Daddy’s Great Granddaughter and Me

Forrest Jewell

“Oh! Granma! What a wonderful dress!”
“May I?” she pleaded, Daddy’s Great Granddaughter and Me

Forrest Jewell

“Oh! Granma! What a wonderful dress!”
“May I?” she pleaded,
Her irresistable smile tugging at my heart
As she lifted the garment in its wrapper
From its storage container.
Oh my!” she exclaimed, gently replacing the dress,
Coming to take my hand,
Lead me to the rocking chair,
Seat me,
Climb into my lap,
And cuddle against me
As she peered sidewise at the dress
And trembled.

I held her — my ten-year-old treasure,
re-definer of childhood
possibly re-definer of human,
Held her and rocked her
And softly sang to her
The songs of her childhood
And, then,
Trying one of the songs of her present
Brought a giggle and
“Granma, you don’t have to sing that song;
“You don’t even like it.”

I kissed her cheek and then her forehead.
I held her away and looked in her eyes;
“Tell me,” I said,
She stood from my lap, took my hand,
And gently led me to the dress.
” Granma,” she said,
“This dress was part of a parachute,
“And a man used it to jump
“From an airplane into a war.”

“Yes, Sweetheart,” I said,
“That was my father;
“He jumped into Holland.
“No one was shooting at them right then
“So he took the time to cut apart
“The parachute and keep a large piece of it;
“It was used to make my mother’s
“Wedding dress.”

My granddaughter somehow visits
Areas of existence that seem closed
To most of us…
“Granma,” she said,
“That was his second time;
“The first time he was shot at;
“Big guns shot at the plane;
“And some hit the plane

“And all those men were scared
“Some of them cried,
“Some prayed,
“Some cursed the people shooting at them,
“But the plane was full of the stuff
“That turns a boy into a man
“And some of them
“Joked and bragged and promised to destroy
“Everything that opposed them;
“And Granma, one of them planned to kill
“One of the boss men in the airplane.
“And some of them thought of people they loved.
“Then they sort of fell out of the airplane into the dark
“And guns kept shooting at them
“While they hung ;in the sky
“And when they were on the ground;
“And, Granma, they were mostly
“Just boys.
“They weren’t really grown up yet.”

“Sweetheart, you’re right;
“My father was eighteen.”

“And, Granma, the other people were scared too,
“The people shooting at them.
“Everybody was scared,
“Nobody wanted to be there,
“But they had to try to kill each other;
“That’s so sad!”
She began trembling again
And tears streamed down her cheeks.
“So sad,” she repeated.
“Your daddy kicked open a door

“And was going to shoot

“But the only people inside
“Were a lady
“and an old man
“and 2 kids hiding behind them.
“Your daddy closed the door,
“And went to the next house.
“He felt bad for the people
“But he felt glad he had opened the door
“Because some of the other soldiers
“Might have killed them.”

I sat again and took her in my lap
To hold her until she calmed and the tears stopped.

“Granma,” she said
“There’s a whole energy of war;
“It seems to go
“Almost everywhere people go;
“All those people in my history books
“Are from wars
“And about making better ways
“To kill people
“And they talk about it
“Like it’s something to be proud of
“And it’s not.”

She sort of collapsed then
And fell asleep.
I hugged her
And rocked her
And caressed her back and shoulders.
I hummed her favorite song
Until it penetrated her awareness
And she woke with her delightful
Giggle
And then a whole-hearted laugh
And a kiss for me.

“Granma,” she said,
“I love you and, you know,
“Your mommy and daddy
“Did some wonderful things:
“They took a war thing
“And made it into a love thing
“And then they gave me you.”

Through my tears
I could see her radiant smile
And there was no way
To hug her tight enough.

“But, Granma,” she said,
“After people had one war,
“Why did they ever have another one?”

I showed up at ten pounds or so
And was immediately stuck
With two huge imperfect models of myself
That I must raise…rear, maybe?,,,correct?

Correcting two huge imperfect models
Of my tiny, ten-pound self
Was job enough
But those two models were part
Of a race of huge models,
All of them knowing they know everything
But knowing nearly nothing
And but imperfectly knowing
What little they know
So that my job of correcting two imperfect models
Included perfecting billions of imperfect models
And more
All the giant imperfect models saw themselves
Not as destroyed children
But as improvers of children
Through a process of systematic destruction of children.

There was a slogan arising from myth…A slogan of
      Following a straight and narrow path through lives
Where people seemed mostly to stumble in darkness
Through a maze of jungles and swamps
      Of confrontation and aggression and exclusion
Under the auspices of assorted Gods (gods?)
Waiting at the end of the straight and narrow path
To reward the warmaker
With an eternity of peace and love and plenty:
An odd process of learning peace by practicing war,
                             learning love by practicing hate,
                             learning inclusion by practicing exclusion;
An odd process…
Damn! It’s odd…but worse,
It doesn’t work
And even worse than that
The ten-pound child
Has become 67 years old
And rather than correcting the race of giants
Has for many years
Been part of the race of giants,
Destroying children,
Interfering little in the processes of
Learning peace through practicing war
And learning love through practicing hate and anger
And learning inclusion by practicing exclusion
And come to feel not as an improver of anything
And sometimes as driftwood washed up
By the storms of years
On the highest of tides
Onto the beaches of time
To dry in the sun
Before becoming ashes and smoke from a campfire.

But there are moments when I notice that
I no longer think in terms of
       Nigger and Kike and Raghead and Wop and Slope and Bum and Maniac and……
       Other
But in terms of models of myself
That I might understand and love rather than hate
And might walk with rather than fear or kill.

And there are moments when I realize that
Though having rejected most of religion      As
            Jut another justification for prejudice
                                               and hate
                                               and war…
                                               for exclusion
I have found them to contain seeds of love
                                              and peace
                                              and inclusion
Distorted through centuries of power struggles
Into the collection of fallacies they have become;
But the seeds were planted in me…
Came along with the ten-pound child,
And my real task after years spent in raising my parents
Has been to attempt to maintain that seed
                               And provide it nourishment
So that it might continue growing
              At least in me
And reduce by some small amount
Humanity’s penchant for
               controlling and hating
And shed seeds of peace and love and inclusion
To grow in the ashes of the wars
                  And the compost of the hate
So that the rapidity of change
That has arisen over the past century
Can become redirected
From competition to cooperation,
From rejection to acceptance
From exclusion to inclusion
From war to peace
          and
From hate to love.
Forrest Jewell

Progress

I didn’t know hm well,
But he seemed to live his life his way,
In some ways successful, generous, thoughtful,
And well thought of;
In other ways an enigma,
Ignoring many constraints and obligations
Of his profession
And of life in general,
Somehow childlike in an apparent innocence
Of the potential consequences
Of his actions
Until, apparently,
His way stopped working for him
And he shot himself
And died.

In his case, the ripples of a death,
Of a suicide,
Are more obvious than in many cases;
His business thrived less well
Than most thought it might have
Due largely to lack of attention
And to lack of insight into business principles
And insistence on doing everything his way
But it was important in the little town,
Providing employment for three women
And for part-time men who drove the twenty miles
To provide the license which allowed the store
To operate for the day
By putting on the show required by
The licensing board.

I was one of those men.

The store operated perfectly well without me,
My role consisting largely of staying out of the way,
Separating the stickers from the computer output,
And watching adorable women do the work
I was paid for
But that was the way the store was organized
And the bullet destroyed that organization.

The bullet took away the jobs of the three women
Two of whom had earned professional licenses
For work that no longer existed in their town
And one of whom lived at the edge of our society’s sinkholes
Through an assortment of
Part-time jobs
In her struggle against keeping her daughter
Out of those sinkholes.
The bullet took away much more:
The closest similar business
Was twenty or so miles away,
Many people of the town
Had no reliable transportation
And the services of the business
Were part of our so-called health care system,
The store provided donations to the town’s
Usual assortment of organizations
Providing activity for fund raisers
In redistributing income
To usually worthwhile groups
And the man who shot himself
Was well-liked and respected
By many members of the town
Who now have no similar figure
In their lives.

Recently, an old man in the town died
After operating a mens’ clothing store for, I guess,
Fifty or sixty years,
Leaving that store to close
Adding to the rows of closed stores
In another of the closing towns
Of the US,
This one built by a railroad company
To supply workers for its shops
In the 1870s
And declining for many years
As the railroads declined,
I think,
Largely because of the US giving the mail contracts
To subsidized airlines
And trucking companies
Subsidized by the interstate highway system
While it complained of the subsidies required
In maintaining the railroads
Which had replaced the subsidized canals
As progress advanced,
Littering the landscape with previous progress
Abandoned in a demoniacal race
To litter the earth with the detritus
Of progress
And with the dreams of
People going their own way
With little thought of the results of the ripples
Their way would have in the lives of those
Near them, dear to them, relying on them,
And ultimately abandoned by them.

Forrest Jewell

NICABM 2008

The first year I came here I signed up for one of the dinner groups that had no stated purpose other than meeting people.  There was one other guy and 4 women.  Of course, the first item of business was to introduce ourselves.  I am extremely shy and sat there soaked in sweat until it was my turn to talk.  I had no idea what to say after my name but stammered out, “I guess I’m a fifty-five? year old juvenile delinquent.  The group broke into laughter and I realized that everyone else had been in the same situation and what I said had broken the ice.  I don’t know what happened to the other guy but I had dinner with the four women every night that week.  One of them was a consultant teaching reflexology to corporate managers and she gave us a class in reflexology.  I had driven here that year and brought some drums with me and we had a drumming circle one evening.  I corresponded with them for a year or so but none of them ever came back.

______________________________________________________________________________

Over the past few years I seem to have become some kind of healer.  Distance seems to be irrelevant and it seems to work with dogs and cats and, I guess, other organisms.  I don’t charge anything but do accept donations.  I am interested in finding more people to try the healing.  I’ve written a handout with my information.  There are some on the bulletin board and you can just ask me for one.

____________________________________________________________________

A few years ago I bought a GPS contraption for the car.  Before using it you have to hook it up to a computer and initialize it — download the maps and so forth from some web site into the GPS equipment.  I kept having trouble with that and finally said some thing like, “God Damn this thing.”  The computer turned off and wouldn’t restart.  The surge protector hadn’t shut down and everything else connected to it worked just fine.

My local computer wizard determined that the power supply had burned out and fried the mother board meaning I had to buy a new computer.  He also told me there was nothing other than a power surge that could have done the damage since there was nothing in the equipment to generate sufficient voltage to do the damage.  He also said that in all the years and all the computers he has seen he’s never seen anything like that.

I don’t know what happened but I try even harder than I did before to avoid becoming irritated with anything that matters, especially people.

______________________________________________________________________________

What follows are comments and poems expressing my amusement with my life and with the institutions of my society.  I never do anything today that I can put off until tomorrow.  This was mostly written last night between about 7 and 9.
——————————————————————-

Differences

When I was 10 or so
I began to fear that I would die from
The dread disease, Lackanookie;
When I was 65 or so I began to realize that
I had never heard of anyone dying from
Lackanookie
And some part of me relaxed
Into a centeredness that allowed me to marvel at,
Rather than striving to conquer, the differences between
Men and women and the reasons why I had quit at
Two strikes in marriage rather than continuing on
To strike out altogether.

In the years since I was 10 or so
And during most of those years,
No matter what I thought I was thinking about
It was always in addition to thinking about
Women;
And now that I am 73 I can look back
And marvel at
The insanity of the path that hormones
And lack of information
Carve through the years allotted to one
Before moving on to some other mode
Of existence
And marvel even more
At the fact that it continues yet,
Albeit accompanied by growing insight
And driven by less intensity,
At least, most of the time.

Forrest Jewell

________________________________________________________

Why does that ignorance exist?

Unless a child has siblings of the other sex, our society – most societies, I guess — has no provision for them to have anything like an intimate relationship with people of the other sex.  This means that children grow up with their eventual mates being, effectively, an alien race.  The society provides no reliable way for young people to learn anything meaningful or useful about sex meaning they will marry – or whatever they do – knowing nothing about how to accept, live with, please, be pleased by, honor, be honored by, or enjoy their partner.

The model marriage in our society is between two virgins who are expected to have some innate understanding of everything required to maintain a marriage.  In my generation the woman has been programmed to perform wifely duties and resent them while the man has been trained to perform husbandly duties and resent them.  It’s long been a mystery to me how any marriage lasts more than a year or two and the constant yammering of our politicians about returning to traditional family values is ridiculous because they never existed.

_______________________________________________________

Raising Kids

Three Stooges movies show life
A lot like my home life as a child;
Those movies mirror lots of things;
For instance
I can’t see the difference between
A Three Stooges movie
And a football game.

Given that my childhood
And the Super Bowl
Are indistinguishable from
A Three Stooges movie
It became very difficult for me
To take life seriously
And eventually I gave up trying.
I look at a baseball game
And see a lot of people
Most of whom must have a high tolerance
For boredom
Ane whose role consists primarily of
Standing around watching
While two others contrive an art form
Out of playing catch
And another tries desperately
To interfere with their game of catch
So as to disturb the boredom
Of the others
By hitting the ball with a club —
That’s a lot like being home waiting for Dad to arrive.

In the life of a child
Schools play a large role –
Sometimes good, I suppose, but
Often not so good;
I started school a couple of months shy
Of my sixth birthday
And had already read
Robin Hood and Treasure Island and
Part of Canterbury Tales
So the school presented me with
Dick and Jane and Mother and Father
And Spot and the cat – Puff, maybe –
And a family situation totally outside my experience –
And began the process of destroying
My desire to be in school
And my ability to learn
Anything there …
Reinforcing
My growing discomfort
In being around people.

So Effective was the school
In consort with my parents
That, at fifteen,
With an IQ (tested when I was in my forties)
Of over 160
I flunked out of high school.

Forrest Jewell

_______________________________________________________

I never have any idea how long any of this is taking so just tell me when to stop.

________________________________________________________

How Comes Suicide

There is a small but growing consensus
Of opinion
Around the notion
That people choose/create their own lives
And then change them
More-or-less
At will.

My first response to that was
HOGWASH
Supposedly
I fought with a bunch of other souls
To live my childhood?
To be a child who couldn’t
Fit into what was supposedly
The best school system
In the United States?
And, as a little boy,
Found solace
In cuddling with my pet
Nanny goat
To avoid the havoc in the house —
Why would anyone do that?

Given that
I was fool enough
To compete for
That childhood
I can understand how
I could create a lot of the rest of my life.

In meditation I’ve encountered
What I think of
As past lives
And I also think I can see how
They have affected this life
And, in that way,
I have created parts of my current life
Out of past lives.

This life is a constant stream of events and thoughs
And relating and learning
And all that a person does
So that, based upon what I came with
And what has occurred since I came
I have created a lot of my life.

A kid can be frustrated with school
And with his parents
And then hold a pistol to his head
And create a whole new life for himself
But I’m still not comfortable
That he has done that alone;
He has taken the information supplied
By those around him,
Come to see himself
As a worthless impediment
And sought to remove the obstacle
He presents
From the lives of those to whom
He feels worthless and some of whom
He desperately loves
And who seem to me to have failed
To encourage in him a sense of sufficient
Self-worth to help him
Fight for his life.

I’ve struggle with the concept of life creation
Since 1977
When my son shot himself in the head
And didn’t die
But he did change his life for the rest of his life
And
The event changed
My life,
My wife’s life,
His mother’s life,
His sister’s life,
……..AND…..
I still don’t know
Who changed what;

Forrest Jewell

________________________________________________________

Disease Creation and Management

Our society operates in a cycle
Of disease creation and
Disease management.
The disease creation portion
Is the marketing of food
Or
What passes for food
And the manipulation of people’s weaknesses
By huge corporations
Selling products
And dreating beliefs
Concerning food and diet
Trading the environment and
The public health
For profit so that
For example
I think the most frequently eaten food is
French Fries.

The disease management portion
Of the cycle
Is what we call the
Health care system
Which has little to do
With either health or caring.
It is created primarily by
Drug companies and
Operated through insurance companies
Which turn would-be healers
Into clerks
Serving a decreasing percentage
Of the population
And, even then,
Treating symptoms with chemicals so that
People can continue destroying themselves
Rather than working to remove the causes
Of the symptoms.

Forrest Jewell