May 7, 2015 is the 10th anniversary of my father's death. Usually, I write an essay about how wise, kind, and special he was. This year, I will let his own words speak for him. While he was fighting cancer, Dad began writing a memoir for his family. Here are some excerpts from it, for those who knew and loved him, and my other friends who didn't have the pleasure of knowing this extraordinary man.
April 7, 2005
“What am I here for, except to set an example?” Dr. Deb Bennett
“I know stuff.” That’s a line from a justifiably low-rated movie that has been in my mind for some time now. In the movie, an old man, who appears to be an old biker dude is asked why he is kept as a member of a post-apocalyptic, young group of rebels battling against the power of a feudalistic, brutal society rising out of a power vacuum after a great war of destruction.
Indeed! He did know a lot of stuff. He had been, in his long life, a warrior, a scientist, and an astronaut. His knowledge and experience were invaluable, and decisive for his rebel group.
Well, I know some “stuff” too. I sure don’t have that old man’s knowledge but I have gained, as anyone else of 59 years would have, or should have, a small collection of “stuff” that might be of interest and maybe even help, on occasion, to his offspring.
That’s the reason for this writing. I’m in the hospital with some complicated complications to colon cancer. I was diagnosed in October 2003 and the medical details aren’t germain, except that the most important thing I know about things like this and I’ve known it for a long time, is that to survive is to accept.
In accepting the true circumstances of your life you can begin to deal with them, however gloomy they might be. Acceptance does NOT mean surrender. It means ACCEPTANCE.
Considering this, it’s clear that if I’m going to pass on a little of my “stuff”, I’d best be doing it. So now I’ll endeavor to begin (even though I’m actually planning on about 20 years to complete the job.)
April 8, 2005
I was born on August 16, 1945. My mom said it was a hot and humid, sticky summer day. I’m sure it was just because I’ve always hated that kind of weather. One of the things about my age that I want to be perfectly clear about is that I’m NOT a Baby Boomer. The Japanese surrendered on August 14. The Baby Boom began almost a year later. Why this should matter so much is almost a mystery to me except that I’ve always sensed some laziness and moral weakness in the slightly younger generation (witness President Clinton’s sexual exploits) what he did didn’t matter to me, but his lies did.
At any rate, just so you can know a little about my boyhood, we’ll get the hell away from politics and talk about “Nehi” soda.
Quite a bit of my growing years were spent in and out of mischief with the other boys at this tiny town called Somerdale where my Dad’s parents and kin lived and their descendants still do. A lady named Bessie Banks ran the town grocery. To call it a grocery is a bit beyond the strictest truth. Actually, it was a store of sorts, though, in the bottom of an old house that hadn’t been lived in for years. It was just a big room with old oily floors and a big pot-bellied stove in the back where Bessie’s dad and his cronies played checkers and spit in the coal pile.
Between the stove and door were a bunch of shelves holding canned goods from fresh to ancient, but the heart of us boy’s attention were two old refrigerators beside the front doors which held the pop. There was Coke in the old small bottles and Pepsi in the same size and best of all, Nehi soda in many great flavors. I don’t know if they even make it any more, but they should, especially that good old “cream soda”. This was our refreshment on those long, hot summer afternoons when we mighty white hunters desperately needed a break from the dangerous stalk of the deadly starlings that harassed our little town, so we slung our “Daisy Red Riders” over our shoulders and headed for the store.
We would pool our pennies and determine our shortfall. One bottle, as I recall, cost a nickel and there was a 1 cent deposit. Since starling hunting paid poor wages, we usually needed to set off along the tar bubbled, boiling roads, looking for enough bottles to fulfill our shortfall. When we got them, we sat under the old walnut tree and drank and burped and considered basic economics.
April 11
Economics wasn’t the only thing, though, that we learned in those days. If you turn on the tv today and scan through the channels it won’t be long till you find one or more lecturing, effectively I hope, about a concept that was being carefully taught to us youngsters. The current correct name for this is one we never heard of in 1955, “ecology” and it means the interconnectedness of all things natural. Actually, of all things “period”.
The thing that now surprises me most about the modern approach to the fact of ecology is that it’s treated as something special. As a unique and separate branch of knowledge. Of course, this is true, it is a needed science but to treat it in only this way is to cut it off from the simple “common sense” that it really is.
The whole idea of interconnectedness was introduced to us kids by our various families—grandparents, parents and uncles--as simple and obvious facts of existence.
When we were trusted, finally, with the huge responsibility of ownership and control of our first Daisy’s, it came with stern and repeated lectures on the sacredness of all life. Now, we were also taught that there is also a balance in nature that needs to be kept and that the destroyers of this balance, through the years, were us humans. This, as Grandpa taught, has put upon us heavy debt.
We were all hunters. Nothing was more natural to us than to stalk and eventually to kill some sort of prey. But, we were hunters of Honor, and this is the heart of our debt. We were carefully indoctrinated to the fact that to honor our prey we must actually feel, not merely empathy, but true love for it and true sorrow for its destruction. If all you feel is the false pride of a good shot, then you are not a hunter, but a killer.
Farmers, for example, hate to have ground hog holes in their fields. Who could blame them? Machinery is expensive. Groundhogs, though, have a reason to exist, too. They provide food for foxes and sometimes hawks and their burrows make secure homes for all kind of critters from snakes to rats to rabbits. Sometimes all at the same time.
But farmers have a right to live, too. In fact, they feed us, don’t they? Too many ground hogs need to go. It’s time to make a payment on our debt. The payment includes not just the bullets and the time and the fun of the stalk, but a serious look at the little, bloody, ball of fur, that just a few moments ago was just trying to make a living.
We were allowed to shoot all the English sparrows and all the starlings that we could get our sites on. That was because they were thought to destroy the native songbird eggs. We were never to judge these little victims, though. It wasn’t their fault they were brought to a land with no niche for them. It was just another imbalance needing correction that was caused by our human arrogance.
You see, what our grandfathers, or at least mine, were eventually teaching us, when they gave us our first Daisy’s and .22’s and shotguns was not how to hunt. That’s a skill we could learn well by ourselves. What they were teaching was the great depth of connectedness between all creatures and the oneness of all life.
A precious lesson, indeed, and one not taught much these days. Grandpa would be much upset if he saw the hunting morals practiced by some of the current generation of “sportsman”. I’m sure he would growl something about them not having a community, or a village, to teach them “the Way”.
“The Way” is a pretty interesting concept. The “Tao”, as I prefer it, is, I guess, a very ancient way to describe a really religious path of life and it’s what we were actually taught as hunters, and it is remarkable that the teaching comes not from a Bible or some religious tome, but from the entire community.
So now we have a path to follow and some moral reason for it, but what path? Who knows? The way of our lives is in the future and will, I promise you, be a surprise. It’s not likely, though, that there will be much hunting in it.
Most likely, there will be several paths. Some may be for economics. “How much money can I make?” Some for fun, or fame or whatever, but among these there will be at least one (especially one) that will go straight to the marrow. The funny thing is that this one may be hard to recognize even though it is your one true calling.
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