Sunday, April 27, 2008
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Galen Green
8606 Chestnut Circle, Apt. 3
Kansas City, MO 64131
816-807-4957
Sunday
October 14, 2007
(941st Anniversary of the
Battle of Hastings)
Dear Shannon (& Co.),
It was great to hear from you, to hear that you and Gene seem to be doing well -- have produced a family and are doing a considerable amount of good in the world -- and that you sounded, in your note of a month or so ago, genuinely interested in exchanging a few memories, reflections, lessons, analyses, etc. concerning our semi-overlapping childhoods at Fairmount Elementary, Brooks Junior High and East High School in Wichita in the 1950's & 60's. I apologize for taking so long to get back to you, but it's been an unusual past couple of months at my end of things. I still work for the Kansas City Missouri School District, but have recently had to move from what I had been doing to what I'm doing nowadays, as a result of a torn left rotator cuff.
More about that later perhaps. Right now, I'm eager to start trying to put into words a few of the impressions from Miss Roberton's 1st grade classroom that have recently begun swimming back to me from when we were 5 & 6 & 7 years old together there in Wichita. Just before Steve Trombold moved back to Wichita (in 2004?), I had a couple of conversations with him, the mere fact of which feels to have opened a floodgate of images, moments and sundry sensory flashbacks that I'm finding both pleasurable and helpful in constructing a gestalt out of such pieces for my memoir-in-progress tentatively titled The Toolmaker’s Other Son. (My late adoptive father, Harry [1908-1982], whom I believe you may have met once or twice back then, was a toolmaker at Boeing from 1941 until they threw him away -- like Arthur Miller's Salesman-- in 1968, just before he was set to retire.) If I'm not mistaken, you & Steve (Dr. Trombold) & Ellis West are the only 3 students who ended up attending all the same schools as me from Kindergarten through our graduation from East in '67. Am I remembering that correctly? And in actuality, of the 4 of us, I was out of the picture in the 6th grade (1960/61), when Harry & Margaret sent Kevin and me to the Wichita Christian Academy. (That'll be a whole chapter in itself.)
I think that the main reason Miss Robertson's 1st grade classroom sticks with me so vividly stubbornly is that so much of my time and energy as an adult has been spent pondering things political, and a little secular homily Miss Robertson delivered to our class one quiet afternoon, probably in the spring of 1956, has itself stuck with me so vividly stubbornly. To condense the substance of this 5-minute homily into an even tinier nutshell, I'll just say that I seem to recall that she started out by responding in her grandmotherly way to a student's question about why our country had recently been involved in Korea and why it had, not very long before we were all born, been involved in fighting Germany & Japan. In a nutshell, her grandmotherly answer began with why and how these United States of America had thrown off the British yoke, and
concluded by explaining that, being the good people we are, we want nothing more than to help oppressed peoples throughout the world to throw off the yoke of their particular oppressors and to achieve (though I'm sure she didn't use this term) self-determination -- i.e. freedom, equality, democracy.
As that was more that half a century ago, I cannot attest to the exact wording our kindly 1st grade teacher used that placid spring afternoon, but it was the first truly stirring testament to democratic principles that I can recall ever having heard. And while it was obviously a huge oversimplification, it got my attention -- and has kept it.
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Let's see: I was born in April of 1949 and ended up as an English major. So please don't hesitate correct my arithmetic. So it would seem to me that I entered kindergarten at Fairmount Elementary in September of 1954 and then Miss Robertson's 1st grade with you in September of 1955, having turned 6 years old that April. Does that sound right?
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I should probably mention at this early juncture that, as a result of untoward fires and floods over the years, I now find myself bereft of most of the photographs, boyhood treasures and paper documentation from my early life. I do, however, seem to recall having run across our 1st grade and 2nd grade class pictures somewhere amongst my little life's shards, not too awfully long ago. I mention this because I seem to recall reading on the back, where my diligent mother had written it in pencil back in the spring of 1956, that our 1st grade teacher's name was Miss Robertson -- and not Miss Robinson, as I believe I misremembered it when writing that shameful little prose piece in the summer of 1977 entitled "Mash Note to an Arizona Housewife," about the crush I'd had on Linda Hull back in high school. (I’ve apologized to her numerous times for that. I'm not the man I used to be – which is just as well.)
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We'll return to Miss Robertson's 1st grade classroom in just a moment, but I do want to insert one more footnote here before we do. I'm wondering if perhaps you ran across the book I'm about to recommend to you while working on your Ph.D. The book is entitled Dissent in Wichita: The Civil Rights Movement in the Midwest, 1954-72 by Gretchen Cassel Eick (University of Illinois Press, 2001; 312 pages). According to the book jacket, Dr. Eick is an assoc. prof. at Friends U. in Wichita. Her Ph.D. is in American studies at KU. (Go Jayhawks!), and she appears to have an impressive resume.
I discovered her book's existence about a year ago while googling key words for this memoir I'm drafting, and I had to buy it off of amazon.com since that's the only place I could find it. (I believe I paid around $15 for it in hardcover, new, plus S&H.) I particularly enjoyed Chpt. 8 which includes considerable reportage on that notorious Sandy's parking lot riot across the street from East in early May of 1967 -- and on the "cheerleader controversy" which allegedly triggered it (though we all know that it was triggered by a multitude of social force, not all of them local by any means). As Head Cheerleader at East at the time, do you have any special insights you'd be willing to share on the matter? Eick's book tends to view it as a rather typical manifestation of late-60’s local politics in which we students were mere pawns. I'm not trying to put you on the spot or to make you feel uncomfortable. That's the last thing I want to do. I'm simply
saying that I found Eick's account edifying.
Heading back now in the general direction of our theme, allow me to recommend equally highly Chpt. 4 of Dissent in Wichita. It's entitled Black and White Together and predictably moves the reader's attention backward in time, from 1967 to the 1950's. On page 60 within this 4th chapter, a section begins entitled Black and White Collaboration in the Fairmount School Project. You can well imagine my astonishment and delight at stumbling upon this informational gem. Before we move on, here's just one illuminating quote from this section:
Fairmount already had a long-standing reputation for academic excellence as
well as a popular principal, Gerald Cron, who was enthusiastic about the
opportunity to make Fairmount a model integrated school. (p. 62)
Throughout my adult life, I've frequently been asked how it is that I get along so well with Black folks of all classes, both inside and outside of the workplace. And as tempted as I am to respond that it's because I have Jesus in my heart, I give them the answer they need to hear, which is: "I was lucky enough to attend racially integrated schools when I as growing up in Wichita." Now, however, I've come to find out that Fairmount, at least, was a kind of "laboratory" to confirm the main premises of the Warren court in their Brown v. Board decision -- which came down the very year you and I started school, so that we were perhaps among the very first Baby-boomer to take racial integration almost totally for granted. Only since going to work for KCMSD in January of last year, and thus being given the privilege of getting to know "up close & personal" the realities of KCMO's less fortunate history of race relations, have I begun to appreciate the full measure of our good fortune in having had the school system we had as a launching pad.
I'd love to hear about your own observations and experiences regarding this issue of school systems around the country which might (or might not) have benefited from the blend of circumstances with which we were blessed in our youth. Meanwhile, shall we journey once again backward in time to the 1955 & '56 and elegant, dedicated, grandmotherly Miss Robertson's 1st grade classroom?
On the 2nd floor of the Nelson Museum here in KCMO, there is a dimly-lit, climate-controlled gallery hung with ancient Chinese scrolls, some of them more than a thousand years old. The first time I entered this particular gallery, I was transported immediately to Fairmount Elementary and specifically to Miss Robertson classroom. It was the scent, the fragrance, something exuded from those ancient Chinese scrolls which had not invaded my olfactory memory since before the Russians launched Sputnik. If I were Marcel Proust, I could fill a dozen pages with florid purple prose as to the mysterious spell which the mere inhalation of the rarified air within that gallery continues to cast over me each time I re-enter it every few years. Being, instead, Galen Green, however, I’ll just say that T.S. Eliot probably said it best when he had J. Alfred Prufrock ask himself: “Is it perfume from a dress/ That makes me so digress?”
In the case of the aroma from these Chinese scrolls, a single whiff conjures up images of Miss Robertson standing gracefully in front of us at our little four-pupil tables with her carefully coiffed pale pink tinted hair, her tidy Edwardian high-collared blouse with slender calf-length skirt and her tasteful 1930’s glasses. In fact, much about our 1st grade teacher tended to strike one, even at the age of 6, as vestigial from the 1930’s or 40’s, if not downright antique. I’m sure you know what I’m getting at here – and that I mean it only in the ameliorative. To me, she presented a mixture of my adoptive mother, Margaret McCall Green (1912-1990), and her own mother, Phoebe Evans McCall (1880-1981), the latter of whom had been a schoolmarm on the Kansas prairie during the Presidencies of Wm. McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt and the former of whom, though in 1956 on a proto-version of the so-called “mommy track,” had herself schoolmarmed in the 1930’s and 40’s, both in one-room country schoolhouses in Franklin County, Kansas, and in the Wichita Public School System (today known as USD #259). So one need not be Sigmund Freud to figure out why it was that Miss Robertson held a special place in my heart and mind – nor why it is that her ghost seems to have taken up permanent residence there.
In point of fact, Miss Robertson and my mother had evidently known one another, had taught together in the years before my parents adopted me, and were somewhat friends, despite Margaret’s being a generation younger than our dear old 1st grade teacher. Sometime during the autumn of 1955, Margaret read a note to me, which she then had me hand-deliver to Miss Robertson, in which she stated in unambiguous terms that (as would end up being the dynamic with all of my grade-school teachers), Miss Robertson had parental consent to employ corporal punishment with me if she deemed it necessary, with specific reference to my little posterior. Needless to say, the mere knowledge of this arrangement had its desired effect.
So, Shannon, if you ever labored under the illusion back then that my being, in general, a perfect little gentleman was pure manifestation of my inborn good character, you’d have been only half right; the other half of my generally polite behavior was motivated by stark terror of kindly, patient Miss Robertson’s dainty hand bringing humiliation to sitting-place. And as with our high school peers Max Moses and Carl Mar, my darkest dread was that of bringing shame upon my parents. When I asked Steve Trombold in a 2003 conversation how it was that he was always such a well-behaved little boy back then, he reminded me of one particular exception to that pattern (in perhaps the 4th grade) when Ann Jones (Remember her? Don’s mother, our phys-ed instructor?) “punished” him one day by making him stand out in the hall, there on the 2nd floor, near the door to Mr. Cron’s office. Dr. Trombold confessed that he was so embarrassed that he tried to hide behind the students’ coats that were hanging along the hallway wall. And I then confessed to him that I’d coincidentally passed through the hallway, had seen him standing there with his little athletic legs sticking out from beneath the coats, and had wondered silently to myself for the next 45 years what he was doing there. Well, now I know.
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I think I’m going to need to take a break here for a few days, though I feel that I have plenty more to share with you on this theme. Anyway, I do have every intention of coming right back within the next week or two and conjuring up more memories of our time together in Miss Roberson’s 1st grade classroom at Fairmount Elementary. In retrospect, I believe that to have been one of the most important, memorable and pleasant years of my entire life. I’ll be eagerly awaiting your take on it. I suspect that, as career educators, we share similar motives in wanting to explore the process of early childhood development through a wide variety of perspectives, including the subjective. Sometimes, when my “significant other” of 15 years, Marie, and I are discussing a film we’ve just sat through together, it’s as though we “didn’t see the same movie,” as the expression goes. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that feeling. Anyway, Shannon, I’ll be eager to hear from you at your earliest convenience, with regard to what I’ve shared here thus far, as well as to any particular pedagogic, sociological, or existential topics you’d care to raise for our future discussion. OK? We’ll see to what extent you and I did or did not “see the same movie.” Whatever the checkered answer, I’m confident that I for one will be enriched by the process.
I can’t go, however, until I’ve said a word or two about Miss Robertson’s ancient bandaid-colored Hudson. Do you remember it? Being male, I can see why it might have made a deeper impression on me. That, and the fact that our family car at that time was also a Hudson, a 1951 gray & tan Hudson Hornet. You may have ridden in it once or twice. No? You may recall that she usually parked her ancient Hudson on Lorraine, just across 14th Street from the school itself. It was my father who told me that Miss Robertson’s car was a Hudson, and then tried to explain to my 6-year-old brain why, if it was a Hudson, it didn’t look anything like our 1951 Hudson Hornet – which, in turn, got me thinking thoughts of Darwinian evolution among various automotive species.
One day, Margaret invited Miss Robertson to lunch with her and me and my adoptive brother, Kevin (who’s 4 years younger than me), at our home. It was a unique experience for me. As I recall, Miss Robertson left her ancient bandaid-colored Hudson parked in its usual spot and rode in our car with my mother and brother and me to lunch at 1737 North Lorraine, 2 blocks away. If I could recall any of the details, I’d relate them. Since I cannot, I’ll simply pause my self-indulgent reminiscence here for now.
But I’ll be back just as soon as is feasible. Meanwhile, please RSVP as much as is feasible for you and let me know whether or not I’m on the track here that you would like for me to be on. OK? Thanks? I’m finding this exercise to be wonderfully therapeutic. Also, if you happen to have any specific questions, please don’t hesitate to ask. OK?
Until Next Time, Stay Well,
Galen
October 17, 2007
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P.S.
If you’d care to know a bit more about me and my work, here’s how to get to a couple of my current blogs:
galengreen.blogspot.com
thetoolmakersotherson.blogspot.com
-- G
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Galen Green
msmith2210@aol.com
&
mythoklast@mailstation.com
(voicemail box: 816-807-4957)
Wednesday
October 17, 2007
(the late Arthur Miller's
92nd birthday)
Dear Shannon (& Co.),
I forgot to congratulate you in my opening installment on getting your doctorate. How typically thoughtless of me! Anyway: CONGRATULATIONS!!! I e-mailed the first installment of my 1st grade reminiscences to you this morning. I hope you found them helpful; I did. And then, to my utter delight, when I arrived home from work this evening, I found your highly illuminating response. I so very much appreciate your using up your last "handful of brain cells" (Love the imagery!) to catch me up on at least a preliminary outline of what you've been doing for the past 40 years. Again: congratulations! I'm so proud just to know you! (Seriously!)
I feel terrible about leaving the wonderful, radiant Christine Roth off my list of those of us who went to the same schools all the way from K thru 12. I guess it was because I seldom if ever ran into her in high school, probably because I spent far too much of my high school career down at the far end of the music & journalism annex, either rehearsing with the madrigal or the choir or for one of our stage musicals or goofing off with the "real" journalist such as Bill Daniels or Cindy Anderson. It's particularly ironic because Christine was always so gracious toward me in grade school -- so friendly and accepting. If you get a chance to share my 1st installment with her, Shannon, I hope you'll include this lame excuse.
I agree that it could be a hoot to reconnect with Steve & Chris sometime in the next few months -- on line at least. Do you have an e-mail address for either of them? I had Steve's but lost it when my system crashed a couple of years ago. It would probably be better if you were the one to make initial contact, but I'll be more than happy to contribute with fair balance to any conversation that gets going. I have fond memories of both of them during our early classroom and playground days together.
Jumping to the end of your very welcome letter: it sounds as though you and I are philosophically on the same page with regard to the intense significance of getting written down (and/or otherwise recorded) for coming generations as much as possible of who we were, of what life has taught us that might come in handy for those wise enough to mark our words, and what this world was really like during the brief time that were passing through it. When Bill Clinton was on Letterman to plug his autobiography a few years back, he emphasized his belief that everybody should at least try to budget some portion of their time and energy to telling the story of their own life and times as they experienced it. Sadly, as you suggest, only a small percentage of those with the literacy and intellect to do so are ever going to make it a priority. I wish that my parents had.
Even though I was merely adopted at birth by these Green-McCall people, every credible concrete detail I've been able to sleuth out concerning the reality of their time on earth has proven helpful to me in understanding me. (If you scroll all the way to the earliest page of my Toolmaker's Other Son blog, you can see a picture I took with my cell phone camera in the Richmond, KS cemetery of my great-grandfather's gravestone (1830-1900). He served with Lincoln in the Illinois legislature as a young man, before emigrating to Kansas, evidently in that 1854-1864 Bleeding Kansas era covered in your dissertation. Last summer, before briefly revisiting the formerly bleeding counties of Franklin & Miami, I reread the Jane Smiley Lidie Newton novel I've recommended in my blog's random reading list. It's available as an audio book through ILL, if (like me) you spend more time driving or working in the kitchen than actually sitting down with eyes & hands free to read. (Audio books have saved my life!)
Before I forget to mention it: I recently ran across a copy of Monitor On Psychology (Sept. '07 edition) which someone had left in what I call the "recycled tract rack" at the Leawood Pioneer Branch library. At the risk of telling you something you probably already know: the cover story, on pp. 38-55, is entitled "Serving Those Who Serve." I mention this only because of what you've told me thus far about what you do as a psychotherapist with soldiers returning home. It sounds as though you've had a fascinating career -- and are continuing to do so. I'd love to hear as much about it sometime as you'd care to share. Whatever you're comfortable with.
Before I drift off into a few more reminiscences from the mid-1950, I wanted to express my curiosity about the title of your doctoral dissertation. It's an absolutely captivating title: Resilience Revisited, A Portrait of Resilience as Expressed Through the Experiences of Kansas Territorial Settlers, 1854 -- 1864. Did I say it right? Is it available on line? How many copies of a KU dissertation are published the first time around nowadays? I'm honestly totally in the dark on such matters.
I've already mentioned my mother's father's parents (1830-1900). On the Green side of things, Harry's parents Ira (1857-1946) & Etta (1861-1958) appear to have both been born somewhere in Pennsylvania and tried farming with some other family members north of Fairfield, Iowa, before deciding to try farming in Kansas, beginning in the 1890's. It's extremely difficult to sort out many reliable historical details with either the Greens or the McCalls. Anyway, what little my father was able to tell me (his being their youngest, born when Etta was nearly 50!) would indicate that Etta & Ira Green were about as hard working and luckless as any of the characters in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. As socially embarrassing as their story is/was to both Harry and me, it was/is philosophically inspiring to us both (if I may presume to speak for the dead). If rule #1 in life is, as Paul McCartney has stated in several published interviews, to NEVER GIVE UP, NO MATTER WHAT, then my parents' parents stand as shining embodiments of that principle. So, you can see why I might have more than a passing interest in your dissertation.
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If The Toolmaker's Other Son were to include an entire chapter on my years as a pupil at Fairmount Elementary School in Wichita in the middle of the 20th century, it might need to open with some visual imagery, some sort of physical description of the place itself:
Fairmount Elementary School, as I recall, before it was demolished to make way for a small fashionably modern Methodist Church, sometime during the many years I was away at the Culture Wars, sat 20 or 30 feet off the street on the northwest corner of the intersection of 14th Street & Lorraine. It was, if I recall correctly (and I'd love to have a photograph, if you know where I could lay my hands on one), a two-story red brick building, probably constructed in the 1920's, judging from the architecture, the plumbing and the age of the Fairmount College neighborhood. For those familiar with the Kansas City Missouri School District, it might be helpful to know that the handsome old edifice which housed my earliest public educational experiences was built in the style of Swinney Elementary just west of the Plaza or Ladd Elementary at 36th & Benton Blvd. As of this writing, urban America is still strewn with hundreds of such relics.
When I was a child, it gave me a headache to hear some crusty old geezer such as I myself am today say that the school he himself attended as a child held "nothing but pleasant memories" for him (or her, as the case may be). Any such tendencies toward "nostalgia" on the part of the oldsters around me back then always struck me as being symptomatic of some disgusting character flaw. And perhaps it is; but here I am, going all dreamy-eyed over an otherwise ordinary two-story red brick building.
Truth to tell: I felt a sense of awe toward that sturdy old fortress of learning and socialization even before my first day in kindergarten inside its nurturing walls; although, admittedly, my sense of awe was itself largely the product of socialization I'd fed upon at our family's supper table ever since I'd been old enough to sit up in my highchair. I can remember riding in the back seat our family car past the school I would one day attend and feeling the stirrings of a hundred fantasies of what "school" would be like.
As is inevitably the case with the gulf between all human fantasies of anticipation and the realities of what follows, there were, in the case of experiences at Fairmount Elementary School, a few stark contrasts. Probably the most significant of these involved my false expectation that school was going to be difficult, which was a direct result of my having a foster sister named Lois Aiken who'd come to live with us when she was 15 and I was 4. The year you and I, Shannon, began kindergarten, Lois began her sophomore year at East High School. In retrospect, I'm guessing that school was "hard" for Lois only because she was an unusually bright young lady, bent on a career in nursing, which meant taking a lot of challenging courses and making excellent grades. (She not only became an RN, but eventually earned masters degrees in both Nursing and Education.)
Lois and her East High friends warned me that even though kindergarten wasn't really school, but only a place where we'd spend our half days (Remember half days?) learning to sit quietly and listen to the teacher, to line up for restroom breaks or to go out for and return from recess, to listen up when we heard any teacher blow her police whistle, to take turns, to share, to play nice, to unroll our little woven rugs purchased at Orr's Bookstore when it was nap time (obviously invented for the kindergarten teacher's mental health), and to stretch out on our nap rugs quietly and pretend to be taking a nap even if we weren't at all sleepy, etc., etc. . . . that even though kindergarten was all fun and games, 1st grade was going to be another kettle of fish entirely, one which would require every ounce of blood, sweat and smarts that an unworthy little puke like myself could summon.
As a consequence of this obnoxious distortion of the facts, I provided my one and only incorrect answer on the little "intake" exam Miss Robertson administered to us orally sometime during the first week of our 9 months together in her 1st grade class. Do you remember that little "test," Shannon? The questions she was asking us to answer as she strolled amongst us where we were sitting up straight and attentive at our tiny 4-child wooden tables, were so incredibly easy that I kept wondering to myself: "What's the catch? When does this get hard? Am I missing something here?"
Remember? There'd be a picture of 3 balls of different colors, and Miss Robertson would tell us to "circle the red ball." No problem. I kept thinking: "If school is this easy, maybe they'll just let me move on to high school with Lois."
Then came the question that tripped me up. On the paper in front of us were the caricatured drawings of two ladies. One was very young and pretty like, let's say, Dale Evans. The other was older and noticeably homely like, let's say, Eleanor Roosevelt . . . or like my adoptive mother Margaret . . . or like Miss Robertson herself. Miss Robertson then asked us to "circle the picture of the pretty lady."
Well, as you, of all people, know, Shannon, I did know the meaning of "pretty" back then. But I'd also been raised to spare people's feelings, as I'm sure you yourself had been. Fat people, homely people, poor people, crippled people -- all those for whom we now have generally agreed-upon euphemistic adjectival phrases -- you and I had been trained to show a special kindness to. "So," I thought to myself, "this must be the trick question I'd been warned about." So I circled the caricature of Eleanor Roosevelt. Which is why I ended up with a 98 instead of a 100 on the very first written exam of my academic career.
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Do you remember the day we sat in a circle and played that little learning game commonly known as "Telephone?" Miss Robertson whispered to the child sitting to her immediate left: "I have a new dress." As I recall, there were only perhaps twenty or so boys & girls present in our classroom that day, seated there in our circle of tiny wooden chairs. I was, therefore, perhaps the eleventh child to have something like "my pet turtle got away" whispered in my ear, which I dutifully whispered into the ear of the child to my left. When something like "my dad's car is orange" was finally whispered into an amused Miss Robertson's right ear, she smiled and explained to us what her original message had been -- and what we should all learn from this little game, concerning the unreliability of whispered gossip. Or words to that effect. Perhaps I remember this little life lesson so stubbornly vividly because of the number of times I've had my life wrecked (and I'm actually understating the case here) by the reckless gossip of folks who were old enough to know better -- some of them in (obviously undeserved) positions of high authority.
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Before I break here again for a few more days, Shannon, I thought I'd very quickly mention a handful of moments from when you & I & Christine & Steve & Ellis were 5 & 6 & 7 together, there in that (relative) Garden of Eden.
Do you remember when we all tied on our regulation arts & crafts aprons (purchased at Orr's Bookstore?), spread out old newspapers on our little 4-pupil wooden tables and gleefully painted empty (clean) peanut butter jars with flowers to be presented as gifts to our mothers? My flowers were red with yellow centers. That's easy for to remember since Margaret kept buttons in that jar right up to the day she died. Nowadays, what sticks in my mind is the fact that we were 1st graders using enamel paint which must have contained toxic levels of lead. Right?
And do you happen to remember that day our class came back from lunch or recess or whatever and the cloakroom along the west wall of our classroom betrayed the unmistakable odor of poop? While someone went to fetch Mr. Gibbs, the custodian (right out of central casting), Miss Robertson passed amongst us ever so discreetly, in essence sniffing in the direction of each of our bottoms. The tragic culprit turned out to be an unusually diminutive little fellow whose name I forget. More than a half century later, I'm finally figuring out that his slight size probably meant that his family had, for whatever reason, decided to lie about his age so that he could begin his schooling in the 1st grade instead of in kindergarten. If I'm not mistaken, the next time I saw him, he was doing recess out on the playground with the kindergarteners. I've often wondered about how such a dramatic early humiliation may have impacted his later development.
&&&&&&&
And finally for now -- but not finally finally -- I'm curious about your own reminiscences from that Age of (relative) Innocence. What do you remember about what they called "Fun Night" at Fairmount Elementary? I can recall my family's attending Fun Night only 2 or 3 years. Will try to find time to say more about it later.
And what about Miss Robertson's classroom itself? Didn't it have rather high windows along the south wall, with the sills low enough to the floor that we little folk could lean against them and look out? Look, Shannon, look! There's Miss Robertson's ancient (but gently driven) Band-Aid-colored Hudson, parked on the other side of 14th Street, along Lorraine, elegantly conspicuous, there in line with the other teachers' cars of more recent manufacture. And look! There we are with our classmates, leaning on the windowsill, looking out at it all.
Until Next Time, Stay Well,
Galen
msmith2210@aol.com
&
mythoklast@mailstation.com
(voicemail box: 816-807-4957)
Wednesday
October 17, 2007
(the late Arthur Miller's
92nd birthday)
Dear Shannon (& Co.),
I forgot to congratulate you in my opening installment on getting your doctorate. How typically thoughtless of me! Anyway: CONGRATULATIONS!!! I e-mailed the first installment of my 1st grade reminiscences to you this morning. I hope you found them helpful; I did. And then, to my utter delight, when I arrived home from work this evening, I found your highly illuminating response. I so very much appreciate your using up your last "handful of brain cells" (Love the imagery!) to catch me up on at least a preliminary outline of what you've been doing for the past 40 years. Again: congratulations! I'm so proud just to know you! (Seriously!)
I feel terrible about leaving the wonderful, radiant Christine Roth off my list of those of us who went to the same schools all the way from K thru 12. I guess it was because I seldom if ever ran into her in high school, probably because I spent far too much of my high school career down at the far end of the music & journalism annex, either rehearsing with the madrigal or the choir or for one of our stage musicals or goofing off with the "real" journalist such as Bill Daniels or Cindy Anderson. It's particularly ironic because Christine was always so gracious toward me in grade school -- so friendly and accepting. If you get a chance to share my 1st installment with her, Shannon, I hope you'll include this lame excuse.
I agree that it could be a hoot to reconnect with Steve & Chris sometime in the next few months -- on line at least. Do you have an e-mail address for either of them? I had Steve's but lost it when my system crashed a couple of years ago. It would probably be better if you were the one to make initial contact, but I'll be more than happy to contribute with fair balance to any conversation that gets going. I have fond memories of both of them during our early classroom and playground days together.
Jumping to the end of your very welcome letter: it sounds as though you and I are philosophically on the same page with regard to the intense significance of getting written down (and/or otherwise recorded) for coming generations as much as possible of who we were, of what life has taught us that might come in handy for those wise enough to mark our words, and what this world was really like during the brief time that were passing through it. When Bill Clinton was on Letterman to plug his autobiography a few years back, he emphasized his belief that everybody should at least try to budget some portion of their time and energy to telling the story of their own life and times as they experienced it. Sadly, as you suggest, only a small percentage of those with the literacy and intellect to do so are ever going to make it a priority. I wish that my parents had.
Even though I was merely adopted at birth by these Green-McCall people, every credible concrete detail I've been able to sleuth out concerning the reality of their time on earth has proven helpful to me in understanding me. (If you scroll all the way to the earliest page of my Toolmaker's Other Son blog, you can see a picture I took with my cell phone camera in the Richmond, KS cemetery of my great-grandfather's gravestone (1830-1900). He served with Lincoln in the Illinois legislature as a young man, before emigrating to Kansas, evidently in that 1854-1864 Bleeding Kansas era covered in your dissertation. Last summer, before briefly revisiting the formerly bleeding counties of Franklin & Miami, I reread the Jane Smiley Lidie Newton novel I've recommended in my blog's random reading list. It's available as an audio book through ILL, if (like me) you spend more time driving or working in the kitchen than actually sitting down with eyes & hands free to read. (Audio books have saved my life!)
Before I forget to mention it: I recently ran across a copy of Monitor On Psychology (Sept. '07 edition) which someone had left in what I call the "recycled tract rack" at the Leawood Pioneer Branch library. At the risk of telling you something you probably already know: the cover story, on pp. 38-55, is entitled "Serving Those Who Serve." I mention this only because of what you've told me thus far about what you do as a psychotherapist with soldiers returning home. It sounds as though you've had a fascinating career -- and are continuing to do so. I'd love to hear as much about it sometime as you'd care to share. Whatever you're comfortable with.
Before I drift off into a few more reminiscences from the mid-1950, I wanted to express my curiosity about the title of your doctoral dissertation. It's an absolutely captivating title: Resilience Revisited, A Portrait of Resilience as Expressed Through the Experiences of Kansas Territorial Settlers, 1854 -- 1864. Did I say it right? Is it available on line? How many copies of a KU dissertation are published the first time around nowadays? I'm honestly totally in the dark on such matters.
I've already mentioned my mother's father's parents (1830-1900). On the Green side of things, Harry's parents Ira (1857-1946) & Etta (1861-1958) appear to have both been born somewhere in Pennsylvania and tried farming with some other family members north of Fairfield, Iowa, before deciding to try farming in Kansas, beginning in the 1890's. It's extremely difficult to sort out many reliable historical details with either the Greens or the McCalls. Anyway, what little my father was able to tell me (his being their youngest, born when Etta was nearly 50!) would indicate that Etta & Ira Green were about as hard working and luckless as any of the characters in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. As socially embarrassing as their story is/was to both Harry and me, it was/is philosophically inspiring to us both (if I may presume to speak for the dead). If rule #1 in life is, as Paul McCartney has stated in several published interviews, to NEVER GIVE UP, NO MATTER WHAT, then my parents' parents stand as shining embodiments of that principle. So, you can see why I might have more than a passing interest in your dissertation.
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If The Toolmaker's Other Son were to include an entire chapter on my years as a pupil at Fairmount Elementary School in Wichita in the middle of the 20th century, it might need to open with some visual imagery, some sort of physical description of the place itself:
Fairmount Elementary School, as I recall, before it was demolished to make way for a small fashionably modern Methodist Church, sometime during the many years I was away at the Culture Wars, sat 20 or 30 feet off the street on the northwest corner of the intersection of 14th Street & Lorraine. It was, if I recall correctly (and I'd love to have a photograph, if you know where I could lay my hands on one), a two-story red brick building, probably constructed in the 1920's, judging from the architecture, the plumbing and the age of the Fairmount College neighborhood. For those familiar with the Kansas City Missouri School District, it might be helpful to know that the handsome old edifice which housed my earliest public educational experiences was built in the style of Swinney Elementary just west of the Plaza or Ladd Elementary at 36th & Benton Blvd. As of this writing, urban America is still strewn with hundreds of such relics.
When I was a child, it gave me a headache to hear some crusty old geezer such as I myself am today say that the school he himself attended as a child held "nothing but pleasant memories" for him (or her, as the case may be). Any such tendencies toward "nostalgia" on the part of the oldsters around me back then always struck me as being symptomatic of some disgusting character flaw. And perhaps it is; but here I am, going all dreamy-eyed over an otherwise ordinary two-story red brick building.
Truth to tell: I felt a sense of awe toward that sturdy old fortress of learning and socialization even before my first day in kindergarten inside its nurturing walls; although, admittedly, my sense of awe was itself largely the product of socialization I'd fed upon at our family's supper table ever since I'd been old enough to sit up in my highchair. I can remember riding in the back seat our family car past the school I would one day attend and feeling the stirrings of a hundred fantasies of what "school" would be like.
As is inevitably the case with the gulf between all human fantasies of anticipation and the realities of what follows, there were, in the case of experiences at Fairmount Elementary School, a few stark contrasts. Probably the most significant of these involved my false expectation that school was going to be difficult, which was a direct result of my having a foster sister named Lois Aiken who'd come to live with us when she was 15 and I was 4. The year you and I, Shannon, began kindergarten, Lois began her sophomore year at East High School. In retrospect, I'm guessing that school was "hard" for Lois only because she was an unusually bright young lady, bent on a career in nursing, which meant taking a lot of challenging courses and making excellent grades. (She not only became an RN, but eventually earned masters degrees in both Nursing and Education.)
Lois and her East High friends warned me that even though kindergarten wasn't really school, but only a place where we'd spend our half days (Remember half days?) learning to sit quietly and listen to the teacher, to line up for restroom breaks or to go out for and return from recess, to listen up when we heard any teacher blow her police whistle, to take turns, to share, to play nice, to unroll our little woven rugs purchased at Orr's Bookstore when it was nap time (obviously invented for the kindergarten teacher's mental health), and to stretch out on our nap rugs quietly and pretend to be taking a nap even if we weren't at all sleepy, etc., etc. . . . that even though kindergarten was all fun and games, 1st grade was going to be another kettle of fish entirely, one which would require every ounce of blood, sweat and smarts that an unworthy little puke like myself could summon.
As a consequence of this obnoxious distortion of the facts, I provided my one and only incorrect answer on the little "intake" exam Miss Robertson administered to us orally sometime during the first week of our 9 months together in her 1st grade class. Do you remember that little "test," Shannon? The questions she was asking us to answer as she strolled amongst us where we were sitting up straight and attentive at our tiny 4-child wooden tables, were so incredibly easy that I kept wondering to myself: "What's the catch? When does this get hard? Am I missing something here?"
Remember? There'd be a picture of 3 balls of different colors, and Miss Robertson would tell us to "circle the red ball." No problem. I kept thinking: "If school is this easy, maybe they'll just let me move on to high school with Lois."
Then came the question that tripped me up. On the paper in front of us were the caricatured drawings of two ladies. One was very young and pretty like, let's say, Dale Evans. The other was older and noticeably homely like, let's say, Eleanor Roosevelt . . . or like my adoptive mother Margaret . . . or like Miss Robertson herself. Miss Robertson then asked us to "circle the picture of the pretty lady."
Well, as you, of all people, know, Shannon, I did know the meaning of "pretty" back then. But I'd also been raised to spare people's feelings, as I'm sure you yourself had been. Fat people, homely people, poor people, crippled people -- all those for whom we now have generally agreed-upon euphemistic adjectival phrases -- you and I had been trained to show a special kindness to. "So," I thought to myself, "this must be the trick question I'd been warned about." So I circled the caricature of Eleanor Roosevelt. Which is why I ended up with a 98 instead of a 100 on the very first written exam of my academic career.
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Do you remember the day we sat in a circle and played that little learning game commonly known as "Telephone?" Miss Robertson whispered to the child sitting to her immediate left: "I have a new dress." As I recall, there were only perhaps twenty or so boys & girls present in our classroom that day, seated there in our circle of tiny wooden chairs. I was, therefore, perhaps the eleventh child to have something like "my pet turtle got away" whispered in my ear, which I dutifully whispered into the ear of the child to my left. When something like "my dad's car is orange" was finally whispered into an amused Miss Robertson's right ear, she smiled and explained to us what her original message had been -- and what we should all learn from this little game, concerning the unreliability of whispered gossip. Or words to that effect. Perhaps I remember this little life lesson so stubbornly vividly because of the number of times I've had my life wrecked (and I'm actually understating the case here) by the reckless gossip of folks who were old enough to know better -- some of them in (obviously undeserved) positions of high authority.
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Before I break here again for a few more days, Shannon, I thought I'd very quickly mention a handful of moments from when you & I & Christine & Steve & Ellis were 5 & 6 & 7 together, there in that (relative) Garden of Eden.
Do you remember when we all tied on our regulation arts & crafts aprons (purchased at Orr's Bookstore?), spread out old newspapers on our little 4-pupil wooden tables and gleefully painted empty (clean) peanut butter jars with flowers to be presented as gifts to our mothers? My flowers were red with yellow centers. That's easy for to remember since Margaret kept buttons in that jar right up to the day she died. Nowadays, what sticks in my mind is the fact that we were 1st graders using enamel paint which must have contained toxic levels of lead. Right?
And do you happen to remember that day our class came back from lunch or recess or whatever and the cloakroom along the west wall of our classroom betrayed the unmistakable odor of poop? While someone went to fetch Mr. Gibbs, the custodian (right out of central casting), Miss Robertson passed amongst us ever so discreetly, in essence sniffing in the direction of each of our bottoms. The tragic culprit turned out to be an unusually diminutive little fellow whose name I forget. More than a half century later, I'm finally figuring out that his slight size probably meant that his family had, for whatever reason, decided to lie about his age so that he could begin his schooling in the 1st grade instead of in kindergarten. If I'm not mistaken, the next time I saw him, he was doing recess out on the playground with the kindergarteners. I've often wondered about how such a dramatic early humiliation may have impacted his later development.
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And finally for now -- but not finally finally -- I'm curious about your own reminiscences from that Age of (relative) Innocence. What do you remember about what they called "Fun Night" at Fairmount Elementary? I can recall my family's attending Fun Night only 2 or 3 years. Will try to find time to say more about it later.
And what about Miss Robertson's classroom itself? Didn't it have rather high windows along the south wall, with the sills low enough to the floor that we little folk could lean against them and look out? Look, Shannon, look! There's Miss Robertson's ancient (but gently driven) Band-Aid-colored Hudson, parked on the other side of 14th Street, along Lorraine, elegantly conspicuous, there in line with the other teachers' cars of more recent manufacture. And look! There we are with our classmates, leaning on the windowsill, looking out at it all.
Until Next Time, Stay Well,
Galen
Circum-Intro-Retrospective by Galen Green
Galen Green
Kansas City, MO
Thursday
October 25, 2007
(the late poet John
Berryman's 93rd birthday)
GALEN'S ONFLOWING CIRCUM-INTRO-RETROSPECTIVE
Dear Shannon,
Although seamlessness would be too much to hope for in our present flow, let us begin by recalling that when we last left us we were leaning on the windowsill in Miss Robertson's 1st grade classroom at the south end of the 1st floor of (the now demolished) Fairmount Elementary School in Wichita, Kansas. It was a shiny blue & gold October day in 1955, a mere half century ago, but much like the shiny blue & gold October day that today has been here in Kansas City. Then, we were 6. Now, we are nearly 60. Anyway, there we were, leaning on our dear, anachronistic, inspiring Miss Robertson's windowsill, gazing out into a world we'd only just begun to attempt to figure out.
This voyage backward in time that I've been allowing myself to indulge in, over these past few days here in the year 2007, has put me in mind of a couple of imaginary moments created by two of my favorite contemporary writers, Woody Allen & Donald Barthelme. One of the most memorable scenes in Woody's absolutely brilliant Annie Hall (1977) is when he takes us, in a surrealistic Bergmanesque style, into his grade school classroom in Brooklyn in the late 1930's and among his dim-witted teachers and phlegmatic classmates, a few of the latter of whom stand up at their little desks and recite one-liners as to what they later became in adult life, such as: "I used to be a heroin addict. Now I'm a methadone addict."
Even though Allen is nearly a full generation older than us, this scene really resonates with me -- not that all that many of our teachers were entirely dim-witted nor our classmates all that phlegmatic. But there were for me (and, I'm guessing, for you as well) all too many unbearably dull hours and days at a time, throughout the 19 years I spent absorbing my formal education, when it did indeed seem as though I was the prisoner of some sort of tribe of zombies for whom I was nothing more than an heretically inventive little egghead, bent on exposing their somnambulism with my inconvenient gift of x-ray vision. As much as I admire Woody Allen's work, however, (which is a lot), I can't say that I share his evidently boundless disdain for America's public schools or for the souls whom dumb luck forces to inhabit them.
The Donald Barthelme prose piece which has kept swimming back onto my memory screen as I've traveled deeper and deeper into this Fairmount Elementary School reminiscence exercise is his 1964 short story entitled "Me and Miss Mandible." The quickest description I can offer you of what it's about would probably be to share with you my own personal take on it. I first read it in a collection of his stories and surrealistic essays sometime in the 1970's.
"Me and Miss Mandible" is composed of twenty-seven diary entries chronicling the experiences of a thirty-five-year-old insurance claims adjuster who, for reasons never entirely clear to either himself or the reader, finds himself transformed into a student back in the 5th grade, but in the body of a full-grown man. In this sense, Barthelme's piece is classic surrealism; you know: the thought-provoking juxtaposition of things not ordinarily found together in nature -- the "fish in a tree" motif. But, for me, what makes the piece especially delightful is the adult male narrator's naive tone combined with his attitude of deadpan acceptance of this bizarre turn of events.
Rather than spoil Barthelme's brilliantly experimental short story for you entirely, I'll simply say that this recent exercise in systematic remembering has similarly transported me back to the time and place I've been inviting myself to remember. Since you're the psychotherapist here, let me say, too, that I'd be interested in any insight your professional experience has taught you as to how this process of a person's being transported by the act of systematic remembering actually takes place. Or is it merely a metaphor, which we in our culture employ without giving it a second thought?
While we're on the subject of psychotherapy, particularly with returning soldiers, I have a question about something I happen to remember from Miss Allen's kindergarten class (1954-55) at the south end of the "garden level" there at Fairmount. (Do you happen to recall, Shannon, whether or not you were in my kindergarten class -- or vice versa? Because I may have this all wrong.) But my rememberer has kept coming back to a moment when I was seated on the floor of Miss Allen's garden-level kindergarten classroom with my tiny classmates, and Miss Allen was relating to our class (in that pre-privacy act era) that one of the little girls in our class was very excited because her daddy, who'd been a "Prisoner of War," had "recently been released" (sic) and would be coming home that very day. I even remember which little girl it was; I mean I can see her face in my mind's eye, though I was never much good with names.
Nor was I ever much good with arithmetic, because the Korean War had, at that moment, been over (or at least as "over" as was ever going to get in our lifetime) for 2 or 3 years (depending on how one figures it). Surely, this little girl's father would have long since been released in some prisoner exchange with the North Koreans -- if, indeed, he had been held prisoner by them. What I theorize, having puzzled over this for more than half a century, is that one of two realities obtained in this case: 1) The father soldier had been released by the North Koreans or Chinese in 1951 or '52 and had needed some form or other of psychotherapy, deprogramming (a la The Manchurian Candidate) or physical rehab, before he could return to civilian life -- or 2) What Miss Allen was telling her kindergarten class that morning was the product of one of those conspiracies by grown-ups to hide embarrassing truths from children. In this case, the inconvenient truth may have been that the father had been incarcerated or (And this is my personal pet theory.) may have been involved in some sort of covert Cold War military intelligence mission abroad. What are your thoughts on this, based on your professional observations and experiences?
(For a couple of years during the early 1960's, the neighbors directly across the street from our family's house at 1737 North Lorraine were a Japanese "war bride" and her dashing uniformed husband stationed at McConnell AFB who was somehow attached to military intelligence.)
But time is slipping away from us, Shannon, and there remain so very many parts of Fairmount Elementary yet to be remembered and sketched: the school library, the so-called "Resource Room," the annexes surrounding the main building, the restrooms, the fire escapes, the boiler room, Mr. Cron's office and his secretary's (later his wife's office), the music room, the PTA meetings, the "the paper drives," the physical education room, the art room, the staircases & drinking fountains & asphalt playground & the expansive slanted playing field, which has become such a powerful metaphor in recent years for all manner of inequity and injustice in American life.
I can still remember, of course, that day in Miss Robertson's 1st grade classroom when my willowy, swanlike classmate named Shannon Mandle, following a brief introduction from the teacher, performed for us an heartbreakingly graceful medley of acrobatic, gymnastic and modern dance moves. I honestly don't recall exactly what she called what you did. But I'd never seen anything like it in my young life. Not even on television or in the movies. (Can you refresh my memory?) It's possible that I may have seen someone on "The Ed Sullivan Show" do "the splits" before, but never with such lithe elegance. I could not, quite frankly, get my mind around the magnificently un-Wichita-eque beauty of my talented little classmate's movements. I'll just leave it at that.
And of course I think often of my other close friends from those early days, the ones I haven't mentioned yet: Steve Sowards, Mike Simons, Gary Short, Wayne Porter, George Moore, and a dozen more. But especially Mike Simons and Steve Sowards. Looking back, I believe that those two friends in particular probably had a more profound and lasting impact on my personal development than did any of the rest. And yet, even as I say this, my mind flashes back to all those whom that generalization omits: Jeff Corbin, Ricky Bell, Walter Reed, Allen Simoni, Bobby Christian, Tommy Glen, Ted Wright, Kenny Meyer (sp?), John Ashbaugh, Jimmy Sours, Steve Townsend, Jimmy Green, J.L. McClure, etc. Of course, when we went to Brooks JHS, much changed. But that's another subject for another chapter.
I've often explained to various adult friends, over the past several decades, my belief that the single factor from these early years which determined how different from my adoptive family I would turn out to be was my growing up in such close physical (and cultural) proximity to a university campus. (I shudder to think what might have become of me otherwise.) It's hard to say for certain which "peak experience" changed me the most: Jeff Corbin's mother (the Vick heiress) inviting me to lunch at the university president's mansion with its library filled with Harry Corbin's travel memorabilia . . . or Steve & Mike Sowards' mother inviting me to dinner the first time at their house on Harvard and my meeting their illustrious father, Dr. Kelly Sowards, in his boxer shorts, finishing an abstract oil painting in his study, taking a breather, as it turned out, from compiling the textbook on Western Civilization that I'd be studying from, a few years later as a freshman at Wichita State University.
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My inclination at this juncture is to spiral outward and then back inward, both in time and in a more broadly encompassing map of my world as a child. Specifically, I'm hoping that you might find it illuminating for me talk briefly about some of what was going on in my life at First Methodist Church in downtown Wichita, between 2nd & 3rd Street on Broadway. (I promise: this won't be a theological declamation.)
Harry & Margaret had been active members there since they'd married in her parents' parlor in tiny Richmond, Kansas, and moved to Wichita in 1941, so naturally I grew up at First Methodist with a collection of kids who ended up attending East High with us, even though they were from far-flung corners of the district. The three who come most immediately to mind are Rollie Enoch, Tommy Boyle and Enid Clinesmith. I'm sure you were familiar with Rollie and Tom, but less sure as to how well you may have known Enid. She had long, straight red hair and lots of freckles and was -- among other things -- a concert-grade classical pianist. I recall that she -- like Eugene Wood -- performed an entire classical piano concert for us at Assembly on at least one occasion. Sophomore year at East, Enid and I used to walk each other downtown to choir practice at First Methodist after school on Wednesdays, in order to save our bus fare for French fries (with lots of ketchup) at the greasy spoon directly across Broadway from the church.
(Parenthetically: each voice section (SATB) in our Youth Choir had a paid soloist from the university to help us along with our sight reading and pitch. That year, the bass section leader was a young man named Sam Ramey, who went on, as you probably already know, to become the foremost operatic basso profundo on the planet -- the Pavarotti of the bottom register, one might say. He'd started out at Colby High School, way out in western Kansas, before coming to Wichita to get his degree. Small world, huh.)
It was interesting to me to grow up -- literally from infancy -- with Rollie Enoch and Tom Boyle. As Bill Clinton said of one of his closest advisers: we used to eat each other’s crayons. For a while during the mid-1980's, Rollie was my family physician, but that just got too creepy. Tom and his wife gave me a lift home from our 20th Reunion dinner dance at the Broadview Hotel in the summer of 1987. The three of us sat outside under the stars and talked for an hour or so. That night was the last time I saw Tom or Rollie. Come to think of it: the Class Reunion Picnic in College Hill Park the next afternoon was the last time I saw you. Remember? You've always been so gracious to me, even when I obviously have nothing much to say. (Like right now, for instance.)
Part of what's motivating me to share this outward spiraling with you, Shannon, is to invite your reciprocation -- if and when Time ever allows it. As you know, one of the popular false constructs in modern cultural anthropology is the one whereby Family, Faith & Flag are what shape the individual. Insofar as this notion will hold any water, I thought it perhaps worthwhile to employ it for our present purpose. Over the years, I've already written a considerable tonnage on both Family & Faith. In my understanding of lives like ours, "Flag" would seem to manifest itself, as much as in any form, as what we as a people seem to have agreed to call the educational system (which is, itself, largely a euphemism or code word for "socialization" or even "initiation" [in the broadest anthropological tribal sense of that word]).
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Speaking of what Time allows us: it's probably getting to be time now for me to come to another pausing place. I'm eager to fire these most recent few pages off to you to give you . . . well, time . . . to process what I've said and what memories, images, questions, comments, analyses, etc. you might wish to fire back at me. Again, I'd like to express my appreciation for your willingness to participate in a conversation such as this. As is probably glaringly obvious, I'm finding it to be helpful on a number of levels.
You probably remember these lines from a song on The Beatles' White Album, which happen to come to mind as I'm saying this:
The deeper you go, the higher you fly.
The higher you fly, the deeper you go . . . .
I believe it's from "Everybody's Got Somethin' To Hide, 'Cept For Me An' My Monkey" -- but that's neither here nor there. For a long time now, the idea expressed in this image has become increasing integral to my own understanding of psychotherapy, spirituality, aesthetics, and a great deal more. I mention it here, Shannon, because I find it delightfully applicable to this process I've diven into as a result of your recent letters. I only hope that this third installment of my onflowing circum-intro-retrospective hasn't turned out to be a disappointment to you because of its emphasis on the process of systematic remembering, rather than on the memories themselves.
I also hope that it hasn't contained overmuch name dropping for your taste. My justification for all the names I've dropped here and/or will probably be dropping in coming installments is twofold. Firstly, each of these names will itself inevitably trigger a flood of memories for any of us who grew up with the flesh & blood human being belonging to that name. Secondly, because this series of letters to you is intended to be refined (eventually) into an early section in my book length memoir aimed at a broader general audience (most of whom haven't even been born yet), what I say in these letters is intended to serve as "exposition," as groundwork for what will come next and next; and any such exposition or groundwork must needs include the introduction of "characters" (as in a novel) likely to be "referred back to" later on.
As I was saying earlier: the notion that what shapes the individual in any given time and place in human history can be legitimately analyzed via the superficial categories called Family, Faith & Flag pretty much constitutes, in my own view, a false construct. As I'm sure you discovered in the process of composing your doctoral dissertation (if not even earlier in your career), the social sciences are shamefully more replete with such false constructs than are the physical sciences. Call me a heretic (and many people have), but one of the fundamental principles which informs my own understanding of the social sciences (the universe of human interactions) is that everything is one thing. (I stole this phrase from Arthur Miller's 1960's play After the Fall.) I believe that the concept that everything is one thing applies particularly well to any analysis of what forces shaped us into who we've become and what we're continuing to be and to become.
When I voyage in my imagination back to the years 1954 thru 1964, spiraling back inward just as I'd promised you a few pages ago I would . . . spiraling back inward to refocus on that period in history between our entering kindergarten and our entering high school . . . I can hear Elvis Presley singing "Love Me Tender" and "Teddy Bear." And I can hear that wonderful male vocal ensemble which sang on TV, in the background, over the opening and closing credits, that stirring theme song to "Wyatt Earp":
Oh, he cleaned up the country, the Old Wild West Country.
He made law and order prevail.
And none can deny it: the legend of Wyatt
Forever will live on the trail.
(Or words to that effect.) This is, of course, a reflecting pool of pure nostalgia in which one could wallow for hours and days at a time. (Which is not an altogether bad idea, if you ask me.) My point being simply that our generation grew from infancy to adulthood under the intoxicating (as well as enlightening) influence of more than -- far, far more than -- Family, Faith & Flag.
I can no more listen to a recording of Elvis singing "Hound Dog" without being transported to that night he appeared on Ed Sullivan, there on our fuzzy black & white TV screen in my family's living room in 1956 than I can listen to a recording of Bing Crosby singing "Where the River Shannon Flows" (available on several collections on CD, by the by) without being transported to the times and places I sang it "back in the day" (as my Black friends might say) for family and friends, including my childhood friend named Shannon.
But Time is getting away from us, and before I go I wanted to be sure to pass along to you the dial-ups for three more of the blogs I've been trying to construct. From something you said recently, I'm inferring that you've already taken an initial glance at these two:
galengreen.blogspot.com
thetoolmakersotherson.blogspot.com
Correct? But I have added a couple of new posts to each, in just the past day or two. In addition to those first two, I thought you might enjoy glancing at:
Happy Peasant Heretic happypeasantheretic.blogspot.com
Ecclesiastes 9:16 (KJV) ecclesiastes916kjv. blogspot.com
Mythoklastic Therapy Institute mythoklastictherapyinstitute.blogspot.com
Let me know what you think, when you get a minute. Admittedly, there is a bit of overlap among the five blogs I've told you about, but not much.
A few pages back, I probably misspoke as to the pleasantness quotient in my rememberings of my years at Fairmount Elementary School. Now that I put my mind to it, I can recall a goodly number of unpleasantnesses. But in the aggregate, my elementary school education was probably about as OK as any working class boy (any toolmaker's other son) could reasonably expect, there in Wichita, Kansas in the 1950's.
Remember the two brothers who rode unicycles to school everyday? They lived less than a block away, at the bottom of that relatively steep hill to the north on Lorraine. They were both older than us and both were quite adept with a unicycle, even on that hill. Their story is a good example of the many mysteries which will forever haunt my memory of grade school. As curious as I was (and still am) about all manner of human goings on which are none of my business, I never got around to finding out what was up with the unicycle brothers.
And remember push-button automatic transmissions? It seems like they came out on the 1956 or '57 Dodge. But I'm probably wrong. Was it your parents who drove one of those? I have this visual stuck in my mind of someone's mother shifting gears on a Dodge station wagon with what I guess would have to be called a push-button gearshift. Just another of those memory mysteries it does no earthly good to fret about.
What interests me far more is what you were able to learn about your prairie ancestors in the course of researching your doctoral dissertation. Were you able to uncover a sufficient amount of primary documentation to satisfy your curiosity as to their lived story? Someday soon, I want to hear all about it -- about what you were able to learn and what research methods you found most effective in getting you to where you needed to be.
Until Next Time, Stay Well,
Galen
October 29, 2007
Kansas City, MO
Thursday
October 25, 2007
(the late poet John
Berryman's 93rd birthday)
GALEN'S ONFLOWING CIRCUM-INTRO-RETROSPECTIVE
Dear Shannon,
Although seamlessness would be too much to hope for in our present flow, let us begin by recalling that when we last left us we were leaning on the windowsill in Miss Robertson's 1st grade classroom at the south end of the 1st floor of (the now demolished) Fairmount Elementary School in Wichita, Kansas. It was a shiny blue & gold October day in 1955, a mere half century ago, but much like the shiny blue & gold October day that today has been here in Kansas City. Then, we were 6. Now, we are nearly 60. Anyway, there we were, leaning on our dear, anachronistic, inspiring Miss Robertson's windowsill, gazing out into a world we'd only just begun to attempt to figure out.
This voyage backward in time that I've been allowing myself to indulge in, over these past few days here in the year 2007, has put me in mind of a couple of imaginary moments created by two of my favorite contemporary writers, Woody Allen & Donald Barthelme. One of the most memorable scenes in Woody's absolutely brilliant Annie Hall (1977) is when he takes us, in a surrealistic Bergmanesque style, into his grade school classroom in Brooklyn in the late 1930's and among his dim-witted teachers and phlegmatic classmates, a few of the latter of whom stand up at their little desks and recite one-liners as to what they later became in adult life, such as: "I used to be a heroin addict. Now I'm a methadone addict."
Even though Allen is nearly a full generation older than us, this scene really resonates with me -- not that all that many of our teachers were entirely dim-witted nor our classmates all that phlegmatic. But there were for me (and, I'm guessing, for you as well) all too many unbearably dull hours and days at a time, throughout the 19 years I spent absorbing my formal education, when it did indeed seem as though I was the prisoner of some sort of tribe of zombies for whom I was nothing more than an heretically inventive little egghead, bent on exposing their somnambulism with my inconvenient gift of x-ray vision. As much as I admire Woody Allen's work, however, (which is a lot), I can't say that I share his evidently boundless disdain for America's public schools or for the souls whom dumb luck forces to inhabit them.
The Donald Barthelme prose piece which has kept swimming back onto my memory screen as I've traveled deeper and deeper into this Fairmount Elementary School reminiscence exercise is his 1964 short story entitled "Me and Miss Mandible." The quickest description I can offer you of what it's about would probably be to share with you my own personal take on it. I first read it in a collection of his stories and surrealistic essays sometime in the 1970's.
"Me and Miss Mandible" is composed of twenty-seven diary entries chronicling the experiences of a thirty-five-year-old insurance claims adjuster who, for reasons never entirely clear to either himself or the reader, finds himself transformed into a student back in the 5th grade, but in the body of a full-grown man. In this sense, Barthelme's piece is classic surrealism; you know: the thought-provoking juxtaposition of things not ordinarily found together in nature -- the "fish in a tree" motif. But, for me, what makes the piece especially delightful is the adult male narrator's naive tone combined with his attitude of deadpan acceptance of this bizarre turn of events.
Rather than spoil Barthelme's brilliantly experimental short story for you entirely, I'll simply say that this recent exercise in systematic remembering has similarly transported me back to the time and place I've been inviting myself to remember. Since you're the psychotherapist here, let me say, too, that I'd be interested in any insight your professional experience has taught you as to how this process of a person's being transported by the act of systematic remembering actually takes place. Or is it merely a metaphor, which we in our culture employ without giving it a second thought?
While we're on the subject of psychotherapy, particularly with returning soldiers, I have a question about something I happen to remember from Miss Allen's kindergarten class (1954-55) at the south end of the "garden level" there at Fairmount. (Do you happen to recall, Shannon, whether or not you were in my kindergarten class -- or vice versa? Because I may have this all wrong.) But my rememberer has kept coming back to a moment when I was seated on the floor of Miss Allen's garden-level kindergarten classroom with my tiny classmates, and Miss Allen was relating to our class (in that pre-privacy act era) that one of the little girls in our class was very excited because her daddy, who'd been a "Prisoner of War," had "recently been released" (sic) and would be coming home that very day. I even remember which little girl it was; I mean I can see her face in my mind's eye, though I was never much good with names.
Nor was I ever much good with arithmetic, because the Korean War had, at that moment, been over (or at least as "over" as was ever going to get in our lifetime) for 2 or 3 years (depending on how one figures it). Surely, this little girl's father would have long since been released in some prisoner exchange with the North Koreans -- if, indeed, he had been held prisoner by them. What I theorize, having puzzled over this for more than half a century, is that one of two realities obtained in this case: 1) The father soldier had been released by the North Koreans or Chinese in 1951 or '52 and had needed some form or other of psychotherapy, deprogramming (a la The Manchurian Candidate) or physical rehab, before he could return to civilian life -- or 2) What Miss Allen was telling her kindergarten class that morning was the product of one of those conspiracies by grown-ups to hide embarrassing truths from children. In this case, the inconvenient truth may have been that the father had been incarcerated or (And this is my personal pet theory.) may have been involved in some sort of covert Cold War military intelligence mission abroad. What are your thoughts on this, based on your professional observations and experiences?
(For a couple of years during the early 1960's, the neighbors directly across the street from our family's house at 1737 North Lorraine were a Japanese "war bride" and her dashing uniformed husband stationed at McConnell AFB who was somehow attached to military intelligence.)
But time is slipping away from us, Shannon, and there remain so very many parts of Fairmount Elementary yet to be remembered and sketched: the school library, the so-called "Resource Room," the annexes surrounding the main building, the restrooms, the fire escapes, the boiler room, Mr. Cron's office and his secretary's (later his wife's office), the music room, the PTA meetings, the "the paper drives," the physical education room, the art room, the staircases & drinking fountains & asphalt playground & the expansive slanted playing field, which has become such a powerful metaphor in recent years for all manner of inequity and injustice in American life.
I can still remember, of course, that day in Miss Robertson's 1st grade classroom when my willowy, swanlike classmate named Shannon Mandle, following a brief introduction from the teacher, performed for us an heartbreakingly graceful medley of acrobatic, gymnastic and modern dance moves. I honestly don't recall exactly what she called what you did. But I'd never seen anything like it in my young life. Not even on television or in the movies. (Can you refresh my memory?) It's possible that I may have seen someone on "The Ed Sullivan Show" do "the splits" before, but never with such lithe elegance. I could not, quite frankly, get my mind around the magnificently un-Wichita-eque beauty of my talented little classmate's movements. I'll just leave it at that.
And of course I think often of my other close friends from those early days, the ones I haven't mentioned yet: Steve Sowards, Mike Simons, Gary Short, Wayne Porter, George Moore, and a dozen more. But especially Mike Simons and Steve Sowards. Looking back, I believe that those two friends in particular probably had a more profound and lasting impact on my personal development than did any of the rest. And yet, even as I say this, my mind flashes back to all those whom that generalization omits: Jeff Corbin, Ricky Bell, Walter Reed, Allen Simoni, Bobby Christian, Tommy Glen, Ted Wright, Kenny Meyer (sp?), John Ashbaugh, Jimmy Sours, Steve Townsend, Jimmy Green, J.L. McClure, etc. Of course, when we went to Brooks JHS, much changed. But that's another subject for another chapter.
I've often explained to various adult friends, over the past several decades, my belief that the single factor from these early years which determined how different from my adoptive family I would turn out to be was my growing up in such close physical (and cultural) proximity to a university campus. (I shudder to think what might have become of me otherwise.) It's hard to say for certain which "peak experience" changed me the most: Jeff Corbin's mother (the Vick heiress) inviting me to lunch at the university president's mansion with its library filled with Harry Corbin's travel memorabilia . . . or Steve & Mike Sowards' mother inviting me to dinner the first time at their house on Harvard and my meeting their illustrious father, Dr. Kelly Sowards, in his boxer shorts, finishing an abstract oil painting in his study, taking a breather, as it turned out, from compiling the textbook on Western Civilization that I'd be studying from, a few years later as a freshman at Wichita State University.
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My inclination at this juncture is to spiral outward and then back inward, both in time and in a more broadly encompassing map of my world as a child. Specifically, I'm hoping that you might find it illuminating for me talk briefly about some of what was going on in my life at First Methodist Church in downtown Wichita, between 2nd & 3rd Street on Broadway. (I promise: this won't be a theological declamation.)
Harry & Margaret had been active members there since they'd married in her parents' parlor in tiny Richmond, Kansas, and moved to Wichita in 1941, so naturally I grew up at First Methodist with a collection of kids who ended up attending East High with us, even though they were from far-flung corners of the district. The three who come most immediately to mind are Rollie Enoch, Tommy Boyle and Enid Clinesmith. I'm sure you were familiar with Rollie and Tom, but less sure as to how well you may have known Enid. She had long, straight red hair and lots of freckles and was -- among other things -- a concert-grade classical pianist. I recall that she -- like Eugene Wood -- performed an entire classical piano concert for us at Assembly on at least one occasion. Sophomore year at East, Enid and I used to walk each other downtown to choir practice at First Methodist after school on Wednesdays, in order to save our bus fare for French fries (with lots of ketchup) at the greasy spoon directly across Broadway from the church.
(Parenthetically: each voice section (SATB) in our Youth Choir had a paid soloist from the university to help us along with our sight reading and pitch. That year, the bass section leader was a young man named Sam Ramey, who went on, as you probably already know, to become the foremost operatic basso profundo on the planet -- the Pavarotti of the bottom register, one might say. He'd started out at Colby High School, way out in western Kansas, before coming to Wichita to get his degree. Small world, huh.)
It was interesting to me to grow up -- literally from infancy -- with Rollie Enoch and Tom Boyle. As Bill Clinton said of one of his closest advisers: we used to eat each other’s crayons. For a while during the mid-1980's, Rollie was my family physician, but that just got too creepy. Tom and his wife gave me a lift home from our 20th Reunion dinner dance at the Broadview Hotel in the summer of 1987. The three of us sat outside under the stars and talked for an hour or so. That night was the last time I saw Tom or Rollie. Come to think of it: the Class Reunion Picnic in College Hill Park the next afternoon was the last time I saw you. Remember? You've always been so gracious to me, even when I obviously have nothing much to say. (Like right now, for instance.)
Part of what's motivating me to share this outward spiraling with you, Shannon, is to invite your reciprocation -- if and when Time ever allows it. As you know, one of the popular false constructs in modern cultural anthropology is the one whereby Family, Faith & Flag are what shape the individual. Insofar as this notion will hold any water, I thought it perhaps worthwhile to employ it for our present purpose. Over the years, I've already written a considerable tonnage on both Family & Faith. In my understanding of lives like ours, "Flag" would seem to manifest itself, as much as in any form, as what we as a people seem to have agreed to call the educational system (which is, itself, largely a euphemism or code word for "socialization" or even "initiation" [in the broadest anthropological tribal sense of that word]).
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Speaking of what Time allows us: it's probably getting to be time now for me to come to another pausing place. I'm eager to fire these most recent few pages off to you to give you . . . well, time . . . to process what I've said and what memories, images, questions, comments, analyses, etc. you might wish to fire back at me. Again, I'd like to express my appreciation for your willingness to participate in a conversation such as this. As is probably glaringly obvious, I'm finding it to be helpful on a number of levels.
You probably remember these lines from a song on The Beatles' White Album, which happen to come to mind as I'm saying this:
The deeper you go, the higher you fly.
The higher you fly, the deeper you go . . . .
I believe it's from "Everybody's Got Somethin' To Hide, 'Cept For Me An' My Monkey" -- but that's neither here nor there. For a long time now, the idea expressed in this image has become increasing integral to my own understanding of psychotherapy, spirituality, aesthetics, and a great deal more. I mention it here, Shannon, because I find it delightfully applicable to this process I've diven into as a result of your recent letters. I only hope that this third installment of my onflowing circum-intro-retrospective hasn't turned out to be a disappointment to you because of its emphasis on the process of systematic remembering, rather than on the memories themselves.
I also hope that it hasn't contained overmuch name dropping for your taste. My justification for all the names I've dropped here and/or will probably be dropping in coming installments is twofold. Firstly, each of these names will itself inevitably trigger a flood of memories for any of us who grew up with the flesh & blood human being belonging to that name. Secondly, because this series of letters to you is intended to be refined (eventually) into an early section in my book length memoir aimed at a broader general audience (most of whom haven't even been born yet), what I say in these letters is intended to serve as "exposition," as groundwork for what will come next and next; and any such exposition or groundwork must needs include the introduction of "characters" (as in a novel) likely to be "referred back to" later on.
As I was saying earlier: the notion that what shapes the individual in any given time and place in human history can be legitimately analyzed via the superficial categories called Family, Faith & Flag pretty much constitutes, in my own view, a false construct. As I'm sure you discovered in the process of composing your doctoral dissertation (if not even earlier in your career), the social sciences are shamefully more replete with such false constructs than are the physical sciences. Call me a heretic (and many people have), but one of the fundamental principles which informs my own understanding of the social sciences (the universe of human interactions) is that everything is one thing. (I stole this phrase from Arthur Miller's 1960's play After the Fall.) I believe that the concept that everything is one thing applies particularly well to any analysis of what forces shaped us into who we've become and what we're continuing to be and to become.
When I voyage in my imagination back to the years 1954 thru 1964, spiraling back inward just as I'd promised you a few pages ago I would . . . spiraling back inward to refocus on that period in history between our entering kindergarten and our entering high school . . . I can hear Elvis Presley singing "Love Me Tender" and "Teddy Bear." And I can hear that wonderful male vocal ensemble which sang on TV, in the background, over the opening and closing credits, that stirring theme song to "Wyatt Earp":
Oh, he cleaned up the country, the Old Wild West Country.
He made law and order prevail.
And none can deny it: the legend of Wyatt
Forever will live on the trail.
(Or words to that effect.) This is, of course, a reflecting pool of pure nostalgia in which one could wallow for hours and days at a time. (Which is not an altogether bad idea, if you ask me.) My point being simply that our generation grew from infancy to adulthood under the intoxicating (as well as enlightening) influence of more than -- far, far more than -- Family, Faith & Flag.
I can no more listen to a recording of Elvis singing "Hound Dog" without being transported to that night he appeared on Ed Sullivan, there on our fuzzy black & white TV screen in my family's living room in 1956 than I can listen to a recording of Bing Crosby singing "Where the River Shannon Flows" (available on several collections on CD, by the by) without being transported to the times and places I sang it "back in the day" (as my Black friends might say) for family and friends, including my childhood friend named Shannon.
But Time is getting away from us, and before I go I wanted to be sure to pass along to you the dial-ups for three more of the blogs I've been trying to construct. From something you said recently, I'm inferring that you've already taken an initial glance at these two:
galengreen.blogspot.com
thetoolmakersotherson.blogspot.com
Correct? But I have added a couple of new posts to each, in just the past day or two. In addition to those first two, I thought you might enjoy glancing at:
Happy Peasant Heretic happypeasantheretic.blogspot.com
Ecclesiastes 9:16 (KJV) ecclesiastes916kjv. blogspot.com
Mythoklastic Therapy Institute mythoklastictherapyinstitute.blogspot.com
Let me know what you think, when you get a minute. Admittedly, there is a bit of overlap among the five blogs I've told you about, but not much.
A few pages back, I probably misspoke as to the pleasantness quotient in my rememberings of my years at Fairmount Elementary School. Now that I put my mind to it, I can recall a goodly number of unpleasantnesses. But in the aggregate, my elementary school education was probably about as OK as any working class boy (any toolmaker's other son) could reasonably expect, there in Wichita, Kansas in the 1950's.
Remember the two brothers who rode unicycles to school everyday? They lived less than a block away, at the bottom of that relatively steep hill to the north on Lorraine. They were both older than us and both were quite adept with a unicycle, even on that hill. Their story is a good example of the many mysteries which will forever haunt my memory of grade school. As curious as I was (and still am) about all manner of human goings on which are none of my business, I never got around to finding out what was up with the unicycle brothers.
And remember push-button automatic transmissions? It seems like they came out on the 1956 or '57 Dodge. But I'm probably wrong. Was it your parents who drove one of those? I have this visual stuck in my mind of someone's mother shifting gears on a Dodge station wagon with what I guess would have to be called a push-button gearshift. Just another of those memory mysteries it does no earthly good to fret about.
What interests me far more is what you were able to learn about your prairie ancestors in the course of researching your doctoral dissertation. Were you able to uncover a sufficient amount of primary documentation to satisfy your curiosity as to their lived story? Someday soon, I want to hear all about it -- about what you were able to learn and what research methods you found most effective in getting you to where you needed to be.
Until Next Time, Stay Well,
Galen
October 29, 2007
Saturday, April 26, 2008
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Galen Green
mythoklast@mailstation.com
msmith2210@aol.com
Kansas City, Missouri
Wednesday
October 31, 2007
(the late poet John
Keats' 212th birthday)
The Galen Green School of History Therapy
Dear Shannon (& Co.),
Unlike most of my other salvageable ideas, that of History Therapy was born directly out of subjective experience. That is to say: I conceived of History Therapy only after I had personally experienced it.
I've intended for some time now to jot down a few of my preliminary thoughts concerning History Therapy, but have finally been moved to follow through only after reading your recent letter in which you mentioned your drawing upon certain historical realities you'd documented, while composing your doctoral dissertation, for the purpose of enhancing the psychotherapeutic care you've subsequently been providing to Iraq War veterans. (Please forgive me if I didn't get that exactly right; I did my best.)
I'm eager to have you tell me more about how this process has worked out for you and your clients. I understand, however, that your busy schedule seems likely to make any immediate response prohibitive. In the meantime, therefore, I thought I'd perhaps be so bold as to share at least the rudiments of my own perspective, fully recognizing that any comparison between the process I have in mind and the process you've been formulating in your work as a psychotherapist may, in fact, be light-years apart. Even if that turns out to be the case, I'm operating here in the faith that this present sharing of my perspective might have some small bit of value for you in your work, or at least somewhere in your future writing.
As I said at the outset: History Therapy was something which happened to me prior to my having conceived of it as a useful process or to my having a name for it. I can, however, recall the first time I brought it up in a conversation. It was with my friend Betty, a semi-retired (M.D.) psychiatrist, probably sometime in 2004. We were both on duty one afternoon at one the many Kansas City area hospitals then owned by Health Midwest and later purchased by Hospital Corporation of America (HCA). Seated across a hospital cafeteria table from Dr. Betty (with whom, I supposed it's worth noting, I'd never been other than a personal friend -- never a client), I was relating to her how certain of my recent readings of "popular histories" had had on me an amazingly healing effect not unlike that of psychotherapy -- and I was asking her whether or not she was aware of, within the broad and multifarious field of 21st century psychotherapy, any such animal as "History Therapy." Although (as nearly as I can recall) she had not heard of anything in her field yet referred to as such, we ended up having a stimulating chat about my personal experiencing of History Therapy and about what potential History Therapy, as a discipline, might or might not have
as a process to help future clients and psychotherapist in their work together.
So, for what it's worth, that was first time I can recall ever having used the term "History Therapy" or even having spoken aloud to another human being so much as a hint of how it had touched my life.
In your letter of about three weeks ago to me, you spoke of "perspective" with a reverence to which I can easily relate. I mention it at this juncture because, as I see it, perspective is the empowering healing elixir which History Therapy has the potential to infuse us with. It pleases me beyond words to hear you speak about it the way you do. Perspective is so shamefully undervalued by Early 21st century American Society ("The Roaring Zeros," as I've dubbed the present decade) a fact which strikes me as all the more chilling because of my fervent conviction that perspective is precisely what Americans -- of every age, race, class, etc. -- are nowadays thirsting for most pitiably.
Without whining to you any more than you need to hear for the purpose of propelling this discourse apace, I'm going to reveal here only that (to parody an old Methodist hymn) "Since History Therapy Came Into My Heart," I've been empowered as only the luckiest of psychotherapy clients have been.
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Another way of turning the thing in an effort to make my (thus far admittedly half-baked) theories concerning what I keep calling "History Therapy" intelligible might be to begin by pointing out what I perceive to be one of several parallels between the positive reinforcement you derived from the process of researching and compiling your doctoral dissertation and that which I continue to derive from the process of inviting History to teach me what I need to know in order to be strengthened and liberated from the toxic bonds of post-industrial civilization.
In both your case and mine, it would seem that one profound question which demands to be asked, over and over, is this: "Precisely to what extent can the inspiration you and I each have drawn from and the life lessons we each have learned from our interfacing with History (to continue here with my annoying anthropomorphizing) be made transferable?" For, although I'm not involved in psychotherapeutic work with Iraq War veterans whose lives and/or psyches have been shattered, I find myself in daily interaction with a significant number of folks who could certainly benefit from a few years of History Therapy.
The title of your dissertation fascinates me more, the longer I think about it: Resilience Revisited, A Portrait of Resilience as Expressed Through the Experiences of Kansas Territorial Settlers, 1854 -- 1864. It is amazing, isn't it, how closely the theme conveyed in that title (bearing mind that I have yet to read any of the document itself) coincides with the thread of theme that runs through so many of the books on my informal reading list I posted on my blog. Amazing, and yet a commonality probably shared by literally millions of American's with prairie ancestors. I have no doubt whatsoever that I'm alive and relatively well today largely because of the sense of resilience I osmosized from my own prairie ancestors; and I'm guessing that you feel similarly. In my case, any such inheritance is mostly by adoption -- i.e., by cultural/behavioral osmosis -- though recently revealed documentation indicates that my biological ancestors also had Midwestern roots. What about your people? I'm eager to learn more about those 19th century Kansas settlers who passed along their resilience to you.
To be perfectly honest: when I was growing up amongst the aging Victorians and Edwardians who bequeathed to me their culture and their own grandparents' resilience, I had little more appreciation of that priceless legacy than do the young folks surrounding us nowadays. That just seems to be the way life is, the way the world works. Right? While it's true that I did take a somewhat keener interest in a few of the more exotic elements of my adoptive ancestors' daily lives than did most of the other members of my generation, it's only been within the past few decades that I've gradually come to appreciate their legacy and to begin, through it and through them, to connect my own orphaned soul, self, psyche . . . to an ever-broadening understanding of humanity -- and of my own little niche within it.
The helpful nature of this dynamic notwithstanding, it seems worthwhile to emphasize here that this therapeutic understanding of one's place in the world and in history is the happy product of History Therapy and not the therapy process itself. To illustrate this distinction, let me share David McCullough's wonderful biography of Harry S. Truman simply entitled Truman. This past summer, I read (with the help of the audio book reading) the entire 1,100 pages of Truman for the third time in ten years. The reason I chose to impose this task on myself was that, for me, Truman delivers an especially epiphanal dose of History Therapy; though the epiphany it delivers is by no means limited to an enhanced self-knowledge; it brings along with it an enhanced appreciation for the resilient personalities in my own history, even though the bloody Kansas-Missouri border is painted right down the middle of both Truman's and my life stories.
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Of course, one of the most widely agreed upon reasons why anyone should even bother to study History is to help them avoid the mistakes of the past. But learning from other people’s mistakes is a functional feasibility only if (to speak like Aesop) the wise monkey who’s watching the less fortunate monkey get his fist caught in the hunter’s monkey trap possesses the smarts and the perspective to comprehend the causal relationship involved. Or, as Jesus might put it: “Let those with eyes see.”
Our generation, which lazy pop historians often label the “Woodstock Generation,” is, of course, the “Vietnam Generation,” the Woodstock phenomenon being but a mere bi-product which provided a photogenic pop culture fetish. (Incidentally, I just happened to be right there in the neighborhood of Woodstock, NY at the very moment the legendary music festival was occurring, hitchhiking my way from New York City to Montreal, Quebec. Believe me: I was having a better time of it that week, in the summer of 1969, than were those folks one sees in the Woodstock documentary dancing naked in the mud. Remind me to tell you guys about it sometime.)
The point I want to make vis-à-vis ours having been (and evidently being condemned to continue to be) “The Vietnam Generation” is that, had we Americans as a nation internalized a sufficient dosage of the tragic lessons of the Vietnam War (that bitter, jagged little pill), then we as a people would likely have made several significantly different choices back in 2002 and 2003 concerning the type of response that would have proven most effective and most appropriate (and less suicidal for our international credibility, as well as for your youngest crop clients and their families) to terrorist threats originating in various parts of the Middle East.
The Galen Green “School” (i.e. Theory) of History Therapy has as its central premise the scientifically verifiable hypothesis that our problem is informational. As much as I do not wish or intend for my little treatise here to veer off into the muddy corn field of political polemic, it’s worth mentioning that we’ve all seen, by now, that bumper sticker which reads: “Bush Lied. People Died.” -- worth mentioning here if only because it encapsulates in the abstract the causal relationship between tainted information and tragic behavior.
Or to reiterate my core premise: our problem is informational. That’s why, to celebrate my 50th birthday in 1999, I founded The Mythoklastic Therapy Institute (MTI), to diminish tragic behavior by “klastling” tainted information, particularly that which is most widely believed (i.e. myth). And that’s also why, just last month, The Mythoklastic Therapy Institute established The Baruch Spinoza School of Realistic Expectations.
History teaches. If we listen carefully, it teaches us not only what’s been going with our species for the past five or six millennia, but even more importantly, History reveals to us the patterns woven across the oceanic loom of our imaginations where History continues to replay and replay like some epic cautionary tale throughout our lives. A few years ago, I set myself the task of wading through the entirety of the late Will & Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization – all 10,000 or so pages of it. (See: aforementioned informal “reading list.”) Just as we were all embarking upon our various college careers and just before the Durants died (only a few hours apart), they published their slender coda, The Lessons of History. Ironically, however, one the five (5) most important lessons of history for us all (but especially for your clients) to internalize comes across much more vividly in the very first installment of their vast epic survey that in their late-1960’s swan song of “lessons.” And this truly all-important lesson of history, this grotesquely illuminating pattern woven in invisible thread, is that (to paraphrase): modernity is merely medieval feudalism spruced up with a fresh coat of paint. A profoundly mythoklastic lesson, yet grotesquely illuminating – an inconvenient truth, at least for those whose portfolios depend on the rest of us believing otherwise.
More than you or I, Iraq War veterans possess at least a potential for making this wicked old world a better place. And, paradoxically, that’s because, more than you or I, they’ve been “played” by the powers that be. Having been bamboozled into believing that slavery in America ended in 1863, they’ve been enslaved to the unworthy purposes of the same folks who brought us the Vietnam War and institutionalized American chattel slavery (unvarnished feudalism: 1492 – 1863). History teaches us this, but we lack the “street cred” to articulate it for the edification of future generations like they can – if they can.
Best of luck in all your worthy endeavors. More soon – God willing.
Until Next Time, Stay Well,
Galen
November 5, 2007
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P.S.
Here’s a song lyric I composed back in the late 1980’s. Decided to include it here, more or less as an afterthought. Never did compose a melody, so always performed it as an ordinary “talkin’ blues” with simple guitar accompaniment. If anyone there has any ideas for a tune to sing it to, please let me know at earliest convenience. Thanks! And enjoy:
MR. DRACULA
Mr. Dracula runs this town with fang and fist.
He bleeds us dry and lays our dreams to waste.
When choosing his victims, he tends to be democratic:
He doesn’t suck only on those who sleep in an attic,
The idiotic or the otherwise pathetic.
Mr. Dracula drained my father down to his last
Drop, then came to turn my flesh to paste.
But I alone have escaped through this dreary mist,
Your screaming Cassandra, bleeding my prophetic
Warning to you, which I can’t make too emphatic.
Mr. Dracula’s thirst won’t be quenched until he’s kissed
Every girl and boy in this town and made a feast
Of their dreams and their blood, in his melodramatic,
Satanic lust for empire. And any critic
Who stands in his way can expect no sympathetic
Ear, for all have had their blood replaced
With his poison. Mr. Dracula has passed
His lies on to his victims as though he’d pissed
In their veins and brains and made them idiotic
With Draculaism --each victim his fanatic.
His fangs are more sharper than those of that
serpent who hissed
Its way and will through Eden and taught us to taste
The knowledge of our disease whose only tonic
Is either death or else daring to become analytic.
In his cape, he might be mistaken for a peripatetic,
But underneath, lies the heart of a fiend beating fast
Toward undermining our dreams, slicker
than can be guessed.
For Mr. Dracula’s thirst has caused him to twist
Even our tongues and brains from their empathetic
Health into cancerous meat, sad, manic.
Mr. Dracula’s our father, our mother, our Zeitgeist,
Our demon lover, sucking us into a tryst,
Sure to drive us each batty and to make thick
Our sacred blood — yours, mine — and to hasten black
Poverty, failure, loss, this burning lake,
This hell, this jam-packed planet, this heist,
This town with its mill for which we are the grist.
And don’t let’s leave out our children, whose blissed
Innocence ends in bleak damnations which leak
Their blood and their dreams into his fangs, sad, sick.
Mr. Dracula runs this town and he keeps a list
Of naughty boys and girls who’d become their own Christ.
So, take my advice and avoid any lunatic
Who tells you otherwise. The mentally weak
Are bound to go on ignoring my little critique.
But you... you whose wisdom has not been erased
By Mr. Dracula’s fangs, you can outwit that beast,
If only you’ll let my words take you by the wrist
To subvert his evil will. Wear this garlic. Don’t panic.
And let the stake you drive at your crossroads be politic.
Words and Music by Galen Green c 1989
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