Category: Meditations

Habits of a lifetime

We are more likely to remember that which is most vivid, and closer to us in time. When I think of my father, I am most likely to remember him in November of 2014, the time I stayed with him and watched him go from independent albeit slightly confused, to unable to care for himself in less than three weeks; memories of suddenly having to feed and toilet a parent tend to be very vivid. I imagine my younger sister has far more vivid and immediate memories; she visited him several times a week during his last year, watching him lose mobility and weight and speech.

But let’s skip over the vivid and immediate, and go back in time to 1992 when my father retired from his job as a microwave tube engineer. He would have preferred to continue working, but the company he worked for only allowed full time work or nothing. Full time for Dad meant ten hour days, with at least a 45 minute commute on either end, and that was more than he felt up to. So he retired, and posted a sign over his desk in the basement of their house which said: “Retire and Die.”

One summer afternoon, not long after that, he and my mother and my younger sister were sitting in the dining room when lightning struck the house. Next thing they knew, a fire had started in the attic. They got out of the house, the fire department arrived, and my mother went across the street to a neighbor’s house to make some phone calls. One of the calls was to me. “Hi Mom,”I said. “I think your father is not feeling too happy,” she said. “Why?” I said, aware that her voice sounded very strained. “The house is on fire, and the fire department is here,” she said.

By the time I got there, the fire fighters had chopped holes in the roof, and were throwing smoldering boxes out onto the back yard. The fire was mostly out, but they were still pumping water into the attic. Mom was right: Dad did not look very happy. Pretty soon a couple of guys who claimed to be insurance adjusters, or some such, showed up and started walking around the the yard. Dad was watching the firefighters, and (I have no doubt) already planning the rebuilding effort, so I took it upon myself to show the two guys where the property line was. One of them did turn out to be someone who would serve as your representative to your insurance company, and Dad later got his business card. (I still have my doubts about the other one; my younger sister later said she thought there were looters around that day.) But rather than hire someone else to deal with the insurance company, Dad decided to do it himself.

He also decided to serve as the general contractor in the rebuilding effort. I was working for a carpenter at that time, and Dad hired Ken to do most of the work. A couple of weeks after the fire, when Ken and I had already started working, Ken told me that my father projected that they would be able to move back into the house in the second or third week of December, in time for Christmas. “There’s no way he’ll be able to pull that off,” Ken said, shaking his head.

But Dad had managed more complex projects with much bigger budgets than this one. He made his PERT charts, dealt with the insurance company, managed the subcontractors, and sure enough Dad and Mom and my sister were able to get out of the depressing condo they had rented and back into their own house by mid-December. A few months later, the last of the work was done, well within the time my father had projected. I doubt Ken said so to my father, but when the job was completed on time (and under budget), he admitted to me that he was impressed.

Years later, Dad wrote his own obituary, and said of himself: “He also spent one year supervising the rebuilding of his residence to repair damage caused by a lightning strike, which was an adventure in construction engineering.” I thought then, and still think, that this year-long engineering project was what got him out of the misery into which retirement had plunged him. In any case, the sign saying “Retire and Die” moved to a place of lesser prominence, and eventually disappeared entirely.

(As a footnote to this story: My mother was always convinced that the lightning had been attracted by the antenna Dad had strung up for his amateur radio transceiver. Dad always pooh-poohed that notion, but Mom had me partially convinced. Then a few years ago I learned enough to pass my amateur radio General class license exam. And a year ago, I found Dad’s construction drawing of the antenna in question. Dad was right: there was no way his antenna started the fire.)

Dad was good at facing down adversity and overcoming obstacles, armed with project management, scientific method, dogged persistence, and a quietly persuasive way with other people. Actually, now that I think of it, he was able to use these habits of a lifetime in dealing with his final decline. And that’s not a bad way to remember him.

Bob Harper’s obituary

My dad died this morning, after illnesses lasting two years. As an engineering physicist and R&D man in the for-profit sector, Dad had to be an excellent project manager, so of course he had the foresight to write his own obituary, which you can read here.

Me? I’m feeling mostly relief at this point; Dad’s quality of life wasn’t that great the last couple of months. Maybe Dad is relieved, too, though since he was a non-theist (he said he couldn’t call himself a humanist because he didn’t think humans should be at the center of the universe), the tense is wrong: let’s say: maybe Dad was relieved when he finally died.

Train wreck

By 1956, my mother, then in her early thirties, had spent most of the previous decade as a school teacher in the Wilmington, Delaware, public schools. But after a difficult end to a love affair she left Delaware to take a job in Weston, Massachusetts. I’m not sure where my mother lived, but she saw a lot of her parents, who lived in Peabody.

My mother once showed me my grandfather’s diary entries from January and February, 1956. I don’t remember much from that diary, except that he was a member of the Board of the Salem church, and that he went to Sunday services regularly, often accompanied by his granddaughter Anne. He made the last entry on February 27, the day after his sixty-fifth birthday. The rest of the diary was blank.

On Tuesday morning, February 28, 1956, a snowy winter day, my grandfather set off for the Peabody train station, to take the train in to Boston. My mother said he had just started a new job; she remembered being struck by how excited and nervous he was about it. At the Peabody station, he boarded Boston and Maine train no. 2406. The train consisted of four Buddliners, self-propelled railcars that needed no locomotive. My grandfather took a seat in the front of the first car, and the train headed south through the blowing snow.

The train joined the main line after the Salem station, and headed towards Swampscott. Thick, heavy snow was coming down fast, and blowing so that it covered the lenses of the signals. That meant the engineer would have been unable to see whether the signals shone red or green. Train 2406 was not equipped with a radio, and when the signals were not visible engineers were supposed to stop the train and contact the dispatcher. But the engineer of train 2406 did not stop. He knew there was another train, train no. 214 with a locomotive and six passenger cars, heading south on the same line just ahead of him; if he had stopped to call the dispatcher, he would have learned that train 214 had stalled on the tracks a quarter of a mile from the Swampscott station. But he just kept going.

When train 214 stalled, a member of the crew was sent to walk back along the track to signal any approaching trains. Train 2406 came out of the snow, going between 40 and 50 miles an hour, and the man from train 214 held up a red flare as a signal. But for whatever reason — operator error, excessive speed for the conditions, lack of familiarity with a new brake system — train 2406 did not even slow down.

Train 2406 hit the rear of the stalled train, hitting with such violence that it shoved the train 214 some fifty feet down the tracks. The photographs of the wreck show an appalling scene. One photo in the collection of the Swampscott Fire Department shows that the first Buddliner in train 2406, the car my grandfather was sitting in, went under the rear car of the stalled train. The front of that first Buddliner became a mass of crushed metal; the roof of that first car was torn off, the left and right sides flattened outwards, and the seats torn off the floor.

Thirteen people died, among them my grandfather; all those who died were in the front Buddliner, car number 6150. Many of those who died were reportedly decapitated or cut in half. The engineer was one of those who died, so we’ll never know exactly why he didn’t stop his train.

A year ago, when my sisters and I were cleaning out my father’s condo after he went into an assisted living facility, I came across a box with a label, written in my mother’s neat schoolteacher handwriting, saying that the box contained some of my grandfather’s personal effects from the day he died. In the box lay grandfather’s gold watch, watch chain, penknife, and gloves; presumably my mother had gotten them from her mother, and had kept them together.

Nine months after the train wreck that killed her father, in the fall of 1956, my mother met a nice electrical engineer named Bob Harper, and nine months after that, in June, 1957, the couple were married out of the Salem Unitarian church — married out of the same church that had held her father’s memorial service nine months earlier.

If you ever find yourself in the Swampscott commuter rail station, look for the low stone monument that lists the names of all those who died in the crash. The victims are listed in alphabetical order; my grandfather, Walter D. Allen, is the first name on the list.

Revised July 15, 2018.

 

Addenda:

A. How the families of victims were notified:

My cousin Nancy says our grandmother learned about her husband’s death when a newspaper reporter came to the house, knocked on the door, and asked for background information on our grandfather.

According to the Salem News, Richard Trask and his family learned about his father’s death from television news reports: “We heard the news he was dead from television reports, and I can still recall the cry-out of my mother and grandmother when it was broadcast.”

B. An excerpt from Walter Allen’s obituary in the Framingham News of February 29, 1956:

Walter D. Allen
Train Wreck Victim
Services Thursday in Salem Church

The funeral of Walter D. Allen, 65, of 44 Andover street, Peabody, the husband of the former Marion Congdon of Framingham, will take place Thursday afternoon at 2 o’clock with services in the First Church (Unitarian) in Salem.

Mr. Allen was one of the 13 person killed in the Swampscott train wreck Tuesday morning.

Survivors are his wife, a son, Richard of Cincinnati, and two daughters, Nancy of Peabody and Mrs. Martha Farwell of Lexington. He was a native of Nantucket, the grandson of a whaling captain. Mr. and Mrs. Allen formerly resided on Warren road [in Framingham]. …

Later he came to Boston where he was with Stone and Webster and the A. L. Hartridge Co. From 1933 to 1935 he was a special assistant to the building commissioner of the City of Newton. He left that post to become chief engineer for the A. C. Lawrence Co. in Peabody. He went on vacation three weeks ago and was scheduled to retire at its conclusion.

C. Contemporary newspaper account of the wreck:

In the California Digital Newspaper Collection, the Madera Daily News Tribune of Wed., Feb. 29, 1956, contains an account of the wreck from United Press wire service:

Engineer Blamed For Train Wreck Which Killed 13

SWAMPSCOTT, Mass. UP — Investigators said today a railroad engineer who died with 12 others in the wreckage of two Boston & Maine commuter trains was responsible for the smashup.

Sixty persons were injured when the Silver Budd Highliner smashed into the rear of a nine car diesel passenger train in a blinding snowstorm.

A B&M investigating board said the Budd Highliner engineer, Ernest Toutellotte, 55, of Winchester. raced his train past two signal lights and a franticallywaving flagman moments before crashing into the halted diesel.

They termed it a “human failure.”

The aluminum-sheathed Highliner’s first car split apart, the twisted metal shrieking under the impact as it upended two rear coaches. The two trains were jammed with about 1,000 passengers.

Bodies were strewn on both sides of the tracks. A few were trapped in the wreckage. Tourtellotte’s mangled body was found alongside the fireman, Raymond F. Jones, 28, of Lynn.

Called Worst Wreck

Officials, who called it the worst wreck in 38 years in New England, said the engineer had violated a railroad operating rule in running past the signal lights. Both were operating, a spokesman said, but were obscured by the blinding snow.

Both trains were on the B&M’s main line which passes through this small North Shore town, 12 miles from Boston. The wreck occurred about a quarter of a mile north of the Swampscott station.

D. A photo of the wreck, courtesy of the Swampscott Fire Department Facebook page:

SwampscottTrainWreck

E. Links to more information on the wreck of Trains 2406 and 214:

Cable access TV show on the wreck, very detailed account, with lots of vintage photos

“Swampscott Fire Captain Remembers Train Wreck,” news story on the 60th anniversary of the wreck

“Town Finds Crash Monument Days Before Anniversary,” article on how the monument to the victims got carried away by snow removal equipment

Photos of the wreck from the Swampscott Fire Department

“Medical Aspects of the Swampscott Train-Wreck Disaster,” article about emergency response to the wreck, in the New England Journal of Medicine

The joy of accounting

While cleaning out my files, I found this essay on the joy of accounting, which I wrote in February, 2005, when we lived in Geneva, Illinois.

How do you give an account of your spirituality? Perhaps I’d start in the present day, and in the place I’m now living. I live in Geneva, Illinois, on what used to be either an oak savannah or a prairie (we are no longer sure exactly where the boundary between the two lay), about a five minute walk from the Fox River. The Fox River originates to the north of us and eventually empties into the Illinois River. Most of the land in Geneva is now dominated by housing developments and shopping malls.

My partner and I arrived in Geneva last August, having driven here from Oakland, California. The rental market in Geneva had slumped, and we were able to find an affordable apartment a ten minute walk from the church where I’m now serving, and a fifteen minute walk from the commuter rail station, where we can catch a train that leaves us, an hour and ten minutes later, in the Ogilvie Transportation Center in downtown Chicago.

We are sharing a car this year. My partner is a freelance writer who travels frequently, and she owns a car which she keeps on the east coast, where she still does much of her work. The car we have here in Geneva is now twelve years old, and we drive it only once or twice a week.

People live in their cars here in the Midwest. It is common to drive your car to drive half a block, rather than try to walk. This part of Illinois alternates between hot, humid summer and cold, bitter winter, with perhaps two weeks of pleasant weather in the spring, and again in the fall. It is easy to get into the habit of driving everywhere. As a result, roads are wide, buildings are set far apart, housing developments go on for miles, shopping malls seem endless. There is no particular reason to leave any prairie or oak savannah within Geneva when you can drive a short twenty or thirty minutes to a county park. Continue reading “The joy of accounting”

Ethics

Every other month, I get to go to the meetings of Elder Journey, where there is usually a wide-ranging and stimulating discussion. Today we were talking about religious responses to the global environmental crisis, and I raised the question of what texts Unitarian Universalists might consult for help or inspiration on this kind of ethical issue.

Cecil Bridges had a great response, which he gave me permission to quote here: “You don’t get your ethics by reading the ‘Seven Principles,’ but by living.”

The same, obviously, holds true for any text, including the usual sacred texts.

One piano lesson

Novelist Iris Murdoch once met Ludwig Wittgenstein, the great philosopher. Murdoch reported that Wittgenstein said: “What’s the good of having one philosophical discussion? It’s like having one piano lesson.”

As someone who was trained in philosophy, I’d say Wittgenstein got it right (as he so often does): one piano lesson is barely enough time to learn that this is a piano, and you sit on a bench in front of it and use your fingers to play it; one philosophical discussion is enough time learn that human beings think, and that they can think carefully and even with precision about a broad array of topics.

And I’d go further and say that Unitarian Universalist Sunday services (and Sunday school classes) are a lot like philosophical discussions, with the addition of music and candles. Sure, you can go to one or two Sunday services, or send your kids to one or two Sunday school classes, and that’s worth doing because then at least you’ll know that human beings can think carefully and even with precision about a broad array of topics. But it’s going to take more than one or two lessons before you’ll be able to play the piano.

Which helps explain why, in today’s immediate-gratification society, Unitarian Universalism can be a tough sell. I mean, why take piano lessons when you can stream great music online? And why learn how to think when Twitter tells you all you need to know about the world?

Venison

Yes, yes, I know, once you saw a Disney movie in which a deer was killed and now you can’t eat venison. However, from an ecological standpoint, deer are a native species that fill an existing ecological niche, unlike the soybeans in your tofu which are invasive exotic species raised in monoculture fields that wipe out countless acres of habitat. And if you’re a small farmer, like Carol’s friend Eva, deer are an herbivore pest in a landscape that now lacks large carnivores to keep their population in check. So eating low-fat, free-range, non-GMO, antibiotic-free, organic venison that is untouched by American Agribusiness is actually an environmentally sound act that lets us humans fill the ecological niche of the large carnivores we have mostly extirpated from North America. It’s nice when we humans can play a positive role in the ecosystem, instead of just replacing the existing ecosystem with our own suburban and urban ecosystems.

When she stayed with us earlier this week, Eva gave use part of a haunch of venison. Carol stir-fried some chunks of venison with onions and greens; it looked really good, but I decided I wanted plain venison. I sliced it thin, and gently fried it in a little butter for a late brunch.

Venison cooking

After gently frying both sides, I covered the pan and let it steam for a minute until the meat was just well-done, with no red in the center. It was fabulous: lean, tender, and very tasty. I re-heated some of the “Warthog” wheat berries in the pan drippings, and the combination of the nutty wheat, the butter, and the meat drippings was the perfect addition to a satisfying brunch.

Constructing God

Theology may not be what you think it is.

Theology used to be a Western intellectual discipline that tried to describe God, humans, and the world in an objective fashion, that is, as if these are objects that can be described. This kind of theology began with the making of myths, and persisted for centuries in the West as rational descriptions of the objective reality of God, humans, and the world. Call this kind of theology “first-order theology.” First-order theology went unchallenged until the Enlightenment, when Kant and others showed that we cannot treat the idea of “God” as an object of experience in the way that “tree” or “human” can be treated as an object of experience.

After Kant, theology entered a phase when it increasingly compared religions, and compared different theologies. This phase recognized that different human groups have different theologies, something that missionaries and colonial expansionists previously had known. However, theologians went beyond the missionaries and colonialists: they recognized that of the different possible theologies, none has an exclusive claim to truth. The chaotic proliferation of theologies in the West since the mid-twentieth century — theology of hope, theology of revolution, death-of-God theology, atheist theology, feminist theology, black theology, queer theology, etc. — has emonstrated clearly that no single theology has an exclusive claim to truth. Call this phase “second-order theology.”

Gordon Kaufman, in his An Essay on Theological Method (1975), has proposed what he calls third-order theology: theology that acknowledges that it is a construct of the human imagination, and moves on from the chaos of second-order theology to something new:

“The increasing encounter of world cultures, on the one hand, and the development of such sciences as cultural anthropology on the other, have produced a level of sophistication which makes first-order theology no longer a viable alternative…. Second-order theology, however, taken by itself is not adequate to meet the human needs for orientation in life: it leaves us with a chaos of conflicting claims and criteria rather than guidance in the order and orienting of our lives. It is necessary for theology now to move to the third-order of deliberate construction if it is to serve contemporary humanity….”

Kaufman is telling us that it is no longer adequate for a theology to describe what it believes to be true. This is the fatal flaw of both fundamentalist Christianity and unbending atheism: now you have to do more than just shout out what you believe to be true. Kaufman is also telling us that it is not adequate to compare and contrast competing theologies, “aware that all positions, including one’s own, are in large part imaginative constructions”; we have to move beyond comparison to the task of constructing something that provides meaning and direction to human life.

And in undertaking this construction of something new, Kaufman brings up two key points. First, the “proper business” of theology should be “analysis, interpretation, and reconstruction of the concept and images of God, as found in the common language and tradition of the West.” I think Kaufman is wise here to limit the business of theology to the West, and to religions that originated in the West: I strongly suspect that the business of theology does not apply the religions of Asia, Africa, and other regions; these religions have their own ways of doing things.

Second, Kaufman reiterates that theology must now become a “constructive activity.” In the past, it was enough for theology to describe, then later to compare, but that’s no longer enough. Theology should be “a construct of the imagination which helps to tie together, unify, and interpret the totality of experience.” This new way of doing theology might be confusing for the fundamentalists and the atheists, and for many others who look at theology with the same delightful naivete — they may have to deal with the fact that theology is not what they think it is.

Elsewhere, Kaufman quotes Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: “Theology [is] grammar.” [The full quote reads as follows: “373. Welche Art von Gegenstand etwas ist, sagt die Grammatik. (Theologie als Grammatik.) — Grammar tells what kind of object anything is. (Theology as grammar.)”] And I think helps explain what theology can do. We need a way to make sense out of existence. We use ordinary language, ordinary words like “God” and “sacred” and “transcendent” to make sense out of existence. And we should understand that there is a grammar that governs how we use ordinary language to make sense of existence. Grammar does not restrict constructive theology, any more than grammar restricts poetry. Grammar provides structure for doing theology, just as it provides a structure for doing poetry.

I brought up poetry on purpose, because again and again I have found myself turning to poets for theology. For example, Margaret Atwood’s cycle of poems on the death of her father (in her book Morning in the Burned House) can be read as constructive theology that analyzes, interprets, and reconstructs “God” as it is found in common English language. Atwood, as it happens, does not find the traditional God of conservative Christians. But she doesn’t waste time in Christian-bashing, nor does she waste time comparing her theology against some other theology. She constructs a theology that helps me to understand the sacred and the transcendent and God (whatever those words mean), as she reflects on death and grief:

…Where have they gone to, brother and sister,
mother and father? Off along the shore,
perhaps. Their clothes are still on the hangers,

their dishes piled beside the sink,
which is beside the woodstove
with its grate and sooty kettle,

every detail clear,
tin cup and rippled mirror.
The day is bright and songless,

the lake is blue, the forest watchful.
In the east a bank of cloud
rises up silently like dark bread. …

This is how we construct a theology that provides a kind of grammar for our lives, a theology that tells us what kind of thing something is: If it is sad, how is it sad? If it is meaningless, how do we then create meaning? If it is sacred, what is it about a day that is bright and songless that imbues life with meaning and maybe even hope? Good sermons and good poems both use the words and grammar of common language to help us construct meaning in our existences. This is why I say: theology may not be what you think it is.