A meditation on origins
(I wrote this journal entry a few days ago. Eileen read it. Now you can if you want to.)
My parents would not recognize or understand many of the things that are most important in my life. I’m thinking of poetry and music. I wonder just how I came to this point, being their son. I think I can see some of how.
My mother left her family to marry my father. She not only left the family she left the part of the country where they lived. Her life seems to me to be in pursuit of something, something that her own parents would not recognize or understand. In that way, I can see how I am like her.
Her father did not know his own father. Definitely there was a gap of recognition and understanding between them, although he knew his own mother.
My father’s parents would definitely recognize some of the thing that were important to him in his life. And they would understand a lot about how he lived his life and maybe a bit about why.
I think of the hymns, the preaching. Although my father spent his life moving away from the conservative part of his tradition, still to the end of his life, he was connected to hymns and even the preaching in a way.
I think he might recognize or understand some of what is important to me in life, the music, the poetry.
I think of him as a young up and coming Church of God minister moving from the south (Greeneville, Tennessee) to the north (Flint, Michigan). I think we had the baby grand piano in south. I don’t remember the stereo console where I heard so much music and watched tv until we moved to Flint.
Dad thought about become a choir director. He also had thoughts of being a “youth leader” in the Church of God. I know he loved music.
I have a multi volume anthology of poetry that his parents gave him on his 21st birthday.
Before he died, when he was deep into his dementia, he asked to come listen to me practice organ at church. I brought him along. He moved around the room as I practiced. I remember not playing very well particularly. But when I was done, he seemed satisfied with an air of finality.
I am beginning to see how I grew out of my background. My mother was a changeling. She moved away from her family and its understandings in a different way from her brother and sister. My father pointed me to the arts while at the same time not exactly recognizing and understanding them very much in the way I have come to value them.
They are both constituent parts of me. I see that now.
Reading update
