Honor thy Father and thy Mother

                                               

Elvis was still alive. I think it was 1975. I would have been 42 years old. It’s the time in your life when you look back to see what‘s gone by and when you look forward you wonder how much time there is left.   Not only how much time there is left, but what you are going to do with what remains.  My dad was still alive; he would enjoy about another year of life, however, my mother, may the memory of her glow always in my mind, had died a few years before.  There were eight kids in our family: two boys and six girls.  My son saw a photograph of me when I was about nine years old, with my younger brother, two sisters, and my dog Spot and he called it the “Grapes of Wrath” family, which, indeed it was.  I was 8 or 9 years old before the Great Depression ended, and it ended only because, of the so called “war effort” necessary to fight WWII.


In a moment I want to say something about the Great Depression and about WW II since they were the circumstantial setting that influenced our daily lives, but before I do that I want to tell what it was that I did day-to-day as a boy.  Work, school, the Catholic Church, and some fun made up my life as a boy.  The work: milking the cows, slopping the hogs, feeding the chickens, and other chores that are necessary on a farm.  The school: New Salem, a one room country school of eight grades with one teacher teaching all the students.  The Church: St. Michael’s.  This is the place where we worshipped God through the Sunday Mass and through catechism, a lot of catechism.  The fun: picture shows with admission for a dime included Newsreels, Laurel and Hardy, bathing beauty, Esther Williams and Van Johnson, and the Lou Gehrig movie The Pride of the Yankees. After the picture show we went down to the street to socialize with all the people who came from their farms to their town, Axtell, on Saturday night.  If I had a nickel I got an ice cream cone. And there was the Joe Louis-Billy Conn fight announced on radio by Don Dunphy that surpassed excitement in the usual sense of the word.  Life had its hardships, but the good and the fun parts crowd to the front of my memory cache.


The Great Depression was the background for the first eight years of my life; the memories I narrate below are from this period. The depression was called “Great” because it lasted a long time and because it was so relentless and so brutal.  It began about four years before I was born. By the time I was born the Axtell Bank had already foreclosed on the loan that my Dad took out in 1927 when he and mother got married. Emotionally my Dad never got over this loss.  FDR was the president and you may have heard he said, “the only thing you have to fear is fear itself” which he said, to dissuade people from going to the bank and taking out their money and putting it under the mattress. FDR knew these “Bank Runs” could bring down the banking system.  He was right about fear, but it was “hope” that was really in short supply.  Emily Dickinson wrote, “Hope” is the thing with feathers -/ That perches in the soul”---I don’t know about the feathers, but I do know about the perch; everyone knew that hope perched with the president in the wheelchair who was doing everything he could to get us through the hard economic times.  I think when Roosevelt was elected we expected him to be hoity toity and not ordinary like us, but even his cultivated voice with its refined and resonate sound seemed appealing.  He tried a lot of things. The brand new high school building in which I went to high school was built by the Works Progress Administration, what people called the WPA. This program was supposed to represent Keynesian Economics.  They say Lord Maynard Keynes woke up one morning in the mid 1930s and asked himself the question, “how do you get out of a depression?” He answered his own question, “You spend your way out!” He then figured out that the government would have to do the spending because no one else could spend or would spend. Even though FDR put in several spending programs like the WPA and the CCC (Civil Conservation Corp) the spending on these programs wasn’t enough to make a big difference, however, for the person who got a job the spending made a huge difference.Now back to the family. Mother was the quiet power in the marriage and she was the dominant one in the relationship; a dominance that I think she hated much of the time.  Especially, in 1941 when daddy went to the Veterans Hospital in Leavenworth, Kansas for five months—he was diagnosed with pernicious anemia.  Five years later with worry as his only disease he spent several months in the Veterans Hospital in Lincoln, Nebraska. Needless to say all the work and all the family obligations fell on my mother’s shoulders while he was gone.At our family reunion the year I said Elvis was still alive things went the way they usually did. After a lot of reminiscing about the more pleasant aspects of our childhood we then switched to the game, “pin your faults on your parents,” mainly my dad since he was the easier target.  Oscar Wilde, in one of his less flippant moments said, “Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.”  We were all in the second stage.Several of the years before this we, like the country, were still mired in the Great Depression and things were bleak. My first reframing is in July 1936; I was few months into my fourth year of life and as a grownup I am surprised I can remember the grasshoppers and how they occupied the twelve acres and indulged their appetites on the corn stalks, tassels, ears and everything. If I focused on a grasshopper nearby I could see how much joy it was having with a smile on its face on its head shaped like a miniature horse head. Even if I could understand in a Darwinian sense (no one had told me about Darwin) the grasshopper’s need to satisfy its hunger I could not understand why it had to smile about eating our corn crop. I looked in the distance at the crowd of grasshoppers; it looked like a quilt with a design of little gray oval figures. I know I must have looked at my father’s, face and while I knew that what was happening was bad I could not read in my father’s face the utter despair he must have felt.  If I had been able to decipher the facial text I would have known that with the corn crop gone there wouldn’t be money to buy food and other things. Later, I imagined the awful despair that he and mother must have felt, the worry that would have kept them awake at night, and the anguish they would have felt for as long as the terrible times lasted.  My imagining was nothing like the real thing, but Cognitive Reframing was as close as I would get.

The war got us out of the Depression, since a lot of money had to be spent building ships, airplanes and everything it takes to fight a war.  The government did everything else it could to promote patriotism in people so they would sacrifice and help the war effort.  There were posters of Uncle Sam, victory gardens, and war bonds.  My mother had a pin cushion beside her sewing machine that was a plaster of paris figurine of Hitler with Adolph’s posterior as the cushion.  Hitler didn’t feel the pins and needles but Mother employed her useful instrument of propaganda to assist in the war effort.  I bought a war bond.  I didn’t have the money to buy it outright so I saved my quarters and with each quarter I bought a war stamp and pasted it in a little book that they gave you at the Post Office. When I had pasted seventy-five of these stamps in the book it totaled $18.75, which, with interest added, would get me $25 a few years later.  I could tell you about rationing, especially gasoline with A, B, or C stamps that were fixed to the windshield, scrap iron drives, and milkweed floss for life preservers, but I think you get the idea.



 I must have been about eight years old; I have this picture in my mind.  Mother, Daddy and I were in the yard between the house and the barn Mother on my right and Daddy on my left we were all looking at the cow and the calf she had given birth to.  The feeling was of woefulness and not of jubilation.  Daddy looked away and said, “She’s slipped her calf.”  I didn’t understand exactly what that meant, but I could see the calf had no cowhide; it was pink, with the texture of a chicken drumstick with the skin removed.  I would later learn that the right way to say it was that the cow had “aborted” her calf.  I would also later learn that the cow had Bang’s disease and that if she had the disease it was likely the other cows in the herd had the disease too.  So it was only later that I knew and felt what my parents knew and felt right away.  Just when things seemed to be getting better for us now there would be no money from the sale of calves and there would be Veterinary bills.  More adversity; more anguish; and more despair for Mother and Daddy.   Even though I felt this somewhat as a boy I felt it differently reimaging it as a middle-aged man.

Maybe our problem was that we had grown up in the time of Dr. Spock, not the Star Trek doctor, but the celebrity pediatrician whose indulgent advice may have spoiled a generation of kids.  In our family we were happy to own our successes; however, we knew our failures were legacies from our parents.  Our motto: Never take responsibility for anything negative when you can just as easily blame it on your parents. At that reunion I decided I would try to make a change in my childhood memories.  I had heard about a process with the imposing sounding name of “Cognitive Reframing” which is defined: “Cognitive reframing is a psychological technique that consists of identifying and then disputing irrational or maladaptive thoughts. Reframing is a way of viewing and experiencing events, ideas, concepts and emotions to find more positive alternatives.”  I think of it as creative visualization in which I recast memories, not in denial, but in a fresh way, so I can see my boyhood memories with the same emotions my parents might have experienced at the time. You see things differently when you are a child. It is like the Bible says, “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.” I was at the point in my life that I wanted to, “put the ways of childhood behind me.” Would “Cognitive Reframing” be the answer?

I wish I could say I waited until I was alone , turned the TV off,, relaxed,  closed my eyes, called up images, and immediately had a cathartic experience that cleansed my mind of negative thoughts about my parents .  But it didn’t work that way. It was a drawn out process since old ideas die hard, and cognitive awareness emerged slowly and tentatively at times. During this period my Dad died, grieving his death gave a whole new frame to the process. His last days and hours created new images for me to remember and to struggle with. One of these images was of my brother and me turning the corner in the Veteran’s Hospital seeing our father, who was suffering from dementia, down the hall in a wheel chair fighting off three of the staff who were attempting to restrain him and get him back to bed. Even though he was non compos mentis he showed the same burning determination that he did on infrequent occasions when he felt he had been wronged.  This fighting spirit is what I had admired most about my Dad. Things had come full circle.  It had been a long time since as a little boy my dad and I went to the rural mailbox and got the package mother had ordered from the Sears & Roebuck catalog  The package the rural mail carrier, Gus Selk, left contained matching father and son jackets. This had been my big boy experience, and now it was only a memory. 

There were images of three experiences I chose to re-imagine. Two of these experiences occurred in the twelve acre field north of our farmhouse. It was the most fertile land on our farm. But it was more than a few acres of land—it was a family place for special things; it was even a ritual ground. One of these occasions came about when my dog Rex died. I should say when my dog Rex was killed. My Dad hooked a trailer to our 1928 Chevrolet Automobile to haul something.  On this hot, August day Rex found the shade underneath the trailer irresistible. It was his mistake to choose the shade beneath one of the trailer wheels. When my Dad got in the car to back the trailer he did not notice Rex and when the trailer was driven backwards Rex was crushed beneath the wheel. I didn’t know about the seven stages of grief then, but I experienced them anyway. We buried Rex in the twelve acre field among the corn stalks. The grave stone was a smooth, gray, oblong stone about six inches long and four inches wide. The flowers: Sunflowers. They were beautiful; they were plentiful; they were flowers that we thought Rex would like. We had nothing to etch the stone with so we could inscribe a few words of blessing for Rex and to record our last “Good-Bye.” We felt bad that it couldn’t be like the tombstones in St. Michael’s cemetery. Even at six years of age I knew crying was a sissies thing, but I couldn’t help it---I cried anyway. I found that grief showed itself through those tears that ran down my face. The year Rex died we had rain and there was no pest assault so the twelve acres of cornfield was lush and green and plentiful.

My next reframing is in 1938, when I was five years old, the Great Depression still had not ended and neither had the hard times.  Chinch Bugs attacked.  Again, it was the twelve acre field that the bugs occupied.  Chinch Bugs are tiny (only 1/8 of an inch long) they are black and white with black and white wings, red legs, and red spots at the base of their antennae. They are every bit as dangerous to crops as grasshoppers. They seemed more sinister; maybe the fact that I was two years older may have made them seem more sinister. The creosote oil that we put down at the edge of the field to ward off the bugs was black and cast an evil hue that was sinister.  By then as a Catholic I knew all about the Devil and how he came from Hades and not only that he did evil things, but that he tempted little boys like me to do evil things.  As I put down the creosote threshold to keep the bugs out I saw harry Payne’s field across the road and expected the Devil to appear at any moment. When as a boy I looked at the cornstalks completely covered with bugs it is hard to pick the right word; I guess swarm or swarming will do. I think I remember that I wanted to bury my head in my hands so I could not see the damage the bugs were doing. Again I don’t remember the look on my dad’s face then, but that didn’t keep me imagining what his look might have been.  In the re-image my Dad is shell shocked, his face looks numb, his eyes are on something distant that has him hypnotized, and his body language shouts “I feel helpless.”  And I question myself: as a grown man could I have gotten through this? My first answer is “no.” then I realize I would have done as he did because I would have had no choice.

It has been forty years since I did the reframing I can vouch for its effectiveness.  My memory of events hasn’t changed, but the awareness of the context surrounding the events has.  And this new awareness brings with it an appreciation of my parents for what they faced and how they got through it and what they gave us that got us through life on much easier terms.

The Sensitivity Training Group that I was a part of in the 70s would call the reframing a “head trip,” however I believe it is empathic remembering. Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, a collection of autobiographical essays, has empathy as its theme.  Each essay is a new story that tells of empathy in another setting. The essays are not moralistic prescriptions but her true accounts of empathy in different situations. The essays are Jamison’s real life experience that reflect both joys and concerns.  In some measure I think the cognitive process I experienced in re-framing my memories of my parents, and with my parents has empathy at its foundation.  The definition of empathy, “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another” sounds simple, but it is not since understanding the feelings of others is incredibly difficult.  The psychologist, Carl Rogers said, “I have found it of enormous value when I can permit myself to understand another person.” My beliefs are a barrier to understanding. My reaction is first to judge. To permit myself to understand another is to open myself to the risk that I may change in the process. The Cognitive Re-framing of the perilous conditions my parents faced in putting food on the table and clothes on our backs has permitted me to understand the emotions they must have felt in those hard times.  Understanding has led to appreciation, and appreciation has led to the realization that they were doing the very best they could, and, most of all that they loved us.