Tag: Life

SOCCER MOM, RUGBY DAD

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

As I said at the time …

So here we are. Who would have thought we’d be attending kids’ soccer and rugby matches? Not us!

Or dealing with declining parents. Your mother’s dementia must be difficult. You mention that she still remembers people and is in a wheelchair, which makes me wonder if she’s afflicted with Alzheimer’s or something different. My wife and the girls talk fondly of Grandpa Marion and how his Alzheimer’s brought out a sweetness in him, while another, with episodes in the past years, turns mean and paranoid. Parkinson’s is rough, too, with its long decline; I lost a dear Mennonite mentor last January, in Virginia, and one of my best friends here is in the early stages – so far, controlled by medication, when they get it right.

Galapagos? My elder girl will be very envious. At age 11, she went on a big Darwin kick, a passion that has never abated. A few years ago, we went down to the Boston Museum of Science for a special exhibit they had, and it was quite impressive. In all of the historical debate over his insights, I’m surprised we don’t hear more about the religious roots of his work – most of his encouragement and support seemed to come from clergymen. Me, I’m quite fond of his later affection with earthworms. Maybe it has to do with my monster composting.

Now I still want to hear how you distinguish between mystery and magic. I have a few ideas, but I doubt they’re as expansive or insightful as yours.

In the meantime, I’m hoping to get back to poetry by early fall. Why can’t I stick to just one kind of writing? Or be somehow easily identifiable? A good friend’s son, who is a successful serious novelist, seems to have the same problem. He, too, wants every book to be unique, rather than a continuation of or variation on his others.

Gotta run … time to commute, again. And tomorrow, another birthday. How can that be?

WATER SIGN OR ELSE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

It’s hard to think 17 years have gone by since this correspondence! As I said at the time …

Your first letter had me repeating to myself, “She has to be a water sign — or at least have a lot of water influence prominent in her chart.” Now you blithely inform me you’re a Pisces. Ah-ha! Figures! Could that be why you’re so alive in your emotions, as astro-informed friends from my past would insist? (For Aquarian me, meanwhile, aloft in encyclopedic data and logical constructs, staying alert to my own emotions can be a real challenge — especially when retreating into my brainiac self became my way of surviving some pretty intense emotional abuse way back when.) So, in some wonderful ways you help me tap dance into some chambers  of my soul. (Molto grazie!) As for the writing skills: do the nuns at dreaded Mother Theodore Guerin get any credit? (Mother … Theodore? And I doubted your age?)

And you wish you look older? Na-na-na-na! Listen to Swami Jnana, kiddo. Do you have any idea how … thoughtful you appear in that photo? It doesn’t get any better than that. Why can’t any of the women I know/have known appreciate being they way they are — which inevitably is much, much lovelier than they presume. (Assignment for future edition, probably when you’re ensconced in that high suite overlooking the Loop and Lake Michigan — I know that view, having been in Jeff MacNally’s eerie in the Chicago Tribune tower a time or two: interview Cindy, Nicky, Cristy, and the rest of the supermodel cult and see if you can find anyone truly satisfied with her looks; bet, deep down, they aren’t.) Ergo: enjoy your current condition while you can. (And may that be for a long, long time!) Most women I know would kill to have the body or the looks of an eighteen-year-old, or so they say. You have the rest of your life to look older. (And may you age gracefully, like Sophia Loren or Joan Collins.) Maybe it’s not really a matter of age, after all, but of self-confidence. Those who are radiant, no matter what, versus those who are wrapped up in their misery. Watcha think?

As for feeling one’s chronological age, you’re an excellent writer: that automatically makes you middle-age. (I know: part of me’s always felt old, too. Maybe it’s just ancient soul.) (My age, by the way, is ninety-two.) But, because you’re an artist, you’re also going to have to find ways of remaining fourteen or fifteen forever. I wouldn’t recommend adult orthodontics as a strategy, although it is an interesting trip and seems to be an good way to open conversations I wouldn’t otherwise have. (And you said something about rambling? Heavens!)

So here I’m looking through some Diane Wakoski volumes for a great insight on adolescence and find instead: “My search for the perfect man, the perfect love, Romance, sexual life, has always been emblematic of my search for something else, you know. In Pretty in Pink, a wonderful character played by an actress who must be thirty but still looks like she’s eighteen, the wise older woman in the film is nostalgically wearing her old high school prom dress and dancing to some golden oldie with the star of the movie (Molly Ringwald) and she says, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could start old and get younger every year?’ I recall my elders always saying that ‘youth is wasted on the young’ … “

I very much enjoyed both the batch of poems you sent along. Do you write as effortlessly as it appears? You have some real knock-‘em-dead connections here: “sometimes she’s a ballerina/hanging by her neck/from the rafters/of some wretched dollhouse//sometimes she’s a little girl/with treasure chest eyes/and a bowl-of-pudding smile” is astonishing. Brava, brava, brava! (Envy, envy, envy!) Ditto: “the sky is pink lemonade.” And the line, “trees singing,” keeps triggering to my ears Isaiah 55:12b, “and all the trees of the countryside clap their hands.”

I, too, prefer direct language — although in my writing, it sometimes seems that by creating a deliberate short-circuit, I’m more able to get down into that painful raw nerve you talk about. I wonder if some of the “trying to hide behind huge words and flowery language” you object to (rightfully so) has more to do with a lack of a real emotional underpinning/experience. A few days before your big package arrived, I received two hardbound prize-winning volumes by those “professional poets” we’ve already defined—and I found myself annoyed. You’re right: there is a lot of hiding going on. And it feels like WORK, both the creation and the reading of it.

Then your latest edition came, and I found myself often laughing aloud with delight, because the pieces were coming from another place in the psyche. (Pieces I checkmarked: “Dead Horse,” “Yes, There Still Are Some Good Ones,” “Sam I Ain’t,” “I read a book about a woman …,” “Sardines,” “The Painkiller,” [hey, is that true about the Walibri???], your centerfold [sick! heh-heh!], your on-going adventures [really fine line: “my feathers are slowly being replaced by rocks … being covered by cold, gray cement”] — and the insights in the paragraph beginning, “i have always been on another planet.”

Please, please, please, send a copy of your chapbook. (What a marvelous title — I can almost taste it. A turnabout on Psalm 34, “O taste and see,” which Denise Levertov uses as a title for a wonderful collection of her own poems — so delicious it opens your eyes.) Watercolor nights, what a vivid linkage, almost a micropoem itself … softness, yet I wonder if night scenes can be done in watercolors: now you make me ask a watercolorist I know.

Was kinda curious about where your neighborhood is — thought maybe it was around Hyde Park, or some other brainy neighborhood. Was surprised to find it on my road atlas as being out toward Mother O’Hare instead. So I asked my boss, who says he’s spent a lot of time in Chi’town (he’s from western Michigan), and he said he thought it was mostly duplexes and bungalows out that way. And then Sunday night I was zoned out in front of the tube, not quite watching some dumb detective story set in Your Fair City, and there they went, ripping onto — you guessed it, your fair street, which may have been filled with some fair number of criminals by then or a fairly high-speed chase. Is life weird or what? Looked like ‘50s ranch houses, mostly. Some trees. Short front yards. Many bathtub Madonnas? (Couldn’t tell.)

I’ve done a lot of travel on maps. Some places I’ve never been I seem to know better than some people do who have actually been there. As Howard McCord has written: “A chest of maps/is a greater legacy/than a case of whisky.//My father left me both.” Another quote: “or what my father said/‘go along the coast as far as/you can without getting killed’/my saint is Hsuan-tsang/who got    _  back.”

Well, hope you’re still enjoying that big old Dodge Diplomat (go along as far as you can and then come back). Assume college has started. Took me three-and-a-half years to figure out how they rig the game against you: the moment you walk into a classroom, you’re already a hundred pages behind. (Wright College? I went to Wright State University, then transferred to Indiana University in Bloomington.)

So here’s to a rewarding and eccentric friendship. None of my other editors get long letters like this. Actually, they’re lucky to get cover letters. But then, they rarely reply with more than a marginal scrawl, either. I wish I were having as much fun with the newspaper as you’re having with Indigo, but, hey, we don’t have centerfolds, either.

Good thoughts to you, always.

Your midnight rambler.

IN THE MIX

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 7 Comments

I’ve heard it said at both ends of the Society of Friends that it takes three committed families to plant a new Meeting. So even with a pastor, a healthy mix of talents is required. This is probably true of other congregations as well, but I’ll continue to use “meeting” here because I think much more is involved than just seeing each other on Sunday morning.

In envisioning an ideal Meeting, let me ask if having six committed families or if having sixty not-so-committed members would be preferable. That is, a smaller group that is highly responsive to each other in their daily activities, or a larger, more loosely knit group that is more widespread through the surrounding community. I’d say there are pros and cons both ways.

The question becomes less abstract when we consider our own expectations of our local family of faith. First, what do you require from a faith community, and then how willing you are to work toward achieving that? Second, how do your personal expectations and participation differ from others in that faith circle? And third, considering the future of the Meeting, what would you hope for? (These, by the way, might be good queries for the annual State of Society Report answers.)

Planting a new Meeting is, of course, only a start. Nurturing it is another matter. My guess is that three families form the minimum requirement because of the range of vision they engender and can pursue together – a microcosm of what we already have here where I worship.

STRIKE THREE AND YOU’RE OUT

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

According to folklore, when intruders disturb a rattlesnake, the first passerby merely irritates the viper. The second passerby becomes truly annoying. The third in rapid succession, though, becomes just too much. And that’s the one the snake strikes.

I think many of us humans have days like that. When we erupt – or someone blows up at us – it’s often far out of proportion to the provocation. What you see merely reflects the third offense or offender – the one that triggers defensive action.

Either way, don’t take it too personally.

SAGEBRUSH AS A STATEMENT

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The diamond hitch is a top-of-the-line knot, especially useful in cowboy, mining, or logging country – or, as I apply it, the desert foothills of Washington state found east of the Cascade mountains. Forefront in my related set of poems is the unspoken recognition of diamond hitch as marriage, with its implied images of diamond ring and getting hitched. In the background, also unvoiced, is the diamond symbol of the clear and enduring heart – further extended to intense spiritual quest, as The Diamond Sutra (Vajrachchedika in Sanskrit) demonstrates, found also in the Buddhist linkage of diamond to Dharma. In addition to serving as an emblem for the open range of the American Far West, sagebrush, moreover, suggests wisdom, spice, even the Burning Bush of Moses – the profound influence desert has upheld for prophets and mystics over the millennia.

SUCH DIFFERENCES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

As I said at the time …

Finally, observing the banner in the background of the thirty-fifth reunion pictures, my wife finally connected a date she’d long known with her own experience: “When you were all graduating, I was being potty trained.”

I wonder what I would tell them, given the chance. I’m not judging them, as much as judging myself and all of the intervening years. The long journey to here. I’m not gloating that I have a younger wife, one who’s only a few years older than some of their own children; besides, that wouldn’t have been the case, had my first marriage not failed. I’m finally experiencing the challenges and joys of parenting, while they already have grandchildren – on that front, maybe they really are much older. See, I am envious of those still married to their spouse right out of high school. They took the straight path and got down to business. In contrast, many lonely nights and a sequence of transitory relationships have been my alternative. I think how innocent I was (ignorant is the more accurate term, actually), especially on matters of sex. In the intervening years, even after I realized that certain girls had gone away because they were pregnant or certain guys were homosexual, I simply couldn’t admit that any of us were actually having, gulp, intercourse. Although, years later, looking at the homecoming court photos in the yearbook, the realization flashed upon me, from one’s smile, that she must have recently become sexually active.

Which leads me to the goddesses. The beauties I both idealized and gazed at with masked lust, wondering how the soft touch would feel, how the naked body would look, how two people actually connect. The ones who left me speechless. The ones who were, in many ways, in a league other than the one I inhabited. To my eyes, they were miraculous and mysterious, invested with secret knowledge and magical powers, with taste, social graces, and high style – no matter how middle-class we were or the fact that our conversations rarely went any deeper than howdy. The reunion photos, then, confirm my fears – that goddesses may become hags – yes, mortal, even grotesque. And yet, to my surprise, some have become more beautiful than ever. How can this be? If we could only return, however briefly, for candid discourse, to uncover what thoughts, feelings, and actions lurked behind those Mona Lisa facades, both then and in the subsequent years. Not superficial conversation, but blunt disclosures. Now, however, sifting through the reunion photos, I soon calculate how few of these goddesses attended – which leads to further speculation. To my eye, they were the essence of what Hollywood starlets aspire to represent. Unlike any mythology, however, few remain in any Olympus. Instead, I must confront a youth culture that offered little wisdom.

I must leave it to the girls-turned-to-women to speak of the Adonis club and its deterioration. Besides, I was never a member. On the other hand, I’ve sometimes quipped that if I could do it all over again, I would have hung out with the greasers – that they had what I was lacking. As if they would have had me! Or am I only imagining they had fun in their tweaking of authority?

To reenter those years also means admitting shame, embarrassment, and guilt. I’m not the golden boy my mother expected, or the great talent my youth pastor counseled. For that matter, it’s been many years since I could tie my hair back in a ponytail or part it down the middle. Since I had a beer bottle tossed at me at a party. As I’ve said, it’s been a long road from there to here.

One soon approaching what will be a fiftieth anniversary reunion, if it happens.

GREAT TASTES FROM NEARBY SOURCES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

There are some things we’ve decided not to grow. Sweet corn, for example, requires more space than we’re willing to allocate.

Part of our decision reflects the reality that we have some fine farm markets nearby, and we welcome the exchange of a local economy. The same-day butter-and-sugar or all white ears are unbeatable, especially when accompanied by our own tomatoes. Who says a feast has to be expensive?

A pick-your-own orchard presents another example. We have fond memories of family journeys to Butternut Farm in Meaderboro for peaches and apples. For me, of course, the visit reminds me of living in the orchard in Washington state’s Yakima Valley, so many years ago, now, though I welcome its many varieties other than Delicious. A Gala, anyone?

The annual trek to a Christmas tree farm here in the city feels related – first, to pick out our choice, and then, a few days before Christmas Eve, to harvest it and somehow fit it into the car. We still treasure the bird nests we’ve found in ours some years.

PYRAMID OF VINING BEANS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Back on June 14, I posted a photo of our newly erected tepee for the pole beans. Now that they’ve sprouted and taken off, here’s how it looks.

The vines have climbed to nearly seven feet tall. I'll need a stepladder for picking.
The vines have climbed to nearly seven feet tall. I’ll need a stepladder for picking.

If the plants produce as well as our first round of sugar snap peas did, I’ll be feeling like a pharaoh of beans. (I hear the groans in our household already. So, she might ask, did that make me a sugar-snap daddy?)

TRULY CORRESPONDENCE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

A while back, while reading a selection of letters by the itinerant Quaker minister Elias Hicks (1748-1830), I was impressed by the length and quality of some of the individual correspondence. These were pieces that could have been published essays, yet were addressed to a specific individual – pieces, I should add, from a farmer by trade.

I’m left wondering about the amount of time some Friends (and others, of course) spent daily or weekly in reading and writing as well as reflecting on the issues at hand.

Don’t tell me it was a slower era or that they had more time to employ – labor was more demanding and often tedious, after all. I think something else is at play here.

As I said, I’m impressed.