insearchofbud

I apologize. This post is religious. Please forgive me.

March 12, 2016

History of my relationship with the Christian church.

The 1950s:  mother took me to the Episcopal Church in Missoula where I had been baptized.   Sometimes she sent me down the alley to ride with our neighbors.

I was most excited when I was eight years old.  Our Sunday school teacher asked each of us to bring a camera.  Mother bought me a roll of 620 film and I used my sister’s box camera; the first frame was of her standing by our garage, squinting into the sun.

I got sick.  I vomited on the grass by the porch on the way into the church.  I spent the next hour asleep on a bench.

A year earlier, when our father was dying of cancer, I stayed with our grandparents in Kalispell.  My grandma sent me to the Methodist church wearing a bright yellow sweatshirt.  I threw a huge tantrum because I didn’t want to go to church wearing a sweatshirt.

I quit church soon after I started pocketing my offering money instead of putting it on the collection plate.

I and most of us kids I knew took ballroom dance lessons at the Episcopal church in Missoula when we were in the seventh grade.  Another kid called me a fool and socked me in the jaw.  I don’t know why.  He said he could have knocked me out if he’d wanted to.

In the eighth grade we moved from Missoula to Dillon.   Mother took me to the Methodist Church.  The minister, Rev. West, was dynamic and progressive.  Methodist Youth Fellowship was interesting for me.  Many of the 17-year-old intellectuals from high school went.

My friends and I went to Methodist Summer Camp on Flathead Lake in 1966.  Our counselor, a woman, had our group of about six boys and six girls leaf through a Playboy magazine to discuss the pictures!

I remember that our counselor complained that the women in the pictures were not even pretty by her standards.  Of course I disagreed. Silently.

None of us boys or girls said much, and I think we all pretended not to care.

Truth was, I could hardly breathe I was so excited.  I thought I was in heaven!

The older boys talked about our experience that day in our cabin after dark.  I remember that one of the boys said that he could hardly wait to get married so he could get all the sex he wanted!  Another boy suggested that affection and compatibility were more important.  I remember thinking that both kids had valid arguments.

As a freshman in Missoula I tried going to a Christian religious group in the evening at the Newman Center, but I couldn’t make any sense of it so I never returned.

Then I telephoned the Baha’i church in Missoula but the guy wouldn’t answer my questions, so I didn’t pursue it.  I thought the Baha’i man didn’t trust my motive for phoning.

My hippie friends and I ended up going to the “Downstairs Coffee House” at the University Congregational Church a couple of blocks from campus.  I learned to smoke cigarettes (tobacco and marijuana) and drink coffee there.  I also fell in love.  At least twice.  We went there dozens of times.

After joining the Marines in 1969 I learned that the least expensive entertainment on base was the chapel.  Our new family went regularly and I learned to sing in the choir.  I ended up learning the futility of Evangelical Christianity, basically a kind of Ponzi scheme, I thought.  Eventually I outgrew fundamental Christianity.  Too many circular arguments.

After the Marines, back in Missoula, our family went to the University Congregational Church.  That was 1976.  We’ve been members of the United Church of Christ 40 years. I still sing in the choir at First Congregational Church in Billings.

If I weren’t religious I’d be a Humanist.  If I were to pick a great church I’d go for the Buddhists.  A truly fine church, in line with family tradition, would be Lutheran.  However, I am simply sticking with what I have, in order to be myself.

There.  Done.

Fredoun Parang, exchange student from Iran, said, in 1966, this carpet came from Southern Russia.  He could tell by the color.  I assumed that the predominant color was orange.  Fredoun’s father told me the rug was worth about $500 as a trade-in.

The last person to own this carpet was my niece Hannah Banana Graham Wild, so I assume her ex-husband Jason Wild or one of their children have the carpet now.  I am good with any of it.  Or none of it.  The rug was part of my childhood and my childhood is over.

The rug had some “S” motifs around the border.  I assumed it stood for our name, Struckman.  I don’t know when I gave that belief up.

The rug was in my brother Tom’s room upstairs at 334 N. Avenue West in Missoula as I spent my elementary school years.  It was in considerably better condition than in the photograph above.

In the 5th and 6th grade I used the rug to block the light coming through a coal-bin window in our house.  For some reason a can of oil stained the rug.  Eventually we moved to 640 E. Kent in Missoula, then to 506 S. Atlantic in Dillon.  By that time I had some appreciation for its value.  I used some cleaning products to get the oil out of the rug.  My mother swore by “409.”  However, I think I used something else.  Something that sprayed out of a can.

Once I went away to Missoula to lead the life of a hippie freshman student in 1967, I took the rug to Elrod Hall to hang on my dorm wall.  I didn’t smoke any ganja in my room.  I smoked it in my friend’s room.  However, the RA, a Nazi from some damn place or other, came to threaten me whenever I used my Underwood typewriter to compose a scathing indictment or cool theory of reality.

After a couple trips to Seattle and back by boxcar or hitchhiking, and after a few psychedelic nights on the bank of the Blackfoot river, I ended up joining the Marine Corps.  I lost track of the rug.

Eventually I was able to afford to get out of the Marines and back to the University with the GI bill.  Our mother died and the three of us kids inherited the Oriental rug.  Tom and I ended up trading custody every five years or so.  Tom and I quit speaking to each other.  He had the rug when he died.

I made sure that Hannah got the rug when her father died.  However, I did take a picture.  Above.

Hannah at our house in Billings in ~1986.

March 9, 2016

March 13, 2014,  Maggie Graham sent me word that our 42-year-old niece, Hannah Graham-Struckman Wild, died.  Her parents were Dana Graham and my brother Tom.  She left her mother, three children: Jacob, Savannah, and Henry.  Also her sister Maggie, other aunts and uncles and cousins, nieces and nephews.

My brother Tom called her “a good sort.”

About ten years ago her ex-husband Jason and she showed up at our house when her grandma died.  Jason had a black eye.  Hannah had started a fight in a bar; then Jason stepped in and got punched.  A similar thing happened in 2000 at the Oxford in Missoula, only her cousin Bob took the punch.

I could tell Hannah didn’t think much of me, just a guy who worked all the time, until I showed her my compost bin in the alley.  Her scowl turned to a broad smile and delighted laughter as I described the snake carcass within the rotting vegetation.

Hannah struggled with the demons of substance abuse and four months before she died, I texted her via Facebook asking her if she was okay.

She replied: “Well, actually no. But I will survive. Thank you for asking.

Hope you are well.

Love, Hannah”

Only she did not.  Who knows?  Perhaps she took a strong drug or drank too much.  We learned that she had been staying at a shelter near Kona, Hawaii, but they refused her admittance because they thought she was drunk.  They gave her a blanket and pillow and she laid down in a nearby field where they found her body.  Her clothes were neatly folded and there was no sign of violence.  Dana and Maggie flew out to Hawaii to identify Hannah’s body and return with her ashes.

Loss like this continues to hurt.

Tom’s daughter, Hannah B. Wild, in 1997.

The day after Mark Fryberger found his body.

Dan Struckman, September, 1997.

Tom’s back yard with his garden.  Corner of Dickens and Defoe. Missoula, Montana.

Back of Tom’s house.  His 1965 Volkswagen Bug.

Tom’s image showed as a light-colored area on his floor where his body decayed.

Another view of Tom’s kitchen and chalkboard with garden planting dates.

Sleeping/livingroom with his Aunt Corinne and nephew Bob.  Bob is sitting between the gas heater and Tom’s small bed.

Tom’s desktop in his sleeping/livingroom.

Wood shop work bench.  Notice home made clamps near shelf above.

The youths who painted these tires gave me permission to photograph them.

As I contemplated my new prescription for a testosterone blocker, finasteride, that my internist prescribed for my enlarged prostate, I nearly forgot some of the other depressing moments in my life.

Gunther, the semi-pug, semi-Brussels Griffon, was due for his afternoon bowel movement.  I remembered that a neighbor at the far west end of the block had been painting his tires, so I took along my camera.

Three or four young men and a young lady were swarmed around a car at the curb, talking trash, it seemed to me.  I interrupted the girl to ask if I could take a picture of the pretty tires.  She asked a young man who laughed and said I could.

So I did.

March 6, 2016

Walked our Brug Gunther west.  He pooped.  It’s at the far end of our 1925-vintage block.  We returned east via the alley, with leash in my left and baggie of poop in my right.

Morning sunshine streaming down alley.  Utility poles, one leaning.  Row of dumpsters.  Does the garbage truck put them down in a neat row?

Narrow storm door leaning against dumpster.  Particle board repaired with white paint.  Sprayed?

I opened another dumpster to drop the baggie.  Hmmm “leaf blower,” I murmured.  Surprised me that I spoke aloud.

Delighted by the blower, I optimistically looked ahead.  The next dumpster had a treadmill next to it, a derelict “Vitamaster 800.”  The next, a bunch of cardboard printed “Bouncer.”  I looked to the house’s front, and sure enough, trampoline, with netting.  A heavy plastic bag.  I stooped to pick it up, then thought better.  I’ll leave this for whoever else picks things up around here.

A bit of tree had grown through a chain link fence, cut off.  Farther, two wooden pallets lean against a fence across the alley. Now, a third one.  No one has touched the pile of boards I put behind our garage.

Gunther made a couple of sympathetic barking sounds as we passed the fence with dogs behind.  At the east end of the block someone left a toilet on the porch.  Most of the birds have quit their morning chirping.

Chapter 1:  The 18-year-old in SF

March 4, 1966

The house shook as if from an earthquake.  Gunther looked out at the window.  Sure enough, it was a full dump truck rumbling past on the street down below.  Living in San Francisco made him think about quakes.  His dog looked up at him, so Gunther sat in his big armchair and said, “up, up!” The dog obliged him, climbing onto the back of the overstuffed chair.  Kept his neck warm.  The dog sighed.  Soon he slept.  Gunther thought about smoking some of his dwindling supply of weed.

Gunther didn’t know why the hell he had moved to San Francisco.  Sure, he wanted to get stoned, listen to music, be a free-loving hippie.  He didn’t know where to buy drugs, didn’t even own a record player, hadn’t the slightest idea how to start to be a hippie.  He felt lost.  The weather was cold.  Seemed like the weather was always cold in San Francisco.  Then, he was afraid of earthquakes.

Snapping the red leather leash onto his dog Dan’s collar, Gunther walked out the back of his narrow Victorian house.  He lived on the second floor and could take the stairs inside or the fire-escape out the back.  Because the house was built on a hillside, the back exit had fewer steps. Of course, there were more steps between the two tall narrow houses.

He lived on the edge of the commercial zone with the warehouses and the businesses that made and sold beauty products, like hair curlers, bobby pins, permanent wave kits.  Also feminine irrigation syringe fountains.  Gunther wondered about the fate of such factories that had now became derelict, empty.

I don’t know who took this picture of PFC Carl R. Bonde, Jr. (Bud) in front of his house in Kalispell, probably in the winter of 1943 or early 1944.

March 4, 2016

On this day in 1943 our uncle Carl (Bud) Ralph Bonde, Jr., was inducted into the U.S. Army in Butte, Montana, at the Armed Forces Entrance Examination Station.  March fourth.  Despite the prayers of his mother in Kalispell, PFC Bonde never returned.  In fact his body remains to this day locked in the wreckage of his troopship, the SS Leopoldville, a Belgian luxury liner that had been requisitioned and refitted for wartime.

Bonde and 762 other soldiers died in the English Channel Christmas Eve, 1944, while those who might have been able to rescue them from the sinking ship partied at the Army post at Cherbourg, France.  They were just six miles away and the doomed soldiers could see the lights of the city from the deck of their ship.

Another important vessel that night, U-486, a German submarine, was hiding near the entrance to the Cherbourg harbor.  This was a common tactic, and it worked that night.  The U-Boat commander, Uberlieutenant Gerhard Meyer, fired two torpedoes.  The first one missed.  My friend Randy Bradham, a member of Carl’s Army Company E, said he had been standing on the deck of the nearby HMS Cheshire and saw the torpedoes coursing through the water.  There had been five ships in the convoy.  My friends escaped the Leo by jumping to the deck of an escort, the HMS Brilliant.

Thanks to the internet and a network of survivors of the SS Leopoldville disaster, I eventually met Dr. Bradham (he trained to become a cardiothoracic surgeon at Ann Arbor, Michigan) and a handful of others from Company E.  I spent several days in their company at a reunion in Florida in 2006.

At the reunion I tried in vain to persuade Carl’s best friend Bill Moomey to wade into the water of the Gulf of Mexico.  I don’t know why that seemed like a good idea.

The old men advised me how to execute my plan to smuggle some soil from Bud’s home in Kalispell to Cherbourg, then out on the Channel to the wreckage of the Leo.  One GI veteran, a fellow who was a retired fireman from Flint, Michigan, suggested I put the dirt into a cosmetics container, such as one for face powder.

In the end I practiced with a mock plastic bag of dirt from my own yard that I successfully carried on a flight to Seattle.

Then I took the real dirt to France in another bag hidden in my suitcase.  My French friend, Bertrand Sciboz, took P. and me to the wreckage site, found the wreck with an echo image scope, and I put it and a wreath into the water there.

This is what the SS Leopoldville looked like on Bertrand’s Echo Scope.

I read Bill Moomey’s message to Bud before pouring the Kalispell soil into the English Channel when we visited the SS Leopoldville in 2007.

March 3, 2016

Our usual 7 a.m. walk, only counter-clockwise around the block.  I was still in my pajamas, the style now.

Gunther rewarded me with several nice — here I wonder — what should I call them?  Turds?  Jeez!

However accurate, “turds” lacks grace.  “Poops,” on the other hand,  really doesn’t quite fit either.  Too precious.  Example:   Little Mary Jane and her bitch may toss in the trash a baggie of poops, but not me!

I am an older guy with a fine male dog, albeit neutered.   What word to use?  “Shits” sounds like a gratuitous use of vulgarity.  I would have gotten a spanking when I was a kid.

Perhaps “craps.”  Yes, I’ll give it a try:  Gunther rewarded me with several nice craps.

No.  Not “craps.”  Craps is a dice game.  Otherwise, it is a verb.  Gunther rewarded me when he crapped.  He made two nice turds.  I’ll leave it there, for now, after I consult a thesaurus.

I am reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ novel “Love in the Time of Cholera.”

At noon Gunther was acting bored, biting at my fingers and feet, so I walked him over to Pioneer Park, to the middle of a grassy area, to fetch a small squeaky tennis ball.  What a hit!  As I sit here typing on the computer he is absent-mindedly playing with the ball.  He makes me so mad!  Every couple of minutes he’ll bump it under the couch, then he’ll whine and cry because he can’t reach it with his short brown arm.

Gunther’s face looks something like Jack Black.  Well, not exactly, but I think you can get the idea.

When we got back to the house the neighbor’s black lab, “Sue,” was standing on her porch, just looking.  I don’t know what she was looking at.  I took off Gunther’s leash and after some coaxing, he headed over to tease the much larger Sue.  Only Sue really didn’t react at first.  Gunther jumped up, then dashed in a circle.  Sue just stood there, wagging half-heartedly.  At the end the pair were romping around.   I couldn’t get Gunther to come to me.  My secret weapon:  Gunther is basically a scared puppy.  I started toward the back door of our house and Gunther quickly followed.

Gunther is asleep now.

March 2, 2016

Up at 6.

Got pharmacy CE. Taxes done.  Walked the block.  Dog pooped.

Bought 200 plastic poop bags.  Talked big with Tony.  Growled at Gunther.  Took nap with same.

Sat by fire at home.

Dog peed.  Felt broken-hearted.  Is my sorrow my salvation?  I love her so much!

But pttht! She’s gone!  Like my Uncle Carl Ralph Bonde, Jr.

I need that parallel universe.  I need it now.

I will write about the desired object until I have it in hand.

“He clasps the crag with crooked hands.”