I was married nearly 60 years ago….to the cutest, most wonderful human female animal I had ever met. She uplifted my spirit, made me laugh, seemed to like me, and smiled alot, was collegiate, studious who respected my studiousness.
Our world predated the foul, ugly drug and sex, violent black racist and atheist John F. Kerry uprisings of the late 1960s…..
She became a journalist; I snooped into Education. We both still cherished the few remaining learning hours of an already collapsing University of Minnesota.
I felt special being with her.
She was an only child. I had made myself an only child, for I was born curious, driven to ask ‘why’ about nearly everything, resulting in grave punishment and banishment from my mother’s habits of the day. My father, a farm boy from Hope, North Dakota, a distant dad, but a Godsend as a decent American, worked seventy hours a week at his drug store.
No one in my neighborhood had any money in those days.
His dad, Frank Ray, my grandfather, was born in Cherryfield, Maine, in 1858, before the beginning of the American Civil War. Because his family practiced primogeniture, with him being the youngest of four boys, he left home in 1875 on horseback to go West “to find his way” in life.
He claimed homestead near Hope, North Dakota a few years later, becoming a farmer.
Like my own father, grandfather Ray, who died seventeen years before I was born, was a busy man of few, very few, words. Several months after his leaving Cherryfield, while stopping at Chillicothe, Ohio, he sent a post card, picturing himself, home to his mother, and wrote:
“Mother, I am fine. Frank…..” (Somewhere in the mess of my life, I still have that very postcard!)
I became geographically, spiritually, and visually closely attached to my vegetative neighborhood in mostly Twin City, Minnesota where I was born. As long as I can remember I’ve loved its outdoors….its conifers, elms, gasplants, peonies, the sun and the shade. I lived only 3 blocks from the often roaring Mississippi River and its limestone walls and cliffs. When I was ten I began delivering newspapers to pay for my needs, both morning and afternoon routes. I particularly loved the morning route during spring, summer, and fall, for the river was at the end of my paper route. After delivery to about sixty customers, I would explore while the morning was still early, the riverside, spy on the eagles and other migratory birds highwaying the river going North and South, watch the fox, racoons and snakes in their times. I knew I had discovered heaven….and that heaven, the beauty, the smell, touch, and sight of its Earth, has never left me.
After thirty four years of marriage, my wife did, however. She remained an indoor person anxious to read leftwing matter she had received in college. She dreamed of New York and things “more important”, less provincial, for a modern woman than anything outside school and office. Leftism had become her Bible. Our three children, two boys and a girl, good people, adult people, love her dearly, as they should. Only two love…. (respect….honor, ala Dennis Prager) their dad dearly, as they should. And then, there is my daughter who has been groomed to be her mother’s special child since birth.
She is a modern American gal of talent and brilliance without education. She is an artist….and a successful one, one I am exceptionally proud of…..and she lives, and has lived in New York now for more than twenty years. Her own dance training took her from home to San Francisco and Cleveland, Ohio years before that. Again, she is very much her mother’s indoor product, quite certain of her own superior talents which have taken her to Gotham where she owns, manages, and teaches her ballet school on Manhattan.
What dad could more proud? Certainly, not I. My art and career of life eventually became entrenched in the acts of creating beautiful landscape gardens…..the most honored of all visual art forms throughout history. Ballet usually is considered, at least traditionally considered another visual art form, one more entertaining than spiritual. (My own mother and dad met in St. Paul, Minnesota in the mid-1920s while competing and then partnering in the dance competitions of their day of ball room dancing.) “Nothing like knowing your own genetics,” I always say.
And now the crux of my writing here. After marriage I became free to travel, especially to Europe and its Britain because of the landscape garden paradises there which seem to grow like weeds in number, but glories usually in visual beauty.
I traveled to New York City countless times, twenty, thirty, for various reasons to expand my understandings of Americana far more than landscape gardening. (The human animal is more fascinating in its doings and history than the plant world, I do confess……if you haven’t already noticed.) And, despite her, I love and shall always love my daughter…..unbeknownst to her, for she is a profound lefty’s lefty, til my heart no longer beats.
My last visit to Donald Trump’s city was the October following the Islamic ‘bombing’ of the World Trade Center.
Daughter and father discovered and enjoyed company together for the better part of a week while I was there……She, with leftist suspicion and caution about her dad, me, with fatherly love. The evening before my departure, the evening of rediscovered family warmth, as I was about to leave her apartment, my beloved daughter warmly, deeply, beautifully said to me…..
“Dad! You know, you could really have made something of yourself if you had come to New York!” My mind and body hugged her very tightly. I kissed her and loved ever more warmly her even though she had become a true New Yorker who knows so nothing about the warmths and beauties of my own home country.
New Yorkers are the product they produce. Despite all of Donald Trump’s countless flaws, so many made so public, I still love the guy…..even that New York in him. After all, I was born and raised a real American, the midwestern one.
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