On the nuture and nature of a mind, prefaced by a yard sale

Timm in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, ten days after his near-fatal accident on Oct. 19, 1981. Mom had flown out to be with him in the trauma unit in Utah. Apparently after his release they travelled back to Jackson Hole to gather some of his things before returning to Florida. They also visited the junkyard where the wrecked Volkswagen Beetle had been towed. I'll get to all this further down in the post.

I write these prefacing comments on the couch watching Beth sell our wares on the second day of our yard sale - the afternoon gone breezy with high cirrus leading a train of clouds, cooling somewhat, prescient with a changer which ushers in autumn at last here, a real change ... Another hour of slow afternoon sales and we'll pack everything up, far less, thank God, than we hauled out yesterday morning. We've made enough to pay some bills, perhaps replace the door at the top of the stairs, sock some away for screening in the back porch, where we intend to have Hugo and Belle spend their afternoons.

Who wouldn't want to buy all this stuff?

I priced all my books for a buck -- and they sold like hotcakes.

There's the Ayatollah of Yard Sales behind the cat in the pumpkin's hat.

We work like dogs so these cats -- Hugo and Belle -- get a screened-in porch. Go figure.

Man, I'm tired. These events are for younger, stronger folks than us. Still, it's a great way to meet new neighbors out walking their dogs and hear some of the community news. We've had earnest comments from like-minded folks who saw the Obama campaign sign in our window. An elderly couple we met just moved up here from Key West. A woman bought a chair she knew her cat would take over and asked if we had a cat who had broken it in. (Violet had.) Others raved about Mount Dora after moving from Long Island or New Jersey or Michigan. Some said how they loved our garden and we swapped ideas on mulch and grass. Others grumped about overdevelopment and a too-long summer. Just about everyone sighed about the change in weather. Yard sales bring our small town home to us entering us into a neighborhood's conversation where the gamut of humanity lives side by side, trying to pay the bills, worrying about the economy and state of the world, dealing with the next health crisis, sharing a laugh about cats and kids and bits on "The Daily Show" or David Letterman.

There is a sadness to these events - the pathos of good stuff that doesn't sell, or does with a cost. Like watching a guy drive off with my old PA equipment. Or watching people come and go without buying anything. Cars slowed down, hazy faces staring for a moment at our goods, drove on without stopping. We parted with our birdbath (Beth wants a taller one), a hutch which had been in the downstairs bathroom which we didn't need after remodeling, a good number of books I always thought I'd read again someday, my PA equipment and a 4-track recorder I thought I'd one day get around to using again in some re-awakening of my music that had never occurred. Stuff which was no longer essential to the everyday, nice to have around but really clutter and salable. I was sad for the stuff that didn't sell, so many pretty plates and ivory pottery, tole fixtures and jadite cups and saucers: they weren't cheap because they were good and people looked at them and passed on, leaving them to warm in the sun and remain still as the clouds gathered overhead.

I wonder how much of Timm's stuff is still boxed up in Christie's apartment. Originally, most of his household wares & clothes - stuff with no real value - was to be donated to thrift stores, but then I heard she was holding on to all of it, unable to let those crusts and crumbs of Timm's life go. I remember all of it stuff into his tiny bachelor's apartment when we were all out in Salem just after he died: a portable life settled into one place, albeit a small one, where Timm was making a real go of his life at last. All of the books piled on a case ... the CDs, many compilations he had recorded himself ... all of that photography equipment ... the closet full of clothes going back, it seemed, to high school ... battered pots and pans, a motley of silver- and glassware ... old computers and stereos stuffed in nooks under his bed or his closet. Timm was a packrat, holding on to everything he had as if stuff was part of identity, a secure blanket of iota to wrap oneself in. Closing down Timm's apartment - which was done in a matter of weeks - was the dissembling of a life, scattering it back to the four winds. I brought his laptop and photos to Florida. Will took his camera back to Pennsylvania. His truck went back to the credit union. His guitar went to his best friend Ken. Some of his journals eventually traveled across the continent to me. Most of his ashes traveled to Columcille. A third are in Oregon someplace, either on a shelf or scattered in a place. I type on Timm's laptop, my fingertips tapping on keys which perhaps recall the heft and deft of my brother's fingertips, his data taking up half of what's stored in the hard drive - photos, inventories of camera equipment no longer in anyone's sole possession, old tax returns, endless resumes, a few poems. Brother, can you spare a rhyme for stuff which waves scatter on the shore, ferried from whevever you were lost?

* * *

It was good to hear from Molly and Dad and Mom for the six-month anniversary of Timm's passing. As I said yesterday, loss does bring us closer together. Not the preferable manner, not in the least, but so it goes. Today I feel calm, almost serene, despite the physical exhaustion. Timm is with us as long as we remember him to each other. Sing his name to the wind.

Timm in a self-portait he included in a Christmas letter a couple years ago. Wanderer, lover of nature, wounded healer, Timm fought all his life with errancies and damage and congential warpings of mind which may have been as much nature as nurture.

October 19 is the anniversary of Timm's near-fatal car accident in 1981. Twenty-seven years ago Timm hitched a ride in a Volkwagen Beetle and -- well, let him tell the story once again:

Haunted by Peace

2003

It was an October night in 1981 that the haunting first began. The moon had not yet risen over the mountains that surrounded the town of Jackson, Wyoming when I stuck my thumb out, trying to get a ride home. The movie I just came from left a smile on my face, a welcome diversion after a day of job-hunting.

A Volkswagen Beetle lumbered up to me and, peering through the windshield, I recognized the occupants from the apartment building we both lived in.
I sat in the backseat, leaning against the side, lulled into a light sleep by the humming engine when it happened.

It was days later when I finally got the full story: a large pick-up had pulled out in front of us when we were doing 60 m.p.h. making the impact inevitable. The driver and the passenger in the front of the Bug were trapped in the mangled mess while I had been ejected, flying 20 yards before hitting the grassy shoulder. The other driver walked away from the incident with a couple of scratches.

A few hours later I was aware of a hard table beneath me, a strong odor of disinfectant and the sound of somebody screaming. I opened my eyes but shut them quickly since the lights above me hurt. People bustled around me but I didn't know what they were doing. My mind a fog, but slowly the realization dawned on me that we had been in an accident.

Somebody was touching my head and another approached the table.

"Is he going to make it doctor?" the newcomer asked the one probing my scalp.
No reply at first, just the gentle probing. Finally the doctor stopped, sighed and responded.

"No, I doubt he'll make it thru the night."

I'm dying. My life didn't flash before my eyes, nor was there a series of regret.

In fact, what I felt surprised me: peace.

It was unlike anything else I'd ever experienced. It surrounded me, enveloping me in a protective cocoon that nothing could touch. The horror of dying at 18, cut down prior to living my life down just didn't matter. Live or die I didn't care. I was beyond caring. I was in that peace.

Later that night I was airlifted 500 miles to Salt Lake City and, contrary to the doctor's prognosis, I lived. But something was different. Eventually I pieced together what had happened, even the last-second screeching of brakes, but what I remembered most was the peace.

I have taken time alone with God every morning since I was in my mid-teens, praying and reading my Bible. It was my way of preparing for the day - getting my head and heart in line with God. It was a few weeks after the accident when I was finally able to do this ritual and then it was there again. The peace. Nowhere near as strong as the night of the accident, but it was the same.

I remembered that night and that incredible peace. I wasn't completely sure what it was all about, I just knew that I never wanted to be separated from it. I was beyond hurting when I was there, enveloped in His presence and here it was again.

My morning devotions took on a whole new meaning as I realized the more I cultivated an intimate relationship with God the more I sensed His present peace.

Before long I noticed it in other places also. Walking in the woods I would be surrounded by it; worshiping, whether in church or alone it was there, and any time I would stop long enough to reconnect with God, there it would be.
It's a wonderful gift, available to everyone. Often appearing as a phantom - unable to physically grasp or manipulate, but when I let go it is there.

He is there.

He is here.

His memory haunts me.

The Volkswagen Beetle in which Timm had been riding.

The deep, oceanic serenity of a soul at home with God: that, I think, is what Timm conveys out of the long underground harrows of his near-death experience, a marinal sense of riding in the ship in which the Ferryman Micheal carries us toward that final shore: a "present peace", most here, abundantly now. This is the lyric music of Pat Matheny's "September Fifteenth," actually keyboardist Lyle Mays' elegy for the jazz pianist Bill Evans, ur-mentor of every gorgeous, longing song. The boat-music of the homeward ride which haunts us for the rest of our days.

When Timm had his accident, I was 23 and living, provisionally, with my mother in Winter Park, Florida. Coincidentally and yet fatefully for the story I share tangentially with Timm, like a twin in every way but shared birth, it was a time of deep wounding for me, my heart cracking wide as Timm's head was suddenly split, which for the both of us, in our separate yet common ways, would prove transformational: a broken love relationship which lamed me with such grief I had to grow. "September Fifteenth" was the anthem of that time for me, gilding the slow hours of my sorrow with a beauty that was inexpressibly keen. And haunted with peace ...

The phone call came in the middle of the night of October 19, 1981, the same hour that we received news of Timm's heart attack and death on April 18, six months and a day ago this year. The accident was in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, but Timm's head injury was so serious that he had been airlifted to a trauma center in Utah. Without hesitation my mother hit her knees and her Scriptures, mouthing the words of entreaty. She packed her bag in the morning and headed for the airport, flying west to be by her son. I would stay on in Florida, watching the dogs Monte (Molly's poodle, she off to college) and Tippy (the female border collie Timm had taken in in Chicago some years before.

Mother wasn't gone too long -- a couple of weeks -- returning with Timm in late October. I remember him then as very quiet, angry at events, eager to get his settlement from the insurance company and get back on his ever-Westward road. He was 18, still wet with womb-water, a kid: how criminal it seemed for him to be lamed so at such an early age.

We both were suffering from great wounds, or I liked to think so, though my late-adolescent emotional suffering hardly compares with his near-death experience. He would also have double-vision and seizures over the years. He suffered from inattention and there were the emotional scars of the shock.

Yet the most grevious wound for Timm was that hearing in his left ear had been severed in the collision. This made it hard for him to triangulate sound. Conversation with another wasn't too hard -- he would bend his head to catch the sound in his good ear - but he easily lost the thread of conversation in a group. Much worse, his damaged hearing made musical performance in a group exceedingly difficult. He loved playing his guitar and had great ambitions as a musician ; monotone sound in one ear pretty well ruined those ambitions.

A potrait of Timm with his guitar, to me obviously meant as a promotional picture. Though his accident greatly impaired Timm's hearing -- and ability to perform with others -- he kept at it for all of his life.

My musical ambitions were equally bright but failed for much worse reasons: I squandered them, living the life rather than trying to work the art. Ironically, I lost about a third of my own hearing to the noise of playing and listening to music.

Also, the great wound of that time for me that I was lamely trying to get over some girl, assaulted by the recognition that I had to grow up if I was ever going to enter a true love relationship. Timm was on pain meds and physical therapy; my physic that season was Pat Matheny and "The Road Less Travelled." If anything, my monotonal, self-enclosed heart had suddenly, through loss, experienced the possibility of the stereophonic possibilities of love; the difference was, I could heal into such new sounds where Timm had to make the best of the music he had.

***

It wouldn't be correct to say that Timm's auto accident was the only cause of so many of Timm's difficulties over the years. There were older problems which the head injury exacerbated. His inattention was evident as a young child; he was the one who unfailingly had accident, laying hands on the stove at three, stepping barefoot on the burning ashes of a construction site at seven. Timmm's accident-prone nature became legend for both family and friends: leaping across a creek to puncture his foot; breaking a tooth biting down on a French fry; getting gasoline in his eye while helping a friend siphon gas into a car; stepping through the roof of house; injuring his back moving a fridge; injuring another tooth diving into a pool; contracting a bad enough case of cholera from the inoculation. There wasn't an accident that Timm wasn't prone to having; his calls home for the greatest while were begun with the line, "Mom, I'm OK, but you wouldn't believe what happened."

Psychiatrists say that one who is accident-prone is self-destructive; they unconsciously conspire to hurt themselves due to a negative view of their selves. Lots of skeletons in Timm's closet could have cheered Timm on to such behaviors; that's a fact. Yet we can also see physical causes. Surely Timm's head injury lent a woozy enought perspective that might have made him waltz into accidents where others might have stepped more ably around them.

But his accidents began long before his car accident. If there are physical reasons for this, let's look at the family record. I had my first grand mal seizure in 1982, with two others slamming me over the next five years. I had been having petit mal seizures for years, momentary lapses into a measure of vertigo and disorientation that fell short of falling all the way down the grand mal seizure's black oubliette. Grand mal seizures are like drowning and coming to back on this shore of life: there is a mad struggle and then the abysss and then the light of day again, the whole body racked with the maelstrom of something deep down, the fast iron grip of a hand which has reached up to pull me away.

Thankfully, my seizure disorder has been effectively marginalized by medication - Phenobarbitol and then Tegretol and its generics. None of the imaging equipment in 1982 caught what apparently was congentially one of the temporal lobes of my brain, a scarry mass which showed up in a CAT scan in 2006 when I was getting tested for my chronic migraines. (As I write I'm coming off a two-day migraine bender which has belligerently refused to be quelled by all of the medications I can take.) The neurologist who reviewed my CAT scan results said that my seizure disorder makes perfect sense in the light of that (benign) mass, congential defects like that are common in seizure disorders.

What I'm getting at is that Timm may have been born with a similar mass in his brain; his errant judgement and balance in getting into all of those accidents might have been the result of petit mal seizures while in motion. The head injury just whacked it worse.

Timm's emotional difficulties over the years may too have been rooted in depth in these physical problems. His history isn't that much different than mine, but he agonized at much deeper league than I. I went to therapy too over the years, ranted at family wounds, sexual abuses & the like; yet Timm remained in the wound for a much more harrowling length. Again: congenital defects plus the head injury, could have darkened Timm's emotional environment from within, making the same events far more difficult to handle.

There are congenital emotions, freight we carry from inherited temperament. We nurse on our parents' subconscious, our psyches weaned on everything from their own growing up, including the unresolved stuff. There is always some gall mixed in with the sweet milk of nurture. Their nature becomes a part of us, for better and ill. Timm was like Mom so much in his Christian faith, in his daily devotions and sense of mission; he is like Dad in his ceaseless energy for projects and people. He is like all the difficulties of their own childhood, the difficulties of their marriage, the yearnings they cant' quite express.

There is also the inheritance of neurochemistry, and in our family some perplexing dollops of disorder are mixed in. At the same time Timm had his accident and I was mooning down into an encounter with my grieving heart, one of our cousins' schizophrenia was in first full wild blossom, with her head roaring with delusional fantasies, the voices so loud and clear out of nowhere that the medications of the time could only heavily sedate her.

What is so difficult with schizophrenia - as with alcholism, which has been proved to be genetically linked - is that the sufferer is in love with the disease; normality is the dread pill which leeches all color and drama from the day. Madness and its lesser filials all have a self-pleasing stink to them, a personal romance which is so perplexing to the family and love ones who watch it dig deeper. Now, I'm not suggesting that Timm was schizophrenic, but he did battle alcoholism and was in therapy and counseling for many years. I can't help but wonder here the intensity and duration of his emotional problems was perhaps more of nature than of nurture.

Me and Timm at a Thanskgiving event at Aunt and Uncle Frank Hellinger, 1981, about a month after his accident.

Perhaps. But let's return to the autumn of 1981, where three of us were fighting our way back from a somewhat common yet distantly related wilderness of near-death and madness and grief. We were all there at Thanksgiving 1981 over at the Hellingers', Mom and Molly too. Molly, recovering from gall bladder surgery, was talking with great animation at the large dinner table; Uncle Frank was relating the benefits of smoking turkeys; and cousin Frank was going on about he wasn't sure whether to finish a doctorate in physics or go into medicine.

Timm was there at the table, leaning into the conversation, straining to hear with his good ear; our ailing cousin was outside down by the lake, smoking cigarettes and talking with the presences under or over the water. I was there too, thinner than ever (some 100 pounds lighter than I am today), wanting to be so much different than I had become, a party boy who was always turning away from his family, not knowing how to make connections which Timm, too, wasn't sure how to make.

The family, somewhat gathered, or half-gathered; that was typical in the long years of separation and distance. These days the distances are still quite great in one way though there is far less separation; time has healed, or scarred over sufficiently, the old wounds. Eventually Timm got his settlement from the insurance company - a pittance, really, $15 thousand bucks or so, enough to buy a Dodge Ram pickup truck and some photo equipment and get the hell outta Florida. He was gone by early 1982 and I wouldn't see him again until sister Molly married in 1987.

That truck was painted midnight blue, I believe - the color of this full-mooned night. It would have been hard to see in moonlight, present only in a glimmer and shadow ... Like Timm ...

Timm with his Dodge Ram, just after buying it with his insurance payout. He's still in Florida here, outside Mom's house ...

... and here is Timm with his truck now down the road, perhaps in Colorado. Note his confidence and pleasure at being where he is.

Although the car accident was a fixed star in Timm's subsequent life, he doesn't make much mention of it in his journals. There is a passage (which I can't find now) where Timm vents his anger at his God for taking away a gift which was so precious to him - he realized that the severered hearing in one ear would always hamper a musical career - but I only came across such a venting once. An old motif in Timm's depressions is that whatever he wanted most would be taken away from him, again and again and again.

I believe Timm almost fully recovered from that accident -- as well as from all of the brute accidents of history and birth and the warpings of mind and soul where our instincts collide through alcoholism and other errancies of spirit - but it was a long, slow recovery, with many turns and evolutions. Timm was a member of AA for 16 years; he attended other support groups over the years and had numerous therapists and counselors; he took a wide range of medicines for depression and inattention and post-traumatic stress disorder. Along with the damage in his hearing he suffered from double-vision and seizures (corrected eventually by Lasik surgery). The voices of his past continued to haunt Timm but slowly the volume was turned down, ebbed back to a range which would allow him to enter the present life more fully in his work and relationships.

Timm the man, I believe, found toward the end of his years a healthy access to Timm the happy boy.

Our cousin recovered - greatly - from the voices in her head through a series of better and more effecdive medications, allowing her to keep a house and hold a job and be a wonderful aunt to her nieces and nephews. But as Timm had to take his daily AA medicine, so she had to take hers. When she was in the hospital recently for treatment of an infection in her knee, the attending psychiatrist thought her medications were too strong and put her on a regimen which proved far too weak for those voices which can never be exorcized. Recently she had a relapse and the family is struggling to get her hospitalized and back under full care. She'll be OK if she takes that bitter reality pill. Timm was OK when he took his. I take my meds and don't seizures, I go to AA and I'm happy with sobriety.

That long slow recovery gave Timm a different perspective, that his happiness lay not in what he wanted but in wanting what he had. And if his musical ambitions were forestalled, he found a full and great expression in his photography, an art he was truly beginning to unleash in his last years. In his photos, Timm is free from the thickets of doubt and obfuscation which can get into the writing (read here!), and, as silent encounters with the world, there is no torture in the hearing, half-present and half-dead. Just the full world for the naked eye, complete and sufficient.

And that haunting of peace Timm wrote about in his recollections of his near-fatal accident on October 17-18, 1981 is a peace which is suffesed in his images, telling us, I believe, that Timm became a vessel of expression for that peace, blooming on in the night like my garden in moonlight.

Why all of this here? The closer reading of Timm's life here has made me look more deeply at my own. He and I are twins of a sort in many ways; so, too, our minds, our mental processes, for better and worse. I see how hard Timm was on himself and his past; read with great sympathy his long difficulties with relationship; wish he had been easier on himself and others. Much of the fault, if you take the nature vs. nurture reading of Timm's history, was in the damaged, warped and magnified lens of his own mind, and not as much with the world it observed. He could have been easier and others -- and himself -- had he been more able to say to himself, "of course this is strange, why wouldn't it be, with this strange perception I have ..." And I read that personally, as words from the wise, the dead, the lost as reproval and guidance, to not take this all too seriously. Of course this is strange ...

The benefit -- the balm in the bane, so to speak -- is that there are sources for healing within us, touched perhaps by our willingness to accept and grow and change. As Timm, so myself: entering my life meant taking the bitter pill that it wasn't what I had dreamed -- nor was it, thank God, all I feared. Planting myself here -- in this small plot of land in Mount Dora Florida, with a wife and way too many cats and a garden and a small amount of real work to accomplish in the world -- meant making use of my wounds, finding means to turn them into wombs of good.

"Beauty heals" - remember?

* * *

On October 18, 1988 - the seventh anniversary of his accident - Timm writes the following in his journal. He is just beginning his recovery in AA, and its daily pill of staying put and doing the right thing seems a bitter pill. Daily existence is not easy for him and there is always the temptation, which he oft could not refuse, to flee. Yet hanging tough with his present reality also allows a dream to rise from its foundations, one which Timm would not quite come to live but exuded, like a fragrance, the very peace he experienced in October 1981. Whether dreams come true one the outside or we experience the happy destiny of our lives from their insides, this one I think says everything about Timm's recovery.

I am presently sitting in the kitchen as John is giving a guitar lesson in the living room. I am still at John's house since I can't seem to put enough money together to get my own place. All of my bills seem to be coming at me at once. So to counter this, I am working two jobs and hoping to pick up a third one. No new developments in the social work scene except that I am working part-time at a group home for developmentally disabled adults (17, 23 & 30). I must admit that I do like it.

A strange thing happened last week. I was having a particularly difficult day dealing with the pain that God was dredging up. This morning God instructed me to keep myself pure that day. I know He was going to do something and I wasn't really sure that I was up for it, but I agreed to do as He bid.

Late in the afternoon, I as daydreaming about something when all of a sudden my thoughts were going faster than I could tink. There before me was the ranch but with a different twist. It was so beautiful that I was in tears, What God was showing me was to incorporate art and music therapy into the program - giving the kids an opportunity to express themselves in more creative ways. I could have professional artists coming in to work with t he kids but also to hold seminars for other aspiring artists. The kids on the upper ladder of the treatment could work cooking & cleaning to earn money. We could also have an outdoor ampitheater for concerts and plays. I had a vision of myself playing & my wife sitting on the deck of our house with two others playing a string quartet as the sun was setting.