Intending to get thatnext Substack post up online yet unable to get to the task for weeks, I finally went to my bookcase and found my copy of Harum Scarum. I had already decided in advance that I would defintely not post the final short story from my father’s book. Keith Abbott’s Harum Scarum is made up of six stories and all of them are autobiographical.
“You’re lucky,” a friend said to me. “You have material about your father. I wish I could learn more about my father.”
Well, the materials are not only about my father. In the last story, “Back to Nature,” I am in the picture and so is my mother. Harum Scarum was published by Coffee House Press in 1984. I remember being deeply ashamed of my teenage self as represented in my father’s story. Even thinking about it now, I didn’t really want to reread the story. And I was avoiding the issue: was I such an ungrateful horrible brat back then?
So when I plucked the book off the bookcase, I was still considering which section I would put on Substack. However, my fingers immediately flipped the pages open to the last story. I don’t know why, other than a feeling of facing the inevitable. As I typed my father’s words into Substack, I realized that I had not been ashamed so much of the small section where I said a few things as a grumpy teenager, but what I had been ashamed about was the part about my parents not getting along.
The location of this episode was during a rare moment when the three of us headed out of the city and into the mountains on a camping trip. I remember that particular trip. While it is possible to pin a lot of my aversion behaviour on autism (now that I know), and this could become a pan-occasion excuse, but in this case I think it’s fairly clear: camping provides an excellent opportunity to experience sensory overload. I disliked camping, and still do. I remember the lake, the resort and the mosquitos. It has to be said that this trip was taken during a period when my parents were making an effort to have “family vacations” since my mother discouraged my father and me to interact with other family members. I don’t recall these trips as fun. In fact my presence in the story is very much how it was – me in the back seat of the car and retreating as much as possible.
It always dismayed me how much my mother was attracted to the most unpleasant physical situations. In my father’s story my mother is insisting on camping near the water and my father has warned her once, even twice, of the swarms of mosquitos. And then in a overriding moment of physical anger, he makes it clear that he will not warn her again and takes charge of the situation. No one will contradict him directly. My mother keeps chipping away at taking back control through various tactics, put downs and criticisms and gaslighting. The sense of emasculation is present throughout the story, the deepening anger and misery.
At one point in my life, just before I left the house, my mother decided that she and I should engage in a mother-daughter trip to Mexico. Because she was a bit daunted by the idea of the dangers we might encounter, she invited a Mexican-American friend to accompany us which meant that my mother was on slightly better behaviour. In Ensenada my mother was determined to eat street food. We were walking somewhere near a wharf and she insisted on heading out to the end of the pier which stank of fish to eat her treat. I refused, not only to stand at the end of the pier but to eat street food. During the drive back north my mother sat on an array of plastic diapers laid out over the driver’s seat.
In “Back to Nature” my father describes his childhood, and the pleasure that he experienced as a child. The character Walt returns to the simple fun of taking a swim in a lake without being criticized, neither himself nor the lake. It struck me in particular the scene in which Walt is eating apple pie. My father loved his mother’s apple pie. Even the phrasing of the words about seeing the trees from a garage window in “Back to Nature” reminds me of one of Keith’s poems about his parents’ farm.
I recall that we did experience car problems on the trip, but my father didn’t stay behind at the lake. He didn’t make a friend and get to hang out with someone who appreciated him. We all left together and I believe it was raining. Was I shocked that the character of Walt chose not to go back to his wife or home? I must have read that ending as a betrayal and somehow I felt accountable.
My friend said, “By the way, do you want to see the dress rehearsal for Tristan und Isolde?”
“Why, yes.”
I had a hunch I must have seen at least one production of this particular Wagner opera somewhere during the past forty years. You know how it is, witnessing multiple versions of the same murky set that faintly resembles a Star Trek episode and grimy opera singers in tunics wandering around a minimalist decor, eager to lean on a wall for accoustical adjustments. It all becomes a bit of a blur.
A few days before the five hours of “geniessen“-ing in the opera house, I arrived at a modern and sterile high school building for a Chi Gong lesson. I could barely open my eyes under the blinding lights. In the not too distant past I have been privileged to take part in several singing masterclasses near Berlin and in which we routinely and strategically practiced Chi Gong exercises to enhance vocal energy and projection. At each masterclass half of the participants were professional Wagnerian singers.
In my first Chi Gong class in Amsterdam, I found myself eyeing a wiry Dutch man who wore his long blond hair in a Chinese style pony tail. A white and black robe hung from his body. No such specimen had been present at the masterclasses for opera singers. Our Chi Gong teacher had been a burly Scotsman who emitted a gentle Paddington-like vibe. He regularly took singers off on “wee” walks and chats around the lake to calm them down. Individually.
I had signed up for the class at the high school location because I felt the need to start to recover from the latter half of 2025, i.e. find my energy and move slow. Moving slow was really appealing to me.
“You straightened your knee,” the wiry pseudo Asian corrected me.
“No, I did not!” I snapped, stepping straight into soprano mode. Maybe it was the lights that were irritating me the most. I don’t think the man expected such immediate feedback.
He made a point to take the time and effort to impress the class with his out-of-nowhere whip his arm around movement.
“Try singing Wotan,” I thought. All I wanted was space and time. And given the harsh lighting, darkness.
Sitting in the opera, I took in the sight of a man the size of a refrigerator and wearing in gigantic knee pads strolling onto stage, “Wo bin ich?” he asked.
Exactly. I feel the audience should participate in these productions. We should shout out, “Probably on a boat, buddy!” or “In your own back garden!”
Then fifteen minutes further into the act, another singer invariably askes, “Was bedeutet das?” Whereupon I feel the audience should call out, “The plot! Lay it on us, pal!” or “Need a hint?”
Of course the second act, after the intermission during which audience members attempt to dine on the contents of their handbags, starts with the same large singer staggering on stage in his comfortable rubber soled shoes, all suited up with a back brace and knee pads under his change of costume, ready for the next two hours, who says, “Wo bin ich?”
Again. It’s standard practice in Wagner operas and a way to keep everyone clued in to what’s apparently happening. I say apparently because the libretto doesn’t help.
“i should stop reading,” my friend muttered to me, indicating the text boxes above our heads. “It’s distracting.”
What was remarkable was the moment near the end of Tristan und Isolde when a recap of the plot was presented by one of the lead singers. As in: if you haven’t been paying attention during the past five hours…..
It is truly amazing to watch Wagnerians manage their energy on stage. The tenor was the most musical performer I have witnessed in a long time. However when I got home, after the sublime end, I just had listen to Callas sing Isolde. Belcanto style, sung in Italian, and it’s not really “Wagner” but it gets me every time.
2025 was a bit of a deadbeat year for me. Having cancelled one vacation due to poor health, it dawned upon me that life could end up being short. And then the medical news I was expecting wasn’t too bad after all. I was declared perfectly fine. So, it boiled down to what did I want to do with myself for New Year’s Eve?
The people of the Netherlands have an unreasonable attraction to extreme amounts fireworks. Just the thought of this overindulgence provokes me to immediately plan to depart the country before the end of the year. And how many more New Year’s Eves was I going to experience at my age? Too many in the Netherlands or not enough elsewhere?
I wasn’t feeling up to taking a plane or a train.
A bus. I could take a bus to…..where? Four hours could get me from Amsterdam to Liege. I booked a round trip. I stood on a forelorn bus stop with a half a dozen other frozen people who had bought a bus ticket. The bus was more than half empty, just as I expected.
To entertain myself in Liege I bought a two day museum pass. But you have to remember it’s Belgium. A fact that came to my mind when I got to Liege and looked at the delapidated buildings. “Why is everything so run down?” I overheard a German tourist exclaim to a tour guide.
There are a fair number of museums in Liege and not all of them are open. (Because it’s Belgium.) So which ones were open on my two day pass? I enjoyed the Folk Museum mightily. As I looked up from examining my museum pass booklet while at the Folk Museum I realized that I was looking straight at another museum across the street. It was the Mulum. A museum about….lamps?
I tried the door. It did not open. A sign said to ring the bell. The man who opened the door was about my height and age. He asked, “You are alone?” He allowed me to enter the museum and then he switched on the lights. The place was filled with lamps and all sorts of bric-a-brac that had to do with lamps. I prepared myself for a swift tour of the museum.
A short tour was not on the curator’s agenda. He obviously felt personally responsible to impart his complete knowledge about lamps to each and every visitor. He asked me where I was from. We were speaking French which is a language I speak quite well. Upon learning that I live in the Netherlands this prompted the man to continue to speak to me in French but with the addition of doubling up words in Flemish so that I received the vocabulary of his subsequent lecture in two languages. It was annoying.
I decided to annoy him back. I let my facial expression slide into a blank canvas. It’s easy for me. I’m autistic. And when no information of interest is presented, I easily tune out. My guide first complained that people these days don’t know anything about lamps. “What would you call that?” He pointed at the lighting above the counter top.
“Flourescent,” I replied.
“Most people don’t know what that is, they say that it is neon,” the man said. “But it is flourescent. This,” he pointed to a sign placed on the wall, “is neon.”
He proceded to talk about oils, vegetal or animal. Then he said, “What do you call this?” he pointed at a small candle stuck in a lamp.
Since his main tactic was to insult the intelligence of his audience, I decided to take the short route, “You tell me.”
He informed me that the word that described what he was pointing at was a word that no one truly understood. He complained that in Dutch the word for candle was taken from latin “cerata” which was a candle made of tallow (animal oil). But that was not what he was pointing at, the object in question was not a “kaars” (candle in Dutch and apparently an inadequate noun because these days Dutch candles are generally not made of tallow) but a “bougie” (candle in French). Why did the French call it a bougie? He asked me this and didn’t wait for my answer. “Because it came from North Africa, and how did it get to Europe?”
I made a guess about trade routes. He refused my answer and stared at me, waiting.
I stared back at him.
He stared more at me.
Good God on earth, what was the man getting at? “The Crusades…” I hazarded.
“No! By boat!”
He was serious. I rolled my eyes.
Then he proceeded to show me a row of thick looking books, all authorities on lamps. “This one is Dutch, and the author is already passed away. This one is mine,” he said. “I need to have it reprinted. This one is Austrian, the author has passed away.” The implication was that the world was losing its experts on lamps.
“Here is my wife, she sang a song,” he pointed at an enlarged picture hanging on the wall of a woman standing next to an elephant. The elephant was wrapping its trunk around her head.
“Regardez!” he tapped the glass of the case of objects for which he was determined to clarify any misunderstandings I might foster. I admit I was looking the pile of railway lamps behind me. “Regardez!”
What was interesting was the water and air system the Romans used to push the oil to replenish the fuel and make the lamps burn longer. “Otherwise you had to constantly refill the lamps,” the man said. He said this more than once. In French, in Flemish, in French, in Flemish. “And did the rich people do this?” He looked at me expectantly, standing in front of a case filled with little terra cotta lamps from Ancient Rome.
“Slaves,” I said and moved a bit closer to the pile of railroad lamps.
He stopped talking for a moment. My reply seemed to throw him off. He did not immediately announce that I was unknowledgable about Roman history. We then entered the time of the greatest significance in lamp inventions, which was an upright fuel reservoir where fuel descended by force of gravity and a lamp could burn for hours. I was looking at an item I had seen in a medieval painting which up until then I had never identified as a lamp. Now I know.
“There are only a few places where gas lamps are still being used today,” he announced. We had made it into the mid 19th century. “Here I am next to the mayor,” he pointed at an enlarged photo on the wall. He explained that he had installed one street lamp in Liege that functions on gas. “But he doesn’t allow me to light the lamp for safety reasons.”
And….I was guessing that the insertion of this collection of lamps into the two day museum pass was the bestowing of a favor in order to give the man an audience either that or a way of getting tourists off the streets for a few hours.
“It seems we lose the game before we start to play.”
Those words from Lauryn Hill’s song “Everything is Everything” always resonated with me.
“We never argue.” I told my boss when I was twenty-two. I was aiming to relate how perfect and idyllic my life with my parents was to him. I was living in Paris and not ever planning on moving back to the states.
He stared at me, wordless.
Right then, I knew something was up. I had said something wrong. And I was wondering how to backtrack.
Of course, he didn’t straight up reply that that policy was abuse. He finally said something along the lines of, “I don’t know about that.”
Looking back, I recognize that at that time:
a. I was not going back to this “perfection” and
b. I was keeping up my parents’ cover story.
Because of me, my father has two Facebook accounts. One that is blocked by certain people who have blocked me, and one that is open to them. On the non-blocked version, a woman I never met wrote a comment about how great my parents were. Yes, the golden couple – once they walked in the door, the entertainment began. The problem is that my belief that my mother actually loved my father (the only person I considered that she did love) ended when I realized she had sent all the previously published materials to the archives and the unpublished materials disappeared. It’s then that I knew that the dark triangle narcissist that was my mother had curated his life, as always, but the ultimate cut was this act.
The materials that Keith used to write the memoir of Richard Brautigan have disappeared. The notebooks, the correspondence, the unpublished works. Vanished.
It will never be possible to untangle my mother from my father’s life. They were together for fifty plus years. And everywhere I turn, she has inserted herself into his career. And then the end of her life brought to the forefront the smear campaigns, the fraudulent identities, the poison pen letters – the endless vitriol that she produced backstage and, when she could, she pushed assertions that could be swallowed into the limelight, disguised as victimization with nauseating results.
“Did you ever see him in a wheelchair?” I asked my aunt.
“No.”
Yet there is a mention of a wheelchair in his papers in connection with the lawsuit. The time when my father was suing Naropa.
“I felt that was your mother’s project.” I was told by a friend.
“He sounded confused when he talked about it,” another person told me.
Isolation, alienation. I had heard about these “problems” back around 2000. After I tried to help untangle whatever was going on from afar, my parents refused to talk to me about the matter anymore. After his death, I learned that my father had won the case and lost a community.
Most of what I have at home are Keith’s letters to me and the letters he sent to Michael Sowl. My father had three themes in his life, his growing up in the Northwest (as related in his books Harem Scarem and First Thing Coming), his years between 1965 – 1989 in which he was involved in the creative world of the Bay Area that included his friendship with Richard Brautigan (related in his books Gush, Rhino Ritz, Mordecai of Monterey, Downstream from Trout Fishing in America), and his Buddhist identity in combination with Naropa.
I decided to put Keith’s academic papers and anything to do with Naropa on Substack. So I have been reading the letters that I have and transcribing them. My father repeated much of the same information, the meat of whatever newsletter he had to share, but with different details to me or Mike.
Later, in essence, Keith was “disgraced” and “outcast” in his “triumph”, but I am guessing that that was a long time ago and Naropa has evolved and moved on. Their program looks worlds away from that of 1989. And perhaps these matters have some historical value.
Or do they?
Rereading the letters my father sent me evoke a slight feeling of exasperation. That “where the hell are you?’ vibe I know too well. But he was definitely enjoying himself, his letters are full of energy and hope. The community he had entered at Naropa was a community engaging in knowledge seeking and intending to look at the world a different way. A group of creative people aiming at social change, turning away from traditional Americana life while having a great time.
I had to think about this a bit. I mean here it was again, staring me in the face, my mother had invented herself to be a “Jew-Sami” through lies and manipulation, and my father had taken on Zen Buddhism and was calling himself “Bear Sage.” Totally ludicrous scenario.
It’s all about stories, isn’t it?
I decided it was time to get out of the house. I went to see three films.
The first, One to One: John and Yoko, definitely fit the time frame of the passages in Mordecai of Monterey and Downstream from Trout Fishing in America that I had been working with these past months. The montage of the era and the innocence and almost slow-mo world compared to the United States of America in 2025 was striking.
The second was Das Verschwinden des Josef Mengele – a film about psychological aspects of identity, guilt and isolation. I think I was looking for more insight. The most cinematically brilliant moment (and horrific) was the replay of Mengele’s crimes in the concentration camp to the music of Schubert and Richard Strauss. The conviction of beauty, the intent of perfection, the grim manipulation of what the “future” should hold was masterfully shown in this juxtaposition of the stripping of human rights and dignity while holding culture up as the culprit and as responsible.
I nearly cancelled my ticket to the third film. I really wanted not to go. I wanted to go to bed at five o’clock in the afternoon and call it a day. That’s how badly I didn’t want to go. The organizer of the Imagine Fantastic Film Festival stood up and announced that since they programmed a series of films which had a racist slant, they were featuring the Inuit film as counterbalance.
“Already a bad start,” I thought, sitting in my seat and determined to sit through the matter.
Why was I there? Because all those years I had been indoctrinated to believe that the culture, the family that I came from were the “wrong” ones. Again, that old isolation tactic. Who were the “real people, the ones with true values”? Why, the Inuits! Those “pure and exempt from all evil doing” Inuits. And in my past life the felony committed here was not overt racism, it was narcissism using racism as an excuse.
The film organizer also explained that there were aspects of the film that were not going to be clear as they pertained to the Inuit culture and Wrong Husband was not made to explain these aspects to a non-Inuit audience. “At least he got that far,” I thought.
It’s about stories, isn’t it? I had just sat through a heart warming romance film with mythical characters saving the day and set in the Arctic. I thought about my father’s letters which I will continue to transcribe and set on Substack as part of a “Naropa” archive, and I will continue to work on Routine Apparitions and tell the story through a story, and I will continue with the compilation of materials to create a bio/autobio of my father’s life.
It sounded like a piece of theater improv. And the performer was directly in front of me. I was sitting in the tram, enjoying the street views from my window seat. The man was standing in the connecting section, leaning on a pole and looking straight at me. He was old. Hold on, maybe he was my age or even a bit older.
To resume: He was an old white guy wearing a backpack, sounding cankerous and entitled. He had something to say and I wasn’t thinking he was part of a pickpocket gang. But you never know.
“Let it ring,” he said, “I have plenty of time.” I could hear the sound of a telephone ringing. It sounded like it was coming from the direction of his packback. And it sounded like an alarm more than a ring tone.
He repeated variations on this type of information, complaining that all people did these days was to look at their phones, and he presumed that folk were examining unadulterated bullshit projected through their screens. I mean, it is more than possible. His voice was loud and had that upper-middle-aged man whine in it. I hate that whine. Whenever I hear it I really have to resist the urge to get all hyped up in my operatic-soprano-doesn’t-take-shit mode (a past life) and flatten the issue into a fine pulverized clump of powder left on the curb for the street cleaning crew. “You did really well,” my lawyer had said after the divorce was finalized.
The tram was full of people and a lot of them were looking at their phones. He had targeted his “primal-audience.” His phone started ringing a second time. He loudly announced more information about his perceived state of the woes of the world. By the third time his phone began to ring, I had already stood up and was ready to exit the tram. He was now in a frenzy. “God damn it! It’s too late!” And he sounded hysterical, yelling words into the phone about an essential drop off or meeting or appointment that was going wrong because he was late or nearly there or maybe couldn’t make it.
I thought about his routine, his morality play, his whatever it was that he was trying to achieve by this schtik. “He’s a decade too late,” I thought. I am not all that wild about all new technological innovations and applications. “Another app?” I think whenever it appears that to take a train, buy a sweater, or pump up my bike tires requires an app.
But I was coming home after a medical visit. Ten years ago I had an operation. Times were different then. The finer details of what exactly was going to happen were all rather murky to me and the information that had been relayed to me was both necessary and limited. The operation was elective, and yet necessary, and I didn’t feel then that I needed to have a lot of insight into my dossier. But this time round, I was sent an email which indicated that I could find all the information on the hospital app. I wasn’t going to quibble about this proposal.
After downloading the app, I saw I could put myself on a waiting list for a test that I was already scheduled for and the wait had been more than six weeks. Should have downloaded this app sooner, I thought. That morning I had checked myself in via the barcode on my phone, a half an hour early, and wandered upstairs to the lobby of the section where I was due to appear only to find a person heading straight towards me. “Ms. Abbott?” he asked and ushered me into his office.
I can’t complain about the app. It tells me exactly what to expect for my appointments and how to prepare. I can also see all the medical results of tests, including those from ten years ago related to the elective operation. I have read the most recent results of my blood tests. I have no idea what it all means and I don’t want to jump to any conclusions. But I decided that it was best to take my time and examine the information because then at least I have a basic grasp of what the medical staff is aware of as they process the state of my health.
“What if,” I mused, slowly walking home from the tram stop, “the improv performer had been a healthy twenty-year-old?” Because given the age of the geezer, it could be that somewhere not too far into the future that upper-middle-aged man might just find himself checking into the hospital with his personal barcode after spending an hour or two on his phone, examining the results of his medical tests and wondering about his fate. Maybe then he might come to better appreciate playing Pingo-Pongo with Murphy the Happy Penguin app to distract himself at times.
A friend of mine related to me that her father had asked her this particular question during a visit to see him. This was about ten years ago. And recently her ninety year old father, a former scientist and teacher at MIT, died.
“No,” my friend had replied to his question.
So before her father passed to the great beyond, she spent ten years with him, hanging out, working on a book of his memories, marathon watching educational videos, enjoying a meal together, etc.
Imagine.
I am working on a book with my father, except that he’s been dead these past six years and I have a truck load of unfinished business with him. It’s complicated.
Keith wrote a memoir of his friend, Richard Brautigan. My friends who read the memoir of the poet and author often remarked afterwards that they had no real idea who my father was from the memoir itself and I can see their point. Keith himself doesn’t come through as a personality that much in his memoir of Richard Brautigan. The question is, should he have? He obviously didn’t feel comfortable putting more of himself in the memoir of his friend.
This weekend I came to the end of Downstream from Troutfishing in America. I had been typing my father’s book into my laptop, paragraph by paragraph, slowly examining what I remember and what I don’t recall. Of my two parents, my father was the one that was in charge of me during my grade school years. Instead of going to elementary school, I occasionally spent my days hanging out with Keith and Richard between the years 1973 – 1975.
The episode in the memoir in which I swept up Richard’s loose change from the floor of his San Francisco apartment is one of my least beloved memories of those times. Yet in the book, it is asserted that this was the ultimate memory of my childhood. What I do cherish is having seen the camaraderie and friendship of the two men. I never understood, when Richard died in 1984, why I didn’t go to the wake or the “celebration of life.”
The discovery of Richard’s body, weeks after his death, was deeply painful and I remember Keith vividly in the days and weeks afterwards. At the end of the memoir, it is clear that he suffered grief of the loss of a friend and the erasure of the shared memories of their youthful past, the days in the late 60’s wandering around San Francisco together, like when a partner dies.
The memoir was first published in 1989 and republished in 2009. I think that it’s had its run as what it was and now I decided to put my father in the memoir. I am not writing it. I am simply inserting my father’s words about himself. He talks about his family, his work and his life in his own way through poems and stories. But the catch is, whatever materials I am inserting are only to reveal Keith’s attitude about his friendship with the complicated and gifted writer and how they made the friendship work. Or, in the end, the torment of trying to be Richard’s friend.
Of course, I have lots of questions. They may never be answered.
Regarding Downstream from Trout Fishing in America, my father mentions thanks to his friend (and Richard’s friend) Michael Sowl for providing him with the letters that he sent to Michael during the years 1976 – 1977. Of the archival material that Reg sent me, those years are missing. In other words, the materials my father used to write the memoir, his own notebooks and journals and letters to Michael, are gone. I believe that someone has these materials and perhaps the letters from Michael to my father. These letters are also missing from the archives in Bellingham.
One letter escaped the fate of the others, as my father returned his own letter to Michael later in 2009 and therefore I can read it.
The letter is undated but was written in the mid 1970’s:
I was out farting around with Richard before that this week. We went to Bolinas on errands, etc….I met Gino Clays too and went to a party at Bolinas on Thursday. A great party, it was at a C&W singer’s house, Rosalie Sorrel and all these musicians came, and we all got swiftly spaced & sang and danced & etc. Out in the country, steel guitars & weird songs…Gino’s a great guy.
Of course the kids are all wandering around with names like Anemone, Shoshone, Eagle Craig, Scree….Oh yeah, I got my new series of poems, too….GREAT DRUNKEN SENTENCES:
You can’t
not fall down
in poetry & that’s why
I like it
For reference:
Just to end on a positive vibe, and view the shared experiences between my father and Richard Brautigan, here is a short clip about the Diggers in which a glimpse of Richard can be seen in a film from the late 60’s, radiant and lending a helping hand, and my father examining a box labeled Lucky Lettuce as he removes it from the bed of a truck.
Debunking my mother’s false identities since her death has taken years. Of course, she wove her disingenuous narratives for decades and targeted different communities with her various falsehoods. Every once in a while I come across an item and I think, “Let me address this, set the record straight.” It’s not only me, other family members have also been involved in this matter.
Unlike the first American professor I had written to about this exact same matter last year, the second American professor wrote a very considerate reply to my request that my mother’s interview should be disregarded for academic use. I nearly felt compelled to write this man back and, in gratitude, send him a photocopy of a letter. Then I decided that there was no reason to reveal the detailed contents of that private family letter in conjection to my mother’s lies. I haven’t gotten back to him. I am not sure any further interaction is necessary.
The letter is remarkable. My great-great grandmother wrote to her son sometime between the years 1917 and 1919. She was feeling poorly and was worried about his inheritance. Did he plan on returning to Hillesøy? Juliana suggested that Harald come back home and bring his new wife.
The family still has Juliana’s letter and it is equally remarkable that it survived.
Harald did return to Northern Norway, once only and long after his mother’s death. He kept the letter and his wife kept the letter after his own death and my grandparents kept the letter and then it was given to my aunt who in turn gave it to me. It is a special letter of love and concern from a mother to a son who lived far away. A son who would not return to live on the Artic island where he was born. A son who expressed regret about immigrating to the United States and missed his family.
Navigating between my mother’s pathological lying and the repercussions thereof has been challenging, But, despite the obstacles, I am happy to report that there has been contact (with varying degrees of success) between people, institutions and cultures when it comes to my family’s Nordic roots and Harald’s own heritage. In a manner, this matter has come to, shall we say, a “full circle”. Unlike my mother’s claim of being Jewish and the failure of the Jewish community that she joined to actually show any courage whatsoever to face family members and have a discussion face to face, my mother’s assertion that Harald was raised within a Sami family and Sami community has been “fairly” addressed with dialogue, including encounters in person in Norway and the United States.
My Dearest Own Harald, Juliana’s letter along with other mementos and correspondence from Harald and Tressa Hansen’s lifetime.
I have to admit that I am becoming a bit of a fan of the Austro-Hungarian empire. And I am not talking politics. Having paid much less attention to this particular historical region of Europe than others, I realized the inevitable fairly early on while in Prague. I’d have to review history to understand the buildings and their historical context for this trip.
***
During one of my last days in Prague I had a mind to visit the Museum of Decorative Arts. The main displays weren’t quite what I was hoping to see. The interior of the building, though, looked like a mix between a festive birthday cake and a fantasy set for a First Communion celebration and it was around then that I started really warming to my subject of late 19th century Austro-Hungarian Empire buildings. You might as well go with the flow.
I had already attended a concert across the street at the Rudolfinum. It had been a spectacular experience. The acoustics were some of the best I have ever heard in my life. Kudos to the architect on that one. My advice would be that if you are ever in Prague, buy a ticket to hear a concert at the Rudolfinum which is, you guessed it, a highly exuberant building. I had to admire all the marble. The pillars are actual marble and not the wooden trompe d’oeil pillars of Northern Europe.
As I made my way down the “secession style” (again, quasi gothic and quasi Roman antiquity themes) staircase at the Decorative Arts Museum, I ducked into the last exhibition room where a selection of works by the Czech photographer Fred Kramer was displayed. Kramer had been a young man when WWII broke out. He was deported from his home in 1942 to what would become a sequence of stays in different concentration camps. He returned to Prague, weighing thirty eight kilos, and started working in commercial art.
The jump in material from the four small black and white photographs of men working in construction, taken in the mid 1930’s, and the presentation of drinking “goblets” from the late 1940’s was stark. The drinking glasses were the type and quality that would have been priced as a post war luxury that most “everyone” could afford. The photo was shot in black and white. The photo only presented the set of drinking glasses. I felt tears spring to my eyes.
Allow me to stop here and make it clear that I fully comprehend that a person who witnessed the murders of innocent people, been a target himself and returned “home” to a location lacking many family members, friends and neighbours is largely beyond my scope of experience. This unfortunate experience is, unhappily, still happening to many people world wide.
When someone tries to kill you, your psyche changes. It’s unavoidable. Looking at Fred Kramer’s photos I felt the penny drop. The abstraction of the object that was being promoted was remarkable. In most photos the object was not being actively used. It was presented because it existed and the presence of a person (usually a woman) was “almost” there. In most cases no background context to the person or the object in the photo was given.
These past four years I have struggled to accept that I will never be the same person. I often wondered if I would feel okay again, whether that hollow feeling of shock and horror would recede. Around May this year, I finally felt my energy return, that drive and stamina that I have depended on all my life to survive. The energy came back, but I don’t feel the same. And I have started to assess this turn of events and, in my case, it could be taken as a positive.
Looking back, there were many activities going on in my childhood home that were definitely not okay and I navigated them as best as possible throughout my life. Moving to Europe is the only reason why I am still alive. The signs that evil was always present, manipulating to be near to me or to “get a handle” on me, and this toxic energy was unceasingly active are obvious to me now. I can’t be that person that I used to be anymore because in retrospect I didn’t fully grasp the patterns of deceptive and insidious toxicity I was living with until, well, until when?
I thought four years ago when the abuser died that it was over. It wasn’t. The abuser continued to abuse by proxy, enlisting complete strangers to do her bidding and to make sure that I, as the daughter, would feel one hundred percent worthless. If she had to die because she was suffering terminal cancer, then everyone else also had to die. And she initiated this plan in 2015 with the recurrence of her cancer diagnosis. My father, entering a slow and steady decline in health, died suddenly in 2019. The abuser spent time and money to carefully carry her plans out. She was charming and clever. And very dangerous.
However, in my case, the suicide bomber plan of my abuser did not succeed. I was too far removed and, additionally, I vigorously fought these strangers back. I reached out, requested contact through mediators and then, having gotten no reply, I attacked and counter attacked and attacked again. These people (some would label them “flying monkeys”) thought that there would be no repercussions to actions that they most probably would never have applied to their own family members because at my mother’s death there was not a single family member present. They were very wrong.
“Why are you doing this?” my therapist asked me.
“Because otherwise I will pay the price later on. It could take ten years off my life.”
Or more.
With perplexity, I sense my brain has now shifted or “rotated” in a way that I can finally freely enjoy concepts that I earlier found challenging. Quite simply: because there are very few reasons left why not to enjoy them. What I used to be wary of because any known attachment and interest made me vulnerable, is no longer problematic. Even the safety labels, what is allowed and not allowed, that I often linked to material objects are gone.
Objects are just objects, and can be valuable or totally insignificant. They might serve a purpose. They can exist independent of humans. In many cases, these objects “out live” humans. Aside from material objects, humans can engage in all sorts of activities that rejoice and truly celebrate other humans. Or not. At the same time that the dissolving of past anxieties is taking place within me, I am aware that somewhere in that collection of listeners in the audience in the Rudolfinum, is a person who may be possibly engaging in murder. And I might even pass them in the foyer, I might even smile vaguely at them, I might exchange words with them, unaware of their dark thoughts. It’s not a pleasant realization and it’s reality. Whatever innocence floated me through all those past years is one hundred percent gone.
***
Standing in the National Gallery in Budapest, I examined the posters hanging on the walls in the temporary exhibition. The posters were Art Nouveau or Art Deco and designed to advertise products. I noted that for many of the posters, the faces were more of an impression than a detailed composition. I discovered that I very much enjoyed that aspect.
After the rise of social media platforms, back in the early 2000’s, I decided to try to find an image of an old flame. I didn’t possess a photo of him. I searched his name, a fairly common name, and examined the photos I found. For the life of me, I couldn’t recognize him in any of the people in the photos. It was quite confusing. I would stare at someone’s photo and try to see if I could discern any features that I might recall. I finally gave up.
Diagnosed with autism, I was later educated to understand that I don’t recall faces well. At times when I meet with friends or family, I am rather astonished when seeing their faces. I think, “I don’t remember her nose being like that, was it always like that?” I now understand that I will never recall the face of my old flame. It’s a bit bittersweet.
***
I noted a few tourists dodging around the floor plan at the National Gallery, trying to find the Monet. The Monet was not entirely superb, what was incredible was the collection of the 20th century Hungarian artists. But those visitors would not appreciate what they did not recognize.
Recently a friend of mine, who is a therapist, deliberately mentioned to me that survivors of narcissists typically believe that they might be autistic. It was a gentle challenge at the end of an evening. Inwardly I sighed. Yes, trauma and autism are very intertwined. However, the experts at the Dutch center for autism evaluation were pretty thorough with their assessment of me. I can confirm that I hit the jackpot.
***
Only a few more days in Budapest. I better get cracking and see the train stations, visit that wonder of an Art Deco church on Sunday (never mind that I won’t understand the Hungarian service), attend Un Ballo in Maschera at the opera (not so much interested in hearing another production of Un Ballo in Maschera but I defintely do want to see the theater and who knows? I might be pleasantly surprised like I was at La Traviata in Prague in the State Theater), and did I really want to visit the Gellert Spa? Yes and no, I want to see the building and the only way to do this is to literally take the plunge. I might enjoy the spa. It depends. Will it be noisy like the one in Aachen? I hope not. One thing is for certain, I am meeting up with my American cousins who are on a Rick Steves trip to take a guided tour of the Liszt Academy and share dinner together. It’s my social event of the week and I am looking forward to reconnecting with them.
On a final note, of the two cities, Prague and Budapest, I must admit I have been more impressed with Budapest. It has that urban grit going on that appeals to me. I would gladly spend another week here.
My piece on my father’s missing manuscripts and notebooks was published in Beat Scene. Thank you Kevin Ring for highlighting this matter and supporting Mordecai of Monterey! Maybe some of Mordecai’s melanoia (the feeling that good things are going to happen) will grace us all!
Although I didn’t get to visit Aachen in 1984, I definitely wanted to see Aachen. Having read up on Charlemagne during my high school’s medieval history class I well understood the core concepts: throne, crowning, important location.
Instead of Aachen in 1984, I was placed as a summer exchange student in a small town in Westfalia. It was a beautiful town with gabled houses and a medieval ruin. I took walks, but as I was socially not very outgoing, you might say I didn’t “react” well to being in a small town. I started to watch Herz zu Herz (Hart to Hart dubbed in German which is the only way to watch Hart to Hart and in addition I recommend a minimal grasp of German to make the experience much more interesting and, indeed, almost fascinating). Thus, I sat mesmerized in front of the white television set in my host family’s living room.
Reviewing this time in my life, I get that this was probably very strange behaviour for a teenager and, from the looks of it, I was certainly not “actively integrating”. So I learned to knit and inevitably I began to enjoy Herz zu Herz while knitting. I was and am not talented at handcrafts but, in my mind, I was now “integrating” and had solved the “active integration” issues. My host mother taught me to knit.
She was a kind woman. In fact, the whole family was kind. The problem was that I came from a dysfunctional family and I was, in a very non savvy way, looking for a new family. Of course, now I understand that I am autistic (late diagnosis) and I can see where my habitual manner and way of viewing issues was compounding the problems. In short, I was harmless but odd, sitting on the couch knitting and watching American shows on German television. Just like the other people living under the same roof. But somehow, the plan was not working and I felt that I still wasn’t “fitting in”.
Researching for my trip to Aachen I read online that “Aachen is best for one day”. This was utter rubbish advice. Aachen can be done in one day, if you don’t know much about history and don’t care to learn more. I booked four nights in the city center. I started out by rising at 6 am on the first morning and attending the 7 am mass at the cathedral. First impression: a handful of nuns and not the hoards of tourists talking loudly and trying to burn the place down by lighting too many candles. By the end of the first day, I felt that I had scratched the surface and, seeing the door to St. Foillan standing open, I stepped inside. I had read online that the church was not of great interest.
Yet it was of great interest. When I first came to Germany, the country I visited was West Germany and the Second World War had ended less than forty years previously. The transition from a vanquished nation into a successful and booming economy was at its apex. Although I am astounded at the city center of Aachen and how much of the city has either survived or been reconstructed, I am also well aware that most of the destruction and damage by the bombings is permanent. Only half of St. Foillan’s pillars survived the war. The other row of pillars was replaced.
Sitting in the church, it smelled to me of 1984. To be sure, the church was rebuilt and modernized in the late fifties. But in 1984 the aura of the renewing, revamping, and forging an alternate world identity was very palpable. I sense that this post war concept is now fading. It’s a pity that the tourist industry dismisses St. Foillan as “not interesting”.
On day two in Aachen I decided to walk further out of the center and found myself on the main (post WWII) shopping street. The kind of shopping street I enjoyed in 1984 and its type is still present despite the post pandemic woes. In 1984 I could buy cheap leather shoes that came from Hungary. I still look for them even though there’s not a leather shoe to be found in the discount stores. Only plastic sneakers. So I walked down Aachen’s high street thinking about buying pink and white leather kitten heels, like I once did in 1984 for less than twenty D-Mark. Humoring myself and tapping into a little whimsical daydreaming, I nearly transported myself back in time.
Returning to 2025 and having bought a “six for fourteen” museum card, I naturally decided to attempt to see at least half of the six of the museums for my fourteen euros within a few hours of purchase. And planned the remaining half for the next day. After the Charlemagne Center and the Couven Museum, I entered the Suermondt-Ludwig museum. I had zero expectations. The place was huge, full of actual works of art and greatly devoid of visitors which astonished me. After the past years battling my way through any museum now overrun by well intentioned and bored tourists, the experience was, once again, like stepping back into 1984.
Side note: Even the drunks, falling into the bushes, are “merely” tanked up on alcohol in Aachen. How old fashioned is that?
Somewhere while on the regional train from Cologne to Aachen, I began to get the feeling of commuting to a lost empire or trespassing into an armpit-like corner of the world. Either. Or. But no matter what, Aachen is a fascinating place to spend a few days in, on and off the beaten track. Will I make it to the Lindt factory? Probably not. But I did see Margaret of York’s coronet at the Treasury and admired a 1950’s cocktail pricker set at the Oxfam store.
