Seeking Meaning

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Many people over the years have encouraged me to read Viktor E. Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning.  I admit to being put off by the unintentionally sexist title (I do remember the days when “man” was generic regarding gender, following the German usage from which it derives).  I finally got around to it and I’m glad I did.  I know that there has been some controversy around it but I found many of Frankl’s observations freeing.  The first part of the edition I read narrates his experience living in concentration camps during Germany’s mad phase.  Such things aren’t easy to read, but they are important, showing what happens when people are devalued by those in power.  It also proves a place for finding meaning in suffering.  The second part of the book introduces logotherapy, the school that Frankl devised.  It’s based on the idea that one’s search for meaning is essential for psychological well being.

Some of us grapple with the question of meaning constantly.  Why are we here?  What should we be doing?  Is there a purpose behind it?  Religions often attempt to answer these kinds of questions, as do various philosophical schools.  Nobody has the definitive, overarching answer, and Frankl doesn’t try to offer one.  There is a bit of existentialism in logotherapy, but the basic idea seems sound to me.  Seeking meaning helps you to carry on.  Frankl also considered finding meaning in suffering, which seems to be a noble goal, if quite difficult to achieve.  Most human lives involve suffering and it is often the biggest problem with which theodicy has to deal.  Finding meaning in it, if that’s what life hands you, seems to be reasonable.  His discussion of paradoxical intention was quite interesting.

My edition of the book has an introduction by Gordon Allport.  That name took me back to my college days when the Harvard professor’s equally problematic title, The Individual and His Religion was required reading.  Despite the pronoun, that was an influential book for me (unfortunately ruined in the flood after we first moved to this house).  I noticed that Frankl cited Allport’s book in his own.  I sometimes think I ought to replace Allport’s book, but I’m not sure that I’d be reading it again any time soon.  Besides, my lost edition had my own annotations in it.  A small measure of personal suffering and loss.  I am glad to have finally read Frankl’s work.  I certainly learned a lot from doing so.  Discovering that there is a psychological school based on finding meaning exists was news to me.  And it just makes sense.

Hello September

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Labor Day is as early as it can possibly be this year and as late as it can possibly be next year.  We live in a time of extremes. In any case, it’s our hello to September and our goodbye to summer.  Since I still think of weather quite a bit, I’m reflecting on how most of the month of August around here has felt like autumn.  A month that I normally think of as consisting of hot dog days as summer reinforces its grip has been one of chilly mornings requiring long-sleeved jogging togs, and even fingerless gloves indoors for a morning or two.  July was hot and rainy.  The kind of hot that saps your strength and energy.  August felt like relief after that, but now we greet September, wondering what might lie ahead.  Many of the trees around here have already started to change, which looked a little odd when it was only August.

A couple weeks ago

Autumn has always been my favorite season, as it is for many people.  It is poignant, however.  Summer has its endless lawn mowing, but trades that off with not requiring a jacket to be outdoors and plenty of sunshine.  More than that, even traditional capitalistic businesses tend to slow down a bit in the summer, if for no other reason, because many employees take vacation time and everything has to put on the brakes a little.  Because we work at breakneck pace for the remainder of the year, this more relaxed season is a welcome respite.  We know, as nights grow cooler and longer, that it is time to put that away for another year.  It’s a season of transitions which is what makes it so melancholy.  Work starts to feel more serious after Labor Day, but the holidays are at least within grasp.  Halloween is really the next on the list.

I sometimes wonder if I’ll ever be able to retire, and if I do, if these day off holidays will be so important to me.  I’ve been interested in studying holidays pretty much all of my professional life.  Never really a fan of the capitalistic ethos, after being thrown into that world I quickly learned to look at holidays as stepping stones to get me through the year.  The first four months are rough.  They do have holidays sprinkled here and there, but March and April and most of May are holiday free zones.  That’s one reason the more relaxed fit summer is welcome.  The pace picks up again tomorrow, but for today, at least, we have one last ounce of summer to live.

Job Months

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I’m sure you’ve had them too.  Job-like months when everything seems to happen all at once.  Your bank account grows anemic, making Quicken feel more like quicksand.  Our most recent started when the roof leaked yet again during heavy storms—I sure am glad climate change isn’t real!  Can you imagine how it’d be if we had extreme weather?  This house dates from the late nineteenth century and presumably, if such super-soakers had always been common, well, the roof would’ve been replaced down to the joists.  In any case, in our fourth call to the roofers over seven years, we faced yet another scary bill.  Then the sink began to leak.  Some minor repairs I can do myself, but this house was an either a DIY’s paradise or purgatory.  For us, mainly the latter.  

A couple years back there was a leak from the upstairs toilet tank.  Now, I’ve replaced the guts of a toilet more than once.  I bought the parts and went to work.  It was then that I discovered a previous owner had purchased a fancy-brand toilet for which toilet guts couldn’t be purchased (well, maybe from Japan or China, by slow boat).  You’ll probably agree that without an outhouse, a working toilet is more or less a necessity.  I watched YouTube and my wife and I went to Lowe’s and bought a new toilet.  I’m sure angels were laughing watching the two of use wrestle this metric-ton porcelain throne up the stairs (and demons laughed as we got the old one down).  Installing it looked straightforward.  When it started to leak, the plumber—we’re on a first-name basis now—came over.  He pointed out the faulty mounting pipe and asked if I’d installed it.  It was from the previous owner with high-class taste in toilets.  He turned to his companion and said, “This is why we’ll never go out of business.”

So a twenty-dollar toilet gut replacement turned into a $600 full toilet replacement.  This was in my mind when I had my head under the sink.  We seem to have stopped the water getting in from above, at least for the moment, but now it was clear that the base cabinet under the sink was going to need to be replaced as well.  I called Doug and he said he’d slot me in as quickly as he could.  I’m pretty sure Job didn’t have indoor plumbing.  He probably had to repair his own roof a time or two, though.  Only in his case, it happened just before God made a bet with Satan.  So the story goes.

Remembering to Forget

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I think I’ve discussed memory before.  I forget.  Anyway, I recently ran across Ebbinghaus’ Forgetting Curve.  Now, I’ve long known that when you reach my age (let’s just say closer to a century than to 1), your short-term memory tends to suffer.  I value my memories, so I try to refresh what’s important frequently.  In any case, Ebbinghaus’ curve isn’t, as far as I can tell, age specific.  It’s primarily an adult problem, but it also resonates with any of us who had to study hard to recall things in school.   The forgetting curve suggests that within one hour of learning new information, 42% is forgotten.  Within 24 hours, 67% is gone.  This is why teachers “drill” students.  Hopefully you’ll remember things like the multiplication table until well into retirement age because you had to repeat it until it stuck.  Where you put the car keys, however, is in that 42%.

I’m a creature of habit.  One of the reasons is that I fear forgetting where something important might be.  The other day it was my wallet.  In these remote working days you don’t need to put on fully equipped pants every day.  Pajama bottoms work fine for Zoom meetings and if you don’t have to go anywhere, why fuss with the wallet, cell phone, pocket tissues-laden pants?  You can put your phone on the desk next to a box of tissues.  The wallet gets left in its usual pocket.  One day I pulled on the pants I last wore and as I was headed to the car noticed my wallet was gone.  Fighting Ebbinghaus, I tried to remember where I’d last used my wallet.  We’d gone to a restaurant the previous weekend that seemed the most likely culprit.  It could’ve fallen out in the car, or maybe down a crack in an overstuffed chair.  I couldn’t find it anywhere, swearing to myself I was going to buy one of those wallet chains if I ever found it again.

(I did eventually find it, in the bathroom.  Apparently this has happened to others as well.)  In this instance, my memory was not to blame.  It had been right in the pocket where I last remembered putting it.  But other things do slip.  Think about the most recent book you read.  How much of it do you remember?  That’s the part that scares me.  I spend lots of time reading, and more than half is gone a day after it’s read.  Unless it’s reinforced.  The solution, I guess, is to read even more.  Maybe about Ebbinghaus’ Forgetting Curve.

Mexican Philosophy

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Once upon a time, I applied for a teaching post at Syracuse University.  (Actually, twice upon a time, but that’s a longer story.)  I was able to gather that one reason I failed to merit an interview was that the religion department prided itself on its dedication to continental philosophy.  Lacking imagination, I couldn’t see how that might apply to teaching Hebrew Bible but then again, I don’t know much.  I’m starting off with than anecdote because it is in keeping with the spirit of Carlos Alberto Sánchez’s excellent Blooming in the Ruins: How Mexican Philosophy Can Guide Us toward the Good Life.  I recently wrote about how reading philosophy is something I enjoy when I can find the time, but what really struck me about this book is that Mexican philosophy is a counter to continental (i.e., European) philosophy and it is much closer to my own outlook.  I’m not in any danger of being offered a new job so it’s safe to say so.

I actually picked up a copy of Sánchez’s book because of a chapter that I’d read.  Much of the work begins with anecdotal accounts, followed on by something original, amplified, and solid (you’ll need to read the book to flesh that out).  Mexican philosophy rejects the idea of universals because each of us is socially located.  What may have seemed universal to European philosophers of the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, many of them quite privileged, simply doesn’t apply to a person raised poor in Mexico.  (Or Pennsylvania, for that matter.)  I read the continental philosophers in school, but they had not had my experiences.  My traumas.  And yes, Sánchez emphasizes that trauma is part of the picture.

While I can’t summarize this wonderful little book here, I can recommend it.  If you have an interest in the larger questions, and if you want some philosophy that doesn’t try to impress you with big words and complex grammatical formulations, this may be for you.  Sánchez writes as if he’d be willing to sit down with you and discuss the matters that make life worth talking about.  The chapter that sold me on his book was the one on the Mexican view of death.  It is only one of several that deserve a bit of your time to chew over.  So I was not welcome among those who specialize in continental philosophy.  Maybe I was looking in the wrong place.  Maybe those who are open to homegrown thinkers of sometimes deep thoughts live south of the border.

End of the Story

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You know that feeling?  Like when you’re driving in thick fog and you know you should stop but you’re late and you have to keep going?  There comes a moment as you’re driving when you know that it’s going to end, and probably badly.  Yet you keep on going.  Trump has me thinking of the end of the world quite a bit.  I know there are many evangelicals out there praying for it fervently while the rest of us would like a little more time on this beautiful planet.  I’d be lying if I said I didn’t understand this outlook, because I do.  I grew up with it and I’ve never forgotten the sensation it caused.  And then I pondered that we are story-telling, and story-thinking creatures.  Perhaps other animals don’t think this way, but we constantly tell ourselves stories.

A story has a beginning, a middle, and well, eventually, an end.  We all know, at some level, that we’re mortal.  Life will end, and every completed story has an end.  Why not the world?  It’s a strangely haunting idea, the world continuing on without us here to make it interesting.  Plants will grow in any soil they can find, even microscopic cracks in the pavement.  Every year it’s like one day everything is suddenly green where only the day before we could see the sky through the branches.  And animals continue their quests for food, mates, and shelter.  Some live to hide while others strut.  Each has a role to play and if you watch them closely you’ll find yourself narrating their stories.  That rabbit.  That bluejay.  That fox.  They have a beginning, middle, and end.  If they can’t tell it, we can do it for them.  It comes naturally to us.

Long ago I learned how one version of Bible interpretation came up with the end of the world as we know it.  I also learned that this was contrived, just as all interpretations are.  This particular one has landed, like a seed, in the cracks of our mind.  It grows, just like that weed in the pavement.  This story must have an end.  We can imagine it no other way.  Even when we grow up and realize that the story was only one we told to children—children old enough to handle it, of course—we still have this certainty that an end is coming.  Like driving in the fog, we just know it.  Even when we realize that in reality we should be putting on the brakes.

Sad Joy

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I sometimes make the mistake of thinking a short book will be a quick read.  Melancholic Joy is a case in point.  Every time I indulge in a book of philosophy I wonder if I missed my true calling.  As my wife is well aware, I’m prone to philosophical musings about the meaning of life although I tend to place myself among the existentialists.  As soon as I saw the title of Brian Treanor’s book it went on my reading list.  It’s short and I thought maybe a week would be enough.  But it wasn’t.  I do hope I can remember much of it.  A word to the wary, the first chapter is very depressing.  Treanor doesn’t sugarcoat the world in his quest on a Life Worth Living.  Those of us who ponder things deeply tend toward melancholy, in my experience.  But stick with it.  There is gold in this book.  Starting with chapter two I was reminded why I took so much philosophy in college.

The world is full of depressing facts.  By the time I was born we’d already devised ways to wipe out the entire human race.  Many, far too many, people live lives of suffering, much of which could be prevented if we didn’t have people like Donald Trump running things.  The political situation is so bad that I’ve disengaged.  Yet still, amid my melancholy, I do feel joy.  You need to parse words carefully here.  Treanor knows that joy and happiness aren’t the same thing.  For those of us predisposed toward melancholy, joy is probably much more common in our lives than happiness.  This book is one that led me to start underlining again.  I do hope to come back to it when my outlook becomes too bleak.  Treanor interacts with both other philosophers and other writers, even some who aren’t always classified as philosophical.  It is a nepenthe.

Some of us think incessantly and can’t help doing so.  It’s a bit difficult to be cheerful if that’s the case.  Melancholic Joy, if I can keep it in mind, may help with that.  There are sections where I had to go back and re-read because my attention had wandered (it happens to us all), but to do so was rewarding.  For anyone who finds many aspects of the world oppressive, and depressing, and who has a philosophical bent, this book is for you.  Just be careful with that first chapter.  Whatever you do, don’t stop there.

Dream Machine

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I’ve reached the age where, instead of how well you slept, it’s the nature of my dreams that is more reliable projector of productivity.  You see, after a night of bad dreams I often wake up drained, lacking energy.  Entire days can be cast into this state of lassitude.  The only thing for it is to sleep again and reset.  The next day I can wake up after positive dreams, bursting with ideas and creativity.  New ideas come so fast that I can’t get them down in time.  Dreams. 

My entire life I’ve been subject to nightmares (no, it’s not the movies).  I still wake up scared at least once or twice a week.  More positive dreams have been struggling with these nighttime frights, and when they win, I have a better day.  I know, I know.  I should be in regular therapy.  The problem is time.  I see notes in papers and elsewhere of people younger than me dying.  On a daily basis.  The problem is I’ve got so much that I want to accomplish that I don’t have time to locate, pay for, and drive to see a therapist every week.  (The bad dreams come that frequently, so it stands to reason that weekly appointments should be on the script, right?)

The thing is, there’s no predicting these dreams or their timing.  My wife and I live a life of routine.  I awake early (anywhere from 1 a.m. To 4 a.m. these days) and begin writing and reading.  I jog as soon as it’s light and start work when I get back.  The 9-2-5 insists that you answer emails until 5 p.m., which can make for some very long days, depending.  After that we have dinner while watching some show we missed when it first aired, and then I go to bed.  That’s been the pattern ever since we bought this house nearly seven years ago.  Before that, we didn’t always watch things in the evening, but that doesn’t seem to make a difference in the dreams.

So I get up early and write down my thoughts for this blog, work on the books I happen to be scrawling at the moment (both fiction and non) and anxiously watch for sunrise, that ever shifting foundation.  And then work.  Always work.  But how well I work will depend largely on what was in my subconscious mind before I wake.  I have no idea if this is normal.  Knowing myself, it probably isn’t.  But I’ve reached the age where it at least starts to make sense.

Framing

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Have you ever gone into one of those art museums where the frame of a painting is so lavish that you notice it almost more than the art it contains?  It certainly says something about me (or where I shop), that I prefer simple frames.  Those that ideally pick up and emphasize something in the picture.  I recently critiqued a book on this blog because the framing seemed off.  Not a week afterwards I found myself going down an internet rabbit hole (the topic isn’t important) because someone had framed a speech so that it seemed to be reading things one particular way.  With that framing, I watched the speech and was astonished.  Then I sent it to one of my brothers and he pointed out that it could be understood a different way.  At first I was embarrassed and defensive (to myself), but I went back and listened again and realized he was right.  I’d accepted the framing uncritically.

We are incapable of seeing everything.  From the shape of our eyes to the limits on our distance vision, we can only take in so much.  That’s what frames are for.  We put them around paintings, photographs, posters, windows, and mirrors.  The demarcate the limit of something.  This image goes only so far.  Televisions used to do that, although now they seem to take up a wall instead of a framed corner space.  But even so.  Movie screens too.  They provide important context.  We know, looking at that screen, that something limited to that screen will appear.  We know that what’s caught in the picture frame can’t reach beyond it, physically.  (I am excluding some modern art, of course.)  Framing is important.

I am glad for this recent object lesson.  I was letting myself get worked up over something I may have viewed the wrong way because I had been primed to do so.  It involved one of my deepest wishes, so emotion definitely played a part in it.  Critical thinking involves looking at the frame and thinking about it as well as what’s inside.  Those who excel at creating content make you forget the frame is there.  The artist isn’t painting to fill a frame, the frame contains the art.  We all know this on some level, I suspect.  Nevertheless, when someone presents us anything with the interpretation built in, we need to ask ourselves if that interpretation is inherent in the object or is it simply part of the frame.  And if it’s the frame, no matter how fancy, we need to remove it and look from a different angle.

Little Things

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Those on anti-clutter campaigns (whose lives I can’t imagine) claim that we have too much stuff.  That may be true, but when you reach a certain age these realia can serve to remind us where we’ve been.  How we’ve become who we are.  We moved to our house in a whirl.  Neither my wife nor I had enough vacation days to take any time off and we had to move 55+ years of stuff over a weekend.  Lately I’ve been going through some of the boxes of little things you keep.  They were generally mixed in with papers I didn’t have time to file, bits of hardware, and a few things I’m not sure why I kept.  In the archaeology of my life, the layer labeled Nashotah House retains a prominent place.  It took many years before I could look at my little Nashotah House things without being overwhelmed by emotion.  Nearly twenty years on, I hope I’m beginning to get over it.

One of the little things I unearthed was a pepper shaker.  One of my students (now sadly departed) had made a label to express her frustration and humor at trying to learn Hebrew as a mature woman.  I’m probably now the age she was then.  This little artifact has been with me through a great number of momentous changes in my life.  It can still bring a little smile, however.  I see it and I remember Judy giving it to me with a laugh.  I probably shared it with the class.  Even now it has two-decade-old pepper in it.  The declutter experts would say it belongs in the dumpster.  They’re wrong.

Nashotah House was the only job on offer following those intense Edinburgh years.  As all of these things recede further and further into the past, they become more valuable.  No matter how small, these objects played a part in what I remember and rubbed me in a way that influenced my shape.  I don’t know what that final shape will be, but I jealously guard my little things, these boxes of years.  They are points of contact between my life and those of others.  I found many other pieces of myself in these miscellaneous boxes.  I know that someday, all things being equal, this stuff will probably end up in some landfill somewhere, waiting for some future archaeologist wondering what realia we kept back in the years when the world went insane.  And if s/he is really brave, they might even try some of the pepper on their future lunch.

Decide

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Decisions we make when we’re young influence our entire lives.  It’s not that you can’t change course—I’ve seen it happen and it can be a thing of true beauty—but the fact is our young lives become our old lives, if we survive.  I’m now in my sixties.  I reflect a lot about my youth and the fact that I grew up in an uneducated, blue-collar family.  I had no idea what college was, and had not a minister convinced me that I might have the right stuff, I would probably never have gone.  It was foolish in a way.  My family contributed nothing financially—they couldn’t afford to.  I started with optimistic scholarships that eventually became less sanguine and I had to borrow more and more.  Once I’d begun on that path, however, turning back looked to be nothing but disastrous.

Photo by Pablo García Saldaña on Unsplash

The internet allows us glimpses, only glimpses, into the lives of those we knew in our younger years.  Many of my surviving high school friends (and that number decreases every year now) have followed paths to their current situations.  I didn’t know them well, perhaps, but they too seemed set to follow in the courses of their lives.  I really hope they’re happy.  I hate to see anyone sad.  Still, there’s a melancholy captured well by a rabbi, who it is I can’t remember, who once said “You can either be wise or be happy.”  There’s an almost kabbalistic truth nestled in that sentiment, it seems.  Your rudder is small and the ocean is very, very big.  As a penurious boy living in an economically depressed refinery town, I never dreamed I’d have the privilege of living in Edinburgh for three years, with a wonderful wife, no less.  And yet, and yet.

The course of my life is not over yet (I hope).  Every day I make hundreds of decisions but none of them seem as momentous as the ones I made before I had seen much beyond rural western Pennsylvania.  I know this is true of others as well, reacting to the pain and angst of the moment, they turn to whatever gives them comfort.  For me it was books.  And church.  The course of a life.  And in a way that will only make sense of those who knew me in high school (none, or very few of whom ever read this blog), when I do my daily exercises, they always include twenty-two push-ups.  A number that, mystically, corresponds to the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet.  Way stations along a curriculum vita.

Peace

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Mother’s Day should be a time for peace.  In these days when misogyny is in style, it’s an especially important holiday.  The one holiday to explicitly honor women, it’s always been an occasion for reflection for me.  We have 364 days of warring and hatred, and one dedicated to the givers of unconditional love.  I can imagine a different world.  One in which women don’t have to become alt-right to gain positions of authority.  Where compassion and humane treatment would be world priorities.  I can imagine.  Although fathers are necessary too, we have no shortage of men pushing forward their personal agendas.  None of them would be where they are without mothers.  And women are the ones who give us care.  I can imagine a world where Mother’s Day wouldn’t have to feel so politicized, almost polemical.

With all eyes on Pope Leo, I can’t help but think how many treat Mother’s Day like an indulgence.  You know you want to get back to your vices, so why not pay for them in advance?  Celebrate mothers today so we can get back to business as usual tomorrow.  I don’t believe that we’ve lost the ability for transformation.  We can make the world a better place.  Think what it would be like if, before undertaking some cruel action, a person stopped to imagine their mother watching them do it.  Would not the world start to improve?  It is a world where we seem to prefer guns to roses, but it’s also a world with an unwritten future.  Pay attention to your mother.  Maybe things will start to get better.

I believe in the transformative potential of holidays.  We have to take their lessons seriously.  I’m sure I’m not the only working stiff who lives life anticipating the next holiday when things might change for the better.  We have to remember, however, what the holidays teach us.  Not treat them as simply facile days of obligation.  Think of Mom and then get back to the grind.  It doesn’t need to be a grind.  We can learn to cooperate and get along, just like Mom told us to.  Instead of isolating such thoughts to a single day, we could repeat them like a mantra.  I don’t know about you, but looking at the headlines, I could do with a bit of peace and love.  And I still believe that things can, and likely will get better.  And I give the credit to our mothers.

Thinking of Home

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The earth, and even life on it, will, I’m confident, outlive our petty desires for money and being the king of the hill.  Scientists are getting tantalizingly close to demonstrating something that many of us already know—life exists elsewhere.  Chemical signatures of life appear as close as Venus and as far as K2-18b.  I suspect our universe is full of life.  And life is more than just rationality.  We’re creatures driven to survive and that level of will appears to be universal.  As Ian Malcolm says, “Life will find a way,” or something similar.  Earth Day should be a celebration but under too many Republican presidents it has become a plea to please stop intentionally harming our planet.  I grew up in that distorted religion known as Fundamentalism.  I learned that the destruction of the world was necessary to force God’s hand with the second coming.  The planet was here to exploit and waste since he’ll be back any day now.

Unlike many of my cohort, I decided to learn more about that perspective.  The more I learned the more shocked I became.  A warped and twisted message had been passed along as Gospel truth, and that the care the creator bestowed upon creation was merely a smokescreen to hide Jesus’ return.  I still believe we are not capable of completely destroying the planet.  Life will continue with or without us.  Life is persistent and hopeful.  That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take care of it.  Earth Day has become a rallying point for those who see the world sensibly.  We have so much wonderful life on this planet.  In our arrogance and in our tendency to take mythology literally, we have assumed the worst.  Why not take care of what we were given?  Jesus may not come back, but perhaps the Lorax will.

There are ways to live sustainably on this planet.  It does mean that some of the richest will need to surrender some of their wealth and power.  We need to learn the habits of requiring less and appreciating more what we have.  Like most people born into the world in this era, I struggle against the desire for new things.  Novelty is natural to such curious creatures as ourselves.  But there are other such curious creatures too.  They have a place here, even as those which seem to have no curiosity do.  It’s a planet big enough for all of us.  We just need to be sensible about it.  And remember the earth today and be thankful for our home every day.

Image credit: NASA/ISS Expedition 28, public domain from Wikimedia Commons

Space Rocks

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The thing from another world.  No, not the movie, but an artifact.  My recent post about the asteroid sent me looking for something.  When we lived in Wisconsin, we purchased a small piece of a meteorite while on a visit to the Yerkes Observatory.  It is, quite literally, a thing from another world.  The problem is, I can’t find it.  Our house isn’t that big but the fragment is quite small.  I’ve been told our house is like a museum—there are curios pretty much everywhere, and they each have some significance.  But the meteorite: where could it be?  I find that moving is one of the most disruptive activities known to those of us in the “developed” world.  As much as I wanted an organized move, the fact is that you can’t have such a move without taking at least a month off work in advance.

There are things (from this world) that I haven’t found in the six-plus years in this house.  Most often they’re like the meteorite in that I don’t think of them often, and when I do I wonder where I might’ve packed them.  Knowing where they might’ve been packed gives a clue to where they might’ve been unpacked.  And no matter what, some things get lost on every move.  There’s a book I had in New Jersey that is simply not here in Pennsylvania.  I’m sure I packed all our books.  One, at least, did not make it over the Delaware.   The fragment of meteorite, which is unique, is only about the size of a small ladybug.  Where might I have put it?  

That small fragment of rock traveled through the solar system.  It likely came from distances no human has ever gone.  Unimaginable distances.  Only to get lost in a house in Pennsylvania.  If it’s here at all.  Back when it was legal to pick up petrified wood, a family friend gave us two chunks from the petrified forest (for now, a National Park in Arizona).  One of them came to me and I treasured it for years.  I haven’t seen it since we moved to Pennsylvania.  There are boxes that haven’t been fully unpacked.  The squirrels make a mess of the garage every winter and I can’t go in there without feeling I should clean things up first, before emptying out the remaining boxes.  To a squirrel the thing from another world is just one more thing to ignore.  It has no value except for to an aging guy who remembers buying it at the very spot where Edwin Hubble worked and Albert Einstein visited.  Only to mislay it when moving fifty miles from state to state.

Not my meteorite. Image credit: Meteoritekid under the GNU Free Documentation License, via Wikimedia Commons

Four-leaf Clover

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It was recently my late mother’s birthday.  I didn’t post about it on that that day since it might become a security question some day.  In any case, it was a somber day for me.  It’d been raining on and off for several days straight and I was wanting a picture of her for my bulletin board.  I remembered that I had inherited one of her photo albums.  This was the old kind with black paper onto which you had to lick and stick corners to hold the pictures.  Many of the photos had fallen out even back when she asked me to hold onto it, but there were some still there of her as a young woman.  As I was looking through them, something inside the front cover caught my attention—the crumbly brown remains of three four-leaf clovers that she’d glued there.

Since this isn’t likely to be a security question, I can say that her home life wasn’t ideal.  The page with the young photos of her were obviously from a day that she and my father were taking pictures of each other as young lovers.  They were outside a house on a summery-looking day.  Smiling and looking for a better future.  Four-leaf clovers.  My father was an alcoholic, and my mother knew that, but hoped that she might change him.  I don’t know the dates of the photos so I’m not sure if they yet knew they’d be parents.  One of the oddities of life is that about the time the questions occur to you, your parents might already be gone.  I wanted to ask about that happy day.  Those clover leaves.  The sunshine.

Rain and gray clouds persisted.  That particular day I had little human interaction, and I felt her presence with me.  I’m not a minister, as she always hoped I would be.  I could never find a job closer to home, as she wished time and again.  I didn’t even get to see her before she died.  Instead I had a photo album on my lap and rain falling.  And work for the day looming.  Her birthday is an engrained date in my mind.  Those last years we tried to find appropriate gifts for a woman who always said, “I don’t need anything.”  A few of those gifts are scattered around our house now.  One that gives me hope is a vase with flowers made from colorful paper that we purchased at a craft show for her.  I look at it and think of crumbled four-leaf clovers.