12.10.07
Posted in Personal at 11:32 pm by Dan Jensen
Our daughter took up violin just last summer.
I recently mentioned to her violin instructor that I’d like to take some lessons as well. I’d bought a violin awhile back, and I’d been practicing along with our daughter. I’d played violin and viola as a boy, when I was about as old as she is now. That was a long time ago. I cannot remember when or why I stopped playing. Was it the bully smashing my violin after school? Was it the move to Africa? Perhaps it was that terrible concert: I was so nervous I could barely play.
I love classical violin; well, romantic violin, to be precise. I’ve always regretted giving up on the violin. It doesn’t help to read about Einstein and his violin. What a pair those two made! So when our daughter expressed an interest in violin, there was no delay. A violin was provided, and shortly thereafter, an instructor.
I’d been doing pretty well during our practices. When I finally got my lesson, I had hardly started playing when our instructor noticed the bow bouncing on the strings. She asked me if I’d seen a doctor about it. She wanted to know whether I was certain that I don’t have a real medical problem. I told her that I don’t think I have Parkinson’s. I’ve always had a tremor; as long as I can remember. I remember that concert. Suddenly I feel like I’ve traveled back in time to childhood. I shrink into a corner as the world expands back to its former proportions.
I’ll bet Parkinson’s is a nightmare, but this is no picnic. I slipped into a funk. The next time our daughter and I practiced, I quit after 30 seconds, and we didn’t practice for another week. I would pick it up when she wasn’t around. I got frustrated immediately. I was ashamed.
My father, a chiropractor, describes that slight tremor as a cerebral palsy. I asked an MD once: he told me: “you shake a little.” Yes, I suppose it doesn’t really matter what you call it.
It can be aggravated by stress, but I don’t always know when the stress is there. It can be rather frustrating when I’m trying to cut my kids’ bangs or finger nails, but I don’t let that stop me.
My daughter recently scheduled a duet for us before several ladies. She had been having a little more trouble with the piece than I had, and just before the performance, she began to get agitated. She was afraid she wouldn’t be able to do it. I told her, “hey, let’s just do it, and if we mess up we mess up. No big deal.” When we began to play, I suddenly couldn’t focus on reading the music. It was as though the notes were slipping around the page; not literally, but I could not get a fix on them. I faltered repeatedly. I’d pick up at the next measure, but I couldn’t concentrate. I was disappointed in myself, but I couldn’t be more proud of her. She just kept going. She played the complete piece without a single pause. She was flawless, in spite of all the distraction that I caused.
She’s a performer, and she’s got one very proud father.
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11.13.07
Posted in Personal, The Sink, San Joaquin Valley at 10:58 pm by Dan Jensen
Sometimes I stop in Hanford or Tulare on my way to the Sierra Nevada, and look at my old homes, neighborhoods, and schools, trying not to raise the suspicions of the current residents.
Of all the kids I knew during my elementary school years, Chuck and Cora are among those I remember most.
Cora was known as a little sister of several football stars, two of whom went on to play in the National Football League. She wasn’t little, though—even in fourth grade. I remember her principally for her dominant presence wherever she went on campus, and her steely breasts which hovered out before her like two bodyguards. I don’t know whether she had any friends. A person would have to be pretty brave to approach her. I don’t think she was a bully, though.
Chuck was the star athlete at James Monroe Elementary School. He wasn’t quite the fastest runner on campus, but he was skilled in just about everything. His intense competitiveness was frightening, yet he was as fair in his dealings on the playground as any kid I knew. He was an angel to me, but of course it must be noted that I posed no competitive threat to him. There were times that, if it weren’t for intercession from Chuck, I wouldn’t have been permitted to play on either team in a given game. Sometimes, though, even the grace of Chuck wasn’t enough, for though I was put onto a team in say, kickball, I would usually mark the permanent end of every line. As a kid would take his or her turn and either run home or make out, he or she would inevitably consider the end of the line as the spot in front of me.
I didn’t keep in touch with Chuck, or any of my classmates. I remember seeing a two-page spread on Chuck in a sports magazine years later, and then several years later I heard on some late night show while crossing Nevada that he’d been forced out of the NFL after he hurt another player badly. I was surprised to read that Chuck had earned a reputation as an executioner, though I never doubted his competitiveness.
© 2007 Dan J. Jensen
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03.05.07
Posted in Personal, Humor, Baha'i at 4:58 pm by Dan Jensen
The SF Bay Area is a good place for those who enjoy trading their wages for palatable art and entertainment, but those who really desire the cutting edge—we head to Fresno.
Barry Smith (photo by Mark Fox)
Now I understand that the book Science Made Stupid defines half-life as “Saturday night in Fresno”, and yes, there was something in there about Fresno and the event horizon of a black hole, but hey, times have changed!
I had run into Barry Smith on the aether a couple years ago, and just last Thursday I was cleaning out one of my email boxes when I stumbled on the remnants of our brief correspondence. I wandered onto the web and browsed through his tour schedule: coming to Fresno—tomorrow!
Coincidence? You be the judge.
I had six hours to drive to Fresno and back and catch Barry Smith’s show Jesus in Montana in between. I’d be locked out if I got there a minute late, so I left San Jose hoping that the 2 1/2 hour drive would not be extended to 3 hours by some unforeseen calamity (as it often is).
I turns out I arrived with time to spare, so I ran down Olive Avenue, wolfed down half a California burger, ran back to the Starline and dropped the price of admission out of my wallet onto the table. I had finally made it. I stumbled into the dark club, felt around for a chair, and basked in the glow of anticipation.
It was certainly therapeutic to sit in the dark laughing in unison with total strangers about a Baha’i doomsday cult, but what was perhaps just as exhilarating was re-living the grand chase for prophecy and universal annihilation that Barry Smith so hilariously describes in his expertly timed PowerPoint presentation.
This is not just any PowerPoint doomsayer. Move over Al Gore.
Barry Smith sees prophecy in the most mundane source material. He even finds Jesus in a street address from his childhood. Ludicrous, eh? Maybe so, but it’s not as uncommon as you may think, and you might want to try it some time. It can bring on quite a buzz.
I have been there. As a young Baha’i, I studied Biblical prophecy, American Indian prophecy, Hindu prophecy, Zoroastrian prophecy, Tibetan prophecy, Nostradamus, blah blah, but I never quite grasped the “Paul is dead” scandal; not, at least, until now.
Perhaps Barry Smith is having fun at the expense of others, but as much as anything, he is poking fun at himself. Perhaps that is the most therapeutic aspect of the whole show.
This must be made available on DVD someday. Come on Barry: if Al could do it, so can you.
A few notes for Baha’is …
I should warn you that “Jesus in Montana” has been rated “R” by—er, Barry?—for foul language, and references to drugs, Armageddon, fornication, religion, and one particular sex offender; but it isn’t all that hard on the Baha’i Faith.
Barry Smith goes so far as to say that, as part of the Baha’i doctrine of progressive revelation, prophecy is the way that God tells us how to recognize the Manifestations. I’m not sure that I’ve ever heard it put that way before, but that seems to be the way a lot of Baha’is look at it. One might call it the “Thief in the Night” wing of the Baha’i Faith.
I understand that Baha’is of the dominant Haifan group are strongly advised to avoid any discussion of the sect that Barry Smith has so much fun with, but it seems to me there is little to fear. Smith pokes fun particularly at the minute size of the BUPC, and estimates, quite charitably, the total number of Baha’is at seven million. He does poke a little fun at progressive revelation, but in a good-natured way. Moses, for instance, taught us not to eat paste, and Jesus taught us how to write in cursive.
Disclosure
Yes, it is true that, like the cult leader that Barry Smith celebrates, I too am a Jensen, and yes my father is a Baha’i Chiropractor, and it’s true that he has been expecting Armageddon since he first read the Scriptures and the pilgrim notes; but that is where the similarities end. Well, my mother was born in Montana. Oh, and there was that guy named Barry who lived in our basement. Hmmm … maybe I didn’t actually grow up in California …
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02.26.07
Posted in Personal, Baha'i at 8:47 pm by Dan Jensen
You might say the sky was crying during the morning commute. Paul McCartney was crying out “The Long and Winding Road” on the car radio. Some memories from years back replayed in my head, and before I knew it, dammit, I was crying too…
My daughter’s teacher recently covered Helen Keller, and my daughter developed a keen interest in Helen Keller and braille. This inspired me to order a braille stylus, slate, and paper from Lighthouse for the Blind in the City.
So there we were with the equipment and supplies. And there she was with her blind grandfather (my father) up there in Washington. The rest was, as they say, academic.
She didn’t know what to write. Was his birthday coming up? No. We looked at the calendar. It was Presidents’ Week. Happy Washington’s Birthday? No. I knew of one date that would be on Grandpa’s calendar that she had never heard of. I hesitated, then I told her, “why don’t you write Happy Ayyam-i-Ha.” This was a reference to an upcoming event on the Baha’i calendar, and I explained it to her.
I punched out some braille for Grandpa as well. I chose a passage that he had recited many times when I was young. No doubt you have heard it as well:
Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Yep. You guessed it. That there’s Shakespeare!
Brief candle…
I may be the rebel of the brood, but I am not the black sheep. That honor goes to my oldest sister. She left home on a mission for the Baha’i Faith when I was a young boy. Shortly thereafter, she married another young Baha’i, but other than having a wonderful baby daughter, it came to naught. They divorced, and she never had another legitimate marriage. She did marry twice more, but neither was a Baha’i marriage. Mom and Dad disapproved of my interest in going to visit her, but they held out a hope that she and her husband might someday have a Baha’i ceremony.
I didn’t see much of Duska until I graduated from college, a couple years after I privately left the Baha’i Faith. She lived and worked near Yosemite, and I was soon doing the same. I took a bus up to visit her, and after that backpacked from Wawona to the Valley, and got a ride to my new workplace.
Over the years, Duska and I developed a new kinship, and she bonded with my wife and children as well. Duska and I would sometimes sit and laugh about how our parents would avoid us. They would drive within a couple miles or so of my house when visiting a doctor or the Bosch Baha’i school, and they had been avoiding Duska for years. Duska and I would, in contrast, go well out of our way to visit our parents, in spite of our differences, and in spite of the treatment we might get during the visit. There would be constant reminders that religion came first, and we often found ourselves upstaged by what was termed “our Baha’i family”. We laughed it off. We really did.
The Baha’i religion almost never came up, but when it did, you can bet that we laughed.
Duska got some free time a few years back, and decided to fly up to Washington to see the folks and family. She stayed the night with us, and made up a game that she played with our baby boy. It was simple: she would look through the window of a Fisher Price house and say “Hi!”, and he would giggle a “Hi” back.
I was a little distracted at the time—I don’t know what about, but I managed to take her to the airport.
She spent the next night at our parents’ house, and suffered from a massive brain hemorrage in the morning. I was able to speak to her again, but the doctor said she could not have heard me.
Mom made certain that Duska had a Baha’i memorial and burial. Mom said she had once asked Duska if she considered herself a Baha’i, and that Duska had responded in the affirmative. I didn’t want to fight about it, but I was horrified. I understood: Duska was still her daughter. Could I blame Mom if she was in denial?
Still, anger was heaped upon grief: what about the Duska that lived and died? What about her? Was anybody going to remember her?
Our neighbor told me, “Dan, the dead don’t care.”
I don’t suppose they do. But regardless, I still miss you, sister. Yeah, sometimes I see you. At the filling station. I was parked in line behind that tan Ford Escort you used to drive, and I could only watch. You got out, filled up, and then you drove away.
I can see lots of things, but that doesn’t change a thing.
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02.21.07
Posted in Personal, The Sink, San Joaquin Valley at 3:53 pm by Dan Jensen
After Visalia, Grangeville may have been the first town in the Sink. It was a stage stop between Visalia and Stockton, and a center of industry—one might say, as the irrigation systems that make the Central Valley what it is today were just beginning. Even the famous naturalist John Muir had stopped in Grangeville to admire the innovative network of canals in 1875, when Grangeville was booming with a population of 600. That was before the Southern Pacific Railroad bypassed Grangeville and thereby doomed it to obscurity.
Before irrigation and other initiatives, the Grangeville area was a harsh place to farm. Salinity, dust storms, and wild cattle and pigs made for unending frustration. The Last Chance and Peoples’ Ditch Companies were formed in 1873 to bring Kings River water to the Grangeville area, and the town itself was organized in 1874.
We lived in the town that the Southern Pacific Railroad created just east of Grangeville. That railroad town would be named Hanford, though there was nothing to ford at Hanford but the Peoples Ditch and the Southern Pacific.
I was given a tour of the canal system one summer when my older brother Al came to Hanford for a visit after returning from Alaska. He purchased an inflatable raft, and invited me on an expedition down the River from Laton to Excelsior Avenue.
As we floated downstream, the river began to look less and less like a river, and more like a canal. Just after we passed what I later determined was the Lower Kings River Ditch diversion, our way was obstructed by a dam on the river—and just by a lucky chance—an angry farmer. Al had to pull the raft out of the river and carry it down a dirt road to a point downstream where we could get back in the water. We finally reached Excelsior Avenue, where Al’s wife Sanna picked us up.
© 2007, 2008 Dan J. Jensen
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02.15.07
Posted in Personal, The Sink, San Joaquin Valley at 8:44 pm by Dan Jensen
When we arrived, the Sink was a hot, arid place, and it only seemed to become more so as Spring burned into Summer. Autumn, though, was a temperate season right from the equinox. It did not offer the freshness and youth of Spring, but it offered something equally consoling: the peace of gradual decline; that comfort of the old which the young cannot conceive.
Autumn, though, did not endure more than five or six weeks. It happened that the close of October, marked in a child’s mind by the annual festival of Halloween, represented a transformation in the Sink, as it does in a similar manner throughout California.
Halloween is said to have once been a Celtic New Year’s Eve festival. I don’t know why the Celts chose the close of October to be the close of the year, but it comes naturally enough to Californians, for it is usually soon after Halloween that the winter rains arrive.
We say winter rains, but what one feels if one walks in the midst of the meadows is the conception of a new cycle of life. The reclined rays of sunlight and cooler weather are no threat to life. There is light and warmth enough, but what is in dire need, and what has been utterly nonexistent for six months, is water. November, then, may not be the favorite month of the Sun worshipper, but the meadows love November. This is when the embryo is planted in the womb of California. By bleak January, the hills will have transformed from the dull, grayish brown of death to the bright greens of rebirth.
The October air is polluted with the exhaust of the year. We blame the cars, the farmers, and the great cities for the suffocating soup that masquerades as air, and we are justified in part, but it is also true that the Sink has always collected the exhaust of the year. Man did not invent fire; certainly not in this land of fire.
But come November the exhaust of the old year is washed away, and puddles of it lay scattered about the Sink bottoms. I looked out that first morning of the year, and walked out and smelled the strange mix of dust and chemical and humidity; it was foreign. It was refreshing to breathe again.
© 2007 Dan J. Jensen
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Posted in Personal, The Sink at 6:33 pm by Dan Jensen
The firemen had come to visit before, last year, but that was in another place, so they didn’t know that I had a history.
We just wanted to see the fire do its magic. Our neighbor Andy and I took an old plastic soap dish to the back lot, put it in a coffee can, and through some dry grass on it. It wouldn’t ignite, so we got some lighter fluid; then it lit. The fire shot up out of the can and lept out onto the long, golden grass. A wave of heat and smoke pushed outward, putting a wasp nest into a frenzy. I was stung a number of times as I ran to the house to tell my sister the news. She had been watching us during a visit, and was about to find out how much kid-sitting can be.
I don’t know what stopped the fire from consuming the neighborhood. Maybe it lost its apetite. Maybe it lost interest.
One may not look forward to a visit from the police, but a visit from the fire department is more frightening. When the police come to visit, it’s likely you’ve been naughty. When firefighters come to visit, you may have been a minute or two from burning down the neighborhood.
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Posted in Personal, The Sink, San Joaquin Valley at 12:35 am by Dan Jensen
There are few pleasures more terrible than the waking of the Tulare Basin on a summer morning. The air has warmth that seems to whisper of the heat of the day, yet comforts as it haunts. The light of roads, the farms, the combines, and the trucks are scattered over the flat expanse like boats on a great, placid sea. One imagines the machine of Valley agriculture to be a sleeping dragon, both terrible and beautiful, and like the dragon, never sleeping very deeply on its treasure pile.
Soon a blue glow appears above the profile of the Sierra Nevada. The glow grows imperceptibly brighter, until spears of white light shoot skyward, heralding the impending arrival of the sun. When the sun arrives, everything is blinded, and the soft hues of dawn are usurped by the glare and deep shadows of the day. The driving becomes strained and dangerous. The dragon is no longer feigning sleep.
The drive from Mojave to Tehachapi is surprisingly short considering that the Sierra Nevada lies immediately to the north. One nearly feels as though one is creeping past a sleeping giant. As a child, I had no thoughts for that scaled beast that today occupies my mind. I only looked up at the ridges, wondering whether the distant figurines were all joshua trees, or whether some of them were Indians.
The descent into the Basin, though an easy, almost welcoming descent, is quite extended. There is no missing the fact that it’s a long way down. From the top, one enjoys a serpentine escort, as twin rails wind in broad coils and cut through the mountains. Leaving the breezy high desert behind, one meets a stagnant, purple blanket of trapped exhausts, herbicides, and pesticides. It is nothing new. Smog has been a companion of the Basin as long as fire itself, and it’s not just bad air that it traps.
Summer always arrives a little early in the Basin. The air is hot, dry, yet stale and sticky. I caught the chickenpox as soon as we landed. I sat fevering and itching, looking out my bedroom window into the heat of the day, though there was nothing to see out there but more houses. There was nowhere to go there. I would say “out” there, but that wouldn’t be quite right. Every piece of land had a claim on it. Every house was a fortress, and the streets and sidewalks were only motes, patrolled by bullies that might as well have been crocodiles.
The mountain streams from the Kings to the Kern once knew the Lake like other streams know the ocean. The lake itself would spill over its natural spillways into the San Joaquin River in spring, keeping its water relatively free of salinity. It was not a park-like place. The lake was a massive breeding ground for malarial mosquitoes. Every summer, as the river flows dropped, the retreating shores of the lake would leave a plain of rotting fish carcasses where the lake had previously been.
Ever since the harvesters reclaimed the lakebed, it’s been hard to think of the lake in the same way. The maps today might represent the lake, but there’s no reason to label the Basin. It’s just the southern San Joaquin Valley today, but if you spend any time there, you can still tell the difference. You can still feel the lake water in the air every time you inhale.
After I got over chickenpox and overcame my fear of crocodiles and automobiles, I would set out to explore, but there was little to be explored. The farms weren’t far away, but they were industrial farms, no more welcoming than a switchyard or a cement plant. Over time, I abandoned the expeditions and settled indoors.
It was not long until the Mission gained a good following. Mom and Dad found a Mission-style house that they could rent as a residence and an office on one of Hanford’s busier streets, Grangeville Boulevard. Business was good; good enough to afford bicycles.
Not having much experience with such childhood skills, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to ride a bike. At age twelve, I felt a little old to be learning such things, but this I did learn, and it changed my world. It transformed the Basin. Suddenly, that immense grid of roads became a frontier, as the desert had been years before. The farms were still forbidden, but at the scale of the Basin, the towns, parks, canals, and other landmarks were a worthy frontier.
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12.05.06
Posted in Religion, Personal, Dixie at 4:46 pm by Dan Jensen
We had moved to South Carolina or South Africa four times by the time I turned fifteen. During those four stints, we lived in seven different towns. The principal motive for all this motion was to participate in mass conversion of Blacks to the Bahá’í Faith.
Mass conversion wasn’t just something that we were drawn to because it meant bringing God’s Word to lots of receptive souls. It was, and remains, an essential component of the Bahá’í “entry by troups” prophecy. It is vitally important to the Bahá’í Faith that it expand. For this reason, Bahá’ís have been pushed continuously to relocate to new places so that they might spread the Faith.
It may be that few Bahá’í families were uprooted as completely as ours, and I’m certain that Dad’s wanderlust played a part, but I have no doubt that our displacement was a direct result of directives of the Bahá’í leadership. We were not just spreading the Good Word; we were fulfilling prophecy.
I think, leaving some room for doubt, that we would have stayed put if we could have afforded it. Our problem was that whenever we would go to these spiritual locales, Mom and Dad could never make a decent living. Either there just wasn’t enough of a market, or segregationists would do what they could to discourage Mom and Dad from running an integrated business. In Walterboro, South Carolina, Mom and Dad caught heat for serving both whites and blacks. After Walterboro, they opened a practice in Easley, which enjoys the dubious distinction of being near to the town of Piedmont, made so infamous by the film “Birth of a Nation” as being the fictional cradle of the Klu Klux Klan. Their luck was no better there.
Though I don’t harbor any sympathies for the whole enterprise of saving souls, I respect the effort that Mom and Dad made to live by their principles. I’ve not known many Bahá’ís who were so willing to dedicate their lives to their Cause, and how many Bahá’ís had the courage to take on the twin demons of segregation and apartheid at the business level?
I say courage, but maybe there was some naiveté as well. Still, courage and foolishness are old bedfellows. What I think may have been unfortunate is the price that my oldest sibling paid for our misadventures. Sometimes kids pay a price for their parents’ ambitions, but it’s not as though Mom and Dad abandoned any of us. Speaking for myself, I was too young to notice. Even when I was a teenager in the South—or in South Africa, I was too displaced to care, even when I found myself between the racist overtures of whites and the fists of blacks.
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Posted in Dixie at 6:20 am by Dan Jensen
Dad’s blind, so it shouldn’t surprise anybody that he never was much for playing catch or bicycling with the kids, but you’d be surprised what he was willing to try on occasion. Of course, if you’d like to wrestle, he’d always be happy to take you on. As for Mom, she worked, of course. She worked and worked. She’s still working.
When all was said and done, we didn’t see much of Mom and Dad during the day. For one, they worked hard, Dad being the chiropractor and Mom being the jane-of-all-trades office manager. Then there were times when they’d go out for a well-deserved cup of coffee or tea. There was also all the Baha’i work, and on an odd day they might be planning our next move or house hunting.
Many of my boyhood memories of dealings with authority figures often involved my sisters, who were 11 and 5 years older than me. In general, there wasn’t a lot to stop me from doing as I pleased.
I remember quite clearly going out for a walk when I was about age four, and getting a ride home in a police cruiser.
The Walterboro that I remember was just a crossing of a pair of dirt roads, with a church and a couple houses. There’s more to the town than that, but that’s all I can recall. Back behind our neighbor’s house, across a field, I remember an outdoor freezer that was stuffed with juice pops. It must have been behind a store, but that didn’t matter. I only remember the freezer and the pops. Long, slender bags full of sweet, frozen punch.
The dirt roads were full of ruts, and there was a big hole between the houses. I don’t know what it was for. Garbage, perhaps. I remember pieces of newsprint tumbling around it. At dusk, there was the truck that would drive through, dusting the neighborhood’s mosquitoes with DDT. What an unearthly memory.
There were pranks, makeshift go carts, a bb gun, a pig attack, plenty of spankings, and a bush fire. There was nothing quite so scary as when my big brother got pneumonia, and no thrill quite like getting a hold of one of his model cars or erector set creations.
Then there was the sexual exploration, the likes of which I wouldn’t experience again until adulthood. Just good clean interracial intercourse among consenting children. Just doing our bit for racial unity, I guess.
We moved to Liberty after I graduated from kindergarten. I then matriculated to playing with fire in the crawlspace under our house, getting beat up at school, and being cajoled by playmates into throwing pebbles at cars.
After school, I would often show myself into town to partake in some window shopping (I don’t think I ever stole until I was seven). One time while dashing off to the five and dime, I got hit by a car. I was knocked out cold, rolling, I was told, down the street. My collar bone was broken. The lady that clobbered me bribed me good. I’d never seen so many cool toys in my life, but man did it hurt. I didn’t dare cross a street for years, unless no cars could be seen on it.
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