FATHER'S DAY

My dad died a long time ago when I was away at college.

Ever since, Father’s Day hasn’t been one of the more outstanding celebratory days. It isn’t because I can’t remember a lot of positive things about my dad, it’s more about a hole that I can’t seem to measure and which never really fills up.

Cancer introduced itself to my dad back in the mid sixties and then proceeded to stalk him for almost two decades before cutting him down at the age of 48.

So anyway, being in a melancholy mood, I thought I’d take a stab at writing a piece that might fit into the inspirational genre.

Knuckle-prints in the Sand

One night I dreamed I was walking along the beach with Monkey-Cam. Many scenes from our hiking adventures flashed across my memory.

In each scene I noticed footprints in the sand. Sometimes there were two sets of footprints, other times there was only one.

This bothered me because I noticed that during the low periods of my life, when I really could have used a friend, I could see only one set of footprints, so I said to Monkey-Cam,

“Monkey-Cam, you promised you’d always be my friend and that we’d be an inseparable team of narrative image photographers. But I have noticed that during our most challenging adventures there has only been one set of footprints. What’s up with that?”

Monkey-Cam replied in his inimitable pantomime gestural language, “Scott, those times when you only see one set of footprints, well, those are the times we rented a camel. Remember?”

“Oh yeah,” I said, “I forgot.”

Oblivion

Gulf

Support

Approaching the river

Hidden moon

Crossing the river

Wonderful night for a moondance

Party balloon

REMEMBER ME

This handprint appears above a depiction of a spotted pony that was painted in a gallery of a cave at the end of the last ice age some fifteen thousand years ago. Scholars point out that the gallery was far away from any living quarters and difficult to get to and therefore posit some religious – perhaps magical – significance to the artwork. It is one of the first recorded instances of a hominid making a characteristic gesture across time – a message that cries, “I was here. Remember me.”

Later, in one of the first super civilizations, the Egyptians went to great lengths to have their respective deity remember them each as specific individuals.

Of course, the more resources one had, the greater the lengths attained…

Who will remember me?

When you face that question, it becomes easy to see the selling points for religion as it exists today. What peasant, toiling in the mud of the fields during a short brutish life wouldn’t want to be re-united with God and family in an Eden-ic paradise?

A forgotten town in West Texas

Memorial Day at Willamette Cemetery

Marcus Borg’s historical, metaphorical approach to the Bible makes a keen distinction between the pre-Easter Jesus and the post-Easter Jesus, and if accurate, makes literally derived ideas from ‘scripture’ about eternal life no more reliable than other approaches. Borg seems to suggest that Jesus’ gospel, at least the one the gospels say he shared, was mostly not about Jesus so much as it was about something called the Kingdom of Heaven – that is - it looks like Jesus was trying to say something about God, not himself – something about how to live while you’re alive and not about setting aside happiness and rewards for your eternal afterlife. (JESUS: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary.)

How do we leave a mark on the world?

Who will remember us?

In Munich, a man approached me and began speaking, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying. His appearance was weathered and merchant-marine-like. His skin was deeply tanned and crackled like old leather. His coat looked lived in with the polishing that comes from wear. I figured he was a beggar or panhandler. He carried a box of cheap white candles. He could see I didn’t understand his words, so he tried some different ones, finally asking, “English?” to which I nodded. He started over again in very good English, telling a story about a friend of his who had just died that day in the underground. He said he was collecting money so he could buy candles to make his friend a small shrine. I had never heard this approach used by panhandlers in Portland, so I handed over several Euros. No doubt my contribution would put him that much closer to acquiring a bottle of cheap wine. I didn’t think of him again.

At the end of a day’s worth of sightseeing, I took the underground train back toward the hotel. As I walked in those long, perpetually lit mall-ways, seeking the surface, I passed a dead end of sorts and chanced to see the ‘beggar’ with 4 or 5 friends standing around an arrangement of candles.




Bad public high school history classes talk about ancient cultures as if the people who lived in them were primitive next-to-cavemen like monkeys who foolishly worshipped the sun. But looking at the art the Egyptians made to mark the event of death lets you see that, if the perspective were to be reversed and they found themselves somehow looking back at us, they would likely shrug at a culture that worshipped the son and look askance at our sheet-rock architecture designed to last for a decade or two.

I think we humans, across cultures and time, are all identical in the desire to be remembered.





It isn’t a pyramid of course, but last night I left my hand-print on some of our more durable examples of contemporary construction. Since I used a spray bottle of water to make the negative hand-print, it seems I will only be remembered for about a half an hour at best.

(Detail of figure above)

Here, where homeless people sleep, the hand-print still seems pretty eloquent.

("I just want to mean something", found artwork under the west end of the Fremont Bridge)

In Memoriam

Time worn stairs to an amusement park ride at Oaks Park. Winter, 2003

There is an old black and white photograph I keep that shows me and my brother, six and five years old respectively, wrestling with my father on the kitchen floor. My father smiles up at the camera (and undoubtedly his wife), and he looks happy. My brother and I are also smiling. Though Dad has twisted us into pretzel shapes, he simultaneously cradles us protectively in his powerful arms (a stealth hug).

Some twelve years later, I wrestle Dad again. Somewhere over the years, it has become a contest. Time after time I try my puny muscles against his, and learn new ways to be beaten. But this time, I have spent a season wrestling for the high school team. I have worked long sweaty hours in the weight room. On the mats, I have practiced a small set of wrestling moves until they are habits.

This time, I catch my Dad in a head-and-arm and miraculously – inexorably – I slowly inch him onto his back and pin him. He struggles mightily. He can’t escape.

I don’t know what I thought was going to happen after all of those years of trying to beat my father. Perhaps I thought I would do a victory dance. Maybe I thought I would tease him and gloat. Maybe I thought he would be proud and congratulate me. But when it is over, when our eyes meet, I see an expression of puzzlement and resignation. It is almost as if he had briefly glanced into the face of death and reluctantly made an appointment for the future. Something changes forever. I almost cry. We never wrestle again.

In retrospect, I understand this event as the ebb and flow of seasons. There is a season of growth, a season of fruitfulness, and eventually a season of decline. By necessity, our parents blaze a trail ahead of us in time – a twenty year offset – that teaches us about the coming winter.

The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost reach consensus. It is par for the course.

The mound of dirt under which my father’s body rests has long been settled and covered with grass. If nature is God’s handiwork, we hope the repeating pattern of the seasons is a characteristic signature - a metaphor for what lies in store for everything that dies. Despite our common sense, we trust that Spring will follow Winter (It always does).

The gospels report that Jesus might have suggested that one good way to think about God is as a father (presumably a good father). Granted, a personified God as a father-figure-archetype is psychologically suspicious, but suspending disbelief temporarily and pondering a God that might cherish my father and wrestle with him on the kitchen floor - cradling him protectively in his powerful arms - is not a bad way to spend a few moments.

It seems beyond belief that a God would care about individual humans – specific meat-beings and their respective bundles of experience and memory – and remember them beyond their physical existence. Yet somehow every human culture seemingly comes up with a version of this story.

Which story is true? Unfortunately, despite all the glowing rhetoric, there is still only one way to find out for sure.

In the meantime, I admire the sentiment contained in a saying my mother found on the occasion of my father’s death. It goes, “Friendship divides our sorrow, and multiplies our joy.”

Someday, when it is comfortable, let’s gather together and tell stories of our fathers and mothers and remember them.

Pattern Recognition

If one reads enough science magazines, one absorbs the idea that a key evolutionary survival characteristic is the ability for animals to recognize patterns. The hominid process of elaboration on this particular ability has resulted in things like superstition, the ability to recognize patterns where they don’t really exist.

Spring at Smith and Bybee Lakes isn’t a clear cut process. Trees rooted at the edge of an uncertain lake can’t decide if they’re waking from winter slumber or drowning. Yet life displays its exuberance to propagate in forms besides budding tree branches, like this head-start patch of Irises schooled in vowel forms.

In one of those annoying coincidences that are used by people to prove there aren't any coincidences, I had been told about Zen masters who spend inordinate amounts of time, painting and repainting Zen circles just days before venturing out to the lakes. Like most things about Zen, the importance of painting simple looking circles over and over largely escapes me. Regardless, I was primed to see circles almost everywhere after thumbing through a book that was filled with pictures like this one. (I apologize. I haven't been able to find the source for this picture ... I'm still looking) It won’t be long before the winter’s moratorium on growth is broken and ‘life’ will begin again to write its green ‘O’s of promise, another well known pattern that addresses rebirth and hints at eternal life.


As Spring wore on into Summer and Summer slid into Fall, I would periodically visit and chronicle nature's repeating expression of birth, death and rebirth. Representative photos of this process can be seen at, http://picasaweb.google.com/realdoubter/LifeCycle