Once and Future

I used to spar with my brother-in-law. We couldn't have been much more different, except that we were both writers who swam in the water of words and ideas. I, a staunch if not militant atheist and iconoclast, who enjoyed a little bear-poking. He, a born and bred southern evangelical preacher, up and coming in the world of young clergy, with plenty of followers and fans. We traded books and kept it friendly though I harbored doubts about his sincerity and he, no doubt, about my sanity.

Along about 2012, we had a long-distance discussion by email. I was in Iowa with my mother, visiting relatives. We got a bit more biting than usual and I fired off a simple retort to something he said, something I don't remember now. All I said was "Kinder, Kirche, Kűche"

“NO!” he responded.  Hitler and Nazi Germany were off-limits, beyond the pale. I was being hyperbolic and irresponsible to even suggest such a thing in regard to his chosen religious beliefs and politics. 

It made me stop for a bit. Was I? The theocratic world created by Margaret Atwood in A Handmaid's Tale still haunted me nearly twenty years after I first read the book. I strongly felt that his brand of Christianity, along with the Republican party, was trending that direction. It didn't feel inconceivable to me.

We let it slide and never brought it up again, but every so often I found myself reflecting on that nascent fear which he had so cavalierly  brushed away. Toward the end of his life, in the last lengthy conversation we had, he expressed his own doubts about the direction things were going, both politically and religiously. 

He died suddenly and unexpectedly at the age of 49. I still miss talking with him. It was through those conversations that I got some insight into the mind of one who was committed, by default and by intellect, to ideas that were antithetical to my own. It was bracing and underlain with acceptance of each other as worthy humans.

I rather wish he were still around to see what's happening today. How would he respond to the pandemic? He had a good and loving heart, even though he was beset by fears and failings, as we all are. I know he would be horrified to see what has become of his Republican party as the DOJ officers are deployed to the streets of American cities, as leadership has failed to make any but the faintest attempts to rein in a plague that is killing thousands of citizens, and "freedom of religion" is employed to disparage and curtail civil rights.

I have been homebound now since March 16, as have so many other people. I read the news and try to maintain some sort of hope that life will become easier, something resembling normal once again. I have the sinking feeling that won't happen. I fear that we are closer than ever to the loss of democratic norms that we have taken for granted. The authoritarianism that seemed possible but unlikely in 2016 becomes more realistic every day. 

I wish my dear, departed brother-in-law had been right. 

Kinder. Kirche. Kűche

You Moved How Many Times?

  

This was my home for the first 4 weeks.

I will soon be seventy years old, which blows my mind. This morning, while reading a biography of Louisa May Alcott and seeing that she moved around a great deal as a child, I decided to count up my moves. 

One of the things I realized as I made the list is that my memory does a lot more spinning than it used to as it tries to retrieve information. I can picture the little buffering circle going round and round. So I'm not sure I got them all, nor can I remember very many street names. 

The final count, in my just-short-of-70-years, is fifty-one. Five. One. Including a few instances of couch-surfing and camping out, which I never think of as homelessness even though I technically didn't have an address and had to use my grandparents' home address as mine. I never lived with my grandparents.

Evergreen, Colorado 1956

My parents moved quite a bit, every year or two, even once during the school year in spite of the fact that my father was a teacher. After they started teaching for the military dependent schools overseas, things actually settled down. Then everyone around us moved and we were in the same place for several years at a time.

Unlike Louisa, I didn't grow up with a fanatic father whose beliefs precluded him from working for wages or owning property ----- or eating regularly. My father was a musician, though, and an aspiring, frustrated concert pianist who always felt like his big break was around the next corner. If only he hadn't somehow saddled himself with a wife and four kids! So there are similarities. 

My sister Barb at our small, plain house - 1958

By the time I graduated from high school in Rota, Spain, I had attended 8 schools. I married at 18 and lighted out on a remarkable journey of geographical cures for anything and everything that ailed me. By the time I was 30, my lifetime score was up to 32 moves and still going. Thirty was a turning point, though. That's the year I got sober for good.

I've been in the same house now for 15 years. Jill and I bought separate new houses when we met and it took us three years to merge. We've been stable ever since.

Sometimes, I get itchy feet. Sometimes, I lunge at the internet looking for a place to move, a desirable house in a new city or country. I may never get over that urge to pack up and search for adventure. But it's different now. I love my wife and the house we live in. She has a hometown not far away with family and familiar places. Occasionally, I even want to move there and try to adopt her home since I've never had a hometown of my own. 

In the meantime, here we are growing older together in a house I still think of as brand new, though it was 2002 when she got it.  That's long enough to launch an entire kid from scratch! (we didn't.)

 

My children have houses of their own, and marriages and careers to go with them. They've been more geographically stable than I, despite my best efforts to haul them from pillar to post in the early years. 

Seventy, huh? That means what, fifteen or twenty years more? Twenty-five if I stretch it? Considering my grasshopper-wastrel days of yore, I'm already living on borrowed time. And here, in this house that is definitely a home, I have found a measure of peace I never expected to have. 

Feet on the ground, breathing the air. Who knew it could be like this?

Buddy and Nana