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.