The Countdown IV - The Later Years

My Life and Times
IV - The Later Years


1968: Nearly the end of THE decade. I had, finally, had enough of the big city vibe, needed a change, when the opportunity came calling, in the form of a brother of my brother’s wife, who was co-owner of a building cleaning business in upstate idaho, that had just won the contract for Building Maintenance in the resort complex of Sun Valley, and who offered me a job there, to be a foreman of their crew.

Yes, please.

I arrived just as their summer season was starting. Had a great time. And then it was time to go.

Part of the reason for my decision to leave a bit abruptly was that I had been flirting (wink wink; as in the blink of an eye, & as in on-again off-again) with the Mormon faith, of my brother and his wife’s family, and something, finally, was wrong, there, for me. It just didn’t seem to be responding to the needs of humanity the way I felt that needed to be done. There were elements of it that made sense. But there were elements that didn’t.1 What to do.

What I did, after engaging in my little reconnaissance and research mission in Utah, and returning to Sun Valley for part of the winter season - and watching there the TV shots of the astronauts circling the Moon, reading from Genesis on that very historic occasion - was to head for the East Bay Area, to see if I could be of any support to my sister-in-law in the raising of my nieces and nephews. What had happened on the personal level, behind the scenes of this historical report on my life and times, with its concentration on points of general interest and interfacing, was that my brother had died, in a mining accident - occasioned by his continued assault on his mountain peak, attempt to fulfil his dream - and I and my sister-in-law’s brothers and close relatives were supporting her financially, to go back to school and get a teacher’s degree, in order for her to support herself and her by-then five children. Which she, and I, did.2

So I played hands-on uncle for a while; taking the kids off her hands with Saturday afternoon trips to the likes of the Oakland Zoo, and a Sea World in the vicinity, and MacArthur Park in San Francisco, and across ‘the longest bridge in the world’ to John Muir Woods, and so forth. And continued my research into various issues. Including The Church; which I soon read my way out of totally. (The main sticking point, actually, was the old one of Christian churches not believing in reincarnation, because it conflicted with their belief . So one or the other would have to go. I chose fact - or as close as one needed to get to it, to recognize it - over faith. As I’ve gone into in more detail in a link from above. Just to flag it chronologically here.)

And including, in particular, the growing interference in people’s lives of the federal government. The door opener there for me was in the health field.

A short walk from downtown Oakland is a park and recreation center called Lake Merritt. I used to hang out in it (and listen to the City’s public band, in their outdoor shelter, of a sunny weekend afternoon, with many others lounging on the grass or in chairs for the elderly. Great stuff; and also usually finishing, like the band in downtown Long Beach at The Shell on The Pike, with a rousing rendition of The Stars and Stripes Forever. Hoorah! Or Who Ra. Or something), until I found a job in a nearby town and moved there. Before that move, on the far side of the lake I discovered a bookstore similar to one run by the John Birch Society that I had discovered in the far end of The Valley, when living in North Hollywood with my brother and his family in the earlier years of this decade of the ‘60s, now coming to an end. This one in Oakland was a private operation, but with the same sort of interesting, alternative materials. It was here, on its crammed shelves and cluttered display tables - near some material on the connection between Marilyn Monroe’s death and the Kennedy brothers, as I recall - that I came across some copies of the monthly newsletter of an outfit called The National Health Federation. In one of them I came across the information that the federal government was engaged in hearings over its intention to limit the public’s access to a range of vitamins and other supplements, and their dosage levels. The NHF had raised the money for a medical representative to be there and monitor the proceedings, and give input.

That was the beginning of my connection with this organization, which had its headquarters in southern California, but sponsored major health conferences in other areas, including in San Francisco. I found myself being drawn, fascinated, into the world of alternative/complementary health practices and information; my old instincts for ‘medicine’ coming back to the fore, here years later from my university days. And not being happy with what I was finding out, about the allopathic medical field trying to freeze out the competition, including, besides the efforts of local, county medical boards, enlisting the federal government on its side.

Another area I had to keep an eye on...as an example of the corrupt practices going on during my life and times. Causing me anger. And a growing sense of helplessness, at the size of it all.

How was I going to help turn this ignoble state of affairs around?...

This was liable to take longer than I may have thought, it was so all-pervading and entrenched...

I recalled when I was hitchhiking my way back across the country, after my quixotic mission to try to see the President, and a middleaged, business-man type, giving me a ride to the edge of his town (in Ohio, I think it was) and engaging me in cordial conversation, said, after eliciting from me some bare facts about what I had been up to: “You must hope this change of yours comes soon.” I had found myself replying, “No; not necessarily. I’m interested in education; and that sort of thing could take...thirty years, to turn things around.”

That would make it around the mid-90’s. If things hadn’t happened by then, for the better, in the world: No more Mr. Nice Guy, I growled to myself, there on the shores of Lake Merritt, watching life around me proceeding seemingly mindlessly at its gentle pace. I was going to go hunting for bear.3

***


It’s now 2010. I have learned that patience is a virtue.

But barely.


The End
The Later Years




Footnotes

1 Sense: Besides the caring factor for its ‘community’ - helping them through times of need, etc. etc., in true solidarity and communitarianism; the right spirit - there was, in particular, the Lehi Stone.
This will take a moment. Don’t go ‘way. (If you do, at this point: Sorry. But this is the way I need to tell this story. It’s my story; my choice. You have yours. Tell it, and choose it, too. Fair enough that we’re individuals. For now. For this time and place. And anyway: I’ve harped on this before in here. What’s your problem? Like the man said to his wife, who complained about his constantly leaving the seat up on the toilet: ‘That’s the way I do it. Get used to it.’ They’re still married. I think.)
It has to do with the Book of Mormon. I think Mark Twain referred to it as ‘chloroform in print’. There is that element of it. But it’s also an intriguing story - both within it , and about its creation, or ‘discovery’; whatever. I won’t go into all that here; just to say that it’s purportedly a history of goings-on in Central America from the point of view of immigrants from the pre-Christian-era Holy Land, brought out of that part of the world for a spiritual purpose, and later having been visited by the resurrected Christ. There’s not much historical evidence for the veracity of the story, except for a curious find, reported on in National Geographic in the early ‘40s. This was of a large stone with curious etchings on it, depicting a bearded man sitting with his back to a tree, and some objects around him. The details aren’t important for this report, just the fact that it all fit perfectly with a dream a character had had as reported in the Book of Mormon. Short of some Mormon missionaries having gone out in the dark of night and chiseling themselves an artifact that they could then point to and say ‘Eureka!’ over, it’s hard to know what to think about this bit of evidentia. I know it had me researching my birth religion more, well, religiously, for a time. But it was time now, I was feeling, to get cracking on a really serious investigation of the Church. Which brings me to

Non-sense: Quitting the lovely setting of Sun Valley1a I drove down to Provo, Utah - where I had begun this whole caper, read lifetime (now starting to draw to a close...Light! More Light!) - and spent some time at BYU (my dad’s old alma mater; where he had wanted to better himself, but at my mom’s expense; however momentary), checking out their bookstore, interviewing a couple of professors who had written books about different aspects of The Story, reading some papers in the stacks about the early history of the Church and Joseph Smith himself. They also had a mockup of the Lehi Stone. Intriguing stuff. But the material in the stacks was devastating to the church’s story - very like the books on early Christianity that I had come across in the New York Public Library back at the beginning of my in-earnest quest, over a decade previously (this was now late1968), were to the Christian religion itself. Smith apparently, in his youth, had a reputation for having a ‘peep stone’ that he would look into, in a hat (shades of a pig in a poke), and tell stories from, including a rather tall tale about a salamander. A salamander? What was all this all about?? And getting the followers to put all their money in his bank, with a display container in the entranceway salted with silver dollars to entice them...and its temple rituals simply being from his Masonic roots...I went off to Salt Lake City to find out more.
Where I spent a couple of months continuing my research; and came across enough material - in the public library there, and the Historical Society's Reading Room, and from a source of alternative literature (an ex-Member who had done a lot of good research on original-source materials) - to know that there was something seriously wrong with the story of the Church’s beginnings as handed down to the membership, and our day. There had been a period of a Great Apostasy in its history. I could readily sympathize, if the stuff that I was coming across was anything to go by in relation to what had stated becoming known in their day.
There was also the main sticking point about reincarnation. I was convinced, by then, of its veracity. The Church believed in pre-existence - the soul ready for incarnation - but, as a good Christian school of belief, just couldn’t - or didn’t want to - get their heads around the question of how we got established as individuated souls in the first place, and what all went into our particular personality makeup in incarnation.1b It was all just too much for their belief system to handle. It would crack. Which it would have to, in time. According to my belief system. And that of a lot of other good people, who just look at the facts, ma’am. (A reference there to a very popular TV show of the time, ‘Dragnet’, starring Jack Webb. Dum da-dum dum.)


1a This is northern Idaho mountain country, and the natural setting is magnificent. I would take off on my days off and go exploring, sleeping in my American Rambler seat-reclinable car on the cool nights. I even made it eastward over to the Grand Tetons in Wyoming; part of the Rocky Mountain range. As I say: Magnificent. If you ever want a vacation from it all, and reattune to your nature roots, and our natural environment. Which I highly recommend. Otherwise we run the risk of becoming merely robots, programmed by our erstwhile masters. Sit up. Lie down. Roll over. Eat my shorts.


1b The annals of reincarnation literature were filled with examples of people whose phobias and attitudes and birthmarks and such were explained by past-life experiences still imprinted on/recorded in their unconscious. And how - eg, as chronicled in Dr. Morris Netherton’s ‘Past Lives Therapy’ (to come out in another decade, but well-prefigured in the literature of the time. The same with Gina Cerminara’s ‘Many Mansions’ and ‘Many Lives, Many Loves’. And Dr. Helen Wambach’s ‘Life Before Life’. And...) - upon accessing ‘directly’ a past -life experience, through a vivid awakened state (guided by a gentle, non-hypnotic process), a person could be freed from the energy of it, and thus be released from its controlling grasp on their psyche, to move further on their path, less fettered from the past.



2 It was a little more complicated than that, in actuality. The night before his funeral I offered, to my sister-in-law’s family, to marry her, for the sake of the kids. It was in part because I was already, to a fair extent, a surrogate father to them anyway, having been a live-in uncle and baby-sitter for most of their lives before they had moved back up north while my brother figured out his next steps (and as one of the girls said to me at this time: “Will you come up and be our daddy?”). It was also in part because I felt a bit guilty, about how my brother could leave them in such a situation; and as a friend of the family had said earlier, when my brother was getting further out on a very precarious limb, he wouldn’t have been able to press his luck so far if I hadn’t been paying the daily bills for them; was that wise? (Maybe not; but I was a ‘dreamer’ too, could sympathize with his ambition.) It was also because our mother was horrified at how “irresponsible” he could be, to have such a large family without a proper means of support for them, and was embarrassed for our side of the family, with her very responsible outlook on life (conveniently forgetting how she had left her own kids to follow her dream). But cooler heads prevailed: (a) They asssured me that they would help financiallly until she could get on her feet; and (b) I was in a quandary about it anyway, because of the religion factor. I was already seriously questioning it; and they were all so involved with The Church in their lives (the Mormons are very social in their belief, with all manner of activities taking up most of their time. Idle hands, and all that) that it would be an awkward situation. I had nothing to offer them on that front, as an alternative, was still a truthseeker. Not conducive to a stable family situation. In the event, after going back to school and teaching for awhile, she met a nice Mormon man; and though they didn’t live totally happily ever after - his own kids from his previous marriage were going through difficult times emotionally, and the mix between the two sets of offspring didn’t always work well - at least they were compatible in their religious attitudes, and that’s a major piece of such a picture.
Which is a way, too, for me to answer any possible question there may be in the reader’s mind as to how I feel about religions. Short answer: They serve a purpose. But I feel that we are now faced with the need to move beyond them, and just relate to Source, with all due respect. That may be a bit of an ask. Religions - or at least rituals - fill a role, in our human evolution. Just so long as they don’t impinge on others. And that’s a bigger ask.



3 Which is an interesting expression, and especially in the context of this story, with a double meaning, at least for me: since as part of my search for Truth, I was drawn to uncover - try to - the real story behind King Arthur. The reality behind the legend. And here I note that I almost wrote ‘the legend behind the myth’. My mind perhaps playing tricks on me; inasmuch as I had been referred to once as ‘a legend in his own time’, so I know how these things can work. Myth possibly overlaying legend, or vice versa, and legend very possiby overlaying some basic reality underneath...
What am I talking about. I’m talking about how King Arthur has been referred to as The Bear, apparently the name deriving from the Celtic word Art or arto-, meaning ‘bear’. But there are quite possibly astrological references in this story as well. And with twelve knights/twelve disciples, dedicated to doing good (and twelve zodiacal houses; with the zodiac figuring prominently in many ancient religions)? The Round Table/the Last Supper table, which there is some evidence to believe was in fact a round table?? If it ever really existed in reality. And what about the references to dragons, as in Uther Pendragon - where did that idea originate from??? And the ‘wounded’ Fisher King, of Grail legend, with his ‘barren’ kingdom - and on and on. There were mysteries upon mysteries here, buried in our literal history.
I was determined to get to the bottom of it. All. At some point.
But all in good timing, I was learning.
Trying, to.
But - grrr, sometimes...