Friday, September 21, 2012

Loose ends, # 3

A Good Death

My fifth grade Sunday School teacher, Mr. Taylor, scolded us one Sunday morning for showing up without a writing instrument.

It was a small matter, I suppose, carrying a pen, but I remember his admonition; I am seldom without a pen.  Now, of course, I always carry a book too, just in case I have "down time." These days I am willing as well to speak in public on short notice or to write should the opportunity arise.

One such opportunity came this last winter just as the "Busan Journal" focus of my blog had, finally, run its course.

We received an email from my cousin Minda that one of my mother's twin sisters, Viola, had died after a period of failing health. Aunt Viola and Aunt Alberta, the surviving twin, were approaching 94; they had lived near each other, except for short periods, their entire lives.

Both of my aunts, like my mother, had lost their husbands decades ago. Both were feeble physically but sharp mentally. My mother, two years younger, has been losing ground to Alzheimer's for several years.

The only other bits of detail you might need for what follows is that my mother and her sisters had a brother, Dean, who died from an infection when he was fourteen.

Time, distance, circumstances, obligations being what they are, I did not go to my Aunt Viola's memorial service.

Instead, I wrote the following short piece, which my oldest brother read at the service as an expression of affection from our side of the family. I offer it here, now, because it is one of the more important -- and hardest -- things I have ever had opportunity to write.





In Memorium, with Gratitude

"We had anticipated that we would be hearing this news sooner rather than later.  Nevertheless, I found myself silenced by it.  For a person who works with words all the time,  I frequently find myself confronted by the need to be silent.  Let God work in that silence.  Let Aunt Viola continue to live in that space in my heart where she has been my whole life. I think I am ready, now, to offer some words.

"I have benefited many time, as we all have, by Aunt Viola’s good life.  Now, at this sad moment, I feel I am benefitting by her good death. I hope that will not be thought an insensitive thing to say. As always, she led by example, and it is a good example, to be honored, to be emulated even if it comes to that. Thank you, Aunt Viola.

"I have many memories of Aunt Viola, but the one that jumps to the foreground at this moment is from the early 1960’s.  My father was building a house for us on Faculty Road in Durham, NH, with Grampa Nordstrom’s considerable help.  During that construction filled summer, the two Aunts come to New Hampshire to help.  Maybe that was not the original plan, but true to their character once they arrived and saw that help was needed there was no question but that they had come to help.  They would help. Period.  Over what seemed to me (as a 12 year old) to be endless weeks, we had set up an assembly line in the living room to paint siding.  It is a big house, and there was a lot of siding.  How vividly I remember Aunt Viola painting strip after strip of siding set up on saw horses, starting early, staying late, working steadily and quickly, singing hymns, telling stories, arguing from time to time in that familiar way the sisters had, alternately encouraging and admonishing me to keep the pieces coming or to take them away, setting an example of hard work, cooperation, and good cheer for a boy who wanted more than anything to be done already. As a 63 year old man looking back 50 years, I must say, the memory and the lesson are vivid.  They have served me well. Thank you, Aunt Viola.

"My wife, Donna, remarked when we first shared your email, Minda, that Aunt Viola’s passing was the beginning of the passing of that generation.  A deeply sad beginning, however much expected. Aunt Albert has had health problems that have weakened her constitution.  We have been losing my mother slowly for some years now, a loss that creates a different kind of grieving.  I know what Donna meant; we always think of the three sisters together.  For all of their children, I imagine, it has been “Mom and her sisters.”  Now Aunt Viola is gone from our daily lives.



"What occurs to me now is that we have lost a lot of that generation already.  We lost Uncle Dean Nordstrom before we even had opportunity to know him.  We have lost all the husbands what seems like generations ago:  Uncle Anton first; Uncle Milford; my father.  All comparatively young men.  So it is not, for me at least, so much that Aunt Viola’s passing is the beginning of the loss of this generation; that began long ago.  For me, the remarkable thing is that God has granted us this long reprieve, this extra time.  We have had the sisters with us for far longer than we might have hoped.  What a blessing that has been.  For these extra years of Aunt Viola’s life, I am profoundly grateful. Well done, good and faithful Aunt.  You have blessed us in and through your life.  Now you have blessed us in leaving. Your note, Minda, that you heard a knock on your door that must have been Aunt Viola leaving, sounds exactly right.  She would have departed without fanfare, but letting you know “I’m going.”


 



Saturday, September 8, 2012

Loose Ends, # 2, Geezer Rock

Are We Rollin', Bob?

Saturday, last, Stefan, my youngest son, and I went to a rock concert. Bob Dylan. Dylan.  The Bobster. Creator of the anthems of my generation.  Icon. Voice of Old Man River himself, in person.

Dylan was playing Tags in Big Flats, an outdoor venue that would be considered small by rock concert standards, capacity being in the neighborhood of six thousand or so.  Reserved seats, for which the concert goer pays primo prices, were white plastic lawn chairs set up in front of the stage and set off with a yellow rope. We bought cheaper lawn tickets, rented two white plastic lawn chairs for $5, and set them just outside the restricted area.

I am not much traveled as concert goer, but I have now seen a number of Dylan concerts and have the T-shirts as evidence.  Both Stefan and I wore concert Ts, as required, for this cultural exposure. 

A concert like this can prove to be a bonding experience between a grizzled boomer and his offspring.

"Tell me what it was like back in the day, Pop."





My take on the performance itself is essentially the same as Pete Seeger's response to Dylan's performance at the Newport Folk Festival all those years ago when Dylan plugged in and, thereby, offended nearly all the "folk music" purists. Seeger is reported to have said that he wanted an ax to cut the cables to Dylan's amplifiers.  Years later he explained that it was too loud -- he could not actually hear the music.

Little has changed in that regard.  Dylan is still kicking out the slats, blasting the faint of heart into the next county, rockin' with the best and baddest of the rockers.  All the cliches apply. Too loud for nuanced analysis. 

I listened hard during each number to catch a line, lyric or melody that would tell me what song I was listening to; but it was generally hard going. I leaned over to shout a title at Stefan when I figured out what we were hearing.  That happened for maybe half the numbers, although I know every song on the playlist that we found on Google later.  Consequently, I shall not evaluate the finer points of the concert.  A very clear, detailed, and presumably accurate assessment of Dylan's new arrangements, shifts in lyrics, and the implications of these things for Dylan-watchers appeared in the New York Times shortly after Labor Day for those who want a real review. For most of us at Tags, nuance was beside the point.

The audience was clearly a veteran Dylan audience, closer in median age to Dylan, who has passed 70, than to my son, who is 26. Most of us sat down for the concert, comfortable in our plastic lawn chairs. No crowd surfing that I am aware of, although several beach balls surfaced early in the concert, but they sank fairly quickly.

Most of the dancing in the aisles seemed to be in the direction of the latrines, which were a cultural experience in themselves.  For the men, at least, the latrine consisted mainly of long aluminum troughs that reminded me of junior high summer camp. The aisle dancing, beer drinking, and the latrines were linked in a direct and urgent way.  I caught only one brief whiff of grass during a concert that lasted the better part of two hours, not the now legendary saturation fogging that were rumored to produce contact highs. And I spotted only one forty-ish dude with the intense glazed deadpan look indicating he was experimenting with serious brain chemistry.

To be fair, a few other observations of the crowd are in order before I quit. There were many vintage concert T-shirt, most of which were tented out by paunches and broad hips. As one might expect, there was a high per capita incidence of bad grey pony tails, curiously braided beards, and geezer-hip clothing choices. On the whole we were generally a tame bunch; most of us looked just like middle class white people flirting with retirement.

Due to the 10 p.m. "noise curfew" in Big Flats, the concert ended on time. We called Bob and his band back for a new treatment of "Blowing in the Wind," and then we all responsibly left to find our cars. Most of us are cautious of the dangers of night driving these days. I suspect we are also more mindful of bed time than we were a half century ago when Dylan first plugged in and jolted the music scene.

Still, it was a fun night rocking in the free world with my boy -- tripping, musically speaking, in our plastic lawn chairs.  As another geezer band wrote in an earlier age, "I know it's only rock'n'roll, but I like it!"

Saturday, September 1, 2012

Loose Ends, Number One

In late January I posted the last of my Busan travel blogs.

At the time, I had a new awareness that travel writing can only be convincing if one is actually traveling.  Once the traveling ends, the identity of the blog begins to fade; it loses urgency for both the writer and the reader.

Consequently -- the hiatus.

In 1998 -- at the end of the last communication-technology Ice Age -- I began writing a column for a local newspaper.  My column was one of four columns written by Houghton people to be published weekly, in rotation; each of us planned to write one column every four weeks.  We had contracted together with the newspaper and were to be paid, at least initially, $15 per column -- not quite enough even in 1998 to allow me to quit my day job, but enough to push our work into the professional category.

A newspaper column is a bit like a blog, or can be.

The four of us all did something a bit different, as one might expect. My column was called "Something to Chew on" -- what I thought at the time was a clever, though indirect, nod both to my tendency to choose eclectic subjects and to our location in dairy country.  I had charmed myself by imagining that I chose to observe the world around me in a kind of wide-eyed bovine wonder.

Don't think about that too long, please. My point here is actually with the end of that column rather than with its inception and intentions.

I submitted my last column in 2003.  By then I was the last columnist standing from the original four.  Two of the writers had, in a manner of speaking, written themselves out.  The third, Jack Leax, a well published local poet and writer, had already gotten a book out of his columns, Out Walking, and did not want the column deadline any more.

I will add that conditions at our newspaper had changed as well.  A new editor had replace the editor we had been working with and the money, for no apparent reason, had stopped coming.



I had hoped to continue writing my column.  But I discovered I could not. Something significant had changed.

[Views of St.Paul's from the far end of the Millennium Bridge, London, October 2010.]




My last column ran a month before the US military began its "Shock and Awe" operation in the Middle East. In that column I had suggested that if there were an alternative to war the Administration was obviously preparing us for -- if an alternative existed, we ought to try it.

I would like to think that had I continued to write my column, I would have tried to express the anguish I was feeling over the Administration's decision to fight. In any case, I was literally unable to continue writing the short pastoral essays that had been my column for five years.

Maybe not continuing was a bit of cowardice on my part. Maybe it was simply writer's block occasioned by my inability to detach myself from the horror of war, albeit from my safe side of the globe.  At any rate, although I wrote or started many drafts for columns, I was not able to submit any of them. They refused to come together.  I was not able to see my way forward from that point with that column.

Something of the same sort has happened with my travel blog.  Eight months ago I realized I could no longer find my way forward with my Busan Journal, given its focused identity and assumptions.

What I have determined is that I will launch a new blog in the old space, featuring the same old writer but with a new identity that will gradually make itself apparent.  While that is playing out, I thank you for reading past blog posts.  And I hope you will want to read the new ones.