84

My father would have been 84 today. 

As I look for his traces in the world, I stop and the mirror shows him to me.  My current choice of reading material, Sheldon Wolin’s Democracy Inc., is a book I would have loved to discuss with him.  It is a book I can hear him quoting.  How I would have loved to hear his thoughts on our current political dystopia.  When his intellect was intact, he was always ahead of the curve. 

Last week I spent many hours, many rocks and 800 lbs. of top soil extending a rock wall on the south side of our screened in porch.  I even enjoyed this process.  I am now planning to get a covering layer of mulch and set up a foundation for my compost pile behind the garage.  What could be more Dennis-like than this? 

I look at my dog, once only Paul’s dog but now our dog.  My dad loved Elsa and remembered her name much longer than Paul’s.  Elsa is now a spry at-least-fifteen years old.  The last picture I have of him was taken while he was asleep in the back seat of the car with Elsa on the way home from Wisconsin. 

Later today I will go running.  Like my father, I am slow but persistent.  I love the scenery more than the exercise.

Grief is a funny thing.  I don’t really know where it comes from or why.  I was never sentimental about my father, but sometimes I feel so sad that he has gone on.  It was never an easy relationship.  My father was an awkward man, and I am acutely aware of my own awkwardness on a daily basis.  Almost six years later I still don’t have the words. 

As I grow older I seem to grow more into who he was.  I see the wisdom in his madness; his compost pile and vegetable garden, his bicycling to work on the burnt orange Schwinn with the baby seat never removed, his love of politics, his reuse of every possible every day item, his desire to darn his socks rather than getting new ones, his happiness in the simple things of life, of trees and loons, of building a retaining wall or just sitting and looking out at the lake. 

(published a little after the actual date)

The Era of Pretense is over - short thoughts on today's confirmation

In September of 2000, a first cousin of my father's said to me that our country wasn't a democracy.  And he didn't mean in the we-are-technically-a-republic sense, he meant it in the sense that we are many of us now beginning to feel.

At the time, I thought he was so radical!  This was a only a few months before Bush v. Gore when the Supreme Court stopped the Florida recount and handed the presidency to Bush.  This was not quite a year before the disaster in lower Manhattan.

The night Trump was elected was a strange night, but this is also one, and frankly, it is scarier to me.  What happened with Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation to the Supreme Court scares me more than all of the other afore mentioned events.  It is the fact that the rulers of our country no longer see any reason to pretend that they do not wield absolute power.  They see no reason to even try to present a face of fairness to the country.

Those in power could have easily withdrawn a man who perjured himself on television in front of the world, who showed him self to be belligerent and aggressive towards women in this same testimony(Senator Klobuchar), who showed a lack of judicial temperament and a wealth of partisan fervor (the Clintons are out to get me) and who very possibly could be guilty of sexual assault.  Those in power could have simply nominated another right wing partisan who would have gutted or overturned Roe v. Wade, who would have affirmed that 'corporations are people, my friend,' and that big business can do whatever they want and damn the people and the environment.

They chose not to do this.  They chose the shove this particular nominee down our throats.  They chose to elevate him because they could.  And they chose to do it to show that we could not stop it.

What will be next?

Truth

There has been a lot of drama swirling around a person in my life recently.  To begin the conversation this way seems to imply that this is a new phenomenon, but in truth the drama has only augmented.  This woman has been a part of my life since I was born.  She is my godmother, my mother's best friend, my once music teacher and my mentor.  Her attitudes and ideas have shaped me perhaps as much as those of my parents.  I count her responsible for much of who I am and for the fact that I am a professional musician today.  To call our relationship complicated would be to grossly understate the messiness of it all, but that isn't what this post is about.

When I was small, my best friend was the son of a friend of my parents' who taught with my father at the university.  We were born a few months apart.  I've heard the following story from all three women referenced.  My mother, my friend's mother and my godmother were all trying to get pregnant around the same time.  My mother seemed to become pregnant instantly.  Soon after, my friend's mother became pregnant, but my godmother never did.

As I was growing up, my godmother told the best stories about her days teaching high school choral music.  Both she and my godfather loved their students and took special interest in their lives.  This interest could even be called transformative for many of them. A few of these people I'd only heard about growing up who came to my godfather's funeral decades later to recount the positive impact of these two people in their lives.

While growing up, I heard many messages from her about women and children with the message that if you want a career or any sort of happy life, it is best not to have children. I particularly remember one story of her meeting a woman on a beach in Hawaii who was allegedly complaining to her that the men get to have all the fun while they are left on the side because they are the 'cow' because they have to physically feed the small children.  Eventually such things turned to statements of being glad that she never had children.  She would occasionally mention the children with problems that had been offered to them by the adoption agency.  They did not want these children. At the same time, I would go upstairs to their spare bedroom and find the nursery they prepared for the child that never came, complete with a crib and rocking horse.  Gradually the room filled with other discarded or saved items, but the rocking horse at least was there through my teen years.

As my godmother has aged many of her traits and proclivities seem to have calcified in the process.  As long as I can remember, she has made denigrating statements against my mother to me while at the same time claiming to be her friend.  These have only gotten more extreme as she as aged and become more erratic.  Finally, at the age of 42, I said no.  I said that I wanted to talk about something other than this. At the time, I knew for a fact she had not even seen or talked to my mother in months.

After the confrontation, I was left puzzling about this person who has been such a force in my life.  I know, at least from others if not from her herself, that not being able to have children was devastating.  It leaves me thinking about what we do with our disappointments in life.

What do we do when we realize that one thing we had wanted the most from life will not happen or is over, be it a career, a child, a relationship, a position or possession in this world?  For my godmother, my theory is that this disappointment turned into a great seed of bitterness hidden even below her own line of sight.  Her relationships with her students often became 'too much.'   She overstepped boundaries.  She became involved in their lives more than most teachers.  Some would say this is the hallmark of a good teacher, but in my case, certainly, it was too much.  In the patterns I've observed from a far with other students, and the reactions of their parents, I would guess that I wasn't the only one.

I also think about her duplicity and vitriol against my mother.  Where does that come from?  Could it be from the fact that my mother seemed to effortlessly achieve that one thing she had once wanted most of all?  Could it be that all of the things she had been taught to value as the measure of a human being, things she continually castigated my mother for lacking, had little to nothing to do with why one person had a child and another did not?  Or with why one person was happy with their life and another not?

It also leaves me thinking about my own career, or whatever this rambling job path I have followed could be called.  My own aspirations for a certain level and frequency of professional performance are well beyond what I have achieved or what I am on any track to achieve.  What do I do with this?  I have made certain choices in my life, and the consequences of those choices have often led me in other directions.  It also might be true that I am just not quite good enough, or that I didn't dedicate myself in the right ways at the right times, that I wasn't single minded enough.  And I think that is true to a point.  I am not single minded.  There have always been things that I have valued more than 'getting the gig.'

Still, when I am face to face with my disappointment, what do I do with this?  When it becomes clear that the shining dream will not be realized as you had envisioned, what do you do with that energy?  That seems to be so much of what defines a life.  What do you do with that disappointment?  How do you come to terms with the unwanted reality staring you in the face?

Even now, my godmother refuses to acknowledge her limitations.  At the age of 72, which of course is not that old, after strokes, falls, cognitive decline and other severe health issues, she refuses to acknowledge that independent living and a return to teaching are not just around the corner for her.  Perhaps I will be proved wrong, and I would like nothing more, but her inability to accept her situation continues to destroy relationships and alienate those who truly do love her.


(July 2018)

On the Dr. Ford's testimony against Kavanaugh

What really happened today...

White men of power:  "We believe her, but we don't care."

"If I were a younger man, I would be working for Kucinich."

“If I were a younger man, I would be working for Kucinich.”  - My father, 2003.

Long a fan of Dennis Kucinich, I stumbled across a recent article declaring him a man who has been ahead of his time for the majority of his political career.  They stopped short of declaring that his time has come, but this is something we may have some indication of when the Ohio Democratic Gubernatorial primary is held on May 8. 

 Here is a short list of reasons why I consider Kucinich worth voting for. 

·       Given an F rating by the NRA.  Supports an assault weapons ban.

·       Supports $15 minimum wage for Ohio.

·       Wants to end all fracking and drilling in Ohio.

·       Says he’ll turn the governor’s mansion into a homeless shelter.

·       Has two beagle mixes.  (Of course, I don’t vote for people because of their pets, but it is a plus.)

He also has a lifetime record of fighting for his principles.  The most notable of these was against the fight to privatize the city power utility when Kucinich was Mayor of Cleveland.  After struggling against powerful interests, including a hit placed on his life by a local mob boss, he eventually lost his reelection bid, but the city utility was not privatized.  In the 90’s Kucinich was cited by the City Council for his “courage”  which saved the people of Cleveland over $195 million dollars by keeping the utility in public hands. 

Returning to my father’s quote, early in 2003 my father declared his support for John Kerry.  Privately he made the above statement to me.  A political scientist and man who found great joy in the sport of politics, he had a long history of working for principled candidates who pushed issues forward but rarely had personal electoral success.   (See Gene McCarthy in 1976.  My father was on the ballot in Ohio as his running mate.)  Even so he had never been to a party convention, and he wanted to be a delegate.  Unbeknownst to me, he also knew that his mild cognitive decline was the beginning of something much larger and this would be one of his last campaigns.  Sadly, he was not chosen as a delegate, something he blamed on being just another white man. He poured his energies into the race, but at his core he saw the solutions to the problems of our society as being something that a candidate like Kerry, unlike Kucinich, would never address.