THE TOOLMAKER’S OTHER SON


A Memoir by Galen Green




First typed draft copyright 2005 by Galen Green
All Right Reserved

(Prose text begun on November 14, 2005; 3:00 a.m.; typed draft begun on December 4, 2005; 12:45 p.m.; Kansas City, Missouri




Ecclesiastes 9:16




Table of Contents


1. Contents
2. Acknowledgements
3. Preface
4. Prologue with Jigsaw Puzzle
5. The Willows (1830 – 1949)
6. Wichita (1949 – 1972)
7. The Deep South (1967)
8. Mexico (1968)
9. New York (1969)
10. Rural Kansas (from 1830 on)
11. Cambridge (1972)
12. Boston (1972 – 1973)
13. Salt Lake City (1973 – 1974)
14. Columbus (1974 – 1981)
15. Out West (1976)
16. Tick Ridge (1980)
17. Philadelphia (1981 – 1982)
18. Park City (1983 – 1984)
19. Seminary (1983 – 1984)
20. Wichita Redux (1984 – 1990)
21. Kansas City (from 1990 on)
22. Brookside (1990 – 1998)
23. The Ambassador (from 1998 on)
24. Chestnut Circle (from 1992 on)
25. Wichita Revisited (2002)
26. Everywhere & Nowhere
27. Afterword
28. Appendices (A – Z)
29. Notes
30. Index
31. About the Author


Preface:


Mission Statement
Of The
Institute for Mythoklastic Therapy & Research



i.

Ecclesiastes 9:16 says it best. The wisdom of the poor is despised. I submit my life’s work as a case in point.

But it’s not about me. It’s about what’s most in need of fixing. Lip service on this topic abounds, so pay it no heed. Decide for yourself. What price are you willing to pay to be even a tiny part of the solution, instead of a part of the problem?

When we strip away the agreed-upon lie we call The Real World, what we’re left with is the real world, which coincides chillingly with the wisdom of the poor referred to by the wise little Jew who wrote Chapter 9 of Ecclesiastes and who just happens to be my personal role model and hero.

We here at the Institute for Mythoklastic Therapy & Research (I.M.T. & R.) honor and seek the wisdom of the poor. But doing so requires us to expose as an enslaving bamboozlement the ostensible “wisdom” of the majority. And this is where the trouble begins. For Mythoklastic Therapy & Research poses a threat to those whose livelihood is the slave trade.


ii.

Given the world we’re given, what might we say, with any accuracy, is going on here? No, I haven’t driven our car off the road and into the ditch of philosophication. Heavens forefend! Rather, I’ve attempted to point out the Bethlehem star upon which history has taught us to rely to guide us through this darkness. And were we simply three wise folk traversing afar, debate would be unnecessary. But we’re not.

The night sky is filled with bright little dots and it seems at times that each of us is following a different one. Yet even this would be preferable to the tragic reality of who’s following what for what I cannot help but see – and therefore cannot help but paint for you here – is a nest of ninnies following what isn’t even there.

Slavery has been the cornerstone of human civilization – and still is. But in recent centuries slavery has needed mythocracy to fire its boilers and cover its tracks. Hence, this folly, this con game, this bamboozlement whereby most folks chase after black holes.


iii.

Perhaps what led Plato to his notion of there being another world, a parallel universe, a reality hidden inside of another dimension and completely apart from the one we think we see, was nothing more than his ordinary daily interactions with the people around him.

Certainly, that’s what’s done it for me, as well as for numerous others much smarter than me. Everyday conversation, especially, leads me there, time and again. When I hear the words and phrases we use to describe this world we share, I’m reminded of how mistaken we are, how paltry our beliefs, how inaccurate our supposed “understanding.”

Even if this were the totality of what Plato and I have in common, it would make me want to go back and study him more closely, him and his most influential imitator, Saul of Tarsus, alias Saint Paul. But that’s a subject for another day, another book. Today, here with you, I’m in the mood to explore how it is that things are so seldom what they seem. It’s my personal belief that the reason for this is not that there is a world of the “spirit” lurking here in this room with us, but rather that we have been coerced into lying to ourselves and to each other about what is actually going on here in this world we share.

-- Galen Green, Founder & C.E.O., Institute for Mythoklastic Therapy & Research; autumn 2005______________________
Prologue with Jigsaw Puzzle

(An Open Letter to Kai Li & An Mei)



My Dearest Children,

As I sit down to write this, it is just a few days before Thanksgiving, and you are still two precious little girls full of promise and still too young for any of this have much meaning.

When I was the age that you are now, I was not at all fond of hearing those words: “When you are older.” They tended to make me feel that I was being belittled with the reminder that I was not yet something that I was supposed to be. Please believe me when I assure you that it is not my intention to make you feel that way. You are exactly what you are supposed to be – two precious little girls full of promise.

Likewise, when you are older and reading this, you will be exactly what you are supposed to be, and I will most likely be dead and gone. In that sense, I am today like the insects of autumn which I observed out in the garden, laying their eggs which will hatch next spring when they themselves have returned to dust, or who, in some cases will serve to furnish their offspring’s first meal. Take. Eat. This is my body – these few words that follow – broken for you and for many.

It will always be the fate of those of us who write these sorts of things to never meet those who will read our words, just as the insects laying their eggs out in the autumn garden will never know their own little ones, just as the parents who brought me into the world never knew me, just the parents who brought you into the world have never known you. Ours is the story of adoption, yours and mine. And it is a very good story, as happy a story as human destiny seems capable of providing; though it is a story which remains mysterious and even unsettling to those around us who have not experienced it.

But we can talk more about that later. Suffice it to say for now that I may well be speaking to you now from beyond the grave, trying to get an urgent message to you, one which I am feverishly scribbling at the end of some doomed civilization. Think of it as a message of love and hope and warning, sent forth to you here with my promise to you that, if you both to decipher it, you just might find to come in handy.


ii.

Try to think of this as a sort of scrapbook. (Do people still keep scrapbooks?) Try to think of this as a gathering together of the scattered fragments of a picture of a story, one which might begin like this:

Once upon a time, a toolmaker had two sons. This poor but honest toolmaker lived with his plain but virtuous wife and their two sons in a rather proud (though shabby) hovel on the edge of The Great American Desert, which also happened to be on the edge of what turned out to be a new age, a new reality.

Now, of the two sons, one was this way and the other was that way. And the reason that I put it in these terms is that I myself just so happen to be the son who was this way and do not wish to offend or alienate my brother, who just so happened to be the son who was that way. And let’s leave it at that. I’m sure that all parties involved will quite understand.

Anyway, try to think of this as a scrapbook of what happened both before and after this story of this picture which just so happened to open in the way I have just described. OK?

Now, this next sentence, which just so happens to have become the sentence you are now reading (or listening to, as the case may be) is the sentence in which time travels very quickly so that, hour by hour, the years fly by like the fluttering pages of a calendar in one of those old movies out of the 1940’s, the practical result being that the poor but honest toolmaker’s two sons are now, as the saying goes, all grown up. And, as Fate would have it, the younger (and taller) of the two lads has grown up to marry the right damsel with whom he has had the right children and has gone about doing all the right sorts of things in the right house in the right neighborhood, etc. But this scrapbook you’re holding in your hands at this very moment does not happen to be a gathering together of the scattered fragments of a picture of the story of that particular son, but rather the etc. etc. of this son, the other son, the toolmaker’s other son – me.

Now, if you’ve ever had the delicious pleasure of putting together what we used to call a jigsaw puzzle containing, let’s say 5,786 pieces, then you already know the bittersweet thrill of puzzling over where, precisely, you ought to begin. One thing that makes pretty good sense, of course, is to begin by clearing off a large space on the living room carpet. (Do people still use words like “living room” and “carpet” in the world of the future?)

Anyway, once a goodly sized space has been cleared, then we may begin thinking about how we wish to begin putting together our enormous puzzle of, say, 5,786 brightly colored pieces. There they are, “jumbled in one common box,” as a very good poet named W. H. Auden once put it. What in the world are we to do but to close our eyes and reach blindly into this box of 5,786 brightly colored pieces of our puzzle and, without peeking, pull out the first piece of our enormous puzzle, placing it, ever so strategically (which here means arbitrarily) as closely as possible to the geographic center of this ample space we’ve cleared here on the living room carpet for our purpose. And, Bingo! There it is!

Alrighty, then. So what do we see? By golly, it looks like a song! A song! But how can that be? You lean over to peer into the puzzle box, at the 5,785 brightly colored pieces still jumbled together there, waiting to be picked, when suddenly you realize that each and every piece of this puzzle appears to be either a song or a poem or a letter to someone you’ve never heard of or what looks to be some fragment of furiously scribbled writing, like a daily entry in someone’s private diary or journal. How odd!

“What kind of jigsaw puzzle is this, anyway?” you ask yourself. The answer to this question is, of course, that this is that kind of jigsaw puzzle whose purpose is to eventually be folded up, just so, and turned, as if by magic, into this very scrapbook you find yourself holding in your hands at this very moment. Very clever; eh? Very!

But back to the living room carpet. Since you have, indeed, put together other puzzles in the past, you naturally resort at this point in the process to that tried and true stratagem of examining box containing the remaining 5,786 pieces to see if there might be a picture of the picture which will eventually emerge before your very eyes, here on the space you’ve cleared on the living room carpet, once all the pieces have been assembled.

But, alas, no such miniature representation of the final picture toward which we are working is to be found anywhere on or in or near the box in which the remaining pieces are jumbled. And yet it’s not as if no such final image were there in the box to be had, as could be said of those aggravatingly impossible puzzles, which we’ve all come across at one time or another, in which every single piece is exactly the same color as every other piece in the box, so that one’s effort at piecing them together would result, not in some interesting picture, but merely in a vast monochromatic field of red or black or white or – if one were very luck – blue.

Quite the contrary. The kind of jigsaw puzzle this appears to be is the kind upon whose every single brightly colored piece is printed something or other which your humble servant, the toolmaker’s other son, has considered to be worth including in our jigsaw puzzle that’s to eventually be folded this way and that until it’s been neatly folded up, just so, into this memoir of sorts, this scrapbook which I’ve put together here to give to you when you grow up.

So, here we are, down our hands and knees on the living room carpet, just the three of us (or so it seems), our eyes fixed upon this first brightly colored piece of our jigsaw puzzle, lying all alone there in the geographic center of this ample space we’ve cleared here for our purpose. But as we lean over, our heads nearly pressed together, in an effort to decipher what this first piece of our puzzle is trying to say to us, here is what we see; here is the song we see it singing to us:

{insert: “The World Is Ugly, and the People Are Sad” by Galen Green}

“Whew! What a way to start out a scrapbook!” you exclaim, reeling backwards in horror. “I thought scrapbooks were supposed to be pretty things!”

“Pretty is as pretty does,” I smile. “At least that’s what my mother used to say – my adoptive mother, who was, as we’ve already established, plain but virtuous.

“Where in the world did a song like that come from?” you ask, still trying to catch your breath.

“That’s an excellent question,” I reply. “I appreciate your asking it, and I’ll do the best I can to answer it. As with all of my songs, ‘The World Is Ugly, and The People Are Sad” is what used to be called a folksong.”

“What do you mean, ‘used to be?’”

I mean that the term “folksong” originally applied to any of a wide variety of songs born out of the experiences of those folks who were unlucky enough to find themselves living their entire lives at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum. This usually meant that such songs had to do with hard luck or hard work or similar difficult circumstances or with what clinicians such as your father often refer to as “situational anxiety,” which is the most natural, healthy and perfectly understandable response to grinding poverty and to the hellish prison of optionless slavery inevitably resulting from it.

In other words, folksongs used to be about the lives of “the folk,” because they were songs born out of the life experiences and the candid observations of “the folk.” Any particular song was or was not a “folksong,” in other words, because of who wrote it (or, back before poor folks were allowed to learn to write, because of who first made it up and sang it).

Nowadays, however, the term “folksong” has come to refer most often to a song which has the sound or feel or flavor of those songs born out of the experiences of the poor folks of some earlier era. With all due respect, such songs might more accurately be called “faux folksongs,” not because they lack sincerity or authenticity of sentiment, but because they represent some relatively comfortable songwriter’s impression of the experiences and observations of the poor, rather than the real deal. A song such as “The World Is Ugly, and The People Are Sad,” on the other hand, represents the real deal, because it’s been written and sung by someone who is genuinely poor, someone whose harassed penury has been poured into it. It’s a folksong because it was written and sung by a poor person, a person whose life circumstances have been relatively uncomfortable in the socioeconomic dimension.

“But it doesn’t sound like a folksong,” you politely protest.

What I hear you saying is that it doesn’t resemble the type of songs we’ve all come, in the past half century or so, to think of as folksongs. But “The World Is Ugly, and The People Are Sad” isn’t a folksong because of what it resembles (i.e. because of what it sounds like), but because of who wrote it (i.e. because of whose actual life experiences and observations it represents, expresses and is born out of).
“But it’s so depressing. It’s so negative,” you interject. “I mean, where’s the hope? Where’s the redemptive love?”

The hope, as you put it, is in the acceptance of reality. And the redemptive love is there as well. But let’s not get bogged down in semantics. I promise you that we can revisit these issues later on, if you’re still in the mood for it. Let’s go back, instead, to your