Deja vu, Again

Jan. 6th 2024— the date of my last blog. It seems fitting to post my first blog of 2025 on Jan. 6th, an unforgettable anniversary in American history. Today’s blog contains much the same message posted over a year ago. I committed then to writing more, and more often, about the things I cared about. At the time, I intended to write about whatever interested me, not just politics. My files include unpublished blogs about sneakers (yeah, go figure that one out) and Thomas Paine. But most blogs focused on my feelings about the upcoming presidential election. In those files is also the finished first draft of my second novel, 20/20. But the blogs and the book’s very political themes ran into my anxiety about exposing myself to the virulent, divisive political and social climate in the United States. My writing sat abandoned for most of the year. I don’t want the same outcome in 2025.

My resolutions and goals have foundered in the past, undermined by my lack of confidence, or the vicissitudes of life, or just plain procrastination often fueled by the two other excuses. 2024 was no different. By the post-Nov. 5 shock, my silence slid into isolation, walled off from the public, depressed by the election’s outcome, and puzzled by why people voted the way they did. But in my deep personal angst, I was mostly disappointed in myself that I had remained silent throughout the year; yes, there is hubris in that assessment. After all, who am I and why would my voice matter? Even though my fiction writing is one of the most important things in my life today, I let 20/20 languish too.

My underlying anxiety hasn’t disappeared, but the lingering internal turmoil has slowly morphed into a realization that artists and journalists need to find their voice in times of stress and discord. Now is the time. My internal struggles won’t magically disappear nor will the anxiety over inserting myself into the public debate. I can’t be sure on this morning in early 2025 that I will be able to surmount the obstacles that thwart me.

I’m not going to make any promises either. But I know where to start. Later this week, I will reprint my speech to my Class of ’74 reunion at Harvard College last May. I was one of about 10 people speaking to the theme, “I Still Have Something to Say.” The title of my speech was “From Newsman to Novelist.” After that, I hope to keep a bi-monthly schedule. And, at some point this year, I will publish 20/20.

Now is the time for all good people to speak up. We may each be a voice in the wilderness but a thousand voices might be heard amidst the din of falsehoods and disinformation. I hope my message won’t be shouting and arguing, nor the responses either. But it’s time to restore essential components of a functioning democracy — debate and compromise. I also plan to speak to one of the topics I know well: Mexico, especially its culture.

Deja Vu

I have been absorbed in my annual end-of-the-year introspection and anticipation of a new year ahead. The past 12 months mostly occurred during my 70th year on the planet. There were good things: finishing my second novel, 20/20, taking an 18-day road trip with Donna down the Pacific Coast visiting friends, a wonderful Thanksgiving with my daughter’s in-laws and then my brother-in-law’s family. The tough side of the ledger has one big entry: knee replacement surgery on Sept. 13th. While my recovery has been successful, the entire effort dominated much of the second half of the year.

I’m determined to make the next year better by remembering and reasserting some basic goals and values. New Year’s resolutions never fully encompass what I’m talking about. My 2024 goals are not new, but more an updating of old desires and goals and energizing them with a new determination to dedicate myself to those goals and to keep them front of mind throughout the year. Write more, including a third novel. Improve my guitar playing. Be a better partner. Spend time with friends I care about. Waste less time.

For better or worse, these resolutions are recurring themes in my life. Thus, the title of the blog. I’ve posted a link below to a blog I wrote in July 2022, gordonmottauthor.com. I’ve also added below a quote from our family therapist, whose words unleashed my blocked desire to write fiction and start a blog. There are always excuses for why I have not been able to stick to those desires and regularly put my thoughts down on “paper.” Procrastination. Rebellion at the thought I HAVE to write to keep interest in my blog alive. Life’s curveballs and demands; a new knee, a daughter’s wedding, the small crises of daily life, keeping us fed and the house running. Fatigue over on-line battles with anti-vaxxers, Covid deniers and MAGA Trumpers. Golf. Visitors, etc, etc, etc.

I take solace in knowing that Covid did wreck havoc in my life in 2020 and 2021. Restoring some sense of purpose and normality took time. Yes, that is partly rationalization. However, our virtual lockdown in our own home from March 2020 until March 2021, when we flew to New York for our first vaccination, presented real challenges. In that year, despite our best efforts, Donna and I battled Covid infections — mine much milder than hers. We did spend more time together, without travel or socializing or anything else. But despite the inward focus, which in many ways was healthy and rejuvenating, in the end, I simply lost momentum. Not a depression per se but a loss of hope and optimism, up to that point two dependable constants in my life. The isolation often seemed like it would never end. But also, in that long, nearly two year period, two dear friends died, each loss a searing reminder of my age.

But here we are, nearly three years after that fateful realization we were living through a global pandemic. I have regained some motivation. I’m healthy again. My network of friends, here in Mexico and around the world, is thriving. Donna and I are enjoying the life we have built here.

And, in the midst of all the angst, 20/20, my second novel is written. The story follows the travails of Duncan Mount, a disgraced journalist who gets thrown into a conspiracy that threatens the future of American democracy. What better day than January 6th to announce that book will be coming soon — a propitious day also to relaunch my blog and begin reasserting my voice and my thoughts about life and the world we live in. In the weeks ahead you’ll read about sneakers, Antarctica, and my questions about the events barreling towards us in 2024.

I hope you enjoy. Best of luck with your own resolutions.

Please comment on:

You can also find all my old blogs there.

Links:

I’m Back
https://gordonmottauthor.com/2022/07/02/july-1-2022/

Quote from A Debut, May 10th, 2019
Our wonderful family therapist, Dr. Steve Fochios Sr. had asked me the most crucial question. He had heard my ramblings for years about my desire to write fiction, and my rationalizations about why it wasn’t happening. He asked me: “Do you have anything to say?” I knew I did, and in my mind, there is a dividing line before and after his question. It broke the logjam, and I began to look for the answer.

October 25, 2022

Memory is fickle. We remember some moments, and others we can’t recall. Why is that?

If we traverse a life of 70 years, that’s 3,640 weeks, 25,550 days, 613,200 hours, 36,780,000 minutes filled with life’s events and memories. I turn 70 today, Oct. 25th — which explains my interest in that timeframe. According to the website Clinical Neurologist Specialists, citing a Scientific American study from 2010, the human brain’s memory capacity is 2.5 petabytes, the equivalent of 2,560 terabytes, or 2.6 million gigabytes. So, how many petabytes, terabytes or gigabytes of information do we process in the course of 70 years? One study says we process up to 74 gigabytes a day, or nearly 2 million gigabytes in 25,550 days. To gauge what 2 million gigabytes means, consider that this MacBook Pro I’m writing on has 1TB of built-in storage, or a mere 1,024 gigabytes. A drop in the bucket. Therefore, apparently the brain is big enough to hold everything we have ever seen, touched, felt, said, and experienced. Then why can’t we remember every passing second in that life?

Okay, okay, you say, I get it. The brain is an amazing apparatus, a wondrous machine stuck on top of our skeletons that does much more than most of us even begin to tap into. Bad on me that I can’t access everything at the drop of a hat.

My point is not to suggest that we should remember everything, because we don’t and we can’t. Nor is it necessary. I don’t need to remember what I had for breakfast on June 13th, 1970 when I was not yet 18 years old. I don’t care, nor would the knowledge add anything to my current experience. That’s reality.

But why are some memories so much more potent than others?

I’m going to tell you some of mine. I hope you will tell me some of yours, too. Here’s the rule: Try to come up with memories that don’t have a photographic backup in your life. Those hard copy artifacts distort the memory of the events they capture — events like a victorious moment in your high school athletic career, your college graduation (god, I look so stoned in those pictures), your wedding, the birth of your first child, the purchase of your first house, your child’s wedding. Those are likely candidates to have been photographed. By the photos’ very existence, your brain’s memory is altered. I’m asking you to search for moments in your memory that exist outside your photographic archives. Do you want to label them peak experiences? Maybe they are. Or maybe they just touched you in some indeterminate way that permits you to summon them without any outside cues.

— A doctor’s office in São Paulo, Brazil where the corner of my eyelid was being stitched up after I, a three year old, tripped and smashed into the pointed corner of a coffee table with the orbital bone of my eye socket.

— Making out with my 19-year-old maid in Campinas, Brazil in a TV room as an almost pubescent 13-year-old boy while my parents stayed at the hospital after my father’s surgery.

— Seeing my someday-to-be wife talking to Jim Downey in the stairwell of my freshman dorm at Harvard.

— Standing in a railroad station in Bolivia as a 20-something, at 1am, high in the altiplano, and being able to read by starlight in an otherwise dark little town.

— Seeing a veil of white light on the JFK ramp leading to the airplane that was taking me to Mexico City in 1978 as a newly-assigned foreign correspondent.

— In 1981, in the dark, standing under a hideous green and orange tarpaulin lashed to the trees on the terrace of the weekend house where I was to be married the next morning, with three of my closest male friends getting ready to help haul it down.

— In a Paris bistro in 1985, watching a waiter clip a thick piece of glass siding on our banquette, and seeing it break in half next to my dinner guest facing me, slam into her head and knock her out.

— Sitting all night in a blond wood paneled birthing room at Lenox Hill hospital in 1989 while Donna labored away without success, and then in the morning hours, hearing the doctor say, she’s in distress, let’s get this baby out.

— My boss walking into my office one morning and saying, how’d you like to work on a cigar magazine.

— In my brother’s intensive care room in Washington D.C. in 1997, with the monitors blinking, the kidney machine pumping, and my sister-in-law and mother and sister standing beside him, looking into his eyes as I was leaving and saying, ‘I’ll see you on the other side.” He died the next morning.

— The moment when Donna had returned from a solo hiking trip in the Canadian Rockies and began to excitedly describe her experience, and my reflexive vision was, me, hurtling off an exposed cliffside trail into the abyss below.

— Standing at the back door of our house in Briarcliff Manor, NY, sticking the key into the door to lock it and breaking down in tears, while Donna and Liz waited in two cars in the driveway as we were leaving to drive to Wooster, Ohio for the start of Liz’s college life.

— As the light was fading in the vacant courtyard of our newly purchased, dilapidated colonial-era house in Queretaro, Mexico, seeing the sunset colors change on the old, white adobe walls and feeling the karma, that “this is the place.”

There are dozens and dozens more “moments” like those, memories that flood my head from time to time when I am feeling nostalgic, like before a 70th birthday.

With the advent of iPhone photo montages, moments without photographic evidence have become rarer. Nonetheless, digging around in your memory is a worthwhile exercise. There is a vast trove of events inside your head, and I believe, or at least suspect, that there is some merit in identifying the ones that have stood the test of time. On momentous birthdays, like a 70th, (well, it feels momentous and a bit overwhelming), it is reassuring to take a look back at where you’ve been, the things you’ve done, and how far you’ve come.

Within those unadulterated memories, there is a life. A life to remember. A life to cherish. A life to celebrate.

Oct. 15, 2022

Lake O’Hara. My fantasies of the backcountry paradise in Yoho National Park, just over the Continental Divide from Lake Louise, had kept me sane during a non-life-threatening summer illness. My desire to be there for our Sept. 2 reservation at Lake O’Hara Lodge inspired me to regain at least a bit of physical conditioning after three surgical procedures and four weeks without any exercise. I refused to let thoughts take over that I might be too weak, or not recovered enough, to hike. The fear was real.

On Sept 2, I stood in the parking lot at the bottom of the Lake O’Hara access road rising up into the mountains in front of me. Was I ready? I was there. Our luggage — my daughter Liz and her husband James and my wife Donna were on the trip too — was lined up waiting for the Lodge bus to come rolling down the road. Like magic, it appeared right on time around 9:30. 

Why do we go? Again and again and again. It was Donna’s 12th visit. My 11th, and Liz is already on her sixth trip there. James, my new son-in-law, has been there three times.

One reason is the stunning beauty. The ring of mountain peaks around Lake O’Hara, stretching down toward the Bow Valley, has been compared to the Swiss Alps. With good reason.

Parks Canada protocols also play a role. Every person who passes the hut at the bottom of the road for anything more than a day hike must have a reservation at the Lodge or at the Campground or at a small encampment known as the Elizabeth Parker Hut operated by the Alpine Club of Canada. On any given day, there are 100 people or less who have secured a space in one of those three places, and a seat space on the Lodge or Parks Canada buses both ways. You can walk in, and many do. But it’s an eight mile hike up the road (most people say it takes three hours) to try to take in as many sights as possible and then, you have to walk back down; no unauthorized camping allowed and no free ride on the buses. 

What do the access rules create? On any given day, in the more remote areas, you may see half a dozen people. On the longest round trip hike to Cathedral Prospect from the Lodge, I saw one other couple during the nearly seven-hour round trip. The semi-wilderness rules, and is not open to suggestions that the modern world should be allowed in.

The Lodge plays its own role in keeping O’Hara a paradise. Don’t get me wrong; it is not roughing it in backcountry to stay there.There are hot showers, or in my case, the tub baths. Electricity. A gourmet chef. A wine cellar well-stocked with Canadian wines. But that’s where any accommodation for outworlders ends. No internet. No TV. No radio. No telephone; well, that’s only partly true—there is a single public telephone booth down the road that takes credit cards where you can call out if there is an absolute emergency. We have even joked (more than half seriously) that the day the Lodge gets internet is the day we stop coming.

But I know how the isolation really works, why the outside world stays far away and cannot intrude. There is a shimmering veil at the bottom of the road, a fantastical barrier that separates the outside world from Lake O’Hara. If you can’t see it, or feel the magical transition that happens as you pass through the veil, (going both ways, by the way), you aren’t really seeing or feeling the wonder of Rocky Mountain backcountry. Once you succumb to the magic, you are in another world. Five or six days without any worries about what’s happening in China or Russia or Ukraine, or Washington D.C or wherever you are from. You re-emerge through the veil rejuvenated, maybe physically exhausted by the thousands of feet of vertical climbs and descents, but knowing that every vacation should make you feel this way. You can’t help but be thrilled and deeply contented with the connection to the natural beauty of Lake O’Hara. 

All behind the veil. Waiting for my next visit.

Oct. 4, 2022

I still harbor those childhood memories of endless summer days and nights, free from homework and school, playing in the woods behind our home in the country while trying to avoid my dad’s demands to mow three acres of pristine bluegrass lawn and in the evening’s glooming chasing fireflies until Mom called me in for bedtime. The idea that summer should still be a time to enjoy yourself remains a mantra. So, on a July night, the 12th to be exact, I woke up about an hour after going to sleep with an all-over body discomfort, not really pain but a deeply unsettling feeling that something wasn’t right. My anxieties kicked into hyperdrive. Sleep never really arrived that night, nor would I have a decent night’s sleep for another 30 days. I sensed that the rest of my summer plans were out the window.

This tale is not just an unveiling, or an unwelcome revelation of something intimate and personal. It also is about getting older, about the difference between having a weird abdominal pain at 30 and at 69, within days of my 70th birthday.  And it’s about how we should never stop being aware of life’s brutal reality, never forgetting or denying that from one minute to the next, everything can change.

Thirty six hours after the initial pain, I was lying in a hospital bed, a CT scan and ultrasound pinpointing a completely blocked kidney. A day later, successful surgery had removed the blockage, but because of extreme swelling, three or four other stones were left behind. Two weeks later, those were removed in New York. The entire four weeks is a blur, a whirlwind of three anesthesias and procedures. Nothing was remotely normal until a stent was removed on Aug. 12th, 30 days after my pain began. In the end, I got a clean bill of health. Recovery was more about dealing with the dull fog induced by the anesthesias and a total lack of exercise in that long month than about any long-term worries.

Yet nothing was the same, either around me or in my head. My wife’s worries were written all over her face. Hugging my daughter felt somehow more urgent, and more necessary. Dinners with friends presented a challenge to not dwell on my illness, but also to stay focused and not let my mind wander. When I saw a picture of myself taken in the middle of the episode, I looked old and drawn, not a description I would have used before. Instead of proudly trumpeting the idea I was in the best shape of life on July 11th, every step I took felt tentative, every day’s end marked by a deep, unsettling fatigue. Every middle of the night wakeup led to long stretches of dark fantasies about, well, about everything and nothing, some important, some totally trivial. I felt trapped by my anxieties, unable to brush them off or somehow resolve them.

I am keenly aware that every day people wake up with discomfort like mine and the pain turns out to be pancreatic or liver cancer, or some other much more serious disease. My wild thoughts that first night had run through all those dire outcomes, the inevitable anxiety caused by unknown origins of pain. In the wake of the experience, however, the mirror of mortality shook my usually intact sense of invulnerability, that precious terrain that let me live without paralyzing fear of death. After two years of pandemic life and the deaths of close friends, I had to admit that I had constructed rationalizations that I was doing everything to stay safe. Inevitably, the psychological toll of denial of trauma caught up with me, and caused a different kind of paralysis; it was fueled by a loss of optimism, usually a bedrock constant in my life. I was stymied at nearly every turn; writer’s block, procrastination, a lack of focus. Yet still, I externalized the ever-present trauma, boxing it into a place where I could ignore the worst outcomes being suffered by others. My simple kidney stone blockage stripped away those illusions and, despite all my proclamations of being fine and happy, I came face to face with the reality that I had been anxious and struggling to regain my pre-pandemic drive and motivation.

Although only a few short weeks have passed since those 30 lost days, I sense the walls are coming down. On a long hike on a mountainous trail in the Canadian Rockies, a trip that I had worried I wouldn’t even be able to make, I stopped feeling like a patient in recovery. I wouldn’t describe it as a new spring in my step on that 9-mile hike, but I was suddenly less worried about being weak. Upon getting home, I have started writing, diving into tasks that had been ignored for too long, devoting time again to my guitar playing and song-writing, and as an adjunct to my writing, beginning to re-imagine the plot lines of my next novel, 20/20.

Is there a lesson here? There are all the cliches: live life to the fullest every day; don’t waste time on inconsequential things; be aware of your surroundings. So yes, there are lessons, maybe ones that don’t make life’s unpredictability any less scary but that might help us prepare for life’s inevitable curveballs. And it may be too soon to declare victory over the malaise of the past two and a half years. But it’s a start. And I now believe the wake-up call of those 30 summer days will prepare me better for what’s to come.

There will be other summers. Not as many as I had ahead of me at 30. But more than some close friends of mine who aren’t with me anymore; they woke up with a pain one day and didn’t make it through the next year or simply laid their head down and didn’t wake up. I won’t ever forget, as I had forgotten on July 12th, that things can and do change in an instant. I’ve been reminded that one of the best ways to cope is to simply move forward, with that core belief in life’s possibilities. Every day.

July 17, 2022

I grew up in an evangelical Christian home. My parents were devout Christians who attended church weekly, prayed before every meal, read the Bible regularly and expected their children to do the same. In my adolescence, I professed to be a born again Christian and I enthusiastically joined groups like Young Life and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Up until college, the church was an integral part of my social life. Without dwelling on the details, I’ll say that my childhood and adolescent beliefs evolved over time into a spiritual landscape that does not, and hasn’t for decades now, included organized religion in any shape or form or denomination.

The only memory I have of politics intruding in our family’s religious life was the 1960 presidential election when I clearly remember my father’s concern over John F. Kennedy’s Catholicism, and whether it was appropriate for a U.S. president to be beholden to the Vatican or the Catholic church. But he was also a devoted Republican at the time, so it wasn’t clear if his vote was informed by religion or political affiliation. Otherwise, my parents lived their Christian values in their personal lives. In the midst of my hometown’s racial violence in 1970, my mother insisted that I invite one of my African-American basketball teammates for dinner at our home, a ranch house in the middle of a 100 percent white, middle class neighborhood. While only one example, I knew my mother, who lived to be nearly 105 years old, treated people with fairness and acceptance regardless of skin color, religious affiliation or background.

Today, my recollections run smack into the debate in the public arena about the role Christianity should have in the public life of the United States of America. Comments like Lauren Boebert’s that the “church should direct government” and that she’s “tired of this separation of church and state junk” reflect a disturbing trend in a segment of the population that shares her beliefs; since she was speaking to a Christian congregation, you can interpret her use of the word church, to mean Christian church. Even the recent Supreme Court decision allowing a high school football coach to pray (we can assume it wasn’t with a Muslim prayer rug) after games at the 50-yard line opens the door to allowing the imposition of one’s personal religious beliefs on non-believers.

One bedrock assumption of the ongoing Christian crusade polemic is that the Founding Fathers, the authors of the Declaration of Independence and subsequently of the Constitution, actually intended the fledgling nation to be guided by the Christian faith.

Those claims about the Founding Fathers are revisionism at its worst. The danger in allowing those claims to go unchallenged is clear. The hidden goal of America’s new Christian crusaders, whether you label it Christian supremacy, or Christian nationalism, is to create a quasi-theocracy in America. It’s not hyperbole to label the movement with those words. Read the movement’s own literature about homosexuals, same sex marriage, birth control, the Ten Commandments in public venues, the primacy of Jesus Christ; the role of women in marriage. Each of these attitudes run contrary to beliefs, both religious and secular, that many Americans hold.

The record is clear. Many of the Founding Fathers were deists. They believed in a divine creator, but not one which actively intervened in earthly activity. Nor did they believe the Bible was the revealed word of God, and they rejected biblical scripture as a source of religious doctrine. In accordance with their beliefs, they rejected the notion of a national religion, or any restrictions on the practice of one’s religious faith, whatever it might be. Here are some salient quotes from the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Thomas Jefferson: “Christianity neither is nor ever was a part of common law. … In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. (Personal correspondence to Dr. Thomas Cooper, Feb. 1814; Dr. Horatio Spaffard, March, 1817)

John Adams: “The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion. (as stated in the Treaty of Tripoli, which Adams signed in 1797)

James Madison: “Religion and government will both exist in greater purity the less they are mixed together.” (Letter to Edward Livingston, July 1822.)

For sure there was debate in the Constitutional Convention about the role of religion in the new Republic. But the men there were learned individuals, who knew the history of Europe and the religious conflicts that had battered the continent throughout history. They also had seen laws and attitudes in some American colonies that led to arrest and expulsion and even execution of so-called heretics.

Cognizant of the past violence in Europe and intolerance in the United States, the men writing the Constitution did agree on the wording of the 1st Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

While some argue that amendment doesn’t explicitly call for the separation of Church and State, the intention was clear. Both Jefferson and Adams considered it one of their greatest achievements, keeping the church out of government, but also the government out of churches. Today, the Christian nationalist movement seeks to undermine the original intent of those men, who constructed a framework for a nation that has survived for 246 years.

You may identify as a Christian, either ethnically as I do or as a full practicing member of the faith. You may even believe that the teachings of Jesus Christ are superior to Yaweh, Budda, or Shiva, or Mohammed. But in this country that has not, and hopefully will never, give you the right to impose your faith’s principles on others.

In fact, in all the world’s major religions, there is a simple and wonderful premise: treat others as you would want to be treated. The golden rule: that is universal. If you call yourself a Christian, when you start vilifying others based for their sexuality, their skin color, their politics, you are violating one of the basic tenets of your own faith.