My brother sent me a photo last month, of my sister, him, and me standing on a path next to a lake looking out over the water like we were trying to figure out how to tell Dad we’d lost his boat. The thing is, though, that Dad didn’t have a boat; he never expressed an interest in fishing, or hunting or golfing, for that matter, when there was real work do, and the path we’re on used to be the road that ran next to the farm where he grew up. We’re not looking for his boat. We’re looking for his life. Where he grew up is under the water.
I’ve written a book about that. It’s in the preparation-for-release stage now, four years and four months after it started out as a letter to my grandson about Dad, because I wanted my grandson to know something about the man who shares his name, now, the name “Vern.” Some of you know about this book thing already and for those who don’t I’m a little hesitant to mention it here because it seems a bit like a self-serving abuse of my Michiana Chronicles privilege. On the other hand, it might be like I’m keeping a secret from my friends if it comes out later this year and you didn’t know about it. So, just between you and me, I wrote a book and I call it When Once Destroyed.
Part of the story is how I learned to live inside my own head at a pretty young age, that the original Vern was a model for that, having grown up in a “walkable village” community that developed over decades, where “puttin’ on airs,” as we used to say, was about the worst thing that a person could do. So here I am puttin’ on airs in the very acts of talking on the radio and writing a book with family and community secrets I didn’t even know about until I started writing it trying to figure out how to let everybody know without letting anybody know.
“Issues,” they call that. I got “issues.”
Therapy might have been an option for me a long time ago, I suppose, but I’ve worked myself over pretty good on a regular basis just fine. Some of that “therapy” I hear people go to kind of seems to me like hiring somebody to mow my yard. It never made sense to me, why some people pay somebody else to mow their yard and then put on an outfit to run down the sidewalk or go to the ‘Y’ to get exercise. Mow your yard and then, if you feel like you’ve got it in you, mow your elderly neighbor’s yard. That’s just me. I don’t mean to make light of mental illness or the help people get from talking to somebody about their issues. Some of my best friends have been helped by therapy. One of my best friends is a therapist. The fact that I don’t think that’s something for me is probably a sign that I could use some. There, that’s my disclaimer.
Anyway, I wrote a book. End of life therapy. I had some things I wanted to share with the new Vern, but my thinking that it ought to be read by other people does seem like putting on airs. I should probably talk to the Amish lady who writes a newspaper column about the goings-on in her family. She probably gets some looks from people riding by while she’s out in the hot sun pushing an 18-inch person-propelled mower across her neighbor’s yard. “There’s Ruth. Who does she think she is?”
The book, part of the story is about what happens to people when their land is taken away. Not just the people who lived on the land, but their children, too, and their children’s children, trying to figure out where they belong in a world that left their father’s way of life behind, the ones looking out over the water for their father’s boat. It may not seem to you that that small-town, rural, life amounted to much, but that way of life gave the people who lived it a lot of satisfaction and it helped instill in their children the common sense that helped make their lives meaningful. For a brief time my sister, my brother, and I had a chance to witness a particular, era-closing 1950s rural American way of life and so we have been drawn back to it from time to time with a sense of sadness at the offhand way in which it was destroyed.
I noticed in my research for the book that the big-shots who are out to make a killing or leave some sort of a legacy don’t spend a lot of time worrying about the effects of their developments on the people in the places they claim to be serving. Government and chamber of commerce folks tout words like “progress” and the “economy” (don’t stand in the way) and the press reports on it from their point of view, until it’s too late to stop it. It’s a repeating story, one that goes from at least as far back as Christopher Columbus up to the present. We’re doing you a favor, Greenland.
Just now, I’m reading in the paper about turning 69 acres of New Carlisle-area farmland into a so-called “walkable village” when there’s a genuine honest-to-God walkable village two miles away where people have worked for decades to establish and maintain businesses in an organic downtown. Some call that new development good-for-the-economy progress, but it reminds me of somebody paying a lawn mower person and then heading out for a run.
Music: "Big Boss Man" by Jimmy Reed
