Not Getting a Hold on Me

I tell people that i am from Wisconsin, even though I only lived there two years. My students ask me where I am from and I tell them San Juan and they feel as if it is an evasion or that I refuse to understand the questions. I have lived in Puerto Rico or it has been my official residence since 1985. But my family has lived here since 1966 and my parents and two of my five sisters still live here. It makes it simpler than a long explanation. If someone asks me where I grew up, then I tell them Iowa, but I have not been in Iowa, other than to visit one of my sister who lives there and a summer job in 1970, since 1966. These questions become meaningless. My students are right in asking me where I am from, since I am not from Puerto Rico, but I do not feel like the label of American really defines anyone very well. I have also been upset by comments like, "Oh, that's because you are an American."
I don't deny being an American and it also bothers me a bit when people patronizingly tell me that I am not like an American. That term describes me about as well as it describes anyone else. A Danish friend of mine once told me that some of her office mates were taking a trip and wanted to meet real Americans. When she offered me, whom she had talked about, they told her that they wanted to meet real Americans, or in other words, Americans closer to a stereotype.
And I live in a country that cannot really define itself, which for me is fine, but spends a lot of energy on boosterism, ignoring chaos and social problems or blaming them on national status. Every morning when I wake up I listen to a jazz station on the university station until 6:00 a.m. and then a program comes on that plays songs like, "I would be Puerto Rican, even if I was born on the moon." Of course, such an exaggeration reflects insecurity and in-your-face nationalism more than true feelings.
Saying I'm an American can also unleash a condescending attitude about the limits of my knowledge, since everyone in the "New World" is an American. This was perhaps some of the first politically correct speech. I just ignore them or explain that they themselves probably do not go through all the trouble of saying "Estado Unidedense." All those other countries have titles. A Mexican is not 'un republica de Mexicano."
All titles or descriptives are vague and lead to assumptions. Despite how television and mass culture has made our knowledge more manufactured and our ideas less individual, there is still a lot that exists beyond these lines. What might be common, what Freud discussed in Civilization and its Discontent is no doubt the engine for what we all do, but it does not determine the shape or content.
And I admit that my culture has determined a lot of what I am and that I can understand more readily someone from my generation who is American. Still, my mind is full of places and cultures and lives beyond my American self. Those who have only American lives have so many, understand uniquely their position in ther social setting, that they cannot be pegged either. Yet we live in fear of being different and want a word like American or Texan or Puerto Rican to say so much about us. We build ourselves throughout our lives and if we remain satisfied with these nationalistic or regionalistic or boosteristic titles, then we will know even less of who we are.

My Father

Until two weeks ago my father was a strong 88-year-old who could spend eight hours in his garden planting potatoes and onions, tilling, riding the mower. But he had stopped eating much because his esophagus had shrunk because of acid reflux. I always remember my father's car had various plastic bottles full of pastel Tums. Apparently he took them all the time. So when my father came down with pneumonia, and then a heart attack and stroke, it was in part to the fact that the food was not going down his esophagus, but coming up again. When this happened, part of it lodged in his trachea.
Perhaps my father could have avoided all of this if he had seen a doctor. But my fahter prided himself on not taking any medicine. When he had his hip replaced at 86 and they asked him to write down all of his medications, he proudly left it blank and when they insisted that he write them all down, he explained that he took nothing. The same was true when he had a pacemaker put in because his pulse was so low and his heart would occasionally miss a few beats. In both cases, he claimed to feel not different after these "improvements" to his body.
My father was a product of the eastern Montana dust plains. Both of his parents came from green watery areas of Scandinavia. His father's home in Sweden had been along Lagen, a broad river-like body of water and his mother had grown up in Denmark, not far from Rys, which was the largest fresh water body of water in Denmark. They planted trees in their yard that grew in the wet years and died in the dry years, a cycle that has perhaps occurred for thousands of years.
Being born in 1920, my father was nine years old when the depression began officially in 1929, but it had begun for farmers before that. My father's parents were in bad shape until the late 40s when my father had come home from teaching each summer to manage the farm and get them out of debt. So my father never threw anything away, including food that had turned some other color. There was always part that could be saved. And when he saw a deal he stocked up. All of his life he has been preparing for the next disaster, trying to become self-sufficient, but also becoming a low-scale consumer. He and my mother went on canning food and shopping for bargains for six children and themselves, long after the six children were gone. They filled their house with clothes from stores that went out of business as the bigger stores took over and from the bigger stores when they went bankrupt. Each summer my father had a huge garden and freezer after freezer filled with frozen apple sauce, blueberries, cauliflower, peas, corn, string beans, mashed potatoes: all of his garden. The root cellar added more jars of tomatoes or spaghetti sauce until there were several hundred jars and my sisters who lived nearby took jars, but could never consume as much as he produced. There are still jars of tomatoes from ten years ago or more that I open up. The seal is still tight. The jars smell of the dusty potatoes and onions that overwinter and often must be thrown out in the spring.
It is as if my father has built his life as a storehouse of provisions, enough for the next life and perhaps the life after that, like ancient burial sites where the dead are given food and provisions for the journey.
My father was cautious about not being poor. Both his parents had been poor. His mother's mother, mormor in Danish, had been the servant girl who married the drunken younger son of the owner of a small farm and with him had ten children. They sold their small farm and moved to the United States, where according to the story, my great-grandmother Jensinde refused to do the farmwork anymore. In America, the man did the farmwork. My father's father, farfar, had a gambling problem and lost the farm in Sweden. Some of his children had already immigrated and his daughter Jenny saved up her money as a housekeeper in Chicago to send for her indigent family. My grandfather Walfred was one of them. The first winter in Chicago, the family legend goes, they bought a large sack of beans and survived on beans, before moving on to North Dakota.
From my grandmother, I gathered that they worked hard to be middle class. My father told me that he had had bed bugs, but told me to tell no one. Obviously he was afraid of being labeled as poor. When we once visited Montana, my sister played with the Mexican migrant children on the farm of one of my father's cousins, and my grandmother became worried about lice and made all of them shower and be combed carefully. My father also told me the family secret when he was 85. My grandfather had been a religious fanatic and had been so insistent on converting his neighbors, that they had him committed to a mentil institution. He proved to be so helpful and benign that they let him go after a while. When he married my grandmother, they were both beyond the prime age for marrying, my grandmother stipulated that the children would be raised in the Lutheran Church and not in a pentecostal church. My father kept this from everyone for all those years. He often spoke of being shy, even though as a Lutheran minister, he was suppsed to speak and have authority and this persona fit him perfectly. He did not have to be himself. He did not speak as himself but as a representative of the church and God. Who he was, the poor farm boy who was good at school, but not very sociable no longer had to risk embarassment.
There is a long list of stories that little by little have come out. My father wet his pants at school. He had a hernia after running into a post in town and the doctor he went to gave him a large truss that he wore for years, even though it was probably unnecessary. It was a constant embarrassment. His sister's teased him about a very poor girl named Bona Dea Parker, who had once said to him in front of my aunts, "Oh Gene, didn't we have a fun time in school." His grandmother Jensinde had dropsy and supposedly hops tea was good for dropsy so he was sent to the store to buy hops. The grocer and the other people in the store joked about how the teatotalers were buying hops, insinuating that they were hypocrites and drank secretly.
My father was also a mommie's boy. His mother Inga bought him books about a boy called "Sunny Boy" and that became my father's nickname. Sunny Boy was always positive and good. He was as one-dimensional as possible and my father kept the books until my sister's took them as adornments for their bookcases. They were for boys who would later read Horatio Algers.
Of course, my father's life and personality is much more complicated than this. He surprised me many times with his actions that contradicted his stern Christian background. He was raised in a Lutheran group that was called the Inner-Mission in Denmark, because it saw its purpose as reforming the Danish church that was too indulgent. It was against playing cards, dancing, and movies when they finally arrived. It took my father 20 years to move away from these ideas, so when I was the rebellious teenager, he was not shocked, or if he was, he did not let me know.
The problem with this blog is that I will always feel like I have not done him credit, not shown enough of his weaknesses, the complexity of his background, that I do not really understand. Who can know the Great Depression, the sense of family when there is no one else around for a mile or two, the disappointments of droughts, killing the livestock because there is no food or water, unless you have gone through it.
But I want to write about this again, but perhaps not as a blog.

My Life in Red

Occasionally it happens. I am walking up the hill and turn a corner to confront the red azalea in bloom and I enter the world of color. The flowers are close and spaced in a way that gives a sense of depth and the air turn red. I walk back and move in again to the color feeling that my eyes have scraped the color out of the air and it has come to rest somewhere within me.
It can also be the green light through bamboo and I will stop to feel the cool liquid breeze, the moving waves of light, the whining of a thick bamboo stalk gnashing againt another, the sudden rustle of leaves chattering above me, and the smell of damp mud. The bamboo and green light I associate with treks up to the Espiritu Santo River, the Holy Ghost River, with two large dogs panting yards in front of me, but I have felt it walking down into the gully of a creek and instead of bamboo straining out all light exist for green, rain forest palms are doing it.
The sense of these moments and sensations can seldom be shared. You can note the green light and point it out, but then it somehow has been spoken and shared and is less real once it is in the world. It has moved from feeling to consensus.
The sense is fragile. If you focus too long on moving into the red, gathering it in with your eyes, you spoil the moment. It should remain brief. Later I can remember the feeling if not the moment of suddenly being in red.
I also find that much that fascinates me (horned spiders, a large red centipede dead in the mud, the buds of an orchid, counting time and remembering events such as deaths by the blooming of a flower, finding a twig is actually a bug) will only impose the burden of a polite response on someone else when I tell about it. Being there is everything and is momentary. Memory is our great comfort.

A World Never Quite Finished

As children it seems magical, perhaps bad magic, that so many people come and then disappear from our lives. Moving as a child means that many people disappear. It is like being moved from one enchantment to another without ever figuring out the magic words or curses. It creates a huge gulf of confusion, a sudden disappearance of sense and meaning, and perhaps leads to the creation of a fantasy world that is more consistent, more maleable than the real world. It makes us all creators, artists.
I don't know what makes a person want to paint or write or dance, other than to entertain others (a risky business and hard to do)or to create a world that is understood. A few find a comfortable life through art, but most don't. As a hobby, we never completely master the skills needed.
The process, sometimes struggle, pays off with meaning or with the state where what one is doing seems to call upon another magic, almost out of time. I am using writing as an example. A distant cousin of mine whom I love very much (Lars Ly) always has five or six paintings in his studio. He moves between them, perhaps waiting for one of them to capture him. And when a painting is done is instinctual in the sense that there is no definition.
I also have a friend who complains about all she has given up to be a writer and threatens occasionally to stop. She just published a CD of her reading essays about what it was like to be a Cuban refugee dumped into the upper Midwest. Her name is Marisella Veiga and the CD is called Square Watermelons. This is a plug. I listened to it and it is amusing, relaxing (the soft voice) and profound.
I myself have had the fear, probably irrational, that at the point where I have a great book of poetry or an appreciative editor for a novel, that those genres will no longer be read. I will be obsolete. Blogs give me that feeling. And I guess I miss the fence between myself and the world that a book provides. It has an audience, but that audience is only fictionalized in the mind of the author and becomes a bit more real when he or she meets a reader. But the book is not me, it is something I made. Blogs seem to insist that this is me.
Of course everything we do creates identity. The work of blogging is creating identity. This is who I am and your reactions tell me who you think I am. Since identity is social, both processes are necessary. I still am a bit leary of the blog. And disappointed with everything about the writing life, except writing itself.

The Death of Irene

It seems to me that the feelings, actions, and script for death is set. We know how we should feel and yet the experience is so foreign and mysterious that for me it is hard to feel quite the way I should. I remember as a child a neighbor four or five houses up the street died, a fairly young unmarried woman. My father gave me her Bible and I was afraid of opening it up, of letting whatever she had that was guarded in the closed pages attack me. Death and germs were closely intertwined in my childhood, perhaps because of the polio scare when I was a child.
What has most bothered me, though, is the numbness I often feel when someone dies. After I cry for a few minutes (the only time I have cried uncontrollably at a death was when Turron, my dog, died of old age a few minutes after he had run up to me.), I have to work to make the moment meaningful, trying to recreate the life of the person who died. Vaguely I am aware that there will be a sense of missing pieces, stories that can be told but not shared, and the sense that a door has been shut in my face. But this is not the script that I am supposed to follow.
I have visited the dying. My friend Ove, whom I lived with for a year and have regretted leaving on and off for most of my life, wanted to celebrate his 50th birthday before he died. When the nurses and doctors told him that he was too sick, he wept so uncontrollably, that they shot him up with cortosone and he walked around his house, the one he had been born in and returned to, dressed in a black suit that was now too big for him, shaking hands of his farmer relatives, who may have slipped off to wash their hands. The next day he was back in the hospital in serious shape and when I went to say goodbye to him, he clasped me so hard that I had the bizarre idea that he was taking me with. And unexplainably, I had an erection.
What do you say for last words? "Vi ses?" We'll see each other. Perhaps he knew that the embrace was the only way to part. And how did he feel when I rushed off to catch a train?
My aunt had managed an architectural firm as their executive secretary. One of the partners in the firm had designed her a marvellous house. It was simplicity and elegance, built on a small plot of woods with a swampy finger of a lake behind the house. The oak trees grew up through the large balcony and the whole back of the house was glass, except for the kitchen. She had a wild flower garden in front.
And now she was in the dreary confines of a nursing home where she looked out onto a golf course across the road. At least there was that. Some of her things were in the room, but much of it was too big for the space and many other things had already been picked over as she passed from her house with her husband to the "elderly village," to separate rooms for her and her husband Frank in the "elderly village's" nursing home, to widowhood at 90 and another move to a nursing home without many pretensions.
She lost her ability for short term memory and drifted into the past as if it were the present, worrying about her mother and father, asking my father if he had seen them. But she always recognized my voice and could remember that I was coming home. I seemed to inhabit a small part of her mind that could maintain a connection with the present.
Seldom am I around when the people I love die. After seeing her for a five days, I had to go to a conference for three days and on the second day after I left she died. Unlike my sisters and father, I was not part of her death vigil. It was my sister Barbara who was with her and noticed that she was dead. At the end of the journey, this final step was small. A little difficulty breathing and then it (a ninety year stretch across most of one century and a small part of another) was over.
I had promised to write something and wrote on my way back on the plane from San Francisco to Minneapolis in a notebook I purchased after I learned that Irene had died. I wrote in Danish which seems to me often to be my own private language since I only use it a few times a month on the phone with a friend who is agoraphobic. But the pages of the notebook were not really bound and before I finished the second page, the first page had already begun to hang from about a half inch that still connected it to the notebook. What I had written had tried to work itself up into an emotion, but instead had bounced and wandered, more focused on the trip out where I had seen an incredible view from the window, the Missouri winding harshly through the furry winter hills blown free of snow, watersheds, the Grand Tetons, Lake Tahoe and finally the barren hills around San Francisco. While I tried to force myself into a more appropriate mood, I remembered the line in Tristam Shandy where the speaker compares his father at his brother's death to Cicero at the death of his daughter. They both had been heartbroken until they realized the great opportunity for writing. The more I tried to write in the notebook, the more I realized that I was trying to fit the proper lugubrious mood.
There seemed to be something else missing from my aunt's death. Usually when someone dies, you hear a story that may develop in repetition which eventually seems to be the meaning of the death. It could be final word, some irony, such as the man who dies while caring for his demented incapacitated wife. With my aunt's death there was no story. She had been in pain, she was on opiates, and a few weeks after the doctor's prediction, she stopped breathing. My sister said that she waited to see me before she died and I believe they wanted that to be my story about her death.
My father, as a Christian, refused to accept condolences. "Why should I be sad? Why should you say you are sorry?" After a while I saw it as a little homily in action or a reaction that he hoped could be used as an example in a sermon. I could almost hear him using it himself. My grandmother at the death of her last sibling was inconsolable. That large family that had emigrated from Jutland and lived first in Minnesota, then North Dakota and finally spread out along the border between Montana and North Dakota, no longer existed. I saw in my mind a creation, since by the time I saw the family farm there was running water and the renters had begun to collect old cars in the yard, including a smashed up one in which a daughter had died and the father became lame. My father had pointed out in the large photograph of the farm house where windmill had been painted in. The windmill I had seen in that picture had had a special meaning for me since my aunt had lost her thumb in the gears of a windmill and then I thought that perhaps that was why it had to be painted in. But my father did not have my grandmother's sense of being abandoned. If he did, he did not show it.
The night before the funeral, one of my sisters had gone through all of my aunt's photographs. I took a wood bound photo album that I had once shown my aunt after I found it in a box in our garage. I had planned on keeping it, but she suddenly said that she wanted it. Not understanding, I had said that she could keep the pictures and then she had told me no, she wanted it. I was surprised at the time because I saw my aunt as incredibly unsentimental and a bit ashamed of the whole western fantasy. This was somewhat born out when many of her close friends were unaware that she had been born on the treeless plains of Eastern Montana. The album reminded me that I had known very little about my aunt's life. I also took some pictures of flowers in my garden that I had sent her in the last months of her life. For an unknown reason, they remind me more of her than the album or the vases or the pottery or needlework she gave me.
These articles are emblems of my aunt. They are not like her necessarily. My image of her as sophisticated, and in the context of most of the people I grew up with she was very sophisticated, was always being contradicted in small ways. Her husband was not especially sophisticated. He was from a Yugoslavian immigrant family that lived on the iron range and worked in the mines. He was on a par with my farm relatives and in many ways more sophisticated than my father, who never said ain't but believed that Christianity was a reformation of Islam until I proved to him that Mohammed had been born in the 7th century. I remember my aunt once asking to keep a tip tray with a cursi little Mexican girl on it because she liked it so much. The album was beautiful, but it seemed too crude, too culturely infused with hyped messages to fit with my image of my aunt. I saw my aunt as the architect saw her when he designed her house.
And how do I fit into this death and life situation. Not very well, I would say. I still feel that I have all the wrong reactions and am frustrated because I cannot react the way I should. I feel a bit closer to my aunt after writing this, perhaps more than the last few years of her life where she became a gypsy being moved from home to home. She and Frank also removed themselves from the context that I had used to feel I knew them and perhaps even care for them, the symphony, the theater, the events, the fine little restaurant on a shady street in south Minneapolis. Those memories and feelings are easier to access now that the sterile little apartments are no longer a barrier between me and my better memories of Irene. It is hard to admit since it seems to make me even less of the proper mourner, but her death has liberated me from thinking of her frail, hopeless, bored, forgetful and allowed me to remember her as the fabulous avant garde cook, the woman in charge of a bustling office, the beautiful clothes, and at times the hysterical laughter. And also, now I can look back at those pictures when she was in her twenties and see that she was a rebel, both in her behavior and thought, the country school teacher who lived far enough away from her pietistic Great Depression, Great Plains parents and brother to have lovers, smoke cigarettes, drink, play cards, dance and vote democrat. But then, the pictures never show more than the thinnest slice of time and the Irene I mourn in my way, sadly enough, I hardly knew.