Childhood Memories, An Unexpected Artifact, And Imaginal Openings

I write this post on the first anniversary of the death of my dear father Jerry Lee Hawver who grew up in an unstable, alcoholic household and through hard work and great people skills became a star athlete and executive with Proctor and Gamble. He and my mother raised my brother and me in the corporate suburbia of the New South of the 1970s and 80s, steadily climbing the ladder of the American dream. For my formative years that was my culture. The dynamic in our home was that I was the child who sought approval. My brother pushed the boundaries. Over time he and I have come together to meet in the center. We are both Hawver stock, and we “get ‘er done.”

In those early years of the feral-child 1970s, us kids had the run of the neighborhood yards and wood lots. I’ve spoken of hanging out by the creek lined with quartz-laden rip-rap looking for crawdads and swinging from giant vines and making “forts.” My best friend’s name was Andrea Hopkins. She and her brother Brandon lived in a house that was kitty-cross from our backyard. Her father had a British accent and they had a few antiques, which I thought made them rather a glamorous family. We would often spend the afternoon exploring, riding our Big Wheels around, playing freeze tag, and putting on plays in the garage. Sometimes Andi and I would get crafty and make little coil pots out of the red Kentucky clay and fill them with potions made of petals from her mom’s flower beds along her driveway. Of course, there were marigolds in the mix. In some ways my new “cottage” rancher is like a return to this liminal space of childhood imaginative possibility. 

I realize now that early success is not necessarily a blessing. I did well in school after a disastrous second-grade year with a body-building teacher, Mrs. Weigand, in an open classroom school I had to take three buses to get to (desegregation). I have a strange memory of being shown a graphic movie of the horrors of smallpox in a tiny room with carpeted levels. That made no sense to me, but I later found out that the Flexners (of the Carnegie / Rockefeller Flexner Report) were from Louisville, so maybe we were part of some public health behavioral experiment. 

I recovered the following year at the much more traditional Wilder Elementary School where we had a fabulous librarian who would take small groups of kids around the shelves and do short book pitches and place books into the hands of kids she knew would love them. It’s funny that there were quite a few paranormal kids’ books in the 70s – John Bellairs and Zilpha Keatley Snyder. The one book that really stayed with me was Margaret Anderson’s “To Nowhere And Back,” a time-travel adventure where a girl passes through an English hedge into another century to make friends with a poor servant girl on the other side. 

I was never in the popular crowd, but I always had a circle of friends. Without realizing it, my identity became wrapped up in my idea of performance, of being a “good” person based on what society said good was. My life unfolded with relative ease, meeting my husband in college, raising a small family, doing my part to make my neighborhood and city a better place, so I thought. But things started to change when my child was in middle school as I began to realize society was being broken on purpose, and the social systems I’d built my identity around began to give way one by one. Eisenhower’s chosen head for ARPA was the President of Procter and Gamble Neil McElroy? Oh, and they ran contracts building nuclear missiles in the panhandle of Texas (Pantex)? You don’t say? Well that sure put Mr. Whipple and Mrs. Olson in a new light in a new light for me. If one’s identity is wrapped up in societal expectations and those start falling away, how does the center hold?

What does it mean to be a “good person” within the expectations of a profoundly flawed system? Here my parents had worked so hard to walk us up the mountain of success, who was I to pull off on a wayside and kick rocks? I was the good girl, wasn’t I? When my marriage fell apart and my child became estranged from me, the silver lining was the opportunity to begin to shed the “good girl” archetype. Not that I had become a “bad girl,” it’s just that I recognized such labels were insufficient and did not do justice to the richly evolving tapestry of my life. Our lives have dramatic arcs. I know it sounds trite, but if there are no bumps in the road, you can’t truly appreciate the parts when the ride is smooth and clear. 

Last year we were trying to sort out the memorial service for my father. At the time I had been applying to all sorts of jobs with the idea that I would stay in Philadelphia and try to hold onto our family home that was almost paid off. In my perceived role of the “good mother,” I thought at some point my young adult child might return from the west coast and need a place to land. Life laughed at me and had the literal soles fall off my shoes on the walk to one interview at Wharton.

During the two-day drive from Philadelphia to North Carolina to be with my father in hospice I cried a lot. I thought about his strength, both physical and strength of character. He was a big man, and I was small, but we fit together, a chip off the old block. I was listening to a podcast this week on our relationship to death and ancestors and Perdita Finn said that sometimes when people go, it is because they can help the ones they love more from the other side. I truly believe my father has been with me every step of the way since that morning when I held his swollen big hands and I read to him from L’Engle’s “An Acceptable Time” and bathed his forehead in kisses, my cheeks wet, and he crossed over. 

After a hurtful email exchange with my child and husband about the memorial service, it was clear that I was being removed from their lives with strong intention and there was nothing I could do about it. I am a planner. Hawvers like to be in control. We try to fix things. All of those things were off the table. It was up to me to build a new story outside of all the stories that had defined my life since I met my husband during our study abroad program in Venice in 1989. I’d never been alone, and now I was going to figure out how to be me, for me, not the good daughter, the model student, the diligent mother and wife. I told my husband I was going to leave Philadelphia and get a cozy cottage where I could garden and a kayak. I spoke it outloud, a reasonable wish, with conviction and with a few days to spare I got it all squared away. 

It’s taken me a year to come around to this way of thinking, because there was a lot of pain to acknowledge and process. But now I realize I was being given space to unfold in a new way. I had a choice. I could hold onto the baggage I was carrying and imagine myself as a failure across many categories. The thing is, I actually like myself and I don’t feel shameful about the course I’ve taken. Regrets? Yes, of course I have some. Have I made missteps? Certainly. But not out of malice, out of lack of information, insight, and wisdom. I deeply miss the people I have lost, but I can learn to be, to become, outside of them, outside their stories and expectations, and that’s ok, too. Perhaps some day they will have grown in their own stories enough and there will be enough space to hold all of who we have become in some new kind of family. Or maybe that won’t happen in this version of the story. I have to learn to accept what comes with an open heart.

Before he left this Earth, my father navigated Alzheimer’s for about six years with numerous falls, escapades, ditched cars, eating light bulbs, jumping back yard fences, and taking apart cable boxes at his nursing home. As I wade into a broader understanding of consciousness, I open up space in my heart for what was really happening with my dad and his glitching interface with what we understand as reality. 

Over the course of my research this past year I found a very interesting memoir written by Elmer Green of the former Menninger Clinic in Topeka, KS where my dad grew up. It’s called “The Ozawkie Book of the Dead: Alzhiemers Isn’t What We Think It Is” (PDF) and it is the story of how he cared for his wife Alyce, his research partner in biofeedback, during her journey through that illness. It involves the nature of the soul and interpenetrating realms and the process of learning and unlearning how to be in this space. 

I think I’m going to read it again, because as terribly traumatic as it was to see my strong, capable father engage with the world in ways that were so extreme and problematic and inscrutable, having a year’s perspective and new awareness of proto-consciousness and the unified field and emergent complexity, I can sit with the hard parts of the process and realize that maybe what my father’s struggles were doing was giving me a window to look through for the answers I seek. 

I was under the weather for about a week. It started with a vicious migraine and then some shooting nerve pain and gradually resolved into a typical cold. Let me tell you, it’s not fun to be feverish in Arkansas in August. Most of the month the daytime highs have lingered in the upper 90s. By the end of the week I was regrouping, less foggy headed, and I decided to take a hike to Balanced Rock and make a heart to honor Jerry Hawver’s life. The trail is on the other side of town. It’s only a three-mile walk, and the idea of balance seemed appropriate. A friend had sent a delightful care package with a hummingbird card and dried herbs from her garden in Arizona. I clipped the hummingbird and took out a selection of peppers to place in my wicker basket along with a heart trimmed from the collar of one of his shirts. It still smells of his aftershave.  

I drove past the bath houses downtown then parked my Subaru on the gravel pull out along Cedar Glades Road, quickly crossed the blind curve, and started the climb. The online reviews said that the first half mile took some effort. It was steep, sure, but the challenge was walking on loose scree. For years I never gave much thought to being particularly careful while I was out and about, because there were always at least two of us. Now, it’s just me. So I have to be watchful about taking a misstep and turning an ankle. I took things slowly and on my way up I picked up a chunk of Novaculite that seemed to have been worked into a hand sized cutting tool or scraper. Idly I ran my fingers over it as I pressed on through the dry, dusty woods. 

Where it leveled out, I paused for a moment and a wild red and black bug caught my eye. When I looked it up later, it turned out to be a velvet ant, a parasitic wasp species where the females are wingless. A minute later, I saw her partner flying down the trail. Fortunately I had the good sense to keep my distance, as I later found out their sting is many times worse than a hornet’s and they are commonly called “cow killers.” 

An interesting synchronicity is that in one of my early blog posts I warned about hybrid “personalized” learning being like a cicada killer. A cicada killer is a large wasp that frequented the garden where I worked. Its reproductive cycle involved capturing their chosen prey on the wing, paralyzing it, dragging it into an underground burrow, and then laying eggs on the body where the larvae would eat their way out. It was rather grotesque imagery, but it served to make a point. Well, turnabout is fair play, and evidently these velvet ants parasitize the pupae of cicada killers. Hmm.

Despite the dryness you could still find a few ferns, and where the side trail to Balanced Rock branched off there were some wild plums dropping onto the path. I gathered a few things en route to supplement what I’d been gifted and brought from home. Not long after I arrived at the outcropping – more loose scree, more careful steps. I managed to get far enough down the slope to fully appreciate the balance embodied by these two impressive boulders. 

Of course right as I got there, a couple arrived panting, and so we gave each other space. I pulled over to a little overlook in the shade and pulled out my basket of offerings. The arrangement of items in this particular heart is both loose and disordered while being vibrant and tactile. There are cracked nuts full of labyrinths, fractal turkey tail fungus, the first fall leaf offerings, and peppery spice. 

I think that would suit my dad just fine. By the end everything was coming apart, which is a difficult thing for Hawvers. Have I said before that Hawvers like to be in control and have a plan? Well, we do. And the last years of Jerry’s life were anything but that. At the time there was a heaviness about it, this uncontrollable fraying and sense of loss that would not be diverted, but a year later, perhaps I can reimagine it as a cocoon tearing apart the restricting expectations my dad must have felt to be a provider and a fixer and the rock for all of those years. To transition to a new form meant things were going to fall apart. How else is renewal possible?  In the looseness of MIA control systems there is the unrealized potential of a new blueprint and within the chaos, a kernel of what’s next.

I sat on that bit of bluff, and thanked my dad for all the things he provided for us. I can feel him giving me a big bear hug and me offering in return a big back scratch. I told him that I missed him deeply and thought of him every day. I also said that I knew he had been walking beside me, but that I was going to be ok, that if he felt held back in any way by me, he could go. I can just picture him high-fiving people all over heaven. I prayed that the creator would help me have the clarity to see the signs and find my purpose as I unfold into this new life. Then I packed up and headed back down the trail. 

The walk back was uneventful with one exception. Near the far end I paused before an unusual artifact, a rusted out wash basin hanging from a knot in a tree at eye level, almost where a shaving mirror would be. It had been galvanized, but the rust had gotten to it and the entire bottom was eroded away. I lifted it off the knot to examine it more closely. It wasn’t large, a bit wider than a typical dinner plate and about four inches deep with a narrow rim punctured in one spot where you could hang it from a nail. 

Now it wasn’t a totally bizarre addition to the landscape. You might find something like that tossed in a ravine out behind an old farmhouse. But there was no other debris around, no trash. I found it right along a trail on land that had been a national park for almost a century. It wasn’t tucked away in the brush; it was right in front of my face. It wasn’t a plastic bottle or even a face mask carelessly tossed trail side. No, this was a message for me, this wash basin, that if it weren’t for the rusted out bottom, would be right at home as part of a Cracker Barrel wall display.

Ok, so I had asked for the wisdom to notice the signs, but then what was I to make of this out-of-place, out-of-time basin? One story you might tell is one of obsolescence. When my life first fell apart during the lockdowns, that was the story I initially jumped into. 

Who am I now that I am no longer my child’s mother, my husband’s wife, my mother’s accomplished daughter? I was a basin whose design was to hold things for others. Basins don’t function alone, they contain things. For decades my identity had contained many things, big and small. From carpool schedules and family vacation plans, to dinner menus and school registration procedures, civic campaigns, etc. etc. My existence was to be a helpful presence. Then somehow I picked up some rust. Perhaps at that school report card meeting in the summer of 2013. Rust wore away at the old functionality of the basin. Interestingly rust interferes with magnetism in metal. So as the basin’s rust surface area increased, it became less polarized. I imagine that might represent a shift towards non-dualism. 

Was I meant to believe I was a failed basin? No, of course not. Because I believe in a benevolent creator that is loving and wants what is best for us. So the story I am choosing to tell myself about the basin is one that Alison Hawver might have imagined in third grade in Mrs. Nevius’s cardboard geodesic dome reading nook sitting on a carpet square. I am going to imagine that like the ugly duckling becoming a graceful swan, I have been a capable and trustworthy basin for many years, but slowly grew into a magical portal of imaginative potential, which given the state of the world right now, is a pretty awesome skill to have on offer. The twenty-first century needs some wiggle room for new possibilities to emerge, some fluidity to flex the boundaries of spacetime.

I’ve traded in the closed, hygienic system of wash basin culture for the jagged, unexpected potential of a back-to-nature, quantum vacuum, anti-mirror portal into proto-consciousness where we can dip in for messages from worlds with a better view than ours. A portal like the cottage hedge in the book “To Nowhere and Back” or the star watching rock from L’Engle’s Time Quintet that I read from at my father’s death bed.

Well, I’ve written all day, and the heat has finally broken with a gentle rain and a cool breeze here on the crystalline flank of Spa City. I hope you haven’t found this too self-indulgent or maudlin. There are lots of big feelings to navigate these days for all of us, and sometimes it’s useful to remember back to the times when all we had to do was make petal potions with our backyard buddies. If you quantum foam some interesting artifacts into your life, I’d love to hear about them and the story goes with that. Thanks for hanging out with me on this Labor Day weekend 2024. A toast to Jerry Hawver. I wouldn’t be who I am without him.