THE SONG OF BOOKS

The Strachans: Bruce, Lucy, Mary, Mark, Paul

My father (1903 - 1969) was a problem.  He also evidently had a problem he couldn’t resolve and his search for answers packed our house with books.  He was the oldest surviving child lived 17 days because he was premature.   (The first conception — and I’m aware that probably women lose several conceptions without knowing.) I’m the oldest surviving child of my father’s, assuming all his children were inside the marriage to my mother, which was certainly faithful on her side.  She always thought my father might have a second family somewhere, so to her mind if he were unfaithful, it would be in conventional terms.

I inherited his search for an indefinable solution and acquired as many books, but the difference is that I read mine.  Not just read, but try to tear apart in the interest of understanding.  I couldn’t do this until my books were purchased — one doesn’t harm library books which are community property.  I have always been highly “moral” in the interest of avoiding danger.  But at some point, maybe late high school, I decided that I would follow good evidence wherever it went, though it made my ears sing with adrenaline.

My father traveled with cameras for his job (PR) and took this photo himself.

He had a concussion.

It’s not as though my father would turn out to be a bank robber or a murderer.  He was a “spanker” and a lousy provider.  I decided this was due to head trauma from an accident driving at night in the Oregon Coast Range when a drunk driver hit his car head on.  But maybe there’s more.  His job — except during WWII — was as a traveling man, a “drummer” not to sell things but as a field man for Pacific Supply Cooperative, which supplied things (mostly petro-derived) to farmer co-ops.  Since he grew up on the prairie, partly in Canada, he was highly aware of the power of co-ops, as though they were his church.  Otherwise, he claimed to be an atheist.  But he was certainly a progressive, esp. when it came to things like nudism or birth control — that is, the taboo parts of life.  

My father tried to make taboos pretty and harmless.

I inherited that.

I inherited that, too, though I never really acted on any of it.  Like him, I mostly read books, but the Seventies revealed that a lot of people shared his ideas.  I know some of them now, still, though they’re older.  Rainbow Family, hippies, off the grid.  I’d sort of timidly approach them, but get rocked back on my heels.

My father traveled during the week, came home exhausted but also wanting a little RandR, like movies; wanting to involve his family in hiking.  Consciously or unconsciously, he chose my mother as someone competent who would manage while he was gone.  This worked until my mother, realizing there was never going to be enough money, went back to college to get her teaching degree.  Adding this meant her weekends were jammed and she became less willing.  Also, what she learned changed her.

When my father died, we discovered that hidden behind his conventional books, some of them popular writing (novels, self-improvement, and culturally admired books like Shakespeare), was a lot of porn.  Not sophisticated erotica (he kept his medical sexology books in his sock drawer — Masters and Johnson, Freud, Kinsey) but lurid truck stop paperback porn.  This was female-overpowering, vulgar, violent stuff.  I only read a few before my brother threw them in his pickup and took them directly to the dump so no garbage man could say where they came from.

With all this information at hand, why was my father reading porn in cheap motels instead of continuing his education? (There was no TV.)  He had a BS from Manitoba and an MS from OSU (then a college) — was it their fault that he never progressed to the level of the Saturday Book Review?  He was a magazine addict, very conventional:  Newsweek, Time, Post, Look, Life.  (I read all of them, too.)  My mother had no time to read until she was retired.  Then she read “Book of the Month” sorts of things.   She liked to do what was popular. 

When I was serving the Kirkland Northshore Unitarian Universalist Church (across the lake from Seattle), as an interim minister, the book causing a sensation was Alice Miller’s “The Drama of the Gifted Child.”  This congregation was a cheerful, lively bunch of artists, teachers, counselors and journalists and many of them loved that book.  

They had been raised humanely and loved their parents (mostly) though they tried to live even more ideal lives.  Miller’s premise was that above-average kids tended to break the taboo on criticizing their parents and critiquing their childhood.  They wanted to be original, not owned by family.  Pretty safe with this group — I don’t even remember any alcoholics.  Drugs weren’t in play. 

In those days I knew nothing about incest based on idealism, and little about male gays.  Neither did most other people.  That may have been a quiet pull beneath our lives.  Would it have explained my father?  Was he abused?  Did he abuse my brothers? (I asked the surviving bro, who said, “Certainly NOT!”)  Then what was the fixation on sex about?  Was he aware of some shortfall in his own dynamics, maybe connected to his failure to be aggressive at work?  He was quite fat and about as sexy as Santa Claus, except no beard.  (I find beards sexy.)  His mother developed a goiter later in life, so I wonder whether the iodine deficiency of the prairies affected her pregnancies.

There’s a body of literature about parents who believe that their children should be gently and lovingly initiated into sexual activity by their own parents (same or other) or by a sex worker surrogate while they wait in the next room.  This is a violation of the conventional (Victorian) boundary between the generations and very confusing.  Esp. if the natural desire of the still-child is same sex or just null.  For some people sex arrives as an overwhelming thunderbolt and then the problem is quite different.  It’s also different in a rural setting than in an urban one with many layers and categories of private culture.  And different between English and French.

My mother (1909 - 1998) had three sisters and an intense Irish-descent father who never really succeeded, but kept everything going by taking construction projects which meant traveling.  The family construct was that the three girls were as good as any boys.  One summer my mother used a borrowed mule to raise a cash crop of corn.  The two oldest girls in particular were strong and competent, very attached to their father, comfortable working alongside men.

My father’s sibs were two male and one girl, very pretty and refined.  In fact, that family’s formal position was that women are princesses, gracile, to be cherished, beautifully dressed, and taught to play the piano and paint charming but tiny watercolors.  My father then played the gallant guardian, romantic and faithful, but never sexual.  He tried to pull me into that story (though I found it confusing for him to offer to take me to a burlesque show) but in that aspect I remained with my mother’s take on the subject, which included jealousy of all precious princesses.  As soon as she had an actual son, I was demoted to being her assistant.

Luckily, I had excellent teachers.  It was the Fifties and they were nearing retirement, essentially Edwardian, often single, and unconflicted. Education (liberal arts) was their answer to everything.  It worked and still works.  Of course, I read all those books, but never discussed them until I got to college where the doors flew open.  They were stage doors and from then on life was dramatic, multiple, and incredible.  I like it when my ears sing.

THE MASOCHISTIC CHILD AS DEPICTED BY HENRY JAMES

Henry James as a boy

I’m back to reading “The Queer Child” by Kathryn Bond Stockton.  The title of the chapter I just finished is “The Smart Child is the Masochistic  Child: Pedagogy, Pedophilia, and the Pleasures of Harm.”  The text to be analyzed is Henry James’ novella, “The Pupil”, which I haven’t read.  Evidently it is very subtle but loaded with dynamite that has exploded in our modern times.  The story dates back to a period when wealthy people engaged same-sex tutors, usually highly educated but impoverished, expected them to develop affection for their pupil but also to impose discipline by beating.  The two are assigned a room and then pretty much ignored.  

Socially they both occupy an ambiguous status that is pre-adult — indeed meant to delay adulthood for the child — but barely post-child for the tutor who is assumed to be sexless since there is probably no appropriate equal partner in the household.  They’re often young men.  The most explosive word in the chapter, used sparingly, is the acronym NAMBLA.  When I first heard that word and asked about it, I got about the same reaction as I got as a pre-teen asking about sodomy.  Not the guilty defense that I got when I asked about masturbation, but a mix of confusion and censorship.  This, of course, made me only more curious.

The idea proposed by Stockton is that the pair learn to “enjoy harm,” when harm is defined as growing up (losing protection) and initiating through enlightenment.  I accept this definition — even see how it could lead to actual sex — but I think it mostly applies to the situation above, the tutor.  It is very hard to enlighten a class of 36 defiant teens who think they know everything.  Only a masochist would try.

Of course, the story, in typical Jamesian style, is subtle, merely tinted skin (blushing) rather than full penetration.  Intercourse CAN be considered as conversation, but the shadow of coitus is in the background, pulsing.  Relationships are tied into social status, family status, wealth, and health.  So the tale resolves when the family (the FATHER) goes broke, the tutor will have to be dismissed, the child proposes to go with him (imitating marriage), and then the child dies of a heart attack.

I’m not sure that the Stockton chapter defends man/boy relationships as much as it tries to explain them.  Is the boy made into a wife?  Is he pressed take a female gender-role, accommodating the wishes of his tutor?  Women in our culture are pressed to be lesser, to accept constraints and harm (child-bearing), to expect punishment, abandonment and broken hearts.  Might as well enjoy all this, dramatize it, glamorize it, imply magical spells, and willing sacrifice.  It worked for Mother Theresa.

Me in 1962

In real life my choice, not quite conscious, was to be a woman/boy companion to a charismatic man.  (This won’t work if the man is “lesser” though lesser men will look for a women or boy who will take this role of squire, absorber of harm, defender of ego.)  I loved the mix of protection (no one messed with me because I “belonged” to this man) and the shared learning I hoped would make us closer.  It didn’t, partly because people sometimes interpreted him as “belonging” to me and as I grew from his tutoring, it made him look lesser.

Women have wrestled with this stuff for millennia but the terms have never been what they are now with modern amelioration for childbirth (even the capacity to contract for someone else to gestate), and industrial warfare so that even the wounded become bionic.  Our whole culture is masochistic, taking harm.  Even the sea has our harm forced onto it, let alone the polar bears.  But we are careful to study.

Delaying maturation, esp. because of having the privilege of wealth, is a status marker, so rich kids are “spoiled” or “immature” in the eyes of those who serve them.  On the rez I was childish and my mother-in-law was even more childish, having been prevented from ever working.  But I was an observant child and she was only a conforming child.  Around us was a community of people who were neither, who survived by growing up early and sticking together as a group.  If they were lucky, that meant extended family.

In order to discuss man/boy, man/man, woman/woman, and woman/man in terms of one big and one little, there has to be a pair of people. Being solitary would seem to jump over the subject, but when I was small and miserable (maybe six) and no adult would talk to me, I learned to fantasize myself as middle-aged (I thought forty would be about right) and tried to imagine what I would say to myself. It was a good mind-stretching exercise. It did not relieve me from the idea that sacrifice for a greater being (future self) would make even a small and lesser being (imagining self) become valuable.  (That damned “Giving Tree” idea.)  

I had a fantasy of a little girl consoling a big weeping man, a plot point that I see in media many times.  Or sometimes it’s about a boy-soldier with a veteran.  Once coitus is pushed out of the concept of intercourse, the whole question of who’s the top and who’s the bottom and what that means remains but the terms are set by the culture and often are just about money — but that’s a later chapter in this book.  Sex for money can make a child into a man who can pay his way.  The trouble is that now sex is as dangerous as childbirth used to be and more expensive in consequences (HIV requiring lifelong medication).  Both are as dangerous as poverty.

Stockton says that NAMBLA presented two motifs: a child’s right to design its education and its privilege to divorce its parents.  Nothing necessarily to do with sex between man and boy or with an older male mistreating a boy.  Except that in America the child’s idea of an education is being a good enough athlete to “get a scholarship to college” though some sports will destroy their brains and their degree will mean less and less as it becomes something to buy.  As for divorcing parents, it will be much easier if you know who they are and where they live.  Maybe the people who are afraid of NAMBLA don’t want kids to know these things.  But it doesn’t sound to me as though having an older same-sex partner will inevitably lead to rape, whipping, starvation and the other things that some parents do to their children.  On the other hand, where is the powerful older man willing to attach to a kid, even the one they helped make?

Analyzing a taboo subject is a good way to attract harm, which is also a good way to create higher priced products.  In a climate where the number of comments one attracts for a post, it will be arousing to say something obnoxious enough for people to comment as objections, thus (they think) topping the original post and being more powerful.  But the guilty bottom has achieved better statistics.  It works for Trump.  It’s like a national catastrophe that drives up the Gross National Product through insurance payouts.  Harm pays.

My fav counseling joke:  The masochist says, “hurt me!”  The sadist says, “no.”

SEX AND WRITING

Who the hell is Mason Cooley?*

Advice about writing and advice about sexual relationship both represent a major failure of the American school system, but at least they’ll purport to teach writing.  Sex in terms of relationship and communication is very similar to writing, but it is a tabooed category.  Sometimes, under cover of a white coat, they will gingerly talk about anatomical equipment — just not what to do with it.

One reason for this taboo is that people in the larger culture are making money off both and they don’t want interference.  If people really learned how to find partners and communicate with them in a satisfying way, it would put whole industries out of business —  clothing, cosmetics, places to let down one’s guard by supplying food and intoxicants, things to read and watch (displaced from reality) — they would collapse.

This is as true of writing/reading — mental and emotional interaction — as of physical contact.  Both emerge from learning the infant does naturally in first months and years.  Part of it is that thing “smart” computers do by watching a person, which is to learn from what one does and then supply what one wants according to the demands one makes.  It’s a “Simple Simon” system because it is always based on what one did in the past, the “last time,” which may fit but may not.  It can be a lid on creativity and exploration, even a kind of censorship.  It can shape personality in dimensions like violence, adaptability, sociability and so on.

Writing can create a virtual world that displaces physical learning.  I was very near-sighted as a child so writing/reading was better.  By chance, I was encouraged in this choice.  My mother sent me off to school a little too young but late in the school year, saying I was too much trouble.  The class had already organized so I was a social isolate. She encouraged my reading because she never got to read as much as she wanted. And so my sexual life has largely centered on reading/writing, often secret and with nothing physical to measure it against.

The late forties and early fifties produced a lot of writing about sex, supposedly scientific and medical:  Masters and Johnson were at the most recent end of the wave.  Freud and Krafft-Ebing (full name Richard Fridolin Joseph Freiherr Krafft von Festenberg auf Frohnberg, genannt von Ebing) were at the beginning.  Kinsey was along in the middle somewhere.  My father bought them as they were published.  I didn’t read any porn until I was in seminary, over forty, and then it was feminist porn.  YOWZER!

Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) was mostly a taxonomy, but as we know, definitions and categories control thinking.  Krafft-Ebing was often working in a legal context where definitions are more potent because they incur consequences.  The law is “teleological,” meaning it works towards some result, usually what those in control want.  He did not address pedophilia and mentioned homosexuality as a feature of insanity.  Much of it was in Latin because the assumption was that anyone who was educated enough to speak Latin could handle the information.  Upper class, you know.  Privileged.  Access to sex, even information, has always been a kind of entitlement.  Same with good books.

Unfortunately, they could not recognize that this German medical attitude was exactly the distancing effect of Cartesian thought that allowed both rational scientific approaches to emotional subjects (good) and the cold-heartedness that made the Holocaust possible (evil) — maybe inevitable.  This persists in contemporary English-speaking cultures.  I don’t know about Germany, which has had some hard, painful thinking to do.

That both WWI and WWII were middle-European at their core is not surprising because the whole continent had been in chaos and war for centuries before nations formed on the basis of pride and power.  These values greatly affect both writing and sex.  Germanic ideas were “civilized” and quite unlike the Celtic and other indigenous understandings of life.  They were reinforced by the Catholic church which was one of the keys to resolving the Thirty Years War by the use of authority, hierarchy, boundaries, and rigidity.  But I am not an historian.

Recognized historians are writers and, more than that, published and often academic.  Their cultural skew affects their understanding of what happened.  The necessity of anchor points requires the names of people and the dates of events, mostly battles but sometimes written documents.   The important stuff happened in between.  "People's history."

Writing as records claimed primacy over every other form of speech and communication.  Licenses and lists for sex, birth, death, and taxes.  That set authority against natural body-based ecologically contexted empathy and interaction.  It was powerful and boring.  Authority sold itself on the grounds that God-said-so and that it was “higher” status culture.  We’re still doing that.  But there’s a strong backlash.  We’ve discovered a lot of lies and misunderstandings.  Clay feet under the spats.

Because America is an immigrant culture it evokes constant worry about being improper and therefore being stigmatized and prevented from success.  On the rez the schools when I taught there were — and probably still are — so focused on proper usage and spelling that they stifle the creativity that they purport to encourage, leaving the student with contradictions that prevent free reading and writing.  Whole school systems are punitive and rigid as if Calvinist missionaries still ran them.  Recently my little nephew started kindergarten in progressive Oregon and came home shamed because he didn’t hold his crayons properly or something.  Now he has to be encouraged to draw and color.

On the other hand, the last time I taught, the other high school English teacher could not correct an ordinary usage and grammar exam without an answer sheet, because her English degree was based on French literary philosophy.  And I, who was educated in the Fifties, was never taught sentence rhetoric.  I could diagram a sentence, tell a participle from a gerund, understood parallel construction, but had no sense of the implications of thought order in English, could not convert one kind of grammar phrase into another, and a dozen other strategies.  Luckily I read like a bonfire and internalized quite a lot unconsciously.  Ultimately one must learn from experience — which is the source of all theories — and that goes for sex as well as writing.

Any system that scolds one for holding a crayon “wrong” or improperly splitting a verb or ending a sentence with a preposition or for using or not using some physical intimate technique in bed is a constraint.  Unless there is some practical reason, such things should themselves be constrained.  This is true for both sex and writing/reading.  Properness is the least useful value for communication.

*Mason Cooley was an aphorist.  What the hell is an aphorist?  Something about bees?  No.  Famous for being famous.

WHERE HAVE ALL THE PULPITS GONE?

I don’t think I’ve ever done this before: re-posted someone else’s blog.  I’ll edit it a bit because it’s rather specialized.  Martin Marty was one of my professors at the U of Chicago Div School.  He’s been a public voice with considerable influence because he is always fair, balanced and clear.  On retirement he began to write this blog every Monday.  On Thursday at the same location someone else, well-qualified, writes on a crucial but more specialized topic.

Vanishing Clergy by Martin Marty

July 27, 2015

Making the rounds after its publication in July 2014 is an item forwarded by many: from The Atlantic, David Wheeler’s catchily-titled “Higher Calling, Lower Wages: The Vanishing of the Middle-Class Clergy.” 

Wheeler’s sub-title explains, “As full-time pastors become a thing of the past, more and more seminary grads are taking on secular jobs to supplement their incomes.”  . . . 

The Association of Theological Schools (Canada and U.S.)—see the link in Sources—or ATS as it is also known, can guide readers to many kinds of adaptation, innovation, enterprise, and energy on the theological school front, but stories of “decline” in worshipping communities is obvious and is pondered by many of the many millions who are involved with them, and who care.

The Atlantic story focuses on Justin Barringer, a Kentuckian who applied to “nearly a hundred jobs over the course of two years,” but landed no full-time, salaried church position. What to do?

As I read of him and his peers, an ornery recommendation leaped to mind: convert to Catholicism, study for and join its clergy, since Catholicism (including its middle-class) is often working “full-time” to find clergy to fill its depleted ranks or keep up with sudden growth in some sectors.

The “vanishing” and “thing of the past” terms are somewhat overstated also in Protestantism and Judaism, where processions of graduates enter the ranks of the “called” and “ordained” to more than what they would call “jobs” each year.

Admittedly, there is a shortage of positions for many in many denominations.

And without a doubt, many post-seminarians are saddled with debts, as are their counterparts in teaching, accounting, law, and many more. As one reads literature from the ATS, publications by denominational agencies, and the like, it is clear that many church bodies are working zealously to help seminarians enter the clergy unshadowed by mountains of debt.

Wheeler, David R. “Higher Calling, Lower Wages: The Vanishing of the Middle-Class Clergy.” The Atlantic, July 22, 2014, Business. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/07/higher-calling-lower-wages-the-collapse-of-the-middle-class-clergy/374786/.

Author, Martin E. Marty, is the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the History of Modern Christianity at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His biography, publications, and contact information can be found at  www.memarty.com.

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Comments:

07.27.15  Mary Scriver in Valier, MT:

(I rather misread the issue here.  The original issue was why there are so many more pastors than pulpits.  I was thinking about why so many pastors are unemployed.  Whose expectations are askew?  Not just me right here, but also in the larger society.  This doesn't seem to be just a problem of ministers, but of all "helping professions" like teachers or social workers  There are a lot of them, but they aren't always very satisfactory and they are not likely to be satisfied with unreal work loads and low pay.)

Though I received an MA in Religious Studies from the U of C Div School in 1980, I left ministry (UUA) in 1988 for a variety of reasons that may be relevant to others in one combination or another:

1.  Ministers have reacted to the Sexual Revolution incautiously.

2.  Congregations will not let ministers explore new post-Christian theologies, maybe out of fear, and insist on old-fashioned apologetics — and yet are bored with them and can’t reconcile them with the far more exciting scientific breakthroughs or even pluralistic accommodations to comparative religions.

3.  Many denominations (esp in the mainstream) have pushed theology aside in favor of social activism and counseling.  Both require rather different educations than Div School.

4.  Many church contexts are over-influenced by corporation models, esp. those concerned with self-preservation through money.

5.  Levelers have brought down the kind of prestige and respect ministers once had and instead gone to “you are our servant who must be obedient to US.”  I had that said to me explicitly in those words and I was in a liberal denomination, though it’s a right wing attitude.

6.  Other vocations use roughly the same skills once the theology is removed.  They pay much better.

7.  Going to visit people in their homes or in the hospital is now unwelcome.

8.  Only the big churches can employ married couples, both ordained.

There are probably more forces than that at work.  The most relevant one for me was simple:  I wanted to come home to the Blackfeet Reservation and not move all the time.  (I am not tribal but I am aging.)  Some denominations assign their ministers, mine went through a long and arduous hiring process.

07.27.15 Dennis Maher, retired clergy:

I think that clergy are vanishing. I am one, now retired and better related to the Clergy Project than to any congregation. The rise of the “nones” has affected clergy as well as people in the pews. This makes clergy vanish.

Also, I worked with the PCUSA call and referral system in the ‘90's and have seen great changes since then. In that denomination then, there were about 1,400 clergy seeking about 950 positions; sometimes 1,200 positions. There are now 1,735 clergy seeking 479 positions, of which only 165 are for pastor or associate pastor. How many are full time is unknown, but most congregations today are under 100 members, making it difficult to pay a living wage to a full time pastor. Many of them used to have full time pastors but are calling part time pastors now. Once upon a time, the pastor was the best educated person in a small town. Now there are many counties without any resident pastor.  [my emphasis mhs]

As the number of educated and connected clergy declines, much knowledge about churches as organizations and institutions has been and is being lost. Denominations are not in a position to care about this, and themselves have lost their corporate memory. I think all of that is fine if congregations would adopt the teachings of Jesus rather than the myths about him as their mission. There is a future for the aphorisms and parables of Jesus but probably not for the church structures that I served for 40 years.

• See more at: https://divinity.uchicago.edu/sightings/vanishing-clergy#sthash.lRahumbw.dpuf

___________

When someone like Rev. Maher has a strong voice, I try to research them via Boogle or some other means.  Rev. Maher appears to be active with The Clergy Letter Project which is a sort of petition website where specific pastors sign up to endorse the active inclusion of evolution in religious thinking.  There are 285 UU’s on the list.  They are not likely to get objections or criticism from their congregations or other ministers.  The church next door to me in Valier would be up in arms.

SIBS

My brother, my cat, my other brother  ('60's)

I was raised with boys, two younger brothers, both left-handed which seemed somehow linked to gender in my mind, sort of like the kid who grew up on a street where all the girls were Catholic and all the boys were from Protestant families.  The kid was in high school before he figured out that gender was not the salient point of difference.  And a lot older than that when he learned that both religion and gender are complex continuums rather than simple dimorphisms.  Some people never figure it out.  My mother didn’t.

My mother privileged “the boys” because she was one of set of sisters whose father longed for a boy.  The sisters set out to produce boys. This goes back into the ways of the British Empire, which are territory-based, defining success and wealth as owning land, which they assumed only males could do.  And the laws reinforced that.  If you owned land, you could survive.  This was proven during the Great American Depression that destroyed fortunes and jobs.  The families who could grow gardens and animals on land they owned were the ones who survived.

My brother, my father

My mother believed in education and was a teacher and librarian herself for many years.  Her sisters married ranchers -- land.  My mother married education -- a man with a master’s degree.  But his MA thesis was about the price of potatoes and he was still tied to the land economy.  His family had homesteaded.  Their brief spate of prosperity was from selling farm machinery (horse-drawn harrows) and the profit was quickly removed by the shift from mechanical land-management to chemical land management.  Instead of harrowing, one sprayed.  Spared from mechanical trauma danger, now the farmer was exposed to organic body systems interference.  My father died subtly demented, hugely obese, estranged from family, supported by his wife.  

My own education has saved me.  I also shared the idealism of both parent families.  One should do good in the world, contribute to progress, and possibly write the Great American Novel.  But my mother covertly believed fertility is a trap.  One of the land mines in it is primogeniture, the idea that only boys can inherit land.  Her two sisters both gave birth to twins, but one had only girls and the other one had twin boys plus another boy plainly unsuited for ranching -- plus a girl.  All the girls were clever and beautiful (my cousins are far more glamorous than I am), which was good since their fortunes lay in marriage.  The result of gender dynamics was family quarrels until the two sister’s husbands (who were brothers) each claimed one of the male fraternal twins.

Mark leaves for Browning, MT.  

Within five minutes of arriving, his duffle was headed down the road with a local.

The first problem my brothers faced was the draft, so -- just as counterphobic as I -- they joined the Marines right out of high school.  Neither saw combat.  One passed his three years playing chess on a ship in the Pacific and the other saw a lot of excitement (catching rattlesnakes, racing motorcycles on the desert) but never left the USA.  The chess player returned quietly and prepared for veterinary medicine but finally backed off.  The snake hunter got his MFA and taught junior college.  Both came to visit me in Browning, were shocked, and left.  Too rough for them.

These were big handsome smart guys with degrees.  I don’t know how much they absorbed my mother’s fear of homosexuality, which came from her bullying father whose worst insult was to bellow at a little boy, “What are you?  Some kind of homo?”  I don’t know whether my brothers found my father’s books in his sock drawer:  Freud, Kinsey, Kraft-Ebing, Masters and Johnson, Van de Velde.  I did.  I thought they were embarrassing.  Not very enlightening.

What really set my heart racing (as well as other anatomical responses) was a few paragraphs in “Green Grass of Wyoming,” where Ken (who was Flicka’s friend in the prequel) was sitting on a high hill with his potential sweetheart, whose pulse was racing so much that it made the hankie in her breast (ulp!) pocket leap rhythmically.  (The hankie alone dates the passage.)  I wore out that page, no manipulation necessary.  Maybe that’s how I got imprinted with the eroticism of landscape.

My mother and her boys at Mark's wedding.

I never talked to my brothers about sex or gender expectations.  There was a tiny bit of “playing doctor” that Older Brother highly disapproved of and closed down by threatening to tell, though we were pretty young and had no way of knowing what would happen if anyone knew.  Older Bro married late to a divorced woman with grown kids and Younger never married, though he produced a daughter to cherish.  I married but might as well have spared the effort since there were no benefits derived from it: no land, no other property, no fidelity, no children, not even any productivity since all the efforts were focused on Scriver bronzes.  My work disappeared into his.  But it was amazing for the decade that it lasted.  No regrets.  An education.  And I got the name.  Scribbler.

All three of us seem to have had some sort of lid on success.  Too dangerous, too many compromises necessary, too unwilling to accept collaboration, maybe fear of the loss of freedom, though in the end we weren’t world-travelers, unless you count the reservation as an exotic foreign country and I do.  I went the farthest in terms of education.  The U of Chicago is also a kind of exotic foreign country but I had no craving for a Ph.D.  Nor was I politically ambitious within my denomination.  I just wanted to know stuff and live on the prairie. 

July, 1952

The ultimate nature of my brothers emerged after my mother’s death.  The Younger had pre-frontal cortex brain trauma from a fall that literally cracked his forehead on a sidewalk.  He showed no emotion at my mother’s death though she had supported him for a decade.  The Older was my mother’s pride and joy who had not been to visit for years but, unemployed, came in time to see her through death and be her executor.  He felt his veterinary knowledge qualified him to take charge of her.  He hadn’t quite expected what that would mean in terms of cleaning up shit and providing pain relief.  Somehow he had assumed that I would do those things -- he doctor, me nurse -- but my mother insisted that I had to earn a living, I had to go to work.  ( I was the only one employed at that point.)  So I did.  The Younger watched and smoked.

After the death the Older bro wanted the Younger Bro out of the house ASAP.  He did not register the brain damage.  Younger participated gleefully in emptying the house of furniture.  When Good Will said the quality of the stuff was too low for them to accept it, the boys asked me to remove what I wanted and then set the rest out on the front yard with a sign saying: “free.”  People carried it off on their heads -- too poor to own cars.  

March, 1956

Older had brought an inflatable mattress.  He sold everything else out from under the Younger, who resourcefully recreated the old furniture layout with cardboard boxes.  While I was at work, the two went to the lawyer and some money was disbursed from the estate.  Younger left to some mysterious destination in his mammoth white old 4-wheel-drive 3/4 ton pickup.  (I called it “Moby Truck.”) Older began the cleanup necessary and dealt with the real estate salesperson.  I paid off the last of my seminary debt and left for Montana.

The house sold quickly and when I look at it now (5103 NE 15^th  in Portland) on Zillow, it looks better than it has from the beginning.  Younger used up his money, used up his welcome with those rancher relatives who had land, and finally died on the street, indigent, vaguely paranoid.  He could not get any help from welfare or disability or even the Veteran’s Administration, which had only begun to realize what pre-frontal cortex brain damage meant. He would not cooperate.  He lied.  He said he was investigating them for the CIA.  Older invested his third of the money, moved to a slightly better house, and otherwise went on living modestly with his wife the way he always has.

Mid-fifties

What does it mean?  We were very careful and prudent behavior-wise, though both brothers were smokers (I’m not) and Older is probably a beer-alcoholic.  We’re not family people in the sense of participation, but I look at genealogy in search of clues.  All the aunts and uncles are dead.  (I’m 75, somehow.) 

Early Fifties

My mother said on her death bed,  “I hope the next world is as much fun as this one has been!”  She was faking it to some degree -- this world was full of hurt for her as it is for everyone -- but not entirely.  We HAVE had a lot of fun.  Silliness.  Excitement.  Adventure.  Everything but money. Actually, I think girls have a lot more fun than boys.  My mother used to say,  “It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.”  Get an education.  Own a house. Resist temptation.  Don’t fall down.  Children optional.