Shrines

The Bear and I have our Saturday circuit – usually involving the flea market at 6^th Avenue at 25^th  in the city, in a two-story garage (known in our jargon as “The Flea”). Another day La Calavera will talk about global flea markets, but the reason to mention it today is that on Saturday the vendors had their memorial table up, which is not there every week but is a regular feature.

We don’t know exactly who does it, but this is a very touching shrine to the members of the vendor community who are no more. We have gotten to know some of them because we have our things we like to look at (books, industrial design, things that incorporate letters, beads, glass and ceramics). But we don’t know everyone, and I can’t say that we know any of the people featured on the shrine table shown here.

There are always flowers on this table, and photos of the lost friends, with framed obituaries and mementos. The close-up below shows the little card they put on the table stating “In loving memory of our friends” in nice type, but there is also the amusing tent card for the insensitive passers-by who might have missed the larger message in the display of religious statuettes, medals and frames – “Don’t Touch not for sale.”

As someone who grew up in a non-Catholic faith, shrines of this type entered my consciousness only relatively recently. I’ve always seen those shrines at the side of the road where people leave flowers and signs for loved ones killed there, but didn’t associate that to this kind of display. My appreciation of shrines was completely changed after the September 11^th attacks, and one day soon I will publish my account of a fire department’s shrine in the aftermath which was pretty overwhelming.

Our habit (between the Bear and me) is to make shrines in the form of little books – so the Bear’s father was made a lovely book for his funeral, with everyone’s remarks and little stories in it. I wrote my mother’s obituary while she was actually still alive, for her 75^th birthday party, and that too I will publish at some point here; I think we all knew at that time that she was not going to live a whole lot longer and it seemed the right thing to do. Though, now that I think of it, I also made a shrine for her at the funeral itself, using photos from her life and little mementos. It was actually someone else’s “shrine” contribution that made me the most sad – someone put a little wooden toy on her ashes box, which she would have loved. Her husband gave us all a piece of the granite from her gravestone which I’ve put on the front table in our foyer, and will one day put a small plaque on it so that future generations will know what it is.

I know cemeteries perform this function too, and actually we have enjoyed many of them over time, but that’s only possible when someone you love dearly is not recently added to the inhabitants. When my father died Joan made him an enormous monument and, I’m quite sure, looks after it to this day.

There are shrines of happiness too, I have noticed – like the display of the Berlin Wall in New York City that I ran across a few years ago. It had special resonance for me as I was there for that occasion. One day I will write about that.

A segment of Berlin wall in New York on 53rd Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues(1)

I guess I don’t think of things like public monuments in this same way, because they seem institutional. I like the shrines that people make spontaneously, locally. They are truly from the heart.

La Calavera would love to share other shrines. Get in touch!

(1) Taken 19 January 2008 by Gaurav1146 who can be found on Wikipedia – thanks Gaurav for putting this image out there!

Finding the universe in my grain of sand

One of the things I have enjoyed the most about my life is that I have found all of the things that I have done deeply interesting. This has caused perplexity in onlookers; having started out by going to art school, it’s hard for some to picture that I might enjoy business operations consulting today. One of the things that people often say is, “That doesn’t seem very creative to me.” That is not how I see it: creativity is not limited to the making of artworks, and indeed, thinking creatively about one’s daily life makes every minute and hour intellectually interesting.

Long after I’d recognized my way of thinking – that everything is interesting – I was exposed to William Blake’s poem Auguries of Innocence which is (in my opinion) dreadfully and ponderously long. However, the first stanza is what everyone thinks of with this poem and it’s wonderful; it really aligns to my point of view:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.

To me it goes along with Rudyard Kipling’s poem If which I have always loved and aspired to – especially in the penultimate lines

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds' worth of distance run. . .

Alas, Kipling determines in the very last lines that having all those wonderful virtues makes one a “Man” which does rather stick in La Calavera’s craw. But never mind that – it repays a read on a regular basis regardless of your gender persuasion. It opens your heart.

The things I’ve been given to think about by diverse circumstances so far in my life – drawing, and letterforms, and type technology, and marketing (actually the least interesting), and market research, information systems, outsourcing, and publishing books, do seem on the surface to be dissimilar. But they all fit into a logical continuum to me!

Earlier in my life I thought that type and type technology was the very best job I ever had – I could work with so many very talented artists and technical people, solving problems that touched the whole world through the printers we were supplying that went into every office environment on the planet. I’ve tended since then to see the problems placed in my way in a greater and greater perspective (doubtless annoying those around me considerably and they have let me know this!)

However, in a very complex world where everything touches everything, and where change in every form at every level of human endeavor and interaction seems to happen faster and faster, it is in some ways inevitable that everything would be present even in work problems which seem contained and localized.

And so, now that I spend considerable effort to think about outsourcing management and publishing books, they too have become fascinating universes in their grains of sand. With a few words you can see it too. For example, never before in history have so many companies performed the work of other companies – and people are not prepared psychologically or from an historical management training perspective to deal with this new world, so they struggle greatly with this paradigm. And books (especially what we are calling White Endpaper Books) are in the early days of disappearing as paper entities, following the complex digital trail that we already lived through with open format type, with music, and with movies. So how do we ensure that the books we care about, books with intrinsic visual and production value, survive this devastating upheaval? These two types of change have ripples throughout global society. And so they are quite deep problems that take the great intellectual effort of many people to navigate. It is so interesting to be part of the thinkers in these fields.

You can see it: the universe is in my grains of sand. It keeps things very interesting! And I keep filling my minutes with all these interesting thoughts – because I don’t know when there won’t be minutes any more.

Flowers from Bill

Encouragement of Spring from Bill in Oregon!

My father’s eulogy

Dad: 1929 – 1999

My father had always had a goal to live to the year 2000, and sadly he missed it by only a few weeks as a result of having cancer. At the end of his life he performed an outstanding and human effort in living his last months in the most difficult of circumstances, which left everyone deeply moved and impressed.

Dad had married for the third time in 2001, to Joan whom he met in Bowling Green through his work. She is a wonderful person, who I have adopted as one of my surrogate mothers (one needs several in this life). We would think of this marriage as “third time is the charm” for him – his other marriages were significantly less successful. He had six children in all, and he tried in his last months to resolve all the many open issues with each of us, with his very best efforts.

He loved his work as a psychiatrist, but because of the nature of it we didn’t have a lot of insight into what he did or how he worked with people. During the viewing days at the funeral many people came to see him off, and wanted to speak to us his children about how much he had helped them and made a difference in their lives. It was a revelation to me; I wish I had known while he was alive about the love his patients had for him.

So here is his eulogy which I wrote and presented for him. I am pleased to say that I got one laugh from the very large crowd (when I talked about his sins). But there were few dry eyes afterwards.

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The last decade of our father’s life was a remarkable series of completions of great circles in his life. He was born in West Virginia, not very far from here, and after 45 years of being in different places, he finally “came home” to Kentucky and the South, and he felt that Bowling Green was home. He had finally come back to his family roots with us, and was rediscovering the value of his children to his life. He was raised as a Catholic, and had been an alter boy, but he fell away after he got to college, and had lived as a humanist during the years since. His relationship with Joan began his spiritual journey to complete his circle with God.

There are few gifts in death, but in Dad’s case the last nine months of contemplation that he had, and the good that he did, was a great gift not only to him, but also to all of us.

From what he said it most possible that his initial return to the Church was taken only to assure that Joan’s soul would be clear in the eyes of the Church. Fortunately, God sent him an intelligent priest to discuss these issues. I have met Father Richard now, and I understand the engagement of these two men, and applaud Father Richard’s perception.

Dad had to do confession. By his own estimation, he’d committed a lot of sins over time (it is fair to say, some with great gusto.) Nevertheless, when the reckoning time arrived, he was willing to unburden himself. By Dad’s account, it took about three hours to get to the bottom of things.

What in the world should a priest give a man of such accomplishment, intelligence, and wit, as a penance for a lifetime of sins? How many Hail Marys would it take to atone?

But according to Dad, Father Richard told him, “Your penance is to accept God’s forgiveness.”

Dad needed meat – all the time. Well, he got it. That penance – to accept the goodness and mercy of God – became a key element in the development of his thinking over the remaining months of his life. To accept that a higher power was in control represented a major shift in his worldview, which required contemplation, discussion, and digestion.

What more perfect penance could be given? Dad was not a candidate for repetitious prayers – though had that been the prescription, he would have taken it. Had he not been intellectually and spiritually challenged in this way, he would not have continued in his reconciliation to spiritual matters so successfully. And as part of that, his dedication to doing good, and doing God’s will, attained tremendous power in his relations and reconciliations with us, as well as acting as a cornerstone of his remarkable and dignified journey toward Death.

He had visions in his last few months, many about spiritual things. He shared these visions with everyone. Dad was not a person given to spiritual ideas. He was a man of facts. But as the ineffable fact of death came toward him, he turned his mind to the evaluation of the spirit. His visions were wonderful and instructive.

His refrain in the last few months when I saw him was, “Be a family.” At Thanksgiving, when we thought he couldn’t possibly live another day, when he woke up and saw us he would say, “I love you.” Like each time might be the last time. And none of us knew if it would be or not.

There was a moment when he told Joan, “I will die like a man”. I don’t know where one goes to learn how to do that. But his process of death was a model of dignity, patience, repose, acceptance, love, and intellectual and spiritual activity. His life had many fragments, and in his last nine months he did everything in his power to bring those pieces together, to create a legacy among his family who would live on after him.

A couple of months ago, in one of the many conversations that he had with us all, I had a chance to tell him how impressed I was with his approach to his circumstances, and using the same words as I have just now with you here. He was touched, and surprised (as if no one was noticing his process!) and said to me, “Wow. Why don’t you write that down?”

So now I have.

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I miss my dad still, all the time.

Bill is funny

Bill took this picture last year near Stayton, Oregon.

Can’t take my eyes off it

The attack on the World Trade Centers towers in 2001 changed my life forever. I became a terrified news junkie at all hours of the day, waiting for the next dreadful event. Recently I’d noted to myself that had faded – but then the earthquake struck Japan.

The shock and sadness of the whole series of events and cascading effects is simply overwhelming. People, animals, communities, property, memories – all wiped out with the natural event. Now the horrible irony of the nuclear plant compromise has mesmerized the entire planet; there’s not a news station in the US that covers anything else (despite so many other things going on in Libya and elsewhere.) It is terrorism of a different sort.

Today, today, today. This is all we can count on. Right now. Love, do, create, build, live now.

Listening to Zero 7

SubZero, as the Bear calls them, ridiculing them for the joy of the sound of the words (but also the amusing visual of the deep freeze in the trendy, expensive, brushed-steel refrigerator for the music which he perceives as bland) are one of my personal favorite bands. I was introduced to them by our friend Tina, a music listener extraordinaire, who tossed off a few tracks one night at her place with the remark, “I know La Calavera will like this” – and she was so right. Jazzy, poppy, electronic, human, sometimes poems of rare insight: just a joy to listen to. Let the record show, I got on the web and bought five albums unheard the day after I heard them for the first time.

The Bear’s son was around the summer I first heard Zero 7. James and I had finally made up after the inevitable period of rejection that occurs in divorces (getting old is totally unacceptable except with regard to the lens it provides on what really happens in life), and we were sitting around in the living room listening to one of the albums (Simple Things). I’m not quite sure how he caught me doing it, but I kept listening over and over to an single track (“Destiny”) and finally he asked me the most direct question of our lives together at that point: “What is it about this that you like so much?”

I had to think about this, and I am sure my answer didn’t help him much. I said, “It’s like a day at the beach.”

The beach. I’m no beach-goer by nature, but I grew up in Los Angeles where the beach is the Place (not to be confused with pLace, which will be discussed some other time by La Calavera). I have the most happy memories of beach days, with transistor radios (yes, it was a while ago, but we had music out there in the wilds near the waves), with sun, and warmth, and friends hanging around and no place to go, only sandcastles to build. We were there with open hearts and minds, enjoying the ocean and sky and wondering at all of the splendid realities of that amazing place (and time). It’s so hard to explain all that to someone who has not lived it – and even more difficult to explain why this music so profoundly epitomizes it and underlines it as an experience for me. James just shook his head and laughed softly at me.

Perhaps related: that same summer, the son of one of our neighbors got married(1) and had an engagement party at the apartment a few months before the wedding. As we are on the second floor with a balcony right over party spot, they asked us to provide music. We were very happy to help, and dutifully wound out the fifty feet of speaker wire for each of the huge speakers that we have. We asked over and over what kind of playlist they would like, but there was no information provided.

So I put on my Zero 7 albums. The wonderful beach music wafted over the party, and over the adjacent pool area, where people were entranced. After I went downstairs, all the people at the pool over 40 came up and said, “What is that gorgeous sound?”

But not the groom . . . after about an hour, he got hold of James and went upstairs to have his way with it. I knew there was a problem when I heard first a Celine Dionne tune, and then a beer commercial. The Millennials had put on a radio station!!! Unbelievable. We have nearly a thousand CDs to pick from, and they elected a commercial radio station.

I’m so old.

(1) In a joyous and astonishingly generous wedding ceremony that we were delighted to have been invited to attend.

Plenteous Beauty

Recently I used the word beauteous in a correspondence with a colleague, who asked me if this was really a word. It’s one I use all the time, but having been challenged, I went and looked it up in the free online Compact Oxford English Dictionary which you can get to through a portal called OneLook that I use all the time.

Oxford defines it as a literary word meaning beautiful, and notes it is from the late Middle English: derived from “beauty” on the pattern of bounteous and plenteous (as they put it).

It’s not quite the quality and perhaps unintentional wit of the Palinism “refudiate” which she invented to the hilarity of all literate people (refute + repudiate) – but beauteous is a lovely conjunction of ideas. Extra helpings of beauty.

Why La Calavera?

La Calavera means The Skull – the symbol of the Mexican Catholic celebration of the Day of the Dead. El Día de los Muertos traces its origin to the Aztec culture, following that well-known tradition of the proselytizing Catholic church to absorb and layer the Catholic religious holidays with the indigenous ones – and providing so much color and interest to modern Catholic celebration. La Calavera has other meanings specific to Mexican history too – she was popularized by Jose Guadalupe Posada (1852 - 1913), a printmaker and activist who gave her a remarkable life which survives to this day.

After losing so many people in my life, I’ve come to see La Calavera as a symbol of the imperative to live – to enjoy our lives and to do all the good we can while we have the chance to do it. I was inspired by my father’s approach to his death from cancer in 1999, and some time I will post the eulogy that I wrote for him that talks about that. We had a chance to tell him that we loved him before he died – but I’ve lost people who I did not have that chance.

With La Calavera, I will record the things that I think are good, are beautiful, are right. Ideas that create love, and happiness, that give individual power to realize goodness. These may be stories about people, or about music, or words, or art, or books. I will use my friend’s first names, but not post any last names, photos, or my own name. My friends know who I am!

Thanks for listening.