Making the Most of Disagreement

            Conflict often cracks the door that leads to healthy dialogue and we must put our foot in the opening. David Bohm (1994) said that conflict was incoherence. People never have legitimate grounds on which to differ, only confusion. War is sustained incoherence, sustained confusion, so too are feuds between families and disagreements of all sorts.

            There is a simple, elegant solution to every dilemma that presents itself to symbol processing systems or social systems and it is understanding, unraveling the knot of incoherence. Bohm said that confusion is analogous to a thought cancer. It begins to destroy the good cells of clarity around it.

            We drag our thoughts (thinking we did before) into our current life situation, along with our felts (feeling we did before) and together they pre-empt our understanding of the reality that is being presented to us now. It is in this way that confusion is handed down from generation to generation, that is, from episode to episode of our lives. Conflict has the capacity to cause people to think rather than drag in what they have already thought, to feel, rather than to load their brains with the chemicals of feelings they had before. When conflict arises, we should seize the moment and not let it pass without investing it with thinking and feeling.

            Not only do we tend to use thoughts and felts rather than thinking and feeling, we often raise monuments to systems of thoughts and felts and worship at their alters. Science, rationality, divine authority and even intuition, have their own hallowed traditions. Most people worship at one or the other of these “churches”. 

            Imagine if you will, four people who believe themselves to be authoritative on the same subject. One relies on “scientific evidence” another on rational thought, a third on a scriptural text and yet another on her intuitive capacity. Their conversation is likely to be conflicted because they cannot agree on something as basic as what they will treat as knowledge or wisdom.

            A person who believes in knowledge derived from science and another who believes in God-breathed understanding, will have countless non-starting discussions, when they seek to reason together. They might as well be thousands of physical miles apart for all the good being together in one room will do them, because the distance between the thought systems in which they believe is so great.

            Still the situation sits there to be readily resolved. Two fresh human beings, two human beings who were not so far gone down the narrow paths of their disparate knowledge traditions, could comprehend the reality and fix on a solution without much effort. However, our two combatants are likely to rage at one another for days, weeks, years, for lifetimes. Incoherence is their inheritance.

            Dialogue (conversational attack on confusion) can be achieved between the separate traditions our combatants worship in. Conflict opens doors on each side. All they need do is open the door and enter.

            Genuine dialogue entails listening without referring the messages to thoughts and feelings from your sacred traditions. It means speaking coherently about what you are thinking, what you are feeling, especially as these are determined by what you are hearing from the other person. The telltale product of dialogue is that both people (all people, if there are more than two) reach new understanding.

            One person at the table says, “I hear what you are saying, and it sounds plausible, but it violates the memory of my ancestors, and I am their representative at this table.” Another person at the table says, “I could not care less about your ancestors, I have my own ancestors of thought and felt to defend.” Everyone at the table is an ambassador for different traditions of thoughts and felts and determined to defend the flags and honor of their kingdom of origin.

            They might just as well be speaking in different languages without interpreters, for all the good their time talking does them. Wisdom sits there in the middle of the table, winking at them, nodding knowingly, but alas, frowning in sadness when the conversation winds down, everyone pushes back from the table and all walk out of the room.

            Rather than hailing from different knowledge traditions, they may be from different power positions. Locally, one person may be talking from the position of authority given to him by the organization.  “Do the rest of you not understand?”, he says. “Can you not hear that mine is the voice being raised on behalf of the organization for which we all work?”

            Another person at the table says, “Do the rest of you not understand? I am speaking as the smartest person in my college graduating class. Another speaks from the power of her experience recalling what she believes to be this same conversation before when subsequent events proved her correct (not realizing that those events are gone forever and that these are new events), another from the mountaintop of his emotion believing that what he says must be correct or otherwise why would he believe it so emotionally.

            Real conflict, times when those sitting at the table begin to change because they are forced to react to the input of others, provide learning opportunities, fleeting seconds when the person with organizational authority sees that there may be understanding beyond the bounds of that protected by his title, when the self-proclaimed “smartest person in the room” realizes that these commoners may have struck on pearls of insight, the person with vast experiences notices the “newness” of the current case, when the emotional mountain climber looks around and sees that the others are climbing the same mountain.

            In this precious present, it would be so healing for one of those at the table or perhaps someone new to the table, to throw down a heavy object breaking the quiet with sound and announce that for the next little while, no one will be permitted to speak or listen in the spirit of anything more than the sense flowing from the mouths of those in the room. No more grandmotherly nostrums, no more of grandfatherly clichés, no more homespun platitude from the mind of a great aunt or uncle.  For the sake of understanding, we will speak and listen in a way that defies tradition.

           

Reference       

Bohm, David. (1994). Thought as a system. London: Routledge.

Let Me Tell You About My Nephew Noah McCullough

Lots of people have nice nephews so please don’t take this the wrong way, but my nephew Noah could beat your nephew in basketball, blindfolded. One night he, his father – my brother - and I were playing basketball on an outdoor court in Nicholasville, Kentucky, one of those with the double ring rims that do not give at all, and just after dark; we did not want to quit so we were still there and Noah decided to shoot free throws and he hit nine out of 10 in the dark. I’d like to see your nephew do that.

Also, my nephew Noah – that sounds better than just calling him Noah- is now several inches taller than his father – my brother – Earl, making him a little taller than me. In fact, the last time I saw him he was growing rapidly and we have not talked for a few weeks, so he may be well over six feet tall by now, making him – I suspect – virtually impossible to guard.

I have not seen him play many games, but I saw him win the MVP of an all-star game in Somerset, Kentucky this past year. After only a couple of minutes into the game, he had three, three pointers – at which point the opposing coach decided they needed to guard him a little more closely. In the two games that day, he hit something like 11 three pointers out of 17 tries and, as I said, walked away with the MVP trophy, his team winning by large margins in both games and he serving as the steady, calming influence as point guard against players who were, at that point, mostly taller and considerably heavier than him.

We knew Noah was going to be a good basketball player several years ago when he started telling us he was going to someday play in the NBA – I mean, how cool is confidence, right? I helped send him to a summer camp in Chapel Hill, NC about six years ago, where he met Kenny the-jet Smith and got to learn from several sharp instructors. We sent him to that camp because since he was a wee lad he has liked North Carolina, for some reason.

Kentucky won the championship the spring of the year he was born and then won it again two years later, but of course, he was too young to be aware of those teams, so by the time he became a fan of college basketball, North Carolina was the best team, so I suppose that is why he adopted them as his favorite.

When he was about 10 years old, I saw him play organized basketball for the first time and although he was one of the smallest players on the floor, he was a deft ball handler and he hit a back over the head layup that any NBA guard would be proud of – without even stopping to admire it or show off, returning to defensive stance immediately - always a good sign.

As you can tell, I know how it feels to take pride in a nephew, so I don’t blame you for thinking your nephew is terrific and I am sure in his own way, he might well be. But my nephew Noah is handsome – look his picture up on facebook if you don’t believe me, has a charming personality – ask anyone in my family or that he goes to school with, if you don’t believe me; and not only that, he is a soul winner.

By the time I was eleven years old I had won six people to the lord. Noah may not have done it that early, but he has kept it up and I am sure he has passed me by now, since I quit winning souls and started living like someone who needs his soul won, in my late teens and early twenties. I kid him that he will end up like Chris “Birdman” Anderson of the NBA, with all that body art on his neck and face, but so far he is walking the straight and narrow and seems destined to be like his father and grandfather, a man close to his Biblical upbringing.

So, if your nephew is under six feet tall, cannot hit ninety percent of his free throws in the dark, has never won MVP of an all-star game, is not the best player in his high school basketball league, and is not a Bible believing soul winner, do me a favor, when your nephew’s birthday comes around, call him up and tell him you love him and that you are proud of him, because if he knows my nephew Noah, his self-esteem may be suffering from the comparison.

But if your nephew compares well to my nephew Noah – with the looks, charming personality and humility – which I don’t think I mentioned before, but yes, on top of everything else he is unassuming and humble in his attitude; then you should be proud of your nephew and have him contact my nephew Noah. Maybe they could hang out and learn from another how to be even more awesome.

I am sorry if I have turned this into a competitive birthday wish for my nephew Noah, but then, nephews only turn seventeen once, are only seniors in high school once and are only the pride of the family for a little while until some other young person comes along and takes center stage in holiday conversations.

The last thing I want to say about my nephew Noah is that he loves his grandmother – my mother with great passion, cried like a baby when his grandfather - my dad, died on mother’s day in 2006, is almost as devoted to his father – my brother Earl as he is to his heavenly father, and perhaps most importantly, in almost every way, he reminds me of myself when I was his age.

Happy Birthday, Noah.

Letter from the Future to 11 year-old Raleigh Mark Kincaid

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Greetings on the occasion of your birthday in 2013 from the skinny slick-haired pointy-nosed guy who one day just showed up in your sixth-grade math class at Beattyville Grade School and is still alive and, GOOD NEWS, so are you!!! I am writing this note to you on the occasion of your birthday, sealing it until time transport is available years later, at which point I will send it to you along with the demand that you reveal none of the things from the future of which I inform you. Even though from the day you read this letter forward you will have foreknowledge of much of what will happen, you will be expected to only nod and smile when events you anticipated unfold, making everyone else think you are just as in the dark as they are. Occasionally it will cause people to refer to you as aloof or condescending, but don’t let that bother you. It is not that you are better than they, only that you have been forewarned; and eventually they will understand what they took to be smugness actually resulted from your having received this correspondence detailing events from decades to come.

Big events will begin to unfold soon, such as two more U.S. national figures being shot down in cold blood, MLK, RFK; only a few years after the murder of JFK. Shortly before the first of these tragedies, your high school basketball team will go the state tournament and lose to Glasgow after winning the first two games! Five years later your high school basketball team will return to the state tourney only to lose in the first game, a game in which you will score one point.

You and I will lead the high school baseball team to the regional tournament in our senior year of high school as first baseman and pitcher/short stop respectively. We will also sing a duet of “No man is an Island” at our high school graduation, but later that same year, Richard Nixon will resign as president and test the theory espoused in that beautiful little song.

That same spring you and I will star as Emile Debeque and Joe Cable in the HS musical, South Pacific, making us stars of a HS musical before it became cult movie years later. We will also sing in a combo that ultimately wins a 4-h club award and plays at the Kentucky state fair. This after us each being selected to All-State chorus in our junior year of HS. We were the second coming of Simon and Garfunkel, without all the hoopla.

As the doctor told your mother, you grew to be tall, really tall, around 6’ 6” or so. I only reached 5’ 11”, which would make me taller than the average, only to be forced to play Jeff to your Mutt. This, along with the fact that you would marry Kim Brown, no shorty in her own right, would result in your bearing most impressive offspring, such that when the four of you entered your church on Sunday morning newcomers would look at the four of you in awe, such tall, regal looking parishoners.

As we are playing baseball one day in Powell County and you tag the base with the ball in your hand the runner will spike your middle finger and I will go over and called him a son of a b***h. Yes, me the preacher’s kid. It turns out I will steadily grow away from religion, but you will not and your mama would always be proud of you, but my daddy will puzzle over me.

You and I will go to College at Morehead and you will major in vocal performance, even staying around for a Masters Degree in Music and it’s a good thing you do stay around because you fall in love with your future wife while you were both in the play Shenandoah, you playing the main role – Charlie Anderson. Yep, you will become quite the ladies man around that time, teaching yourself to play the guitar, having the ladies swooning over your rich baritone voice and ultimately breaking the hearts of all but one: Kim Brown.

A few years later you will marry her and be blessed with those two most gorgeous children I mentioned, just like they draw it on the board, a boy and a girl, both with yellow hair, charming faces and pleasant personalities. You would turn out to have those children after you had sworn to me when we roomed together at college that you would not have any because you did not like the direction the world was going. I guess you will have changed your mind and decided the world needed two more people to help tip the balance back in the right direction.

Yes, we will room together at college but shortly after we graduate our lives will take us to different places and we would never live in the same town again. However, we will write many letters to one over the years and in the late 1980s, we would start sending one another electronic mail from our personal computers. I know, that’s crazy, right, electronic mail? All sorts of inventions impact us as we get older, too much for me to tell you here. But another computer-related one that occurred was Facebook, beginning in 2004, something that allows our friends to view this letter I am writing to you all at the same time.

You will go to Indiana University to get your doctorate in vocal performance, training to be an opera singer, only that does not prove to be your passion, so you will come back to Kentucky and eventually get your graduate degree in marriage and family therapy at the University of Kentucky. During this same time, the United States will turn against poor people and start honoring only the wealthy and this will last until it reaches as sickening apex around the time I am writing this.

Men will go to the moon a few years from the time you are reading this, but they will stop doing that after a while and return to pummeling people from other nations with weapons of mass destruction, owing in part to the fact that shortly after the new millennium, one of the nation’s largest cities will be hit by a brutal attack from people of middle-eastern extraction, an event  about which I will not be specific; but suffice it to say, it will be gruesome.

So hunker down, my friend, there are lots of crazy things coming to the nation you love, but your mama will live a long life and no, she will never disappoint you and she will go to her reward knowing you became an upstanding citizen with near renaissance-man capacity for variety from golf, to music, to parenting, to fly fishing, to husbanding, to counseling the suffering.

And know that I, your BFF (sorry for that future reference, but it means best friend forever) will as long as we both live, honor you as one of the greatest people he has ever known. So I hope you appreciate this day, the day you have received this letter from the skinny little slick-haired pointy-nosed boy who just now entered your 6^th grade math class. But don’t tell anyone our little secrets.

My response to a person on Facebook who asked what liberals are fighting for.

You asked what Elizabeth Warren, “liberal nut” as you called her, is fighting for. If she were writing this, she would make it much more clear than I will, but you have challenged me, not her, so I will respond.

What are liberals fighting for?

We liberals fight for justice, not because we think our society, government and its people are awful, but because we revere them and want to see them reach their full potential. By society, I mean individuals and collectives who interact to create values, norms and expectations for human thought and behavior. By government I mean the democratic republic that was and is our national choice which relies on direct and indirect participation by the citizenry, direct being serving as representatives in elected or appointed offices and indirect being engaging in public debate over issues, voting your conscience and serving as called upon on juries or in other occasional capacities-e.g. as a party participant or leader. And by people, I mean citizens who seek information to help them stay current on the issues of the day so they can be ready to engage individually or collectively.

These three groups are not inherently good or bad, right or wrong; but rather they sometimes work at cross purposes. Sometimes our societal norms, institutions, values, laws and policies are such that they benefit a distinct minority and underserve the interest of a distinct majority. In the last several decades our government has moved away from protecting the interests of ordinary citizens to serving the interests of the powerful: corporations, the wealthy, the politically connected. Many individual citizens are not fully informed as to prevailing norms, values, policies and may not even know how their government works for or against their interests. Unions have historically worked on behalf of the working class to help inform citizens and to influence norms and governmental and corporate institutions.

Unions have been successfully characterized by those who would like to keep the average person in our country in the dark as to the prevailing cultural norms, corporate actions and the extent to which the government is under the influence of the powerful, as enemies of the economy. Unions are seen as dangerous by those who would keep you ignorant and out of power as a working-class person, and so they cast them in a bad light as often as possible.

What Elizabeth Warren means is that she is willing to fight against the powerful 1% of Americans who now receive 20% of the income, because those people have taken over the government, they own the corporations and they have created a condition in which the norms, institutions and values of our society are distinctly against the interest of those who are in the economic middle class or lower.

Conservatives say they are fighting for traditions and against change advocated by liberals, but in fact, over the last forty years our nation has changed dramatically in favor of the wealthy, so the conservative cause currently is to keep the change coming, and preserve the changes that have occurred during that span of time. Since 1973 the income of the bottom 98% has stayed roughly the same while that of the top 2% has risen by many fold. If productivity gains during this time had been passed along to you and me, you and I would be making around 30% more than we currently do, per year. It's not a coincidence that the middle class in the U.S. was strongest when unions were strongest, during the middle part of the 20th century.

You will not be told this type of thing by Fox News, talk radio and the typical protestant minister in the southeastern United States, three of the most powerful, largely white/male political forces in our country. To learn more of what the liberal cause is, you need to do what you did right here on FB, ask a good question.

Welcome to Walmart, young man.

It happened again yesterday, I walked into Walmart and the greeter reminded me of my father who died on mother’s day in 2006. The greeter- an older gentlemen- looked at me and said: “Welcome to Walmart, young man”, but as he looked at me, I got the feeling he was scrutinizing me as a person.

My dad was not one of those people who could be said to not judge others, in fact, quite the opposite, he judged everyone on everything from their appearance to their choices to the people they hung around with. If it was something on which someone could be judged, he did it, despite the fact that his guru, Jesus, once said: Judge not that ye be not judged for with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged.” [KJV of Bible]

Before you accuse me of “dead-father bashing”, let me add that my father judged people mainly with an eye for diagnosing their spiritual condition so he could talk to them on his favorite subject: how a relationship with Jesus would fix whatever ailed them, whereas a lot of people judge others and conclude they themsleves are better than the other person or that there is something deficient in the other person. Dad had the world in two groups, those who were saved and those not saved and if you professed to be saved, you might make all sorts of mistakes in your life, but at least you would go to heaven when you died, and to him that was pretty much all that mattered.

But it was not just that I thought the Walmart greeter was judging me, it was that like my father, he seemed to be the sort of man who deeply loved other human beings. I inferred from just his brief attention to me that he was not only acknowledging me, but processing me deeply. Do you know people who seem to pretend to acknowledge you or those who are paying attention to you only at a superficial level? This man did not seem to be one of those just as my dad was not one of those types.

A dear friend of his came into the bedroom in my brother’s house where he would die the next evening and dad looked at him, smiled and pumped his fist up in the air, feebly, but still, as a dying man, he brought his fist up toward the ceiling to say he was praising the lord to see his friend. At this point dad had completely lost his voice due to his lungs being taken over by small-cell tumors. I will never forget the look of joy on his emaciated face at seeing his friend, no more than I will forget the look he wore the next evening when me and my three siblings stood around his bed and he opened his eyes, stared at my brother for several seconds, opened his mouth and then stopped breathing, with his eyes and mouth both still open.

My point is, in the presence of some people, I get the feeling I am barely registering, but with others, I get the feeling I have their undivided attention. Dad had a highly-developed capacity to attend to the presence of other people.

I will never know if I come across that way to others – I hope I do – but when I am in the presence of someone who processes others the way my dad did, especially if that person is an older man, I am reminded of dad and I start reflecting on how much I miss him, for better and for worse.

You see, I was fortunate enough to be the son of someone who deeply loved and attended to ALL people, so you can only imagine how laser-like his love and attention were in my life. For most of my adult life, no matter how far from him I lived, I would reflect on a regular basis how he might respond if he could see me as I was doing whatever I was doing.

If I contemplated telling someone off at work whom I thought had done me wrong, or if I actually went through with it, sooner or later I would have to deal with my reflection on how dad would have taken it, what he might have said, advice he might have given, whether he would have seen me as being right or wrong.

Dad has been gone over seven years and I no longer have to concern myself with what he might actually think of what I am doing. I don’t subscribe to the belief some seem to hold which is that not only is Jesus looking down on us, but those we have loved are doing so as well. I have this relentlessly realistic part of my mind that says, once your eyes are no longer functioning and your body is wasting away in the ground, you are not looking at too many people.

I spoke at his funeral and one of the things I said that day was that all the sinners in Breathitt, Lee and Owsley County Kentucky could breathe easier because Paul McCullough was gone. I might have been talking to myself though. If I were perfectly honest, as much as I loved him and as much as I missed him, I too was, in a way, breathing easier he was gone.

While he was around I tried to live up to his expectations, I tried to not do anything that might grieve him, in short, I was constantly mindful of his love and attention. After he was gone, I found replacements for his scrutiny in other people whose opinions I respect, but there would and could never be anyone whose opinion would matter to me quite as much as his did.

He is not around to judge me and I am probably not as trustworthy or as tightly self-controlled as I was with him around, but I suppose he was in my life long enough that I learned to be my own judge, to exert my own sort of pressure on my decision making. Now, about the only time I remember the power of his influence is when I am walking into Walmart and an older gentleman looks at me carefully as says: “Welcome to Walmart, young man.”

Center of Attention? Yes, please, I mean no,...actually, I'm not sure.

When’s the last time you had the hiccups? I can’t remember when I did, but it’s been a long time. With the hiccups you got to be the center of attention for a little while, with people telling you how to get rid of them, comparing memories of remedies tried, trying to make you laugh, scaring you, or almost choking you with sips of water while you held your nose, or other things like that.

Being the center of attention is not something I necessarily want these days, in fact, I am not sure I have ever wanted it, at least while I was getting it; but after I have had it, I have found myself fondly remembering the feeling.

My freshman year in high school I sang a song behind the stage curtain as part of a school production, while on stage there was a life nativity scene. The song – I think it was called the Magnificat or something like that- went this way: Chorus “As the rain rushes down and the earth blossoms forth and the wind caresses every tree. You can hear the turtle dove singing all throughout the land of the fair young Virgin Mary.” Bridge: “My heart sings out, with praise of my Lord, my soul rejoices in Christ my savior, for he has looked upon his servant tenderly, humble as he is…Chorus: “As the rain rushes down…” same as before. It had a lovely tune.

I bring that up because after I had sung the song, Mr. Stamper called the principals office on behalf of some girls in his class who wanted me to come down to his home-room- we had all gone back to our home room after assembly- so they could talk to me. When I walked into the room, several of the girls swooned in unison, something like: “Aaaaahh…” I can’t really remember exactly what it sounded like, but I have never been so afraid in my life. I had no idea how to react. I could not hold my head up and there was no way I could look at any of them. Pretty soon Mr. Stamper saw how uncomfortable I was and allowed me to leave the room and head back to my own home room, where my face could return to its normal color.

Since then I have often remembered that day as a missed opportunity. I frittered away whatever popularity I had gained by coming across as uncomfortable and too shy to even talk to anyone. I remember being afraid that some of the girls would learn that I lived in a house trailer on a muddy hillside or that my daddy was a religious fanatic. But if I am to be honest, I must admit that even then, I absolutely loved the attention, it’s just that I had no way of dealing with it.

Even in high school after I started singing all the time, in plays, with a group, solos at choral performances or at weddings; I never knew exactly how to react when someone said I sang well. Once as I was driving a girl home from a date, she asked me to sing for her and it made me so nervous I snapped at her and said: “I don’t ask you to play your saxophone when we are in the car, do I?” She wondered why I was so upset and I said something to the effect that I wanted us to talk about important stuff, not have me perform for her. She got out of the car and needless to say, there was no kiss involved. I drove back home thinking what an idiot I was and I still think what a stupid thing that was to do.

I don’t think there has ever been a time when I did not crave attention but at the same time, I don’t think there has ever been a time when I knew how to handle it. It’s like I sit and pine over the fact that other people are getting the recognition and then when I get some, I have no idea how to accept it without being awkward.

It was ironic that when I played the role of Tony Kirby in the play: “You can’t take it with you”, since the girl who had asked me to sing on the date, played the role of Alice Sycamore, my fiancee, and who in the play, was afraid for me to meet her family because they were so eccentric. Her grandfather did not pay his income tax because he did not believe in it; an uncle who lived with them made fireworks in the basement and played with erector sets. Meanwhile, my character Tony’s father was a proper society man and made Alice feel ill at ease. The shoe was on the other foot in real life, where I was the one who felt like a social outcast.

For twenty five years now I have taught at a university and I have no problem talking in front of classes and even hamming it up at times, trying to be entertaining or at least interesting, but after all these years, when the setting is informal - say I am telling a story for a roomful of friends or family- I get tongue tied and begin to feel like a shy little kid again, which throws off my timing, makes me forget key parts of the story and generally would make it appear I would never be able to stand in front of a college classroom and make sense of anything.

I was happy to see someone had posted on Facebook the other day about how they could write excellent fiction or works of literature, but became tongue tied when trying to string together more than a few sentences for friends and family. I suspect this difficulty has something to do with communication between brain hemispheres, but I would not know that for certain. I do know it is likely I will still be dealing with this when I am blowing out the candles on my 100-birthday cake.

Growing up together, music and our journey

Finishing Growing Up Together

When you are 19 years old it’s in the back of your mind that every new thing you see or do may be the start of something big. Your inner dialogue says in the voice of someone as if on TV, “Historians look back at 1975 as a turning point year in the life of the young Tanga Bea or the young Mike.” That year our inner dialogues were correct. I realize I am assuming we think alike, which is admittedly a shaky proposition.

           

When we met we were still 18 years old. You had taken the ferry to Indiana and seen the Reds at Crosley Field, but you had never been more than 200 miles from Covington, Kentucky where you were born. Compared to you I was a world traveler, having ventured as far east from my birthplace of Greenville, South Carolina as Goldsboro, North Carolina, as far south as Columbia, S.C., as far north as Cincinnati, and as far west as Frankfort, Kentucky. By the time you met me my head was still spinning from all the travel.

           

We were apparently on the same football field with our respective bands, Pendleton County and Lee County, in 1971, at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond, Kentucky, you with your flute and me with my tuba. You could charm snakes from beneath the porch with your flute, but I only made my spine more crooked with the tuba.

           

I first met your mother in the Fall of 1975 or Spring of 1976, in other words, when she was 57 years old. It seems I knew her much longer but it was only about 25 years. Of course, to know her for a minute was to know her for a lifetime, she was so steadfastly herself. I met her and probably Aunt May and Aunt Sylvia when the choir came to Falmouth to sing. You can correct me on this later.

           

Just think, in the Fall of 1974 we wandered around Weatherby Gym picking up class cards, not knowing we were wandering around in one another’s presence. In fact, we were wandering around among what would turn out to be lifelong friends, Evans, Aschcrafts, and Wilsons were wandering around Weatherby too.

           

What are those times? They no longer exist and therefore are as dead as the people who have literally passed and lie in state from that era, but we continue to recall the scenes, the conversations and the faces. Only those usually pretty bad pictures they took as we left registration remain as proof that it happened, those and the records we made with our grades, kept in file drawers in the administration building.

           

Even the pictures and paper records would be impeachable in a court of law. Some slick attorney would be able to cast a shadow of a doubt as to their authenticity. The fact that we rehearse those times regularly with the people who shared them with us allows us to keep them fresher in mind. My guess is, those who have not kept in touch with friends from that era find most of it a total blur. But the fact that we work so hard to remember is testament to our understanding of how tenuous our claim to times passed really is.

           

We give accounts to make ourselves more comfortable with the memories, supplying lost details with current biases. Maybe that’s why we find ourselves so often wondering which year something happened, or exactly who was there or where we were living at the time, or later on, which grade the kids were in. If we can establish these things, the whole account gains needed credibility. The love we have for one another does not permit us to be overly honest. We are generous to a fault. We tend to say to one another; you were, back then, what you apparently remember yourself to be and I will defend your right to go on believing that, especially if you will help me do the same.

We finished growing up together. Two can live more cheaply together than the two can live separately -the cliché is worded more informally. Two can finish growing up together more efficiently than the two can finish growing up alone, except, when two people complete their ascent into adulthood as marriage partners, they run the risk - or merit the benefit - of not fully confronting their individual adjustment shortcomings. They may become sociological or psychological crutches for one another.

           

I will never know what it might have been like to work my way through graduate school depending only on interaction with other graduate students or just other people for my emotional health. As it was, neither of us had to contend with the difficult-to- accommodate nuances of other people. If we did not like someone with whom we found ourselves having to spend a good deal of time, we could always retreat to our relationship and soften the blow for ourselves. “I don’t like the personality adjustment this person demands of me”, we might have said, “Will you help me get through this time without making that adjustment? You will? Thanks. Yes, I will do the same for you.”

           

At the time I must have thought such ongoing accommodation of others would be an unnecessary use of my mental and emotional energy. Whether it would have been or not, we will never know. Every meaningful relationship we have had since 1977 has been absorbed by both of us, never privately.

             

As the years go by it becomes more difficult to recall the earliest days of our marriage. The time around the wedding and honeymoon stand out and I can remember big things like part of the wedding cake falling, how long it took to open all our gifts, my family being late, how full and hot the church was, not getting you a wedding present, the Pinto being permanently painted, your mom’s Malibu, the Days Inn, the Best Western in Bardstown, the honeymoon suite in Caves City, playing put-put golf, and Long John Silver’s chicken planks.

           

The pictures we had are fading and scattered. I wonder where the audiotape is, the one you would listen to repeatedly to hear Raleigh hit the high note in the Lord’s Prayer, with the baby yelling. You even knew which baby that was, a baby who is now around 40 years old.

           

All these years of shared experience are so meaningless to anyone but us, so intense with emotion at the time but so easy to just let slide from our conversations these days. They even threaten to fall completely out of our minds. Looking back on them leads me to both nostalgia and the recognition that time makes fun of self-importance. It turns us into repositories of images and notions of the past, headed for a horizon over which our passage will be accorded little attention. But we were there and we are here now and holding our lives up to the light one more time seems useful, at least it does to me.

Music

Music has been important to us.  Our first song together was “I really want to see you tonight” by England Dan and John Ford-Coley. For a long time we were not sure whether they were saying “I’m not talking about Meridian” or “I’m not talking about moving in”. We admitted our uncertainty, stayed persistent and eventually figured it out together. It was a relief for us both to not feel pressure to understand every lyric to every song. Couples these days would just Google it.

It must have been the Spring of 1977 when we drove to Lexington to hear England Dan and John Ford-Coley and Neil Sedaka in Concert. Who knows how we had the money. Of course, concerts were not nearly as expensive back then. You kept the tickets to that and other things we did together for a long time. My inability to keep up with such things must have rubbed off on you.

           

Follow Me, The Wedding Song, Evergreen, The Lord’s Prayer, (did I leave one out?) we worked out this selection during the summer of 1977. I drove to Falmouth virtually every weekend that summer, once or twice bringing Earl along. At the beginning of the summer, when it appeared I would not have a job in the oil fields, I wound up at Tommy and Brenda’s and we talked late at night about the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire, both watching national news coverage of it.

           

Over the years we bought a couple of “borrowed” milk crates full of vinyl music albums. Some we had before we married, mostly things I had bought like Blood on the Tracks by Bob Dylan or Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen. Together we bought John Denver, Neil Sedaka, Neil Diamond, Paul Simon, James Taylor, Carol King. I realize, recounting these albums, that you did more listening than you did selecting. 

           

You loved music, you just never spent as much on it as I did, but then you did not have the money I did J. Cowsills, Johnny Rivers, and Strawberry Alarm Clock, you had their 45s. My 45s included: How can you mend a broken heart by the Bee Gees and Trying to Hold on to my woman by Lamont Dozier.

           

Concerts were everywhere. Over the years, after we married we saw John Denver, Kenny Rogers, The Righteous Brothers, Dan Fogelberg, James Taylor, Charlie McClain and even Andy Williams. 

Your favorite group while we lived in Indiana were Graham Russell and Air Supply. I liked Supertramp and their song “Take the long way home”, which played on the car radio the night I came to get you at Zales after having forgotten to pick you up from work five hours earlier. All the times I have recounted the fact that this was the song playing, you have never seemed to see the humor in it.

The Journey

When two people marry it is as if they are starting on a train trip from which they vow to be carried off.  No matter where or how many times the train stops to load or unload, they continue their conversation, planning the next time they will get up to visit the bathroom, or when they will walk to the meal car and get a box of food. 

           

Once the meal is eaten, the bathroom is out of the way, it’s back to the seat by the window and the view of the country side.  Out the window are sometimes parts of the world they have not seen before.  He nods in the direction of something interesting so she can see it too. That way they can later talk about what it was.

           

Sometimes they sit headed forward and sometimes they head backwards.  If they have to change trains at a station, they may wind up sitting temporarily in separate seats, but their eyes remain connected and as soon as someone moves, they are back together again, talking quietly.

           

The train goes places and they get off together and explore, but eventually the time for sightseeing is over and they return to another train and its back across the wide-open spaces again, through the city, over the mountains and the rivers with their high bridges. 

           

One perspective on marriage is that it is a trap, a place where pathetic people become mired in an interminable day-to-day. The other extreme is that it is a haven, a place of sanctuary where love is the eternal bed. The truth lies somewhere in between.

           

Those who give up on marriage after a short while do so sometimes because they become something like claustrophobic, I would assume.  They need elbow room, something fresh and new.        

           

But one can never leave oneself and therefore nothing is ever completely fresh.  The sights I see tomorrow will be seen by the eyes I use today. When I look at the world, I don’t just see it psycho-perceptually, but I see it with perspective, my mind adds meaning to it.  The tendency to see the familiar as less attractive than the unfamiliar is not necessarily a part of the human condition, but rather something that reaches epidemic proportions in certain societies, in some people’s lives.

           

To continuously see the new and fresh with the same person may be the greatest delight of marriage.  It is indeed a sad marriage when neither is any longer capable of appreciating change or embracing new habits or taking on better ways of being together and alone.  It may be an even sadder marriage when only one is willing to continue investigating experiences.

           

It’s really this nimbleness, this openness to sharing more than the same old thing that allows two people to not just continue to live in the same house but to live in a way that is beneficial to both of their souls.

           

Anticipation of progress has been a theme in our life and to a certain extent we have seen it happen.  Our lives together remain open-ended.  We still look forward to what may be coming next year, even though we tend to know the containers it will be shipped in and who will be the supplier.  That is, we may visit the same restaurants next year that we do this, or we may still be spending our Friday evenings reading, but as long as we keep a youthful and expectant viewpoint, no two Friday evenings will be the same.

           

That show Mystery Science Theatre sort of sums up what I am talking about.  The character’s heads showed up on the bottom of the movie screen and they talked all the way through it, sometimes making fun of the plot or the actors, but always keeping the banter witty and light. 

           

I am reminded of Aunt May and Uncle Bill or Aunt Sylvie and Uncle Ivan. They were sort of like the Mystery Science Theatre troupe, sitting there watching the movie of their lives, making cute little comments and smiling at one another’s demonstration of defiance in the face of the threats of boredom or irrelevancy.  I say bring on the many days and evenings we have yet to share. I think we are up to it. What do you think?  Just a hint of a smile on your face is usually enough to reassure me things are okay. But, on occasion we may get greedy and laugh right out loud. And they said you were a saint for staying with me. Little did they know, right? Right?

August 6, 2013: Happy Anniversary, Tanga Bea Turner McCullough!!

Tomorrow marks 36 years of marriage for Tanga and me. Yes, you read that correctly, 36, as in three dozen or one-fourth of a gross. I know, we don’t even look 36 years old, let alone old enough to be married so long. I would not believe it either, had I not been there for the whole blooming thing. It turns out we got married on the 32^nd anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. If you find something funny in the connection between our marriage and that day, you have a warped sense of humor- and welcome to the club.

I don’t believe it would be an exaggeration to say there were 250 people at our wedding. It was held at Tanga’s home church and everyone in the general area must have felt sorry for her. Not very many made their way up from South Carolina or Beattyville, Kentucky, the places I had called home; only family and my best man. One of my groomsmen did not show up and I have not heard from him to this day. Our friendship was the only obvious casualty of my marriage.

Ten days later, after our honeymoon to Bardstown, Kentucky; to see the Stephen Foster story, the day we moved into our first apartment; I was standing at the sink doing something, maybe washing dishes with a radio beside me playing music, when they interrupted to say Elvis had died. There was something surreal about Elvis dying just as we got started in marriage. Again, any connection you might make between the death of the king and us moving into our first apartment would be in poor taste.

We lived in Kentucky two more years after our marriage, moved to Terre Haute, Indiana in August of 1979, and we have not lived in Kentucky since. I think it is a coincidence that Kentucky has struggled since we left. In 1978, Democrat Walter Dee Huddleston won 61% of the vote to the 37% won by Republican Louis Guenthner, in the U.S. Senate race for Kentucky. In 1980, Democrat Wendell Ford won the U.S. Senate seat in Kentucky with 65% of the vote to Republican Mary Foust’s 35%. I refuse to take the blame for the change that has occurred since.

Things have gone a little better on the basketball front. Kentucky won a NCAA title in 1958 and 1978, while we were there. In the 34 years we have been gone, they have won three titles. In the 65 years since they won their first NCAA basketball title, Kentucky has won seven more, which comes to around one every nine years or so. The 2014 title will give them a total of nine in 67 seasons, or one every seven and a half years. Not bad for a state missing two of its biggest fans.

We have three couple friends – now with children, children-spouses and a few other friends- from college that I am pretty sure, not a single year has gone by without us seeing them at least once and for the last twenty-five years or so, at least twice; and in the last ten years or so, at least four times. We have joked about us possibly moving in together and starting our own commune, but that would probably not work, since Tanga and I are the only communists in the bunch.

Tanga and I had a daughter on the second-to-last day of 1981. She, like us, is not one to stay close to home. For the last three April-through-Septembers she has worked as a U.S. Park Ranger in Alaska, 2011 and 12 in Skagway and this year in Glacier Bay. Back in 2002 she traveled to the Normandy, France area for a travel study. In 2003, she went to London and saw something like 15 plays in 14 days, some of them at the Globe theater. In 2004 she spent the summer backpacking from Ireland to Rome and in 2004-5 she spent the school year teaching English in Manosque, France.

She and I got to travel to London and Paris in 2007 and Tanga and I were in Cambridge for 7-7-2005, when terrorists blew up the tube and a couple of busses. Tanga and I spent our thirtieth anniversary, in 2007, at Cancun, Mexico. That was the only time we actually took a trip for our anniversary.

Our marriage has lasted through Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, Obama and hopefully will last at least through Clinton II, if not Clinton III – Chelsea. It has lasted through nothing but bleak years of Cincinnati Reds teams, except for 1990. We have watched nine Olympic games, including 1980 - the U.S. boycott year. We have watched 36 sets of Super Bowl commercials and halftimes, neither of us all that taken with the actual games.

We have lived through the Jonestown Massacre, John Lennon’s assassination, Reagan being shot, Hurricanes Hugo, Andrew, Katrina and Sandy – and a host of lesser ones, the first Gulf War, the roaring nineties, the tech bubble bursting, September 11^th, the Iraq War, the housing bubble bursting, the great recession, the election of the first African American to the White House and unfortunately, we are still living through whatever you call the mess in Afghanistan.

We have attended the funerals of her wonderful mother Edna, my wonderful father Paul, her 44 year-old brother Roger and her brother Roger’s wife, son and two grandsons; the weddings of a niece and nephew – my sister Cathy’s two; another niece – Brenda’s daughter and that of her brother and my brother as well.

We have lived in Kentucky, Indiana, Tennessee, New Jersey, Tennessee again, North Carolina and back to Tennessee. We have probably driven around two million miles between us, a number inflated by the fact that she and I have lived 65 and 55 miles respectively, from our work, for the last nineteen years or so.

We have moved twelve times in 36 years, counting moving into Lewis number nine, the efficiency apartment at Morehead where we had just arrived when Elvis died. If our house, which is currently on the market, sells; that will be our thirteenth move.

Suffice it to say, a lot can happen in 36 years and it has, but we are still around and ready for what the next 36 might bring. No one can predict what will transpire in three-dozen years, but if we could, that would not be nearly as much fun, would it? Who knows, maybe nothing much will happen so that when I sit down to write about our second 36 years, the piece will be much shorter.

The easy way?

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Often when something is difficult or time consuming I find myself trying to devise an easier or quicker way to do it. When I buy beets for juicing - stems and leaves still on, I have a tendency to throw them in the refrigerator, until I need them only to find them in a disgusting state of decay from the humidity in the area of the frig where I laid them. I justify this because it would take time to get out the cutting board, separate them, cut them into juicable sized stems and leaves, put them in ziplock bags and then, in the refrigerator.

Even as I type these sentences I am thinking, how can I get this piece on doing things the easy way done a little easier, without poring over every word and without editing it after I am finished.

I have known people who dropped out of college because of a math class, an English class or in one case, “because I could tell I had nothing in common with the professor”, only to find life without college quite tough - with jobs harder to come by and the ones available not what they would prefer. I wonder if they ever think that the easier way, not finishing college, actually turned out to be the hard way; the way I think when I see my beet stems and leaves rotting in the refrigerator and I have to throw them away. Maybe I should start processing my veggies as soon as I get them home, the way I did this afternoon, because I knew I was going to be writing this piece on not always taking the easy way out.

This past spring I tried to run a marathon without putting in enough training miles per week and I wound up walking much of the second half and finishing thirty minutes slower than my previous marathon time. But I start thinking of easy alternatives even when the thing I am doing is not nearly as hard as training for a marathon. I do it if I am replacing a ceiling fan or a light switch, writing an essay or an email, making a speech or just chit-chatting with someone. I am always looking to cut corners on big things or on small ones.

I suspect a psychologist would tell me this tendency is a sign I am ADHD, which I bet I was when I was little, although they did not have the diagnosis back then; and which I bet I still am. But it would not surprise me if a lot of people would not say they did the same thing. In fact, finding easy ways of doing things is sort of like what engineers do for a living, so it cannot be all bad, right?

It is probably not that big of a problem if I cut corners to save time, money or energy; when the matter is not life or death for me or a loved one, or when it does not mean I compromise my performance on an important project or shortchange the quality of my future life, in some way. The only problem is, I not only do it on unimportant things; I do it on big ones too.

I did it as a high school student, where I did not work my hardest. I did it my first year of college and I am not sure I did not do it on my Ph.D. dissertation, which honestly, I was never all that proud of as an accomplishment. It got me my degree, but I do not believe I came close to giving it everything I had. By that time, I just wanted to be done with the degree and move on with the rest of my life, instead of taking pride in the process and product.

I have known people who have given up on relationships, on members of their family, even on their state of residence – moving to another state in hopes that the new state would fix their problems. I knew one couple that gave up on keeping their money in banks because the bank was always hassling them about writing bad checks. When they told anyone they kept their money at home instead of a bank, they made it sound like the bank had done them wrong – actually that several banks in succession had done them wrong and so they finally gave up on banks.

It is easier to take supplements than to eat the proper foods, easier to sit sweating twenty minutes in a sauna than to spend that time on an elliptical, and in general it appears to be easier to take a hand full of pills than to either eat right or exercise. It gets worse, when it comes to health. Apparently, a lot of people think it is easier to have multiple by-pass surgeries than it is to take care of their health by not eating cholesterol-filled animal products and dairy.

Clearly lying in bed an extra hour is easier than getting out of bed and running three miles, or getting on an exercise bike, right? I mean, you have to put on your clothes, stretch, run-which is no fun - and then come back home and shower, then put on other clothes, whereas if you stayed in bed, all you had to do was find one outfit after you showered and just slip on your clothes.

But lying in bed day after day and year after year without doing work on your body only seems easier. At some point, the “difficulties” of living that way start to become obvious. You wind up in poor health, in the hospital, taking all kinds of pills, hurting all over, having headaches, stomach problems, thinking problems, problems getting around, not being able to go on a hike, not being able ultimately, to easily get out of the bed you so easily chose to lie in all those mornings, instead of getting up and doing the more difficult thing, taking care of the only body you will ever have.

I know, I am a big one to talk, but the next time you succumb to the temptation to take the easy way out, ask yourself, where is the hidden difficulty in that “so-called” easier way? I am going to try myself, although it sure is a lot easier to just write an essay on the subject.