Last week, it appeared we were going to lose that bastion of books, pf515. Thankfully, that is not the case. Before that happy news arrived, some of us thought we might, temporarily, replicate what pf515 did, on a Friday, rather than Wednesday schedule. Even though the potential disaster of a pf515-less DK has been averted, we are of a mind to keep the Friday morning slot engaged. This week, I will write on the theme of favorite (or least favorite) authors and/or influential books. It is my hope that R&BLers will line up to rotate to contribute diaries to be published on Fridays at 8-9AM.
In this second Friday diary, I will discuss the impact on me of the autobiography of Loren Eiseley, entitled All the Strange Hours.
First, a little background.
When I was nine years old, something wonderful happened. I was sitting in my fifth grade classroom, the realm of one Miss Symmes, who would the following year become Mrs. Duncan. Miss Symmes (I don't remember her first name; we didn't have that kind of relationship) was one of those teachers so great that when I recall her, it is in mythic terms. Surely she couldn't have been that amazing. Yet she was.
I was already a reader with a gargantuan appetite. Having, according to my mother, started reading at the age of less than two, and having been blessed not to have a TV in the home until I was eight, I devoured books like candy. Miss Symmes was devoted to the cause of reading. She ran a classics book program. If you read every book on the Great Books list (starting with Pilgrim's Progress), you got your name on a plaque, and she would buy you any one book you desired. Once having completed that task, you were permitted to begin the next adventure, which was to read, for plaque and present, every single one of the Newberry Prize-winning books.
That was not all Miss Symmes did. She also graded us, as a class, every day. If we, as a class, scored a five (on a one to five scale), we were awarded a gold star, which she would place above the blackboard for all to see. It was not easy to get a score of five. We would have to, as a class, pay attention and be respectful of each other, not an easy assignment for a room with thirty budding personalities. Once we accumulated five stars, Miss Symmes would award us with a field trip. We went to museums and zoos and gardens, peered down into tidepools, got back-stage passes to aquaria, toured a series of churches, mosques and synagogues.
Once a year, we had Mayan week, when we explored the Mayan culture. Miss Symmes had a Mayan face, with a long sloping forehead, and a nose like the beak of a predator bird. It was then that I started to fall in love with archaeology.
Around the same time, I read one of Louis Leakey's books, and saw him at the local community college, spinning tales and making cat's cradles, as he raised money to keep his excavations going.
But I digress. That one glorious spring day, in 1969, I was sitting in my fifth-grade class, when Miss Symmes ushered in two young bemused and disheveled young men. She introduced them as archaeologists. I was thrilled that I would be hearing from professionals in a field that I was beginning to become interested in. But they weren't there to talk; they were there to recruit.
A few miles down the road, there was a new housing development being built into a dale and the hillsides thereof. The developer had uncovered, in the process of construction excavation, a pre-historic Native Americam burial site. Now, back in 1969, there were no laws which mandated that the developer need to give archaeologists time to properly excavate material from a site uncovered in the process of construction. Notwithstanding this, pleas from Cal Berkeley archaeologists had persuaded the developer to "work around" the site for a few days. So, here the archaeologists were, in my fifth grade class, pleading for bodies to help.
Thus it was that I and a number of other fifth-graders found ourselved bouncing along in the back of a pick-up truck headed toward a grand adventure. It's been over forty years since that week, and I don't remember everything that happened. I do distinctly remember two things. The first was my own assignment. I was given a standing sifter, and was told to shake material spaded onto the sifter through, and to look for anything interesting. Most of the material was shells, as there was a large midden of such material. But I did find a couple of interesting things.
The second was a moment when we thought we were done. The developer advised us that he was going to blast earth off of the hill above the site. We all had to evacuate, and it was expected that the excavation would be overwhelmed with loosened soil. We withdrew all our tools and equipment, and waited at a distance. A few minutes later, an air-horn blared, and there was a roar on the hill above the site. A handful of earth clods trickled down the hill; we had more time to excavate.
From that moment, I was hooked. I knew what I was going to do with my life. I was going to live by the code of the trowel and sifter.
What, you may well ask, does any of this have to do with Loren Eiseley and his autobiograpy? Everything. We all have had moments in our life which change our path. But those moments do not exist in a vacuum. We come to those moments informed by the accretion of experiences which layer our being.
So it was with me and Loren Eiseley. His memoir was not the first of his books I had read. He was, among many other things, an anthropologist, and he wrote with a very distinct voice. I devoured his writings. All the Strange Hours was published in 1975. I was beginning my senior year in high school, and was in the process of deciding where I might wish to go to school. I knew I wanted to be an archaeologist, which considerably narrowed my options as to where I might wish to be a student. This is where my life stood, when I opened All the Strange Hours, and read these first paragraphs:
When my aunt died I found among her effects a beautiful silver-backed Victorian hand mirror. It had been one of a twin pair my maternal grandfather had given to his girls. The last time I had seen my mother's mirror it had been scarred by petulant violence and the handle had been snapped off. It had marked the difference between the two girls -- their care of things, perhaps their lives. I had looked into the mirror as a child, admiring the scrollwork on the silver. Mostly things like that did not exist in our house. Finally it disappeared. The face of a child vanished with it, my own face. Without the mirror I was unaware when it departed.
Make no mistake. Everything in the mind is in rat's country. It doesn't die. They are merely carried, these disparate memories, back and forth in the desert of a billion neurons, set down, picked up, and dropped again by mental pack rats. Nothing perishes, it is merely lost till a surgeon's electrode starts the music of an old piano player whose scrolls are dust. Or you yourself do it, tossing in the restless nights, or even in the dayon a strange street when a hurdy-gurdy plays. Nothing is lost, but it can never be again as it was. You will only find the bits and cry out because they were yourself. Nothing can begin again and go right, but still it is you, your mind, picking endlessly over the splintered glass of a mirror dropped and broken long ago. I should have never gone to that place, never accepted the engagement, never spoken under the lights of their brand-new auditorium.
I was hooked. Given the restraints of fair usage, not to mention the difficulty of choosing between so many bejeweled sentences, paragraphs and chapters, I will quote no more here from the book. I will not steal the unique experience that a new reader might garner from this, one of the great memoirs of the 20th century. Not that the word "memoir" comes close to doing justice to this meteoric soul-baring and rumination.
The question remains: how on earth did this change my life? Just so; Loren Eiseley was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, located in Philadelphia. Penn was on my short list of schools I was considering applying to. I had thought of applying to Harvard, but my high school mentor had indicated he did not consider that to be the right school for me. I had also been offered a full scholarship the the University of South Florida. Somehow, USF had found out about my passion for archaeology, and they invited me to attend their university to become an underwater archeologist. I think back now at how different my life might have been, if I had accepted their offer. Unfortunately, that was the year that the film Jaws was released, and their was no chance that I would take them up on their invitation. (Really. I know if was only a movie, but I was that traumatized after having watched it.) Another school I considered was the University of Arizona, which had an outstanding program, and had the added benefit of being close to where my grandmother Geneva, a woman I worshipped, lived.
The fact remained that Eiseley was a professor at Penn. As I read, mesmerized, I knew that Penn was the only place for me. I would study at the feet of Eiseley and other giants. I would spend my time at the world-famous University of Pennsyvania museum, home to the excavators of Nippur, Tikal and Nubia. I sent my application into Penn, and awaited my acceptance. I did not apply to any other school.
There was a snafu in the advising department of my high school; they forgot to send my data to Penn. One day, I received a thin envelope from Penn admissions. They regretted to inform me that I was being denied admission, due to my failure to provide the necessary documents. They wished me well. I was crushed, but not defeated. I instantly composed a rejection letter of my own, advising them that, notwithstanding their denial, I would be attending Penn. Penn needed me. The office of admissions was so astonished that they telephone my mother, asking if my letter was for real. She assured them that it was. I still refused to apply to any other school.
Early in the month of May, at the tail-end of a Model United Nations conference in Fresno, California, I was on the verge of winning "Best Delegate" for my committee assignment as a delegate representing the USA. I was giving a speech at the podium when my best friend Peter walked in. He sat down, smiled, turned over a placard, and wrote something on the back with a black felt-tip pen. He then turned the placard around so I could see it. The message read Your mother called. You've been accepted to Penn.
Now, I know that this is all a heartwarming story. I would like to tell you that life proceeded from that point like a soaring poem written by Whitman. Not so.
I was the first member of my family to travel East of the Rockies since the Civil War. I had applied to, and had been accepted to Penn site unseen. My imaginings had me sitting in front of a roaring fire in a Georgian mansion set in a bucolic setting, drinking cognac with one of the great minds of Penn. I first realized that I was mistaken in my fantasy as the limousine from the Philadelphia Airport passed a large field of oil storage tanks. Philadelphia turned out to be nothing like what I had imagined.
For the first time in my life, I was living away from home. As a native Californian, I was considered an alien by my fellow dormitory mates. At that time, there were virtually no West-coasters at Penn. I was one of less than a dozen Californians in my class. Folks kept asking me if I surfed or listened to the Beach Boys. As a Northern Californian who would have never considered surfing in the frigid Pacific waters off of Marin County, and who considered Beach Boy music to be dreck, this annoyed me to no end. One of my roommates insisted on playing Kiss over and over again; the rest of the hall reverberated endlessly to the strains of Born to Run.
And Philadelphia seemed a cold, unfriendly place. It was in this city that I first heard someone use the N-word, casually in conversation. Philadelphia was, with a few exceptions, an adamantly racially divided city, with a police department at war with its black citizens. There were major gang conflicts going on in the neighborhood just west of the University. The weather that September when I arrived was hot and humid, totally foreign to a Bay Area native like me. The following January, the wind-chilled temperature, when I stepped off the place after winter break, was fifty degrees below zero.
Unprotected by the trappings of control barely applied by my parents, my nascent alcoholism roared to a new level. Having skated by on my brains and wits all of my student life, I had little skill in the application of actual study, and any skill I did have eroded in the face of endless gallons of booze and bushes of weed. That first year was nearly a total disaster, mitigated only by the passion I had for archaeology. I spent every spare minute in the University Museum.
As I nearly drowned in my own self-absorbtion, I decided to put off taking a class by Eiseley until the following year. There was nothing about myself that I considered worthy of a seat in his class. But he would be teaching a class in the History of Sociology and Science in the fall semester of my sophomore year. I would have straightened my act out by then.
Loren Eiseley passed away during the summer of 1977. I never met him. It took me seven years to finally manage to gain my diploma, after dropping out three times and at one point considering giving up. By the time I left school, Reagan had eviscerated grants for archaeology, which overnight cut the jobs in the field in half. i was too exhausted to consider continuing to graduate school, even though half my anthropological credits were graduate level. I couldn't see spending more years in school, just so I could stand at the end of a long line. But that's a story for another time.
I did, during the period I was in school, work as an archaeologist, participating in several excavations. I even, one day, after a heavy rain, on a hill in Western Illinois overlooking the Mississippi River, going over ground being graded by a farmer to build houses on his property, had the experience of seeing human bone sticking out of the ground. Mr. Kraft gave us a week or so to get out what we could. As he graded the ground with his bulldozer blade, I perched on the arm, yelling for him to stop whenevr I saw skeletal remains. It turned out to be a major burial sited, with the remains under slabs of granite on a bluff high above the river. We had students helping us with the excavation. The beginning becomes the end becomes the beginning.
Over time, I changed. I came to love Philadelphia, and the people who live here. One day, I woke up to a story about the latest bout of political corruption, and I didn't laugh. I knew on that day, I had graduated from immigrant to citizen of this glorious city. I rooted for the Phillies last year, even though they were playing my boyhood team in the World Series. I also bleed Eagle green, Flyer orange and actually am excited at how the Sixers are once again becoming relevant under the tutelage of their coach Doug Collins. I have worshiped at the Palestra, and have been awed by the majesty of the Philadelphia Orchestra. I have watched as a city with an indifferent culinary palate has blossomed into a major destination for those who love great food.
It all started with those first two paragraphs from Loren Eiseley's memoirs. They were the seeds that fell in the soil of my life up to that point, and took root. They are the reason that I ended up where I am and who I am today. They were my Moirae.