1. Today memories of the spring and summer of the year 2000 suddenly rose up and occupied my thoughts. Starting in late March through early June of that year, I was on the only sabbatical leave I ever had during my teaching career. I'd proposed a project involving researching Richard Hugo in Seattle, but those plans got waylaid when I contracted bacterial meningitis in the November of 1999 and by my mother being diagnosed with breast cancer around the same time my sabbatical began.
Some time in early 2000, Debbie's brother, Brian, sent me a copy of Jon Krakauer's Mt. Everest book, Into Thin Air. Without going into a lot of detail, suffice it to say that Krakauer's book, to me, was a story about what things look like on the edge, when living on the fine line between life and death.
Consequently, I changed the focus of my sabbatical, rode a Greyhound bus to Kellogg to be with Mom, and read book after book about living on the edge and of people who live by extremist beliefs. I jumped right into Krakauer's Into the Wild. I read more books about mountain climbing, books about Antarctic exploration, the Charles Manson family, true crime books, the OJ Simpson trial, and more.
(By the way, my sabbatical reading led to my starting the Copia Lecture series in Eugene and I kicked off the series with a lecture that grew out of those months of study. The lecture series lasted about two and half or three years. In the fall of 2004, primarily because of my struggles with fatigue and depression, I decided to terminate the series.)
I bring this up because I realized today that without really thinking about it, I've returned in the last month to the kind of study I did on my sabbatical through podcasts, documentary films, and books.
I've mentioned podcasts and documentaries along these lines in recent posts. Right now I'm reading Leah Sottile's book When the Moon Turns Blood. In it, Sottile tells the story of Lori Vallow and Chad Daybed, accused of having killed Vallow's children, JJ Vallow and Tyler Ryan. They haven't gone to trial yet.
To put this story in an historical and religious context, Sottile explores the history of the Church of Latter Day Saints and, more specifically, individuals and their followers who have splintered away from the mainstream church and embraced more extreme views, especially of the end times and the return to earth of Jesus Christ.
Some of what Sottile writes about splinter groups is familiar to me because about 15-20 years ago I read Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven, a deeply disturbing book about the murder of Brenda Lafferty and her infant daughter, Erica. Brenda's two brothers-in-law, both adherents to extremist LDS ideologies, committed the murders in the name of God. Krakauer devotes a good chunk of his book to writing about his research into the history of the Church of Latter Day Saints and fundamentalist communities guided by extremist ideologies.
I won't stop with this Sottile's book. It really does feel like I'm back on that sabbatical leave again.
2. Debbie was fried this evening after having dental work done this afternoon. After we ate some leftover spaghetti and sauce from Tuesday night, we decided not to watch television but listen to podcasts.
We listened to two episodes of Throughline, an NPR podcast.
The first featured a three member panel composed of Ann Applebaum, Malcolm Nance, and Peniel Joseph. The podcast's moderators posed questions to the panel about polarization in the USA, the increase of people drawn to authoritarian/autocratic governance, extremism, and whether the USA is headed to some kind of Civil War.
3. That podcast was fascinating, but it was draining listening to an hour of this discussion.
So, we changed gears a bit and listened to a Throughline episode digging into the history of the board game Monopoly.
Hearing the Monopoly origin story and controversy surrounding where it came from was fascinating, as was learning more about the game's popularity and its significance as a cultural artifact.
About half way through the episode, I realized that not many degrees of separation existed between the episode's storyteller, Mary Pilon, and me.
Her name rang a faint bell when she introduced herself and the bell rang a little louder as the episode continued.
I suddenly thought, "I think Mary Pilon is from Eugene!"
I was right, as confirmed by a quick look at her bio.
Then I slowly figured out that her dad, Myron Pilon, worked as a Horace Mann insurance agent and I worked with him for several years, starting with the purchase of the house at 940 Madison. Mary's mother, Carol Morse, was also familiar to me for her work at LCC in the counseling department and with a program called The Saturday Circus.
None of this means much. After all, Mary Pilon wouldn't know me from Adam or Eve, but I liked working with her dad. I vaguely remembered when Mary Pilon wrote as a Churchill High School student for the local paper, The Register Guard. We never crossed paths.
But, I admit, this podcast episode meant a bit more to me, thanks to this small connection, than all of the episodes I've listened to where the degrees of separation between me and podcasters are more numerous.
Now I must read Mary Pilon's book: The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World's Favorite Board Game.
No comments:
Post a Comment