Question Time

[gurdonark]

Three notes to self:

1. Time to re-read Great Expectations
2. Perhaps it is time to move to a camera with more than .1 megapixels
3. Time to expand my marketing skills.

Note to you:

Today it came to me that I read so many of you so very assiduously, and yet I feel that often I miss essential threads.
Sometimes I put one of you in NY, when years ago you moved to MA, or some such. Sometimes I read your elaborately-plotted lives and realize that I have questions to which you have answers if it were only polite to ask. I'm not really talking about
those matters of personal experience which only prurience would cause one to invade (not that I lack any degree of human flaw in any particular respect, but I like to think my flaws are measured and suitably boring). On the other hand, the exercise perhaps benefits from an element of unpredictability about the questions. I mean to ask those plot points which a courteous person would not ask for fear of seeming intrusive, out of place, out of reckoning, inattentive, or just darned incisive.

I rather like those odd UK parliaments with their Question Times. I propose to you something to which you may agree by entering a comment. I propose that you grant me amnesty to ask you a question or questions about your life that I would ordinarily feel too shy to ask directly. The "amnesty" means that I know, before I ask, that asking anyone a question about a novel rather lacks decorum. I also know that many of my questions could be solved by assiduous reading.

You are not bound to answer, and you are free, if you do answer, to answer obliquely. You'll see as readily as I do that
it will be more fun for you if you can be more revelatory, in a very public setting, but I don't want you to tell me something
you'd regret sharing. I am not encouraging you to tell me secrets, as secrets have this beautiful banality about them that
I do not always require of life.

Would you like to grant me amnesty to ask you a question or questions? If so, just type in the comments--I grant you amnesty.

Comments

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

You have been through so much this past year, and you've written about it with remarkable clarity. Yet I've got a number of qustions to fill in some details:

1. How old is your son? Is he school-oriented?

2. Where did you grow up? Most of us have a favorite place we went in Summers for outdoor fun (for me, it was a grandparent's house 40 miles away or a lake cabin). Did you have one, and where?

3. What family dysfunction did you grow up around, if any?

4. What theological notion did you find utterly lovely and utterly not the answer to any issue in your life?

[daisydumont.livejournal.com]

1) i assume you mean my younger son, the one still at home? (the older son is 26, about to be married, and working from [his] home. he graduated from UMd about 3 years ago.) ted is 16, a computer geek, and brainy without being very interested in studiousness. it frustrates me, as i was the kind of student who kills herself getting everything just right and going for the A!

2) i grew up in southern indiana, a small town half an hour from terre haute, near a beautiful state park. i miss the hoosier state constantly, though i've lived away from it for going on 33 years. i actually never liked outdoor fun much -- i'm a born housecat -- but i did love walking in the woods at that park or playing on the beach.
on that beach

3) my father was volatile and often angry. i recognize now that he suffered from seasonal affect disorder, among other things, and he probably needed lots and lots of therapy, which he never got. i grew up terrified, literally shrinking-away afraid, of men because he was so loud when he was angry. (he never, ever hit us kids. it was all volume.) again, now i see what was happening with him, and i understood it at last when i became an adult and saw the same forces and traits operating in myself. the fear of men has caused me untold problems all my life. i was talking about it with my older sister over christmas, and different as we are we discovered we both do the flirting thing with men to get past the fear.

4) very interesting question. you've couched it in the past tense. hmmm. i suppose i became aware of theology in methodist sunday school. my parents had no religious affiliation, but i went to my grandmother's church after a certain age and acquired a deep fear of God as Punisher. so much anger. the love of Jesus is such a contrast, you know? i never could reconcile the two vastly different faces they presented as divine. even now, i have a much stronger grasp of the love of Christ than i do of God the Father. (father problems, dontcha know.) this may be the source of my current waffly theology, whereby i do think of myself as a christian, though in many ways i'm a sort of deist and a universalist -- god, to me, is the love that moves the sun and the other stars, and jesus is the face of that love that we can see (in icon and in story). but all the highly-articulated theology that people have killed one another for over the millennia? as you say, utterly not the answer to anything.

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

Of course it's in the past tense, as you've got it all figured out now :). I personally plan to have my key to all mythologies ready any day now.

I love southern indiana. It's one of those places tourists don't go, but should--I always want to write articles to people how they should leave Hollywood Boulevard alone and find the rolling hills of Indiana.

This whole generation of teens who are geniuses in so many ways but decline to apply themselves intrigue me. I declined to apply myself in my day on more noble grounds, like thinking about the meaning of life.