Red Lake
From the Heyes Collection
For some reason tonight I can’t stop thinking about what happened in Red Lake yesterday. According to the local news, Neva Rodgers, the 62 year old teacher who was killed was going to retire after this summer. It just shakes me to the core. I started looking, somewhat obsessively, at the photographs on the Red Lake Net News site. They don’t have anything to do with the shootings, but they make me remember high school.
Neva Rodgers was the yearbook advisor. The 1972 Red Lake High School Yearbook reminds me of the sort of photographs I took for my own high school’s yearbook in 1975 and 1976. The pages of clumsy rephotographs of the Reverend Heyes Albums with their scratched and obliterated faces make me think of the cruelty we so willingly inflict on each other. The pictures could be small town anywhere.
Looking at the stats for the school, it seems that only 67% of the students passed the basic writing test in 2002. It is very sad to me that a zombie-obsessed kid could bring such tragedy down on this tribe. The ratio of students to teachers at the school seems reasonable, and yet no one made the difference for this kid. What really ripped me up the worst was listening to former students of Neva Rodgers talk about how she let them stay in her home when they had no where else to go. I think most people go into teaching because they want to make a difference somehow. But no one made that difference for Jeff Weise.
March 22, 2005 9:41 PM | Comments (2)
Casting (2)
My father fishing in the Pacific Ocean near Ventura, CA c. 1947
Dad and Mom
I was a little surprised to see this photograph in one of my mother’s albums. My first question was: who is that woman hanging on my father’s arm? That can’t be my mother. But it is. She even remembered the color of the bathing suit—it was red.
Looking at other pictures of their car (a 1939 Ford), I zoomed in on the license plate. It showed 1948, so that means the photograph was probably taken in 1947 or 1948. My Dad would have been 22 or 23.
Hope
The Road to Hope, Minnesota
Hope is one of the most common place names in the United States. The most famous is probably Hope, Arkansas—the birthplace of President Bill Clinton. Traveling around last summer, I kept seeing signs gesturing toward hope.
I turned 47 today. I hope that the upcoming years are as interesting as the past years were. I have every reason to suspect they will be. As I have often said in the past year, life is perhaps better than its ever been. It’s nice to be in a good relationship for a change. It’s nice to be able to research the things that I really want to research. It’s nice to think that I can actually continue down this path until I don’t have the strength to do it any more.
Going to visit my mother this week, I started to think about my father a lot. He was the same age I am now during my teenage years. I was a late baby. This age was not a kind one for my father; he was bitter and anxious to retire. He ended up retiring at 55, settling for a meager $400 a month in pension just because he couldn’t stand to work another day in the oil fields. I don’t have that feeling at all, but then of course I haven’t worked nearly so hard across the span of my life. So much of it has felt more like play—I’ve always done pretty much what I wanted to do, and never had the sort of responsibility he had. This doesn’t mean that I haven’t had responsibilities—I did help raise a pair of teenagers—but I’ve never had to do the sort of back-breaking soul-destroying work he did.
The strange thing about it was that work was the most important thing to my father. He really taught me that. Work can save you from the pains of disappointment, from the things that you can’t change. If you work hard, then eventually you can make a difference in some way to some thing or somebody. Stopping is seldom an option. What bothered my father about his job wasn’t the work—it was just that it wasn’t the work he wanted to do. He wanted to build another house. He wanted to raise cattle. He wanted to raise a garden. All these things were still work, but it was working for himself—not someone else.
I think that’s the reason I feel so much hope about where I am now. The work I do for me is coincident with the work I do for money. Like my father, the rest of my life has been far more dissatisfying and self-crushing. Now, I work for me. I hope it can stay that way.
March 18, 2005 2:23 PM | Comments (8)
Midwestern Tour
I had hoped to be in San Francisco this week, but instead I’ve been doing the brown tour. Connections along the way did not cooperate, so it’s been an involuntary hiatus. In case anyone is considering it, March is not the ideal time to do a tour of the Midwestern US.
