An urge in search of a topic. A sense of unease, a touch of malaise, “And a hearty hi ho silver”.
One can live so long that one has a sense of history just by being part of the historical scene for such a long time. Who but I for instance really recognizes that tag line from the radio program or the echo of a beat or meter that brought me to it? Probably only “The Lone Ranger” who came to us “from out of the pages of yesteryear” as I myself do? How did a perfectly viable and vastly entertaining media simply cease to be? I have often lain under a car, dropping a clutch or some such miserable enterprise and wished I could hear a story. You can’t very well watch television with your eyes out of focus because you are gazing at the cars undercarriage in a quarter inch of head space with you head in transmission fluid. But , “gone, gone and never to return”. Before something is just discarded we ought to be warned, sort of like the preliminary indicators of an impending heart attack for instance. I need time to adjust to change and radio programming just “changed”. I would have liked to have said to the “changers” in the words of an old radio program, “Ah ah ah, don’t touch that dial”. But no, change “came on like Gang Busters”.
Well, perhaps I am feeling this way because I do feel that preliminary warning of impending radical change. If so, if our world is again preparing for an axial change I don’t just want to sense it, I want to know. That’s the fair thing. What kind of a world is this when they can just substitute one kind of entertainment for another without telling us that “we now interrupt our regularly scheduled programming” for unending inane music or mentally stultifying talk shows run by egoists who wont let those they interview speak. The hell with it I say.
My mother just had a stroke which left her somewhat disabled.
My mother just had a stroke which left her somewhat disabled. Until this time my 89 year old mother had been living alone, taking care of herself, driving very well and winning most of her groups weekly Bridge tournaments. She was bright, funny, and fun. I have spent the last two weeks on and off with her. She asks me now what there is for her to look forward to. It is a fair question. I have replied that she has as much to look forward to as the average person. That is, what does life offer anyway? She can still enjoy the company of friends, a good meal, a good book, good conversation and the “feeling of wind on her skin”.
Today I attended a weekly gathering of my own group. We meet every Wednesday, having chosen a topic that one of us presents and on which the others comment in turn. This week we were just sitting in a café having finished lunch and since it is the beginning of a new semester choosing topics. That done we fell into a number of simultaneous discussions around the table. I sat and listened as sitting on my left two economics professors laughed and jibed with a professor of Political Science. Across from me an emeritus Political Science professor, an atheist, slyly insisted in trying to engage me in a discussion on the Garden of Eden, the nature of the fruit and whether there were any animals outside the garden. To my right a discussion was going on between a Professor of History, specializing in Woman’s Studies who was laughing and arguing with a Professor of Philosophy who is also an operating room nurse and a former nun. Across the table from them and occasionally joining in to that conversation two Sociologists, one of them a former employee of the State Department who served in Indonesia and the other and a very left wing rabidly anti capitalist and anti any perception of imperialism but funny as hell Latin American expert traded blows and laughed. I engaged and disengaged with every one in as much as I could get a word in edgewise and when ever the conversation got into an area where I had a chance of making a semi literate comment. And I thought, young or old, there is this in life.
My mother was born in 1913. She was a farm girl who in her early years moved with her family onto a dry farm homestead in Saint Anthony, Idaho. Those were hard-scrabble times. The house was little better than a shack without plumbing or electricity. Mother said she often wrapped her arms and legs in newspapers to defend against the mosquitoes. At approximately nine years of age she was given the task of driving the cattle to pasture. This entailed swimming them across irrigation canals and a river. Mother couldn’t swim. She clung in fear to the mane of the horse, floating behind it as it swam. Grandmother knew the potential danger but having no other options simply told mother not to fall in and drown. During haymaking time mother both drove and rode the derrick horse and at times “tromped hay”. Tromping hay involved standing on an ever-growing stack of hay and stomping flat the hay that dropped from the derrick forks. This meant lifting your knees almost chest high each time, in order to free your feet from the enveloping pile of hay just dropped so that you could get your feet above it and smash it flat to make a nice tight stack. Mother said it got so hot she got nosebleeds and heat exhaustion. I suppose if you had asked her at that time what life held and what she had to look forward to she would have just yearned for an end to farm work and for freedom from the mosquitoes. It would be another fifteen years before life held much else for her. But even in that time of poverty, hard work and fear she remembers brothers and sisters and friends and the fun they had swimming in the irrigation canals with tin can water wings and the little green water snakes winding sinuously among them. There wasn’t much in life for her then either but she enjoyed it or portions of it. I have tried to point out this sort of thing to her but without much success. Having achieved a fullness of years she is understandably disinclined to credit the philosophy of children, hers or otherwise.
The dreams we dream
We have just begun the new semester here. I have had my usual beginning of school nightmare in which I am unable to find my class. I am rushing around looking and when I do find the class, in my panic I have not brought my notes and have to speak from memory.
I told another teacher of this and he said it is his recurrent nightmare as well. My brother in law, also a teacher laughed and said that he has that dream every night. Two other teachers I confided in admitted that every semester they have the same nightmare. I guess no one totally gets over the original fear of, what ever it is.
I can go them one better however. While teaching High School, forty-three years ago in Pleasant Grove I dreamed that I couldn’t find my class and I was in a panic because if they got a minute to themselves, unsupervised, they went wild. I finally ran them down. They were in a cattle truck in the parking lot and as I had feared, totally out of control. I climbed up the side of the truck and dropped over the edge in among the wild beasts. As they defied attempts to control them and were escaping over the sides of the truck I, in desperation, drew my pen and shot them down as they fled.
Today, while teaching American History I looked down at my notes and realized I had finished chapter one and with thirty minutes to go I did not have lecture notes to chapter two. As in my nightmare I adlibbed for thirty minutes. And now I may have to find another dream. It turns out that after doing this for forty four years I could do it in my sleep.