Legacy

[Above photo: Three blueberry bushes and the path to the compost. ]

14 August 2022

We hear so often of politicians that they have done so-and-so, “thinking of their legacy”. Sports figures, at least those very few who are at the pinnacle of pinnacles in their chosen activity, are concerned about their legacy. How many Super Bowl rings, how many NBA championships, how many Grand Slam titles?  I suppose with the death of Bill Russell and Serena’s retirement from tennis, I think more of this. And famous scientists, movie stars, all manner of prominent people.  We all want to be remembered.

This is on my mind as I just read a biographical sketch of Norbert Rieger, the child psychiatrist in whose name I’ll get an award in October. In brief, after fleeing Austria and Italy for America in 1938, he desperately attempted to bring his wife and children but failed. They perished in a Nazi camp. He then dedicated himself to working with severely disturbed, often psychotic, children, helping to find their humanity and creating healing programs for them that became national models.  That seems to me to be a legacy with which I can identify, one that is fully human, fashioned with kindness, curiosity, intelligence and tenacity. Not so easily quantifiable as 7 Super Bowl rings but surely a fuller measure of the man.

I was discussing climate change with my niece last night—who better?!  She suggests that if all the ice melts, the sea will rise some 400 feet. With just a 20 or 30 foot rise—the collapse of a large Antarctic ice shelf  or part of the Greenland ice cap— there would be death, chaos, loss, and massive displacement of populations in the world. In thinking about our future on this island, it would seem prudent to consider selling now and buying on a lake—no tides, easily accessed, much less expensive infrastructure, and so forth. My thought is that I couldn’t easily focus on my summer retreat if the world is collapsing. She makes the good point that the world is currently collapsing. True, enough, and I find it difficult now to tolerate my relative ease and security with much of the world’s population desperate for survival.

I enjoy my time here immensely, both sharing it with others and being solitary. Just as I am nearly hypnotized by the current political show, the scoff-laws and would-be tyrants parading their lies, if the drama of climate collapse is even more ever-present, it would seem impossible for my conscience to tolerate my summer retreat while others have no roof. And it isn’t that my not having it helps anyone. It’s just how I’m built.

Being all too human, I treated myself to a box of fresh figs this week. With all the mangos, mangosteen, and passion fruit in the tropics, I’d forgotten how much I love figs. Across the levee road from our first home, situated on the Sacramento River, was the foundation of a farmstead.  Nearby was an immense fig tree, abandoned and neglected except for the many ground squirrels who were eagerly eating the fruit. In season my wife and I gathered as many as we wanted, gorging on them. A ripe fig is a marvel, one of Nature’s special gifts. I don’t recall if we ever cooked them, so delicious were they fresh, their flesh nearly jellied and a deep brownish-maroon. 

I visited new friends’ for supper. She’s a child psychiatrist and he was in, I think, IT. He previously lived on Peaks Island, commuting the 3 miles to Portland by kayak each day. Now retired, he built a jewel box of a modern house near me in Portland.  The roof-deck has a view of Casco Bay and, you guessed it, Peaks Island. But the real stunner is his woodworking.  In a modest basement room he has a full commercial lathe, table and band-saws, a planer-joiner, and other tools, mechanized and hand, of the trade. He has focused on funriture and turning hardwood bowls of various sizes. They are spectacular, even as he talks about the imperfections that he (not I) can see in them. The processes of completing a bowl appear to be all-consuming in a meditative way that would leave me feeling calm and satisfied.  I had just wanted to see his design for a workbench!  Hidden talents, they must be everywhere, people who can focus their passions intensely so that they develop remarkable skills and create things of great beauty and utility. It is too easy to squander our gifts, rather than to develop them. We comply with the purveyors of objects and media to our own impoverishment. It can be quite a struggle to resist or limit ourselves. It is interesting, because these distractions are such recent, and recently accelerating, phenomena.

You heard it here first! If it is really getting hot for the Donald, and the temperature appears to be rising, I predict he’ll head to Saudi Arabia with nuclear secrets. They’ll reward him handsomely with a palace and limitless MacDonalds, refuse his extradition, and he’ll attempt to exert his influence over the GOP and his minions virtually from there.  The irony is that after many failed business ventures, DT has found something he’s exceptional at: creating fear, division, and illusion.

Clouds, especially in an otherwise clear blue sky, can appear surprisingly substantial. It makes some sense that theologically-inspired painters of old would place a throne and their chosen be-robed, wild-haired, bearded man sitting on it in the midst of a great cloud. But why did they choose a man, not a woman, to be the Supreme Being? Just one of numerous flaws in the Tale, a reflection of the strategic dominance of men in creating the legend.

Of my legacy….what?  “He played a poor hand well [with help].” seems self-pitying, even though there is truth in it. “He loved children.” sounds creepy.  “On balance, he was good man. Not perfect but he sought redemption for his failings through good works.”  It beats serial infidelity, 30,000 lies, and an insurrection!