My mother took this picture about one year before she died.
The odor of hog manure remindes me of my father.
I remember once, very young, before my mother died, of sitting with my younger sisters on the porch swing and hearing a frightful noise in our garage.
“What’s that?” one sister asks.
“Daddy.” I say. “I can smell him.”
Dad laughed, giving himself away.
He really had meant to spook us kids, and was surprised himself, that his occupational scent had betrayed him.
Dad is a neat dresser.
If you know me then understand that my father is not like me. The garden mud and dirt I carry on shoes and clothes, into public places, I consider a sort of public reminder of the physical human work required to grow food that people eat, a fertile growing medium into which culturally disconnected lives can find root to substance and meaning, my body serves as more than a walking educational billboard and odorama for what I faithfully sell in the shape of fruits and vegetables as honest labor. I consider my appearance and smell, a deliberate, easy, “in your face” type of public awareness service.
But then I raise fruits and vegetables. My dad raised hogs and cattle.
And my Dad is neat. As a younger man, dashing, today: still handsome - in my view.
As I grew up, Dad and his older brother, Uncle John, were partners in a cattle and hog farm operation in the slightly eastern center of Kansas. About half the land they farm is native pastures, the rest farmed in wheat and milo. Though the partnership was dissolved and land divided between them after I left home, the land is still farmed by them, plus two cousins, my sister and and their families.
All of us third generation Americans were raised within 2 miles of the original farmstead my Great Grandfather bought shortly after immigrating from Germany at the age of 20.
Great Grandpa Roth was a German draft dodger. He began partying a week before his report date. He was in such bad shape by the time he got to the induction center they sent him home for a week to recover.
He and his girlfriend and future wife took the opportunity to get on a boat instead, and follow the 10 year old trail of his older sister to the very heartland of America, Clay Center, Kansas - to be exact.
Canes were popular weapons then, and cane fights common. When the two young people finally stepped off the train in Clay Center in August of 1883 Great Grandpa Roth clutched his cane, ready to fight off wild indians, so I am told.
I see my Great Grandparents standing there, cane in hand, strangers in a very strange land. Though the hills deceptively resembled those they had grown up in, the country was different. They would not have known about the great wars to come against their motherland, could not have forseen Prohibition, the Dust Bowl or the Great Depression. Probably did not know they stood near the very center of this new nation, in the center of what would be called the Bible Belt, in the center of what would be learned to be the tornado belt. The country's lessons would be often harsh and involve generations.
Trying to figure out who I am I have found myself trying to figure out who they were, expecially this man , and how came this distance of me from him.
Looking back, it seems to me, Great Grandpa John Roth was a deliberate, hardworking man who liked wine. He liked smoke. He was a strict disiplinarian, sometimes subject to temper and foul German language.
He ruled his household more by fear than by affection, and judged the success of his life by the land he came to own and farm, the force and habit of his religious practice, and the seven children he raised. More or less in that order.
And as his children tell it, he softened in his old age, maybe I think reversing that order.
My Great Grandfather's fine children embraced his religion as resolutely as they rejected his personal habits and pleasures.
He died at the age of 84, 4 years and 15 days before I was born.
I was born into a world surrounded by his youngest son's children, my father and my aunt and two uncles, who all (including Grandpa) grew up, married, settled down and raised us children; me - my 4 sisters - and a slew of cousins, within 3 miles of the origional home/farmstead he bought 5 miles from the small town of Green, Kansas. Land about 12 miles from where Great Grandpa and Grandma first stepped off that train.
In the years of my growing up I never heard any of their children or grand children utter a foul word, saw any of them sip a taste of alcohol, or smoke. As a child I came to understand that for me to do so would be for me to personally insult God.
Though it would be a sin to think I was not damned already, to curse, drink or smoke would make it so, even in their minds' eyes. (Like perhaps they see the unspeakable faults of my Great Grandpa Roth.) Though today, generally, I have grown grateful for the distance such ingrained education places between me, and drink and smoke, I was in my early 20's, in psycho-scream therapy and 1500 miles away from that home place when I finally came to experience the power of saying the unspeakable names of God.
They came out of my mouth as sacred revelation, four letter words as divine lightning. Words preceded, preordained, and dwarfed by the locomotive power of personal release, deep, heart wrenching truth.
I have wondered since of the power of words, imagining the terror, awe and wonder of the first humanoids to contemplate SAYING. It is divine and dangerous work.
When God brought the animals to Adam to be named, Adam must have shaken with terror, for he must have felt that to call out the wrong name tugs the very plug of Creation and saws the thread of his own existence.
He has to understand that all SAYING, all words, are names for different aspects of God. To SAY incorrectly calls out the wrong aspect of God, causing cosmic short circuit and meltdown. To SAY incorrectly is sin.
Somehow I make the connection that classic tragedy is always dependent on an unspoken, unacknowledged truth.
Redemption depends on speaking and acknowledging truth, doing what is forbidden, what puts you most at risk, before it is too late. I had looked deep into the mirror and examined my Methusulah's face and survived my unspeakable truths.
And because I did this think, I believed there was a wall between me and my family.
When I was 43 years old I found out that my Grandmother, mother of my father, died in a mental institution, "Kansas State Hospital."
Unlike the revelations that came in therapy, this one came easy, and the insight it gave to my past was just as powerful. I understood my family more than I had.
I know nothing of the causes particular: biological, psychological, medical, social, etc., that contributed to her illness, nor the circumstances surrounding her illness or death - though I have tried to imagine them and hope to learn more someday.
I had thought that my open mental angst and psycho-bleating (and healing) was a fault that put a distance between me and all of them, a distance I did not want. But to discover my Grand Mother's anguish, and her children's - at last - was a gift. I saw that what I thought kept me apart - placed me to the heart of my family.
This was the gift my Grandmother gave me with her suffering, and I claim it gladly, for it places me where I want and chose to be.
The smell of hog manure reminds me of my father. And so, is a pleasant reminder.
