cultural commentary from the desk of Don Shewey
WORK
It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
— Wendell Berry
Andy’s cousin Rick graciously offered to drive us back to Denver, all 6 of us jammed into their car: Rick and his wife Kristi, me and Andy, and their daughters Sara and Kara, the latter of whom took the wayback.
We spent the rest of the weekend visiting my sisters Barbara and Joanne, who were meeting Andy for the first time. They live in Aurora, where Barbara and I were born and where I lived for a year while my Air Force father was stationed in Vietnam.
Aurora has long been our family hometown, so it’s quite strange for the city to become overnight an emblem of tragic violence. The Century 16 movie theater, where the crazed gunman murdered a dozen people and injured 58 more, turns out to be right down the street from where we stayed at Barbara’s house (formerly my parents’ residence). A week later, the impromptu memorial to the victims was in full swing.
Barbara and her husband Steve put us up in their guest room, whose decorative motif is Barbara’s favorite animal.
She’s seriously into giraffes.
My niece Carlee hosted a Sunday afternoon gathering, which gave me a chance to see her and her siblings, Jeri and Adam, and to meet Carlee’s new partner Mike and Adam’s new partner Laura.
Long lean Jeri as a hobby hand-paints T-shirts like the one modeled by her long lean son Kody.
Kody has bonded heavily with Mike’s rambunctious and adorably cute four-year-old, Josh.
Barbara’s house is full of pets, especially when Joanne brings her dog Molly over to commune with Barbara’s dog Rusty and her cat Callie. Only once did I manage to sight Lady, Barbara’s other cat who hides out all day under the bed and prowls the house by night. Let’s face it: Lady is a vampire.
While Andy and I were in Iceland in June, my sisters took a cruise to Alaska to celebrate my older sister Marianne’s 60th birthday. Barbara and Steve gave me a photo album from the trip that contained a big surprise — Barbara had brought along a mask of me that they had themselves photographed with all along the tour, “Where’s Waldo”-style.
And then Barbara got up early to chauffeur us to the flight back to New York. Sisters are great.
ALCOHOLISM
It is certainly true that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders [DSM] overpathologizes the human condition and that psychiatrists and other mental-health professionals may feel obligated to diagnose a patient with something. There is one diagnosis in the DSM, however, that is not given often enough, due to the biases of the clinicians, patients, and insurance and pharmaceutical companies. That diagnosis is alcohol abuse. Other diagnoses, such as depression, anxiety disorder, social phobia, or bipolar disorder, are often given to patients along with the message that they are abusing alcohol to “self-medicate” for their underlying condition. In my opinion the opposite is more often true: The real underlying condition is alcoholism, and the symptoms presented by the patients are largely a response to alcohol abuse – and, to a lesser extent, drug abuse.
I believe that this problem is more deeply entrenched in our society than we like to acknowledge, and it often ends up in the lap of mental-health professionals, masquerading as anything other than itself.
— Stephen Pittelli, MD, letter to the editor in The Sun
I’ve been loving New York magazine’s new “In Conversation” feature, which exudes ambitions to become the new version of Playboy magazine’s in-depth interviews. On the heels of rambling, riveting chats with Barney Frank and Spike Lee, last week there was Martin Amis — not one of my favorite writers ever, but someone I’m totally content to read a lengthy Q&A with. You can read the whole thing here. David Wallace-Wells conducted the interview. Some notable excerpts:
“In America, the policeman is a working-class hero. In England, the policeman is a working-class traitor. That’s why there’s such violent names for the police in criminal England—they call them not only the filth, the filth, but also the puss. They’re the lowest of the low. When policemen go to prison in England, they have as bad a time as a pedophile. The police in America are quite, to my senses, fascistic—you know, an immediate end to all humor, end of all human contact. It’s a real assertion of authority in a way that’s very rare in England. In England, police are, softly, softly, Now sir, come on sir. It’s a humoring voice, not an authoritarian one. But when a riot starts, it’s all off—the law suspended. It’s just the sort of thing that happens every now and then. Very hard to see any kind of social protest in it.”
“It sounds schmaltzy to say, but fiction is much more to do with love than people admit or acknowledge. The novelist has to not only love his characters—which you do, without even thinking about it, just as you love your children. But also to love the reader, and that’s what I mean by the pleasure principle. The difference between a Nabokov, who in almost all his novels, nineteen novels, gives you his best chair and his best wine and his best conversation. Compare that to Joyce, who, when you arrive at his house, is nowhere to be found, and then you stumble upon him, making some disgusting drink of peat and dandelion in the kitchen. He doesn’t really care about you. Henry James ended up that way. They fall out of love with the reader. And the writing becomes a little distant.”
I flew into Denver, and Andy met me at the airport with his cousin’s daughter Melissa and his niece Avery — they were waiting by this amazing VW bug completely covered in beads.
We headed west up into the Rockies to the town of Dillon, where Andy’s family had found a gigantic VRBO (vacation rental by owner) with a beautiful view.
Unexpectedly, the lot next to the house was under construction, but it made to my eye a picturesque ruin.
The occasion for this gathering was to memorialize Andy’s Aunt Helen, who died earlier this year. I never met her, but this trip was a happy occasion to meet Andy’s mother’s other sister, Jean, whom I liked very much.
For Andy, family trips center on time spent with his beloved niece Avery…
…and equally beloved nephew Nathan, seen here in the embrace of Andy’s mom Brooke, aka GeeGee.
The kids’ mother is Andy’s sister Becky, who wowed the assembly with her killer mac-and-cheese whose secret ingredient was bacon. This was a crowd that loves its bacon. As who wouldn’t?
I got to meet almost all the relatives I hadn’t met before, including soulful young Preston, seven-year-old son of Andy’s cousin Heather
When we weren’t watching the Olympics, we headed out to the outlet mall, which was a lot less interesting than the farmer’s market in Dillon, where I picked up some fresh local peaches and tomatoes and a Greek olive with Thai curry tapenade (not pictured).
another eye opens 