A wet argument with a couple of dead Greeks:

Around the World and Home

I believe I’ve spent two 4ths of July off of American shores. One was punctuated by an early morning run with the Bulls of Pamplona and another was spent in Koh Lanta, Thailand, wherein a very guttural screed was written as a frustrated American.

This particular 4^th was spent back home again in Indiana on the heels of a trip back from London. While there is 70% of an essay about that trip and the British Museum sitting currently unfinished, the contrast between London (which is still the center of the universe) and the stretch where the glacier stopped that I call my hometown could not have been greater.

This weekend I took my two year old Betsy down to visit my surrogate grandmother Mickey Martin. Given that there are 99.5 years in between Mickey and Betsy and no genetic predisposition, there’s an obvious but inexplicable link between the two of them.

At Mickey’s were also my “cousins” her two oldest grandsons Chad and Andrew, with whom I’ve shared the vast majority of Thanksgivings and at least a bit of time in summers stamping down the cliff from Mickey’s house in Leatherwood Creek.

Leatherwood creek is between 12-30 feet wide, and rarely deeper than two feet. It winds around Bedford, through Otis Park Golf Course (which makes some bends quite nice for finding golf balls) past the valley where I grew up and eventually dumps unceremoniously into White River south of town.

It is objectively an unextraordinary creek in every way but one…it was mine as a boy.

This was the first time that I’d taken Betsy to properly play in the creek. Little different than when we were 5 or 8 or 24, Chad and Andrew and I were knee deep in that little creek, trying to catch crawdads and skipping the flattest rocks we could find.

Betsy, far from any reservations about these two relatively strange men or the creek, charged her little red knockoff Crocs into the reflected gold off that limestone bottom.

I’ve always been big on place. That place, without breathtaking vistas or world class fishing or any unique differentiator between it and a thousand small creeks running through rural topographies, is about as important as any other to me.

Heraclitus said that “a man never steps in the same river twice.”

(Heraclitus probably gets a little too much play on The Moorman Conquest, partially for my lack of witty Ancient Greek phrases to be pulled on command, and partially because I really love moving water.)

This aphorism can be applied to anything from hydrological flow constantly evolving a river to “generals always fighting the last war”.

Leatherwood Creek is different than I was when I was a kid, whether the fallen sycamores that have accumulated on the piling of the humpback bridge or the channel that cut an island next to what used to be the only flow strong enough to knock over a 10 year old. Compared to the differences found in all those other places where my feet have trod over the last 33 years, it is almost identical.

Being able to take Betsy there and seeing her joy in those humble ancestral waters that I once called mine, gave a sense of an uncertain trajectory that eventually orbited back towards home. Orbits don’t stop moving, but eventually one will come back to see the same perspective again, but with all of the knowledge gained in the interim.

This revolution around a woman whose characteristics I’d always thought of as with the raw, enduring and unstoppable power of a glacier, feels different. This is a woman for whom a Great Depression, a World War, six kids and a husband whose first heart attack was before 40, and unavoidable losses of 102 years of loved ones has yet to break.

As I showed Betsy, through the eyes of an eager audience for whom this was all VERY EXCITING, where cucumbers grew and where we got our worms from the compost pile and cooked crawdads over the fire on a flat rock, I realized how much of my life was formed between two acres and a creek at the bottom of Slaughter House Hill.

The worm bin in our back yard that Betsy loves to check on, the canoe leaning uneasily out of the bed of my truck, no less than the conversation with the Zimbabwean Minister of Mines in a London Four Seasons or a connection with the CEO of a 100 year old business in Germany in a town that globalization made redundant.

That place, and very specifically that 101 year old woman with a sweating blue Hamms Beer on the table always knew that no matter what aphelion that I managed to make it out to, gravity would always bring me back.  

Heraclitus might think that Betsy didn’t step in the same river as her papa, but I’ll just have to agree to disagree with him on that small point. I reckon his thoughts and mine on the concepts of logos and the necessity of counterbalancing forces for dynamic harmony.

That Parmenides of Elea was a piker anyway.