Collection

I have been in this room, but we were with Cicero, not Spock. An elegiac, good read. "The logic of mercy" ... yes ...

It's not news to me that the fashion industry produces a massive amount of the garbage we create, but ten percent is still an eye opening figure. Also, just a bit more for my TBR pile; thanks, Nature!

Speaking of fashion ... it's been some time since I linked an American Duchess piece, but how about - oh, sixteen pieces? Looking at the capsule wardrobe. Love the "just one black frock" image!

History which, not only did they fail to teach this in my schools, I literally have never even heard of these HUNDREDS of takeovers, or the IAT, before now. It seems like that's burial. It seems like that is colonial power and prejudice, still alive and well.

(T)rans joy is real

What a beautiful essay. Go click and be blessed

79

We miss you, dad.

Collection

I'm beginning to wonder whether I ought to change the title of my links posts from "collection" - being an occasionally churchgoing girl, sometimes it has the sound of an offering plate ...

One of the strange things that comes from global warming, after heat waves and insane, snow-stormy winters, and flooding and drought, is the archaeology uncovered in the latter of these disasters. The changing course of water, and of late especially drought, has literally exposed our past; and this is not the first time I've heard of it. Here, a not-exacly-a-"dig" at Vistula in Poland (as so often, via The History Blog). Resident archaeology experts encouraged to comment, ahem.


The History Girls has a lovely collection of portraits of women reading; the Japanese one is a nice addition to note. I am aware my blog skews heavily Euro-centric, even more so than American, so please take a look at the Kuniyoshi print; I actually have a great love of Japanese art. Perhaps I need to showcase this (or African or Mongol or Polynesian ... suggestions always welcome!).

Not quite in that vein exactly, we can take a look at a repurposing of foreign-distribution a particular cover for Penguin Classics. As he always does, the Caustic Cover Critic treats us not just to fascinating cover art, but his own worthwhile commentary.

Speaking of archaeologists - if you've ever wondered "What comes with an archaeology action figure?" the answer is here. (Product update: photogenic archaeologist has a couple more years on 'im now.) OSUM.

Okay, and now I must away. I have already rebuilt my bed an flopped the mattress (many people like to flip theirs occasionally, but when it's queen size and you do it singlehanded, it's definitely flopping), it is time to begin laundry, clean the cat box, and dust a bit. Related note: vintage Melissa Ethridge makes absolutely excellent housecleaning music.

Happy 78th birthday, dad. I'm celebrating by getting a few things DONE. Miss you.

That Day

Twelve years on, this is the day of the year I can't seem to control my anger. Hallmark emailed me about how I should handle this holiday, and I wanted to scream and rant. Deletion just is not enough.

Through the year, I can manage to get through every one of the thousands upon thousands of times I am told by my television, mail, and so on that I am a non-person because I do not belong to A FAMILY (I have family, yes; but the degree to which our politics and pop culture presumes all people are - or are supposed to be - members of a nuclear family is impossible to really "feel" for those who actually do; for those of us who do not, it is an inescapable imposition upon us that we don't belong to the world if we don't belong to one). But come May and Mother's Day, this day begins to bob up on the horizon. And there is no way around it.

Father's Day acknowledges NOTHING about those of us whose fathers are no longer with us. Never mind those whose fathers don't occupy that nuclear-familial role. What that must feel like I can't even imagine, but it's awful to contemplate.

I only know that the only thing I've been able to feel for this day, myself, for a dozen years is impotent anger. Impotent, not in the face of my father, but in the face of my CULTURE, which parades ugly shirts and power tools and stupid stereotypes at me for weeks on end, and cannot apparently conceive of death.

It is exhausting - the parade, and my own anger. I know the latter is a bag of rocks I collected for myself and it does nothing. But I let it live on, because I am not perfect and I don't want to be, and I have very little anger and hatred in my life. This ... Well, this doesn't actually hurt anyone. It is not aimed inward, it's not aimed at anyone. Only the faceless monolith of the idiotic and money-driven tone of the world I have chosen to stick with in life. Hallmark needs to bite it hard enough to break a tooth. But there's no ill wished on actual humans (or teeth).



On my dad's last Father's Day, I made sweet rolls and brought them to my parents' house. We ate out on their brick lanai in the back yard, then lay in the grass, lolled in the hammock, talked to each other in the iron patio furniture. My rolls weren't as good as grandma's - the sugar didn't completely caramelize with the butter. But they tasted good. My dad told me long ago, my bread was really good. It was good enough, that day.


That day is over.

This one ... isn't.

Dropping Science

We talked about science and morality as if the two were the same thing.
--Geoff Ryman, WAS

It's a funny thing, reading Was right after reading H. G. Wells' Marriage. The quote above comes from a long internal monologue from a character who is thinking about a period pretty darn close to that of Marriage, and echoes some of the aspirational philosophy of Wells' work.

Through the early decades of the twentieth century, science and discovery fed an American identity filled with pride in innovation . Certainly, this has its problems in itself, but undeniably it co-opted study and basic science into an support for applied science that was core to the hurtling progress of our nineteeth and twentieth centuries, and is such a part of what the nation is, for good and ill. We gained a reputation as plastic people, perhaps - but we also burgeoned with domestic productivity which later we became ashamed of and sold away, and have not yet quite rebuilt - even as we fear and revile those to whom we gave up manufacture and labor economically.

Image: Wikipedia

A year or so ago, I wrote a post about my dad and his religious faith, and the consternation I've always felt, that people imagine scientists are by definition godless. I took that post down because it was too personal, but I'll echo it now with this observation - when I came to him as a kid, upset because the good little southern Christians in my class taunted me that my father couldn't believe in G-d because he was a scientist ... dad told me that his faith was the very reason he studied the workings of the world. When I was little, he said it in simple terms; but we had that conversation all my life, and his curiosity and spiritual wonder were never far apart. He enacted it in more than his profession; he was engaged by how everything worked - history, cars, carpentry, our minds and hearts, even politics.

My experience with the "godless" kids began in the nineteen-seventies. But there has been a shift in the national psyche since then, especially strong in the eighties and nineties, and bringing us to a place where the idea topping this post is inconceivable to too many people. Born of the same kinds of folk who raised my old tormenters, and of those tormenters themselves, now busily teaching their children the same biases and fears. The Reagan years pushed off this shift, and the increasing primacy of faith and fear politically has confirmed its power.

Now we talk about science and morality as if they are antagonistic properties. We are short on kids wanting to enter the sciences, and treat those who do as curiosities - perhaps to be admired, and we know we need them, but still the adults in research and even development are subject to skepticism and a perception as odd, if not outright dangerous.

Research and science are constant sources of cultural anxiety, and I'm not going to say that is without good reason. But human innovation has always brought with it ethical questions, and those are insufficient reason to simply shut down our attempts to eff the ineffable.


We've gone from inheriting the wind to breaking it.

Effed

I emailed a voice mail message to myself at home today.

"Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable. ... Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.”
--Douglas Adams

One week before my dad died, we got cell phones. I recall him, mom, and me in their room, programming the little sneaker-shaped things, laughing at how amazing they were, playing with ring tones and so on, commenting about their appearance.

Dad was in bed that day, and we got the phones because his disease was terminal. Mom wanted to be able to reach out instantly in case of emergency.

We had no idea we had so little time left.

Long after he died, I read somewhere about the Columbia shuttle disaster, and was shocked and perplexed; I had no recollection of this event, and this is not the sort of event one easily misses. It had happened the day I was over at the house, playing with the phones. It’s entirely possible – even quite likely – that we were watching news of it that day. If I claimed to remember, I’d be convincing myself though.

An event I cannot erase, unfortunately, was the epochal broadcast of the Michael Jackson interview with Martin Bashir. This aired the night before he died – and after we did know.

Dad went to the hospital on a Friday afternoon, or perhaps it was morning. I went upstairs to my boss’s boss’s office, a still and stately area of our building, and interrupted a meeting between them. Anything my own boss said was blotted out by her boss, a man I still respect, admire, and am immensely grateful to to this day. He all but insisted upon getting me a car to the hospital. But I drove. I needed that time in the empty space of the cab of my beloved, first car. I needed to have it and the freedom of movement it brought with it, and I had the strangest fear of leaving it, like my purse, at my office – and then what, and then what, was all I could think, though I recognized how kind the offer was even as I refused. I needed the drive.

I needed somewhat less the turquoise Honda or Toyota with the Icthys and “GOT CHRIST” sticker on the back that cut me off on a steeply curved part of the freeway, where I spun out and ended at a standstill, facing east in the westbound lanes, and wondering (to this day, yes) whether that Christian ever knew what they’d done to me. Even just on the practical level.

The rest of the drive was safe, and the hospital was what hospitals are. Dad was in a grey cul-de-sac of the ER, it seems cluttered in my memory, but we were alone at least. Mom left us after a little while – ostensibly to eat or go get someone or talk to people or use that cell phone … but, I think, to leave us alone. Mom doesn’t always work that way, but that day, she did.

And that day, we still didn’t know.

Before she left, the three of us were talking about my boyfriend. We’d only been seeing each other a few weeks – our first date was on my parents’ anniversary, in fact – and he was coming to visit the next day. I was thirty-four, they could see I was smitten, everything was heightened with dad being in the hospital, and this was his first visit. Mr. X.

Mom wanted him to come to the hospital (we’d learned by that point they were admitting dad, they were just waiting for a room). Dad was flat against that. Not the right place. Not the right time. “Another time, Helen.” And he would not be brooked. I was to enjoy our first visit, and a little celebration which had nothing to do with hospitals.

I wasn’t anxious for any brooking myself, not least because – good gravy, what pressure to put on a new guy. I agreed to dad’s proclamation that I would follow through with celebration, and he and Mr. X would meet some other time.

The backstory here is that dad wasn’t a big one with the I Will Not Be Brooked thing. He tended to appreciate my mom’s motivations, and if he didn’t he indulged them. She wasn’t a bad planner, it worked out most of the time. But in a hospital gown and in a poor state of health – not the way he planned to meet the new boy. No. Period. Done. No anger, and no flexing of power. Just a blank absolute, baldly laid down, no more drama than that.

Then he had an attack.

When dad had an attack, he called it the dragon. Dad hated that goddamned dragon. Hated it – and, like the brooking thing: dad was not given to hatred.

He told mom to give him an Oxycodone, and she remonstrated, and he cursed that he didn’t care about prescription guidelines, he needed it and he was going to take the pill.

He took it. Mom left. And he and I sat alone, talking about Cicero and Rome and Sulla and Marius.

And then the room was ready. I seem to have left, perhaps to go home and change clothes, because I then recall coming back to the hospital, suddenly filled with family – and we knew. We knew. We knew.

I hate that goddamned dragon.

No memory of the Challenger, but memory of Martin Bashir and spitting, icy, snowy weather. Bitter stuff. Pretty only on the skylights outside dad’s window. Memory of that long-ago neighbor, of my cousin V, of getting dad into the bed. And a morphine shot.

That was the end, then – the prosaic fussings of a man transferring into a real hospital bed out of an ER one. His abject little cotton gown, socked feet. Orderly, nurse, someone giving him the morphine once he was settled. And gone. No more chance, ever again. No return. No more conversation. Breathing, still, as hideously awful as that process had become. But gone. Irretrievable.

His flesh purple and his muscles thin.

Gold wedding band *glowing* in that twilight.

And me and mom and Mojourner. Only us.

Phone calls on that silvery sneaker, at all hours, in the hallway. I must have called Mr. X, told him. He was still going to come. He was still going to come.

We talked about the plans. Nobody else was with us, it must have been so late. No television by then. Only snow, blackness and glaring hospital parking lot lights. And us. We knew – and could not imagine.

Great Xs of snow on those domed skylights. Falling, then slipping away, occluding the light in soft-edged X shapes.

Dad’s skin so soft.

Mom made us both leave. Get some sleep, she enjoined us. I think I did go to bed, because I have this memory that through much of the next day I was wearing the pants I wore to bed. Fortunately, not obviously pajamas. But yes. That exhaustion, that emotional fume, social oblivion. Living, that day, in the sacred space-time of mourning.

Glowing.

Talking with my best friend TEO at some bitter hour of the morning, knees up, pressed against the hallway wall, sitting on the gleaming floor.

Mom spooned him all night. He died where his heart lived; wrapped up in her.

She called us at 4:30 and we came back. It was like, and unlike, the time we spent alone with him sleeping. But he was there still.

Still.

Stilled.

I held his hand, and some residual electricity spasm’d, pulsed. It didn’t feel like magic. It didn’t mean anything. Even still warm. I knew this was a body. With a wedding band glowing on it.

I did not see him after that. Some did, but I held to his wish he not be … viewed. I treasure those who needed that. Some saw him after his eyes had been harvested, head bandaged, Teiresias destined for an oven, mute, and no longer my daddy. I know why they held his hand then.

I’d held his hand already. That was finished.

And then a blur, a rush, the longest day in the world. I cannot talk to you about that day. Must not, it feels like. Too many things.


***


Some time later, my mom handed me a Valentine’s Day card without telling me. It was from dad. Opening that almost killed me.

But there was one treasure.

Dad had left a voice mail, that day – that dark Columbia day – that day we’d all been at the family house, the day he’d been in his own bed, the day we were smiling over those nifty phones. He’d left me his voice.  “Hello (phone number)” that gruff, joyous voice of his.

He hadn’t known.



I lost that recording, long long ago.

I don’t need it. Any more than I needed to hold or see his body after it became the domain of orderlies and donations and morgues.

But I miss it.


***


So, today, when my mom left me a recording my email dutifully saved to a file. I sent it home.

January 30

Today is the 85th birthday of Gene Hackman, an actor I’ve always enjoyed. Years ago, a friend told me my dad reminded them of him very strongly – and, though there is no physical resemblance in their looks, I’ve always remembered that. Hackman has a gruff voice yet warmth that does indeed have some similarity my dad’s presence.

Today is also someone else’s birthday, someone else who loved my dad.

And in less than two weeks, it’ll be the anniversary of the day he died. It will be twelve years now, and I won’t be obvious about how it all feels. Only this: when we were bereft of him, I came to understand ancestor-veneration, something so many cultures across the world have shared, but which is considered almost unseemly in our own. Only this: I am incapable of not measuring the lives of others against the span My Father was given. Wilt Chamberlain died younger. Gene Hackman is several years older, and still with us.

It’s not a contest. But it’s impossible not to measure, when someone is cut short. Impossible not to think about what the real dad would have been like at seventy-seven. Impossible not to want, still, to talk with him. To think, “I bet if he were alive, I’d have pushed harder on my book; it’d be published by now.”

Gene Hackman is a historical novelist, did you know?


Today is also Friday, it’s pay day, and tomorrow I have a date for Girls’ Night Out. I’m looking forward to a good weekend; even if, right now, I am indulging a very Lush Case of hormones indeed.

Happy Gene Hackman’s birthday (or Charles I’s death day – or Balthild’s day – or whatever you prefer)!

ZPG ... and Little Beasts

It was only a couple of weeks ago that I learned my dad, whose chief pride, joy, and commitment in life were his kids and his love for mom, actually worried a lot about having children.  He was extremely concerned about global overpopulation – and this was fifty years ago, kids, back when the world’s population was a mere pittance at just over three billion (we’re around seven billion now, if you believe The Internet).  He had no such qualms about marriage itself, interestingly enough – my parents were wed within three months or so of meeting one another – and the story goes that he was asking my aunt (his sister, married before he was) “Is it true two can live as cheaply as one?” very quickly once he met my mom.

I had a bit of the good, old-fashioned population fear myself when I was younger, intermingled with the “do I want to bring a child into *This World*” angst I think many of us get, without really allowing it to take concrete form.  But, above all, my failure to procreate stems from the lack of desire to do so.

My mom and I were antiquing one day, and somehow it came up – a bright, sunny Saturday afternoon, and I learned that dad had once been very concerned about global population growth.  Coming along well after this question had become moot for him, of course – I knew only a dad whose greatest fulfillment was in his kids and wife.  I can’t honestly remember whether she asked me, but I told her I had not had children because I never experienced that driving desire some people have, and it seemed to me that, lacking that, it would be incredibly unwise to have kids anyway.  She seemed to accept this; either because she knows me well, or because she herself has not endured the world’s most painful urge for more grandchildren (she does have two), it’s always seemed to me that she wasn’t het up about my providing them.  I can recall a time when people pushed me a bit about having children, but I can’t recall my mother being one of those to whom it seemed to mean a great deal to dictate my procreative habits.

Mom’s strongest guidance in that department, in fact, always came in the form of explaining in no uncertain terms the very negative consequences of my becoming pregnant out of wedlock, and the expectations of my continence in this department.  (Indeed, she was still having nightmares about my showing up on the doorstep knocked up after I turned forty, though I haven’t heard about such a dream in the past year or two.  Heh.)

Truth be told, I used to have a potent fear – and I’m not really cured of it, though the point is to my mind clearly moot by this time, aged forty-six – that I would be abusive.  This is not owing to any such example, but when I reached twenty or so I just had an instinct about my impatience and temper – my twenties were not good years for equanimity and tolerance – and this stuck with me even to the point I still feel guilty about the way I treat my poor pets sometimes.  Pen doesn’t behave like an abused child, but I’ve given her a shout or two – partiuclarly during the house-training months - not proud to remember.

It doesn’t come up much anymore, that people find me unnatural for not having children – but, at this point in life, I do sometimes catch the glimmer of strangeness when people realize I have not.  The discomfort is hardly what it was during my “child bearing years”, but it remains an unnecessary awkwardness I wish people could avoid, even those who don’t know they’re reacting to it.  At times like starting a new job and so on, the failure to be a participant in a 4-member nuclear family in the correct neighborhood does come up again and again.  Given the photos of my nieces at my desk, too, there’s always the explaining to do.

So after all these years of the subliminal layer of my life, in which dealing with my unnaturalness in this regard is a perpetual, but very quiet, buzz in my eardrums, it was interesting to consider my father … as a man who wasn’t perhaps completely sure he wanted to be a father.

Well, he WANTED that.  But he was capable of questioning it.

Let it be said, once he plunged into the wide world of parenthood, there was no way to tell if he ever questioned it again.  My suspicion is:  no.  He was committed to us, to my mom, in a way I’ve rarely seen anyone commit to anything.  The worst memories are the confirmation of this – the time I verbally beat him up when he all but did a term paper for me – and I didn’t like the way he did it.  (Eesh.)  The time I rejected a present he was so pleased to have bought for me.  That one still makes me queasy, and it’s been probably twenty-five years.  The fights I picked, with my brother and/or my mom.  I wasn’t a nice kid any more than I was a nice twenty-something, and if his devotion EVER flagged, he concealed it utterly.  And dad is the person in this world who knew more about me than anyone living except for Mr. X.

I think about the generosity of his love, its limitless capacity and tolerance and patience and bounty, and it makes me weep and I am humbled.  I’ll probably never love like that in my life – though what I felt for and wished I could give to Mr. X is more than I ever would have imagined when we met.  What I have given.  I may not love like my dad, but I am damned steady, maternal instinct or no.

Years on, and ageing somewhat now, it’s hard not to look back on my thinking when I “could have” done this or that, and not think I was making excuses.  But the omission of parenting has never been in doubt.  I can remember naming babies when I was eighteen years old, with my First Love.  But I cannot recall a single moment in my life, hearing the tick-tock of the Biological Clock, nor wishing anything had been different in this.  I’ve never regretted not becoming a mother, either.

Maybe my omission is the balance to dad’s allowance.  I held off where he sallied forth.

Or maybe I’m just my own odd and lonesome beast, wandering the plain on the margins and enjoying untrammeled grass.  It can get lonesome – and even scary, knowing jackals pick off the loose ends.  But I seem never to have needed to contribute more little-beasts to the herd.

Bones, Baubles, Irrelevancies

The interest we’ve seen, during the past year, in bones of centuries-gone kings such as Richard III and now that possible fragment of Alfred the Great – and, indeed, the perennial interest humankind has in the remains of our dead, has had me thinking about this most singular form of artifact.  One of the most influential religious faiths history has ever seen has institutionalized the reverencing of dead martyrs’ bodies, from proposing incorruption and corpses’ divinely sweet fragrances as evidence of saintliness to prayers offered before knucklebones and holy f*reskins.  It is not merely the entombment, nor even the spiritual care, of the dead which seems to drive us, but that ineffable affinity humans have for transforming the material into the mystical.

Our attraction to “things” and “stuff” has always been a double-edged sword.  There are epochally powerful religions formulated *against* attachments to the material world, warning against earthly attachments.  And yet, even those faiths have yielded art and artifacts throughout history; indeed, the destruction of Buddhist statues can be decried as a crime even as the veneration of relics may be derided as idolatry.

Human beings are a fascinating lot – and so many of us contain both these impulses:  the resistance to materialism we think on one hand ought to guide us … and the pathological desire to collect possessions and experiences with objects, which sometimes also takes on a moral overtone, or gains traction with sentiment.  How many families have we seen, who come to blows over who-gets-what when a loved one (or, at least, a family member) dies?  How many secrets have been kept, protecting some line of inheritance or material “equality” in division of such spoils?  My brother and I both have had conversations with our mom, about concerns she has that each of us should be treated equally.  We might have cared about that when we were kids (or perhaps it was only me …) – but as we’ve grown older, we’re just grateful she’s with us.  In the end, his daughters will get it all anyway – heh.  Much as I love my pets, they won’t do any good with the perfectly baffling array of vintage costume jewelry I’ve amassed in my lifetime (and, indeed, I imagine my nieces won’t have much use for many of the bits, bobs, and baubles of my estate, when it comes to it).  My mom might fret about who will get what, or perhaps what the fate may be of things she has strong emotional associations for, and wants to see those emotional value-settings continued – “this was a ring your grandfather gave me” or “this was your great-great aunt’s piece of farm equipment” and so on – but our family may not have the stamina for attaching the same values to things that were held before us.

One of those things I know we do hold onto, though – is my father’s remains.  This is not a single body in a casket, but a parcel of ashes – each of us has a small amount, and the rest we entombed in a columbarium.  Dad has graced, since his death, the waves off a sacred parcel of coast in Hawai’I, a certain place where his sister lived, my grandmother’s casket, a few baggies, a box with a dragon on it, and whatever sacred vessels my mom and my brother have found for their concrete memory of his person.  I once defiled a piece of furniture owned by my beloved Jewish cousin, my best friend, a table given to me by her and now rather un-kosher, having had a dead man’s ashes sitting on it.  She suggested that the ritual with a spotless red calf would be a bit much to “cleanse” something merely touched by a Gentile she loved so much herself – and yet, even our awareness of this symbolic uncleanliness speaks again to the stuff of death, its ceremony, its – please pardon me, I don’t mean to make a joke – undying presence for us all.

There is a Donald Harington character, Eli Willard, who lives long, long – beyond the normal expectations of our lifetimes – and who, after he passes on at last, is preserved and enshrined in a glass casket.  For the century after his death, Willard’s body is variously exhibited, hidden away, lost, found, treated as a curiosity, as a talisman, and – at long last – he is put to rest.  In that earth to which so many of us expect to return when we die.  Eli’s material presence is thematically, philosophically powerful; magical.

My dad’s presence is closer to the ground, for me – I don’t pray to him; I don’t pray through him.  And yet, the day he died, I came instantly to understand and appreciate many cultures’ practices of ancestor worship.  I pine, sometimes, for the hope he could even only intercede in my life, if we may no longer participate in it together.  But that is selfishness, and vain magic at that.  I don’t turn to his little dragon box when I am in confusion, nor sit with it to the strains of Important Music and tears and candlelight.

But I have that box.

I have the painting of Einstein one of his students once gave him, too.  There are objects, important objects – throughout my life and home – born of the relationships in my life, and born of their own relationships, inherited by me.  My grandparents’ wedding portrait (two separate photos actually, merged and softly hand-tinted, framed, and so long a part of my family I hardly know where all it has hung and hidden), the pictures drawn and painted by my mama’s mother, the furniture which dates back, some of it, something like ninety years.  We are all artifactories, and not least of those Things we leave behind is our bodies themselves.  Even things left long before we die – that box with my hair in it, from when I was a little girl – and some of my mother’s.  Baby teeth, kept in little keepsake boxes.  Fingerprints, baby footprints, plaster casts, bronze baby booties, the lines on a wall showing what child was how tall, when.

We record and enshrine our bodies even before our souls depart them.  We even entomb spirit without body; empty, and false, graves abound around the world, throughout history.

The Cenotaph of Abraham
Image:  Wikimedia

But it is the stuff of death we protect most fiercely.  The furore over Richard’s authenticity, the deep excitement over Alfred’s purported hip … we don’t care because we care so much about the royals themselves.  We care because our stewardship of the dead, itself, never dies.  How many nobles the world over have been buried, exhumed, and reconsecrated unto the ground centuries later?  Why is it Oliver Cromwell’s decapitated noggin has its own Wikipedia page?  Because we use these bodies – these parts – both to mark our care and disposal of those we feel matter for good or ill; and we use our observation of their deaths to mark how it *is* we feel … and how we felt before.  Veneration comes and goes.  Our need to reflect that veneration – or desecration (read that article on Cromwell’s head to understand the power of vengeance, even upon the dead) does not.

I am interested to find out whether the hip bone might be Alfred’s.  Not because of the artifact’s eventual fate (still, intriguingly, unfolding before us, a thousand years and more since his life expired), but because its PATH is itself a fascinating story.  As Eli Willard’s life after death is.  As the paths, and analyses, of every mummy we’ve ever disturbed and peered at with questions beyond the relevancy of those who preserved the remains.  The story of Otzi is riveting, compelling.  It’s science, but it only matters to us because we reach out to Otzi as humans – as those seeking to understand what went before, to reassure ourselves of what may come after.

There are those of us who might relish the idea of being found in a thousand – in ten thousand – years from now, being able to tell, by our persons, something of who we were, of where we lived and what mattered.  There are those for whom the idea is blasphemous, anathema.  Our own studies of the ancient dead are hardly beyond ethical questioning – no matter how fascinating I find these inquiries, I still know what it means to disturb those who should be at rest (to disturb cultures, and dust long settled – the dust to which we all will return).  I would not mind, myself, being the subject of such curiosity.  But I will perhaps leave no anatomical artifact behind – as someone dear to me once pointed out, it’s not like there’s anyone to visit my grave.  And graves themselves are a real estate issue in our world, with implications and ethics all their own.  It might be nice to have myself buried biodegradably, and make such questions moot.  But I may become ashes myself, eventually invisible and un-study-able.  Perhaps I can convince myself there is inscrutable power in being thus ineffable, heh.

What will become of that little dragon box with my father in it.

What will become of me.

When it comes down to it, I’m not sure I care very much at all.  Even vain as I am, it’s not like I’ll be here to enjoy any fate – or revile it – my earthly remains may come to.  The idea of occupying a little clay box, unregarded, at one of my nieces’ homes, seventy years hence, doesn’t appeal to nor revulse me – it just seems irrelevant.  (What THEY need of me, they have always had, and that has nothing to do with Things and Stuff.)  I don’t even think about what my books will mean to anyone, once my body and my estate dissipate and fade away.  Immortality means nothing to me – if it did, I would have had children, I imagine.  (And yet … here I am, blogging my blithering brains away …)  The stuff of my death, as much as the stuff of my life, may go where it will and I’m not going to fret now nor in the hereafter about that.  If there is a hereafter, I’ll hope to see those who may dispose of that stuff, when they are at the point of their own disposal.  I am flotsam, and this doesn’t bother me – it’s as much an irrelevancy as Things and Stuff are supposed to be, according to certain philosophies.  I contain multitudes, but nothing fools me into ascribing immortality to that – and no amount of collecting, holding on to, and curating the artifacts of my life makes me honestly believe that what I imbue with meaning contains that meaning in its own right.  I’m content with my earthbound avarice – and will be just as content, when relieved of the condition, to know it will not survive me.

Cross-Referencing Life

It started this morning, when on "Smallville" the egregious Lois gives Clark a speech about how the yet-unnamed, and yet-unknown-to-her hero (at this point in the series, cringingly referred to as The Blur) PROTECTS her by never revealing his identity.  Oh, but it wasn't about to stop there.



Today is my dad's 75th birthday.  He may not be with us to celebrate anymore, but to say "would have been" his birthday is dirty to me.  The day still is.  He just isn't the physical constant, with us, we once had.

I streamed up some Neil DeGrasse Tyson tonight - and the ep of Nova Science Now Netflix had on top of its stack, happens to be "Where Did We Come From?"  An apt choice - we grew up on Nova, on PBS, on Sagan and James Burke and learn-y stuff and adventure-y stuff like Wild Kingdom and National Geographic.  Not even all of it televised, either, kids.

Toward the end of this episode, we have a look at the science of memory, and a pretty good discussion about the nature of identity and humanity, in the context of memory making us who we are.

"Imagine:  you're an adult person, and you spent a lot of time accumulating an identity.  You might not like that identity ... but the very notion that you could literally remove all of it--I don't know what you would be.  I'm not sure you'd be human." --Andre Fenton

Some of the nastiest disagreements I have ever had in my life actually turned on the morality of this question.  Specifically, disagreements with Mr. X.  He's not, shall we say, the most self-satisfied person I ever met.  On occasion, he has wished it were possible that I could be delivered of ever having known him.  He thinks this is the height of morality - the desire to remove a stimulus or stressor which (from a certain, limited perspective) is a negative.

To my mind, of course, the loss of self that represents is unconscionable.  It's all very cute for sci-fi or magic to provide "solutions" for perceived victims of evil, saving them from the memory of an event ... or a person.  Superman thinks he's a great guy for PROTECTING (fostering the ignorance of) the inferior (female) Lois.  The girl in Harry Potter like mind-wipes her parents, apparently quite the heroism (I seethingly care for no part of at all).

We all lie to save people.  But to actually usurp from those around us ... *who they are* - by removing their experience of tragedy, betrayal, hatred, heartbreak - there is no standard by which this can be made whole, by which this can be made morally acceptable.

X has pointed out, as I should here, his impulse is never to actually DO this thing.  Were there such a power (don't ask Dr. Fenton for the "help"), he knows it would be un-wieldable.  And so it seems to him that to be a *theoretical* good, a desire for someone beloved not to have to experience pain.

This is how we misjudge ourselves.  Life can't be conducted without pain - and life without the experience of X (as he knows) isn't worthy of the name.  I don't mean that I would kill myself if I hadn't known X:  I mean that what knowing him has given me (far apart from anything HE has, directly, given me by volition) is as important to me as what knowing my dearest, oldest friends, what knowing my family endowed me with.  The aspects of the person I've become in the ten years since I met him are peerlessly valuable.  The person I am now is not merely someone I would not give up, but is a self I would give my all to defend.  The very idea of alteration, of loss, of all these past ten years have made of me is offensive beyond almost anything else I can conceive.

And I have a high threshold of offense.  It takes a great deal to put me in the state.



Today is my dad's birthday, and even if I don't get to talk with him anymore, the woman I am is made and honed in tribute to My Father.  I'm human, and flawed, and weak, and manipulative ... but I am proud of those parts of me beyond these things.  Proud of the offering I have become - and unashamed that my offering is not just to my father, but made through every single day, in almost everything I do.

The Horror of Loss

It's a long weekend, so timing is strange, and nothing is happening as normal. Not feeling well, I took a two hour nap today on the chaise, and just now I finally recommitted to cleaning the house.

I dropped my father's old transistor radio. Circa probably sometime in the 1940s, this was a mahogany colored bakelite little breadbox, and had still worked even as recently as when we were kids. It was fully intact, still had all components and tubes, and would even buzz quietly if actually plugged in and turned on. And I have shattered its case.

My instant response to this was to fall to the floor in shards myself, loud sobs, terrible tears.

I know that the loss of a thing attached to a man is fearful only because it is one less piece of HIM. Because it reminds us that as time passes, there will be less and less. It's not about the object; the object is a symbol.

My brother trades in symbols like that, saving what has been hidden, and calling it artifact.

My mom is able to ascribe symbolism to approximate objects - not the "real" thing from her childhood, she can still attach the immortality imbued in artifacts into new artifacts like the ones actually attached to memory.

I live surrounded by artifacts. The beautiful tables TEO has let me hold onto, which stood silent at the center of warm afternoons at her father's. The chair my sister-in-law upholstered, in which I sit typing right now. The television X left with me, and the DVD player he gave me the day my father died. The paintings of my grandmother, the globe, always beside this radio, which my dad had as a kid. There are pieces of my grandparents', parents', siblings', even my nieces' lives all over this cheering, welcoming house. They MAKE it cheering and welcoming. They make it feel "warm" to me in that ineffable way beside the point of temperature.

My very father's cremains, in his little dragon box.



This is why I could never in good faith (har de har) be a Buddhist. I'm a believer in the cult of Stuff.

Breaking my father's radio means there is one less (intact) thing of his in the world.

Maybe my brother's old advice - to bury some piece of it in one place, other pieces of it far away, in some archaeologically-impossible configuration - is the next response.

Now is not the time to contemplate disposal.

Now is the time to still the wracking horror, to sit in this good chair, to be glad of those things which do survive, to survey my blessings, to nullify my self-blame for something which isn't even a crime.

Now is the time to clean this house.

Now is the time to be glad of the father I had ... *have* ... who was so fine a man that the very loss of his childhood radio is occasion for such anguish. Tears and flapdoodle.


***


The anniversary is coming, and I'm surviving a lush case. What once was a radio had become just a piece of silent decor. I know better than that this is genuinely loss.

But I know enough, too, to experience this sadness, to know it for what it is. And to be so grateful I have so much to lose. How blessed my dad made me.

How like a little kid in the way I miss him.

Santa's Little Helper

Dad was, for years, in his baggie in a beautiful box upstairs, quiet, but generally far from me physically. When I found him his box, I kept him in the guest room for a while, afraid of knocking the lid off, and frankly not knowing where to put him. More recently, I put him in a niche in my bedroom; a quiet and fragrant spot where he would be unlikely to be disturbed.

Today I brought him down to help me decorate the tree.

I want him down here; where it is warm, where life really lives. Not to be displayed, not to be a trophy. Somewhere safe.

The bookshelves would be appropriate, but are not yet ideal to my mind. There is a drawer he could stay in, unseen, central, safe. Something like that. Ever present. As he is.

For now, he's helping deck the halls. Soon I'll know where he should stay for a while.

Another Part of My Spirit

The day began bright and beautiful, a phrase chosen very much with a winking smile and a finger tapping the side of the bridge of my nose. Today was the blessing of the animals at church.

I've never gone to one of these, but always found it a charming idea. I realize, too, there is more than one way to skin a cat (har) spiritually - and this does have an importance to it. The service was held outside, and the thing I noticed was that the presence of our animals provided ways and reasons for our fellowship to speak with one *another* in ways which ordinarily we do not. Even as welcoming and loving as this congregation has always been to me, today had something special about it.

I love my dear dog, and consider her a blessing. But in blessing her, once again, I was the receiver.

I had the priest speak to her, not as Sidney, but as Lolly. The name I use with her the most. The softer one. The one which came as a song, the one which rose like mist from HER - not the name once given to her by people who gave her up. My sweet little La.

And, bless her all over again, she was such a good - and HAPPY - girl.


***


Dad loved her. She is a great sitting-at-your-feet-and-sighing-quietly dog, and she is also an archetypally DOG-gy dog. She's not too small, but she's terribly cute. She's not too barky, but when she does speak she has the power of an animal. She's playful, but content. She's aristocratic looking, but a perfect mutt. Mixed and made, she's absolutely excellent.


***


So today I blessed my dog, and found (I hope) rest for my father.

A good day.

I'm going to finish cleaning. Then, I think, oatmeal with cinnamon for dinner. Just the nice, warm thing to enjoy.

Rest

I forgot one thing.

When dad was fighting to be able to breathe ...



... he said he was fighting the dragon.


***


Either I have made a horrible mistake, or the dragon is honoring the hero.



I put his ashes in the box today. It was an exact perfect fit. When I put the lid on, pushed its crease into the rim of the little clay bowl, a tiny grey puff arose. Breath of the dragon.



I wonder whether I have done a terribly wrong thing. Only one person who reads here can tell me. And I'm listening.


***


I miss you, dad.

It's hard, and it is harder without you. I'm sorry I made it harder for you, too.



All I could say. No prayer for this one.

The Vault That Made Me Be

My father has been dead almost eight years, and in that time he has been in a box.

Ordinarily, this would be appropriate; except that we cremated his body. And it is a small portion of his cremains I am talking about. My part of dad's ashes. And the box they are in is a jewelry box.

In a baggie.

Ziploc - though I'm not sure it isn't an off brand bag. I don't think it's even got the yellow-and-blue-make-green closing seam. It definitely doesn't have one of those newfangled hard plastic zippy-closey-handle things they do now.

So off and on, over the years, I have looked in different places to find a good place to put my piece...s, of my father.

I never liked the idea of a glass bottle. He didn't want his body viewed - though a few did go to say goodbye to him. After they had removed his eyes. His bandaged face was the last some saw of dad.

The last I saw of him was his still-warm hand, his bright wedding band, in his hospital bed. The way his hand infinitessimally contracted on mine.


***


I have looked at soapstone keepsake boxes ... carved wooden ones ... many kinds. I've talked with my brother about his carving one. I've had one friend, TT, who warmed to the idea of helping me find something. T is so lovely.



Today was simply a glorious day. This is the season my father loved best - classes underway, crisp days coming to cleanse the heat and sweat of summer - the time of year, through history, so many of us who live with seasons have chosen for reflection and renewal. Mom happened to call me, and I was excited when she wanted to go to Carytown. And in Carytown is Ten Thousand Villages. Exactly the sort of place one might find a small, lovely place ... to put one's father's ashes.


***


When I was little (... and isn't that a funny phrase, out of a middle-aged woman? I realize, those words are ones you usually hear from people under the age of ten ...), my dad used to tell us the story of how mama made him marry her.

Mama worked at a bank.

She kept a dragon in the vault.


***


The box is small and clay. The dragon is wonderful. It happens, too, that of course dragons are magic, as was my father. That dragons are often joyous, and sometimes even amusing. Sometimes quite dear.

And dragons are auspicious. They are good - and *great* - symbols.

My dad will rest guarded by a dragon. Seems right.



And now I want to dig out the book my brother gave me once. "An Instinct for Dragons."

Most Post

By far the most-hit page in my blog.

You humble me, just looking at that.

Thank you.

Evenings of September

Tonight is what my father called "a soft night."

I think my dad found nights like this almost unbearably romantic.



Says someone unexpected, who hasn't seen a night like this in years: they *are*.

Hagen - Five

On a 100-plus degree day, you feel the heat in a very particular way. I am grateful it wasn't humid today, but the heat was prodigious nonetheless.

Thus it was, when I went to the ice cream aisle in the grocery store: I wanted something minty. Nothing creamy, nothing even overly sweet. I wanted mint. Cool, frozen mint.

A month or two ago, I tried Hagen Dasz dark chocolate mint, and it was amazing. That was the perfect thing for today: nice quality cocoa flavor, not very sweet, not very strong, but a nice mintiness. Sadly, today - no luck.

I went for Hagen Dasz Five's mint flavor instead. It wasn't chocolate, but I think HD does a good 'scream, so I was up for a try.

The mint, in the end, was actually a hair too minimal for what I meant to be looking for.

But what I found instead was the closest thing I've ever tasted to my dad's homemade ice cream.



Sitting on that block-thick bench we had, out under the oak in the center of the backyard. Cranking, cranking. He'd put us on in shifts, each of us pumping at the old wooden ice cream maker, the steel hardware, the wooden handle smooth against the palm. I suppose he probably didn't leave us on the job all that long individually, but as the ice cream freezes the pumping gets harder to manage. Five minutes of pushing those wooden paddles through the stiffening custard, down inside its canister, down inside the ice and salt in the bucket: it gets to be a long time, in summertime. Particularly when you just want the ice cream. Or, for that matter: the CUSTARD we made it from.

My lawd, that homemade custard. Who needs ice cream ... ?

Well: dad.

Dad LOVED ice cream. The only job he ever wasn't good at was working at an ice cream counter, heh. Custard was fine to be served with mom's homemade blackberry cobbler, after a day when we went out to the farm and stopped on the way home from seeing family, and picked and picked and picked. Virginia blackberries. Mmm.

Oh, but custard - dad's ideal custard - was for pouring into the canister. Paddling. Freezing. Churning.



Father's Day, seven years after his death. Eight years since my last Father's Day with a living dad of my own. I ate ice cream (made with five ingredients - hence the name - milk, cream, eggs, sugar, and - in this case - a touch of mint), and it tasted a bit like daddy used to make. It even melted like that ice cream used to.

I miss you, dad. You were the very, very best.