The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were.
I'll tell a story tonight, because I'm a bit weary. I've stayed away from my favorite virtual neighborhood, except for a few random comments and recommends. It's not that I don't feel that I have anything to contribute or words to say, it just feels like most of them have been said and it would be redundant for me to chime in.
John F. Kennedy liberally (of course) quoted in italics throughout.
More to follow...
I know too much about the current Middle East events and I know too little and I think there is no side of the fence that I could stand on without sinking to my knees. I have close friends involved in this conflict on "both sides" (as if there is indeed "a side") and I have a son-in-law who I keep expecting a call from about some kind of nasty instant deployment that would send my family into a terrifying spin. East or Middle East, what we have is war.
Too often we... enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.
I want to tell a story about two now dead Democrats. That's about the only way I can tie in politics and the personal tonight and it's a stretch. Fair warning - if you're not up for a stretched narrative, move along.
I'd like to paint a picture of two very regular people, my folks, who back in the day, could have been anyone's parents or anyone's neighbors. In those days, especially the `50s and `60s, it was nearly impossible to tell a Republican from a Democrat - at least in small town America. There were no yellow ribbon magnets and no flag stickers attached to anything and everything. It was just darn hard to tell who you voted for - unless you were one of the ladies operating the local voting precinct and you sneaked a peak at the ballot being turned in (which you did because you were the town gossip and what better job for the town gossip than to work as a volunteer at the precinct). Thus, it can be inferred, in a small town it was hard to tell a Democrat from a Republican - but everyone knew.
Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.
My mother really was a bitch of a woman but she had a style that was all her own and a man who loved her deeply. Two of the most different people from each other, you could not imagine, in personality and demeanor. My parents met in the early years of the 1940's. Mother was a refugee from the Yakima Valley, from what was essentially a western states Dust Bowl, Depression era existence. She was also an escapee of what I'm certain was an emotionally and physically abusive relationship, with all the twists and turns of drama, gambling, drinking and poverty that could be had at the end of those years of the Depression.
Mother missed her one other chance out of the Yakima Valley when my grandmother refused to assist her with room and board at Reed College in Portland and also forbade her from leaving home. She had won a full ride, four year college tuition scholarship to Reed, but there was no money and even lower expectations on the part of my grandmother who saw no need for her daughter to go off to college when none of the other six siblings had ever done so. This was 1934 and you usually did what your mother wanted you to do, especially when the family was in need. And then my mother met Riley.
Mother's first marriage was to a man 10 years her senior; she was 18, he was 28 and it was sometime in late 1934 shortly after her graduation from high school. She often told me that she married Riley so that she had a reason to quit being her mother's best hired hand on the farm. I'm certain, knowing my mother, that she was indeed the hardest worker in the family.
Her marriage disintegrated rapidly. In fairly short order over the course of the next four years, she had two daughters, my half sisters in 1936 and 1938. What did she know? Her reality was that she was young, only a high school education, with two small children and a drunk for a husband. Riley was a professional card and pool shark and a lightweight boxer of some renown. But he wasn't a good or consistent provider and the more responsibilities that were added on, the more he descended further into alcoholism and gambling. Mother recounted a time when she went into the local saloon in Toppenish, Washington - must have been around 1938 or so - and demanded that he come home with money for eggs and milk after having been gone for three days playing pool. She'd gotten a ride into town from a neighbor. She was likely all of about 22 at the time and in those days she had a serious stutter. Her fiery red haired personality hadn't yet matured to the full blown fury that I often saw as a child over twenty five years later. I can't imagine where she got the courage, but she was a mother, after all.
There are risks and costs to action. But they are far less than the long range risks of comfortable inaction.
Inevitably, maybe to save her soul or what little self esteem she still had left, Mother left Riley in 1941 and moved to Seattle to find work, figuring that she might have an easier time in a city that was becoming part of the WWII war machine and plenty of jobs were available there. Leaving her two small children with Riley's mother, as my mother's own family would have nothing to do with her at the time because of her separation and later divorce (just wasn't done), she began a waitress job at a 24 hour restaurant in downtown Seattle. It was in this restaurant that she met my Father, who was the night cook at the diner. During the summer months, my dad worked on fishing boats and cannery tenders in Alaska, but during the off season, he usually worked two jobs - cooking and longshoring on the docks in Seattle.
I guess it was love at first sight. Perhaps that's always what your parents say when they want you to believe that two people can love each other and stay married. I often think, after all, what could have possessed my dad? Not only was my mother a soon-to-be divorcee with two small children, still during the end of the Depression and at the start of World War II for the US, but she was one tough woman to live with. It must have been love. She had great legs and the best damn smile you could ever see and I know it was that sparkle that my dad lived for. He was Jimmy Stewart handsome, shy and tall and lanky with a fetching Norwegian accent, along with a can-do attitude. Must have been love.
Sure it's a big job; but I don't know anyone who can do it better than I can.
They were married in 1943 and Dad still alternated the months of the year between Seattle and Alaska, to make ends meet. He was classified 4-F in the draft, as he had a severely damaged back from previous injuries incurred in Alaska and he also suffered from profound hearing loss with about 25% hearing. My dad strongly felt that he contributed to the war effort in his Alaska time, fishing for food for the nation; he also had two brothers in the military. His youngest brother, Miller, died in the invasion of Normandy. Miller was a tank destroyer driver and the story that I know goes that he and his mates were welded into the tank destroyers so that the Germans couldn't pop open the top hatches and toss grenades into the well of the tanks. I don't know how true that was, but Miller died in early July of 1944 in a hedgerow somewhere in France and his name is on the War memorial in downtown Seattle. The so-very-little pieces we have left of him are the documents and one purple heart...and the telegram informing of his death in July 1944. He was so young, in his early twenties. There is no other trace of Miller, except for my brother, who carries Miller's middle name as his first name.
The greater our knowledge increases the more our ignorance unfolds.
There was strife and some scandal for those newlyweds, my parents, in the years of the war. Riley, Mother's first husband, sued for custody of my half sisters in order to obtain a deferment from the draft. He was on the upper edge of his thirties at the time, but it was highly possible that he would have been called. He employed my mother's youngest sister to spy on Mother and Dad in Seattle and report back to him any activity that he could use against my mom. My mother told me just a couple of years before she completely lost her memory that she and my dad had lived together in Seattle before they were married - shocking! She was in her eighties when she told me this and I'll always wonder. I'm not totally certain if this was an item Riley uncovered, or if he simply had the deeper pockets at the time, but for many years my sisters spent at least six months with their father in central and eastern Washington, and the balance of the time with my folks.
Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.
That simple, now historical fact of being a child yo-yo is still a sore spot with my sister, even now, almost sixty years later as she recounts her time as a child. I find myself ambivalent, but I listen to her side now - I grew up with my mother's side of the story and I consider myself fortunate to finally, after all these years, hear the other side. There was always a deep and mystifying rift between my mother and my sisters and I was so much younger and so much influenced by what my mother said that I find it hard to piece the motivations and the stories from both sides together. I understand both sides - as a single parent twice now, I can fully understand the need to start a new life and get away from a bad or hopeless situation. I understand the pain that children can feel when they are uprooted all the time and shuttled between homes. I can also understand how difficult it is to strike out on your own with small children and try to fight the dragons back - whether those dragons are people in your own family or the people you are trying to get away from.
When written in Chinese, the word "crisis" is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.
I can also understand the hardship of the war years and how necessity often made for hard choices. I suspect that my mother's acceptance of Riley's custody of the girls for 6 months a year every year had a lot to do with her intrinsic knowledge that if she was going to have a successful second marriage with my father, she couldn't be embroiled in constant battle with her first husband (especially after Riley had shown up on her doorstep and threatened to "beat the shit" out of her and my dad nearly killed him). I believe my sister when she says she always felt like she was part of the unloved first family and that the only thing that really mattered to my mother at the time was whatever life and family she was creating with my father. I can understand that, too, and I know that this is my sister's never-healed hurt talking.
For time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.
My folks later built a house in Seattle, which is still standing today, somewhere in the neighborhood of 135th and Ashworth, near Aurora Boulevard. The item of note to me about this house is that it displayed a great combination of my father's carpentry skills and building ability and my mother's totally wacky design sense, or lack thereof. The living room and dining room had beautiful white oak floors and my dad built the fireplace with an "F" visible in different colored bricks on the outside exterior of the chimney. My mother, bless her soul, painted the cupboards in the kitchen turquoise, the walls a chiffon yellow, had china red counters installed and some (according to my sister) god-awful chartreuse curtains on the windows. I never lived in this house, as my parents moved to Oregon before I was born, but I recall the motel kitchen as having a similar color scheme - with the exception that instead of chartreuse curtains, my mother found some incredibly tacky and fake plastic bamboo shades in orange. Ohmigod. My dad still loved her.
If we cannot now end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.
In this kitchen of the motel, we also had (this was the sixties, after all) a yellow Formica table - you know the kind - chrome trim with chrome and yellow plastic seats and an expandable drop leaf. My dad would often come home from work, grab a Hamm's, sit at that table and light a Chesterfield. The cuffs of his work pants usually served as the dumping spot for his ashes if he couldn't immediately see an ashtray. I also remember several times after dinner, when my dad would walk into the kitchen, grab my mom around the waist, and swing her around for a quick dance and a stolen kiss. Oh, Alfred. I don't know how many suds from the kitchen sink wound up on the ceiling from those brief and lovely exercises. He almost always helped her finish the dish washing after dinner and he often cooked and baked bread. He was an unusual man for that generation and time. During the occasional social events they attended, my folks were always the first couple on the dance floor and often the last to leave. Other men's wives seemed to want to dance with my dad and as a kid, I could never understand why they weren't dancing with their own husbands.
My father took on the role of my sister's father in every way except biological. He disciplined and loved them, clothed and fed them, walked my sister down the aisle with tears in his eyes in 1961, so many years ago. I also know that both of my sisters saw him in that light as well and they knew that my dad loved them as much as he loved his other two - my brother and myself.
One of the few fights and the last verbal argument that my parents had before my dad died in 1969 was an argument over whether they would travel to Seattle to see my sister's new daughter who was born on September 9 of that year. My mother, being the business woman and a practical kind of gal, wanted to wait until the summer motel season was over (if you're curious, see my previous diary on life in a motel!) and that they could wait until late September or early October to travel to Seattle to see my new niece. But my father put his foot down and insisted that the minute my niece was born, that they would go directly to Seattle so that he could see his only living grandchild. This is turning into a longer and more complicated story than I planned. But, you see, 1969 was a year for the record books in my family. In January of that year, my uncle died (the husband who was married to my aunt who spied on my mother and father during the war and who had since made up with my parents). His death was a nasty one - black lung disease from his years as a coal miner in Colorado, I believe. Then in May of 1969, my almost six year old nephew died when his bicycle was hit by a 16 year old new driver - my sister was five months pregnant at the time with her daughter.
I look forward to a great future for America - a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose.
Dad figured that it was high time for some good news and he was absolutely committed to seeing his next grandchild. He was especially cognizant of the hard time that my sister was likely going to have with a new baby in the house after losing her first child so tragically just months before. My sister recently recounted to me a phone call that she had with my dad, and not my mother, and how he talked with her for a long time and gave her a sense of calmness and the ability to believe she could handle whatever was coming. Now, you see, my dad was a man of few words and for him to talk on the phone for any length of time seems to me now as almost a miracle. But he was a guy that you could count on and he had an incredible presence in that he was a man you were convinced could accomplish anything if he had to. After all, he loved my mom.
My father won the argument - which wasn't always the case between my parents. My mother subscribed to the belief that whosoever yells the loudest and longest always wins, and if that doesn't work, then use guilt. But this time it didn't work with my dad. He was canny to her ways. He loved her still.
Peace is a daily, a weekly, a monthly process, gradually changing opinions, slowly eroding old barriers, quietly building new structures.
On October 7, 1969, we had been back from Seattle about three weeks, and the winter storms were starting on the coast of Oregon. In the course of his job that day, my dad drowned in the Coquille (okay, another old diary). After over 28 years of marriage, whiskey kisses, shit-eating grins with a half-smoked Chesterfield hanging from his mouth, occasional grab and swings and jitterbugs around the house, pinochle all night with visiting family members, and hard work, side by side with the love of her life, my mother became a widow at the age of 52.
In the case of Dead Democrats, especially my Father, I thought of him tonight. Standing out on the front yard of my house, I looked up into the sky and I saw a light of what might have been either the shuttle or the international space station fly over. It was around 11 pm Pacific Standard Time here in Seattle. I thought of my Dad who loved all things space-oriented; Kennedy's race to the moon, Apollo missions, Star Trek which we watched each week, and color TV, which we were one of the first folks to get in town, because my dad wanted to see the space shots in color. I imagine him up there, flying with the shuttle or catching a ride in spirit with the international space station inhabitants. It's a fitting place for Dad to be, a bit closer to the stars. I envision my mother on a nearby planet, yelling for him to get home to dinner.
In a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the moon it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there.
There's ivy obscuring that "F" on the chimney on the house my parents built. The white oak floors are probably covered in carpet now. My folks are side-by-side in Evergreen-Washelli, not in space as I imagine, but not too far from the house they built on Ashworth.
Our country is still in space after all these years, though it is a tenuous thing and the goals are no longer clear to most people. It seems that our view of the future is narrower, more survivalist, less hopeful, more anxious. Sometimes the world gets a little closer, closed in; perspective shrinks and ideals start to melt. Sometimes the future doesn't seem so full of promise. My father, in his calm, reticent, Norwegian way, would tell me that if we have the technology to fly miles above the earth, we can also make the earth a safer place to fly home to.
Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind. We prefer world law in the age of self-determination to world war in the age of mass extermination.