I SIT HERE TYPING

I was into the Ira Progoff Journal method once. www.intensivejournal.org/ Left my journal in a briefcase in my van while I hiked Macleay Park in Portland and it was stolen. At least they didn’t take the van. The journal was not a big loss. But it’s an interesting method.

You start by divvying up your time-line. Make a list of “steppingstones” like when you moved, when you had an operation, when you went to a new school, your jobs, and so on. Of course, this is meant for nice stable middle-class people who can pay for intensive journal workshops, so writing a list of the milestones won’t be tough: pre-school, primary, grade school, jr. high, high school. community college, state university. First job. Maybe a few more. Marriage. Kids. Grandkids. With a little luck, retirement. That’s about it. March, march, march, march.

Then you go back to the spaces in between the steppingstones and think of a metaphor that describes it: waterlily drifting, Harley roaring, a loaf of white bread, fireworks over a lake -- really more like how you felt about it than whether it’s accurate. In fact, the steppingstones don’t matter all that much. Just put down the ones that seemed important, a point of transformation or resignation. This is where it gets interesting.

They sell you a three-ring binder with tabbed dividers for doing this work, because the steppingstones are only the beginning. There is a whole series of assignments about different aspects of your life. Workshops are set up for you to sit in a room with the other people, write to an assigned topic under the guidance of a leader, and maybe read a paragraph or two out loud to the group. This is Jungian theory filtered through the Sixties and reframed for a certain kind of person.

The new take on Jung (“A Dangerous Method” by the same guy that did “The Black Swan,” David Cronenberg) breaks up this “nice” memoir mode. Instead of the Shared Depth Consciousness, this director is saying, “Hey, this stuff is all experimental anyway. Why NOT have sex with your therapist?” There’s a new day coming. Or already here. But remember this is the guy who made the movie about being turned into a fly because why NOT experiment on yourself?” (Straight from "why-not" to horror.) Jung, Freud, et al can be taken in a number of directions -- some safe, some not. My first Progoff journal must have been in the Seventies and it was very safe. If I were to write a new journal, the first thing I would do is dump Progoff. Or even Jung. If they think an hysterical pretty girl screaming and pounding is dangerous, they don’t know “nuthin’.”

I always want to start back a few generations, which can be dangerous because people (family) get angry. That’s where they start arguing about “facts” when facts really have very little to do with it. I think about the huge forces acting on the planet: climate, war, comets flaming across the skies. Whole populations moving across the continents or seas. Immigration, economics, secrets, sham identities.

Though I missed the Great Depression, barely, it had something to do with my parents marrying late and starting life in a repossessed house, a little nicer than they could have bought otherwise. But the Depression also meant my mother had to drop out of college, which made her determined to get me through to graduation (bachelor’s), which connected up with her going back in the middle of her forties, which probably connected up with me going back to seminary in the middle of my forties. But why did my grad school make her so angry?

My father’s family made sure that as the oldest he got his Master’s degree, but it was in agriculture, which meant he didn’t know anything about the humanities world except the names of the famous people. His idea of an intellectual life was playing chess and subscribing to magazines -- which I read. All of ‘em. Life, Collier’s, Look, Time, US News & World Report, Redbook, Reader’s Digest, Boy’s Life. It was Life that told us who was a genius: Picasso, Pollock, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Mailer. All identified by Manhattan/European/Jewish Immigrants. He also subscribed to the Police Gazette, accounts of sex and murder. So I had a funny split in the way I saw the world. We all did.

In the Fifties the relief of winning WWII was sometimes just exhaustion. As a family we traveled across the USA and into Canada, admiring the huge engineering projects like the Grand Coulee Dam. Camping in all the famous parks: Banff, Yellowstone, Yosemite -- we missed Glacier, which is why I’m here now. It was a 1961 make-up for a wrong turn my mother took in 1953 while my father was asleep. We kids were either fighting or drugged on comic books. We slept in a tent trailer along the road or sometimes in a “tourist cabin,” tiny minimal places.

Everywhere we went, people seemed a little stunned. Everything needed a coat of paint. Every small town had many bar signs, two kinds -- a straight-sided stemmed Martini glass or a round-bowled champagne glass. We didn’t drink, smoke, cuss, go to dances. Every meal except breakfast was a hamburger and a shake. Dakota and Michigan were crammed with our relatives, or so it seemed. Small town and rural folks. In high school (Class of 1957) I refused to go on any more family trips and stayed home alone.

Going off to college in Chicago was like walking off a cliff. I had no idea. Still processing it. So are my classmates from then. It was immersion theatre; it was Jung-er than Jung; it was religion; it was class/culture issues; it was sexuality challenged. You wanna talk danger? We were at risk. Never for anything criminal, but . . . Several were insane enough to be institutionalized. I guess figuring that out would make this a memoir worth reading by someone else.

The reservation years were a great gift. Couldn’t be duplicated now. I was a child again and this time I got a lot closer to growing up. Bob used to say that instead of him paying alimony, I should pay him tuition for the education he gave me. He was right.

In the animal control years I discovered my strength, which was hard determination rather than flexibility. That segued into the ministry in a solid but counter-intuitive way. I was tough, and -- one counselor told me -- counter-phobic (see something terrifying, deliberately walk right into it) and fatalistic (willing to risk death), which worked in both contexts. Animal control is a street job, not a shelter job, and in a devious way, so is the ministry -- just more dangerous. Ministry, I mean. After ten years it was clearly not suitable for me.

Then came the Nineties doing data entry in Portland downtown: drug gangs shooting in the streets, homeless people old and young everywhere, political corruption, gambling with lives over floods, dead women found in trash bags under houses. (So repetitive.) Black issues, not at all like NA politics -- two majorities struggling. I escaped to Valier just in time to get my book about Bob Scriver published before the whole industry crashed.

We don’t know what will happen next -- none of us do. That’s probably a good thing. The last five years have been the most exciting and most dangerous yet. And all I did was sit here typing.