What makes my life worth writing about — and possibly reading by others — is that it is an account of traveling across two massive paradigm shifts in America The first one was from being an agriculturally based country on through industrialization to cities. My paternal grandparents and father struggled hard by raising potatoes to make enough money to send at least their oldest son, my father, to college where he studied — potatoes. But he made his living as a wool buyer and then farmer cooperatives.
My maternal grandfather tried to make a living on a underperforming prune orchard and lived mostly by construction away from his family. My mother was the oldest of four girls and was supposed to graduate from college, but the Great Depression intervened. Though she spent the summer between what would have been her sophomore and junior years with a leased mule and a sack of seed corn, growing what was supposed to be her tuition, the crop didn’t sell for enough to pay the bill. She went to town and knocked on the door of every business until she found a job doing bookkeeping.
Married in Portland, my father was a traveling man so my mother was left alone, just as her mother had been. She used every trick from canning U-pick fruit to doing covert bookkeeping for a neighborhood button business to keep us afloat without embarrassing my father. A 1948 concussion from a road accident changed his personality and contributed to his poor health and relatively early death. By 1953 my mother came out in the open, claimed money from her now solvent widowed father, and went back to school so she could teach. This was her only real job all her life and it was at the same school while my father disintegrated. In the end she mused, “I was retired longer than I taught!”
I was the oldest child who went to college according to the pattern. That’s the second major American paradigm shift. I broke the family. Though I had a full-tuition scholarship and my mother paid the rest, I don’t mean "broke" in a financial sense. I left the culture they had joined when they moved from the farms. We scattered. Now I’m the last living member of my nuclear family.
First I left the pattern by attending Northwestern University in the theatre department dominated by Alvina Krause teaching “Method” acting in her Edwardian Ibsen and Chekhov way. In addition to her conception of the individual- in-the-culture way of seeing people, I found Paul Schilpp’s humanist view of religion and left my childhood Presbyterianism. Both professors had a past with Garrett Theological Seminary which in a sense fed them into Northwestern on the same campus. I had no relationship to Garrett except by walking past their vigorous games of volleyball. I had no suspicion that their version of humanism was highly Methodist.
Second, decades later, I had double enrollment at Meadville/Lombard Theological School as part of the University of Chicago and earned degrees from both. I was partly subsidized by the UUA, partly used my retirement fund, partly worked at the U of Chicago Law School, and partly took on a debt of $12,000. I was coming from my third “education” on the Blackfeet Reservation but never connected with the anthropologists at the U of C. Instead, because of Norman Maclean and Richard Stern, I entered on reflection about narrativity (stories) just before Derrida and Foucault exploded in bombs of deconstruction. I barely begin to understand them now, an incomplete paradigm shift.
In theory I was entering the ministry, but in fact the actual practice turned out to be more about institutions than about thought. I fled back to the Blackfeet world and then, thrown out in the war between dominating middle-class and nearly hidden ancient ways, back to Portland where I vamped in a civil service job until I could get back to Montana. In those years my mother was dying of blood cancer and knew it, like her own mother except this time without pain — just fatigue. Her bequest bought this house.
At first I tried to understand my relatives who could not understand me. I made them nervous, so I gave it up and lived online. But I’m about to give that up as well. Solitary (with cats) is my choice in order to think through these great waves of leaving country life and then middle-class life, and winnowing out some kind of meaning.
Now I find the whole country is facing questions of how to survive and what to save. If one of my abiding obligations is how to communicate what I’ve learned, how does what I’ve learned teach me to do that? I’m fatalistic. I’ll do my best, but if I’m unheard and unhelpful, then that’s the way it is. The time wasn’t open. The synergy between what I write and what people can hear just doesn’t exist.
I didn’t exactly leave the agricultural economy, here in this irrigation-based village. I didn’t exactly leave seminary, here with my groaning bookshelves and dingling computer. I never even thought of leaving what I learned on the rez, though my understanding of it has changed drastically, so that a valiant woman who rodeoed and wrote romances about it is now more typical than a disenfranchised young man who has visions. (Kari Lynn Dell vs. James Welch)
Real deconstruction began, of course, when I came back to this east slope setting. Politics, the economy, and the pandemic has thrown everything to the ground now. I just don’t have far to fall. Only more books than I can possibly read in the years I have left — if it’s years. I talk to more people who are dead than who are walking around town. What does publication or commodification have to do with it?
Another paradigm shift is just taking substance and shape. We knew the demographics would necessarily change and that the enfranchised and entitled would fight it. We did not know that hundreds of thousands would suddenly die or that the global weather change would be so immediate and violent. We knew the FBI was fighting the Mafia, but we didn’t know that criminal plutocrats would invade the world and we would elect one of their minor and laughable figures to be president.
There will be more gardens and more laughing. But also more Death Valleys. Much “writing” will be on video. Much “religion” will have left the institutions. Old white rich men with bimbos on their arms will finally be obsolete. Hopefully.
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