%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

Galen Green
mythoklast@mailstation.com
msmith2210@aol.com
Kansas City, Missouri

Wednesday
December 05, 2007
(my late grandfather, Will
McCall's 140th birthday)


%%%%%%%



From Within the Heart of the Heart of the Song



%%%%%%%


Let your mercy spill on all these burning hearts in hell,
if it be your will to make us well.
And draw us near and bind us tight,
all your children here in their rags of light . . .

-- Leonard Cohen, from "If It Be Your Will"
on Various Positions (album released 1984)


%%%%%%%


It's not ignorance does so much damage; it's knowin' so derned much that ain't so.

-- Josh Billings, American Humorist
(born Henry Wheeler Shaw, 1818 -- 1885)


%%%%%%%


I heard it in the wind last night
It sounded like applause
Chilly now
End of summer
No more shiny hot nights
It was just the arbutus rustling
And the bumping of the logs
And the moon swept down black water
Like an empty spotlight

-- Joni Mitchell, from “For the Roses” (1972)



%%%%%%%



Dear Shannon (& Co.),

Welcome to the seventh installment of my memoir within a memoir. As always, I hope that all's well with you and yours. Thanks for your thoughtful suggestions and kind comments. I appreciate that very much. Please know that I understand perfectly well how busy you are and that you're not likely to have the opportunity to write to me all that much in the near future. Truth to tell: I wouldn't have been able to pour forth to the extent that I have in recent weeks, were it not for an uncharacteristic convergence of favorable circumstances at work. Because I realize that this bit of good fortune is inevitably in limited supply, I’ve been making every attempt to “make hay while the sun shines.” Please be assured that this rate of flow isn’t likely to remain steady for all that much longer. If by some miracle, however, it does, then please accept my eternal gratitude for your having provided me with just the right “audience” to impel me into accomplishing a long overdue step toward make The Toolmaker’s Other Son make clearer sense to a more general audience. Thanks!

Having been in “talk therapy” from time to time, particularly back in the 1980’s, for a few months here and a few months there, I’ve had a meager amount of practice in telling my life story in a relatively few words. But I don’t feel as though I’ve ever been very good at it. This probably has to do with my having been raised by an adoptive mother and father both of whose families of origin were quiet country people. (Both the Greens and the McCalls would have fit quite comfortably into Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegone, Minnesota. Remnants of the breed, in fact, still haunt a few of the houses and Methodist churches of Franklin and Osage Counties in northeaster Kansas.)

I mention this narrative shortcoming on my part only by way of prefacing my contemplating making a sort of “dry run” at telling my life story – or at least at talking about telling my life story.

Every life is a story. And every life story is worth telling, but not necessarily all for the same set of reasons. I seriously doubt that, for me, the telling of my story (or of significant portions thereof) would have ever in this lifetime drifted to near the top of my “to do list,” i.e. my long-term priorities list, had I not turned out to be, for an inordinate number of scoundrels and charlatans (vipers and scorpions) such an attractive target of slander, libel and all manner of calumny and fraud.

Moreover, I firmly believe that, in the process of "setting the record straight" (as the cliché goes), I may be able to serve as a paradigm case study to at least a few of the millions of hapless folks in similar situations. In other words, I've set out to compile The Toolmaker's Other Son, at least in part, as a tool for building solidarity among those folks whom I believe need a revitalized solidarity the most.


%%%%%%%


On several occasions in the recent past, I've sat down with myself and taken a stab at organizing the chronology of my 58 years here on earth so as to make it make sense to a relatively disinterested reader. Thus far, however, I've been pretty dissatisfied with the results of every such effort.

A couple of autobiographers who seem to have worked out within themselves some mode of stylistic compromise which both informs and entertains with relatively harmonious balance are Bob Dylan and Henry Adams. Dylan is sometimes anecdotal and sometimes a straightforward chronicler, in the first (and so far only) volume of his Chronicles. Adams, on the other hand, tends to tend toward the philosophical, toying coyly with his reader's perfectly natural curiosity about the aristocratic lifestyle of a man most famous for having been descended from famous Adams ancestors. While the organizing principles employed by both Adams and Dylan are admirable and even inspiring, they'll likely prove to be of limited utility to me. That's because I'm a relative nobody, compared to Adams and Dylan.

Nowadays, of course, both the most entertaining and the most illuminating autobiographies usually take the form of fiction. Two examples of what I have in mind in saying this are the novels of Philip Roth and Antonya Nelson. * Roth's works you're likely already somewhat familiar with, if only by reputation. Tony Nelson's novels and short stories you may be less familiar with, although you knew her family -- at least tangentially -- and perhaps even brushed up against her when she'd have been a very young girl growing up in Wichita. You may have even babysat her. I know that I did.

%%%%%%%

* Antonya Nelson (b. 1961) is an American author from Wichita, Kansas. She received an MFA from the University of Arizona and has published four collections of short stories, some of which have appeared in magazines including The New Yorker, Esquire, and Harper's. She received a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 2000.
Nelson is the author of five short story collections, including Some Fun (Scribner’s 2006), In The Land Of Men, and three novels (Talking in Bed, Nobody’s Girl, and Living to Tell). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper's, Redbook and many other magazines, as well as in anthologies such as Prize Stories: the O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. Her books have been New York Times Notable Books of 1992, 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002, and she was named in 1999 by The New Yorker as one of the “twenty young fiction writers for the new millennium.”
She is the recipient of the 2003 Rea Award for the Short Story, as well as NEA and Guggenheim Fellowships, and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program, as well as in the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program. She lives in Telluride, Colorado, Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Houston, Texas.

%%%%%%%

Do you remember James Nelson from Brooks Junior High? (If not, check the yearbook, if you still have it. I don't.) James is our age. And although he was markedly different from me in temperament and taste, he and I became close friends by the 9th grade. As with the late Danny Butcher (et al.), he'd attended Carter Elementary.

Eventually, I hope to write an entire chapter (perhaps 10 or 20 pages) on my long and extensive connection to the Nelson family. I suppose that it'd be safe to say that it all began with my bonding as buds with James, who subsequently invited me over to their house on several occasions, probably in 1963 or '64 to listen to his impressive collection of (mostly) automotive related LP's. For our younger readers: Those were 12" vinyl phonograph recordings. Each one held approximately 45 minutes of music or other prerecorded sound. They represented cutting edge audio technology during the period from perhaps 1960 thru 1980. Without them, there'd have been no Beatles. And again, for our younger readers: just think of The Beatles as Sir Paul McCartney's first back-up band. And, for our much younger readers: Sir Paul McCartney will probably be best remembered as the golden throated composer and singer of such popular classics as "Yesterday" and "Hey Jude" -- as well as for having been, for 30 years, the husband of the late Linda Eastman McCartney, whose fine line of vegetarian frozen foods can be found (as of this writing) in America's better supermarkets.

Anyway, Antonya Nelson is James Nelson's sister -- or, more precisely, half-sister. As you can see from the footnote (below) which I stole from Wikipedia, Tony is 12 years younger than us. At the time she was born, their family was living on Gentry, across from Fairmount Park, maybe 3 or 4 houses from the corner of Gentry & 16th Street. Did you know any of them back then -- you or your brother or parents? Although I first met the late Dr. Bill (F.W.) Nelson and his lovely second wife, Susan -- Tony's (& David's & Julie's) mother -- way back in the mid-1960's, I didn't really get to know any of them, except for James, until 1968. By then, they'd all moved to the large white stucco house on the southwest corner of 1st Street & Roosevelt in College Hill. I actually lived with them from March until June of 1970 (a long story in itself) and "babysat" Tony, the budding novelist, and her younger siblings, on rare occasions.

I hope you'll forgive my digression from the theme of today's ramble, which is supposed to constitute my contemplation of how I'll end up structuring The Toolmaker's Other Son. As I was starting to say: Nowadays, both the most entertaining and the most illuminating autobiographies usually take the form of fiction, of which Tony Nelson's excellent novels and short stories present us with useful examples; although, in the case of Tony's writing, as with a significant proportion of fictional writing overall, such stylistic concepts as "thinly veiled" and "loosely based upon" frequently apply.
I say this only because of my own observations drawn from my aforementioned extensive connection with her family of origin throughout the 1960's & 70's. I'm tempted to provide you with a few illustrative details; but, to do so in this context, would necessitate my violating one of the guidelines I've laid down for myself as a memoirist, and that is not to make life any more difficult that it already is for any of the people in my past who may still be above ground. While this degree of self-imposed punch-pulling goes against my overall nature and represents a compromise of several others of my guidelines as a memoirist, it simply makes a lot of practical sense when contextualized in "the great overview." However, suffice it say that, when Garrison Keillor reminds us that that child in any given family who grows up to write about his or her childhood and family never tends to be the most compassionate nor the most fair-minded child in the family, he could easily have had Tony Nelson in mind. Let's leave it at that.


%%%%%%%


In much the same way that the renowned fiction writer Antonya Nelson weaves reminiscences and reflections from her past observations and experiences into the stuff of story, so her former babysitter and family friend Galen Green weaves his reminiscences and reflections from his past observations and experiences into the stuff of non-story. What I mean, in this particular context, by the term "non-story" might most accurately be equated with "critical analysis," a term not remotely as "sexy" as words like "story" or "fiction." Thus lacking in sex appeal (in the marketing sense of that term), critical analysis must needs find compensatory avenues into the hearts and minds of any potential readership it hopes to entice.

In other words: Why would an otherwise totally disinterested occasional reader of The New Yorker (or of The Kansas Quarterly, for that matter) or of Philip Roth's novels -- or occasional listener to the music of Joni Mitchell or Bob Dylan or J.S. Bach -- or occasional patron of art house films (or Woody Allen films -- or whatever) . . . why, oh why, would such a prospective reader of The Toolmaker's Other Son . . . bother to give this memoir of mine the time of day?

While I'll readily admit here that I may be deluding myself in this, I can actually think of several reasons, off hand, several motivating factors. The first of these, paradoxically, is the flip side of what it is that's likely to drive the average reader of memoirs away -- or at least to keep the disinterested disinterested. We might most bluntly call this factor "the nobody factor." To wit: "What the heck makes this complete nobody think that a busy, educated, discriminating reader such as myself would have the least bit of interest in reading a book about his life and times?" This type of perfectly natural reaction, however, conceals precisely the preconsciously prelogical attraction which has been known to sell more than a few books by other ostensible nobodies. Let us abbreviate this attraction semi-accurately as "curiosity" and then move on.

A second potential motivating factor which might "put some butts in those seats" (as we say in show biz) we'll call "the solidarity factor." Surely I was not the only 20-year-old hitchhiker traveling from New York City to New England (and, in my case, points north), in August of 1969, to make the conscious, unfashionable and eminently sane decision to skip Woodstock (the legendary music festival) -- just as I (and thousands like me) had gone out of our way to forego attending the insane war in Indochina. My point here being that I'm not the only tree-hugging folksonging secular humanist tax-and-spend liberal Democrat with a mind (and a conscience and an imagination and a philosophy and a theology) of my own. And I'm banking on at least a handful of my soul mates out there in Toyland feeling just enough of a tug of solidarity with the subject/author of The Toolmaker's Other Son to cough up the price of theater ticket to wallow a while in said solidarity.


Even though there are several other motivating factors which could have the potential for selling more than a handful of copies of my memoir-in-progress (and which, in turn, help to motivate me to keep on cranking it out, inch by toilsome inch) I'm going to bother you here with only one more, a third. I guess I'll call it "the genre factor," mostly due to the fact that my memoir doesn't conform neatly to the accepted definitions of any of the genre one usually walks into a bookstore to look for. It refuses to fit neatly into any pigeonhole. It's certainly not a novel or a collection of poems or stories. Nor is it, strictly speaking, a conventional autobiography nor a philosophical treatise, a political manifesto, a theological discourse, a cookbook, a how-to manual, an edifying guide for troubled youth, an anthology of music, art or movie reviews, nor the confessions of a fallen screen idol or disgraced sports hero.

And although it is constructed around the scaffolding of Galen Green's rather ordinary, rather extraordinary life story, The Toolmaker's Other Son doesn't presume to be the story of Galen Green's life. It's not the story of anything. It is, as has already been established, a non-story.

A preliminary introduction to The Toolmaker's Other Son, which I drafted in the autumn of 2005 (roughly two years ago, in other words), is largely constructed around the image of a colorful 5,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, its pieces dumped out onto the living room carpet to be put together as a cozy family recreational project on long winter nights by the blazing hearth. In this respect at least, my humble non-story thus carries the false promise of joining some of the more well-beloved winter tales of Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare and Nathaniel Hawthorn. But, being a non-story, whatever promise it carries is headed elsewhere.


%%%%%%%


At this stage of the game, Shannon, where that elsewhere might turn out to be is anybody's guess. Antonya Nelson's father, Dr. Nelson, who served as a mentor and kind of second father to me throughout my undergraduate years, used to relate the famous anecdote about Ernest Hemingway's being asked by a woman at what point it was exactly when he inserted the theme into his stories. Dr. Nelson's Hemingway anecdote is funny because theme is, of course, not something which a fiction writer "inserts" into his or her story. With a memoirist of the non-story, it works somewhat differently.

I've often said, over the two years that I've been constructing The Toolmaker's Other Son, that this memoir of mine is already roughly 75% written. That's because so much of its substance consists of what I personally consider to be Galen Green's Greatest Hits. In other words, what I believe to be my hundred or so poems, prose poems, song lyrics, etc. which best tell (And here comes that word again!) the story of my life -- even though my memoir is to be "about," for want of a better construct, my "inner" rather than my "outer" life. (Please to forgive the unintended Platonic false dichotomy implicit here.)

Thus, whatever detectable "theme" emerges, as one peruses -- in some best of all possible futures -- the final 400-page hardbound version of The Toolmaker's Other Son, will have been the product of the stylistic, structural, organizational decisions you're witnessing me struggling with at this very moment. Hence, I suppose it would be arguable that I'm engaged in the laborious process of "inserting the theme" into my memoir at this very moment. With this in mind, I cannot but hope against hope that The Toolmaker's Other Son will turn out to be greater than the sum of its parts.


%%%%%%%


This, then, is the sort of finished product I've had in mind now since the late summer of 2005. That's not to say that it's the same finished product which will, Providence willing, sometime within my lifetime, appear in our hands, as well as upon the bookshelves and reading tables of the world's thousand most discerning literary critics and sociopolitical opinion-makers. Nor is it to say, by any means, that it'll bear much resemblance to my conception of it in its numerous earlier incarnations. It's not; it won't.


%%%%%%%


By now, I've resigned myself to the ineluctable fact that the theme of whatever book I end up constructing from out of all this toil and moil and quasi-divine inspiration is simply not going to be an entity nor a property nor a substance to which I can give a pronounceable name and then insert into my book the way they inject the cream filling into a Hostess Twinkie or the butter into a Butterball Turkey. If, peradventure, it could somehow be just such an injectable, I frequently ask myself what pronounceable name I would choose to give it, before the magical insertion took place. Here's just one of the answers I find myself giving myself in response to that colossal hypothetical:

Trust only in the evidence.


%%%%%%%


Now that The West Wing has no new episodes with which to seduce, comfort and educate me, my favorite fictional protagonist on any regular network television series is Gil Grissom, Ph.D. on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. While I can identify with Grissom (portrayed by William Petersen) only perhaps 87.3%, that's still twice as much as I can identify with any other currently syndicated fictional character (with the possible exception of Lisa Simpson on The Simpsons). Whenever Grissom is asked why he's a CSI, he responds, "Because the dead can't speak for themselves." This is one of his favorite quotes and he uses it frequently.

Like me, Dr. Grissom worships (metaphorically speaking) at The Alter of the Evidence. He's a forensic entomologist, as well as the night-shift supervisor of the Clark County, Nevada CSI forensics team, investigating crimes in and around the city of Las Vegas. He was born (something that can't be said for every fictional character) in 1956, is a lapsed Catholic, can read lips and knows sign language because his late widowed mother was deaf. Growing up, he was an avid reader and an amateur scientist, who financed (I love this part!) his first "body farm" with his winnings from a high stakes poker game.

Early CSI episodes revealed Grissom to be witty, enthusiastic and quirky scientist with a good sense of humor. He's always been portrayed as the father figure of the team, the leader who can be perceived as cold and emotionless, but who is fiercely loyal to his CSI's and passionate about his work. In addition to being somewhat of a polymath beyond his career training, he's proven to be a very cultured man on many occasions, having a wide knowledge of history, literature and art.


%%%%%%%


And with that, Shannon, I’m afraid I’m going to have to come to a sudden pause. It seems that Marie & I are having unexpected computer problems. (Are there any other kind?) And I don’t want to run the risk of losing what I’ve written to you here thus far. I fear that I’ve yet to arrive at the intended place in my ramble where I could have truly spoken from within the heart of the heart of the song. But it seems that this unforeseen turn of events will necessitate my presenting you with a rain-check. Meanwhile, here’s yet another song lyric from my distant past. Hope your holiday season is one of comfort and joy.


Until Next Time, Stay Well,


Galen


%%%%%%%


Coda:



Tomorrow and Tomorrow



Once I was caught in the mad flow.
My life was but a walking shadow
On its way to dusty death,
I dreamed of Lady Macbeth
In the dusty street of Colorado,
Where I dreamed of breathing her dying breath.

My heart was once full of worry,
So full of sound and fury,
Like a tale told by an idiot.
I was always stopping to pity it
Until I crossed the wide Missouri
And washed the pain from my pretty cut.

Chorus:
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
My life will be but a walking shadow
In the dusty streets of Colorado,
A tale told by an idiot,
Full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing
But arising in the spring
Signifying nothing
But arising in the spring
Signifying nothing;
But I don’t let it bring me sorrow.
No, I don’t let it bring me sorrow.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Creeps in its petty pace;
But I don’t let it bring me sorrow,
Not even when my fingers trace
The neighbor’s flowers I had to borrow
To fill my broken vase.

The streetlights of Colorado
Will light my way to dusty death.
My life is but a walking shadow
That fades a little with every breath;
But I’m not gonna let the mad flow
Drag me under like Lady Macbeth

(repeat chorus)

My life began in Missouri,
It’s a tale told by an idiot,
Full of sound and fury;
But now I’ve learned not to pity it
And now I’ve learned not to worry
About the salt that’s in my pretty cut.

I beg and steal and borrow
To keep away the sorrow
That creeps in its petty pace
Like the fractures in my broken vase
As tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Carries me away without a trace

(repeat chorus)


Words and Music by Galen Green c 1978


/gg