Geoff Campbell, the headmaster of prestigious Phoenix Country Day, and I used to go camping and hunting. We did this in the winter, usually just after Christmas, and would wander around the Blue Ridge or Cumberlands until we got too cold. One year we took a canned ham with us and ate from it for two days. By the second day it had acquired what I believe to be Staphylococcus aureus. This bacteria produces a toxin that causes cramping, nausea and diarrhea, usually in fewer than five hours. You can’t get rid of S. areus by cooking since the toxin is heat stable. It’s probably living in your nose right now, by the way, but let that pass. We both were ill, but Geoff was in agony.
My children think that I’m a cheapskate. This is unfair. I may be economical, but I’m neither stingy nor miserly. I look for value wherever it can be found. And I really don’t want to grow old and become one of those who hoards money and belongings.
I can always get one more use out of anything. Toothpaste tubes gives me more trouble in this department than they used to. They used to be made of metal and one could really squeeze the last molecule on to the sparsely bristled brush. The brush is sparsely bristled now; it was not that way when new. I can make both last for over a year.
A tube of original Pepsodent is 66% less expensive than most of the other brands. It is much cheaper than the $4-$7 you’ll pay for your ferret’s toothpaste, according to the non profit group “Massachusetts Ferret Friends”. Visit them on the web.
I collected tubes of Ultra Brite toothpaste (the toothpaste with sex appeal) once during a six week jaunt through the middle east and Europe. In Italy it was “Ultra Brait” (denti bianchissimi), in Austria it was “Ultra Weiss” (die zahncreme mit dem wildengeschmack) and in French it was just “Ultra Brite” (le dentrifice au gout sauvage).
I got a huge kick out of that packaging. Most people bring really cool souvenirs home from their trips. I brought toothpaste . . . and used it.
My economy is somewhat compulsive. It’s not as bad as other compulsive behaviors I have such as knowing precisely what time it is even if I awaken in the middle of the night.
To greater and lesser degrees all members of my family of origin suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder. My sister’s manifestations of this disorder involve irresistible urges to make a fresh pot whenever a Mr. Coffee is sighted. For reasons known only to her she will then allow it to become cold, serving others from a dented metal thermos with yesterday’s brew therein. Another of her compulsions is to wash any clothing not safely closeted. She does this in blistering hot water. Most of my parents clothing is too small for them nowadays. It is all very white. Beka also will locate a partly emptied container (oh, let’s say a shampoo bottle) and fill it with another liquid located nearby. It need not be any form of soap or shampoo. She discards the newly emptied container with something approaching Buddhist serenity, and returns to her television (always channel five).
This is why I’m used to our housekeeper, a possibly legal Mexican from Monterrey, who will unpack anything in our house and store it where she believes it belongs. Consuelo (whose real name is Linda, by the way) abhors packaging. Egg cartons? Never! The bag of potatoes? Forget about it! A multi-pack of go-gurt? Let’s let it out! “Libertad” is her battle cry. She has numerous other quirks. Rearranging the furniture is one. Once she cut the grass. Another time she washed the front of our house. I call her Consuelo only because I always wanted a maid named Consuelo. She is a treasure for us even though she speaks no English and apparently doesn’t want to learn. I am reasonably fluent in Spanish, but when she hides my son’s Nintendo DS and its stylus, I am as mute as a swan. How does one even begin to inquire?
As a child my brother used to “double click” his milk glass against his teeth before drinking. He would “double tap” a doorjamb on this way through. He would “double touch” just about anything for a number of years. My parents harbor deep suspicions of psychiatrists and, even worse, psychologists. Their manner of handling such aberrant behaviors was to shout them out. “Stop that!” they would cry. Eventually Bayne subordinated his compulsions. He mastered them. Unhappily, as everyone in the world except my family knows, these compulsions are still with him. They are not really mastered at all. They ooze out in his adult life, like the alien Sigourney Weaver had to kill. He is tremendously uncomfortable with peace and quiet, for example, and will turn on rock music in his fully wired house while he shouts for me to come listen to one of his children perform a song or instrumental selection. One of their dogs is usually barking, several dozen of their phones will be ringing, and he’ll suddenly rush to his computer to play “EverQuest” while eating a jalapeño popper. If Beka’s serenity is achieved by fulfilling the demands of her inner voice, Bayne’s is achieved through sensory overload.
Can you imagine a full family gathering with these people? Wait, it gets better. My mother is hard of hearing. Dad shouts. Mama believes he shouts because he, too, is hard of hearing, not because he has lived with her hearing loss for decades. Dad will begin his part of the conversation from a distant room in order to be well into his declamation upon entry. He is oblivious to other conversations taking place and is usually waving a newspaper or magazine article when he enters. All of his conversations end like this: “Read this and when you’re through, throw it away.”
Mama hasn’t needed to hear for many years due to the fact that she’s usually telling a story. That’s her compulsion. The last known listening event for her occurred back on August 7, 1978, when President Jimmy Carter declared a federal emergency regarding the Love Canal. The special report on channel 5 pre-empted Charlie Hall’s weather forecast and that made her “damn mad.”
The Love Canal was located in a neighborhood of Niagra Falls, New York. It was flooded with toxic chemicals, backfilled, and a school was built on it. Epilepsy, asthma, and miscarriages were some of the problems. 56% of children born in the neighborhood had birth defects. It’s still a mess. I am so glad that young people today are interested in saving the planet. I hope it’s not too late.
I’m certainly not immune to this compulsive problem. On the contrary, I’ve got it worse than all the rest of them. In schools today we are actively investigating why so many students have trouble with their “executive function.” The executive function is knowing how to put first things first. We learned it by hearing my father intone “first things first” on a daily basis while growing up.
My executive function is my only function. When I realize, for example, that the car’s oil needs to be changed, I cannot think of anything else. Late on a Sunday night I will be seeking a grease monkey who can provide relief. My executive function says, “This is your sole reason for existing. Get the oil changed.” It is not unlike Beka’s coffee-making.
I count when I’m toweling off after a shower and while getting dressed. I count when I’m filling a glass with water. Once I watched the glass overflow, and I let it overflow, until I reached 10. Ten was the number I had to reach before shutting off the water.
Usually these things are funny. They are not deeply inconvenient. Moreover, they are the quirks that provide the color to our lives.
During the nineties everyone was fond of claiming “dysfunctional families”. It was sort of a fraternity of right-thinking-young adults whose brotherhood revolved around rejecting their families of origin. A former student of mine pointed out once that if you had a roof over your head, a bed, clothes, and were made to go to school, your family was not dysfunctional. Quirky, perhaps, but not dysfunctional. I like his definition. And I definitely like quirky families.
I don’t see much compulsive behavior in my children, yet. I can identify traits in them, however. Lillian has almost no conception of minutes or hours. It is clear to me that if she is supposed to be at a 6:30 appointment she will leave the house precisely at 6:30. In her mind, evidently, space and time will bend; a worm-hole will appear; she will arrive at the same moment she left. Caroline will, out of the blue, make peculiar statements that immediately stifle subsequent conversation. Once she quieted an entire roomful of people by proclaiming that she didn’t like to get wet. No one knew what to say in response to this odd announcement. She’s also in a “justice” phase. She still has some vague memory of the Garden of Eden and believes that life is fair.
I believe that children are in the Garden. Sometime around the end of third grade or the beginning of fourth they leave the Garden. Banished. There’s no where to go now but across the desert, finding an oasis from time to time.
For me those oases come from nature. That’s why things like the Love Canal are so immoral. And don’t even get me started on the Everglades.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Monday, September 17, 2007
Introduction to the Writing I am Forced to Undertake
Have you ever noticed that all medical doctors in North America adopt no more than three basic facial expressions? These expressions bring to mind the automatic transmission of an early Pontiac. The most common, seen round the clock in hospitals and offices across the continent is when their faces shift to neutral. It brings peace to patients, and indeed in many cases, submission. In neutral, we are assured that millions of synapses are not only collecting data, but processing it in such a way that a salutary result is guaranteed. Next one may observe the forward gear: intent on a course of physick that will bring a “hail fellow, well met” from all acquaintances in no time. It is a terror for nurses, orderlies, and first year residents, but a great comfort to the afflicted. Finally there is reverse. It is rare, and almost always accompanied by something akin to a somatic expression of guilt. It is fleeting. None is an expression of joy; none of agony, though surely they must feel these emotions from time to time.
Sir William Osler, that great physician and philosopher, will soon take his place with the rest of those forgotten. Not chief among his works, but salient nonetheless, is a commencement address he gave to his students (and colleagues!) entitled “Aequanimitas”. The great irony is that a portion of this wonderful speech (including the title misspelled!) that points to the importance of library research, is routinely and mistakenly attributed to the author Samuel Butler.
It’s not tabloids making this mistake. It’s not People magazine, or Psychology Today, or even the Times-Picayune. Readers may make a quick search of medical college websites from Brooklyn to Montana and find that Osler’s exhortations are given away with this false citation as introductions by medical scholastics on topics ranging from evidenced-based medicine to medical informatics.
This makes me very, very angry.
The souls who should be protecting the ideas of the most important western medical thinker of our times ignore the truth with abandon. It was Osler who got the students out of the lecture halls and into the wards! He painted the perfect portrait of medical decorum and intellect. But who can blame them?
When I was a student at The University of the South (and much more on this later!) studying under the tutelage of a white-haired and gowned savant who perpetually clenched a pipe in his teeth while lecturing, I read these words: “Truth in history is not necessarily what happened, but what men believed happened.” I learned that this concept was penned by someone named Professor William A. Dunning, quoted in a history book by John Samuel Ezell. I have never forgotten this lesson.
It also makes me very, very angry.
But I’m glad of that. What would happen if it didn’t make me angry? If it didn’t, then I wouldn’t write. I would, like the famous inventor in Thoreau’s Mosquito Coast, “go back to bed.”
Now it has come to pass that my family insists that I write something. They have cajoled, begged, and otherwise used well-placed guilt to stimulate this work. Thus, with anger as the fuel, I will begin a long piece. Much of it will probably be a rant. Some of it will be funny. It will all be humorous in the real sense of humor, and it will be true. Professor Dunning’s assertion might cause one to believe that, if everything is not outright fiction, then it is at least idiosyncratic fallacy. I refute him. Begone! Vade retro Satanas!
Here, then, is the truth. It is the truth of my family. But to find the truth about Sir William Osler, don’t bother looking anywhere other than the deposit of faith at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. It is perhaps only there that you can read Aequanimitas properly cited. Within, you will discover that among his other great legacies the doctor carefully, beautifully, and elegantly explains to young doctors how to keep their faces in neutral.
Henry G. Selby
Bluffton, South Carolina
September, 2007
Sir William Osler, that great physician and philosopher, will soon take his place with the rest of those forgotten. Not chief among his works, but salient nonetheless, is a commencement address he gave to his students (and colleagues!) entitled “Aequanimitas”. The great irony is that a portion of this wonderful speech (including the title misspelled!) that points to the importance of library research, is routinely and mistakenly attributed to the author Samuel Butler.
It’s not tabloids making this mistake. It’s not People magazine, or Psychology Today, or even the Times-Picayune. Readers may make a quick search of medical college websites from Brooklyn to Montana and find that Osler’s exhortations are given away with this false citation as introductions by medical scholastics on topics ranging from evidenced-based medicine to medical informatics.
This makes me very, very angry.
The souls who should be protecting the ideas of the most important western medical thinker of our times ignore the truth with abandon. It was Osler who got the students out of the lecture halls and into the wards! He painted the perfect portrait of medical decorum and intellect. But who can blame them?
When I was a student at The University of the South (and much more on this later!) studying under the tutelage of a white-haired and gowned savant who perpetually clenched a pipe in his teeth while lecturing, I read these words: “Truth in history is not necessarily what happened, but what men believed happened.” I learned that this concept was penned by someone named Professor William A. Dunning, quoted in a history book by John Samuel Ezell. I have never forgotten this lesson.
It also makes me very, very angry.
But I’m glad of that. What would happen if it didn’t make me angry? If it didn’t, then I wouldn’t write. I would, like the famous inventor in Thoreau’s Mosquito Coast, “go back to bed.”
Now it has come to pass that my family insists that I write something. They have cajoled, begged, and otherwise used well-placed guilt to stimulate this work. Thus, with anger as the fuel, I will begin a long piece. Much of it will probably be a rant. Some of it will be funny. It will all be humorous in the real sense of humor, and it will be true. Professor Dunning’s assertion might cause one to believe that, if everything is not outright fiction, then it is at least idiosyncratic fallacy. I refute him. Begone! Vade retro Satanas!
Here, then, is the truth. It is the truth of my family. But to find the truth about Sir William Osler, don’t bother looking anywhere other than the deposit of faith at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. It is perhaps only there that you can read Aequanimitas properly cited. Within, you will discover that among his other great legacies the doctor carefully, beautifully, and elegantly explains to young doctors how to keep their faces in neutral.
Henry G. Selby
Bluffton, South Carolina
September, 2007
Preface
The real reason time machines will never be invented is because there is no such thing as time. Mr. Paul Shaw taught me that in a ninth grade civics class at Southern Junior High School in Lexington, Kentucky. I don’t know why he pontificated about time in a civics class, I only know that he pointed at his watch and shouted, “Do know what time is? It’s this watch! That’s what time is!”
In one of Kurt Vonnegut’s books he observes that the world could do with a lot less love and a little more common decency.
Once as a teenager, after conferring with the rector of my church about a difficult situation, I proposed that we should pray about it. He said for me to go ahead and pray; he would instead think.
When passing a field of cows I can name the breeds: Holstein, Angus, Hereford, Brahmas, San Gertrudis. My mother taught me to identify them. We have never farmed.
I was paid fifty cents for memorizing the twenty-third psalm. I learned it by listening to Dinah Shore sing it on a 78 rpm recording. My father was big on having us memorize things he thought were important. I wasn’t paid to memorize the creation story of Genesis, but I can still mimic Charles Laughton’s voice booming out “Who told thee that thou wert naked?” That, too, came from a record played on the Magnavox.
It wouldn’t take me five minutes to produce a hundred more vignettes of how I was formed. You could do the same thing if you’d stop reading this and start remembering. If you do, you’ll intuitively know why my children can identify cattle breeds, recite the love chapter from Corinthians, and love each other very much. Everyone has a story to tell. They are all really good stories, too. Here’s mine.
In one of Kurt Vonnegut’s books he observes that the world could do with a lot less love and a little more common decency.
Once as a teenager, after conferring with the rector of my church about a difficult situation, I proposed that we should pray about it. He said for me to go ahead and pray; he would instead think.
When passing a field of cows I can name the breeds: Holstein, Angus, Hereford, Brahmas, San Gertrudis. My mother taught me to identify them. We have never farmed.
I was paid fifty cents for memorizing the twenty-third psalm. I learned it by listening to Dinah Shore sing it on a 78 rpm recording. My father was big on having us memorize things he thought were important. I wasn’t paid to memorize the creation story of Genesis, but I can still mimic Charles Laughton’s voice booming out “Who told thee that thou wert naked?” That, too, came from a record played on the Magnavox.
It wouldn’t take me five minutes to produce a hundred more vignettes of how I was formed. You could do the same thing if you’d stop reading this and start remembering. If you do, you’ll intuitively know why my children can identify cattle breeds, recite the love chapter from Corinthians, and love each other very much. Everyone has a story to tell. They are all really good stories, too. Here’s mine.
Chapter 1: Dramatis Personae
John Bayne Selby, a cavalry brat from either Cheyenne or Roswell (depending on the needs of the story involved), formed a duet with Jane Claire Dentry of Baltimore, got her with child, and went to Korea where he served the army honorably as the only doctor who could operate the newly invented artificial kidney. The child was named Bayne. Upon his return the trio set up housekeeping in a Quonset hut near the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. The climate being cold, and the parents young and vigorous, led to the production of another son, Henry, two and a half years later. For reasons lost to history, the quartet then moved to Lexington, Kentucky where Dr. Selby busily helped to found the Lexington Clinic. There they produced the third and final fruit of their loins, Rebecca, and the quintet was complete. The children were given nicknames of Buzz, Hank, and Beka.
I am Henry. My wife Cindy and I have three children. My older brother is Bayne. He and his wife Lynda have three children. Our younger sister is Rebecca. She lives with our parents on Sullivans Island, South Carolina. If she had married, she also would have three children. This is what we do. I know this because our mother and father each came from three-children families. It’s genetic.
Our eldest is Lillian, a driven and hard working graphic designer with a deep longing for beauty. Next is Caroline, a quixotic crusader, majoring in music, who will march into hell for a heavenly cause. Son Hank is only nine, but already showing the danger signs of art. His singing voice is celestial. My children are all artists of one sort or another, God forbid. I am surrounded by them and many others like them. They are moths to my flame: they come at me, surround me, choke the reality of workaday life from my every breath and extinguish the taper of pragmatism that my American schooling so carefully tried to dip in the tallow of capitalism.
My brother’s children are also artists. How can this be? Claire, the firstborn, is off to Europe again to study metallurgy so her jewelry designs will achieve Germanic precision. Isabelle floats between New York and Charleston museums on the winds of violin concertos that have been her sustenance since early childhood. John, at least, seems to eschew “fine” art by wailing away on an electric guitar, though he is not safely indemnified. He has a fine voice and plays a remarkable number of instruments.
Our wives may be at fault, for they are gifted both musically and with those tools commonly associated with artists such as charcoal, brushes and canvas. Cindy, however, has been a paralegal, medical assistant, and is a Stephen Minister. Lynda, likewise, is a nurse who among other billets, operated a treatment center and served on a vestry. I am a headmaster. Bayne is a medical doctor. These are down-to-earth occupations. What is the root of this art problem?
These are the major players, the principals, in my story. You will meet others. It is all true.
I am Henry. My wife Cindy and I have three children. My older brother is Bayne. He and his wife Lynda have three children. Our younger sister is Rebecca. She lives with our parents on Sullivans Island, South Carolina. If she had married, she also would have three children. This is what we do. I know this because our mother and father each came from three-children families. It’s genetic.
Our eldest is Lillian, a driven and hard working graphic designer with a deep longing for beauty. Next is Caroline, a quixotic crusader, majoring in music, who will march into hell for a heavenly cause. Son Hank is only nine, but already showing the danger signs of art. His singing voice is celestial. My children are all artists of one sort or another, God forbid. I am surrounded by them and many others like them. They are moths to my flame: they come at me, surround me, choke the reality of workaday life from my every breath and extinguish the taper of pragmatism that my American schooling so carefully tried to dip in the tallow of capitalism.
My brother’s children are also artists. How can this be? Claire, the firstborn, is off to Europe again to study metallurgy so her jewelry designs will achieve Germanic precision. Isabelle floats between New York and Charleston museums on the winds of violin concertos that have been her sustenance since early childhood. John, at least, seems to eschew “fine” art by wailing away on an electric guitar, though he is not safely indemnified. He has a fine voice and plays a remarkable number of instruments.
Our wives may be at fault, for they are gifted both musically and with those tools commonly associated with artists such as charcoal, brushes and canvas. Cindy, however, has been a paralegal, medical assistant, and is a Stephen Minister. Lynda, likewise, is a nurse who among other billets, operated a treatment center and served on a vestry. I am a headmaster. Bayne is a medical doctor. These are down-to-earth occupations. What is the root of this art problem?
These are the major players, the principals, in my story. You will meet others. It is all true.
Chapter 2: The Problem of Art
The four fundamental forces in our universe are, as every schoolboy knows, electromagnetism, gravity, weak nuclear force and strong nuclear force. You may, due to being a mere human, recognize them as blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm (sanguine, melancholic, choleric, phlegmatic). These four forces may be superunified, of course. When this happens in string theory, physicists tell us that the strings can “sing”. Kepler knew this back in the seventeenth century (Harmony of the Spheres) and he was merely building on Pythagoras a thousand years before (Armonia).
I am content to call this superunification by these four letters: YHWH. You can call it Yahweh, or you can call it Jehovah, or it can (if you are an observant Jew) remain unspoken. I happen to know, due to my brief jaunt in a Sulpician seminary, that this tetragrammaton is the verb “to be” in ancient Hebrew. Studying Hebrew was the second most difficult course I ever took. The first was calculus. I never did understand how to “do” the calculus, but I love its inherent beauty.
That’s why it’s amazing that physicists – and not biologists! – seem to be able to unify all creation. For them there is no pesky division of science and religion, spirituality and measurement, or those hateful Hegelian dialectics. Have you ever met a melancholy physicist? No. They are all happy. The universe is their playground, and they are profoundly delighted to be here. All of my preschoolers are physicists. I watch them run and fall and climb and invent and laugh. When they do cry, a hug restores all order to the cosmos.
The problem with all of this, obviously, is art. Paula Hovey, an art major at The University of the South, had a nervous breakdown the night before her comprehensive exam. This school, usually called Sewanee, requires a four-year final exam of its majors. If you flunk it, you have six months to study and re-take it. If you flunk it a second time, well, there are plenty of good jobs out there in real estate I suppose.
Paula, the night before her comprehensive, realized that she didn’t know what art is. She could not define it. She began to cry and to repeat the question, “what is art?” several hundred times. I was more than a bit nervous. She spelled it slowly: A-R-T. She shouted it. She rearranged the letters to spell “tar” and “rat”. Much of this histrionic display helped me to achieve a similar mental state before my own English exam the following year. Paula passed the test, by the way.
English majors are artists of a sort. Some are critics, some are historians, some curators, and some practice the craft and actually produce it. I never rearranged the letters of “English” the night before my exam (“hgnesli?”), but I was indeed frightened. It took a week before I received my passing grade, during which time I briefly considered suicide. Jean Paul Sartre maintained that the only real question is that of suicide.
David Breslin, a young man I hired to be a coach while I was headmaster of Chesapeake Academy once observed that “suicide is not an option.” I like this statement. I have often repeated it to others. It is simple, concise, and rings true. Like physics equations that explain a universal theory of relativity, it has a faith dimension. Physicists like to look at their equations as faith statements. The expressions on their faces are very similar to visitors at the gallery studying a Gauguin.
Good doctors are artists, too. We used to refer to the medical arts instead of medical science. David Breslin is not a doctor; rather, he captained Ohio State’s lacrosse team to a national championship the year before I hired him. The creation of an interdependent group of athletes who form into a new thing seems to look like art, doesn’t it? It’s really not so very different from extemporaneous speaking or improvisational acting.
I have read the creation accounts of Genesis hundreds of times. So have you. But when Miss Stiles, my mean English teacher at Tates Creek Senior High showed me these lines, it changed everything:
Then God sat down
On the side of a hill where He could think;
By a deep, wide river He sat down;
With His head in His hands,
God thought and thought,
Till He thought, "I'll make me a man!"
Up from the bed of the river
God scooped the clay;
And by the bank of the river
He kneeled Him down;
And there the great God Almighty
Who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky,
Who flung the stars to the most far corner of the night,
Who rounded the earth in the middle of His hand;
This Great God,
Like a mammy bending over her baby,
Kneeled down in the dust
Toiling over a lump of clay
Till He shaped it in His own image;
Then into it He blew the breath of life,
And man became a living soul.
Amen. Amen.
James Weldon Johnson wrote these lines. It’s the latter half of a poem called “The Creation” that he wrote around 1927. He was a school principal. He also wrote “Lift Every Voice and Sing” that you can find in The Hymnal 1982. I can’t read the poem aloud because I start crying. Poetry does this to me. It’s my mother’s fault.
I am content to call this superunification by these four letters: YHWH. You can call it Yahweh, or you can call it Jehovah, or it can (if you are an observant Jew) remain unspoken. I happen to know, due to my brief jaunt in a Sulpician seminary, that this tetragrammaton is the verb “to be” in ancient Hebrew. Studying Hebrew was the second most difficult course I ever took. The first was calculus. I never did understand how to “do” the calculus, but I love its inherent beauty.
That’s why it’s amazing that physicists – and not biologists! – seem to be able to unify all creation. For them there is no pesky division of science and religion, spirituality and measurement, or those hateful Hegelian dialectics. Have you ever met a melancholy physicist? No. They are all happy. The universe is their playground, and they are profoundly delighted to be here. All of my preschoolers are physicists. I watch them run and fall and climb and invent and laugh. When they do cry, a hug restores all order to the cosmos.
The problem with all of this, obviously, is art. Paula Hovey, an art major at The University of the South, had a nervous breakdown the night before her comprehensive exam. This school, usually called Sewanee, requires a four-year final exam of its majors. If you flunk it, you have six months to study and re-take it. If you flunk it a second time, well, there are plenty of good jobs out there in real estate I suppose.
Paula, the night before her comprehensive, realized that she didn’t know what art is. She could not define it. She began to cry and to repeat the question, “what is art?” several hundred times. I was more than a bit nervous. She spelled it slowly: A-R-T. She shouted it. She rearranged the letters to spell “tar” and “rat”. Much of this histrionic display helped me to achieve a similar mental state before my own English exam the following year. Paula passed the test, by the way.
English majors are artists of a sort. Some are critics, some are historians, some curators, and some practice the craft and actually produce it. I never rearranged the letters of “English” the night before my exam (“hgnesli?”), but I was indeed frightened. It took a week before I received my passing grade, during which time I briefly considered suicide. Jean Paul Sartre maintained that the only real question is that of suicide.
David Breslin, a young man I hired to be a coach while I was headmaster of Chesapeake Academy once observed that “suicide is not an option.” I like this statement. I have often repeated it to others. It is simple, concise, and rings true. Like physics equations that explain a universal theory of relativity, it has a faith dimension. Physicists like to look at their equations as faith statements. The expressions on their faces are very similar to visitors at the gallery studying a Gauguin.
Good doctors are artists, too. We used to refer to the medical arts instead of medical science. David Breslin is not a doctor; rather, he captained Ohio State’s lacrosse team to a national championship the year before I hired him. The creation of an interdependent group of athletes who form into a new thing seems to look like art, doesn’t it? It’s really not so very different from extemporaneous speaking or improvisational acting.
I have read the creation accounts of Genesis hundreds of times. So have you. But when Miss Stiles, my mean English teacher at Tates Creek Senior High showed me these lines, it changed everything:
Then God sat down
On the side of a hill where He could think;
By a deep, wide river He sat down;
With His head in His hands,
God thought and thought,
Till He thought, "I'll make me a man!"
Up from the bed of the river
God scooped the clay;
And by the bank of the river
He kneeled Him down;
And there the great God Almighty
Who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky,
Who flung the stars to the most far corner of the night,
Who rounded the earth in the middle of His hand;
This Great God,
Like a mammy bending over her baby,
Kneeled down in the dust
Toiling over a lump of clay
Till He shaped it in His own image;
Then into it He blew the breath of life,
And man became a living soul.
Amen. Amen.
James Weldon Johnson wrote these lines. It’s the latter half of a poem called “The Creation” that he wrote around 1927. He was a school principal. He also wrote “Lift Every Voice and Sing” that you can find in The Hymnal 1982. I can’t read the poem aloud because I start crying. Poetry does this to me. It’s my mother’s fault.
Chapter 3: The Problem of Mothers
I am absolutely not going to talk about Mother God. Well, okay, just a little bit. Father Evans (the priest who thought while I prayed) told me to think about God’s love as a mother’s love, not as a father’s love. Unconditional. We fathers love best when our progeny, like the Wizard of Oz, “ . . . perform feats of stratospheric skill never before attempted by civilized man.” Mothers just love. I try to explore my feminine side here, but I just can’t really get it.
Western religion has missed many a boat, but it is in the feminine divine that it really missed out. The passing (and extremely cultish) nod to Mary, crude though it was, at least hints that we are not completely bereft of a sense of mystery. Human reproduction is the best example of this mystery. I’m nervous now, however, since I’m about to talk about sex.
And why should a fifty-two year old man be afraid to discuss sex? Because he was raised by the last Victorian. My grandmother died of tuberculosis when my mother was nine. Mama was reared by her grandmother who actually lived during the reign of Victoria. In examining old photographs I suspect that Henrietta Troupe Dames, my great grandmother, was Victoria. Did you know that Victorians covered the legs of chairs and tables so as not to excite prurient interest? They didn’t even call them “legs”. They were “limbs”. My cultural milieu, therefore, is off by an entire generation! To say that I was conflicted during the infamous “summer of love” in 1967 and the following years is a perfect example of understatement.
Our father tried his best to teach us about the mechanics of sexual reproduction. After a trip to the animal husbandry building at the University of Kentucky to view a bull servicing a cow (Holstein), I was convinced that urine soaked through the cow’s spine and a calf was conceived. He later showed us a flip-chart book that explained (among other things) puberty and wet dreams. Incongruously, it had a picture of a family going to church on the cover. Inside, the pictures were black-and-white line drawings. One that is still with me is a drawing of sperm under a microscope’s field of view. They looked like tadpoles. Dad told us that nocturnal emissions often accompanied “bad dreams”. By this, of course, he meant erotic dreams. I thought bad dreams were nightmares. For years I was afraid of peeing tadpoles in my bed while having “bad dreams”.
Here, for the first time, I will confess publicly that I never did have a nocturnal emission. The reason is obvious: I was terrified of waking up in a pool of tadpoles. My good friend Joseph Thompson claimed I didn’t have them because I wore jockies instead of boxers and rode my bicycle everywhere, but I knew otherwise.
Once as a thirteen-year old on a visit to Mexico City, I had a sore place on my penis. Dad gave me some ointment, but asked if I had been doing anything bad. Bad? I privately recounted my sins, prayed for forgiveness, and the sore disappeared. This cause and effect confused me for years. What would happen to my penis if I did anything really bad? At the least I have been a very good citizen.
We never used euphemisms for body parts or functions. For all the Victoriana present in our family, we were an enlightened home. “That’s nothing I’ve never seen before,” my mother, a nurse, would say if one of us displayed immodesty.
When I finally did grasp the mechanics of human copulation I couldn’t believe it. In truth, I still don’t. Even bathing in the afterglow of sexual congress, I don’t believe what just happened. I do not believe that my parents ever copulated either.
On the other hand, once in a while Mama would be particularly ebullient, dancing and singing around the house, and murmuring things like, “Oh, your father was such a young man last night,” much to my horror.
These rare insights into eros did nothing to diminish the powerful, the overwhelmingly powerful notion of love in my family. Mama loved Daddy; Daddy loved Mama. They loved us; we loved them and each other. We loved each other because we were taught to love each other. It was a maxim that children had to be taught to love each other. We were. “Go give your sister a kiss.” “Hug your brother.” “Take care of your sister.” These commands echo in our heads even today.
The love that we learned to have for each other is mother’s love. It is unconditional. It is creative. It is everything. When we come face to face with the beauty of creation, not tangentially but really face to face, the moment is sublime. It may bring tears. It is often unique. It may be, for example, unique to me that the second movement of Beethoven’s seventh symphony makes my tears flow every time I hear it. It’s why real poetry provokes the same response.
So the conclusion to this syllogism must be as follows: mothers are to blame for art. If they wouldn’t love us, and teach us to love, we could all just go make some money.
Western religion has missed many a boat, but it is in the feminine divine that it really missed out. The passing (and extremely cultish) nod to Mary, crude though it was, at least hints that we are not completely bereft of a sense of mystery. Human reproduction is the best example of this mystery. I’m nervous now, however, since I’m about to talk about sex.
And why should a fifty-two year old man be afraid to discuss sex? Because he was raised by the last Victorian. My grandmother died of tuberculosis when my mother was nine. Mama was reared by her grandmother who actually lived during the reign of Victoria. In examining old photographs I suspect that Henrietta Troupe Dames, my great grandmother, was Victoria. Did you know that Victorians covered the legs of chairs and tables so as not to excite prurient interest? They didn’t even call them “legs”. They were “limbs”. My cultural milieu, therefore, is off by an entire generation! To say that I was conflicted during the infamous “summer of love” in 1967 and the following years is a perfect example of understatement.
Our father tried his best to teach us about the mechanics of sexual reproduction. After a trip to the animal husbandry building at the University of Kentucky to view a bull servicing a cow (Holstein), I was convinced that urine soaked through the cow’s spine and a calf was conceived. He later showed us a flip-chart book that explained (among other things) puberty and wet dreams. Incongruously, it had a picture of a family going to church on the cover. Inside, the pictures were black-and-white line drawings. One that is still with me is a drawing of sperm under a microscope’s field of view. They looked like tadpoles. Dad told us that nocturnal emissions often accompanied “bad dreams”. By this, of course, he meant erotic dreams. I thought bad dreams were nightmares. For years I was afraid of peeing tadpoles in my bed while having “bad dreams”.
Here, for the first time, I will confess publicly that I never did have a nocturnal emission. The reason is obvious: I was terrified of waking up in a pool of tadpoles. My good friend Joseph Thompson claimed I didn’t have them because I wore jockies instead of boxers and rode my bicycle everywhere, but I knew otherwise.
Once as a thirteen-year old on a visit to Mexico City, I had a sore place on my penis. Dad gave me some ointment, but asked if I had been doing anything bad. Bad? I privately recounted my sins, prayed for forgiveness, and the sore disappeared. This cause and effect confused me for years. What would happen to my penis if I did anything really bad? At the least I have been a very good citizen.
We never used euphemisms for body parts or functions. For all the Victoriana present in our family, we were an enlightened home. “That’s nothing I’ve never seen before,” my mother, a nurse, would say if one of us displayed immodesty.
When I finally did grasp the mechanics of human copulation I couldn’t believe it. In truth, I still don’t. Even bathing in the afterglow of sexual congress, I don’t believe what just happened. I do not believe that my parents ever copulated either.
On the other hand, once in a while Mama would be particularly ebullient, dancing and singing around the house, and murmuring things like, “Oh, your father was such a young man last night,” much to my horror.
These rare insights into eros did nothing to diminish the powerful, the overwhelmingly powerful notion of love in my family. Mama loved Daddy; Daddy loved Mama. They loved us; we loved them and each other. We loved each other because we were taught to love each other. It was a maxim that children had to be taught to love each other. We were. “Go give your sister a kiss.” “Hug your brother.” “Take care of your sister.” These commands echo in our heads even today.
The love that we learned to have for each other is mother’s love. It is unconditional. It is creative. It is everything. When we come face to face with the beauty of creation, not tangentially but really face to face, the moment is sublime. It may bring tears. It is often unique. It may be, for example, unique to me that the second movement of Beethoven’s seventh symphony makes my tears flow every time I hear it. It’s why real poetry provokes the same response.
So the conclusion to this syllogism must be as follows: mothers are to blame for art. If they wouldn’t love us, and teach us to love, we could all just go make some money.
Chapter 4: The Problem of Money
Money is an idea. In order for it to work people have to have faith that a paper bill, for example, has value greater than its selfsame paper and ink. This is nuts! The intrinsic value of fungible currency (oh, let’s say a one dollar bill and a hundred dollar bill) is the same. But with the one dollar bill I can’t even buy Hank a collectible plastic head filled with sugar at the checkout line. With the hundred dollar bill I can take the whole family out for a nice dinner where they won’t finish their food, ask for doggie bags, and store the remains in the refrigerator for several days before I throw it out. That’s value!
So for money to work we have to have faith. I believe that this c-note is worth more than its one dollar counterpart, which, as you will recall, has just the same amount of ink and rag content in it as the hundred. This, I repeat, is nuts.
The only entities who understand money appear to be men in suits who wear neckties slightly too long. These entities are brokers. They’re not really living beings; rather, they are supernatural dolls with strings that one can pull to hear them intone, “invest for long term.” They never vary this advice. Millions of Americans pay them to say the sacred words over and over again. We never tire of hearing it. We always act like we’ve never heard the words before. “He’s a good broker,” we tell our friends. “He told me to invest for the long term.” I am persuaded that they may be angels. They do not have free will as we do.
Without going into great detail, it seems obvious to even the meanest understanding that money is a god. Dealing with this god is religious in every sense. Conclusion? There are no atheists. This is the faith that moves mountains, every day, and builds condominiums. But I stray from the remarkable incidents of my childhood.
My father taught us that it was dangerous to do business with family members. To punctuate his lesson he would be sure to stiff my brother and me at every turn. He bamboozled us, for example, into razing our old two-car garage for a whopping seventy-five dollars (American). Being teenagers constantly jolted by massive infusions of testosterone, we accepted the challenge. After paying the junk man sixty-five dollars to haul away the rubble, we split the remaining loot between us in anticipation of our grand summer trip around the United States.
Gasoline, in those days, was thirty-five cents per gallon. I know this because we refused to pay forty-seven cents per gallon at the station near Monarch Pass in Colorado. The ancient truck we were driving held eighteen gallons. With the treasury amassed from my father’s beneficence, we could buy a tank and a half! Fortunately, our mother paid us twenty-five cents per window (including screens and woodwork) that we cleaned at home, so we were in high cotton most of the time. Our allowances in high school were fifty cents for me and seventy five cents for Bayne. Clearly this was pure gravy.
The problem, as you math majors have already determined, is that we were driving through thirty-eight states. Food wasn’t a big issue since we didn’t eat. Well, we did have a footlocker full of those small cereal boxes that Bayne had lifted from his college dining hall day after day. I brought along a fifty pound bag of rice. We made ketchup soup several times. We picked apricots and thinned pears in the Yakima Valley of Washington to make some cash, were pursued by the homosexual bank president that got us our migrant worker jobs, and hightailed it down the highway.
I would never allow my children to make such a journey. Two months and two days is how long we were gone. On the other hand, I wouldn’t allow my kids to knock down a garage. This is the same garage, with its steeply sloped roof, that we would climb upon with gallon after gallon of water during winter. After several hogsheads had been poured down the slope, we had a pretty good sliding board that ended twelve feet higher than the snow pack below. The snow pack was usually about two inches. We would zoom at mach speeds off the roof and then slam into the earth. No one had a better childhood.
Our parents didn’t want us to think about money. They didn’t want us to have jobs. We had to sneak them. “You’ll be working the rest of your life,” Mama would say. This was small consolation when the allowance wasn’t even enough to take Hot Lisa, for example, to the drive-in. I once concealed an early morning paper route for over two months before being found out. I lied, of course, and claimed that I was just helping my friend Lanny. But it was my route.
Norman Landolt Schott (Lanny) was raised by his grandmother, great grandparents, and great aunt. He and I were always up to something, never terribly bad, but Mama was suspicious as I recall. The weirdest thing we did was to modify an old riding lawn mower and drive it all the way to the airport at speeds approaching 9 miles per hour. We did rebuild cars from the ground up, made elaborate photographic darkrooms, and once welded together a homemade go-cart that achieved a record-breaking 68 miles per hour. The cars that we rebuilt and sold made us enough cash to go to Florida once. On our way down the Western Kentucky Parkway the engine in our Corvair Spyder blew and we had to hitchhike home. Back in town, but still ten miles from home, Dad passed us on the highway. “I think I saw Hank hitch-hiking,” he reported to Mama. He was often befuddled this way.
We made the trip in his great aunt’s luxurious Electra 225 anyway. On the way I was robbed, we were caught in a hurricane over on the Gulf, and I was called upon to rescue three people in the ocean near New Smyrna. Two of them lived. I performed artificial respiration and chest compressions on the sixteen year old girl, but she died. I was sixteen years old, too.
I also made money on the sly by selling penny candy at school. This was demonstrably frowned upon by the school authorities, but my friend Ken Brautigam and I came up with an ingenious solution. We would tell nosey teachers and principals that we were raising money for MFU. They believed it was some sort of Methodist youth group. MFU stood for “Money For Us”.
Once I worked for a brief time as a telephone solicitor, claiming that donations made would provide a busload of orphans an evening of fun at the Bluegrass Fair. I never really knew for whom I was working. We were paid in cash.
So during my high school years I never really had a job like real kids do. I am now “working the rest of my life” and find it very rewarding. Most days I can’t believe that I’m actually paid to be a headmaster. I love schools. I love the kids. I have been in school buildings continuously since I was five years old, except for one year when I drove an 18-wheeler. This might be some sort of record.
One of my favorite school memories is of sitting next to Cathy Cooper in typing class. My father made me take typing because my academic performance was just shaky enough to suggest that when I was drafted I would be sent to Viet Nam. “If you can type,” he told me, “they won’t put you where you’ll be shot at.” Thusly motivated, I achieved 85 words per minute on a manual Royal. To this day I believe that touch typing is the most important thing I learned in school.
Cathy’s father was also a doctor. He was a proctologist. I spent a great deal of time in typing class wondering if this embarrassed her. I imagined what it would be like to study a never-ending succession of anuses day after day. I asked Dad, whose specialties were easy to brag about, why anyone would choose such a career path. He explained the power that great teachers have in causing their students to become excited about a certain branch of knowledge. It started me thinking, like most of his statements do.
So for money to work we have to have faith. I believe that this c-note is worth more than its one dollar counterpart, which, as you will recall, has just the same amount of ink and rag content in it as the hundred. This, I repeat, is nuts.
The only entities who understand money appear to be men in suits who wear neckties slightly too long. These entities are brokers. They’re not really living beings; rather, they are supernatural dolls with strings that one can pull to hear them intone, “invest for long term.” They never vary this advice. Millions of Americans pay them to say the sacred words over and over again. We never tire of hearing it. We always act like we’ve never heard the words before. “He’s a good broker,” we tell our friends. “He told me to invest for the long term.” I am persuaded that they may be angels. They do not have free will as we do.
Without going into great detail, it seems obvious to even the meanest understanding that money is a god. Dealing with this god is religious in every sense. Conclusion? There are no atheists. This is the faith that moves mountains, every day, and builds condominiums. But I stray from the remarkable incidents of my childhood.
My father taught us that it was dangerous to do business with family members. To punctuate his lesson he would be sure to stiff my brother and me at every turn. He bamboozled us, for example, into razing our old two-car garage for a whopping seventy-five dollars (American). Being teenagers constantly jolted by massive infusions of testosterone, we accepted the challenge. After paying the junk man sixty-five dollars to haul away the rubble, we split the remaining loot between us in anticipation of our grand summer trip around the United States.
Gasoline, in those days, was thirty-five cents per gallon. I know this because we refused to pay forty-seven cents per gallon at the station near Monarch Pass in Colorado. The ancient truck we were driving held eighteen gallons. With the treasury amassed from my father’s beneficence, we could buy a tank and a half! Fortunately, our mother paid us twenty-five cents per window (including screens and woodwork) that we cleaned at home, so we were in high cotton most of the time. Our allowances in high school were fifty cents for me and seventy five cents for Bayne. Clearly this was pure gravy.
The problem, as you math majors have already determined, is that we were driving through thirty-eight states. Food wasn’t a big issue since we didn’t eat. Well, we did have a footlocker full of those small cereal boxes that Bayne had lifted from his college dining hall day after day. I brought along a fifty pound bag of rice. We made ketchup soup several times. We picked apricots and thinned pears in the Yakima Valley of Washington to make some cash, were pursued by the homosexual bank president that got us our migrant worker jobs, and hightailed it down the highway.
I would never allow my children to make such a journey. Two months and two days is how long we were gone. On the other hand, I wouldn’t allow my kids to knock down a garage. This is the same garage, with its steeply sloped roof, that we would climb upon with gallon after gallon of water during winter. After several hogsheads had been poured down the slope, we had a pretty good sliding board that ended twelve feet higher than the snow pack below. The snow pack was usually about two inches. We would zoom at mach speeds off the roof and then slam into the earth. No one had a better childhood.
Our parents didn’t want us to think about money. They didn’t want us to have jobs. We had to sneak them. “You’ll be working the rest of your life,” Mama would say. This was small consolation when the allowance wasn’t even enough to take Hot Lisa, for example, to the drive-in. I once concealed an early morning paper route for over two months before being found out. I lied, of course, and claimed that I was just helping my friend Lanny. But it was my route.
Norman Landolt Schott (Lanny) was raised by his grandmother, great grandparents, and great aunt. He and I were always up to something, never terribly bad, but Mama was suspicious as I recall. The weirdest thing we did was to modify an old riding lawn mower and drive it all the way to the airport at speeds approaching 9 miles per hour. We did rebuild cars from the ground up, made elaborate photographic darkrooms, and once welded together a homemade go-cart that achieved a record-breaking 68 miles per hour. The cars that we rebuilt and sold made us enough cash to go to Florida once. On our way down the Western Kentucky Parkway the engine in our Corvair Spyder blew and we had to hitchhike home. Back in town, but still ten miles from home, Dad passed us on the highway. “I think I saw Hank hitch-hiking,” he reported to Mama. He was often befuddled this way.
We made the trip in his great aunt’s luxurious Electra 225 anyway. On the way I was robbed, we were caught in a hurricane over on the Gulf, and I was called upon to rescue three people in the ocean near New Smyrna. Two of them lived. I performed artificial respiration and chest compressions on the sixteen year old girl, but she died. I was sixteen years old, too.
I also made money on the sly by selling penny candy at school. This was demonstrably frowned upon by the school authorities, but my friend Ken Brautigam and I came up with an ingenious solution. We would tell nosey teachers and principals that we were raising money for MFU. They believed it was some sort of Methodist youth group. MFU stood for “Money For Us”.
Once I worked for a brief time as a telephone solicitor, claiming that donations made would provide a busload of orphans an evening of fun at the Bluegrass Fair. I never really knew for whom I was working. We were paid in cash.
So during my high school years I never really had a job like real kids do. I am now “working the rest of my life” and find it very rewarding. Most days I can’t believe that I’m actually paid to be a headmaster. I love schools. I love the kids. I have been in school buildings continuously since I was five years old, except for one year when I drove an 18-wheeler. This might be some sort of record.
One of my favorite school memories is of sitting next to Cathy Cooper in typing class. My father made me take typing because my academic performance was just shaky enough to suggest that when I was drafted I would be sent to Viet Nam. “If you can type,” he told me, “they won’t put you where you’ll be shot at.” Thusly motivated, I achieved 85 words per minute on a manual Royal. To this day I believe that touch typing is the most important thing I learned in school.
Cathy’s father was also a doctor. He was a proctologist. I spent a great deal of time in typing class wondering if this embarrassed her. I imagined what it would be like to study a never-ending succession of anuses day after day. I asked Dad, whose specialties were easy to brag about, why anyone would choose such a career path. He explained the power that great teachers have in causing their students to become excited about a certain branch of knowledge. It started me thinking, like most of his statements do.
Chapter 5: The Problem of Fathers
When we whistled a series of fifteen notes in a pattern that defies my ability to describe, White Sox would come running. He was our boxer; he was devoted to each of us in a special way. He always came when any of us whistled. I was playing in a field one day (at age eight) where there were cows (Herefords) and he spent a great deal of time keeping the cows away from me with active barking and dancing. When it was time to go home he lay down and was too tired to get up. I went home and told Mama. She and I took my wagon, lifted him into it, and took him to the vet. He died later that day.
I knew that he was dead, but for several weeks thereafter I would go out to the front porch in the evening and whistle those fifteen notes. And then I’d wait. He never came even though I whistled and willed him to come with all my heart.
The father in the famous prodigal son story used to go out on his porch and look for his son. Day after day, week after week, month after month, for several years, he yearned for his son. “What’s that in the distance? Is that he?” Day after day. Happily for him, the son did come home and they killed the fatted calf. But I knew how he felt, even at age eight.
We grew up in awe of our father. And if he was as great as we thought, one could easily grasp that God the Father Almighty must really be something. Mama repeatedly told us that “your father is the most intelligent man” or “the smartest doctor.” And this about his various swimming strokes: “no one swims more beautifully.” He also won most of his tennis matches. Therefore it was easy to believe that every pearl of wisdom that came from his lips was not just true, but gospel truth.
Later, when I became a vaguely sentient being in college, I realized that he might sometimes be mistaken on some subject or another. I also came to realize that he had absolutely no idea that we children heard his voice, his pronouncements, his dictums, his ideas, his truths, as the real deal.
In my life I have collected fathers. There was my own, of course, and Fr. Brainerd and Fr. Evans and Fr. MacDonald and Fr. Rhys and Fr. Roth and Fr. Merchant, among others. These were priests. There were many other significant male figures who were not priests but had the same powerful influence on me. Joseph Campbell calls this archetype a “male mother;” that is, a nurturing man who is not “dad”. My brother is one also.
But I’m also a dad to my three children and I love them to the point of bursting. Lillian wants me to write this story, but she also has the idea that it could turn into a fictional novel based on familial history. I think she’s on to something here, but I’ve just got to get this part done to “tune up” the old engine for such a project.
As a dad I’ve had a lot of successes. On the other hand, I remember bringing home a balsa wood airplane (just like I had as a boy) for Caroline. She was delighted. On its maiden flight it landed on the roof. Lillian’s papier-mâché vase that we made into a lamp slowly and agonizingly collapsed when the heat from the lightbulb melted the paste. Hank’s time capsule, a coffee can full of pictures and keepsakes carefully buried in the back yard, revealed nothing but mulch when it was exhumed less than six months later.
They love me anyway.
The problem with fathers is that they appear to be gods. They are male, so they have large egos that demand constant feeding, and this feeding (akin to worship), reinforces the god problem. I don’t know if my children believe every pearl that comes from my lips. I hope not. I just hope that they will marry a real lover.
I knew that he was dead, but for several weeks thereafter I would go out to the front porch in the evening and whistle those fifteen notes. And then I’d wait. He never came even though I whistled and willed him to come with all my heart.
The father in the famous prodigal son story used to go out on his porch and look for his son. Day after day, week after week, month after month, for several years, he yearned for his son. “What’s that in the distance? Is that he?” Day after day. Happily for him, the son did come home and they killed the fatted calf. But I knew how he felt, even at age eight.
We grew up in awe of our father. And if he was as great as we thought, one could easily grasp that God the Father Almighty must really be something. Mama repeatedly told us that “your father is the most intelligent man” or “the smartest doctor.” And this about his various swimming strokes: “no one swims more beautifully.” He also won most of his tennis matches. Therefore it was easy to believe that every pearl of wisdom that came from his lips was not just true, but gospel truth.
Later, when I became a vaguely sentient being in college, I realized that he might sometimes be mistaken on some subject or another. I also came to realize that he had absolutely no idea that we children heard his voice, his pronouncements, his dictums, his ideas, his truths, as the real deal.
In my life I have collected fathers. There was my own, of course, and Fr. Brainerd and Fr. Evans and Fr. MacDonald and Fr. Rhys and Fr. Roth and Fr. Merchant, among others. These were priests. There were many other significant male figures who were not priests but had the same powerful influence on me. Joseph Campbell calls this archetype a “male mother;” that is, a nurturing man who is not “dad”. My brother is one also.
But I’m also a dad to my three children and I love them to the point of bursting. Lillian wants me to write this story, but she also has the idea that it could turn into a fictional novel based on familial history. I think she’s on to something here, but I’ve just got to get this part done to “tune up” the old engine for such a project.
As a dad I’ve had a lot of successes. On the other hand, I remember bringing home a balsa wood airplane (just like I had as a boy) for Caroline. She was delighted. On its maiden flight it landed on the roof. Lillian’s papier-mâché vase that we made into a lamp slowly and agonizingly collapsed when the heat from the lightbulb melted the paste. Hank’s time capsule, a coffee can full of pictures and keepsakes carefully buried in the back yard, revealed nothing but mulch when it was exhumed less than six months later.
They love me anyway.
The problem with fathers is that they appear to be gods. They are male, so they have large egos that demand constant feeding, and this feeding (akin to worship), reinforces the god problem. I don’t know if my children believe every pearl that comes from my lips. I hope not. I just hope that they will marry a real lover.
Chapter 6: The Problem of Love
Just before Christmas in 1972 (I was a senior in high school and the National Football League had only recently absorbed the American Football League) an amazing thing happened. The Steelers were playing the Raiders in Pittsburgh, and losing by one point with 22 seconds remaining in the game. The Steelers had the ball, but it was fourth and 10 and they were on their own 40. Dang. No hope for these losers who had been losing for forty years.
But of course, there was a Christmas miracle of sorts. Franco Harris (a running back) caught Terry Bradshaw’s pass as it bounced backwards out of the receiver’s hands. It may have touched a defensive player before Franco Harris nabbed it. (This tidbit is only important if you care about the rules). Anyway, Harris ran for a touchdown and the Steelers won the game 13-7 after successfully scoring the extra point. In the next seven years the Steelers won four Superbowls.
I don’t love football. Maybe you do, maybe you don’t. But you’ve gotta love this famous story. For ten bonus points can you name it? Yes, it was the immaculate reception.
I think one can love football. I think it’s possible to love anything or anyone, except perhaps Jack Black’s performance in “King Kong”. I do not believe that the word “love” must be reserved for people. On the other hand, I think it is downright perverse to love “things” instead of people (or my golden retrievers). Possible, but perverse.
I simply believe that love has an object outside of self (I love YOU), and that it is a verb rather than a noun. Love is functioning for the well being of others. That’s what love is. I can speak with authority on this subject because I was an English major. We wrote lots of papers and read lots of words, but mostly we tried to figure out love. Well, here it is, folks: functioning for the well being of others.
I want my children to marry lovers. Authentic lovers. I already know that my children can be lovers themselves, so the match really needs to be a good one. Unfortunately for love, most young people are so self-absorbed that they can’t possibly function for the well being of another unless they are neurotic, co-dependent, or otherwise dysfunctional in the relationship department. Young people are moving through the narcissistic phase that, according to Freud at least, has to occur. Healthy people shed narcissism eventually; unhealthy people never shed it. They take hostages. They are emotional terrorists.
Also back in high school, when Franco Harris was catching a bean ball and winning the division playoff, and when I had mastered touch typing, I saw a poster. Poster art and poster philosophy were very big back then. (Actually the “art” was not art, at least not like the art one saw on posters from France. Ours were more like black-light posters of someone with an afro). Anyway, the poster I saw said, “We like someone because. We love someone although.” I thought this was pretty deep. I still do.
Father Joseph Martin, a Sulpician, says that real love is a mother gagging while changing a dirty diaper.
I like my brother for many reasons because. I also love him for some althoughs. I love him although me made me practice my times tables all the way through the twelves during our summer vacation when he discovered that I was going into the fifth grade and didn’t know them. “Everyone knows the times tables in the fourth grade,” he lied. Wandering around Lake Fanny, my great uncle’s stud farm, I recited tables to his immense satisfaction. My great uncle was named Henry, for his mother Henrietta. His brother was named Gordon. My name is Henry Gordon. My mother’s brother was named Gordon, too. I like to think that I was named for all of them.
Legend has it that a Lady Gordon of Scotland during the sixteeth century recruited her retinue of knights in a unique way. She would clench a piece of gold between her third molars. Any man who could reach it with his tongue would be accepted. This story helped me socially during college.
Uncle Gordon liked nothing better than helping me do something myself. He had the patience of Job while showing me how to tie a fishing hook, for example, on a leader. He’s dead now, but I have had a number of chilling experiences while helping a child during which I feel his presence and guiding hand.
There’s been too much written about love and sex. I think this subject may be fairly simple. Make no mistake, I do NOT think the subject of sex is simple. My point here is that the subject of love and sex is relatively understandable. How many times have we met a person who didn’t have enough money for the collection plate, but put some in anyway and, waa laa, he seems to have more money the next week? How about when you gave someone a present and they got so much joy from it that you were thrilled? Jesus said that it’s better to give than to receive. Why? What’s the motive? So you’ll feel good? Of course not. The mystery, the amazing mystery is that selfless behavior begets one blessing after another. It doesn’t make sense, but it’s real and it’s the Truth.
Of the many great paradoxes of life (and all life seems paradoxical), St. Francis said it best: it is in giving that we receive, it is pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we receive eternal life. Amen.
But of course, there was a Christmas miracle of sorts. Franco Harris (a running back) caught Terry Bradshaw’s pass as it bounced backwards out of the receiver’s hands. It may have touched a defensive player before Franco Harris nabbed it. (This tidbit is only important if you care about the rules). Anyway, Harris ran for a touchdown and the Steelers won the game 13-7 after successfully scoring the extra point. In the next seven years the Steelers won four Superbowls.
I don’t love football. Maybe you do, maybe you don’t. But you’ve gotta love this famous story. For ten bonus points can you name it? Yes, it was the immaculate reception.
I think one can love football. I think it’s possible to love anything or anyone, except perhaps Jack Black’s performance in “King Kong”. I do not believe that the word “love” must be reserved for people. On the other hand, I think it is downright perverse to love “things” instead of people (or my golden retrievers). Possible, but perverse.
I simply believe that love has an object outside of self (I love YOU), and that it is a verb rather than a noun. Love is functioning for the well being of others. That’s what love is. I can speak with authority on this subject because I was an English major. We wrote lots of papers and read lots of words, but mostly we tried to figure out love. Well, here it is, folks: functioning for the well being of others.
I want my children to marry lovers. Authentic lovers. I already know that my children can be lovers themselves, so the match really needs to be a good one. Unfortunately for love, most young people are so self-absorbed that they can’t possibly function for the well being of another unless they are neurotic, co-dependent, or otherwise dysfunctional in the relationship department. Young people are moving through the narcissistic phase that, according to Freud at least, has to occur. Healthy people shed narcissism eventually; unhealthy people never shed it. They take hostages. They are emotional terrorists.
Also back in high school, when Franco Harris was catching a bean ball and winning the division playoff, and when I had mastered touch typing, I saw a poster. Poster art and poster philosophy were very big back then. (Actually the “art” was not art, at least not like the art one saw on posters from France. Ours were more like black-light posters of someone with an afro). Anyway, the poster I saw said, “We like someone because. We love someone although.” I thought this was pretty deep. I still do.
Father Joseph Martin, a Sulpician, says that real love is a mother gagging while changing a dirty diaper.
I like my brother for many reasons because. I also love him for some althoughs. I love him although me made me practice my times tables all the way through the twelves during our summer vacation when he discovered that I was going into the fifth grade and didn’t know them. “Everyone knows the times tables in the fourth grade,” he lied. Wandering around Lake Fanny, my great uncle’s stud farm, I recited tables to his immense satisfaction. My great uncle was named Henry, for his mother Henrietta. His brother was named Gordon. My name is Henry Gordon. My mother’s brother was named Gordon, too. I like to think that I was named for all of them.
Legend has it that a Lady Gordon of Scotland during the sixteeth century recruited her retinue of knights in a unique way. She would clench a piece of gold between her third molars. Any man who could reach it with his tongue would be accepted. This story helped me socially during college.
Uncle Gordon liked nothing better than helping me do something myself. He had the patience of Job while showing me how to tie a fishing hook, for example, on a leader. He’s dead now, but I have had a number of chilling experiences while helping a child during which I feel his presence and guiding hand.
There’s been too much written about love and sex. I think this subject may be fairly simple. Make no mistake, I do NOT think the subject of sex is simple. My point here is that the subject of love and sex is relatively understandable. How many times have we met a person who didn’t have enough money for the collection plate, but put some in anyway and, waa laa, he seems to have more money the next week? How about when you gave someone a present and they got so much joy from it that you were thrilled? Jesus said that it’s better to give than to receive. Why? What’s the motive? So you’ll feel good? Of course not. The mystery, the amazing mystery is that selfless behavior begets one blessing after another. It doesn’t make sense, but it’s real and it’s the Truth.
Of the many great paradoxes of life (and all life seems paradoxical), St. Francis said it best: it is in giving that we receive, it is pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we receive eternal life. Amen.
Chapter 7: Paradox: The Final Problem
I had trouble with fractions. This would enrage my father from time to time who would try to help me with my homework. One night he was particularly frustrated with my lack of native understanding, and was gesticulating with his middle finger in the direction of six-twelfths on my homework page. I had to simplify the fraction, I guess, to one-half. I couldn’t do this, of course, because I was horrified that he was pointing with the “rod” finger. I didn’t know exactly what the “rod” finger did, but I knew that one should never use it for any reason whatsoever.
His finger, I noticed, had four black hairs growing out of the second joint. As he pounded the finger against the fraction, the hairs never moved! I then noticed that I could see the pores of his skin, and the pores looked larger where the four hairs were. Gradually I realized that he had begun not only to raise his voice, but to shout.
“Six-TWELTS. It’s six-TWELTS!” he cried. I wondered why he said “twelts”. The word was obviously twelfths, right? I timidly began to point out the correct pronunciation to him. That’s all I can remember of this event. The crystal has gone dark.
What a mystery all of life is! I have no trouble with fractions today, I frequently think in decimal terms, and I’m an absolute wiz in measurement and conversions. If I only knew then what I know now I could go back and show that mean-spirited fourth grade math teacher a thing or two! On the other hand, if I had been good at fractions back then I probably wouldn’t be a husband to Cindy, a father to my children, and a headmaster. To understand this you must have either studied fractal geometry, chaos theory, or watched “Jurassic Park” several thousand times. When the butterfly flaps its wings in Tokyo, the weather changes in New York.
To go beyond reason or opinion is what defines paradox. We normally see a paradox as two independently true statements that are contradictory when introduced to each other. Paradoxes are higher on the social scale than oxymora. We chuckle at “jumbo shrimp”; we howl when we hear about “army intelligence”; we slap our thighs at “pretty ugly” or “a new classic”. More than a contradiction in terms, paradoxes are explicitly and intrinsically true. They are not funny. They make me nervous.
My world is loaded with these elements in a precise 1:1 ratio. God has revealed to me that my job is to keep these equally balanced in my brain at all times, believing both equally without giving one a wink-and-a-nod at the expense of the other. This is a terrible burden. I would much rather leave this work up to Martin Heidegger or Ludwig Wittgenstein or Aristotle or others who are paid to consider the meaning of life.
On the other hand, I have taught the conjugation of the verb “to speak” in first year Spanish for thirty years. Maybe a bit of higher order thinking is just what I need to keep my teaching fresh. On the other hand I’ve also taught Bible, theology, algebra, graphic design, American lit, world history, earth science, physical science, AP Spanish, geography, journalism, British lit, piano, guitar, music theory, chorus, drama, sailing, canoeing, astronomy, life skills (!), and coached a number of sports.
On the other hand, where’s the profit in any of this? Was Qoholeth right? Fortunately, the University of Northern Colorado answers this question by maintaining that philosophy majors will make a pile of money. I’m not kidding. Check it out.
Here’s my first real memory. I am convinced that anything that I “remember” prior to this event was added by photographs or family stories. This is my first real one:
I was running from Mr. Don’s back yard across his gravel driveway to our yard. I tripped and fell, skinning my knees horribly. I slid to a stop on the grass in our yard, face to face with a wild violet staring up at me. The gradually deepening hues of the petals led my eyes to the pistils, stamen, anthers, and bright golden stigma. It was so beautiful that I stopped crying. My first memory is of something so beautiful that it made me stop hurting. (Many years later I learned that my “birth flower” is the violet. My color is “violet”. My birthstone is amethyst. None of that is significant).
What is significant is that my sister Beka is beautiful. She is way beyond being just another member of our family. She is the symbol of who we are. She made us. And she’s beautiful inside and out.
Beka has a number of neurological disorders that hamper her ability to communicate or function in ways that are “normal”. Her disabilities hamper us, too. Or maybe a better way of saying this that her disabilities have formed, and continue to form, us.
Beka has a stock set of questions that she’ll ask, particularly in a telephone conversation. Her most repeated question is, “Everything good there?” If we don’t answer affirmatively, she’ll ask it again and again until we say that everything is good here.
Theologically speaking, there is a difference between “good” and “perfect”. “Good” means that everything is as it should be at this moment. For example, when God created the universe in seven days we are told that “it was good”. The Hebrew here really doesn’t mean completely perfected, and it is significant that the children of Adam and Eve are far from perfect. Beka’s question forces me into a place of acceptance. Everything is as it should be right now.
My sister is the ultimate paradox. She reminds me that I will never know the answer to the questions that the paradoxes of life propose, but that I must remain on the quest. She is not my guide, my Virgil; rather, she is my Beatrice. I must live in the moment while struggling to climb to the Empyrean.
Today I will replace the fuel filter in my leaf blower. Tomorrow I will shave another $23,000 off the annual budget for my school in order to make the finance committee happy. In a month I’ll be addressing the state teachers’ conference on the subject of attention deficit disorder. Tonight I’m cooking chili. Life is great. Everything good here.
The end.
His finger, I noticed, had four black hairs growing out of the second joint. As he pounded the finger against the fraction, the hairs never moved! I then noticed that I could see the pores of his skin, and the pores looked larger where the four hairs were. Gradually I realized that he had begun not only to raise his voice, but to shout.
“Six-TWELTS. It’s six-TWELTS!” he cried. I wondered why he said “twelts”. The word was obviously twelfths, right? I timidly began to point out the correct pronunciation to him. That’s all I can remember of this event. The crystal has gone dark.
What a mystery all of life is! I have no trouble with fractions today, I frequently think in decimal terms, and I’m an absolute wiz in measurement and conversions. If I only knew then what I know now I could go back and show that mean-spirited fourth grade math teacher a thing or two! On the other hand, if I had been good at fractions back then I probably wouldn’t be a husband to Cindy, a father to my children, and a headmaster. To understand this you must have either studied fractal geometry, chaos theory, or watched “Jurassic Park” several thousand times. When the butterfly flaps its wings in Tokyo, the weather changes in New York.
To go beyond reason or opinion is what defines paradox. We normally see a paradox as two independently true statements that are contradictory when introduced to each other. Paradoxes are higher on the social scale than oxymora. We chuckle at “jumbo shrimp”; we howl when we hear about “army intelligence”; we slap our thighs at “pretty ugly” or “a new classic”. More than a contradiction in terms, paradoxes are explicitly and intrinsically true. They are not funny. They make me nervous.
My world is loaded with these elements in a precise 1:1 ratio. God has revealed to me that my job is to keep these equally balanced in my brain at all times, believing both equally without giving one a wink-and-a-nod at the expense of the other. This is a terrible burden. I would much rather leave this work up to Martin Heidegger or Ludwig Wittgenstein or Aristotle or others who are paid to consider the meaning of life.
On the other hand, I have taught the conjugation of the verb “to speak” in first year Spanish for thirty years. Maybe a bit of higher order thinking is just what I need to keep my teaching fresh. On the other hand I’ve also taught Bible, theology, algebra, graphic design, American lit, world history, earth science, physical science, AP Spanish, geography, journalism, British lit, piano, guitar, music theory, chorus, drama, sailing, canoeing, astronomy, life skills (!), and coached a number of sports.
On the other hand, where’s the profit in any of this? Was Qoholeth right? Fortunately, the University of Northern Colorado answers this question by maintaining that philosophy majors will make a pile of money. I’m not kidding. Check it out.
Here’s my first real memory. I am convinced that anything that I “remember” prior to this event was added by photographs or family stories. This is my first real one:
I was running from Mr. Don’s back yard across his gravel driveway to our yard. I tripped and fell, skinning my knees horribly. I slid to a stop on the grass in our yard, face to face with a wild violet staring up at me. The gradually deepening hues of the petals led my eyes to the pistils, stamen, anthers, and bright golden stigma. It was so beautiful that I stopped crying. My first memory is of something so beautiful that it made me stop hurting. (Many years later I learned that my “birth flower” is the violet. My color is “violet”. My birthstone is amethyst. None of that is significant).
What is significant is that my sister Beka is beautiful. She is way beyond being just another member of our family. She is the symbol of who we are. She made us. And she’s beautiful inside and out.
Beka has a number of neurological disorders that hamper her ability to communicate or function in ways that are “normal”. Her disabilities hamper us, too. Or maybe a better way of saying this that her disabilities have formed, and continue to form, us.
Beka has a stock set of questions that she’ll ask, particularly in a telephone conversation. Her most repeated question is, “Everything good there?” If we don’t answer affirmatively, she’ll ask it again and again until we say that everything is good here.
Theologically speaking, there is a difference between “good” and “perfect”. “Good” means that everything is as it should be at this moment. For example, when God created the universe in seven days we are told that “it was good”. The Hebrew here really doesn’t mean completely perfected, and it is significant that the children of Adam and Eve are far from perfect. Beka’s question forces me into a place of acceptance. Everything is as it should be right now.
My sister is the ultimate paradox. She reminds me that I will never know the answer to the questions that the paradoxes of life propose, but that I must remain on the quest. She is not my guide, my Virgil; rather, she is my Beatrice. I must live in the moment while struggling to climb to the Empyrean.
Today I will replace the fuel filter in my leaf blower. Tomorrow I will shave another $23,000 off the annual budget for my school in order to make the finance committee happy. In a month I’ll be addressing the state teachers’ conference on the subject of attention deficit disorder. Tonight I’m cooking chili. Life is great. Everything good here.
The end.
Afterword
No one ever assigned me to write a 500 word essay or “whatever” number of words. I have no idea how long 500 words is. In college our professors would only say that the paper had to be long enough to cover the topic. In those days I would type on a manual Royal typewriter. Now I’m typing in Microsoft Word and it can tell me how long this essay is: it’s 7,537 words right now. Here are a few more words.
I hope you liked it. It’s not for anyone outside of our family: they wouldn’t get it. Yeah, there’s a well-turned phrase here or there, and I suppose a couple of paragraphs might be publishable for a non-Selby. For the most part, however, this is just for us. I hope it sparked a few ideas for you. It has sparked so many for me that I can’t wait to get started on the next project. I have been wondering what boys do who don’t have older brothers. How do they learn the proper method of dunking cinnamon crisps in milk without having them break? What are families like who don’t eat meals together? Did anyone else raise a rooster in the suburbs?
The whole point of this essay, for essay it is, was for me to make an attempt. It was also to undergo some self-examination to see what influences were in my life so that I could capitalize on them during the next attempt. God, love, family, scholarship, friends, and familial aphorisms seem to be the big winners. At emotional times like this, times of quiet introspection and sentimentality, I always remember the words Mama would say to me: “FOR LORD’S SAKE, HANK! WHY DON’T YOU USE THE BRAIN GOD GAVE YOU?!?
-HGS
I hope you liked it. It’s not for anyone outside of our family: they wouldn’t get it. Yeah, there’s a well-turned phrase here or there, and I suppose a couple of paragraphs might be publishable for a non-Selby. For the most part, however, this is just for us. I hope it sparked a few ideas for you. It has sparked so many for me that I can’t wait to get started on the next project. I have been wondering what boys do who don’t have older brothers. How do they learn the proper method of dunking cinnamon crisps in milk without having them break? What are families like who don’t eat meals together? Did anyone else raise a rooster in the suburbs?
The whole point of this essay, for essay it is, was for me to make an attempt. It was also to undergo some self-examination to see what influences were in my life so that I could capitalize on them during the next attempt. God, love, family, scholarship, friends, and familial aphorisms seem to be the big winners. At emotional times like this, times of quiet introspection and sentimentality, I always remember the words Mama would say to me: “FOR LORD’S SAKE, HANK! WHY DON’T YOU USE THE BRAIN GOD GAVE YOU?!?
-HGS
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