Memoirous

I’ve learned that birthdays don’t mean a lot. In fact, they can be somewhat disappointing, a let down. Birthdays come and go. Since this blog is about memories, I’d like to share how I celebrated the 200 th birthday of the USA. 1976 found me at a Young Life camp outside of Pittsburgh, PA. I was a volunteer at an inner-city youth camp put on by an organization for high schoolers called Young Life. It was considered cool Christian. My high school allowed the club to post info in meetings on campus. I met through Young Life a life-long friend, Jane McSweeney nee Jarrell, from Dayton, Ohio. She was city mouse and I was if not country mouse at least Centerville-suburban mouse. She and I were recruited for the camp, where we met Mark Bruce and a few other Young Lifers. I didn’t work directly with the kids; I did laundry. It was a regular machine and took forever to do many, many loads. On the morning of the 4 th , I was aware it was supposed to be a monumental day—for the nation, not ...

Every once in a while, I get a brain burble, a brief flash of memory. I’m not sure what spurs this synapse. Maybe it is the season of Lent and the liturgy sent to me by the brothers of Assumption Abbey in Dickerson, ND where I stayed on my cross-country bike trip in 2020. Maybe it is from watching “Secrets of the Dead” on PBS as I work on a new cross-stitch project. As I work, moving my needle up and down, I listen to how civilizations rise and fall. People and places I’ve never heard of, pre-antiquity, before medieval Europe, before the spread of Christianity, people groups from places our current president might label “shit-hole countries” were building and crafting fabulous palaces using gold and silver and precious gems, living sustainably for hundreds of years—before . . . . Sometimes no one knows. Something stops. The people die-off, are assimilated, migrate away due to ? Again, we don’t know but perhaps climate change, invaders, disease, other disasters. Bardic tales are f...

I had coffee with a friend who is kindly reading over a nonfiction manuscript I’m trying to peddle to editors. We talked about memories and how those are woven into the narrative. She asked: Did you really think like this as a kid. The answer is yes. See last post on Fads I was a slow boil, still waters run deep kind of kid. Yet, I was never AP material, though I remember one high school teacher’s amazement of how quickly I untangled and gave the straight forward translation to various parables in a book we were reading. This story is about . . . She just let me go on and on since no one else was contributing to the discussion. But mostly I sat overwhelmed in class. I totally overthought everything. Except math/algebra. I had no idea whatsoever. I remember going to see the movie Rocky and trying to discuss it with some kids in my class. I knew it was schlocky even then, but I also knew it was inspiring. No one was supposed to make it to the top (of the steps). Not the girlfriend...

In 1975 and 1979 Congress passed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which established the right to education for students with disabilities. Prior to that special education was spotty, dependent upon what the local school board deemed necessary or were capable of doing. I remember—and let me place this memory: It was pre-school, meaning I wasn’t enrolled yet in kindergarten. My brother was likely at the high end of elementary school. We lived in Washington Township between Kettering and Centerville; we all attended Driscoll Elementary (built 1962), a school still in use today. In the year book, categorized by grade level, there was a section where the students seemed older (but, let’s be honest, looking at students from the past they ALL look older than today’s students!!) and didn’t seem to fit any particular grade level. I asked my older brother Steve who these kids were. He told me they were in a special educa...

In the documentary (series) The Beatles: Get Back , directed and produced by Peter Jackson—which to be honest, I’ve not watched in its entirety (nearly 8 hours in total, quite a commitment) there was insight given into the band members creative process. The series covers the making of the Beatles’ 1970 album Let It Be and draws largely from unused footage and audio material captured while the Beatles were in the studio over the course of 21 days. So a LOT of boring stuff, you know, the part where one sits around and tries to come up with something. The part where we can easily feel blocked or like our left brain is letting us down. Often we just want it to “come”—like turning on a switch. It only comes by butt in chair. Indeed, there’s John Lennon sitting in a chair with a guitar singing nonsense words to a familiar tune that would become “Get Back”. Sometimes Paul would just sing the alphabet, focusing more on chords/arrangements, and then come up with the lyrics later. * My yo...

Never underestimate a squirrel. They like to hang out on the sides of the road where a walnut tree drops those big walnut bombs and wait for cars to roll over them and then they run out to gather the nuts. It’s also where they die, run over by a car. So whenever I ride by on my bike I) am careful not to hit a walnut bomb and topple over, my front wheel torqued by the impact and 2) I’m careful not to squish a squirrel, and 3) I remember once collecting walnuts as a kid. It might have been my Little House on the Prairie period, one that lasted over ten years, approx. age 8 – 18. This is when I experimented with natural dyes and woodland crafts. Anyway, I collected a paper sack of half-decomposed walnut balls. Somehow I thought that was the nut, or maybe I knew the nut was inside . Nevertheless, I picked up the whole thing and brought them home an put them under my bed. So that when I was doing sit-ups, a hundred every night before going to bed, I was accosted by worms crawling acro...

I read in the news that Phil Donahue died. Suddenly I felt very Daytonian. I texted my friend, also a Jane, from Dayton. Donahue died, is what I wrote. I knew Jane would understand. It’s not news but us. Once more, we’re remembering our childhood and where we came from and how pieces of it are sloughing off each day. I can’t help but think of Donahue and Erma Bombach the famous newspaper humorous and author of several books who was also from Dayton. She and Phil Donahue were neighbors in Centerville, Ohio (where I’m from) when they both broke out onto the national stage. (Side note: my piece “Obsolete,” was published Fall, 2019 in the Erma Bombeck blog out of University of Dayton.) Anyway, Phil Donahue died and now my friend and I are left bemoaning that we, too, will one day be relegated to a random memory to those who care to remember. RIP Phil. Peace.    

That One Bike Ride, 1970 *where we took off without water, food, money, a map *where I are a whole loaf of French Toast and got a huge tummyache *where after a few miles and a big hill we turned back *where after those few miles, I began to miss home and got scared *where I felt the furthest I had ever been from what I knew *the unknown I cannot tell you how old I was. It was the 1970s when kids rambled outside unwatched. We were a gaggle of kids with a plan—albeit one very loose, disorganized, not well-thought through plan—to ride our bikes, possibly to Miamisburg. Again, I’m not certain as memory and time have corroded the edges of what may or may not have happened. I believe we took Alex Bell Rd, past Normandy Methodist Church and down a hill. The point is, we entered uncharted territory, left Washington Township, Centerville, our school district. Nothing was recognizable. I do remember a hill going down and feeling sick because before leaving one of the kids’s mother ...

Possibly because I’ve been reading the letters of poets Bernadette Mayer and Clark Coolidge (SEE link my last post, http://memoirouswrite.blogspot.com/2023/06/all-this-thinking-correspondence-of.html ) between the two, I’ve been dwelling in the past. Add to that I’m old. Not old old, but thumbing the pages of social security mail sent to me, encouraging me to sign up for Part B—or is it A, and is it Medicare or Medicaid, is it anything? What are we assured of? I’ve been dwelling in an existential crux, thinking about mortality, the passing of an age. Maybe family makes us/me think about all this. I remember after both my parents died within a span of months, going back to Ohio to clear out the dregs, the last of the last at their extended living facility/house in Canal Fulton. I thought it was no big deal. I had a car, gas money, the time—all the factors that have usually vexed me in getting away from my “normal” life in Chicago. My plan was to stay at the house and slowly unwind e...

A Personal Calling, or Vocation Vocation—the difference between work and putting your passions into action. Yes, I labored, getting up early before the sun and sometimes working an overnight shift at the community’s magazine Cornerstone. Volunteering outside my other volunteer hours. You see, the work was not compensated monetarily. We worked together for the benefit of others and basically for room and board. It is a complicated kind of communism where ideology is supreme and we corporately strived to see that the greater whole grew, got better. It is a concept almost entirely archaic. No one does this except maybe a recent grad taking a gap year—except this was no grand tour or backpacker’s dream trip; we wanted to share Christ’s love in action by providing meals, housing, relationship. Ourselves. Outside of the practical work of feeding the community (sammies, kitchen crew) I did visitations to the elderly, in the form of light housework and wellness checks, taking them to the docto...

Finding Community, Finding Home, part 2 Community in Chicago at Jesus People USA did not immediately feel like home and it took a while for me to think that they “got” who I was. There were a lot of misunderstandings along the way. One of my first jobs was making sammies. Our work crews that went out during the day (comprised entirely of men) required packed lunches. I was on a crew that made sandwiches, slapping peanut butter and jelly between two pieces of bread. Not the most nutritious lunch for those doing hard manual work all day outside, but it’s what we had. The addition of chips and homemade cookies if you were lucky. A piece of fresh fruit was considered a luxury. I then got moved onto a kitchen crew where we literally worked ALL DAY, from 4 a.m. getting breakfast out first for the workers, then for moms and kids going to school. If you were late, then nothing. The day finished around 7 pm after cleaning up. At first none of these jobs were me; I could identify with hardly any...

Finding Community, Finding Home, part1 It took a while. I finished high school. I started at Wright State University. I dropped out of Wright State. I went to Maranatha Bible Institute associated with my church. Then there was a church split and I was excommunicated. Friends were told to mark, admonish, and avoid me—a sermon preached from the pulpit, as laid out 2 Timothy chapters 2 and 3, Scriptures taken out of context and perverted for power over others. I suffered a breakdown. I went back to Wright State while at the same time moving out of my parent’s house. I was struggling for clarity. I dropped out of Wright State—again—and traveled out West, getting a seasonal job at Yellowstone National Park. I extended my work contract, as I had no future plans. Late 1979/early 1980 found me in Athens, Ohio enrolled at Ohio University. I chose this school as I wanted to be close to a very solid friend, someone who would call me out and also encourage me: Keith Wasserman, who would go o...

Who Am I? Questions of identity outside of community The women of Women Talking were born and raised in their colony. Every part of their life was regulated by their faith. How they ate, related to others, and their eternal soul. That was not my experience. I chose to join my community as a young person right out of college. Even as a child I felt called by God. Call it prayer or talking to the sun, I held conversations in my head, sometimes audible, asking for help, guidance, begging for love, mercy. I had a chaotic childhood where I constantly wondered about my place in the family. It’s hard to reduce into words how I felt, much like an outsider. I do not believe anyone in my family “got” me. I was certainly lonely. I yearned for acceptance and was open to fairies, to a make-believe. I imagined a world on the underside of the real one that was perhaps more real than the one we can see and hear, touch, taste, and feel. That there was something MORE to this life. Thus, even as a yo...

As I mentioned in my last post, Peter Orner has a shtick. He’ll maybe start with a memory, an anecdote and then weave in family details that then leads to a wider context, perhaps a contemporary perspective. He’ll also tie in a book citation, a detail from something he once read—usually an author that has flown under the radar and deserves to be read or revisited. For example—every time I pass a rock, the kind left behind as glacial debris, moraine, of which there are many such random big rocks here in the Great Lakes region (I grew up in Ohio) I always remember 1) I live in a post-glacial region, we are formed by our environment, remnants left behind litter our past 2) my sister falling and chipping a tooth on our neighbor’s rock on Princewood Avenue in Kettering. I don’t know how old she was? Nine, ten, eleven but this incident followed her. Not only did the initial fall leave her with a jagged tooth (it was a permanent one, something that as a kid I always wondered about?? perma...

I remember as a kid in the middle of the night suddenly deciding I wanted to lie down in an intersection of a busy road beneath a street light—just to see what would happen. This memory might need some context. I might have been out with friends doing stupid stuff. I wasn’t into drugs or drank. Nevertheless, we never ran out of dumb ideas. It might have been the randomness or a sense of power, of baiting fate that made me think lying down in a road was cool. It might have also played into my sensibility surrounding ruins, abandoned spaces. The sudden shift in a four-lane road now seemingly empty of traffic that called to me to occupy it. The feeling that the street lights still worked, still did their job despite the fact that whatever they were designed to do was not necessary at that moment in time. It was about time, this encapsulated “now”, an invitation to step inside. I took it. I can still recall the heat of the blacktop, the textured tarmac, the flashing colors of the s...

I remember those hot summer days out on my bike. I can’t stay in the house another moment, I just have to get outside. August, you know the end is near, school will start soon, and unstructured time will come to a close. So do everything. There is a tension between the lazy staying up and sleeping late and the hurry-up of waking early to get it all in. I hop on my bike when the dew is still on the ground and the sky is just brightening. The morning and landscape spread out before me as I iron the hills beneath my tires, as the ribbon of roadway unfurls before me. A fox crosses the blacktop and scitters into a crack in a stone wall, I turn a corner and there stands a deer, flicking its tail, its eyes glued on me until it too bounds away. Suddenly the sun is beating down directly above and there are no bicycle shadows. Heat waves shimmer upward from the asphalt like eye tricks. And, I realize I have little water, no snacks and no money. I have gone further than I intended to and no...

 Flash back to  Monday, March 5, 2018 Weird Jobs I've Had I’ve done a lot of crazy things for money. Collected bottles and cans for cash, There was the usual: babysitting, mowing grass, cleaning the kitty litter, and shoveling snow. I got up at 4 in the morning to deliver newspapers. One summer me and the neighborhood kids built an amusement park in the backyard and charged admission. We sold Zagnut and Zero bars at our concession stand. The weirdest thing I’ve ever done was answer an ad looking for someone to dress up in a broccoli costume and walk around the mall offering samples of raw vegetables. It seemed surreal—probably because I was sleep deprived. It was my final semester of college, I needed a few extra bucks. But surreal in the sense that I, a vegetable, was asking people to eat me, to eat my fellow vegetables. It felt cannibalistic. Obviously, I was overthinking the job. Whenever I see broccoli on the salad bar line I’m reminded of that time in my life—and usually ...

I was a childhood insomniac—now I can barely make it past 8 o’clock, but back in my tweens I’d stay up all night reading, afraid to close my eyes against the dark night. I shared a room with my sister and when she had turned out the light—or, most likely, made ME turn off the light (she had a way of jumping into bed and pulling the covers over her head and demanding I get out of bed and do the duty). I’d then instead of returning to my bed, I’d head to the closet, close the door, turn on the light and live another life. There was a summer there where I discovered the works of Jules Verne, what might now be considered “soft” science fiction.” I was continually amazed at how he had predicted technical and scientific advancements that came after him. Maybe it was the time period: the thrill of industrialization, that modern man could build whatever they needed. The power of the steam engine. The only thing man couldn’t fix was himself, the turning of all that industrial know-how into ki...

In the summer of ’76 some friends of mine answered the call of God and went to England to accompany a traveling evangelist. The boys had just graduated from high school and were from my youth group at church. They would be gone for the whole summer. One night me and Barb went over to Rhonda Owens house out in the country for a sleep-over. Rhonda said let’s make a tape for Keith and Mike and send it to England for them to listen to. We set up a tape recorder out in the backyard and lay down under the stars and just gabbed. If I recall it was a lot of nonsense. What I also remember is the brilliance of that night sky. Crystal clear. The whole universe pinwheeling above our heads. A smudge of Milky Wave. A plethora of falling stars streaking across the sky, more than I could count. Comets trailing tails of colored gases. It was as if the heavens were giving us a show. Every other exclamation on the tape was: There’s another one! And another one! I wish with all my heart to hear that...

  These days . . . . I wish for a crystal ball, a Google button for an internet search into the future, a tarot card reader. When I was twenty, on the cusp of several major life decisions, I went to see a prophet. My evangelical church was holding Holy Spirit week, a series of revival services and a woman known to be a prophet was scheduled to speak. So many thoughts were rolling around inside my head. I was thinking about dropping out of college Changing churches Actually quitting religion I was considering leaving the country and had applied for a passport I believe all of the above would have blown my parents up, but I was grown and living out of the house. I’d already gone down a couple of blind alleys, figuratively, and was unsure of what lay ahead. I just wished I could see a mile or two down the road. I needed a map because I was afraid of making a wrong turn. I just wished I knew what it was I wanted  Now at age 61 I’m back here again . . . at the sam...