Drying Bones

I was born right after the surrender of Germany in WW II, on July 10th 1945, in Pasadena, California, . A little less than a month later, on August 6th, my country dropped a new kind of bomb, an atomic bomb, on Hiroshima killing about 70,000 people instantly. 30,000 more men, women and children would die by the end of the year from the invisible radiation. A few days later we dropped another atomic bomb on Nagasaki, killing an estimated 40,000 people instantly. And another 30,000 people would die from the residual radiation by the end of the year. These numbers are guesses. Wikipedia says, “the bombings killed between 129,000 and 226,000 people, most of whom were civilians.” Couldn’t we have arranged for a demonstration of our new bomb in the middle of a desert and invited delegates from Japan to witness it and then, afterwards, demanded their surrender?  Why didn’t we? This is an insane, unimaginable, horror that is a permanent tattoo on the beginning of my life. And I believe that we all must never forget that we all carry this legacy, this shame, to ensure our humility.

CHAPTER 2:   THE GIFT OF A JOURNEY, OVER 30 YEARS SO FAR.

Both of my parents were the ministers of a sort of a liberal metaphysical Christian church. The church had living quarters upstairs and was our home for the first three years of my life. On one Sunday morning, in a family story told innumerable times, I got away from my baby sitter and waddled completely naked up the center isle of the chapel while my father was giving a sermon. One of the women in the choir swooped down the isle and delivered me back to my babysitter.

Somehow my parents managed to save enough of their meager church salary to buy a lot just below the foothills of Altadena with a view of the Pacific Ocean about 40 miles away. With the help of some college students my father built a concrete block house and we moved out of the church. I have three brothers. Tom, the oldest, teaches at the University of New Hampshire. When I was three years old he moved out of the house. Like many artists he drinks too much and I don’t think he’s very happy. The next oldest brother died the Halloween before last. He was 42. I loved him but I didn’t like him very much. He was an angry bigot and yet the courage and the passion of his life humbles me. My younger brother, among many other things, is an aging hippie capitalist. He’s more self-destructive than I am and I’m worried about him. My father died in 1966. I was 21. Six or seven years later my mother remarried – a nice old guy. I’m quite close to my mother.

My parents gave us very little religious indoctrination. We were taught only that everything in the universe is an aspect, a projection of “Godness,” and that there is nothing that we can get away with, good or bad.

I remember my childhood having a surface of happiness flowing over a deep current of shame. I wonder if most people who think childhood is a time of peace and security have forgotten what it’s like. I have always believed myself ugly, uncoordinated, and somehow mentally and emotionally out of step with the rest of the world. But I have also always wanted to know all people, do all things, and live all places, and yet I have felt at the same time that it was all empty. I went through an atheist stage in high school, trying to determine what was mine and what came from my parents. Soon after this period I had some semi-mystical “religious” experiences and with great idealism and considerable naivete I threw myself into the hippie culture in the mid sixties. But as that vision faded and the Vietnam war continued I retreated into drugs. After flirting with that edge for several years I began to work more and more with meditation and various “spiritual” disciplines. In the seventies I went through my religious fanatic stage. I got involved with an eastern guru, made a religious pilgrimage to India, entered an ashram here in San Francisco and lived under traditional renunciant vows of chastity, obedience, and poverty, for three and a half years. I left that order four or five years ago, bought a new BMW motorcycle, and went to work as a projectionist, often showing something like Cinderella one night and then The Hot Nasties the next. I worked the Turk St. Follies and the Mitchell Brother’s O’Farrell Theater scheduling strippers and running their spotlight while snorting coke and smoking dope with a copy Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras in my hip pocket. I spent a summer in Paris in love with a gorgeous French girl who spoke English with a northern Irish accent. After three months of midnight picnics on the Seine and afternoons in the Louvre she broke my heart. I spent the following summer fighting and making love with an exquisite German girl all over western Europe. I trying to give up romance.

But I’m finally beginning to accept the fact that I’m a human being, that I’m here and will probably have to stay for awhile. Though I’m a Linguistics major preparing for the TEFL program I’m still not really sure what I want to be when I grow up other than immersed in passionate Buddhist detachment.

I’m wondering, do other languages besides English capitalize the personal pronoun?