PBS is airing Mystery of Chaco Canyon again. Fascinatin' stuff, Maynard. I'm even more intrigued the second time around. Well, for a couple reasons. Some kinda convergence going on, seems like. "Stars aligned and our webs were spun." Kind of familiar, actually. Like I've been here before. Well, I have, actually. A couple times. 'Til by turning and turning we come round right...We don't have cable or satellite TV, and only get 3 stations out here on our bent and lopped rabbit ear antennae - Fox (of course! for keeping up with the Jones's), CBS, and (thank God!) PBS. I follow along with PBS pretty faithfully - I especially enjoy Washington Week (Gwen Ifill rocks!), McLaughlin Group, Bill Moyer/David Broncaccio's Now, Frontline, Tony Hillerman's detective stories on Mystery, BBC News... and I used to catch Charlie Rose every night, but not so much lately. And I especially appreciate the local stuff. It's all good. The kids love it, too.
So last night I needed a break from my current project (I'm writing a fancy-dancy genealogy program in Visual Basic I have high hopes for generating some income - we just gotsta to get some income comin' IN), so I popped the cap off the last beer in the fridge (left over from our 10th annual 4th of July family get-together) and plopped myself down in front of the tube for a couple of hours.
The first offering up, from the Secrets of the Dead series, was Search for the First Human in which a "team of scientists claim fossilized bones discovered in Kenya during a 2000 excavation are the oldest direct ancestor to humankind." And we are talking old, here - over six million years of ancient history. That's pretty old. It seems dear Lucy, who lived only 4.5 million years ago, isn't our gramma after all, but a cousin, and about 160,000+ times removed at that. The new Mother of All Living's surname is Aurora - though they're not sure she left any progeny, given the tiger teeth marks found on her femur. But if she did live long enough to pass along the human DNA torch, and barring any terminal interruptions in the reiterative branching out of her family tree, she could conceivably be our grandmother prefixed with 250,000 greats (give or take 75,000).
Conceivably? One of the lasting images I took from the film was the way they put that number in human terms - if all your ancestors were to line up single file one behind the other, your 60g-great grandparents would be about 120 feet behind you. They would have been born about 30 AD. Aurora would be standing about 90 MILES behind them.
What a picture. That there is one tall tree. My program's relationship calculation algorithm would handle it, but I doubt my database engine could. Not to mention my hard drive's data capacity.
What really intrigued me is that great-gramma Aurora's bones still speak for those who have ears to hear. Kind of like the blood of Abel that still cries out from the ground, even now. "He being dead yet speaketh." It's a meta-language thing, I guess. "There is no speech nor language, nothing audible is heard, yet their voice goes out to all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world..." Body language, anyone?
"The universe is made of stories, not atoms..." That's what got me interested in genealogy in the first place - wanting to know the stories. Everyone's got a story. Some have two. Put all the stories together and you get History. The Loom of Heaven weaves all the threads of our tell-tale lives together into one magnificent and most eloquent tapestry. I rather think one reason eternity lasts such a long time is so we can hear them all.
One particular story I'd especially like to hear is how it came to be that my grandfather Ray, my dad's dad, didn't marry Dorothy, my grandmother. Did his older brother Wesley, the hotshot pioneering pilot and instructor whose temper exempted him from wartime service but who was killed in another war 20 years later from a 20 guage shotgun blast to his head while he slept, talk him out of it? Grampa Ray didn't have time to tell his story properly - he died at 20 a year after my dad was born when he flew his Buhl Pup he had bought just a week prior into a tailwind (he saw some buds on the ground below and circled around to wave 'hi!'), and dropped out of the sky like a cold stone. (I wonder if he ever circled around Dorothy's folks farm at Corunna a few miles to the north from where he went down, perhaps maybe catch a glimpse of the fruit of his youthful loins. Who wouldn't? Or did big brother Wesley sufficiently "warn" him about those kinds of tail-winds but not the other? Near as I can tell Wesley didn't become a flight instructor until after the crash. So many questions.)
My dad actually saw the plane with his own eyes. It was still parked there in the barn 13 years later when my dad started wondering about the story, himself. He told me there was still blood stains on the cracked windshield.
I got to hear the story, the parts my dad knew and remembered. It explained a lot. I found out that my penchant for pepper is genetic. When I went to see my dad for the first time in 30 years (that was back in 85), he told me Gramma Gussie (her given name was Augusta, but everyone called her Gus for short) was just so pleased to see him pepper his eggs so profusely, "just like my Ray, your daddy, used to." Well, my daddy was pleased at my peppered eggs, too. As was I. Hey, a taste for pepper is primal stuff. I'll take the connections where I can find them.
Well, my dad's going to get to hear the rest of the story pretty soon. Found out last month he's got cancer in both lungs. I might still be in shock, but... I'm excited for him. Our story turned into a happy ending one - after thirty years of separation he and I re-connected and caught up with each other. We're both so fortunate to have had that conversation before either of us died. It's been health to all our bones for both of us. But he never did get to have that talk with his dad. Soon he'll get to, and I'm happy for him. It's a conversation that's been left dangling long enough.
Anyway, back to the recurring day-dream from last night. The Mystery of Chaco Canyon...
You should watch it. It's all about architecture, about making a place for people that's situated between heaven and earth, a mid-point place of meeting that brings the rhythms and patterns of the two together in a shared and blended symmetry of space and time in such a way that one reflects the other, answers the other with an awe and delight that only comes from a divine kind of romance, the kind of recognition only lovers at first sight know, full of irresistable intrigue and fascination, evocative of the kind of wide-eyed rapt attention that never blinks. Ever.
Which is my theme, my recurring dream - my own personal cosmic drama: in which all things (my wife and children, my church, the sun, moon, and stars, trees, a loaf of bread, a jug of wine, golden-oldie tunes, even shows on PBS) are sacraments that speak to the Romance at the heart of the universe, the Love that turns my world.
Weird, I know. Yeah, dream on. But it's mine. It has its charm. However, lately I wonder where I got that idea. Because I've had it for awhile, now. Well, I got to wondering, and then remembering, when I had one of those "NPR driveway moments" a couple weeks ago. I've tried to write about it a couple times ever since, because it was more than just a moment, and I wanted to get it down, or out, like putting it away in jars, like gramma did jam. I wanted to preserve that moment, because it was the sort moment that illuminated a whole lot of certain kinds of similar moments I've had over the years, sort of like a deja vu but without the dread. But until now it just didn't come right.
Well, it didn't come partly because part of me was afraid I had gotten my "charming idea" from my cult. Scary thought, that. They did leave a mark. There are connections. And I remembered those connections in the midst of my NPR driveway moment, and it was reason enough to give me pause. What caused me to remeber was hearing the voice of Judee Sill on the radio. Judee is one of those old familar voices to me, one I hadn't heard since 1974, since shorly after I'd left the cult. No one else has heard from her either, turns out. As the NPR story about her life and recordings (which are making a significant comeback, lately, hence the story) unfolded, I was shocked and grieved to find out that Judee died of a drug overdose at the tender age of 35 back in '79. Too soon! Too sad! So I spent the rest of the day scouring the internet, trying to find out "the rest of the story". To hear others tell it, she was one of those folks with a couple. A couple rather sad ones, too.
Not too many folks knew of Judee the singer/songwriter back in '74, but I did. Through her record, Heart Food, Judee was my constant and delightful companion at a very tough and very tender time in my life. Hers was the first record I bought upon my return to my "old" life after exiting the cult. She came at just the right time, too, and hit just the right spot. Her songs were like no one else's, and she sang them like no one else, either. They spoke to me. Well, I recognized her voice. I loved her voice. She was like a big sister to me. She kept me from going crazy.
Or, then again, on the other hand, perhaps she was influential in perpetuating those crazed cosmic notions of mine I picked up God knows where. I look back and I do see how that marvelous mystical spin she put on such ordinary things helped keep those same romanticized cosmic Catherine-wheels turning in my brain. She sang in the same key, and with the same resonant strains of music that the moving of the heavenly spheres make. She had the knack. Judee found a way to hit that one sublime blue note of the lost chord with such perfect pitch it could shatter cold stone in a heartbeat. But then her story falls off after that. Go figure.
So I couldn't write about this, as much as I wanted to, as often as I tried. For various reasons. But then last night, when thousand year old echoes from out of the ruins of the Anastasi's sacred stone monument at Chaco Canyon carried on the air and reached my ear, I recognized the old familiar pattern once again, and I was back in the driveway, paused and attentive, once more. So I put it in a jar to save for later. And as always, it comes with a story. Inside a story. World without end. Amen.
Want to hear Judee? Oddly enough (or not so oddly, on second thought) she reminds me a lot of Bruce Cockburn. See if you can hear the similarities. Let me know if you do. I know there's no accounting for musical taste, and maybe you had to have been there, but I'm thinking it's not just me.
Here you go:
Down Where the Valleys Are Low
There's a Rugged Road
The Donor (my favorite, but it stops right at the best part!!)
Soldier Of The Heart
The Pearl
The Kiss (I love this one! here's the studio version set to sucky you-toobie graphics - better if beheld with eyes wide shut.)
The Phoenix
Enjoy!
