Category Archives: family history

Another Memorial Day

Posted on by

Last October I wrote about a photo of my father and his immediate famiily that was taken at the Long homestead in Las Cruces, New Mexico around 1930. That photo came my way at about the time I was reading Gwynne’s Empire of the Summer Moon, a reflection on the closing of the Indian wars in the southwest, the part of the southwest where I grew up and thought of those bitter conflicts as part of an ancient past. But it wasn’t ancient, isn’t ancient today.

A family history research project led me to a greater sense of connection with and proximity to the southwestern frontier than I had ever experienced before. I had visited the graves of Quanah Parker and Geronimo at Ft. Sill as a youngster, but I didn’t know then and have only recently understood that those graves are about eighty miles as the crow flies from Sayre, Oklahoma where my father was born at his family’s first homestead. That proximity and connection does not incline us to place wreaths on Indian graves at Ft. Sill. But perhaps it should.

When I first started this blog, I wrote about my father, who died in World War II. I’ve always liked this picture of him, taken at Ft. Bliss during training exercises before he and his comrades in the New Mexico Militia were sent to the Philippines as the United States 200th Coast Artillery in August 1941. He was a physician and a volunteer—at the time his unit was federalized physicians couldn’t be drafted—though he didn’t want to go overseas and hoped for a long time that the unit would be reprieved. I’ve always thought service in the National Guard was part of a payback for help with medical school—my father graduated from medical school in 1932—though I’ve never confirmed my suspicion. We saw him off with his unit on the train at El Paso a couple of days after my birthday that summer of 1941. He told me to take care of my mother. Here’s a bit more of what I wrote back then, paraphrased a little.

“More recently, I’ve read many of his letters to my mother. They describe his westward journey, first by train and then by ship, to the east, his arrival, much experience in the first heady weeks of his encounter with the MacArthur establishment. He didn’t like MacArthur, but I think he loved the old brown shoe army and relished being even a very lowly Captain, as he puts it in one letter, in that foreign outpost which must have had a certain old fashioned clubbiness and esprit. Then, of course, things turned sour. The letters are fewer from mid October on, and stop altogether in late November. One letter arrived after Pearl Harbor, written from a tent on Bataan in February, 1942. He died in 1944, somewhere in the South Pacific on an unmarked prisoner ship that was torpedoed by the U. S. Navy. The story of the sinking made the papers back home, with tales of escaping prisoners being beaten to death by Japanese marines. Of course that wasn’t anywhere near the whole horror of it.

“I learned more about the Japanese death ships when I read Dorothy Cave’s Beyond Courage a few years back. Apparently the Japanese used prisoner ships, marked with a red cross, to ship munitions, but there seems also to have been an intention to exterminate prisoners by transporting them on unmarked ships. Cave’s book also confirmed my impression from family and other history that my father and his comrades had been abandoned by their government when it was decided that the war in Europe took precedence over the far east. I learned too that my mother had been a member of an advocacy group during the war, that attempted to pressure congress and the president to rescue the folk in the Philippines. I found a collection of newsletters among her effects after her death. I also found a check for $100 that my father wrote to someone with a Filipino name. It was presented to my mother for payment after the war. The letter that accompanied it explained that my father had written it for black market medical supplies that he managed to smuggle into the prison at Camp O’Donnell.

“After his death was confirmed, they promoted him to Major and gave him some medals. One was a Bronze Star, the highest military decoration awarded to noncombatants. He also received a Presidential Citation, signed by Franklin Roosevelt, which my mother always cherished. I didn’t know much of this as a child. I thought my father’s Purple Heart more important than the Bronze Star, bigger and more imposing. And for a long time I refused to believe he was dead. I fantasized that he would come around the corner of my school one day and grab me up in his arms.” There’s an error in the Bronze Star citation. It dates my father’s internment from April 1941 and should read April 1942.

My father’s regiment was sent to the Philippines because its personnel spoke Spanish. It was a multicultural unit that included native Americans as well as hispanics and anglos like my father. It had been a horse cavalry unit only recently. I remember a closet full of my father’s cavalry uniforms and riding boots. It’s a nice irony that less than fifty years after the close of the Indian and range wars, and in a place where both had been pretty fierce, there was a military regiment that included soldiers whose recent ancestors had likely fought each other over territorial and other claims, some of them genocidal, now a unit engaged in a common struggle far from home and united in part by a common language that wasn’t English.

Into my own

Posted on by

Recently I was sent a collection of family photographs. Among them is this snapshot taken outside the farmhouse in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where my father and his brothers and sister did much of their growing up. My father is the tall one in the middle with his hands on my grandmother’s shoulders. Her youthful appearance startles me. The elderly woman on the far left is my great grandmother, Melissa Peterson. The farm in Las Cruces was a homestead. Only my uncle Bill (standing just behind Mrs. Peterson and my aunt Frances) was born there. My father, his brother Randolph (the one with the silk handkerchief in his pocket), and his sister were born at an earlier homestead near Sayre, Oklahoma. There’s no date on this photo, but I think it was taken in 1930 or ’31. The subjects seem to be dressed in their best, on their way somewhere.

Except for my father they would all live long lives. Mrs. Peterson lived to be 82; my grandmother and two of her children would live almost a century, reaching the age of 99. Uncle Randolph, the eldest of my grandmother’s children, would live to be 94. And except for Mrs. Peterson they would all find themselves far away from Las Cruces at the end of their lives, most of their experience shaped largely by their country’s mid-century adventures in the far east. All of my grandmother’s children went to college. As I look at these images of them, see the hardscrabble under their feet and the house with its look of temporariness, I am thinking how remarkable that is.

I’ll not tell all I know of their stories now. My father and my uncle Bill were already in medical school, I think; uncle Randolph on his way up the corporate ladder in what would become AT&T. My aunt Frances would marry a man who became a Brigadier and travel widely. My grandmother, once her children were launched, would travel widely as well, living in Honolulu for a while and finally settling in Seattle. But the various fulfillments of these separate destinies were long ahead of them all in 1930—what strikes me in this photo is the seeming anticipation in their demeanor, and a certain innocence.

My title is borrowed from a poem of Robert Frost’s that anticipates the end of a long life as a time of certainty. The poem’s speaker imagines that friends he left behind, should they catch him up at the end of life’s journey, would discover him to be not “changed from him they knew— / Only more sure of all [he] thought was true.” These are the thoughts of a young man, part of Frost’s first book, A Boy’s Will, published when the poet was thirty-eight years old. At this distance they seem a recipe for closed mindedness.

• • •

I recalled the lines from Frost as I was thinking about some lines from a much longer ago dead poet, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey:

Martial, the things that do attain
The happy life, be these, I finde.
The richessse left, not got with pain:
The frutefull ground, the quiet minde:

After I factor out the mindset of the landed aristocrat, there remains in this translation of Surrey’s the still attractive classical ideal of the quiet mind; though Surrey’s own mind was less than likely to be quiet. Like Martial he lived in turbulent times. He led a dangerous life as a Catholic in the twilight of Henry VIII’s reign and was ultimately executed as a traitor. He was perhaps 30 years old when he died.

But the ideal of the quiet mind need not be thought youthful, nor need it presuppose certainty. It is a stoic ideal, conceived as a response to uncertainty and frustration, a consciousness that seeks its own in the midst of political and other stresses; and it’s sometimes held up as a goal of liberal education, a mind both copious and quiet, “liberally furnished with objects of contemplation,” to paraphrase Dr. Johnson, another latter day stoic, who between herculean labor and coping with Tourette’s syndrome and other afflictions, had plenty of mental noise in his life.

I’ve just finished a week’s reading that included, in addition to various consumables (by which I mean newspapers, blogs, media, etc.), John Gardner’s Grendel, which my class discussed last week, S. C. Gwynne’s Empire of the Summer Moon, a popular meditation on the the winding down of the Indian wars in the southwest (yet another retelling of the story of Cynthia Ann Parker, the exploits of her son, Quannah, and the capitulation of the People), and Wendell Berry’s Home Economics.

I turned to Gwynne on the recommendation of friends I encountered in my home town of Abilene, Texas where I recently attended the 57th reunion of my high-school graduating class and was struck by the realization that my grandparents had arrived in western Oklahoma around 1901 in the aftermath of the turbulent events Gwynne’s narrative brings to mind. From Gardner I took away (again—I’ve read Grendel many times now) what seems the quite reasonable claim that Whitehead was right to assign the name of God to that which limits action and energy and therefore calls forth “the entire multiplicity of eternal objects.”

And I turned again to Berry because I am trying to formulate for myself a rationale for the liberal arts in contemporary university education. I’ve previously written about Berry’s essay, “The Loss of the University.” But now I’m more interested in his thoughts on sustainability and his claim that community has economic value, because it seems to me that whatever case we make for the liberal arts in our day has got to take into account the material conditions required for their study and the material benefits of the same. If we can’t make the case that the liberal arts have practical, economic value, it is hard to argue that they have cultural or spiritual value. As Berry puts it with respect to community, “Can there be a harvest festival where there is no harvest?”

• • •

Two years ago I asked my class to read Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. It’s a beautiful book, though I don’t agree with much of it, including its core argument. MacIntyre says, in a preface to the third edition, that he was not yet a Thomist at the time he wrote the book (1981); but what I think I loved about After Virtue when I first read it in the mid-eighties was its insistance on the importance of a conception of human nature. Without such a conception (and I like Aristotle and Thomas about this too) the Enlightenment notions of liberty and equality are pretty empty. Something more is required, it seems to me, as a ground for these notions than the naked assertion of self-interest—some notion of human good, potential or real, immediate or lost. Adam Smith, often cited as the godfather of neoliberal economics, believed in a moral sentiment, physically present in human being.

The enlightenment tradition has tended to emphasize private judgment, private enterprise, etc., as opposed to centralized coordination. This was liberating in the eighteenth century, when people could still be put to death for witchcraft. Now, when “The notion that every action is is both a private experience and a a public utility,” as Whitehead says, has all but died out, individual beliefs and practices tend to be asserted as near absolute private entitlements. We see this on both sides of the political spectrum, but it has particularly emerged recently in the argument against government mandated health care. Obamacare, so called, infringes on my right of self-determination. Government, so we are told, has no right to tell me, as a sovereign individual, that I have to purchase health insurance. It’s the old seat-belt argument.

Here is Aquinas’s fifth proof of God, the one I like the best:

The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. We see that things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly, do they achieve their end. Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God.

I don’t like this because I think it succeeds as a proof. Its conclusion in no way follows from its premises. As an argument, it’s an exercise in question begging. But it’s beautiful, and beauty is truth in a way; though Keats claimed too much for the idea.

Still, my point here is that without such a conception of intelligence grounded in the material stuff of the world, the enlightenment conceptions of liberty and equality degenerate into empty assertions of individual autonomy that are easily transformed into the right to bear arms, the right not to purchase health insurance, the right not to wear a seat belt, etc. And politics aside, without such a conception the fundamental issues of ethics and aesthetics degenerate into cost benefit analysis that deserves comparison with the excesses of medieval scholasticism, or into empty claims about the timeless worth of things that we know only as inferences and extrapolations.

• • •

At this point in my life I am more uncertain than I have ever been about the things I hold dear, though I am pretty comfortable in my skin. I tend to think that certainty, not uncertainty, is the enemy of life. None of us knows when he will die–that’s the fundamental uncertainty–and I don’t need to be certain about the ideas that I use, because my practice constantly confirms their usefulness. Unlike MacIntyre I embrace and celebrate democratic pluralism. To be sure, it gives us Sarah Palin and the gun toting folks in Arizona and elsewhere. But it also gives us what I identify, following Richard Rorty, as liberal hope.

Uncertainty seems basic to the hope for a better world. An uncertain person, such as I am, tends to embrace bounded ambition in regard to the potential for historical accomplishment, or social progress. But the person who seeks certainty seeks an establishment, a city on a hill, the end of history. I think history and the end of history both abide in the moment, and I am content with that. I embrace the long tradition of uncertainty in Christian mysticism. (See, for instance, “The Cloud of Unknowing.”) Rather than doctrine, I embrace prayer. I find common prayer particularly efficacious, though I have no belief in, or knowledge of, a personal god.

I am not uncomfortable with any of this, perhaps because I am a poet and grounded in poetry. I read, for instance, the ending of “Little Gidding,” as it draws together the poet’s personal quest with Dante and Julian of Norwich, as a method of being. Here are the lines:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always?
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well . . .

And I think of truth as but one of the conditions of thoughts that one loves. The difficulty of Truth and Truth establishments is that they drive truth (small t) out of the room. In this regard I am remembering something from Hannah Arendt, in one of her letters to Mary McCarthy, “The chief fallacy is to believe that Truth is a result which comes at the end of a thought-process. Truth, on the contrary, is always the beginning of thought; thinking is always result-less. That is the difference between ‘philosophy’ and science. Science has results, philosophy never. Thinking starts after an experience of truth has struck home, so to speak. . . .”

I’ve learned a lot from MacIntyre, even though I don’t agree with him about much. I particularly don’t agree that Aristotle needs vindication. Aristotle remains with us, as Plato does, perfectly available to the next thinker who might wish to use him as Aquinas used him, just as the Homeric poems remain available to poets. I’m not entirely sure of this, but I think MacIntyre’s use of Aristotle may be perverse. It’s not an adventurous use in any case, as Whitehead’s use of Plato is adventurous, for instance.

“In my end is my beginning.” All my grandmother’s children went to college. I loved college so much that I’ve never wanted to leave. Though I’ve knocked around a bit and seen a bit of the world, I remain primarily a mental traveler, like Joyce Cary’s “randipole Billy Blake,” perhaps not unlike my grandmother’s children, too—on my way somewhere unknown, unknowing.

Notes from past weeks

Posted on by

I sometimes wonder if this blog has any use, much less any readers. I don’t write here regularly enough and tend not to keep resolutions to change for the better. Yesterday, though, I had a note in the mail from a chance reader in Germany inquiring about the inspiration for my poem “Flatbush Waltz.” I was flattered and answered quickly. I wrote the poem because I had fallen in love with Itzhak Perlman’s recording of that Andy Statmen tune. You can hear it here on YouTube.

Writing that poem also gave me occasion to search out a copy of a book I loved back in the 1970s, Thad Stem’s First Reader. Thad was one of a group of writers I knew in North Carolina in those years, who practiced their craft in the state’s network of newspapers, many of them small weeklies, an informal fraternity that that included Sam Ragan, Cliff Blue and others. The Late Tom Wicker got his start among them, writing for The Sandhill Citizen.

Over spring break, my beloved and I made a fast trip to Texas. On our way home we stopped off in Marshall for a few hours. Marshall is in Harrison County; my mother’s people settled there in 1834, hoping, I think, to escape the abolition of slavery in the United States by migrating to the fledgling Republic of Texas. They claimed large tracts of land adjoining Caddo Lake and eventually named the place Scottsville.


We found a few remnants of Scottsville on our visit: a cemetery dedicated to the memory of the Confederacy, and the Scott house, where My Grandfather was born in 1879. The old dwelling was originally built by W. T. Scott in 1840, according to a pamphlet kindly provided to us by Beverly Smith, whom we met at the Scott cemetery chapel. I grew up with a wealth of stories about the Scotts, some of them lurid; and I told a few of those stories in a piece I published back in 1992. I am thinking of telling them again, more thoroughly and at greater length.