The Times of Your Life
Random Writings, Chosen at Random, that can be Read Randomly
Copyright 2011 by
Lois Foyt and Jon Foyt
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 by Lois Foyt and Jon Foyt
All characters in these short stories are fictitious, and any resemblance to real persons living or dead is coincidental.
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Time is Our Friend
(Most of the Time)
Time presents us with a universe of thought. Peering back into what some call the infinity of time, we have the opportunity to empathize with those who have lived before us, not only our own ancestors but those many and diverse lives that sculpted world history—not just the stories of kings and queens, generals with their wars and politicians with their cleverness, but the uphill climb of those real persons who, working against the formidable social and business constraints of their times, created new concepts in science, society, medicine, the arts and transportation.
Reading primary sources such as their personal journals, their memoirs, and their exchanges of letters with others allows us glimpses into the machinations of their minds, impressionist pictures of their spiritual and behavioral beliefs. Such sources describe their hopes and allow us to fear their failures and share their successes. Extrapolating their personal stories into the present time and even out into the future gives us a thrill of times that may come and that we may experience. Empathy with them living in their time allows us to develop a feel for our own time and the limits imposed upon us by society’s many institutions and accompanying restrictions, and by those we impose on our own selves, limiting our vision, or hopefully freeing it.
That “time is money” is a slogan of commerce and industry and old-fashioned factory assembly lines as money rules our lives rendering us its obedient servant.
This same commerce has wished upon us the rule of retirement, so that we do not hinder emerging ideas for commerce and throw up roadblocks to the volcano-like momentum introduced by the bubbling energy of each new generation. Yet to acquiesce to this time called “retirement” dulls the excitement of time, and then time ceases to be our friend.
However if we view retirement not as our pesonal withdrawal from challenges but rather as the sight of enticing new horizons, then once again time becomes our friend.
The House of Blue Lights
Outside of town, down a remote road that led to no known place, there hid, so the legend goes, an old house whose eves were strung with strings of blue light bulbs, each one of which cast—so the legend warned—a weird and ghostly spell upon those who dared to approach close enough in the hours long after dark had tinted in ice-cold colors this House of Blue Lights’ rural Indiana situs.
The place was not so far away by car as to require a long journey, rather a more driving resolve of achieving this destination, plus for safety the accompaniment of supportive friends as one, in daring do, undertook this frightening mission of creeping up upon this bluish and so-it-was-said the floating and almost ghost-like amorphous haze that engulfed The House of Blue Lights.
Who, assuming they were a living person or persons, lived or moved ghost-like inside this house? And if we went there and summoned enough courage to move through the haze and knock on the door, who was to open the door and, hopefully and fearfully, respond to the questions to which we all needed answers?
The person or thing that might open the door in response to our hesitant knock could be possessed with either great wisdom or great terror for us standing, hopeful but helpless, before it, waiting…. Perhaps these two traits of good and evil might display themselves together in one really innovative person.
At that time in our developing and generationally obedient teenage minds, the good of wisdom was reserved for teachers, preachers, a governor, a mayor, the banker and others of comparable merit who were in charge of the society we knew. That left evil, the terror of the unknown.
Unless our ranks were joined by several of us out for an evening of adventure, we were singularly afraid to venture out there to visit the dreaded House of Blue Lights. This night was to be our communal awakening or a lark lost to “score one for let’s see what happens.”
In our limited growing-up life experiences of the 1940s, most of us mainstream teenagers had not yet discovered that those people in charge of society each pursued their own selfish agendas, whether they be the party line of an organized national church—oh yes, the minister might have opinions but they were allowed to reach only so far. Like a billiard ball hitting the bumper, his personal and possibly divergent opinions would bounce back to conform to the thrust of the official church doctrine. The same with the politician and his party’s line, the businessman with making his profits, the teacher’s duty to echo his school’s authorized curriculum, the patriot to wave the flag of country in order to deflect all criticism.
Yet, secretly we longed for someone—perhaps it was the person living behind the entry door of The House of Blue Lights—to open doors to as-yet-unseen rooms of life where guidance about behavior, about our lives to come, about our own directions in the darkness of a Mid-West evening, might be found—a light illuminating for us the answers that surely must exist out there in the real world.
For the person turning on those blue lights must be too wise for the comfort of normal city society and therefore confined either by authoritarian decree or by self decision to retire behind the façade of blue weirdness and remain inside behind those blue lights, waiting to be asked, waiting to be allowed to pontificate about life, waiting as did the Oracle at Delphi, to give answers, no mater how vague—but at least to give answers for us in our own minds’ ways to interpret and to therefore act upon.
Now, some sixty years later and remembering The House of Blue Lights, I fantasize about gong back there to the middle of that state of Indiana to try to find once again this ghostly house. Yet while buoyed by fantasy, I realize that its lights, its wisdom, its threats have long ago disappeared, victim to a bulldozers blade, to fire set by dissident teenagers of a later day, to violent storm, to the decay of time, and I wonder what became of that person who waited there safely behind those blue lights? And what of his—or maybe the person was a “she”—wisdom, advice and future-looking thoughts. Was that wisdom hiding there in The House of Blue Lights never to be accessed? Is there wisdom hiding somewhere today, waiting to be read, waiting to be heard, waiting to be acted upon, wisdom accessible nowhere else, a secret wisdom, a treasured wisdom? Where is The House of Blue Lights and the person sponsoring the glow of wisdom (or terror?) in today’s world? And if found, would we dare go inside, venturing beyond its ominous façade?
A Perplexing Question of Timing
Amongst the many perplexing questions for mankind to ponder, which include: How and why was the Universe Created; What is the True Purpose of Our Lives; Where does God Live, or does He or She even exist; Do Animals really think; How Long will it be before Our Sun Burns Out; and did the Neanderthals interbreed with the new species on the block, Home Sapiens; one must add: why were individual people born at the time when they were born and not sooner or later in time, or yet to be conceived?
When one reads the story of history, the question cannot help but be contemplated: what if some or all of these folks were born earlier or later, or perhaps their souls or their characters or their personalities are still patiently packaged in the queue of future-to-be-people, waiting for that moment of conception and their dutiful arrival on earth? Is there a never-ending inventory of such souls on which the world has drawn in the past and will so do in the future, till the end of time?
How did it happen that the people who founded this country all arrived on Earth at more or less the same time, well virtually the same time, on the shores and in the colonies of the New World? Some even coming from the Old World. Did their timing of their appearances on the New World’s stage conform to a script written by a Higher Power? Some might argue so. Ultra patriots and politicians and some historians might put forth this patriotic or nationalistic argument. Others might cite Jesus’ career as having been pre-determined by this same Ultimate Power. Yet to what power would these same folks turn to justify the rise and the terrible lives of Adolph Hitler and his cabal of cronies? What if Hitler had been born thirty years earlier? To the Nazis can be added a long list of butcher-like dictators and self-serving leaders who along the timeline of history committed unspeakable human crimes. What if they had been born later, or not yet at all, still waiting off stage?
In the 1930s a comic strip portrayed characters who, in commenting on an event in which she or he found themselves embroiled, philosophized that they were “born thirty years too soon,” or on some occasions, “thirty years too late.” Perhaps trying to adapt to rapid changes in technology and unsettling changes in societal behavior can lead one to conclude in the same way as this comic strip person did three quarters of a century ago.
Yet try to change your personal script. Yeah! You can’t can you? Such a fruitless attempt and the obvious void of any result leads a person invariably to experience another of life’s helpless feelings, as one seeks answers to perplexing questions surrounding one’s own existence.
The Gatekeeper
The Director of the Foundation gave me my job because, so she told me, she needed someone with my literary qualifications to sort through the hordes of today’s writers and their plethora of material, be it poetry, fiction, or non-fiction. After all, she explained, today there is little good writing. She let me read the learned article she wrote thirty years ago about the great authors of the West, which she published under her by-line in the Foundation’s slick magazine. “Nothing written since,” she said to me with that deep all-wise female laugh of hers, “can come close to the literary accomplishments of those now-deceased men and women of letters.”
“Back then,” she had said in her article, “writers had dedicated editors at the New York publishing houses, editors who really edited. Moreover, literary agents, as well, labored with their writers to produce well-polished pieces.” Knowing I had read her article, she now looked at me and opined, “Today there is only an explosion of quantity—not quality. Why everyone with a word processor thinks he or she is a budding Pulitzer Prize winner, a Steinbeck, a Paul Horgan, a Willa Cather, a D. H. Lawrence…” She rattled off name after name of the well-known writers who wrote about the West at some point in their body of literary work and whom she had so eloquently ennobled in her long-ago article.
So I was installed in my position as the magazine’s literary critic with instructions to really criticize, and to do so regularly and often. Because the Foundation was so prestigious and so influential, book editors at local newspapers, bookstore owners, as well as the women at the city, county, and college libraries, whose job it was to select the books to buy, would follow my lead. My criticism was to become the word, at least in these parts.
Because of the Director’s power, she told me she would assure my coronation and my reign as the region’s literary gatekeeper. And she did. I joined the list of local celebrities. And her celebrated article remained the definitive authority on writers of the West. No new ideas for society penned by local authors were to be allowed to pass through my gate. No new writing styles were to be praised. Streams of consciousness, minimalist, revisionist—they had all been developed years ago. Like the legendary man at the U.S. Patent Office who resigned his position in the 19th century because he was certain no new inventions could possibly be created, the Director assured me there would be no new thoughts expressed by today’s writers. “Don’t forget,” she reminded me, “there are only a few story plots, and in their plays the Greeks presented them all.”
The Director’s argument made sense to me, because she was, after all, the boss, my boss, the Foundation’s boss, the region’s intellectual literary authority. Yet I couldn’t help ask myself, “Would that status quo remain, installed, indeed nailed to the crosses high up there in our literary pantheon?”
Local writers besieged me with their hopes, their articles, their stories, their books, asking me to review them, pleading with me to praise their words, begging me to support their careers. Few had been published by the “major” New York publishers. If they were published at all, it was by little-known small presses of dubious distinction, which made my rejection job easier. After all, the Director explained to me with impatience and intolerance in her voice, only publishers in New York are trained to detect an effort that could qualify as today’s “really good” writing. “The rest is…well, just the literary rabble running amuck.” Those big conglomerate New York publishers, of course, chose to focus on established Eastern authors writing the tried and true books about coming of age, child abuse, historical novels, the romance genre, and in non-fiction all the how-to books about subjects ranging from computers to cookbooks to child psychology and child rearing.
Given her overview of writing and publishing, I speculated that the big publishers provided a perk or two to my Director, perhaps permitting her a praising quote on the dust cover of some history book about the West, perhaps providing her and her counterparts around the country invitations to speak at book festivals, writers’ conferences and other events.
Ego enhancing can be as valuable a currency as hundred dollar bills bulging from a surreptitiously-delivered envelope. I pictured a booking agent in the Manhattan office of the Publisher’s Association, whose job it was to match a list of prominent people with dignitaries for the upcoming calendar of conferences. In return for their continued endorsement of the publishers’ writers they would receive occasional gifts, ranging from Cartier pens to Armani tuxedos or designer gowns. The Director hinted she might even enter my name in their coveted list.
But then at times, I worried the Director might eliminate my job altogether. That is, until I realized that her keeping me on was essential to her making sure that no new writers emerged in the region, for if they did, her thirty-year-old article could not be reprinted every year in the Foundation’s colorful magazine, and her position as the region’s literary authority would be compromised and she would be out of favor with the New York publishing establishment. In that event she could no longer chair the Foundation’s annual Book Festival, in which academics praised the writers of the distant past, and where she would receive the accolades of the wealthy people who supported the Foundation with their tax-deductible gifts. For her own ego needs, I began to understand that I was employed to keep the regional literary gate closed, while suggesting an illusion of swinging it open with invitations to new writers proffered by every issue of the magazine. Both for her own vested reputation and to respect what everyone perceived to be the literary status-quo, she and I worked together so that no new writer from this part of the country would be allowed passage through my gate into the land of literary acceptance.
Then one day a local writer brought me the following short story, unpublished even by a local small press or magazine, unendorsed even by the local high school or community college English teachers. The Director was out of town delivering the keynote speech at the National Convention for Foundations. I had finished composing my trashing criticism for the next issue of the magazine, so instead of simply smiling politely and discarding the story, I took the pages home with me that evening, expecting to quickly dismiss this story during the first commercial break on the nightly network news. You see, I have learned to be a fast reader.
The story was entitled “The Gatekeeper.” I read it in its entirety that evening, soon switching off the television. I concluded that from here on out in my life I could no longer allow anyone else to think for me, to direct my mind, to rule my values. No taste of being a local celebrity, no matter how seemingly secure I felt in my job, no matter how much ego building I benefited from, no bribe in any form could substitute for my personal intellectual integrity. Late that night I wrote my resignation letter. The next morning I taped it to The Director’s door of her suite of offices as her return greeting.
Here is “The Gatekeeper:”
When the GI Joes came home from fighting and winning World War II, they wanted to marry, buy new homes, and begin to parent the generation that soon became known as the Baby Boomers. A total of fifteen years of the economic deprivation of the Great Depression followed by the hell of war nurtured their pent-up demands for materialism, for maternity, for male macho madness. Most women had waited for them, most factories tooled up for the manufacture of their post-war motorcars.
Yet the proposed new suburbs of houses needed wood for floors, walls, and roofs. Where was there to be found enough wood, cheap wood, pliable wood, wood that easily accepted the waiting-to-be-hammer-driven nails of the muscular and eager house framers?
Fir trees, Douglas Fir trees—they were they best of all the wood species for framing these houses that would hopefully line all these new streets in all these new metropolitan suburbs. Someone in New York said these unique Douglas Fir trees grew “Out West.” Someone in the Empire State Building read one of the novels of Zane Grey, wherein he told of vast stands of these magnificent trees growing “Out West.” These wonderful trees were described as 180 feet tall, three and a half to six feet in diameter.
One enterprising analyst on Wall Street, researching trees in the New York Public Library, learned that Zane Grey and his Indian guide often fished for trout in a place called Diamond Lake. He found a map and spied a Diamond Lake, shaped like a cut diamond that lay deep in the heart of a county in the far-off state of Oregon in a county named Douglas. From his map, he saw this Douglas County was as large geographically as the entire state of Connecticut. The county surely must be, he reasoned with his analytical logic, named for the Douglas Fir tree. The county seat showed up on the map as being a place with the nice name of Roseburg.
The analyst persuaded his stock brokerage firm to hire a recently-discharged army major to personally investigate the quantity of what could be a major resource of timber for what the analyst predicted would become the post-war housing boom in America. Accepting his assignment, the major packed his Gladstone travel bag and boarded the crack overnight Twentieth Century Limited for Chicago. At his train depot in the Windy City he hailed a waiting Parmalee taxi, especially built to rush transcontinental passengers from one of Chicago’s several train stations across Chicago to another, as there were no other fast links. At his second station he boarded another train to make the long two-night journey to Portland, where he transferred to a third train, this one a milk train that chugged slowly south through the Willamette Valley and on into the hills of southern Oregon, finally arriving at the old brick railroad station in Roseburg.
De-training, the major asked around town for someone who could attest to the magnitude of these vast forests of Douglas fir trees. Several people promptly directed him to their local authority, who they respectfully referred to as “Old Fred.” They told the major Old Fred held forth in his suite at the Rose Hotel “down on Main Street,” a few blocks away.
“He’s our timber cruiser,” the major was advised.
“What’s a timber cruiser,” the major asked.
The local laughed. “You’re not from around here.”
“New York.”
The local laughed louder. “No timber in New York, I guess.”
The major shook his head.
“Well, a timber cruiser ain’t no boat. You see, Old Fred, he cruises through the timber astride his horse, and then he tells you how many board feet of timber—that’s lumber, ya know,” the local advised and went on, “there’s a-growin’ up thar in them thar hills.”
“What’s a board foot?” the major asked.
Trying to be tolerant of this city man, the local explained the accepted measurement of saw timber and saw logs, “One foot square by one inch thick, but, as Old Fred’ll explain, a thousand board feet is the accepted measurement for buyin’ and sellin’ timber around these parts. I don’t know what they use in New York.” The local laughed.
Eager for answers, the major went directly to the Rose Hotel to consult Old Fred. He found the bewiskered man sitting in his well-worn rocking chair, smoking an old corncob pipe. Old Fred didn’t get up, barely extended his hand in greeting and kept on puffing. His slow and seemingly wise puffs, his mannerisms connoted to the major a wisdom of the West—a timber wisdom.
Being from New York, the major wasted no time with informalities of anecdotes from his long train trip, of the roses blooming in the town of Roseburg, all of which would have consumed a half hour or so of his valuable time. Unbeknownst to the major, that was the male way “Out Here,” a technique that could have served to endear him to this rocking regional timber authority.
Instead, using the accepted Manhattan conversational approach, the major immediately demanded to know, “How much timber—Douglas fir, I mean—board feet, that is—grows up in those hills around Diamond Lake?”
Old Fred puffed for a while, as if mentally doing math calculations, his silence annoying the impatient major. Old Fred was in no hurry.
A hundred years earlier, Roseburg had begun as a stage stop on the old Applegate Trail, the Fort Hall, Idaho offshoot from the better-known Oregon Trail. Down through the intervening years not much had happened here in good olde Roseburg. The Umpqua River continued to rage west toward the Pacific Ocean as it challenged the annual migration of its bounty of Steelhead. The rains returned every winter to nourish the fir trees. In this relatively mild climate, the live oak trees always presented their green, and the local truck farms always brought forth their yields of beans and other produce. Perhaps exploding populations breed a certain frenzy of activity, while here in this remote sparsely peopled place there was no bustle, no hurry, no impatience.
The major fidgeted. In the Army in the vitality of the War, he had learned to overcome fatigue, hunger, and inconvenience. But, damn it all, the War was over, and he was impatient to set aside confrontation and return to the civilities of peacetime. He observed that Old Fred was too old to have been in the recent War. Yet this local icon was confronting a bona fide War veteran with his failure to cooperate in a New York-sponsored inquiry that simply sought facts.
Behind his bewiskered countenance, Old Fred smiled, and then finally spoke. “Bet you didn’t know we almost formed our own state out here—Jefferson, so our new constitution called us—yup, we had adopted a constitution for our new state—southern Oregon and Northern California counties back in the 20s. Ya see, during the Great Depression, we got no roads, no federal money. We’d been sucking hind teat out here for years. You Easterners back there in Dee Cee and New York—you all ignored us. Ya see, none of you ever came ‘way out’ here, west of Yellowstone and north of the Grand Canyon.”
The major said he didn’t know about that, and asked again about the Douglas Fir trees and board feet.
“The Japs attacked our Pearl Harbor.” Old Fred went on with his explanation, “War brought the end of the State of Jefferson.”
“The trees?” the major insisted, annoyed, his jaw set as if he was ordering his troops to prepare for a charge. “I hear there are massive stands of century-old Douglas Fir Trees up there.” He gestured over his shoulder toward the hills rising to the east of Roseburg.
A hint of a smile appeared on Old Fred’s face as he rocked and puffed. With authority he drawled, “Naw, there ain’t enough trees up thar to pay for you to buy saws and hire the loggers. Now you go back to your limestone skyscrapers and your canyons of Wall Street and leave us Oregonians in peace.”
The major looked surprised. “But we in New York heard…”
“Well, ya heard wrong,” Old Fred said, smoke rising from his corncob pipe. “Give my regards to Broadway, ya hear,” and he guffawed.
Dutifully, the major retraced his long train ride and reported his negative findings.
Time passed and the national demand for housing grew stronger, more widespread, more urgent.
Another Wall Street analyst heard rumors about unbounded supplies of Douglas Fir “Out West.” In his research he talked to the first analyst who told him all those stories of great stands of timber were false. Yes, Sir, he had learned that from the regional authority on the matter.
The second analyst thought the potential profits so alluring that he decided to find out for himself. This time he hired a discharged colonel—a bird colonel, too—to go “out there” to Oregon.
The colonel, a decorated war veteran who was known for quickly sizing up situations, prepared himself with all the old maps he could find of Oregon and especially Douglas County. There weren’t many, because this far-western territory had remained virtually unexplored. He read several of Zane Grey’s novels on the long train journey west, through his transfer in Chicago, and while waiting at the old Victorian Portland railroad station for his connection to the milk train south to Roseburg.
In a repeat of the major’s experience, the colonel was directed by locals to the Rose Hotel and to Old Fred, their respected timber cruiser, who he found rocking and puffing away. A conversation similar to the earlier one with the major ensued. Discouraged, the colonel left town and returned to report his findings to Wall Street.
More time passed and across this victorious nation the housing demand was growing out of control. Synthetic materials were being developed, substitutes for wood, such as aluminum studs and strong, color-baked-on plastic wall panels known as Lustron® that were stuck to these aluminum studs with bolts were all being explored. Regular bricks, and even adobe bricks made of mud and straw and dried in the sun, were all being advocated as alternative building materials.
But those in the know knew wood, knew that Douglas Fir lumber was the best, the cheapest, the easiest for house framers to fit to size on the job and then to hammer into place. Yes, they argued, Douglas Fir was by far the best solution to satisfy this national housing appetite, which was now threatening the stability of the body politic so much so that the future of democracy itself hung in the balance. Civil unrest, especially given the Cold War with the Soviet Union looming on the horizon, was the last thing the United States of America needed. In view of this evil Russian threat, a repeat of this country’s communist and socialist movements of the 1930s was not to be tolerated!
Now, there are two possible endings to this story of Old Fred, our timber cruiser and Gatekeeper—two entirely different endings. You, Dear Reader, must choose.
The first ending unfolds as follows:
All the security analysts in New York forgot about Oregon. In those days homebuilders were small one-man companies, none of which had the time or inclination to investigate Douglas County on their own. What if the rumors were true, they worried, and big business got into their business? They’d be wiped out. They preferred to preserve the existing status quo, the balance, the security, the void offered by continuing uncertainties.
Besides, conventional wisdom is conventional wisdom, an accepted folkloric wisdom that everyone knows to be true. Wisdom from someone who knows must never be questioned. Nevertheless the demand for housing escalated across the country. Neither the factories of the plastic people, those of the aluminum advocates, the adobe bricks, or the brick ovens came anywhere close to meeting the demand for housing as generated by the American conquering armies returning home. Discord grew. Unrest prevailed. People were living in tents, huddling in cardboard hovels, sequestered under railroad bridges. In these unromantic environs, the explosion of the Baby Boomer Generation remained unborn. And if anyone thought of such an unusual generational label, they were characterized as being a bomb menace, a child abuser to what few babies were then being born. Revolution ensued. Communism, with its promise of housing for the masses, prevailed. Brick housing projects built high rises, eventually, too late for creature comfort, too late to help spawn and explode any such heralded boom of babies.
Douglas County remained virgin, an environmentalist’s vision of the ultimate utopia of Mother Nature. One day a man named Ralph Nader became its appointed commissar. The citizen comrades, astride their horses, emulated the cruising of their idolized legend, Old Fred, wandering along the faint wilderness trails, as the vast and seemingly unending forests of Douglas Fir trees remained untouched, the gin-clear waters of Diamond Lake shimmering at its core. The steelhead romped along the rushing Umpqua River, and every year the rains came and the roses bloomed anew. Few today know of Douglas County, Oregon, for this Connecticut-sized region is officially called the Peoples’ Republic of Jefferson.
Or, if you prefer, here is the alternative ending to The Gatekeeper:
Finally, a security analyst from Wall Street who had grown up on a farm in Upstate New York and knew about horses, wilderness exploration, and trees flew on a propeller-driven commercial DC-3 airplane directly into Roseburg, landing on its dirt airstrip. He located a farmer and told him he was here to see for himself about this purported unlimited supply of Douglas Fir trees. The farmer mentioned Old Fred a-rocking, but this third analyst insisted on finding out for himself. Shaking his head in disbelief that anyone would bypass Old Fred, the farmer finally rented this New Yorker a horse. Outfitted with camping gear and a camera, our third analyst rode off east and disappeared into the wilderness of Douglas County, emerging weeks later, the radiance of his discovery beaming from his countenance.
The rest is history. Lumber mills, plywood mills, chain saws, logging roads, logging trucks, jobs, and undreamed of economic prosperity reverberated throughout Douglas County, Oregon. Houses, suburbs, and material happiness spread across the United States of America. Old Fred, the forgotten Gatekeeper rocking away in the old Rose Hotel, died a few years later when a truck carrying dynamite destined to destroy a rocky abutment lying in the way of a new logging road blew up in front of the Rose Hotel, raising the hotel and everyone sleeping inside. Departing into oblivion went Old Fred, one of the last of the great Gatekeepers, no longer single-handedly holding back this nation of innovators.
Now, I ask you, Dear Reader, do you know other Old Gatekeepers out there plying their inhibiting trade?
The Tall Tree
How I envy the tall tree that rises higher, quite a bit higher, than the other trees by our house. This tree is the first to see the sunrise, the last to bid the sunset good evening. All day long it senses, indeed experiences the breeze, soaks in the days when the rain comes and is host to the all-seeing birds, large and small, singing, calling, speaking their bird calls and their unique and special songs to the neighborhood.
The tall tree looks down upon us as if it were an all-seeing, all-knowing, all mapping deity or, in today’s terms a broadcasting GPS, recording us and our movements ever so ethereally, its compiled data soon to be swallowed by other unrecorded events in the passage of time.
Yet, would I want to be this monarchial tree on its throne of importance? If I were this deciduous giant, then I would have to put down roots for life in this place and reconcile myself to stay forever rooted in this soil right here under my feet. No, not for me, for putting down roots is the bane of freedom of movement.
The Celebrity
The idol of to-day pushes the hero of yesterday out of our recollection; and will, in turn, be supplanted by his successor of to-morrow.
--Washington Irving
With frustration growing into acrimony we argued among ourselves over who held the throne as the greatest celebrity of our time. Advocates proffered names that, to them and their cohorts, were well-known and popular. Mostly our candidates were generational, revealing the range of ages of those of us playing this celebrity game. Some candidates were convicted criminals, others of politics and government, many associated with Hollywood or often seen by viewers on television monitors. Name familiarity, face recognition, all proved to be known or presumably known quantities to these fans.
Boomer Rules
My Lady told me that at any given time in the history, and even in the prehistory of society, there were rules. “This is the way we do it.” Whether the rules were written, codified she said was the legal term, or unwritten, as in “everybody knows,” there are rules. Rules for behavior, rules for thinking, for believing, for disbelieving, for interaction between individuals. The behavioral alternative, she insisted, was inter-personal anarchy, life run amuck, society deteriorating into chaos. “We can’t have that, now can we?”
So I reviewed the rules I was taught as a child. I retrieved them from the depths of my mind. I rehearsed them in my thoughts. To learn more, I read biographies. I read history. I read about the behavior of characters in novels. I superimposed on my weeks and months these rules plus those learned in school, in church, from those who might today be called mentors, and were then known as leaders, whether of men or of just me—those to whom I had looked up. At last I thought I had a handle on these “rules.” I attempted to apply them in my everyday life.
Had My Lady been with me in every one of my attempted applications of these rules, would I have fared better? Of course, such minute by minute guidance is unavailable in daily life from anyone, except oneself. Even had such 24/7 help come up on my mental monitor by means of a simple mouse click, I would have experienced no better result. Why, I agonized, was I so out of step? I retreated to review. I withdrew to be able to withstand. I went to the seashore to see the waves, observe the tide, to gaze out across a timeless horizon.
Every seventh wave, they say, is the big one, the one from which to retreat, the one that changes the configuration of the sands, repositions the driftwood, redeposits the refuse, remakes the beach. Not much time passes between these seven waves, and as I watched, slowly, incessantly, with determination, life around me was changing, and with these changes came new interpretations of the rules, even new rules—all these unwritten and unfamiliar to me behavioral rules. While I slept the Baby Boomers had washed ashore, wave after wave of them, each unlucky seventh reformatting the social seashore, leaving me adrift with no harbor, so safe landing, no gunwale to hang onto in my emotional turbulence.
Some people carry a Bible with them, shards of paper sticking out to mark certain question-answering passages. Some people attend confession to appeal for comfort. Some people visit board-certified psychologists, hoping to gleam a glimpse of insight. Some people seek answers from those gurus who claim to channel the wisdom of a long-past person in order that they might treat the dilemmas of today. All seeking answers, searching indexes of the compendiums that list these behavioral “rules.”
Finally I realized the answers are simple, there to be codified for us all, and applied by us. All we need do is to corral a Boomer and not let him or her loose until he or she has codified these seventh-wave Boomer Rules. I have done such a thing. I caught a Boomer and locked it away in a garret. He is a behavioral sociologist by trade, as learned and as wise as any Boomer you will ever meet. Before I released him back into the stream, he wrote me as follows:
“These are the Boomer Rules. You should know them. We all do. Why don’t you? But since you are so old, and so out of touch, and so confining of me, I shall set them forth for you. Then you can tell them to your lady, and watch her turn over in her grave.
“You mentioned the word truth? What does that word mean? I can find it only in Webster under “obs.” For “obsolete.” If there ever was such a word it has been replaced by “spin.” The rule of spin is: how can I look the best in the eyes of my peers. Spin is fiction superimposed on non-fiction, creative story-telling by and for the benefit of the storyteller, whether it be a resume of one’s education and professional experience, a report to an employer, or a response to a customer inquiry. You would probably label such manipulation as “lies.” But that word, too, is “obs.” Try using the synonym, “cool,” instead.
“You asked about some weird concept you called “etiquette” and spoke about “proper behavior.” You are indeed out of date. You must think first of yourself and how you will look to those around you. You see, the better you look the more proper is your behavior. Here, the more material belongings you display, the better you look. And the busier you declare yourself, the more important you look. The more medicines you let people know you take, the more effete you become. Also, the more you lie about your achievements, your interests, your children, your pets, the cooler you become. Other Boomers around you are lesser in importance, not to be respected, but to be ignored, for this rule says you are number “uno,” and the care stops there.
“That’s another rule: Boomers run the world, so forget about those older and those younger, unless they are Boomer children. You see, we Boomers blame you for not bringing us up properly, for all our problems, for the wars, for the peace, for the ills of society. They label you as hypocrites for your contrasting beliefs, old-fashioned for your dress and your tastes, and “really out of it as to what is actually cool.” And they look down on the newer generations as inferior to them, because they chose a time too late to be born, and as well ‘they couldn’t possibly be cool—they weren’t at Woodstock.’”
The Distant Mountain Beyond Delphi
Delphi, the home of the Wise and Forecasting Oracle of Ancient Greece, was once deemed to be the Center of the Known World, much as Washington, D. C. might in today’s world be cast.
That evening, in the dusk at Delphi I looked up to the West. There, mysteriously high on the slopes of a mountain far, shone a light—like a shadow-causing street light mounted on a telephone pole above an old and decaying train depot in a Midwestern US town—shinning ever so dimly, yet this evening conveying its illumination across the Grecian miles to me, standing there as I was in that clear and crisp dusk in Delphi, Greece.
There appeared to be a road—probably, or for sure, dirt—running up the slope and underneath the light, and on each side some buildings—houses, certainly—in which people and likely their animals, separated apart by a mere wall, lived day after day after day.
I stared on and on as time went by, wondering, imagining as to the wisdom, or lack thereof, inhabiting the minds of the people of that almost inaccessible village—yes, as I looked and examined every aspect of the visual image, it was most certainly a village. How one made their way there, if one wanted to for some reason or other, remained unclear as no highway, road or even a narrow donkey track leading from Delphi across the distance traced a meaningful or mapable course from Delphi to the illuminated location.
I thought: there, in that remote little village must surely exist the wisdom of the universe—a person or persons hiding out there, who possessed a Shangri-la-like understanding—yeah, the sought-after knowledge of the meaning of the universe, of our lives, of our reasons for being where we are, who we are and what we are. There, in that remote village were The Answers. Yes, they must be there, in the mind and voices of the bare-roots farmers and the sheepherders, of those all-knowing visionaries who lived there—there in that isolated village because they were ostracized from Athens, yes, and even from Delphi. I must travel there! For on that remote mountain slope lay the answers to life, to the universe, to the spiritualism of ancient Greece, modern Greece and to the modern world.
Mount San Antonio
Mount San Antonio rules the central border between New Mexico and Colorado, overseeing the vast San Luis Valley to the north and the deep Rio Grande Gorge to the east. Fall colors of the Aspen, brilliantized by the afternoon October sun, cloak the rising peak, suggesting in their subtle hues a palate so infinite as to conceal from us the meaning of their higher wisdom. Oh, to be up there in those trees on this day, for amongst them must be a hint, even more than a hint perhaps, of this higher wisdom. The treeish communication between these families of deciduous trees exchanges a spectrum of expression as yet unknown by us humans—how else could their family heraldries be so different, paint such a canvas of fall delight. Surely in those heights, looking at those leaves from below, one can sense truths unheard of in the valleys and gorges below.
Down below, where people live, wisdom is limited by a host of forces. To rise above this list of limits seems imponderable. Rigid religious ritual conforms the congregation; prejudices of all sorts of hues serves in everyone’s mind to prejudge people, whether the category into which they are put be ethnic or age, sex or social position, celebrity or ordinary—there, you see, the use of the word “ordinary” condemns one to the mundane, for who knows or wants to get to know anyone “ordinary?”
Sunrise over Denver
The pinks of the cloud wisps give way to the approaching mundane grays of rush-hour morning. The light from the last stars dim and vanish. The blue sky now controls as the sun travels west from the Kansas prairie to illuminate the snow-dusted front range of the Rocky Mountains. The sky, the vast beyond, positions this mountain-featured planet of ours somewhere in an endless universal space.
How simple would have been the view of centuries ago that the sun and the stars revolved around us, that we represented the focal point of this universal canvas. By this morning, though, science has informed us of an endless complexity of this sky, out there millions of light years to the end, or not to the end, of the universe. And maybe beyond, yet another universe. Laugh at the thought of that universe’s different rules of physics, different from the truths of this planet—where opposite formulae rule—where good is evil and evil good—where up is down and down is up, and on and on. If so, where then is truth? Is truth, like beauty, in the eyes of the beholder, a selfish value we seek, a light we see in the distance to which we want to travel, but to which we never reach?
The Lust for Logistics
Living life day after day invites an absorption into logistics. The car must commute, and that is a ritual of bondage by traffic, on-ramps and off-ramps, stop and go lights—mostly stop. Shopping for staples and for self-indulgences—coffee for the commute, clothes and commerce designed for the kids, checking accounts to balance—the minuses that must be turned into pluses—but how and when? These daily preoccupations prevail, and to allow them to dominate is so easy a trap in which to fall. Having fallen, to think, perchance to dream, to imagine, is to look up hopelessly from the bottom of a deep well, only a glimmer of light far off at the top remains, perhaps a vestige of hope, but then only resignation and a further ensuing and ongoing lust for the lure of logistics.
The Copse
Given a grouping of Prairie cottonwoods, their various directions of growth will form a cacophony of forms: their trunks will head in every which way. Why do they not each grow straight, or each lean away from the prevailing winds, their life-forms set by natural forces? Are they each so individualistic in their expressions as to resist these natural forces?
In a copse of aspen or a forest of lodgepole pine, or a hillside of ponderosa pine, trunks are straight up toward the sky, seldom deviating from this given pattern of growth. A few ponderosa may eventually fork into two trunks, their life-trunk bifurcating as it doubles its spread of branches.
In a congregation of people, conformity of behavior and of beliefs is expected. Oh some may deviate ever so slightly, but all paths of life must head in the direction determined by that particular society’s forces. One does not easily move from one congregation to another, nor can a tree pick up and relocate its roots.
The Reunion
Whether high school or college, or corporate or caught-in-catastrophe, reunions of the participants are to be attended by those who were, by choice or by fate, so enrolled in the particular cause or event. Reunions are organized by someone so as to have a schedule of events, to collect money to pay for the meeting hall, for the food to entice, for the mailed-out multi-colored invitations, for the photographer to record attendance and for the work of the organizer. The agenda calls for speeches by the important ones on the alumni role while the ordinary ones listen to the important ones. Oh, to be important and be listened to, but why be important when one need only listen?
The Clouds of Colorado
Clouds above Colorado—east of the Front Range rising above the Great Plains, where this endless flat prairie finally comes to an end, form designs as abstract as those sketched by an artist on a psychedelic binge. Sometimes the clouds form into flying saucers looking down from on high upon these Denver suburbs, reporting the ever-increasing sprawl of houses, highways and Home Depots back through the universe to their distant home base for further analysis by an all-knowing intelligence.
Other days a grayish cloak spreads to the east like a tide encroaching upon a distant seashore, while a trace of blue sky hugs the tops of the Rocky Mountains, waiting for the slow prevailing westerly winds to dispatch the hovering cloak east toward Kansas and allow the rising sun to shine upon these suburbs.
What is that funnel cloud to the north touching down near the airport? A pencil-thin white or gray pointing up or is it pointing down? Soon gone, moving northeast toward Nebraska. The reason people here build basements (storm cellars) digging down into the earth—for their own safety from these speed-of-light-like inds.
On days when clouds turn into abstract wisps, the sun rises like thunder from Kansas and the clouds turn burning red, only for a passing moment, and then they’re cloud color again as the day and the highway traffic down below sound their daily development.
Poor Marquardt
Poor Marquardt is dead.
Poor Marquardt is dead.
But in the overall scheme of things—“things,” the term applied when no one quite knows the proper label to apply—does it mater that poor Marquardt is dead? Probably not. So, then why should I write about Poor Marquardt? Now? When only you may read?
Because he would want you to know how he died—no, not how, but why he died.
Yes, listen for a moment. After all, why cannot you listen for just one precious moment to why a fellow homo sapiens died? Is that too much to ask of you? If so, then punch another channel on your remote, or place another call on your cellular. Still here? Then let’s you and me tune in to what’s left of Poor Marquardt’s vibes floating through the universe, floating, floating, fading, fading into oblivion. Because Poor Marquardt is dead!
Dead at last, they said. The authorities, those in charge, those really running things—there’s that word again: “things.”
Who was Marquardt and why was he labeled as poor? He wasn’t poor. Look at his Living Trust—he was up to date on estate planning, determined to avoid the costs of probate with siphoning attorney’s fees, he was intent on skirting the age-old systems of society. Yes, Marquardt was as up to date as tomorrow’s news. Nevertheless Poor Marquardt is dead.
He was labeled as poor because he was so rich in knowledge that he was poor in allowed life expectancy. It seems that Poor Marquardt was a marked man of knowledge—destined to be eliminated from consideration by the media, the masses, the academics, to be ignored, to be forgotten as quickly as possible. Only death can bring such ignominy.
But are you interested to know why? If you do learn why, might you not be the next to follow Poor Marquardt, in death, in oblivion, in “nothingness?” Oh, then, run, hide, switch channels, switch anything—there’s that “thing” word again, switch jobs, switch locations, switch brands, switch to the infinity of “nothing”—the antithesis of “something.” Because “things” are what are going on. That’s precisely what Poor Marquardt knew.
On his deathbed, in his last words, in his considered thoughts, in his gifted intuition, the following are the concepts he conveyed to me. I must transmit his mind’s conclusions to you and to everyone else, that is, before—before I, too follow Poor Marquardt into the emptiness of death. For then, even if one person—yourself—hears, reads, listens, thinks, contemplates, then I, like Poor Marquardt, will have passed on these truisms, and they will not be lost to the annals of history, to the silence of the deserts, to the complexities of the jungles, to the wastelands of the swamps, to the obliterating forces of the tides, or gone away with the winds.
I knelt there in the dark, in the rain, in the snow, in the cold, in the wind, over Poor Marquardt, his pain becoming my pain, his blood flowing with my blood, his thoughts becoming my own. He whispered to me, I clinging to every word, remembering, and now reciting for you.
Marquardt was not a man of letters, a scholar, an academic, an “authority,” a celebrity. He was not a guest on any talk show that I know of. Nor was Marquardt a revolutionary, a communist, a white supremacist, an anarchist, a fanatic on any kind or stripe. Marquardt was man, and man was the ruler of the planet, the protector, the watchman, the embodiment of all most holy, all most Godly, all most wonderful. Had he the political connections Marquardt might have been a man of letters, a scholar, an academic, an “authority,” a guest on talk shows, whose picture might have even appeared on the cover of “Time.” For he was time itself. Nevertheless, Poor Marquardt is dead. Will his thoughts, now my thoughts, go with him to the grave? Oh, they didn’t bury him, they just allowed him to blow away on the next gale whipping through our town. Out of sight, out of mind, so they say, so they wish…
So, for the record, for posterity, for the historians, for the psychologists, for the sociologists, for the economists, for the five o’clock news anchor woman, here then is Marquardt’s Manifesto, as told to me:
Whoops, I put the mouse on “paste” and clicked but nothing happened. Where is the rest of my story? Oh, I bet it’s my agent—she just got a new computer, and she said something on her last email that she thinks she punched the wrong key; at any rate the rest of story, well, apparently she’s lost it.
No problem. I’ve got backup. You bet, I always backup everything, whether I need to or not. So, I’ll simply retrieve the rest of this story from my backup...oh, there’s that error message again...same message...I don’t know what that error message means. They’re telling me I have to go to their online support chat room and enter my question. Oh, they assure my satisfaction is their 24/7 concern for, after all, I am a valued customer!
Any rate, send me your email address, and as soon as I recover Marquardt’s Manifesto, I‘ll send it along to you, gratis. And I apologize for any inconvenience.
But hold on before you get pissed. For when you do read Marquardt’s Manifesto I’m certain you’ll agree that waiting for it to appear on your screen on your tablet or wherever was well worth your angst, for it contains universal answers to universal questions.
--Your Faithful Scribe, from somewhere out there in the Universe
Mid-Winter at Heritage Eagle Bend Active Adult Golfing and Living Community
You’ve heard stories about homeowner associations ruling over the citizens living in their condominiums or planned developments, but not until you’ve resided in an active adult community and subjected yourself to their behavioral thought control and activities disciplined police committees, elected by and with the consent of the fifty-plus residents have you experienced the real terror of democratically-elected authorities with their dominating dogma and their rigid rules. Here’s one example that’ll drive you to a life of transiency:
At about 2 a.m. I awoke to a loud banging on our front door. I donned my robe and rushed to see the messenger. She was tall, about 6 feet 4 inches, so I judged because she had to duck and then kneel down to look me hard in the eyes. Her uniform was as dark as the night outside, matching her large black sunglasses that hid the color of her eyes, which I feared raged at me in a red devilish glow. Beyond her at the curb I saw a lighted van and inside two of the biggest goons I had encountered since my days roving with the gangs in Southwest Albuquerque. On the side of van, lighted by the movement-triggered lamppost in our front yard, I could read in large letters arching above an artful logo of a smiling golfer: “Heritage Eagle Bend Discipline Authority.”
My intruding nighttime guest, Amazonia, as I will call her although she didn’t announce her name to me, wore a wide leather belt in which she housed the largest nightstick I have ever seen. From this same belt her chrome handcuffs sparkled in the flicker from my “welcome” light illuminating my entry door. On her shoulder a communication device crackled with a voice sounding distant, yet I knew that was close because it announced it was from “HEB Headquarters.” Another weapon of strange proportions, dark and sinister, was housed in readiness within easy reach by her right arm, its leather strap unbuckled, its chamber, so I assumed, loaded and ready for trigger pulling.
Her voice was contralto, although not musically so, just ominously so. After giving me two seconds to refute my identity, which I didn’t attempt, she announced, “You been seen running on the paved golf cart paths,” asserting that a camera hidden somewhere high up in one of the cottonwood trees had reported my many morning exercise misdeeds to the “authorities.”
I trembled. She went on, her voice mellowing a decibel or two, “Now we’re a compassionate, friendly, loving community here, Mr. a…ah…” I composed myself enough to remember my name and told her in a weak voice. “Ah, yes,” she mumbled, checking off a box on her clipboard form while adding, “You get one warning, and consider this your one warning.” She paused while the magnitude of her statement sunk in, and then held up her index finger, repeating loudly the word “one,” as if to underline it on some sort of a three-copy official form that she would hand in to a “higher authority.” She raised her dark glasses to rest on her forehead and repeated, as if she were a second grade teacher exercising social authority, “We don’t run or walk on our paved golf course paths. They’re for our dear golfers driving their state-of-the-art golf carts!” For her exclamation point, she touched her long finger to my forehead and held it there until I nodded my head in enough of an affirmative that she withdrew her finger, her hand and her arm and rested the lot on her nightstick. To my relief she turned and walked commandingly down my entry walkway past another of my “welcome” signs.
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