The Peripatetic Philosopher on:

California Dreaming

Part One: Family!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© June 26, 2015

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way"

Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), first line in his novel “Anna Karenina” (1877) also author of "War and Peace” (1869).

“There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children.  One of these is roots, the other, wings.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1742-1832), poet, dramatist, philosopher, novelist and author of “Faust” (1808) and “The Sorrows of Young Werther" (1774).

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On Thursday, June 18, we left for California to visit my sister, Janice Fisher Ewing, whom I had not seen since 1987 when she and my other sister, Pat, visited Betty and I in Brussels, Belgium where I was working for Honeywell Europe Ltd. at Honeywell’s European Headquarters as Director of Human Resources Planning and Development.

Janice is nine years younger than I am but has suffered ill health for several years.  She and Betty became fast friends when she visited us in Europe, traveling with my sister Pat throughout Europe with Betty as their guide.

David and Janice Ewing live in the desert in a place called “Hemet,” an oasis of a place of 78,000 of pristine homes of hardy construction, tiled roofs, rock gardens instead of lawns and surrounded in gray brown mountains absent of vegetation and cloudless skies with temperatures that range from 104 to 112 degrees Fahrenheit during the day, but cool off to a comfortable 77 degrees after sundown.

There is a noticeable absence also of flies and mosquitoes, as well as the cockroaches that are so familiar to us in Florida. 

It is a dry heat and surprisingly bearable during the day as long as you are sufficiently hydrated. 

The city of Hemet is clean and orderly as the lives of those in residence are as likely as well to be so, which brings me to the subject of the family in this initial installment of this adventure. 

When I was consulting in the 1970s, while pursuing my Ph.D. in industrial/organizational psychology, on the East Coast (Connecticut to Miami), it was mainly police departments in matters of organizational development or “OD.”  It was the era of “Law & Order” in the United States initiated by President Richard Nixon.

But in matters of executive development, I conducted seminars in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver and Dallas for senior managers and executives many times during this same period. 

So, as you might suspect, I was on the road a good part of the time while managing my studies at the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida.

It should also be noted that I was an absent father to my four growing children even when home, as I was most likely involved in researching or writing a paper for one of my courses, not to mention eventually writing a master’s thesis and doctorate dissertation, both of which turned out to be books, each taking the better part of a year. 

Fortunately, my police consulting work became the laboratory for both scholarly documents. 

FAMILY IN PERSPECTIVE

Being nine years older than my sister, Janice, I was through university before she was out of grammar school at St. Patrick’s.  As illustrated in my memoir written as a novel, “In the Shadow of the Courthouse,” my da was a yeller.  

He yelled at home because he was frustrated as a worker, having quit school after the seventh grade, largely because he was a ward of his extended family, that is, relatives who encouraged him to move on.  His mother had died when he was born, and his da had taken off never to be heard from again. 

It was this inauspicious beginning that lay the destiny of my sister, Janice, to be the only sibling present as my da’s health deteriorated, while the yelling intensified.  He would die at the age of 50 from multiple myeloma.

He had yelled at me much more than my other three siblings, but I considered it dissonant noise of no importance, but not my sister, Janice.  She absorbed this noise as a poison with no available antidote. 

Thus developed an unhappy situation, a father with little education or language to articulate in his own defense in the world of work, taking that frustration home and out on his family, especially Janice, a beautiful child who would grow into a beautiful woman.  She would carry the dread of this abusive disposition into her adult life, ultimately in my view contributing to her failing health.

We were looking forward to seeing Janice, and David Ewing, her husband of more than thirty years, who has a touching story of his own which I will share shortly.

My sister Janice had two lovely children, Danny and Suzanne Schall who are now adults with children of their own.  Suzanne lives in northern California some 500 miles from Hemet and planned to come but broke her the patella of kneecap  in a fall with her daughter. 

Danny, whom I haven’t seen since he was a boy, is a handsome man of fifty.  He and his wife, Michelle, have two inspiring children in Elyssa and Ryan, 19 and 21, both college students. 

To give you a sense of our itinerary, we landed in Los Angeles on June 18, and stayed in a hotel near the airport to adjust to jet lag, and then motored out to Hemet in the afternoon of June 19. 

To say that it was emotional to see my sister, Janice, after 28 years, is to put it mildly.  She is just as beautiful as ever, but fragile and has difficulty coming up with words trapped reluctantly in her memory since her stroke.

Remarkably, after three days of constant engagement with me bombarding her mind with memories of our youth, she found those trapped words and lucidly expressed herself. 

I am an industrial psychologist, not a clinical psychologist, but I firmly believe that psychology creates terminology that does not relieve but contributes to stereotypical assessments of a person’s capability once hit by such a malady as a stroke.    

"DINNER WITH ANDRE" HAS NOTHING ON US!

“My Dinner with Andre” (1981) was a film starring Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn, depicting a conversation between Gregory and Shawn at Café des Artistes.  Their conversation covered such topics as experimental theatre, the nature of theatre, and the nature of life, contrasting Shawn's modest, down-to-earth humanism with Gregory's extravagant spiritual experiences.

You might say the conversation between David Ewing, Danny and Michele Schall and beautiful millennial Alyssa Schall with Betty and Me had aspects that might be seen to resemble that of Gregory and Shawn.

David Ewing, well read and a perspicacious student of a universe of subjects, spent twelve years studying at university, completing the course work in analytical philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, one of the most prestigious graduate universities in the world in philosophy as well as many other disciplines, has however failed ever to write his dissertation.

Danny Schall, a college graduate, with an extensive and colorful entrepreneur resume, is affable with a ready wit and quick repartee especially to those generated by me, his uncle Jim.

Michele Schall, a college graduate with a graduate education, is a school teacher, and consistent with my own experience, a strict Roman Catholic upbringing with the scars to prove it.  She has well developed views based on a wide range of subjects and is quick to challenge if what is proffered is inconsistent with her experience. 

Elyssa Schall, soon to be a college sophomore, remained quiet until brought into the conversation by David Ewing for her reaction to my blunt declaration that the family was dead but not yet buried and that millennials were moving beyond social and cultural norms.  Always serene, diplomatic and respectful of the adults in the room, she personified for me the confidence and competence of this newest generation.

You might say the conversation, which went on for four hours, varied from earthy humanism to spiritual fatalism.    

To wit, David Ewing reacted rather vociferously to my description of analytical philosophy as little more than “BS,” as I found it as well as many other American systems of philosophy as incomprehensible.  

He countered by noting that I often quote Eric Hoffer in my works, the self-educated longshoreman and pragmatic philosopher, as being “given no respect by academia or Berkeley’s philosophy department.”

Hoffer, I offered, focused on behavior in mass movements with pragmatic and useful insights that have proven beneficial to me, consistent with the pragmatic philosophy of William James, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.  

He quickly reminded me that Emerson was a poet and essayist and not a philosopher, and so that subject went on and on.  There was no point in arguing on Emerson's transcendentalism which was a philosophy of the spirit with a short life.   

Michele had many useful remarks about what it was like to be an educator today in the public school system, while Betty had useful comments to make about student costs, conduct and administration in a private school.

Consistent with my essays, my comments often centered on language, on explosive words that had much to do with success or failure, happiness or sorrow, love or hate.

Such words as “focus” and “attention” and the behavior behind the words to generate the able learner.  The word “confident” and how critical that word is in dealing with the bullying tactics of authority figures at every level in every discipline and function in society.

The word “consequence” now fails to embarrass or demand atonement for untoward behavior, and of course there are the political words of "power" and "race," which are manipulated to blur actual issues.   

Many subjects such as abortion, Catholicism, mental and physical health were discussed openly, including the importance of confidence, and why it is so sullied.  

FACEBOOK "FATHER'S DAY" TRIBUTE

As readers who have read “In the Shadow of the Courthouse” (2003) know, I had a problem with my da.  My eldest son has had a problem with me.  This is no new experience.  Winston Churchill had a problem with his son, and his son with his celebrated father. 

Robert, my eldest son, is a doting parent and hard-working tennis professional and more like his father in his drive and personality than he would perhaps ever like to admit. 

In this four hour session, we discussed the common blood of family and how, though separated by 3,000 miles, and having not seen each other for more than a score of years, Danny resembles my da in looks and me in his personality.

Danny is gregarious and an extrovert while I am neither but our approach is consistently similar: that is, it is easier to ask forgiveness than permission to do the outrageous.

The resemblance is how we look at life and engage it, embracing our fears and using our Irish bravado to bluster our way forward whatever the challenge. 

While my son, Robert, has that same persona that same Irish gusto, only his approach is to novelize experience turning reality into engaging mythology, or is it the other way around? 

On Monday morning, June 22, after Sunday was “Father’s Day,” a message was posted by my son on Facebook that went viral on line.   

Anyone who creates viral content is likely – I’ve learned – to find the content takes on a life of its own after appearing on Facebook.

Perhaps Robert knows the secret formula to viral power online, or was it viral by accident?   I don’t know because I don’t follow Facebook or any other social media network much less tweet or text.

That  said I was surprised when hearing in California that he claimed that I had been a catcher for the Chicago Cubs.  

Now, I am a big Chicago Cubs fan, and in my youth, I was, indeed, offered a “class D” contract to play baseball for the Chicago Cubs in its farm system.  I opted instead to attend university.

In the 1950s, the minor leagues in support of Major League Baseball included class “D” and “C” and “B” and “A” and “AA” and “AAA” minor league baseball teams as stepping stones to the Big Leagues.  In other words, I would have been six stepping stones short of catching for the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field in Chicago. 

My beautiful Betty asked me if I felt embarrassed with this claim.

“No,” I replied, “I feel the same Irish blood runs through my son's veins as it does his father’s.” 

With the Irish, mythology and reality have a common ancestry.  It is the nature of the race and the reason it survives to this day as a poetic conundrum.

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