I was talking with someone I know about the deaths of our respective parents. This person’s parents died four and six years ago, and I got the sense they still feel it fairly strongly. My mother died twenty-five years ago today. I thought I’d feel strongly about the twenty-fifth anniversary my mother’s death, but that hasn’t been the case. Of course I still think about her. But twenty-five years is a long time. She died so long ago now that I don’t really remember what she looked like, I mostly just remember what photographs of her look like. And I don’t really remember what she sounded like, I mostly just remember the one audio recording my younger sister made of her. Then too, she had dementia the last few years of her life, so some of my most vivid memories of her are from that time. So, for example, I remember sitting in my parents’ dining room talking to my mother. She obviously had no idea who I was, but was very polite to me. My father walked by, smiled at her, she smiled back. When he was out of earshot, she turned to me and said, “Who was that man?” That kind of memory is more recent and more vivid than most of my other memories of her. I often feel that my memory is unreliable, and perhaps this is one reason why: the memories I wish were most important, and thus most vivid, often seem to get obscured by other memories.
Category: Memoir
An anniversary
Thirty years ago this past August, I began working as a director of religious education (DRE) at a Unitarian Universalist congregation. I’ve been working in UU congregations in one capacity or another ever since: as a DRE (twice), an interim religious educator, an interim associate minister, a minister of religious education (twice), and as a parish minister (twice).
Over thirty years and nine congregations, I’ve never seriously considered switching careers. The pay isn’t great (when I moved to Massachusetts, I discovered that I qualified for low and moderate income housing). The job security isn’t all that great (not any more). But I’ve stuck with it, mostly because congregations do a lot of good in the world. For example, research shows that kids who are part of a congregation are less likely to engage in risky behaviors (substance abuse, suicidal ideation, etc.), and are more likely to have good mental health. It’s pretty good having a job where I feel like I’m helping make the world a better place.
But it is kind of odd to think that it’s been thirty years….
A COVID memoir
I wrote this for a science fiction fanzine. But it also works well for this blog.
I
Two years before the pandemic hit, we started living in a graveyard. Not right in the middle of the graves—there was a low stone wall that separated our house, the cemetery office, and the parking area from the graves. But we lived inside the tall iron fence that separated the cemetery from the residential area surrounding it, and each evening an electric motor would start up, slowly driving the big iron gate along its track, shutting us off from the rest of the world.
It might sound a little creepy, but it was actually a very pleasant place to live. We lived in the old caretaker’s house, which was over a hundred years old. Neighbors walked past our house during the day, taking a walk in the cemetery, because it was only open space in the neighborhood. We could chat with the cemetery supervisor, and we got to know some of the members of the cemetery’s board of directors. At night when the gate closed, we had our own private five acre back yard. And, as we liked to say, the neighbors were quiet.
I’m not the first to notice that life during the pandemic felt like living inside a dystopian sf novel. That we lived in a graveyard made it feel even more like a novel. And it felt especially dystopian at the end of the summer, when the sky turned bloody reddish orange.
Continue reading “A COVID memoir”Four years
Four years ago today, on Friday, March 13, 2020, the state of California shut down schools across the state. I was then the minister of religious education in Palo Alto, Santa Clara County, California. Since our congregation decided to tie our education programs to whatever the public schools did, that meant we too were going to move all our programs online effective immediately. And on that same day, Santa Clara county banned all gatherings of more than 100 people, so our congregation moved Sunday services online as of the following Sunday.
Complete lockdown happened three days later, as most Bay Area counties issued a stay-at-home order on March 16. A state-wide shelter-in-place order was issued on March 19.
Houses of worship were considered “essential services,” so I could get out of the house and go to work a couple of days a week. But it was definitely creepy commuting to work on Highway 101. The week before, all four lanes in both directions would be packed with cars from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. In the first weeks after the shut-down, at times I’d see no other cars on the road. It reminded me of this passage from Daniel Defoe’s Journal of a Plague Year: “…the great streets within the city [of London], such as Leadenhall Street, Bishopsgate Street, Cornhill, and even the Exchange itself, had grass growing in them in several places; neither cart or coach were seen in the streets from morning to evening, except some country carts to bring roots and beans, or peas, hay, and straw, to the market, and those but very few compared to what was usual.”
Dream world
I woke up early, decided it was too early, and went back to sleep. I seem to have had a lot of dreams, none of which I remember. But I have vague memories of a dream involving my mother, during the years she had dementia. My mother died twenty-five years ago this month, and for the last few years of her life had gradually increasing dementia associated with supranuclear palsy, Parkinson’s, and the side effect of the drugs she was taking. She didn’t know who I was for the last couple of years of her life, and I didn’t have much in the way of real conversations with her for a couple of years before that. The mother who appeared in my dream last night was the person who had dementia — not always making sense, sometimes hallucinating. It’s funny how vivid my memories of that time still are, vivid enough to reappear in my dreams from time to time.
Memory
I awakened this morning in the grip of an unpleasant memory.
The memory was from the end of the last semester of my last year of undergraduate study. I had majored in philosophy because it had the least amount of required coursework. That meant I had plenty of time to take classes in fine arts and music, and do lots of reading on my own.
Even if I had taken more philosophy classes, I knew I was a mediocre and uninspired philosophy student. I knew it, and the department chair knew it, and I knew he knew it. But I didn’t think I was anything worse than mediocre and uninspired. So I was a little taken aback when the department chair pulled me aside one day and said that sometimes the philosophy faculty needed to talk a little more with one of the seniors….
At first I had no idea what he was talking about. He seemed to be talking around in circles. Then it became clear he was saying I had to meet with philosophy faculty for some kind of oral exam. The exam would take place in two days.
Two days. Holy shit. I still didn’t understand what was going on. I felt too burned out to study.
By the time of the oral exam, I was terrified. I have a vivid memory of walking into an office and confronting the entire philosophy faculty. As soon as they started questioning me, though, I realized I had been mistaken about the purpose of the oral exam. Apparently someone had proposed me for academic honors. That’s what they were going to examine about. This was not at all what I had expected. I froze, and could barely speak. Some of the faculty looked disappointed and even disdainful. It was humiliating. At least they had the kindness to let me go quickly.
Of course I didn’t get honors. Nor did I deserve them — I had done as little coursework as possible in philosophy. I was pretty sure that the department chair also felt I didn’t deserve honors, which helped explain why he couldn’t bring himself to tell me that I was being considered for honors. He and I had clashed a number of times — I thought he was a pompous ass who had coasted on a brilliant PhD dissertation but never published anything — and he thought I was intellectually immature and needed his special guidance. He cornered me at breakfast on graduation and insisted on telling me that he knew I was a prejudiced New England Yankee who hated French Canadians like him and that’s why we never got along. Actually, in my town there were no French Canadians, and that just happened to be the one form of New England ethnic/racial hatred that I had not learned. But I knew what he meant. No wonder he found me distasteful. And recognizing the justice of his opinion of me didn’t change my opinion of him: that he was a pompous ass and an intellectual pretender.
At graduation, we had to sit through an incredibly boring commencement speech about the glories of capitalism (I’m not making this up). I hadn’t wanted to attend graduation, but my parents insisted. Since they had paid for a third of my college degree, I knew they deserved something for their investment, so I bought the robe and the funny hat and sat there through the boring ceremony. We had been instructed that when it came our turn to walk across the stage and receive our diploma, we were supposed to shake the hand of the college president first, then take our diploma from his other hand. I grabbed the diploma first, then shook his hand — I wasn’t taking a chance on them yanking it away from me at the last minute on some pretext or another.
A couple of footnotes: After failing miserably in that oral exam, I was asked to apply for the department prize in philosophy by submitting a list of books I had read on my own, outside of coursework, during my final two years of college. It was an impressively long list, and I got the prize — a gift certificate for $40 worth of books (worth $120 in 2022 dollars). Those books probably were worth more to me than honors, because after graduation I spent 12 years in the residential construction business where no one cared if I went to college, let alone whether I got honors or not. And I met a fair number of former philosophy majors working construction who didn’t use their degrees, either.
Ed
Ed died this morning, peacefully in his sleep. Here’s a picture of him when he was 32, sitting next to his four year old daughter:
His daughter doesn’t like this photo. She said: no one should be allowed to give little girls hair cuts like that. But since she never looks at this blog, I can get away with posting this. I think it’s a nice father-daughter photo.
The Ted memorial rest area
For the past month, we’ve been living in Westport, Mass., and I’ve been commuting to my new job in Cohasset, Mass. It’s at least an hour and a half drive, more if there’s traffic. By the time I come home, I’m often tired of driving. Fortunately, there’s a rest area almost exactly halfway between the church in Cohasset and our temporary place in Westport. I often find myself pulling into that rest area to stretch my legs and clear my head.
It’s not much of a rest area. The parking lot is too small for the amount of truck traffic, with big rigs everywhere. By contrast, the lot for cars is usually mostly empty. Inside the building, there’s a Burger King and a Dunkin Donuts. But they seem to sell most of their food at their drive-through windows, because there’s hardly ever anyone sitting in the dining area. In spite of all the tractor trailer rigs, the whole place feels oddly deserted.
I stopped there on my way home today. It was lunch time, and the dining area was as deserted as usual. A memory forced its way to the surface of my consciousness. Back in 2008, I was working in New Bedford, and once a month I’d drive up to Newton for Sacred Harp singing. Ted, whom I sang with in another choir in New Bedford, started getting into Sacred Harp singing, too. So we’d drive up together to sing Sacred Harp. But I’d often have missed dinner in order to sing, so on the way home we’d stop at this exact same rest area to grab a sandwich. We’d spend the long drives talking, and we’d sit in that deserted rest area — even back then, it was always deserted — and talk some more while we ate. Mostly we talked about music. I still remember how he said he used to sing with five different ensembles when he lived in San Francisco, one for each night of the week.
When I moved to California, I lost touch with Ted. I’m not a good correspondent, and neither was he. A few years ago, I learned from one of his siblings that he had died.
Ted and I both sang bass. He was a pleasure to sing next to, not just because he was a good musician and a good singer. Some choral singers are on an ego trip, wanting to show off how good they are. That kind of singer is not fun to sit next to. Ted was the other kind of singer, the singer who’s there for the music, who subsumes their ego in the music. Marge Piercy talked about something similar in her poem “To Be of Use”: “I want to be with people who submerge / in the task … / who are not parlor generals and field deserters / but move in a common rhythm / when the food must come in or the fire be put out.” Piercy was talking about work, not music, but you see the same kind of thing in music. As it happens, I did actually do physical work with Ted on several occasions, and he worked the way he sang: submerged in the task, rather than a parlor general. That’s the kind of person I like to spend time with.
When I was in the rest area today, I got to thinking about Ted. I guess for me, that’s now the Ted memorial rest area. Not a bad thing to think about while I’m stretching my legs and getting a sandwich.
Anesthesia
Update, October 10: Turns out when I wrote this, the anesthesia was still clouding my brain — my prose is even more confused and incoherent than usual. I’ll leave it up as written, so to show what anesthesia can do to you.
In college, I took a class with Lucius Outlaw, Jr., in which we read Edmund Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations. Husserl’s book opened up the possibility of observing the stream of one’s own consciousness, something I’ve been interested in, and have practiced, ever since. So when I went in for a colonoscopy yesterday, I decided to take the opportunity to try to observe what happened as I was given anesthesia, and later how I came out of anesthesia
Thinking back to a previous colonoscopy, I realized that I simply couldn’t remember some things I knew had happened after coming out of the anesthesia. I couldn’t, for example, remember getting dressed, though I knew I had done so. Before I underwent anesthesia yesterday, I wanted to see what I could retain in memory from the time I went under anesthesia until I arrived back at home.
I have a clear memory of when I lost consciousness. One of the nurses asked me to settle myself slightly differently on the gurney, which I did, and then — nothing.
Continue reading “Anesthesia”45th anniversary
Forty-five years ago today…Nixon announcing on national television that he was resigning…what a strange moment….