Suffer the children

Yesterday would have ticked off my mom.

She eventually left the Catholic Church, upset with its history of treatment toward native cultures, especially toward native Americans. Or so I gathered: It was yet one more family matter I learned indirectly.

Wednesday's canonization of Fr. Junipero Serra, founder of the California mission system, would have outraged her. Pope Francis elevated Serra to sainthood on his trip to the United States.

I share her anger, failing in my misplaced righteousness to comprehend this gesture, built on a pyre of reed-thin apologies.

I have heard from Catholic authorities that Serra deserves sainthood for the greater good of bringing the Gospel to the Chumash and Cahuilla and Ohlone and other native California cultures. Never mind supplanting hundreds of years of these cultures own beliefs and rituals. Never mind that the missions who gathered/captured native people under the authority of the Church forbade them to practice their own cultures. Some cultures even today carry the names given by the mission system — identified as mission bands, as Gabrieleños, Luiseños, Diegueños, as Serranos.

Never mind that native people were decimated under mission "care," from mistreatment and displacement and disease.

I have heard from Church authorities that Serra protected the gathered/captured from the brutal might of Spanish soldiers who helped carry out the grand plan of missions up the coast of California. Never mind that the Church was the law of this grand plan, and Serra allowed beatings and abuse of his neophytes (gathered/captured) in demanding obeisance to Church authority. Never mind that they were forced to stay and work at the missions.

I have heard it was a different time, that should be judged within context. I have heard that soldiers were whipped for their transgressions too, no different than for the native people forced to live at the mission.

My knowledge of saints is limited, but I can't think of any whose life comprised allowing others to be beaten and abused into submission. My personal sainthood meter would not include that as criteria.

A new explanation for Serra's sainthood surfaced this week — that it's an acknowledgement to Latinos of their culture's long history in what is the United States, an acknowledgement of Latino growth in the U.S. Catholic Church.

If that's so — if it's a political parlay — I feel sorry for Latinos given this burnt offering, this legacy of conquest as validation; and for native Americans, sloughed aside, not mattering now as they didn't matter then, screwed once more.

I read this week that as a result of Fr. Serra's canonization, Catholic schoolchildren in California will study a more nuanced story of the Mission Indians — that was the term used — and their hardships.

Too small consolation.

I grew up a couple of miles from Mission La Purísima, now a pastoral state park. Fr. Serra had died before this mission was founded, and Purísima was run by Fr. Fermin Lasuén, serving for a few years as the system's mission control. It's a beautiful, peaceful mission, stately sunbaked adobe buildings and cool gardens with stone fountains shaded by olive trees.

To be there is to forget that it was a prison enforced by the Word of God. The Chumash reed and bamboo homes are off to one end of the mission grounds, a token few; they must be rebuilt every once in a while.

In our home are a couple of pieces of furniture that one might describe as Mission Style. That's the legacy of the missions: We have adopted architectural touches as our own, reflecting a romanticized time that never really was.

My mom had an affinity for native cultures that, despite her eloquence, she never really articulated to us. She loved looking at Indian basketry in museums, a love lost on her children until we became her age. She liked having grown up in Washburn, North Dakota, near where Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery wintered at the Mandan village on the Missouri River 210 years ago.

Their traces are almost gone now, pushed aside, put in a museum, compartmentalized, as has befallen native cultures across this country. Everything I do, everywhere I go — almost all that we are as Americans — came about by the pushing aside, the wiping out of people before me, by my father's father's fathers, and mother's mother's mothers, to get their land and impose our own cultures, by whip and pox and foreign authority.

In California, the missions still stand as monuments, some as parks, some as active churches, refurbished and generously placarded. We regard their bucolic grandeur, and think how that lantern would make a great sconce over the garage.

To the victor, as always, has gone the spoils.

Pope Francis made it official and holy.

What would Jesus do, indeed.

One Tin Soldier*

Lost on the list of celebrity deaths the last few days is Tom Laughlin, who could have put my hometown on the map.

But didn't.

Quick sketch of The Master Gunfighter Scene That Would Never End.

I was startled to see Laughlin was 82 when he died. Peter O'Toole passed away at 81, but we watched him grow old, leveraging his age and reputation in roles perfect for him.

Laughlin disappeared from my view over the decades, so he'll always be the young man, gliding like a boxer, dressed like a charro in a giant black sombrero and matching embroidered and spangled coat, who gave me his autograph, a smile and a few kind encouraging words one day in 1975.

"See my Billy Jack movies?" he might have asked.

"No," I probably said.

"That's all right. Come see this one," he might have replied. Or something like that.

Laughlin was famous at the time as Billy Jack, a vigilante character he created and spun into four movies that built a cult following. He was Chuck Norris before Chuck Norris was God, a proto-Rambo. Billy Jack was an outsider, a Vietnam veteran, expert in the martial arts, half white, half Navajo, ostracized, pilloried, shamed. You could only push him so far before he wiped the floor clean with the bad guys, busting them up with a flying kick to their lumpy bad-guy jaws.

Billy Jack preached peace by beating the hell out of people. Or so I gather. My parents wouldn't let me see the movies. I could listen to the hit song, though, the anti-war hit "One Tin Soldier," from one of the movies.

Laughlin parleyed his success as Billy Jack to write and produce The Master Gunfighter. A major motion picture, being shot right here in Lompoc! That's how I remember the hype, and we all bought it because my whole family went down to Mission La Purísima to see the filming. We might even have walked the three miles, enjoying the benefit of living just across the chaparral bluff above the mission.

The whole town seemed to be there. The half who weren't hired as extras stood behind rope barriers to watch them.

Two keen memories remain:

• For the first time, that old mission came to life. We walked there a lot, and it's a fun hike to a rare place, but the mission was just a bunch of old buildings to me as a little kid. Some of the rooms of the mission were fitted out with the tools of the mission trade — a loom, a leather tanning shop, a tallow works, the soldiers' quarters — but they were caged off, the captive tools just sitting there in the semi-darkness, dusty, unused, dead, smelling of bad breath.
  
  This movie restarted the mission's heart. Dozens of people stood in costumes like statues until a distant voice from a megaphone shouted, "Rolling … and action!" and the people began hoeing and tending the vast gardens, and washing clothes at the round stone pool that served as the lavandería, and carrying hay in carts to the corralled cows, and marching around and walking and talking. Suddenly I could see the mission's mission, merciless though it may have been.
  
  I'm not sure whether the mission was playing itself in this movie. It has portrayed other places, mostly ranches, such as in the movie Seabiscuit and a made-for-TV movie called Dazzle, in which viewers were supposed to believe Cliff Robertson's mission-style ranch was an actual mission, the building running some 150 yards long.
  
  As a state park, Mission La Purísima is perfect for filming, pristine, far from the main road and telephone lines and clutter — unlike working churches such as missions Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo, still the center of the towns built around them.
  
  Earthquakes destroyed the first Mission La Purísima and the mission fathers moved it four miles to where it is now. Another earthquake leveled that, and the mission moldered. What visitors see now has been rebuilt by the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration during the Depression, so it's mostly 20th Century re-bar and concrete on an 18th Century foundation.
  
  It looks freshly built, and its state and volunteer caretakers take good care and apply new paint. About 15 years ago the west end of the long complex was painted pink (ok, salmon). I'm not sure why; maybe historians found some new information and applied it, in the same way paleontologists play with new colors for how Stegosaurus might have looked (this time, all the colors of the rainbow!)
  
  When The Master Gunfighter was shot, the same walls were cream white like the rest of the mission, with a band of dark red along the ground.

• Making movies is boring.
  
  We hung around all day to see only two scenes shot. After the scene in which the mission had come to life, the extras were sent home, the cameras and lights and cranes and dollies and miscellany were torn down and hauled 100 yards to the west end of the mission, rebuilt and repositioned. Two hours later, the filmmakers shot what seemed like a simple scene in which a rider was to gallop up to his superiors, sitting horseback, to warn them a bad guy approached.
  
  Gallop up, say one line, ride off. That's it.
  
  The scene needed at least three-dozen takes. The rider got tangled in bushes, or his horse overshot the mark, or undershot it, or refused to run at all. Or the rider fell out of his saddle. Or the rider flubbed his line, or completely forgot it, or ran out of breath, or the lighting wasn't right, or a donkey brayed, or a cloud passed over the sun. Over and over again the scene played out, funnier and funnier each time. I'd seen it so many times, you think I'd be able to recite it now.

I can't say The Master Gunfighter was the worst movie made, because I never saw it. It had the misfortune to be born before direct-to-DVD could have salvaged some production costs.

I heard it wasn't good. Film critic Roger Ebert wrote, "I don't think there's any way an intelligent moviegoer could sit through this mess and accurately describe the plot afterward."

I gather it was a mishmash of spaghetti western, samurai revenge and even some true California history, about the brutal subjugation of Chumash Indians by the mission fathers. And some samurai sword- and gunplay, probably.

Well, it was a good try, I guess. I will remember Tom Laughlin as a movie star who seemed to really like the people who watched his movies — and people who had never seen them. Typical for my Lompoc, though, to receive something with so much promise and have it fall short. Yeah, I'm hard on my hometown.

Rest in peace, Billy Jack.

* Watch Tom Laughlin in action!

P.S. Now that I look at the movie poster, I think: Nice typography. Also, I might have gotten an autograph from co-star Ron O'Neal of Superfly fame. If I told him I'd never heard of him, he hid his disappointment. He's an actor, after all. As an old guy, I mis-read the credits: You'd think I would have remembered that Ryan O'Neal was in The Master Gunfighter.

Drawing lessons

We are, none of us, old. Not nearly as old as our parents when they were this old.

Parents shouldn't have to write their children's obituaries. — John Bingle

Forget regret, or life is yours to miss. — Jonathan Larson

Take care of yourself. Take … care … of yourself. People are counting on you.

Think how you've made someone else's life better. Appreciate that.

Greet people with a firm handshake — accept a firm handshake in return — and look them in the eye. — Richard Taniguchi

Grieve loss, of course. Of course. Plumb the fathoms of unfathomable sorrow — tethered, God help us, by someone who can draw you back up — for the loss of a child. I couldn't or wouldn't be so easily rescued at the loss of my own children; I can only imagine, but choose not to.

Grieve for young children who lose their parents, and lose the worlds built for them, and instructions for worlds yet unbuilt.

John and Greg visit a sick friend.

Soften your hearts and let the tears come for those who have come upon death, or whose loved ones have known horrible death. Comfort them as you will. Help them ease the image from their eyes, help them shake the real but unreasonable guilt that they could have averted death, as my mom found my dad, and as my sister found our mom, circumstance sparing me.

Grieve, of course. Then, laugh.

Laughter bubbled out of the chapel at the Starbuck-Lind mortuary in my hometown, the laughter of the heavy hearted, saying goodbye to our friend Greg Cox last weekend. I'm afraid I may have laughed too soon and loudly, intruding on Greg's family's need for space and peace and dignity, and I feel bad for that. But I couldn't help it, just as I couldn't help laughing after losing my parents. As vast and dark as their absence, their presence outshines.

People packed the chapel and the wings, people whom Greg touched, through many years (though we mourn it was not more). People came to honor him and his family, of course, but also to share what Greg brought to each of us. Many, many more, it was clear, were thinking of Greg from afar. We were there because of him; we were together again because of him; in ways many and various, we were going about our lives because of something Greg might have done, said, inspired.

Ageless Mr. Taniguchi, our biology teacher, shook our hands the way he had taught us, with knuckle-knocking firmness, and celebrated Greg and us. Greg's death shook him deeply, it was clear, but pride in Greg and the students he taught so long ago restored him, and laughter bubbled out with ours.

An inauspicious start: Greg's second from right in the middle row, I'm third
from right in the back row. The gentleman holding the sign, Bill Heath, spoke
heartfelt memories at Greg's memorial. Bill is a dentist in Vandenberg Village.

Some of us from elementary school through high school — some of us who had lost touch — were much like players in a stage production, having performed our act without knowing how the play ends. So when classmates and longtime friends from Stanford shared their memories, we learned the rest of the story.

Greg's role was consistent: Polite, gracious, with a gremlin's sense of disarming, sometimes disquieting, humor. Smart, yes, but hardworking, and somehow able to break off great chunks of achievement. Greg made me better by being able to hang around him, riding his coattails. Mr. Taniguchi reminded me math and science were not my strengths, but I tilted at windmills just the same. I give Greg credit for making me run to catch up.

His green Mercury Cougar with the velveteen upholstered seats and the opera windows in the back, we learn, conveyed him from our lives to the next.

Stanford friends reminded us of Greg's keen attention to others in conversation, and his ability to draw you out with thoughtful questions. Stanford friends also told what we couldn't know: His ease with talking and playing with their children, the same keen attention to what they had to say. 

At the reception, our friend John Bingle had the brave idea to seek more stories from the Stanford crowd, and I joined to listen. After, friends from long ago, friends brought in by the memory of Greg, spent the evening celebrating who we have become.

My sister, John and I spent the remainder of the weekend as tourists in our hometown, walking the beach at Surf, talking loudly over the unrelenting waves, then strolling La Purísima's mission grounds and up to the cross on the hill. The valley lay clear and crisp and gray-green on a mid-December morning.

Of my last six trips home, three have been to say final goodbyes, and at least one to help in the aftermath of a goodbye. Lompoc's grip on me is dwindling to gossamer, stretching thin.

Dawdling home, I dipped myself in the chill waters of Avila Beach, joining a group that swims every Sunday morning. We broke through the waves, then swam a mile arc out past the Avila Beach pier before trying our luck escaping heavy breakers to flop back onto shore. I had proven an amateur.

It was salve for a weekend strange and wonderful.

One big walking pimple*

Such a happy, deluded kid …
Is this vaguely R. Crumb-y?

Lengthy correspondence with a friend from high school long ago (thanks facebook!) forced me to reckon with the fiery trial through which we pass: Junior high (or middle school, if you insist, though a different name doesn't improve that hell) and high school, especially the Making Our Way in the World part.

The memories led me to confront my sophomore year at Cabrillo High (best mascot ever, as long as you ignore the genocidal pedigree; unbelievably awesome aquarium and graphic design lab, long after my time, sadly; remarkably considered and consistent use of logo elements), when my uniform looked like this (left):

1. A Greek fisherman's hat, worn every single day. I got it at Fisherman's Wharf  on an eighth grade trip to San Francisco because (honest to God!) I saw an ABC After School Special in which the teen-aged protagonist treasured the Greek fisherman's cap given him by his late father. My dad was quite alive.

[Note: I make tangential connections to the world. The reasons I'm a San Francisco Giants fan, for example, are that one of my aunts has lived in and around the Bay area — mostly around, in Marin County and the south Bay — and I found the place exotic and fraught with adventure, and because an older cousin, nowhere near the Bay Area, could imitate Flip Wilson doing his Geraldine character shouting, "Hit that ball, Willie (Mays)! C'mon, Willie, hit that ball!"]

Tabbed for your convenience!
Just clip it out and clad me to recreate
an exciting night at Huyck Stadium!

2. A rugby shirt. Even though they're typically long-sleeved, I insisted (to myself) on wearing a short-sleeve version, because I read that drug users like to hide the needle tracks on their arms with long sleeves, and I didn't want anybody thinking I used. What a full-out weird kid I was. I had several of these, and occasionally wore a collarless polo shirt (there was a name for these, but I've forgotten it) to break up the monotony; you could get them from Miller's Outpost (anybody remember that place?).

3. Jeans, but not real ones, not even real denim. My parents usually bought from JC Penney or the Vandenberg Air Force Base Exchange, and found less expensive bluish looking, kinda stretchy pants that resembled jeans, from a distance.

3a. Sometimes I wore corduroys. Anyone remember corduroys? Where did they go?

4. Those shoes you got at K Mart. They must have had a name — someone told me they're "Clark desert boots" though I think the name may have been (knockoff) Wallabees  — but I call them, "shoes you got at K Mart." They were high-topped (mid-ankle) the uppers made of tan suede, and the soles made of "crepe" if that's what bright, hardened layers of rubber cement means. A ridge of fabric ran from the top of the shoe around the toe, holding the three pieces of suede together. Usually they had only two or four lace eyelets. Everyone wore them at the time. I haven't seen them since.

5. On Friday nights during football season, I wore the same thing, except I added a backbreakingly heavy ivory colored Irish fisherman's sweater, to complete the evening ensemble. It would have kept me warm during a hearty gale, if we ever had one. It did protect me from the fog so common on a Lompoc evening, and any girl who may have even accidentally entertained a molecule of thought about going out with me. I really thought I was something, with a style neither imitated or duplicated, probably with sound reason.

I was, quite plainly, a plain dork. I think I must have seen myself in a mirror or a photo, and decided by junior year to lose the uniform.

But I give myself credit for daring to exhibit what I thought passed for style. My body had thinned from the junior high pudge (think Bobby Hill without the buzz cut), from a lot of running around Mission La Purísima where I grew up (I was hoping to make either the 1976 or 1980 U.S. Olympic team. Honest to God! Don't tell me a rich fantasy life has no benefits!) and I wanted to exult in my sleek form a bit, celebrate a la Walt Whitman. And I credit my parents for not calling me out (maybe they thought it looked good, but having seen their old stepping-out photos,  I don't see how they could). Mom drew the line at a Navy pea coat; that fell into the "get a job and buy it yourself" category. For the most part, my parents let me find my own way; I remember once my mom let it slip that my dad had a conversation with her along the lines of, "No son of mine is going to draw and paint …" but my dad never discouraged me directly from exploring art.

Thanks for coming along on my catharsis …

* Thanks to Carol Burnett for her concise definition of adolescence.