Mourning the missing memories

By David Rutter

Perhaps you never quite escape childhood.

You rarely grasp self-awareness overtly, but it seems clear we are composite creatures of inherited preferences. Our personalities are not random.

But the ways one person’s experiences are bound to another remains inherently mysterious, at least to me. Why does it sometimes work, and just as often not?

Do you not wonder why you are you? And why you cannot be somebody better?

I do every day.

I have come to sense this question, but no real answers, in my Facebook relationships and friends, some of whom began as real friends in real life.

What many share on Facebook is a deep sense of loss, remembrance and longing for parents, siblings or spouses who have died. Death mobilizes them to anniversary remembrances. 

I also watch with envy as some friends detail the joyous day-by-day sorties of children traveling toward adulthood.

Obviously because most of my friends and acquaintances are older — because I am,  too — the emotional gene pool is tilted toward the deeper end of loss and regret.

At least 50 percent of everybody I know on Facebook remembers and narrates with longing those who have died. The retelling of wonderful but lost personalities keeps them alive in some ephemeral but real way.

I envy their sharing because it means they knew those people well enough to honor them with loving memories.

In fact, Facebook lets you glimpse more about the personalities of deceased strangers than you do about their descendants you know. 

In a strange quirk, many reveal their lost parents or spouses more easily than their own current feelings and attitudes. Perhaps the past is more serene because it’s more controllable. The Facebook narrators are simultaneously reminiscing and purging.

In many ways, no one debates gentle memories.

For me, this Facebook phenomenon often is like some digital walk among the cemetery stones. The cemetery asks you to think of your own pending arrival there, and what those who visit later will say about you. We seldom burden friends standing in front of us with these stories, but will share them more freely on Facebook.

Writing emotionally about deceased loved ones on Facebook might be the only vestige of writing complete, personal thoughts left to Americans. We do not write many letters anymore. Or detailed diaries. 

We once shared our lives and dreams using those letters. Now the shorthand of Facebook and Twitter must suffice. We have depersonalized the personal.

Aside from financial or government documents, think of how seldom you write your signature now. Or salutations in your own hand. Or words of love. Who writes love letters?

Real words and real ideas might be among Facebook’s only real value to all of us.  It remains the one place we openly share our hearts with each other.

I have not been very good at this sharing, and the lack makes me embarrassed. Though my life is a thousand memories of growing up, there seems no coherent narrative to it, as if only pieces of myself remain.

My profound, personal exception is Fred Arthur Rutter, my father.

I have spent a full year researching and then writing my interpretation of his World War II memoir. In this book — “The Watermelon Gang” — I am the interpreter of his heart and experience. I speak in his voice as truly as I know how.

I hoped to serve as writer Orson Scott Card once did when he titled his book, “The Speaker for the Dead.” 

The “Gang” book has forced me to look existentially at my father, and reassemble my reaction to his existence, even as we lived life together. These are separate experiences. Even the realization that I am doing this dual high-wire assessment  consciously is startling to me. 

Or maybe just unexpectedly comforting.

Unlike Facebook contemporaries, I do not mourn in public. Or even contemplate why I would. I do not share feelings of personal loss, or seldom even the exultation about a wonderful life remembered if they were close to me. 

I often wish this came more easily to me.

Discrete solidarity with your own soul, I realize, is a very antique approach to explaining your world to others. And defining it to yourself.

Self-examination seems more important to me now after a professional life of writing mostly about other lives. Strangers. The famous and infamous. The mighty. The mundane. The heroic. The villainous. But all were stories extracted from a different world.

I have mourned the passing of both my father and mother differently than anyone I know mourned theirs, and have no urge to claim it was a better way. Only that it was my way. 

Indeed, it also was my parents’ way. I realized that just as I wrote that sentence. It is 12:18 p.m. on a Thursday.

 In the decades of our family’s lives together, I never heard them discuss personal feelings, either happy or otherwise, especially about their parents. Or even about each other. Or their siblings. Or my siblings. Or even about me, except when I was a disappointment.

I never knew how they voted or what public issues consumed them, except for my mother’s Roman Catholic faith and the certainty she voted for President John F. Kennedy for that reason alone. But I never knew if they Liked Ike, believed in the New Deal, the Great Society or Fats Domino. Were they against the Vietnam War,  or Nixon, or Hula Hoops?

For that matter, there were no dinner table tales and rants about any relative that I can remember. 

Perhaps they knew their children — especially me — would transmit the scurrilous tale to the relative in question. In the case of me, they likely were right. Perhaps being denied family information will make you become a snitch.

They were a loving couple and smart people, but they seldom shared their deepest, darkest views of others, or even admiration, at least never within my hearing.

This is a recent and amazing revelation for me. I do not ever recall my mother and father speaking about their parents or their feelings for them, even on the days my grandparents died.

My father fell into permanent mourning when his wife of 50 years died and left him alone to ponder that loneliness. I do not otherwise remember him ever crying about the loss of a loved one or a close friend.

So when I became a man, I did not share those feelings either, even on the days when both of them died. It is neither a cause for shame nor pride. It just is, though I am remorseful, because my feelings about this topic are oddly disjointed, when compared to others I know and value. 

I was following a psychological model without ever realizing it.

The book about my father’s childhood and World War II life in China forced me to rebuild him from the ground up, in order to understand him and the life he faced. 

He had told me about that life as his life was coming to the end.  

That sharing was a gift I cherished because the nuances were all new to me. He shared thoughts and emotions. At last I could be the reporter of his life.

Imagine discovering who your father really was and is, but only in the last year of his 84 years. I had spent nearly every day with him for 40 years as son and co-worker, but hardly knew who he was.

Imagine discovering what your true, deeper feelings are about parents, but only then at the latest possible moment.

I had always loved and respected dad, though from an emotional distance. But I came to like him, a lot.

It is odd to befriend your father only when you know that he will soon be only a memory.

So I used that set of discoveries and motives to launch the book about him.  And for him, to be honest. It was a task I owed him, and joyfully embraced it. He had deserved a better son than I was. However such an experiment is possible, I am comforted that I did an honest job as a ventriloquist.

Over years as a professional writer, I have written much less about my mother — Rose Juanita Brown Rutter — than my father who died 16 years ago.

I did not understand my father for most of his youth and all of mine, but I understood her even less clearly before she died 21 years ago. Whatever we did not understand about each other was never discussed, analyzed or even acknowledged. We left each other to figure it out.

The family of my childhood seemed in most regards an articulate, thoughtful, progressive group, except about our feelings for each other which were, as they say, complex. That seemed a deliberately nurtured dead zone in my sense of the universe.

Or perhaps I did not pay close enough attention to their whispered signals.

I could not write a book about my mother’s  life because I knew nothing of its emotional inner workings, even the years of sharing a home. All I remember are anecdotes about her charming and unique quirks delivered by other people, mostly family friends. I know her only from tiny slivers, shards and snippets of time we shared.

But in any case, I never have used Facebook to share birthdays, anniversaries or generally celebrate their lives or note their passing. There are no public commemorations. 

My feelings on those days are mine to consider and hold. It is my way, because it was their way, too.

I still believe in the boundaries of privacy. Maybe my incomplete memories are a form of punishment for shyness.

So there are holes  — large, empty chasms — in my understanding, even of the life I have lived. I never knew or recollected the days on which my four grandparents died, but my childhood home seemed to take no notice of them at all, either living or dead. 

There were no discussions about them before their passing or even afterward, although my family lived with my grandparents at intermittent intervals during times of interstate family transition.

I was present at the funerals of my grandparents, though not an integral participant in the events.

My grandparents did not hide or skulk, and all seemed lively, interesting, decent human beings.

What I know about all four I gained by direct personal observation during times we spent alone together. I tended to pay attention to my environment with them even when I was very young.

The family — including aunts, uncles and cousins at large gatherings— often retold anecdotes about our extended family’s oddities, but they were never intimate or deeply personal. The stories usually were “interesting” the way good jokes are.

The exceptions are meaningful. No one told me when I was 8 that my grandfather nearly drown himself in too much whiskey to mourn the death of his wife. No one explained grief to me. I felt that grief in his eyes. I learned and knew, and he did not hide it, or himself, from me.

Even with few words, he and I knew each other better than anyone else in our world understood us. 

As for the larger human issues, no one explained love, or hope, or sadness to me. Or why birds are beautiful or meanness is not. What does life mean? Or death? As a man, I have tried to understand all of those more clearly.

Maybe my parents gave me that curiosity without them even knowing it. Or me sensing that education, even as it happened. They did not supply many answers that I can grasp, but they did show me how to ask my own questions and find my own way.

I still wish they were standing beside me again to share the life we somehow missed the first time.

My life has been a search for emotional memories I do not have. 

We were a family that did not share such deeply personal feelings with the outside world. 

Or even, most usually, with each other.

For that alone, I envy friends who share those memories on Facebook. They do not always know how lucky they are to have that warm beach as a sanctuary.

An experiment: Can we rediscover friendship?

By David Rutter

She is an old business friend, although I seldom pay much attention to the boundaries everyone else takes for granted in managing their Facebook “friends.”

She is smart, talented, interesting, and I always thought well of her. In the last year, she has faced undefined personal trauma — damaged health and heartache have tracked her down, and though she never revealed exact details, I could tell from her Facebook signals that life had turned hard and complex. She did not specify, and I did not intrude.

I was her friend, or at least that is how I had always seen our relationship.

But was I her friend? And what does that even mean now? That word ricochets without a thought to its meaning or significance. The Facebook community and its overlords have driven us to this status and, as Facebook informs us, we all are the sum totals of our Facebook ”status” listing. We are defined by the game of Facebook which pretends it is real life, though it clearly is not.

The telegraph and the hand-crank telephone were devices and tools, but they did not substitute for our lives.  We used them; they did not use us, except to alter our understanding of what is possible in the world. That control is a presumptive role we have granted without much debate to Facebook’s franchise because Facebook is Mommy/Daddy. And their right to define our lives does not seem debatable.

But Facebook friends are not friends. They are merely echoes of reality — doppelgängers—  that we have allowed to take the place of human relationships. I am dubious about the value of that trade, and what we have lessened in ourselves with the transaction.

With Facebook’s urgings and our own laziness and ineptitude, we have allowed that to become the new reality. We often are asleep at the wheel of our own lives.

I sometimes feel like I am dozing at the wheel of that speeding car until someone unseen shakes me awake.

What? Wait? Where am I, and what have I done? 

Ah, revelation, he says. Rutter awakes to the real world, and sees the Matrix for what it is. He then strikes his forehead with the open palm of his hand.

My first thought is the most meaningful question. Is this imitation the way I want my world to work?

Friendship must mean something more than a check marked “status” box on a computer program.

As for my old friend with too many heartaches, did I do anything at all to show I had personal concern about her welfare, beyond general pleasantries?  Did I ever really help her? What does friendship mean, and had I validated Facebook’s general devaluing of humanity? Tell me what my caring means.

So. I reached out to her on Facebook— not to intrude or dismiss her right to privacy— but simply to let her know that another person in the world does indeed care about her pain. 

It was a decision to care. I decided.

And if sharing my time and support make any real difference, I would  do that. In short, I have your back. If you need what I can offer, call me. I promise to help if I can, because that is what real friends do for each other. Extending yourself over invisible boundaries is the whole point of friendship.

She was thankful, although probably perplexed just a little. Maybe it made an infinitesimal but real difference in her day,  for a minute or so.

As I wrote to her, I am trying to do what Facebook suggests I do, which is be a “friend.”  This might seem like a superficial word game, but it’s not. I want those people I have acknowledged as my “friends” actually to be my friends, and not merely among the accumulated roster of invisible connections on a social media platform.

I would sabotage and defeat Facebook by doing exactly what Facebook claims is its mission. I would be even more Facebook than Facebook. I would take my friendship to the real world.

Deciding to be human is strangely energizing. And more than that, it is necessary if we are serious about validating why we exist. And of proving of what value is that existence.

Friends deserve a special level of care and concern. Accepting that means only that you accept a joyous, human responsibility for decency. Friends reach out, and are not embarrassed by the need to share — triumph, pain or just the experience of surviving life together. 

We must share our humanness, or lose it.

 I have decided that if I am going to call myself a “friend,” then I should start to act like one. Baby steps, first.

As I wrote to her, I have been thinking a lot about these life transactions, because I do not like the state of my known universe and feel mostly powerless to change it — or to change myself so that the alteration has some evidence of positive good. 

I am not so happy with myself. When this happens, I question who am I and what in the hell I think I’m doing in this world. 

It’s an old personal habit of personnel self-inventory that can depress you, but perhaps educate you, as well. I fear (an apt term) that I was always something of a closet empath, but the world does not actually value that personality, especially in business and professional managers. Plus, I was a lousy empath or at least lousy at making it work.

I often saw the pain in others but could not fix it.

You wind up hiding those feelings and sensibilities. You make yourself fit the mold rather than making life fit your heart. You’re never quite happy, and even less sure why you are so sad.

Empaths want to change the world, but fear they cannot and, as a result of laziness or frustration, quit trying. But ultimately you get to be who you chose to be. So I have decided to redefine for myself what I care about, who I care about and make sure I do not leave my feelings unstated. 

If I cannot save the world from itself — which I can’t and make no pretense that I can— at least I will let people I value know that they are special and unique. Maybe saving the world from itself starts with saving yourself first, and then reaching out to those closest within your reach, and sharing your care for them. 

Say it. Stop hiding it. It’s OK to be real, and allow others to be real, too.

This will not be a contest to see how many charitable organizations I can join before sunset. This is one to one, human to human, just me to you. One true act of friendship a day. Just you and I, if you will join my little experiment. There are no membership dues, except the willingness to be better, to do better.

Something about how we all share life must change — and I choose to start with myself.

If you are my friend or wish to be, help me with this and perhaps  extending your hand will help you, too.

It’s a start. 

What Zuckerberg’s numbers don’t get about real friendship

By David Rutter

 

With all due respect to the algorithm wizards at Facebook, they’ve sort missed the point with “Friend suggestions.”  

True, it seems preposterous that Facebook and Mark Elliot Zuckerberg could get any element of interpersonal relationships wrong, but there it is.

This “friend suggestion” is a relatively new standard communication from Facebook and additional to “friend requests” which come from fellow Facebookers seeking affiliation with you. The “suggestion” option is based on computer analysis of your search habits.

But I have received “suggestions” in behalf of 30 people. Here are some of my potential new friends being promoted by Facebook: An ex-wife who barely tolerates me being in the state with her; the former husband of my life partner who hates me more than his ex-wife; a former corporate colleague who suckered me into a  business meeting and then fired me from a profession I had hoped to continue for another decade. Nothing personal, you understand. I’m just crushing your career at its highest trajectory point because someone told me to do it. Have a nice day.

There are a dozen or who accidentally were in the same room with me on one day in the last 10 years for no particular reason, though we never exchanged what you’d call an introduction.

There are former co-workers, many of whom were close friends before Facebook, and we all use Facebook to keep connected. But other former colleagues—too many for comfort’s sake— were never my friends when we worked together. And they made sure afterwards that I knew they would not be my friends, either, despite Facebook’s nudgings.

Another subset contains friends of a person I already know from Facebook. This suggested relationship is based on the premise that I would wish to be “friends” with anyone because a third party I know might know them.

In the real world, we call those people “strangers.”

Facebook suggested that I join a group devoted to “Olson Twins gossip.” Cripes! A former sportswriter I once called in print “a useless lapdog for Bobby Knight” is projected as a friend. Don’t think so.

All these karmic collisions reflect that Facebook designers, scientists and programmers either do not know what a “friend” is, at least as I have encountered the term— or they are refining the term for commercial advancement.

 Or just as likely, they are rewarded for “churn” — people moving To, ‘Fro and Yonder in a chaotic dance that creates “activity” but no tangible or meaningful results.

One of my “suggested friends” is a regional newspaper editor who does not know me, but does not answer her phone or return a half dozen calls seeking to talk about a potential news story. Facebook somehow picked her as a “friend suggestion” because I know some of her colleagues.

Luckily, Facebook has constructed a trap door to escape this Mobius Loop. Says the official tutorial: “From the opened page click on Notifications from the left section of the page. From the right section under All Notifications, click on a Facebook option. From the appeared list uncheck the checkbox in front of the “Adds a friend you suggested”  option. Finally, click on Save Changes button to make the changes permanent.”

All this evidence reinforces that, aside from your role being digitized data points on the grid, Facebook does not have much idea who you are as a unique sentient being, despite its corporate chumminess. Yes, theoretically you are the sum total of all the events of your life. But you are also unique for the feelings and moments you never share with anyone.

As for the life you choose to share, Facebook does not recognize that you are a human being with deeply held friends who were well-earned over decades of sharing triumph and tragedy. All it knows is a cumulative running total of who shows up on Facebook, and how often you — or people you know— interact with them.

But “interaction” is a thin definition of friendship.

You might not be a casual person with casual affections, which does not imply you lack the deeper variety.

But you might not ever have been casual about anything. Not everyone is designed to seek elective office by shaking hands with 1,000 total strangers, and pretending each is an old buddy. That makes you indifferent to most of the people you encounter every day, but they are not necessarily potential enemies. Or friends, either.

Facebook only sees a small prism of your reality.

In the Facebook universe, it only seems you have 320 million potential friends in the United States just waiting for you to reach out.

The truth is that you can’t have 300 good friends even if you were inclined. That’s because there is not enough time or energy to invest in making those relationships real, and your brain is not big enough to power more than five deep friendships at a time, and another 150 you’d consider “good friends”.

 All the others are just photographic profile faces attached to bios and resumes.

That deeper limit on real friendship has been scientifically verified by Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary anthropologist at Oxford in England. He has made a study of how many people the average person really knows. It’s about 150.

That’s a biologically built-in number that transcends culture and even your primate family. The shared limiting factor is the size of your brain synapses, regardless if you are a chimpanzee, gorilla or human.

You consciousness simply does not accommodate more than 150 in the “friend file cabinet.”

Dunbar does not suggest we all need 150 friends because even that number is ephemeral. Start counting the names of your “friends” right now. When you get to 50, you’ll hit a psychic brick wall. That’s because at any moment in your life, the people with whom you share llfe likely has shifted to a different group. Fifty of those your brain retains as “friends’ likely aren’t your friends any longer.

As for 150, that’s merely the number of people with different levels of connection that we recognize as being involved in our lives. We know them. But “Friend No. 151” is likely to be all but a stranger to us.

It’s our brain functioning as a filter for incoming data. Your soul guards the entry gate.

Facebook may be functioning only in the commercial sense when it seeks to redefine what the word “friend” means. Because we don’t argue over the definition, Facebook might be winning that debate because we haven’t chosen to reject the new paradigm.

Culture does this all the time. What the word and functional relevance that “phone” meant to your grandparents is not at all similar to what the term means now. Technology not only improves machines, but it also changes our perception of what the machine means.

 Perhaps Facebook is doing the same to the concept of “friend.”

But deeper friendship is so subtle an investment that I strongly suspect Facebook cannot yet understand its nuance, because friendship is a human activity, not a technological one. It’s not even a commercial relationship.

And before Zuckerberg’s algorithms stand in judgment, and I must answer: No, I am not a robot. I am having enough difficulty just being a human being.

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Brothers bound to the music

 

By David Rutter

Rich, the gifted guitarist, arose from his chair before The Band’s rehearsal that Wednesday to face us, and deliver the news.

We 20 in the Big Band Sound of Deerfield are mostly slogging the long corridor down the far side of midlife; so when friends share medical news, we usually brace ourselves to hear the hard words, because often the news is grim. 

We all had hoped Rich’s news about Jim, a good friend from the heart of the saxophone section, would be heartening. The same was true of Ron, another gifted sax man. Another bandmate stood to share news about him.

Both fought illness for many months, and both were resilient cusses. They were, according to the shared term we once understood, manly. Both often played when they did not feel well because sharing the music with us meant something to them.

 We admired them for that, as much as for their skill. 

But the news wasn’t heartening. Pancreatic cancer is never heartening.

Jim was in hospice, and his time was short. He had fought as long as he could, and now he wanted the peace of resolution.

The news about Ron was similar. Yes, hospice. Yes, cancer. Yes, he might not have long.

Some cancers force tortured, lengthy fights. Pancreatic cancer barely gives a person a chance to get their affairs in order. “Get their affairs in order.” What a strange turn of phrase we have adopted for being required to die abruptly.

They both faced the verdict because there is little other choice. They both drifted away in a sedated sleep, and then were gone.

Friends soon came to sit in their chairs and play the Basie and Ellington musical charts they had mastered. This is the music and social evolution shared by bands of old brothers. Life ends. With any luck, new friends present themselves and the music continues.

We seek that comfort because you can hear the echoes of old friends in the music we’ve all played together. They and their notes remain there forever if we are lucky, even if the lead tenor chair holds a different person. Big Bands are arranged by “chairs” with each devoted to different instruments playing a different part. The rhythm section holds the musical jigsaw puzzle together.

On most days, we are what anyone including we would call regular guys playing in a volunteer community band. Some are still working into their 60s at their professions. Others are older and retired. Others barely middle aged. One or two are spectacularly gifted kids who had heard about us, and wanted to share the old music. 

Basie riffs can reach out across the ages if you open yourself to the sound.

But when we gather to rehearse, we are just The Band.

 On some nights when the stars and our personal musical biorhythms align, we are almost spectacular. Swing band music is a test of shared, common rhythms and depends fundamentally on great rhythm sections — piano, drums, bass and guitar— to get the ship of notes moving together downstream. 

This band was extraordinarily lucky. There is no specific reason that we should be a good band. But on some nights, some glorious nights of music, we are. It is largely so arbitrary and unpredictable that even Owen, our director and conductor, cannot fully explain the mystery. 

But often the most beautiful aspect of life cannot be explained. How can it be that a beautiful woman inexplicably still makes an old man’s heart skip a beat? Why do stars in the night sky still transfix a soul? Why are the most profound formulas written in invisible ink?

Neither does the music we play make any sense on the nights when it is almost perfect, because big band swing is deceptively difficult to play well.

And when we drive home in every direction from the rehearsal hall, we usually are both exhausted and exhilarated. Swing music is a physical test, and old men are charmed to find they can still pass those tests.

But there are many tests. Life and death is a multiple choice test we essentially all fail when the time comes. But you hope the end, as with the music, is graceful and unexpectedly beautiful.

Other gifted musicians now sit in the sax section chairs once occupied by Jim and Ron. If a band regenerates and survives long enough, the line of generational succession can resemble a royal family’s genealogy, replenished across the decades. The skills, the music, the shared values all endure.

Both Jim and Ron had complex professional lives and devoted families outside of their Band relationships. Their loss hurt many people who loved them and others of us who shared strands of their lives. 

When friends like them exit the world, we are all diminished, but heartened that at least we had them with us for years.

But over time, when we sit to play some music on some nights, we can hear them without straining our psychic sensibilities. At least we feel faint echoes of shared, laid-back syncopation they had mastered. Even those invited to occupy Jim and Ron’s chairs are hardly strangers. They’ve sat in often, as members of the unofficial but valued band-in-waiting system.

A sustainable band is always building and reshaping for its future.

When the new, officially welcomed regulars  play with us now, they will sometimes unfurl the same musical phrases just as Jim and Ron did.

When that happens, it is not odd or eerie. Nothing is being taken from a legacy. The story is being retold, enriched and strengthened. It makes you feel surprisingly confident that the best of life’s moments survive what we think is the end.

The music always brings us back to the path. We are bound to the music, and by it. The music confers a sort of immortality.

After all, Mozart’s music has been played by 200,000 musicians over the centuries and all searched for Wolfgang’s perfect blend of groove and tone. That is the task that Basie and Ellington present. We all seek the same groove every time we sit together and play.

As men, Jim and Ron were more than valued. They were revered, which is the status that every truly mature male person hopes to earn. Both figured out life, and decided not to waste a day of it, even at the end.

Jim and Ron were fellow, elegant travelers on a trip we’re all taking. We miss them every time we play. 

 But if peace and joy exist after this life, that belongs to them now. We all hope that’s true for us, as well as for them.

 Our affection for them endures, because their music never goes away.

 

The Bard of Porter County’s Midway

By David Rutter

Joy and melancholy flow in equal portions this week in Valparaiso, Ind., for those who remember Tom Seibel.

It’s county fair week — actually 10 days — and fair No. 168 if I’m counting right, when all the lovely scents and mesmerizing glitz of rural culture converge south of town astride Indiana 49.  The midway lights twinkle in the shimmering afterglow of dusk. The grandstand rocks, the cotton candy billows, lemonade gushes. Many cows moo.

 

 

 

 

Tom was a glorious artistic specimen during Porter County Fair week — a chronicler resplendent in his element. He was a Chaucer who found his perfect place to tell perfect little stories. Sometimes that convergence never happens, even for talented writers.

But it did for Tom.

As a reporter, he always could capture the details of capital murder court cases and the grimy residue of government news. But for two summer weeks, he was a reborn monarch butterfly. For the years we worked together in Valparaiso for the Post-Tribune newspaper, he owned the Porter County Fair as much as any person could.

He was the Bard of the Midway.

He was recruited to the job on a hunch, and it did not take long to see his poet’s instincts. 

But Tom was very ill. And four months after his last fair column closed the books on 2002, he was gone. Diabetes and heart failure took him at 59. His body just stopped working and, as much as any early death is a sadness, this was more so for those fans who had found him, just as he had found them.

I was one of those fans. 

We all were deprived of decades of gentle, funny, insightful writing he most certainly would have produced. Every time he wrote about the fair, he explored a deeper, more insightful appreciation of its grandness and the grandness of its denizens. He was a gift to the people of that old county. 

When hometown newspapers flutter and die in the wind, the Tom Seibels that make them great and necessary are never replaced.  Those are losses from which a newspaper and its readers never fully recover.

In truth, my fair memories are a perfect amalgam of nostalgia, fun, and rare courage. 

It’s the only place where I could ride a tall Ferris wheel without vertigo and eat as many corn dogs as my stomach could accommodate.

Perhaps Porter Countians know this, but perhaps not. Not all county fairs are wonderful. Some are mismanaged, lifeless drudges and worse. But as a veteran of county fairs in 10 states, I can testify that Porter County’s annual show is a glittering, translucent  jewel and easily the best fair week of my life.

This is Porter County’s greatest glory because Porter County still has real farms and real farm families with farm kids devoted to raising massive hogs and refined bovines. There’s always a super star musical group. This time it’s Brooks and Dunn. 

There’s always a demolition derby, school bus figure eight races, and tests of tractor pulling strength. Families still battle to claim the homestead title of  “grand champion pies.”

And then there were Tom’s stories.

He had grown up in ribald Chicago newsrooms and had been a fishing buddy of legendary columnist Mike Royko. 

Whatever had flowered in his professional reporter’s mind, the fair touched it, and opened that spirit to the sun.

The 30 or so personal columns he did from the Indiana 49 grounds remain testaments to Indiana county fairs in general and Porter County’s interpretation of homespun showbiz specifically.

He loved the odd, carny freak-show purveyor who traveled with a large alligator in a mobile tank and displayed the creature as though it were a surviving dinosaur, which it sort of was. He loved weird animals and weird people. The fair had both.

He spent one afternoon standing near the 4-H animal pens secretly compiling what visitors said to the animals when they thought no one was listening. If you were an eccentric person with odder life experiences, he could find you at the fair and tell your story.

He could identify who made the best midway lemonade. Why not all corndogs are created equal and who had the best odds of being crowned Miss Porter County Fair.

He could stealthily strike up a conversation with a complete stranger, and before the stranger knew it, Tom would know everything about the person worth repeating to a reader. They’d part as friends.

Tom loved the fair with an open, unambiguous devotion.

As he wrote on the eve of his final fair in 2002:

“Got Japanese beetles on your begonia or wild rose? Follow a Slurpee truck down the street? Hear a distant drone of a calliope?

“As sure as the pesky beetles at fair time are akin to robins in spring, any of the above could be signs that the fair — the 152nd Porter County Agricultural Fair — has begun.”

Later that week, his nose perked up at the airborne scents. He not only profiled events like a good reporter would, he listened to the voices, he could capture the sensory immersion of a fair. 

“On Thursday afternoon, flags fronting the Porter County Fair grounds were blowing west, bringing the scent of fair food to the west parking lot. It’s been a year of wind, a new one every day, it seems.

“On this one traveled an odor of corn dogs, elephant ears, sweet potato fries and popcorn.

“The smell was combined with the fragrances coming out of animal barns.

“Compounded it was, by the humidity falling from the sky.”

‘It’s been slow,’ said Judy Davis at George’s, a vagabond food trailer noted for its elephant ears.”

This is the week I think of Tom, that fair and how they belong together. 

With any luck, heaven is a county fair that never ends, a place where corndogs are always warm, the Ferris wheel’s light show twinkles in the night air, and gentle poets hold court.

David.Rutter@live.com

An anniversary to mourn

Anniversaries dominate your life as you get older, which is, I suppose, the inevitable cost of survival.

Our corporeal lives face expiration dates, and each significant marker on the toll road edges us closer to that exit ramp. But we’re optimists; so we choose to plop one foot in front of the other and walk ahead as best we can.

But some days are harder than others. This is Dec. 13. This is my hard day.

I thought long and intently about it seven years ago when I first wrote about Dec. 13 memories I had never really shared until then.

I contemplated more than I had done in the past and maybe more than I should.

That’s because Dec. 13 is the one anniversary that feels more like unfinished business than a milestone.

We all have moments we can’t shake. This is mine.

On Dec. 13, 1977—40 years ago this week— many of the people I knew most well and cared about most deeply died in a massive fireball just off the end of an airport runway in Evansville, Ind.

Fourteen were basketball players for the University of Evansville Aces, and the rest were the official family of the team, plus a few crew members of an aging DC-3 that burst into flames and crushed a town’s soul.

I still believe I should have been on that plane that night. Believe down to the core of my heart. I always flew with the Aces. But we all receive good luck we don’t deserve and bad luck we probably do deserve. Maybe every resolution works out exactly as it should.

There is no good reason other than random chance that steered me away from it. We all are handed such detours in life, but never recognize them except when our luck is obviously bad.

In those days, I had been the “beat” reporter who covered the Aces for nearly a decade and only months before had been asked to be News Editor of the paper where I had grown up. Though it was more money and more responsibility, taking the new job was a tough call because I had to give up the Aces.

I would give up all the night flights back from jeweled basketball palaces, for even as a “college division” team, the Aces played a national schedule, though with a quaint, homespun approach.

Athletic Business Manager Bob Hudson saved meal money by serving chicken box lunches on the charter flights. There were no Nike apparel contracts or loitering pro agents for this family.

But it was a joyous life. Peter Pan could have been a sportswriter. It was, in many fundamental ways, my professional childhood.

The team and the people who adored it – most of Evansville’s 130,000 citizens – were a family and I was a chronicler of that family’s history. To give up that was not an easy choice.

But even Pan grows up; so I accepted the news job because it was the responsible thing to do.

I grew up at 7:22 p.m. on Dec. 13.

Aside from the days my parents passed away, it was the hardest day of my life.

Of course, I wasn’t the only one who easily could have been on the plane that blustery, awful, hateful night, but wasn’t.

Jerry Sloan could have been sitting next to me in that old DC-3.

He was the greatest player the school ever produced and later one of the Chicago Bulls’ early stars. Sloan had taken the head coaching job there for a week that summer, but had second thoughts and decided to stay in the professional ranks.

In 2009, when I first wrote this, Sloan had coached his 1,000th game in the NBA that week. And I turned out the 10,000th newspaper of my career, give or take a few.

In 2009—but never before and never since—it was the only reflection on this topic I figured was worth me repeating.

I survived because I was toiling away that night in my little office cubby hole on the second floor of the Second and Vine street fortress that once housed the Evansville Courier. The Aces were taking off for Murphreesboro, Tenn., to play Middle Tennessee State the next night.

The larger reasons why I did not die that night elude me. I kept my feelings to myself for 30 years because there was nothing in my pain that could offer much illumination for thousands of others who had shared even deeper grief from that night.

I did not attend any college basketball game for years afterward. I stayed away from Roberts Stadium, the team’s home floor. I mostly stood far back from the annual memorials of the event. Public heartache did not appeal to me, especially displaying mine.

Perhaps I never figured out how to mourn properly, or share my loss in public.

I lost whatever remained of my childhood that night, or least my adolescence. Many of us in the newsroom wanted to cry as that night crawled into dawn, but held it back out of respect. We viewed the duty to tell the Aces’ story with a clear head as a higher mission. We all suffered.

But I never mistook my loss for the one suffered by my friends on that old DC-3. No vanity rightly deserves that hubris.

If there is such a thing as survivor’s guilt, mine would deserve no sympathy at all, and I claimed none, even inside my own private thoughts.

But all 24 remain in my heart, and I remember each of them on Dec. 13. Their faces are all still there. When I am alone today, I will stop and summon memories of the rain-soaked field where they all perished.

And I will remember the nights of triumphs and loss we had shared.

They were great kids.

My silent benediction will not seem much commemoration for the loss. But it’s all I know how to do.

I was just a would-be Peter Pan, and they were the Lost Boys. We shared remarkable times and grand adventures.

As for me, I had to grow up. There seemed no other choice. I never cried for the Aces that night or any other Dec. 13 since then. But I never stopped wanting to.

To the beautiful women of RM

Forgive me for what seems an unnecessarily awkward self-reflection. But I’ve been worrying about having failed for 50 years to do what I should have done in 1965.

Of late, the failure weighs even heavier on me. No one has unlimited years to repair a flaw, even if it seems sort of silly and not relevant to big issues.

Penny Ziemer Ford and Gloria Konsler called Facebook friends for photos of our female classmates in their 1960s uniforms to show granddaughters just how comically hideous and preposterous the fashion requirements once were at Rex Mundi High School.

Rex Mundi (“King of the World” for all you unaccustomed to Latin) was an Evansville, Ind., Catholic high school that gloried and prospered in the 1960s and then, sadly, went out of business.

I went to a school yearbook just to remind myself of those years and those images.

But here’s the thing. As I looked at the photos, what I saw was exactly what I remember from those days. The images were not goofy or hideous at all. What I saw were schoolmates who all were stunningly beautiful.

So, this note is to all you girls from Rex Mundi:

Speaking for all the males—because we were all awkward lumpheads then—we thought you all were quite spectacular. Being awkward lumpheads, we never told you that. I was an awkward, GEEKY lumphead; so there was no way I was going to speak up on behalf of the males.

Maybe the uniforms were a burden on you, but as for the boys, we thought you were quite spectacular in every way. I do not believe the power of years prompts me to exaggerate.

I wouldn’t be so gauche as to pick out specific girls in my 1965 class, because it’s not necessary. When I see group pictures of you, your glory and grandness as sassy, smart, beautiful women are reaffirmed.

You all were amazing creatures, and we RM males were lucky just to be near you. We never told you then, and I’d bet no one has mentioned it much during the intervening years. Men are inherently graceless creatures.

But I want to correct that lapse in your behalf now. You were gorgeous, spirited, fun women even as teen-agers, and my affection for all of you grows as the years speed past.

The uniforms? I even sort of liked them, too. They transformed you into this identically dressed army of beautiful, sensuous creatures. And speaking just from one male point of view? For those four years, you were OUR army of beautiful, spirited, intelligent women. Of course, there always were the 48 First Fridays of our years, plus the holy days and civic occasions when you all dressed in civilian finery.

You were breathtaking. Absolutely breathtaking.

I spent much of my high school life in a perpetual gasp of adolescent admiration.

In truth, though we had no spiritual strength or sophistication to tell you at the time, we all knew we were lucky boys just to have you around us.

Of course, the 1965 female grads of Rex Mundi— as did all the other classes, too— went on to full, productive adult lives as teachers, doctors, business leaders and parents. You were beautiful girls who grew into beautiful women. And that beauty ran very deep in your souls. It still shows.

As for me, I remain an ungracefully aging geeky, awkward lumphead with no excuse for not telling you then how much of a “wow” you were. How much we longed for your attention.

All the boys knew the truth then. All I can do is make sure you know it now.

Sloan just wanted to say a quiet goodbye

To readers: For some reason I don’t know,  this column made the Internet/Facebook rounds this week (April 2017) some seven months after its publication in Chicago Tribune affiliates. I do not know if it was archived. But here it is again; for those who asked.

 

 

By David Rutter

He seemed a man among children. Quiet, confident, never self-focused. He acted like you always thought men were supposed to act. He was Lou Gehrig and Atticus Finch.

He wore John Deere caps when no one looked. He was shy.

He never sought to seem what he wasn’t.

If you admire grand souls, you would have liked him.

So, even now, I never mourn when athletic superstars fail as human beings, because I never thought of them as heroes. They had skill. Do not comingle the two.

But I gave myself one exception to that cool, intellectualized appreciation. Just one.

Jerry Sloan.

Now Sloan faces the last steps of his life, and last week he told us all goodbye while he still could, because a moment awaits just up ahead when that will be denied him.

He is dying.

Admirers gave him a surprise 74th birthday party last week in his rural Salt Lake home. He has good days. They said he seemed himself, just as always. Warm, gentle, funny. He was always the guy who would be your best friend if you were lucky enough.

How long remains for him, no one can say.

He suffers advancing Parkinson’s disease, but he also contracted “Lewy body” dementia, the second most common form after Alzheimer’s. It drove Robin Williams to suicide.

Lewy dementia steals the mind and installs hallucinogenic terrors. About 1.4 million Americans have it.

These two evils will kill Jerry Sloan sooner or later. He wants friends to remember only who he was as a man, not who he might become in his last hours.

Even when I first encountered Sloan, I knew he was different. He was a basketball star at the University of Evansville, and I was a hometown high school kid trying to figure out life and my tenuous place in it.

The writers who became colleagues in another five years had already nicknamed Sloan. They called him “The McLeansboro Fox” after his Illinois hometown’s sports teams, and for his wily survival skills.

In truth, he was born and raised in Gobblers Knob, 15 miles south of McLeansboro, but writers couldn’t figure out how to safely use “Gobblers Knob” in a nickname.

He was the youngest of 10 raised by a single mom after his dad died when Jerry was 4. He did farm chores at 4:30 a.m., and then hoofed almost two miles to school for 7 a.m. basketball practice. He was a tough farm kid with a gentle heart. Not perfect, but real.

He led — willed, actually — the Aces to an undefeated national title in 1965, forever sealing his legend there. Then he introduced himself to Chicago as a 10-year Bulls star and then to the Utah Jazz as a spectacular coach. His Jazz won 1,221 games and made the playoffs 20 times before he quit in 2011.

But that’s just sports stuff. Admire it, or not. Those milestones merely gave him a place to work while he lived an admirable, humble life.

After watching him — knowing him briefly as he passed by — I learned the Essential Sloan. He was a quiet man, inside and out. He let others triumph. He stood quietly at their side and, when they suffered, they never faced the pain and fear alone. He was always there.

He was revered as a person.

He was devoted to his three children and when he finally lost beloved wife Bobbye to cancer in 2004, I feared it might crush him.

They had been twin forces of nature. She had almost physically forced him out of the shadows after he quit the University of Illinois in his freshman year. She made him come to Evansville and leave the farm, at least until he proved to himself he was not running away out of fear.

Then he made himself a permanent, unequivocal superstar.

Her death did not crush him, though her decade of fighting multiple cancers had tortured them both. He became more somber.

He survived with his children and became the luckiest man ever. He and Tammy Jessop found each other, and they wed in 2006.

She saved him as Bobbye had done decades earlier.

In the course of his 55 public years, no one doubted his honesty, compassion or integrity. He never demanded more than he gave. He was dignified and courageous.

He mostly lived the way we all would, if we were better people.

He soon will go from us as he has lived. Quietly.

A significant soul will be gone.

And when that day comes, I will be as sad as I have ever been.

David.Rutter@live.com

 

3 more things I found Saturday

by David Rutter

 

3 things I discovered, and remembered, looking for something else.

1: A moon in our solar system has rain, seas, tides, organic molecules and global chemistry that might look a lot like Earth’s before we unlocked oxygen. The place would reek of methane if the gas there were not frozen stiff. It’s a lovely vacation spot except that it’s often 300 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. In case none of these facts strike a chord of recognition, it’s Titan http://bit.ly/2jvaNkI which circles Saturn, and is more like a small planet than a large moon. Our sentient neighborhood is divided into two groups. Half are those who hear those facts and say “So what?” And those who hear those facts and are even more captivated because we likely will go there only as disembodied robot landers. As for me, sign me up or Robot Space Command. I’m ready for a different planet.

 

2: I’m getting spam emails from Russia and China, written in Russian and Chinese, which means I must learn new languages in order to be scammed. Maybe they use that same sort of odd Internet Pigeon Nigerian dialect. “Dearest, Beloved Comrade, I have many million of rubles and yens just for you because my former husband died belligerently of the really bad cancers, and I cannot convert my bequest without your beloved assistance.”

3: Just my urological opinion, but If Donald Trump wants a morality pissing match with Georgia Rep. John Lewis http://huff.to/2iTOkgw

he’s going to need a bigger bladder. Lewis with only a Bible for defense was nearly beaten to death by Alabama State Troopers after 1965’s Selma civil rights march. Nearly simultaneously, our soon-to-be 45^th president was claiming Vietnam War service credit for not catching a venereal disease in New York. Totally equivalent achievements.

Lewis need not fear his reputation for a life of courage will be tarnished. As for us, we are doomed to four years of urination humor before it peters out.

 

3 things

Three downhearted things I thought about today.

 

1: America seems to have turned its back on … America. Most of the heroes in my life – from my father to Lincoln – have been humble. America has lost its sense and admiration of humility as a basic value. Or maybe we were never who I thought we were.

2: America discourages me, disheartens me and, I fear, devalues me as a human being, seemingly of little merit. Maybe you have felt the cold draft of indifference blowing on your neck. This is the first time I have felt like an alien in the land of my birth. Watching the cabinet confirmation hearings this week will make you feel hopeless that we were ever a land of open arms.

3: If Ireland would take me back, I might go home there. Silly, vain, childish thought. It’s the lure of cultural genetics, and probably no more than a false echo from inside an otherwise dark cave. I do not feel drawn that way because Ireland has proved it has a deep heart. But Ireland suffered too much to be arrogant. It remembers the pain inflicted upon it by others. Ireland, at least in my dreams, remains a place of humble values, and I find that compelling. On second thought, maybe I’ll stay here and fight like hell.