We all live in the past but our children don’t…until they make one…It’s a problem.
Very Few Choose To Understand The Past
This is Why History Repeats Itself…
This process should have a special name…equated with lowering your IQ. Like “IQ-down” or “YQ-Down” (I or U)
Growing up, I had a black cat…named Chowser…! Why the name Chowser? Well keep reading!…
I really had no idea at the time…I made his name up…but he became Chowser….long before public internet was born…cats roamed the earth. His ancestors like he did…looked at people like food. We are lucky they are miniature…
He had bright green eyes and was very sleek, when he grew…he became huge and very sleek…We lived in Seattle…Near the University of Washington and he was allowed to go outside and would stay up in a tree, not quite a Cheshire Cat…no stripes…(I have no memory of a cat box…probably because I never cleaned it…)but he would disappear into the green foliage and all I remember seeing was the green glowing, eyes…yes they glowed…magic come to life…He was genuinely my buddy…or so I thought…he laid in the sun while I played with my dolls, (no barbies please…my mother was an educator…)or when my brother was engineering tinker toys and Tonka trucks…Usually I was irritating my brother and Chowser stayed close. My mother had had a white fluffy Persian Cat…”Harry,” but this black cat was mine. One time we rescued him from the Arboretum, (waited for him to come home…)…The Washington Park Arboretum…crossing the bridge which my grandmother and mother told me there were trolls underneath.
(the Montlake Cut)
Of course I believed them…I was three years old. Yes I still prefer to believe in trolls under the bridge. (it is a way to stop children in that era from crossing the bridge on their own)
The Park…and “Sewer Trestle” down the street from our home E. Lynn Street, near U.W. Hub… (a craftsman where I convinced my brother to ride his trike down the front stairs…)(… https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/2417-E-Lynn-St-Seattle-WA-98112/49098180_zpid/)(way different now…I want to claim my memories on Zillow…thanks) beckoned to Chowser and he ran off into the woods, I could not sleep until he came home. (mom used tuna and Harry…) I lay in my child-sized red doll-bed that my grandfather had built with a blanket…Those days Seattle was less crowded…many less cars…but a black cat on a road at night…something to worry about…Especially near the Husky Stadium…the old one…before the new one Fell down…Fall was football games and harvest leaves, my grandmother a seamstress and designer…made French Clown costumes for us for Halloween…I went back to look at the trees we had planted…they are HUGE…I am getting smaller. Someday I hope to be compost for a tree. Now a look…they are gone…everything changes. Yes Bill, planting trees is a good idea…our new world…not so much.
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| Cheshire Cat Alice in Wonderland Lewis Carroll |
We would go to Bainbridge Island, and WA during summers and Fall Holidays. Pack up the Olive Green Dodge Dart…after the 1940’s car blew up on the floating bridge on the way to a Seattle Pilot’s baseball game…Escape to the Country…Always escaping…
We had a library, a stone fireplace, and the original antiques from the house because the “farmer” (an orchardist) had left…leaving antique furniture and things behind. It was a treasure trove of beautiful and exotic things from a previous time, the 1800’s. Rejected items at that time no one wanted because “old furniture” from your great grandparents era was not cool…not modern, not sleek…Imagine a whole house of antique furniture sitting outside in the orchard…abandoned…everything was moved back in and the ghosts came too. Along with my grandmother’s phonograph and her memories as a beautiful girl in the early 1900’s. This is the original house…this is not me…no dishwasher then
Our farmhouse was built on acreage and surrounded by a lovely unkempt orchard…My grandmother, born in the 1890’s canned and cooked and canned and cooked…all on a wood stove…pantry was filled with beautiful jars, flour and supplies…it was a happy time…even though we had to go outside to use the bathroom…that had the green clawfoot tub and rusty plumbing…added on probably in the 1900’s (history of the clawfoot tub) we had so many fruit trees and two old barns,..fruit was so plentiful it fell to the ground and rotted…heritage apples, and pears…Italian Plums and even a peach or two…we had a large sprawling garden…and my favorite a climbing old perfumed French pink rose, hanging heavy on the house… under this huge Paris tribute we ate breakfast…along with Chowser…
Chowser would sleep in the sun and look up at us with very drunk green eyes…watching every move we made… every night he would run through the grassy fields and hunt mice and rats...brown and grey creatures we liked because of Beatrice Potter books…
lured by the intoxicating smell of fruit… every morning…we would find before breakfast a “gift”, of a baby rat…but usually of a mouse…He would disappear into the tall wavy grass…(we did not mow the orchard…it was truly wild)…my grandmother never knew my brother and I would pick up these specimens…daily…for curiosity and examination…we were too young to be afraid of death or germs…upon seeing us one morning…early trying to bring a rat to life…in our small hands, my mother did not scream…(teacher’s instincts) but instead told us to take the rat outside and place it so it could run away when it came too…years later I found out she had bitten her tongue so hard so as to not scream…and scare us…that she drew blood…We were not to be scared…ever…
My grandfather, Irish Catholic, and born in Seattle, WA Capitol Hill, had been a combat soldier, an engineer in WWI. He tried to re-enlist even though injured in WWII. He never fully recovered from his injuries and never spoke of them. France was just a dream, with the bad memories pushed to the back with stories of Paris, and cooking…salad dressings…and beautiful paintings…perfume and singing in French… La Marseillaise…How would I know what it meant? He died from injured lungs shortly after WWII ended—his presence ever felt because he had been the love of my grandmother’s life. It was a mixed marriage. They had guts to love one another.
Everyone called him “Daddy” and told stories of his comic stunts…it took me years to figure out from family dynamics that he had suffered greatly in the war, and then greatly later from depression. He had been an engineer, majored and mastered in literature, and did beautiful carpentry, teaching drafters… logging with John Nordstrom…before the shoes… very very early. His green pipe stand and French binoculars military issue were always out, reminding my grandmother…and mother ever in their hearts…These breaks in the heart never really mend…they just get easier to bear with distractions. The loss understood through the win of a terrible war. (win some you lose some)
Curiously…we never spoke of the Wars… or Hitler…Only to be cautious and not discuss being Jewish EVER with anyone. My maternal grandmother was Jewish but any hint of this culture or practice was simply erased. At the time as a very small child I really did not understand our conversations. My mother never even said the word “Hitler” only that when she was in school during the war there was this word called “Kike” I had no frame of reference, no practice, no religion…(Jewish Scholars at the Farmhouse…)only my poor mother’s uncomfortable face. “Do not talk about…never talk about being Jewish…” Instead, years later she gave me books, like the “Diary of Anne Frank” and “All Kind of Family.” I never connected the … dots…until much later.
My parents had divorced, my father from New York…stayed in Washington State but was banished from our lives while I was very little. His father, my grandfather had walked out of Belarus with Meyer Lansky as a small child with others escaping severe pogram’s (which came before Stalin) and came to America to make a great fortune in the garment industry. My father when I became reacquainted with him…as a “tween” never spoke of these details either…comedy rises up very quickly in these absolutely absurd situations. Now I know…
Even though I never met my father after the age of two, (until older)…my mother never spoke of him…I knew when he called weekly to check in. It is funny how children just know these things. I knew…remember it was a dial tone with a party line at the Farmhouse.
So…Chowser a great hunter, a purring lover…and then one day…he simply disappeared and never came back…Finally I was told that my beloved big hunting, green eyed cat had been hit on the road…when I cried my grandmother who cried secretly for my grandfather…told me “not to cry.” Shortly thereafter my brother was given a black kitten when I went off to preschool..whom he named “Jake” after the drugstore man on the corner in Seattle by the Aboretum…who gave us ice cream cones. (Jake became huge too…and hunted and hunted for us…) Years later I found out that someone knowingly hit Chowser…and threw him…his broken body along side the road near our property…A small beautiful country road. My mother and grandmother found him…and buried him…crying all the time. My heart, hurt…for a long time for Chowser, and it was not until I was quite abit older…I was able to look at that. I had learned not to cry.
It was useful.
My family was determined to make sure we never suffered…but erasing or not explaining history does not do this…PTSD is passed on from generation to generation unless we look at the past maybe literally wallow in it. (please do not break things or people when you do this!)
My parents also loved each other until they died. They too, both of them rebelled against their histories, determined not to repeat them…(HA!) Here we are repeating history all over again!
I am very lucky to be the child of parents who love each other. I am very lucky in some ways to have had such an idyllic childhood without my family’s terrible memories…(why do we have to make more?)…what I do remember very very clearly is the emotion, and now studying history have been able to discover the history attached to those emotions…we loved black cats…ate borscht…and pretended the world was a safe place for a little while.
Russia & Cats & Stalin
Dead Poets:
p.s. Regarding Dr. Joel Kovel. Simply “Joel” to me…a brilliant, brilliant man. Might have been involved with the CIA’s experiments with LSD. His conversion to communism…well, he was hanging out with the daughter of a decorated American combat veteran. Highly unlikely that he would ever speak positively of communism with the crowd at our summer home. Be kind. Had people been kind to his Aunt Betty…it might never have happened. Judaism is beautiful. It is too bad Joel was angry at his family. He died a Christian. I spoke to him, unfortunately not before he died. Identity is complicated.
https://mondoweiss.net/2012/09/the-conversion -of-joel-kovel-part-1/
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