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The Varied God

~ On the Human Experience of the Seasons.

The Varied God

Monthly Archives: June 2017

Montana

18 Sunday Jun 2017

Posted by Tom Cooper in Montana, School Year, Seasons, Summer

≈ 2 Comments

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Montana, School Year, Seasons, Summer

I visited Montana in early June, mostly the town of Kalispell, and Glacier National Park, and places with great names like Hungry Horse and Spotted Bear. It is a beautiful state, dead in the midst of the Rocky Mountains. It also has the distinction of being hugely under-populated. A state of well over 147,000 square miles, it just this year passed one million in population. By comparison, my home state of Missouri, only the 18th most populous state, is a little less than half that size and has more than 6 million residents. Montanans are proud and protective of this fact. I saw a bumper sticker that read, ‘Montana is full, I hear South Dakota is nice!’

But they also have a fierce winter. Anyone you speak with can tell stories of shoveling deep snow off their roof to keep it from collapsing. And the winter, at least its effects, lasts a long time. This was June, and when I was visiting Glacier National Park, I found that it was not completely open yet. There is a road called the Going to the Sun Road, which leads from the Lake McDonald area up into the mountains and glaciers. One takes the famous Red Buses to make the trip up this notoriously circuitous road. But the snow was not quite melted enough, and people were hiking and biking up the portion of the road that was navigable.

Perhaps this long winter is why people in Montana (at least from what I observed in the town of Kalispell) love their flower gardens. Everywhere are brilliant early summer displays of iris, poppies, roses, and many other flowers. They favor flowering shrubs—lilac abounds—and even trees that take on gaudy displays, like flowering chestnut, mountain ash, crabapple, and linden.

But perhaps nothing else is more emblematic of their desire to prolong the summer than the fact that their kids don’t start school until after Labor Day. This used to be the tradition throughout much of the United States. It is said that it was because rural communities needed to plan their agricultural activities around the school year, and a beginning date after September 1 was important for that. But it likely originates in other considerations, particularly the problem of asking young students to sit and pay attention for several hours a day in stifling, un-air conditioned schoolrooms. In Missouri, the law says that any district wanting to start the school year before September 1 must hold a public hearing declaring that. Almost all districts now do so, and start as early as mid-August, mostly because they want students to have as much ‘catch-up’ time as possible in the classroom before they take standardized assessment tests (just another idiocy forced on our educational system by ill-advised standardized tests, but I’ll let that go for now).

In Montana, the summer comes on later, and is not as long, and families want the time to appreciate it. They are a hunting, fishing, camping, boating, climbing, hiking-crazy people. They like to be out in it, and they want as much summertime as possible to do that. I don’t suppose Montanans are any less concerned than folks from other states about their children doing well on tests (though there is a strong streak of libertarian-style distrust of federal mandates), I just think that the priority of living the whole summer trumps that concern.

This is just another example of my basic and abiding thesis, that nothing influences our lives more than the seasons. In Missouri, and many other states, we have a long summer that often grows tedious in its heat and humidity, so part of it is ‘negotiable.’ In Montana—nuh-uh. We’re living for the summer while we’ve got it.

Donald Duck

13 Tuesday Jun 2017

Posted by Tom Cooper in Childhood, Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, Seasons

≈ 2 Comments

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Childhood, Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, Seasons

When I was little, I never understood a word that Donald Duck said. It was all squawks to me, sometimes angry, sometimes happy, but just squawks. I’m not sure I even understood that we were supposed to comprehend that he was saying words. It wasn’t much better with Mickey Mouse, whom I rarely understood—that high-pitched squeaking just didn’t register for me. I know that he and Donald were out on adventures, they were in peril or under dire circumstances, but I really didn’t know what it was they had to say about that. This is emblematic of my whole childhood.

I usually didn’t understand much. What was going on around me, why people were doing this or that, where we were going when we got in the car, I just didn’t pay attention, or want to know. Maybe I was just not that bright.

We liked to play Monopoly—or to put it more truthfully, kids I knew liked to play Monopoly and I was often drafted to take a hand in the game. I liked the playing pieces, the cannon, the hat, the battleship, and the board with all the play money, but I never understood what was supposed to happen. We moved pieces around the board, bought things, went to jail, got out of jail, until people started fighting and others drifted away to do something else. I honestly never saw a game of Monopoly end with someone ‘winning,’ so to this day I do not know what it means to win at Monopoly. Maybe that’s just me, but there were a lot of things I never understood in any real sense.

Granted, much of what you do as a kid is reduced to its most basic elements. We played army a lot, which meant shooting at each other and claiming to have killed each other, because that’s what armies do. There was none of the sense that we are hoping to gain territory or chase the opposing army out of the territory they have gained, no sense of mission aside from killing each other. What most people see when they look at war is people killing other people, so that’s what child’s play becomes. But my sense of detachment from the world went beyond that.

I had parents who fought a lot. I think it’s pretty standard for kids not to know what their parents are fighting about, and I certainly never knew, even when I was a teenager and right up to the time of their divorce. And this brings to light one reason I was so detached from life: I avoided what was unpleasant. It was no fun hearing my mom and dad arguing, so I got as far from the action as I could and pretended it was not happening. But my sense of detachment runs deeper than that.

One of the things they fought over was church. My mom was raised Church of Christ, and my dad was raised Baptist. If you don’t know, these are two Christian sects that are so completely similar that they can’t stand one another. The only differences, as far as I can tell, is that one lets you drink a little grape juice and eat a bite of cracker during church, and one has a piano playing along with the hymns on Sunday morning. Aside from that they believe all the same things—mostly that anything even mildly enjoyable is a sin. My grandfather on my dad’s side was a Baptist minister, and I spent most of my summers in Vacation Bible School memorizing Psalms and making crosses out of burnt matchsticks, or pieces of dry macaroni, or little bits of gravel and feathers, or whatever else seemed to be lying around the church basement. Both of these religions stress that you do not get baptized until you make the personal decision to do so, you decide to ‘bring Jesus into your life,’ as I recall Granddaddy saying over and over again. But I really did not understand until pretty late in life that this is supposed to be real, that there were people who actually believed that Jesus was magic and came back to life and went to live up in heaven with his magic father. It made me wonder, it still makes me wonder, what else I don’t understand about life.

I think that once I got a little older and started looking back on life I began to reexamine much of what had gone before. Maybe it’s trying to understand things that led me to the most basic work of understanding—thinking about the seasons we live in. When you’re a kid the seasons mean so much. For one thing, you live for summer, when there’s no school and, as I recently heard a child put it, every day is a Saturday. Fall, when I was a kid, meant creating huge piles of fallen leaves, lighting them afire, and roasting wieners or marshmallows in the flames. Winter meant snow and sledding. I remember all of these things, the smells, sounds, and temperatures of the seasons, but I don’t think I ever thought much about the seasons. When do the seasons change? Why do they change? These were just not questions I asked.

My first grade teacher had a bulletin board on which she displayed the months of the year in a big circle. They were divided by the seasons, three months per season, in the neat way we think about them. December, January, and February were winter, and you came down off winter into March, April and May, lolling along the bottom for the summer months and then climbing back up the circle to autumn. It wasn’t until I began work on The Varied God that I realized this bulletin board had been one of the most powerful images in my life. All those decades gone by and I still see the months rolling by in a big circle. I still see summer as a time spent lolling along the bottom, autumn as a climb into winter. I have discussed this image in the book a few times, since there are so many cultures that view the seasons as a circle, an endless cycle of time. This was one thing I understood, even as a child, and it came via a good lesson from a good teacher.

Maybe somebody should create graphics to help us understand Donald Duck, or Mickey Mouse. Maybe we should just keep the closed captioning on when our kids watch cartoons, so they can read what is being said (at least they’d be reading something, right?) It’s not easy to have elemental discussions with children, but it might be worth it sometime to ask if they understand the most basic things about life, like what are winter and summer. You may be amused by the answers.

 

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