Part II, Day 11: On Inheritance

From today's reading from Your True Home, the Everyday Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh:

Our Inheritance.

We contain all the beautiful qualities and actions of our ancestors, and also the painful qualities.  Knowing this, we can try our best to continue what is good and beautiful in our ancestors, and we will practice to transform the violence and pain passed down to us from so many generations.  We know that we practice peace not only for ourselves, but for the benefit of all our descendants.

I used to say to people that my sister, Mira Bartok, and I are lucky because we got some of the best traits in the family gene pool, and none of the worst.  There are writers and painters and pianists and skilled gardeners and farmers and bishops and rabbis and tailors in our ancestry, but in that mix, often from the same people, are afflictions like paranoid schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, alcoholism, arrogance, and cruelty.

Hans Herr: Do I have this man's DNA?

Lately I've been reconsidering our inherited ratio of violence and pain to beauty and goodness.  I know now that the generations of people who came before us also had a lot to teach us about endurance and strength and faith, and I'm grateful for what they gave us.

Take Hans Herr, for example.  He's the patriarch on our father's side.  Born in Zurich in 1639 and persecuted for his religion, he came to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania in the early 18th century and founded the first Mennonite Church in North America.  He was 70 when he and his fellow bishops and church members and family fled Europe. They sought the help of William Penn when they looked for land, and when they arrived in the New World they had to leave behind all their worldly possessions and many of the people they loved.

Seventy must have been old in 1710.  Imagine starting over in a new country at that age, having enough faith in your beliefs to go to jail for them, to risk death for them, to leave your country for them, and then finally to travel by sea to a place where no one speaks your language, or truly wants you there, or comprehends your fondness for excessive facial hair.

Our father, his great-great-great-great-great (give or take a few) grandson, tried to disavow his ancestry and become a new man.  He told our mother that he was the descendant of Hungarian gypsies, and well into our thirties my sister and I believed that we were half-gypsy.  We would probably still believe this were it not for our half-brother from our father's first marriage, who hired a detective and came looking for us and gave us a peak at the family tree.

We had to wonder: why had our father created a more romantic story for himself?  What was he running from, and why?  His novel, Journey not to End, opens with the narrator being liberated from the camps in Belsen. What drew him to that story instead?

What's not to like about theologians and, as it turned out, Indiana chicken farmers?  In a way, Mennonites and poultry seemed as exotic to me, when I heard all this, as Hungarian gypsies.

The other story our father told, but not to us as small children, was that he may have been the product of his mother's illicit affair with a Jewish man, a traveling salesman.  He liked to tell his friends he was half-Jewish, perhaps to distance himself from the heavy Protestantism.

But maybe he really was the love child of the wandering Jew?  I'll never know.  If he is, I guess I don't get to keep the top Mennonite as my patriarch.  I live among the Amish, and it would be nice to have something in common with them.  Either way, I still get chickens.  By all accounts, our father grew up on a farm.

My father's life itself, like the novel's title, was a journey not to end: it took him from Indiana to Chicago to Los Angeles via somewhere in the European war fields, and then it ended with him dying alone, at age 60, in an apartment in New Orleans, with nothing in his possession but his VA card, five suits, and maybe (we'll never knew for sure) his upright typewriter, unfinished manuscripts, and passport.  It's highly likely that Hurricane Katrina carried his bones from the unmarked pauper's grave where he was buried off to sea.

I found out about Hans Herr, and the half-brother's family tree, just before I got tenure, when I was looking to make a life for myself up here in the North Country, a poor farming county in the far north of the empire state.  To go from thinking of myself as someone with a genetic predisposition for wandering to someone with deep roots in this land, from before it was even a nation . . . It was a marvelous thing to chew on, and I haven't finished yet.

That's me as a baby with my mother pointing to my favorite painting of my father's.  My mother and I called it "The Schmoes"

Philip Smith, master tailor.  Now: What was his surname before Ellis Island?

My young parents

On my mother's side in Belarus, there were rabbis and tailors.  My second-cousin's son Michael just sent us this picture of our great-great grandfather in his atelier.  Maybe I've added an extra "great," I don't know.

My grandmother, who was born to the Smiths, worked as the credit manager at a chemical company in Cleveland--probably one of the companies who opened their effluence straight into the Cuyahoga River and caused it to set fire.

She was good with numbers, good with bookkeeping, both of which are skills I lack.  She also played the piano, like her father had played the violin, and that gift was passed on to our mother, who would have been a concert pianist if she hadn't been stricken with mental illness and lost everything she had. 

Mira Bartok, Norma Herr, and me

But now, when I look back on our mother as a young woman trying to balance motherhood with being a wife to a writer and painter--a man who also had a serious drinking problem and who had made up a romantic life for himself to run from what he saw as drudgery, Middle American drudgery--I can't help but admire her for fostering in us, her daughters, a passion for the arts.  And while I resented our father for abandoning us to pursue his dream--wandering and writing and painting--it gave me a map for a radical way to live that wasn't readily found in Cleveland, Ohio, circa 1970s.

Who else, but from our parents, did my sister and I inherit the crazy belief that literature and art were more important than wealth and security?

Among all the crimes I accused my parents of in my worst hours, back when my mode of being was to define myself against the family I had come from, was never that they told me not to have dreams, to just go settle for something, anything, rather than pursue a life that challenges me to try and fail and pick myself up and risk failure again day after day. 

One of the ironies in our story is that my sister thinks, now, that there actually were gypsies in our ancestry.  Our mother's father, who always told us he was the youngest of 13, and was born in Macedonia, and dropped out of school in third grade to go to work, may have been from a family of Roma.  The brothers and sisters all set sail from different ports around the Mediterranean.  They all have different stories on their passports about their origin: that they are Turkish, or Bulgarian, or Greek, or Macedonian, the last of which is hybridy anyway.  I don't know if we'll ever know who these people really were.

Our grandmother married our grandfather because she was pregnant, not because she loved him.  She lived in fear of this crude, angry man who kept a rifle in the attic that we all thought he might use on us.

Chickens from Deep Root Farm

But now, when I think of him, I remember how he confessed to me once that he had a lifelong fear of chickens.  He said that when he was a child working on a farm, a chicken tried to pluck his eyes out.  I picture him now as a young boy cowering in the chicken coop, and I want to go into that coop and protect him.

Our father told our mother that his parents expected him to become a stockbroker or a minister, and that he worked his way through college plucking chickens.

Actually, we later found out, he served in World War II, and he went to college on the GI bill.

When I re-read Thich Nhat Hanh's meditation on inheritance, I think of all the different people and qualities that have come through my blood.  Story-telling in many forms.  A love of music and literature and painting.  Fear.  Religiosity.  Stubbornness.  And a love/hate relationship with poultry.

Sometimes I wish I could channel some of these people and their talents on command.

My sister plays fiddle and piano and harp and ukelele and my claim to fame, musically, is that when I dance around the house by myself, I seldom miss the beat.

In home ec, when we switched from cooking to sewing, I got a D.

Zoe and me, photo by Tara Freeman

In my family line there is also sweetness and generosity and tenderness.  My maternal grandmother's mother, I was reminded again recently by family friends, was the most kind and loving woman that anyone in their circle knew.  I only met her when I was a baby and I'm glad our lives intersected, however briefly.

And from my grandmother to my mother to both my sister and me is a straight line, a great passion that hasn't weakened with each generation and if anything, has grown stronger.

A mad love for dogs.

Part II, Day One: Another 108 Days

It's the beginning of April, the trees, confused by late March's summer weather, are budding a month early, and Zoe and I just returned from a road trip to Vermont and Massachusetts in which she:

• walked and ran five miles a day (except for driving days);
• met, hiked alongside, dined with, and had a pajama party with Milo, the golden retriever who has the same bone cancer as she does, his pack sister, Emily, their human family, James and Glenn, and meanwhile made the acquaintance of a certain wily, nimble, provocative, refrigerator-vaulting cat; 
• visited her saucy, smiley cousin Sadie, whose herding instincts take the form of tagging the humans in the flock with a rag or stick or squeaky toy on each walk, and who has been known to do a leap-frog over Zoe, horizontally; 
• had acupuncture twice, liked it, and booked in again for mid-April; 
• embarked on a new chapter of more adventurous canine dining (raw meats!  oats!  kelp!  holy health food store!); 
• chased one UPS truck to the street and then sat in smug, self-satisfaction in a pool of sunlight on my sister and brother-in-law's deck, telling us all by her haughty look: My work is done here now; 
• shoved her saucy, smiley cousin aside on the couch to find the best position for watching Michele Williams become Marilyn Monroe on family movie night; 
• and returned home to the North Country to assume her favorite position on the deck guarding the house and ruling the people inside it.

Zoe and I agree: it feels good to be home again.

And it feels good to be back on the beat, writing about daily life, even if this new season will definitely challenge my dog and my husband and me to be stronger than we thought we were, because spring has sprung with much uncertainty.

For today's meditation, I opened up to this teaching from Your True Home, the Everyday Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh:

We all feel insecure.  We don't know what the future holds: accidents happen, a loved one may suddenly be struck by an incurable disease and die, and we are not sure if we'll be alive tomorrow.  This is all part of impermanence, and this feeling of insecurity can make us suffer.

How can we face this feeling?  What is our practice?  I think living deeply in the moment is what we have to learn and practice so we can face this feeling of insecurity.  We have to handle the present moment well.  We live deeply in the present moment so that in the future we will have no regrets.  We are aware that both we and the person in front of us are alive.  We cherish the moment and do whatever we can to make life meaningful and to make him happy in this moment.

Gentle reader, this is my mission for the next 108 posts (which might not happen on 108 consecutive days; I'm giving myself a little leeway this time . . . )  To cherish the moment and do what I can to make life meaningful for my dog, myself, and our little pack, even as Zoe's future is uncertain.

We know that the nodules in her lung were shrinking during most of the winter, when I began writing "Winter with Zoe," and then they got a little bigger as we began a new season and a new kind of chemotherapy treatment.

But today, as I write, she is very much alive.  Her coat is shining, her eyes are bright, and she is on an hour-long walk with her favorite beagle and her favorite golden retriever, and three of her favorite men, including my husband: what we refer to around here as the gentlemen's walk.  Before she left a few minutes ago, she ate her new food with gusto, then tossed around the squeaky beaver, looking murderous and delighted at once.  She's baaaaack, and she's ready for a good Sunday, and she might even con us into doing something foolish, something April foolish, on her behalf.

I have a backlog of stories to share with you.  I look forward to taking this ride with you again, gentle reader, and I wish you a most relaxing Sunday and start to the new month. 

Day 103: A Tale of Two Mondays

Part I      The Monday before Spring Break:  Putting Mindfulness to the Test

So I've been trying to be totally here now, and that means focusing my attention not just on the obvious things that require complete concentration, like driving and writing, but mundane tasks where it is easy to drift off: washing the dishes, chopping carrots, doing laundry, getting mail at the post office, that sort of thing.

Early on I wrote a post, which you can find here, a taking-out-the-trash meditation, courtesy of Thich Nhat Hanh from You are Here.  I try to employ this helpful mantra on garbage day:

"Flowers and garbage are both organic in nature.  So looking deeply into the nature of a flower, you can see the presence of the compost and the garbage.  The flower is also going to turn into garbage, but don't be afraid!  You are a gardener, and you have in your hands the power to transform garbage into flowers, into fruit, into vegetables.  You don't throw anything away, because you are not afraid of garbage.  Your hands are capable of transforming it into flowers, or lettuce, or cucumbers.

"The same is true of your happiness and your sorrow.  Sorrow, fear, and depression are all a kind of garbage.  These bits of garbage are part of real life, and we must look deeply into their nature.  You can practice in order to turn these bits of garbage into flowers.  It is not only your love that is organic; your hate is, too.  So you should not throw anything out.  All you have to do is learn how to transform your garbage into flowers."

But what would Thich Nhat Hanh say about our problem with our neighbors, who give us their garbage?  Zen task of the morning: How to bring mindfulness to the dirty ugly truth that someone is putting trash in our bin and expecting us to take care of it?

We live on a busy road in a small village and over the years we've had to contend with the spectacle of all kinds of nasty stuff tossed onto our lawn: McDonald's cups, coke bottles, empty cigarette cartons.  And then there was the notorious drive-by diapering.  Don't ask.

But now we have a new problem, as of 2012.  We have "neighbors"--I use this term loosely because I know our neighbors across the street and next door, and they are all courteous, rules-playing, generous people who are quite clearly not the culprits here--who leave trash in our bins and expect us to not only pay for it, but bag it for them.

Well, the first time it was in a bag--one of the black bags that had just been outlawed by New York State.  We had just bought clear bags for our garbage, and our garbage-donors hadn't.  So I transferred the contents of their very large, heavy black bag into one of our new clear ones, and then, of course, because it was as tall as I am, and maybe also because I wasn't being mindful enough, it broke, and their garbage and I bonded in a very intimate way.  On my hands, down my legs, were spilled sodas, cigarette butts, and something viscous and sweet-smelling like pudding or melted ice cream.

Lately the trash just comes in loose shopping bags from the Price Chopper.

"Maybe if you pay close attention, you'll find a bill or something, that has their address," my husband told me.  He had seen the garbage earlier and planned to deal with it after the dog walk without telling me, but then his car died and I had to go fetch Zoe and hand him his wallet while he called AAA.

So here is my test.  Or course I'm pissed off, but I also don't want to let it wreck my morning.  I have work to do.  So I behold the bags.  Why does this garbage donation feel particularly hostile?  Inside the top bag is a big wad of human hair.  Long and black.  And some bloodied Q-tips.  Where have those Q-tips been?

I think, well, this is organic material.  It belonged to a living human being with real life human problems, including economic ones.  I certainly can relate to that one.  And I believe garbage removal should be paid for by our taxes.  I don't think it should be a luxury.  So since I'm more well off in my current life than my neighbor, I can be his or her benefactor this one time.

I think about Thich Nhat Hanh, and how the flowers become garbage, and the lettuce and cucumbers were in the compost.  But the rest of the bag contains a giant soda bottle that needs to go to recyclables (my donor expects me to sort his trash too, you see), and junk food detritus: the styrofoam Chinese to-go box, the Lucky Charms box (which should also be sorted into the paper bag, but I'm cheating now), the pizza box (that too?  I've never been sure about pizza boxes if they have pizza on them), and juice boxes.

The detritus of my neighbors' weekend is in my hands.  I'm not wearing gloves, so this feels all the more intimate.

I inhale and I exhale.  I observe all kinds of snarky class judgments rising to the surface without judging them.  Thoughts like, You could save money by cooking real food, and maybe you could afford garbage bags.  I would be happy to help you out here if I didn't have to bag your trash for you, Mr. or Ms. Long Black Hair Lucky Charms.  Maybe you would feel better, and have the energy to be doing this job yourself, if you didn't eat gross stuff all the time.

There it is out on the road, a temptation to those in need.  Wheel it in, Nat!

I was raised by a Welfare mom, but there was a garbage service in our building and we didn't have to pay for it. Would my mother have slipped out under cover of night and put our trash into other people's bins if we didn't have this service?  You bet.  We do what we do to survive.

I inhale and exhale.  Then I decide to mix my donor's trash with ours into a single bag so as to save not only on our bill but on the plastic that goes into the landfill.  That is the ultimate fusing.  Lucky Charms falls next to the empty bag of Zoe's food.  She needs all the luck she can get, so I'll take it where I can.

But now I'm onto the next stage of mindfulness.  To remember to wheel in our garbage bin, after the collectors have come for it, so that we don't have to go through this exercise every single week.

My view every morning as I wrote last week

Namaste, my friends.

Sweet Interlude on the Beach:

Part II    Putting Mindfulness to the Test, Two Mondays Later

We drove home from North Carolina to progressively warmer weather.  It was 65 when we took our last beach walk, and we returned to 77 degrees.

While we were gone, someone came and stole winter from us.  There is no snow anywhere to be found.

The dog runs through the yard looking for it.

The house is clean, and since we made no garbage this week, we have nothing to wheel out, and nothing to tempt the local garbage donors.

I wake Monday at 6 to walk to the studio for meditation and writing, with nothing to try not to grumble over, nothing to rise above, nothing to transcend.  Just a morning like any other: pink sky, still wind, and the river, my old friend, flowing past the house in no hurry to go anywhere or be anything other than what it is.