“I Am My Own Grandpa”
By Michael Erlewine
“I AM MY OWN GRANDPA”
I am certain that all of us, each and every one, has peculiarities, and I don’t mean tics, that stick with us through thick or thin. I know I do. And chief among these that I have to honor in my life has to do with grandpas, older men (and women) that provide guidance.
“I am my own grandpa,” as the song goes. I never had a grandpa on either side of the family, and my father, loved as he was, never was able to talk to his five sons in any deeply personal way. It just never happened.
And although I didn’t know ‘what’ I was missing, I felt I was missing something. And on top of that, being raised out in the countryside with no neighbors further compiled the problem.
In today’s world, when I look around, mentors and therapy seem to be everywhere. Not just adults, but kids are in therapy and most everyone I know has one or more therapists. I don’t and never have had anything like that, not at all, and apparently my approach is to ‘suck it up’ when faced with internal problems.
Whether that is good, bad, or indifferent is not what I am getting at here. I am just seeing into what has been an unwritten theme in my life and talking about it for a moment.
Because apparently my father was private and unable to talk personally and in depth with any of his five sons. I had to seek out that kind of ‘grandpa’ wisdom on my own, and I did.
First of all, I found truth, beauty and guidance in Mother Nature, starting from when I was just a young boy living out on the edge of society in the countryside, and later I sought and found guidance from an elder, a traveling Rosicrucian initiator of western esoteric wisdom, and then in the hundreds of Black blues musicians that I interviewed and I finally found it in Tibetan rinpoches, and worked with one rinpoche in particular for 36 years.
What my father was unable to do, my mom did in spades. She was always there for her five sons and very much rose to the occasion. I had no sisters as siblings, and feel surrounded by women, first by my mom, and later by my three daughters. I like women. I do have one son, whom I treasure as well.
I was never an athlete other than a little bit through swimming. I was good at it, won one award, and also trained and worked as a lifeguard in a summer camp. I love the water and the creatures of the water.
I won the biology award at my high school through producing a fairly elaborate study and slideshow of the marine fauna of the north shore of Boston, and went to MIT in that competition. I of course, since I hated school, flunked that year and had to repeat the 10th grade. Once again, nature and the natural was and has been my refuge throughout my life.
And the most amazing, to me stunning, fact of my life was when my decades long dharma practice came to a head, meaning I actually had a dharma breakthrough that altered the course of my life. I don’t need to repeat that story here, because I have on this blog several times over the years.
The point I will repeat is that after many decades of deliberate dharma practice, during a very difficult time in my life, when I reached out for what could only be called ‘refuge’, instead of the meditation cushion that I assumed was my refuge place, I leapfrogged right past that cushion and found myself seeking solace in Mother Nature, going all the way back to when I was just a young boy and then a young man.
And because to me when the chips were down and the rubber met the road that was most familiar to me, what I trusted most in life. I had kind of forgotten this truth, yet when instinct in me took over in this troubled time, immediately I was back there in my past trusting Mother Nature. That just was the way it was. And so, I don’t naturally have the buffer of therapy as so many do today in society and life. Nature has always been my refuge and teacher.
And as mentioned, lacking any grandpa energy, instead I sought out wise men (and some women) that I trusted to guide me. However, also as mentioned, because I trained early on in nature’s rules and laws, unfortunately for me, I did not just naturally trust society’s teachers and leaders. I did not.
I looked into the eyes of my elders, and as a young person, that was almost everyone of course, for signs of the command and savvy apparently I needed in order to trust others to guide me. If I did not see that flicker of savvy and life wisdom in their eyes, I did not want to take or learn from them, if only because I did not myself want to become like I saw them to be.
I did had one teacher, it was in fourth grade, Mrs. Althouse, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania that I trusted to instruct me, and beyond that, there were none. And my mother was an artist and painter, and there was one friend of my mother who lived out in the country, and she was part of a group of artists that would meet.
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And I would go with mom out to these meeting and just be in nature. Her name was Peggy Dodge, and she mentored me in nature. I can remember one time my diving into her pond and coming out with a large water snake (and they bite) holding in one hand the snake from biting me and swimming with the other hand.
As mentioned, it was Peggy Dodge who first sparked my interest in nature and all things natural, and at that young age I became a naturalist, and a serious one at that. I did little else but study nature until I was around the age of eighteen, but that is another story. However, I want to tell you about the next person who greatly affected me, and that was Stanley Tennenbaum.
One day, when I was 19 years old (this had to be early in 1961), I was hitchhiking out on Huron Street, near my parent’s home on the west side (305 Wildwood) of Ann Arbor, trying to get downtown. It was only perhaps a mile, but I didn’t want to walk. I was used to hitchhiking and had already hitched to California and back, not to mention around five round trips to New York City.
Anyway, I was picked up by a somewhat strange character. This guy was immediately friendly, and he explained as we drove along that his name was Stanley Tennenbaum and that he had a research scholarship at the University of Michigan Department of Mathematics in the foundation of mathematics.
In short, he was paid just to think and work with his own mind in the realm of math. I liked that idea. Later I would find out that Stan Tennenbaum was quite famous in the world of mathematics for work he did on a proof by the great mathematician Gödel. Stanley was interested in what are called recursive functions and other very abstract forms of mathematics. I didn’t know what to think of him.
For one, Stanley had all the earmarks of the eccentric genius: long hair, thick glasses, and a wild and crazy (and I mean crazy) look in his eye. During that ride into town, Stan, who was very interested in education, couldn’t resist striking up a conversation with me. He was very direct and became friendly and personal with me at once. At first, I thought this guy has to be gay, but he was not. Who else would be interested me, a 19-year kid who was a nobody, so we talked.
In that very short ride of probably only a mile or two, he managed to find out that I had dropped out of high school and was casting around for some direction in life. For reasons of which I have no idea, he fixed on me as someone that he could help and immediately (on the spot!) invited me to come and live with himself and his family out on a farm near Chelsea, Michigan for that spring.
Do I have to tell you that this was odd? Even so, I was totally intrigued that anyone would have an interest in me at all. I had nothing going for me other than just being myself. But
this guy was fascinating and sincere, so I accepted his offer and before I knew it, I was living in Stan’s attic out on a farm near Chelsea.
The idea was that I would live there for free (I had no money), and Stan would give me various study projects to complete under his guidance. American history was the first on his list, as I well remember. And that is how I came to live with Stanley Tennenbaum and his family.
I will never forget the first morning I woke up on that farm. There I was, half-awake in a tiny room in the attic and feeling for sure that I was in a different place than home. Suddenly, up through the stairwell from below came this deafening sound. It was something like music, but unlike any music I had ever heard before. It was almost terrifying. As it turned out it was a Bach fugue played on the organ and at incredible volume. That was my real introduction to my sojourn with Stan, not to mention to Bach fugues.
I am sure Tennenbaum’s wonderful wife and young family must have wondered what in the world I was doing living in their house, but I never heard a peep from them. I did study that book on American history. In fact, I came across some handwritten notes not that long ago, carefully copied out in my indecipherable script. I did the work, but I also took in the farm that spring in 1961. I remember watching the cows in the warm barnyard sun for hours. Some of my drawings are enclosed.
As for the studying, as mentioned, I did the work, and it went OK, but I am VERY hard to teach. I tend to like to teach myself things, although you could not ask for a more enthusiastic teacher than Tennenbaum.
Remember, I never got out of high school because I had trouble respecting teachers who were not (in my opinion) life teachers. I thirsted for life teachers, and Stanley came close. That being said, I did not always see eye to eye with Tennenbaum, and he did have a bit of a temper. My own stubbornness eventually led me to leave the farm, but it was not unfriendly. Did I mention that I am very stubborn?
All and all, I got a lot out of that experience, not so much with American history, but mostly just the fact that someone was interested in how my mind worked and thought enough of me to try and help me by offering some direction. That made a difference. I owe Stanley Tennenbaum my deepest thanks for taking the time to single me out for encouragement. It came at the right time, and it really meant something to me.
Years later I found out that Tennenbaum was a kind of genius (and maverick) in mathematics, part of the great tradition that came out of the University of Chicago in the early part of the 20th Century.
His papers are legendary and the anecdotes about his life are too. Some have likened him to a modern Socrates, bouncing around from math departments across the country, at times without a job and means, but engaging (at times irreverently) those he met with a mind they would not soon forget. I remember Stanley Tennenbaum and thank him for his interest in me.
In the end, however, I was (even under those circumstances) pretty much as un-teachable as ever, and it was only some months later that I left Ann Arbor and fate found me out on the road again, hitchhiking and traveling with an unknown songwriter by the name of Bob Dylan. This was the spring of 1961 and one of life’s turning points for me. I am my own Forrest Gump.
[Photo of Stanley Tennenbaum, contour drawings by me.]
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