Chuck Dimond

The stories of French arrogance are legion and disparagement is nearly automatic among Americans.  While I had one awful experience in Budapest at the hands of a man from France, to me the French are almost always delightful. From servers in restaurants to drivers on French roads I’ve encountered patience and class.  I’ve called on their kindness many times and they’ve responded.  That I don’t speak their language and so many of them speak mine deepens the gratitude.

Arriving in Nice at midnight and driving for the first time in Europe was harrowing.  Roads must have been designed with the intent to confuse and endanger.  A night clerk at a hotel we had not booked saved our lives as she directed us to the one we did.

I can now say though that I have driven where they know how.  The French expressways, while expensive, are a marvel.  The passing lane is literally that.  Moving at fairly high speeds—130 kilometers (80 miles an hour)—you flow.  There is almost always a lane to pass.  Drivers, whether fast or slow, simply do not camp in the high speed lane.  Similar principles cause traffic to flow in town.  Aggressive movement but with the absence of road rage.

In Avignon Monday the cyber café came to a standstill as the manager and one of her English-speaking customers studied and learned correct directions to our hotel.   Their caring set the tone for a sweet overnight visit to Avignon and its Palais des Papes.

Tuesday morning included a drive-by through Chateaux-du-Pape.  There was a minor epiphany:  this is where we will stay in the future.  The village that carries the name of the district is beautiful.  Beauty and great wine—what more could one ask from life.  Time on the water perhaps.

For us, Le Lavandou delivers.  Home for the next two days it is rest and restoration on the coast of France in preparation for Italy.

We pass our time in a room with a view of the Mediterranean.  Cross a narrow street and we’re at a most beautiful beach.  Life is full.

My guess is that if you spoke the name Gaudi most Americans would think you are talking about a former sportscaster.  Travel to Barcelona and stand before Sagrada Familia and the world changes.  Experiencing Antoni Gaudi’s unfinished church is a spiritual passage.  Dedicated to an architecture drawing its forms, lines and structure from nature Gaudi shook the world in the early 1900s.  This Frank Lloyd Wright fan of straight, clean lines and mission furniture now lives in an expanded world.

In pre-trip planning with a widely traveled friend the line emerged, “Barcelona is all about Gaudi.”  My impressions take in more, of course, as did hers, but Gaudi startles my world perspective.  His work takes my breath away.  An enormous life labor captures purity within nature.  Art is not confined to canvas.

As Italy and France freaks, Elizabeth and I walk Barcelona with a prejudice.  Its sweet nesting on the Mediterranean soothes.  Just as we think we have a sense of this city we round a corner and are charmed by yet a new character.

Catalunya and La Rambla, where we’re staying, make New York Christmas shopping weekend seem sparsely populated.  Young, beautiful people own its streets.  There is confidence bordering on arrogance.  Knowing experience will temper it doesn’t alter knowing that the beauty of this place earns arrogance.

Tomorrow is the Picasso museum and a flight to Southern France.  Immersed in beauty we move with humility.

Its hold is instant.  Enter New Mexico and life changes.  Ancient land.  Deep turquoise sky.  Pinons and pine; oak and aspen.  Wind caressing spring filled streambeds.  Red to near white clay color the earth.  Native American, Hispanic and Anglo share place unlike any other.  The spirit rises standing within life, past and present.

Tony Hillerman’s collection of the essays of artists is called The Spell of New Mexico.  My favorite from D.H. Lawrence:  “…the moment I saw the brilliant, proud morning shine high up over the deserts of Santa Fe, something stood still in my world, and I started to attend.  There was a certain magnificence in the high-up day, a certain eagle-like royalty…  In the magnificent fierce morning of New Mexico one sprang awake, a new part of the soul woke up suddenly, and the old world gave way to a new.”

Elizabeth and I travel to New Mexico with intent.  Look at possible housing.  Consider possible neighborhood.  Force the comparison.

Mind, body and grandchildren in and near Portland.  Soul in New Mexico.  Thinking choice possible begins a fool’s journey.  But they are among my favorite.  Embrace the fool within and learn.

Present life roots in the physical-mind and body.  The spirit knows not the constraint of time and geography.  Once at home, always at home.  The soul is never really absent from home.

Ancient land.

Deep turquoise sky.

Pinons and pine; oak and aspen.

Wind caressing spring filled streambeds.

Red to near white clay color the earth.

Native American, Hispanic and Anglo share place unlike any other.

The spirit rises standing within life, past and present.

The boys will turn two 12 days apart this September.  At the end of an introductory afternoon and evening they hug good night.  Isaiah and Riley punctuate an end to family separation.  Opportunity to define connections lays before the 15 aunts, uncles and cousins.  A gift unopened for some 40 years.

There is a Christian teaching that the most painful fate is separation from God.  Created in his image our human separations carry a remarkable pain.

My brother and I are the remaining members of our family.  Our grown children are meeting for the first time.  Reasons why are wrapped in human complexity revealed, if at all, in different shapes and forms to different perspectives.  Exploration is tricky.

Elizabeth has been at a conference in Denver all week.  Arriving to our empty home one retrieved voice mail startles.  “Call Austin.  It’s an emergency.”  Numerous possibilities flash.  All are bad.  None even close to forecasting the scrambled life that soon will be mine.

The answering voice is calm, measured, distant.  “There was a terrible car accident this morning. Willam is going to be OK.  He’s here at Austin General.  But Chuck, Aletha didn’t make it.”

There is no proper way to learn your 2-year-old grandson lives though injured, but your 30-year-old daughter is dead.  The soul simply contracts.  Disbelief offers temporary, weak shelter.  The result is some hollow, automatic, unremembered response offered to the voice from Austin.

In a kind of slow motion my parts separate in protective disconnection.  The silence of my house where Aletha and I sat on the balcony and filled past estrangement with coffee, cigarettes and confession overwhelms.  I fill it with Aletha’s suggestion when once I described the music experience I wanted.  Sarah McLachlan, she said.  Sarah’s lament filled the space:  “Hold on.  Hold on to yourself.  This is gonna hurt like hell.”

Alcohol slowly flowing to the stomach convinces in its journey.  This isn’t real.  I redial the Austin number.  “Did you just call me and say that Aletha died this morning?”

“Yes, Chuck, I did.”

This is how Aletha physically disappeared from my life.  She remains in every other way.  In my mind.  In my heart.  In my soul.

We she left me to walk with an unhealed wound—she left a testament to our ability to survive an experience beyond our capacity.  Aletha continues to nourish.  Her gift of unconditional love a harmonious, continuous vibration.

There is so much lost by so many:  jobs, homes, health insurance.  Our shared risk extends beyond the individual to reach the world’s financial system and all it supports.  Reality creates for all an inalienable right for fear.  It hangs in the air like burned chicken feathers.  Yet, in my experience, fear does not define this time.

There is depression.  My friends in the public sector—mostly focused on the poor experience the despair that leaves them weary.  No one is untouched by the depth of the danger.  But fear does not govern those I know.

Over dinner last Friday a friend spoke of opportunity.  The American economy is the greatest in the history of the world.  It will not fail.  Opportunity surrounds.

My son and daughter-in-law reconfigure childcare.  My mother-in-law tries to balance the cost of health insurance against her commitment to family.  My sister-in-law teaches her children the requirements of shrinking income.  My stepdaughter tightens her belt and looks for a less expensive place to live.  All these common acts unfold in the midst of the daily challenge of life for all.

Perhaps the explanation from the author Molly Ferguson is why.  “Fear is a question:  What are you afraid of and why?  Just as the seed of health is an illness, because illness contains information, your fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if you explore them.”

I read a simple story about a man who lost a high paying job.  Free-lancing brings home a third of what he earned before.  There is no health insurance and he prays his health holds.  I am blessed, he says.  His conclusion is common among those bruised by hard times.

I do not travel this time with Pollyannas.  Dread and realism walk their streets.  Fear is in the air, but it does not own.  Perhaps Mark Twain understood: “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about my grandparents.  Because of them my earliest years unfolded in a parallel universe to the sometimes harshness of the times.  They lived in a present tense world.  The boundaries marked by love, humor, freedom and forgiveness.  They didn’t plan.  Life unfolded with a natural rhythm.  Their actions removed all doubt about the depth of their character.

Lena Rebecca McCoy Haller so loved her grand children we all knew deep in our hearts that we were her favorite.  Many long, late night arguments among the cousins persuaded no one.  Family did not claim all her caring.  When a teen-ager turned up pregnant in the small Nebraska town some of the ladies circulated a petition encouraging the girl to leave.  My grandmother ran them off her front porch with a broom.

It was a farming town.  Most worked long, hard and constantly to expand their acreage.  Not Charles Francis Haller.  His small farm provided a comfortable living for the family.  The hours not required to grow more crops were spent serving his community as volunteer fireman, policeman and mayor.  When he died, the entire town closed for the service.

There is an old jar filled with Nebraska wheat on a shelf in my bookcase.  Scratched in its silver lid is “CH ‘48.”  It was the year he grew his first crop after inheriting the farm from his father.  That jar is a prized possession.

Their deaths broke our family circle in many ways.  The years of a connected family spending holidays and vacations together ended.  Gone with the parallel universe Charlie and Lena created for us.

I think about my grandparents often.  Their strength facing good and bad times; their goodness spread upon the world.  I’m back in the middle of a warm summer day where laughter drifts in the air.

When I was five my older brother told me tangerines grow under the sea and all those seeds are really fish eggs.  Not another tangerine passed my lips in childhood.

Max Leon had the grace to wait till I was a bit older before informing me that I have an egghead.  Clearly, his meaning wasn’t that I am an intellectual.  Whether as a child or adult you consider what you want to look like, egghead doesn’t occur to the normal person.

My older brother also taught me other things.  What caused the pain on the faces of two young black playmates in a small Kansas town when I blurted out the stupid rhyme “two against one is N-word fun.”  In 1956 he was my political guide as John Fitzgerald Kennedy stepped onto the stage at the Democratic National Convention.  We shared the excitement of change in America.

Through my early life I was the sponge to his lessons.  Sometimes together as when we joined to face down some rock throwing neighbor boys.  Sometimes not.  He stood alone in his early 20s to openly acknowledge that he was gay.  On a 1960s Albuquerque street he was beaten by a group of thugs in a passing car as he walked alone.  He passed into adulthood in a hostile land seeking an identity he could accept.

His physical beauty and charisma charmed.  Women swooned as they fought to be his reformer.  My egghead grew, fed by jealousy.

In early 1985 my life was good.  I was the political reporter for KOIN-TV.  While covering the Oregon Legislature the call came from my mother.  “Your brother has AIDS.”  I was frozen by the words that pronounced his death sentence.  The execution took 14 months.  Months consumed with crippling diseases, fighting to stay alive, consenting to death.

In the evening of May 27, 1986, Max Leon said simply, “It’s over.”  He told me how good a person I had been, and passed into a coma.  Hours later, sitting in the room as his chosen witness my brother raised his hand in farewell.  He stopped breathing.

His physical absence is always profound.  Yet as I confront the challenges of my life he is always there.  Teaching.  Encouraging.  Loving.

“In family, nothing is beyond forgiveness.”  Already in an emotional state as I watch the movie Ebb Tide, the words startle me.  The internal debate erupts but is quickly over-run as my perspective turns away from the other and toward me and I consider whether to be for or against myself.

Choosing Family as a content area is a gutsy call.  Nothing in my personal life has so challenged, befuddled and yet defined me.   Blood family, blended family, chosen family—it is all complicated and the territory is filled with land mines.  Usually you’ve buried them all yourself.  And damn it you no longer have the map.  You can walk very, very carefully for the rest of your life or just get used to the occasional loss of limb.

It all began in the complex relationship with my parents.  I can testify to the difficulties of the middle child.  You watch as some in that big extended family grab on to the oldest and others are thrilled with the youngest.  Rarely did anyone choose the middle.  You wonder whether it’s a judgment about you or just the random placement you have in the series.  Generally, you conclude it’s the former.  Nearly all the negative stuff ends up aimed straight at your own heart.

All the raw emotions of parent-child experience changed radically and suddenly for me when my parents died.  My father took his last labored breath over five years ago.  My mother died with no warning one early August morning in 2008.  Taking their leave they kindly packed and took with them the more hurtful memories.  As I think about them now, see their faces in the clouds, or feel a gentle chiding when I have an especially ungracious thought about someone, it is with a deep knowing of the love they hold for me.

The challenges coming in a form the size of mountains are not about the acts of others.  They are about my own.  As I write in this content area, I’ll protect the innocent, but seek to shed light.  If it doesn’t illuminate I’ll not press the publish button.

“In family, nothing is beyond forgiveness.”  Not forgotten, but forgiven in the classic sense:  to give as before.  My internal debate on the merits of the idea have fully given way to a deep personal hope/prayer—that it is true.