My father, Donald, was only 71 when he passed away. Today he would have celebrated his 100th birthday. Donald Eugene Hill was born at home near the tiny burg of Colburn, Indiana, on October 14, 1915. I saw the house once, abandoned and in the middle of a field; it has since been torn down.
Almost two generations older than me, and deceased since the late 1980s, my dad still connects me to times, lives, and customs taught to him by his parents and grandparents who knew the 19th Century.
There was an abandoned yoke for a draft horse that pulled a plow in back of the barn when I was a kid. I missed the days of my dad using horses to plow and till by only a decade or so. My brothers learned to farm using draft animals.
I may have missed the experiences, but the connections were palpable to me.
These were times when my family, and the culture from which they, came were agrarian. The larger society was in the midst of an industrial revolution but the old ways from many previous centuries still brought food to tables. Territories opened, land rushes drew adventurers and drifters.
Dad saw the coming of the end of the life he knew. Not his own mortality, though he knew that well, but rather the incorporation of the basic production of essential goods necessary to sustaining life into mechanized, impersonal processes removed from nurturance and knowledge.
How did he convey such nuanced information to me? He lived life honestly and he told stories. Boy, oh, boy, did he tell stories. Many people thought him to be an odd duck. And he was. So am I.
He did not give a hoot about what most people thought.
He once roared out during discussion with a local priest for whom he was doing some carpentry, “There is no God but Allah,” while in the middle of the sidewalk in our small, Indiana town. My brother, Roger, witnessed this, and was mortified. We were Christians. I can only imagine that he was demonstrating the belief that one should proclaim one’s beliefs publicly, as in the Islamic call to prayer, in some sort of intense religious discussion with the good Friar. He loved to expound on religious philosophy.
As an agnostic who could, “recite all the begats,” my father was an enigma. His memory had to be photographic, as he could recall anything he ever read and/or learned at the knee of his grandfather, Silas Hill, a Brethren Minister. But at heart my dad was a historian and a logician, not a church-goer. My interests in anthropology and semiotics did not fall very far from the proverbial tree.
He loved to tell stories about finding buried treasure. Some thought his stories were tall tales. But it was easier to find buried loot back when he was a boy, as people did actually bury their precious metal and gold and silver coins to hide them from ne’er do wells in the days before bank deposits were insured. Dad found serious money a couple of times according to my brothers. He literally stumbled over a can of gold coins, on the property just off the road our farm was on, and that financed his first tractor in the 1940s. You see Dad may have told tall tales, but he also listened deeply and analytically to the old men who gathered in the center of the town. Their stories revealed much about who did what where, some of which included who took the whereabouts of where they buried their money to the grave with them.
I cannot document these stories as facts, but I know the stories did not change over time, but they were plausible, and had verifiable elements. And he valued truth and community. He was active as a citizen, He was a volunteer fireman, a founding member of the group in our township. He was an active member of The Farmers Union and the local Democratic Party. Service and truth were important to him. But he also understood the power of telling a story or two.
So, if you would, do me a favor and give a gift in honor of my Dad’s 100th birthday: tell someone a story that you were told as a child. Such is the stuff of legacy.
Happy 100th Daddy.
Clouds of Late Fifties Funk
I have been in a funk and giving myself a pity party for the last several weeks. First I realized my magical year was ending as my 58th birthday rolled around a couple weeks ago. Born in 1957 my 57th year was to be magical or golden according to contemporary mythology I chose to embrace. This past year has been eventful, but magical is stretching it a bit. Then I realized I celebrated the wrong year. Damn.
I should have known this as my 49th birthday forever stands out in my memory as the day I was escorted from a U.S. Armed Services Senate Committee hearing because I called Donald Rumsfeld a liar and Ted Stevens who was chairing the session said “Get that woman out of here.” After being escorted out the door to the sidewalk I spoke with a Vietnamese delegation of business men who were on a tour of Capitol Hill.
A culmination of pro-peace activism that began 38 years earlier when my brother was horrifically wounded in Vietnam juxtaposed with finding a trade group of the same country against whom my brother fought was a coupling that made me realize that individual soldiers really are just fodder for corporate interests. Awareness of all sorts descended upon me during that 50th year when I fully came into my own.
That day in D.C. began my 50th year that would find me caring for my mother in the last month of her life in her home 2000 miles away from my home and family a year later on my 59th birthday. Somehow my family did not send a card not even a call. It was not the best of times, but it was a learning time, and there was much healing between my mother and me. The experience of that year taught me something that should have been obvious before it became real to me. The first year ends with the celebration of the 1st birthday or 1st wedding anniversary. The 50th year ends with the 50th birthday, the 57th year ends with the 57th birthday.
So I missed my magical year, thinking the 58th year was the 57th year. My magical year was not this past year, but the year before. Now I have to go through my blogs and journals and photos and find out how my 57th year, May 2013 to May 2014, really was.
This was a real downer of a realization after a less than eventful Mother’s Day opened the week leading up to my birthday. And I had all these event descriptions and photos picked out for a summary post about the year.
Something began to dawn on me when my daughter called to wish me a Happy Mother’s Day, bless her, and she asked if her dad had announced his usual insensitive Mother’s Day comment, repeated every year, “You are not my mother, so I didn’t get you anything.” Twenty-five years of being told this gets very old. I told her he did indeed say this again. We both just groaned and shook our heads.
My husband does not do presents well. Unless someone applies constant reminders or pressure, he “forgets.” I know after talking to many, many spouses of scientists and academic researchers that this tendency to forget about the importance of real world events is a character trait of many ridiculously bright people. I am not sure it is so much that this type of person cannot remember such things, but they have been taught by our culture that they do not need to bother with such mundane world occurrences.
So weekend one, Mothers Day, less than stellar. Weekend two, birthday, less than marvelous. Then Memorial Day, weekend three and this is the first Memorial Day for me since my brother passed away last November. He was a casualty of the Vietnam War although it took 45 years for him to succumb to the physical injuries and psychic wounds he suffered in Hue and Khe Sanh. My parents are gone. Three of my four brothers are deceased.
Let me tell you that all this really sucks. I have spent most of my adult life dealing with depression. I have it under control, so I no longer bottom out and become mired in black pits of despair. But lethargy and lack of focus can and will descend when I do not actively countermand the early stage of a downward spiral. I have gotten much better at reframing when something triggers recursive negative thinking.
I have even accepted that sometimes I need to incorporate the negative realizations into my worldview so that next time I experience them I do not spend so much energy fighting them and pushing them back down into the subconscious. Acknowledge and go on.
These past three weeks of realization have not been fun, but they were probably part of an experience that needed to be lived through. I have come to trust myself when it comes to almost unconsciously doing what I need to do. I wish I could count on someone to do things for me when they need to be done, but all I have is me. And I do have me. I am strong, resilient, intelligent, and caring.
I suspect we all need to learn to support ourselves more than we do, to be our own best friends, because we do walk through this life as an individual. In my case I am an individual who is 58, in her 59th year, headed toward my 59th birthday next May.
25 Years With My Daughter Thus Far
This will not be a huge post, not intended to change other people’s lives, nor for getting page views, or for furthering other bloggy-world accomplishments, but it is about my biggest, best, most wonderful accomplishment in this world: My daughter Phoebe. She is pictured below with her fiancé, Adam.
I love her more than life itself. She taught me more about love than I ever dreamed of knowing. I am proud of her. I love laughing with her. I miss her physical presence as she attends grad school around the Great Lakes and I am here, where she was born, in the northern reaches of the Sonoran Desert.
I love you Phoebe, Happy Birthday! As always, you are the light of my life…
…as you have been since your birth!
Columbus, Chicken DNA and My Dad
1915. It seems worlds away from today. My Dad was born in a small farmhouse outside the burg of Colburn 98 years ago today Indiana to Dorothy and Ellis, a young married couple. He was the first of 8 children, seven of whom lived into adulthood.
Today I am in the midst of a juxtaposition that would have amused my father. Dad loved history and knowledge. He and I used to joke about my only being able to remember when his birthday by associating it with the fact the day was also the day of the Battle of Hastings in 1066. He loved this!
He undoubtedly would have had some wry pronouncement about Columbus Day being on October 12, the anniversary of his landing on what he called San Salvador and was a small island in the Bahamas that is also known as Watlings Island, not the second Monday in October.
Dad and I shared a type of intellect that focuses how things inter-relate. Words, history and ecology all were parts of the same process to us: life. Maybe this mega or meta world view came from being a farmers for generations or from our family coming from Anabaptist roots that recognized the interplay of community, technology, and politics on a very personal level. Maybe it was both and a thousand other things creating a heritable mesh of nature and nurture expressed in both of us. I think he knew how like him I was. I was 29 when he passed away and I had not really realized how alike we were. I did not know him when he was 29. I wasn’t born until he was in his early 40s. So I didn’t really come to know him until he was close to the same age that I now am.
Whatever the case, were Dad alive I know we would be discussing Columbus and the ever-increasing evidence that the Catalan Captain was so far down the list when it comes to Europeans setting foot in the “New World” that it wouldn’t even be worthy of note had his landing not signaled the coming invasion and genocide from Spain and Catholicism. He would have loved the “chicken connection” in the current discussion. While not our only livestock, we did have up to 1000 hens at any one time on the farm.
Castilian, Latin and Catalan were the only languages in which Columbus ever wrote.
Findings published in Christopher Columbus: The DNA of his writings explain that although he wrote in Castilian it was certainly not his first language and his origins are pinpointed to the Aragon region because of the grammar and the way he constructed sentences.
So the first thing my Dad would do with this information is make some sort of inappropriate joke involving southern European ethnic groups. My Dad was a product of the rural early 20th Century. Cultural sensitivity was not high on the list of social expectations.
The second thing he would do would be to begin to wax eloquent about people meeting Columbus showing how the whole “discovery” thing was a cockamamie cover-up of other migrations to the Americas, and just the Southern European take on things. Even in the 1960s when I was a little kid in grade school pre-Columbian northern European contact was discussed. Even little kids were taught about Leif Erickson was The various bits of information that show pre-Columbian contacts with other parts of the world in both trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific exchanges of information, plants, and animals as shown by a long list of evidence such as:
The sweet potato is a plant native to the Americas, and its pre-historic presence in Polynesia is a long-standing anthropological problem. — Modeling the prehistoric arrival of the sweet potato in Polynesia Álvaro Montenegro in Journal of Archaeological Science Volume 35, Issue 2, February 2008, Pages 355–367
But plants might have floated from South America to Polynesia in despite of the currents and winds flowing in the opposite direction, right? So how did chickens get to coastal Chile? Well, no one knows exactly because science cannot prove, it can only disprove. The evidence as first presented in “Radiocarbon and DNA evidence for a pre-Columbian introduction of Polynesian chickens to Chile” (Read and download PDF.) shows that chicken bones found in the archaeological site of ElArenal-1, on the Arauco Peninsula of Chile, that are from AD 1000 – 1500, seem to be from the same genetic population as chickens from Polynesian archaeological sites from the same time period and differ from other populations. These are the earliest known chickens found in the Americas. This particular journal article also summarizes other known evidence for pre-Columbian contact include
the presence of South American sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) in pre-European archaeological sites in Polynesia, most notably from Mangaia, Cook Islands, where it is dated indirectly to AD 1000
Linguistic and archaeological evidence suggest that the bottle gourd (Lagenaria siceraria), also from the Americas, was present in Eastern Polynesia before AD 1200
Voyaging from Polynesia to the Americas has been proposed in relation to linguistic and archaeological evidence for the occurrence of some watercraft, namely sewn plank canoes, and fishhook forms found in southern California which resemble Polynesian types.
Sewn plank canoes have also been documented in Chile by ethnographers and claims have been made suggesting artifactual and linguistic evidence for Polynesian influence in the Mapuche region of south central ChileComputer simulations suggest that voyaging eastward from Polynesia in the southern hemisphere where the mid-latitude westerlies are more accessible, is a more likely prospect than a northern route to the Americas
My Birthday Gift to Myself
Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me… “Well, you say it’s your birthday, well it’s my birthday, too, yeah…” “A very merry un-birthday to you… to you!”
I think I may give myself something material as well… like an iPhone on a Cricket plan, but while I’d love to take a walk in the Wildflower Woods of Gene Stratton-Porter’s northern Indiana, and reminisce along purple-infused, lilac-scented paths, what I am really giving myself is the gift of permission to redo everything I have that is online, again…
Do I do this every year? Well… yes I do. My favorite quote is àpropos here, it is one by Walt Whitman: “Do I contradict myself, very well then, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.”
I’ve only teared up a couple of times today. Pretty good for me on a special day. I always get sad on such days. No reason to go into why… but I am learning, even at this advanced age, that I do not have to explain myself or my actions to anyone. This may be the biggest thing I have learned for a long, long time; it is right up there with how to filter out idiots, apart from idiotic things said by friends, as a separate items on my Facebook stream. (That dear friends is a post in and of itself! There are so many wonderful people I like to follow but even they post really stupid things!)
I think it was three years ago that I started to put everything on nfhill.com. Then two years ago I decided to create donenesting.com, then last year it was boomher.net… and somewhere along in there I decided reasoncreek.com had to exist. Perhaps you see a pattern?
So, at least for the moment, I am giving myself permission to mix it up again even though I’ve sworn a thousand times that I would not do it again. I’m keeping Reason Creek, this site, and will keep it live. I like my little imaginary spot under a tree by a stream where I can read while naked and converse with other reasonable people. (Sort of like working from home in your pajamas.) What else I will keep live is questionable. I started building a business site that I need to finish and update at Hill Research Services.
Those are the two places I will focus my online writing energies while I finish up the book that I have been working on for the last 10 years, started writing in earnest a couple of years ago, and started the (please Goddess!) penultimate draft a few weeks ago. No more sites. I have this little virtual hording problem that I will post about in the next month or so. My name is Nancy and I horde domain names. So that makes two more posts, Domain Hording and Facebook Idiocy, that I have just thought of while writing this post. Geesh, this writing thing is a vicious circle, cycle, or something, no?
I hear that there are people who are not constantly assaulted by ideas, but I am certainly not one of them. Anyway, this year I am giving myself permission to focus on my book, blog and business site. Damn all those other great ideas I’ve had like Late Boomers, Build Peace, BoomHer, Done Nesting, Things in the Attic, Triple Bottom Lines, Blogging Cooperative, Tucson Ghosts, Massage Therapy Tucson, Casita Gaia… they can just hang out in cyberspace, like the neglected orphans they are, until I figure out what to do with them. Unless you want to make me an offer! Seriously, there is the third blog post topic I’ve generated while writing this one – Domains for Sale!
So now I’m off to work on something else other than this post! What do you horde, virtually? Have you ever given yourself permission to do something for your birthday? What was it?
The Merry, Merry Month of May
May is my birth month. I’m sure that is why I have such a positive association with it. Birthdays were major for me as a kid. It was better than Christmas as far as gifts after I was 4 or so. It seemed to come out of the blue when I was very little, unlike Christmas that had a major lead-up and so much anticipation that there couldn’t help but be a let down when it finally arrived. Birthdays were a surprise. My special day seemed to come out of the blue until I learned to read the signs that it was approaching.
Spring! Not rainy, chilly spring, but warm, bright spring and blossoms galore signaled my approaching birthday! Spring that was filled with tulips, Lilacs, bright and light green leaves led directly and almost imperceptibly into Summer. Summer equaled the end of school. I knew about that even before I went to school because summer, as I conceptualized it, began right around my birthday, and summer was when my brothers were home. Big brothers to bug. Yippee!!! I loved my brothers. They were my world.
So I am planning on having a great month and building upon all those good memories and association. Let’s see if I can have all my personally oriented posts be truly positive ones this month!