, shoulders, knees, and elbows froze up. The smell of Icy Hot filled our homes at night. Other sounds replaced the thunk of the black spheroid.

Samuelson, like these other talented guys, chose racquetball, along with poetry, painting, woodworking, etc. The dreaded racquetball? Too much a lethal weapon. To bump shoulders with one of the first to hit the sand at Iwo was one thing; to be on the wrong end of a pesky club was something else. 

But with Scotty, had I tried the sport, I would have been in good hands. He would have beaten me, but gently, sweetly.  It would even have felt good.

So we “few, we happy” five, left the “Playing Fields of Eton.” Exercise died and Walking-While-Talking was born. Ok, I admit my earlier mistake. For 5 magic years, I Was Homo Ludens. As with the Randy Miller, Ron Messer, and Ralph Thompson Reading Groups, something sweet and eternal lingers long after the lights are, so to speak, turned off and the warriors are heading home. The sweet memories of friendship endure.  No one really kept score [except Hunter], but all of us remember being together.

And in spite of “troubles,” we move on, without Decker, remembering the time we were the Playing Amigos.

Perhaps the tone has gotten out of hand, here. The night wears on and now I’m completely awake and emotional. It was about games, though, wasn’t it? I mean playing, as Huizinga instructs us, allows us to play out the earth’s curse, that hunger every man has to either go to war or play football.

And so we end with the Rookie, Scotty. I did tell you he would hug afterwards, but don’t forget your Bandaids.

Scotty worked from the top of the ability ladder down. Why not begin with the president of the college? A man, competitive to make sure, he finished dessert before you did because he had to. Life was a CONTEST! EVERYTHING. Even the sweet ritual every morning any caring husband knows: making the bed, his half, at least. But you would think him the only man on the globe to help his wife make the bed in the morning—and in less than a minute.

I see him now: jaw squared, muscles tight as violin strings, racquet ready for mayhem. But he always lost. And he didn’t like to lose, which made “our man,” Scotty’s constant victories, even sweeter. No malice, mind you. It’s only a game.

I remind you and me that rigor and gut-straining courage built this Kingdom. And with profound respect, I bow to our former president. I’ve just reread The Giant Joshua. Whipple charts the struggle, that pioneer sinew that built, prophetically, southern Utah into what it is today—good and bad.

Allow Maurine’s irony its play. Faith is the accommodation of ambiguity. And our college and the church became stronger because of that president, who, to be honest, did lead a herd of thoroughbreds to water, and they did drink.

But  he could never handle Scotty’s backhand.

And here in Austin, now early in the morning, all is silent. My Carolyn-designed house, her signature everywhere, covers another family, now a rented house.  Here, the Tabernacle Choir guides me through Handel.

And all is very quiet.

The Haunted Lake

In an earlier blog I made a valiant effort to “prove” memory and time are the endless supply of fish that swim forever in the Lake Austin of our subconscious. I am bold enough to assert that in that Other World at some point or cumulatively as needed, the fish surface, and submissively slide into the net of our consciousness and become part of our inner conversation.

Yes, you say, Bishop Drug on a lonely Friday night, eating banana splits with you mother is a good thing. But what about the bad memories? The bad fish? For example, the dreaded Chinese Snake Fish can cover a football field on a summer morning, slip into a fast-moving brook and gobble up all the Rainbows the hatchery can plant--and an anxious weekend fisherman can pull from the tumbling waters.


I speak for the most part from heartfelt vicarious experience, from quiet, gut-wrenching conversations, sitting behind a desk as an LDS bishop. That counseling experience helped me gain insight. 


And what of books? May I speak from books?  I write out of deep compassion and love, but I speak mostly as a stranger to some of the terrible things our friends and loved ones have been through. I have openly shared my family skeletons, but there is no first-hand trauma from which to speak. 

My own Lake is invaded by, say, small carp.  In other words, they threaten my good memories and solid feelings about myself.  But I can suggest three strategies for dealing with the infamous Chinese Snake Fish or even the Big Whites.  

One way of surviving “shark bite” is [1] writing.  No less a troubled soul than the now defunct Eldridge Cleaver confessed his need to write himself out of the darkness of murder and rape. A former Black Panther, later a Right Wing zealot, he ended his life as a kind of spiritual drifter. “I began to write to survive,” he said. He did survive.

Lincoln and Jefferson were letter writers. Were they able to siphon off the melancholia into ink . . . and peace? What of the heroic little Basque teapot, our Dollie? She was no Jefferson, but she wrote even more than 20,000 letters, ending her life still scratching out a farewell to a friend from first grade.

I also suggest Joan Didion, a modern writer, who began publishing while yet in her crib.  Sort of.  Her Blue Nights, the long midnight walks through her daughter, Quintana’s death, within the last couple of years is a spiritual exercise of sorts in the exorcising of death--demons that plow the sad wake of her loss. There is still that textured, nervous prose, leading her, hopefully to some kind of peace.

Writing—journals, for example, on the backs of envelopes or even on tablecloths is cathartic. When did you last write a loved one a real letter, telling them you care?

Next, is the very act of [2] reading our bad memories away; therapeutic reading, reading as “equipment for living,” says Kenneth Burke. Find yourself in a book. Become Herzog or Lizzie Bennet. Now, together, the “new” you and your friend, Lizzie, crowd out and cope with the darkness.

For me, sacred texts work best: Job, of late, though I sport no boils. How soothing are my moments with my two grandsons, reading in our feeble Spanish, Mosiah in the Book of Mormon. All three of us don’t know more than 25% of the words, but we plow on. The Cabbalist believes that merely reading, say phonetically, the Hebrew Torah “calms the soul.” Some deep, non-cognitive submerging into the Lake, scaring the giant sharks away. 

You know from our conversations that Victor Frankl is in my bloodstream.  He would suggest that we [3] Try love. Where do you begin, especially if you are not a natural lover of humankind? You could pet a dog or hold a disinterested cat. Reach out and touch someone/something—somehow, if only with words. I think there is power behind words, what one film calls itself: The Secret Life of Words.

The other day in Georgetown I encountered—no--accosted a tall old boy, leaning into the sun, his red suspenders a dead give away. Blue collar all the way. My kind of guy.

“So how far is Sun City?” I asked. Bent, but still a giant of a man he took me to the early 50s, to places I had been—Bishop, Escondido, San Diego. As a railroad inspector, he rides the steel and he looks around, like, say Darwin, inspecting His World.  Although retired, he remains a railroad man, but apparently he thought about things along the way.  Adam Gopnik, in his study, Angels and Ages, a Short Book about Darwin and Lincoln, says both Darwin and Lincoln, “always thought as they saw.”

We parted at a pottery shop, his wife scurrying like a lab rat, looking for more clay stuff. “I remember passing by the Calavo loading shed and then passing your little country store,” he said. I placed pennies on those rails. Perhaps our eyes met in 1954. Friends in Escondido meet again in Georgetown, Texas. One Family, Indivisible.

Small world. Reaching out, I found another human, one of God’s children. What if we were neighbors in Sun City? Friend-stories and the human family drive out the bad memories. And family stories, like many of these meandering blogs, fill empty spaces. The useless carp head for the shallows; good Rainbows dominate our consciousness and even most of our unconsciousness. Love for others transforms us; such love enabled Frankl to survive the death camps. Paul says we are "made anew" because of the "love of Christ that dwells in us."

The other day in Costco I fell into conversation with a pretty woman [of course] demonstrating cheese, I think.  I knew she was South American, though silver-haired and very fair. “You remind me of my Grandma Lucy many years ago,” I said, sneaking a wink. With slight accent, she smiled. “So I suppose ‘jjjjou’ want a grandma hug.”

"Yes," I said.  We hugged.  The human touch. We transfer energy to one another.  Joseph Smith once told William Corey, who suffered from what we generally call ulcers and the frontier folks called dyspepsia, "If I could be around you more, I could heal you."


If I named the healing huggers who fill my life, I would need a whole wall to list them.  During the two years Carolyn and I helped in the Humanitarian Center, we met many who healed by simply working: sewing quilts, painting toys, making nightgowns for the little people. One story you've heard is that of the 90+ Salt Lake Woman who holds and hugs the quilt she has just finished, "filling it with the love" she hopes a little child in Kosovo or Honduras will feel when they cover up at night


Elder Nelson, when dedicating Poland for LDS missionary work, said “I knew if I could just touch the security guard’s arm that he would soften and allow us entrance into the locked cemetery, which overlooked the city.” He reached out, touched the guard’s arm. “Ok," the guard said in Polish to the church interpreter, “but hurry. This is against the rules.”

We write, read, and love others by reaching out, even to that tired clerk at Kohler’s or the DMV.  She might be your 35^th cousin away.

Close enough.

PS I will continue with a fourth strategy, plugging into the Atonement on Nov 30th.

Sanctuaries Lost

I want to avoid the philosophical and economic components that orbit around the word  “progress.” It’s easier for me to talk about how things I once loved have simply changed –changed by either destruction or such dramatic renovation that the “old” has disappeared.

Only memory is left; that deep reservoir of endless capacity, ever filling, continuously nurturing our eternal past, as if Lake Austin’s water level continued to rise but magically never flooded. Endless in depth, it feeds memory/fish and the fish simply grow bigger as others are added. But I am no fisher of fish but love my calling as fisher of memories.

After visiting my doctor the other day, we ate lunch and then wandered around Georgetown, intrigued by several wonderful old buildings, especially the courthouse, which had apparently been restored to its pristine beginnings. As I passed some of the empty stores or noticed the decay of the decorative exteriors, I wished in my heart that every store were as it once was, always new, as on its birth day, full of light and the sound of happy people engaging each other, buying and selling the world’s goods and services.

Here I’m in trouble already. My grandson could open the door and yell “entropy!” or add the battle cry of our struggle against inevitable decay: progress, change, and constant repair.

And memory.

My solicitous doctor, however, does not see “progress.” He taps my stomach and listens to my aging heart. There’s time yet for renovation, perhaps. In my own case, however, when it comes to my body, I do not reach for either renovation or renewal. Not here, not now.

That takes place in The Other World. Different landscape; different furnishings. Better air, more trees, and lions that rarely roar. He looks intently into my eyes. Can he also see the cataracts my optometrist warns me about?  "No, other stuff--your heart, as we've discussed before," he says quietly. "Would you consider an EKG?"  I eye him off once again, repeating our earlier conversations. “Your choice,” he says, kindly, as usual.

Let the shadow of entropy fall, for that shadow will fall.

I think of my new Swedish friend, Tomas Transtroemer: “Everything is now, now, now. Gravity/Pulling us toward work in the dark.” No, Tomas, Work in the Light.

While riding home, Lora eyes the GPS, her modern compass/Liahona. Into my mind creeps the whirrrrrring sound of ceiling fans in the old and now invisible Bishop Drug. I am 6, my mother sits next to me, tall on the stool; we dominate the special sounds and smells in old drug stores. We hear pills being poured into bottles and the quiet talk between the old man, apparently ill, and the kind, gruff voice of our local pharmacist, Lee.

The Mojave Winds blow. Playing Man is Working Man [ET, my Dad] tonight, remaining over the weekend in the High Sierras, in the Mammoth area, feeding hungry propane tanks with liquid fuel that warms the lodge and scattered cabins. Ice covers the narrow, two-lane road down the steep grade.

Mom and I inhale salt compounds, faint fumes of perfume. We hear the clanking sound of stainless steel, scooping up mounds of ice cream, a mound of delight, buried in the elixir of chocolate and butterscotch. Faye, our neighbor, smiling, adds bananas. “How are you two tonight, Dollie?”

“We are enjoying our Friday night reward food,” she tells Faye.

That was the Friday night ritual when Dad either worked late or played. Winters, he took to his skates on his brother’s pond or if in the mountains, strapped on his skis. If he played, we played, walking the crisp little journey to Bishop Drug.

Sometimes, however, we walked across the street and paid Maud Dalling [a dollar for Mom, 25 cents for me] and watched a movie. My Foolish Heart, with the husky-throated Susan Hayward or Red River, starring The Duke and a new guy Mom loved immediately: Monty Cliff. She looked for the romance and saved most of the westerns for me, on Saturday, where at 2:00 I could pull baby teeth with JuJuBees and watch Allen Ladd or Roy Rogers, or Randolph Scott. I think Scott made a movie every ten days. Yes, I saw every single one.

A cartoon and Movie Tone News. I knew each Saturday by 2:15 that we were winning the war. It wasn’t long before the deep, dramatic voice assured us, backed with grainy black and white footage that we were also winning the next war, the one in Korea, that was never even declared a war.  A cartoon with a mouse or a rabbit followed. And then the main feature, the curtains parting, the boxed up cooler air, rushing out over our spellbound faces, spreading like an invisible cloud.

Dessert then dessert. Could anything be better? Even though I sensed Mom’s occasional pain, masking the reward food, I enjoyed myself. And I never forgot. Were her movies, like Lost Boundaries, my first real look at black-white  relationships and the no-man/woman’s land blacks lived in after the Civil War. But they taught us in elementary school that negroes were free.  Did she plan my film-watching on impulse, or did she hope to instruct in these things?  And why did she read With His Eye on the Sparrow: A Negro Woman's Story?  Was it more than just a "read-aloud" book before bed?


Was it just the wind again? Cold afternoons, we escaped to our little library on main street. Out of the cold and into the warmth and the special quiet of libraries.  A quiet, frankly, that BYU-I could never capture.  It was a dating center; the books mere furnishings—only the ambience of a real university—the chatter centered in what Michael, my brother, calls “conversation about relationships and fabric.” What happened to our conversation about conversation?

I do know the childhood trips to the library were instructive and precious, as precious as her animated voice, reading Hans Christian Anderson’s fairytales to me at bedtime.  Books weighed more than Roy Rogers.  She helped me learn that.

Family specialists tell us we never forget the smell of burning autumn leaves and the sound of a parent reading. Mothers, do you sit next to your daughter and read to her? She may turn away, lost in the “real” world she loves, where Little Bieber resides. Years later, she will remember your voice, the soothing flow of words, your hand quietly resting on her leg.

Darkness is not the same once you’ve been read to. Ever.

“Oh, Brave New World.” 

Mom never deliberately guided me in the library. I think she trusted my heart her whole life, even when saw me wandering off the narrow path. Generally, however, she followed her bliss, leaving me to follow mine. My Uncle Roy and wife, Shirley, the sleepy-eyed one, her lips full, bovine movements, sliding through the days of her feckless life, saw daylight one Christmas and bought me Swiss Family Robinson.

I was never quite the same. Sometimes, even now, in my Late Winter Years, I go to the tree house, to what Gerard Manley Hopkins called the “tackle and trim” of that ingeniously created refuge. And the soothing sound and safety of the rolling sea, alone on that island. It's important to have a place to go to late at night. And I'm not talking about electronic screens, what Huxley called the "feelies" in 1936 in his novel. This "New World" Steve Jobs and the boys created had better be "Brave."

What are the vanishing landscapes in your memory lake? Can you remember Christmas shopping at, oh, you know, Sears or JC Penney’s? Can you smell autumn, the autumn you knew as a child?  Can you smell the smells of your second grade classroom?  The smell of wax?  The smell of chalk and paper?

I know, I’m drifting into the Land my grandchildren will never know.  I’m sorry. Chalk?  Blackboard? Quill and inkwell, anyone? Let us, as Thoreau invites us, “Go a-fishing in the River of Time”--and wish that time didn't flow like a river.  But flow it will, and it is not the same river a second after we put our toes into it. Ask, Heraclitus, the Greek. We live in a world of constant change, change that is constant-flowing like a river.  Mortality; entropy.

I leave you with Linda Gregg’s sweet review of our memory-lake. In “Fishing in the Keep of Silence,” she believes in a “God who thinks about poetry all the time, . . . repeat [ing]  “Happily to Himself./There are fish in the net,/Lots of fish this time in the net of the heart.” [italics added]

Sanctuary or Prison?

Last Saturday I took Cam, my grandson, and a fellow booklover, to Barnes and Noble.  I know, I know. You’ll tell me about Amazon and Half.com and the money I would save.  I know this, but I felt the need to look and heft and page through books. Books!  Paper, ink, brightly illustrated covers!

We came home with a very large sack, something like $150 worth of booty.  And so this week I have sat in the Texas sun, poolside, trying to forget the price we Texans are paying for the mellow yellow autumn sunshine.  Drought. Yes, I apologize to my Idaho friends who have begun to pay the price:  Ice and snow. Remember, however, my wise words:  "Weather is a state of mind."  I only wish I could live what I preach. . . every day, every winter.

And for this reason my first choice for Sunday afternoon was Neil White’s first book, a memoir, entitled In the Sanctuary of Outcasts.  How does a prison become a sanctuary?

White, a small-time publisher of magazines, finding himself strapped for money, desperately tried to keep his finger in a business that was oozing money like the Louisiana dike system. But it was like trying to hold back the Mississippi every rainy season.   White becomes a white-collar criminal.

Switching funds from one account to another, often where there was nothing but fabricated money to begin with, he was caught, tried and sent to Carville, a once ante-bellum South plantation, rescued by Woodrow Wilson as a refuge for a growing and unmanageable number of lepers—the Biblical outcasts—who until 1917 had no place to go.  Not a single state or city would accept them.

Facing a year in "prison," he learns about leprosy.  Interestingly enough, Carville becomes a “sanctuary” for him, as well as for the lepers and the broken-down, often immobilized, obese convicts. Both convicts and lepers could not be housed any place else in the prison system.  The criminals and the lepers—something out of the New Testament.

White introduces us to a cross-section of sick, physically disabled “convicts,” housed in one large wing and a host of courageous Lepers living in the second wing.

I am moved by such men as White, who can transform their surroundings into something “else,” like a cloudy, marrow-freezing day in Rexburg, or an ailment into something meaningful.

We are all in that business of "making the best of a bad situation." Certainly a job lost, [once a sanctuary--even if we didn’t realize it at the time] casts us into a kind of prison of fear, and I am sure a unique form of loneliness.  I assume here.

For students, my grandchildren, perhaps, a class or even a particular building, can become a “prison” of sorts.  I never liked the Eyring Science Center at BYU, because I don’t like the smell of chemicals. That usually means chemistry, a discipline I could not get my head around.  Sulfur, whew!  I wouldn’t make a good soldier either, even though I still try and convince my grandchildren that I was a Navy Seal in the 80s.

Let me leave you with the very epitome of courage at Carville—Ella Bounds, whom her father dropped off when she was 12, sick with Leprosy in her legs.  Now, at 80, she is up early, anxious for her paper and a cup of hickory coffee. Without legs, wheelchair-bound, she pushes her way through the long halls, singing out, “Ain’t no place like home.”  Do the math.  One building; true, rolling mounds of grass and flowers.  But one building.  Alone.

Those who like their reading in film form [streaming Netflix] might consider, “Bless You Prison,” the true story of Romanian Nicoleta Grossu, who spent 7 years in a communist prison for “traitors.”

She found God, memorized the several dozen scriptures carved into the cold cement walls that surrounded her, and transformed her prison into a sanctuary.  Later she found a whole huge Bible, which she tore into sections and handed to her inmate friends. They read their hearts into peace.

What about a short laundry list of possible prisons we may find ourselves facing now or soon?  Can you with God’s help, or the help of Buddha or that Energy Field Ella Bounds found, transform that prison into a sanctuary?

• Finding a major and then sticking with it until you finish; finding it hard to decide to decide.
• Living in a space you define as a prison, i.e., your own home, inhabited by other creatures called “family.”
• Living in an apartment without hope in the distant future of a better place to be.
• Finding yourself surrounded by people whom you find suffocating, those “Idiots,” Greg House calls his medical team.  Is there a Greg House in your life?
• Discovering the shock of realizing your marriage has cracks, is oozing river water, a dike ready to collapse.
• Facing a doctor who says taboo words like “cancer,” “neurological disorder.”
• Death—inevitable.
•  Looking in the mirror and facing the prospects of yet another Good Housekeeping magic diet.
• Discovering within yourself spiritual burnout [usually in your 40s], something Thomas a Kempis called “spiritual dryness.”  [The Imitation of Christ]
• Looking sideways at a child and thinking for a split second, "I love her—but I don’t like her..." 
• Looking inside yourself and realizing you have no desire to change.  How do I “desire to desire?” Asking yourself if you have the guts to plant the seed of hope, nourish it, cultivate it, and patiently allow it to grow.

Living Water, Part II: A River Runs Through It

A couple of years later we rented a home near Bishop Creek, waiting there while Dad put a contractor to work on our new home. Typically “ET and Dollie,” made of cinder block, it was never faced with brick. No castles for these two. Housing was a means to an end, what Aristotle called an “instrumental good.” No child today in the circles where my grandchildren run, does the word "shack" ever surface. Dollie knew the word and what a shack was. Any deviations? Hardwood floors throughout but a small kitchen. Where was Dollie in the planning? Maybe she had agoraphobia—the fear of open spaces? Too many horizons already? Not enough closure?

Once, knocking doors in Germany with a Wyoming kid, Wayne Brown, quiet, gentle and competent like so many, a German woman looked at him and asked if he was from Ukraine. “Du hast Russsische Augen?” she questioned. That far away look; that open, perhaps vacant stare of a man from Wind River country—who else but Germans, suffering even more after the Lost War from claustrophobia. The women had a habit: they sucked air in; a nervous reaching for air, for space, stuffed into apartments, beehives without a queen, with a neighbor who often remained a stranger for years. Never “Du” only the more formal “Sie.” Paul calls such, “strangers and foreigners,” still filled with the fear of the American Occupation [1945-1948], a dark, untold story of casual rape and opportunistic robbery.

Not always. Sometimes love and children and a new life, not in a crowded apartment, but an open American Midwest life. Kansas.

Bishop creek emerges as the main artery, an aorta of my childhood. Yes, I've discovered I was at least Playing Boy. Gene and Tommy Weaver and I worked the creek banks, mastering every blade of grass. Silly in our play we collected tadpoles. A life in a bottle of river water was no life at all. And boring for us, finally. Our nemesis, the Victor kids, also collected tadpoles.  Then they maimed them with their jack-knives and tossed them back into the creek. Into the creek went potential frogs that would never be. The infamous Victors would cut the tails off, and scar the stomach.


They would pay; this David would bring down those Goliaths, with a sack of rocks at the end of the summer, a week before school began.  I lobbed to my heart's content--lots of “thunks,” lots of swearing, three bloody heads, but no lawsuits, thank heavens!

Our stay in what we would always call "the new house" did not last long. Naturally, a man and a woman who knew the difference between a new house and shack would care little about location. In terms of money in the bank, we were easily “upper middle” class, but Dad never showed anyone that. A trailer park settled in half a block away. A cement company had been in operation for years. We ate like kings, a feeding frenzy on Dollie's Mediterranean-Oakie combos:  lamp chops with okra, tossed salad, biscuits, and chili rellenos.

Other memories float through my mind like Bishop Creek, a home for me, and a body of water that was "alive" enough for people in Los Angeles to get in their cars and drive all the way up into the Sierra Nevada village to chase fish—and in season, deer and elk. For me it was simply home. And that new home we would soon leave. I knew it the Saturday my Dad mowed the lawn himself. Whenever he pitched in with yard work or had someone paint a room, it meant we were moving. Oakie restlessness. On the move … to Escondido, the “hidden valley” and the American Graffiti chapters of my life.

In Escondido two bodies of water emerged: The ground water pond across old Highway 78 and the ocean, 17 miles away. The pond was a passing chapter, made more infamous by Gene's threat to single-handedly destroy the entire “squad” of five Junior Marines. The ocean, on the other hand, became the most important place in my Escondido life. I spent as much time “walking” the beach, usually a girl in hand, or walking alone, trying to put myself together. Yes, the primal ocean, our place of birth, my friend, Steve, contends. “The soup, i.e., a little ammonia, some eukaryote cells, a lightning strike—and primitive life. A cell with a nucleus; The Cambrian Explosion.

My brother-in-law, who lives in Escondido, says he could “never leave Escondido,” because it's near the ocean. “You rarely go to the ocean, Warren,” I would say. He murmurs, “Yes, but I need to know it's there.” So the ocean remains a constant metaphor in American life, for those near or far. Those away, those there, “go down to the ocean” far less than they admit. For those of us in, say, Texas, it still works. For me it's the ebb and flow of life, the flow of time and history itself.

We hear Matthew Arnold's voice, still barely ringing in our high school heads. “The sea is calm tonight.” And then, like Sophocles, the wise old Greek dramatist, we also look and wonder if this is the “ebb” or “flow” of our America-as-we-know-it future. Tomas Tranströmer, the Swedish writer, isn't looking at the ocean when he thinks of history, but his river works in the same way. “The stream [time and history flowing] pulled with its willing and unwilling.” Those of us sometimes “unwilling participants” in history are flotsam, caught in strong currents [politicians and generals] who push us like the river, like “logs … crosswise [we] twirl sluggishly and helplessly away … push[ed] among stones and rubbish, wedge fast, and pile up like clasped hands" [italics added].

Or, think of the poignant ending of A River Runs Through It, ye sons of ET, ye fly fishermen who spend a day staring at the water, thinking of time as a river...

Living Water - Part I

There is no greater dramatic setting in the New Testament than the meeting of Christ with the wanton Samaritan woman. Surrounded by sand, the precious well is the magnet that draws the entire village to it each day. What a cross-section of adults and children there were—but no men; they had man things to do. And then the encounter: a Jew, a man, meets a Samaritan woman, the historical outcasts from Jewish society. The two alone? She labors to pull water from the vital well; he offers Himself, a different kind of Well of Water, a Well that promises “everlasting” water. No more long walks, alone, brooding over a long line of lost lovers—men who come into her life and then leave. She always has a man, but she has nothing. Now, however, a new kind of well and water.

What about us and water? The Coming Crisis may not be about oil. It may be about water. Ask the Turks, who control the upper Euphrates—and the conflicted, ever-angry Iraqis who wait downstream, not for oil, but for water. Yes, water is our life. We floated in water before our birth and as we grew, we drank it and if we were lucky, we played in it. Later, as pensive, sometimes heartbroken or inspired adolescents, we sat by, brooded over it in a way the Samaritan Woman brooded. Neruda, the great Chilean poet, draws our attention to water's own will and its persistence in being itself. It “has no direction,” he says, and while it runs, it “Takes limpid lessons from stone … and plays out the unrealized ambitions of the foam.”

The Mississippi River has its own will. The Army Corps. of Engineers have spent a hundred years trying to tame Old Man River. It says “nothing;” it meanders; it destroys dikes and catch-basins and floods tributaries who join it. Now the Red River is its Little Brother. Watch out New Orleans. SHE. Yes, let's forget the “Old Man River;” let's make her powerful and willful, full of the inexplicable beauty of a woman—all women, a species of their own, apart, but thankfully willing to cleave unto us lost men. Admit it:  without whom, Nothing. Now she wants to move east, towards Texas. 


And move she will.

Ask yourselves about the water in your life. For me, the Bishop Canal, a sluggish, starved at times, high desert run-off “crick,” as we called her. We could float her with Huck Finn handcrafted "rafts." Rafts, which we banged together with odds and ends and nails from Dicky Montoya's garage; the boards, the refuge pile from my Dad's loading dock, which was our “dock,” our point of departure, moving sideways down the lazy canal, towards Bishop Bridge, which passed Dad's business. Time to unload—walk back and start over.

Why her? Why does Bishop Canal live in my 71-year-old memory this morning in Austin, Texas? Freedom, folks. A Declaration of Freedom. On that April morning the siren went off. A big deal in a town the size of, say, Rigby, ID. Bobby Stokes and I were just five-years-old. I had seen Manzanar earlier that year—my earliest recollection. His mother drove by, a bright, funny-looking, hat askew on her head; her smile bright; her gums shining above her considerable teeth. “The War's over,” she said. "I'm driving downtown to honk the horn."

Did she mean The War? Yes, the one that brought the yellow telegram and the long ride into the howling desert and the periodic tears, “Gene killed at Bastogne. Love, Mommy.” And just a month earlier, formally marched by threat of Mary Jane's pancake turner, I had scrubbed all the swastikas off the front of the house. “Do you want Pop Rashton to throw you in jail for being a damn Nazi?" she said with conviction, eyes blazing. Pop was our only cop, a 300 pound Panda Bear, who, for some reason, always carried his Billy club. Was it to simmer down an occasional fistfight between drunken Paiutes from the reservation? Was it for show?

We grew up, the day after the war. We took on Bishop Creek. Later, at the age of four, Gene, my brother joined us, a diminutive crew reminding you, perhaps, of Lord of the Flies. But we were harmless and the world must have been harmless. With endless freedom, we explored the "apple orchards" of which Dylan Thomas speaks. “We were free and easy” in our love of trees—and of water.

Before my graduation to the “big” water of Bishop Creek, though, I remember the most important and dangerous thing that probably ever happened at the Bishop Canal—or in Bishop itself. And nobody knows. Along the Canal was the storage area and loading dock. There sat two sausage-shaped 500-gallon tanks of liquid gas. On the eve of moving to our pre-new house, which was being built, the deliveryman dumped about 400 gallons of propane in the second tank, got in his truck, and drove away. One thing, however:  the hose was still attached. Within seconds, the heavier than air propane was pouring out of the broken hose like water out of a fire hose, cascading—yes, down onto the Canal, riding on top of the water like foam on a river, heading on a circuitous route around Bishop and then out to Bishop Creek.

Our poor, hysterical truck driver was worthless. Consequently, Dad headed down the street—running—because a spark [they were common in those days when cars backfired] would literally blow Bishop off the map. Mom said that when he entered the fenced area, that “he disappeared into the dense fog of billowing gas.” Propane is heavy and rides along the surface, but when you have that much, it will begin to rise, crowding for space. Dad removed the hose and capped the pipe, returned, and sat on the couch.  He smelled of propane, the frozen gas quickly melting into liquid form, left him looking like he'd been in a rainstorm. All we could do was wait. That could have been his longest and most sincere prayer.

Nothing happened.

The lives of what could have been several hundred people were spared. It was the 40s; the only newspaper was a two-man operation owned by my Dad's fly fishing buddies.

It was never spoken of again. Anywhere.

Am I merely floating on an “Old Son” mood-wave, emotions triggered by chemicals somewhere in my brain? My friend, Steve, would say, “Yes, it's part of your wiring. Your cortex is firing. You've deliberately filtered all the dark stuff.” Dark stuff like Ralph and the choirboys and the pig's head, the roots of religion in Golding's book about "natural man." Or in this case, boys in Nature, surrendering to fear and superstition and building religion, even if it's a pig's head, swarming with flies, for hope and peace when the darkness came.

Did Bishop Creek and The Canal really mean and exist what the sweatshirt says: “Bishop in the 40s:  What America Once Was!” Or were we simply lucky, squirreling around creeks and canals, alone, while Mom was home oblivious? Or trusting? Or, did she wring her hands and ask God in her pleading, childlike Spanish-Catholic way? “Help them, my ‘chico’s,’” fervently pleading. Or was it simple pragmatics? A quiet house, a place where she handled the Mojave winds more easily with us out, gone, splashing and diving and now ready for the dreaded Seven Foot, the most feared turn in the sweet-flowing Bishop Creek. Maybe there was no wringing of hands. Maybe she simply didn't think it through the way we do now when a grandchild walks 50 feet to the neighbor's and we conjure up pedophiles and "drive-bys." Yes, today, simply "driving by" someone is no longer just taking a ride into the desert:  in the Barrios, it's death.