It's History

One of my old friends is researching in History on the campus unrest of the early seventies, which curiously enough was when we were in high school together, and many of us were faculty brats. My dad was actually one of those radical professors who was suspended from classes, for supposedly making trouble, and then there was a big hoo-hah in court and a faculty committee investigation, where he and three others (the Four) were eventually exonerated. Of course the students were quite capable of making trouble without any help from the faculty at all.

I haven't seen or talked to my dad George in some years, since my brother was here briefly a while back and we all had lunch. I suggested to my friend the Historian that she is probably better off contacting him very professional-like, rather than as an old friend of mine, because I have no clue how he is doing except what I hear from my friend Barb, who is the Significant Other of one of the other Four, and they see each other socially from time to time. Over the years I have come to understand that his divorce from my mother was acrimonious, to say the least, which would explain why he prefers no reminders of that part of his life. I saw him occasionally in my twenties when I was visiting my Cuban family across the street, but since then our contacts have been scarcer; and he has never met my husband or son.

But this all got me thinking, so a couple days ago I tried phoning. I was on my walk, thinkin about all this stuff, and I had the number on my cellphone (having thought about this before) and tried it. Walked along nearly to the zoo letting it ring. No answer.

Then I tried Directory Assistance -- first time I have done that with the cellphone, but finally the 411 number has sunk into the aged little grey cells. I had been phoning the wrong number. His listed number is d'oh! a number I learned in college, and obviously misplaced. The old high school home phone number is apparently stuck in my memory for the duration; I wonder how I could get dibs on it, a very old number from a small town exchange like Whitewater. Then maybe place a call to, like, 1970.

No answer at that number either. I had time to think about what I'd say if I got an answering machine. No problem with what I'd say if I got HIM, how is he doing? etc but heaven forbid I should sound like an idiot on an answering machine. The people at Directory Assistance were surprisingly easy to get information from -- at least I have the address right.

This reminds me I have some striking black and white photos of his house when it was newly risen from the dirt of the cornfield, and all moderne white plastic furniture. I did actually stay with him briefly back then, when I was in town, from time to time, and my BFF and I took these photos. How did we get in?? No don't tell me... the key was... under the mat?

We's arteests

I live for my fanmail. I write a lot of stuff for very limited distribution and don't care who reads it. That is the nature and magic of writing. All you gotta do to join is to read it.If I had ever worked out how to make a living at writing, or someone had already invented that wheel and just told me about it, maybe I would be doing that. Teaching is the only day job most artists can muster that directly relates; marketing one's work is another whole study; and the competition of academia is not always nurturing to some artists. Arteests. Some of the best poets I know are cab drivers, or housewives, or run for mayor.

Book arts (single handwrit copies) is pretty much where I live, in a professional sense. "Spoken words fly away, but the written word remains." Notebooks, have I got notebooks. Catherine kept them for me in an Annie Green Springs box in her attic when I moved to Miami, but now I have got them in a file cabinet. One folder of correspondence is still labeled "High School Madness." And a bookcase, or twelve.

Doris Lessing in The Golden Notebook had her protagonist's life divided into separate colored notebooks until like separate personalities they were all integrated into The Golden Notebook. But I digress.

I was going to write a novel. Before I was so rudely interrupted. But then there was too much material. It was going to be about how some kids tried to help each other grow up.

A time passed, and now it seems, everybody is having these dreams. (Bob Dylan said that, in "Talking World War Three Blues". Also:) I'll let you be in my dream, if I can be in yours. I like movies where the line between fantasy and reality is a teensy bit smudged. Everyone has their own version. That's postmodernism.

The last gift of time

Lately I am in constant email correspondence with a crowd of these old friends from high school, The Group. Our Gang. It is a great pleasure to share friendship over such a very long time. It is a very present joy to find oneself in some quarters liked and esteemed, however improbable that may still strike some of us. Let us not let pleasant memories rob us of attention to where we are now. Our journeys between then and now are wandering roads. One has quite enough of bringing new people up to speed. It is an unusual privilege to bring old friends up to speed, with whom one has shared experiences half a lifetime past.

On my walk yesterday I was thinking that perhaps for all of us those times were brighter in memory than in experience. For some of us it was particularly dark, but nostalgia flattens the shadows. Memory is a tricksy hobbit.

Janet still asks me (sometimes just in my head) Why? why hold on to all that load of memory? and sometimes I think well, it's useful. Partly useful. Partly useful, mostly dead? But the useful part cannot be separated from the difficult painful part.

I've been reading Carolyn Heilbrun's The Last Gift of Time; Life Beyond Sixty (just studying up in advance ya know) and she describes being an old person who is peculiarly unafflicted with memory. I am just getting on to a funnier chapter in which she points out, not how boring old people's memories are to young people (and sometimes to other old people, she has already done that), but how young people are better sources of information than they are audiences. Like when you need advice on using your cellphone, or good music that isn't forty years old. Or reminding. Whatever.

Scarred for life?

Renewed contact with more of my friends from high school has got a lot of old content surfacing, even more than before.

I only attended two years of Whitewater High School, then moved to San Diego, and if the truth be known, got into college the next year on the strength of excellent test scores and some very credible looking transcript forms that my free school handed out to be filled in, just before it was taken over and totally restructured by a reputable educator who just happened to be living at our house -- who took much better care of my brother's education thereafter. If you put a big gold notary sticker on one of those pre-printed diploma things and get a couple people to sign, it looks just like you graduated with all pomp and circumstance. But I never have.

First I tried the gargantuan Crawford high school in San Diego, which worked for about a month. And then there was the free school, Abraxas, still operating under the same new management in Poway. It had totalled something like fifteen different schools for me by that point. I had to get a B.S. in Elementary Education to figure it all out. There wasn't any Science to it at all.

Not that a liberal education isn't a very fine thing indeed. The lack of graduation robes and tassel has surely scarred me for life!