Musings

Yin & Yang of the holidays

For us this year it was a very rich holiday. Lots of joy but a more balanced level of activity between doing and just enjoying. Hearing from friends and family, going to events, enjoying the decorations and festivities.  Content with everything we need and feeling very fortunate.

We saw family early before Christmas so it was more taking pleasure in our home and having things done so we could enjoy a fire and staying inside during the wonderful soaking rain. We’ve had more rain in the last 3 months than we had in the first 8 months.  A gift we more appreciate because of loss. Yin & Yang.

Both John and I enjoyed a very interesting mystery by a first-time author, S.J. Watson. “Before I Go to Sleep” is about an amnesiac (written from her viewpoint) who literally wakes up in an older body, but with only a few memories of childhood. Each day she has to rediscover herself and reconstruct her history. Interesting story and a mystery that really makes you think about how our experiences define and shape us—while you just wonder what is really going on—what is imagined, what is real. More a “how did this amnesia happen?”

And who couldn’t feel a tear of joy seeing our servicemen come home and surprise their children and loved ones at unexpected events. I never grew tired of seeing those features. And suffering from longing and loss of loved ones is always magnified during a holiday when it is fresh and ongoing. My Yin or shade was merely remembering those I’ve lost, my Yang or light was just enjoying  relaxing activities—so I considered it very balanced, if bittersweet at times.

The same balance was not true for everyone I knew for a variety of circumstances. One friend and neighbor from the late 60’s and early 70’s lost his son, who when we knew him was a toddler and pre-schooler.  When John said Morgan would be over 40, I really took a pause, because he’s a forever young toddler and pre-schooler for me. I had a mental picture of him in his 20’s, but 40 something? But the calendar isn’t lying on that one.

We will now start to venture out the holiday movies. I’m very interested personally in War Horse.  A shaping incident for my mother during World War I was their horses being drafted and taken to war in Europe. Until her death my mother longed for, and at times agonized, about those two horses. She was around 8 when they were taken so the ages of many of the elementary aged children we’re seeing in the returning servicemen stories-- shaping, lifelong stories.

Think of the sacrifice that farmers, who plowed their fields with horses, made to that war effort. My mother remembered her brothers pulling the plow . . . and that they were a sorry substitute for the horses. But I suppose the real story is what those horses meant beyond farming. My grandmother on my father’s side, always talked about foregoing church in the early 1900’s so the horses could rest.  Have you ever felt that deep of an attachment to a machine?

So now our part of the holiday is looking forward and what resolutions and activities will be for next year. What do you want your holiday letters to say next year? How will you balance Yin & Yang? Happy New Year!

Illustrated from Musings column in the 12/28/2011 Fort Bend Independent.

Big

If you read “Lonesome Dove” by Larry McMurtry or watched the mini-series adaptation of it, you’re familiar with the characters who formed the first full service cattle drives including the chuck wagon, scouting,  guiding  and moving.

The main characters of “Lonesome Dove” were inspired by Charles Goodnight, Oliver Loving and Bose Ikard of Weatherford, Texas.  These men were big in every way.  Pioneers. Brave.  Tough, but not mean—they were generous of spirit, but did not demure of doing something tough when it was required. They didn’t throw it off to someone else.  They had a code of right and wrong—and you did “right” even when it was personally hard.

Thanks to the Fort Bend library, I listened as I drove to Oklahoma recently to McMurtry’s first book “Horseman, Pass By” on audio disk.  You may remember it as the movie “Hud.” So I not only found the abandoned cemetery of some of my ancestors in Weatherford, but also discovered many connections of how this entire part of the country fits together in my family’s past.  

Goodnight, Loving and Ikard made big footprints on Weatherford, Texas.  It was rodeo week and the memory of these men is prominently featured in town history and establishments.

About mid-way between Weatherford and my home town in Oklahoma is McMurtry’s home town, Archer City, Texas. I always enjoy seeing how many more buildings McMurtry has taken over for his antiquarian book business . . . it’s now four, with number four being on the same block as The Royal—the movie theater in “The Last Picture Show. “

The Royal is no more than a front now like on a movie set. Most of the building has collapsed, and it’s painted red, white and blue.

“The Last Picture Show” played in Archer City, July 1, courtesy of Texas Monthly and Alamo Drafthouse Movie Theaters. According to the Wichita Falls Times Record, McMurtry spoke about the book and film.  John and I attended the movie shortly after we moved to Houston in the early 70’s. He had never seen me so emotional at a movie. I was re-naming the characters as individuals I knew-- many of them moving through life much like the tumbleweeds blowing down the desolate, cold streets in winter. Lonely, no purpose.  

McMurtry has thankfully captured many of the stories about the West I heard as a child and made them live through memorable characters.

As I was driving west out of Archer City, “Horseman, Pass By” is nearing the end, with protagonist Homer Bannon’s funeral. It speaks of the big sky and the big horsemen that made the West  including Charles Goodnight, their code disappearing to the likes of Hud and the unscrupulous.

And there before me was the cloudless big sky stretching as far as I could see in this stark and unforgiving country. It was 110 with little shade, dry as a bone.

I felt very small, insignificant, and soft compared with the accomplishments settling this “wild territory” that was home land to the Kiowa, Apache and Comanche Indians. Toward the end of his life, Charles Goodnight saved one of the last herds of buffalo, which slaughtered indiscriminately for sport alone, had gone from millions and sustaining a way of life, to almost extinct.

Like I said, Charles Goodnight was a big man in many ways.

Illustrated from Musings column in Fort Bend Independent  07/06/2011 edition by Janice Scanlan.

. . . More stuff . . . .

Who's the Western Artist who created the "iron work mural" in the picture above? I don't know, but the work is the left "rail" on the entry to The Iron Trail, a retail store in Archer City pictured to the left. They had stepped out or I would have gone inside.

 

And here's the "right railing panel.

PS. I listened to McMurtry's "All My Friends Are Going to be Strangers" on the way home. But don't be a stranger, let me know what you think.

 

Please click on pictures if you wish to enlarge the view.