THE BEST AND THE WORST
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
I can forget my grumbling about whitewashing eulogies since listening to Maddow’s summary of Rumsfeld’s life, for which he paid no price, We did. And his crimes have stuck with us for generations, part of the sick stink of slavery, sticky with blood from whips.
It’s the day that Cosby, black, was let out of jail on a technicality. Another poisonous promoter of trespass disguised as a family man. Old, blind, discredited but with a wife who defends him even from her perch on the Howard University board. What will happen with that?
Today the indictments — FINALLY — of the Trump racket were delivered and will begin processing. No one knows where it will go — the words are “sequential” and “subsequent.” It won’t stop now. Trump continued his fantasy presidency by visiting the Wall, which we are told by historians somehow got into his head from walls built by Rome to keep out the Germanic barbarians. But he WAS descended from Germanic barbarians. He just pretended to be a Roman emperor.
Scores of people across the northwest have been killed by the “heat dome,” the eversion of the Arctic blasts of the winter. Years ago we were told that global warming is not a thermostat, but rather an addling of the sun-driven energy patterns around the globe that in turn drive the jet streams and ocean currents. Decades ago people began to move South to the pleasantly warm places. Now they are all moving North to keep from being cooked alive while the ocean rises.
Human demographic proportions and motives were already being changed by the pandemic. The stubborn or incapable people are dying by the thousands, maybe not quite enough to change the CO2 the way the Euro-carried pandemics cleared the continent of millions of people and so stopped agriculture. The same thing happened in Europe when the Asian Black Death came sweeping over them. The scientists have the numbers.
In the online memorial for the Reverend John Marsh, my small remarks were not used, but I learned a lot about John from those who did supply videos. Once we both left Canada, we didn’t really stay in contact, but it’s clear that we were very different kinds of Unitarians. He was a classic “inherited” Unitarian from New England stock with all the inner commandments and outer styles that are implied. Dignified and kind, he was absent-minded to the point of forgetting lunch meetings — evidently he didn’t keep an appointment book. He had important friends at King’s Chapel, as close as one can get to Unitarian “high church.”
But John’s honorable life, accompanied and helped by many sympathetic women and high status men, was quite different from my nearly guerrilla approach. This sealed me off from the institutional machinery that I criticized. I was silly, so that when I was asked by the other students to participate in the Meadville/Lombard seminary board meetings, I drew cartoons of problems rather than giving a standard formal encomium. That was before a board member confided to me her serious belief in flying saucers and before I realized that most of the trustees simply qualified by having a lot of money. Not to worry, they told me. The Rev. John Wolfe and a few people he trusted made all the decisions. They told me that’s the way ALL boards of trustees operate.
My ministry sometimes seemed like something I was doing all by myself while the congregations and authorities simply watched. This was a bit like my marriage, though Bob and I were working hard for a common purpose. Still, I was “having a marriage” and he was employing me. He divorced me without my presence or consent, paid me $1200, and replaced me with an alcoholic even more childish woman. He hired both lawyers, paid them, paid the psychiatrist (!), and let me stay out on the little Two Medicine ranch all winter until I began to teach again. Then he made a lot of money, felt like a huge success and had a miserable last ten years. I didn’t do the wrong thing, which would have been contesting the divorce and smashing the Scriver Studio in the process.
Somehow and not on purpose, I have managed to avoid growing up in the sense of doing the wise and institutional thing the culture prescribes. I always took chances to see what would happen. Most of the time the result was nothing, but often interesting. Even revealing. Everyone simply looked away.
When my mother died, my brother Mark took over the funeral arrangements, prepared the house, sold it, threw Paul out, and gave us our shares. At that point I should have sought a public protector for Paul, who was subtly demented by his old concussion. Instead I raced back to Montana and bought this house, where I have created a body of work, including a book about Scriver fully of stories both tragic and funny. (“Bronze Inside and Out,” it’s on Amazon, naturally.)
I did not know how seriously deranged Paul was until after he died on the street in Eugene where he had once been a professor. I thought he was protected by VA docs in a program that our cousin lied to get him out of. I did not know about the death of Mark until I realized I hadn’t talked to him for a long time and called him. His wife said, “Oh, he died two years ago.” She had told no one in the family.
So I’m not surprised by the atrocities and horrors, the many secrets, the shortfalls and sins, because this is evidently the way life really is unless you keep working on it and setting up protocols. This is a dark side, but there are compensations, happy surprises, and narrow escapes from doom. The past twenty years have been a blessing for me, a confirmation of skills and education that I can put into writing.
I just filled the clothesline 3 times with the last of the winter clothes I couldn’t wash then. I use the laundromat and the roads were closed; then the pandemic shut us down. When these clothes come in, I’ll start on the weeds with my battery-operated weed whacker. After my crisis in the fall which meant re-shingling the roof, replacing the gas water heater with electricity, and the floor gas furnace with a wall furnace that vents directly outside, I’m in debt but the house is much safer.
The cats are stretched out flat on the cool floor. Some have departed — the old tomcats and the newest kittens whose mother took them out into secret cool grass. Anything could happen next. I’ve run out of script. WAIT! There’s a kitten! A REAL one!
