Out of Our Past Lives

OUT OF OUR PAST LIVES

Copyright © 2014 Elizabeth Léonie Simpson, Editor.

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-3156-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-3157-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014906742

iUniverse rev. date: 04/24/2014

Acknowledgements

Many people have contributed to this book. Most important of all are those latest residents of the Saratoga Retirement Community in Saratoga, California whose stories are shared here.

Judith Corney and Margaret White have spent precious time proof-reading the completed manuscript. Several avid practitioners offered good photographs for the cover; Bill Friedrichs’ colorful view was selected.

This collection could not have been assembled without the continual, comprehensive assistance of my step-son, Peter Wurr, who shares a quite incredibly close relationship with my computer.

To the Reader Pray then, take care, that tak’st my book in hand, To read it well; that is, to understand.

Ben Jonson (1573-1637)

Contents

Reader’s Guide

Alone by Canoe

Alan Corney

A Kansas Beginning

Lou Yabroff

Three Very Happy Years in a Small Town

Alfreda Mastman

Beverly’s Hilton, I-VI

Bev and Bob Avery

Living Overseas as a Physical Therapist

Barbara Merrill

Summers on the Family Farm

Richard Roof

A Weatherman’s World

Jim Kistler

Why I Remain an Alien

John Price

Summarizing a Life

Don Schmidek (with Jan Schmidek)

Chanel No. 5

Judith Oppenheimer

Tales from Oz

Horace Osgood Hayes

My Nursing Career

Sheila Gault

As Time Goes By

Jerry Daniels

The Dream

Betty Bocks

A Dam Story

Kutlu Enver Doluca

On Becoming a Mother

Judith Oppenheimer

Radio West

Jocelyn Orr

Da Ultimate Yoke (The Ultimate Joke)

Joanne Szybalski

Summers with Gagi

Bill Friedrichs

Two Trips Around the World: A Wanderer’s Story

Jim White

A Singer’s Tale

June Clodius

A Niagara Experience

Isik Doluca

Notes on Being an Actress

Esther Wedner

Travels with Sally and Lee Ann

Sally Ravel and Lee Ann Wolfe

Contributors

Reader’s Guide

Reader, who are we who live in this beautiful, accessible retirement community? The simple answer is: a diverse lot. Are you familiar with your neighbors? We have come to know each other by dining, walking, exercising (in the pool and out), game-playing, busing to theater, concerts, and lectures, as well as through committee participation. But how well are we acquainted? Should we not know each other better? Do I have the skill and the power to guide you into this somewhat alien territory?

I would like to think that I am a modern Scheherazade, not one spinning her tales to entertain a powerful, threatening ruler and save her life. Still, I have other, inclusive reasons for putting this book together. My collection, I like to think, has been made with many, possibly equally, positive motives. These books, now three including this one, are intended for all of us to be doorways into inner, private rooms decorated by every writer and shared by all who care to enter. Here are memories we have lived with for, if I want to understand who I am today, I need to know who I was in the past.

Recollection provides identity, discovery, not comparison or even a report of reality. What it brings is an orderly reconstruction of the past, something requiring negotiation, not a microcopy, that is so individual that we may never know which part of it is true or which part of it is false. Sometimes when the writer sits down to record a personal history it comes out rushing like a commercial truck on a superhighway. We must halt the rush and select questions to ask the driver such as, should only what is praising or profitable be shared with others? What about the frightening, penetrating events that have shaped our way of thinking? Of behaving? Some happenings are subject to abandonment like an unwanted orphan child but they are part of the richness we own.

Is this type of neglect the outcome of faulty memory or deliberate distortion? Do records of the self have to be entirely true? Can they be? Is it possible for the person to select out what he or she would like to remember? Images in the mind come accompanied by captions learned in the social world. They supply the need for order, continuity, and consistency. The best recollections are both ambiguous and confusing and therefore open to interpretation by the person who has them. In short, perhaps that which is remembered needs to be authentic, but not necessarily accurate.

We pursue reality without any real hope of catching up with it entirely. And as we encounter its shadow and its light, we alter our perceptions and our selves are re-made. Memory is a singular construction taken from what matters to each of us. It is not an unaltered videotape, a fixed copy passed from human to human but, rather, a unique creation that is the outcome of millions of recorded sources. The social cohesion needed in any group is ornamented by recurring individuality.

Our past comes with us wherever we go, but it is not necessarily presented as front page news. Nor should it be. We have an enduring privilege in the right of choice, of selection, in how we present ourselves to others, when and where. The truth is that the memory behind that selection is the equivalent of a visit to a flea market laid out not wholly but in multiple parts, to be picked over and examined. Subject to the deterioration of time, its aspects may be invested with imagination or shaped by selective erosion. Flea markets are laden with memories. These gathered bits and pieces of arts and crafts are genuine, not attempts to imitate or outdo the lives of others. For Chinese scholars, the importance of preservation of the past was built into a proverb: The palest ink is better than the best memory.

The need to keep something of our past originates less in the brain’s work than in that of the heart’s translucent recreation, embracing what we have been and done. Memory is the mortar between events of experience, providing evidence that something happened—indeed, whether it did or not. We have the right to be the novelists of the self—a right José Ortega y Gasset called ontological privilege.

By necessity, any writing or thinking about the past is done a posteriori. The writer is the present person, not the one being described imaginatively. Nor was the thinker ever exactly that person. Memory alone cannot be held to account for what is reproduced upon the written page in the name of personal retrospection or recall. But does it matter? Is it always important for the reader or the listener to know whether the tale constructed is a conscientious report, an embroidered or exaggerated truth, or an interesting but misleading story?

Retrospection is a powerful force—if it is healthy and sound and if it is given the opportunity for expression. Sharing memories as, for example, when biography or autobiography serve as acts of remembrance, accomplishes what other, more transient, forms of memorial never can: the preservation of a vanished life. Such a rendering endures as a monument, evocation, explanation, and summary. But, although the package may be closed, it is still accessible for revision at a later date.

Sharing memories in person, agreeing on the grand image of the past, as friends, family, or the members of a larger society have always done, is a comforting, self-validating process. Memory is more than an ornament; it is a necessary part of the structure of the human organism. It permits the individual not simply to travel in time but to play on the past as if it were an accordion, expanding and collapsing it at will, altering its timbre, volume, and rhythm, together with its range of feeling. Whenever this takes place, it is neither chronology nor factual exactitude which gives importance to memory. It is meaning.

That meaning is drawn from a web of myth woven from belief and hope and applied in actions both social and personal. When conflict arises between distinct and differing realities, simple but valuable mechanisms are used to respond to the dissonance which occurs. Basic among these are the capacity to forget and its alternative, the ability to alter the past—to re-write history of the social world or the person. These may be either conscious, deliberate tactics, or unconscious ones occurring automatically through the internal defense mechanism that Sigmund Freud called repression.

This collection of essays presents many aspects of remembering. It is a book for gourmet tasting, not the satisfaction of ravenous hunger. If you take the editor’s advice, you will savor, not try to devour.

The healthy life, the valued life, is bound by three dimensions. It is a life in which every present moment holds both memory and anticipation. Past, present, and future co-exist. Each has its depth and form, but they are not necessarily sequential or linear. Living in the present alone might be like being stranded on a small island. Though its resources may be plentiful and varied, in a short time they will become too familiar, too narrow, and too restrictive. The present is here, surrounding us at all times, not to be avoided and not to be separated completely either from yesterday or the tomorrow for which hopes, plans, and expectations already exist. These properties of time merge; their boundaries are not fixed, and the individual living through them is a wanderer whose path is not entirely self-chosen. In each mind, formless moment succeeds fulfilled moment, amorphous year succeeds the reality of completed year. At life’s end, the third dimension of anticipation shrinks, inevitably foreshortened by the awareness of death’s imminence.

Given the wide range of backgrounds (rural and urban, American and foreign), interests, and variety of experiences, our open community—an elaborate polyglot—is available for enduring exploration. Here we are all essayists (and two are poets). Some have been physical adventurers: by canoe or hitchhiking around the world. Some have written of the meaning their careers or amateur ventures have given to their lives (the building of dams, physical therapy applied around the world, nursing, and acting.)

Many other ways of life and thinking are exhibited in these pages to inform and entertain you.

At the age of 40, an unmarried physician decided to adopt a newborn and raise him alone to maturity. The power of loved family members (especially a grandmother with a special nickname or a family farmer), friendship with a man from Washington state who became internationally famous, and the gift of money to support esthetic interests are described by those touched by these influences. Here life in small groups is explored—whether it is growing up in a Midwest farm town or becoming participant in the training of doctors in a famous clinic.

Told by those who have lived through them, not all of these accounts are completely happy ones. Scarred by fire as a child, a successful grandmother still remembers her pain and her long fear of being ignored or disliked. Smitten with cancer, a singer finds a religious message which bolsters her strength. Two women who have collected data for a book they were writing together lose a year’s work on their indexed material when heaving mountains bring on a computer crash. A small boy, visiting with his parents at Niagara Falls, disappears into a crowd. (This one ends with mutual joy.)

All these tales are shared case histories, living memories and not ones that have vanished. For each of us our recollections are windows to the past, revisiting occasions that may be welcomed or rejected, clarifying, or an enduring painful, ugly blot upon nearer scenery. In all of human life, the process of remembrance has an essential dual function, both for you, the reader as well as the writer, and for society. It provides continuity in time for the thought and feeling processes of distinct, observing persons. For the individual, memory is a transaction between personal history and development. The past, as it is recalled, changes the way in which the person develops, the route taken, as well as the destination.

But memory also provides a fluctuating center for the establishment and maintenance of social groups. All such groups—families, friends, societies, and nations—have aspects of memory in common with the individuals who comprise them. In all cases, more is retained than is readily available, useful, or valued. Mechanisms of selection and repression are ours to use to cull out what is not wanted or even acknowledged and to emphasize a past which enhances the present with its possibilities for the direction or ornamentation of the future. Within nations, this process is often done at the conscious level, e. g., the Japanese produced textbooks which greatly understated their role in World War II. This type of distortion is not at all exclusive to Japan; every society has a preferred collection of historical facts chosen to be presented and taught to forthcoming generations. Until recently, textbooks in the United States did not discuss the deceits and ravages perpetrated against native American tribes whose lands were expropriated. History books provided by the European countries described the plundering of raw materials from their colonies and their use as captive markets as bringing enlightenment, peace, and justice—a process piously known as assuming the white man’s burden.

The freedom to determine what happens next is limited at any stage of life—a limitation that becomes increasingly obvious over the passage of time. It is true, as the poet Robert Burns wrote, that The best laid schemes o’mice and men/Gang aft a-glay’ Of the three time fields of life, it is the past alone that can be fully controlled. Why? Because it alone can be recalled and