Tag Archives: authentic living

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LittleJohnnyIX

(Another installment in the series of stories I tell June from my childhood.)

A visit to Granmunnie’s house

When Little Johnny was about eight or nine, he would ride the train, the Central of Georgia, from Adel to Macon and go visit his grandma—he called her Granmunnie—who lived in Gray. (Georgia Gray, as Johnny called it.)

Johnny got to ride the train because Granmunnie’s friend Mr. Green was a conductor, and he helped look out for Johnny on the trip.

Granmunnie lived in a big two-story house right in the middle of Gray, and worked as a social worker for the welfare department in Jones County. Johnny loved the house, though the upstairs, especially the room that was always locked at the top of the stairs, was a little scary. One day he climbed out the window of the landing onto the little porch roof and slipped down to look in the window of the locked room. He was kinda disappointed, though, because there was nothing but boxes and trunks and old manikins and piles of clothes in the room. No skeletons or ghosts or anything exciting!

He also loved going to work with Granmunnie at the courthouse annex, but the “trusties” who did yard work and janitorial work around the courthouse were a little scary too in their blue and white striped uniforms.

Johnny would get to ride with Granmunnie to visit some of her clients out in the county, and they would often stop at a peach orchard a friend of hers owned and she would walk out into the orchard and pick a few peaches and then she and Johnny would sit in her old 1940s Chevrolet and eat them.

They would visit a man who lived out in the middle of a pasture in a little shack he had made out of old signs and cardboard boxes, and a family who lived in an very old wooden house that was teetering on top of piles of rocks on a little clay hill. Johnny would try to talk to the kids who were sitting on the rickety old porch, but they never said much.

Sometimes while Granmunnie was working in her office, Johnny would go into the little county library that was in the same building and lie on the couch and read. He loved reading books about dogs, like Big Red, and one of his favorite characters, Augustus, and he even read some adult mysteries, including a lot of Perry Mason stories. (The Darby Trial was one mystery, which he read because he thought it was the Darby ‘trail’ not ‘trial,’ and he didn’t understand much of what was going on in it!.)

He and his Granmunnie had lime sherbet with Bubble-Up almost every day after supper, and Johnny still thinks of her whenever he sees lime sherbet.

Granmunnie’s house had a closed well on the back porch, but she never drew water from it. There was an old shed and a storage building in the back yard, which was all bare clay with a few oak leaves scattered around, and Johnny would get a rake and run around the back yard pulling the rake behind him to make tracks through the leaves.

There was also a very old, one-room house at the very back of the lot, just across an alley that ran through, and a woman who occasionally would cook or clean Granmunnie’s house lived there by herself. The old house had an open fireplace in it and the woman did all her cooking in the fireplace. Johnny remembers the way the house always smelled like wood smoke, because there was always a fire, even in the summer.

There was an old, old car in the shed that Uncle Dan had bought when he was young—maybe it even worked—and Johnny loved to sit in it and pretend to drive. It had wire wheels and no top, and Johnny thought it was just about the coolest thing he ever had seen!

The house was very mysterious to Johnny, because there were doors at several places outside that went under the house, which was higher off the ground than Johnny was tall! The whole thing was surrounded by old rusted iron fences that had very decorative, pointy things at the top of each post and gates that opened up into the alley at the side of the house.

When the visit was over, Granmunnie would drive Johnny in to the train station in Macon for his ride back to Adel. She always packed him a nice little lunch for the ride, and he enjoyed looking out the window while he ate.

One time, he had just finished his lunch when the conductor came through with a large garbage can calling out to the passengers for trash. Johnny wanted to get his lunch bag into the can, so he quickly rolled it up and tossed it in.

Just as the conductor pulled the trash out of the train car and started across the clattering, scary platform where the two cars were hooked together, Johnny realized that he had forgotten that in the bottom of his lunch sack were about four of his favorite cookies—Nabisco sugar wafers—and he had just thrown them away.

He was so disappointed and sad that he almost cried when he realized the cookies were gone. But it was too late to chase down the trash and get them back! Little Johnny remembers that trip—and his Granmunnie—every time he eats sugar wafers!

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Little Johnny VIII

Little Johnny and the grease trap

(A very funny one in the Little Johnny series, stories I tell June from my childhood.)

Once upon a time when Little Johnny was about four, he had a very embarrassing experience—one of quite a few, as he was a bit of a showoff as a little boy!

Johnny and his family were all visiting Aunt Sadie and Uncle Andrew in Pidcock, Georgia, one summer weekend, and all of Johnny’s many cousins were there, the McKinnons who lived there—Billy, Mabbat, Wallace, Phillip—and Patsy and Marilee, and Barbara and Little Bill, and maybe a few more. It was one of those family gatherings that happened a lot down in Brooks County.

So they were all playing outside that day, which is what they mostly did wherever they were, and Little Johnny decided he needed to show off a little bit.

“I bet y’all I can walk all the way around the top of that grease trap!” he boasted, knowing everybody would be impressed because nobody wanted to even get close to that grease trap most of the time. It was stinky and yucky and scary. It was just a little brick wall about a foot high that made a pool just underneath the kitchen windows that caught all the dishwater and trapped the grease (hence its name!) from all the dirty dishes instead of running it through the septic system where it tended to clog up the pipes and the drain field. But it was yucky!

So everybody poo-pooed Johnny’s boasting, saying they knew he wouldn’t get up on that wall and walk around it cuz he would be in big trouble!

Well, that was about all it took to make sure that Little Johnny was gonna do it, since they dared him.

Well, he stepped up on it, and they all gathered around oooohhing and ahhh-ing and taunting him even more. So off he stepped on his daring journey around the little wall. Except that about three steps into that journey, his foot slipped on that old crumbly brick and down he went, Plop! right into that stinky, greasy, yukky mess!

Of course, he started yelping right away and somebody went running off to get his mommy and he was trying to climb out when she arrived.

She was not very happy! She mostly just snatched him out of that mess and marched him around to the back steps by the ear.

“Stand on those steps!” she ordered.

So Johnny stood on the steps while Mommy hosed him down good with the garden hose, and she wasn’t too delicate about it either. She finally had to make him strip down to his underwear to get him halfway clean, and then she marched him into the shower—luckily, there was a shower room right off the back porch, because this was a country farm house and being dirty was pretty normal.

Johnny was not happy about getting hosed down, especially with all his cousins standing around laughing at him and taunting him for being such a showoff.

But we all hope that Little Johnny learned a good lesson from that grease trap! He sure did stay away from it for the rest of his childhood!

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Little Johnny VII

(Another installment in the stories I tell June from my childhood and youth. This is a re-telling of one of her favorites – it’s also in LJ II along with the bike ride story.)

Little Johnny and the trestle

Once upon a time when Little Johnny was a teenager, he was driving his Daddy’s station wagon (that old 1956 black Ford) around in the countryside in North Carolina with some of his brothers and his sister and their friends when a scary thing happened.

They were just out “riding around” as they liked to do, but it was in the country around Lake Junaluska, and Johnny didn’t know much about the roads up there, since they were just visiting their friends during the summer. Bunny Anna, who had spend most of the summers of her life there, at least a few weeks every year, knew the area and she was helping Johnny know where to go on their ride.

One of the nicest drives around was old County Road, and they were just cruising along it when suddenly Bunny Anna said, “Oh look, here comes the trestle, speed up Johnny! It’ll be fun!”

So, of course, Johnny speeded up. Maybe a little more than Bunny expected! Because she started yelling, “No, no, slow down, I was just kidding!”

Well, Johnny tried to slow down, but it was a little too late, because he was going a little too fast and when they went under the trestle, he discovered why Bunny was yelling.

On the other end of the trestle, County Road made a pretty sharp right curve, following the mountain, as those mountain roads tend to do, and Johnny was going a bit too fast for that curve. He was wheeling the old station wagon around and putting on the brakes as hard as he could, but the car drifted right on across the left lane and onto the shoulder of the road! Johnny could hear the tires on his side of the car roaring in the gravel on the shoulder, and that’s when he looked out the side window. There was not much shoulder there, just a very steep bank down to the little river that the road followed, and lots of rocks and scary stuff.

Johnny was hanging onto the steering wheel and trying to keep the car from running off the road, and nobody was saying anything—they were all holding their breath and covering their faces to keep from screaming. It was lucky there were no cars coming the other way, and after a little while Johnny was able to slow down and get the car back onto the road.

He pulled over into a pullout on the cliff side of the road and stopped. Then everybody in the car started laughing and talking and being really happy that they didn’t just die, but Johnny’s sister, Linda, was so scared that she didn’t really like all that laughing. She was a very sweet, very good little girl, but it really upset her and she yelled out at everybody, “Y’all stop your damn laughing!”

Everybody got quiet all of a sudden, because they were all so shocked to hear Linda say that! You could hear some of them whispering, oh wow! Linda cussed! I never heard Linda cuss! and things like that. And then everybody started telling her how sorry they were for laughing and that she was right, they shouldn’t be laughing because they did almost just die!

After everybody calmed down, Little Johnny drove them all back to Junaluska, but he drove very slowly! After a while, they all kinda started talking again, but everybody was talking really quiet now, and finally Johnny told everybody how sorry he was that he scared them, and Bunny told everybody how sorry she was that she suggested for Johnny to speed up, and everybody kinda go over, but they never forgot it!

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AnnaJune Fall 23

The children

Summer-Fall 2023…

Me and June…

Well, it’s been me and June a lot since the beginning of the summer. She’s spending lots of time with me, tho Mommy’s not here much, and we’re getting on well. Her birthday was fun, and she’s very proud to be five — tells everyone she meets that she’s five.

And boy is she five! She has such expanded ideas about things these days, and it has been very interesting and sweet watching her learn about a wide variety of things since she started kindergarten. She has a great kindergarten teacher, Mary Frye, and she usually is very excited about going to school, tho as the year is progressing, she is getting less eager to go.

She’s also just generally expanding her awareness of life — sometimes it’s disturbing, as she has said to me several times that she doesn’t want me to die. She was also playing pretend about someone dying and asked me frequently about my brother Bob’s death. Gene’s death (June 27) has been very hard on her, as well as on me. I think the reality of Taylor’s mom’s early death and these two uncles dying has made her especially sensitive and aware of the subject of death.

I wrote in my journal soon after Gene’s death, “I guess June keeps me going. She’s very loving, though stubborn, and so aware. She asked me yesterday if I was going to die in a long time or a short time. I told her I didn’t know, that no one knows. Gene’s death is a big factor in that, I guess. We tried to prepare them both, but kids don’t really understand. Just that someone’s gone.

“I do worry about her dealing with my death, but I think she will be okay. She’s strong and very self-reliant. I just hope she remembers how much I love her!”

We got a kitty and she is crazy for that cat! She doesn’t really know how to be nice to it, tho. Just treats it like it is a stuffed animal. Luckily, the cat is very tolerant!

June and I rode to St. Simons together to visit with Linda and John, and Stewart and Julian showed up with the little one, Charolette! June loved being with everyone!

She would really much prefer we were all together, so this back and forth life is hard on her. She’s with me about four days a week, usually, and then sometimes more, as Taylor stays over occasionally.

Taylor texted me one day to say, as part of a long and involved message, that “Anna June says she has the best Daddy in the world. And she’s so proud of you…” That meant a lot to ole Dad!

One of the most amazing things she’s said to me lately was about black holes, which I included in Little Johnny V – I had told her a story about crashing on my bike as a kid, and she said, well, you have to careful not to fall into a black hole because they suck up everything that falls into them!

I was astounded and asked her further, discovering that she had learned about them from some YouTube thing, but she didn’t realize there were not any on the Earth. So we talked further. Then she asked me, “But where do things go when they fall into a black hole?”

I said, when I got over being amazed, that no one knows the answer to that and lots of scientists are trying to figure it out.

The list of amazing things she says has gone beyond keeping up with it! And she’s doing so well in Kindergarten! She was in the paper twice for being in the student’s of the month for the Leaders in Me program, and her diagnostics are really good for the first half of the year. She can read lots of stuff and is very into learning more reading as well as the phonics. She enjoys seeing the words in the stories that she almost knows by heart and realizing that it’s the word that says… whatever it is. And she loves sounding out the words she doesn’t know.

Her math skills are pretty amazing too! She can “subatize” so well! (I just learned that term, which means recognize how many things are in a group without counting… something like that.)

She loves playing dice, and I think it helps her math awareness.

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Just working

September 22, 2022 (The Autumn Equinox)

“When I was lil girl, I played piano, but not no more… I’s got nothin’.  I not finish my school, you know…  when the war start, no! — I was start workin’. I jus’ been workin’ all my life.”

Kate — a maid in the BOQ at England Air Force Base, Alexandria, Louisiana. She was a Philipino/Japanese woman who had married a GI. (From my journal, May of 1972)

I often think of Kate and what she said to me about working. Although my life has been vastly different from hers, I sometimes feel that the same is true of me, that I “just been working all my life.”

Although my Social Security records show a large gap of more than a year after I got out of the Air Force, I have mostly always worked. And I have worked at a very large number of very diverse jobs.

So I decided to try to come up with a list — maybe some description — of most of the various work situations I’ve ended up in over the years.

Childhood

My parents always stressed working, and we kids always had our chores and a little allowance, and were expected to help out with house and yard work. I remember I really hated picking up pecans because of the dryness and how it made my hands feel.

When I was old enough to reach the counters and push a broom, fifth grade I suppose, I was working Wednesdays (paper day) and Saturdays at my daddy’s newspaper office, The Claxton Enterprise. I helped move the folded papers to the table for mailing, and I often rode with Daddy to the nearby post offices when we had to deliver them.

On Saturdays, I swept the back shop, collecting up all the big sheets of newsprint that had been trashed during the printing process. Occasionally, I washed the big windows up front and helped out in the office supply business. I also collected the lead slugs of type and helped with the process of melting them down into ingots for setting the next week’s paper on the Linotype. Plus I wrapped and delivered job printing around town — on foot. Later, I helped out with some of the news work, covered a few football games, and did whatever was needed.

After Daddy’s first heart attack, I helped Uncle Dan put out the paper for a couple of months while Daddy recovered. Then I went off to Vietnam.

Delivery jobs

During high school, I also had a couple of other jobs, though how long and what the schedule of those jobs was is a little blurry in my memory now! I worked Saturdays delivering dry cleaning for Smith’s Dry Cleaners, which was owned by Frank Smith, the Mayor of Claxton. It was an exciting job, as the old panel truck would occasionally lose brakes and I had to learn how to stop by switching off the engine and popping the clutch in second gear, then snatching up the emergency brake. I also worked delivering the Savannah Morning News, first in a car with the old guy, a cab driver, who had the contract, and then, when I was 15 I think, on an old Cushman Husky, which was also exciting to ride. The brakes on it tended to lock up, and I turned it sideways in the road once, which sent me flying thru the air and landing on my hands and knees on the pavement. Fun. The other interesting part of that job was that I occasionally had to ride with the old guy out to the county line to pick up whiskey for a customer.

Bookbinder — Georgia Southern College library

When I went to college, I worked in the bindery at the college library. I also worked on the college newspaper and the yearbook staff, and I helped the college sports publicist keep stats at basketball games.

Pilot — US Air Force

I was in the US Air Force for about four years, flying airplanes, but that’s a whole ‘nother story. It’s in my other blog, A War Journal. That chronicles my experiences related to the Air Force and a year in Vietnam.

After the Air Force, I took a few months off to recover my sanity and then I was back at the newspaper business.

Reporter — Tifton News Examiner

I helped my uncle, Dan Eden, publish a little newspaper in Tifton, Georgia, for part of a year, but things were a little difficult there, so he moved to Gray, Georgia. That really didn’t work out for me, so sometime in 1973 I moved to Orlando, Florida, where my brother, Stewart, lived.

Photo processor and greenhouse worker

I had two jobs there, though I’m not sure of the sequence or the duration of the two. I worked the 11-to-7 shift at a photo processing plant — Champaign Color — in the color-print darkroom, loading big cases filled with 35 mm negatives into a machine that made prints. I also worked for a commercial plant nursery watering and fertilizing greenhouses filled with ornamental plants all day. Those were both short-term, very strange jobs.

Graphic arts — a shopper in Glendale

I was on the road for a few months after that, ending up in Phoenix, Arizona. I worked as a graphic artist for a “shopper” — a newspaper that’s mostly ads and is given away –though I can’t remember the name of the paper. I mostly did ad layout, but I did a little darkroom work, which I had learned to do at my daddy’s newspaper.

Press operator – Medco Jewelry Company

I moved from there to Independence, Missouri, and got a job working in the in-house print shop at Medco Jewelry Company in Kansas City. I started out doing darkroom and graphics there, but learned to run a small offset press and worked into being one of the pressmen.

Press operator — Center Stake office, RLDS church

I had to ride a bus into downtown Kansas City every day for that job, so soon I moved to being the pressman at a church district office, doing all the printing for several churches, mostly Sunday bulletins. Later, I began to work for one of the churches in the district, doing all their printing. My first child was born during this time, and as our horizons expanded, I decided to go back to college.

Social Studies Teacher

I eventually got certified as a teacher in several states and started teaching in Crownpoint, New Mexico, where I taught Navajo children social studies. I only lasted a year there, and then I taught for two years in Jesup, Georgia, at Jesup Middle Grades.

Volunteer work — Koinonia Farms Community and Habitat for Humanity

We next went to Koinonia Community near Plains, Georgia for a work-study program, as we were interested in exploring intentional community living. I worked on maintenance for their pecan packing plant, picked grapes, cleared out orchards and a variety of other jobs on the Farm. I also worked on a construction crew, building a house for a poor family in Plains, at Habitat (which is a spin-off of Koinonia). I was on a crew of three guys, and we did most everything to frame up and finish the house. We didn’t do the foundation or the roof. Great experience! No pay.

Assembly-line worker — motor home plant

Things again went awry in my life, and I ended up in Eugene, Oregon. I worked for a time there as an assembly-line worker, building and installing dashboards for motor homes. A crazy job that I quit so I could hitchhike back to Georgia for my brother’s wedding. I also did day labor for an organic farm outside of Eugene, planting garlic and digging potatoes and whatever else needed doing. I got paid very little, but I could bring home large bags of vegetables for our family group. The guy who owned it also took me out mushroom hunting, and I learned how to identify chanterelles and Shitake.

Organizer/officer worker — Eugene Council for Human Rights

I got involved with an activist group, the Eugene Council for Human Rights in Latin America, and before long was working as an assistant in their office, doing graphic arts and lots of other things.

Typesetter/Print shop manager — The Siuslaw News

I moved from Eugene to Florence, Oregon, where I was a nanny of sorts for a first-grader while his mom went to college classes. Then I got a real job as a typesetter, doing classified ads for the newspaper in Florence. I worked into doing some graphics and then into the print shop. I did darkroom work, job layout and printing.  I eventually became the manager of the print shop, running the 11×17 AM press and the 17×22 Heidelberg press. The Heidelberg was a project! The boss bought it used and abused — all the rollers were stuck together from being shut down all inked up and left for a long time, so I had to pull everything out and replace them with new rollers. But it was a wonderful press once we got it working. I also did all the darkroom and plate work for the print shop operation.

Reporter/Editor — The Press-Sentinel, Jesup, Georgia

After my dad died in 1986, we moved to Jesup to be with my mom, and I got a job as a reporter with The Press-Sentinel, a weekly paper that my dad had worked for from 1973 through his retirement in about 1985. I did news and sports reporting, and I was sports editor and later news editor. I also did all the reporting for The Ludowici News, a small paper that the Press-Sentinel published in a nearby town.

Teacher — again — Jesup schools

After a few years in newspaper work, I went back to teaching. I taught at Jesup Junior High, Arthur Williams Middle School, and Wayne County High. Social studies, science and English at the middle schools, civics and advanced composition at the high school. After retiring from public school teaching in 2007, I taught GED and ESOL classes for a few years for the technical college.

Newspaper reporter — again — The Press-Sentinel

When a job at the paper opened up in about August of 2017, I moved back there on a part-time basis, sharing the week with another reporter. When things slowed down with the COVID-19 pandemic, I became the only reporter, working with the news editor to produce the paper each week. And that is where I am today, working three days a week plus event coverage as needed.

It’s been a wild ride.

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She’s growing up

(This is the third installment in the series The children. See The children… intro for an introduction… These posts are all in the category The children…I think I will try alternating between journal entries on June and Marvin and entries on the others, keeping the June/Marvin entries chronological and the others more random, time wise. We’ll see how that goes!)

January 20, 2019

A busy season, not kept up here… writing with my new real fountain pen that Taylor gave me for Christmas! So smooth! So much to catch up on with Anna June’s life! She’s so close to walking and talking it’s scary… can stand w/only a little help balancing, and she takes little steps if you hold her hand. She’s also eating a little solid food, with predictable results for diaper changes… She’s a big girl now!

Her quirky personality continues to delight us and continues to add new little elements. She’s been a little sick with a cold and cough the last couple of weeks, so has a hard time sleeping. I’ve been doing a lot of walking and rocking, and she’s slept many hours on my chest or cuddled up to me. It’s so sweet!

She’s also quite a brave and rambunctious kid! At the moment, she has a big bruise on her cheek and a knot on her head from falling — usually because she tries to do too many things at once, like standing up and reaching down to pick something up. But she’s a very happy kid too! She loves to laugh and seems to know what’s funny! She laughs when I tease her and tickle her tummy, or when I snort and chase her across the floor, and she always laughs like she’s really proud of herself when she pulls up on a chair.

She’s a real explorer, too! She bears close watching, this one. Especially when she’s playing on her own, as she’s tried to go out the back door, and she loves to push any door back and forth. She knows how to push toys back and forth too, and slide or throw them across the floor! She is almost eight months old now, so I guess she’s gonna be developing even faster in the next few months. Taylor and I are enjoying her so much, trying to be aware of how quickly these precious early months go by, and not miss a moment. I’m home five days a week, mostly, other than a few meetings or games, so I’m involved, deeply, day-to-day, and loving it, loving them, my sweet, sweet family.

January 27, 2019

June has been a wild-baby-wild baby tonight! Crawling all over Granny’s house, carrying a little pink sock. Up and down the steps from den to living room and back over and over, laughing and playing with me, so sweet! She pulls up on everything and is sitting in her highchair eating bits of food and bread, which she loves. And she loves to drink water from a glass. She’s close to holding it herself, too.

Her little cooings and babbling and spitting sounds are so sweet that I hardly want her to start talking! But that will be sweet too! We all enjoy her so much! Marvin is doing better with her, though still some issues.

I’ve not yet done anything re: connecting with the kids… I guess I’m afraid. But Liana’s birthday is coming soon…!

January 30, 2019

June’s energetic little forays into the world around her are so delightful! Tonight, upstairs, she was crawling about with a little tin of sleep balm in her hand, making her little “aaargghh” sound, chewing on it, throwing it across the floor, then crawling after it and banging it and rubbing it vigorously on the floor. And intermittently looking at us, smiling with delight over her new toy! She does love to go on stroller rides around the pond and watch the chickens peck about. She loves to be outside, even just to look out the window. It usually calms her if she’s upset or crying just to look out at the chickens or whatever might be in view. She gets excited whenever the back door is opened and loves crawling around in the grass.

Still trying to figure out what to say to Liana. I don’t understand why she won’t communicate with me, so it’s hard to know how to break through. I need to start with saying how important she is to me, and how I love her and miss her so much and want to be connected… or do I need to apologize abjectly for my stupid failure to confide in her from the beginning? My fear and weakness in not just being open about it all… I guess some combination of these two approaches… I think I don’t need to say too much, which is my tendency, but I definitely need to say something.

April 7, 2019

April already and things are much the same. I discussed it all with Therese last week, and she suggested I keep trying, meditate on what to say and how to say it…

June continues to be a darling child, 10 months old in a couple of days. She loves to walk around holding my hands. She just laughs and crows when she walks. We went to the park, and she walked, with help, all over, crawled a very long crawl across the lawn. She’s almost saying words at times and loves playing with Marvin. He’s gradually learning to share, thought it’s hard. Most things are better with Marvin, though some things are worse. His defiance is really hard for me to deal with. Bedtimes and mornings are a lot better usually – though sometimes mornings are hard.

I never hear from anyone, but I guess I rarely call anyone… I guess we’re all drifting into separate lives…

May 2, 2019

Anna June is totally walking! Not yet 11 months old, she can go all over, change directions, almost go up the step. She took the first few tentative steps from chair to couch at least two weeks ago, and walked from Granny’s chair to the kitchen counter, almost 10 steps, about five days ago. She’s been getting braver every day, and yesterday walked all the way across the big room. She is so proud of herself and so cute when she walks, with her wide stance and determined attitude!

She plays with Marvin like a big kid, and they have so much fun. He’s gradually learning how to be careful of her, though he still wants to grab her and has hurt her a few times. He’s doing much better at bedtime now, going to sleep on his own after a few books. And better, usually, in the mornings. He had a great fourth birthday — four kids to play with plus Uncle Stewart! (Whom he loves and who has the same birthday!) And Kay & Jaap, plus Taylor’s friends from Cherokee, Kiwi and Sarah, who brought her six-year old daughter.

Anna June continues to be such a sweet girl, hugging us and saying HI!, waving, saying Da-da and Mommie and Nanny — we think! She seems to understand so much of what we say that we think she’ll be talking soon. Well, she is talking, just not in words that we know! And she loves to sing!

Also clearly loves music! Any time I play my guitar, she immediately zooms over and wants to play and dance! She notices music on TV and dances to it, too.

She loves drinking water or tea and can hold the glass by herself to drink. Sometimes she spills, but she is really good at holding a glass and drinking. She also loves to go outside. She asks to go out, pointing and making sounds, and loves to play in the grass. She also loves to chase the chickens and push the gate back and forth. And eat dirt.

One of the cutest things about her is the variety of little expressions she makes. Hard to describe, but she’s been doing this little quick eyebrow raise for a long time, since very early on… plus she nods and shakes her head and makes animated expressions that are so endearing. She just came over to me and climbed up into my lap and read my little red notebook, tried to put on my glasses, looked for the pen, and smacked her lips when she found my empty cup. And was just generally charming!

She continues to find sleeping on top of me or in my lap her favorite nap-time place. But I haven’t had to walk her at night for several months now. She also plays well alone. She loves to put things into containers and then take them out again. She loves to play with Marvin’s trains, cars, trucks, etc. She tries to put the train cars together like she sees Marvin doing… So many things she does in imitation of what she sees us all doing that it’s hard to describe — or remember!

Stewart was here for the party, and I talked to John and Orion on O’s birthday, but otherwise have had no communication with anyone. Will try again to talk to Lucy and some of my siblings — and still trying to find a way back in with Liana. She is, according to her IG, starting up her herbal consulting practice. Hope to talk to her about it, as I’ve been making lots of tea, tinctures, infusions and salves for the past two years. Maybe she’ll talk to me about that…

May 16, 2019

Almost a full moon…. Life goes on. I was resentful of the lack of response to my comments on Li’s post about the consulting practice. I needed to confess that. Trying to understand. Therese suggested I work on a letter, even though it may never be delivered. Working on beginning that here. Maybe and un-ID’d blog post or something…

On the Anna June front, things are great! She is so energetic and loves to play and walks so well now! She walked all the way around the garden today! A long way! Curious and investigating everything! And so sweet and charming to everyone. She does love to eat, though she has no teeth yet.

June 8, 2019

Anna June is ONE tomorrow! She’s eating blueberries by the dozen tonight, just loves them! Taylor’s friend Irina just brought them to us, so we’re all enjoying them. Stewart, Jaap and Kay are to come here for the birthday party tomorrow, so we should mark the day well! Taylor’s making another amazing cake, a vanilla-sprinkles cake, and lasagne like we had when we brought her home. We looked for buttonbush flowers and mallow today, like the ones we found on the way to the birthing center, but no luck. Maybe later.

Am working on writing something to Liana. And thinking about doing a blog for the kids… a way to make it current. Maybe start with selected bits from this journal.

June 9, 2019

Anna June’s birthday! She’s a happy girl! Slept thru the night last night! She’s a beautiful and very special child. She’s been walking for more than a month now, can almost go up and down the steps without sitting down, and she can crawl all the way to the top of the stairs – which gives me no end of worry! She can also drink from a glass and eat with a fork — which she loves to do! Her manual dexterity is unparalleled She also has excellent balance and strength and can walk backwards! She seems to understand a lot of what we say and communicates her wants very well. She points and vocalizes with clear intent. And she does have very definite wants!

But she’s usually happy and lots of fun playing with Marvin. She knows just how to play with cars and trucks and trains and all his toys, complete with the sound effects. She can put the Duplo blocks together and tries to hook the train cars and tracks together.

I so so wish my two families could be one! I think John and Manna and kids would love these two, and Lucy and Li would be a good relationship for June and Marvin to have, and ultimately would be a positive thing for all of them. I don’t know how to make that happen, but I keep hoping for a way, at least an opening in the wall. I guess it will take time. It’s been two years now since things were pretty much over, and the kids began to be aware of that, but I guess that’s not long enough for them to adjust.

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My way-finding

The Pages section of this blog ( which show up as the numbered titles in the left panel) is mostly the narrative of my way-finding… the process, halting and flawed as it was, by which I came to finally find my way to acceptance of the Buddha’s teachings as the best fit for some kind of guidance for my very crazy life. This is a work in progress, and I’m about to begin work on the next chapter in the story, so I’m looking back over what I’ve written so far.

The story attempts to explain how someone with a very Baptist background – my grandfather and great grandfather were both Baptist ministers – came to be an avowed Buddhist. Along the way, I relate some of the crazier bits of my life journey and throw in some ideas about what a Buddhist meditation practice looks like.

Reading back over it I came across this section that gives something of the flavor of the narrative. I’ve been trying to be brutally honest and gain some perspective on the whole thing for myself… which I suppose is the actual reason for doing it in the first place:

I thought at the time that I was truly trying to make things work, but the perspective of the years, the experience on the cushion and in life since, have taught me the truth: I was completely consumed by, not just my passion, but by my addiction to self. I think that I must have convinced myself, – and thought I convinced others – using all the deep thinking and fancy words that I had come to rely on, that I was open and kind and compassionate and deeply concerned about deeply important things… and such bullshit on and on as I can hardly even bear to go back and read in my journal!

But the truth is, I was just very self-absorbed and ego-driven, very blind to the truths about myself, very alienated from life and other human beings, extremely ignorant about the causes of my own suffering and the degree to which I was inflicting suffering on all those around me.

In short, I was where most people are before allowing a little light in, but with an extra added dose of over-intellectualized self-righteousness!

I wish I could say that my arrival in Eugene – know locally as The Green Hole – precipitated a sea change in my attitudes and behaviors and I began a serious quest for Enlightenment.

Unfortunately, it took a while longer before light began to dawn in my life.

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Acceptance

What is the real point of a meditation practice? What is the purpose of any kind of activity intended to develop insight, liberation, enlightenment or just deeper understanding of life?

There are probably as many answers to those questions as there are “spiritual paths” or practice methodologies. But I’m trying to push through to some essentials, some underlying basics, some answer that is pragmatic and practical and doesn’t depend on path or method. My recent experience with things falling apart in my life–and how I dealt with that–have me thinking that a very basic thing that my efforts have done for me is to help me be prepared when things come crashing down.

After some years of varied meditation practice and other efforts at grappling with big questions, including working with a teacher on a regular basis, I have realized that there’s not some kind of ultimate goal, some kind of flashing magic experience that will open doors of understanding so deep that nothing disturbs me. It’s just a matter of relying on the experiences and teachings that have accumulated over these years to help me know how to deal with what comes up, whatever that is.

What this most recent crash, this falling apart, has shown me is that acceptance is the key element.

About a week into the crash, which left me alone with my thoughts, memories, tears and depression every day, I tried to sort out why, exactly, I felt so crazy. What I came up with more or less guided me through the next weeks of that ordeal, and though it wasn’t a whole lot of help in making it less painful, it did help me navigate it, survive it, and be open to resolving the issues that led to the crash when that became a possibility.

I learned a lot through it all, and I hope I can share some of that in this venue. The key realization of the breakthrough that helped me find a way forward–which in the beginning seemed like an impossibility–were understanding why I felt so crazy. I realized that most of my agony was because I was resisting and angry about the whole situation.

I was resisting what was happening because I didn’t want it to be happening, and I didn’t want to feel any of the feelings I was going through. And I was angry that it was happening and out of my control. Nothing I could do could make me feel any better about the situation.

It seemed as if I was just going to be sad and hopeless and pathetic for the rest of my life because I had become dependent on others for my emotional stability.

On that breakthrough evening, I realized that the only way to move on was to stop resisting. As much as I hated the thought of “giving up” on things getting better, I realized that I needed to move to–at least begin the movement toward–accepting that this was my life and that I was responsible for my own mental/emotional health and sanity. I had already moved past being angry at anyone else, but as I wrote in my journal that night, I needed to “truly get over being angry” and stop thinking that someone was gonna fix it.

What my Zen practice and other meditation gave me at this point was the understanding that I could embrace this sadness and pain and nauseating depression as just another emotional state no better nor worse than any other. Suddenly all those years of sitting on the cushion, walking and chanting and reading about how it’s all the same snapped into clear relief. Could I really accept that notion?

Well, I didn’t really want to. I wanted to think that if my suffering was big enough, I would be pitied, and it would stop. But I realized that I just needed to be the Zen I had tried to be all these years, to be in it fully and accept that maybe it just takes this much pain to push me through to that state of enlightened mind that could accept what is, “the present moment,” as the teachers say.

Not that suddenly it was all better. Far from it. I spent quite a few weeks more of up and down and “railing against God,” as the Christians say. My depression was still strong most of the time, and I was lost in hog wallows of self-pity a lot of the time. But things never got so bad I couldn’t function, and eventually I began to find a tolerable level of emotional calm.

In addition, I began to have some realizations that advanced my practice itself, as I bit by bit began to understand how to apply that notion of acceptance to what was going on in my life. I began to see that what had happened could be understood as a really big lesson in impermanence, that idea of anicca /emptiness/ shunyatta that I had studied and professed to be pursuing understanding of for all these years. A really big lesson. And the pain as energy for penetrating to the insight of what it means to say that it’s all impermanent.


I had to plow through a whole lot of guilt, self-blame, self-loathing and the deep sense that I just deserved the pain I was getting. Instant karma.

I began to really relate to the old Elmore James song that I had long loved, “Musta Done Somebody Wrong.” I’ve always loved the blues, and now they began to take on new meaning for me. Robert Johnson’s line about “like consumption, killing me by degrees,” was a favorite when I played guitar out on the front porch. But I was slowly working my way through it. As I look at my journal entries, I see gradual progress in understanding.

My actual sitting practice had somewhat declined in intensity over the past few years (that’s another story), but I began to sit daily and seriously again during this incident. In the beginning, I was using sitting as an escape from depression and loneliness. At some point, I had a breakthrough about that as well.

A few weeks into the period of despair, I began re-reading Pema Chodron’s When Things Fall Apart, which I had read many years ago and appreciated. Her analysis and advice was very helpful, and as I began to seriously meditate again, I realized that my approach to meditation was flawed.
I realized that, rather than using meditation as a distraction from the depression and pain, I needed to embrace the pain as a positive thing because it’s pushing me to get serious on the cushion. And to just sit and seriously be with the sitting as what this is all about. In my journal, I articulated it this way:

“…Approach the meditation as what I need to be doing, not as a distraction or escape from the pain and discomfort of the situation, and seeing that why all the other things—TV, music, even reading—just kinda make me feel sick and I don’t want to do them, is because I need to do the sitting and they are just a distraction from that.”

(Journal, June 7, 2021)

This realization opened me up to vast possibilities of increased understanding, compassion and tenderness.

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Revisiting “Between the World and Me”

And have brought humanity to the edge of

oblivion: because they think they are white.

–James Baldwin

[This was first posted in 2015, but the current social climate has persuaded me to re-post this, and perhaps some other pertinent posts, as a response to what I hear out there.]

In his 1984 essay “On Being ‘White’… and Other Lies,”* James Baldwin laid the creation of the racist society that threatens our very existence at the feet of those waves of European immigrants who left behind their separate national/cultural identities to come to “America” and become white.

In his new work Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates picks up where Baldwin left off, explicating the idea, describing in heart-breaking personal detail this deeply rooted cancer, and painting a richly textured vision of what it’s like growing up black in America today, the America of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. Written as a letter to his adolescent son, this book pierces to the heart of the moral bankruptcy that is being revealed in greater detail with each passing news cycle.

To say this book is profound, deep, pivotal is almost understatement. This book is a samurai sword cutting off the head of the monster that has arisen from the festering evil pit of “white supremacy”. It makes as clear as seems possible exactly how and why this situation has come to pass, exactly how horrendous it is, and lays out a vision of what just possibly could be a way through to a future for humanity.

Coates articulates so clearly the perspective, the experience, the human tragedy of Black America that it seems to me that anyone who reads this book would experience at least a crack in the armor of hate and apathy that perpetuates this evil situation. He allows one to get inside – as nearly as possible via the writers’ craft – how it feels, the fear and insecurity, the anger and loathing that permeate our streets. With the added dimension of the father’s deep sadness and fear for his son, that most deeply human quality of love and instinct for protection, he buries his message deep in the heart.

Tony Morrison says this book is “required reading” and that Coates fills the intellectual void left when Baldwin died nearly 30 years ago. Maybe I’m overly optimistic, but I believe it could open the hearts and minds of even the most mean-spirited, small-minded, low-life racists and haters, and if it could truly become required reading for our next generation, we might have a chance.

As you feel Coates’ love for his child, this so-familiar human emotion, his deep humanity comes through, and you understand in this deeply visceral way that his color, his appearance, his “race” is such a small and superficial aspect of who he is that one can only see, however dimly, what an absurd notion is “race.”

But this book goes far beyond debunking racism, far beyond a simple diatribe on the evils of racist white society. It provides a deeply honest inquiry into what it takes for one man to be free, a lyric anthem to the meaning of the struggle, and a truly profound vision of humanity at its heart.

Coates also makes it clear that the black people of America are not the sole victims of the flawed vision of life, which he calls The Dream, but that this habit of thought, this conception of the human role on the earth is creating a violent, authoritarian nightmare that is laying waste the people of the earth and the Earth itself.

“The mettle that it takes to look away from the horror of our prison system, from police forces transformed into armies, from the long war against the black body, is not forged overnight. This is the practiced habit of jabbing out one’s eyes and forgetting the work of one’s hands.” [p. 98]

“The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting to which, likely to the end of our days, we must invariably return.”[p. 111]

“Once, the Dream’s parameters were caged by technology and by the limits of horsepower and wind. But the Dreamers have improved themselves, and the damming of seas for voltage, the extraction of coal, the transmuting of oil into food, have enabled an expansion in plunder with no known precedent. And this revolution has freed the Dreamers to plunder not just the bodies of human beings but the body of the Earth itself.” [p. 150]

Coates’ vision for a transcendent future is not an overly hopeful one. But it likely is the best we have. “I do not believe we can stop them,” he says of The Dreamers, the “white” power elite who are destroying black people and the world. He goes on, speaking to his son, Samori, who is named for the late 19th century Guinean who resisted the French colonial powers:

“…because they must ultimately stop themselves. And still I urge you to struggle. Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom…. But do not struggle for the Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all. The Dream is the same habit that endangers the planet, the same habit that sees our bodies stowed away in prisons and ghettos.”

If we who call ourselves white can step off this stage, shed this absurd notion of whiteness, abandon the destructive pursuits of the ill-conceived ‘dream’, and learn to struggle, to find the meaning in the struggle alongside those who have suffered so much and know its lessons, then perhaps there’s some light at the end of that long dark tunnel we’ve made. Perhaps we’ll find our way together to a new story that includes everyone and everything.

[*For a PDF of Baldwin’s essay, visit Collective Liberation]

Click to access Baldwin_On_Being_White.pdf

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A Powerful Woman Speaks Truth

The essay “Women Policing Women: the Prison of Belief” is a very powerful, clear, and truthful statement addressing the issue of women who oppose feminist ideas and who shame independent women. I really love the analogy to religion — if something questions one’s beliefs, the human tendency is to “double-down” and trash whatever it is that brings up the question rather than look honestly at one’s own belief and sort through to the truth.

That’s what Etomi says is happening when women criticize other women for being “too independent” or expressing any kind of feminist ideas. Patriarchy is first of all a belief system, a “religion” of sorts, especially when it gets entwined with fundamentalism in various religions. Questioning it then becomes questioning the whole religious foundation of someone’s life. For most people, it’s just too hard to go through the analysis and truth-seeking required to come out on the other side of that, so they just harden their positions with attacks on others who differ.

It is a very worthwhile essay, though a bit long, and I recommend it highly to anyone who would maintain a life of integrity.

Women Policing Women — by Ozzy Etomi on Medium, from Athena Speaks.