P is for Philosophy— Lessons from my Dad

I’m going to live dangerously here for this edition of the A to Z Bloggers Challenge and try to form a picture of how, why and where my interest in philosophy came from. Hopefully it won’t look like I’m bluffing my way around a topic I once knew something about...more than a half a century ago. Any "book learning" I had decades ago is running for the hills as if Godzilla just stomped into town. If the Blogging Police want to tisk‑tisk me for bluffing, I can live with it. But stick with me to the end and I may eventually write something profoundly philosophical—and I don’t mean a review of the perfume by that name. (Which I do like, in case anyone wants to know.)

AI defines philosophy this way: “The systematic study of fundamental questions concerning existence, knowledge, ethics, reason, and language. Derived from the Greek for ‘love of wisdom,’ it uses rational argument and critical analysis to understand the world, rather than relying on empirical observation alone. It analyzes concepts like truth, reality, and morality.”

My ideas on philosophy are deeply rooted, and they got their start at my dad’s side. I absorbed them by listening to his Will Rogers‑style way of viewing the world. I don’t know how he picked up his respect for knowledge and education. He dropped out of school in grade school. Except for the newspaper, he wasn’t a reader. Yet when I was in college taking classes in philosophy, world religion and logic, we could discuss those topics and he held his own talking about Socrates, Plato, mythical utopian cities, and the origins of our values and laws.

Life was his teacher. He’d witnessed Ku Klux Klan hangings while hiding in the woods as a kid. He saw the unfairness of Blacks, Italians and Irish getting paid less than whites in the coal mines while they all worked side by side. And I’ll never forget the look of horror and disgust on Dad’s face on Bloody Sunday in 1963 when the nightly news showed fire hoses and attack dogs turned on the peaceful marchers in Selma.

I’ll also never forget the look of sheer happiness that lit up his face when Tiger Woods won his first PGA in 1999. He was proud of Tiger for breaking the color barrier in a game Dad loved his entire life. I’m glad he isn’t here to see how far Tiger has fallen, but Dad was the most fair‑minded person I’ve ever known. He’d probably express forgiveness. Why? Because he knew Tiger spent his whole career carrying a heavy load as a role model for an entire generation of dark‑skinned kids. Dad always looked for the story behind the actions of others, and the story usually came with an empathetic twist.

Case in point: decades ago my cousin and brother took my dad to a strip joint, thinking they’d shock him and prove how “grown up” they’d become. After the stripper did her act, my cousin asked what Dad thought about a woman who’d do that. He expected a lot of things, but not Dad saying, “Well, she probably has a baby at home that needs milk, and this is the best job she could get.”

When I downsized nearly five years ago, twenty‑seven books on philosophy and religion made the cut. And I’ve read every single one cover to cover. I can’t say the same about all the other books on my shelves. Some of the titles range from the Bible and The Good Book (aka The Humanist’s Bible) to Aristotle Would Have Liked Oprah, Working on God, The Idiot’s Guide to Philosophy, Seinfeld and Philosophy, Man’s Search for a Soul, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, The Nature of Man, and The Republic of Plato.

Many of my books aren’t hard‑hitting textbooks. But books like Seinfeld and Philosophy (by William Irwin) can teach concepts in a way most of us can understand. One blurb on the back says the book “nicely illustrates how the comic can illuminate the profound.” Yup. Jerry’s constant questioning of everything is very much like what Socrates did to teach. As the book puts it, “Both Socrates and Jerry Seinfeld manage to make something considerable out of seemingly obvious questions and trivial subject matter.”

Kramer, in the same book, is portrayed as being stuck in Søren Kierkegaard’s aesthetic stage of life. In case you’re rusty on your Danish philosophers, Kierkegaard (1813–1855) was the father of the Three Spheres of Existence: the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious. The first stage is marked by pleasure‑seeking. Kramer is in constant pursuit of whatever interests him, and what interests him changes daily. He has no ability to commit to anything.

If I believe in the three spheres — and I can certainly name long periods when I was stuck in the aesthetic stage — then I can also pinpoint when my ethical stage began, when I started taking on more responsibility and living a more purposeful life.

But Kierkegaard believed it takes a leap of faith to enter the third stage, and that most people remain in the ethical stage, never taking that leap to fully commit to God. Think nuns‑and‑priests‑level commitment. You can be a steady churchgoer and still not be in the third stage if you’re not willing to give up your creature comforts.

Right about now, if anyone is still reading, you’re probably asking what does it matters what some old Danish dude thought. To answer that, I’ll share a quote from The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Philosophy: “Kierkegaard’s work gave rise to the major trend in twentieth‑century philosophy known as existentialism, a philosophy that focuses on the meaning of existence for the individual.” And I dare say nearly everyone reading this flirted with that branch of philosophy in the late ’60s and early ’70s—the counterculture years—when we were all searching for meaning and purpose. Some of us still are. I know I am.

Maybe that’s why the recent Walk for Peace fascinated me so much. It reminded me that there are still people willing to give up their earthly comforts to reach a higher plane of faith.

Sometimes life is a gentle ride in a canoe, and other times it’s like riding in an overloaded ferry boat while holding your breath until you reach the other side. Have you ever written or said something, then Googled it to make sure it originated in your own brain and wasn’t something your subconscious coughed up like a cat with a hairball? That’s what I did with the first sentence in this paragraph. I wrote it as a reply to a comment on my blog, then deleted it because it seemed too richly philosophically for me to have “invented” it. Google couldn’t find anything remotely similar, so I’m pretty sure I can claim the line as my own.

And with that, my promise to write something philosophical is fulfilled. © 

Note: The painting at the top was by Raphael and its titled The School of Athens. I still have the term paper I wrote in 1961 about the gathering of philosophers portrayed in the piece. It's the only term paper I've kept all these years. I read it very few years just to remind myself that I once knew things. 

O is for Overtime—When Work Was Just What You Did

 

A few posts back in this A to Z Blogger’s Challenge, I wrote about my dad working long overtime hours during WWII, and that got me thinking about all the overtime Don and I worked over the years. At no point in my adult life did I ever have a tidy nine-to-five job like Dolly Parton sang about in her 1980 movie song with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin.

I never “tumbled out of bed and stumbled to the kitchen” to pour myself a cup of “ambition” before heading off to a predictable shift. In the floral industry, where I worked for twenty years, there was no such thing as nine to five. We worked when there was work to do. Funerals, holidays, and weddings didn’t care what time the shop or greenhouses closed. Brides often needed evening appointments, and grieving families needed casket sprays and pedestal pieces with gold-foil letters proclaiming labels like “Mother” or “Grandfather.” Those letters are still the same fonts they were sixty years ago. And yes, I still have the same hand-held Clipper #700 stapler I used back then. The letters, however, now come with sticky backs.

Funerals were unpredictable, but weddings guaranteed overtime on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. Not ideal for my man‑hunting days. (Girls who met their spouses in high school or college missed the era of wondering where on earth you’d find a decent man.) Most of the guys I worked with were either married or gay. One was deep in the closet, circa the ’60s. With my hours, my default social life became Sunday skiing or after work bar‑hopping with two single co‑workers—a gay girl and a gay guy. None of us ever found what we were looking on those after work bar hops. Surprise, surprise .

We did have some fun after hours, the kind you can only have when management is nowhere in sight. Flowers came in from all over the world, and once in a while cockroaches hitched a ride. One shipment must have included a pregnant one because they multiplied fast. When we told the boss, he said the monthly spraying would take care of it. We didn’t want to wait. So we trapped a dozen in a jar and planted them in his desk drawers. The next morning, he walked into his office with his coffee and came shooting right back out like the hounds of hell were after him. That night the chemical guy was waiting for us to punch out. The boss? We didn’t see him again all day, and he never found out what we’d done.

Holidays were the worst for overtime. My bosses did wholesale as well as retail, so we prepared artificial arrangements by the hundreds to ship to four states before switching to retail fresh flower orders. We also decorated houses—inside and out—for wealthy clients and big parties. Twelve-to fourteen-hour shifts weren’t unusual. I learned early on to finish my Christmas shopping before Thanksgiving. I also learned that if I wanted a break, I had to learn to drink coffee, because my boss didn’t like the image of someone sitting in the break room “doing nothing.”

When I left that job, I started my own weddings‑only service out of my home. A one‑woman operation with part‑time help from my nieces, my mom and Don. Anyone who’s ever had their own business knows who ends up working the longest hours. After ten years of that—and more than a few Bridezillas—I gave it up and went back to college, which I wrote about in E is for Education. At the same time, I worked part‑time for Don, plowing snow in the winters and doing parking lot maintenance the rest of the year. He had five or six part‑time workers, but it was he and I who worked the most overtime. Exhausted was our default condition during the nineties. Oh, and did I mention he also worked a full time job at GM where, went we first met, they had a lot of mandatory overtime?

Those years blur together now—the late nights, the early mornings, the holidays spent working instead of celebrating. At the time, it all felt ordinary, just the way life was for us. Maybe that’s the thing about overtime—you don’t notice the hours until you finally step outside and see how far they carried you. ©

N is for Nieces and Nephews—The Long Arc of Family

This is probably going to be the hardest post I’ll write for the A to Z blog Challenge. Hard partly because I want to protect their privacy and not reveal details they haven’t shared publicly. And that’s not my natural style. I have a tendency to beat small observations to death.

So I started by asking AI to define nieces, and I laughed out loud when it told me: “Nieces are cherished family members who bring joy, sunshine, and love, often described as angels or little princesses who rule the heart.” My brother’s daughters (and son and step‑son) are cherished family members who have brought joy, sunshine, and love into my life. But “little princesses”? Not even close. Growing up, tomboys probably would have been far more accurate. I’d be shocked if there were any glitter‑covered tiaras or net tutus in their box of memories. I’ll have to ask.

AI had this to say about nephews: They “celebrate the unique bond between aunts/uncles and their nephews, often highlighting joy, mentorship, and unconditional love.” The unconditional love part is certainly true for me, and I’m pretty sure my nephew would agree my husband could claim a spot on the team that mentored him—considering Don taught him how to plow snow, and Jesse went on to start his own lawn‑care and plow service.

But even before Don came into my life, Jesse and the girls brought joy. I didn’t see them as often as my folks did when they were growing up, but when I did, it was always playtime. And yes, I apologized to my sister‑in‑law and my mother’s ghosts for leaving all the cooking and cleanup to them at family dinners and holidays while I played with the kids. I was deep into photography back then, and those years are well documented. There’s no denying I was the fun aunt.

My two step‑nephews came into our lives with my brother’s second marriage, and by then the “golden years” of bonding had passed, so I’m not as close to them as the others. But they turned into a solid, caring and productive human being anyone would be proud to call family.

All five of them did, and the bond between them is warm and full of love, once you scratch through the surface-stress left behind from caring for my brother during his dementia years. Those of us who've been through that know there is a period of healing that has to take place after adult kids buries their parent. And they seem to be right on schedule in the healing process.

Their growing up years: My heart still smiles at the memories of building forts, swimming, walking in the woods, and doing crafts with my “three musketeers.” In their teen years the girls even worked for me. I had a business making flowers for weddings, and in the summers—when I was busiest—they each spent week days with me in the city. As we sat making corsages and bouquets, I introduced them to Young and the Restless. Or was it As the World Turns? I’m too old to recall the details of long-ago habits and secret pleasures.

If nothing else, I taught the girls that when you have a clean house, you treat yourself to fresh flowers. Both have mentioned that to me recently. I need to revise that directive for myself, though, to: Anytime I go to the store, buy flowers, because my opportunities to do so are getting farther apart as I age.

I’ve watched my brother’s kids grow, learn and weather hard times when their parents divorced. I’ve watched them settle down, raise children of their own, and become productive human beings anyone would be proud to have in their family tree. And I’m pretty sure they’d agree that in addition to being kin, we’ve made the transition to being friends on equal footing. They grew up, and so did I, in all the best ways.

To paraphrase a Hallmark card, “I may not be their mom, but I’m definitely their biggest fan and cheerleader.”