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.

Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds

My mother, Dollie, was a farm girl until she married Dad, in 1939. Her mother, Lucy Jauregui, was also a farm girl and remained one. Born in Del Mar to Basque immigrants, she worked the critters and drove tractor until her early death [55] in 1954.

In my mind’s eye Lucy remains forever young, pigtails swinging, as she walks the freshly turned loam, singing a Spanish folksong, oblivious to the heartache, which lay ahead.

She lived and died in the same house, too young when she married at 15 to fathom the responsibility that came with each of the five children who followed in quick succession.

She grew restless, living with a man whose maturity could not even match her own. She became, in R.S. Thomas’ words, “the strong body, the safe island, Where men may come, sons and lovers, Daring the cold seas of her eyes.” Those “cold seas” I knew nothing of as her “first grandchild,” the crown I wore, the abrazar that I’ve never forgotten, “her wise lap” my refuge.

Love is knowing someone and loving them in spite of the knowing.

My earliest encounter with that notion of what academics call “unconditional love,” I learned from a plaque above my mother’s stove. I give you Edgar Guest, whose simple lyrics graced many homes in the 40s and 50s. “A friend is not a fella who is taken in by sham. A friend is one who knows our faults and doesn’t give a damn.” An early reader, self-schooled on Prince Valiant and the lush illustrations in the Sunday paper, I began to read stuff my parents probably didn’t know I was able to understand.

Guest’s declaration of unconditional friendship bound me to my Grandma Lucy, my “safe island” of another kind of geography. When her letter came, announcing her second marriage to a man I always feared, it was for me, the crazy decision of a girlish woman acting like an irresponsible teenager. I hadn’t lost a grandma—I had lost a grandpa. That other fella would never be anything to me:  He was Edgar Guest’s “sham.”

But the ranch remained, where Grandma and "that guy" lived--still a constant refuge.  She was still my Grandma, my Lucy with those Spanish diamond eyes.


A memory floats into my mind as I write tonight.  Lucy and I went down to the shed to milk Rosa, her cow.  While she milked, she told me about growing up on the land and explained to me how she chose marriage over school.  "Larry, my Darling First Grandson, we have you, because your Grandpa and I had your mother."  As we walked back to the house, the fog rolled gently from the sea, quietly enveloping us.  She took my hand tightly and carried the milk pail with the other.  "Larry, we won't forget this little vacation, will we?"  I nodded.  She stopped, knelt down, and kissed me on the cheek.  


And we never forgot.


Have you ever wondered why God’s gifts appear, at least, to be random—at least random to us? I love that so-called “inconsistency” with which God distributes upon genius poets and composers, craftsmen, scientist and inventors. Why would my Lucy, with the “cold sea eyes” and the generous lap also have a sixth sense gift? But that gift, mind you, didn’t help anyone.

“I’m worried about Jack,” she said. Jack, her oldest son, the glue that held this tottering, now broken, family together. Jack, whose artistic hand illustrated everything he did. If he wrote a paper [always a brilliant paper] on John Greenleaf Whittier, there was a drawing of the very likeness of the poet. Jack, the student at San Diego State; Jack the quiet, solid one. “I’m worried,” she said.

Jack, killed in a yet-to-be explained car wreck. The driver? The “Sham Fella’s” one-eyed son. I remember the telegram to Dollie—yellow paper, black print, and the message short: “Jack killed tonight. Love, Mommy [Lucy].” We climbed into one of several cars Dad kept trading up and down for, looking for the “right rod,” he said. But the war was on. Even at 4-years-old, I remember the “consolation,” drive—into the Mojave Desert, the wind whipping our Blue Beetle, as Pop called it. Mom wept, her face turned to the glass. Lucy knew but what she didn’t know was that the complete unraveling of the family would accelerate.

The Sham probably didn’t worry. He had 200 acres, worth 350 million dollars now, but not then, 350 million, that is.

Then came the dream. Gene, Lucy's second son, worked at Convair, building the B-29s that set all of Japan afire. A drinker, restless on those warm ocean breezy evenings, he came home late. “I wanna join, Mom, everyone else is over there. My military waiver isn’t enough for me anymore.”

Gene trains fast, is flown to Scotland for six weeks additional training, and then finds himself in what history would call the Battle of the Bulge. Lucy dreams uneasily, night after night. Then, one morning, her braided hair combed out and touching her waist, she leaves the hairpins and comes down the stairs. “Gene’s dead,” she says solemnly. The “cold seas” of her eyes, now the Red Sea, full of salt.” Irene, the daughter, says later, “Mom said, ‘I saw Gene, his head full of blood. ‘Mom,’ he cried out.’” Two days later, another telegram, yellow paper, with the print nearly the same. “Gene killed at Bastogne. Mommy.”

Again the comfort drive. Dad quiet, lost for words. Mom searches for answers. “Maybe it’s for the better. I think he was already an alcoholic. Maybe this is a blessing … maybe.”

How did Lucy cope? “In her wide lap … a quiet music, hers being the voice “That coaxes time back to the shadows.” The Farm House, huge and filled with the smell of apple pie and old wood, the creaky stairs, the musty smell of over a century. Ghosts. And an attic full of strange treasure. A month before she died Lucy took me to the secret attic. The Sham is out searching for water. “If we only had water,” he muses, his mole-riddled,  massive body and razor-sharp voice gone for the day. Peace—alone with Grandma Lucy. She hands me the German helmet and bayonet Gene sent home. Jack’s ashes sit quietly in an urn. Or not? Later stories place him under the Box Elder tree in the circle drive, closer to Grandma Jauregui, where everyone felt more safe, away form The Sham.

What flitting dreams haunted Lucy once the Farm House emptied? Only Roy remained. Black, shiny eyes, “cold as the seas”? Glared at The Sham Grandpa, the oversized Swiss water-seeking, land-grabbing, brother-in-law, now the husband and the landowner.

Dollie has been “loaned” to Lucy’s sister in Beaumont, California, sent there because of a promise of “braces” for her teeth, a stable, Basque environment:  Lots of love. Five years pass blissfully. Then death. With Dollie’s aunt gone, she is left to be raised as Pip, in Great Expectations tells us, “by the hand,” the hand of his angry sister.  Not mom’s sister:  her cousin, Juanita Arro—cold, sizzling, black-haired banshee with a voice, yes, like a razor. ET enters and begins to take over. “Mommy” never calls. No Farm House to return to. Time. They begin raising each other. But that’s Another Family Story.

Roy grows slowly but is witty—and dangerous. One autumn afternoon he takes his trusty .22 rifle and climbs the hill that towers over the Farm House. “We might catch water draining down into that gulley beyond the hill,” says The Husband-Brother-in-Law. He eats breakfast, heads for the door, water-douching stick in hand.

Roy takes aim and fires. The tiny bullet hits the door jam, The Sham falls back into the house. Angry, yes, always angry. This time, though, he’s scared and Roy is on a Greyhound bus that night, on his way to Dollie, to Bishop … and the Mojave Wind.

The Wicked Witch and Fergus: Unfinished Business

Without a plan I began this journey to find family. In so doing I have become what Scott Card calls a “Speaker for the dead.”  The high seriousness has become more real and burdensome to me.  It has made me think of the role of truth, and how pain and truth often grapple inextricably but synergistically.  Ender learns this same lesson when he takes on the role of “Speaker.” The Truth can hurt, but Grace—from God and Others, heals.

Who, for example, can write of my Uncle Gene and do so with Grace and honesty? Thomas à Kempis, one of my favorite Catholic writers, speaks of a “truth [that] teacheth inwardly,” then adds, that the “eyes that open to outward things [people]” is not the Truth we seek, but that we must be “intent on inward things.”

Searching Gene's inward life must include Juanita, his wife, my aunt, my mother’s cousin, and my Dad’s sister-in-law. Brothers, ET and Gene, married cousins, Dollie and Juanita. Yes, the cousin-guardian of my mother after Dollie’s Aunt Annie died.   Juanita and Dollie, separated by eight years, were thrown together without a mother to guide them. Mom's Aunt Annie could have been that person.  The person her sister Lucy [Mom's own mother] could never be.  A clash of personalities—loneliness on a California ranch, night and darkness and fear. 


Thank heavens there was ET. 


Sadly, Dollie's nemesis was Juanita, the negative-shaping force in her "motherless" life. Lucy had been an unsteady presence until Mom turned 12.  Sensing her own personal failure, Lucy sent Mom to live with Aunt Annie, and daughter, Juanita.  Remember the promise of braces? Never happened.

With Aunt Annie now gone, Juanita stepped in and became the bane of Mom’s existence. 


Christmas decorating expanded into a week-long ritual; Easter lasted three days. Epic-sized meals spread out for “the harvest crew” at the ranch, the preparation began two weeks before they even arrived.  


Catholicism took on the dark, almost sinister, controlling mechanism we find in Henry James’ The American. A family in the novel control the daughter's love and destiny, and rush her off to a monastery away from her American lover.  


The deep roots of Juanita's Mediterranean Temper surfaced.  Juanita could out-yell anyone—even Mom. And she intended to break Dollie, as she would eventually break Gene, my uncle.  "She could cut you in half with her knife-like voice," Mom once said in frustration.

Dark and moody, she could "freeze you" for weeks with what Mom called, "That damn silent treatment."  Pain and isolation for Dollie.  This was Dollie's First Windstorm.


When Mom married Dad, Juanita, jealous, angry that Mom “defied” her and “married without permission,” sent Mom her sole belongings in a box, COD, which in those days meant, “collect or cash on delivery.” Eight dollars! In 1939 that was—who knows? Mom said the whole wedding itself only cost six dollars:  A license, a blood test, two dollars for a utility minister of some faith, and a corsage. No honeymoon. Dad started his job the next morning driving tractor for five dollars a day.

How then, did these two women ever come together, let alone live in the same town? Again, the Thompsons were like migratory crows. They always sought each other out. 


Isn't that love?


Gene bought a business, put ET in charge, and then quietly shut the door on life. That answers the strange, ironic question of their tension-filled proximity. 

Time heals wounds. Time can kill hatred. Question? How long can a holocaust victim harbor hatred? A thousand years? Two thousand years? I guess it depends if you believe in that many years. “The best literature in the world is purgative-redemptive,” says Kenneth Burke, the literary critic.  So, in films and books we look for change, for transformation and acceptance.  Other Sources, besides and in addition to God, sometimes converge to create change.  In the film, Five Corners, Harry, [Tim Robbins] changes while watching Martin Luther King speak.  He becomes a pacifist and a civil rights volunteer and plans on going to Mississippi. 

Lora tells me that in yoga there’s an asana (pose) that represents surviving our life experiences:  [1] Arising in the asana; [2] Abiding; [3] Finally dissolving into the next asana. Think of the beauty of that as reality and metaphor. If I take a certain stance or tap into an energy source, I change. Part of the heroics of walking on nails is first believing the nails are not there. 


Let me add Terry Warner’s magnificent mantra:  “Who I am is how I am with others.” 

Mom, much later in life, said of Juanita, “She cannot go on cursing me if I choose not to be cursed.” This transformation came not on the road to some Damascus; this was the culmination of a life-long journey.  But face-to-face reconciliation never really happened. Juanita had to die first, then Mom, facing death, continued the project alone, the "cross," she said, "Juanita has given me to bear all my life."  But in the end, Dollie came to peace.



And Uncle Gene?  Yeats’ Irish prophet and poet-renegade [Fergus/Gene], "Who rules the shadows of the wood … And all disheveled wandering stars," remains enigmatic, the least understood Thompson Boy.  And a look at his marriage with Juanita does not make anything more clear. 

This would be, as I’ve alluded before to the Tolstoys, “an uncivil war.” Not quite. It wasn’t what one of Hemingway’s characters calls his “separate peace,” though close. Maybe it was Nixon and Kissinger’s détente. At best, it was a non-marriage; two people living out their lives together residing in separate boxes. That’s why Uncle Gene “ruled [only] the shadows of the wood.” He was hidden in the shadows until the day he killed himself, lying quietly dead-drunk under his carbon monoxide spewing Buick.


I failed to find Fergus and even the Fairy Godmother who loved me.  My search ends Here.  I'll begin again--in the Other World.