Touched by greatness, in a sense...

Please see my latest post on Main Street Plaza: Thoughts of Nancy.

In it, I talk about the life and experiences of my great-great-great-great aunt who was one of the teen brides of Joseph Smith, founding prophet of Mormonism.

Death II: deal with it!

I've made some progress since my post about why I don't like death.

Every now and then I feel this glimmer of "It's not such a horrifying thing that I'll never see what becomes of the human race and that one day (and forever after that) my consciousness will cease to exist. That's life, and when I'm dead I won't know the difference."

I'm always really proud of myself when I think that way, but unfortunately those moments are few and far between. Most of the time it's more like a constant stream of (whenever I get a free moment) thinking "Now what was it that I'm not supposed to think about since it leaves me paralyzed with dread, yet there is absolutely nothing I can do about it? Oh yeah, death. D'oh!!!"

Maybe that's why I keep so busy?

I think I've pinpointed part of the problem, though. It upsets me to contemplate my "legacy" i.e. how I will be remembered after I'm dead. The Indigo Girls' song about Virginia Woolf illustrates what I'm talking about:

They published your diary and that's how I got to know you
key to the room of your own and a mind without end
here's a young girl on a kind of a telephone line through time
the voice at the other end comes like a long lost friend.

One of the main reasons I write is to make a connection with people. So in some ways this stanza represents a beautiful dream -- to continue to make new friends through my writings even after I'm no longer there to do it in person. The problem with this dream comes a little later in the song:

if you need to know that you weathered the storm of cruel mortality
a hundred years later I'm sitting here living proof.

See the problem?

As sweet as that sentiment is, Virginia Woolf did not "weather the storm of cruel mortality." She's dead. Completely dead. As dead as Charlemagne, as dead as Ozymandias, as dead as some random Mesopotamian peasant whose name has been forgotten for seven thousand years. (Actually maybe even more dead than Ozymandius since he's a fictional character.)

So the "telephone line through time" is a sad image because in reality it's a one-way communication. Virgina Woolf cannot meet her new friend or swap confidences with her or go out for tea with her or even know of her existence. It's almost a pretty picture except that a main protagonist is absent. So the ultimate fantasy happy ending -- being loved by future generations -- isn't a happy ending at all.

Again my Mormon formation shows up as a part of who I am today. All of the focus and value placed on family history has made it so that when I write, I think of my audience as "future generations." That's the wrong fantasy for an atheist to have. There's no reason to shoot for the "most influential people of all time" list because even if I were to make it, it's not as though I'll be there in heaven signing autographs for people. If I want to make a connection with people through writing, the time is now! (Through a blog, for example...)

I'm not saying one should forget about future generations -- far from it. You shouldn't forget about the needs of future generations any more than you should forget about people in need who are alive right now. But if you're a humanist, you work to leave the world a better place for their sake, not your own.

That said, if someone is reading my stuff after I'm dead, I'm not going to say "No! Put it down! Right now!!!" (How could I? ;^) )

I don't have a problem accepting a lot of the limitations of being human (see QZed's post on that), but I guess I'm still working on accepting the fact that my total experience is limited in time as well as space. Baby steps!!! :D

Family History: Moonshine

My best friend from my high school days used to like to recount that she was descended of one of the most famous bloodthirsty pirates on the high seas. As my cousin wrote in her ancestry I'm not so proud of post, sometimes family history stories should not be told with a gleam of pride in your eye.

But the problem is that I love stories!!! And in story terms, sometimes the worst ones are the best ones!!!

Some of the most colorful tales from our oral history come from the hillbilly branch of the family tree, whose progress into civilization was discussed here. And as I mentioned here, this bluegrass background may have been an influence for my uncle in his LDS and Christian album. But my own imagination was more captured by the stories of "Uncle Pink" running shine during the prohibition -- driving up from southern Illinois to visit his respectable (LDS) brother (my great grandfather) in the suburbs of Chicago, and making a stop in Chicago to sell the fruit of the stills to some of the associates of Al Capone....

See? That last bit is the part that's not supposed to be recounted with pride (since Al Capone was a bad guy by any measure), but somehow it makes the story more interesting since it situates it in a historical context.

Some of my relatives who read this blog can tell me if I got the story all wrong. I hope not, but that's part of the fun of oral history -- it's like your own personal set of legends that get taller with each generation they pass through. They get interpreted by each generation too. The Utah branch of the family recounts that the cause of the untimely death of one jack-Mormon ancestor was alcohol. My brother suggested that we could add an equal-and-opposite moral history by pointing out that our bluegrass great-grandpa might not have died from cholesterol-related heart failure if Mormonism hadn't prevented him from counterbalancing his southern-fried-chicken diet with its traditional digestif: moonshine whiskey.

And so whenever I see a hidden still in the backwoods portrayed in movies or television, part of me is thinking: "Yep, my ancestors did that." ;^)



My sons recently got a DVD of The Rescuers and we've watched it as a family it a bunch of times. I've carefully pointed out to my sons their ancestral place in history when the swamp critters appear on the scene in their wooden shack, drinking their homemade moonshine. The film is set in Louisiana, but the colorful locals as they're portrayed could as easily have been from Tennessee, Kentucky, or southern Illinois. It probably says something about me that my one-and-only contribution to Wikipedia was a bullet point about The Rescuers in the entry about moonshine.



My husband was less thrilled about my connection with this part of the film. He clearly identifies more with the respectable foreign dignitary mice meeting at the UN building in New York. But he has a completely different type of questionable family history:

My husband has an ancestral gold ring (hidden away in a safety-deposit box somewhere) that demonstrates that he has inherited some sort of title of nobility. It's not clear what the precise title is (whether he's secretly a Marquis or a Vicompte or whatever) because apparently their family doesn't have the same fondness for oral history that I do. I asked my MIL about the title once (because when we were first married I had this crazy idea that I'd do his genealogy the way my mom did for my dad), but my MIL replied that it's nothing to be proud of that the king of France granted their family a noble title in gratitude for putting down some peasant rebellion.

So (according to my MIL anyway) her husband's family consisted of petty nobles who rose up from the ranks of mid-level landholders by grinding the peasants down. I can't tell how true this is since my husband's immediate family doesn't have much contact with his extended family (long story), and I can't ask the previous Marquis because of course he's dead. But if MIL's version is accurate, she's right it's nothing to be proud of. It's clearly worse than being a hillbilly shine-runner loosely connected with the mob, but maybe not quite as bad as being a bloodthirsty pirate...

Family history: we're different.

I'm starting to realize that my perspective on Mormonism is a rather unusual one. I think this is largely because my LDS extended family is not typical.

Already the fact that I was raised as a fourth-generation "mission field Mormon" is a little bit unusual. So my family has a strong Mormon tradition without having an "inter-mountain west" tradition.

My dad was a convert, so I'm talking about my mom's family here. My mom's dad was born and raised in Utah and came from pioneer stock tracing back to Nauvoo, etc., but in some ways he was like an import or infusion of official history into a clan that was strongly centered in Illinois. My mother's mother's family all lived together in the same area long enough to ensure that our oral tradition has always centered around my great-grandfather: my mother's mother's father Grandpa G, who converted to the LDS church in the 1920's.

Grandpa G was something of a Joseph Smith figure. I don't mean that in any of the negative ways that will immediately jump to the minds of my exmo friends (womanizer, shiftless charlatan, etc.). Rather I mean that Grandpa G came from humble, rural beginnings yet had enormous ambition and enormous confidence.

Reading Grandma and Grandpa G's memoirs, they essentially tell the following story:

They were born and raised as hillbillies in the back woods of southern Illinois. They had a limited education and limited opportunities, and they were surrounded by limited people who had no ambition and no concept of how big the world might be outside their tiny, petty town. (I know that sounds bad, but that's basically the portrait they paint.) But Grandpa G was different. He had the capacity to make something of himself.

(Grandma G too, but apparently to a lesser degree, at least according to the memoir.)

So they moved out of the back hills and into civilization -- to a town not far from Chicago -- where Grandpa G found a good job.

Mormonism gave Grandpa G the opportunity to become a leader. The LDS church had almost no presence in their new town at the time, so Grandma and Grandpa G built up a branch essentially from zero. Salt Lake sent missionaries and other support, but this was a distant enough outpost that our dominant and charismatic Grandpa G largely had free reign to run things as he saw fit for decades while the LDS church in his area grew. (Many people were introduced to the church through the huge regular neighborhood fried-chicken-and-corn-on-the-cob dinners they used to throw at their house, according to the memoir.)

My mother wrote a charming memoir herself about what it was like to attend her grandfather's branch back in the fifties, and maybe she'll let me run it here sometime.

Now there is a stereotype within Mormonism that Mormon men are a bunch of yes-men who are totally incapable of standing up for themselves because they have to submit 100% to the church hierarchy which micromanages their lives right down to which church roles they fulfill, which meetings they attend with whom and at what time, which friends they must visit, etc. People say that the LDS church needs to subjugate women because that's the reward that is offered to men: the man gets to be the president of his own family, and in exchange he must hand his balls over to the next guy up in the church hierarchy. You may object to this characterization, but it's pretty clearly a common view.

Grandpa G was no cowering yes-man. My mom used to joke that her grandpa was John Wayne. So some of the most dramatic stories in our family's oral tradition center around the power struggle as Salt Lake tried to reign Grandpa G in a bit.

The church leadership demands strict obedience and must be in control over the local leaders, but they apparently worked out something of a truce with Grandpa G since they didn't want to alienate him too much. He was too good at running things and at attracting new members. So to some degree Salt Lake was willing to work around the fact that Grandpa G wasn't about to hand his balls to the next guy up the ladder. No way, no how.

The LDS ethic has an interesting blend of "do as you're told" and "do it yourself." I think that because of my extended family's stories and traditions, I was raised on an extra heavy dose of "do it yourself." I grew up surrounded by the message: "We're different. We're special. We're not limited -- we can do anything. Anything at all. Just step aside and watch us do it."

I'm not going to say that this is a good message or a bad message. However, I will say that I think this may be part of the reason why so many of the members of our extended family of my generation (my siblings and cousins) have left the church.

An organization needs a few take-charge strong-willed free spirits to keep it lively and kicking. So even a rigid, authoritarian hierarchy can find a way to accommodate a certain number of them. But only so many...