Nasus gelida

[Above photo: An amaryllis in front of a painting of Bagan, representing the old, cruel royal kingdom. Not so different from the current military dictatorship.]

16 January 2022

Lord, the trouble with writing a blog, or ageing, begins when you recognize you are repeating yourself! I told the story of ski racing in Colorado twice. I generally read the previous post or two before beginning to write. Well, I suppose you can just skip over repetitions. Or maybe you are getting old enough you don’t notice.

Portland was built with bricks. In the port area, there are many old brick buildings. Up a few streets in Downtown, are many more, often of a quite lovely design—-probably banks or something prosperous. The large homes here are often of brick. It isn’t earthquake country, clearly. Which brings me to the sidewalks. You guessed it, brick. Get a little moisture from rain or snowmelt, let it freeze and, voila, all of Portland is a big skating rink. I tend to walk in the streets when the sidewalks are really treacherous.

I went for a walk yesterday, 9 degrees but with the wind chill factored, -8. I was doing OK until I turned to walk into the wind. My nose instantly felt like a piece of wood and I had visions of frostbite, gangrene, and amputation. It is one of the really grim aspects of facial burns or Hanson’s Disease (leprosy).  Looking into someone’s bare nasal cavity is shocking and repellent beyond what is warranted. I put my glove over my nose and headed home.

I recall being incredibly cold at the top of a ski race in Climax, Colorado. The wind was also howling, blowing loose snow about. We were a tough bunch, I think, to tolerate that without loss of digits.  When it snowed in the evening in Denver proper, I’d often take my skis, my car, and a length of rope and drive by 2 or 3 friend’s homes. Then we’d take turns, one driving and the others on skis hanging onto the rope which was tied to the bumper. We would stick to less-travelled streets where the snow was good and often head for City Park. It was flat and poorly illuminated so if we turned off our headlights we could drive through it on the grass, hoping not to hit a tree. We didn’t damage anything and it was so much fun!

In writing my memoir, the details are prompted by old photographs, letters, diary entries, a surprising amount of mediocre poetry, and, most helpfully, dreams. My dreams and my associations to them are helping me remove a lot of thorns from my soul in that they allow me to assess details of my past anew. The central attachment figure for me growing up was my mother, similar to many of us. She had amazing and wonderful talent and spirit but also a very negligent and destructive side, especially when slighted.

Aren’t you a little bit old and a little far down the road to be sorting this out now? I ask myself. Do it when you can, I reply. I was able to make peace enough with her when she was living that we could enjoy each other’s company. I’d buy her plane tickets to visit. She also liked my wife a lot; and was a little frightened of her, I think, since she didn’t fit comfortably into any of my mother’s customary boxes.

I have been formed in many parts by my relationship to her, learning to be careful and measured when with her, especially if she was on a tear. I recall a crucial moment, for me, between my medical school graduation in NY and starting my internship in Seattle.  I travelled to Mexico for several weeks and was supposed to head to Denver a week or more before the start of my internship. Mom had invited my older brother and his family to visit from Virginia and we were all to head to Mesa Verde. It was her plan, not mine. I certainly loved them but needed some wildness, sandwiched as I was between so much hard work, long hours, and incredible self-discipline.

While in Mexico I met an anthropology PhD student, Winfred Pulst, from Heidelberg University and he invited me to accompany him. We flew into the jungle in the Chiapas Highlands and lived in a tiny hut on a small lake in a village of about 80 Lacandon Indians. They were Mayans whose ancestors, by virtue of their remote jungle habitat, had never encountered the Spanish. It was an incredible experience, once in a lifetime. But it meant I couldn’t join my family for a trip in Colorado.

My mother was furious, leaving me an angry note, no money, and no car key when I finally got home to Denver. Rather than feel guilty, as I ordinarily would, I thought about the stresses of medical school and internship, decided that I deserved to take my vacation as I wished, and was able to brush off her rage. We’d all experienced it so much growing up, mixed with her other and remarkable qualities, that it wasn’t a surprise.

I had two dreams last night that recalled both sides of her and it felt terrific to write it all down clearly. On balance, she did remarkably well with what she had and had been given but she left all of us with scars of varying length and depth.

My current life is centered on inner experience, not the exotic externalities of, say, Myanmar or Africa. This may mean that my blog posts will devolve, about which I have mixed feelings, into memories and reflections.  They will likely be of more interest to me in writing than they will be to an audience reading them, suggesting that I should just write and not publish.

I do think that part of my resiliency, as one of you queried recently, is that I have attempted to externalize my struggles in order to better see them. I have stacks of notebooks reaching back to college. I had more but my mother threw away my locked footlocker with all my Harvard possessions when she moved across town. It was clearly labelled and she didn’t ask me what I would like done with it. It’s another example of her impulsive indifference to her children, I think. She moved from one huge house to another even larger, so space wasn’t an issue. And she was unable to apologize, defensively blaming me for storing it at her home, although she’d never complained about it previously.

What puzzles me is, having read a good bit of George Vaillant’s work on the life course of a cohort of Harvard undergraduates, I am alone in old age and have had some pretty big stones tossed my way but I am not depressed, isolative, alcoholic, or even unhappy. I feel hopeful about my future, more than I do for the planet’s. It leads me to think about the good things I have received from this difficult mother.

I keep thinking an orange jumpsuit would compliment DT’s orange complexion. It may be in his near future. You shouldn’t be able to broadcast lies without consequence, certainly as a major government figure, lies that result in violence, death, and destruction.  I don’t like whatever violence accompanied the BLM protests but the two examples are not equivalent. He was encouraging and organizing his minions to “stand down and stand by” and to “fight like hell or you won’t have a country”.

No leaders in BLM were encouraging violence. It is inevitable, unfortunately, that when change is occurring, the rage of a few of the oppressed will out.  Or perhaps it is just a few opportunists, looking for a free case of Jack Daniels, a wide-screen TV, or simply to break or burn some stuff. It shouldn’t be compassed and they need to be held to the law.  In a democracy, largely peaceful protests of a people who have not had equal treatment for centuries is something we should applaud. Squeaky wheels get greased.  There is little scheduled routine maintenance for social inequalities.

I hope my life gets a bit more exciting so I can share that, as well.