Expressing thanks -- belatedly

The dog days of August aren't ordinarily days of Thanksgiving and, as I approach 85, they seem decidedly tardy to do what I'd like to do today -- express my gratitude to many whom, besides my family, have given me inspiration and insight to wind along the merry path of life:

I can't help but start with my father. At the age of 12, I was having emergeny surgery in a Dickinson, N.D., hospital. Apparently, I was overdosed with anesthetic. The nuns who were nurses came running out, crying, "We need a priest." I don't know if he used any profanity in replying, but he suggested, "Just get another doctor in there!"

In grade school, Mabel Planer, from Brainerd, Minn., lent her skills to carrying me through junior high in Mott, N.D., with high grades and current encouragement. Why do we always wait until it's too late to get these messages to them?

In high school, Allen Williams, counselor for the Albuquerque High Record, coached me from my first appointment as sophomore reporter (I had to give up drumming in the band to take it), though sports editor up to editor in my senior year -- basic training for my long wished-for career in newspapering. And there was Gertrude McGowan, who liked my essay on, "Driving in the City -- the Land of Dented Fenders," that kicked my tender ego upstairs again.

Colleg professors at the University of New Mexico took it from there. Dudley Wynn, who had left a university position in the east to recover from tuberculosois in New Mexico's sun, taught English literature with special talent in portraying the beauty of poetry. But when the final examination came along, I had to write an essay on what I''d learned.

I filled an entire notebook with the glories of the English countryside, extolling the land from that produced its talent -- but very little of what I'd learned in his class. Wynn cracked that the writing was pretty good -- but it went around the purpose of the essay wonderfully. Thus, he inspired even as he set me straight on how beating around the bush usuallly doesn't produce results.

Compare that with another professor, a stuffed-shirt fellow teaching neo-classical English lieteerature. I had arrived at his classroom late -- as usual -- one morning. When I sat in a folded chair, it collapsed and shot straight up the aisle to his desk I got my first "F" grade at the end of six weeks. I protested with a unique apology. Since I was working my way through college as the sports editor of The Albuquerque Journal, I was often late in getting home at night and had little time to study.

His expression changed magnificently. I was a writer! My grades improved perceptively thereafter. Oh, what fools these mortals be!

Editor H. P. Pickrell, at The Journal, had given me a big boost when he hired me on to the paper after I had covered my high school graduation night for him. Sittingthere in my mortarboard hat, I took copious notes from the longest and dryest graduation night address you could imagine. I had my notes folded properly as I knew reporters did it, and eked out five or six paragaphs that got into print. That did it.

When I heard of the man, Heywood Broun, who organized the Newspaper Guild, another reporter from the opopositiosition paper and I put together a meeting for all reporters at the Franciscan Hotel for a Sunday when no one would be working. Unfortunately, the management of the two newspapers called a staff meeting at the newwspaper offices for the same hour.

Alas, only the two of us showed up to organize the Guild. When my editor heard about my involvement in it, it broke his heart after all he'd done for me. To make up for it, he gave me a raise -- from $5 a week to $10 -- and evening working hours so I could go to college in the fall.

He's the same editor who, eight years later, was again saddened when I was offered a job on the Los Angeles Daily News for $77.50 a week while I was only making $40 at The Journal. He offered to meet the Daily News figure. I thanked him but declined. The News had a Guild. I've been an advocate of unions ever since.

The Daily News was a newspaperman's newspaper. Phil Garrison, who had been my PR officer in the Air Corps, offered me the job in the summer of 1946. I had another offer to join a publicity firm in New York City. I compared the two. In New York, I would have made far more money first -- and died earlier from ulcers. That's the way I looked at it.

The News was exhiliarating. And Garrison was good to me, although he differed from my politics. "A Socialist," he said, "is a Communist with a wife and two children." That well described me, I suppose. Although I saw a line that divides Socialism from Communism whether I had a wife and two children or not.

In the fading days as the newspaper was headed for bankruptcy, I said it would be a "cold day in hell" before I would go to work for Norman Chandler at the L,A. Times - Mirror. It was the coldest day of December, 1944, when I signed up with The Mirror, Chandler's afternoon newspaper, and found another man to express gratitude here: Managing Editor Ed Murray, who ran such a a liberally-bent tab that the Chandlers finally let him go.

Murry had me covering visiting delegations from the Soviet Union so often that I enrolled in a Russian language class to assist in my work. I learned how to ask where the bathroom was and when dinner would be served, but the responses often came to me in Spanish instead of Russian.

Once I ran into him when a p.r. man for a Skid Row property owner wanted to give me $500 to keep his boss' name out of an exposè another reporter and I were writing. Murray only laughed at me and sent me back to work. The next day the p.r. man came back again and went into Murray's office.

Raging Ed hustled the guy alll the way out of the cityroom to the enjoyment of all of us.

Ed is in the same class as Frank McCulloch, my managing editor at the L.A. Times after The Mireror collapsed. Frank is the guy who came to me and said, "We've done a good job covering the racial turmoil in Mississipi and Alabama, but what are we doing in our own backyard?

Given the job, I enjoyed a season or two of introducing the black propulation and its poblems into the erstwhile lilly-white columns of the august Times. After McCulloch left, the next managing editor didn't have the same outlook on the story, and pulled me off of it. Put him on the same list as the prof who got excited when my chair slammed into his desk.

In retirement, tired of watching the grass grow, I got re-introduced into the hum of things when my granddaughter, Erin, writing a school essay, asked me why I became interessted in civil rights. That, plus excellent encouragment and medicine from the greatest primary medical doctor on the horizon, Bruce Covner, got me writing again. And, as you can see, I'm still at it, with the best editor in the neighborhood, my spouse, Barbara, who keeps my commas in the right place and my sensitivity sharpened to good taste -- but never able to keep me from going on passed the place that ought to be the finish line.

Covner has taken over where psychiatry never finished up, keeping me with my eye on the prize instead of on the hopelessness of everything. Politics, religion, philosophy, international relations, he's ready to join in past my allotted time for appointments, in my vciew. His alertness when health alarms start ringing, he hears before I do, and he has seen me through some skirmishes I would not have won without him.

This is a never-ending list of people whom I owe much to. But I don't want to forget the lady who failed to throw my newspaper against the door as I demanded that led to my return to writing a column. (See, "Why I Write for the Stockton Record," in a previous blog.)

And did I mention what a lovely editor I have lived with for the past 15 years? The best years I've had. Twilights go on and on, and that's a good thing.

Lincoln, Melancholy, Mortality

I’ve just read Joshua Wolf Shenk’s cover piece in The Atlantic for October 2005, “Lincoln’s Great Depression,” which tries to deal with Lincoln’s melancholy in terms of modern understandings of psychology, contending that the Great Emancipator’s legacy of successes in dealing the with critical issues facing the nation were directly derived from his way of dealing with depression.

The mysteries of manic/depression have always intrigued me because I, too, deal with such mood swings – never quite so disabling that I could accept self destruction as resolve. I could not let my love for those dependent upon me, and who count on my being around to resort to such resolution.

Was a belief in God a motivation for Lincoln to counter his melancholy with acts of nobility? Shenk touches on that, but not in much depth. "God" can be employed as a figure of speech in dealing with issues of responsibility for one’s existence, but it only provokes me to make a direct approach to it.

Do I believe in a God who presides over all of our thoughts and our actions? I think not. But I don’t dismiss it. Atheism is as much a belief as theism. Agnosticism, in my definition, anyway, dictates that one’s responsibility to self and to others can only be handled by taking all responsibility for one’s self. Thus, the issue of whether a God exists is not essential at all

Death, if it means the total end of one’s “spirit,” his memory, his experience, means only an end to the plagues of life – yes, and the pleasures, too. It will come, and the outcomes will come what may. If there is anything beyond death– which, of course, there is no evidence -- only hope by those who choose to believe. “Whatever will be, will be."

You may interpret this then that I am in truth a Believer inasmuch that I must assume that I can only account for my behavior to myself. Like any other human being, that is far from perfect. If there is a Supreme Being, that has to be enough for him – or her – or it. No rational thought permits any other ending. We would be ascribing human behavior to any God to be vengeful, demanding, condescending. We then should pray to ourselves to amend our behavior, to cease our indiscretions

That is responsibility.

The wish for something beyond the grave undoubtedly is strongly imprinted in all of mankind. I look at myself and laugh at it – and go on ”communicating” with a tiny cat who crawled up on my shoulder every night to give and receive warmth and affection before a veterinarian injected the poison that brought on a peaceful death to end her fading health

An earthquake kills thousands in China. A tsunami wipes out more thousands in Thailand. Shocked? We are that, but the pain of Tammy the cat’s death brings more sorrow.

And I still call the dog, Bo, who died at 14 late last year. He was always there, wherever I was. His affection was simple and enduring. Will he be there when we die? Will the dozens of other pets in my lifetime, as well as the uncles and the cousins whom one reckons up by dozens? If there are no ups and downs in an afterlife, wouldn’t it be the most miserable and boring “perfect” world? Hell is often spoken of with more affection and variety.

Let it be enough to know that we have seeded friends and spouses and children and their children to take up where we leave off, and that will be our legacy – our afterlife.

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A Brother named Edward

My spouse had a brother named Edward. And, let me tell you, he was a brother who could make his way in this world quite successfully. He would have been have been 90 years old today, so in addition to writing this to the background of old hymns that I’m playing in his memory, I have a few other remarkable things to say about him:

Polite? That was a word for him. Why, when you’re having dinner and you’re passing the plate with a couple of fried chicken pieces remaining – one of which you particularly wish he wouldn’t pick – he would pass it on and say so graciously, “Thank you, but not at the present time.”

He was the best pet-sitter we ever had. He left his beloved Teddy to us when he passed on, and we could tell the moment we went to the bathroom how much attention he had in Edward’s care. That friendly cat seldom fails to come in for a petting when we’re settled in there. “There, Teddy, nice kitty, Teddy. Yes, we’ll pet you just as Edward must have done.”

And Edward was kind to the folks his sister got for him as caregivers in his late years. One of his caregivers returned the favors with equal kindness. Once we found that a gentleman caregiver had taken Edward to the bar with him.

Some of the caregivers marveled at Edward’s good taste in silver, jewelry, trinkets and other valuables. They helped themselves generously to these valuables he had saved, and we knew they were in, well, eager hands.

When Edward passed on, we had a memorial service at our house, which attracted everyone from his favorite Presbyterian pastor to his handyman, Dave. And do you know what? As the pastor paused before his final “amen,” the old clock on the wall, which seldom got wound up, struck a sonorous “GONG.” To close the service.

Did he love his sister? He was in his adolescent years when she arrived surprisingly on the scene;. Shortly afterward, their father died. Edward then took over the role of father to Barbara and indispensable helpmate to their mother even in the devastating era of economic depression over the land.

And he didn’t pass on until he thought he had done his last respect to Barbara. He died on her birthday – peacefully and undoubtedly aware that he had done all he could until it was all over.

Yes, Edward was quite a man. I am glad he lived and entered my life too. We try to mark his passing every year with a flower tossed into the waves of the ocean where his ashes were scattered.

We have only one budding rose coming on today, but it has arrived timely enough that it will serve for the simple ceremony.

Sleep well, Edward. ..

Paul, September 7, 2005