Last week I spent vacation time with Cohen, Tristan, and my brother, Dan, in a remote cabin near Ely, Minnesota. We had a good time even though the weather was cold with snowfall some of the time. Check out the trip photos on my photos page.
I am sitting here on the couch, missing church again. All of us woke up too late to get going in time. Sigh. That says something, I suppose, about the general state of my faith walk.
On the positive side, we had a good time visiting with my brother Dan in Milwaukee yesterday. We went to California Pizza Kitchen for lunch — the first time I’ve ever eaten there. I really enjoyed a — get this — pear and gorgonzola pizza. It was delicious! The rest of the afternoon was spent sitting idly and/or napping (one of my favorite pasttimes), and then I went to a nearby Pick ‘n Save to buy roast chicken, salad, challah bread and other stuff for a nice supper. We got home around 8:30p.
My brother, Dan, moved to Milwaukee a few days ago and started a new job there. He rented a nice house and invited us to come up and see it today. So we did. It was a beautiful day, nearly perfect weather. Most people who aren’t familiar with it think Milwaukee is a grimy, industrial-type of city. It used to be like that, I think, but these days it is really beautiful in places, especially along the lakefront. We loved Dan’s place and we also enjoyed eating lunch together at a nearby Mongolian barbeque restaurant. See a photo album of the trip here.
I haven’t posted anything in a great while and that’s a good thing. I just haven’t felt like writing anything. Now that it’s January 1, 2008, I felt I should write the first post of the new year.
So, what’s been happening in my life? Well, I’ve been enjoying the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. I had to work last week, which was dull. But I’m thankful to have had some time off anyway. We hosted Christmas Eve (which is when my family gives presents and does the usual Christmas-y things). It required a tremendous amount of work to make our house somewhat presentable given that it usually looks like a bomb has exploded. But we managed to pull it all together and we had a good time. Michele made a lovely meal, there was plenty of yummy things to munch on, and even some Bailey’s Irish Cream was on hand to enjoy. Christmas day was quiet and relaxed. We had a nice meal then, too, and sat around watching movies at my brother-in-law’s house.
This past few days were spent with my side of the family in east central Illinois. We hadn’t been there in several months — quite a long time. It was great to see everyone, including little Russel, my niece’s baby boy. My nephew Ben was with his cousins in Canada so we didn’t see him, and my brother, Dan, wasn’t feeling well so we missed seeing him, too. But everyone else was there. One of the fun things we did was to go on our first geocaching adventure using the GPS unit my brother-in-law gave me for Christmas. I looked up three geocaches in the area and we were able to find two out of the three. The children enjoyed it and in the process we were able to spend some healthy time tramping around in the outdoors finding lots of interesting things like a cecropia moth’s cocoon, and seeing a flock of pheasants (something the little kids had never seen before).
Of course we enjoyed giving and receiving lots of presents. The little kids each got some special things such as kiddie digital cameras, MP3 players, cute big fluffy animal slippers, and much more. Michele got an iPod nano — cool!
We are thankful for many blessings, including the opportunity to spend time with both sides of our families.
Last night was a bit more exciting than we wanted it to be. I was hanging curtain toppers in our family room while Brinley and Cohen played. Suddenly Brinley started crying and when I turned around to see what had happened, she was walking toward me, screaming, and as she opened her mouth, blood started pouring out. That was scary. I grabbed some paper towel, scooped her up, and rushed upstairs to the bathroom to clean her up and try to see what was wrong. Basically, she fell onto the corner of an ottoman and bit all the way through to the outside just above her chin. The outside looked like a regular screwdriver had pierced it but the inside was a much bigger and messier cut. Off to the emergency room we went. (Why does this kind of thing always have to happen to her? One of my life’s mysteries.)
She needed several stitches on the inside of her mouth and the outside puncture wound was glued shut. She handled the whole thing extremely well, impressing the nurse and doctor very much. For a kid who can be kind of a hypochondriac, she was a trooper.
As a father I now understand where my mother’s gray hairs came from. There were plenty of similar incidents in my family when I was growing up. One of them that stands out the most in my memory is when my brother, Dan, and I decided we would build a tree house down by the river near where we lived. We picked the biggest, tallest tree. Dan stayed on the ground gathering dead branches (!) to use for the floor while I climbed up the tree as high as I could go and made the floor with the branches Dan had gathered, lifting them up with a rope and pulley. After I had done this for a while I thought it might be time to test out the sturdiness of the floor I had made. I remember crawling out onto the floor and hearing a loud crack, then just blankness as I fell. My brother estimated afterward that I fell 30 ft. He said I hit the ground on my back and immediately bounced up as if I was a rubber ball or something. Fortunately I landed on a bit of dead wood branches and that probably saved me from broken bones or worse. I bounced up because among other things, I had had the wind knocked out of me and I couldn’t breathe. I remember being in a lot of pain.
Somehow we both got back to our house, about a mile away. I crawled up into my top bunk bed and just lay there groaning occasionally. I don’t remember if someone called my mother or if it was late afternoon and time for her to leave work anyway. But when she came home I promptly forgot my pain, or rather, it was overridden by fear from my mother’s wrath. Yes, she was extremely angry with me for what I had done. She made me take a bath — I could have been dying but I at least had to be clean before seeing a doctor! — and I remember her sitting in the bathroom telling me to scrub and get myself all clean. Then she took me to the nearest emergency room, about 20 miles away. I was extremely fortunate because I had no broken bones and no internal bleeding or anything like that. I think I had a bruised spleen and/or kidneys or something like that, but basically I was one big, walking bruise from head to foot, and I remember not being able to move much without pain for at least a few days.
Looking back on the incident, I realize just how lucky I was. I also realize that the source of my mother’s wrath was probably fear; fear that I was seriously hurt or fear of what might have been. Anyway, I was surprised to get an email from her this a.m. pointing to a blog post by a mother whose little girl fell a similar distance from a tree in her backyard and who was seriously injured. My mother said it reminded her of that long ago time that I have just described.
I’ve never participated in a meme before, but I kinda like the one I just found in a very serendipitous way on a blog named Bella Dia. (This is a blog I have to tell Michele about, if she doesn’t know about it already. Michele is a blog-reading fiend when it comes to blogs like Bella Dia that feature craft-related content.)
This meme is called “The Encyclopedia of Me” and the idea behind it is to create twenty six posts, one for each letter of the alphabet. Each letter will represent a topic that explains a bit about who I am, my interests, my life. Bella Dia suggests that this be done over the course of the month of August; I’m not sure I want to follow that timeframe. Instead, I think I’ll add new posts at random intervals over the next few months.
I know, I know: This kind of thing is exactly what blog critics think blogs are all about: a bunch of people just blabbing about themselves and who cares? If you don’t care, don’t read it. No skin off my nose.
Most of my life I’ve been anxious about one thing or another. One of my favorite Bible verses is Philippians 4:6 which says:
Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.
Why am I anxious? I suppose at the core of it, I lack faith in God. Anxiety is a form of unbelief. I realize this. If I truly believed that He has the whole world in His hands, I’d realize that there is nothing to worry about. If I only tried harder when faced with another crisis or problem, to remember all of those past times when He has brought me through completely and safely, I wouldn’t struggle so much with anxiety.
There are other reasons for this tendency. There were a lot of anxious times in our family when I was growing up. Sometimes we had a lot of money, but most of the time we didn’t. There were many times when we couldn’t be sure that we’d continue to have a place to live due to financial troubles. Anxiety was generated by my father’s long addiction to alcohol and all of the issues and events surrounding that. There were many arguments in our household that I still remember quite vividly. Lots of loud shouting, crying, verbal warfare with words as weapons. There were physical conflicts as well, but not as much. I still remember my two oldest brothers fighting on the front lawn of our house, rolling around on the ground, throwing punches and so forth, and being absolutely convinced that they were going to kill each other. My brother Dan and I shared a room most of our growing up years and we almost always got along, but we did occasionally have fights, too. One time, for some really silly reason that I can’t remember, we began a fight. I remember Dan coming after me to punch me in the face. He swung really hard with his right fist and I ducked just in time, with the result that his fist hit the edge of our dresser, breaking his hand. Ironically we learned that the break was called a boxer’s break after he was taken to the emergency room and had it looked at. Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention that the reason he was coming after me to punch me was that I had just thrown a D cell battery as hard as I could at him, hitting him in the chest. He was so angry and full of adrenaline that he didn’t even feel it.
I am anxious also because I’ve failed a lot of times. Fear of failure can be a strong force keeping you from doing new things, trying to go in new directions.
And part of the anxiety I’ve known all my life is no doubt related to some of the larger events that played out in the church group to which I belonged. I’ve mentioned before that 1970 was a watershed year in which many events occurred that shaped how and where I was raised, the people and family I knew or didn’t know, etc. There were other splits among the brethren after that. Looking back, it seems to me that there was often the need to identify which side we were on, and this caused some memorable conflicts, hard feelings, and yes, anxiety.
Hopefully the next post in this meme, for the letter B, will be much more positive!
You know how some people seem to enjoy periodically rearranging furniture in their homes? (Jeff, one of my older brothers, used to do this a lot with his bedroom. My brother Dan and I shared a room at the time, and we even let him rearrange ours once in a while just for the fun of it.) Well, I seem to do the same thing with this blog every once in a while. Here are the latest changes:
The Publications page is the biggest change. I decided that it might be a good idea to track down everything I’ve had a hand in publishing and maintain it in Zotero. Once I did that, I thought, Why not just present it on a page in WordPress? Then once I did that, I thought, Hey, here’s a great way to use COinS! So I have COinS-ized that page. The list of my publications is a lot longer than I thought and looks a bit more impressive than it really should. It actually includes writeups of several NASIG presentations I gave plus some short pathfinders I compiled while a grad student in the Latin American library at UIUC. That was a long time ago!
The year 1970 is permanently engraved in my memory. Lots of things happened that year that irrevocably changed my family and those things still have an impact on me today.
In July 1970 I had my third birthday.
That same year, my paternal grandfather, Grandpa Oberg, died. I don’t remember him unfortunately, but I have particular memories of his death, such as seeing him in a casket in the dining room of the house belonging to my Uncle Laverne and Aunt Harriett Oberg, my father’s older brother and his wife. People, mostly relatives, were standing around in groups, many of them crying. Then there was the graveyard and the gravesite where he was buried. If my memory is correct, it was a sunny day and my brother, Dan, and I ran around a bit, and I particularly remember looking down into the big black hole into which my grandpa’s casket was to be laid. In my memory, my mother had made us black suits with matching jackets and shorts with a white shirt underneath. (Interestingly, a few years ago when my Uncle Laverne died, I drove out to Nebraska to attend his funeral along with some other family members. My uncle was buried in the same graveyard as my grandpa. The graveyard was definitely familiar to me even after more than 30 years had passed since my Grandpa Oberg’s funeral. My brothers and I decided to look for his grave and I was the first one to find it. That whole, short visit to Gothenburg, Nebraska, was like a series of flashbacks to memories long suppressed.)
In 1970 the church group my family belonged to suffered a huge split over revelations of immorality, or at least, ‘inappropriate conduct,’ of what they then termed the ‘universal leader,’ a man from New York named James Taylor, Jr. (a.k.a. JT Jr.). My maternal grandfather, Stanley McCallum, was involved in uncovering the ‘inappropriate conduct’ and was therefore near the center of the whole controversy. People in this church group (generically known as Exclusive Brethren) split over who believed which side of the story. This affected people all over the world, splitting families, pitting children against parents, husbands against wives, friends against each other. Two of my grandpa’s own sons refused to believe him and actively worked to discredit him and support JT Jr. (and still do to this day). I have no memory of Uncle David and Uncle Garth and I know next to nothing about their children or grandchildren, my cousins, except for one who left that group about eight years ago. I know of situations beyond count where separations were forced by JT Jr. supporters, e.g. children were taken away from their parents by relatives, in some cases, never to be seen again. I know of husbands whose wives and kids stayed with the JT Jr. camp and spent the rest of their lives living alone and never recovering from the pain of separation. My grandpa and grandma never recovered from this, either.
Partly due to this split, my parents decided in 1970 to sell their farm in Nebraska and move in with my maternal grandparents in Detroit. I well remember living in the basement of my grandparents’ home for several months, then moving into a nearby house, where we lived for the next year and a half or so before moving to east central Illinois where I spent most of my growing up years. Lots of dramatic and difficult experiences punctuated that 18 month stay in Detroit but I won’t go into them here. My grandma died in 1982 and my grandpa in 1987. After their death when going through some of their papers I remember coming across my grandma’s diaries in which she documented some of the anguish, loss, and depression they felt as a result of the 1970 split.
For me the events of 1970 became almost legendary, serving as a backdrop to just about everything and everybody I knew. And there were many more splits after that. I no longer think that one side was entirely evil and one was entirely good. I do know, however, that the legacy of this JT Jr. guy is still very prevalent today, especially in Australia and New Zealand where the latest ‘universal leader’ is a Sydney business man named Bruce Hales. These people have received a lot of media scrutiny over their political machinations in that part of the world and elsewhere. It was pretty freaky for me to read about and then see a few videos on Google Video documenting what’s been going on. Fortunately I haven’t had much interaction with these people, although my sister Becky and her husband, Martin, have. Martin has many siblings who are in that group and they have been involved in legal proceedings about custody battles and such between parents and children who are part of this sect and those who aren’t. Both times I traveled to New Zealand, I saw members of this sect (a.k.a. Peebs, Exclusives, The Brethren, PBs, etc.) everywhere, and all of the people I knew there were tragically affected in some way or another. I well remember going to a small town in the north of the South Island called Motueka where there is a meeting of about 200 members, a big population of Peebs in such a small town. As soon as we arrived in town, our arrival was noted by these people and we were watched during our stay. My brother-in-law’s father and I would walk down one side of the main street, and notice some of these people coming toward us on the same side of the street. As soon as they noticed us, they crossed over to the other side of the street so as not to come in contact.
I am very thankful to have not been raised in that group, that my parents raised me and my siblings in a better environment, even though that environment was heavily influenced by, and contained a lot of legacies from, the JT Jr. era such as alcoholism. I’ve glossed over most of the darker elements to the story because I don’t think they need to be gone over yet again and also because I still don’t have a complete understanding of it all. And I don’t really want to anymore.
So…There you have it. 1970 was quite a year.
I’ve finally dipped my toes into a couple of much-hyped social web services: MySpace, and Skype. Actually I’ve had a MySpace account for several months but haven’t really used it because, frankly, I have little use for what seems like a service that recreates the high school cliques experience in an online format. Now that I have managed to configure my account in a way that’s more to my liking, plus now that I’ve found that not everyone using this service is a party-animal-obsessed teenager or college student, I may make more use of it. We’ll see.
I’m much more impressed with Skype. I know, I know, that’s been around for forever. I just hadn’t investigated it before. Even I can get techno-overload, you know 
Anyway, after a student in my class mentioned that he uses it, I decided to give it a try. As I already stated, it is impressive. I’ve managed to call land line phones with little problem and have also used it to talk with my brother, Dan. It’s far from perfect in terms of sound quality and clarity but hey, it’s free! I am particularly thinking of using it to talk with my sister and her family in New Zealand. Using Skype, that phone conversation would only cost $.02 per minute, which is incredible. When we move to our new house (hopefully next week some time — we were supposed to have moved already by now but that’s a long story for another time…) we may not request land line phone service. Instead we may rely on our cell phones plus Skype.
If you read this blog and use either or both of these services, contact me and I’d be happy to add you into my list of contacts!
We had a lot of fun this weekend, thanks in large part to a visit by my brother, Dan. He suggested we go out to eat at a restaurant Thursday night, and he also came over and made supper Friday night while Michele and the kids were at my in-laws. We watched a bit of Les Misérables as well as Chicken Little. Saturday morning he joined us for a trip to Brookfield Zoo, buying us a family pass for the year. We had a great time, and the weather was perfect: sunny, breezy, and warm. This photo shows an underwater view of one of the dolphins in Brookfield Zoo’s Seven Seas exhibit. Lots more photos are available from the trip.