I suspect that the name “Rich Mullins” probably means nothing to most of my regular readers.
Rich Mullins was a recording artist in the “contemporary Christian” genre. (He died in a traffic accident in 1997.) He is probably most famous as the writer of the song “Awesome God,” which is a massively popular song that has been adopted as a worship anthem in a particular kind of Christian church. (If you’ve ever caught a commercial for one of those “worship and praise” music compilations, you might well have seen an auditorium of people singing it with their eyes closed and arms upraised.)
I’ve alluded here and there to the complicated and confusing nature of my religious identity and beliefs. One thing I’ve made explicit is that I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian church, the theology of which I have overwhelmingly rejected. But the truth of how I would identify myself now and why is complicated, and for the time being is something I prefer to keep out of discussions here. Suffice it to say that what beliefs I have now emerge from a constantly shifting balance between hope and doubt.
But back to Rich Mullins.
As a teenager, I attended a big annual Christian youth conference over a couple of years. And one year Mr. Mullins came to perform, if memory serves not just once but over the course of the whole conference. In any case, I can’t recall all that much about his performances beyond that I enjoyed them, except for one particular thing he said on stage. I don’t remember how the subject of gays came up, but I do remember what he said about them. (It was at this same conference, either that year or the other year I attended, that a Christian comedian referred to homosexuals as “faggots,” to the roaring laughter and cheers of the audience. I, of course, laughed right along.) In a nutshell, he said that gay people weren’t going to hell because they were gay. No, if they were going to hell, it was because they didn’t know the love of Jesus Christ, just like anyone else. (I was still trying to believe gays were a “they” rather than a “we.”)
Now, at this point in my life I recoil from most of that. Among the beliefs I’ve jettisoned over the years, belief in any sort of literal hell was the first to go. (One half of my family is of a non-Christian religion, and I was never really able to believe in any kind of God who would send my beloved grandparents to hell.) I suspect that those words don’t strike anyone as all that kind or merciful or worthy of gratitude.
But for me, they meant the world. I was used to hearing that gay people were uniquely perverted, and that their depravity made them a class of sinner all their own, worthy of scant more than revulsion. So to hear a (relatively) famous Christian musician stand in front of an auditorium full of the peers I was desperately pretending for and say that people like me (fight it though I may) were simply sinners no worse than anyone else… well, to me it sounded and still feels like kindness.
And I loved his album “Winds of Heaven, Stuff of Earth.” It was one of my favorites. I can still sing several of the tracks from memory. For a young man who, all internal conflicts notwithstanding, was full of sincere longing for God, Mr. Mullins’ songs were beautiful and meaningful and true.
But I can’t really sing them any longer. In contrast to the other major soundtracks of my early adolescence, the B-52s albums “Bouncing Off the Satellites” and “Cosmic Thing” which (with their goofy good cheer) were my first real glimpse of a life where gay people could be expect to be treated as something other than faggots, I just can’t sing along to songs about beliefs I no longer hold. (The lovely, subtle “If I Stand” being an exception.) From everything I can read about him now, Mr. Mullins was a kind, inclusive, thoughtful and decent person, and one I would almost certainly have liked had I really met him. But the songs on the albums I grew up loving are too narrow in their idea of God to move me any longer.
And so that’s this week’s Question — what have you, with some sadness perhaps, left behind? What once had meaning that is now lost to you? What holds a special place in your memory for what once made it dear, but is dear no longer?
Great question Russell.
I grew up in evangelical Christian setting too. And I found a lot of comfort and inspiration in Rich Mullins. (I loved “If I Stand” too, and sang it in church to a soundtrack.) My favorite song from that casette tape was “Home.” http://youtu.be/_YWTeRL9usc
When I started breaking free from the fundamentalist Christian world a bunch of years ago, like you my belief in hell was the first thing to go. One of my dilemmas in my long years of leaving was feeling I had to choose between intellectual honesty and the things that moved my soul, including the music I had been surrounded by my whole life.
It’s really hard. I can remember sitting in services thinking, “I no longer believe the words I’m singing, but the melody and some kind of meaning way underneath it is beautiful and rings true. Do I have to throw this chord progression out with the creed it carries?”
The answer always struck me as “probably yes.” But my feelings about it have varied widely over the years. Sometimes I’ve let the songs go with a lot of grief, sometimes with lots of rage (some songs I get almost an allergic reaction to when I hear them, because they are tainted in my mind with their history of being used as a weapon in altar calls). My favorite way of letting go of a song is when I’m able to be at peace about it, when I can feel grateful for any joy I’ve received from it in the past, give it a hug, and let it go.
I’ve now been completely out of that world for enough years to feel comfortable converting to a different religion, a socially progressive, intellectually honest tradition within that religion. I still bump into these little pockets of things from my past, like you reminding me how moved I used to be in high school by Rich Mullins’ music. It’s a good opportunity for introspection and being thankful for where I am now. My new path is so much better for my soul, my heart, my mind, my whole life. And thank goodness there’s depth and richness in the thousands-of-years-old music tradition I’m walking into.
Thanks so much for this lovely, lovely comment, which expands so well on what I was trying to say in the OP.
I have also made my way to a socially progressive, intellectually honest religious tradition. (Or, more accurately, two such traditions. I have a strong affinity for the religion of half of my family at this time in my life.) I wish you joy and peace with your new path.
And my favorite songs were “The Other Side of the World” and “Such a Thing as Glory,” along with “If I Stand.” I am genuinely grateful for the part the music played in my life when it did, and that there is still one song that speaks to my heart now.
Wow. What an awesome comment.
I don’t know if I could listen to Michael W. Smith’s _The Big Picture_ today. I had it on cassette but, when I upgraded from cassette to cds, it didn’t come along.
One of my professors told us once that growing older was like a huge hike with all kinds of stuff and equipment and, as we hiked, we would drop pieces of equipment that we found we no longer needed. “You will get lighter and lighter”, he told us.
It seemed, at the time, like something that ought to be true but… jeez… I *NEED* all of these beliefs!, I thought to myself. But as I walked, I found myself abandoning stuff I realized I no longer needed, as helpful as I thought it was at one point.
Sometimes I wonder if I need any of it.
I had that album, too. “Wired for Sound” was my favorite track.
I was still in the fundamentalist church when Amy Grant had the temerity to record a “secular” album, albeit one with at least one explicitly religious song. I still remember listening to one of her albums in the car, going somewhere with another family from church. The mother was one who played a very large role in my childhood, a truly loving and wonderful person and also one of the most judgmental people I’ve ever met. (I also remember her telling me that gays choose to be that way because of an innate tendency toward self-destruction.) And she made it plain that she questioned Ms. Grant’s religious devotion because of her decision to record an anodyne album full of light bubblegum pop tunes, just because they were no longer just about God.
Some people don’t seem to drop so much as they get older, I guess.
Los Angeles comes to mind.
I was raised there, in the suburbs of the Santa Clarita Valley. When my father was transferred to the Pacific Northwest I was devastated. At the time I loved Los Angeles with a passion, and couldn’t imagine why we’d want to live anywhere else. As soon as we moved, I started to keep track of the months left before I graduated so that I could move back. I didn’t even care what college I’d go to, so long as it was in L.A.
I no longer feel that way about Los Angeles, even though I feel great love and affection for many people who live there. But I’m no longer and LA boy, and never will be again.
I spent some time there last week, and I thoroughly enjoyed every moment. But despite having such a fabulous time, there’s no doubt in my mind I’d never willingly choose to live there again. Approaching Los Angeles from the perspective of an Oregonian, it amazes me how dully brown and flat the entire city is. The traffic can be oppressive. I was having dinner with friends on the patio of their Hollywood Hills home that overlooked the rooftop of the Magic Castle when I heard what I at first assumed were nearby fireworks. “Gun shots,” my friend explained casually. “They’re pretty common these days.”
A lot of California transplants, when they first move to Portland, treat our punitive littering laws with disdain – and I include myself in that group. I remember having an argument with a friend in my sophomore year after he got mad at me for tossing an empty coke can out of his car window. “It’s just one can,” I said as I rolled my eyes. These days, of course, the word new transplants use when asked not to litter is “nazi.” But now when I walk down Ventura Blvd., I marvel at how people there seem to be fine with discarding cans, bottle, fast food bags, sandwich crusts, cigarette butts, and all kind of other detritus on the street, sidewalk and bushes that surround them each day.
And yet I can’t deny that going to LA gives me a thrill that comes from having once thought of it as home. It can still make me vividly remember every reason I ever loved it to my very core, despite the fact that I’ve moved on to (literally) greener pastures.
Litter drives me bananas. I have been known to pick up litter I find when I’m walking somewhere, muttering murderously all the while.
Your feelings about LA are similar to how I feel about New York City, though with a bit of a difference. I love New York and will probably always think of it as my “home” in a lot of ways. But whenever I visit it now, I feel disconnected from it and know it’s not really my home any longer. (The absence of certain best friends contributes strongly to that feeling.) And I could never imagine trying to raise kids there, though I know millions do so quite well.
But would I live there again in some alternate universe wherein I was not raising children and didn’t have a great job I am loath to abandon in Massachusetts? Oh, you bet. There is no place so full of fascination and color and life for me as New York.
My neighborhood has a lot of fairly recent immigrants. This is not a “dirty immigrants” comment – immigrants are people, the same as any, and I am glad they’re here; but the countries/communities from which they come, do not have the same social norms when it comes to littering and citywide garbage pickup.
So they think nothing of throwing garbage out of cars, and piling garbage/junk on the side of the street. I imagine in their minds, this is just the way it’s done.
And it drives me nuts. Over time I’ve gotten one set of neighbors to improve significantly, but there were some tense interactions, compounded by language barriers. And I still do a lot of picking up, both on my property and in the street, and some adjacent lots.
I would imagine much of LA’s (and NY’s) littering issues are similar in this regard.
Stamp collecting. I was obsessive about it when I was younger. Now, meh. But it did teach me a lot of history and geography.
Theatre.
I love theatre, will always love theatre, and do not regret that I spent the majority of my 20s trying for a career in theatre. But the old joke remains true: “How do you make a small fortune in theatre? Answer: Start with a large one.” I just came to realize that I was not really getting anywhere and tired of submitting to the same programs/fellowships without much luck. And I also met some older artists (not necessarily theatre) that did not get out in time and were truly bitter souls living precarious existences. And I simply decided that such a life was not for me.
The people I know who can do theatre successfully can be “independently employed in the arts” because they either come from money or married into it. I grew up very comfortably but these people came from serious money. They are nice people but facts are facts.
The other tentative answer might be New York. I like San Francisco a lot but love New York and it is very easy to make me feel homesick for New York. However, I realize that life in New York involves a lot of insanity or serious changing of lifestyle choices and San Francisco is not exactly an easy market either. On Sunday, the Chronicle advertised a 2.7 million dollar mansion in Marin with an indoor pool (saltwater and solar-heated), grape arbors and lots of fruit trees. The NY Times advertised a 2.4 million dollar apartment in SOHO with one bedroom and 2.5 bathrooms. The current occupants of the apartment turned the bedroom into a dining room and the loft space into their sleeping area. Plus there is the entire New York City arms race for getting your kids into the “right” school for tons of money.
But still I love New York and always think about moving back without putting much effort into finding a job there.
BTW I’ve always been meaning to ask: You identify as Jewish IIRC and I think you said your mom was Jewish. How did you end up growing evangelical? I know some Jewish parents that married Christians and let their kids grow up Mainline Protestant and Catholic-lite. But I think they would all say Hell No to Evangelical Christianity.
You and I clearly feel similarly about New York. The price of real estate, the whole “right school” insanity, the lack of space etc etc etc make it a no-go for raising a family. But I still love it.
Yes, I’ve mentioned before that I identify as Jewish, though in a tentative, complicated way. How I came to be raised in evangelical, fundamentalist Christianity involves stories other than my own, and that I do not feel I have leave to discuss in this medium. If I’m ever lucky enough to hang out with you in person, it’s a topic I’d be happy to talk about at length, however.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/20/realestate/what-is-middle-class-in-manhattan.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
This is an article that made a lot of people angry but I think it is an interesting and possibly impossible to answer question. What does it mean to be middle-class in New York?
And I must admit that people are right to call me out every now and then on my socio-economic issues/status when I talk about the things we mentioned above. When we say it is impossible to raise kids in New York, we mean it is very hard to give them an upper-middle class lifestyle or above. If I was worth tens of millions of dollars or more I would possibly consider raising my kids in New York because it would mean living in a large apartment on the Upper West Side or a Brooklyn Brownstone. But because I am probably not going to be that wealthy in the near future, I say it is impossible to raise a family in NYC.
Yet there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of people who raise their kids in NYC without those means. What does it say about me that if I moved back East and eventually settled down and had kids, I would move to Westchester or Nassau County so I could send my kids to a good, suburban public school instead of braving navigation of the NYC public school system or sending them to an ultra-expensive private school? I’ve been challenged on my liberalism for pretty much saying if I ever have kids, I will move to the suburbs.
But you are right that I love it so.
the nyc public school system is indeed an issue.
Do you send your kid to public school? How old is he?
I knew several people in college who grew up in NYC in a socio-economic status that was middle class or somewhat above but still really not able to afford NYC Private School tuition. They solved this problem by finding housing in the few good school districts for elementary and middle school* and hoping their kids got into Bronx Science, Stuy, La Guardia, Hunter, Brooklyn Tech, or Cardozo. My friends did get into the good public high schools. Some of their siblings did not get into the good high schools and I saw a lot of parents do a mad dash at the end of middle school to find a good private high school.
*When I was 26 and very single but looking at apartments in Carroll Gardens, the real estate agent was always sure to point out which apartments were included in the good school district.
I must admit that the same thing happens in San Francisco but the scale is smaller. But plenty of people leave for the suburbs when their kids reach pre-school or above. Or the parents do the same thing as described above.
Not responding to your question per say, but I wanted to comment on Mullin’s statement about gays’ lack of love for Jesus/God.
I was raised Catholic, including attending Catholic School for the first five years, but have long since abandoned the faith. It wasn’t so much a thoughtful, conscious decision, in part because I don’t know how much I ever really believed any of it. I sort of went along with what was going on because that is what we did, but I never really had any deep conviction. The only time I really remember praying and meaning it was when my mom and stepdad would fight, a situation that can make any young child find religion fast.
Zazzy’s parents were Lutheran and Jewish. She was primarily raised Jewish, including having a Bat Mitzvah, but also had some cultural Christian elements mixed in. She too is not a woman of faith.
A good friend of mine got married a few years back. He is very religious, traditional Catholic, so much so that the priest remarked my friend asked him to break out some elements of the ceremony that he hadn’t done in years. Part of the priest’s speech included a discussion of love. He explained that the only real, true love was Catholic love, either between a Catholic man and a Catholic woman or between a Catholic and Jesus/God. I had to lean over to Zazzy and say, “Well, cancel the wedding plans. We’re not really in love.”
If I recall and interpret his comments correctly, I don’t think he was saying that gays can’t love God, but rather if they didn’t then they would join other sinners in facing God’s judgment. I took it to mean that everyone is a sinner, everyone needs God’s love and forgiveness, and gays were just like everyone else in that regard.
That is interesting and far better than my interpretation. I’ve often seen it said that to be gay, or more accurately, to indulge in being gay is to turn away from loving God. One cannot simultaneously live a “gay lifestyle” and love God; they are mutually exclusive.
If he was saying that gays are just like other folks… well, good on him!
I don’t know if he thought it possible to be both gay and love God, but I got the clear sense that he was saying gays are no different than anyone else in this fallen world, and no less deserving of God’s love or Christian compassion and respect.
Interesting. I don’t know that I’ve ever really heard that perspective offered in an environment that is rabidly promoting fundamentalist Christianity. But I might be playing to stereotypes, having generally avoided just such environments.
In my situation, I’m fairly confident that the priest was quite clear in his wording: There is one true love and it is Catholic love.
I’m still not even really sure what that means, to be perfectly honest.
There was a day when Divorce was the big deal in the church. Oh the horror, oh the clutching at pearls. Divorced people were driven away.
Then the 70s arrived and divorce went through the Evangelical community like wildfire. If they’d expelled all the divorced people the pews would have been empty. Now you find Sunday School classes for single parents in pretty much every church.
So I was getting married, did all the music myself. My wife kinda lay down on the job, I did most of the legwork for my marriage ceremony. Anyway, there was a baritone whose voice I’d always loved, hired him on to sing several pieces. He’d gotten divorced and no longer attended the church. Now I was married in my parents’ church, I was then attending a church in downtown Chicago.
What I didn’t know — was the reason for the baritone’s divorce: he’d come out as gay. And this is one of the songs he sang. Tristes sous leurs déguisements fantasques
It wasn’t until months later, when I ran into the baritone, over lunch, that he came out to me. He also told me how viciously delighted he’d been to sing that song before the church which had treated him so shabbily. There had been some ruckus with the Church Music Department but they couldn’t do anything about it, what with it being a private wedding and all.
Old prejudices die hard. But they do die.
What makes his comments so meaningful to me and remarkable was precisely how surprising and unusual they were in that particular context. Again, it was at that same conference where I was treated to faggot jokes from the stage, and it was in a similar where I heard the speaker “humorously” speak of shipping gays off to a desert island. To have said that was to deviate from the norm.
Thanks for clarifying. I clearly misunderstood the comment (and, as a result, the rest of the essay). Nuance often seems antithetical to dogma. Mr. Mullins seems to have demonstrated otherwise, even if to just one fortunate individual in the audience.
I was also raised Catholic, until I put my foot down and informed my father that I was, “Done going to Church and CCD.” My sister (who was always scared of Dad) used to just lie and say that CCD was canceled, etc. My brother was the only one of us who ever made it to Confirmation.
Part of my abrupt departure from All Things Catholic: discovery of a ‘contract’ my mother had signed when she and my father were married. My mother was a Protestant, my father a Catholic. Back in the ’50’s when they were married – it wasn’t done to marry ‘outside’ your church, and my folks were married in the same church my mother grew up in.
As a result, unless my mother signed a contract stating that, “All children born of this union shall be raised in the ideals and teachings of the Catholic Church…” they would excommunicate my father.
For me, that was the final straw for Catholicism in my life. I wanted nothing to do with a religion which (essentially) blackmails other people.
Christian Rock repelled me. Larry Norman, Randy Stonehill, Phil Keaggy, Michael W. Smith, Amy Grant, just awful. And other people were pressing me to play this stuff, oh you’re the piano guy, whip up a version of Ha Ha World and I’d say “this guy is just ripping off Neil Young and half the folkies, this is crap.”
Even when it wasn’t overtly Christian, as in the case of U2, it was crap. I sure like U2 better before Bono decided he was Jesus.
I’d play offertories with choruses arranged from old hymns and verses in quieter prog rock / Steely Dan, angular harmony style. Went over pretty well with everyone. Bach used to do the same thing in his day, work with old chorales and give them a makeover.
Christian Rock was skim milk. None of it was any good. Music can go in one of two ways: either it’s a song wrapped around a lyric, as gospel and country music and hip-hop do it, or it’s a lyric wrapped around a song, as blues and rock and jazz do it, where the vocal is just another part of the mix. Christian Rock got the order wrong. Rock can’t preach. Country can and routinely does preach because that’s the way it works on the mixer board, with VOX pushed up high and the rest of the tracks supporting it.
And all these years later, Christian Rock is still crap. Still preaching to the faithful, as ersatz and thematically plagiaristic as ever. To think, this is the same religion that gave the world Bach and Mozart, writing stirring masses and cantatas, and Duke Ellington’s Sacred Concerts, reduced to this state. It’s the Devil’s work, I tell you.
As ever when this topic arises, Hank Hill knows where it’s at:
http://youtu.be/8TsL0DO-c1E
Very good, Glyph. Zackly.
About as far as I was able to push that prog stuff was an instrumental arrangement of Genesis’ Firth of Fifth, with my Arp 2600 and bass pedals, a flute player from college and a cellist. Thereafter I was told to restrain myself a bit.
I heard they thought the scale model of Stonehenge was overkill. 😉
I was youthful and impulsive. What can I say? All that time, all those Pictish types in the youth group, all too willing to haul those monoliths….
As a kid, I followed baseball as best as I could and collected baseball cards, particularly those of my favorite slugger (at the time), Mark McGuire. College saw me drifting apart from this hobby, and I’ve never really returned to it. Sometimes, when the season is nearing the World Series, I’ll think to myself, “Hey, I wonder when baseball season starts?” But by then it’s too late and I’ll forget about getting back into it until the next year around the same time.
There was this thing in New York called the Algonquin Round Table, where, legend has it, the brightest lights of New York would get together to play poker and exchange witty banter. Some of the jokes are, indeed, legendary:
Alexander Woolcott, gloating over his latest book: “Ah, is there anything rarer than a Woolcott first edition?”
F. P. Adams: “A Woolcott second edition.”
Robert Benchley arrives late for the game. “Sorry, I’ve been rehearsing Helen Walker.” (a Broadway starlet he’d been seeing a lot of.) Adams again: “No baby talk at the table.”
Dorothy Parker, describing a brilliant if roundheeled acquaintance: “She knows sixteen languages and can’t say ‘no’ in any of them.”
And, when I was a kid, this was the greatest thing ever, like the Athens of Socrates and Plato, but funnier. What could be better than sparkling conversation with the great wits of the day?
Well, you’ve probably noticed by now that the names are pretty obscure these days. Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley may be dimly remembered, but Franklin Pierce Adams? Alexander Woolcott? Heywood Broun? They weren’t great writers and playwrights, more like second-to-third-raters with good press agents. And the repartee probably wasn’t all that sparkling, given that all the stuff about them retells the same ten jokes. (Most of which start with suspiciously unlikely straight lines.) So, little by little, as I grew up, I began to accept that that Round Table was as legendary as the other one, and the dream that someday I’d be part of something like it faded away.
Sure, you didn’t reach a coveted place of erudition, wit, and advanced-stage-alcoholism – but you got the internet, with boundless cat .gifs, Rickrolling, and countless baseless accusations of being a Nazi sympathizer.
So it’s a wash, really.
I am aware of all internet traditions.
Somewhat ironically, I was not aware of that particular internet tradition.
If it helps, I like to blog while tossing back a stiff cocktail.
so this entry should be Russell S +2?
The stellar wits of our day will become just as dated in their turn. The more trenchant the commentary on today’s problems, the less-likely it is to make sense in a decade. Even Christopher Hitchens, for all his wit and verbal panache, has become tiresome in re-quotation. What was deluxe becomes debris and nothing is as passé as yesterday’s joke.
Jokes are the last thing anyone acquires in learning a language and few are they who can tell a good one, even in their own native tongue. But Dorothy Parker’s jokes will last longer than the rest of that august company in the Algonquin Hotel. She sorta summed it up, herself, saying there’s a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.
Which means that they will be rediscovered by my hypothetical grandkids when my hypothetical grandkids are precocious humanities students at the finer liberal arts colleges of America.
I say this half in jest.
“Well, you’ve probably noticed by now that the names are pretty obscure these days. Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley may be dimly remembered, but Franklin Pierce Adams? Alexander Woolcott? Heywood Broun? They weren’t great writers and playwrights, more like second-to-third-raters with good press agents. And the repartee probably wasn’t all that sparkling, given that all the stuff about them retells the same ten jokes. (Most of which start with suspiciously unlikely straight lines.) So, little by little, as I grew up, I began to accept that that Round Table was as legendary as the other one, and the dream that someday I’d be part of something like it faded away.”
This depends on your crowd. I can find a lot of smart and precocious students at various liberal arts colleges around the country with the same yearning as you who still recognize the names.
You just need to hang out in the English department and look for nostalgic minded would be writers who dream of careers in publishing and rue wistfully for the era of Max Perkins.
Well. The deepest and most honest answer to your question – maybe rather sadder than you intended? – is that I am sorting out which of my good memories of my father may be worth keeping, even now when I have no plans to ever speak to him again, and which of them are irrevocably tainted by, well, the reasons why I won’t speak to him (which I would rather not get into). I would rather stop remembering the latter (not, like, literal memory erasure – just – I would like to stop the process of starting to remember them fondly and then feeling like I’ve been run over by a truck).
More trivially, I used to really really like a lot of cute things or extremely colorful/fantastic things that I don’t find aesthetically appealing at ALL anymore. Stuff like this or this, for example. I knew what the Important Aesthetic Judgment people would say about those things, even back then, but I just didn’t give a crap- they made me happy. And now they don’t. I enjoy other things NOW, that I didn’t then… but I wish my ability to like things was 100 percent accretive, you know? I don’t like stopping liking things. I miss the simple delight of liking the things themselves, and even more so, I miss being able to discuss them gleefully with other people who liked them.
When I leave the “Stupid” off the Question, it’s generally because the Question is likely to have answers other than the usual frivolous variety. I hope you find a way to sift through the memories of your father and find a few bits of gold that you can truly separate from all the dross.
I think a part of the problem is that it’s really hard to tell whether any given memory *is* gold, or gold-plated dross. And then if I have to even ponder that – so much of it is a revising and re-interpretation, without clear answers one way or the other – it pretty much turns it into dross, regardless. *sighs*
But I have found a few things, things that would be good memories no matter what their context or participants are, that seem safe to hold on to. So I’m sticking with those, for now.
Since I have absolutely nothing helpful to say about how to go about picking and choosing safely, perhaps the best I can do is to wish you, my friend of whom I am so fond, the very best of luck in finding a few precious things worth holding onto.
Thank you very kindly.
It helps to have a safe place to say such things in, after so many years of not saying them.
I used to decorate my dorm in anime posters. Now I look back at that in horror. Possibly largely out of wondering how much said anime posters (along with other things) prevented me from getting a girlfriend in college.
I miss the sense of being able to choose to move to a new locale just because. I’m fortunate in my life and love my kids as deeply as any good parent. But the knowledge that I can’t just drop everything and move to…Montana? Amsterdam? Maine? There’s a real loss of youthful freedom there that at times I do feel very deeply.
I suppose now is a good time to casually mention that, even if you can’t actually move here, there’s at least one nice chap who lives in Maine who would happily walk down to the dock not far from his house and fetch a lobster fresh from the boat to cook up for you should you visit.
We have talked about it and would very much like to do so. This year we’re committed to a trip back to the family in Cali, but maybe the following summer. We do love to travel, and I really want to show our kids as many different places as we can.