Pondering 01: Paused, Pondering And Reflecting — Origins
I’ve recently noticed I am pushed to write by a cyclic force I have’t yet figured out…but I both want to figure it out, …yet don’t want to mar a psychically rewarding thing. But, being currently mid-cycle, I felt it rewarding to stop for a minute and ‘ponder’, then ‘reflect’ and hopefully evolve…in my understanding of myself and the world around us. (‘Ponder’ will be my new mantra…until it is superceded …perhaps by a more ‘evolved’ mental state.)
As I’ve pointed out in earlier posts to Medium, I recall I first began to sense a state of pondering when a child of 3–4…as I looked over the casket lid at the resting body of my good, great uncle ..surrounded by our extended, multi-racial-nation family in Kansas-Nebraska. (My extended family ‘extends’ racially and nationalistically from Old French-Louisiana, Swedish-German, African, Native American
Backstory, perhaps weekly during the MET opera season my casketed Kansas-Nebraska great uncle ritually treated me to one quarter-puff on his cuban cigar when I regularly visited him, delivered by Mom, to don the extra earpiece he had rigged up for me to listen with him to the Saturday Met operas…on his crystal radio…while we both waited for the women to finish cooking and call the family to a dinner.
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My ‘Met opera’ uncle was an Austrian refugee boy who somehow escaped Europe to America, worked his way from New York to Kansas-Nebraska, and melded into the greater gene pool of America’s heartland (German-Swedish-French-Irish-Spanish…, Native American, Freemen African Americans,…they all mixed freely at earlier times before racial and nationalistic compartmentalizing (racial segregation) set in...as America‘s political life ‘evolved.’
Note — the casketed, ‘MET’ great uncle was not the north Kansas mule-skinner great uncle who was an orphaned, 11 year-old ‘gofer’ for a road-gang (the Dalton Brothers), walked the same Dodge City streets as Wyatt Earp and Billy the kid, and eventually sheltered Bonnie and Clyde and Baby Face Nelson who spent overnights in the coal mine on his 15 acre farm out on the plains of north Kansas). That uncle described to me how in the old days people learned for survival to avoid eye contact with certain ‘lawmen’ as well as with publicly known outlaw killers — both groups being high strung “bad men”…which as an adult, I’ve come to retroactively translate as probably psychotic individuals. (But that was America’s ‘wild west’, then…although now the ‘wild west’ has lived on to be a bi-coastal state of mind.)
To return to MET opera Saturdays: I also pondered our family dinners that were in themselves mirrors of the heartland. The dishes presented varieties of regional ‘American’ and international cuisines that characterized America at that time …Native American corn and venison-berry-quince-black walnut pudding, German-Swedish schnitzel and apple sauce with potato pancakes and sauerkraut, African Okra and collards and turnip tops, French legumes, and the Creole pecan pies (hmmm) and my mother’s version of oysterless Jambalaya and Gumbo made with homemade spicy sausage. (I was indoctrinated with an international taste for food that I guess has been a prime motivating factor for my equal liking for international travels and wanderings.)
But, again at great (Austrian) uncle’s MET opera sharing, I pondered both the wonderfully appealing smell of Cuban tobacco, the soothing melodies, progressions and arias of ‘Figaro’, ‘Norma’ … and especially ‘Hoffmann’ (Offenbach), and the mystery how a shiny little piece of rock in the midst of wires and coils could pick up radio transmissions from a thousand miles away. (My child’s mind thought ‘thousand miles’ was equivalent to any distance from Nebraska-Kansas to the Met or to the Moon, but for a while ‘thousand miles’ was such a valuable addition to my young learning that I repeated it so numerous times daily, that it motivated an irritated request from Mom that I ‘move on’ and acquire new words for my developing vocabulary’ …a process she kicked off by introducing me to a few words in her Louisiana French.)
Finished ‘pondering’ for today…I want to further ponder the state of our lives as a global species about to self-annihilate …either ourselves, or our planet, or both (a momentous accomplishment for a primate-origin species.)
