Egoism
Individualism
Sovereignty
Splendor

(These ideas are explicated in this sloppy manifesto)

 
SplendorQuest: Johnny Kocurek



He would have been 102 years old today, but he died in 1976, the year my older sister and I graduated from high school. My mother's father, my grandfather, the most important person in my life, then and now.

His parents were from Czechoslovakia, but he was born in a little town called Westville, Illinois. He was the oldest of ten children. When his father ran off, he went to work in the Peabody Coal Mines to support his mother and his brothers and sisters. He was ten years old. He worked twelve hours a day, six days a week, and for many years he was paid in company scrip rather than legal tender. He put all of his brothers and sisters--my great-uncles and great-aunts--through high school before he started his own family. To the day he died, his education never extended beyond the fifth grade--yet he was the wisest man I've ever known.

I wrote about him here, a long time ago, and more recently here. The truth is, I write about him all the time. He's the solid earth beneath everything I write, everything I say, everything I do. Everything I am.

In Cinderella's memories of the zoo, I said:

"I smelled that motor and it took me back thirty years. I felt like I was standing on a dock launching a fishing boat with my grandfather. I could smell the motor and the water and the fish and the dirt and the nightcrawlers. I could hear geese a long way off and I could hear my grandpa whistling, and it was just like I was right there, all in a flash."

That's so much him, so much us, half a lifetime ago. He always had time for me, fishing and camping and puttering around with this and that. He whistled incessantly, and it drove other people to distraction, but I just took it as a part of him.

And taking people as they are is something I think I learned from him. My grandfather was a man of firm and fixed standards. There was nothing muddy or gray inside his mind. But among other people he could purse his lips--resoundingly, if you knew his facial expressions--and keep his mouth shut. I think these are the two faces of the twenty-dollar gold piece of liberty: A steadfast conviction to doing what you think is right, and a rigorous tolerance of other people's differing choices.

I expect everyone has done things they're ashamed of, but I can't imagine that my grandfather ever did. I don't hero-worship anyone, and I think a measure of adulthood is the recognition that one's parents and grandparents are not gods (or devils), but just people, with virtues and faults in the usual distribution. But I spent many days of many years with Johnny Kocurek, and I never once saw him act on any motive but the fullest and most perfect rectitude.

He was a man full of thought, and his every thought was full of grace. I miss him every day.
posted by Greg Swann at 9:23 PM

 
It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...



On Friday, I asked Cathy to pick up a bag of hard Christmas candy to help fill up some boxes we were preparing to send to Iraq. We've been sending stuff to our young friend Andy Zorn all along, but Cathy has managed to adopt two more GIs, MPs no less, and the stuff we had for each of them didn't fill up their boxes. Two hours later she came home with vast quantities of stuff, way more than could fit into the boxes. On Saturday I shipped four boxes (two for Andy) weighing over 25 pounds. The postage was $56. I would laugh at us, except that I want those brave kids to know that we support and admire them for what they're doing.

And to each of our GIs, Cathy sent a tiny Christmas tree, just enough to remind them of the homes they must be away from this Christmas.

And it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas every where I go. For years people have groused that Thanksgiving gets rolled, but this year the instant Christmasification after Halloween was particularly blatant. Okay by me. I don't need help to celebrate Thanksgiving, and I love what Christmas does to the world outside my mind.

And we've done our own little bit, too. Our annual Christmas card web page is finished and posted. We've done photo Christmas cards forever--that Christmas-in-the-desert photo of my kids Meredith and Cameron is ten years old to the day--but since 1999, we've made versions of our cards available on the web. We're blatantly early this year because the snail-mail version of this year's card is being printed in vast quantities out of state.

We're going to my mother's home for Thanksgiving, which is maybe a good reason to rush Christmas, recalling that home is that place where, when you go there, you yearn at once to run away again. Even so, it was fun reliving too much of my past to dig out that photo of Meredith and Cameron, and I found three others that I want to memorialize in a more-permanent way. Plus which, I have at least one Christmas story to write, all this on top of the huge crush of business. But Christmas is that state of mind, where, when you come to it, you remember what it is you're working for.

And enough of that babbling. Go see our Christmas card. And Best of the Season to you, blatantly early or not...
posted by Greg Swann at 9:52 PM

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