Origins

The Marvelous Grandpaphone

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Photo by Arthur Edelmans on Unsplash

The word “grandpaphone” came to me as I woke from a dream.

In the dream, I was at a family reunion. Some youngsters were showing me a trick that they learned. They poured a liquid on an old LP record. It flattened the grooves, making the surface shiny and smooth. I said they shouldn’t do that and explained what the grooves were for. I wanted to tell them about playing my grandmother’s old wind-up gramophone as a boy. It played recordings on cylinders instead of disks. But first, I wanted to figure out whose grandkids these were. They must belong to one of my siblings. However, they seemed not to know who I was talking about when I named my brother and sisters.

I realized the meaning of this dream in what my son calls “Ha-Ha time” (half asleep and half awake).

The children who erase the LP and do not remember my generation’s names will be my grandchildren’s grandchildren. I don’t know all the first names of my sixteen great-great-grandparents. Do you know yours?

Unless your ancestors are the kind of people recorded in history books or you are an obsessive-compulsive genealogist, you are unlikely to know much about that generation.

The dream confronted me with an aspect of mortality that may be even more profound than the eventual death of my body — the erasure of the fact that I ever lived.

I heard this hymn playing in the background:

Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
bears all who breathe away,
they fly, forgotten, as a dream
dies in the dawning day.

Isaac Watts revised by Brian Wren

That was when I woke up, and the word “grandpaphone” came to me. A grandpaphone picks up and plays the vibrations of the ancestors through the generations.

That is the best I can hope for. My efforts to become immortal aren’t bearing much fruit.

If my descendants have an enormous trust fund, it won’t bear my name, and they won’t have other reminders of my existence.

I did publish a book of sermons, but it went out of print in the 1990s. The paper in the copies I have on my shelves is already turning yellow.

I can count on appearing in the histories of the churches I served, but I fear that most of those churches won’t make it past the middle of this century.

The dream was calling me to recognize a truth my culture ignores –the importance of ancestors.

My particular Christian tradition has been guilty of looking down its nose at what it calls “ancestor worship.” So we reduce one of the Ten Commandments: “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long upon the earth,” to handing out corsages on Mother’s Day.

Rabbi Abraham Heschel was once asked what this commandment meant for people who had been abused or abandoned by their parents. Rabbi Heschel said the commandment does not require us to pretend that bad behavior is honorable. What it does command us to do is to have a reverence for the mystery of our own existence. Our parents, their parents, and all our ancestors are the symbols of that mystery.

Our ancestors do, indeed, represent a mystery: the mystery of who we are, how we got here, and, maybe, where we are going.

I was lucky to know all four of my grandparents, one of my great-grandmothers, and a step-great-grandmother. Some people come from family lines full of the kind of people who get biographies written about them — or at least an article in Wikipedia. Some people don’t even know the names of the two people who made them. But we all have this in common: a family tree that doubles in size with every generation: four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents — you can do the math. We don’t often realize that if even one of our 128 ancestors seven generations ago had not “come through,” as it were, you and I would not be here.

Perhaps your reaction is, “I’m just a random set of genes that came together to win the life lottery.”

Or maybe you think like my grandchildren. Once, when all four of them were together, I told them how my 15-year-old self got up the nerve to reach out for their grandmother’s hand, and she let me hold it. After telling that story, I asked, “Are you here because I reached for her hand? Or did I reach for her hand because you are supposed to be here?”

They all agreed that their inevitable future existence was the reason I crushed on their grandmother.

Whatever you think—and I admit there are days when I think my life is a lottery ticket and days when I think my life is inevitable—just thinking about it should fill us with reverence for the mystery of our existence.

You can create a very simple daily discipline of remembering your parents and their parents, grandparents, and ancestors and bowing in gratitude, thanking them for the gift of life. Since I have added that to my morning routine, I feel a reverence for life that I haven’t felt before.

I think I am playing the grandpaphone.

JFK and Julius Caesar

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For about twenty years, I could get a congregation to nod their heads in agreement when I said, “We all remember where we were and what we were doing when we heard that President Kennedy had been shot.”

But now, as Longfellow once wrote about another event, “Hardly a man is now alive who remembers that fateful day and year.” (There are, statisticians tell me, more women alive who remember).

I was in a 10th-grade English class. We were in the middle of reading Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. I remember reading out loud a speech by Marc Antony encountering Caesar’s body after he had been assassinated:

O mighty Caesar, dost thou lie so low?
Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils
Shrunk to this little measure? Fare thee well.—

[ Act 1:Scene 1)

There was a knock on our classroom door. Our teacher, who would unexpectedly die in a car accident herself in about eighteen months, went out and then returned a couple of minutes later to tell us that the President had been shot.

That moment taught me that even the most important people are mortal and how quickly and unexpectedly life and even history can change — the same thing Shakespeare was trying to say.

Shakespeare also says that the assassination of Caesar had consequences that Brutus and Cassius never intended when they drove their knives into Caesar’s heart.

I grew up in a family and a community that preferred the upright and honest Richard Nixon to the spoiled Democrat (said with distaste) John Kennedy. And many of us believed that Nixon would have been president if Richard Daley had not been able to dig up a lot of Democrats from Chicago’s graveyards. Kennedy won by only five electoral votes and a little over 100,000 popular votes (cp. Joe Biden’s 74 electoral votes and seven million popular votes in 2020.)

But, we (following Nixon’s example) accepted the official results when Kennedy was elected and mourned along with the rest of the country when he was killed. And we wished the new President well.

That taught me what it means to be an American.

I don’t know how the world would be different if Kennedy had not been shot that day. Historians I respect doubt that JFK could have gotten the Civil Rights Act through Congress the way LBJ did. Some of them also wonder if he would have escalated our involvement in Vietnam the way LBJ did. Both of those events have shaped much of our history since.

I’d be interested in your answers to at least one of these questions:

Where were you, and what were you doing on November 22, 1963?

Do great people make history, or does history make great people?

What event or experience taught you what it means to be an American?

What event taught you that life can be unpredictable?

The Year of the Rat

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Year of the Rat 2020

I like Chinese food. I hate the placemats in Chinese restaurants. No matter how many times I study them, they always tell me that I am a rat.

The placemats show the 12 years of the Chinese Zodiac.

I look at all the other years and wish I could be a Tiger or a Rabbit.

Dragon would be cool!

I’d settle for Pig.

Snake is a toss-up with Rat. Although I can think of more positive things about snakes.

No matter how many times I eat Chinese, the news is always the same. I am a Rat. To me the Rat represents all that is unlovely, unloving and unlovable in me.

Astrology may be bunk, but it points to the truth that life has certain “givens.” The Native American poet, Joy Harjo, now the U.S. Poet Laureate, wrote, “Remember the sky that you were born under.” People who live close to nature notice the way the stars shine the night a baby is born. Two billion Christians remember a star shining over Bethlehem one night long ago.

If I count the year I was born, the Year of the Rat has come around for the seventh time. If I look at myself at 12, 24, 36, 48, 60, and now, I see so many changes in those 12 year cycles, for example:

  • At 12, I was a farm boy.
  • At 24, I was young man with a wife, a baby, and a church.
  • In the past 12 years, both my parents died. For the first time, I left a church smaller than it was when I arrived. I retired. We moved to New York City.

I look in the mirror and compare what I see with snapshots taken from those other cycles of the Zodiac. Where did the hair go? How did what hair I have left turn so white when it started so black? Where did the wrinkles come from?

In some ways, what remains the same is more mysterious than what has changed.

How can I be the same person now that I was at 12? What is this mystery that I call my “self?”

I still read and then pontificate about what I’ve learned. I still laugh out loud at jokes other people don’t seem to get. But there are other things that also persist. All of them are part of the rat.

The Rat represents all those parts of me that I have tried to shut out, poison, or trap. I can’t kill it. Most of the time the Rat just hides in the shadows. But he is there. He is always there.

In this 7th Year of the Rat, I look back and see that there is not much I can do about my past failures and limitations. The rat-like genes that gnawed away the cilia inside my cochlea now may be gnawing at my bones and my lungs.

My life is my life. It is a combination of the choices I made and things that were built in to my life from conception. But oddly, that empowers me to make the best of what my life is, Rat and all.

Accepting the unlovely Rat in me also helps me see that the Rat can be “quick-witted, resourceful, and versatile” at times.

Maybe that’s why the Chinese astrologers also say that the Rat is kind. Once a Rat accepts and feels compassion for himself, he can care for other fallible human beings.

After all, if you can love a Rat, you can love anybody.

The Past is Ever Before Us

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Recently, I learned that people in some cultures gesture before them when they speak of the past. When they talk about the future, they gesture behind them.

It makes sense. We can see the past as clearly as we see what is in front of us. We cannot see the future, just as we cannot see what is behind our backs. (Elementary schoolteachers are an exception, of course.)

It comforts me, as we leave a place and people we love, to think of the past as ever before me. I will always be able to see those people and places in a way I am not able to see my future. But how does one do that without living in the past? How does the past become a place of reference, not residence?

Our 49th anniversary was our next-to-last day in Cleveland. We spent part of it at one of our favorite places, the Cleveland Museum of Art. CMA contains one of the best and most balanced collections of art in America.

You can see many world-famous pieces of art for free. It does not have gates inside the door, with employees “suggesting” a $20 “donation.” CMA’s trustees follow the museum’s founders’ desire that it be free “for all the people forever.”

When our sons and then our grandchildren were small, they loved the armor court. There, knights wear truly shining armor. We also loved watching our grandchildren create art on giant, super-duper iPads in the Artlens Gallery. Those are some of our favorite memories.

At the museum, Jacquie and I, farm kids who grew up knowing nothing about art, learned how to “see” art. By looking at good art, we learned the simple method of distinguishing it from bad art. As one art critic says, “When you see bad art, you first go “Wow!” Then, after looking longer, you say, “huh?”, because there isn’t much there. When you see good art, you may say, “huh?” first. But then, if you look longer, you begin to say, “Wow!”

We sat for several minutes in front of “Lot’s Wife.”This monumental painting shows the bleakest landscape you can imagine. In the foreground, are railroad tracks like the ones that carried doomed passengers to the death camps. In the background, are the shadows of what appear to be ruined buildings obscured by smoke.

Yes, when I first saw it years ago, I said, “huh”. The longer I look at it, the more I say, “Wow!”

Going to the museum symbolizes what I mean about the past being ever before us. Our memory mounts moments on the walls of our hearts like paintings in a museum. We can see faces before us the way Rembrandt saw a kitchen maid.

We can see camping trips before us the way the Hudson River School artists painted the wilderness.

We can take our time as we look at those moments. We can step back and get perspective, or move in close to see the tiny details.

Chances are, the moments that made us say, “Wow!” at first, will remain in the warehouse. The ones that we hang in the galleries of the heart will be the moments that puzzled us, maybe even pained us, or have escaped our notice until now. What was that fight about? What about those meals we shared with others?

Stepping back, we can see deeper meaning in them. We may see grace strokes that we missed at first. We may see how those moments influence our choices now, the way artists today learn to draw from Michelangelo or learn to break the rules of drawing from Picasso.

We do not put the past and all the people we have loved and all the places we have been behind us. The past is ever before us. All we have to do is look.

Burden or Anchor?

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When we were first married, we had nothing. One day, my Mom took Jacquie and me to yard sale. Mom spied an end table blackened with old varnish and asked how much it was. The person said, “five dollars.”

Mom said, “he’ll take it.”

I was a little taken aback by the way Mom was spending my money and started to object as the owner went to get her money box to receive my five dollars.

Mom said in a whisper, “It’s solid cherry.”

It was. She refinished it. It was beautiful. It became an anchor for us. It was one of the first things that Jacquie and I owned together. It was ours, instead of mine or hers. When we bought other furniture, it dictated our taste. Our first really big purchase was a cherry bedroom suite. Not many years ago, we bought a new dining room table and chairs, also cherry.

Mom refinished that end table half a century ago. It probably needs refinishing again.

Someone else can do that. It is not going with us. We are deeply grateful for my mother’s discerning eye and her hard work. We are also ready, as we approach our 50th anniversary next year, to ask ourselves what we like.

Things change in the second half of life.

What used to be an anchor can become a burden. As we let go of our old anchors, we gain the freedom to sail into whatever is next on life’s journey.

That’s the way Jacquie and I feel as we let go of so many things in order to move from our four-bedroom house in Cleveland Heights, Ohio to a small apartment in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of New York City. We would not be going on to this next chapter if we hung on to things that cost us a lot of money. or that have deep sentimental value, or just seem like the things that two people our age ought to have.

In some ways, my mother is my model for this. When my Dad died, she had a house jam-packed with so many things she had refinished. She had a barn full of things (especially chairs, for some reason) that she was going to refinish. She had never lived more than 15 miles from where she was born in Western New York. But she left almost all of it behind to move to a retirement community in New Hampshire, near my youngest sister. As the Alzheimer’s progressed, she moved from her large independent living apartment to a smaller assisted living apartment. She eventually shared a room with another patient in the memory unit and died owning a bed, a chair, a dresser, and a small bookshelf. One shelf was full of Agatha Christie mysteries. She said the great thing about Alzheimer’s was that she could read them again since she couldn’t remember how they came out.

Someday, even our old bodies that have anchored us to this earth for so many good years will become burdens that we will need to lay down, too.

I hope that when we do, we will be able to sail away to whatever is next.

Fillmore

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Because you read The Life of Andrew Jackson, you might be interested in this biography of . . . 
 

Millard Fillmore

 
I did read a biography of Andrew Jackson about four years ago. I’ve read several presidential biographies. There have been 44 presidents other than Jackson. Why would Goodreads recommend a biography of Millard Fillmore? 
 
I know the reason and it makes the small hairs rise on the back of my neck.
 
In most rankings of U.S. Presidents, Millard Fillmore is almost always near the bottom. Never at the bottom. That place is reserved for Pierce, or Buchanan, or Andrew Johnson, or Harding. Even on a list of the worst, Fillmore is never the first.
 
Fillmore was never actually elected to the Presidency. Zachary Taylor died 15 months into his presidency. Fillmore, his much-ignored Vice President, served out the rest of Taylor’s term. Fillmore’s own party, the Whigs, then refused to nominate him for a second term. Fillmore was the last Whig President.
 
More than one writer has said that “his very name connotes mediocrity.”
 
And that is my problem. His very name connotes mediocrity.
 
My hometown is named after Millard Fillmore. It’s not a secret. My Facebook profile lists my hometown. I hooked Goodreads to Facebook years ago. Apparently, Goodreads’ algorithm looks like this:
Reads Presidential biographies
+
From Fillmore, NY
=
Wants to read about the 13th President of the United States.
 
Well, I did click on a description of the book. It was the first biography about Millard Fillmore. It was published in the 1950’s, over 80 years after he died. The Buffalo Historical Society had to pay a history professor to write about Fillmore. Their interest? Fillmore also was the first president of the Buffalo Historical Society. Wikipedia lists only three other Millard Fillmore biographies. Compare that to the number of Lincoln biographies.
 
Since I have lived in another state for half my life, I can usually answer the question, “Where are you from?” with a vague reference to a small town south of Buffalo and Rochester.
 
When pressed for the name of the town, I tell them, but almost always follow up with this story:
“In 1850, the town was a collection of stores and houses known as “Mouth of the Creek.” They wanted a post office. They had the bright idea to name the town after the current President. They got their post office.”
 
I don’t know how many times I’ve told that story. How often have you explained how your hometown got its name? When Lancaster, Nebraska, became “Lincoln” in 1867, it was an act of admiration. I want people to know that Fillmore, NY, got its name from political expediency. I explain the origin of the name because the name Fillmore connotes mediocrity.
 
But, the name “Fillmore” is on my birth certificate. The name “Fillmore” is on my high school diploma. When my hometown comes up in conversation,  I handle it the way I handle being hard-of-hearing. I joke about it.
 
Making jokes about President Fillmore’s famous mediocrity isn’t hard. It’s in his biography.
 
Did you know that he began his political life as a leader of the Anti-Masonic Party? The name is self explanatory and, believe it or not, it was the first viable third party in America. Fillmore ended his career as the Presidential candidate of the Know Nothing Party. They got their name because members told people that they “Know Nothing” about what the party stands for. What did they stand for? They hated immigrants and people of other religions. Ireland and Germany were sending their criminals to us. Criminals who went to mass every Sunday. They believed the Pope was plotting to turn America into a Catholic nation. Sound familiar? Somehow, the name still fits. 
 
I handle the name of my hometown the same way that I handle being hard of hearing. If I joke about it, no one else can make fun of me.
 
I learned to use humor that way from Fillmore, my hometown. In 1950, the people of Fillmore* planned their Centennial. Other towns could celebrate their growth, important events that took place there, or important people who came from there. But not much ever happened in Fillmore. So the people of Fillmore chose this as their motto:
 
100 Years of Rigor Mortis
 
True story. You could look it up. Time Magazine reported it.
 
The only other time Fillmore got into the national news was back in the 80’s. The town offered a complete medical office free to any physician who would come there. A doctor took them up on it. People loved the way he talked like ordinary people. After a few months, other physicians in the county began looking into his credentials. They learned that, the week before he came to Fillmore, he was driving a fork-lift in a factory in Rochester.
 
I tell that story a lot, too.
 
Why? What’s the problem? Jacquie’s birth certificate says, “Fillmore”, too.  Most of the people I love best in the world were born there or lived there all their lives. I still have relatives and old friends there. They are good people. The surrounding area is beautiful.
 
Does where you come from matter? I suppose not, But, for some reason, where we come from follows us around. That’s why we often ask each other, “Where are you from?” Sure, not all the stereotypes we carry about people who grew up in the country or the city are true. Not all the assumptions we make about people who grew up in the East or the West or the South are true. Yet, it is true that our place of origin shapes us. And, for better or worse, it becomes part of our identity. One of the tasks of life is to come to terms with that aspect of our identity. Some people run away from where they came from. Others embrace it. Some disparage it. One of the tasks of the second half of life is to come to terms with our origins, because it truly is a part of our identity. 
Before there were last names, many people carried the name of their hometown, Joan of Arc, is one example. Jesus of Nazareth is another. 
 
Jesus may have been born in “The City of David”. King David had also been born in Bethlehem. But Jesus grew up in Nazareth in Galilee, a rural, hilly region, like the area around Fillmore. Nazareth in Jesus’ time may have been about the size of Fillmore. A few hundred people.
 
The gospels refer to Jesus as “Jesus of Nazareth” sixteen times. In the first chapter of John’s gospel, Philip invites Nathanael to meet “Jesus of Nazareth.” Nathanael responds: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”
 
We don’t know why Nathanael looked down on Nazareth. He came from Bethsaida, a town near Nazareth that experienced fast growth in Jesus’ time. So maybe that was the reason. We only know that the place Jesus came from was a problem for him. It was something he needed to get past with some people. 
 
I don’t know what that means except, if you come from a place like Fillmore,  you are not alone.
 
 
* We reject the term “Fillmorons.”