In recognition of, celebration in, and reflection upon 25 years of writing poetry (once this August arrives), I began two months ago on March 14th to recite the poems of my past on Tuesday evenings, each evening sharing one year of poetry. The first seven nights were on IG Live, my very first time using this service, but because of the limitations of ownership and control available to users through Zuckerberg’s monster Meta, I have moved the Tuesday evening recitations to my YouTube channel, a website that remains a halfway decent “location” for creators and communities on the Internet.
This Tuesday, May 16th, at 8 PM EST, I’ll be reciting the 10th night of poems, these from the year 2008, when I was 22 and 23. Tune in and join a small but growing community of interested persons in witnessing the evolution of a poet, unabashed and unfiltered, the poor compositions and the great, as I openly share the trace of poetic concerns that have developed and made me the poet I am today.
This is quite late to be posting, but as this website is the authorial presence of the work of myself, Gary Dale Burns, I must make an effort to update any readers or visitors of this page with the not-so-new-news that in August of 2022, the editors at Chosen Family included my poem “Stacking Firewood in Hudson” in the fifth issue of their music/culture zine that was officially launched this year as a monthly.
The editors are currently on break from publishing their zine, but if you are a mid-Hudson Valley native, be sure to give them a follow on IG @chosenfamilypresents for current news on performances by talented folk and the coming resurrection of the zine in springtime.
We have the green around us grown full and we are feeling lighter, making plans, letting the masks slip (literally, figuratively) while a stronger variant and other strains roll-on. We will all collectively see before the summer ends a brighter light than the past solstice, up ahead, out of our antic haze. We are already buzzing with its glow, resonating with what looks somewhat familiar yet new and strange, and we take it to indicate a “post-COVID” future – while the pandemic’s tail elongates.
We speak of returns, to what was, in order to slow the whiplash; or we turtle inward with hesitation, uncertain if the wounds we’ve sustained will heal properly in the new air. We were excited and scared and we don’t know, we just don’t know – so some of us risk it to live with imagined impunity (never mind the elderly, never mind the immunocompromised). With autumn’s shadow soon to fall on our doorstep, things are even more uncertain – the shadow of the next wave, most likely.
You can deny it if you like, to ease the mind and body, but know that the remainder of this decade until 2030 will be gloomy. It’s the gloom through which you see a light that’s supposed to be at the end of some tunnel – not a tunnel of death, mind you, but a tunnel of life! You know it will be the most trying decade on planet Earth ever lived by our species, and also, that we did NOT pass Year One (or Two) of this pandemic with high marks on any scale of humility or sanity.
But don’t freak out – maybe freak out a little – more so, do not suppose that “normal” is what we are ever heading back to (please Higher Power, let that hallucination pass). We’re actually heading back to ourselves, our habits, our sleep, unless we take some of this wakefulness with us into the new but shadowy atmosphere. It could slip our grasp, this new reality, or, we could disconnect from the dream, going with Dud on this one:
In the past two years, I haven’t posted much on my website, and not much has been published IRL. I’m still grappling with the loss of my father and 5 other family members in the last 6 years. I’ve taught in two schools, soon to be three, but that’s for the application/interviewing process to determine. I’ve written many new poems, but none in the last three months, the longest dry spell I’ve had in my 24 years of the craft.
However, I did write/crafted two zines that were made from a group invitation/prompt with Reciprocal Works, headed by Katie Ford and River Wharton, a real gem of an experience in the rough times. That’s the true purpose of this post, if you got this far – and both are available for FREE to download below – one from the Reciprocal Works website (definitely check-out the other zines!) and one just through a public link to the PDF on my Drive.
Both are copyrighted and cannot be reproduced without my permission, but the permission to take them in and reply back to me with thoughts and feels are most welcome.
The following post was placed on my Instagram and Facebook feeds a few weeks ago in order to alert friends of the passing of my father, whose memoir I’ve been reflecting on with previous posts on this blog. His obituary is being printed in his hometown paper, The Victoria Advocate, tomorrow, Thursday July 23rd 2020, and I felt it was appropriate to post these words here before continuing (at an unknown later date) the memoir project which I will be finishing in his honor. – GDB
A week ago my father Robert Burns died of a heart attack in Portland, Oregon. He was 61. Yesterday morning my mother and I returned from settling his affairs, or beginning that process, and mourning & remembering him with my sister who still lives in the PNW. We’ve had many health scares in the past decade, each one shocking the system, but none of them really prepared me for this. The whole experience has been surreal and I stayed clear of posting anything until the end of the journey. But now I wanted to share with friends, many of whom may have met him, some lessons I carry with me from his time as my father.
First of all, our relationship was fraught with issues. We did not get along for many years. He formally adopted my brother and I after marrying my newly divorced mother, coming into my life when I was 5. He was overwhelmed taking on parenting two growing sons, then having a daughter a year later into this new marriage, straight out of a first one gone awry. He was often an angry and frustrated man, physically and verbally abusive, making one feel small and insignificant. Also, he stood 6’3″ at his tallest, near and sometimes over 400 lbs., so he was an imposing parent we usually tried to avoid. Times were good when he was employed and on anti-depressants, and bad when he didn’t have either. It was hard to see beyond my own nose about him and it took many years to step back and view him like a bust of frozen music, his past and person in-the-round.
Although a stubborn and prideful man, he was also humble before his God and generous towards strangers. A Christian who often quoted the converted Saul, it wasn’t until after his divorce from my mother that I began to see behind the monstrous figure I had so feared. I found there a man in pain, wounded by abuse he had suffered in his adoptive family, and privately haunted by his financial failures and self-sabotage. I also began to know and understand his vulnerabilities, those in particular that plague the psyches of the Boomers, but which can be entryways into grief and soul work. I listened and was able to forgive, working on myself in the process, and am very thankful we shared the time to do so.
The last decade, after intensive therapy, late diagnoses, and slower life in care facilities, we were able to bond as two adult men with a shared history as father and son. I had never felt closer to him, and I feel like we had more path to walk. He trusted me as a typist and editor for his memoir, which will continue now that he has passed, as he wrote the final pages before his fateful visit to the emergency room. Oddly enough or fittingly before I drove out to the Finger Lakes to meet my mother last Wednesday, I checked my mailbox and found the final pages of his memoir stuffed into the manila envelope I had self-addressed a month earlier. I finally took a hard look at it in the backseat at a rest area parking lot and broke down crying. Tears might be the origin of baptism, but I don’t know what kind of world I’ve now been brought into by them. It will take time to find out.
It saddens me I will no longer be able to call him or call him back, to reminisce about lines of movies and television bits which stuck in our brains, to tell him I love and care about him, or send him another book. I am at a loss for truer words, but I will have his to remember. I hated him, then I loved him – he was my father.
The grades are in, the paperwork signed, the end-of-year meetings attended, and the books and materials needed for summer work taken home. From behind masks at the school building, from a screen at home, I’ve (mostly) said goodbye to my colleagues and my students. It was a strange, confusing, maddening time, and revealed much about what are reasonable and unreasonable expectations of students and parents during a time of crisis.
The last day we were in the building all together was March 13th, a Thursday more than three months ago, the end of a four-day week. Our new superintendent was looking forward to the bonding and professional development of that Friday’s Superintendent Day. But it was cancelled and we were soon navigating an increasingly shifting and complicating line of procedures to follow and rules or guidelines to stick to with attention and alertness. The school building was closed, but we were still employed. It was like following trail posts on an expedition through a wilderness which had suddenly sprung up out of ground we thought was so cultivated and tame. Our sense of direction, muddled, and our patience and values, challenged.
Through it all, we yearned, yearned to return to a paideia-stasis, to imagine this was only a passing stretch of territory. Many of us aimed to “make up” for the lost time in our classrooms with packets and packets of mailed or delivered work, with Zoom meetings day-after-day near the same time they would’ve been in our classrooms, or with an undiminished rigor of instructional videos. The gauntlet brings me to last week, when the deadline for grades was Tuesday afternoon. As I sat through both Wednesday and Thursday until the early morning hours considering, re-considering, calculating, and re-calculating, the fate of some 70-odd 9th, 10th and 11th graders taking English at a rural, upstate, public high school in New York, I wondered: Who or what was this all really for? The reaper hanging his scythe over all of us.
But the grades needed to be, despite what current research shows about the relative value of grades for students. The letters and numbers given by teachers for student work are still so strongly believed in as a true measure of their ability, performance, or mastery by ourselves, parents, and the students. It is one of the more slippery subjects to take up with colleagues and administrators, as this belief is firmly rooted in them as well. As our 4th quarter finished up, marks were entered and students were not a-u-t-o-m-a-t-i-c-a-l-l-y passed into the next grade because of this crisis. They were assigned work, they were expected to do it, were given opportunities for help and support, and it was collected either digitally or from a bus route pick-up coordinated by our principal. For my part, I pulled way back on the final quarter. Only 2 works of literature were read and only 2-4 assignments were given, depending on the grade level. This amounted to roughly 20 minutes of work in English each day.
The results: A little more than half of my students returned some or all of their work, approximately 45 out of 70 students.
Our board of education had the final decision about grading, but after they were delivered a survey sent to all faculty by our supportive superintendent. The majority of us in the high school desired to give a Pass/Fail option based on their academic effort. After deliberating awhile (I watched this live on Zoom) they decided that numerical grades would still be given, and that evidence of learning would be the language employed to answer the question “How are we going to be able to equitably grade students on an individual basis?” Their reasoning was that students who do continue to work through the crisis ought to be rewarded for their efforts, since giving out P/F marks does not either positively or negatively affect the final grade. In this case of course, they meant positively for the students who they were advocating for with their decision – the students who could do the work, do it well, and turn it in, i.e., less than half our students.
But why less than half? Working in a rural school, many students had unreliable Internet connections and/or a scarcity of devices. The specific board response, that all students who show evidence of learning will receive a final grade that can be no lower than the average of their first three quarters, was seen as fair and just and the bottom line when it comes to how we as educators were to evaluate our students. But it did not factor in students, from my reckoning as much as 35-40%, who lack not only the above but possibly at-home support, a quiet place to work, or even the time. At least a dozen of my students were put to work, likely helping their families during the crisis to bring in funds.
Regarding equity, my mentor put it best that the evaluation of a student goes beyond the rubrics in a grading policy. Luckily, another option was given (which I took up) to give an incomplete to a student who turns in nothing, then an additional two-and-a-half weeks to contact their teacher and get work in. I’ve heard back from two parents thus far – and then the grades will finally be given. A measure of success? Perhaps. Or maybe a measure only of the belief that schooling is real in a strange and deadly global mist which is muddling all standards, educational or otherwise.
I believe I can remember the very week in 1997 when Mike Judge’s King of the Hill came on the air and into our living room. My father became enthused, loved the show immediately – his Texas accent all-of-a-sudden came out in imitation of all the characters who had a thick, prevailing drawl which colored their speech, even after the show’s episode was over. He affirmed out loud to us the truth of Judge’s representations of his home state’s proud culture and the people of the region he had grown-up around. He also laughed at the fun with which Judge poked at it all, a fellow Texan, who turned a critical eye on his own upbringing. He had stories to tell us about people “just like” so-and-so, just like the show.
We all liked King of the Hill, especially since The Simpsons had long been part of our staple after-dinner-family-time-at-the-TV. The FOX network knew it would ride that series’ rising wave of adult-cartoon popularity (and hey, it had Simpsons writer Greg Daniels co-running with Judge). Texas was on TV, and maybe I took it to give or purporting to give a window into my father’s past. Of course, this was while we were still living in Oregon, about to move to Western New York, and years before we actually all lived together in the damp, constricting heat of North Houston, among the people who were up until then only characters on television, and stories my dad told. That gave me new insight into what kind of environment ‘Bobby’ grew up in – but Bobby Hill on the TV wasn’t one of my dad’s stories. I knew he was actually one of mine.
Four months into this project, the window of his memoir continues to widen, maybe not much more than the 18″-24″ we had for a boxed television set. The stories are flowing, but I become more unsure of the perspective it’s actually granting me. His two chapters on his high school years are cloudier than the first three chapters – in the sense that they suggest shapes of experiences rather than describe them. They have less detail and are washed out, possibly from his own admission of the beginning of drug and alcohol use.
The relationship between his adoptive father and him heightens and becomes more complicated. For instance, there is a “nemesis” older boy that he is forbidden to fight with, someone who egged him on in intermediary school and who had moved on to Stroman High School, where my dad spent his first two years. So, on becoming a freshman, this boy was a junior, and the antagonism begins again. My dad doesn’t really explain why this is a wish he acutely respects of his father’s, whereas other demands of his time & energy by parental authority are challenged. Later, he does admit, that his physical stature always presented him with “social difficulties” (6’2 and 245 lbs.) but he doesn’t explicitly connect this problem to his family or friends – or his rival, who may just have been intimidated. It is a factor he cites with the opposite sex, whom he figures are intimidated by his size, which causes him to be “friend-zoned.” The memoir is a preoccupation with not receiving love and attention and not being free enough to choose – not that one gets to choose one’s body. What he is really receiving (or not receiving) is unclear, scrambled like snow, the image beneath a kind of phantom of psychic energy…
And here I am, again, summarizing and trying to tease out and explain how things add-up, why connections are or aren’t made, wherein the truth my father supplicates before manifests, or not, by the words he has written via the muse, spirit, inspiration. An excerpted sentence:
I was a miserable kid. I was angry and tired of the life I was living, and I know that not one soul cared. I have to be real and reflective about these matters.
Switching from the past tense to the the present in the second sentence is a chief example of the style throughout the memoir. Someone living with PTSD is often unable to know the one from the other, which is one of three of my father’s diagnoses.
Bobby Hill, in the above captured still, asks his father Hank the question “Why do you have to hate what you don’t understand?” I don’t actually know the episode it is from, as I searched through many screen grabs of Bobby, the very same nickname my father was given as a young man. But as I mentioned above, Bobby represented for me how unknown I felt in the shadow of my father. The man lacked empathy, writes how he was unable to develop it, but does not have much in the writing itself, though he claims that now, at 60, he has been able to develop it. I wish I could see that in this writing, instead of the hate which is turned towards that which he doesn’t understand.
It’s really self-hatred that isn’t addressed, but is the next step after a hatred of the life one is living. Internalized, how can one ever get away from that purgatorial cage? How does one begin to understand another if they are always potentially an object of hatred?
I have finished transcribing and am collecting my thoughts for the final post.
If you move an average of 2-3 years growing up, one begins to self-identify with a deeper and more transient nature than what our culture prescribes as the aim of one’s material life. After all, to be sedentary is to be rooted, to grow into a place, to invest time and energy and love and devotion to the cause of peace and to the idea of shared, communal space.
If there is a nomad within you where there is for so many others a stolid and principled settler, your movements in life aren’t periods but phases of huntings and gatherings for sanctuary, for shelter, for brief connections and the restocking of goods, before moving on to the next place, and the next, and the next – never quite at peace, never tied down, not really belonging anywhere. The latter was my experience as a child and young man – always the new kid, the odd face, the unknown variable in a formula of constants.
I look up from the pages of his memoir and think how this upbringing provided to me was so unlike my father’s own formative and sedentary years in southern Texas. Now that we are two decades into a new century of upheaval and displacement, I’ve simmered down my own frustration felt about being so transient. To be certain, 10 years of staying put in one place (Portland, OR) helped ease and soothe my sore joints, but I soon picked up again, headed back east, and have worked on myself towards a realization that I actually received some form of grace, an adaptation’s blessing, with my upbringing – though very tired and worn down has it made my spirit. In a world that will become more and more migratory, displacing its people like sand dunes, eroding cities with the oceans’ leaping tides, Global Climate Shift will wear down those who remain sedentary and never listen to that inner nomad.
It is now wearing down our material livelihoods with a current pandemic circling the globe. The planet demands we become more amenable to the compass, deep within. Where will it take us for survival – and how can examples from the past temporarily guide us while we find our way?
Meanwhile in the 1970s…
It feels kind of like paving-over his narrative to give a summary, if that’s indeed what I am proceeding to do in these posts, of those stretches of years which encompass each chapter of my father’s memoir. The preface itself was a sketch of 60 years with a fairly rough chronology; the private, Episcopalian, primary school years have few reminiscences before mentioning quickly intermediate, secondary, college and so on, in very broad strokes, “just the highlights” Bob has said over the phone. What is established in Chapter 1 is the main idea, which is all predicated on “the lack thereof,” from the hypothetical reader’s point-of-view.
These include but are not limited to: The lack of social and emotional skills, the lack of recognition of his intelligence, the lack of close friends, the lack of parents who took him seriously when he reported familial abuse, the lack of empathy, and the lack of trust in others.
As reader number one, I struggle to ask what I am left with, reading and typing out this personal record. Do I begin to find truth in Wordsworth’s line “the child is father to the man”? Something like this is what I tell myself, and I attempt to take a step back. This is like archaeology, and in that discipline, geology must be reckoned with first. There are layers within which the pieces of one’s identity are settled. Those layers have to be brushed away. But also, this is a story of his life, and few else can verify the details, as his parents are dead and friends are far-flung. I have to take him at his word.
It is as if an ancient Trojan were present at Hisarlik with Schliemann on his historic dig, saying “Disregard these other layers and those objects – here, these are the ones which tell my story.” No one but the bard Homer being able to confirm anything from that period, whoever they were, whenever the lines were set down.
I type again – the things which remain are what Bob composes as his life’s theme. He had the gift and power of intelligence, smarter than anyone else around him in fact, and this was used to help his purpose. This purpose, however flawed, fueled his life: he would make his parents as angry as he was, to bring their attention to him (which he claims was only involved in managing their own outward public perception, a symptom of Adult Children of Alcoholics, which is in line with the ACA’s Laundry List) and also, not to fall into the suicidal trap of self-hatred which he was feeling. In the ACA, anger is known as “emotional intoxication.”
My father attempted throughout his pre- and early teen years to shift this tendency to more healthy activities with efforts in scouting, choir, and church service, though each of these things acted as more of an escape. Two natures were at work within him – one that told him what he had was enough and to stay put, the other that he needed to leave Victoria as soon as he was able to, but at least with a high school diploma.
“There are things I have yet to put closure to.”
I believe in what my dad has felt, but I’m critical about his reasoning process and where it took him, which I don’t think he could have predicted. As an adult his own faith in the logic of his intelligence, and the conclusions they brought him to, made my mother nickname him ‘Spock.’ Indeed, Star Trek was often on the television at home, whether it was the syndicated Original Series, the 6 movies with the TOS cast on VHS, or new episodes of TNG, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager. Yet, as a child, the Star Trek character I saw most in my father was not Spock the Vulcan but Worf the Klingon. Worf is a complicated but easily flattened character in TNG and DS9. However, many episodes are centered around his chief feature – Worf is a character between cultures, between the codes of his people and his duties to Starfleet. With this came struggle and friction, and it would be true to say that my father was also angry, adopted, and like Worf, from a family that by other’s estimation, ‘lacked honor.’
Because of these and other factors, my father was distant and didn’t show much affection towards me or my accomplishments, seemed bothered and/or upset at most anything my siblings and I did and was prone to fits of anger and depression. Worf’s son Alexander, who is introduced to him about the same age as I was to my father, is so intimidated by him, whom he barely knows him when they first meet. When Alexander eventually comes to live permanently on the Enterprise-D with Worf, he has a difficult time in his new environment and is likewise angry at his father.
I was too, all my childhood, and now, reading his memoirs, I become more aware of the patterns which are passed from the father to the son when there is a true lack of attention and conscientiousness of the self and others.
Actor Jonathan Pryce and Director Terry Gilliam during the filming of 2018’s long-awaited epic The Man Who Killed Don Quixote
When Don Quixote first sets out as an adventurer, sans Sancho Panza, his primary encounters before returning briefly home are with an innkeeper, farmer, and merchant. Each have a distinct reaction to Quixote’s presence as a “knight errant.” These reactions can roughly be equated with all further subsequent encounters Quixote has on the plains. And to critically extrapolate even further: there are 1 of 3 ways of dealing with any madman.
The innkeeper’s way
The innkeeper recognizes Q.’s madness, and knows enough about chivalric romances not to upset Quixote, and so, he is kindly, humors him (as do the prostitutes at the inn who are made into ladies) and with good-nature plays along and Q. is knighted, if only to help the innkeeper send him on his way. During his visit, two muleteers are hit on their heads who interpret Quixote’s watch over his armor as nothing but an act.
So, the innkeeper’s lesson is: There are harmful consequences in taking what seems to be fantasy to you for what is reality to another – and pleasantries if you entertain their fantasy.
The farmer’s way
The farmer recognizes no madness, but humors Q. as he would any figure that seems to be of authority – by agreeing with him outwardly, then ignoring his proscriptions. The farmer further abuses the boy who is being flogged, the injustice which first drew Q.’s attention. He gives him no wages, and implores him to go back to Quixote and tell him what was done, knowing nothing will come of it.
The farmer’s takeaway is: There are no consequences to not upholding a man’s word if you have no belief in their power (or madness).
The merchant’s way
The merchant (and gang of merchants) does not care whether Q. is mad or of authority. They see only an out-of-fashion boob, a man who takes himself seriously and so, can be taken advantage of. It’s during this third encounter which does the most harm to Q. – they demand to see an image of Dulcinea to prove to them her beauty. He rushes at the merchant, lance in hand, and Rocinante falters, he falls. He is beaten, his lance is shattered, and is left to ache in the dust, blaming his old nag.
And so, the merchant’s rebuttal is: Those who are weakened by their own fantasies will be crushed with the bleeding and bruised proof of the real.
Teen-doppelganger-me on TV: actor Michael Maronna as ‘Big Pete’ from Nickelodeon’s The Adventures of Pete & Pete
On the carpet
I grew up on the living room carpet, whatever cheap gray or brown weave the apartment complex had installed in the 3-bed/1.5 bath five of us would occupy in the western, southern or eastern part of this country, depending on the year. Anyways, I was often on the carpet at the foot of the center of the living room: the television set with its accompanying VCR for our modest collection or video store rentals. The weave of the carpet would imprint itself into the skin of my elbows and arms, with the kernels of popcorn or shells of sunflower seeds or whatever else detritus sticking to me falling away when I got up after hours of the tube. When we spent time together as a family, it was either in one of three places – at Sunday service, our dining room table, or in front of the television. I wonder if everyone else in the family would agree, if Bob has written about this later in his memoir, but to my memory, gazing up at the images of the TV set together were some of the most peaceful and civil moments we shared as a family…
Anyhow, Tertius here reporting that I’ve finished transcribing the preface – at least that’s what I take it to be. My father (I’ll use this term when writing about the voice in the text – I’ll use Bob when reflecting on him as a writer of the text) explicitly states in the opening paragraphs of his memoir that the main “takeaways” he’d like a reader to receive at the end of his story are the following, and I quote:
There were certain skills lacking in this boy’s upbringing
His social environment would not only cause him to insulate from others while trying to reach out in normal and age-appropriate ways, and
Part of his normal response to his environment, given his lacking set of skills, would be to do things to make him think more highly of himself
If you re-read these takeaways, as I keep doing so, you’ll begin to get a preliminary sense of the intentions behind writing this memoir – not to leave the story of a man, but of a boy; not an opening out, but an insulation; not what was gained in life, but what was lacking. Lastly, what Bob even writes on the same page (still in the third-person), is that it’s about things he has done to “think more highly of himself.” He admits it is the consensus of psych professionals that these tendencies are “borderline narcissistic” – the ego’s defensive result of “the amount of people who kept trying to destroy me.” For the record, Bob does have three mental diagnoses, but to those who know the whole story (the psych professionals do not) are paraphrased as saying “It’s a pure miracle that you’re still alive!” and on later pages of the preface, gives the explanation that “I had to lie to myself to maintain enough psychological subtlety to not kill myself at an early age.”
Spurs dug into me when I first read the sentence which begins “In the words of the few people who know my whole story…” I frantically searched my mind but found I have no idea who these people are. I thought maybe that I was one of those people, but as I continue to transcribe, I am beginning to have my doubts. Perhaps my sister, who is eager to read this work and could clarify what is cloudy. Growing up with Bob was complicated because so many of the stories he told he told so often, often enough that you began to believe that they really happened. When I was a teenager he admitted that many of the stories he told didn’t happen to him, that they had “sounded better told in the first person.” A shock, but not a surprising one. Don’t we all fashion ourselves and embellish with vanity and pride the aura which we project socially? Except, this was a family member, the man whose name I bore, but one who became more of a stranger.
Even before this revelation, which at the time made me angry and confused, there was a shroud over his past. We learned the essential things early on from our mother and grandparents: he had been married before, he was adopted, he was a convert, and he was disowned because of his conversion to become a Saint. There was a kind of admiration in this which needed to be paid to him, that he felt needed to be paid to him, a respect which my brother and I were hard pressed to show. Later we learned from him that he had lived through several kinds of abuse, grave misunderstandings, subtle coercion or trickery, a kind of spiritual injustice, the sins of the father, etc. – in short, he had suffered. These were harder to show respect to because it involved too much pity and sorrow. Even with these new facts it was difficult to know the truth about Bob. I’m not sure I’ll even get the truth about him from this memoir.
The preface tracks his life from birth, adoption, early years in Victoria, to the end of his time at the elementary school he attended at Trinity Episcopal, ending at fifth grade. According to the U.S. Census from 1960, Victoria had a population of 33,047 people and was considered an urban place. His family attended, or were affiliated with, Northside Baptist, and this difference in religion taught at school v. religion taught at home is sharply contrasted – indeed, my father converted two more times in his life, baptized again into a non-denominational church, then confirmed a Catholic (He now attends another non-denominational church in Portland). It’s curious that he doesn’t mention his father’s occupation, owner/operator of the now defunct Red Bird Hot Shot Service, an out-of-normal delivery hours trucking company. He doesn’t mention his brother’s name, which is understandable considering the abuse he endured from that also adopted son. But he also leaves out mentioning one of his sisters entirely, and doesn’t say anything about both of them being intellectually disabled, the blood progeny of his parents – the very reason why they adopted him and his brother.
What isn’t there, what is lacking – perhaps this is what makes a person who they are. Conditions are key factors: the woman’s health who birthed you, the family you grow up in, the community you are a part of; the losses however, leave places that need filling. My father appeals to God, the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, to “open my memory to completeness” and that by the time he is finished with this project he will “either be a pastor and trying to fulfill my life’s calling or dead.”
The last pages will be mailed to me soon, and we are still talking over the phone.
My father, leaning in the foreground, as an extra in the 1994 TV mini-series adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand
You don’t have to do this
The above was said with love by the two women closest to me and this project, my partner and my mother. They meant well – they would like to save me the taxing emotional work and efforts in time & energy that this project will cost. I’m choosing to do it anyway, based upon what I define as obligatory, believing obligations are not always dissimilar from the responsibilities incumbent upon us as members of a community, or a workplace, or a family. Sometimes they are different, and in that case, yes lover, and yes mother, they don’t have to be done. One can choose to accept it or not accept it. For good reason though, I feel that this project both is and is not my choice. It’s an obligation I have no choice about but also, a responsibility I choose to accept.
This project began after a few phone calls lead to a manila envelope of loose pages arriving in my mailbox in the late fall of 2019. It had six forever stamps in the top right corner, each bearing the word “CELEBRATE” among balloons that were brightly contrasted against its black rectangular background. After another, thicker, envelope arriving just before the unprecedented virus-related interruption of all our regular day-to-day activities and work lives, I am now continuing into the spring of 2020 after having completely transcribed the first envelope’s contents.
Compared to planning lessons for six sections of high school English, co-creating a presentation on the changing ELA standards in NY state, or attending multiple weekly team meetings, this is relatively simple work – being an amanuensis. I spend an hour here and there away from my life situation and those aforementioned responsibilities to sit at a desk, slowly turning over sheets from yellow legal pads numbered at the top left corner in a ragged scrawl, typing the deciphered script into a file on an aging laptop. This project holds no payment at the end – it’s not business, but personal. I’m working to transcribe my father’s memoir, a memoir he has entitled:
A Seemingly Wasted Life
My father has planned this project for at least the last decade, a decade in which his health has gradually worsened from strokes, heart attacks, sepsis, and amputations. Feeling the reality of his mortality, and following his 60th birthday last year, he began to speak seriously during our phone calls from his nursing home in Portland, Oregon about the memoir. This precipitated an exchange between us, and last week, a little over a year since he began writing, he’s said that writing has finished and he will send the third and final envelope soon. In fact, he sends me the only copies in existence of his story across the country to my current home in upstate New York, entrusting to the US Postal Service, and then to me. The story of his life figuratively and literally spans the continent – a story that as I read and transcribe will soon include his story of my childhood.
Knowing this complicates the role I’m playing as Tertius of Iconium to his Paul the Apostle. I am not writing down an epistle to the Romans, but also, Paul wasn’t Tertius’s father – at least not biologically – but nor is my father my biological one.
I should explain: I met my father when I was three or four, my brother was a toddler, and my mother was recently divorced. We were all living under the protection of her parents in her childhood home on Lake Ripple in Grafton, Massachusetts. My mother was depressed but seeking, seeking a father for her sons, seeking a love that would last. My grandparents in kind were looking for a new husband for their daughter, and the church – The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints – had the same faith-based reason to search as my grandparents: families are forever, therefore if fractured they need to be made whole. When they married, both had had previous marriages, and so once they were wed they were committed to making their second one work.
My biological father was not a native New Englander, nor is my father. I remember my father as a man of stature and girth, a Texas Goliath of red hair and freckles, a loud man, a man of strong opinion, of sharp intelligence, and much more I didn’t perceive until I grew up and began to see him as an equal. I have no memory of my biological one, but I must have had some impression of the man who I had first beheld, coming out of the womb with eyes wide open. Perhaps a remnant of him was there when I met the man who was to become my father, who began to spend more time with us sitting in the pews at church, then at home at the dinner table. Before forging a relationship with my father as an adult, we had great difficulties as father and son, and I expect to see that reflected in his writing. However, I could also be surprised – the clarity of memories are often as a frosted glass: somewhat transparent and somewhat opaque.
Amanuensis
This word has Latin roots, Roman, meaning “within hand’s reach” – which I cannot be present for my father, except through his manuscripts, and by our connection maintained over the phone. He mentions the Romans and early Christians so much in his preface, it would be a mistake not to mention them here in my own, what I hope to be a record of this journey as his amanuensis, and a reflection on his faith, his memories, and his life. My next post will be a reflection on the preface, which has been completely transcribed, awaiting corrections and clarifications from Bob, my dad.
G.D. Burns, Poet-Educator 