The Truth of Ourselves

 

We have to see our own faults,

our own shortcomings 

and complicity with evil

before the full weight of truth

can inhabit our minds and we

truly see what is to be seen.

Until that happens the truth 

about ourselves and the society

we inhabit is intolerable.

It can only be experienced

with denial as an intermediary,

a filter, a fudge, to protect us 

from the truth of ourselves and

what we (mis)perceive 

of the world around us.  

Until that happens there is only justification, not truth.

Kindergarten in Knightstown

 

My younger sister’s kindergarten teacher sent me a Facebook friend request today.  Funny thing is, we moved to Orleans, Indiana in the summer before my first grade year so she was never my kindergarten teacher.  That doesn’t mean we can’t be friends, but it does kind of violate my loose and unspoken rule to not friend anyone I do not know directly or have not known long enough to feel some connection to.

***

I went to kindergarten in Knightstown, Indiana.  My teacher’s name was Mrs. Stroop.  She had  medium-length brown hair pulled back in some fashion with a part down the center of her head and large glasses.  I don’t remember her being either mean or particularly nice.

Our tables were close to the ground and rectangular shaped.  I would guess there were about six of them with six kids each, three to a side, though that is likely an overestimation.  They were color coded via a round construction paper circle taped at one end.  I sat at the purple table with a kid who had a reputation for being the smartest kid in the class.

I remembered his name well into adulthood but now in my 50’s I can no longer recall it.  He looked like a little man with his hair neatly parted on the side and a kind of quiet gravitas.  I had not yet become acquainted with Mr. Rogers, but in retrospect this boy looked like the child version.  His presence at my table was somehow reassuring, like having our own teacher’s aid if the assignment proved too difficult or inscrutable.  

***

Memories at this point are random.  I built a cool extended drag racer with some pieces from a tube-shaped can and then put the finished product back in carefully and put the lid on it thinking I could preserve it indefinitely that way.  Another kid tried to open the can and I prevented him from doing so by saying “No!” in no uncertain terms which got me in trouble with the teacher.  I was preserving my artistic creation for future use but she reframed it as a problem with “sharing”.  It was very un-Mr. Rogers-like of me and simply the beginning of a long and illustrious career of mischievousness in school that put me at odds with many of my teachers.

***

That particular school had an old gymnasium attached to it.  On rainy days during recess we ran around pell-mell on the basketball floor and scurried up on the stage with teachers constantly imploring us to get off the stage, slow down, and not shove each other.  There was a Christmas program there that year and I sat in the dark on a chair facing the stage with a few hundred other people.  There was a huge calendar of December on the back wall of the stage.  It was decorated like a winter wonderland that I found strangely comforting and being there at night with my parents only intensified the feeling.  My older sister was in the program wearing an outfit that matched everyone else's that I seem to recollect was a white top and black skirt for the girls and black slacks for the boys.

Sitting a few seats over in the dark was a neighbor of ours.  She was what I would refer to as “rough around the edges”.  She was poor and talked in a way that was full of slang and bad grammar that I found disquieting coming from an adult.  Once when I was at her house her young son was eating peanut butter from the jar and began choking on something.  She became loud and panicky and when the obstruction in his throat was dislodged he vomited.  It might have been a marble.  I did not return to that house and I have not liked peanut butter since.  At the Christmas program her daughter was prancing out on stage behind my sister when suddenly her mother’s voice rang out in the darkness, “Pull up your skirt, Boo Boo!”

***

Twelve years later that small gym would become famous.  It was preserved so well over the years without any significant updates that they used it in the movie “Hoosiers” which is set in the 50’s.  I don’t have to tell you how surreal it was to watch that movie as a high school senior and see the gym that I hadn’t been in since kindergarten in 1974.  It continues to this day to be preserved for its historical significance and can be visited if you are ever in Knightstown.  

Interestingly enough my wife went to Butler University and we’ve been to Hinkle Fieldhouse for a basketball game.  That gym was also featured in “Hoosiers” because it was used for years as the venue for the Indiana high school basketball championship game.

***

So, Mrs. E, you may have never been my kindergarten teacher but your friend request sent me running down memory lane.  I now anticipate waking up in the middle of the night in the near future with that kid’s name from the purple table made evident to my conscious mind.  I imagine these days he is probably a NASA scientist or CEO of a company… and I am still mischievous.  

Archbishop Paul has Passed

 

The cardinal sings 

sweetly from the tree.

Breezes blow and 

choir the chimes.

White flower petals 

fall like snow.

It is Pascha morning and 

Archbishop Paul has passed. 

Christ is Risen, indeed!

***

The Fairies have Moved On

 

The fairies have moved on 

and left me with a daughter 

who is old beyond her years.  

There are still hints of an 

effortless innocence but

it is lessening by the hour.  

She wants to attain some 

better command of her life 

and of her wider world, 

but at such a cost!  

The fairies have moved on 

and they are not coming back.

***

I have such sweet memories of her fairy door at the house where we lived until she was 8 years old.  When we moved to our current house 3 years ago we bought a second fairy door and I secretly attached it to a tree in our back yard.

We were playing back there soon thereafter and I “ stumbled upon it”.  She looked at me sideways and accused me of orchestrating the discovery.  Regardless, she did make some decorations for it during the pandemic with all of that time at home and bought some accoutrements for it as well for imaginative play.

But today I mowed the yard for the first time this year and I saw the door without its decorations looking sad and abandoned.  The fairies have moved on and so has my little girl.

“Visual Writing” a la KVJ

When you seemingly run out of things to write about sometimes you end up writing about writing.

***

My recent explorations into the life and work of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (KVJ) have been uncovering some startling similarities in outlook and style that I was hitherto unaware of.  I am not saying I am in the same league as KVJ as a writer (Heavens, no!) but maybe he is a grown man and I am a kind of baby brother.  Maybe we share some DNA but I am significantly smaller in size and lacking in the ability to fully function as an adult (read: “write”) but I keep crawling nonetheless.

***

In continuing to read Suzanne McConnell’s “Pity the Reader: on writing with style” I stumbled upon something this morning that was revelatory.  She pointed out that KVJ would doodle during class at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop where she was a student of his.  This was connected to the fact his father and grandfather were architects, his sister was an artist, and his three children were all painters to some degree or other.  All this to say that “Vonnegut was tuned and trained to the visual, as well as the audial.”  This is followed by the key paragraph which is a KVJ quote:

“The people who were senior to me at the Sun [Cornell University’s newspaper] were full of advice. . . . The theory was that large, sprawling paragraphs tended to discourage readers and make the paper appear ugly.  Their strategy was primarily visual—that is, short paragraphs, often one-sentence paragraphs.  It seems to work very well, seemed to serve both me and the readers, so I stayed with it when I decided to make a living as a fiction writer.”

These ideas are revelatory to me because over the past 10 years that I’ve attempted to grow as a writer I’ve used photographs/creative images along with short almost poem-like paragraphs to convey what I want to convey to my (mostly imaginary) readers.  I keep these writings in my blog and you can scroll through hundreds of entries without finding one that lacks an image or has an unwieldy paragraph in it (never mind the preponderance of poems).  

I used to think this approach might be a crutch, but now that I’m reading this about KVJ I feel I can embrace it freely as my particular way of communicating what is inside me.  As an added bonus, the doodles I’ve made in countless classes and meetings over the years no longer need to be a source of shame or embarrassment. 

***

Maybe my job has something to do with it as well or there has been some cross-pollination going on.  I am a Consultation Liaison Psychiatrist at a hospital and I see patients who are primarily there for medical reasons but with a significant psychiatric overlap.  Other services consult me to have patients evaluated for a variety of reasons to include psychosis, mania, suicidality, delirium, dementia, withdrawal, depression, anxiety… and the list goes on.

It is important that my documentation is accessible and easily understood.  I accomplish this in part by utilizing short pithy paragraphs that are easy on the eyes and do not bog you down in a mass of words on the screen.  It is a common pitfall when I have medical students or residents working with me that they will try and submit a complex Borg-box of dense writing that no one will bother to read or if they have to read it they will become irritated in the process.  No one enjoys being forced to be “assimilated”.  

***

It is in this context that I can better understand what I’ve been trying to do with a peculiar structural style that began with a writing experiment from 2016.  It started as a writing exercise where I was meandering with an idea but keeping all the paragraphs small and of uniform size, almost like a poem.  At some point I realized it was actually helpful in moving the story along and forcing me to be more deliberate in what I was trying to say and what images were being conveyed.  Instead of a diarrhea of words I was dropping rabbit pellets along a path to an ending.  

After I finished this first experiment (The Hovel) I assumed it was a one-off and just an exercise of sorts, but the second time I tried it the flow returned and carried me along in a way that was unlike the struggles of “free” writing.  And now I have about six or seven of these type stories in my blog.  They are visually peculiar, like bricks stacked one on top of the other.  Maybe this is not exactly what KVJ had in mind but I enjoy it and hopefully it can “serve both me and the readers” whomever they may be.  

Time Traveling with my Son

 

I dreamed this morning that I was with my 17 year old son on a hill overlooking a high school.  He was a bit despondent and said he would like to turn back time 7 years.  Somehow this was possible and I asked if he was sure about such a momentous decision.  He assured me that he was and I agreed to come with him and share the experience.

My thoughts ran along the lines of what he and I could do differently with this added time and foreknowledge that would be ours.  I mentioned something to him offhandedly about being more aggressive on the basketball court in order to gain more success.  I really didn’t think about myself and what I might do as 7 years didn’t seem like much at my age.

So the decision was made and in the distance beyond the high school the sky began to blossom into what appeared to be a pink and red energy field with crackling tendrils.  I wondered if it might be radioactive or harmful to us in some way and I suggested we run into the high school for some protection.  Elias refused and it enveloped us.

I found myself standing over him in his old room in our old house.  He was now 10 and no longer taller than me.  In a kind of dazed disbelief I tried to tousle his hair with an aggressive rub but it was too short for that.  He looked up at me with a smile but there was a sadness in his eyes.  We had done the unimaginable and there was no going back.

***

Above the City

I am looking at an image from the Looney Tunes catalog that has wrangled me out of reality and into a dream.  This is being facilitated by listening to something on Apple Music called “Ambient Chill” through ear buds.  Follow me if you can.

I will float here for just a bit.  There is no fear, no vertigo, only a pregnant-now that swells with the sound of wind and rain.  Round dots of color are blooming on the street below as pedestrians open their umbrellas.  

They scurry along not knowing that I am watching them as God must from up above.  “Hello!  I love you!”  There is a strong smell of ozone and water on hot concrete all around, but then the whiff of a flower wafts through on a breeze.

How long will I stay in this state?  As long as I can.  As long as the image stays clear in my mind and the flow of formless music continues through my thoughts.  I believe the cottage on the roof of the building is mine.  I gladly claim it.

I descend to its door and stand on the flagstone path.  The smells now are of wet wooden shingles and a mild moldiness.  My heart expands and contracts in my chest, my body a bellows of melancholy memories.  “Mom?  Are you home?”

It is empty but there is a kettle steaming on a wood burning stove.  I find a cup in a cupboard and blow out the dust.  Further foraging reveals dried tea leaves in a tin that I dump into the kettle and allow it to steep while I explore the space.

A small cast iron bed sits against the wall under two windows with a green wool blanket tucked in and finished out with a white sheet folded over its lip.  A threadbare rug covers a good bit of the plank floor.  The tea is ready and I pour myself a cup.

Outside the cottage there is a side table and chair underneath a large umbrella.  I sit in its shade with my tea and look to the horizon from my high perch.  A bird lights on the edge of a window box full of flowers and fixes me with its gaze.

I sense the bird is a conduit of sorts and I open myself to communicate to and through it.  I feel myself surrendering to a deep flow of affection that is timeless and impossibly light.  As the bird launches into flight I follow it into the yielding air.

And land on this padded seat in a corner of the Physician’s Dining Room, my fingers tapping out these words as the dream recedes and others nearby talk boisterously about sports and politics.  It is a place of respite, but only in my mind.  

***