Mineral Point (Part 12)

Last night I dreamt about my father. We were on a rooftop, his bachelor pad in the reality of the dream. He was telling me about how my mom taught him medicine after she had gotten back from Tokyo. None of that corresponds to the reality of actual events. We were laying on our backs like two friends watching the clouds, the roof under construction. I asked him where he learned to repair roofs and he said wistfully that he only learned how to start to repair roofs but never how to finish them. Though it was my father in the dream none of it felt like my actual father. In the dream I wondered why he was telling me these things, talking to me like I was his buddy and not his son. It felt a little awkward. Earlier in the dream I was walking through the hallway of a derelict institution, cluttered with unused office equipment, dimly lit, and I encountered Maggie and Kitty Girl, cats I used to live with, sitting on shelf at the height of my head. I snuggled them with head and hands and Maggie spoke to me with her mind. I could understand everything she said but couldn't remember when I woke up. Nothing about that interaction seemed strange. 

Dreams about my father are typically not like the one I had last night. A week ago I had a dream where I was giving a short lecture on teaching in an outdoor shelter, night time, obviously a subconscious enactment of my job duties as of late. My dad was there in there sitting next to me, listening and watching. I wanted to know what he thought about what I had said, whatever it was, but nothing. Silence. This is a typical dream where my father appears. Mute but present. In the dream last night he spoke but it didn't seem like his voice. I wonder in the dream a week ago, what would I do if he actually spoke? What if he addressed my wondering? If approval finally came would I believe it, or would it seem like it came from another, someone I didn't recognize. 

**

My dad was born in the South-West corner of West Virginia, the Appalachian mountains. When he was a kid his family moved to Pikeville Kentucky, the Eastern part of Kentucky, still in the Appalachian mountains. Don't fact check me on this as I'm terrified of my sister finding out that I am writing about our family. Eastern Kentucky has historically been a poor and 'underserved' part of the country. Before the civil war is was known as an area to run away to, remote coal mining country where if you did something wrong on the East coast you could disappear into the hills. In the civil war Eastern Kentucky was both the north and the south, fuzzy boundaries meant that families and communities took sides depending on their affiliations. Famous family feuds such as the Hatfields and McCoys came about because of the civil war, where after the war was over the families on opposing sides kept fighting each other, reliving the trauma of the war through later generations. In WWII, when the G.I. Bill benefitted most of the United States as young men went off to fight and then came home to go to college, in Eastern Kentucky the coal mining industry and its importance to the war effort dictated that those young men say at their jobs mining coal, and thus, not a lot folks had a tradition of going to college. In contemporary times Eastern Kentucky, like a lot of rural poor places in the States was devastated by the opioid epidemic. It's a part of the US where poverty has been entrenched for some time, Caudill's Night Comes to the Cumberlands a somewhat famous account of Eastern Kentucky's history for those interested in the larger picture. That is not to say that my father and his brother were poor, or rich for that matter. My grandmother worked for the coal companies doing administrative work. My great aunt, my grandmother's sister, owned a motel where my dad lived as kid. His father left the family when he was a teenager. Again, don't quote me on these things. This is history as I remember being told. 

My dad went to college at Berea. Berea is a special kind of Liberal Arts college, small, old (founded in 1855) and the first to racially segregate in the entire country and one of the first to admit men and women during the 19th Century. Tuition at Berea was and still is free. Every student, however, has to work and there is a long tradition of arts and crafts in the town such as weaving, wood working, and helping run the school. It's a special place, its abolitionist and progressive roots, and for my dad it was part of a program where talented kids without the means to go to college could go to college. He studied journalism and worked at the paper. After college he joined the Peace Corps and was sent to the Congo where he lived and left before his term, which I believe was due to political issues. He moved to Wisconsin with my mom in the very late 60's, lived in a few different small towns before settling in Mineral Point. In the early 80's they moved to Madison and a year or two later divorced. My Dad went back to Mineral Point and my Mom stayed in Madison. I was around the age of 4 when all that happened and don't really have any significant memories of them together. Once my mom told me that she felt sorry for how all the trouble affected us but I tried to reassure her, that it couldn't have been any other way, versions of 'it is what it is' and that while it's possible to think about alternative paths, as a kid I didn't really question any of it, didn't feel that I was missing out on anything. I got to live in a small town and on a farm and go to good public schools. These are good things about a bi-furcated childhood.

During the summers in Mineral Point I'd typically go to swimming practice which started at noon and then go hangout with Adam and his brother Matt at their Dad's place for the afternoon. Ted, Adam and Matt's Dad, was a painter and artist but made his actual money from an inheritance and various investments and business he oversaw, most prominently a rock quarry. Ted built houses as well out the limestone rocks from the quarry, Frank Lloyd Wright-esque prairie style homes, first on top of the hill next to the quarry and then after him and Cathy divorced he built a house at the foot of the hill and then later, across the road at the top of the next hill, the hills and valleys of the Southwest Wisconsin. When we were kids Adam and I would play around the quarry, though frankly there's not much to do with rocks and heavy machinery when you're a kid. Later, in high school we'd go there to smoke the pot we'd take from his dad and my dad's stash. About five years ago back in Mineral Point the quarry had been mined all the way to the ground, the view from the top of the hill now level with the road at the base of the hill. As I became an adult, Ted became a father-like figure and a mentor of sorts, someone who I could talk with about my Dad and keep me informed about the situation (information that I could then pass on to my brother and sister) with the farm once our relationship with Susan soured. Despite their occasional annoyance with each other, Ted and my Dad were good friends and Ted looked out for us kids in a sense when my Dad got sick. 

As kids, Ted's compound at the base of the hill was a good place to spend summer days. I'd play Sega Genesis with Matt, usually a game called Star Control and play around in the creek which ran behind the house. The house itself was more of a compound connected by a sea of deck, two buildings, one with two bedrooms, a bathroom, kitchen, etc. and another building where Ted painted, did his music, and kept his computer, an advanced for that time desktop Mac that I used to play Kings Quest and Sim City on. Adam and I would run around playing with his BB gun or look at his dirt bike magazines or watch Indiana Jones on VHS. Down the road was a big warehouse that Ted owned and rented out that we'd sometimes roam around in, glorious days of no parental supervision whatsoever. We'd ride bikes up to the Five Points store to buy candy or play catch with baseball mitts on the seldomly traveled road in front of Ted's place or work for some paltry sum of money that Ted offered us in exchange for performing menial tasks like painting the deck or cleaning the fountain. In the evening my Dad would swing by on his way home from the Power Company, pick me up, and take me back to the farm. Knowing now what I know about kids and parents, I suspect we weren't as free as we felt, that someone was paying attention to where we roamed but it didn't feel like it at the time. All of it idyllic in retrospect. Of the three of us kids, my brother, sister, and I, I was probably the one that had the deepest connection to Mineral Point and post-college thought about moving back there. Were that a possibility I would have made different life choices, and mostly likely would never have ended up moving to California, working as an adjunct for so long, getting a PhD or coming here to China. 

Mineral Point (Part 11)

Getting at the motivation to write, to tell these stories about my dad and Mineral Point and life in my early 20's was prompted this summer from when I started to write about playing basketball in China, about the story I wanted to tell about the tournament I played in last Spring. In my notes I had started to write about how I got started playing sports and about swimming, which lead me to some more notes about the summer swim team in Mineral Point and to thinking about moving between Mineral Point and Madison and a bifurcated lifestyle; about being in two places at once and maintaining two identities, one for my mom and one for my dad. Like Ghostbusters, never cross the stream or else risk annihilation. Shift. Like a lot of this kind of writing though, I set out to write about one thing but the momentum of what I actually write ends up taking me in another direction. I mean to get back to basketball but am still trying to dig into this phenomenon of perception, to outline some of the contours of why I see and act in particular ways such that I can tell the story of that tournament in a way where I can maintain if not a moral high ground then at least a reasonable response to the situation. As if I can control the way that a story is received by providing enough backstory.

This habit of speech and of mind has been with me for as at least long as I have thought to reflect, that often instead of getting straight to the point, instead of saying the thing I mean to say, I provide so much backstory and contextualization that I forget why I started in the first place. Like reading a sentence so closely you forget the beginning before you reach the end. This is more for speech than writing, though it takes on a slightly different form in writing, depending on the kind. A blog and its essays forms are more speechy whereas a work email keeps the equation simpler most times, writing to colleagues or students; that our roles clarify our relationships to each other and therefore I either am asked or ask others, no explanation necessary. Or, we assume that we understand the larger context since we all work together, no explanation necessary. But when it comes to a situation where I am not sure how much the other needs to know, a situation where I feel the need to justify my actions or beliefs, which sometimes feels like all the time, I contextualize, assuming that if I say what it is I have to say directly then the other person is likely to misunderstand. This then is a kind of pretentiousness, a pre-rhetorical habit that probably comes out of past experience, one part paranoid projection and one part necessary defensive measure against a conditioned belief that speaking my mind will get me into trouble. 

To be direct then, writing about Mineral Point is about writing about death, or specifically, my own death, a thing that I have been worried about since my early 20's and possibility that what he had is what I will have. One aspect of being in China is language learning, an ability that has been empirically demonstrated to be a factor in delaying the onset of dementia. Exercise as well has shown to contribute delayed onset. Whether or not my thoughts at that time, now vestiges, were simply projections spurred by self-indulgent existential quandaries or justified response to uncertainty (I should also mention that 9/11 occurred shortly after I returned to Seattle), this idea that I have a limited amount of time was particularly salient during that period of my life. Therefore, I figured, I better pursue poetry because I need to leave something behind, that I need to get to it and get to it now. That, and when I met Poet Liz during my last year of college there was literally nothing else other than poetry than anyone had said I had talent for. I've always thought that if my dad had been cognizant that he would have been critical of my decision to pursue poetry, would have asked me to hone in on something more achievable. God, I missed him so much. I wanted to ask him what he thought I should do, should be doing, how to go about it. A few years before he was diagnosed one day I asked him what he wanted to be as an adult when he was a kid. He said he still didn't know what he wanted to be, yet, he was, I thought, and admired him for this.