Living

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My Past Flows into My Future

In the film The Graduate, as Benjamin battles for the soul of Elaine, rescuing her from a marriage that would imprison her, Mrs. Robinson snarls at Elaine, “It’s too late.”

“Not for me,” she says.

They run from the church, get on a bus, sit in the back – she wearing a wedding dress, he disheveled from his long drive and battle to save her – look backward from where they came, then set their gaze forward. They’ve made a clear choice: “Not that.” They look neither happy nor sad. They look bewildered, maybe even scared, the unspoken question, “Now what?” hanging in the air between them.

The Graduate came out in the fall of 1967 – the year I started college at San Francisco State. By the end of my freshman year, Johnson announced peace talks, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated, and in a philosophy class to which black radicals had been invited, I experienced for the first time the depth of the racial divide.

I had been catapulted out of a world that was trying desperately to remain static and into a world that was changing with volcanic intensity.

It was within that volcanic intensity that I met the man who would become my first husband. We were together for five years, married for two and a half.

Our breakup was not very elegant. I was the one who initiated it. Though I could not articulate it at the time, I left because I needed to answer the question, “Now what?” He was stuck with great determination in “Not that.” I don’t think either of us had the language to understand what “not that” was or meant.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been touring that past. First, I reconnected with people from that period who I thought I had lost in the breakup of the marriage. The following week, I waded knee deep into my family when I attended the memorial for my uncle, who died in June at the age of 100. One of the attendees was my younger brother, who, for reasons I suspect are not even clear to him, has shut me out of his life.

I have visited the past many times, trying to make sense of it. What was different about this particular journey was that I could see it through the prism of my present – and I am very present in my present right now. My heart is strong – it allows me to see things without guilt, shame, anger, or blame. All because I decided that the story I had been told was mine, wasn’t. Starting this blog was my way of discovering my story and owning it.

My brother, both of them actually, have written me out of their stories. I’m sorry for that. I don’t think I deserve it, but, I don’t get to write their stories, they write their own.

I think my former husband might have written me out of his. I’m sorry for that, too, because whatever pain we caused each other (plenty to go around when a marriage breaks apart), I’m clear that he is a part of my story. He is the person responsible for showing me the “Not that” door. I placed myself at San Francisco State for that opportunity, and he provided it.

It was my choice to go through the “What now?” door that doomed our relationship and began the long and sometime arduous journey to my present.

Reconnecting to the people I knew then, especially the women, helped me understand how deeply sexist the Not That was. We have all grown and blossomed into people our mothers either never dreamed of being, or only dreamed of being possible.

It took close to twenty years for me to learn that I could marry without sacrificing myself to Mrs. Robinson’s curse “It’s too late.” I fell in love with and married a man who sees who I am – whose story includes me. He cherishes my heart and I cherish his, which is, in part, why my heart is so strong.

I think that’s probably the answer I found for “What now?” Cherishing and being cherished.

The present, a college professor wrote on the board once, is how the past flows into the future.

Connections from my past are flowing into my future, and I’m grateful for that. They were a part of my story then, and I think they will be a part of my story now.

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A paint-myself-blue-and-dangle-the-head-of-my-enemy-on-the-neck-of-my-horse-Celtic warrior kind of day

There has been an Impeach Obama crew outside the local Post Office for some time now. I’ve heard about them, but never seen them myself – until yesterday. There was something about seeing the sign with Obama compared to Hitler that really rattled me.  It trivializes what Hitler did.

My paint-myself-blue-and-dangle-the-head-of-my-enemy-on-the-neck-of-my-horse-Celtic warrior kicked in.

I started by asking the group if they knew that winning an election was not an impeachable offense. When I pointed out that it was ridiculous to have Obama compared with Hitler since the color of his skin would have targeted him for shipment to a Concentration Camp, one of them accused me of being racist since Hitler also killed German people (for being Jewish, gypsy, homosexual, communist, or just because – but picky, picky, picky).

When I asked repeatedly what impeachable offense Obama committed, they said there were so many that I should just read their literature. I was joined by someone else who started questioning the group as well. They said we need to get rid of the traitors in Congress – traitors like Barney Frank.

Finally, exasperated because they wouldn’t answer my questions, I reached over to get a piece of their literature and all three of the Impeach Obama people freaked out. The woman practically threw herself over the literature, one of the men grabbed my hand, pressing it onto the pile of paper just as I was trying to pick it up so that I picked up several pieces. One tried to push me out of the way as another grabbed the paper from my hand. I held on and he ripped it out of my hand – that is I had about  three-quarters of the flyer, he had the other quarter.

It was at that point that they called the police to report that I was ripping up their literature.

In the meantime, the guy who had joined me in questioning the group called the police to report that I was being assaulted.

Three policemen showed up in separate cars. I overheard the one, after taking the story from the Impeach Obama people say, “You called because of that?”

I told the policeman who was questioning me that I had no intention of filing assault charges. He seemed relieved. He nevertheless asked if I was injured in anyway. I told him, no, other than my sciatica and we both agreed that while that was uncomfortable, it was not related to the call to impeach Obama.

A couple that had stayed to say they saw everything talked to the police. I asked them what they saw and they said I was uncivil because I was in their face – that I was aggressive in my questioning – that they saw me pick up several flyers and rip them up.

When I asked if they thought Obama was a natural born citizen, the man said he’s never seen Obama’s birth certificate. My better nature prevailed so I did not ask him for his IQ test. Instead, I pointed out that since Obama’s mother is a natural born citizen, that Obama was automatically a natural born citizen.

I finally asked one of the policemen if he would get a flyer from them so I could see why they wanted to impeach Obama. He got one and gave it to me – there was nothing on there about why Obama should be impeached .

I was rattled all day. My blood ran hot, you might say. And I’ve been trying to articulate why.

I’m writing this because I posted a synopsis of the incident on my Facebook page and I realized that it wasn’t clear that the police hadn’t come to arrest me, they had come to take my statement about being assaulted. I wanted to assure everyone that they don’t have to have bail-raising parties for me.

So, now that you can all rest assured that you don’t have to start a petition to release the Karen-Hogan one, I have some thoughts on why this group in front of the Post Office is so upsetting to me.

I wished I had asked the question: what happens after he gets impeached? My guess is they don’t know that he would have to face a trial, and then if found guilty would be removed from office. If not found guilty, he would stay in office.

If he were removed from office, Biden would become president.

I just have a sneaky hunch that they think impeaching Obama means removing him from office and then they can choose who get to choose the president.

Their ignorance really bothers me. And it’s ignorance wrapped in patriotism.

The other troubling part is they have no interest in answering questions. In fact, the couple thought that my asking questions was being uncivil, I was very aggressive. When I asked if the Obama with a Hitler moustache wasn’t offensive, they said it was freedom of speech.

The Republican leadership and Glenn Becks and Rush Limbaughs are empowering this attitude – an attitude of victimization and fear – victimized by and fearful of a world that is filled with diversity and ambiguity.

That’s what scares me: the empowerment of fear and victimization. If that prevails, we are really going to be in for it.

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For Him, There was Time Enough

My Uncle Ray died on June 22, 2010. He was one hundred years old.

He died on a Tuesday. The Sunday before, he drove himself to church and back. So his was not a lingering clinging-to-life ending. I do not believe he suffered pain or humiliation. To paraphrase Lucinda Matlock from Spoon River Anthology, at 100, he had lived enough. That’s all.

The country was not quite 134 years old the day he was born in January, 1910, barely six years after the Wright brothers lifted off the earth in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

Flight is how I think of my uncle. He built his own airplanes, and, I don’t know all the details, but he was a part of the space program in the Sixties — from Alan Shepard’s 15 minute space flight to the landing on the moon. I believe he helped design components for the vessels.

My family lives a long time. My great grandfather married for the third time at 90 and lived to be 105. I last saw him when he was 104 and he regaled me with tales of traveling by covered wagon and chasing a horse thief when he was Marshall in the Oklahoma territory. He lived long enough to see the moon landing, the one my uncle was a part of. My grandmother lived to 99 and last year, her youngest sibling died just shy of 101.

Uncle Ray was the oldest of my grandmother’s five children, and the last to die. So my generation, the children of my mother and her siblings are now officially grownups. The oldest of us is 79, the youngest 57. Probably time for us to become grownups, but, when you have a generation between you and the great whatever, even if it’s only one person, someone still thinks you’re the kid.

None of this means anything in particular. It’s just a perspective. You would think that the death of someone at 100 is expected, that you wouldn’t be surprised, that you could dismiss it with a “well it was a long and good life.”

But that isn’t it. It isn’t shocking or tragic, like when a twenty year old dies before his time.

The surprise is you’ve come to expect that the person will live forever. Their passing is huge. You get that they take with them stories that are set in a time and place that you know of only through history books. Their stories personalize history. My uncle’s lifetime spanned a century that saw our world shrink to a spinning globe as we looked down from outer space and a message sent from halfway round the world being delivered in seconds through the Internet.

He was sweet, my Uncle Ray, and funny. He used to say, “I come from a very high-strung family, some were strung higher from the tree than others.”

Our stories are important. I captured my grandmother’s and put it in a book called, Kid, I Can’t Remember Nothin‘. I thought her story would be different than it was. Everyone said family was important to her, and it was, but her one regret was that she didn’t get the chance to do something she wanted to do: be a telegrapher, sending messages to and receiving them from the far corners of the world.

My Uncle Ray retired to Sequim, Washington — to property that included a landing strip. The planes he built himself are still in the hangars on his property, so for me, his story is about taking flight. I’m sorry I didn’t get the chance to capture my Uncle Ray’s story. I wonder if taking flight would have been the story he told.

Whatever it would have been, I think he lived the story he wanted to live.

At 100, he lived enough. That’s all. And that is huge.

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A Father’s Day Presence

What I thought was a kind of springcleaning of my Writingshed has really been an excavation. As I went through boxes of what I thought were old photos, I found stuff as well. Stuff like:

The 1956 Scimitar, the annual for the American School in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. I was in first grade and had nightmares about my teacher, Miss Hadaka. She does look quite dour in her photo.

A lunch menu from the Wonosobo dated November 27th 1957. The Wonosobo was the Dutch freighter that was our home for 75 days as we made our way from Saudi Arabia to Long Beach, California.

A disembarkment paper permitting me to leave the ship to visit Bombay.

And, I found some letters my father had written me while he was in Dhahran alone, earning housing points so he could bring us over with him. He took the job with Aramco because it meant getting us to a more financially secure place.

The letters span the period of about a year, from October 1953 to July 1954. I was four years old. I’m sure there were more – either I haven’t found them yet or they just didn’t make it to the scrapbook.

In these letters he assures me that Santa Claus comes to Saudi Arabia (he arrives by helicopter because the sand is hard on his reindeer); explains that Arabs drink water from water bags made of goat skin, describes how they make them, confesses that he would likely never drink from a water bag made from goat skin, and explains that really, it’s ony the Bedouins who still use them – his crew has cooler cans with ice-chilled water; and talks about how happy the Arab children are, though they have no toys.

In nearly every letter he describes the kittens he’s come across and how they make him think of me, and that when we join him, I will get a kitten. We couldn’t get a dog, he said, because they don’t have anyone to give rabies shots. But we’d definitely get a kitten.

In one letter, he describes a camp in the middle of the desert. He was on an exploration – probably a trip into the desert to explore for oil. “On each of these exploration parties, an emir and a troop of soldiers accompany each party, the troops have their tents pitched a mile from camp, and over about three miles and a couple of sand dunes away, the emir and his four wives have some more tents pitched.”

He describes the desert foxes that come into his camp, the kangaroo rats, and the locust, “You see one flying around, or rather, a jillion of them and you’d think it was a flock of sparrows. The Arabs catch them and boil a big bucket full of them and let them dry in the sun and eat them, but they have no competition from me, cause Daddy was getting too good of food to try anything like that.”

On the same trip he describes the sight of his Arab crew kneeling and bowing in prayer along the ridge of a sand dune. “Sundown is prayer time for the Arabs and so they try to get on the highest point to try to be the last one to see the sun go down, they feel they are closer to Allah that way.”

In that same letter he says, “The thing I remember the most that I liked was at night; as I’ve told you, we had a full moon, and you’d walk out past the camp lights – it was cool at night – just right for shirt sleeves. You could sit out there and talk – everything seemed so peaceful you’d think you were on another world.”

Another letter speaks of his yearning for us, “Honey, I’ll sure be glad when you guys get over here, it’s sure lonesome without you. You’ll have a good time over here. First of all you’ll have a nice long airplane trip across the U.S. to New York then across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe and stop at the place Daddy sent you the little Dutch shoes from. Then you’ll fly over some real pretty mountains and cities to Rome, and from there across the Mediterranean Ocean and then over the desert to where I am.”

In what might be my favorite letter he says he got a high school graduation announcement from one of his nieces in Iowa. He see the photos of me and how much I’ve grown and changed since he last saw me and imagines the day that I will graduate form high school. He reminds me that there is a swimming pool where we can swim at night from April to November, it’s that warm in Arabia.
“Karen,” he wrote, “I was talking to a friend of mine here today who has been nationally known in America for his diving ability and he helps the children out, at the pool on swimming and diving. His star pupil is a little girl about nine years old. She’s cute as a bug’s ear and can she ever dive and swim. She’s a regular porpoise. He told me that when you get over here that he’ll help all of you out on your diving and swimming.”

I don’t remember whether this person taught me diving and swimming. But I do remember the diving board. I remember walking out to the edge of the board and looking into the water and being so terrified that I turned around and walked off the diving board to solid ground.

I know I did this several times, each time hoping to find the courage to jump. One day I asked my father to stand by the side of the pool as I climbed onto the board. I don’t really know what made me decide that that day was the day. I just remember that this time, I would not go back the way I came. I closed my eyes, jumped, hit the water, and felt the water rush up my nose. I suspect it was natural buoyancy that brought me back to the surface because I did surface, swam to the side, climbed out, and got in line to jump off the board again.

I don’t think I’ve ever yearned for a daddy who would take care of me, fix whatever was wrong and make the world right. My father wasn’t that kind of daddy. In fact, in many ways I tried to save him. Battered by his own father, his wounds ran deep, and for many years, I thought it was my job to heal them.

I didn’t need an omnipotent daddy – my road in life is one of independence and competence and adventure – exploring the unknown landscape, seeing the beauty in a desert drenched in full moon light.  I suspect that is in my DNA.

I know my mother read my father’s letters to me when they arrived, but I have no memory of that. She or I glued the envelopes with the letters tucked inside into the scrapbook that also has my drawings of angels, spelling exercises from my first grade class, and a letter to me from Santa Claus.

For some reason, I never went back and read them, until today. They are written on delicate tissue-like paper – the kind of paper you used back then to send a letter via airmail. They were mostly written at night, just before he went to bed. His handwriting is not always easy to read – I have to get the context to decipher some words. Each letter ends with “I love you and miss you.”

My father died sixteen years ago. He had Alzheimer’s so really, he’s been gone for longer than that. He’s been gone so long, that I don’t exactly miss him. I’ve grown used to him not being here.

It was obviously hard on him, being away from us. Missing two years of our childhood, my brothers’ and mine. But, he did some pretty great things in his absence. He explored worlds few Americans knew of or experienced fifty years ago. He paved the way for us to join him, described the route we would take to finally reach him. When we had the opportunity to travel, he put us on a Dutch freighter so we could spend 75 days seeing worlds that were exotic and remote back then.

He allowed us to taste what he had tasted.

And, because of his absence, I have a record of how he felt about us, his family. Wistful yearnings for us mixed with the stories of life in a landscape far removed from our daily landscape. Tender feelings. Feelings as delicate as the paper he wrote them on.

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The Grace of Everyday Living

Summer is in season. The summer solstice is two weeks away, but, summer is in season here where my writing shed lives.

When I lived in San Francisco, it would be a foggy day. There might have been other foggy days, but there was always the one that seemed to herald to me a change of season.

Here, it’s the bright morning sun with a cool breeze finding its way into my writing shed. I think the same birds visit at this time of year as other seasons. But their songs sound like summer to me.

Summer is in season.

I love the day that heralds the seasonal change – the passage of time.  It seems foolish to ever want time to stand still – or worse, to kill time – doing whatever it is  we do when we say, “I’m just killing time.”

I did a major housecleaning in my writing shed. Books had been strewn on the floor, magazines haphazardly placed in baskets, old photos stored in multiple places, waiting until I got around to organizing them.

It’s great to find old photos. Talk about visible signs of time passing. I found photos of my stepdaughters taken at the Renaissance Faire, at Fort Point, on Fathers’ Day – the French toast brunch they’d prepared spread before us.

I came upon one of my mother and I taken twenty years ago in front of the Haida totem pole that had been installed in Sausalito as part of a celebration of Haida culture and art. The Haida artists had carved it in its place.

I visited the totem pole from time to time — experiencing  it.

One early morning (I can’t say for certain, but I think it was in the fall), as I sat at Caffee Trieste, I saw the totem pole being carried away on a truck. I knew that the installation was temporary, but I hadn’t known when it would leave. Perhaps it had been there a year, through the four seasons.

I felt somehow privileged to see it pass by me, as if I was in the right place at the right time. I think it would have been much harder on me if I had just gone to see it one day and found it gone.

My father was still alive when the photo of my mother and I was taken, but Alzheimers had already stolen him from us. I had just recently divorced my husband. So it was just my mother and me.

Those were good times with my mother. She trusted me, which she didn’t always do. I used to think it was because I was untrustworthy, not worthy of her trust. But time taught me that that was just the flaw in her tapestry – not trusting love.

But this photo captured a moment of trust. Two women on their own, riding change.

Spring and fall seem like active times to me – times for planting and gathering. Summer and winter seem to me to be more about nourishing and trusting and waiting. Winter is about trusting that the sun will return. Summer about trusting that what you planted in the spring will grow – that you will be able to reap it in the fall for nourishment in the winter.

I’ve gathered a number of baskets over the years since that photo of my mother and I was taken. As I went through my writing shed, divesting myself of stuff I no longer need, organizing the stuff I do need, I emptied baskets. I have five empty baskets — baskets waiting to be filled.

I think that might be what summer is to me – baskets waiting to be filled.