Perhaps it’s a function of my personality, but sometimes I find myself making large, sweeping generalizations about the world and my place in it, and then spending weeks or months (and sometimes years) working to connect the dots, to see if I actually believe what I’ve said. I tend to act on impulse philosophically, but those impulses are often well informed, and I later find how true they were to my developing character.
Several years ago, I made one such statement to myself: I am philosophically opposed to professional sports. The statement came out of the realization that the “professionalizing” of sports has removed the activity of those sports in large part from the general population. For instance, a century ago people played baseball. Grown people, kids, it was a part of the experience of American life. It wasn’t the “national pastime” because everyone watched it on television, but because people actually played baseball. But how often does that happen now? Not much. The game has become so specialized that there’s no way the average Joe can play, or so he thinks.
Maybe it’s not “professionalism” as such, maybe it’s television, but the specialized skills involved in hitting a ninety-five mile-per-hour fastball, or in turning a double play, are skills that are only developed when you have nothing else to do. The professional athlete spends his time, all of it, honing his skills. He or she often achieves the height of human potential in that sphere. And it is moving, inspiring. I think that’s why it bothers me so much.
One of the few things that can make me well up with emotion is highlight reels. My wife knows that almost my favorite time of the year is right before New-Years when they start showing the year-end recap shows for sports and news and so forth. The “Play-Of-The-Day” on ESPN’s SportsCenter was one of my favorite things for a long time. I love to see people reaching new heights. It’s the whole ABC Sports mantra, “The thrill of victory, and the agony of defeat.” (And doesn’t your mind run the clip of Vinko Bogata, the Slovenian ski jumper, crashing at the World Ski Flying Championships in 1970, whenever you hear that line? I can hear the music.) Sports are iconic in that way. They show us what’s possible in ourselves. They used to show us what was available to all, if we only tried hard enough, if we only worked for it.
But the professional athlete changed that. There’s no way I’m going to be Michael Jordan, no matter how hard I try. It’s a combination of his natural ability plus time and money involved. Jordan practiced every day, for hours a day. Early in his career, when he was criticized as prolific scorer who couldn’t play defense, he changed his game. He practiced, and worked on his defensive skills, and only a season or two later was named the NBA defensive player of the year (in addition to leading the league in scoring that season). It’s still inspiring, his story is still a great one, but it’s inspiring from afar now. “That’s great what Michael Jordan can do, with all that talent, and time, and money. But I could never do that.”
Contrast this with the sports figures earlier in the professional era, people like Jim Thorpe, or Wilma Rudolph. People who achieved great things in an era when those achievements were accessible, they could be comprehended by the public. Now, you look at Tiger Woods’, or Barry Bonds’ records (never mind the question of steroids in Bonds’ case) and they’re just incomprehensible.
Brian Eno is apocryphally reported to have said about the Velvet Underground that not many people bought their records when they were first released, but that everyone who did started a band. I’ve seen this same quote applied to other albums, like the Beastie Boys’ “Paul’s Boutique,” or The Mission of Burma, or “Bleach,” Nirvana’s first record. The point is that this music was not widely popular but it was immediately, accessibly inspiring in a way that the over-produced hit machine music wasn’t. Britiney Spears may have inspired a million teenage girls to sing in the bathroom mirror with a hairbrush, but the people who first heard “The Velvet Underground & Nico” actually bought a guitar, plugged it in and blew out the windows in their parents' garage. There’s a qualitative difference to the level of “inspiration,” that decreases the further you get from its source.
I realized, almost as soon as I was conscious of my feelings about pro sports that I was on thin ice. I am a musician, a songwriter and performer, and it did not escape my notice that the same forces at work in sports were at work in the culture at large, not least the arts. If I was opposed to the separation that professionalism created between the athlete and culture, didn’t I also have be opposed to the separation that professionalism created between the musician, or the artist, or the writer and culture? Here’s where it gets messy, because people have been practicing these arts for thousands of years. There has been something that could be called “professionalism” attached to many of them for nearly that long (professionalism loosely being defined as the ability to make one’s living from their pursuit). If attaching monetary gain was the harbinger of doom for these pursuits, I was wasting my time trying to “make it” as a songwriter.
I shelved these thoughts for several years. They were a little too close to home. I continued my work in radio, and continued writing and performing my songs in obscurity, which mercifully spared me the ennui of philosophical compromise. However, as time progressed I wound up working in larger arenas, both in radio and the music industry. After a couple years spent on the road tour managing a fairly well-known band, and seeing the effects of the “business” on their life, philosophy and psyche, I could no longer ignore the fact that the same forces I spotted at work years earlier in sports were just as prevalent and just as damaging in the music industry. The fans of these bands were just as removed from the actual practice of making music as the sports fan is from hitting a home run.
Professionalism, or commercialism, or whatever you want to call it, the process of an art form or any practice becoming widely successful in the public arena, reduces it to a spectator sport. In the mind of the average “fan,” why would they participate if they can’t do it at that level? Why play basketball if you can’t dunk or shoot like Jordan or Iverson? Why play music if you can’t play like Prince, or sing like Christina, or move like Beyonce? It’s poison to the arts in culture. The arts (and here I’m including the “art” of athletic performance) were made to inspire not just appreciation, but participation. They lose their power when they are only practiced by a few.
Music through the ages was not just high-art form, it was oral history, it was storytelling and community. It was worship and participation in the spiritual and philosophical life of the community. Nights spent around the piano singing the old songs were ways that families remembered where they came from, and where they dreamed of what could be. The arts are not just means of communication, of pontification; they are ways of seeing. And when we stop practicing them, we stop seeing in that way. The poet is not greater than us in his skill with words so much as in his powers of observation. He does not stand above us and point the way from afar. He stands beside us and says “See? Do you really see?” And he invites us to see with him, and experience more fully. It’s not taking the time to write, or paint or play that creates great art; it’s taking the time to see, to hear, to experience. And from that the art flows.
And we lose this when we give it over to the pros, when the only experience we get of living is vicarious. I don’t want anyone seeing for me, or hearing for me. I want to see and hear and sing and play and run and throw and experience it all myself. Then maybe I will have actually lived, otherwise I can’t be sure.
So what about the question of money? Am I prostituting my art if I take money for it? A lot of people think so. And I’m not one to easily disagree with them. But isn’t my art or my labor or my practice worth something? It certainly is. And I’m not the one to determine the value of that. But I know that there’s art that builds, that inspires and creates more, and there’s art that separates and dulls and elevates itself above the populace. And I don’t think the difference is as simple as some “high-art versus low-art” dualism. I think it lies in the heart of the artist, and in what they intend. If I practice my art with the intention of making money foremost in my mind, then I am not likely to bring life through it. But if I practice my art for its own sake, for the enjoyment of it and for the experience it gives me of seeing the world and myself in new ways, then I am on to something. And whether or not I make money from it, I will be a richer person.
That’s where I am with my writing now. I make a little money off it, now and then, but not enough to support a life or a family. I still hope that one day I might be able to do it “full-time” in the sense that I create a life where I’m fully invested in the pursuits that my art involves. And I am cognizant that writing full-time means not less actual living, but more. You can’t write if you’re not experiencing things, if you’re not involved in and participating with the lives of those around you. That’s one of the great tragedies we inflict upon our stars. We make them rich and rob them of the reality that made their art great in the first place. As someone said in another context, “We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.” I suspect that the life I dream of would look something like a playground, where we would all be doing the things we love, and out of that love would come concern and care for others that would not allow us to neglect the larger concerns.
There are many things I do now for money that are not as “creative” but that I still enjoy like carpentry, or design, or the management of artists (all of which are creative in their own ways). I like to think that if I were practicing my art full time I would continue to do those things, only I would enjoy them more because my income was not dependent upon them. Yesterday I was a little depressed about my songwriting. I wrote this in my journal:
“My son never waits for a better time to create something he cares about. When he gets the idea, he does it. His ideas are always fresh and exciting to him. He doesn't second guess himself, or edit or get neurotic about what people will think of him for saying something or writing something or drawing something. He lives in the moment.”
I want to learn to play again. I want to write music that no one will ever hear, and make it beautiful and full of wonder because that’s what I see in the world. I want to run and jump and throw and catch not because I have to keep my heart rate up for twenty minutes, but because it’s exhilarating! Because when I run I feel like a deer, and I’m amazed at how fast I can go. Because when I throw a ball and someone catches it I marvel at the coordination of body and mind to send something up through the atmosphere, into the unknown, and have it come down precisely where I hoped it would. I want to sing not for who might be listening or what it might get me, but because it sounds like the wind in the trees... simply for the sake of the song.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Monday, February 25, 2008
Annotation - Clear Mind Wild Heart
David Whyte is an English poet who currently resides in British Columbia. In addition to writing poetry, he works as a corporate consultant and uses his poetic insight in the field of organizational development. This six-disc audio series uses poetry, and the unfolding power of the imagination, to illustrate the larger principles of life, and lead into a discussion about the possibilities that exist when we get outside of our closed and limited experience.
The first thing I noticed and enjoyed about this series is simply the way Whyte reads poetry. He inhabits it, and makes it his own. Whether reading from Rilke or Yeats, Butler or Shelly, he’s not afraid to play with a poem, to repeat lines and whole stanzas as many times as necessary to wring the truth from them. I particularly enjoyed his reading of Rilke’s “The Man Watching.” He took the last stanza:
It’s an amazing poem, and the way he reads it, repeating the whole stanza twice, then repeating each line, “Winning does not tempt that man. Winning. Does not tempt that man. This is how he grows, this, this is how he grows…”
Whyte covers topics like silence, grief, nature, vocation… the whole of human experience. He uses poetry to pull back the veil from a lot of what we experience, and invite us into a fuller engagement with the world in which we live. As a naturalist he spends a lot of time on the idea of “presence” and connection to the “numinous” through nature. He reads some of his own poetry, but mostly uses the words of others to demonstrate the deeper level of experience we can aspire to.
Honestly there’s so much in this series that I enjoy… I don’t quite know how to write about it. The best I can say is that it’s inspiring… to dream, to take life seriously, to write better, to read more… I used to write a lot of poetry, years ago and before I started writing songs. I think somewhere along the way the form and constraint of songwriting choked some of the poetry out of me. But this series has made me want to start again. I have a couple of Whyte’s other works – another CD series, a book of poems titled The House of Belonging, and a non-fiction book I’m excited to read titled The Heart Aroused: Poetry and The Preservation of the Soul In Corporate America. It’s good stuff, and it’s already informing my own creativity.
Whyte, David. Clear Mind Wild Heart: Finding Courage and Clarity Through Poetry. Louisville, Sounds True Inc. 2002.
The first thing I noticed and enjoyed about this series is simply the way Whyte reads poetry. He inhabits it, and makes it his own. Whether reading from Rilke or Yeats, Butler or Shelly, he’s not afraid to play with a poem, to repeat lines and whole stanzas as many times as necessary to wring the truth from them. I particularly enjoyed his reading of Rilke’s “The Man Watching.” He took the last stanza:
“Winning does not tempt that man
this is how he grows: By being defeated,
decisively
by constantly greater beings.”
this is how he grows: By being defeated,
decisively
by constantly greater beings.”
It’s an amazing poem, and the way he reads it, repeating the whole stanza twice, then repeating each line, “Winning does not tempt that man. Winning. Does not tempt that man. This is how he grows, this, this is how he grows…”
Whyte covers topics like silence, grief, nature, vocation… the whole of human experience. He uses poetry to pull back the veil from a lot of what we experience, and invite us into a fuller engagement with the world in which we live. As a naturalist he spends a lot of time on the idea of “presence” and connection to the “numinous” through nature. He reads some of his own poetry, but mostly uses the words of others to demonstrate the deeper level of experience we can aspire to.
Honestly there’s so much in this series that I enjoy… I don’t quite know how to write about it. The best I can say is that it’s inspiring… to dream, to take life seriously, to write better, to read more… I used to write a lot of poetry, years ago and before I started writing songs. I think somewhere along the way the form and constraint of songwriting choked some of the poetry out of me. But this series has made me want to start again. I have a couple of Whyte’s other works – another CD series, a book of poems titled The House of Belonging, and a non-fiction book I’m excited to read titled The Heart Aroused: Poetry and The Preservation of the Soul In Corporate America. It’s good stuff, and it’s already informing my own creativity.
Whyte, David. Clear Mind Wild Heart: Finding Courage and Clarity Through Poetry. Louisville, Sounds True Inc. 2002.
The Man Watching
by Rainer Maria Rilke
I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can't bear without a friend,
I can't love without a sister
The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.
What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.
When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler's sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.
Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.
I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can't bear without a friend,
I can't love without a sister
The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.
What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.
When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler's sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.
Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.
Be Here Now
My son never waits for a better time to create something he cares about. When he gets the idea, he does it. His ideas are always fresh and exciting to him. He doesn't second guess himself, or edit or get neurotic about what people will think of him for saying something or writing something or drawing something. He lives in the moment.
Last night I lay in bed for an hour with a lyric and a melody going through my head. This morning I woke up and the magic is gone. the genesis is gone. I remember some of the words, but the creative spark has left me and I’m depressed. What I if I lived in the moment like my son? Dinner might be late occasionally. I might live a slightly MORE fractured existence than I currently do. But I’d be PRESENT. I would get my ideas out and the life that is in me would be allowed to show. And I wouldn’t feel this way. Bottled up and corked and like my mind is constipated.
Last night I lay in bed for an hour with a lyric and a melody going through my head. This morning I woke up and the magic is gone. the genesis is gone. I remember some of the words, but the creative spark has left me and I’m depressed. What I if I lived in the moment like my son? Dinner might be late occasionally. I might live a slightly MORE fractured existence than I currently do. But I’d be PRESENT. I would get my ideas out and the life that is in me would be allowed to show. And I wouldn’t feel this way. Bottled up and corked and like my mind is constipated.
Friday, February 22, 2008
Annotation - DAVID COPPERFIELD by Charles Dickens
“Whether I shall be the hero of my tale, or whether that office shall be left to another, these pages shall describe.” - David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
What a book. Again and again I’m reminded why they’re called “Classic Literature.” The breath and scope of this book is just wonderful and compelling. Sure, it’s long as all get-out, but it’s worth every second and every page.
I had actually started reading David Copperfield prior to coming to Vermont for ADP. I took the Greyhound to Montpelier and back from Cincinnati, and I knew I’d need something long for the twenty-six hours each way, so I grabbed it fairly at random off the shelf. It was between David Copperfield and The Canterbury Tales. I’m glad I chose as I did.
Mid-way through the book I started to think, “Why am I reading this?” It was so dark, so bleak
and despairing. And with what my family and I are currently in the midst of, we need things to inspire, to uplift and bring hope. Dickens wasn’t giving much hope.
But over the course of the story you learn that hope comes not in individual actions or events, but in a life well-lived; in family and friends, in shared victory and defeat, in close companionship, love and loss. Copperfield starts out well with a loving mother, but things quickly go bad, and from bad to worse for quite some time. But his good-will, his bonhomie and general resourcefulness are a source of hope and inspiration. He determines to do what he can. He is clear eyed and unflinching in his estimations of Mr. and Ms. Murdstone (David’s Stepfather and his sister) as well as his ongoing relationship with Uriah Heep, scoundrel of scoundrels and prototype of malevolence.
I felt strong identification in David’s relationships with women, first with “Young Em’ly” and later with Agnes. He pursues Dora, who by her own admission is a child, a silly thing, while all the time he has near him two of the most beautiful, kind, gentle and loving creatures ever to grace the page. Emily turns from his affection first to Ham Peggoty, and eventually runs away in shame with Steerforth. Agnes, however, waits for him, the very picture of fidelity and truth. I feel like I myself wandered through a good portion of my life completely unaware of the jewels that lay around me in relationships, opportunities and experiences that I took for granted. Maybe that’s an inherent trait to young boys. But we would hope that it’s a trait passing with age. In Copperfield’s case it’s not age that brings the change, but tragedy. Dora’s death frees him to realize that he had married poorly, and that his true love had been there all along, and remained there.
There is great hope in the story. As a moral tale it reminds me of a story by C.S. Lewis. Some perceived Lewis’s icon and mentor, George MacDonald, as a heretic because he believed that God always offers a chance for redemption, even after death. MacDonald could not believe that God would ever turn his back on the soul truly penitent. In MacDonald’s defense Lewis wrote The Great Divorce, a story about souls on a bus ride through the afterlife, essentially from Hell to Heaven. When they reach Heaven, the grass is so sharp it cuts the feet. The light so blinding it hurts the eye. And many turn back from such a painful glory and choose the comforts of their familiar Hell. Lewis’s point is that the choices we make in life are the same choices we are likely to make in death. Second chances (or third, or fourth) are often pointless because we choose poorly no matter how many times we’re allowed. And so with Steerforth, and with Em’ly’s maid, whom she takes to Australia.
There is not much change of character or of heart in David Copperfield. The truly good remain good at heart. Some triumph and some perish. The truly bad remain bad, no matter their temporary appearances. In the end, the lives of the wicked are wasted, no matter the gain, and the lives (and even deaths) of the “righteous” (here I’m betraying my fundamentalist upbringing) are triumphant and glorious, even in death. Where the change comes is when someone’s true character has been hidden or subverted. Then there is the epiphany of finding who that person really was. There is great hope in that, as there always is in something that takes us out of ourselves and reminds us of our place in the larger story.
Flannery O’Connor, in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, describes taking some of her stories to an old neighbor in rural Georgia. When she returns to ask what she thought, the woman says, “Well those stories just gone and showed you what some folks would do.” That’s right. Dickens’ stories are grand and involved. But in the end, the reason they’re so wonderful and touching is because they just show you what some folks (like ourselves) would do. And it’s good to have company.
Memoir - "Iyeska"
Recently a friend introduced me to the word “Iyeska.” It’s a Native American word, I believe Lakota Sioux originally, with at least three different meanings: If one is talking about ancestry or culture, it means, “mixed-blood.” If talking about language it means “translator;” and in reference to the sacred, Iyeska means “Shaman.”
I love this one word with three such distinct and separate meanings, and that they all connect. The “mixed-blood” would have often been the translator, the one with the knowledge of two cultures, with two parents, who was raised speaking both languages. And the Shaman is often a translator of sorts, whether translating spiritual ideas to the community or tribe, or translating the spiritual and cultural significance of events that might seem insignificant at first glance. It has been said, “Iyeska is the spirit who stands at the crossroads between the visible and the invisible worlds.” Somewhere in this idea is a central theme to who I am.
When the male human fetus is in the womb, near the end of the first trimester a process takes place called the “androgen wash.” Chemicals produced due to the male’s Y chromosome wash over the brain, with the primary androgen being testosterone. The result is that synapse connections between the left and right hemispheres of the brain are “burned” away by this reaction. On average, about twenty percent of the connections between the hemispheres are destroyed. This process seems to account for some of the “masculinisation” of the child’s brain, and mirrors a similar process that takes place when the second androgen wash takes place at the onset of puberty .
There has been quite a bit of medical speculation that concentrations of testosterone and other hormones in the androgen wash, as well as the duration of the process in individual males, might be somewhat linked to left handedness, to more creative (right brain) thinking, and possibly even to homosexuality. The thinking being: males with more dilute androgen wash retain more of those brain connections, and are less extreme in their gender traits. They might retain some more “feminine” cognitive traits (access to more emotionally based or “intuitive” forms of cognition), and may result in more access to creative parts of the brain than most males typically have.
Since I first heard this information in my early twenties, I have always been fascinated by the concept, and have wished there was a way you could easily test the brain to see how much of those connections remain. I have always felt like “iyeska,” between two worlds, possibly even between the two hemispheres of the "collective brain." I could be the poster child for the “androgen deficient wash” I’ve read about: I am somewhat ambidextrous. I write left-handed and naturally play guitar left-handed. However I throw and catch right handed. I am right hand and left foot dominant in almost all physical ways. I eat either way, and sometimes get confused which one feels more comfortable. I walk the line between a creative (right brain) person and a logical, linear (left brain person). I can get easily caught up in logical, linear tasks and goal orientation, but I also love to work in free-form problem solving and brainstorming areas.
I am constantly finding myself in the role of interpreter, or liaison, between the artistic world and the commercial world. Artists often lack the ability to explain or interpret their work to the general public. They need someone to explain what they’re doing and why it’s important to the world. Throughout my life I have found myself in those situations. I have worked for and alongside artists for my entire adult life, practicing my own art along the way and wishing that I had someone to interpret or “push” my work the way I was capable of doing for others. I created curricula in churches I worked with on the topics of Arts, Culture, and Worldview; teaching the “non-artistic” public why art is so crucial to culture, and why the support and development of the arts throughout the spheres of society is key to the progression and development of our culture.
It seems I am always at this crossroads, between the two worlds. Just last night, leaving my office, I ran into a girl from the neighborhood that wants to be a photographer. She is struggling to learn the art, to get her ability to rise to her desire, and to find fulfillment in this form she cares about so deeply. But she’s getting discouraged, and when I asked why she wasn’t out shooting photos of the blanket of new-fallen snow all around, she responded, “I think I’m retiring from photography.” We started talking about the creative process, how she felt dry and uninspired and was about to give up. I walked with her and explained how that’s simply part of the process, you give out, you create, and then you retreat a little, take some time, and fill yourself up again. The lack of inspiration doesn’t mean you’re not an artists, it just means you’re not taking photos that instant. But the inspiration will return; and when it does, if you’ve sold your camera, you’re one sad sack. She went away laughing, enjoying the snow, and from a block away called back to me, “So much for retirement!”
I have these conversations constantly. I understand the artist. I speak their language, and I intuitively understand the process and the difficulties associated with it. I know what the artist needs to hear in order to maintain belief in their art at difficult times, and I seem to know intuitively as well when the best and kindest thing to say is, “Stop. You’re doing it wrong, and you need to re-examine your path.”
Last night I was talking with my wife about some of this, about the conversation I’d had with our photographer friend on the street and the progressing realization that this is who I am. I brought up my last real job, working as Tour Manager for a major-label band touring through the US and internationally. I said, “You know, I think that’s why I was valuable to them for a while, was because I knew how to encourage them. More than my skill as a tour manager, more than my organizational abilities or my ability to get the show on or make the stage look right or make sure we got paid what we were supposed to every night… I think the thing that was indispensable for those two and a half years was that I knew how to inspire and motivate them. And in the end, it wasn’t lack of communication, or travel or any of the other contributing factors that ended my time with them, it was simply that I couldn’t be that person for them anymore. I didn’t believe in them in the same way. And they knew it.”
I think it was a significant realization for me at the time that the break came, not because of any of the external factors, but because what I was really there to do was to be their “Iyeska.” And the season for that ended. And when it did, it took the magic right out of everything else. Realizing that has given me more closure about that time than any other single revelation.
In 1996, my wife (fiancé at the time) and I were in Switzerland working with a missions organization. I was teaching Critical Thinking and Worldview with a university outside of Lausanne. Our work was done and I was preparing to come back to The States. A Maori woman named Alana took the two of us aside, and basically gave us what amounted to a “prophecy” for our lives. She said that she saw us as “consultants,” or liaisons. She didn’t quite know what that meant to us or how we should take it, but she felt the sense very strongly that this identity was to mark our lives together. I treasured those words because I felt they hit at the heart of who I need to be.
But if artists have a difficult time making a living through their art, what living is to be made from talking about it? I’ve never been able to connect the dots between my passion, my ability, and my checkbook. That’s a fairly mercenary way to put it, but as I’ve said to my wife before, “I can do anything except make a living.”
More than anything I’ve written here so far, this is the reason for this memoir. I’m trying to make sense of it all, to gain some perspective on my life and find the central questions. I believe that somehow in this process I’ll uncover the code, or unlock the door. I’ll find the arrow that points in the direction I need to go, and in doing it this way I’ll have a road map that I can return to for reference and guidance when I get lost again.
Anyway, that’s the plan.
I love this one word with three such distinct and separate meanings, and that they all connect. The “mixed-blood” would have often been the translator, the one with the knowledge of two cultures, with two parents, who was raised speaking both languages. And the Shaman is often a translator of sorts, whether translating spiritual ideas to the community or tribe, or translating the spiritual and cultural significance of events that might seem insignificant at first glance. It has been said, “Iyeska is the spirit who stands at the crossroads between the visible and the invisible worlds.” Somewhere in this idea is a central theme to who I am.
When the male human fetus is in the womb, near the end of the first trimester a process takes place called the “androgen wash.” Chemicals produced due to the male’s Y chromosome wash over the brain, with the primary androgen being testosterone. The result is that synapse connections between the left and right hemispheres of the brain are “burned” away by this reaction. On average, about twenty percent of the connections between the hemispheres are destroyed. This process seems to account for some of the “masculinisation” of the child’s brain, and mirrors a similar process that takes place when the second androgen wash takes place at the onset of puberty .
There has been quite a bit of medical speculation that concentrations of testosterone and other hormones in the androgen wash, as well as the duration of the process in individual males, might be somewhat linked to left handedness, to more creative (right brain) thinking, and possibly even to homosexuality. The thinking being: males with more dilute androgen wash retain more of those brain connections, and are less extreme in their gender traits. They might retain some more “feminine” cognitive traits (access to more emotionally based or “intuitive” forms of cognition), and may result in more access to creative parts of the brain than most males typically have.
Since I first heard this information in my early twenties, I have always been fascinated by the concept, and have wished there was a way you could easily test the brain to see how much of those connections remain. I have always felt like “iyeska,” between two worlds, possibly even between the two hemispheres of the "collective brain." I could be the poster child for the “androgen deficient wash” I’ve read about: I am somewhat ambidextrous. I write left-handed and naturally play guitar left-handed. However I throw and catch right handed. I am right hand and left foot dominant in almost all physical ways. I eat either way, and sometimes get confused which one feels more comfortable. I walk the line between a creative (right brain) person and a logical, linear (left brain person). I can get easily caught up in logical, linear tasks and goal orientation, but I also love to work in free-form problem solving and brainstorming areas.
I am constantly finding myself in the role of interpreter, or liaison, between the artistic world and the commercial world. Artists often lack the ability to explain or interpret their work to the general public. They need someone to explain what they’re doing and why it’s important to the world. Throughout my life I have found myself in those situations. I have worked for and alongside artists for my entire adult life, practicing my own art along the way and wishing that I had someone to interpret or “push” my work the way I was capable of doing for others. I created curricula in churches I worked with on the topics of Arts, Culture, and Worldview; teaching the “non-artistic” public why art is so crucial to culture, and why the support and development of the arts throughout the spheres of society is key to the progression and development of our culture.
It seems I am always at this crossroads, between the two worlds. Just last night, leaving my office, I ran into a girl from the neighborhood that wants to be a photographer. She is struggling to learn the art, to get her ability to rise to her desire, and to find fulfillment in this form she cares about so deeply. But she’s getting discouraged, and when I asked why she wasn’t out shooting photos of the blanket of new-fallen snow all around, she responded, “I think I’m retiring from photography.” We started talking about the creative process, how she felt dry and uninspired and was about to give up. I walked with her and explained how that’s simply part of the process, you give out, you create, and then you retreat a little, take some time, and fill yourself up again. The lack of inspiration doesn’t mean you’re not an artists, it just means you’re not taking photos that instant. But the inspiration will return; and when it does, if you’ve sold your camera, you’re one sad sack. She went away laughing, enjoying the snow, and from a block away called back to me, “So much for retirement!”
I have these conversations constantly. I understand the artist. I speak their language, and I intuitively understand the process and the difficulties associated with it. I know what the artist needs to hear in order to maintain belief in their art at difficult times, and I seem to know intuitively as well when the best and kindest thing to say is, “Stop. You’re doing it wrong, and you need to re-examine your path.”
Last night I was talking with my wife about some of this, about the conversation I’d had with our photographer friend on the street and the progressing realization that this is who I am. I brought up my last real job, working as Tour Manager for a major-label band touring through the US and internationally. I said, “You know, I think that’s why I was valuable to them for a while, was because I knew how to encourage them. More than my skill as a tour manager, more than my organizational abilities or my ability to get the show on or make the stage look right or make sure we got paid what we were supposed to every night… I think the thing that was indispensable for those two and a half years was that I knew how to inspire and motivate them. And in the end, it wasn’t lack of communication, or travel or any of the other contributing factors that ended my time with them, it was simply that I couldn’t be that person for them anymore. I didn’t believe in them in the same way. And they knew it.”
I think it was a significant realization for me at the time that the break came, not because of any of the external factors, but because what I was really there to do was to be their “Iyeska.” And the season for that ended. And when it did, it took the magic right out of everything else. Realizing that has given me more closure about that time than any other single revelation.
In 1996, my wife (fiancé at the time) and I were in Switzerland working with a missions organization. I was teaching Critical Thinking and Worldview with a university outside of Lausanne. Our work was done and I was preparing to come back to The States. A Maori woman named Alana took the two of us aside, and basically gave us what amounted to a “prophecy” for our lives. She said that she saw us as “consultants,” or liaisons. She didn’t quite know what that meant to us or how we should take it, but she felt the sense very strongly that this identity was to mark our lives together. I treasured those words because I felt they hit at the heart of who I need to be.
But if artists have a difficult time making a living through their art, what living is to be made from talking about it? I’ve never been able to connect the dots between my passion, my ability, and my checkbook. That’s a fairly mercenary way to put it, but as I’ve said to my wife before, “I can do anything except make a living.”
More than anything I’ve written here so far, this is the reason for this memoir. I’m trying to make sense of it all, to gain some perspective on my life and find the central questions. I believe that somehow in this process I’ll uncover the code, or unlock the door. I’ll find the arrow that points in the direction I need to go, and in doing it this way I’ll have a road map that I can return to for reference and guidance when I get lost again.
Anyway, that’s the plan.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Memoir - Mom, etc.
My parents divorced when I was three years old. My older sister Britiney was six. My dad had been having an affair for a while apparently, and my mother ended the marriage.
Growing up, I always just thought that was normal. That was the way we were. And when the teachers in class would ask, “How many of your parents are married?” and “How many of your parents are divorced?” it was always about 50/50 anyway, so it never seemed odd to me. It wasn’t until my twenties that I started to think about the effects their divorce might have had on me, positive or negative.
My mom is a pretty smart woman. She is one of seven kids, and as I mentioned before, she is really the only one to break out and make a life and a career for herself. I have often thought how difficult it must have been for her when, in 1975, she found herself supporting two young children; re-entering the job market at 32 without a degree. My memories of those years are mainly of her being gone. I know she was depressed and drank a lot.
I used to have a recurring nightmare. It was always set in our house on 21st Street in Idaho Falls. In the dream, my mom would be going out for the night, leaving my sister and me alone, as was often the case. I would be in my room on the second floor and would hear noises in the back yard. I ran to the window in my mom’s bedroom, and looked out to see men in gold space suits landing and running through the back yard. As I ran downstairs through the kitchen I could see them coming toward the sliding glass doors in the dining room, and when I burst into the garage to yell to my mom for help before she left, I would get out there just in time to see her brown Camaro drive off as the garage door closed. I don’t know how many times I had that dream, but it always terrified me. There was something coming for me. There was something to fear. And just as it was getting near, she was leaving.
When my folks split up, my dad bought my mom a house in a Mormon suburb of Idaho Falls called Ammon. I dimly remember the small, brown, ranch-style house. Mostly I remember the undeveloped fields around the neighborhood, and that our large back yard had no grass. My dad came out one weekend and built a fort out near the back of the property. It would have been a tree house, but there were no trees. I remember being too afraid of the black widow spiders to ever really play out there. My only other real memories of that place are of my Star Wars sheets on the bunk beds my dad’s friend Smitty built for me, and lots of nightmares; lots of nights spent yelling out for my mom, too scared to get out of bed and run into her room.
My mom found some good work, started going to night school, and eventually got a job as an executive assistant at the same company where my Dad was an engineer. E.G.& G. was at that time the company contracted to manage and run the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory (INEL), the nuclear power facility located in the Idaho desert about an hour from Idaho Falls, just outside of Arco. The families in Idaho Falls associated with either INEL or the Argon National Laboratory, the other large facility out there, just referred to both locations as “The Site.” Anyone from Idaho Falls can describe the ubiquitous yellow “Site Busses” that leave early in the morning and ferry people to and from The Site every day. My dad was lucky in that he worked for the engineering offices of E.G.&G., which meant that he didn’t have to go to The Site every day. His office was in Idaho Falls.
I don’t know the extent to which my Dad was keeping us afloat when they first split up. I assume it was almost entirely. When my mom got a job working for the same company it meant that she wasn’t completely dependent on my Dad for child support or living expenses. The man she worked for, Larry Ybarrando, was a brilliant engineer who truly valued her as an asset. As such he encouraged her to develop, to finish her education, to study and take the job beyond the boundaries of a normal secretary. Before long, when Japanese businessmen and engineers would come to Idaho Falls to tour the facilities and learn about the processes, she would be their guide and liaison. She built a life and a career for herself out of nothing, and at the time there’s no way my sister and I could have comprehended how difficult it was for her. We just knew she was gone a lot.
We soon moved closer to town, to the green and white split-level house on 21st Street in which we would live until we moved away from Idaho Falls ten years later. We were just two blocks from the apartment on St. Clair where my parents were living when I was born. The apartment of my first memory.
My dad was doing well professionally, my mom was getting on her feet, and my parents wanted us to have a good education. They decided to send us to a private Baptist school on the other side of town. The school must have had some kind of reputation at the time for them to choose one so far away. We were bussed to a school thirty minutes away, in a town where it didn’t take thirty minutes to get anywhere. Gethsemane Christian School was an extremely conservative private school. The girls were not allowed to wear pants. The boys were sent home if their hair touched their collars or covered their ears. Skirts could not be anywhere near the knee, much less over it. My parents were not the least bit Christian. They had no religious inclination one way or another at the time; it just offered a better education than the public school.
For my sister and me, going to private school meant that we never really got to know the kids in our neighborhood because we never interacted with them. And we never spent time with the kids we went to school with, because they were all bussed there as well, from different neighborhoods all over town. If we wanted to spend the night at a friend’s house, or go to a birthday party, it involved a huge trip out in the car, and either someone waiting for us, or someone picking us up. The upshot is that we grew up playing alone a lot. Later on we would hear the term “latch-key kids,” kids who went to school alone, came home to an empty house, and basically looked after themselves large parts of the day while their parents worked. For us this was just how it was.
I remember one night when the bus dropped us off and the house was locked. I think we usually had a key stashed somewhere but this time it was gone. We were the only kids in the neighborhood from that school, so the bus actually dropped us off at our house, instead just on the corner of the block. The driver couldn’t leave until we were safely inside the house, and we had no way of getting in. We didn’t really know any of the neighbors, and they were all at work, so there was no-where to go. In the end the bus driver took us home with her at the end of the route, and called my mom at work to let her know where we were. I remember spending that afternoon watching TV with her kids in a house that reeked of urine and old food, while she trimmed her kids’ toenails by biting them off. We were merely perplexed, but when my mom picked us up and we told her about the scene, she was mortified. As a parent now myself, the thought of some stranger taking my kids (we were probably 7 and 10 at the time) home with them to some squalid apartment… maybe I’m overly sensitive, but it horrifies me.
But, as it always is… it was just life as we knew it. My mom worked a lot, drank a lot and dated a succession of men. When she wasn’t out with some guy on a date or at a social function, she was drinking with my aunts and playing cards. We watched a lot of TV, ate a lot of frozen TV dinners, and spent a lot of time on our own.
My mom during these years was so much at sea with her own life that she never really interfered into ours. When she told me to clean my room, I locked myself inside and didn’t come out for a day. When she told me to rake the leaves, I stood in the yard and defied her to explain why they should be raked since more would fall the next day. When she tells these stories now, she laughs and describes how “Smart” I was at the time. Not smart as in “smart assed,” but smart as in quick, bright, able to see through her questions to the pointlessness of them. She didn’t have answers for me. She would just marvel at her “bright” son who questioned the system, and would always relent.
As I tell these stories I see myself as someone looking for a reason to do something, anything. There are good reasons to rake the leaves. If you don’t, they cover the grass and rot and the grass dies. There are good reasons to clean a room: if you don’t, food molds and rots inside and you get sick. Not to mention that as an adult, if you don’t have the ability to look after and clean after yourself, you live in squalor. But my mom had her hands full just keeping food on the table. These days I can see that. Growing up I resented her terribly for not being there, for not answering my questions, for not challenging me. But now I look back and see that she was scared, terrified, by the prospect of raising two kids alone. She was depressed. And she did what she could.
These days I see that. But at the time, and all through school, the only thing I saw was a mother that deferred any and every decision to me. In sixth grade I told my mom I was done with private school, and she transferred me to the public school down the street. I started racing dirt bikes and hanging out with the kids from the neighborhood, spending less and less time at home. By the time I was twelve, and in seventh grade, I was drinking regularly (usually from her liquor cabinet), spending nights on the street until the early morning hours, generally on my way to trouble.
All through this time, my mother cultivated a relationship with a guy we called “Mr. R.” We didn’t like him very much, but he had some money and he took us places. He owned part of a hot springs near Challis, Idaho, about two hours from where we lived, and on holiday weekends we would often drive up there with him and his kids (who were exactly our ages) and spend the weekends swimming and running in the hills. Those drives are memorable mostly because we listened to Willie Nelson and Alabama, and because I remember the two of them, my mother and him, with a bottle of vodka, a cooler of ice and orange juice, and two large cups between them. He drove, she mixed, and by the end of the drive the bottle was empty.
They dated from about seven years, but resisted getting married. One weekend we got a call that he’d been in an accident. He was living in Boise, managing a construction firm, and somewhere between Boise and Idaho Falls, on a mountain road, he’d fallen asleep (or passed out) with the cruise control set at eighty. His Chrysler New Yorker, with the power seats and the voice that told you “the door is ajar, the door is ajar” had gone off the road between mile marker 217 and 218 on Highway 20 outside of Fairfield, had gone over an embankment, down a gully, up the other side and plowed headlong into a ditch at full speed. He was badly broken and they weren’t sure he would live.
My mom spent long hours with him in the hospital while he convalesced, and it was there, beside his hospital bed, that she finally agreed to marry him.
And so we were moving to Boise. Five hours from Idaho Falls, the Capitol City. I was just about to start eighth grade, and my sister was entering her junior year in at I.F. High School. She was in the choir, and the glee club and had made good friends that she didn’t want to leave. So she decided to stay and live with my Dad and his wife. My mom quit the job she’d held for a decade, left the comfortable living she’d made for herself and her kids, and she and I packed up and moved West.
Within a year they were divorced. She had good reasons for never marrying him, and those were confirmed by the way he treated her when then finally did. One day after school I walked into the kitchen and my mom was sitting at the table going over papers and folders and looking through files. She looked serious. I said, “What’s up?”
She said, “We’re leaving. I’m divorcing him.”
I said, “Great. When do we move?”
School was letting out for the summer shortly, and I had been planning to go back to Idaho Falls to spend a few weeks at my Dad’s house. By the time I returned, mid summer, my mom had moved into a condo about a mile away, and there was no sign that we’d ever been anywhere else. She had already found a job working as an assistant for some lawyer downtown, and we fell right into a rhythm of it being just the two of us. She worked a lot, and now I was the one who was never there.
From this time on I was basically on my own in my mother’s home. There was no curfew, no restrictions. I did what I wanted, and was only kept from getting into real trouble by the fact that I was new in town and didn’t really know where the party was. I was my mom’s rock. I was the smart one, the solidity. If I had an opinion on anything she would put it above her own. But I needed a parent. A guide. I needed someone to be a safety net so that I could go out and fail and learn to get up again.
Looking back I am surprised how little I remember from these times. I catch glimpses, highlights of whole years of my childhood and adolescent years, but mostly it seems like I just drifted. I never engaged. I was never fully present in my life. I went to school dimly lit. I had been a good student as a kid. I was smart and liked to learn. But in the public schools, and with no motivation, I just attended. I passed. “C” average. I played sports if anyone suggested I go out for something. I played football for two years. I played basketball for two more. I ran track. But there was no real interest. I didn’t really care how I did in those efforts and neither did anyone else. I got by. No one asked anything more.
My wife and I have recently attended some marital counseling sessions to address some of the difficulties in our relationship. One of the persistent themes that arises in my life is the lack of patience I have for anyone who can’t learn on their own, who can’t figure it out. During one of our sessions I discovered that this is deep in me as a result of never having any adequate guidance. I remember vividly when I was at school in Hawaii. I was twenty years old, rooming with a guy from Cleveland in his mid-thirties. One morning I was in the little kitchenette/bathroom shaving when he walked by. “What the hell are you doing?” He laughed.
“What? I’m shaving.”
“Didn’t anyone ever show you how to do that? You’re carving your face off!” and he walked away. But no one ever did show me how to do it. No one ever taught me how to shave, or balance a checkbook, or study, or be honest. Because my mom relied on me so entirely for some solidity, especially in my teenage years, I always felt like I had to know these things intuitively. I always had to figure them out on my own. And I got good at it. People complemented my independence and my ability to pick up new skills and knowledge. I figured people out. I figured systems out. I never studied in high school, but I passed all the tests because I figured out how the teachers thought. I figured out what the tests were looking for, and I gave it to them. And somewhere along the way, I lost the ability to say, “I don’t know.” I found that I had to know.
And so, today when I’m in a group setting or a work environment and someone can’t figure it out, I get angry, and I resent them. When my son needs me to show him something over and over because he’s six years old for god’s sake… I resent it. When my wife needs help figuring out something on the computer, or when a co-worker needs help understanding a piece of software or a system or policy that’s been implemented… I get angry. Deep inside me on a subconscious level something screams out, “Why should you have it easy? I had to figure this shit out myself, and I did! Why should you get help?”
In the session where we pinpointed this, the therapist had my wife repeating things to me over and over again that would communicate safety, security, that it was okay to fail, and that vulnerability and willingness to not know the answers is what creates intimacy. But that doesn’t change my programming.
In my professional life this is evidenced in my job history. In almost every field I’ve been in, at some point there’s a conversation along the lines of, “Have you ever done _______?”
“No, but it doesn’t look that hard.”
“Okay, well, now that’s your job. Let me know if you have any questions. Oh, and can you train these other three people to do it as well?”
“Um… sure.”
I’ve never given myself the latitude to now know. And because I am a pretty quick study, and I do pick things up quickly, I’ve advanced and done pretty well in fields I knew nothing about, and in which I often had no real interest. The interest was always in the learning, and in the figuring out. But when I have learned that skill and gained that knowledge, and figured out that system or cracked that code; then I’m done. I’m bored. And I never really wanted to be that person anyway, so the job or the task holds no further fulfillment for me.
I’ve always suspected that I’m going about it backwards; that most people start out wanting to be in a certain field, and so they start at the bottom and maybe get some education or foundational training, and then the work their way up. Along the way they acquire the skills and the knowledge necessary to succeed in that field. And by the time they’re the manager or the supervisor or whatever, they should know what everyone else under them knows (for the most part). But it never seems to work that way. And what ends up happening is that I end up spinning plates… acting the part of someone who does job “X.” Whether that’s radio, or tour management, or welding or carpentry or teaching. In every field I’ve been playing the part of someone who does that job. Putting on the suit. Acting in a role. And I do it well. But eventually I get tired of play-acting. And then it comes to the question, “Do I really want to do this? Is this satisfying?” And because I was only in it really for the learning experience… once the learning is done the answer is, “No.”
(to be continued...)
Growing up, I always just thought that was normal. That was the way we were. And when the teachers in class would ask, “How many of your parents are married?” and “How many of your parents are divorced?” it was always about 50/50 anyway, so it never seemed odd to me. It wasn’t until my twenties that I started to think about the effects their divorce might have had on me, positive or negative.
My mom is a pretty smart woman. She is one of seven kids, and as I mentioned before, she is really the only one to break out and make a life and a career for herself. I have often thought how difficult it must have been for her when, in 1975, she found herself supporting two young children; re-entering the job market at 32 without a degree. My memories of those years are mainly of her being gone. I know she was depressed and drank a lot.
I used to have a recurring nightmare. It was always set in our house on 21st Street in Idaho Falls. In the dream, my mom would be going out for the night, leaving my sister and me alone, as was often the case. I would be in my room on the second floor and would hear noises in the back yard. I ran to the window in my mom’s bedroom, and looked out to see men in gold space suits landing and running through the back yard. As I ran downstairs through the kitchen I could see them coming toward the sliding glass doors in the dining room, and when I burst into the garage to yell to my mom for help before she left, I would get out there just in time to see her brown Camaro drive off as the garage door closed. I don’t know how many times I had that dream, but it always terrified me. There was something coming for me. There was something to fear. And just as it was getting near, she was leaving.
When my folks split up, my dad bought my mom a house in a Mormon suburb of Idaho Falls called Ammon. I dimly remember the small, brown, ranch-style house. Mostly I remember the undeveloped fields around the neighborhood, and that our large back yard had no grass. My dad came out one weekend and built a fort out near the back of the property. It would have been a tree house, but there were no trees. I remember being too afraid of the black widow spiders to ever really play out there. My only other real memories of that place are of my Star Wars sheets on the bunk beds my dad’s friend Smitty built for me, and lots of nightmares; lots of nights spent yelling out for my mom, too scared to get out of bed and run into her room.
My mom found some good work, started going to night school, and eventually got a job as an executive assistant at the same company where my Dad was an engineer. E.G.& G. was at that time the company contracted to manage and run the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory (INEL), the nuclear power facility located in the Idaho desert about an hour from Idaho Falls, just outside of Arco. The families in Idaho Falls associated with either INEL or the Argon National Laboratory, the other large facility out there, just referred to both locations as “The Site.” Anyone from Idaho Falls can describe the ubiquitous yellow “Site Busses” that leave early in the morning and ferry people to and from The Site every day. My dad was lucky in that he worked for the engineering offices of E.G.&G., which meant that he didn’t have to go to The Site every day. His office was in Idaho Falls.
I don’t know the extent to which my Dad was keeping us afloat when they first split up. I assume it was almost entirely. When my mom got a job working for the same company it meant that she wasn’t completely dependent on my Dad for child support or living expenses. The man she worked for, Larry Ybarrando, was a brilliant engineer who truly valued her as an asset. As such he encouraged her to develop, to finish her education, to study and take the job beyond the boundaries of a normal secretary. Before long, when Japanese businessmen and engineers would come to Idaho Falls to tour the facilities and learn about the processes, she would be their guide and liaison. She built a life and a career for herself out of nothing, and at the time there’s no way my sister and I could have comprehended how difficult it was for her. We just knew she was gone a lot.
We soon moved closer to town, to the green and white split-level house on 21st Street in which we would live until we moved away from Idaho Falls ten years later. We were just two blocks from the apartment on St. Clair where my parents were living when I was born. The apartment of my first memory.
My dad was doing well professionally, my mom was getting on her feet, and my parents wanted us to have a good education. They decided to send us to a private Baptist school on the other side of town. The school must have had some kind of reputation at the time for them to choose one so far away. We were bussed to a school thirty minutes away, in a town where it didn’t take thirty minutes to get anywhere. Gethsemane Christian School was an extremely conservative private school. The girls were not allowed to wear pants. The boys were sent home if their hair touched their collars or covered their ears. Skirts could not be anywhere near the knee, much less over it. My parents were not the least bit Christian. They had no religious inclination one way or another at the time; it just offered a better education than the public school.
For my sister and me, going to private school meant that we never really got to know the kids in our neighborhood because we never interacted with them. And we never spent time with the kids we went to school with, because they were all bussed there as well, from different neighborhoods all over town. If we wanted to spend the night at a friend’s house, or go to a birthday party, it involved a huge trip out in the car, and either someone waiting for us, or someone picking us up. The upshot is that we grew up playing alone a lot. Later on we would hear the term “latch-key kids,” kids who went to school alone, came home to an empty house, and basically looked after themselves large parts of the day while their parents worked. For us this was just how it was.
I remember one night when the bus dropped us off and the house was locked. I think we usually had a key stashed somewhere but this time it was gone. We were the only kids in the neighborhood from that school, so the bus actually dropped us off at our house, instead just on the corner of the block. The driver couldn’t leave until we were safely inside the house, and we had no way of getting in. We didn’t really know any of the neighbors, and they were all at work, so there was no-where to go. In the end the bus driver took us home with her at the end of the route, and called my mom at work to let her know where we were. I remember spending that afternoon watching TV with her kids in a house that reeked of urine and old food, while she trimmed her kids’ toenails by biting them off. We were merely perplexed, but when my mom picked us up and we told her about the scene, she was mortified. As a parent now myself, the thought of some stranger taking my kids (we were probably 7 and 10 at the time) home with them to some squalid apartment… maybe I’m overly sensitive, but it horrifies me.
But, as it always is… it was just life as we knew it. My mom worked a lot, drank a lot and dated a succession of men. When she wasn’t out with some guy on a date or at a social function, she was drinking with my aunts and playing cards. We watched a lot of TV, ate a lot of frozen TV dinners, and spent a lot of time on our own.
My mom during these years was so much at sea with her own life that she never really interfered into ours. When she told me to clean my room, I locked myself inside and didn’t come out for a day. When she told me to rake the leaves, I stood in the yard and defied her to explain why they should be raked since more would fall the next day. When she tells these stories now, she laughs and describes how “Smart” I was at the time. Not smart as in “smart assed,” but smart as in quick, bright, able to see through her questions to the pointlessness of them. She didn’t have answers for me. She would just marvel at her “bright” son who questioned the system, and would always relent.
As I tell these stories I see myself as someone looking for a reason to do something, anything. There are good reasons to rake the leaves. If you don’t, they cover the grass and rot and the grass dies. There are good reasons to clean a room: if you don’t, food molds and rots inside and you get sick. Not to mention that as an adult, if you don’t have the ability to look after and clean after yourself, you live in squalor. But my mom had her hands full just keeping food on the table. These days I can see that. Growing up I resented her terribly for not being there, for not answering my questions, for not challenging me. But now I look back and see that she was scared, terrified, by the prospect of raising two kids alone. She was depressed. And she did what she could.
These days I see that. But at the time, and all through school, the only thing I saw was a mother that deferred any and every decision to me. In sixth grade I told my mom I was done with private school, and she transferred me to the public school down the street. I started racing dirt bikes and hanging out with the kids from the neighborhood, spending less and less time at home. By the time I was twelve, and in seventh grade, I was drinking regularly (usually from her liquor cabinet), spending nights on the street until the early morning hours, generally on my way to trouble.
All through this time, my mother cultivated a relationship with a guy we called “Mr. R.” We didn’t like him very much, but he had some money and he took us places. He owned part of a hot springs near Challis, Idaho, about two hours from where we lived, and on holiday weekends we would often drive up there with him and his kids (who were exactly our ages) and spend the weekends swimming and running in the hills. Those drives are memorable mostly because we listened to Willie Nelson and Alabama, and because I remember the two of them, my mother and him, with a bottle of vodka, a cooler of ice and orange juice, and two large cups between them. He drove, she mixed, and by the end of the drive the bottle was empty.
They dated from about seven years, but resisted getting married. One weekend we got a call that he’d been in an accident. He was living in Boise, managing a construction firm, and somewhere between Boise and Idaho Falls, on a mountain road, he’d fallen asleep (or passed out) with the cruise control set at eighty. His Chrysler New Yorker, with the power seats and the voice that told you “the door is ajar, the door is ajar” had gone off the road between mile marker 217 and 218 on Highway 20 outside of Fairfield, had gone over an embankment, down a gully, up the other side and plowed headlong into a ditch at full speed. He was badly broken and they weren’t sure he would live.
My mom spent long hours with him in the hospital while he convalesced, and it was there, beside his hospital bed, that she finally agreed to marry him.
And so we were moving to Boise. Five hours from Idaho Falls, the Capitol City. I was just about to start eighth grade, and my sister was entering her junior year in at I.F. High School. She was in the choir, and the glee club and had made good friends that she didn’t want to leave. So she decided to stay and live with my Dad and his wife. My mom quit the job she’d held for a decade, left the comfortable living she’d made for herself and her kids, and she and I packed up and moved West.
Within a year they were divorced. She had good reasons for never marrying him, and those were confirmed by the way he treated her when then finally did. One day after school I walked into the kitchen and my mom was sitting at the table going over papers and folders and looking through files. She looked serious. I said, “What’s up?”
She said, “We’re leaving. I’m divorcing him.”
I said, “Great. When do we move?”
School was letting out for the summer shortly, and I had been planning to go back to Idaho Falls to spend a few weeks at my Dad’s house. By the time I returned, mid summer, my mom had moved into a condo about a mile away, and there was no sign that we’d ever been anywhere else. She had already found a job working as an assistant for some lawyer downtown, and we fell right into a rhythm of it being just the two of us. She worked a lot, and now I was the one who was never there.
From this time on I was basically on my own in my mother’s home. There was no curfew, no restrictions. I did what I wanted, and was only kept from getting into real trouble by the fact that I was new in town and didn’t really know where the party was. I was my mom’s rock. I was the smart one, the solidity. If I had an opinion on anything she would put it above her own. But I needed a parent. A guide. I needed someone to be a safety net so that I could go out and fail and learn to get up again.
Looking back I am surprised how little I remember from these times. I catch glimpses, highlights of whole years of my childhood and adolescent years, but mostly it seems like I just drifted. I never engaged. I was never fully present in my life. I went to school dimly lit. I had been a good student as a kid. I was smart and liked to learn. But in the public schools, and with no motivation, I just attended. I passed. “C” average. I played sports if anyone suggested I go out for something. I played football for two years. I played basketball for two more. I ran track. But there was no real interest. I didn’t really care how I did in those efforts and neither did anyone else. I got by. No one asked anything more.
My wife and I have recently attended some marital counseling sessions to address some of the difficulties in our relationship. One of the persistent themes that arises in my life is the lack of patience I have for anyone who can’t learn on their own, who can’t figure it out. During one of our sessions I discovered that this is deep in me as a result of never having any adequate guidance. I remember vividly when I was at school in Hawaii. I was twenty years old, rooming with a guy from Cleveland in his mid-thirties. One morning I was in the little kitchenette/bathroom shaving when he walked by. “What the hell are you doing?” He laughed.
“What? I’m shaving.”
“Didn’t anyone ever show you how to do that? You’re carving your face off!” and he walked away. But no one ever did show me how to do it. No one ever taught me how to shave, or balance a checkbook, or study, or be honest. Because my mom relied on me so entirely for some solidity, especially in my teenage years, I always felt like I had to know these things intuitively. I always had to figure them out on my own. And I got good at it. People complemented my independence and my ability to pick up new skills and knowledge. I figured people out. I figured systems out. I never studied in high school, but I passed all the tests because I figured out how the teachers thought. I figured out what the tests were looking for, and I gave it to them. And somewhere along the way, I lost the ability to say, “I don’t know.” I found that I had to know.
And so, today when I’m in a group setting or a work environment and someone can’t figure it out, I get angry, and I resent them. When my son needs me to show him something over and over because he’s six years old for god’s sake… I resent it. When my wife needs help figuring out something on the computer, or when a co-worker needs help understanding a piece of software or a system or policy that’s been implemented… I get angry. Deep inside me on a subconscious level something screams out, “Why should you have it easy? I had to figure this shit out myself, and I did! Why should you get help?”
In the session where we pinpointed this, the therapist had my wife repeating things to me over and over again that would communicate safety, security, that it was okay to fail, and that vulnerability and willingness to not know the answers is what creates intimacy. But that doesn’t change my programming.
In my professional life this is evidenced in my job history. In almost every field I’ve been in, at some point there’s a conversation along the lines of, “Have you ever done _______?”
“No, but it doesn’t look that hard.”
“Okay, well, now that’s your job. Let me know if you have any questions. Oh, and can you train these other three people to do it as well?”
“Um… sure.”
I’ve never given myself the latitude to now know. And because I am a pretty quick study, and I do pick things up quickly, I’ve advanced and done pretty well in fields I knew nothing about, and in which I often had no real interest. The interest was always in the learning, and in the figuring out. But when I have learned that skill and gained that knowledge, and figured out that system or cracked that code; then I’m done. I’m bored. And I never really wanted to be that person anyway, so the job or the task holds no further fulfillment for me.
I’ve always suspected that I’m going about it backwards; that most people start out wanting to be in a certain field, and so they start at the bottom and maybe get some education or foundational training, and then the work their way up. Along the way they acquire the skills and the knowledge necessary to succeed in that field. And by the time they’re the manager or the supervisor or whatever, they should know what everyone else under them knows (for the most part). But it never seems to work that way. And what ends up happening is that I end up spinning plates… acting the part of someone who does job “X.” Whether that’s radio, or tour management, or welding or carpentry or teaching. In every field I’ve been playing the part of someone who does that job. Putting on the suit. Acting in a role. And I do it well. But eventually I get tired of play-acting. And then it comes to the question, “Do I really want to do this? Is this satisfying?” And because I was only in it really for the learning experience… once the learning is done the answer is, “No.”
(to be continued...)
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