- Which movie theater did you go to on your first date? Whether or not that theater still exists, this site may have a photo of it, along with other interesting historical data. The first theater I took Carol to is this one. It’s still there, and still awesome. (Thanks to Ernie Marek for the link.)
- Five years later, I proposed to Carol while we watched the sun set from a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River. There are other ways of doing it. I forgot to bring a flashlight up the side of that bluff, and we had to pick our way down in near-darkness. My nerdiness has gaps. (Thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.)
- The Softpro retail bookstore at the Denver Tech Center is closing its doors at the end of March. Even though it’s 70+ miles away, I’ve dropped a fair bit of change there. Bummer.
- Back in the 50s, the Russians were producing an extremely interesting line of low-voltage tubes. I’m still trying to get my head around how they work internally, but hey, “Gammatron” is a wonderful name for a line of tubes–or anything else. (Thanks to Jim Strickland for the link.)
- The war on “moist” (see yesterday’s entry) prompted Bruce Baker to remind us of Moist von Lipwig, a Discworld character whose distinguishing characteristic is having no distinguishing characteristics. See Going Postal and Making Money .
- People are still selling tumbleweeds on eBay. I can’t figure it. If the world has an abundance of anything, it’s tumbleweeds. Unless maybe you live in New York City and want some Western ambience without ever actually going there.
- When I was in college, a girl told me: “The trouble with you, Jeff, is that you’re too damned happy!” Guilty. And this research sounds like BS to me, in part because low expectations are not the same as pessimism. And also in part because most pessimists I’ve spent time with seem pretty unhappy. But what do I know? I’m a pessimism denier.
- The Atlantic reports research suggesting that the Neanderthals went extinct because they ran out of woolly mammoths and couldn’t get their substantial (and hard) heads around hunting bunnies. I’m still convinced that they wiped themselves out for lack of dogs. (Thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.)
- Humanoid robots could make good firefighters, and the Navy is working on it. I’ll believe it when I see it, of course, but I keep thinking that a humanoid robot who can fight fires can do a lot of other interesting things. (Thanks to Bp. Sam’l Bassett for the link.)
- God sometimes teaches stupid people harsh lessons–and sometimes they’re so funny they hurt. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
Memoir
Odd Lots
Out, Out, Damned 2012!
I think we misunderstood the Mayans. (Like that’s hard?) They weren’t talking about the end of the world. They were telling us to hang in there: The end of 2012 was at hand. I’d drink to that, and tonight I probably will.
Boy. I’d like to wash this year right out of my hair–and I don’t have a whole lot of hair.
I had had high hopes of relaxing on the shores of Lake McConaughy with a kite string in my hand and one foot in the water on the day I turned 60, but no: Damfool Colorado had to catch fire. Jimi Henton fled to our house with all her dogs (and two of ours) when the smoke got too thick at her place, and while no one we knew well was injured or lost their homes, it was a near enough thing, especially having seen it on the news from 1100 miles away.
Deaths and serious illnesses continued to whittle away at my circle of friends. A lot of that simply happens as you climb into your sixties, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. It was unnerving to check the Facebook page of a woman I knew in college, only to find that she had died over a year ago. Other good friends had open-heart surgery, cancer surgery, and lesser but nonetheless confounding failures in the meat-suit machinery. Indeed, I had a few of my own.
Then of course there was the tribal hatefest we call elections, when people I thought I knew gave themselves over completely to a species of slobbering, eyes-rolled-back-in-the-head rage against The Other that was terrifying to behold. This is the way that genocide begins, and I was under a pall until it was over. Even then, it took weeks to shake off the depression. And even now, there are a few people who simply will not let it go. It’s a psychological truth that I originally found in Colin Wilson’s writings: Once we grant ourselves permission to hate, it feels good and is devilishly hard to give up.
I know it makes me sound like a crank, but maybe it’s a cause worth cranking on: We must stop this national orgy of partisan hatred.
I guess there were some upsides to 2012. I finished my first full-sized novel since 1999, and only the second I’ve done since high school. My nephew Brian proposed to his beautiful girlfriend of many years, Ali, and we have a big-bash wedding to look forward to next September. I gave my accumulated hoard of Lego to our nieces Katie and Julie, and they’re loving it. I continued to be startled by the richness to be found in loving Carol, as I have now for 43 years. (I’m fond of saying that I fell in love with her half an hour before I even met her.) QBit still jumps into my lap whenever he can. I’ve made new friends (particularly in my Thursday night writing group) and rekindled my love of Pascal programming, now that Lazarus is ready for prime time. We threw a couple of nerd parties that people are still talking about.
2012, bleahhh. I’m going to go downstairs and watch a movie with my forever girlfriend, and toast to Lady Julian with a glass of Roscato wine and a slice of Lou Malnati pizza. Hope heals. Stomach lining regrows. Scar tissue means that you weren’t hiding behind the couch the whole time.
Cut to the chase: All manner of thing will fersure be well. But man, the bottle of Advil is empty.
You Can’t Go Home Again
We’re back and I’m ok; you can stop worrying about me now. (Nonetheless, many thanks for all the concerned emails.) We flew to Chicago to house-sit for Carol’s sister for a week or so, and most of what I did there was read books and visit family and a few old friends. My arm no longer hurts…much, and that only when I put significant weight or torque on it. I’m going to strength training tomorrow, a session I suspect will be interesting.
In the meantime, I passed through my old neighborhood on the way to visit my kindergarten friend Art, and cruised down the street where I grew up, to see the house I lived in until I was 23. I was halfway down the block when it hit me: This is all wrong. I stopped where I knew my old house had been, and looked at something that was no longer my old house. In fact, it looked a lot like Dorothy’s tornado had dropped somebody else’s house on top of the house of my birth and somehow got the alignment right.
Let me show you the house shortly after its completion in 1949:
It was a fairly common design, by the well-known Chicago developer Maclennan, and there were lots of them in our neighborhood. The original floor plan was just 900 square feet, with only two bedrooms and one bath. When my sister came along in 1956 my parents put a floor under the cathedral ceiling and made a third bedroom out of it, with a new dormer for a half bath upstairs. Shortly after that, they put a good-sized family room off the back side of the house that ran the full width of the structure. The family room included a brick fireplace with its own chimney. It was a little tight (especially by today’s standards) but I finished the basement in knotty pine when I was 15 and after establishing my desk and workbench there spent a great deal of my time downstairs.
My mother lived there for 47 years, and when we sold the house in 1996 I figured that somebody would put some work into it. Whew. Was I right or what? It looks like they literally shaved off the second story and the family room completely, or possibly gutted the place down to the brick walls and started over. (I’m guessing my knotty pine walls in the basement did not make the cut either.) The house as it is today looks a little topheavy, but the lot is only 35 feet wide, and it takes some creativity to maximize the useful space buildable on that little land.
No hard feelings, though forgive me for thinking that it just looks funny. The most striking change was the removal of both chimneys, which made me sigh because my first ham radio antenna was 30′ of #22 wire strung from one chimney to the other. I worked 34 states from that house (on a hacked-up Knight T-60) and saw eight planets from the front lawn. It was, let’s say, formative.
Much more to talk about. I’ll try and catch up in coming days. I have a new desktop machine here, having scragged the old one by touching it before grounding myself. When you see a quarter-inch spark jump from your finger to a USB port, you know that nothing good is about to happen. I have a sketch for a steampunk discharge station coming together, with a 5″ bronze gear and a VR-75 gas regulator tube for visual effects. Touch your quadcore before touching the discharge station, and it’s back to your Babbage barn, bunky!
Dancing with Diction
Today is the birthday of Dr. Seuss, without whom I would care nothing for poetry. One of the great bonding behaviors I shared with my baby sister was running around the house reciting snatches (sneeches?) of kid-book poetry at the tops of our lungs. “This one has a little star! This one has a little car! Say, what a lot of fish there are!” The king of that castle is and will always be Theodor Geisel 1904-1991. Circa 1960 our parents had signed us up for what amounted to the Dr. Seuss book club, and every month we got one of his books or another book that was clearly written in his style. There were some outliers not written in verse, like Look Out for Pirates! but who remembers those anymore? (Go, Dog, Go! may be one exception.)
On the other hand, I only have to recall the title of One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish and my poetry-reciter is off at a trot. Gretchen’s even better at it than I. Don’t get us started if you’re one of those lit’ry types who feels that any poetry with rhyme and meter is worthy only of folding into the center of a Hallmark card.
Modern universities crank such out by the pallet load. Years ‘n years ago, at one damned cocktail party conversation or another (I think associated with the Book Expo America trade show) I made an energetic case that good poetry can have both rhyme and meter. A well-credentialed tribalist immediately jumped on me, steam jetting from every orifice. “So,” he jetted, “all poetry should be doggerel?”
Whoo-boy! Note the well-worn tribal tactic: I suggested that something the tribalist hated should be allowed. The tribalist immediately misrepresented me as saying that everything except what he hated should be forbidden. I called him on it. I basically humiliated him in front of several of his peers. How did I humiliate him? I dared him to begin reciting blank verse from some author who would be taught in college literature courses. He couldn’t do it. I turned the knife by immediately beginning to recite “The Hollow Men.” I stopped after eight or ten lines. I then asked him which poet had written the following:
mighty guest of merely me
–traveler from eternity;
in a single wish, receive
all I am and dream and have.
He shook his head. “You did.” Heh. Don’t I wish. It was e. e. cummings. I offered to recite the rest of the poem. The dork said “No thanks,” and slunk away.
Now, I may be a better memorizer than he was. But I had a secret advantage: Structured poetry is easier to remember. And a secret vulnerability: I had recited all of Eliot that I could recall, and I remember Eliot today largely because I used to make fun of him so much. (I wasn’t singling Eliot out–Dr. Seuss himself did not escape.) Give me Macavity any day, even if the sophisticates dismiss it as children’s poetry. (It’s a cat poem. Dare ‘ya to call it doggerel!) I can recite a great deal of that. It contains irony, subtlety, and much merriment.You can dance to it. I give it a 10.
Note that I don’t “hate” blank verse and freeform poetry, nor do I dismiss it simply because it lacks rhyme and meter. I studied it. I studied Walt Whitman, Robert Lowell, Wallace Stevens, Theodore Roethke, and all those guys of that era and that school of poetry, which has basically won the day. I still recall why my profs thought they were significant. The problem is that the poems themselves I have utterly forgotten. Lowell has a great line somewhere about ’59 Chevies rolling past like fish in a tank, in finned servility. But that’s all of him that I can remember, having read an entire book full of his stuff and discussed it at length in a 300-level class. I’m sure it was carefully crafted. I’ll grant that it was important. But in no way on this or any other world could it ever be fun.
For that you have to go back to poets like Vachel Lindsay, who opened “The Santa Fe Trail” in an eminently memorable way:
This is the order of the music of the morning-:
First from the far east comes but a crooning.
The crooning turns to a sunrise singing:
Hark to the calm-horn, balm-horn, psalm-horn.
Hark to the faint-horn, quaint-horn, saint-horn…
Damn, not only can I see that, I can feel it! It makes me want to run around the house with my baby sister (now 55) yelling “Ho for Kansas land that restores us! When houses choke us and great books bore us!” Eventually we collapse on the couch, breathless from laughing so hard and glowing from feeling so good. Kid stuff? Sure! At least for kids who haven’t yet sold their kidness for a pot of message.
Poetry is about laughter, especially laughter that comes of wishing we could be in Kansas so that we could get away from all those Great Books that are so ponderously self-important they they undergo lexical collapse and vanish into their own navels while everybody stands around scratching their heads trying to understand what the hell they were attempting to convey.
And about dancing, yes. Poetry is dancing with diction, doing the polka with participles, spinning an allemand with adverbs. It’s cutting loose from grim reality for awhile and letting language just take us. “He thought he saw an elephant / That practiced on a fife: / He looked again and found it was / A letter from his wife.” What does it mean? You’d be surprised. I’ll tell you in a minute, but…the music isn’t over yet.
If I’d had to jump straight into Lowell and Roethke I would have tossed it all overboard. But Dr. Seuss had gotten to me first. He taught me that you could dance to words, and from that dance it was a short step to Chaucer and Pope and Longfellow and Tennyson and Lindsay and Robert Frost and e. e. cummings. Having danced to the edges of rhyme and meter (cummings is a great transition) I could go the rest of the way, and watch the fins go by with Robert Lowell.
Did poetry classes leave a sour taste in your mouth? Grab a Dr. Seuss book, and find your sister if you have one. Run around the house spitting iambs and trochees until you collapse laughing on the couch. That’s how you reboot your poetry sense. Then, if you want, you can take it all the rest of the way to Walt Whitman and beyond.
But I personally wouldn’t blame you if you stopped right there.
Unhappy Old Year
So. Once again we rebooted the calendar, and it worked. Whew. Couldn’t have happened soon enough. This year had its moments, but it wasn’t among the best I can recall, though it stands shoulders above 2002.
The year began with the worst flu I’ve had in 35 years. Lesson: Get your flu shots! Carol did. I didn’t. Q.E.D. There was other illness in the family that I won’t talk about, though nothing life-threatening. For that we have to move out into our friendscape. We lost Prudy Stewart, a stalwart from the local Bichon Frise Club, along with Harold Shippey, a gentleman in our camping group. Two of my grade school teachers died within a couple of months of one another: Mrs. Mary Clare Toffenetti, who taught art and French at IC school, and Mrs. Mary Veronica Condon, who taught third grade and also French. Dan Matthews, one of the kids in my grade school class, who had been a close friend for several years, died on Christmas Day. Just last night, one of our parishioners, who generally sat two pews behind us at church, had a serious heart attack. He’s in a coma and is not expected to survive.
All this since November 1, sheesh.
Oh, and my house almost blew up. Settling soil has been our bane here for years now. We had to empty the lower level and get the slab mudjacked, and are still fooling with paint chips and carpet samples now that the carpet’s been torn up anyway. All of my SF and most of my electronics magazines are packed and out of reach. It’s a mess.
For good things to report I’ll begin with the completion of Drumlin Circus, a 53,000 word short novel that came together in one furious six-week period, during which I wrote as much as 5,000 words in a single day. Jim Strickland and I put a tete-beche double novel on the market, incorporating Drumlin Circus and On Gossamer Wings, both tales from the Drumlins World.
Jim and I attended the Taos Toolbox writers’ workshop in July, conducted by Walter Jon Williams and taught by Walter and my SF mentor Nancy Kress. I described the workshop in two entries after we got back, and would have continued if my damned gas line hadn’t threatened to ignite virtually under my feet. (I hope to write a little more about the workshop in coming days.) I will say right now that if you have a little experience in SF or fantasy, Taos Toolbox is spectacular. Granted, it’s expensive, and almost unbelievably intense. Jim describes it as a 500-level graduate course in the art of the novel compressed into two weeks, and that sounds about right. Walter is currently accepting applications for the 2012 workshop, and I give it my wholehearted recommendation. I met a lot of wonderful people, workshopped 15,000 words of my current novel-in-progress, Ten Gentle Opportunities, and returned with new dedication to the craft of fiction. I’d hoped to finish TGO by the end of the year, but (as described above) the year did not cooperate. The new target is April 1. Snotty AIs, zombies dancing the Macarena, a copier factory gone rogue, magic as software, physics as alternate magic, and malware from another universe…hey, what else d’ya want?
On October 2, Carol and I celebrated our 35th wedding anniversary. We spent ten days on Oahu, generating enough gumption to start having the lower level rehabbed when we got back. It took everything we could generate, and more.
I joined the Writers Write! group here locally, and have made many friends there. The group’s motto is Just write the damn book! It’s advice I need to take.
Those are the broad strokes. Scattered among the days were little flashes of light and minor grunts of annoyance. My brakes have needed work three times. I met Cynthia Felice. My new superregenerative FM receiver has dead spots. I finished a nice steampunk computer table. That sort of thing; up and down on an almost daily basis.
I have high hopes for 2012. Carol and I have deliberately held back opening our Christmas presents until January 6th to get an upbeat start on the year, and 2012’s first 18 hours have gone pretty well. I won’t try to draw any conclusions from the data points presented. Hey, sea level dropped 6mm in 2010 alone. Blips happen, so let’s not read too much into any of them. It’s not the end of the Holocene…yet. Then there’s the Mayan calendar. Y2KXII, anybody? Let’s party!)
Happy new year, everyone. Strive to appreciate your friends this year. (You won’t have them forever!) Write more. Worry less. Go outside and check your gas pipes. Eat fat and drink sweet wine, and make sure you share what you have with others. I’ll be here when you need me.
Thirty-Five Years
Thirty-five years ago today, Carol and I stood side by side at St. John Brebeuf church in Niles, Illinois, and promised before God that we would strive to be not simply together, but together as best friends and inseparable partners, until whatever end may come. That’s the short form; I’m not sure I could say it better than I said it five years ago in this space.
So I’ll add some backstory: It was a big Polish wedding, with the ceremony at Carol’s parish church and the reception (217 guests) that evening at the now-vanished Northwest Builders Hall in Chicago. There were eight in the bridal party, and, remarkably, we have been in regular touch with seven of the eight. My childhood best friend Art Krumrey (whom I met at Edison School kindergarten in 1957) was our best man, and Carol’s sister Kathy was maid of honor.
L-R: My locker partner Tom Barounis, my sister Gretchen, Fox Patrol colleague George Murphy, Carol’s friend Eileen Schultz, me, Carol, Carol’s sister Kathy, Art Krumrey, Carol’s sorority sister Roseann Such, and my high school astronomy club colleague George Hodous. The bridesmaid dresses were mostly timeless; the groomsmen’s tuxes very Seventies. The food was Polish and spectacular, and we had a polka band that wore everybody out, which is what we hired them to do.
The family turned out in force, as did most of our friends. The page below is from our wedding guest signature book, and I consider it about as interesting as such things ever get. Edward E. Smith and George O. Smith were both there, though after signing the book they left at 40% the speed of light and I didn’t get pictures. The late (and terribly missed) George M. Ewing included his callsign, as always (portable 9!) and fan artists Phil Foglio and Doug Rice collaborated on some between-the-lines illumination. Mary the Mother of God signed in from the future (as Our Lady of the Endless Sky, straight from Sinus Iridum) though many of us wonder why the Blessed Mother had trouble with her handwriting.
It was huge good fun. Outside the church, family threw rice and friends threw punch-card chad, which I was picking out of my ears well into our honeymoon in the Cayman Islands. Carol’s sister caught the bouquet. (I don’t recall who got the garter.) We had a martini fountain, which was the first time I’d ever seen that technology, though not the last.
It’s sobering to look at the wedding photos and see an entire generation gone (except for Carol’s mom) as well as friends like George Ewing and Sharon Bloom who died far, far too soon. The photos are a snapshot of a time that few appreciate but which wasn’t as bad as conventional wisdom holds. Like the Forties (which we all mocked in our youth) the Seventies will come back someday, though I wouldn’t wait up for clones of the AMC Pacer.
As for Carol and me, well, the promise has been kept. We’ve taken some hits down the years but the flag still flies. Marriage works. It does. Not always and sometimes not the first time, but in our case, luck was with us and love did the rest. Thirty-five years on we have transformed one another, as marriage is intended to do, and at this point Jeff without Carol is no more meaningful than dividing by zero. Mission accomplished. Thanks from both of us to those who’ve been with us all this time, and to those others who have by now taken their places in the Community of Saints, all of whom made it possible without fully understanding how much their simple kindness and unending faith would mean to two ordinary people who made those extraordinary promises so many years ago.
Early Halloween
I’m starting to get notes from people asking if I’m all right, and I am, though for the last few days I’ve been fighting an anomalous migraine headache and haven’t felt much like writing. Lots to catch up on, now that I’m feeling better.
First off, I guess, would be the fate of our closest Borders. No sooner did it close its doors than a crane hoisted a banner for Spirit Halloween Stores across the name. I’m not a big Halloween fan (my sister got that gene) and so haven’t paid much attention to Halloween retailing, but Spirit is a national chain with an interesting business model: lie in wait for a big-box store to go belly-up, and then quickly reanimate the corpse for a couple of months prior to October 31. We have at least one other Spirit outlet here in the Springs, up on the north side inside the vacated remains of Ultimate Electronics. They may have year-round stores somewhere, probably in larger cities with more of a Halloween culture than we have here. The new store (in Southgate Plaza) hasn’t opened yet, even though there’s only 30 shopping days left until You Know What. Somehow they make it work.
And while we’re talking about reanimating corpses, I want to recommend a short story to zombie fans who may not have heard of it: “Impulse” by Eric Frank Russell. It first appeared in Astounding in September 1938, but it’s been reprinted many times since then. I found it in my decayed and dustbound copy of Groff Conklin’s 1962 paperback horror anthology Twisted. That’s a little remarkable, because “Impulse” is not a horror story as we usually define it. It’s pure SF, and remarkably prescient SF at that. Consider this excerpt:
It was a space vessel that carried us from our home world of Glantok. The vessel was exceedingly small by your standards–but we, too, are small. Very small. We are submicroscopic, and our number is myriad.
“No, not intelligent germs.” The ghastly speaker stole the thought from his listener’s mind. “We are less even than those.” He paused while he searched for words more explicit. “In the mass, we resemble a liquid. You might think of us as an intelligent virus.”
Basically, Russell’s talking about a colony of nanomachines living inside a dead human body that it stole from a morgue. The nanons got it running again, and even accessed memory proteins in its brain. So we’ve got a zombie here, a real zombie that doesn’t rely on supernatural machinery to make it go.
The story is better than typical pulp, although it respects all the usual pulp tropes including a mostly unecessary damsel in distress. I’m a fan of the story for an odd reason: It was the first story I ever read to a group. In the summer of 1964, my scoutmaster at Camp West in Michigan tapped me to read the story to Troop 926 while gathered around the evening campfire. It was fun, if a little tricky, because I had not read the story before sitting down to read it, and didn’t know myself how it would turn out. I remembered the title but not the author, and it took some googling to find it–else I would be flipping through the hundred-odd anthologies I have on the shelves downstairs.
By the way, Conklin is a superb anthologist, possibly the best out of the 1950-1975 era, and if you ever spot one of his books, it’s worth grabbing. (Kingsley Amis is another; his Spectrum books should be stalked and devoured.)
One more note about ghosts, albeit of the sign variety: While in Chicago last week I visited the strip mall retail complex at Harlem and Foster, which was an early shopping center (circa 1960) and when built contained the closest department store to where I grew up. (Turn Style, long-gone but the precursor to Target and K-Mart.) The strip mall contained the bank where I got my first account, and the Walgreens where I got my first job washing dishes at their grill. It also contained a slightly freaky windowless lower level divided into four small stores, one of which was the Arcade Bookshop. It was the first bookstore where I recall spending my own money, and I probably bought Conklin’s Twisted there. I also ordered several books on the fourth dimension from the very patient lady behind the counter. It opened when the mall as a whole opened. It became a Christian bookstore in the 1980s, and closed in the early 1990s. You can’t see it in the photo shown above, but the upper right sign space is the old Arcade Bookshop sign, reversed so the back side is out. However, if you’re there in front of it you can clearly read the store’s name through the plastic–backwards, sure, but that’s no real trick, and seeing the old store where I spent so much of my allowance in the 1960s was definitely a treat.
For All That Will Be, Yes!
Carol and I met 42 years ago this evening. I’ve told the story before, and the backstory. The oldest known photo of the two of us together is here, not quite a month after we met. I won’t go on at length this evening, but I will mention that in 1974, just before she went away to grad school, Carol made me a banner with the inscription, “For all that has been, Thank you. For all that will be, Yes.”
I went up to her a little while ago and said the same thing to her. Funny how it sounds just as good now (and is just as true!) as it was way back in 1974.
Victoria Duntemann and Lady Julian
Today is Mother’s Day, and I celebrate it in eternal memory of Victoria Albina Pryes Duntemann 1924-2000. But today is also something else: May 8, the feast day of Lady Julian of Norwich, denied sainthood by the Roman Catholic Church for daring to suggest that God would triumph over Hell. Lady Julian is my personal patron saint, and I have declared her the Patron Saint of Gonzo Optimism: All manner of thing will be well. All. No exceptions. It don’t get much more gonzo than that.
Lady Julian was very careful of what she said, and had to be, lest she be burnt at the stake by her mass-murdering psychopath of a bishop, Henry Despenser, who ordered the Lollard Pits to be dug near Norwich and then gleefully filled them. The message of Lady Julian’s visions, which she hid well and could barely believe herself, was as simple as it was audacious: God will not settle for anything less than the salvation of everyone and everything.
It’s one of those painful ironies that I heard of Lady Julian only a couple of years before my mother’s death. Victoria Duntemann’s religion was an insane Polish peasant amplification of the fringes of Triumphal Catholicism, and basically consisted of Hell plus debris. That said, she took it only a little farther than the grim priests of my childhood parish, who gripped Hell to their hearts like an infernal teddy bear. Whether they understood it that way or not (and I think some did) they defined Catholicism as what you had to do to stay out of Hell, which ultimately cooked down to obeying them without question and having as little to do with sex as possible. My mother and countless other goodhearted and sensitive people swallowed this blasphemy whole, and in far too many cases (my mother’s included) it crushed all hope from them.
Hell haunted my mother her entire life. I was at her bedside when she died, and I am convinced that she died of despair, fearing that sins either wholly imagined or minor and long forgiven would land her in unending torment. (Right: She who was a nurse all her life, comforting countless people and tending to both of her parents and later her husband in their final years, and giving ceaselessly of her time and money to the church that had taken such pains to terrify her–Hell-fodder, of course.) Managing my consequent anger has become one of the great challenges of my life.
Hell has got to go. It no longer frightens the evil, and causes only suffering among the good. It is an emblem of either a sadistic or a defeated God. Do we have the guts to imagine a better God, one who will out-stubborn the worst of us and bring the whole shebang back into divine wholeness before the curtain falls?
Already done: “And so our good Lord answered to all the questions and doubts which I could raise, saying most comfortingly: I may make all things well, and I can make all things well, and I shall make all things well, and I will make all things well; and you will see yourself that every kind of thing will be well.” Julian of Norwich, Showings, Chapter XXXI.
I may. I can. I shall. I will. What does He have to do, hit us over the head with a #7 frying pan?
I’m convinced. Given a few more years, I might have persuaded my mother. She understood me poorly, but she listened to me, and she took me seriously, as all good mothers must of the children they bring into the world. I built telescopes on her front lawn, and she was always willing to give me a dollar for one more damned pipe fitting to twist into the declination axis. She read and approved of “Our Lady of the Endless Sky,” which was my first published story, written in some respects for her. She didn’t read the pile of my computer books that she kept in a corner of the livingroom, but I think they got the message across that her only son was neither crazy nor stupid. Perhaps more significant than any of that, I think she saw something of herself in me, and recognized the ache for God that she herself felt and had tried to instill in her children. She was ready to hear me out long before I knew enough to begin speaking, but I didn’t begin speaking until she could no longer listen.
I managed to avoid the trap she fell into, and maybe that’s triumph enough. Mothers want the best for their children, and what I got was what she should have had: a religion that celebrates the fundamental goodness of all creation, and the inescapable love of God. She knows the truth now. Could Lady Julian have told her? (Better late than never!)
If not, then what are patron saints for?
How Music Really Oughta Work
I just got back from Big Family Easter In Chicago, where it rained eight out of the ten days we were there. So I’m drying out, catching my breath, tinkering with the outline of Ten Gentle Opportunities, and trying to iron out a long list of wrinkles in several ebook projects. I’m crosseyed from poking at details, so I’ll take ten minutes out for a slightly tangled story. This may start to sound like an episode of James Burke’s Connections after awhile, but bear with me.
Marci Braun (scroll down a little) is a popular country/western DJ on Chicago’s big country station US99.5. She’s also Carol’s sister’s husband’s cousin’s daughter, and we’ve seen her here and there at family gatherings on Carol’s side since she was a pre-teen. The first time we took Dash to Chicago (he was nine weeks old at the time) he was a big hit at our nephew Matt’s college graduation party, and he bonded with Marci in a country hemidemisemiquaver. So I listen to her when I know she’ll be on the air, and she has a lot to do with my growing affection for country music. Oh, and the fact that pop music is now completely incoherent, lacking warmth, melody, harmony, and just about everything else that I value. Several of my friends among the Educated Elite grumble at me for listening to country music (“It’s so, so, well, Republican!“) but I just tell them that if they can bring back close harmony and clever lyrics to pop music, I’ll jump. In the meantime, I listen to country and classical. Draw whatever conclusions you wish. (No points for the obvious one that I take great pleasure in annoying the Educated Elite.)
Anyway. A week ago Monday night, while I was driving from our condo in Des Plaines to Crystal Lake after not seeing Carol for three days, I punched the 99.5 button on the car radio, and Marci was there. (Actually, odds are that she was a digital audio file at that moment, but that’s just how the radio business works.) She ran a commercial, and then introduced a song: Darius Rucker’s “This.” Great raving upbeat piece, celebrating a life that turned out very well somehow, in spite of all the mistakes we make and the bad luck that comes as a side dish to life’s main course, generally right there beside the lima beans.
Brilliant lyric, which you can read here. The gist:
I don’t really know how I got here
But I’m sure glad that I did;
And it’s crazy to think that one little thing
Could’ve changed all of it.Maybe it didn’t turn out like I planned–
Maybe that’s why I’m such, such a lucky man!For every stoplight I didn’t make;
Every chance I did or I didn’t take;
All the nights I went too far;
All the girls that broke my heart;
All the doors that I had to close;
All the things I knew but I didn’t know
Thank God for all I missed
Cause it led me here to
This.
If you like feel-good music, go buy that song, which will cost you the same as a small Diet Coke at McDonalds, and will stay with you a lot longer. Just as the song began I was coming out of the Union Pacific underpass on Northwest Highway just west of Des Plaines, and there was a freight train heading by overhead. At the song’s inspiration, I was reflecting on how much I like my life. I’ve gotten almost everything I’ve ever wanted, granting that some of it took awhile. I found my soulmate at 17, and my life’s work at 33. That may have been optimal: Had I not met Carol that early I would probably have lost her to someone else, because at 16 she didn’t know yet how hot she really was. (And anyone who knew me when I was 17 will recall how hot I wasn’t.) If I hadn’t worked at technical pursuits before I discovered that I was an editor and a tech writer, well, I might have tried to make a living on SF (ha!) or given up on writing entirely. Everything just seemed to flow, one small success from another, with equal parts luck and hard work to drive the machinery. I had it: Dogs, houses, sunsets, tube sockets, saints up and down the family tree, everything. (I even had a pickup truck once.)
Luck. Trains. Whew. In 1977 I was driving home from my mom’s house along Devon avenue, and I raced a train to a crossing. I made it by two car lengths. Why? I don’t know. It was by several orders of magnitude the stupidest thing I’ve ever done, and if my dad’s anemic, beat-to-hell ’74 AMC wagon had been just a little bit out of tune, I would have died in 1977. I had been married to Carol for less than a year, and had not yet completed wire-wrapping my first computer. I was just getting out of first gear. Damn, I’d barely gotten out of park.
Stupidity comes in smaller containers as well. I told my broker to buy $5,000 worth of Microsoft stock a month after they went public in 1986. She offered me a limited partnership instead, and I took it rather than chewing her ass to go back and do what I told her. But compared to being splatted by a General Electric U23B, hey, small potatoes.
Like I said, great song. I got home to Colorado, fired up Firefox, found the song among Amazon’s DRM-free 99c MP3s, and ninety seconds later it was playing. It’s not tied to a particular player or DRM technology, so there’s no reason to think I won’t be playing it twenty years from now. Certainly we’ll play it at our 40th wedding anniverary party in 2016, where I will wear my expensive cowboy hat and dare y’all to dance.
That’s how music ought to work: You hear a song somewhere that you’d like to hear again, so you find it online, pay for it quickly and easily, download it, and keep it forever. I remember 45s and LP vinyl. (Hell, I remember 78s.) I remember 8″ reel-to-reel. I remember 8-tracks and cassettes and CDs. I remember my Diamond Rio. I still have an iPod. Maybe we had to pass through all that to get where we are today, and maybe it might have turned out differently had some engineer been brighter or Sony not as dumb as they always turn out to be. Doesn’t matter. The message hasn’t gotten out to every last corner of the world, but as long as Amazon’s system or something like it exists, music is where it needs to be.
Play it again. Play it forever. We’ve arrived.
