Friday, August 30, 2013
Brad and Derek
These past weeks have been difficult. Nonnie’s father, Reese Bradburn, died at 12:01AM on August 7th, while Nonnie and I were driving home from Albuquerque in a rental truck. She flew to San Antonio from Boise, to be with the rest of her family.
Brad, the name his friends used, had an interesting life. Raised in a coal mining town in Pennsylvania he joined the marines as a young man and was sent to China waiting to participate in the planned invasion of Japan. The atomic bomb ended the war and probably saved his life; he visited Nagasaki shortly after the surrender.
After the surrender of Japan he left the marines while he was still in China and walked to the other side of the base and joined Civil Air Transport (CAT), and started his civilian career in Asia. He married a Russian woman who was raised in China and they eventually had four daughters.
After Civil Air Transport closed Brad went to work for Air America, which, like CAT, was owned by the CIA. He was station manager in Hong Kong, which was where Nonnie went to grade school and high school. After the Viet Nam war ended he and his family moved to the Washington DC area, then he moved to Oklahoma.
Brad did great things with his life - a true member of the greatest generation.
August 21st was the one year anniversary of Derek’s death - the next day was his birthday - he would have been 35. On his birthday we drank champagne at his grave site, released 35 helium balloons, and ate birthday cake.
If time heals all things it hasn’t started yet; I miss him more than ever.
Monday, August 12, 2013
Fifty Years
Last Saturday night I went to my high school fifty year reunion, a fun evening with moments of joy, sorrow, regret, and delight all mixed together; emotions passing through me like pages on a flip chart. Everyone wore a name tag with their name on it as it was in high school, and below their name their black and white graduation picture, so it was easy to recognize people once I saw their tag. A few people were recognizable across the room, but most were not, although once I saw their tag I thought “of course.”
Since this was the first reunion I have attended, it really had been fifty years since I had seen most of the people there, and since we had over 600 people in our graduating class I probably didn’t know some of them even back when we graduated. Some friends that I really wanted to see didn’t show up, much to my disappointment; I don’t know why they didn’t come, maybe they didn’t want to go back in time, maybe they have health issues - I just don’t know. And over ninety people had died since graduation day, a long painful list of friends I wanted to see again, but never will.
One interesting thing to me was how people turned out, what they had done over the fifty years, what they had accomplished, what their choices and priorities had been.
I certainly had not seen the potential in some of my classmates; I didn’t see the talents that would make them successful in life, at the same time I had thought that being cool would guarantee success later in life. It didn’t.
Some said the city is planning to tear down our high school and rebuild on the same site, an idea everyone at the reunion thought crazy. The building and grounds are beautiful; they were the setting for the movie Mr Holland’s Opus.
I think most of us agreed that we went to high school in a more innocent time, before drugs, war, and assassinations changed America forever. But our high school was very large and very competitive, and not everyone was a great athlete, or a scholar, or a great performer; additionally we tended to form cliques, which were great if you were in but painful if you weren’t. Probably the 275 classmates who attended were the ones who had good memories of high school and had the money to return for the reunion; the ones with not so good memories stayed home.
When I graduated I thought that my adult life would have two bookends; a beginning - high school graduation - and an ending - the fifty year reunion. I thought I went to a great high school and I thought I had the best of all possible friends and classmates. I still think that.
But I hope that this reunion was not the second bookend to my life - I hope I still have things to do, places to visit, and old friends to see again.
Since this was the first reunion I have attended, it really had been fifty years since I had seen most of the people there, and since we had over 600 people in our graduating class I probably didn’t know some of them even back when we graduated. Some friends that I really wanted to see didn’t show up, much to my disappointment; I don’t know why they didn’t come, maybe they didn’t want to go back in time, maybe they have health issues - I just don’t know. And over ninety people had died since graduation day, a long painful list of friends I wanted to see again, but never will.
One interesting thing to me was how people turned out, what they had done over the fifty years, what they had accomplished, what their choices and priorities had been.
I certainly had not seen the potential in some of my classmates; I didn’t see the talents that would make them successful in life, at the same time I had thought that being cool would guarantee success later in life. It didn’t.
Some said the city is planning to tear down our high school and rebuild on the same site, an idea everyone at the reunion thought crazy. The building and grounds are beautiful; they were the setting for the movie Mr Holland’s Opus.
I think most of us agreed that we went to high school in a more innocent time, before drugs, war, and assassinations changed America forever. But our high school was very large and very competitive, and not everyone was a great athlete, or a scholar, or a great performer; additionally we tended to form cliques, which were great if you were in but painful if you weren’t. Probably the 275 classmates who attended were the ones who had good memories of high school and had the money to return for the reunion; the ones with not so good memories stayed home.
When I graduated I thought that my adult life would have two bookends; a beginning - high school graduation - and an ending - the fifty year reunion. I thought I went to a great high school and I thought I had the best of all possible friends and classmates. I still think that.
But I hope that this reunion was not the second bookend to my life - I hope I still have things to do, places to visit, and old friends to see again.
Thursday, July 18, 2013
Thursday, July 11, 2013
Friday, July 5, 2013
FOURTH OF JULY
Yesterday, July 3rd, was sunny and hot - today it is cloudy and cold. I shouldn’t let the weather change my feelings about such an important holiday, the holiday that celebrates the founding of our country, and our civil liberties.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...
Substitute “people” for “men” and you have a perfect idea, an idea to build a life, or a country, on. The news is full of events that occur because people deny this idea, because one group of people hates another. When people act in accordance with this idea it seldom makes news. However, leaders who follow this idea are the ones who make history: Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama.
Recently it was disclosed just how much of our email, our phone calls, our lives, the government is monitoring. It may be necessary to protect us from terrorism, but I am unconvinced. Anyone who remembers The Pentagon Papers will have a hard time fully trusting our government. Most people seem to put their safety above their freedom. I think this is dangerous, and mistaken,
Last week my son Colin turned thirty. That day we ate salmon and drank sangria, and the next day we drove to the Olympic Peninsula and cooked clams, mussels, shrimp, sausage, potatoes, and corn over an open charcoal fire. It was ninety degrees in Seattle that day, but in our campground the wind was gusting and it was only sixty five degrees. We didn’t bring the right clothes and we were all cold. Only our grandson Oran seemed to be unaffected by the temperature - he ran everywhere, hunted for berries, jumped into any water he could find, and kept himself warm.
Thirty years ago I remember sitting at my desk in my office in Aruba when my dad called me from Portland to say that I had another son, that Nonnie had had a C-section and that she and Colin were doing well. Up to that moment I didn’t know if we would have a second son or a daughter. I was so excited and happy, and a little sad that I wasn’t there. Two weeks later I did fly to Portland and Nonnie and the boys met me at the airport. Derek came running down the concourse saying “Dad, dad - do you want to see my new brother?” So I held Colin for the first time outside the arrival gate in the airport while hundreds of approving passengers walked by.
Thirty years later much has changed - Colin has grown up and security at the airport makes it impossible to meet arriving passengers at the gate - Colin has his own son, and every young mother knows the gender of her baby after the first ultrasound.
I hope you had a good holiday!
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...
Substitute “people” for “men” and you have a perfect idea, an idea to build a life, or a country, on. The news is full of events that occur because people deny this idea, because one group of people hates another. When people act in accordance with this idea it seldom makes news. However, leaders who follow this idea are the ones who make history: Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama.
Recently it was disclosed just how much of our email, our phone calls, our lives, the government is monitoring. It may be necessary to protect us from terrorism, but I am unconvinced. Anyone who remembers The Pentagon Papers will have a hard time fully trusting our government. Most people seem to put their safety above their freedom. I think this is dangerous, and mistaken,
Last week my son Colin turned thirty. That day we ate salmon and drank sangria, and the next day we drove to the Olympic Peninsula and cooked clams, mussels, shrimp, sausage, potatoes, and corn over an open charcoal fire. It was ninety degrees in Seattle that day, but in our campground the wind was gusting and it was only sixty five degrees. We didn’t bring the right clothes and we were all cold. Only our grandson Oran seemed to be unaffected by the temperature - he ran everywhere, hunted for berries, jumped into any water he could find, and kept himself warm.
Thirty years ago I remember sitting at my desk in my office in Aruba when my dad called me from Portland to say that I had another son, that Nonnie had had a C-section and that she and Colin were doing well. Up to that moment I didn’t know if we would have a second son or a daughter. I was so excited and happy, and a little sad that I wasn’t there. Two weeks later I did fly to Portland and Nonnie and the boys met me at the airport. Derek came running down the concourse saying “Dad, dad - do you want to see my new brother?” So I held Colin for the first time outside the arrival gate in the airport while hundreds of approving passengers walked by.
Thirty years later much has changed - Colin has grown up and security at the airport makes it impossible to meet arriving passengers at the gate - Colin has his own son, and every young mother knows the gender of her baby after the first ultrasound.
I hope you had a good holiday!
Monday, June 24, 2013
Sunday, June 23, 2013
Books
As I have been unpacking books today I have been thinking of where I got each book, what I was doing at the time, why I bought it, what the book was about, and so on.
The Camera was the first book of the Life Library of Photography series, a series I started to buy and read while I was in Greenland in 1973. I had just bought my first camera, a Minolta SRT 101 single lens reflex camera, a simple workhorse camera which brought me so much enjoyment hiking and photographing the barren landscape.
The book describes a dated technology but an ageless aesthetic.
Soon after I finished my tour in Greenland and returned to the US I started buying the Hundred Greatest Books from the Franklin Library. Moby Dick was the first of the series, and each month a new leather bound book would arrive, and each month I would hold it, smell it, rub it - everything but read it. That’s not entirely true; I did read some of them, like Crime and Punishment, but others, such as Euripides Plays, I just couldn’t get into.
The fall before I went to Nigeria in 1977 I read Return to Laughter, an anthropological novel by Eleanor Smith Bowen, a fictional retelling of the author’s experiences living and working with the Tiv in Nigeria, the same tribe my wife and I would be working with a few months later. My copy of the book, a tape wrapped paperback that sold for $2.50, is well worn and earmarked, evidence of being read multiple times. More than anything else this book prepared me for the shock of moving into an entirely different culture.
Once I was living in Nigeria I started looking for books that would help me understand the people there. My copy of Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe is also held together by clear tape, but that old copy means a lot more to me than a brand new book would. Achebe was a great writer (he died recently) and this book started to open the door for me, to see the Nigerian culture from their side, to begin to start to comprehend the complexity of their society.
Another book that brings back memories is a cheap hard bound copy of The Life of Lenin by Maria Prilezhayeva, published in Moscow, and sold for 65 Kopeks. I obtained my copy while living in Almaty, Kazakhstan. The book is all propaganda, all about Lenin’s heroic struggles and the joys of communism, and as such is an interesting example of the way things were before the Soviet Union broke up.
I read my copy of The Plague by Albert Camus shortly after caring for a young man with bubonic and pneumonic plague in Gallup, NM, and the actions and emotions that he describes so well could still be seen at the Gallup Indian Medical Center - the panic, the denials, the pragmatism.
These book, and many more, tell the story of my life; much better than I could ever tell it.
The Camera was the first book of the Life Library of Photography series, a series I started to buy and read while I was in Greenland in 1973. I had just bought my first camera, a Minolta SRT 101 single lens reflex camera, a simple workhorse camera which brought me so much enjoyment hiking and photographing the barren landscape.
The book describes a dated technology but an ageless aesthetic.
Soon after I finished my tour in Greenland and returned to the US I started buying the Hundred Greatest Books from the Franklin Library. Moby Dick was the first of the series, and each month a new leather bound book would arrive, and each month I would hold it, smell it, rub it - everything but read it. That’s not entirely true; I did read some of them, like Crime and Punishment, but others, such as Euripides Plays, I just couldn’t get into.
The fall before I went to Nigeria in 1977 I read Return to Laughter, an anthropological novel by Eleanor Smith Bowen, a fictional retelling of the author’s experiences living and working with the Tiv in Nigeria, the same tribe my wife and I would be working with a few months later. My copy of the book, a tape wrapped paperback that sold for $2.50, is well worn and earmarked, evidence of being read multiple times. More than anything else this book prepared me for the shock of moving into an entirely different culture.
Once I was living in Nigeria I started looking for books that would help me understand the people there. My copy of Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe is also held together by clear tape, but that old copy means a lot more to me than a brand new book would. Achebe was a great writer (he died recently) and this book started to open the door for me, to see the Nigerian culture from their side, to begin to start to comprehend the complexity of their society.
Another book that brings back memories is a cheap hard bound copy of The Life of Lenin by Maria Prilezhayeva, published in Moscow, and sold for 65 Kopeks. I obtained my copy while living in Almaty, Kazakhstan. The book is all propaganda, all about Lenin’s heroic struggles and the joys of communism, and as such is an interesting example of the way things were before the Soviet Union broke up.
I read my copy of The Plague by Albert Camus shortly after caring for a young man with bubonic and pneumonic plague in Gallup, NM, and the actions and emotions that he describes so well could still be seen at the Gallup Indian Medical Center - the panic, the denials, the pragmatism.
These book, and many more, tell the story of my life; much better than I could ever tell it.
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