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I pride myself on being a person who welcomes diversity. I fancy myself to be open to all varieties of humanity, even those I have not yet encountered. I don’t use the word “different,” or worse “real differ’nt,” as an epithet, the way I heard it used in my hometown when I was a child. Yet recent events have brought my touted tolerance for diversity up short. The barrage of print and TV news about the (successful) attempt by the Minnesota Vikings to secure public financing for a new stadium has reminded me there’s one group of people whose culture I just cannot fathom:
Sports fans who paint their faces and bodies, dress in jerseys with players’ names and numbers on them, and bellow with beery breath.
I probably have more difficulty “accepting” rambunctious Vikings fans than Green Bay Packer cheeseheads, for example. My education in Scandinavian history and culture left me wary of anachronism. Horned helmets? A misreading of ancient ritual artifacts. Huge, hairy guys in bearskins? Well, look at my puny Danish relatives and try to conjure up their ancestors. Beer drinking? That’s well documented.
Living in proximity with another social group can enhance our understanding—or confirm the adage, “Familiarity breeds contempt.” The wonderfully restored Open Book building, which houses the Loft Literary Center, where I teach, sits almost next door to the Metrodome, the inverted teflon bowl where the Vikings currently play. The new stadium will block a bigger chunk of sky from our classroom windows. On game nights, Loft students get jammed up in traffic on their way to class, rejoice over distant parking spaces, and scramble through the Viking hordes. I remember one evening when a student staggered into class fifteen minutes late looking harried and pronounced solemnly, “They’re not our tribe.”
Yes, that’s the problem. I’ll hold fast to my ideals and maybe someday grow fond of these folks.
My first weak attempt at spring cleaning has turned up the printed discussion materials from a Lenten covenant group I took part in at my Presbyterian church. This question caught my attention, as it had done the first time I encountered it during Lent:
The Heidelberg Catechism in our Book of Confessions asks, “What is your only comfort, in life and death?” It might ask, where do you find peace in a world of enmity, suffering and death? How would you answer the question of the catechism?
Now, the authors of the Heidelberg Confession didn’t intend the question to be open-ended, but supplied an answer that is a basic statement of Christian faith. Our discussion, however, encouraged us to look beyond dogma and find fitting personal answers. Mine came quickly: history.
Since I first became conscious of it, the grand sweep of history has given me comfort and peace in a world of enmity, suffering and death. I’m not referring to the bromide that knowing history keeps us from repeating it. We do manage, despite what we know, to cycle through old problems again and again. My comfort comes from knowing that human life existed long before my teeny span, and will continue on, unless mine or a subsequent generation mucks it up. All the people who ever have or ever will inhabit the earth bear the same basic longings and frustrations, and knowing that makes mine bearable–and less significant than I might imagine them in fretful moments. Vast dimensions of time and space help us dial back our ego pretensions. Consider the message of the Monty Python song, “The Galaxy.”
\”The Galaxy\” on YouTube
I take comfort not only in the long sweep of history, but also in its general direction. I come from a family of Midwestern progressive populists, people who believed that history tends toward the better, and that we inhabitants of the galaxy, within our brief lifespans, can act in thoughtful, deliberate ways that help push the course toward ultimate good. Leaving home for college exposed me to cynicism as an alternate, quite popular outlook on life. The daily news nourishes cynicism by offering plenty of evidence of regression: war, genocide, slavery, domestic violence. Yet I still choose the progressive’s optimism. I believe our tiny actions steadily wear away at injustice and human folly. Some populations experience faster forward motion than others, and they, especially, must guard against smugness, the cynic’s great love.
Recently I’ve been hearing and reading about “historical trauma,” a legacy of past injustice that still carries power to shape the present. Diane Wilson writes, in her book Beloved Child, about several Dakota people who are working to heal the lingering effects of genocide and forced exile. They do so by advancing all that they value in Dakota tradition into the present, allowing it to thrive in their daily lives. The U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 is still the most contentious event in Minnesota history, and this year is its 150th anniversary, a milestone that calls for commemoration. Yesterday, I was one of a group of people invited to view the mock-up of an exhibit on the war that will open at the Minnesota Historical Society in June. We were equipped with post-it notes and pens in case we wanted to offer comments and suggestions. The curator, Kate Roberts, is making sure that people of many persuasions will have a say in how this complex history is presented and interpreted. One panel identified the Mdewakanton Dakota leader Taoyateduta as “more commonly known as Little Crow.” Someone had stuck up a post-it note asking, “known by whom?” Perception matters. His own people surely called him by his Dakota name. The use of language tells us a great deal about the direction history might take, if we listen to one another’s experiences of it. The U.S.-Dakota War used to be called the Dakota Uprising, a name suggesting a stereotypical cause: The natives were restless. Before that, it bore an even more accusatory name, the Sioux Massacre.
I’ve witnessed yet another reckoning with historical trauma this week: two performances of Alvin Ailey’s “Revelations,”a dance he created as an artistic expression of African American history. I still carry images from a performance years ago, while Ailey was still alive and leading the company. The staging and costumes made more explicit reference to history back then, suggesting slavery and work in the cottonfields. The current performance seems to stress the emotional universality of the piece, but retains visual allusions to the African American church, which is the source of its music. The trajectory of the dance is progressive, from the mournful “I Been ‘Buked and I Been Scorned” to the jubilant “Rocka My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham.” Since its creation in 1960, this danced rendition of the up-from-slavery story has become the American dance piece most frequently performed around the world. People who see it now apparently respond more to its emotional progression from despair to joy than to its historical narrative. Affirming the core Americanness of African American experience is a good outcome, and evoking emotional and spiritual resonance in others, both allies and presumed enemies, is even better. History moves forward that way. Yet none of us should forget where we started, lest we lose the measure of our progress and that great source of comfort, the grand sweep of history.
The same day Dick Clark died, I read yet another newspaper lament about the Facebook generation’s lack of genuine community. Reliance on a virtual community, rather than face-to-face engagement, is exacerbating young people’s loneliness, the article maintained. Had Dick Clark’s death not tossed me back to the reality check of memory, I might have joined in the fretting. Instead, I realized that nothing much has changed with regard to friendship and loneliness since my youth.
To be honest, American Bandstand was the baby boom generation’s social network, our virtual community, the place where we enjoyed, vicariously, the companionship of dancers we could only watch on our TV screens. Just how many of us, I wonder, raced home after school afraid we might miss the opening five or ten of those ninety precious minutes that assured us we belonged to the group “teenagers,” “the rock ‘n’roll generation?” Having left the comfort of an elementary school with a remarkably stable population–other working-class kids I had known since kindergarten, I counted on the vicarious friendship of those Italian kids in Philadelphia to help me negotiate new, real-life friendships in my larger, area-wide junior high. One commonality we could draw on in making friends was a shared attitude toward Bandstand. My friends were the kids who loved it, kids who were not ashamed to dance in their living rooms, even if it meant swinging around a chair or a door jamb. Some of those friends are still present in my life and indulging these memories.
 Arlene Sullivan and Kenny Rossi, all grown up The technology we relied on in building our social network was, of course, more primitive. TV was, after all, a one-way form of communication. We had to send our votes in by mail to help Kenny and Arlene or Justine and Bob win the periodic dance contests. I learned the watched-pot lesson by anticipating too eagerly the arrival of my Bandstand yearbook in the mailbox at the end of our driveway. It finally came on the one day I forgot to think about it. When my sister handed down her old manual typewriter, one of the first uses I put it to was creating a list of all the Bandstand regulars whose names I knew, in separate boy and girl columns. I checked the list with friends to see whose names I had omitted. No one found my familiarity with Bandstand regulars obsessive. I wrote fan letters to the dancers, and, to my amazement, they wrote back. Barbara Levick told me that the boy she danced with most often, Walt Grzelak, was indeed her boyfriend, and Carmen Jimenez revealed that she was only 13, still a year too young to appear on the show legitimately. One day those documents of my acceptance into a virtual community will turn up in a cluttered closet.
While Bandstand introduced us to the variety of the day’s popular music, Dick Clark did tend to promote the slick pop stuff with special enthusiasm. Today, if I play my old 45s of the Philadelphia sound–Frankie Avalon’s “Venus,” Fabian’s “Turn Me Loose”–I can understand why my dad kept asking if they were singing into a tin can. Yet I also see how deeply Dick Clark understood teenage longings. Like so many other girls, I fell for those guys and heard them singing to only me. Later I would find both more sophistication and aesthetic satisfaction in the music of Levon Helm, for example, who died just a day after Dick Clark.
American Bandstand expanded the boundaries of our virtual community without ever announcing that it was doing so. One regular, Myrna Horowitz, danced with a limp, showing us that physical perfection was not a requirement for inclusion. To the many polio survivors in my age group, her presence was a vital affirmation of their teenage normality. I’ve read some commentary by Bandstand watchers of more “bourgeois” backgrounds that the working-class, urban Italian kids on the show offered them their first chance to feel fond and familiar with a dangerous “other.” The show was, for many of us rural Midwesterners, a first experience of racial integration. It featured Little Richard and Chuck Berry on the same terms as white performers, ignoring the public furor about white kids listening to “race music.” Gradually we saw black teenagers dancing across our TV screens–in token numbers, yes, but still it seemed bold. Without Bandstand‘s success, would our younger siblings and cousins have had Soul Train?
So ease up, baby boomers. Let the lonely, longing youth find community on Facebook. Imagine how much closer we could have felt to our favorite dancers and our fellow Bandstand fans if we’d had the capacity to post and like and tweet.
P.S. I got to thinking later that only one of the names of Bandstand regulars I mentioned is Italian. Barbara Levick said in her letter that she was Italian, whether one-half or three-fourths I don’t remember. Here are some other Bandstand names I recall and still pronounce with pleasure: Scaldiferri, Giordano, MonteCarlo, Molittieri, Gaeda, Russo, Beltrante, Carelli . . . In a town of Jensens and Knudsens and Bjerkes and Kvenvolds, these vowel-rich names were so alluring.
The last week in January brought the death of a relative who has loomed large in my consciousness of family despite his diminishing physical presence in my life through the decades. My outlaw cousin, whom I will not name here out of concern for his children and grandchildren, died a natural death after a long life of theft, fraud, and trickery. I don’t know whether he made a deathbed conversion, but by his continuing offenses, he seemed to prove himself beyond the reach of rehabilitation. He had done time in prison, where he allegedly made new contacts and refined his skills in trafficking stolen car parts. As recently as two years ago, at age 80, he was arrested for disorderly conduct, and he was the object of recent calls to the police. Booking and charging and trying him had become too costly, and both the police and the county sheriff had switched to pre-emption: watching him, anticipating his crimes, persuading him to return stolen objects. In fact, the community was on alert. When he brought an elderly, senile relative to the bank to withdraw money from his account, the teller phoned another cousin to let her know he was up to something. The warning came too late: he had already secured the deed to the elderly relative’s house and emptied it of any valuables.
I could never document all his misbehavior, which began in childhood, and I don’t mean to try. I am left curious about how a person comes to be this way, and how his habits and his reputation affect the lives of those close to him. Part of the puzzle is that he never alienated himself from family (though some kept a salutary distance), but stayed present in its circle, showing up faithfully at family occasions. The cynic in me can say that family occasions are prime sites for purses to go unattended, and that familiarity and trust make the con easier to accomplish. Yet I don’t think that’s the whole story. I want to think the attachment mattered to him in some deeper way.
My cousin was the classic bad seed and the classic unwanted child–or so the family story goes. He was born to my young, unmarried aunt who was expected to leave him at the distant welfare home to be adopted. She didn’t. Some say that she brought him home as a bargaining chip, hoping that his father would marry her and that her parents would accept this marriage to someone they thought a good-for-nothing hellion. Later she married someone else and had three more sons, all upstanding citizens. When my cousin became too unruly for that household, he was sent to my grandparents, and when he misbehaved too badly there, he was sent home to his mother again. Sometimes he ended up at the state reform school. He flaunted his badness. It became his identity in the family and his reputation locally. We all figured out how to cope with our connection to him–an obvious one for my immediate family because we shared a last name.
I have puzzled over my cousin’s life and tried to guess at its motives and emotions. Getting to know the humanity of the female inmates I teach in my writing class at Shakopee prison has only complicated the puzzle. I see them striving to restore their better selves and to repair their damaged relationships. My cousin could be a doting grandfather, yet he continued to prey on others. The closest I’ve ever come to “understanding” him was finding a model for him in the outlaw Grettir, the anti-hero of the old Icelandic saga, Grettir’s Saga. Grettir was the archetypal utlagi, an outlaw, forced to live in exile, in isolation outside the bounds of society, because of his unrepentant, destructive acts. Yet the portrayal of Grettir shows some human nuances that save him from being a total monster, a stereotype.
When people in my circle die, I find myself only occasionally inhabited by their presence, but more often accompanied by a consciousness of spirit. This has happened even with my outlaw cousin. The other morning, while walking my dog through the commercial area of my neighborhood, I passed a Cintas truck parked in front of the hardware store. The driver was gone, but he had left a side panel door wide open. Inside was a large supply of floor mats, rolled and stacked–the absorbent, rubber-bottomed mats used inside store entrances in the winter time. What would stop me from reaching in and helping myself? I thought. I felt a quick impulse to grab one, and even a warm desire to see one inside my front door, where it could soak up snow and thaw from boots and paws and collect the kernels of sand and road salt that get tracked across my wood floors. Yes, I thought, I would make good use of it. I would like it.
I resisted the impulse and kept walking, but I continued to play out the theft in my mind. Would it be awkward to carry that roll under my arm? How heavy might it be? Would anyone who saw me think it odd and intervene? I had even noted that the truck was parked facing the other direction, so when the driver got in and took off, he wouldn’t pass me and my dog hurrying along the sidewalk with the stolen booty.
Such impulses and imaginings are not a normal part of my day, but I suspect they governed my cousin’s every moment. I began to think that his spirit had nudged me into feeling some empathy with him rather than holding him in constant judgment. What would it be like to feel the impulse so strongly you couldn’t resist it? Did he rationalize his actions or just grab and run? Did he feel remorse later or just laugh in that taunting way that I remember from childhood?
How far under the surface does this impulse lie in the rest of us? Think of all it takes–training, self-restraint, communal mores and taboos, compassion for and from others–to keep it from conquering our good intentions.
Today is the centenary of my dad’s birth. Gordon Leslie Register was born on January 16, 1912, and died on November 30, 2004, six weeks short of 93. I could go many directions from here, but ultimately my subject will be the maintenance of family ties.
For too long already I have been doing research for a book about a rather obscure historical event in my home landscape: the drainage of an 18,000-acre wetland between Albert Lea and Austin, Minnesota, by non-resident land speculators. I’ve been curious about my ancestors’ experience of the affected landscape, their attitudes toward the drainage, and its impact on their lives. Of course I also want to trace whether they influenced my orientation to the natural environment and to socioeconomic issues. I know that my dad’s maternal grandfather, E.H. Ostrander, was a vocal opponent of the drainage project. Dad’s paternal grandparents, John and Amanda Register, were more directly affected by it: Turtle Creek, the natural creek that was reamed out and turned into Judicial Ditch Number One to empty all that surface water into the Cedar River, ran through their farm.
Ancestry.com carries incomplete collections of a couple of newspapers from the area: The Freeborn County Standard and the Austin Daily Herald. Earlier I had searched the word “dredge” on the Ancestry site to find mentions of the drainage project, and I have skimmed reels and reels of microfilm of the Standard at the Minnesota Historical Society. Last week I decided to search the name of the township where the Registers farmed in Ancestry’s copies of the Herald. These small town newspapers carried news from each of the rural townships, and since the Registers lived nearer to Austin than to their county seat, Albert Lea, I figured some of their news might get reported there. My keyword search for “Moscow” yielded a good many items, even excluding the reports from the 1905 revolution in that other Moscow.
I learned that my grandfather, “Little Leslie Register,” suffered a sore throat in May of 1898, when he was nine, and that the family lost four head of cattle to a lightning strike in August of 1911. My dad took pride in being the third generation of the family born on the farm that his great-grandparents, Robert and Mary Speer, had settled in 1855. Now I wonder if he was indeed born there. For the birth of her first child, my aunt Vivian, in November 1910, my grandma, I learned, had moved back home with her parents in Alden township to spend her lying-in time. Did she do that for Gordy’s birth, too? As I finished my search through the 1911 Herald last Friday and signed out of the Ancestry site, I thought I would soon know. But the next morning I discovered that Ancestry’s collection stops in 1911 and resumes in 1951. I’ll soon be skimming microfilmed copies at MHS. I imagine the Ostranders would have had a harder time accommodating my grandma the second time around, since her mother was also about to give birth–to her eleventh child, a frail boy who died months later. We’ll soon see.
My most striking find in this collection of township “gossip” was the effort the Registers put into maintaining their family relationships. As John and Amanda’s children married and moved to other townships and counties, the frequent visiting began. The married children came home to visit their parents; the parents and family went to visit the married children. The children still at home in Moscow spent days and weeks with their married siblings. The Minnesota Registers visited Registers in Kansas, North Dakota, and Iowa, and Speers in Iowa and Wisconsin, and received their visits in turn. They probably had a local telephone by 1907, when the lines were strung to Moscow, but long distance came later. We can be smug about our instantaneous online connections–oh, wow, Skype!–but the Moscow Registers could step onto a train at several times of the day and travel in any direction. Judging from the frequency with which they did so, access to family mattered a great deal.
My dad’s experience as the fourth generation to live on a single farm (until his parents lost it in the recession of the 1920s) obscures the fact that his family was more mobile than stationary. Robert and Mary Speer were part of a gradual westward migration typical of European American families. They left his parents in Wisconsin to find land in Minnesota. His parents had left an older generation in Michigan after a migration from upstate New York. The New York Speers had come from New Jersey, where a boatload of Dutch immigrants had arrived in the seventeenth century. Some of our Dutch ancestors were descendants of exiled English Puritans. We have long been on the move. Even so, the impulse to connect with family took my parents and sisters and me back to our grandparents’ homes every Sunday.
All that impressive visiting in the Herald obscures another truth about the family: its internal rifts. Those become apparent only when I stop to notice who is missing from the record. There is no reported visiting to or from Ottertail County, where John’s brother Leroy ended up. George Speer, Amanda’s brother, disappeared from the U.S. Census, and, I thought, from the earth–until he turned up visiting “friends” in Moscow months after his father’s death, apparently when the will was settled. We visited elderly Great Aunt Hattie and her “nervous” brother Bert on a farm near Austin, and we drove Great Aunt Isabelle from Austin to Albert Lea for family occasions. Yet there were other Austin relatives I never got to meet–something to do with the loss of the farm, I guessed. I have cousins from Arizona I am barely beginning to know, because their dad and mine–brothers–were estranged for 27 years. Knowing that family legacy of orneriness, I understand why John and Amanda held on so tightly–or might it have been Amanda’s doing?
I would like to give the last word about family ties and legacies to my daughter, who posted this lovely entry on her Facebook page just before Thanksgiving:
With the holiday just around the corner, I find myself thinking a lot about family, like who I may see next week for dinner, ones who will be out of town, and those who are no longer around. I am so thankful to be part of such a loving family. Today, I recall my grandma’s beautiful, clear blue, caring eyes and how active and involved my grandpa was throughout his entire life. The two of them have passed down so many great traits to their children. My mom found her own way to give back through her church, and more recently, through volunteering her literary skills at a correctional facility. I ♥ family.
In nearly all the classes I teach at the Loft Literary Center, I declare the classroom sacred writing space from 10 minutes before the official start time to 10 minutes after. Besides allowing people to straggle in from rush hour gridlock and the hunt for parking, it affirms the mission that brings us together and guarantees that everyone present will have had some time to write during the week. Each class session also includes a take-home writing assignment.
Some students use the 20 minutes of writing time to catch up with the week’s reading assignment. Loft students lead busy lives, I know. Without the pressure of grades and degrees, only a fraction of the class turns in the writing assignments each week. So I chuckled a bit when I read the evaluations for my recently completed Personal Essay class and learned that one student would have liked more writing exercises, including some to take home.
I do have a collection of writing exercises that I’ve used over the years, and I’m happy to publish some of them here from time to time. Most are intended for writers of memoir and essay. If I have evidence that they’re actually being seen and used, I might create a separate page and post a couple each week. Here, for starters, are five:
- Finish this sentence and continue writing: “It all started when . . .”
- List or draw everything you remember along your route from home to school. Choose one item and write what it meant to you then and what it means to you now.
- Pull a sentence out of a piece you have written and rewrite the sentence five different ways. Choose the version you like best and use it as the opening sentence for new writing.
- With the project you are working on in mind, think of something relevant to it that begins with the letter “a” and write about it. Work your way through the alphabet, a letter-a-day.
- Junichiro Tanizaki writes in his essay “In Praise of Shadows” that “elegance is frigid” and that tarnished objects are more beautiful than polished ones. This runs against the grain of Western aesthetics. Does manure smell pleasant if it reminds you of childhood? Are rough textures ever soothing? Can a foul mood be enlightening? How might you write against the grain? Where in your own experience have you found the tarnished beautiful?
A core mission of the Loft Literary Center, where I teach, is to foster a writing community. A tangible sign of this mission at work is the independent writing groups that students form after a course is finished. Some last for years; others dissipate due to busy lives, mismatched skills, or issues with group dynamics that arise when there is no teacher to maintain balance.
In recent weeks, two students have come to me with concerns about faltering writing groups. In both cases, the problem was one endemic to groups engaging in mutual critique* of personal non-fiction, such as memoir and personal essay. I fight it weekly in the classroom. It is the tendency of commentary on writing to drift into discussion of the personal experience the writing is meant to convey. Sometimes the writer feels safer talking about difficult experiences, especially, than exposing them on the page. In this case, discussion that ought to be about craft gives way to bad amateur therapy. Sometimes a reader feels compelled to offer condolences rather than critique, especially if the writing seems raw and the writer, fragile. Sometimes readers pass judgment on experiences that trouble them or urge the writer to tone down revelations that upset their image of the writer-as-person.
The solution is to set clear boundaries: Discussion should focus on the effectiveness of the writing about personal experience and not stray into the living of it. Given that memoir can range over a lifetime, it’s important to remember that the narrator on the page is not exactly equivalent to the writer asking for comments or to the person the group has come to know. Yes, members of writing groups can become friends or even adversaries, but when they have a piece of writing in front of them, they are writers and readers first and need to focus on the literary quality of what’s on the page. It is not rude to suggest that a more precise word choice or simpler syntax would improve a piece about the tragic death of a loved one. It is rude to presume that the writer would rather have sympathy or advice about how to handle grief than honest comments on her/his writing.
Here is a set of rules I have developed for use in writing groups:
- Set up a rotation schedule that assures fairness and balance and also functions as a deadline.
- When you hand out work, include a list of questions or problems you have been contending with and would like your peers to help resolve.
- Offer written as well as spoken commentary on your peers’ work.
- Set up a schedule to trade off responsibility for facilitation. One person might prepare to make the opening comments on a piece, while another might watch the clock and make sure time is allotted equally. One of them, or another, might call the discussion back into focus if it strays from the work at hand.
- If you can’t help but be absent, read the work distributed and send your comments in promptly.
- Draw clear boundaries between useful commentary and distracting or discouraging commentary. For example, commentary should support the author’s own intention and not ask for material that simply satisfies the reader’s curiosity or tastes. Commentary should aid the development of craft and not take issue with content or views expressed. Commentary should focus on the work at hand and not divert attention to the commenter’s personal stories, viewpoints, or writing struggles—unless they are truly relevant and helpful.
- Take responsibility for keeping the discussion balanced by pausing between comments to allow others to make theirs.
- Use discussion time efficiently by nodding or saying “me, too” rather than repeating comments that others have already made.
- Remember that even if the work at hand is tragic, disturbing, controversial, or distasteful, you show the greatest respect for one another’s efforts by offering comments that help improve the quality of the writing.
*I refuse to use “workshop” as a verb or “workshopping” as its gerund noun. My choices are either “mutual commentary” or “mutual critique” and “comment” or “offer critique.” “Critique” as a verb is awkward, and “criticize” has a connotation of finding fault. Also, I never offer “feedback” on written work. I don’t believe any work-in-progress deserves that awful screechy noise produced by malfunctioning microphones.
Education in the humanities is under siege again . . . or still. In a period of joblessness, training people in the barely lucrative fields of art, music, literature, language, social and cultural history may seem like an indulgence, as Florida’s governor Rick Scott recently proclaimed and as Mitt Romney apparently believes, having said he might eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. It wasn’t always so. During the Cold War, the U.S. government promoted humanities education and cultural exchanges to help secure Western democracy against incursions of Soviet-style communism. My graduate education in Scandinavian languages and literatures at the University of Chicago was financed by a National Defense Foreign Language Fellowship, instituted by Congress to foster the study of “critical” languages and cultures. I never faced off with a Soviet agent, but I did become fluent in Swedish and pretty well-versed in Scandinavian literature, culture, and history. I published a couple of books on Swedish women writers and taught for seven years in a one-year renewable (non-tenure track) position, but beyond that found little practical–i.e. remunerative–use for my degrees. Nevertheless, I will never regret learning to see a “language area” whole–to see how a certain population’s artistic and spiritual expression relate to its material situation, its history, its landscape, and how all these factors shape the language with which it perceives and describes everything. My education in Scandinavian studies has given me a template for understanding other cultures, other places, other times.
I believe that our current political polarization and the uncivil behavior it breeds betray an inability to think contextually. The humanities teach us to see relationships among, for example, material circumstances and values and behavior. We come to understand why other people are not always like us and to regard them on their own terms, instead of judging them against ours. Rather than dismiss them as alien or “real differ’nt,” as we might say in Minnesota, we come to appreciate their art and music and literature as a turning of the kaleidoscope, a shifting of vision that helps us see splendor we would otherwise miss.
My formal education in the humanities–designated as such–began in my junior year of high school in Albert Lea, Minnesota. A two-year interdisciplinary program, Hum I and Hum II, offered a new vision of our national heritage and taught us to apply that broader vision to the rest of the world. Wallace Kennedy taught us American literature, drama, and art. Nicholas Cords taught us U.S. history and American music. In our senior year Orville Gilmore introduced us to “Western civilization”–literature, philosophy, art, and architecture beginning with Ancient Greece. An unusual number of us Hum graduates ended up working in the arts and humanities, and the program itself became a model for humanities in secondary education across the country. Yes, Albert Lea, Minnesota, a blue-collar town in the Midwestern cornbelt, was a humanities hotbed.
While I was composing this blog, sad news arrived of the death the day before Thanksgiving of one of my favorite high school classmates, Bill Yost, whose life itself is an argument for humanities education. Bill, like me, had a dad employed at Wilson’s meatpacking plant. His mom, like mine, worked to supplement the family income, despite the reigning “feminine mystique.” Mine was a salesclerk; his operated a beauty salon in the family home. Our ancestors had farmed in the same township and fared poorly in the Depression. We knew each other from the First Lutheran church nursery on, but didn’t talk all that much, being of different genders. It was only in our middle age that Bill and I turned our pleasant co-existence into friendship, when we discovered how appreciative we both were of our working-class upbringings and our public education.
Bill didn’t take the humanities class. I’m not sure why, but seem to remember him telling me that he didn’t know he was capable of it. But he did enroll in a summer school English class taught by Wally Kennedy. That class transformed his life; I’m certain he told me that. It awakened and validated his artistic creativity and geared him up for a lifelong vocation in the humanities. For thirty years, Bill Yost served as the Cultural Arts Director of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He brought plays and concerts and dance performances to the Eisenhower Hall Theater, set up art exhibits, and taught elective classes in the humanities and fine arts to our nation’s budding military officers. I like to think that Bill enlarged the context in which they view both allies and the people identified in wartime as the enemy.
As an arts administrator in a nationally visible post, working in proximity to New York City, Bill had access to high-art circles, but kept his humility. Among wealthy people with privileged private school educations, he reminded himself that he went to “the Albert Lea School on the park in midtown.” When Wegener’s disease caused neuropathy in his legs, he walked with a cane or two from an assortment he bought at yard sales and painted in “a decorative and sometimes alarming fashion.” He used his canes on visits to the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, then joked that he had shown his work there.
Even as illness sapped his strength and “the Reaper nipped at [his] heels,” Bill kept living his vocation. He painted every day, and sculpted as well. His mixed media Doppelgänger portraits are my favorites, especially “Verna Under the Dryer” and “Saturday Night Special,” which hark back to his mom’s work. Three weeks before his death, Bill opened a solo exhibit of his art called “Face to Face: Assemblages” in the campus gallery at SUNY Orange/ Newburgh. It is scheduled to remain up through December 16.
In addition to his daily commitment to painting, Bill read one new poem a day, a habit he picked up from comedian Red Skelton. There was a story behind that, one that he would rather tell me in person, he said–a story I will now have to do without. His excitement about poetry was palpable, even via email. He wrote me to share the joy the day that Philip Levine, “one of ours,” was named Poet Laureate, and he was moved by a reading he arranged earlier this year for W.S. Merwin in an intimate conference room at the Storm King Art Center, where he volunteered as a docent and walked almost daily. Another source of excitement was his volunteer advisory work on the restoration of the Ritz Theater in Newburgh, NY.
Aside from his own artistic production, his knowledge of the humanities, his acquaintance with many accomplished artists, his commitment to making the arts accessible in his local community, his enthusiasm for his students’ creative endeavors, the most important quality that his humanities education instilled in Bill Yost is good will. I never knew him to disparage anyone or turn his quick and quirky wit into sarcasm. He saw people and their creative expression in a broad context, on their own terms, and sought to understand them. That, in the end, is what matters most about a humanities education.
(Read the New York Times obituary. A celebration of Bill’s life will be held on Saturday, December 10, at 1:00 p.m. at the Class of 1929 Art Gallery in the Eisenhower Hall Theatre at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.)
In his introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay, the text for my fall Loft course, Phillip Lopate quotes the early eighteenth century British essayist Joseph Addison: “I live in the World rather as a Spectator of Mankind than as one of the species.” In fact, Addison and his co-editor, Richard Steele, chose to name one of their periodicals The Spectator. The other was The Tatler. I am guessing that many writers, both those inclined toward essay and those who create fiction out of their observations of “real” life, could comfortably clothe themselves in Addison’s self-definition. The term “Tatler” fits us, too, because we make tall or true tales of what we observe.
We are the people who drift around in social gatherings, tuning in to conversations in progress but seldom initiating our own. Eavesdropping on others’ conversations yields a wider comprehension of human life than we can attain through our own narrow lines of inquiry. Mine is limited by my knowledge, my imagination, and my Scandinavian American sense of propriety. As an oral historian, too, I look forward to the moment when the interviewee launches into a story that opens the memory wide and loosens the tongue, and I can set aside my prepared questions and relish the unexpected.
We spectators tend to get pegged as either shy or aloof. People who perceive us as shy and want to invite us into conversation begin with the kind but dreaded question, “What are you writing now?” We dread it because material not yet fully articulated in writing is even harder to express in speech–especially with pleasant spontaneity. We may have an answer at the ready that sounds so pat it discourages further conversation. If we fumble to describe our work in the moment, we entangle ourselves in a monologue of arcane information and half-baked ideas that drives the listener off to fetch another drink. We could, of course, forestall the question by asking one ourselves, but hmmm, which question? The proper, expected how are you? A quirky, revealing one? The one we are truly curious to have answered? No, we’d rather watch and listen. A cloak of invisibility would be nice.
Our writing vocation requires us to spend most of our working hours in solitude. We string words together, rearrange them, delete some and replace them with others. We become, at times, too mired in language to speak it fluently, or too rapt in fertile silence to break it easily. This habit of solitude has led me to identify with other solitary creatures. My totem, if I had one, would be the white egret standing alone at the edge of a wetland, all senses alert to fish. The sight of an egret turns a bland day euphoric. One gorgeous day this past August, I left the usual freeway route and took a road that crosses a floodplain of the Minnesota River. Standing in a wetland alongside were scores of white egrets, each at its own post, focused on its own fishing task. The scene reminded me of Ragdale, a writers’ and artists’ retreat in Lake Forest, Illinois, where residents wander the adjacent prairie alone, sit in the garden alone and daydream, or pass each other with a quick meeting of the eyes, mouths resolutely shut. At dinner at the end of the day, we are happy and ready for conversation. Awkward conversation, sometimes, but no matter. We know most of us would rather spectate, then go back to our desks and tattle.
The weather forecasters say it will hit 85 on this golden-hued October day in Minneapolis, yet I see the evidence of a long winter ahead. I have only to look out my bathroom window. The eave trough along my porch roof is lined with walnuts. The planter box on the deck, with impatiens still in bloom, is heaped with walnuts. Do the squirrels know what’s coming, or are they as deluded as we humans are in the face of global warming?
 
The transporter of all these walnuts is him/herself a sign of change–Darwinian adaptation, maybe? It is smaller than our typical gray squirrels, and its tail is less bushy. Its fur is tinged with red, but it’s not a true red squirrel either. Might it be a hybrid? Do gray squirrels and red squirrels crossbreed? In my 27 years in this neighborhood, I’ve noted generation after generation of albino squirrels–usually just one in the population at a time. Maybe this busy little squirrel is just another creature of recessive genes. I’m struck, too, by how much faster it moves than the “normal” squirrels along the dwindling squirrel highways in my block’s interior–dwindling due to Dutch elm disease, oak wilt, and, soon, the ash borer. For now, the tall, fully-leaved ash in my backyard is a bright yellow-green.
Up the street, another house is being torn down–another former lake cottage. Back in the early twentieth century, when this neighborhood between lakes was still fields and wetlands, city residents built cottages here for weekend and summer use. One pair of cottages is now on the National Register of Historic Places, but the rest are being bulldozed or enclosed inside larger floor-plans. It’s eerie to see the house where Myra lived until recently roofless and gutted, its walls looking as fragile as cardboard. Soon we neighbors will adjust to the commotion we endured last winter on the lot next door to Myra’s: trucks roaring by, workers with visible breath hurrying inside the Tyvek-wrapped skeleton of the new structure, construction debris mounting up in dumpsters. I will never quite get used to this change: cottages gone or grown huge, distinctive bungalows disappearing inside featureless foursquares. What will become of my thoroughly lived-in Dutch colonial when I’m gone?
Meanwhile, change is hitting the old lumber baron district along St. Paul’s Summit Avenue, too. Yesterday, as I drove the scenic route home from the Minnesota History Center to avoid rush hour on the freeways, I noticed one “for sale” sign after another, and the thickest stretch ran atop Cathedral Hill, where the oldest and largest mansions sit. I had assumed, wrongly, I guess, that the people who live in those houses count in the one per cent that is still accumulating wealth in the recession. Yet maybe these high livers are merely overextended—stuck with underwater mortgages and heavy credit card debt. Is our economy falling to the level at which stately old mansions get subdivided once again into substandard housing? But then how are we to understand the replacement or encasement of cozy-sized cottages? Is there any connection to be drawn with the fervid stockpiling of walnuts?
P.S. When I let my dog out into the backyard this morning (October 11), I noticed that all the walnuts had been removed from the planter box. I hadn’t seen it happen, so I can’t say whether the squirrel transported them to a safer location or some other creature stole them. Now I’d like whoever it was to come back and clear out the eave trough.
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