Apparitions of history (and its mystery)

It's October now, Timm, and you would feel greatly re-confirmed in your decision to move far north and west of Florida all those years ago, although it meant farewelling your family in a way you did not have the time to re-constitute: for this past week we've been stuck under a high-pressure dome which has kept temps soaring back in mid-July heights, into the mid-90's day after day after day, not enough moisture in the atmosphere to whip up much storm relief, just fleeting 'boomers which bolt about a little, pour a bucket of rain, then vanish ... There hasn't been an October like this in Florida since 1980 when I moved here, right about the time you moved away. Hot sunlight oddly poised against short-and-shorter days as the light creeps away toward its winter manger. You would feel quite refreshed to have instead your Oregonian autumnals, loving to be in the great outdoors as the year gilds with transformation, winds cooler, leaves falling, forests becoming a more transparent blanket of foliage as the leaves fall, the sky that heartbreaking hue of blue which says the change is upon us ... Sigh.

Well, we're finally in for a change, or so they say, with rain moving into the area today ahead of a cool front, one high-pressure-dome knocked out of the deep-Southeastern ring by a burly enough customer. Dad says snow is coming this week to Columcille; we won't get any of that, but daily temps will sink to the mid-70's by Saturday, hooray ...

And it's 2009, and the world has changed greatly since you last saw it, running the early spring evening in April 2008: changed in ways you would not much like -- you might still be looking for work, and the local ambience is surely much darker, with unemployment so high, so many people heading to financial ruination, real-estate market shot, stimulus money from the government mostly helping teachers and construction workers, no great funds for the sort of arts funding there was back in the Depression, no government grant to you to capture Oregon as it is through your accomplished camera ... Well, these consolations: Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, albeit for reasons no one is quite sure of, except that maybe it was awarded in recognition of things the committee would like to see him accomplish at some later date. And your Denver Broncos are undefeated this season, beating even the likes of the Boston Patriots.

Your recovery would reaffirm that where the darkness is greatest, there too is light, the possibility through surrender to reach the ground which holds fast, no matter what comes. I've heard it said in AA that when a person dies, their sins are forgiven and your crimes fade from the collective memory; all that remains, is durable, is the legacy of your good acts. I'm sure you are still sorely missed by your community. Like Rep. Hooley said at your memorial, who will hurry to help first as you always did? And who will aid in healing the sufferings of our tribe with images of beauty, the way you did, believing in the immortal physic of a perfect mountain stream?



Your brother Will continues with that work, with your camera, staying quite busy with his photography following the publication of A Stillness Within A Frame. Recently he sent me photos of flowers in his garden and a St. Francis Day Blessing of the Pets event at Columcille.








Will also recently sent me a series of old pictures he unearthed from our Chicago days, when Dad was minister at Lakeview Presbyterian Church at the corner of Broadway and Addison, about six city blocks east of Wrigley Field. A mission church, heavily supported by the city Presbytery, the church was abundant in mission, with a senior center in the basement serving lunch on weekedays, a thrift store, and a high school up on the second floor. It was a free school, meaning a school outside the public school system and not supported by private tuition. When the school - Lakeview Academy - started in 1973, I was 15, you were 8; the family had reunited from Florida and was living in a row house on Fullerton Avenue, adjacent to Fullerton Seminary.

Trying to capture the ambience of this time is difficult; it is both memorable and washed away. Scenes, moods, the gray cast of the Chicago sky still seep through. The difference between ever-warm, sleepy Winter Haven in Florida and that big Northern city was immense. Chicago was noise and grit, poverty and eternal motion; it was junkies and crazy people and kids going to and from school and lanky unisex men and women in baggies and tall platform shoes, it was cops and cabs racing by on the street and hookers and transvestites and the Salvation Army across the street from the church, a walled enclave where devotees emerged from in full uniform, to ring the bell and help the sick and poor of spirit, much as the spirit-filled congregation of our church tried to. My adolescence tints the glass a grayish-blue, hopelessly infatuated with Ronnie Andre and playing guitar for the church choir and going about school and being so earnest about Christian mission.

Where were you? You had a room in that row house, but I can't remember if it was on the second or third floor. You attended a private Lutheran school with Molly. You had a friend down the street named Paul Roth whom he played with frequently. You had your dog Tippy and when you slept, you still sucked your thumb. You was around, but I was in my own teenaged world, a confused jangle of faith and evangelical music bound to their lower charkas of unrequieted love and rock 'n' roll.

In my adolescent dopiness, I didn't think much about you or anyone else except the objects of my obsessions. I wanted it all and I didn't know what I wanted. I stayed up late in the front bedroom on the third floor of that row house with various boarders we took on from the school in singles or in pairs, Eddie Rivera and Al Arguellez, Eddie's brother Ritchie, Bernardo Medina. Up there we'd stay up late every night reciting lines from Cheech & Chong comedy albums, play air guitar with a vacuum cleaner to Alice Cooper's "Halo of Flies," occasionally do homework, bang on whatever served as a street tympani to the O'Jays "Papa Was a Rolliing Stone," sing Christian songs on acoustic guitars.

It's all muddled together, so bent through the prism of an emerging self, self-centered in the extreme as all adolescents are, bearing the brunt of eternity with each day walking the twelve blocks up Halstead or Broadway to school, on days that alternately cold or brutally so, the wind whipping off Lake Michigan and rushing around and down the canyons of stone and steel so brutally that tie-lines were strung around the John Hancock building downtown. (The Chicago American - remember that paper? - would run pictures every year of some little old lady holding on for dear life to that rope, feet perpendicular to her body as the wind tried to haul her away).

What else of the era, now nearly four decades gone? Publication of the Pentagon Papers, Richard Nixon entering the Watergate crisis, the oil embargo creating long lines at gas stations, "Ziggy Stardust" by David Bowie and "Angie" by the Rolling Stones, race riots at Senn High School and the Jesus People living in a Korean Church up the street, moving into our evangelical territory with longhair salvation and the Resurrection Band.

The school had 13 students, almost all of them dropouts from Senn High in Uptown, a true battlefield of a melting pot, the black and Puerto Ricans always at war, mixing in white Appalachians and Asian-American immigrants from now and then. Horrible. Our school was really created for these dropouts and provided intensive, one-on-one remedial tutoring. Triage for a broken system's broken charges. I was sort of along for the ride, didn't want to try my hand at the 4,000 student Lane Tech - a little more middle-class, less of a prison but still a too-enormous mill of angles and fists I quailed to negotiate.

We operated on a wing and prayers, getting cardboard desk/workstations donated from somewhere, books from somewhere else. The driving force in the school was Anita Smith, the only paid teacher at the time, a 30-something no-nonsense teacher with a real passion for the vocation. 35 years later the school is still there, and Anita is still teaching there, taking on crop after crop of ill-educated, poorly-disciplined kids from the flotsom and jetsam of our ever-broken working-class family caste, kids who deserve a break from their lousy origins. I haven't been back since 1974 when I graduated, but hear about the school from time to time from Dad, who's been back to visit numerous times (most recently late this summer).

Anyway, the pictures Will found and sent are as if up from a time capsule - grainy and poorly-lit snaps of a day at that school. He was giving photography a first, schooled hand, and these are samples of that work. They are very grainy -- most are enlarged from a contact sheet that Will scanned -- but the faintness of the images lends to the ambience of the distance of these memories. A door to the mystery of what was our history.

Eddie Rivera fashioned himself in the likeness of his hero Bruce Lee. Here he performs flips in the snow.

Danny and Cookie.

Phyllis Arguellez and Nancy Guitierrez.

Ritchie Rivera.

Phyllis and me.

Edwin Negron with Al's guitar.

Ronnie Andre with her blithe boyfriend Eddie. Boy did I have a crush on Ronnie.

Edwin Negron with Eddie Rivera in their Phantom Lords gang suits. They professed to be a Christian gang, out to help people, but when they were busted on the grounds of Senn High School my father took their hats away.

An arty shot by Will of Phyllis.

We were all so busy - Dad with the day-to-day operations of a mission church, Mom engaged in helping out in the senior center & prayer groups & bible study, Molly and Timm in their school, Will and I at Lakeview Academy and me so involved in other church activities, mostly in music, playing a 12-string Epiphone acoustic guitar in lieu of an organist. We were together as a family for breakfast and dinner, the six of us plus the one or two boarders, Lord what a full table that was, Shep and Monte and Tippy, our three dogs, lined up in the big window of the front living room looking down, like vultures, on every passserby. (For some reason, they were always on the third floor when the front door opened with one of us coming in, and the three dogs would roll down three flights of stairs in one barking fur tumbleweed, Tippy peeing on the steps as she raced down.

Lots of stories - many part of routine family lore which we repeat to each other whenever we're together. It was an odd, sometimes fun, sometimes hilarious, other times hurtful, still other times wonderful experience. Some of the stories were been too difficult to tell -- right, Timm? I didn't find some of yours out until after you were dead.

Will and I graduated from Lakeview High. I wrote a lot of Christian songs, my first hand at merging music and words. New Town became quite hip, with its bars and unisex fashions. Uptown remained a hard ghetto. The Cubs kept losing ("Awwwwwwww" was a sound echoing up frequently from Wrigley Field a few blocks over). Dad and Mom were together for another couple of years, separating for the last time in 1974. That's when the great family diaspora happened, with Dad moving to New York City, Mom and Molly and you back down to Florida, Will to California and me out to Whitworth College just outside Spokane, Washington. Our family ceased to exist then, or became an entity of great distance and small communication. Mom and Dad's divorce was final in 1977. We would not re-unite as a family again until 1987, when Molly got married, and there were only two re-unions since, with my first wedding in January 1988, and then Will's wedding in 1996.

Filter all that back through the lens of Will's camera as he snapped away regularities of our day at Lakeview Academy: a complex, bittersweet whole, with all of the yearning and angst of adolescence fully in the frame. You appeared only two times in them, and one is the ghostliest and strangest and most serene of them all. It's group picture of students from Lakeview plus you and it's awry, everything tilting to the left (everyone's laughing, so the purpose is meant), slipped into the motion of chaos. You are center and Albert and Eddie are holding your hands, more brother to you than Will or I. Maybe Will was laughing as he shot the picture or getting tickled from behind; maybe everyone was breaking up at once. The aperture is too open or the shutter speed too slow for the exisiting light, so everyone is a phantasm in the image, as if there yet fast slipping off, like my memory of those days.




How different that image is from the following one which was clearly arranged and well-shot, the only one in color, of the Academy that first year of its existence.

A formal photograph of the inaugural class of Lakeview Academy, which is still going strong 35 years later. (Head teacher Anita Smith, front row second from right, is still teaching there.) Will is second to the left in the back row, and I'm in the center rear standing in front of the cross.

And yet the one in which you so frostily appear with that huge smile is the clearest image of how the distant past becomes in our minds as it soaks down into oblivion, retrieved for this one moment. Those assembled for this picture have been scattered from it - as the youngest, Timm, you are dead; several others may be, too. (A Native American kid named Lloyd who loved playing guitar and had jam sessions where there was always drugs overdosed and died at 15.)Some got heavily into drugs, some went to prison. Many have alcohol habits which they've kicked or endured or vary between periods of sobriety and slips. Some eventually married and had kids, got divorced and re-married, worked this job and that into some form of career. There have been reunions but I have never been back, not since '78 or so when I stopped over on the way to Columcille.

Chicago stayed Chicago. Lakeview Academy is still going strong, the oldest free school still in existence anywhere. Real estate got pricey. Our family home in Evanston, which Dad bought for 30 thousand in 1963, was on the market in the late 90's for 1.2 million. The Cubs made it to the playoffs a couple of times but no further and havejust been recently sold by the bankrupt Tribune Corporation to a private family, along with Wrigley Field, for some 800 million dollars. Tribune is bankrupt, and so is the Sun Times. So it goes.

And we were one of its passing, throwaway moments, of not much value to it and yet among our most precious. There we all were before we were gone.

A more recent photo of Lakeview Presbyterian Church, quite renovated.

Note

Timm traveled to Chicago in 1998 with his wife Mik to attend what "PCM School" - something to do with Christian ministry -- taking the train one day into the city to confront some of the scenes of his growing-up which had determined, he believed for years, much of the hurtful courses of his later life.

On 6.11.98 he writes in his journal,

"I've taken a break from PCM School to go visit the Fullerton house. I realized yesterday I need to . I've made a vow to no longer "react" & avoid the pain of my past, but face it. In going back I hope to do two things: 1) Reassociate with the actual feelings. Last night when I visualized standing in front of the house I could see myself picking up a rock and throwing it with all my might through the front window. The rage of being abandoned, neglected, unprotected welled up to all parts of my body. I guess I need to re-frame the picture with me as an adult. It's funny how I must associate the rage with a little hurting boy.

"The second part of what I need to do today and when I go to Evanston is collect symbols of my lost innocence, needs unmet and wounds created. On Sunday Mik & I will have a burial service, where I can take all these symbols & lay them in a grave. Like most burials, this does not signify the ending of grieving, but I think in many ways it is beginning. I know I can grieve the losses, cry, feel my pain, knowing that it's time.

"I think on balance I need to somehow find a symbol or symbols to which take back the good parts of my childhood. It's easy to see only the bad & ignore the good.

"As I ride the train right now into Chicago,there's this gooey, dark anxiety, mixed with trepidation. I view the area as enemy - one I'm powerless over. I was powerless ver my parents' inability and decisions, and against my abusers. I just accepted it all as a passive receptor, resigned to the thought that this is just how life is. I know now that this isn't true.

"A few minutes ago as I stood on the train platform I found myself needing the presence of Jesus with me. Not that He's ever not there, but I need the sense - the reminder that I do not make this trip alone. In the empty seat next to me He sits; as I walk down Fullerton and cross to the DePaul campus, I see Him by my side; and as I stand in front of my old house His arm is draped over my shoulder, sharing my pain so I don't get overwhelmed. Now the house windows are dark and broken; I realize nobody lives there any more - especially me ..."

A train ticket from the Illinois Regional Commuter Railroad Corporation for June 11 is stuck in his journal here.

Timm does not write of his actual visit to these places, and the conclusion of the trip is quite different, with he and Mik getting into a fight of such enormity that they end up traveling back to Portland on separate flights. The healing, it seems, had a longer row to hoe. But the garden of his life did get seeded, and he did see it come to bear fruit, transforming old hurts into a harvest for others to take nourishment in and savor.

There's Timm at the left performing with, I think, Lakeview's version of the Youth Choir -- there weren't many their age. Sister Molly is next to him, then Nancy Guiterrez on guitar with, I think, her older sister singing along.