Letter to John et al 7-8-17

Gut’n Morgen…

Am just finishing up another read, The Women in the Castle by Jessica Shattuck.  Another WWII-post WWII Nazi-Germany tale about the wives of “resisters,” of which von Stauffenberg was one, who planned to murder der Fuerher.   In this novel, their husbands have all been hung for their treachery, all the wives have been scattered amongst the camps, used by the Nazis, or Russians, or whichever group finds them… the main character Marianne von Lingenfels searches for the wives and the children to bring them together to protect them, and to remind them there were “good” Germans who did not believe in the Fuerher’s madness.  We all know people like Marianne, who can tell you JUST how to live – it’s how she survives.  In fact, she reminds me of someone to whom I am related.

Anyway…the book has plenty of layers of intrigue…you get the sense how easily wickedness and laziness can lead to destruction, and how life moves on, people survive… I’ll be glad when it’s done, the book I mean…but I paid for it, by golly, so I will bloody well finish it…and will damned well like, I tell you!

Working from home gives me the sense that I’m living in E M Forsters story, The Machine Stops, wherein society has advanced to where people all live in their own comfortable, high tech “caves,” aware of people through their computers..plenty of warnings about a whole world outside…no one heeds the warnings, until one day the machine stops;  the provider of air, and food, and comfort grinds to a stop…emergency exits fly open, but people can no longer walk, and have no idea where to go, or how to get there…the machine is not there to tell them.  I laugh during the day, when I take a minute to stretch and stare out the window.  Three steps to the window, three steps to the chair, to sit again and email or skype my conversations.   My garden out my window  looks like the film of the beautiful garden Edward G. Robinson chose to have played in Soylent Green as he makes his transition from man to food.

A book I just finished, A Man Called Ove, is a great tale, me thinks, about a man who just wants to die to be with his late wife, but who is stymied at every, hilarious attempt at suicide.   In one part of the story (it takes place in socialist Sweden, mind you) he realizes that the government “men in white shirts” are coming to take his old friend/enemy neighbor away to a home, because the government has determined his wife can no longer care for him.  Ove is filled with purpose to stop this overreach…you applaud this small, non-violent, but clever and successful effort.

In this book, The Women in the Castle, I just read a blurb about one of the women remembering how her father, a doctor,  railed prewar against the communists and the Nazis, all the while losing patients to the new hospital across town built by the Nazis and offering FREE care.   Sounds like the urges of today’s Left to enthrall the masses with FREE stuff…mmm hmm…I’ve seen the “care” Medicaid offers, how it fails…and I hear the limits to care Medicare allows, leaving my now old friends and neighbors to fend for themselves.   All these protestors in today’s Germany crying out against the bourgeoisie (though with all their education, they do not think to call it this archaic term), decrying wealth and capitalism, think they have invented something new…that only they see the world as it is.  That their stupid vitriol will bring enlightenment and peace.  Stupid. They are caught on the Left’s treadmill of illusion.  All wishin’ and hopin’…no plan, no solution…

Once, when I was deep in therapy years ago, my counselor said that it appeared I think of five or six things at once.  I was so glad someone understood that…it’s like constant multidimensional thought, not always in alignment.   She went on to tell me that when I spoke with her, she wanted me to think of only one thing, and analyze THAT.    I stopped going to her.   Plus she wanted me to admit that I’d had this horrible experience of brutality growing up…I told her I would not proceed along that line of thinking, that if my mother found out, she’d kill me HAAAA. the counselor was so shocked…I thought it a fine joke.  So easy to demonize Mom…one woman who did what she could as well a she could…and it was good.      Why do they do that, counselors? Presume that all that got us where we are was horrid. That our fathers neglected us because they went to work to earn the money to feed, clothe and house us.  That our mothers were cruel to expect us to behave and succeed?   There are thunder and lightening in the midst of the most beautiful storms…why make them more than the wonders of nature they are?

Oh, don’t  I imagine myself this great thinker…HA   Once, when my first husband told me no wife of his needed to go to college, and would not be allowed to work, I went to the library, first for books about Richard Wetherill and Mesa Verde, thinking I would continue the anthropology studies I’d begun at Eastern.  I would write a dissertation about the Anasazi and the Hohokam before them, and become as famous as Mary Leakey with her Australopithicine.   Then I thought to study nuclear fission…since Rocky Flats was nearby, and its nuclear warheads were the focus of so much protest in the 70’s…Father Berrigan had moved from Vietnam War protest to nuclear warhead protests, and though I detested his involvement along with that of that nun who chained herself to the gates of Rocky Flats, I liked Fr. B’s comment,“Don’t just do something, stand there” – a 60s reminder of the need for political thought as well as action.   Too bad he did not practice what he preached.     Anyway, I thought I’d write this grand dissertation of the necessity of using nuclear fission, et fusion, to further the cause of progress.     Delusions of grandeur… Mom always said Grandma Herman had them…I kinda like ’em…

enough yammering…I need to go drive my Mini into the hills and find a lunch spot to sit and finish my book, with hotdogs and mustard and chocolate chip cookies, … Good day, Fellow Travelers… Hope to leave my cocoon soon to see each of you in your own habitat…

love ya, Rox