Spoons
This story is a live draft.
I have two spoons. That’s all I really have left. All that remain. They’re from my parents’ wedding. They’re pewter, of all things, and they have a viking legend story on them.
My mother wore a formal, purple jumpsuit in photos while pregnant with me. She wore baby blue and white when they married, or at least at the reception. They were married in Vegas, but they had a reception with my grandparents, and there are several cute photos showing happiness. A few photos show them at a table, drinking wine near the color of red Kool-aid. And then, there is the purple, satin jumpsuit later.
She wore a similar color on my date of delivery: a maroonish purple. Sever photos show her on a stretcher, relaxed. In one, she’s smoking a cigarette. And then, there are the photos after delivery. I’m quiet and content with my head covered in a cap and I’m in a gown and swaddled in my mother’s arms with my father gleefully looking over me. My mother received flowers.
As an infant, I was unable to hear. My ears were a cause of many problems, and my head, to this day, swells in pain in response to things going wrong, like a panic butting. I was in excruciating pain and had tubes put in, they said. I was, and still am, an extremely sensitive being. I’m also female.
I wasn’t treated like a boy growing up, but my parents raised me to be strong of mind and independent of thought, the two things my father praised, regarded, respected, and craved in my mother. He was so passionate about her, but she could not be tamed. She is a woman, was my father’s thinking. He didn’t say much, but he made his reasoning clear enough for me to comprehend my father’s opinion of women. He was not gender-neutral in his thinking and planning regarding his children and his family.
My father’s way of thought isn’t accepted by all today, and yet, his opinion is entirely what I need and cannot find in the world. I need my doctors to comprehend that I’m not a man. I cannot keep up with men and the requests of doctors who compare me to medical science data built on male studies. I also have brothers who are unable to stay in stride. We’re weak in our capacity to run races, but we think a great deal more than, it seems, is average, and since the brain is a muscle, I’m stunned that nuerology isn’t inclusive to total health. I overwork my brain often, and the brain does act as a muscle and does burn calories and does expend energy. The Thinking Man statue is a pose that shows man in outward form appearing still, like a machine in neutral, yet he is likely to be overly consumed by thought. Would you call the Thinking Man ‘lazy’? Stress burns calories.
I have several older brothers. four half and two step. Sounds like a dance routine: a four square and a two step. My parents were each married three times. Six marriages and three stepbrothers. I have one little brother. He’s the most unlazy, and yet he’s also the one who probably understands what I’m saying most of all. In contrast, one of my brothers is extremely athletic, and he’s the most outwardly, financially successful. He’s the most likely to ‘fit in’ in picture shows of ‘perfect.’ He also was given a full-ride through college, with paid fraternity dues, and he was the only one given that ride of all five of us. His life is on a routine he’s had for a very long time. He doesn’t shift his lifestyle, stays the ‘straight-and-arrow,’ and invests modestly. But, he’s somewhat lazy in thought and rarely, if ever, leaves his box of conventional safety.
I have never been fortunate enough to have a stable box of convention to hold onto, but when I do find myself within one, I hang on for dear life, nearly ruining the box itself. I thought, as a girl, and because of my father’s way, my lack of strength to be like my brother would be better understood, but it isn’t. My father did not raise his first four children; they were raised on a farm by their mother, a lifestyle I didn’t comprehend until I’d worked with farming families and their children. We’re different only in how we think, as in when and where, not how often. My students understand this, and as I’ve aged, I’ve come to recognize that I’m tending to farms when I work online, much the way a farmer tends. This doesn’t inspire my brother’s opinions toward change; yet, our father was not an athlete.
My mother was discriminated against in public schools. She grew up in Eugene, Oregon and graduated in the mid-60s from high school, and her opinion is very clear: 1. She is a twin, and her twin brother’s records in high school contrast her own vividly. He excelled while she was pushed back and questioned for things like coming up with the correct answers on math assignments without showing her work. She feels she did not have to show her work to obtain the correct answer. Doing the work slowed her down. She still derived the correct answer, with a few dots and marks. This strategy is used on exams such as the LSAT logic portion, but I am not certain her teachers would have known this (Would a math teacher know this factoid today? Is logic a form of math or English? Interesting to note, here, that English is capitalized while math is not). 2. My mother was put into classes ‘for girls,’ and she found it boring. She does not want to cook all day and recognizes cooking as a chore, just like cleaning. She’d rather paint, make art, be a woman in a rather traditional sense, but her education and cultural upbringing told her that, to be a strong and respected woman, she had to put on a voice, dress a certain way, and wear her hair and makeup to outwardly express her equality and separation from men.
My mother outwardly shows that wearing makeup is a waste of time to her. She also shows that fixing her hair shouldn’t be about looking gorgeous but functional. That said, she is expressive in color and wears shades that are regal, shapes that do not draw the eye into flaws but, rather, accentuate a touch. As a senior in Florida, she fits in entirely: capris, top, sandals, short hair, a purse and she’s at Publix picking up her Thanksgiving meal. She fits in, not as an athlete but, as a thinking woman in her senior years. Not uncommon whatsoever.
Had my parents stayed married, those two spoons would have carried their love quite far. My mother never parted with them, nor the matching pewter plate set and the goblets and the carving set. She gave them to me, and I carried all of those pieces with me through hell and high water, literally, but today all that remains are the two spoons.
I’m grateful to have my spoons. They’re salad tongs, it appears, although one was dye punched to make a spork. It’s interesting to note that the spoons have a vivid history that connects to my parents’ ancestry, on both sides, yet the conversation fell out of fashion. My ancestry is complete up to the 15th century, but it dates back to about 5 BCE with the story of these two spoons, yet the conversation ran out of fashion.
My grandparents are gone. My father’s parents both died of cancer, as did my father and his sister. They died within the span of seven years, and my grandfather became ill around the time I turned eighteen and died within a few years. All the stories were lost, all the greater connections to extended family were lost, and when my grandmother died, years later and after my father, she was blind, having breast cancer that spread to her brain, I was so far from home that we were unable to share those stories one last time. Her time with hospice was lonely, and she became argumentative when she lost her sight. Her death was proceed by her daughters, whom was the receiver of the antagonistic moments.
Emotions can make us sick. Today, I’m sick. I’m getting sick, and I can feel it. I have a growth on my rib that could be cancerous or could cause a stroke. It’s been looked at, as best as the x-ray could offer, and I have calcium deposits I watch over, knowing stroke runs in my mother’s family. I know my risks, and I know my shoes. My doctor doesn’t seem to evaluate these nuances of my existence in my medical records but should.
The spoons hold a viking story, showing rank order on one side and the ships on the other with a mark, like a rock, on the base of the backside. My mother’s family are from Amsterdam, England, Spain, and Eastern Europe. They’ve been in the United States, on one side, since arriving on the Santa Maria. The other side arrived from Rotterdam sometime around 1888. Both of her lines moved west to Oregon during the Dust Bowl and Great Depression. My grandmother was one of the first teachers, and her teaching contract from 1927 is not too far from societal expectations of teachers today. My grandfather, in some photos, looks just like F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of eleven children on a starved farm, he worked with his hands, building homes in Eugene, on the railroad, and had a legacy of working on his way westward to include working in caves.
How does a viking survive?
His ashtray broke some ten years ago. My mother left the room. She wasn’t angry as much as she was heartbroken. It was large, all glass, and quite heavy. She’d just moved back from Oregon to Florida again. She’d scheduled the move with a private moving company. They spoke Russian. Her items arrived a month late, and the boxes had been riffled through. Nearly all of her collected hierlooms had been stolen. The ashtray was one of the few remaining items. I broke it. It slipped from my hands and onto a terrazo floor.
My mother and I have carried all we are able to all my life. Today, I have only a few things, and it was my family who gave most of my things away, as if they didn’t have value and were an inconvenience. I’m lucky to have the spoons.
My father passed in 1999. A crisis moment in the history of the computer. He hated the computer. He did not think cellphones were a great idea. He had a car phone. He did not invest in AT&T when I proposed he buy stock in 1993, when cellphones were just ready to hit the market. He did not buy stocks. My grandmother did. She handled all of the family investments outside of real estate. She lost money in Enron. This impacted the small inheritance I received, but my loss when they left my life, my father, his parents, and my aunt, was the lost of things to hold. I received my father’s wedding ring from my parents’ marriage: a gold band of chains. Of my grandmother’s belongings, I held onto a black, crotcheted cardigan and a hospital blanket brought in by the hospice staff. She did not crotchet; my mom’s mother did, which was why I chose the sweater. The sweater was stolen by a visiting ‘friend.’ The hospital blanket was taken by someone at some point without my knowning, also. My father’s ring was stolen, also, and also from my home by a ‘friend.’
A chain ring. My brother’s “Chains” also, his stepson. My eldest brother. He and my eldest sister are the same age, and this song reminds me of them. They were not related and were the best of friends when I was young, like my two sibling parents.
Both of my parents raised me in a world short on friends. They did not trust everyone and were not the most outgoing people. They showed me how valuable peace at home is and why. They showed me, through their own conflicts, the lengths they went to to ensure they had safe homes without theft, without hatred, even when happy was missing. We shared private moments, me and my mom and me and my dad. Through me, they stayed together in their conflict. I held onto small things, like a flower from a day at a garden, a four-leaf clover from my grandparents, something a friend gave me. We had moments that brought us to tears with love and gratitude, even in hard times and often in hard times, in a way that showed both of them the capacity to love that they gave to me.
I’m not seeing the same way of being in my family any longer. I don’t often find people able to stop and think about the same things as I do. My mother is aging. She is delicate, as am I.
I don’t know that my father would have a great many words to share today, but he would take me on a drive somewhere, he’d take me to lunch and let me talk and talk, he’d listen without judgment, and he’d say something at some point that told me everything he felt but in a small package I could take with me to remember what he said. He was wise that way. Not perfect at all, and often I’d argue his points like my mother. But, he never stopped responding, never stopped believing good would prevail circumstance, never once made me feel as if he didn’t believe in my every fiber of being.
I remember how in love my parents were when they were married. I remember being in so much pain as a small child. I remember my mom’s way with me before I could speak. I remember the ways my parents taught me to express my feelings and emotions and conflicts. Those two spoons tell me a story of something they valued, legacy, that aimed to tie my families together with perminance and prominance; they have names. Looking back, today, it’s clear that the money didn’t matter to them. What mattered is what wasn’t said often enough and is nearly lost now, stored only in some of our memories.
I was made to hold my families together, not part them, but my father’s first family does not feel the same. They feel that they are a separate family. Not having my father there, in their home, while they grew up limited their capacity to comprehend the depth of love in our father, and in my mother. She kept those spoons, never forgetting one moment of time with them. They forgot her a long time ago, their stepmom. Disposed of her.
The same thing happened to my stepmom. She felt disposed of and never contacted anyone again and doesn’t respond if we try. The offense was too great to bear, but it was about money. She had all the things but no money. After my father’s death, she told me her apartment would have been okay for me, just starting out, but it wasn’t okay for her. My father was gone. There wasn’t an insurance policy to make a claim on because the claim was denied. She wasn’t homeless or unloved.
When we spoke, I was living in HUD housing, was twenty-one, and I had two small children. I was attending college under grants and loans. I’d experienced food insecurities, homelessness, and had never done anything to deserve my own life circumstances. My mother was poverty-stricken, and then so was I.
I’m grateful for my two spoons. I’m grateful for my two eyes that see. I’m grateful to not be deceived by money, knowing full-well the total value of my belongings ‘lost.’
Right around 9/11, I was listening to this song on repeat: “Spoon,” by Dave Matthews and Alanis Morrisette. One of the greatest arguments I have with people, personally and professionally, is that Christianity is all over most music, so why label it? I come from a ‘Christian family,’ mostly Catholic. Like Mumford & Sons, there is an old, old guitar solo, like a banjo. It reminds me of Irish music. I’m also Irish, and those Vikings aren’t only a legacy from my mother. Vikings also made their way to Ireland, and my father’s family, the Gallaghers and the Terrys, have a long Irish legacy, including indentured servitude in the United States. My great-grandfather was an Irish, Roman-Catholic priest, somewhere outside of Chicago. That’s where he met my great-grandmother, Dorothy Terry. She was an actress in a vaudeville act, so I’m told but cannot confirm, and they fell in love. He took her to Hollywood, and she succeeded and so did he. They have a treasured love story — or did.
In California, my grandfather and father were both long-boarders as kids living in LA. They both went to Catholic school, and then my father left the church when he divorced his first wife. His wife joined the Presbyterian church. My father and my mother did not attend church.
My mother’s families had a history of oppressed conflict with systems like churches. She and her twin, Rick, went to church as little kids, walking to and fro in a small town where everyone knew them as ‘the twins.’ She remembers going to the Lutheran church when she was four or so, and they’re fond memories, but he parents did not attend.
My grandmother did not want to be a teacher. She grew up on a prominent farm in the midwest, in a legacy family dating back to a ‘George Washington Terell’ with ancestral names that are quite legendry in the United States and Europe, but she was accused of doing something she did not do (or so I was told), and her reputation and her family’s suffered. And then, along came the depression. My great-grandfather was the superintendent of schools. He was tall, very tall, so tall that my great-grandmother had to stand on a stool to help him to put his coat on in the morning. Without the farm, she had to work and was sent out to teach in one-room schoolhouses. She traveled westward with her first husband and told stories, not often, of living in a tent with an alcoholic husband who was not kind. She met my grandfather in Eugene. They were both still married and met while with their spouses, who hit it off first and in front of them, so they decided they’d be better off. I imagine she was quite happy with him.
He died when my mother was only sixteen. The scars of the scarlet letter experience my grandmother experienced were not healed. She never had the lifestyle of the woman she seemed to crave to be. She sat much like my own mother in her feelings of theft. Her capacity was not allowed. Yes, she was another intellectually thinking woman, but . . . .
Family skeletons are stuck in this box of photographs I have. Other than my spoons, I have one train trunk of photos and what looks like some message my Uncle Rick left for us to solve that I cannot figure out alone. My mother will not say.
Today, all I know is that my family is far from me. So, I’ll take a moment in my scratch-space here to send this to my family:
I love my family endlessly. “To thine ownself be true” rings solid when you love yourself within your family members. To see yourself in different settings is only one example of how awesome it is to know and to appreciate and to regard family. Spoons. Mine aren’t silver, but they are not without value.
This one, too. My father and I loved music. “How do they not hear the ‘Christianity’? It’s all over every song, Dad, even if they use another word. It’s the same things. Hymnals. Why does it matter if it’s labeled?” He agreed. So, why isn’t this song playing on Sundays in churches? Copyright issues?
I missed their concert, like most. I rarely attend, but Mumford & Sons had a small concert near me when I moved back west, and I felt a family duty to attend but was unable. “Music is the soundtrack of our lives,” Rick Dees, and we listened religiously to music in the car, driving back and forth along the 405 and the 101 from his house to mine, all the years of my childhood. And, every Saturday, I listened to the sound of the “Top 40” in the background, on the radio, and often danced in the living room, sometimes showing off new moves I’d learned in dance class.
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My father owned only one home after my parent’s divorce; her too, and one condo, and my mother has moved innumerable times. My father did not. He was one to steadily build, to stay in one place. He lived in Los Angeles, then the county, and then only ever to Orange County. He never left his square — much like Emmanuel Kant. There is something to be said about predictability in life, but I cannot claim that it makes a better life. My father died at 59.
The house he purchased, however, was his pride and joy. All his love went into his home. First, he had the woodwork specially stained, and he added a bar in the pub and a large entertainment center to the family room. Then, he had all of the woodwork, including the banisters of the staircase, the window with rose etchings, the front doors, and the shelves in the library all stained the same color. It seemed to take forever, and the shade, being so important, is similar to the floor of the Santa Barbara Mission, where my father was a deacon.
He did not have the laundry room cupboards stained. Instead, he and my stepmom decided on murals, one for each of their children, to be painted on the doors. The home is for rent today, and the paintings are still in tact, all these years later. I don’t think I’ve been in that home since I was fourteen, thirty-five years. Mine is a pair of orange, Fiscar scissors hanging on a nail from a lavender, satin ribbon tied in a bow. My stepbrother’s baseball hat is also still there, along with the painting of the bunny rabbit for my stepmom.
I could never carry those cupboards, and I can’t afford to purchase the home nor rent it today, but it’s there. While I’m lost on the things I used to have to hold, paint holds the memories stable still. I only just found this when the house went on the market recently, for the first time that I’ve ever been aware of. Furnished too, and for $7500/mo. Slightly puzzling. The bar is gone. Some things are changed, not much. It’s significant to know that we still are marked on those cupboards. It matters, but I am probably the only person in my family to know this tidbit. My family is not here today.
This song came out and was part of my regular life just a few years after leacing that home. My father lost everything in a business contract. He said, “because of a clause in a contract. Do you believe that?” And, he never was able to ressurect his business thereafter.
Our life changed entirely. He had had wealth all of my life, and when he did not, he turned to my grandparents. It was not a luxury, however. I think my father would have been able to relate to this song in feeling, sometimes feeling like he had to give up his personal freedoms to continue his business, sometimes feeling the way people under a bridge felt, caring for those people within the framework of his own business in eminent domain consulting. He’d been in a contract to build a new stadium, but the other party backed out of the deal within a clause. Few things remained.
His car was gone. It was the only one he’d ever chosen himself. Prior, he’d had business cars. I remember him saying he was going into the family business after he and my mom divorced or sometime around then. I was four or so? An Oldsmobile was appropriate. It was that or a Cadillac. He always had an Oldsmobile, and his last car was also one. His one car was a BMW 8 series, royal red.
Red is my mother’s favorite color. She has the story of the cherry pie incident, but my father’s favorite candy, sometimes, was a Christopher’s Big Cherry. My mother usually chose a Peppermint Patty, so he often ate peppermint chip ice cream for the rest of his life. She was sixteen, married her high school sweetheart, and was in San Diego as a new naval wife. She made a cherry pie for her husband, but she was so nervous that the pie was rock hard. Too much tapioca, she says: “She’s my cherry pie . . .” and “Solid, solid as a rock” always echo to me when this story erodes itself. My mother also had a garnet, raw, found in a coal mine, she said, by my grandfather. It was larger than a golf ball and black on the outside but eminated a sparkle of red. We used to dream of how to cut the stone into jewelry; it’s both of our birthstones. The stone is lost now. ‘Lost.’ I stupidly gave it to a friend years ago and told him to “Prove it” when he said he’d be able to do more with what I had than I was doing. It was all we actually had.
I was an idealistic teenager, and often I’m still too optimistic. This song makes sense to me, knowing I have a snaggletooth of a ‘broken smile’ and love has come to me like this voice. I’ve been serenaded to, I’ve had men love me, I’ve met men’s insecurities, and I also hear my father’s sensitivity in this song too, like that of any father watching over his child or a man watching over the woman he loves. This song came after my father’s passing but has held me steady. They say the “secret” is to believe and that, if you believe, eventually your belief will manifest. That’s also ‘abracadabra.’
I love the rain. I was born in a maroon shade. My first car was maroon. I’m one of my father’s five children. Funny how we connect with music, like it’s made for us individually.
But, when I hear that song or anything else regarding rain, I also, always feel the burn of this song, as well.
My mother’s hometown, Eugene, is nearly synonymous to the term ‘rain.’ It rains constantly at times. Hearing this song, as a child, my mom would utter on and on about how much it rains in Oregon, how she wanted to go home, how the mountains were better there. I loved the smell of the rain on concrete, pavement, grass. I also loved the smell of gasoline, smells like the taste of silver polish. I’ve now lived in Eugene, throughout Oregon and the Pacific Northwest, but also I’ve lived in Florida. I lived there for two decades, far, far away from my father’s family, in a place inaccessible then like now, sadly not unfamiliar, like there has always been a hidden family feud happening in the shadows.
This song, too, echoes a time in my life when I better understood the aura that stills around me now.
“Hold your head up . . .” “Chin UP. Put your chin up. You’re slouching.” That started upon my parents’ divorce. I never lifted my chin the same. Someone called me a snob once. My chin up sticks my nose in the air; my mother’s too. Look like a snob or have a double-chin? Which nets more friendships? What would Dale Carnegie say? What he doesn’t mention is that ‘misery loves company,’ like this hymnal.
With my father, if this song came on the radio and we were slowly coasting down PCH listening to KOST 103.5, we would talk about how people felt about this song. We all want to send out an SOS sometimes. How do we do that? Are there people on the street or in the nearby cars sending out an SOS? Sometimes we prayed, but it wasn’t a formality so much as a moment to be very deliberate with words and intentions. “God’s always listening.”
Just like this song, and I wonder, now, if it’s because of how the bible is simply that connected to western culture or if it’s simply the way music sounds. I can’t speak for non-English speakers, but isn’t that the essence of being an authentic and true person? Belief in a higher power or not, our actions are not ever fully hidden nor unknown. And now, everything can be recorded, if someone is that interested. Like god.
Growing up, I took it for granted that other kids were raised the same way. I can’t find a reason to lie. Politeness? I would fail in a course on lying. So, I’m Christian in the sense that my father raised me to hold that ethos dear to my soul, but I don’t always label my foundation. Others seem to need the label. I don’t always. I cannot say what is the right nor wrong word for total divinity. The best I know is numinocity. There is always something numinous beyond human capacity. My father and I never shared this word, but he would have loved it.
He never sang in the car. He did not attend church often, not throughout the greater part of his adulthood. He was no longer in the Catholic church when I was born, and although he visited and I could feel his desire to be there, I never saw anything reflecting Catholicism in our home. Instead, we visited some churches, different ones, and we spoke in the car. We didn’t always agree. Often we did not; often I’d approach him with conflicts my mother presented. But, late in his life, he did return to church, yet to a Presbyterian one. He enjoyed it, but I was no longer around to see his change. He became a deacon again and traveled to Israel. He left a scholarship for others to follow in his footsteps. He sang, softly, in church. He did, however, dance with me. Sometimes; only in public settings. Father and daughter moments for others to catch sight of, outside of our home. At home, he was often alone in the house, quiet and pensive, often pretending to trim the hedges maintained by a gardener. Smoking cigarettes outside.
My mother smoked inside our home until she quit smoking just before Hurricane Charley. She smoked and drank wine in her same spot every night, and to this day she still sits in her spot on the couch. Not as often drinking wine and never smoking, she hold her life stable by watching the same shows on repeat. Dowton Abbey is her favorite. It’s her reprieve.
I hated that they smoked when I was growing up, but now I smoke. It’s a remembrance to them, to what was lost in my family, it’s consecration of ashes never handled properly. My father’s ashes were buried, which was not his dying wish, but I did not forget. They’re buried in a yard near my grandparents, however. All three of them died of cancer: skin to lung; lung; and breast and lung to brain, and my aunt died of cancer, as well. Was it the smoking or the aesbestos in the homes they remodeled and resold? Was it the construction sites? Was it the family business? Was it the chemicals that used to be in cigarettes and filters? Their deaths all occurred within seven years, like the seven year drought in Southern California when I was growing up.
I’m in the desert today, and the idea of the desert always reminds me of Jesus, and other protagonists, walk through the desert. It’s not a great story; it’s a warning. All of the imagery growing up of lucid mirages in heatwaves, the near-death experiences, in comedy and drama, are too similar to struggling people walking down streets everyday for me not to feel fear in this setting. As beautiful as it is, it’s terrifying place to be impoverished.
Imagine God singing this song while watching a woman he loves dying in the desert alone. Imagine. Why not?
Or this one:
Why not? That was the difference between my parents. My father worked to see God in everything, and I did too alongside, while my mom struggles, still, with her spirituality and self-acceptance. My father taught me to love myself not as an arrogance but as an expression of accepting the idea of God’s love being endless. “God made you in his image”; “God made you exactly the way he meant to make you”; “We’re all here for a purpose.”
Part of that understanding, for me, was to see my mom’s plight: What if you’re wrong? “My god understands me,” she retorted too many times. I think my father would’ve sang “Iris” to my mother, had he had the permission.
I saw the Goo Goo Dolls in concert, it Tampa. They sang this song, and I was hidden in the back of the stadium, watching like I was hiding, drinking a soda. It was dramatic, like a music video, and I felt as if he was singing directly to me. I was so taken aback that when Bon Jovi played next, I was ready to leave and laid down on the chairs and tried to fall asleep. Row 7 has its advantages, I suppose, in that there are chairs on the floor.
I always saw the ironic connections between media and my life, in some things. We all do it. Maroon 5 reminds me of my first car and that I’m child #5 from a family that really used to be like The Brady Bunch to me. I love this song, and we have stories of church on Sundays, and we have stories of sleeping in on Sundays, and we have stories unshared because of divorces and conflicts regarding belief. It’s sad.
My dad might not be able to take a roadtrip with me today, but I can leave this piece here to celebrate his life, soundtrack and all, while he and I are still “waiting on the world to change.” When he was a deacon in the Catholic church, he loved to give out Thanksgiving dinners to the homeless. He always looked out of the car window with an aim to understand others. “How do you love everyone with a Christian heart?” In ways, he reminded me of Martin Luther King, Jr., and we have two of those names, too, and my daddy is a junior, and there are more parallels. I’d have sung this song to him anytime, flaunting the social ideals of my generation and how we are changing the world.
I don’t think he’d have understood Linkin Park entirely, but he might have listened. There is cadence. There is heart and soul. Why isn’t Linkin Park heard as ‘Christian’? Why not? Read the lyrics. It could be analyzed using ‘Critical Race Theory,’ and I could argue that using a Christian analysis would be appropriate given the history and prevalence of Western Civilization, but we could also use all kinds of analytical lenses. How about a pixilation analysis, and could I also have a web analysis of the stretch and impact of this song, globally, prior to considering things like censorship?
Here’s another one: Nickleback. Sometimes all of the songs sound like they have the same beat. That means something. Why would they do that and be successful? What’s attractive about the beat of their songs? “This is how you remind me of what I really am” is a great lyric. and the rest of the song is about relating to his experience. Why aren’t people in churches singing these songs and crying for others in prayer? And themselves? “Never made it as a wiseman / couldn’t cut it as a poor man stealing” sounds like lines a priest could utter with significance. What a gorgeous musical that might make one day.
“You never know,” Dr. N, my philosophy professor.
So, about 9/11. What a difficult story to share. I was on Orange Avenue in Sarasota. It was a gorgeous but warm morning, wet air, heavy in humidity. My daughter was in kindergarten down the street. President Bush was at the elementary school just north — errily.
