Wisconsin (Draft chapter of a larger work)

After retiring from the Army, my father got a job with AAA in Wisconsin. Wisconsin, to me, seemed almost the Wild West compared to the tangle of traffic that is DC and Alexandria. 

We uprooted and looked for house in a small town that might serve as home base for my Dad's field work. I liked the town of Sun Prairie, if for reason beyond the sound of the name, but we chose Stoughton. It was close enough to Madison for my dad and small enough for my mother to feel comfortable driving and house-holding. 

While we waited or a house to become available, we lived in a cottage on the shore of a lake, Lake Kegonsa, "the lake of many fishes". I thought we out in the wilderness and would shoot my .22 standing on the back porch into the woods behind the cottage. That was not something our neighbors appreciated, and I heard about it. 

It was strange living on a lake after the urban life of northern Virginia. All of us were a little naive bordering on reckless with the new surroundings. 

One time we rented a row boat from Sunnyside, the resort near the cottage, and rowed out into the lake. A windstorm came up and we had to fight waves to get back to Sunnyside. The waves came up fast, and we had to row into the wind. We made little, if any progress, and our little craft was taking on water. 

A glittery ski boat came to out rescue, piloted by a handsome guy Maggie's age. His interest in rescuing us took on a real mission when he saw that the new blonde from school was in trouble. He pulled up alongside to get the painter from the row boat so he could tow us to the dock. His attention was more behind his destination than it was forward. The air was charged with attraction.

I just sat in the back of the beleaguered dinghy and stared across the whitecaps at the shore. 

Maggie was assimilating to the new place in her way and I would have to figure out mine. 

I sleep-walked through high school, numb mostly. Two insights stood out, though. One was that I found a part of myself in words, keeping a journal. Two, I loved art. I drew for the pure joy of it in out basement. I did participate  for personal reasons and could not care less about accomplishing what others felt was worth doing. I wrestled because I liked working out, but had no competitive fire. I did well in math and humanities, well enough to be elected to give a speech at graduation. But my assimilation was more cultural. This was a land of lakes, woods, and farms. People fished, hunted, and worked long days. I would learn these ways, more or less, and play the role of redneck for a while. 

My best days were spent alone in a canoe on the Yahara River, which ran in front of our house. I could carry the Grumman 17 foot aluminum canoe across the street, through the Park, and down the bank to a rocky ledge near the water and launch. From there I could paddle upstream, through town, under the Highway 51 bridge, the railroad bridge, and out into the marsh. The river opened up into cattails, oak woods, and farm land. Redwing blackbirds perched on the cattails and carp swirled the muddy water in the shallows. 

Out here, I found something of myself. It was part of me that I didn't know but wanted to to become. it was restless, loved rivers, woods, and mountains. This part of me would carry me through long, rough patches of shadow and loneliness that waited for me after my life in the small town. 

Fast forward a few years, and I am out of high school, doing yard and farm harvesting work in the the summer and working in a truck body factory during the winter, driving an old International pick-up truck, carrying rifles on a rack over the rear window of the cab, and drinking to blackout after frustrating nights in bars trying to meet women.  

I revel in being a bit of an outcast and call myself a "DG," or degenerate. I can see a path forward that includes a muscle car, a small house, maybe a wife, and a life lived in a small town. 

But there is something gnawing at me. I can't quite put it into words, but it involves college, learning to think, and taking a sharp turn into the unknown. 

A chance meeting at the urinals with the president of the truck body company helps me to imagine a new path. The president and I are standing beside each other at the urinals and he asks, "What are you doing here?" 

I am silent, but he goes on. "This is no place for you. I can put you in charge building doors because John, the head, is about to retire, if you want. But you can do something else. I heard your speech at the last graduation. You aren't factory material. Think about it." 

So there it was. A fork in the road. I knew but didn't know at the same time. 

A few days later, all of us workers on the line are called to a general meeting. The president stands on a riveting table and gives us the news. At that historical moment, a recession has hit, and he offers a deal to anyone willing to quit rather than be fired. 

I jump on it and resign. I apply to the University of Wisconsin -- Steven's Point, and state my major as forestry, and pay for my first semester with money I made building semi trailer doors.

Maslow's Ladder, Father's Day (Intro to a Larger Work)

I was never very good at taking advice, especially from older people, like my father. The curriculum of the young is not that of the old. The young are warriors, on the move, achieving; the old are moving inward and taking stock of the life they have lived, coming to peace. 

As a father now myself, I have to remember that when I think of writing something for my sons. The oh- so- patronizing-and- axiomatic tones of elders talking to young people makes me cringe a bit. I don't know if aging, by itself, constitutes wisdom. Experience can, if we learn something from it, knock off some of the erroneous ego-based assumptions we all carry about what is the best way to travel through the time given to us. 

That is what I hope to achieve with these scribbles to you both, my beloved sons. 

I have lived a life of searching. I did not (much) chase fame or wealth and had little ambition for those things. What I did listen and look for was something very elusive, a kind of quality of experience, of being more engaged with what was happening. My worst fear was that I would pass though this life numb, void of convictions or empathy, untouched by the troubles and delights of this earthly journey. 

That meant that I had some work to do, because before I knew better, I had been hammered by a trauma that I had no idea how to process or digest. As an adolescent whose father was at war in a time of great turmoil, I was already wounded and had crafted for myself a shell in which I hid away from the world as a form of self-protection. 

People called me "shy" and I stood only on the periphery of things, sitting out because I did not know how to handle pain. 

My path lay in turning that wordless tangle of trauma into some kind of art. My greatest desire was to get what was inside, out, literally to express, like mothers express milk from their breasts, that boiling mess I had churning in my heart. 

I had to go alone, an a path that almost always was the back way, through the woods, around the places where people gather. Most people interfered with my search; they distracted me from what I was looking for. No, it was solitary, mostly, this path I had to follow.

I got lucky. Life did not lead me into a despair so great that it would destroy me. I had helpers along the way -- friends, teachers, familiars, and just blind circumstance -- that diverted me back onto the path right when I needed it most. 

I was poor. I was a student. I was lost. But I escaped being prey. And for that I am very grateful, because this life led me to where I am, a place where I can look back and tell a bit of the story. 

I have learned not to avoid pain, and, as a bonus, have learned to feel joy. The two are braided together. What a surprise to find hidden inside greatest fear, the windfall of my greatest desire. I have won by surrendering.  

Sciatica

I am currently incapacitated and hobbled by pain. That pain erases my hopes and plans for the day, and instead, the proximity and reminder of the ephemeral vulnerablity of this body sit down next to me again. Mortality sits close and takes up the entire frame of my awareness. 

I feel the scarcity of time left to me and load the awareness into every step I take. The onslaught of fact and memory whispers at the edges of my struggles to attach ice packs and heating pads. I meet my desires that are braided into the failures of talent and circumstance and hold my hands up to the hot fires of grief. I approach but don't immerse myself in the emotions. 

I track the timeline of my life in a random collage of images. The memories rise out the mysteries of shadow. I wander the streets of Merida, Yucatan, wake up under a bridge on a hitch-hiking journey through Texas, see the beloved ghosts of women I have loved, now dead. I too am approaching the end, but it not a big deal. In fact it is routine, a passing of another unrealized human. 

Here, in the dark, on the edges of pain, I try to reconcile with the unrequited business of my life. It's a secret and solitary business, one that no one will read or know.

I didn't think it would go this way. My spring was supposed to be pain-free, a trip to New Mexico, where I would fill the fountain, feed the birds, explore the forests on my bicycle, nail down some licks on the guitar, and maybe paint some of my dreams. 

Instead I sit here crippled with a cocktail of meds -- Meloxicam, steroids, Gabafentin, Banofen, Tramadol -- that are not up to holding the line on pain. I am forced to sit and ruminate on the random wanderings of my mind. Memories assail me. I am thrown into the gauntlet on my end-of-life urgency to come to terms with the path my life has taken.

The unborn curriculum glows with a heat I cannot survive, but I warm myself in the proximity I can handle. It won't let me rest.

The pain rises and falls. I walk when I can, to the kitchen, to the bathroom, to the porch. I sit when I cannot walk. No position is comfortable. For short periods, when the meds meet the pain, I sleep. My dreams are a fever of mystery and shadow -- climbing mountains, driving through rivers, chasing ships on the ocean, lusting after the relief, the melting that is sexual union. 

It is not what I thought my days would be. It is what it is, and I am learning to lean into the pain. 

I wait for relief. I surrender into the pain, and this moment is the sum of my reality. I watch the screen of mu mind but live the hot and glowing wire of pain. All that matters is that I curl into a chasm of what comfort I can find. There is no escape.  

Awakening Stardust

 

I have no choice but to compose this chapter called Aging. The plot, tone, scene, and arc are up to me, but the outcome is obligatory, the conclusion foregone. I am leaning into introversion, exploring the canyons of psyche, the geology of conditioning, the bones, ligaments, and anatomy of narrative and history of conditioning. I travel through the topography as a witness, the terrain a snapshot of territory in flux, as temporary as a flower, about to be washed away by rushing force of time and mortality.

If I build anything here, it is the practice of seeing, listening, and surrendering all that I have held up as "me." The space I inhabit is not a space at all, but a wave on its way to somewhere else, a wave out of a particle. "I" am disintegrating as I loosen my grip on what I thought was solid and permanent, but "I" am also connecting to something larger, something ongoing, something moving, a force traveling as light between the space of matter, but infusing matter. 

I begin to understand what the phrase "made of stardust" really means. The egoic Erec is a transient manifestation of form; the soul abiding and animating the flesh goes on into iterations and evolving transformations. I never left cosmic origins, but I may have forgotten them.

The upshot of this is that I have no choice but to choose love, to love this life, even as the form of it fades, declines, and eventually disolves. Release is the hardest part of love, as the hands only know grasping. I have to learn another way. 

My transition may come sooner than I think since I am losing contact with this material plane, but while I am here I need to live unfettered life of surrender and heartbreak, as in the heart breaking open.