BOOK REVIEW

"We're all of us afraid of many things, but if you make yourself smaller or let your fear confine you, then you really aren't your own person at all -- are you?" (Circling the Sun, p. 165) ... and this:

"The trick is learning to take things as they come and fully, too, with no resistance or fear, not trying to grip then too tightly or make them bend." (p. 336)

Just now, tonight, I finished Circling the Sun and said to myself "what a beautiful book." ... and even more such a beautiful story.

It happens to be biographical, too. A sort-of fictionalized version of the memoir of Beryl Markham, one of the 20th Century's most remarkable women, one who becomes a record-setting aviatrix. But that's not really what the book's about. It puts a frame on it, but "Circling" is a seriously hard-to-put-down read about a woman whose life begins in Kenya, but becomes all else, all things that matter, as well.

Paula McLain is a wonderful writer. And as I fully expected, and loved to do, I learned a lot about my own writing craft by making my way slowly through her beautiful descriptives of some of the most insightful wisdom surrounding human -- our -- behavior, attitudes, and powerful powerlessness.

Read it. Five stars. No doubt.

'The enemies of recovery are legion'

An excerpt from my memoir, pages 182 and 183

 The sun is setting now, casting a red celestial curtain across the forested horizon before me. Life moves on. Creation’s counsel is dramatic but subtle. Silence alone inspires. And again I ask, where does this “normal” lead?

My story shows the way– through just as many paths as there are people with chemical dependency problems. All paths, however, will run parallel. Some will finally meld into one– “The Path,” the one which follows the basic principles of recovery.

Take care, I must, for the path is not through some kind of monastic solipsism. Isolation is the bane of recovery, dangerous turf for many. The way is through the comradery of one alcoholic or drug addict with another– connections that work but are hard to explain, but I try. My experience, and that of the millions throughout the world who have found the miracle of recovery, supports that belief, that process. First, beware– for the enemies of recovery are legion:

ENABLERS: “Keep your friends close,” goes a popular saying, “and your enemies even closer.” Wise advice, but distorted when it comes to “enablers.” They are people, usually relatives or close friends, who “enable” alcohol or other drug abuse to continue unchallenged. They do so unwittingly, just thinking of themselves as friends. So the friends-and-enemies formula reverses. Enabling friends can become enemies by endorsing victimology and thus prolong dysfunctional behavior, especially chemical dependency.

PEER PRESSURE: Friends should not let friends get hooked, but they do. And the abuser is driven by a need to be accepted, to fit in, to be one of the group. A deadly symbiosis sets in.

CULTURE: Contemporary music, media, and mores can all effectively endorse addictive behavior. The classic motion picture Casablanca, forever a favorite of mine, always comes to mind when I think about this.

The suave “Rick,” Humphrey Bogart’s award-winning character, is never without a cigarette... or a drink. As time goes by, the lithe and lovely Ingrid Bergman as Ilsa comes on the scene and is ever around (until her plane comes in, anyway)... enabling. The message I got was that smoking and drinking were “cool,” so if I wanted to be too, I should do both. I did.

The need to be accepted, and with a ticket to the party, eerily but accurately echoes something my mother told me over and over: “Never go along with the crowd just to make others think highly of you or without thinking it through.” I had forgotten that at the worst possible time in my life.

For these and other reasons, my experience– and those of many others– I believe must be heard. Otherwise, those stories are like blades of grass in a great field, or barely perceptible ripples on the face of an endless sea. They must be told before the constant winds carry them away. We who’ve walked the walk share our experiences, our strengths, our failings, and our hopes for the future with those who will be helped by them... and those who want to be.

 

(An excerpt from WAR BABY, a memoir, pages 182 and 183. See reviews and buy the book on Amazon here: http://goo.gl/OrFRUc )

 

The wonder of a child's imagination

 A girl of about three visited Historic Polegreen Church with her mother recently for a community event -- “Family Fun Day.”

Mom seemed delighted that her child was there to learn the site’s history (See our note below for a description). But she may not have expected just how much that was so.

One of the Girl Scouts who were assisting at the event gave the child a sort-of wand with colorful ribbons billowing from the end. The girl used it to imagine … and she entered the space of the ancient church’s recreated interior.

The child’s imagination and her colorful wand transformed her into a wide-eyed princess walking about her “castle;” for that is what she told her mother when she asked.

It was a moment as evocative as the history of the structure itself . Was the child’s imagination influenced by the spiritual feel of the place?

Perhaps. But we shall never know … until we try it ourselves.

***

            Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, Historic Polegreen Church preserves and interprets the beginnings of religious liberties in Virginia Colony in the mid 1700s.

It is located in the metro Richmond, Va. Region in Hanover County. Here’s a link  to a Google map:  https://goo.gl/maps/osYiR

The mission of the Historic Polegreen Church Foundation is to commemorate the struggle for civil and religious freedom in Colonial Virginia by the Rev. Samuel Davies and the “Hanover Dissenters”. Learn more on our Facebook page -- @Polegreen, or Web site – www.historicpolegreen.org, or Twitter @Polegreen1747.

Troglodytes and angels

In my high school years, I and some of my friends were interested in broadcasting as a career. Those were the days when rock-and-roll ruled – Elvis topped the charts, Rickie Nelson wowed the girls, the Everly Brothers pioneered the space between rhythm-and-blues and classic country-and-western.

And then there was the simply unclassifiable – stuff that particularly appealed to the  male teenaged mind. Pieces like a little ditty by one “Napoleon XIV”. Seems his lost love drove him over the edge…so he sang – or chanted, really – to a relentless ba-doom, ba-doom, ba-doom beat…

They're coming to take me away, ha-haaa.
They're coming to take me away, ho ho…
To the funny farm, where life is beautiful all the time….

Ba-doom…ba-doom…ba-doom…

This hit by Jerry Samuels in 1966 from Warner Brothers Records made it all the way to the top ten for several weeks.

Radio was what several of us high-school mates wanted to do …specifically spinning the “top-ten” of the day.

Trouble was, life caught up with us. Each of us went off to college and the military, and ended up someplace else.

Except… one of us actually got a real job in radio. And he did it while a student at a local university. But it was not exactly like life with the Troglodytes. It was with a small-town Christian station.

And this was not some nice normal mainstream Christian station. It was a strident fire-and-brimstone, rural evangelical, steroid-stoked, holy-roller station.

And my friend’s first job was as the early-morning guy, the one who “ran the board,” as they say. His was the soul that stood between the woebegone world with its troglodytes, loons and blasphemers, and the pristine well-ironed and starched psyches of right-wing Christianity… and Pat Robertson was probably just barely out of law school then.

Six o’clock on Sunday mornings marked the start of D-Day every week for my friend. The station went on the air while mom and pop got their broods ready to go and once more be blessed, prayed-for, preached-at and who-knew what all else.

Meanwhile my man was ready at the switchboard. The local news and weather had been done. Next up was a stream of uplifting music. Then the switching started. All my friend had to do was a back-and-forth between the breaks in the music and the words of the pastor. The breaks had to be clean and without a second’s dead-time. Not one second.

The day came, though, when my friend came to work hung-over. He was a college student after all, and he was in a fraternity, too. And those kinds of Sundays happened, they did.

But his switching and clicking of buttons were flawless … almost, for he soon missed a fast break into the local pastor’s pitch for the day.

One … two … three … the seconds clicked off. The station went silent, a quiescence only broken by my friend’s frantic cry when he saw the mistake he had made.

“HOLY SH*T!” he said … and he realized his mike was live.

I expect you can imagine what happened next. He was out of there like a Saturn Five rocket had been hitched to his hind parts.

In our sometimes crazy youths, most of us bounce back quickly. My friend lost that job but that by no means was the end of the story.

He went on to another radio gig, followed by a successful tenure in television and a long and fruitful career in the public relations business.

And that – as Walter Cronkite always said – is the way it was.

Ba-doom … ba-doom … ba-doom …

A trip to the Monkey House

A great  Moment of Truth for this previously unreconstructed white Southern great-grandson of a Confederate veteran came on a bright summer day at the Monkey House of the Washington Zoo.

(Clarification – that would be the National Zoological Park, as opposed to Washington’s other zoo. Noam sayin?)

I and my offspring were observing those cute little primates swinging, leaping, scrounging, making faces, and slinging dookie at each other.

Amidst the mouth-making poop-fights,  I began to see how some could say we higher primates had perhaps inherited some of our show-offy little cousins’ DNA.

All you have to do is follow a couple of dozen “Friends” on Facebook to see the grown-up version of the Monkey House in action.

Or – even worse – read every email you actually get.

For example, I got one the other day that asserted President Barack Obama had said on Meet the Press in 2008 that he was going to turn the country into an Islamic caliphate.

The record shows he said no such thing. It was pure fabrication.

And that was a rehash of the same email that made the rounds seven years earlier which I had hoped would have been laughed out of existence by now. So why has it resurfaced now? Why has a seven-year-old- lie bubbled up through the slime again now?

I believe it has a lot to do with the undeniable fact that the President is now nearing the end of his second term in office and is enjoying some rather undeniable successes.

Not all of us agree on those successes. But they have happened, and a divided Congress has even  come together to make at least one of them real – something that would not have happened if the two parties had not found compromise. Common ground.

I write as we enjoy Fourth of July celebrations all across the fruited plain. And that has sparked some introspection on my part.

In the run-up to my celebration, I have been examining the history of how the United States negotiated  the fevered times between these times:

• The period from Patrick Henry's "Liberty or Death" speech in1775, and the following year when the Declaration of Independence was proclaimed ...
• And 1787 when we finally got ourselves a Constitution.

Reading anew the history of the period between 1775 and 1787 shows how it took honest compromise and the ability to keep compromising – and find common ground -- before the founders arrived at consensus. It was agonizing, but a republic with a constitution was the result.

Since then, history unequivocally proves that compromise has been the key to American exceptionalism. Any honest survey course in American history makes that clear.

But today? Do we still  have it in us to find common ground between factions?

Or does the Monkey House suddenly look eerily familiar?