Haunted by the past

                           

  Haints in the Side Yard

I just birthed another book. It's an odd feeling. Even though I've written all my life, ever since I learned how to form sentences in first grade, I never expected to have actual books out in the world. Now there are seven.

I wrote, as a child, because I could. I knew how to transfer words in my mind to paper. I could save them up ---- and I have. I could go back and read them later, and recreate the experience all over again. That seemed like magic. It still does.

Fifty-three years worth of journals repose in the blue bookcase in my upstairs room. Everything up there is dusty. I don't go upstairs often, though it's a cozy space. But my writing desk and now-stationary laptop are downstairs, and steps can seem daunting. Plus it's Buddy the Doggy's favorite place, his man cave. He can keep an eye on the neighborhood from up there.

The other day, I mentioned a long-ago incident from when my son was five years old. I became curious; memory is a tricky beast. One of the reasons I write things down is to keep myself from making things up. So I trotted upstairs and pulled that volume from the shelf, blew off the dust, pounded the couch pillow (cough, cough) and sat down to find the magic of the written word.

Life goes by day to day. In the morning, we never know what's going to happen. Something life-changing can occur at any moment. The thing is, often we don't even recognize it when it does. I was 29 years old in February of 1980. Andrew was still in his Superman phase. He spent two years in full regalia most of the time. I was feeling my oats as well --- living with my folks for free in the Azores, a fulltime Portugese grandmother to take care of Andrew by day and plenty of childcare at night as well. Single, ripe, and fancy free on an Air Force base is the stuff lurid lit is made of, and I was trying my best to live up to the genre.

What I remembered so vividly was the decision to send Andrew to live with his father in the States. In hindsight, 35 years later and 33 years sober, it was pivotal. It was the beginning of the end of my drinking. It was the realization that I was hurting my child and he needed a "normal" life. It was fear that I couldn't control myself and might actually harm him sometime. So I sent him away, rather than change myself. That, right there, that's addiction.

In my journal from February 1980, it rates a small paragraph, spliced in between accounts of cast parties, flirtations, speculation and drunkalogue. I have no way of knowing what would have happened if I had not sent him home. I'm dead sure it was the right thing to do, though once it happened, a few months later, I was bereft, and spent several pages lamenting the loss and wondering whether I would ever get him back. I did, but it took three years and getting sober before it happened.

I still keep a journal. It's sporadic. I'll write intensely when my mind is crammed and my life is feeling out of control. Then I'll go a month or two without writing at all. But I never quit. Every so often I go back and check myself like this, check in on my old self. There's a lot I don't remember. Things that seemed catastrophic at the time, have disappeared entirely from my memory. People, too. I'm surprised at how memory works, and doesn't work.

When I face a perplexing decision or emotionally-charged situation, I try to project ahead to the end of my life and look back on the present. It usually helps to change my perspective that way. Puts things in focus. In the meantime, while regular, sweet, boring life unfolds, I do what I can to stay awake to what's in front of me and, when inspired, write it down in my journal.

The new book is  called Haints in the Sideyard, a sequel to Way Out in Dog Heaven. Do you know what a haint is?

Swab Jockey

Hi Swab-Jockey:

That's how the letter between brothers begins. Lester, pictured above, was just out of boot camp in 1944, 18 years old and a recent high school grad. Eugene was a seasoned sailor, with three years under his belt, and welcomed his little squirt brother into the fold. The letter is salty and sprinkled with jargon and slang, a delicious glimpse of why the brother who "got wild" was later brought up to Captain's Mast. For me, 70 years later, it's a delight.

I've spent the past couple of days reading every single letter and postcard in bundles that were banded together with crumbling rubber bands. It's a one-sided picture, comprised almost entirely of Lester's letters home to Mom and Pop, back in Iowa. Scrubbed though they probably were, to save the sensibility of his mother and maiden aunt, hints of a wider experience come through. But what communicated to me was the first glimpse I've ever had of my father as an emerging young man, years before I was born.

Ida Keuhling and Ralph E. Bundy on their wedding day, 1918

What I knew of my dad was almost entirely on the surface. He wasn't given to talking about his feelings. First and foremost, he was a musician. Everything else was an add-on. That aspect of his life was well in place by the time he joined the war, and gave him considerable anxiety during the two years he served. Nearly every letter laments his lack of a piano, of practice time, his loss of technique and fear that he would never regain his concert career path. When I was growing up, he still sought pianos where ever we were, despite the fact that we had a sweet little baby grand at home. He would duck into churches, bars and restaurants, music stores or hotel lobbies. He could not pass up a chance to sit and play, even if it annoyed his wife and embarrassed his kids. 

I never thought of him as a small town guy with small town attitudes, but his letters reveal where he came from. We moved around a great deal when I was young, every year or two, and finally landed in Europe, teaching for the military dependent schools. My experience was one of openness, tolerance, and acceptance, though when I think of it, Dad was far more likely to criticize people than Mom ever was. It came as a shock to me to see the casual racism and jingoistic attitude expressed in my father's World War II letters. It reminds me not only that we are all subject to the cultural and normative prejudices of our times, but that we can be completely unaware of them, as well. And it begs the question I ask myself frequently ---- where are my own blind spots? What do I say or write that is unwittingly offensive?

I feel like I've been on a journey this week. So many questions arise, personal to me and my family, as well as larger speculation about the "Greatest Generation" that has come to be revered in what is undoubtedly an unrealistic haze of nostalgia and forgetfulness. They were boys, many of those who fought the war. Dad spent his two years of service not heroically saving the world, but throwing-up over the side of the "peanut shell" minesweeper he was assigned to. Join the Navy and see the world? All he wanted was to go back to his hometown, go to college, resume the life that had been interrupted to send him off to the bays and harbors of the Pacific. Repeatedly, he told his folks ---- who apparently were urging him to be happy that he could see so many foreign sights ---- that he shared too little space with too many men, the chow was not very good, fresh water was sometimes not available, he had to stand watches at all odd hours and rarely got anything but "spyglass liberty" to see these wonderful foreign sights.

Of course, he always was something of a hypochondriac and loved to let everyone know when he was unhappy.

These letters gave me a peek into his interior life, at least when he was so very young. He was a vividly descriptive writer. He had many dreams and plans for the future. He worried about his invalid mother. He sorely missed his piano and his teacher. He confessed that he didn't fit in because he didn't carouse like his shipmates, because he played classical music, because once he had run through all the westerns and mysteries aboard, he pleaded for someone back home to send him Shakespeare.

I've spent a lifetime thinking that my unexpected arrival in the world derailed my father's life. He had to get married. He had to support a family. If it weren't for me, and my untimely appearance, he could have been a concert pianist. Even after enough therapy and logic to realize that wasn't true, I don't think I got it until now. He had derailed long before I came along, for reasons unrelated to my mother, my siblings, or me.

Happy birthday, Lester William Bundy. 70 years ago you graduated from Teacher's College High School in Cedar Falls on your 18th birthday, and promptly followed so many other young people into the war effort. Tomorrow you would have been 88 years old.

Lester and my son, Andrew after a recital duet

Three Years and Counting

It takes awhile to get perspective on anything. It has now been three years since I officially retired from my teaching job. This morning, I found my journal from that time and read it, from September 2010 right through the breakdown that put me on medical leave in January 2011, then into retirement. Trouble was brewing throughout, and I was staring down that deep well of depression long before the day I walked out. I put up a valiant fight. I nearly lost myself in the effort.

What is most striking for me is the language I used to describe my situation at school. It was a battle and I was in the trenches. I was responsible for my company of 21 students and felt like I was failing them. There were too many casualities. I also used a prison metaphor. At that time, I intended to work until I turned 62, two more school years. I saw it as a sentence. I would be paroled on my 62nd birthday, and would return to civilian life, the world outside, the real world.

I had developed many coping mechanisms and strategies for getting from one day to the next. Over and over, the saving grace was time with the kids. I journaled my delight in them, described them as precious, worried over them and celebrated their successes. I sought refuge and support in my network of colleagues, foxhole friends who struggled along beside me.

Perhaps the strangest bit I came across was the account of a day when I couldn't stop crying, felt hopeless and defeated at school, and one of the people who held some power told me that "Depression is from Satan, and Satan has you right where he wants you." I was stunned speechless. I did feel like I was living in hell, but would never have characterized it like that. Way outside of my belief structure!

What made me think of this today was talking to a friend who escaped from the public school insanity into a more balanced teaching position. Spring break has just passed, and I remember spring breaks and Sundays back when I was working. They were not times of rest and relaxation. Every Sunday was a marathon of work: writing lesson plans, making materials, researching ideas, checking work, bookkeeping, and devising strategies and lessons for individual students who needed particular attention. It was also the day of dread, knowing that 5:15 would come on Monday morning and it would be on again, 10-12 hour workdays, faculty and committee meetings, conferences, phone calls, emails, assessments, and oh yes, maybe even some teaching.

I thought about this today while lying on the guest bed upstairs, petting the dog and doing nothing except enjoying the experience of a peaceful Sunday afternoon. I know what my friends are likely doing today, I know what tomorrow morning will be like, and the pace of the work week, and the feeling that whatever you do it is never enough, and there's no way to catch up. I'm immensely grateful to be out of it.

I wish teaching was truly about education. I wish it was more about discovery and delight, and less about measurement and regulation. I wish children were not being conditioned to think of learning in the negative context of testing, competition, inadequacy and, far too often, failure. It's not like that for everyone, but too often that is the reality of school for students, teachers and administrators alike. 

I still miss my kids. I still think of them. I no longer feel like I failed them, for the most part. I know I did what I could to bring human kindness and love into those groups of 6 and 7 and 8 year olds. They were still curious, excited, and motivated to explore their world. I like to think I helped guide them in those important ways, at least a little bit ---- and let them know that I believed in them. Those are qualities they can carry forward much better than scores on a test or grades on a report card. And that's why I wanted to be a teacher in the first place.

Value vs Values

A news story I found this morning about stolen art brings me back to a subject I find endlessly fascinating. How do we value the things around us?

A Gaugin painting, stolen and later sold at auction for a miniscule price, with other lost or abandoned items, hung in a man's home for over 40 years and nobody noticed. Had it been in a museum, it would have been seen and admired (or criticized) by thousands of people over that same time span. It would have been guarded and insured and protected from the elements. It would have been curated and maintained, listed in brochures, validated by experts to establish its provenance. As it was, it hung in the dining room because it was a picture of food.

So what is its true value? Is it the money it could fetch if sold at auction now? Is it the pleasure the man's family and friends derived from having a fine still life on the wall? The article says he also bought another painting of lesser value at the same auction. Its value must have been so much less that the artist didn't even deserve to be mentioned. So does the value lie in the artist's name and reputation? It might be that the "lesser value" painting was more appealing to its owner than the Gaugin. Who knows?

I find this topic interesting because I'm so surrounded by stuff in our house. Also because I've hung around with museum people and historians for so much of my life. I have a lot of family antiques which have been passed down for several generations. As to their monetary value, I have no clear idea. I know the family provenance for many pieces ----- Aunt Lou did the needlework on these chair covers, this doll came into Iowa territory in the covered wagon, this marble-topped table with the crack stood in Mimi and Grandaddy's parlor, the cobalt blue teapot with the abalone stork on the front and the broken spout were Mabel's. But if all this stuff was bundled up and shunted to the auction house, stripped of all ID except the physical descriptions, where would the value lie? For me, much of the value is in knowing the stories, identifying pieces in old photos, having heard the voices of great-grandparents who owned this collection of hatpins, those old postcards, this inscribed book. 

I could sell them at auction and carry home the money, but it wouldn't represent their value to me, nor would the new owners have the same appreciation as I have. They might love the lines of this chair, be ecstatic about completing a set of china,or feel they made out like a bandit on this old mahogany secretary ----- those are values, too. But not the same as knowing who sat in those chairs one hundred years ago. 

We all get caught up in worth and value. It underlies most decisions, whether we're aware of it or not. We exercise value and worth whether comparing prices on paper towels at the grocery store or deciding between the house with five acres in the country or the one in town with a two car garage and a hot tub. Our values show up in everything we do and so often it has little to do with the inherent value of something. Remember those commercials for whatever the product was ---- popcorn and ice cream $10, helium balloons $20, smiles of a birthday kid, Priceless? That's the deal.

There have long been admonitions and sayings about value and worth, reminders that "The best things in life aren't things" or "You can't take it with you." Perhaps it is human nature to want to hoard and store up things to pass along, or hedge against future uncertainty. One of my oldest friends, who along with her husband and sons had built their dream house, doing much of the work themselves, lost it all in a fire. Nobody was home. It was a complete loss, but they were all ok. Later she told me that the things she missed the most were the mementos, the baby pictures, saved letters, things that were personal and irreplaceable. Things related to people and their stories, to love.

I ask myself frequently what it is that I love, what matters the most? In the way of my ancestors, I won't have any money to leave my children, but there will be stuff ---- stories and things that won't last forever, may or may not have monetary value, and will present them with the necessity of making decisions about what to keep and what to get rid of. That will be my legacy of material wealth, but I don't believe it's all that I leave. The most valuable things I leave my kids have nothing to do with stuff, and everything to do with worth. And values. And love. 

GOD LOVES CLOWNS

"At length the long-expected knock was heard. She hurried to the door, and met her husband; a man whose face was careworn and depressed, though he was young. There was a remarkable expression in it now, a kind of serious delight of which he felt ashamed; and which he struggled to repress.

He sat down to the dinner that had been hoarding for him by the fire, and when she asked him faintly what news (which was not until after a long silence), he appeared embarrassed how to answer.

'Is it good,' she said, 'or bad?' to help him.
'Bad,' he answered.
'We are quite ruined?'
'No. There is hope yet, Caroline.'
'If he relents,' she said, amazed, 'there is! Nothing is past hope, if such a miracle has happened.'
'He is past relenting,' said her husband. 'He is dead."
                                                                                            Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol


This is the passage that popped into my mind when I read online that Fred Phelps, leader of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church, had died yesterday. When someone has been the source of so much poison and controversy, it is hard to know how to greet that news. Yet, the death itself was inevitable.

There is no one, good, bad, or indifferent, who gets out of this alive. In the end, regardless of how we have lived, who we have loved or hated, who has been lifted up or crushed by our actions and words, we're all reduced to worm food. And it's going to happen in a relatively predictable timespan. 

I think of myself as a depressive optimist. I know, I know. It doesn't make sense, but there you are. I love me some paradox. So I often dwell on this very topic, the fact that regardless of what any of us does or doesn't do, we all are dead in the end. When I think like this, sometimes it's horrifying, sometimes it grinds my wheels to a complete stop, but often, it's comforting. It gives me a silent pass to be just another human. So what if I haven't written the Great American Novel? Really, so what if I spend all day in my jammies, drinking coffee, reading and playing with dogs, and sitting on the swing with Jill? I can guarantee that tomorrow the sun will come up again (or at least that's how we'll perceive it) whether I set the world on fire, set my house on fire, or simply sit by the fire all day. When it's done it's done, and sooner or later nobody is even going to remember or care. 

I had great admiration for my father's musical talent and his unshakable commitment to continued learning and practice. Yet, since he succumbed to Alzheimer's Disease 11 years ago, what difference does it make? There are a few recoverable recordings on outdated media. My own recognition and appreciation for the classical and jazz repertoire continues, even though he is gone. People who knew him sometimes tell me how much they enjoyed his playing, or learned from his instruction. But fewer and fewer people actually experienced his talent in real life. In another 50 years, he and Mom will be names on a stone in an Albia, Iowa cemetery that nobody remembers. And I'll be right there on the same stone ---- we put the whole family on one monument ---- don't you love cremation?

So the depressive side of me dwells on "What's the use?" while the optimist in me celebrates these passing days, each unique and special in its own way.  Rare is the day that I don't feel overwhelmed with gratitude about something.

Fred Phelps? In 50 years, he'll be a name on a stone that people walking through the cemetery may or may not recognize. We still talk about the best of the best ---- didn't I quote Dickens above? ---- and the worst of the worst---- (I'm talking to you, Adolf), but most of us will simply be forgotten. May we all rest in peace.

Jazz and Love

I suddenly feel like I'm in a time warp.

We spent the day working at home, Jill in the yard, me scrubbing floors and baseboards on hands and knees, Pandora disco channel at warp sound ---- shakin' that booty and gettin' down.

After several hours, we sat on the swing in the backyard sunshine, then I fixed a tray of snacks ---- cheese, olives, two kinds of (gluten free) crackers, celery with cream cheese and cocktails. All right. Shirley Temples, with Maraschino cherries, of course. Served in glasses suitable for Old-Fashioneds. On the deck.

Followed, after showers and feeding of the kids (critters), by steaks on the grill, baked potatoes and salad for dinner, and then coffee. Disco station replaced by Jazz station on Pandora. Dancing in the kitchen, cheek to cheek. 

You'd think it was 1958. Except for the lesbian part. And gluten free. And no alcohol. Well, and Jill wasn't born till 1960.

It's how I thought life would be when I was grown up ---- all marriage and jazz and steak dinners. I just didn't have the details quite right. 

But you know what? It's exactly what I want. Life isn't perfect, or always easy. There are plenty more veggie-wrap-and-tomato-soup dinners than steak. The house is not usually this clean, and by tomorrow it will be once again blanketed in dirt and sticks and leaves that the dogs bring in. Happiness can be elusive, worry can assert its ugly presence. But this is it. This is what I wanted, exactly and completely, and I'm overcome with gratitude tonight.

I'm not sure it gets any better than this.

Dare I Say Snow?

There is nothing quite like an anticipatory snow day in the Southland. It's like church, only quieter. Nothing is happening and nobody is moving. Ordinarily, by this time of the morning, school buses would be chugging along, people would be going to work, the garbage truck would be snatching up containers with it's big, noisy claw. But even the birds are hiding.

It could not be like this in my native Iowa. You can't cease to carry on when you live in a place that is cold and snowy six months out of the year. You become inured to it, bundled up, head down, getting by. But here in the land of sunshine, where thirty degrees is a calamity, when the weatherfolk breathe the S word, life comes to a halt. And I love it!

Where else do you get out of school and work before a single flake is spotted? It fits our culture, the strong belief that there are more important things in life than making a buck. Sometimes, everybody needs a day of rest, and the unscheduled ones are the best. It's the sudden opportunity to do something out of the ordinary ---- read a novel, watch a movie, play games, clean out a closet, organize the photos, split a pot of tea and talk, paint a picture, take a nap. All the things we wish we had time for during the busy, over-scheduled days.

Yes, on TV they're making it sound like we're all going to die. Yes, there's the very real possibility that ice will bring down the power lines and life will take a sudden turn for the worse. But in the meantime, in the pause that comes before the storm, when anticipation is ascendant and anything is possible, it's good to remember that we never know what's going to happen next ---- not even on an ordinary work-a-day Wednesday ---- and there is always room for surprise.

Bring on the hot chocolate. Today, I'm tasting the sweetness of life without a plan.