[Above photo: Lengthening shadows in the Western Cemetery. My photos shall soon improve as I have a new, very capable camera, mine having died.]
26 December 2021
The power of prayer. Or, at least, of wishing. We had another top-dressing of snow yesterday afternoon and last night. Even though it will likely melt in the mid-30’s temperatures of the next few days, it is glorious. And, despite cleaning off my car and again shoveling my back and front steps, my sidewalk, and the same for my landlady who is in Canada with her honey, I continue to love it.
Driving for 45 minutes through snowfall last night on the way to my brother’s home in Brunswick, I re-experienced the thrill of driving into the Rockies in winter as a kid. Like the time we tried to pass a sluggard and slid into the ditch, rocking the stick shift between first and reverse trying to escape its hold, until we dropped the transmission. That was a bad time but I don’t recall our mother giving us hell for it. We coasted downhill to the Ford dealership in Idaho Springs where we left it for repair.
Then, driving with friends in my own car, a 1936 Ford V-8 with a leather rooftop, a continental tire, and a crank-opening windshield, to Winter Park for a day of skiing. The tires, of course, were bald and the mechanical brakes, which required constant beneath-the-car adjustment, made us swerve right or left when applied. We got up and down safely, despite an abundance of snow on the road and others spinning about.
When I reached my destination last night I was warmly welcomed and fed a glorious meal. By mutual agreement we don’t talk politics since we three see the world, and its alterations, very differently. We talked and talked and I learned more of my sister-in-law’s family history, as well as some of my own. My brother was the executor of my mother’s will and, in sorting her belongings, he retrieved a large plastic bin filled with letters and photos. We looked at only a few last night but they stunned me, recalling times both good and painful.
Among the more memorable were photos of my paternal grandfather, who I never knew. He had a 6th grade education but went to night school to become a CPA. He and his family lived in Denver and he delivered the payroll by buckboard to the Guggenheim mines in Colorado. The discovery in Leadville of high grade silver-lead ore formed the basis of the Guggenheim mining fortune, which they then developed globally. My grandfather, Judd Stewart, impressed the Guggenheims (either Meyer or his son, Daniel) and he was hired as one of their “personal accountants”, moving his family to Plainfield, NJ.
In the course of his employment with them (dying at 55yo of a coronary occlusion), he amassed a considerable fortune, which was left to his wife and 3 sons. No matter that, according to family legend, he and his wife didn’t talk to each other for 10 years—“Roger, would you ask your mother to please pass the gravy?” All the money paid for the boys to attend Cornell and when my father met my mother in medical school, he had a 41foot yawl, “Playmate”, a Chrysler touring car, a closet full of Saville Row suits, and a mistress in an apartment in Manhattan. With the crash of 1929, all of the above, including all the money, vanished. Except the suits. The mistress, naturally, was gone before.
This is a long digression as a preface to my discovery of numerous photos of Judd that I have never seen. In every one he looks tight, angry, vain, and controlling. No wonder Grandmother didn’t want to talk with him—or sleep with him, as they had separate bedrooms. I wondered briefly if writing this was a betrayal, airing the family laundry. I am of the belief that we have a desperate need to learn about relationships from any and all sources and if that includes from the dead, so be it. And marital misery is so universal as to be prosaic, not shocking. But I was shocked at how strongly I reacted to the visages of this unhappy, driven ancestor.
Switching gears, as I was walking through the Reiche School playground across the street from my apartment, heading toward Spring Street and the Western Cemetery, I felt that oceanic fullness: all the little kids, of all hues and speaking a rainbow of languages, busy running about, buzzing like bees, Brownian movement. I felt their immense potential, as we all must if we attend them, since they are tomorrow and my sun is gradually setting.
I am interested in becoming more familiar with this feeling of simple joy, almost a breathlessness. When I have attempted to understand the religious beliefs of others, my thoughts fall into the common categories of hope (especially for those in hopeless situations}; comfort (in familiar rituals); reassurance (in times of fear and darkness); and in the appeal of awe and grandeur (being affiliated with it). What I haven’t really considered is the experiences of oceanic fullness.
I’ve had these, commonly as a child, in nature and when hearing a great piece of classical music. And on seeing beautiful buildings. Also, in the intoxication of falling in love. I was surprised, as a young man, to realize that I held a view of my childhood as very priviledged, feeling I’d been lucky. There is luck in being born a white male to employed, educated parents in the US in 1940. But it puzzled me that my mother’s recurrent mental illness, my father’s death when I was 9yo, their arguments, her lability and suicidal behaviors, and our frequent moves didn’t temper my sense of good fortune.
It relates to two things, I believe. One, the bad stuff was so painful to me that I banished it from my mind. And, secondly, I did have many, many experiences of a wonderful limitlessness and connectedness which colored brightly my childhood memories. Awakening before anyone and running to the dock, not a breath of wind on the water, to jump into a rowboat and move out into the beauty of Lake Washington at sunrise. Or, to be among the first at the top of the ski lift, looking down at unbroken powder snow. Or, coming over a rise in the Sierras to see a crystalline lake and trout surfacing. My list of settings is as limitless as the feelings they induce in me. I’d guess that many people who experience (I’d say,”Imagine”.) oneness with a god have a similar feeling of love and limitlessness. It’s a powerful motivator to seek the same again, I’ve found.
I recommend to you an article— https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/20/rightwingers-us-social-change-coming — by Rebecca Solnit, an essayist of the moment, suggesting that the powerful river flowing through our history towards fairness, inclusion, and equality for all humans has an unstoppable flow. And that GOP attempts to dam it are bound, eventually, to fail; change is coming and it is frightening or abhorrent to some but that won’t halt its current. “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. told us. We may resist Trump, as well we should, but he—they—are actually the resistance. One is a skirmish, the other is the war.
Also, watching Amy Jo Hutchinson testifying before Congress about the lives of the impoverished “doing the best they know how” in West Virginia and elsewhere is powerful and brings their plight home. I’ve watched it 3 times. Scroll down the page at https://www.rattlethewindows.com/ to see it.
I’m off for a snowy walk.
A Psychiatrist in Myanmar 