Introduction
With only a few months to go, it's looking like I’m going to make it to my 70th birthday. Considering the metaphorical knife’s edge I’ve danced along my entire life, I’m astonished to be here. Hell, I remember celebrating my unlikely entry into the Half Century Club—recalling some friends and acquaintances who didn’t make it. Not to mention my own close calls.
Yet here I am. Even more amazing for me is all the people who have become part of my life along the way—especially in the pulse of babies turned toddlers and beyond these past six years. Their parents are full-time professionals, and I was privileged to be the most active member of our three-grandparent baby care support team during their first couple of years, since I had more available time than my working wife. The physical beings of these active grandchildren quite literally instructed my body to reinvigorate itself, which it did.
Those repeated days and weeks together created deep bonds through shared adventures and memories - memories that will fade as they grow but still leave lasting imprints that I feel good about. This past year, a baby girl from a new clutch joined us, nor have I forgotten my original two grandchildren, now in their twenties, busy building their own lives.
I include this upfront because it explains why I feel I’ve earned the legitimacy to tackle our deeper questions. Writing this story will allow me to reflect on how my experiences helped weave themselves into my particular perspective - the relationship between myself and the knowledge I possess.
I am the cumulative product of half a billion years of the uninterrupted evolution of a single bloodline. I used to possess the latest living incarnation of that process. Then my daughter superseded me, and now it is her daughter's turn. An eternal pageant of mothers giving birth to babies, as time races by. Imprinting its changes onto the living, who in turn pass along those changes, in Earth’s ongoing pageant of evolution.
This understanding has imbued me with my own down to Earth, evolution appreciating outlook that makes a clear distinction between my body/brain, the cumulative product of evolution, and my mind, the cumulative product of all my experiences, reflecting a most fundamental truth: Physical Reality ~ Mind divide.
Now I want to capture that journey. Of course, I’d love for people to read it, to find something in it that resonates. But truth be told, after over a quarter-century of reaching out in search of “my” intellectual and political community and hoping to become a part of something bigger—only to hear the sound of one hand clapping—I’m over worrying about others. This I’m writing with myself and a small circle of loved ones in mind.
While I can, I'll work on stringing together the highlights of dreams that became memories and experiences that made lasting impacts on how I perceive the human condition and this planet Earth that created and sustains us. Feel welcome to look in on us.
Then I’ll toss the pearls into the current, hoping.
Prequel
This story is about my life as I’m looking back at it from 69 years old. To get the tone right, I need to jump ahead to share a petite epiphany I experienced in my thirties around the time my daughter was born.
It started with the question: What happens to one’s soul when we give up on scripture’s judgmental, personal God and His contrived promise of heaven and threat of hell? The question fascinated me for years.
Until it resolved itself into a splendid little Sunday School parable about life, and death, and Evolution’s continuity. The type of narrative some could craft into a religion, while others could weave it into a fairytale or a song.
Me? I only took it as far as this conceptualization, then I moved on.
It started with an appreciation that science has demonstrated that our thoughts are best understood as a reflection of our body-brain communicating with itself (see Solms, Damasio, Sapolsky, etc. for the details).
We know that our body-brain produces bioelectrical neural energy that can be measured and visualized. This begs the question: What happens with this energy when we die?
I feel comfortable equating this bioelectrical life force with our unique soul. After all, this is bio-poetry based on science, not science itself! So imagine, at death, a wave of energy is released as our body’s cells shut down—a burst of soul radiating outward to be reabsorbed into Earth’s biosphere.
Now, consider the flip side: the conception of life.
I’ve watched time-lapse microscopy of an egg surrounded by hordes of sperm striving to penetrate. At the moment of conception, a spark of energy flashes across the egg’s surface. This spark of energy essentially armors the egg so that no more sperm can penetrate.
Poetically, it’s easy for me to visualize an individual's final wave radiating out and encountering an egg and sperm at just the right moment to join the union. Not reincarnation—more like harmonizing with a subtle echo, a spark of life.
As we grow, we get out of life what we invest into it, and that gets reflected in our body-brain and the soul it produces (read: bioelectrical imprint). When we die, there it goes, carrying the imprint with an echo of its former self. The cycle starts all over again. Life is not a metaphorical circle; it is a spiral.
For me, it offers another poetic rationale for striving to be the best I can. Not to be mistaken with seeking wealth. Our soul grows in depth and complexity commensurate with what one puts into our life and those of others—not in how many toys and debt one manages to accumulate and get away with before dying.
It was a poetic resolution, and that’s about as far as it went. It resolved a mystical itch for me.
I think it also taught me something about what gave rise to religions. I began appreciating that, historically, religions were a sort of medicine that developing societies needed to help citizens deal with the great miseries of the unknown, fear of death, life’s unforgiving changes. (Perhaps there’s also a deep desire to be told what to do and think.) They guided us through the stages of our lives while establishing behavioral norms for the community.
All that is important and beautiful—so long as people appreciate that “God Almighty” is beyond our human understanding. Opposed to a “Personal God” who is the reflection of an Ego run amok, hubris, and is to be shunned.
Okay, so what about this trinity of egg, sperm, and bioelectrical energy? First, a ripple that triggers a shockwave, galvanizing the egg/sperm like a metaphorical defibrillator. Kicking off another round of baby-making, where bioelectrical energy infuses the molecular, cellular structures, spending the next nine months recapitulating the past half a billion years of uninterrupted generations before arriving as the most recent evolutionary incarnation—with a body to grow into, a life to live, and memories to acquire.
For me, all that is wonderfully profound and worth musing on. And it brings me to one specific birth—my own.
What a splendid journey it’s been. - Chapter One
I can’t think of my birth without including the previous nine months when I grew, quite literally, cheek by jowl with my wombie. Obviously, my training began rather early and provided one of the first perceptual filters for my brain. When our big birth day arrived, I knew to step aside and let her move out first—she had places to go.
Unfortunately, I must have been awkward about it. In all the confusion, I not only wrapped the umbilical cord around my neck, apparently I also thought it would be great fun to moon the world before making my entrance.
Bad move, that one. It took nearly 50 minutes for a team of very dedicated doctors and nurses to dislodge me from the tangle I’d gotten into—only for me to then scare the bejeezus out of everyone with my frighteningly limp and blue appearance. I’m informed that it took a few smacks before they smacked hard enough to get my attention. Like in the movies, once the crying started, I pinked right up, thanks to a healthy heart, lungs and all the rest of it.
What a relief for everyone when they placed me into a cozy crib next to my waiting big sis.
Before long, we were bundled up with Mom and on our way home, led by Dad. Dad was a top-rung musician—high in talent, low in financial stability—so he had to shoehorn us into a modest two-room apartment in the war-ravaged northern industrial city of Münster. I heard my eight-year-older brother had a tough time with the addition of two crying, stinking, "pooping machines” (his words) crowding his scene.
Fortunately, besides music and his family, Dad loved art and photography and had a way with cameras and writing copy. He had also learned to speak English well. Still, lacking business acumen in bombed-out, post-war, depression-racked Germany, life was bleak. It had been tough enough with one well-behaved and unusually studious son in a tiny apartment. With two more mouths to feed, it was a scary prospect, and my parents saw little chance of a future in Germany.
In life’s many lotteries, we win some, we lose some. We won big with Mom’s mother’s sister, Aunt Elsie, and her husband, Uncle Julius, who were politically astute enough to immigrate to the USA in the 1930s. They were living the American Dream in Chicago, working for Sunbeam Appliances, and best of all, they decided to sponsor our growing family—just in the nick of time, since there was yet another little one on the way.
They sponsored what must have felt like the great escape from Germany to the land of opportunity and fortune. They remained a wonderful presence in our lives and rank as my first heroes.
Okay, so there we were—my sister and I, not even half a year old; my brother, Dad, and a pregnant Mom—getting a blessedly inexpensive berth on an ocean liner. Did I say inexpensive? The hitch? December, steaming across the North Atlantic Ocean on the ocean liner TSS New York.
I don’t recall Dad ever talking about the voyage; he was always busy looking forward. My brother remembers having the time of his life. At eight, with an engineer’s heart and already a full-blown love affair with planes, he was allowed to escape our cabin to explore—though confined to the corridors and public rooms, while doorways to the promenade decks were often latched shut due to the storms throughout the voyage.
My mother recalls a couple of nice days, but then the storms came. Mom also recalled babies pooping, everyone puking, and feeling like warmed-over death—except for my brother. She struggled to feed me since I keep drifting off at her breast, only to wake the moment she put me down. My sister, on the other hand, ate well, then cried endlessly. All of this in a cramped, swaying cabin with one little porthole, and the atmosphere getting thicker by the day, amplifying their exhaustion. When I imagine that Mom was pregnant and probably dealing with morning sickness on top of it all, I’m in awe of her.
My brother remembers the lashed porthole and the stink of the cabin. Since he felt fine, he remembers escaping as much as possible, which was all the time. For most of the journey, he was limited to walking the hallways and public areas, as the storm had exterior doors & portholes latched shut and the promenades were off-limits to passengers for a good deal of the twelve day journey.
He does recall the ship listing. Once, he found a hatch door unlatched and slightly ajar. Of course, he had to try pushing it open—and he managed it—only to suddenly find himself outside in the raging storm. With a change in the howling wind and the ship's roll, the door slammed shut, trapping him outside. Fortunately, with another roll of a wave and a lot of effort, he managed to pull it back open and he got back inside—scared shitless, but having acquired a whole new level of appreciation for why those doors are kept shut during storms and why posted rules should be followed.
Adding to their trials, instead of steaming straight for their first destination Halifax, the ship was diverted further north to help search for a boat in distress. This filled my brother with excitement, but after a couple of days of fruitless (boring) searching, he was happy when the TSS New York picked up a full head of steam and returned to her voyage under sunny skies.
Their arrival in Halifax was thrilling and fascinating and his eight year old self liken the tugs and celebrating ships to “the performance of a great ballet” as the vessel was guided and docked - to give way to the grander ballet of people disembarking, embarking, cargo being winched off the vessel, and supplies back on - it was all absolutely engrossing for our budding engineer.
Leaving Halifax he remembers being struck by a bout of depression, knowing he was going to have to disembark the “first love of his life” in a couple days. Recently, when I first heard this, I remember thinking, wow, you were a precocious little guy.
When he got over it, he remembers being glued to the starboard rail, watching the distant coastline, and the lights of towns and harbors seemingly floating north past them.
Then we were there. The grandest of arrivals. My bro remembers New York Harbor in full regalia putting the Halifax pageant to shame. Then the ship was docked and watching was over, with family bundled together it was time to take our place in the unstoppable tide of humanity. We missed arriving at historic Ellis Island by one year, so were processed through the new Barge Office in Battery Park, Manhattan.
Then my exhausted, relieved, and proud mother and father, with infants and son in tow, stepped onto American soil and into the American Dream.
It was December 1955, and Rosa Parks was on the front pages of all the newspapers.
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