Grandma's Eulogy

This past weekend, flew back to Decorah, Iowa (place of my birth) to attend my Grandmother's funeral. Also wrote and delivered the eulogy. Several cousins asked for a copy and so I thought I'd post it here for all and sundry...

Maude Pruisman

I want to thank you all for coming today to honor the memory and celebrate the life of Maude Pruisman, my grandmother, and the grandmother of many others here. She was also great grandmother, aunt and great-aunt for many more here today as well as a mother-in-law and a cousin to some. As Maude’s eldest grandchild, I have been asked to share a few short remarks about our dear grandmother, or grandma, as I always knew her.

Grandma lived a very long time. In those nine decades she saw almost the full breadth and scope of the 20^th Century. When she was born, President Woodrow Wilson was in his first term, automobiles had only been around for 15 years and most people didn’t have electricity or indoor plumbing. When she was 54 years old, just two years older than I am today, Man landed on the Moon.

Like everyone who lives a very long time, her life was full of ups and downs. When I remember Grandma smiling and laughing, those times she had the biggest smile on her face, was when she was with her grandchildren. I think that her grandchildren brought her the greatest pleasure in her life. A close second was successfully bidding 10 no-trump in a spirited game of 500, or experiencing a very long discard run in Skipbo.

Grandma liked to cook, and she was a good cook. All of the grandchildren I’m sure will remember her Apple Koogan, her sour green bean casserole and vinegar potato salad, but I also remember her fried bullheads. I’m sure if I could taste them again, I would appreciate them a lot more than I did when I was 7 years old. Grandma also liked As the World Turns, and going to coffee with Grampa Klaas, and all her friends, in downtown Kanawha.

I am old enough to remember when Grandma had a job. She worked for the school system in Kanawha where she was employed as a cook; she used to help out in the kitchen when she was living at Eastern Star, too. She was always a very hard worker and an immaculate housekeeper. I am also old enough to remember Manley, and going to visit grandma at her house there, where grandma lived with her first husband Charlie, and where their four children: Glenn, Betty, LaDonna and Rhonda were raised. During one memorable visit there, I learned a painful lesson about not playing with sewing machines.

Grandma had more than her share of heartbreak in her life as well. She suffered tremendous grief having all four of her children and one grandchild (Cally Jo) predecease her. The hardest to bear was probably the first: Aunt Rhonda, who I remember as a laughing, friendly sixteen year old. One day Rhonda and I were riding our bikes in Kanawha, where grandma moved after marrying Klaas Pruisman, when Rhonda fell off and skinned her knee in the road. The sight of her bloody knee and tears made me panic and I ran home to grandma’s house screaming that Rhonda was hurt real bad. Grandma was in a state of panic to match mine, but then Rhonda came pedaling up, saying that it was “nothing.” Then Grandma got mad at me for scaring her. I was so confused.

On the day of Rhonda’s funeral, grandma sat weeping in her chair in the Kanawha house with a grief so powerful it couldn’t be helped by anything I could do. My heart breaks when I remember it.

Grandma taught me many things, and gave me many gifts. Of the lessons she taught me the most vivid was that work is its own reward. Despite her wisdom, in the end, I decided that work as its own reward is pretty rotten compensation. Grandma and Grandpa had apple trees in their backyard. One summer I went to stay with grandma and grampa for a week. Unbeknownst to me, my mother and Grandma had cooked up a plan for me to do some chores. The chore in question was to pick up the fallen apples from the apple trees in grandma’s back yard and put them in a bucket to be thrown away. Well, I enjoyed that as much as any six-year-old can who’s picking up mushy, rotting apples covered with bumble bees with his bare hands. To this day I have no idea why it was so important that I use my bare hands for that job, rather than rubber gloves, or a hand spade. But suffice it to say, the possibility of using such common-sense tools never even entered grandma’s mind. Grandma, you see, was German, and never afraid to get her hands dirty.

In retrospect, I much preferred visiting my Aunt Dolly, who made me costumes, and who had much better toys to play with.

I had many more visits with Grandma after that. All of them were much nicer, but then I was never asked to pick up rotten apples again, either.

Grandma gave me a couple of gifts that were very special to me. The first was when I was three, and in St. Mary’s Hospital in Rochester. I was going in for major surgery and grandma asked me what I wanted. I said “a baby-doll.” I’m not sure why, but it was probably because I’d seen one of the other children in the pediatric ward playing with one and I wanted a similar experience. Apparently there followed a family conference as to whether it was appropriate for a boy to have a baby-doll, and a decision was reached that it was probably okay. If only they could have known! In any event, I was given the baby-doll, which followed me into and out of surgery and through recovery. Another gift I remember fondly was a recording of Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra playing Beethoven’s Fifth. I played the grooves off that record.

When I was a little older Grandma and Grampa used to go on trips with Mom and Dad and Karen and me. On one trip out west, near the city of Las Vegas, Nevada, Mom and Dad came back to the campsite after visiting a casino (a pursuit Dad has never fallen out of love with) to find Grandma suffering heatstroke from the desert sun and me shivering inside a sleeping bag after swimming all day in ice-cold water. Later in the trip as we were driving over the Rockies, Klaas made the comment, “Mountains: You’ve seen one, you’ve seen ‘em all.” Mom held her tongue for 800 more miles until we returned to Iowa, and Klaas marveled about how much the corn had grown while we were away on the trip, and Mom said, “Cornfields: you’ve seen one, you seen ‘em all.” And that, as Lily Tomlin would say, is the truth.

So in the end, I knew Grandma as well as anyone. She was an uncomplicated person who knew her own mind, and when she formed an opinion, she stuck to it. She was stubborn that way. She expressed her feelings and always tried to be fair. I can’t say she was always happy or even generally happy, but she wasn’t a sad person, either. She knew that family meant more to her than anything else in her life. It was her great joy and accounted for her greatest grief when those relationships ended too soon.

I loved her with all my heart, even though she sometimes frustrated me to distraction. For some reason she found a lot of what I had to say very amusing. Those kids, they say the darndest things…

A friend of mine from college once asked me if I believed in life after death. I said no, that I believe in the resurrection and the life. By that I mean that I believe in the sleep of death, and it is not only what I believe, it is also what I prefer to believe. Grandma is no longer with us, she’s passed on. Her grief and pain are wholly healed. Some day, the horn will sound, and all will rise. On that day, I very much believe, Maude Pruisman will find her name written in the Book of Life. I accept that on faith, and I furthermore hope on that day to find my own name written in the book with other than erasable ink, just as Grandma, my mom and dad and all my aunts and uncles have tried to ensure for me through their instruction and example, and for whose efforts I have been insufficiently grateful.

Thank you for listening.

Lost - It was All A Dream...?

The opening shot of the pilot of Lost features an eye. Jack's eye, it turns out, opening. The last shot of the end of the series, six years later again, zooms in on Jack's right eye, shutting. This film technique is a framing device. It is a bold and unambiguous choice. The first frame of any moving picture is inarguably important for setting the frame of reference for what follows. The tight focus on the single eye also implies that the story following will be intimately involved with this character's point of view. What he sees is important. The camera is in some ways his eye. To end the narrative also focused on his eye implies that everything in between was experienced by him and through him. And it raises the question, is this observer reliable? Is he experiencing a three-dimensional composite reality shared with other living human beings, or is this a private reality, a dream?

The producers' choice to roll the credits over the deserted wreckage of Oceanic flight 815 cements the latter view. While the producers ended LOST with enough ambiguity to allow differing conjectures as to what was real reality, the film technique of beginning and ending the series focused on Jack's eye proves their true intent. The entire series was a fever dream in the mind of Jack Shepherd as he lies dying on the ground after the crash of Oceanic flight 815 from Sydney. Letting go and accepting his own death is the purpose of the six-year narrative which follows, just as Jack's father Christian, leads him to do in the final scene of the final episode. It is a very, very emotional moment. While the "it was all a dream" ending is generally a copout, in this instance it works profoundly, and proves that there's life left in the old tropes, if they're executed extremely well.

Something's Afoot

Something's stirring deep within. Awareness is creeping down into the cracks and crevasses of my psyche to affect my subconscious with the understanding that I am being, and have been for the past two years, somewhat self-destructive and self defeating. This is probably due to minimalist treatment I have sought for my depression, but I also believe that I'm lazy by nature. My parents tried to amend that character flaw by forcing me to work at jobs ranging from paper delivery, lawn mowing, grocery store stock boy, cheese factory drudge, etc. All the while I really wanted to retreat into my own head. This is the focus of my extremely quiet life now. However, in the past year, I have retreated farther. In 2009 I spend 2000 hours playing World of Warcraft and elevated three different characters to 80th Level. That's the equivalent of a full-time job. I don't begrudge the time, except I didn't get any writing done. Writing is hard because, unlike a videogame, you can't go to that inner place where you feel warm and comfortable and insulated from the outside. Writing is painful self-examination. There's nothing I like better than to lay in my bed, watching a tv episode (on DVD, so there's no commercials) and playing solitaire or bejeweled on my laptop. I don't have to think about anything. But nothing gets done, either.

I'm now feeling a new need to lose weight, get organized and work harder at making my hopes and goals a reality. This is good news. And with it comes energy. I'm excited! I've re-cathected with my apartment, which I'd fallen out of love with. Perhaps this coincides with more sunshine and warmer weather. That's probably part of the process.

To Arizona - a Postcard from Heinrich Himmler

While I'm white and speak fluent English, I am quite paranoid about traveling to Arizona anytime in the near future. What is "reasonable suspicion" besides carte blanche to the police to stop anyone and demand to see proof of American citizenship? My fear is not that I would be stopped, but what would happen if stopped, since I would refuse to comply. Thus, today's photo from times gone by: No. 8 Prinz Albrecht Strasse, the former headquarters of Hitler's feared gestapo, which is a German portmanteau combining Geheime Staatspolizei, which translated into English, comes uncomfortably close to "Homeland Security." So let us pause to remember where anti-immigration policies can eventually lead.

Android v. Windows Mobile

Microsoft has dropped the ball in the phone wars, giving ground to Android, and allowing it to achieve market supremacy. While I chose the Samsung Omnia with Windows Mobile 6.1 as my first smartphone, I am regretting the decision. Windows Mobile is simply too small and too cluttered. Furthermore, navigation is iffy and flakey. Even scrolling from the As to the Ws in my phone book is problematic. I chose the Omnia because I was comfortable years ago with my iPAQ handheld computer, but I desire a more robust user experience, not hesitancy and glitches. I do believe I will catch the next lifeboat off the sinking Windows Mobile ship.

The Music Man

Depression <

I think this has much to do with listening to music over the past few days. Good music, too! Those who know me know I love music and that I have two favorite composers that rise to the very top of my list of delights: Philip Glass and Richard Wagner.

Philip Glass is the minimalist composer who wrote Einstein On the Beach. The term minimalism isn't strictly accurate in his case, as he employs minimalist harmonies and melodies, but prolix notation--using revolving arpeggios--to create the effect of stillness in motion. It's quite remarkable when it works. It doesn't work all the time. However, his plaintive, minor sonorities strike just the right mood in me, and apparently in others, as his star has grown over the years. I became a die-hard fan the first time I listened to The Photographer all the way through in 1985. I have since acquired almost everything he's written, but especially the film scores, which really show off his moody, completely unique, style and substance.

Richard Wagner hardly needs an introduction. He was the enfant terrible of the 19th Century, turning music, drama, politics and poetry on their heads, and through dint of pure willpower, became internationally recognized as the genius he truly felt himself to be. While Wagner's music, programmatic and romantic, is far from minimal, the use of chromatic tonalities has something in common with Glass (or rather Glass with it). While Wagner is all thundering power and brass in most cases, some of the gentlest, most sensitive and emotional passages are his best: such as Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde and the Overture to Lohengrin. Of course, my good friend Steve Will will recognize the Tristan und Isolde music from the score to the film Excalibur.

Beethoven and Liszt

My friend Steve Will today blogged about Naxos music company, which publishes some of the rarest music performed. I just happen to LOVE Beethoven and Franz Liszt. There's an old story that Beethoven was present at Liszt's first Vienna concert (at age 11 years or so) in 1822, and actually kissed the apollonian youth post facto. God I wish I could have seen that. In any event, Liszt later transcribed Beethoven's nine symphonies for solo piano. Naxos has released performances of these transcriptions over time, and I've been waiting for a while for my favorite of the symphonies to be released, Symphony No. 7, with its sonorous, emotional second movement. It is, as I expected: sublime. However, my favorite in this recording is the 4th Movement, in which Beethoven's and Liszt's sonorities mingle and merge in a kind of Reece's pieces combination of classical musical rhapsody. Konstantin Scherbakov's virtuoso playing is not all pounding thunder, which I became accustomed to listening to Horowitz over the years, but has delicacy and sensitivity, and hooks your heartstrings...