Asides
Lurking inside religious belief
is pain and disappointment
in how human beings behave
toward one another.
The response of many religions to this pain and disappointment is to advocate for the increase of evil in the world.
Words to live by: Fundamentals
Before therapy: Chance, which tosses babies like coins and made me mad…
After therapy: Chance, which tosses babies like coins that land in mad families.
Poetry / Therapy – Before and After
Time in Wyoming isn’t measured in minutes, hours, or days, but in unpredictable bouts of weather. It’s a slow and sheltered world. When life is tied to nature the calendar falls away, and weather takes its place. Is the air cold, warm, or middling? Is the sky blue, or are clouds boiling above the horizon? Any interlude without wind is a shock to the senses, as if part of oneself had disappeared. Warmth and brilliant light can last a day, with winter’s return at dinnertime. Summer may never come, replaced by some unnamable season.
Journal / No Calendar Needed
Personal satisfaction comes and goes like flashes of sunlight
between cottonwood leaves that are stirred on the wind.
The world is coming apart, but isn’t it always?
It depends on when and where one popped into being.
For the majority of human beings belief is solid; the system is solid.
Bloody war and then a bit of peace; just enough time to
bury the dead, to have another child, to help a parent pass away:
Mercy may be nothing more than the randomness of the universe
at work; mercy brought me to Wyoming.
Poetry / Mercy
AUGUST provides that sliding feeling, down into winter. This year it’s a sly slope. It’s hot, so hot, the climate changing, revving up like a global fireball. The afternoon heat is a drug that drags the eyelids shut; the body is heavy and limp, the brain cooked and confused. The garden is sad and lovely, the sedums happy, the bachelor buttons itchy, dry, gone to seed, stems cracking, bending, blown to the ground by the nuclear winds of the sun. The wild prickly pear made their big play back in June. At rest now, they snore behind their barbs, their fat pads safe from every agent except my shovel. Divide and conquer: jab at joints, pull drapes of hairy roots from the sand; dump in the trash can. Relinquish the yellow summer corpses to their destiny as nutrients for next year. The garden is lovely but sad. Summer slides away into a few paradisial hours of fall and then winter crashes down like scenery struck from a stage, the curtain dropped, color gone, the land colorless.
AUGUST is the time of weeds. A sci-fi end-of-the-world month, quiet beyond normal, normally quiet, our town is not much more than a roadside stop in the wilderness. There are two wildernesses here, two dimensions of The West. The desert is nature’s wild child, the other wilderness belongs to man. My house is barely a house, furnishing a hot shower, a cooking stove and electric lights. It’s an old lady camp, with laundry burning on the line, burnt dry, smelling of ozone: purified. The dog creates an animal rhythm in my house. It’s a barefoot house, both winter and summer. My feet love my house.
August, 3 million B.C.E.
Wild Brain / Prose Poetry
A written biography necessarily begins at a specific point in time, but a real life may accumulate like snow until it moves forward slowly, as a glacier will. Another life may assemble like a jigsaw puzzle, the result inevitable whichever piece one begins with. The front door to my house stands open and cool, but comfortable air moves through the screen door. A bell rings at the middle school up the street and fleetingly, the image of a child runs into the house and calls me Mom, but there is no puzzle piece that shows a child.
Small tasks become precious ways to gather time. When pulled, a thread makes emptiness into a pretty ruffle.
Our desert might be all there is to the world. Wheel tracks laid down like yellow ribbons wander hills where brush and bunchgrass grow so uniformly that ant hills and their territories form welcome interludes. There must have been citizens who were drawn by the distance from Rome into small lives like mine, believing that to find the center of things they must go around the world the wrong way. Consciousness may be the basis of material desire, but happiness remains an invisible relationship between the human mind and what it finds – a union of time and place and person that is so very different from membership in a family or a society. I never wanted what other people offered, as if the art of living is as simple as shopping for a dress.
This is a road map of Wyoming, for those Americans who think that Wyoming is a foreign country or part of Canada, perhaps. Believe it or not, this is a common assumption of Americans.
Journal / Biography Begins
Original ice: big bubble is about 1″ across.
The texture of the big ice bubble reminded me of old style photo flashbulbs that melted when triggered. This image is the result.
Photo Day / Ice Bubbles
Telemarketeer (circa 1997)
“Wyoming never was anyone’s destination.” Guzman
In my now-and-then capacity as a telemarketer for the local newspaper, I have been addressed as Sir, Son, Ma’m, Dear, and Dude. The confusion produced by my telephone voice began when I was about ten years old, the result of an innocent quirk of nature (an alto voice) that caused my mother so much embarrassment that she directed me to speak in a higher, more feminine voice, insisting that if I did so, the change would become permanent. Her idiotic suggestion did not win my compliance, and to this day, the people I ring up on behalf of the local newspaper call me Sir, Son, Ma’am, or Dude and I let them think whatever they wish.
As TV journalists like to say, “the vast majority” of copies of the weekly consumer flyer designated The Guide are delivered to residents within the only two towns in our county. Of the 30,000 copies printed each week, 350 must be mailed to outlying households, a service for which the United States Postal Service charges the publishers $125.00 per week. The postal authorities have decided that we (that’s me) must obtain the names of 8,000 people who will admit that they wish to receive The Guide, otherwise the Postal Service will no longer permit the 350 copies to be mailed at bulk rate.
About Our County (not the entire state, just our county)
Imagine an area the size of Massachusetts. Remove the vegetation, the thriving cities and towns, the ethnic culture, the restaurants, the shopping, the seafood, the numerous institutions of research and higher learning, the cultural arts, professional sports teams, and all but 35,000 of its people. Add bitter alkaline soil, a uniformly high and lifeless plateau (average altitude 6,100′) and precipitation on a par with the Mongolian Steppe.
True, a river does flow through the area like the Nile crosses Egypt, but without delivering a single bucket of fertile sediment. Too barren for cattle, Pronghorn, coyote, and rabbit compose a tentative fauna. Hordes of sheep are trucked in during February because the vast public lands mean they can be rotated to a different grazing patch every two to three days. I wrote a poem one day while honking my way through a confused mass of mutton that was blocking the road.
The sheep have returned; white lice in Paradise.
Over the brief time that I’ve lived in Wyoming, contact with my neighbors has for the most part been via the phone calls I make on behalf of the newspaper’s ongoing survey. When someone answers the phone I say, “This is The Buckaroo Guide calling to verify that you still wish to receive The Guide.” The usual response is uh, or uh-huh, both of which mean yes, so I quickly confirm the address as it appears in the phone book. Good enough, but in an extraordinary number of instances, the phone number does not belong to the person listed in the phone book. This invalidates the response, and I must ask the person to reveal his or her correct address and identity. Shockingly, he or she invariably complies. The percentage of disconnected numbers is also high: area jobs depend on oil and gas production and coal and trona (baking soda) mining, industries that guarantee a transient population.
About half the respondents don’t recognize the free paper as The Guide, so I prompt them with, “The free Tuesday paper, the shopper’s guide, you know, the one that has the TV listings inside?” Everyone gets it then, although a few say, “Oh! That thing I find in my bushes every Tuesday.” Which is true. An alarming number of residents fear that we intend to take it away from them or that we will start charging for it. One woman said, “Well, if it’s a bother, I guess you can stop bringing it.” Another meekly replied, “No, I don’t want it anymore – is that OK?”
Some say positive things such as, “We love that little paper.” “I sure do need that TV Guide,” and “Don’t leave me without the grocery store coupons.” A teenager responded wryly, “My mother and her husband aren’t here. Call back.” Stereotypical husbands must “ask the wife.” “I’m not in a decision-making position in this house,” admitted one.
“My wife just got laid off and I’m kinda gettin’ that way too.” What this had to do with receiving a free paper, I’m not sure. I worry about folks who contrive to make me decide whether to say “yes” or “no” for them, and about a man who shouted, “Come over for a soft drink, a cup of coffee, and Ritz crackers.”
A high percentage of those who wish to stop delivery cite failing eyesight or blindness. “I always have the TV on, why do I need a TV guide?” an elderly gentleman asked. Despair overcomes me whenever I intrude on what imagine to be a tiny human black hole at the center of a room-sized galaxy, surviving on energy sucked from an excruciatingly loud television set, with the furnace set on Hell, and in the company of a sole surviving houseplant that was packed into potting soil in 1952, its one withered leaf gasping for the CO2 that the old human can no longer supply in sufficient quantity.
The phone book is crammed with names that are new to me: Likwartz, Labuda, Bodyfelt, Copyak, Bozovich, Blazovich, Chewning, Bilyeu, Crnich, Cukale, Delanneoy, Depoyster, Fagnant, Holopeter, Jauregui, Jelouchan, Lovercheck, Manhard, Warpness, and more. Between 1850 and 1950, this corner of Wyoming attracted an international ensemble of men looking for the worst work on earth; mining, logging and the UPPR railroad. Alas, names are the only lasting evidence of a diverse cultural heritage, which is not surprising in an environment that defeats human effort and paralyzes the psyche.
A friend who grew up in a coal camp north of town contends that by the 1950’s, everyone had become the same. “Everybody just looked and sounded the same,” he said. “Bleak, beaten up, defeated.”
I continue to jot down amazing names: LaDonna LaCroix, Season Lower, Ty Harder, Larry Hell, Numa Grubb, Jack Leathers, Bert Mexican, Edwardo Wardo, Osmo Ranta, Clint Chick, Caddy Cackler, Fyrn Coon, Rhett Coy, Theron Dye, Deena & Alle Jo Butters, Kamber Bink Backman, Wanda Hodo, Hushlen Cochrun, Tex Jasperson, Cyma Cudney, Bubb Buh. And the surnames – Uncapher, Sweat, Warpness, Chitica, Laundra, Tonette.
Another melancholy evening as a telemarketer: one phone exchange took off on a sad energy of its own. I don’t recall what set the woman off, but she said that as a young bride, she had agreed to follow her husband into the Colorado mountains for a three-month try at a mining job. The pair stayed to raise four kids before moving to Wyoming.
“Eighteen years in Colorado, eighteen here,” she said. A symmetrical life at least. Her husband still works as a miner and drives a “twelve-mile-long dirt road with 291 ditches” to work and back, which worries her. “I can’t believe that my life is all gone,” she sighed. “After eighteen years we still don’t know anyone in this town,” she lamented. Me neither; my rubber dingy ran aground here a short two years ago and I’ve been busy getting to know the landscape.
“We’re sorry, you have reached a marriage that has been disconnected or is no longer in service.” No longer connected are Duke + Sandra; Don + Darla; Eldon + LaRie; Cactus + Tammy; Amber + Travis; Hava + Holly; Jay + Dee Dee.
It could be 1955 outside the newspaper office, except that this was an exciting town back then. Editions of the newspaper from that time are characterized by enthusiasm and pride; by advertisements for roadhouses, dance halls, and social clubs that catered to every interest, age and hobby. There were restaurants and stores. A full plate of gossip and local news kept people connected. Flipping through the newspaper archives makes me wish I had wandered here a half century ago. Today’s main street is a dreary alignment of gas stations, concrete block motels, and tire and auto body shops, punctuated by weedy lots and businesses that stick to the Interstate interchange at either end of town like cultural antibodies guaranteed to fight off growth and prosperity.
Journal / Telemarketeer
Away from town, the earth is all vista, all stark.
The yellow world is miles wide, vast and homely; all mine, on a winter’s day when all the other people on earth are somewhere else, but not here: not following snowy paths that make me wonder where they go, but not where they end.
Distances in my world are measured by miles of brush gone dry and gold; in square miles of Old Lady Sage-in-waiting; waiting for the commencement of a spring of silver scents.
All Vista, All Stark / Prose Poetry
Two yard sales are located conveniently uphill (and upscale) from my house, in a neighborhood of brick houses with attached garages that have real doors. My neighbor’s house has a two-car garage, but they have hung blue tarps over the entrances instead of doors. Some bright entrepreneur ought to print tarps that look like garage doors.
The tables at the first yard sale were piled with baby clothes and Made in China knickknacks; of no interest to me, but across the street, attached to a fence, was a sign for Free Puppies.
I forgot about pots and pans and Christmas ornaments, dodged traffic to cross to the house where black and white pups were being held prisoner inside a large cardboard box. A pup, only a pup, I thought, lifting a tiny male and drawing him to my chest. A fragment of nature, one more extra mouth, and on the scale of things, unimportant in this big world. But he was a wisp of something innocent and beautiful in my arms, against my chest, in this crummy world.
Poor me, enraptured by his puppy smell, attached to him instantly with the glue of the heart’s nucleus, his soft little body, all white with black speckles, in my arms, to stay, so instead of kitchen towels, rusty planters, or used garden tools, I came home with IT and the resident canines were furious.
The Invincible Madams
The puppy was thoroughly, indecently sniffed by my two females, who barked at the speckled boy as if he were a snake that had dared to slither onto the kitchen floor. Miss Piss the Elder, refused to share even a small space with him and left the room as soon as he crawled within six feet of her, but eventually she returned to watch the abomination through the doorway. The younger aunty was a bit more congenial, watching the invader from close up, but she jumped into the air with a yelp whenever his little nose reached out to touch hers. Number three (counting me) in the household, she is not about to yield one pat of attention to a spotted pup.
Apparently there is some doggy time limit within which an “invader” is expected to disappear: the ladies began hyperventilating in my direction, demanding that I evict the object that had trespassed into their home, although they were doing a fine job of it themselves, confining him within a tiny space on the floor with astonishingly meaningful growls and bared teeth.
Poor little pup – transported from the safety of the litter; helpless, and yet bold enough to face a beast whose head loomed like the Gorgon over his small body. Nature has sent him into the world immune to the poking noses and bared teeth, the cacophony of rejection. He is determined to be embraced by the tyrannical madams. Why do they not relent?? The two ladies didn’t care how much I wanted that tiny speckled boy to join our home. Why should they?
After hours of expressing their indomitable will, I had to confess that I was unwilling to have my days and nights made into snarling hell, and to break the aunties’ hearts by disrupting our satisfying triad. The house is quiet again and the dogs doze in the yard. Do they dream of the speckled boy? Have they encoded a shared myth of the time they repelled a repugnant outsider, forced on them by their beloved, but fickle, mistress? Has my flagrant disloyalty hurt their loyal hearts? Having forcefully reminded me of the duties of leadership, I returned the speckled beast to where I found him. I will be forgiven. They are dogs and could do no less.
The pup’s scent lingers here and there on my jacket, on the edge of the water bowl, on the kitchen floor. I strip off my clothes and toss them into the washer. His smell must be washed away, for my benefit, as well as theirs.
Journal / Unwelcome Spotted Dog
Last evening I washed buckets of broken ceramics in the bathtub, then conveyed them to the back porch to dry, having collected assorted discards in the afternoon at an abandoned mine dump.
The dogs scrambled past me across the tailgate, then took off down patches of broken asphalt that distinguish the road from the mud around it, disturbing foot prints we had made the day before. Conditions were tolerable and little snow remained. The bare and brushy valley where the dump lies, is one of the quietest places I know, the air so still that the silence draws attention to itself. The site is clean, the trash having burned off years ago.
Thousands of food cans dumped along the railway grade by miners have been reduced to rust. Little is intact except for an occasional small bottle that held shoe polish or naughty cologne. The simple act of plucking items from the earth, and dropping them into my bucket, restored something essential, my need to comb the earth for bits of history never subsides.
Whether or not my loot results in artistic objects hardly matters. (It did.) A cross-country trail of left-behind work maps my migrations, and only a small stack of drawings and a few sculptures reveal anything about me.
Journal / Scavenging Old Dumps
On any winter day, you might see me bent over, or down on my knees, in the midst of a frozen landscape, trying to steady my shaking camera, pushed around by the wind and numb, aiming for another photo of ice.
Freeze – thaw, freeze-thaw. It’s the rhythm of winter.
Photo Day / Bitter Cold Ice
Blackbirds
The Algebrains are here, all twenty-eight motor mouths going at once. I’m hungry, I need a restroom, and I itch from chalk dust. Outside, the state flag of Arizona flaps lamely in a crack of grey sky barely visible between beige plastic curtain panels. The school day has only begun, but I can’t wait to go home.
Contrary to the widespread American belief that kids hate math, and indeed may be psychologically traumatized by being forced to “do it,” I haven’t heard one peep of pain since I began substitute teaching. Sadly, most students who complete algebra don’t go on to discover its applications in higher math and science, which is like learning grammar and spelling without ever writing a postcard or a love note.
Next period: Yo hablo arithmetic. A boy that the teacher claimed would be of help because he speaks English reads a Mexican comic book and refuses to speak to me. His classmates resemble a flock of blackbirds that eye each other, cawing and ruffling their feathers as they peck away at their workbooks, comparing least common denominators and simplified fractions.
The Female Clan
Girls sit on the dance floor washed over by the soft blue glow of a ballet video. They gather themselves in twos or three to groom each other. The girls brush hair, braid hair, then let it loose so they can brush again. I could be Jane Goodall observing chimps in the wild, for this is the natural state of women all their lives – dependent on a net of female friends and relations for sustenance and support. I remember that girls of my generation also performed the same rituals during movies and assemblies, friends taking turns so each girl got her share of care.
In seconds the mood of the group shifts as they suddenly change positions and regroup, lying about like puppies, licking their paws and settling down near each other, head on foot, backs touching as they snooze. Some of the girls sit nose to nose, identically dressed in white t-shirts and shorts, in white socks or bare feet, with legs crossed. Mostly they talk, their smooth chatter continually defining friendships and alliances.
Meanwhile, in the video, ballerinas, steadfast models of femininity, dressed in white chiffon and blue silk, hop gracefully to classical music; from a voice out on the floor, I catch the word “pee-pee” and track it to a girl who ducks her head and continues hurriedly, “I want to see it, you know, flat.”
“You mean flacid,” her friend interjects. Good vocabulary.
“Yeah, that’s it. But I can’t. Every time I get near him he gets an erection. Like that!” She snaps her fingers and giggles. “Like lightning!”
Two of the listeners look my way and the girl who is showing off quickly concludes, “So now I get real close to him when I see him in the hall so everyone can see his pants bulge.” Even good girls go bad once they discover this power.
My “that’s enough” double eyebrow raise prompts her to say, “Oops! Sorry,” and the group returns to analyzing the implication of every word and gesture in the day’s catalogue of notes and conversations.
Brushes brush, and the room hums to Barber and ballerinas.
Journal / Why I didn’t become a teacher
The air is cold now, in the night and in the early morning. The dog noses her way under the covers: she pushes at the edge of the coverlet near my head as if she is a free dog in the forest, pushing leaves into a pile in the roots of a tree. Then we are settled again, the dog twitching to the rhythm of dreams, content to have satisfied her illusion of wildness, in a house at the edge of town, that wildness close by, two blocks down the street.
Cold is a positive force in the dark early morning and a presence in the room. Cold is welcome, as if in waking we have come down from a place too near the sun. The sun’s radiation feels like a god’s hammer, radiation pushing on the body, with great effect, after traveling 93 million miles our way. Its power startles me, walking on the dusty ground, rocks pulverized by the weight of sunlight, the sun pushing on my back, on my shoulders, pushing me across the surface of the earth, sucking water from my mouth and skin, the vapor vanishing into the air, into a blue glassy sky, back into the world.
Journal Wyoming / Winter-Summer
Unjust Summer
Summer to the third power –
No clouds, no shade, no escape
From the blue spaces, from the yard
burning hot and red and pink,
as if the chimes and lawn chairs
and a whirl-a-gig were featured in
Home & Garden: Mars
MARS
WYOMING
From “Yellow World”
Who I was Supposed to be.
The Dreaded VBS
My cousin Bette hated her curly red hair, but her mother and the other females of the family told her that her hair was beautiful and that she’d love it after she grew up, but they lied. Women lie constantly because they think doing so will make their children feel better. My mother was the only one who wasn’t lying. She loved Bette’s impossible hair, but regretted having given birth to my fence-straight bob. The lie didn’t stop Bette from shrieking and whimpering whenever my aunt yanked a comb through her Orphan Annie halo, or whacked her with the hair brush, a stroke of love which was supposed to stop her tears. The result was that Bette’s adult life was wasted in a sad quest to have someone else’s hair.
My cousin’s hair had nothing to do with an unexpected event that changed my life, except that it occurred during our yearly visit to my mother’s relatives. I don’t recall the version of Christianity her family followed out of the thousands of micro brews available. My uncle was a little Scotch bastard, so they may have been Presbyterians. Fortunately for the rest of us, he disappeared on Sundays in his black and red Mercury convertible to play golf. It would have been like him to demand that the family go to church while he drank scotch at the country club bar. My relatives’ place of worship didn’t hand out ‘Get-out-of-Hell-Free’ cards for a weekly donation, and the congregation didn’t stand, kneel, or sing much. In lieu of wine, grape juice was passed through the pews in small paper cups like the ones dentists used to provide, followed by trays of white bread croutons. My mother, who was a fan of high religious frou-frou, was scandalized. How could materials available in any grocery store be expected to turn into the blood and flesh of Jesus Christ? From her I learned that if one is dressing God’s play, one had better provide quality props.
My mother was paid to sing at weddings and other church-hosted events before she married my father, a vocation that exposed her to a range of worship styles. Based on this early market research, she chose to ally our family with the Episcopalians, who dressed well and sang the beautiful songs that she liked to sing, plus she got to share coffee and donut holes with exceedingly prosperous people, a ritual that helped her to push aside her childhood poverty for a few minutes. My mother never questioned the church’s edict that women must cover their heads in the sanctuary; poverty and abuse had prepared her to accept shame. She and the other women did subvert the prejudice by turning the ban into a fashion hobby. I liked her multitude of fancy hats, regardless of the complex sociology involved.
“Wear the Donald Duck hat,” I would say when she couldn’t decide which one to wear and we were late. Dad, the engineer, believed that Newton’s laws were as applicable to human psychology as to aircraft design, so instead of wasting energy opposing mother’s inertia, he sat at the kitchen table like a big dog waiting to be taken for a walk. The famous Donald Duck hat was shaped like a pancake with a projection in front that resembled a duck’s bill. My mother adopted my nickname for the hat, which pleased me. Too often she took offhand comments to be criticism. My mother badly needed to lighten up.
I might have developed into an acceptable American had my mother heeded my plea for lenience regarding Vacation Bible School that summer. “School? It’s supposed to be summer vacation.”
“Your cousin Bette is going, so you are going.” My mother had noticed a reluctant streak that appeared whenever I was asked to participate in group activities like Brownie Scouts or school plays. What would be next, a boycott of beauty pageants? The previous year she had shoved me in front of the cameras, and shockingly, I became the local Kiwanis Club’s Miss Peanut. When shown my idiotic picture in the newspaper I seethed with embarrassment: had my parents been aware of such things, they would have recognized that their female child was the reincarnation of a stodgy old Roman whose core directive was gravitas, but they weren’t. The thought that I might fail to socialize in the accepted feminine way caused my mother to push back sporadically, while my father encouraged the trend, probably because she made him wait for everything. My mother recognized that she had given birth to a child that she didn’t like and it made her furious.
Bette’s older sister, who was soon to depart into an embarrassing adult life as the wife of a bigamist Venezuelan deep sea diver, dropped us off at the church, where we were seated with other kids our age at a table set on the lawn. Adult supervisors handed each of us a blue felt board and paper cutouts of Jesus and several loose sheep. Jesus had those spooky Sunday School eyes that look nowhere and everywhere, letting kids know that like Santa Claus, he knows if you’ve been good or bad. The sheep gazed upward with unmistakable religious fervor. It was just too obvious.
Spooky Jesus
The adults instructed us to press the paper figures to the fabric until they stuck. I looked to my cousin and the other children, expecting one of them to ask why we were doing this, but they were busy making decisions: should Jesus float high above the flock or should he take an egalitarian stance among them? I tilted my board to study the symbolic problem. An errant breeze caught the paper cut outs, which fluttered momentarily, then fell onto the grass. Cousin Bette and another girl began to shriek. “Look what you did! You let Jesus touch the ground.”
“Hurry! Hurry! Pick him up.” they screeched, as if the three second rule applied to images of deities.
“Stop shouting,” I told my cousin. “It’s just a piece of paper.”
“No it is not!” she screamed. “It’s Jesus and you let him touch the ground and you are in big trouble!”
“God is gonna punish you,” gasped the other girl, who apparently expected a bolt of lightning or other crude Biblical barbarity to take me out in front of her very eyes.
A bad feeling passed through me, a feeling that would become familiar; a sinking feeling, as if a scary universe had been substituted for the familiar one. In this other universe grape juice and crackers turned into blood and 2000 year-old human flesh was eaten – ordinary people volunteered to be cannibals, and this was supposed to make them happy. The discovery that religion wasn’t a harmless piece of theatre made me question the motives of adults. Everything they presented as absolute truth was suddenly open to discussion. Bette and the other children had been taught that pieces of paper had the power to hurt them. What was worse, they believed that a small girl deserved to be punished because the wind blew a picture of a man onto the ground.
How I Became a Renegade
I finally know something about most of the people and places that eventually produced me. I found a family, but only by skipping my parents’ generation.
I was the only member of my family interested in tracing genealogical history. My father kept his ancestry secret, except to say that he hated Germans; his mother was German, and he hated her. This was irrational: He was German. And why hate an entire nation of people just because you hate your mother?
My Welsh ancestors experienced the takeover of Britain by my Anglo-Saxon – Dane ancestors
My mother’s family were poor Welsh people who had come across the sea in stinking little ships like millions of other immigrants around 1890-1900, in order to escape the coal mines and British oppression. My grandfather found work pulling giant sheets of tin off rollers in a mill 12 hours a day. It wrecked his health and the family was still poor thanks to greedy and brutal factory owners who saw immigrants as cheap exploitable labor (like Americans see distant populations in poor and totalitarian countries today.) The old Welsh ladies couldn’t remember much of life in the ‘Old Country’ and didn’t seem interested in genealogy at all. Life began when they stepped off the boat in Baltimore.
My father’s mother’s ancestors weren’t difficult to find. A ship of Bavarians and other Germans arrived in Patterson, New Jersey in 1854. A young man and woman met on board and married. He worked for the Erie Railroad, then moved on to railroads in Ohio. She produced ten sons who all lived to adulthood and became railroaders. My father’s mother descended from this line of successful people. Why would my father be ashamed of his ancestors? His father’s family was another story; misinformation, wrong leads, veiled secrets, a blank page three generations back. Three males: a father and two sons “farmed out” as indentured servants to separate farm families. My father’s misrepresentation of his father’s line as suspicious and untraceable threw me off as he intended.
Our surname is not common, and only one distant family turned up as a possibility: Germans who helped establish Germantown, PA, but had Anglicized their name. This couldn’t be the bunch of riff-raff my father alluded to! I worked forward from that end and found that indeed, our line was connected, but apparently ‘we’ were less successful descendants that moved to Ohio from Pennsylvania; a common result of land division. But there was nothing to be ashamed of – these were hard-working pacifist farmers that typified the American story.
I’m currently tracing a sliver of ancestry that I had ignored: It turns out I’m partly Anglo-Saxon after all.
An old saying: Keep a bad man on your side.
Saturday in Wyoming / Discovering my Ancestors
Sometimes one catches the domestic dog showing signs of contemplation, of thoughts mysterious and deep, but then one remembers that their awareness is overwhelmed by images, chemicals, sound waves and instinctive impulse, and they are not thinking in abstractions or words, ever.
Fred and Dexa!
The Mysterious Thoughts of Dogs
Perhaps I need a new picture of myself as something other than a stupefied reptile.
My cue comes from whatever appears through the window blinds each morning. I shiver as if waking to a primeval dawn, a sluggish reptile that feels fear first before life. I am a poor reptile trapped between a star that comes and goes creating our days; we exist in that uncomfortable transition. Halfway alive; halfway dead, three dimensions bloom around me: clouds of color and scent, action whipping by.
Strong sunlight moves me up the evolutionary staircase, leaving slushy reptilian hydraulics behind, the thought that moves a limb taking forever to reach the tip of a distant nerve. Blood flows into four feet that break out in a sudden dance; a tongue finds food, emotion sloshes unevenly between stupor and aggression.
I drew an image of an isolated butte with a blue cloud directly above it, and gave it the name Red Temple. I’ve drawn it over and over throughout the years and it tells me that I need to picture myself as an ancient building, which despite time and disaster is a beloved ruin, like the Acropolis.
December comes in overhead, in narrow bands of blue between gray, as we walk the airstrip. My thought was that we would walk a short way then turn around, but I follow the dogs from the Caution Runway Drops Off 500 sign to the actual slope where dense shrub land resumes. The sign lies on the ground, shot full of holes. The view is wonderful on a clear day, with the distant mountain ranges pasted to the horizon. Can’t see them today.
We head back along the opposite side of the runway, which overlooks a winding canyon and steep buttes with long skirts. A silver sliver of what might be frozen water looks close enough to step on, but is miles away. The truck is parked a half mile off, posing under the remaining blue sky. A smear of pinkish gray cloud hovers over it exactly where an artist would place it.
Is there a friendly house left in the world? New sketches are taped to my walls; bright, interesting, and coming from inside a person plucked from home and culture, who has had to invent an individual culture. Uncivilized perhaps, but ecstatic, lively, rich, and mythic.
I have been a fish, navigating to a stream a world away, a flowing, changing slip of water that cannot be pictured or mapped, but which joins the ocean, mixes with it, but does not vanish. Maybe it’s not the water that the fish seeks, but its container: the rock and soil and life of all the creatures peculiar to that the specific land.
Dream
The details of last night’s dream escape me, but the point of the dream was that honesty is necessary for love. It may be honest to tell someone you hate them, but is that love? Or is the willingness to reveal that you feel hatred toward someone the very love that is necessary to replace hate with recognition of mutual humanity? Lies are never love.
It seems that I did not know my parents. What I know is how I reacted to what they presented to to the world and to me. Their characters, their actions and their life experiences were condensed to cartoons in my child mind. How else can it be? Children repeat what their parents tell them is important until it becomes trite. We were poor, my brothers beat me, my father drank too much, the world isn’t what I want it to be, and the myriad subtle cues over disappointment in being a parent.
I’m a typical American in that I grew up believing that life is open ended. One’s future is a graph of happiness and well-being that rises without end; the chief component and reward of such a life is money, but instinct asks, What kind of animal is man? Tragedy is the nature of existence, and by recognizing this truism I become more attuned to life, more sympathetic to others: it is the recognition of tragedy that makes me feel human. All species respond to their environment in complex ways, but what we know is the tragedy of experience lost; who we believe we are is destroyed every minute of every day. Other species live: we live knowing the price of knowing loss, which is the power behind our striving and discontent. Knowledge makes us securely human; to refuse knowledge is to choose victimhood.
How I used to ramble / Journal
November / A high school in Arizona
I carefully transcribe notes that chemistry and physics students have handed in today in response to a video on electromagnetism. The video weaves together the historical development of theory and technology and demonstrates the effects of electrical properties. While dense with information, the presentation is organized, well-paced and thoughtful. Student work is so uniformly mediocre that surprises come from occasional competent papers; some work has the power to shock and shame.
Four classes have watched the video and handed in their notes and I’ve collected some interesting spellings: eleclisitey, electricuated, elktrick feald, eletic, elecudid, are a few of the variations on electricity, as in, “When Ben Franklin tried to cook a turkey with eleclisitey he almost elecudid himself.”
The spellings of other terms prove equally mysterious: protelter, potianal, caepgy, obvisour, pontechel, actrick, and dervasl. Even these, and mistakes like finominan, phylosifors, and poor Farid Day and Benterm Franklean would be helped greatly by a vocabulary handout, but the teacher prepared none. Torturous thought is another matter. Paper after paper is excruciatingly foreign, as if I’m in a country where only an occasional person has learned to read and write.
“If two charges attract the it attracts but if one attracts and one sudtracts then it will attract then subtracts.”
“The sun near stops or ends in space when a object has postively changed when moist with charge.”
“When to much elet charge attack whe not engugh charge repel.”
“Radio wave ditrabute a electric rate.”
“The core of an apple and the moon had something in common.”
But this is suburban America, the majority of students are white, middle class, and doing no better than the scattering of minority students. The only satisfactory notes, written in a breezy style in a careful and readable script, was handed in by a Latino boy. A few others manage a good sentence or two, but leave me longing for something more. One set of notes is composed of a stanza of phrases that when read aloud becomes a weird cry from some poor ghost trapped on the other side of literacy.
it drease the sun
drease it the squar of the distance
lead the star
of electic
lightining bolt what they are
electric force
push the charge closer
positivitive work can also
potientel
franklin said positively charge
natively charge repel is other
positetive charge
one object is electric charge
of course it native charge is zero
which mean a test charge
of course inside there no
feels at all but there no
potental inside depend
posivetive raise the potential
great mind of the pass
law for the electric fire
attract his other
repel his other when a
battery is equal to the voltage
Great Minds of the Pass / Farid Day and Benterm Franklean
He couldn’t find his Mustang, but he knew
it was somewhere in that parking lot, and we stumbled
from row to row, two red-faced kids
who picked each other up in a honky-tonk crowd.
He couldn’t find his Mustang, but he found my hand
and pressed it to his thigh, saying,
“This here’s where my leg got tore on bob-wire;
this here’s where my brother cut me.”
Poetry Day / The Mustang
In nature we find that males mark territorial boundaries using a variety of methods.
Photo Day / Males Mark Territory
I grow old learning something new every day.
Solon 636 BC~ 558 BC, Greek Statesman
One can read the obvious in this statement, something like, we’re never too old to learn, but it suddenly occurred to me that the burden of age can be those things that you wished you had never learned, especially about how badly humans behave toward each other.
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Periodically I check in with what ancient writers had to say about conditions we find ourselves dealing with today. If only American politicians and corporate leaders could grasp these ideas:
Those who know how to win are much more numerous than those who know how to make proper use of their victories. Polybius (205 BC – 118 BC)
The humble suffer when the mighty disagree.
Aggression unchallenged is aggression unleashed. Phaedrus (15 BC – 50 AD) (Greed is a manifestation of aggression.)
A man’s character is his fate. Heraclitus (540 BC – 480 BC) (How did we forget that character is necessary to leadership?)
We excuse our sloth under the pretext of difficulty. Marcus Fabius Quintilian (35 – 90) Roman orator. (Nothing gets done in the USA because the smallest tasks have been made as difficult as possible to achieve, through layers upon layers of irrelevant policy, obstructive laws and the refusal on the part of leaders to be leaders; no one is held responsible for outcomes.)
What power has law where only money rules? Gaius Petronius Arbiter 27-66 A.D, Emperor Nero’s advisor (How ironic!)
There is nothing so easy but that it becomes difficult when you do it reluctantly. Publius Terentius Afer Where are those leaders who are committed to their jobs, and not merely to “cashing out” and abandoning the country?
Words to live by:
Community
A neighbor’s truck throttles past the house,
its muffler dropped at the bottom of some hill.
I laugh because it sounds like my truck.
Artsyberger: Images & Words Aspie Style 
