Oliver Smith
Thinking of Kirby, who died 09/04/2005
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Oliver Smith
Thinking of Kirby, who died 09/04/2005 < CyberPoet.com < Jim Smith home < Writing < Essay Index |
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Thinking of Kirby,
who died 09/04/2005 09/05/2005 Haide, my cousin, just sent an e-mail message I have been expecting since her father (Kirby, my uncle, my mother's brother) was diagnosed with cancer of the colon and liver back in October, 2004. Recent weeks have brought news of successively worsening conditions for Kirby, so yesterday's news wasn't a surprise, only closure and sadness. My first thought was in recollection of the last time I saw Murray (his brother) and Kirby together. he was with visiting at Murray's house in the foothills of the rockies, outside of Denver, Colorado. Murray died a couple of weeks after that meeting, which was almost exactly twenty years ago in August of 1985. They were arguing about whether or not dogs and wolves could mate and reproduce and what was the meaning of "species", with respect to whether or not members of different species could mate and reproduce. It was an interesting discussion carried out with respect, intellectual accuity and a bit of humor. I never had a chance to know Kirby all that well, but I was aware of him throughout my life, and I must admit that I admired his ability and willingness to stand up to the rigid religious fundamentalism embraced by my mother, which resulted in her persistent criticism of everything relating him. This criticism was so strident and pervasive that, as a young person, I was confused by the two startlingly divergent perspectives I would encounter with respect to him. One perspective was that of the "lost", "rebellious" and uncompromisingly "stubborn" view that my mother was determined to cultivate in my mind, and the other perspective was the calm, respectful and safe atmosphere that I experienced whenever I was in the presence of aunt Carolyn (his wife) and Kirby, during our infrequent visits to their house in Pamona, California. The first seventeen years of my life were spent on the move, packing up and relocating like nomads without a destination and no real sense that there would ever be a time when I could catch my breath and take a good look at who I was and discern the path that I needed to take for the rest of my life. I was deprived of that opportunity and was left in a whirlwind of theological and cultural baggage that I would spend the next thirty years shedding, one excruciating layer at a time. For me, Kirby's very existence and the memories I accumulated from my encounters with him and his family were one of the few calming, safe and rational facets of my turbulent youth. I cherished those memories and clung to them as I embarked on my own, long spiritual journey to find a path to my own connection with the universe in which we live. Kirby provided the first clear signal that there were other perspectives that a person could embrace, that were outside of the confining boundaries of religious fundamentalism. Although it took many years to fully comprehend the profound nature of this discovery, I did finally navigate to a path that has proven effective for me, and I have Kirby's existence to thank for that. In January of 2002 Roseann and I took Amtrak to southern California when Roseann suggested that I spend some time with Kirby to learn more about my family history. At the time I was engaged in an extended conversation with Caralyn (Kirby's wife, my aunt, and the mother of Haide and Bruce, the two children still living in southern California). Due to the fragmented experiences of my youth I possessed only an obscure sense of many details pertaining to my youth, to the point where I actually thought that I didn't have any memories, but as I started to document my life, my memories started to reappear. It was as though I needed to build a narrative of my life in order to connect the various slivers and shards of my memories to construct a somewhat complete picture of who I was and how I came to be who I am now. Various efforts to have a conversation with my mother to discuss the past only resulted in further excoriations of my father, Kirby and anyone else that my mother was not satisfied with so I gave up on that front. It was through my conversations with Carolyn and Kirby that I was able to get a better sense of my history and the context in which my youth had developed. It was through this dialog that I was able to understand a number of disconnected memories that I couldn't connect with any specific event. But they were specifically associated with a time when my mother took me and my two younger sisters away from my father and sought refuge with Kirby and Carolyn, intending to leave permanently. But my dad arrived and convinced my mother to come back to him in Phoenix. My mother had never talked about this trip so I had no way of understanding where those memories fit into the narrative of my past until then. Another strong memory from my past were the negative comments my mother made about Kirby and Carolyn's house in Pamona, California. Within her sights, particularly, were the house itself ("why do they need such a big house, especially since it has very little furniture") and the bomb shelter that they built in the back of the house ("what is the point of doing that?"). The usefulness of bomb shelters, which were somewhat popular in the wake of the Cuban missile crises, have been discussed for decades and I don't have any particular opinion either way on that issue, but the comments about the "large house without furniture" were quite interesting when I learned that the reason Kirby and Carolyn didn't have more furniture was because they were sending so much money to my mother, in an effort to help her pay her tuition at Northern Colorado Teaching College (now University of Northern Colorado) in Greeley, Colorado. In general, I was quite surprised to learn how dependent my mother was on Kirby and Carolyn during those years. I never once heard my mother express any appreciation for Kirby's generosity on her behalf. In January of 2002, Roseann and I took Amtrak from our home in Minnesota to southern California with the specific intention to interview Kirby and to finally connect in come meaningful way. Since that visit, Kirby has been through a difficult sequence of events, including the brush fires that ravaged southern California in October of 2003, taking their trailor house in Temecula down to ashes, leaving him with serious burns as he tried to rescue some possessions from the fire. Then in 2004 came the discovery of his cancer. It was during that trip in 2002 that I saw, for the first time, a truly sensitive and vulnerable side of Kirby, who generally was always (at least in my presence) calm, logical and confident. This was displayed in two ways. The first was in his emotional response to the voice of the young Welsh singer, Charlotte Church. He insisted that we watch a video of one of her concerts and I was taken aback by how deeply affected he was by the music, the voice and the overall presence of this young woman. She seemed to be communicating something new and wonderful to him, through her music. The second revelation came later that night when he and I, alone together, talked late into the night, discussing many things, but he seemed particularly interested in why I still attended church in spite of the more pan-spiritualistic perspectives that I now possess. I explained to him the nature of the church that Roseann and I currently attend and how respectful that spiritual community is to each person's individual spiritual journey and how much I appreciated that. During this discourse, we reminisced about a trip that our two families made to Sequoia National Park in the mid-sixties, when I was around 13 years of age. At the time, I lived with my mother in Tuba City, Arizona and my mother drove non-stop to Sequoia, a long trip for a weekend experience. I mentioned that at one point during that trip I ended up alone in the forest, wandering into the dense green world to the point where I lost all sense of being in the presence of other humans not far away, but out of sight. I was surrounded by the deeply abiding, ageless cycle of existence in many of its manifestations within the softly filtered sunlight that illuminated the space beneath the canopy of ancient trees. I was in the presence birth, growth, maturity, reproduction, nurturing and death, the full cycle observed by humans from the beginning of their collective consciousness. It was with that image of the green world that we both understood each other and connected in a way that would not have been possible otherwise. As Kirby makes his own transition to the other world I think of that memory that he helped to bring about, and the connection that I have with the universe that his presence played a role in nurturing, for it is there that we will all come together, regardless of the path we have found to get there.
The End
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( Count from 08/09/2003 ) |