Barbara Stoner's Blog, page 7

The Fam

How in the world did one blond haired, blue eyed, English/Norwegian family of two parents and six children become a “We Are the World” poster?

It wasn’t the eldest, Barbara, who although serial monogamous with several variants in later life, serially married and procreated with two straight white males of European heritage.

My sister Joan, who liked things that were imported, married first a German and then our favorite brother-in-law, a Turk. We’re branching out now. One daughter’s husband is a Finn.

My eldest brother serially married two African-American women, and his daughter's husband is Mexican, with whom she has had three lovely daughters.

My second eldest brother, who left us recently and all too soon, produced a brood of four, one of whom married an Australian and one of whom is in a same-sex relationship.

The third brother hasn’t branched out as much, but there’s time left for his unmarried children. He has spawned one lawyer and one doctor, though, which has to count for something.

My youngest brother married into the Chippewa, and his son married a lovely Korean woman.

I realized this for the first time – how many cultures we have welcomed into our fold and with whom we have shared our own – while sitting at dinner last Friday night, a dinner hosted by my late brother Paul’s son, bringing us all together in his honor. And looking around at them all, I fell in love again.

My sister Joan, who distributed cookies and fruit in colorful Target bags to every one of us staying in the Best Western last weekend. The next day, in the hotel lobby, as we gathered to travel to the Celebration of Life, she was there handing out crisp, new hankies ready to catch and wipe the tears she knew would come.

My brother Randy, who the next day at the Celebration of Life, delivered an eulogy describing Paul discovering his place as a point guard on a basketball court, and carrying the metaphor through to describe his place in life. I didn’t even know what a point guard was. He’s the one who throws the ball, not to where the scorer is, but to where he will be able to make the basket. Paul was a researcher in developmental disabilities, and Randy described his technique, both in his work and with his family, as a point guard – showing the way to what they could achieve and guarding them as they tried.

My brother Dennis, the calm one, the (solar) engineer, the one who can usually find the most practical solution to any problem, but who also tends to just go ahead and do it. He never tries to organize everybody else into doing it. That would have been Paul. “Hey, everybody. Let’s all unload this sand and make a beach for the Pond.” Dennis would just grab a shovel and start digging. He married his high school sweetheart, a plant pathologist, and they suit each other well.

My youngest brother Brian drove down from the north woods of Minnesota to pick me up. He is, as far as I’m concerned, one of the best blues guitar players I have ever heard, but few others will ever know that because he fell in love with the lakes and the trees and married, for a second time, into the Chippewa. I spent some little time as a young girl fantasizing about running away to live with the “Indians,” as we called Native Americans in the 50’s. Brian pretty much did it. His wife, Lori, is one of my favorite sisters. We bonded over P.G. Wodehouse. And you just can’t get Brian to come down out of the woods for very long. He’s found the place where he belongs.

There were 40 or 50 of us around that table on Friday night. Cousins who had flown in from the west coast and driven through a snow storm from St. Louis joined us as the evening flew by. One of the participants, Dietlinda, had flown in from Germany. She was a foreign exchange student who lived with us for a year back in 1961 or so. She has become a sister. Looking around, seeing everyone in animated conversation, I thought to myself, there isn’t one person at this table with whom I could not have an interesting conversation for an hour or so.

With Paul gone, I don’t know where we will gather in the future. That could be in the hands of Paul's wife, the great Barbara Van Gelder, the mistress of Pond Hill Farm. It may also be up to the cousins. Christopher, Caroline, Adria, Ayshe, Alison, Megan, Dylan, Laurel, Julia, Taylor, Hallie and Derek. Their partners and their children and their children’s children. May their blithe spirits continue to bless the world.

Family. The Fam, as our new Doctor Who calls her new companions. I have joined several families of choice over the years, but have come to realize that I am peculiarly fortunate to have a birth family which I have finally matured enough to value for what it is and all it has given me. I love my families of choice still. But last weekend, not for the first time, I fell in love again with my own little haploid group and the globalization they have embraced.

We are many.

We are one.

Paul

I pushed my little brother Paul down the stairs. He was about 10 and I must have been 16 or so. I know why I did it and knew it at the time. I don’t remember what the silly argument was about. I do remember that of a sudden he reminded me of myself – he looked like me, he sounded like me, he was the mirror image of me. And I was disgusted with me, so I pushed him down the stairs.

He wasn’t hurt, that I recall. Nothing broken. Can’t say we were the closest of sibs from then on. But I was growing up and out. He was going to be sticking around for a while.

The only other vivid memory I have of this little brother is from much earlier. He was maybe 4 or so, and I was 10. We were at a beach somewhere, and Dad announced that we were leaving. Dennis might have been with us then – a babe in arms. Brian perhaps one last sparkle in Dad’s eye, but not yet in sight. Joanie and Randy were already on their way back to the car, but little Paulie begged to go back in the water one last time.

I was never much of a big sister to any of them. It was Joan who would take over that role as I locked myself in a bathroom with a book and made myself hard to find for chores. But that day I decided to be a good big sister. I swooped Paul up in my arms and carried him back to the water for one last dip. But no sooner had I done so, than my Dad, always trying to corral his brood, came back, took Paul from me, and yanked my arm to pull me along, scolding as we went.

So much for being the responsible big sister. Sadly, I was easily dissuaded.

Is that why I don’t remember much of Paul’s childhood? Of course, I was a great deal older, and had much more important concerns. He grew, with his older brother Randy, into sports, in which I had no interest at all.

Then suddenly he was graduating from college and marrying an adorable woman named Barbara. She would later introduce me as “the original,” after which she could do no wrong in my eyes. Somehow he continued through more education, and wound up doing research and teaching early childhood behavior at Southern Illinois University. There was the year during my second marriage that four of us – Joan, Randy’s and Paul’s wives, and I were pregnant at the same time. Two born in August, two in January. The bonds between them have been slippery at times, but always there.

He and his Barbara bought a property outside of Carbondale, Illinois, and made it a homestead. Paul designed the house on a hill overlooking the pond, Barbara made flower gardens, and together they raised three girls and one red-headed boy, Dylan Paul. Paul was the one of us who tried and almost made it to Woodstock.

When our parents grew too old to care for themselves, Paul took them in, and they cared for them as long as it was possible to do so before dementia took firm hold. Then they transferred them to a facility nearby and became hands-on custodial parents. Barbara held Mom’s hand as she died. I think Paul was with my dad. Paul’s house was the last place I saw either of them.

Living away in Seattle, I didn’t get to visit often, but in the last few years I did make it down there a few times when the family gathered. And when the family gathered, so did Paul’s many friends and neighbors. There was always music, and a bonfire and marvelous food and a houseful of flowers. Every year for a while, all four brothers, Randy, Paul, Dennis and Brian, would gather there for a weekend of golf.

The last time I came, I rode down with my brother Randy, from Chicago, and as we came through the front door, Paul greeted me with a big smile. “Barb! Your book is great! It should be a movie!” It would have been the highlight of the visit if it weren’t for the Great Eclipse of 2017. Pond Hill Farm was directly under the path of totality. The house was full, tents were scattered across the huge lawn between the house and the pond. Paul organized a contest to see who could drive a golf ball across the pond to a little green on the far side. The weather was perfect, aside from the heat. Paul handed out glasses. Barbara had bought a bunch of eclipse cookies and filled the house with zinnias. A friend from Chicago had brought a telescope. Other friends found ways to see the eclipse in the shadows of the trees. I edited my last novel, A Dream of Houses, in the air conditioning until time for the sun to disappear. I remember nighthawks coming out over the pond as the sky darkened. I remember seeing the stars. And the black disc in the sky. And my brother Paul smiled at us all, seeing that it was good.

Now we hear that he is suffering, and in great danger from the monstrous claws of Cancer.

My sister Joan writes it best:

With Paul and Barbara VanGelder Bates and Randy Bates in Giant City State Park on 8 Nov '18, thoughts please for Paul Bates as he struggles for health in Carbondale, fourth of six, father of four, grandparent to seven, Paul embodies the open warmth and character of the can do and can help spirit that we admire and strive to emulate.

Anyone want key to the Kubota, Need help across town, come over for live music...brother Brian in town, chop wood for Winter...brother Dennis in town, a read by author-sister Barbara Stoner, the eclipse?! All gather around potlucks and bonfires at their Pond Hill Farm.

And I did not even write the word Sports, OMG, walking the course recently and talking chosen Sports. These two brothers intellect for the plays, the coaching, the stats, unending. And Paul, your wry humor, not a minute angry, you talk and keep talking at the table through any situation...the definition of a peacemaker. Love for my Paul

It isn't right, in my eyes. I'm the oldest. I had a little spot of a little c a few years ago, but it appears to be gone. I have always hoped that we would go in order. Selfish, in a way, since I would never have to see any of them go before me and, since I have been the most improvident, it would only be right to have me safely off anybody's hands before the dementia set in. Alas. The latest word is not good. But whatever the next few weeks bring, we are with him one way or another. As my sister says, Love for my Paul.

We are six

We are one

THM: Chris

THM stands for the title of a post I hope to do soon on my old friend, Bill Heintzelman, who, when I knew him, was a Blue Moon bartender. An honored post in my culture. Today is voting day, and I don't have the time to write it. But in going through my tubs and bins, I came across a sheaf of papers he gave me once: short monographs of Blue Moon people he hoped someday to make into a book or a play, perhaps? He didn't live long enough to finish it. But I can't let them go unpublished. Here is one of them:

"I used to play pro ball. Tacoma Indians. Once pounded a homer outta Cheney Stadium. Still go back and look at the place where it cleared the center field wall. My eyes fill with tears. A catcher, I was. Most catchers can't hit."

Now he plays softball in the derelict league. Still a catcher. Still can't hit, no evidence of any home run ever. As Casey said, "You could look it up."

He wears an Oregon Ducks baseball hat with a peak at the crown and a perfect curve in the bill. He talks to all the women. If they won't stand still, he doesn't mind following. People introduce him as a former baseball player. No catcher since Smokey Burgess had that physique. Everybody's buddy, Chris.

People don't mind the baseball story. When he tells it, guys who have played with him look at the floor and wait for, "most catchers can't hit."

It's not regrettable, he wants to meet you, all of you ladies. Just sit next to him. "Want to go out to my car and smoke some dope?" He's gone a discreet twenty minutes and comes back smiling conquest. But it's just another whack over the center field wall at Cheney. No harm done. So he doesn't always tell the truth.

"Nice hair cut, nice car; nice shirt; I like your hat." What a pal. It's hard to return the compliment, but you want to say something. Hi, Chris, wonder what you do for a living.

Sticks and Stones

Sticks and stones may break my bones

But words will never hurt me.

I can almost hear my mother comforting me with those words when I cried because somebody called me a name. I had no way of comparing the two experiences - sticks and stones vs. words - until much later, but I'm here to tell you that there has never been an aphorism more false.

This was brought home to me the morning I lay on my couch and listened to Dr. Blasey-Ford talk about Brett Kavanaugh and Mark Judge. Yes, they hurt her, but not badly. She was frightened of them, but she got away. It was likely the first and I hope the last time she ever experienced this kind of sexual assault, and if so, she would have remembered it no matter how much time passed. But the thing that sealed the deal, that locked the memory tightly in the memory vault, that, in her own words seared itself into her hippocampus, was the laughter. Brett and Mark were having a fine old time. She was nothing. And they laughed about it.

Here is a comprehensive list (I think) of the times and manner in which I have been physically abused:

Arms held painfully behind my back by a man who thought he could pimp me out. I had no intention of ever obeying, and kept telling him not to be so silly, he was behaving like somebody in a bad B movie. I even felt embarrassed for him. Well, it was a bad B-movie to me. Never quite real to me at the time. But I do remember that it happened.
Jumped into a fray between a girlfriend of mine and her boyfriend, and was knocked to the pavement. I got up and didn't try that again, until ...
Jumped on a guy's back when he threatened to kill his girlfriend in a bar, and had my legs knocked painfully against the pool table while the guy kept yelling for me to get off so he could kill me. I think my boyfriend and the bartender came to the rescue, but I really can't remember.
The worst one: a jealous boyfriend pulled his motorcycle over into a roadside stop one night after a party. We were both drunk so I was more honest than usual and he got angry. He accused me of not loving him and not wanting him to follow me when I moved to Seattle. He was right on both counts. His response was to beat my head on the ground for so long and so hard that I thought he would kill me. I have a memory of him threatening me with a knife one time later, but I was able to grab it and throw it out the window. I could and probably should have reported these, but I was leaving town and didn't want to get hung up in court. I just wanted out of there.
Jumped on a very big guy with a very long reach who was going after my boyfriend, who was shorter with not so long a reach, and was punched in the mouth and knocked to the sidewalk. I still don't remember going in a second time, but everybody said that I did. The next thing I knew I was in the girls bathroom with some friends, wiping blood off the cut on my lip that came from the ring on his finger. The next day, somebody asked about me if I had herpes. I told him not to worry about it because it would never be anything he would have to worry about.
Coke addict boyfriend hit me in the face in Mexico when I would not give him drug money. I gave in, not trusting Mexican police to be protective of me.
Same boyfriend spit Listerine in my eyes, when I would not give him drug money. Now I was home, and did not give in. However, for many reasons, I never reported him.

You will notice, none of these qualify as sexual assaults. Still, if you think I lose sleep over these memories just because I remember them, that they haunt me in any way, you would be wrong.

There is only one man whose treatment of me still comes back like a bad dream, and he never laid a finger on me. Instead, he belittled me in subtle ways, gas lighted me, let me know, when I was down, that it was all my own fault and that he wasn't on my side. His favorite movie, he told me, was A Boy and His Dog. I hadn't seen it. I wish I had. He isn't a bad man. He is a cruel man.

A blow to the head or a spit in the face in anger is almost, if not quite, forgivable. Those men were weak and afraid and had violence in them. But they weren't cruel.

It's cruelty that hurt the most. Just as it is the cruel laughter that Dr. Blasey-Ford still hears.

Donald Trump is a cruel man. Many of his followers reflect that cruelty. Brett Kavanaugh, in his yearbook, betrays the stain of cruelty in his remark about Renate. His dissension in re the immigrant girl who needed an abortion betrays that stain as well. The Senators that waved away, even smiled down at women confronting them with their own pain, are cruel men. The Republican Party, as Paul Krugman points out, seems to have embraced cruelty as a kind of discipline. They are people who do not and can not look angry women in the face when these women are talking to them. And as painful as those women's memories were and as hard as it was to tell of them, they now have the added pain of the cruel men, and women, who did not want to listen.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a bit on this subject which is one that mystifies me still. I am still friends with the coke addict. I think he's clean, but it doesn't matter. I'll likely never see him again, since I've moved too far from his stomping grounds. None of the others are anywhere near my life - I don't remember their names and wouldn't know them if I bumped into them somewhere. Their misdeeds are nothing more than fodder for my fictions mill should I need them. But I wonder about those incidents sometimes. About why I'm not angry. Why I'm not hurt. And I think maybe it's because they are just sticks and stones. They hurt for a moment. They didn't mess with my head.

The cruel man moved far, far away. The last I heard, he was starting a new relationship. I wish I had her email. I'd tell her to watch A Boy and His Dog.

But Mom, I have to tell you. Whenever I have been physically hurt, when my arms have been twisted behind my back, when my head has been pounded into the ground, or when I was washing Listerine out of my eyes, that pain disappeared. The words live on. Sometimes they still hurt.

Flight into Fantasy

I read lots of good books. Lots of non-fiction. Today, I’m reading Toynbee’s A Study of History. It has characters who figured long ago in far away places with strange sounding names. Judas Maccabaeus. Bar Kokaba. Mithradates, King of Pontus. Spartacus. There is a lot in history that parallels what we are currently experiencing that I find interesting.

My fiction choices range from LitFic (Toni Morrison, Umberto Eco, Virginia Woolf, etc.), through MythFic (Tolkien, Rowling, Kay), to SciFi/Fan (Outlander, The Expanse, Vampires, Werewolves, and Anything by Bernard Cornwell).

What I don’t read – never did, really – are out and out Romance. Bodice Rippers. Manly Men and Buxom Beauties. Never having been buxom, I didn't relate.

And then I decided, on a whim, to read the first of Jesse Gage’s (USA TODAY) best seller series, Highland Wishes, titled appropriately enough Wishing for a Highlander. Even the title made me feel a little curdled. If I was reading it on a beach, I’d probably hide it in a copy of The New Yorker. I’m just that kind of arrogant. Not that I’m proud of it or anything. Serves me right, then, to bury my arrogance in a Bodice Ripper.

I met Jessi Gage in my Seattle Writer’s group, Writers’ Cramp, and critiqued the book that I think will turn out to be Volume 2 of Highland Wishes, which I will read before the year is out. Jessi is charming, funny, and as buxom as her heroine, who is also charming and funny and whose bodice does get ripped, but not by the hero. The hero runs the bodice-ripper through in a most satisfying way, and the book is off to the races.

I enjoyed the bloody hell out of it. Did it smack a little too much of Gabaldon? Yes. There’s time travel. Were there cliched plot twists? Of course. This is a genre book, and genre books need to give the reader what they have come to expect. What is delightful about Wishing for a Highlander is how much over the top Gage goes – things you wished that Gabaldon had put in, Jessi puts in and it’s fun (what did the Tinkers do with the car, Jessi?). There is a mystery to be solved by series’ end, I hope. And in the meantime, you just read yourself into a mythical medieval Scotland that never was but should have been.

And all the while you are in this never-never land, you have not given whatsisname a single, solitary thought, and when you drift off to sleep, you drift off with a dream already tucked inside. Ya know, The New Yorker has never, ever done that for me.

Free Range

What in the hell is a “free range” kid?

I have a feeling it is what was called in my day, “a kid.”

Here’s me at three: Pearl the telephone operator for our party line (we called her Central) calls my mother. “Your daughter is outside in the street, in a mud puddle. She’s naked.” This was in Badger, a little town of 300 Norwegian farmers, and my mother had no idea I had even gotten out. Well, she came right down the street and scooped me up, but I wasn’t locked in the apartment. Until I was in second grade, we lived above the grocery store my dad owned, and there’s a lot I remember about Badger, most of it happening outside where my mother didn’t know exactly where I was. Looking at horror comics in Johnny and Martha’s basement? Exploring weird places around the grain elevators across the street? One of my early childhood horror stories was hearing of children falling into them and drowning in the grain. Playing doctor with the other children under blanket tents in the minister’s back yard. Running behind the only bar in town to yell “Blow the whistle” at the caboose of the train that had just come through. Upside down in the date barrel in the store. Sneaking a peak at the buffalo hanging in the freezer locker that our butcher Frank brought back from his yearly hunting trip in the Dakotas.

Here’s me in my grade school years: Walking alone to school down a long winding street and crossing a busy one (don’t remember a crossing guard) because I had missed the bus. Running off to play in the “pasture,” a wooded pasture land where somebody (never knew who, never met them) let a couple of horses run. There was a creek and a bridge and we kids spent a lot of time trying to get on the horses. I never succeeded, but some did. I was jealous. We played cowboys and Indians. I always wanted to be an Indian. When I wasn’t off on my bicycle, I was somewhere up a tree. Usually with a book. Sometimes, when we were lucky, there was a new house going up, which meant whole new opportunities for play and make believe, whether it was a great muddy hole of an excavation or a hide and seek forest of framing. I had a very religious girlfriend who believed with all her heart that God meant her to fly, and we spent a lot of time looking for places for her to jump off so she could practice.

Nobody was abducted, killed, or suffered much more than a skinned knee or small bloody gashes acquired when squirming through the barbed wire fence into the “pasture.”

We were, in a way, the first “free range” kids. We didn’t have to work on farms or in factories. After school or in summer, if we could manage it, we escaped to the streets and back yards, wood lots and pastures. We came home when we were hungry. We were sent to bed at a reasonable hour, but even that was avoidable if you had a flashlight and a book to read under the covers and if you could get your little sister not to tell. Because we didn’t tell, either.

“What were you kids up to?” our mothers might ask. “Oh, nuthin’. Just playin’.” We didn’t tell our parents about the great new house excavation three blocks over or how Bobby fell off a horse into the creek out in the “pasture,” or how I tried to climb a tree that was too big for me and managed to get onto the lowest branch only to fall off when I couldn’t find a way to get to the next one. Probably about five or six feet. I don’t remember. I was just glad nobody was around to see it. Very shameful for a proud tree climber.

Maybe it was because by that time there were five going on six kids in my family. If there’s one thing to be said for big families, it’s that it is easy to get lost. So long as all of us were home for supper, ambulatory, and not bleeding on the plastic table cloth, it’s all good.

I still drive very carefully down residential streets, expecting any minute that a kid will run out after a ball. But they don’t. There aren’t any. Kids. I don’t know if they’re in the house with video games (full disclosure: I love video games) or if their parents have all arranged supervised play dates or what? I do know that if my neighbors here in Madison spot a kid sneaking through a back yard, they call the police.

Well, that’s what the kid gets, for not being able to sneak through a back yard without getting caught, I suppose. Then again, there aren’t any “free range” kids anymore. They’re either on play dates or up to no good. You should probably call the cops.

Life In My Jammies

Stole this from the internet the other day, remembering the days when I had to think about what to wear to school/work/bar/parties.

There is a special joy I get from wearing "yesterday pants." What are Yesterday Pants? Glad you asked. The pants you wore yesterday that nobody saw you in so you wear them again today because they were the ones you didn't have to go in the closet for.

Those days are over.

Keep in mind that I'm 75 and at one time would not have dreamed of leaving the house without eye makeup and curled hair, not to mention something attractive-ish to wear. I've metamorphed. A few years ago, I decided that all I really needed in my closet were a couple different colors of sweat pants, with tee-shirts and/or sweatshirts to match-ish. Oh, I kept a couple of fancy things for dress-up – the bar is no longer a daily, even weekly, routine, but sometimes there’s a birthday or a memorial. I cut the number of parties down to four per year. That decision made mornings quicker and easier. Goodbye “yesterday pants,” hello sweatpants of the week.

Not much later, I found it much easier to pull the sweatpants on over my jammie bottoms. I only changed out of the jammies altogether to do errands.

In the meantime, I had also discovered that eye makeup could no longer be part of my daily routine. Eye makeup requires a sure hand and no glasses. My hand was sure enough but without my glasses I couldn’t see my eyes and just try putting on eyeliner while wearing glasses. By this time I was nearing 70, and while ego was still squeaking to be heard, I made a rash decision. You’re an old lady now, just get used to it. Goodbye, eye liner. Goodbye, too, permed hair, hello sensible wash and run haircut. Who wants to face old age looking like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

It took a while for me to get over myself, but I can honestly say that I don’t think anybody even noticed. To my friends, I still looked like me. So then, I had to get over them recognizing this new, obviously much older (practically dead) me, as really me. To them, I hadn’t changed at all.

But I did it. By the time I left Seattle, I had long forgotten to even check the mirror before I left the house. I yam what I yam and that’s all what I yam. And life went on just as it ever had.

So, here I am in Madison, WI. Sweat pants are not suggested for summer days, even in an air-conditioned house. It’s 1:43 on a July Sunday afternoon, and I am still in my jammies. I’ll pull a pair of slacks over them to take a short walk after dark tonight with fireflies lighting my way. Nobody, least of all me, gives a shit.

Yesterday’s pants do perfectly well for today, tonight, and probably tomorrow. When you’re 75, you can pretty much do as you like. I like writing and reading and crossword puzzles and jigsaws and video games. None of those things requires a change of clothes. I love living life in my jammies.

Fishing Story

Looking for a July poem - who the hell writes poetry about July? "On hot, mosquito-ridden nights, I think of you." Not so promising. Then I found Billy Collins:

Fishing on the Susquehanna in July

I have never been fishing on the Susquehanna

or on any river for that matter

to be perfectly honest.

Not in July or any month

have I had the pleasure -- if it is a pleasure --

of fishing on the Susquehanna.

I am more likely to be found

in a quiet room like this one --

a painting of a woman on the wall,

a bowl of tangerines on the table --

trying to manufacture the sensation

of fishing on the Susquehanna.

There is little doubt

that others have been fishing

on the Susquehanna,

rowing upstream in a wooden boat,

sliding the oars under the water

then raising them to drip in the light.

But the nearest I have ever come to

fishing on the Susquehanna

was one afternoon in a museum in Philadelphia,

when I balanced a little egg of time

in front of a painting

in which that river curled around a bend

under a blue cloud-ruffled sky,

dense trees along the banks,

and a fellow with a red bandana

sitting in a small, green

flat-bottom boat

holding the thin whip of a pole.

That is something I am unlikely

ever to do, I remember

saying to myself and the person next to me.

Then I blinked and moved on

to other American scenes

of haystacks, water whitening over rocks,

even one of a brown hare

who seemed so wired with alertness

I imagined him springing right out of the frame.

Tags: Poetry

A Real Good Time

Three old friends met on a cool and cloudy Wisconsin Friday night to hear once again the band that had drawn them, and others, together long years before.

Brion is famous at the Blue Moon Tavern in Seattle for inaugurating Sunday Night Dead Night (what we Deadheads sometimes called “church”), although he insists it was Sheelah, who insists it was Brion, and so forth and so on. He’s a big guy with a big grin who loves baseball. He moved back to his hometown of Milwaukee several years ago to take care of his mother (he’s that kind of guy), and when she was gone, he stayed on, working with kids and bartending in a music club on the weekends. I remember walking out of a Dead show in Sacramento with him and some other folks. Jerry had just gotten a new toy that allowed his guitar to mimic other instruments and during one of the warm-ups, could be heard playing “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” using the organ option. “Jerry’s going baroque,” Brion said to me. “Oh, I don’t know,” I replied, with an attempt at après show humor. “Sounds to me like he’s doing all right.”

Brender, when I first met him, was proprietor of a production company named Crabby Goat, which produced and promoted, among other things, Robert Hunter (guitarist and lyricist for The Grateful Dead) and The Gyuto Monks, Tibetan throat singers. I was privileged to be asked to assist in minor ways in a few of these productions. We became good friends through our mutual affection for the Dead and for his significant other, Caroline, whose death from cancer served only to bring those of us who knew and loved her closer together.

Barbara is older than both of them by at least 10 years. She lived in Seattle for 32 years, and still misses it, so spending quality time with the next generation of our favorite band, not to mention the next few generations of Deadheads, with old friends was an unexpected blessing. Barbara’s knees do not work so well anymore, so dancing on that steep grade of a grassy hillside was out, toe and finger dancing while sitting on the ground, looking up at a waxing gibbous moon ducking in and out of cloud cover, was in. Nevertheless. China Doll.

The Next Gen seems to be doing it right, too. As we stood in the crowd waiting to be admitted, a woman near us went down – maybe heat exhaustion from the day, maybe lack of good hydration – and a circle immediately formed around her, giving her room to just sit and breathe. When official rescue arrived, the crowd made certain that her “family” was allowed room to go through with her. The assumption was that she was taken to a med tent, and then they were all likely released to go into the show. It was a good feeling with which to start the night.

And maybe we’ll do it again next year. Maybe we won’t. It doesn’t matter at this point. We had this night, not to relive an old experience, although there was some of that, but to get a glimpse of what the future might hold. Both for our music and for our people.

Thank you for a real good time.

The World Is Ending Again

The World as We Know It has ended several times over the eons and across the continents. I can count at least 3 for what we call Western Civ, beginning with William the Conqueror and going on through Christopher Columbus to the First World War. Each time, something (Saxon England, the Middle Ages, and what I might call the Golden Years of pre-Industrial Europe), began to run out of steam and concluded with a thunderclap. Sorry for the mixed metaphors. Lots more on the way.

I’m fairly certain it’s happening again, and has been happening for quite a while. When did it start? Well, I’m a dyed in the wool Democrat and I like to blame everything on Ronald Reagan, so I’m going to start there. I think it’s a fair place to start. It was Reagan, after all, who said that government was not the solution to our problems. Government itself was the problem. That pithy bumper sticker caught on like a house afire and the fire blazes to this day.

The problem is that, child of the sixties though I am, I recognized fairly early on that it was government itself that is the center around which community is built. Because in this country, we ourselves are the government. We found a town, we elect a mayor, we nudge a select few into the major offices, and then we organize around them, blaming them for everything that goes wrong but also believing that they could always go right if we worked them hard enough. Saying that government is the problem, period, suggests that we can do without it. That the rules aren’t for us. Rules, from far right to far left, are seen as nothing more than oppression. We don’t need no stinking rules.

Our Big Bang came on 9/11. I don’t know that we still recognize that awful day as the Battle of Hastings, Discovery of the Americas, or Trench Warfare of the 21st Century. But it was, because on top of mistrust of government and other institutions, we now added fear. And I think a good case can be made for the current victory of resentment and fear in the person of Donald Trump. And while we are busy trying to understand the reasons behind this travesty, his minions are deconstructing government, with the blessing of all those convinced that government can never be a solution. It is always the problem.

Why else are Trump supporters in and out of Congress not up in arms about poisonous runoff seeping once again into their water supplies. Why else are “Christian” communities afraid of children from Guatamala? Why are both adults and children in the backwaters and small towns of America overdosing on opioids? Why does there seem to be a consensus in both white and black America that there isn’t really any future coming for them?

I think it may be because there isn’t. Not the future anyone had envisioned, anyway. The future is inevitably on its way, and some of our leaders have made attempts to prepare this country for that future – and even they don’t have a clear idea of what that will be. Not only did no one expect the Spanish Inquisition – nobody expected the English to take up speaking French, nobody expected two entirely unknown continents, and nobody expected a little civilized fight among family members with horses and sabers to turn into fields and ditches of mud and barbed wire, tanks and machine guns, and bombs dropping out of the sky blowing up the “civilized” world.

So today we talk about the changes that that will come with technology, with climate change, with “jobless economies,” and corporate globalism, but I don’t think we have any idea of what’s really coming down the pike. Oh, don’t get me wrong. I don’t either. All I know is that we have no way of knowing.

But as things stand now, it doesn’t look good for us, as in U.S. We had a chance to build some new infrastructure with a few newfangled ideas. We had a chance to lead the world in alternate power technologies. We had a chance to become a nation that put its money and resources into the health and education of its people – I heard this morning that the Trump Administration is telling insurance companies they no longer have to cover pre-existing conditions. Bill Clinton tried a few things, but gave up too easily. George W. Bush got sidetracked with a war he didn’t need to start. Mitch McConnell (may he forever rot in whatever hell that might exist) decided not to let Barack Obama do anything that could redound to his credit, even if it served the country well. And Trump – well. Here we are.

We are becoming a shoddy nation of ungovernable, hateful people who are terrified of whatever is waiting on the road ahead. I’m convinced we can’t actually turn the ship of state around. But maybe, if we try real hard, we can take the wheel and go in another direction. Not back, but, if you watch The Expanse, into the Ring. Into the unknown. With determination and curiosity. Wish I could live long enough to see just a glimpse.

Tags: Politics