Our Dad: A True Scanner

I have recently discovered that I am what is called a Scanner, someone who goes from project to project, always coming up with new ideas, doing great creative work, pushing the boundaries, and always on the look out for new things to get involved in and to learn. That doesn't surprise me, especially since I was the daughter of two people who today would probably be called scanners.

My father is the obvious one. My sister and I had both zeroed in on him. My mother is not so obvious, but it is very obvious to me that she too was a scanner, creatively going from project to project, always eager to learn new things. I am quite sure that this commonality brought them together.

My mother was a very creative, very talented woman, who did not have the opportunity to finish school the way she would have wanted. She kept a good neat home, and she was incredibly creative. And the creativity led to many projects of many different kinds, from sewing to teaching her daughters many different things to interior decorating (our homes) to coming up with incredible ideas for school papers we had to do to breeding and showing Boxer dogs.

But let's look at my Dad in this article because he was a very obvious scanner.

My Dad was born April 18, 1917. He had a pretty normal childhood albeit he was a latch key kid since my grandmother worked for AT&T to earn money for the family to live on while my grandfather went to college to become a teacher.

Neither of my paternal grandparents, or my maternal grandparents, were scanners. Indeed, our grandparent families were so normal that I will never forget the day my Dad, having gone back to college while I was a teenager, and having gone to Boston University Theological School while I was in high school, was installed as a Methodist minister. Beautiful ceremony, and since he already had a church, there were many of his parishioners there to support him.

I was sitting in the second row between my paternal grandmother and her mother, my great grandmother, Bertha Jones Buzzell. The service was beautiful and as they put a stole on my Dad signifying that he was a minister, my great grandmother turned to my grandmother and said, in a not too low voice, "Clevis never did amount to much, did he?"

I had to put my head down as I couldn't stop giggling. I remember nothing else about that ceremony outside of all the people that were there than my great grandmother's comment. I still giggle when I think of her in that situation.

Gram Buzzell was a neat person, a Quaker, who had built a meeting house/school house on her farm so the family could have meetings on Sunday and a school room for the children on week days, and she will be another story for me to tell.

But going back to my father: I count the number of things that we know that he got into as jobs and some as hobbies:

Dropped out of college, either because he wanted to or because his parents could not afford the tuition during the depression -- I always heard the latter but I suspect both things are correct

1. Dishwasher in a restaurant our mother was a waitress in: that is where they met each other -- and how did they meet? Actually, she picked a dirty glass up from a table that was set for the opening of business and she rushed into the kitchen with it, accosting our father. I was told once by our mother that suddenly she, a five foot three woman, was balling out a six foot three dishwasher who looked down on her anger and just started laughing!

2. US Army patrolling the Panama Canal Zone on horseback -- and there is nothing about this mounted corp that protected the canal zone anywhere on the Internet. But somewhere there are pictures of my father in uniform on a horse in the canal zone.

3. Back in New England, he married our mother in Vermont and went to Mass Radio School

4. Pan American Airways radio officer -- Coral Gables Florida

5. Eventually grounded from Pan Am and given a desk job because of ulcers -- didn't like desk jobs so moved on

6. US Merchant Marines on the run from Boston to Mermansk and back during 2nd world war

7. Merchant Marines came after Pan Am? I guess I never thought of the sequencing here, but it did.

8. Railroad man -- moved to Greenfield MA for this work, but I cannot remember exactly what he did on the railroad but I do remember we had to go pick him up when he came into the station on the Christmas Eve night that my sister was born -- I was four years old

9. Worked behind the counter where car parts were sold at an auto dealer in Greenfield Mass

10. Drove a wholesale bread truck to businesses in Vermont and back every morning (we still lived in Greenfield, and there was one memorable morning when my father, who had gotten sprayed by a skunk came home stinking and cleansed it away with ketchup? That's what I remember.

11. Drove a retail bread truck to customers in Greenfield Mass

12. Insurance sales man for Metropolitan Life Insurance

13. Thanks to the influence of a phenomenal English Methodist minister, Rev. Hopkinson, in Greenfield, he decided to enter the ministry when Hoppy died. He was given provisional status in Maine with a church at Cape Porpoise when I was going into my sophomore year of school.

14. He went to the University of New Hampshire for four years, driving back and forth from Cape Porpoise every day all winter, to get his BA degree; majored in English; during the summers of those college years, went to Boston University Theological School for a ministerial degree.

15. Served three churches in succession starting with Cape Porpoise, then South Portland, then Scarborough . . . all in Maine.

16. Our paternal grandparents retired and moved to Scarborough because they liked the community – near Portland and closer to their summer home, and of course, near our parents..

17. Dad left the ministry in 1963 when a Scout that he was guiding drowned at a lake near Scarboro.

18. Totally disillusioned, he turned away from God for letting that happen, and became an English Teacher

19. Taught first at Peelskill Military Academy in Peekskill NY

20. When PMA closed down 1968, he got a job teaching high school English in Norway Maine, a school that serviced eight communities in western Maine Norway and Paris Maine. First they rented a house in South Paris; then they bought a house in Norway.

21. He never got to retire: he was retired when he had a severe heart attack followed by a stroke just before he was supposed to be released from the hospital and that stroke left him unable to talk.

22. Along the way, he taught swimming in Greenfield, Northfield, etc. to children and teens

23. He was a Mason and a member of the Scottish Rite

24, He was an excellent photographer, developer, and printer -- in one home, he had a dark room in the basement; in other homes, he made do with a bathroom which meant that he did not have the time he had with the dark room to do his work.

26. He was a writer, whose stories are fun to read, but he refused to try to publish any of his stories because he believed they were not good enough to be published. I have "published" many of his stories on a blog in his memory – see http://dearjubilee-inmyfatherswords.blogspot.com/2011/06/snapshot-in-time.html

Our Dad was bright, smart, friendly, always had a lot of friends and was always well liked by his colleagues and his students. He had a quick mind, a stern demeanor, and he swam like a fish.

Knowing Our Calling

Earlier this year I left a program after four years of preparatory courses because I realized that the goal that I had been pursuing was not my calling. There are different ways to help others, and I realized as I approached 70 chronologically but feeling more like 38 physically and mentally that I needed to explore what aging means to me: it seems so sad that we go from the child who is asked "How old are you?" and who replies: "I'm eight but I will be nine in October" to the college student proud of being 21 and entering graduate school to the teacher who loves being 30, to the woman who knows 45 is the best yet, to the older woman looking forward to retirement, to the person who tries to hide her age with hair dye, make up, and sees the rest of her life as all down hill.

What? How can that be? Where has the enthusiasm for learning and becoming more and more of who we are gone? Yes, death is the end of this life, but until death comes, we need to live with the enthusiasm of that child looking forward and that young woman who dreamed huge dreams. We need to fly on our own course and celebrate our age because our age is not only a number, it is a marker of the new things we are doing.

I hadn't knitted for years, but seeing some beautiful yarn in a discount store two years ago, I felt called to knit. I bought it, and the much younger friend with me asked, what would I do with the yarn. I knitted a scarf and a hat for my daughter, then bought more yarn and knitted scarves for my husband's daughters, then ribbed hats for all 11 grandchildren, and then, not wanting to knit sweaters and stuff, I looked around and thought: knit for those who can use knitted things.

So to make this project large enough to make a difference, I took my knitting to church one Sunday, and sat in the parish hall and had a Tom Sawyer moment. People came over with their coffee, sat down, "what are you doing?", "I'm knitting scarves for people in a shelter," and then "can I help" they asked, and today, many of those people are in a group called Stitches. We knit; we crochet; we tie flannel into blankets for children; and we sew beautiful fabrics into fun lap quilts for children who use wheel chairs.

I look at all we have done and I realize that I spend as much time and effort and research on this project as I did when I was doing my dissertation or teaching at Boston University or returning to the job market as a marketing communications researcher, writer, and project manager.

You see, this isn't about working at a specific thing; it is all about doing what we are called to do, and I now realize that I have never done anything without having been called to do it. That doesn't end with retirement; that work isn’t reduced by aging. This is the soul looking out from within us for things to do to make the world a better place, a more humane place, a more fun place, a more loving place, . . . a more spiritual place.

Aging does have an impact on what I do: I have much more understanding of myself and what I can do, as well as more compassion for others. I am reminded of all that I have previously been called to do, and I realize that I will continue answering those calls for the rest of my life. (see June 18, 2011: Picture the Behavior and Make It Happen)

It was true then, and it is true now. Now more than ever in many different ways, ways of using my talents keep opening, much like the words of a song: "whatever spirit wants of me, I will be, I will be, I will be."

It took me many years to realize what the words of that song mean: we all have a calling that we can summarize in a few words like my learning new things and telling others. Knowing that calling, it is easier to recognize what is ours to do and doors keep opening, taking me into many ways of growing as me.

Stitches and Prayer Beads and Training Dogs

To me, each stitch, when I am knitting or sewing, is a prayer bead – and as with a prayer bead, I am going within as in meditation. This is a peaceful experience that takes me to my core. And from knitting, this extrapolates to other things, like working with the dogs: being at one with the dog I am working with, mind to mind, soul to soul. (see June 18, 2011 Picture the Behavior).

That article was not about being more present in myself, but the illustrations and the idea of clearing our minds in order to successfully work with our dogs is definitely about going within. to teach the dogs, we must clear our minds of all the daily stuff and to be open to "hearing" the dog and "being heard" by the dog -- This is an exercise in going within, and I deeply believe that we cannot train a dog without going within.

My work with the meditation value of handwork teaches me the same thing: we go within to do this work and to teach others to do this work. The work itself ends up helping others since we do our stitch work for people who benefit from the products.