Incorporeal Works

December 24, 1968 around 9:30 p.m. est approximately, in a broadcast from Apollo 8, during the ninth revolution around the moon, Astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders took turns reading the following:

William Anders
“We are now approaching lunar sunrise and, for all the people back on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

Jim Lovell
“And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

Frank Borman
“And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.

And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas “ and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth.”

I saw this television broadcast that Christmas Eve, shortly before leaving for Christmas Eve service at St. Paul’s Chuch.  The sight of the Moon, with those words being repeated at that great distance, impressed me as few other things had that year of epochal happenings, that annus horriblis. After war, assassinations, riots, chaos in the streets of Chicago during the Democratic convention, that two minute broadcast was healing.

I loved Christmas as a child. Who didn’t? Anticipation, present lust, carols, Santa looming like a portent of delight from advertisements and entertainment on every hand built the excitement. The tree arrived and perfumed the house with evergreen smells, we hung it round about with ornaments, we hung our stockings, and on the evening of The Day, we thought we would never fall asleep - but we did.

And the next morning…staggering out of bed, into the playroom, what bliss!! Fifteen minutes, tops, and wrapping paper was being gathered up by our mother for re-use (the Depression cast a long shadow in the 1950s) and we were grabbing up one present after the other, unable to stick to one new toy long, overkill.

My family was in the retail trade, all my aunts and uncles on my father’s side, along with his parents, plus the multitudinous cousins, were the family of Miller Brothers, a department store in the old mold, in Chattanooga, TN. Retailers called themselves “merchants” in that day. A connotation of craft and dignity was passed on to us, the fourth generation of merchant princes and princesses, my sisters and cousins and I. But on Christmas Morning, we played. Then we grew up.

My first job - full-time, not vacation job - was in the toy department. This route was traditional in the family for budding merchants. If you could survive Christmas in the toy department, you were of the mettle necessary to make a merchant. I survived, but Christmas joy for me died  that first season, filled with twelve-hour days, herds of frantic parents and screaming children, blizzards of paperwork, lay-by tags, stock counts disintegrating in the chaos of toy department hell.

I left the toy department a couple of years later, but the experience and the terror stayed with me. From that year, Christmas Season cast me into deep depression, followed the week after Christmas Day by whatever flu bug was fashionable that year; I was so tired by then that my immune system collapsed. But not until after the Day After Christmas, the second biggest day for retail sales, after Thanksgiving. Then I could take to my bed.

Leaving The Store ten years later (after a buy-out and merger) began a qualified recovery, but as with those ravaged with alcohol or drugs, I would always be recovering, not cured. I avoid stores, advertising and thoughts of Christmas each year until the eve of The Day. Then I rush around and buy a few things and dispatch them to family. The depleted shelves makes the choices spare enough that I need spend little time, though much money, doing my bit.

The happiest day of my year comes on the Day After Christmas, a day I have not spent in a retail outlet since 1973. Peace.

There is another part of Christmas which by heroic effort I have kept separate from spending and frenzy and exhaustion. Of that Christmas I will post tomorrow.

Last night, I watched my grandchildren for a few hours while their parents were away. I supervised the evening meal, answered their many questions about food, when their Mommy and Daddy would be home, and tried to referee their hyperactive competitions. They are nearly six years old, and four and a half. A constant delight, even when they are very active and mischievous.

A half hour after finishing supper, they were playing in their little playroom while I sat on the couch in the next room. Suddenly there was a loud explosion outside, down the hill below the house as well as I could judge. The lights went out immediately.

Much excitement and many question from the two children, the older burbling on about a “blackout” at her school a year ago. I determined in a few minutes, after locating the telephone in the dark house, that the power company was on the way, and that five houses total were without electricity.

For the next hour, the children were relatively inactive, unable to see their toys, or the TV, or anything else. We sat on the couch in the living room and talked. They asked many questions, and I answered, as best I could. Most of the questions concerned what I remembered as a little boy their age, and what I remembered of them “back when we were babies.” A matter of a few short years, by my scale of time, but eons for them.

In many ways, that hour was wonderful. The peripatetic children rarely hold long conversations, and the hour before bedtime last night I will remember for a very long time. The power was still out when their bedtime arrived, and I took them up the dark stairs to their respective bedrooms. They each insisted on open curtains and blinds in their rooms, since they had no night lights. No question of bedtime stories, since there was no light to allow reading.

But we had made our own stories for the past hour, and within minutes they were both asleep, not their usual routine. What a wonderful night. I am sure the power company fielded many impatient calls over the two hours of outage, but I had a wonderful time.

the observations of Franklin Walter Reese, Colonel, USAR

My grandfather, my mother’s father, of whom I have posted here before, was posted to first Korea, then Japan the year following Japan’s defeat in World War II. My grandmother and my aunt followed, but not in six months, as they thought they would, but in eighteen months, the very end of 1947. By that time the Colonel was in Tokyo, and eventually they were billeted in a very comfortable Japanese house, complete with garden, maid and gardener.

For the eighteen months before the rest of his family arrived, my grandfather was mostly in Korea, a place he despised on sight, and only gradually came to know enough about to understand. On his departure, my grandmother gave him a thick ledger book, and commanded him to record his daily life, thoughts and descriptions of places and events, so that eventually she could share something of the time he would spend apart from her. They had never been apart more than a matter of weeks, or a month or two, in all their years in the army.

Growing up, I only knew sketchy details of all this, principally my grandmother’s fond memories of the house in Tokyo, and her exploration of the shops and stores of that rapidly rebuilding city. It was through the efforts of a family friend that the journal finally was turned into a printed booklet, distributed in 1990 to the family at large.

Reading the journal has been a priceless gift, a view of my grandfather more complete than I could have imagined. I loved my grandfather, as everybody in the family did, especially the grandchildren. We thought we knew our grandfather, but the journal immeasurably expanded our appreciation of his intellect, his language skills, and the depth of his compassion, understanding and moral values.

The journal is also in many places hysterically funny. Funny quite on purpose, for humor was my grandfather’s shield and buckler against loneliness and the squalor of life in the third world, which Korea at least certainly was. There are many stories in the journal, but some of the shorter impressions and funny bits are collected at the end, following the entry for my grandmother and aunt’s arrival. I will post a few here.

From his voyage on the transport ship:

The “monster” as we called the toilet in our cabin. From time to time a large amount of air collected in the line and when one stepped on he pedal to flush the bowl, the air would release suddenly, shooting the water from the bowl in a geyser several feet high. Most alarming the first few times it happens. One had to learn to sneak up stealthily on the foot pedal, jab it quickly, and retreat until Old Faithful subsided. Note: it must have been more annoying to the females.

In Korea:

The way the Korean plumbers ripped out all the Benjos* in the hotel to replace  them with western toilets, then found out they didn’t have the latter - the resultant suffering by the hotel population.

*Basically a hole in the floor opening into a trough, with no seat. You “hover” and pee. Or the other.

Yeah, plumbing and bathroom concerns were much on my grandfather’s mind.

Two GIs who visited a Korean friend for a convivial evening fueled by much saki. They went for a walk after dinner, and while crossing the Han River the GIs decided it would be a lot of fun to drop the Korean off the bridge into the river…which they did. He was not injured, and managed to crawl out safely, but was quite puzzled at the actions of his good American friends.

So, the next day he went to an MP officer to complain. The officer looked at him pityingly and then said, “You should be greatly honored. In America, it is the custom in fraternities, clubs and colleges to initiate new members in this way. The two soldiers were making you a member of their club, and you are now a very close brother to all American soldiers.”

The Korean was so gratified by this explanation that he implemented the same “initiation” in a Korean club to which he belonged, and for several weeks it was quite common to see Koreans solemnly dropping their “brothers” off the bridge into the river. The American sense of humor prevails.

Many more stories, but that will have to do for now.

I miss my grandfather, but I am so thankful for his journal.

In the continuing struggle within the Episcopal Church over ordination of openly homosexual priests and bishops, the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh and several other dioceses Wednesday, December 3, released a draft constitution for a new Anglican organization to replace the Episcopal Church in the Anglican Communion. The Common Cause Partnership, composed of dissident Episcopalians unwilling to acknowledge homosexuals as full members of the church, was formed in the wake of the consecration of Bishop Gene Robinson in New Hampshire in 2003.

The canonical legalities of what the rebel congregations have done will be debated, condemned and fought over. The central question for me, as a reasoning human being, a Christian and an Episcopalian, however, is how should I view others in accordance with my faith. The recusants of this latest schism have rejected some Episcopalians on the grounds of their sexual preferences. Citing biblical authority for denying consecration or ordination would be more convincing if there were really any definitive statements on those questions in the bible.

Another front in the war on homosexual participation in religion is marriage between persons of the same sex. A featured story in Newsweek this week addresses this topic, timely because of the approval by California voters of Proposition 8, banning such unions. A pertinent statement from “Our Mutual Joy,” the article by Lisa Miller, religion editor for the magazine:

…while the Bible and Jesus say many important things about love and family, neither explicitly defines marriage as between one man and one woman.

The article examines in some depth what the Bible actually says, and what it omits to say, on the topic of marriage in general and specifically the lack of specificity on the question of same sex marriages.  Very well worth reading, although as Editor Jon Meacham notes in his column, The Editor’s Desk, regarding likely reaction to Newsweek making this topic their cover story,

Let the letters and e-mails come. History and demographics are on the side of those who favor inclusion over exclusion.

I hope so. Reason as well as compassion would seem to make inevitable the acceptance of all persons into a compassionate church.

It will be interesting to see the local fallout from the real estate bubble implosion, and the attendant economy meltdown. I am especially interested in the effects on North Chattanooga, where I live. For fifteen years or more, real estate in this area has been escalating in demand and therefore price. Small bungalows have been gentrified and sold for amazing prices. Unbuildable sites now have houses and condos perched on their unsuitable terrain.

I have watched a recent development with special interest.

Old Pine Breeze

On a ridge top where first a tuberculosis sanitarium, then a child development treatment facility were located, the old buildings were razed some years ago. This year, a gated community christened “Hill Pointe” gradually rose on the spot where TB patients died and were cremated, where troubled adolescents served involuntary terms of confinement and counseling. I looked up one house now for sale, for a mere $598,000. The houses and town homes are thickly clustered,

New Gate

with minimal yards and lots of luxury touches to jack up the prices. The vanished wards and dormitories named after local families are only memories. Or more, perhaps.

Pine Breeze Sanitarium, later Pine Breeze Center,  figured in a novel, Four and Twenty Blackbirds, written by former Chattanoogan Cherie Priest, published in 2005. Priest had explored the old buildings shortly before they were demolished, and experienced a truly spooky manifestation, which she incorporated into her book. Even apart from the local interest, a good book.

So, perhaps the new homeowners perched high on Stringer’s ridge will find some unadvertised amenities in the stillness of nights spent where so many troubled spirits lived and sometimes died.

“They’re here,” a little girl said in a movie once. They may still be, on Hill Pointe.