That Was Then, This Is Now
Season 6, #3: Nightwalking home led to family. That is, until things changed
“Though the artist may have a number of goals and motivations, there is only one intention. This is the grand gesture of the work.
It is not an exercise of thought, a goal to be set, or a means of commodification. It is a truth that lives inside of you. Through your living it, that truth becomes embodied in the work. If the work doesn’t represent who you are and what you’re living, how can it hold an energetic charge?”
—Rick Rubin1
IF STORYSHED IS THE trunk of my personal history tree, then Completely in the Dark (aka CITD, my old WordPress blog) are its roots. There would be no Daytalking, Nightwalking, or Stargazing without CITD, of that I’m certain.
But to be clearer, my stories of that history (and therefore my understanding of that history—not anyone else’s, which of course would differ) were the chief goal of CITD. My other goals included using those stories as a way of dealing with grief and anxiety, yet also sharing others’ stories, such as family and friends, through the blog.
All worthy pursuits.
The Nightwalking branch of the personal history tree is a slender and creaky one. Nightwalking isn’t particularly wordy, so I use my inner Daytalking (the chirpy, relational side of my personality) to coax out its murky unspoken emotions and to direct Stargazing’s laser beam into its dark corners to reveal what’s lurking there.
That, my friends, has been the goal of this series “That Was Then, This Is Now,” where previous pieces have focused on cars and transportation, and recently music and cinema.
It’s time to turn the page and go deeper—way deeper, into trickier dark waters.
As the series progresses, I get more nervous, especially since this third installment, right here before your eyes, is focused on home and family.
Why so twitchy? Well, it’s striking closer to the bone—scraping away at places I haven’t considered in a long time. But, by doing so, I’m hoping it allows for a clearer view of possible futures. Your vision of home and experience with family reveals volumes about who you are as a person.
As producer Rick Rubin says in the above quote, “It is a truth that lives inside of you.” And by you, I don’t just mean me. Maybe this resonates with some of you reading this who are on paths far removed from mine.
So let’s go see together, shall we?
That Was Then: It’s a Family Affair
THE YEAR IS 1950 and the U.S. national census is in full swing.
In a completely bizarre fit of Stargazing, I got curious and started searching internet archives of that census, drilling down to Greensburg, Indiana, and my late mother’s childhood home there.
To my astonishment, this is what I found:
As I looked at it my imagination kicked in, since the previous entries list “No one home.” But when the census-taker reached the Adams house, he or she was able to jot down my future grandparents and the teenage girl who—nine years later—would become my mother. I imagined what that day must’ve been like, what time of year it was, the smell in the air: if it was Sunday, was Grandma cooking a pot roast? Did Mom answer the door and call to her folks? Was she playing with neighborhood friends or was she alone with her parents?
My family, the group of people who raised me, begins here. Amazing.
Once Mom met my father (it took multiple dates until that clicked, as Dad used to tell me), they finally wed on December 21, 1957, and I was born two years later. Baby brother followed two years later.
We were now a new family—something I called in CITD “The Family Project” since my late father was an architect and project manager and was determined to lead and direct us like the captain of a whaling ship, barking orders from behind the helm.
In his youth, Dad was an honorably discharged Army veteran (Korea and Japan) and career-building firebrand who was proud of his independence and can-do abilities. He was never shy to let people know what he was capable of. As his first-born, I found that hugely intimidating. Much, much later I learned how behind that gruff exterior he was actually a softie, always kind to other women and outgoing and friendly to strangers. I admired that about him.
At first my brother’s birth struck me as an ominous development—unwanted, direct competition to my primacy in the household, and I recall resenting the sudden shift of attention. That was probably the first deep wound of my young life. There’s even a story around that, as I noted in Completely in the Dark:
I decided I’d had enough [at 5 years old] and was gonna strike out on my own. Dad even helped me pack. Mom gave me a sandwich and they saw me out the door. “Well,” Dad said, “Good luck. Hope you write to us when you get to where you’re goin’.”
I burst into tears and begged to be taken back.2
Whether that played out exactly that way, who knows? I do know I felt conflicted and it’s likely I was forceful enough to insist on leaving home, but how it played out among the participants is important to note. I can only conjecture, but Dad likely enlisted Mom’s help, i.e., “Let’s play along with Mike,” and she went and made the sandwich, probably returning from the kitchen with that bemused smile of hers that I still recall to this day.
If I felt hurt, it was because I thought Mom would always be on my side. And truth told, she was. All the women in our family quickly came to the rescue.
From my mother, to my grandmothers, to my aunt and cousins I felt the nurturing power that only women can give to boys who feel emotional and vulnerable from the get-go. Grandma Mamie loved both me and my brother no end as my mother was an only child and they lavished all their attention on us. I saw Grandpa Ray and Mamie way more than my father’s parents, although the folks did their best to even things out for both families. They had to walk a fine line, and even little kids can sense that.
By the mid-1960s, we’d left Indiana and moved to Maryland where every year my father’s career expanded, with projects at the National Institutes of Health and NASA, working in Bethesda but renting a house in Olney, Maryland, with a huge yard, kid’s playhouse, a treehouse nestled in the apple trees beyond which were far backfield hedges, all surrounded by a grove of pines.
I was becoming a weird kid: one who loved horror movies and comic books, Batman and Robin, science catalogs and studying meteorology, all my science fiction paperback books and digging into Mom and Dad’s record collection (which I think they primarily bought for dinner party music rather than outright music appreciation—although Mom loved her show tunes, such as Oklahoma! or South Pacific and The Sound of Music). Mom was my friend and chief audience—I lived for her attention and loved to make her laugh.
Dad—well, he was in a pressure cooker with a high-stakes job. The tension must’ve erupted when he returned home at night. I wrote about a particular incident in CITD that gives you a snapshot of what we were like as father and son in the late 1960s:
Then there was that day in Maryland when I drove the riding mower through the garage door.
Dad and I had fundamentally divergent temperaments: I was dreamy, moody, and emotional; he was focused, rigid, and rational. There wasn’t a time in my early life where I felt nurtured by him, even when he took me and my brother fishing. I’d get bored and start to talk. He told me to shut up or I’d drive away the fish. If he was working on something in the garage, he’d send me to look for a 3/8 in. crescent wrench in the basement. I’d return a half-hour later with a hammer. Absolutely drove him bonkers.
So one day, in Maryland, he agrees to show me how to drive the riding lawn mower. I’m, oh, somewhere between 8-10 years old at this point. He demonstrates how to put it in gear, where the brake is, how to go in reverse—probably in more detail than I was able to take in at the time.
The mower starts with a roar and I’m off, everything going fine, tooling around the driveway, the cutting blade up and sailing like a breeze. Then I’m heading toward the garage and panic. Where’s the brake again?!
CRASH. Right through the door.
I can still hear him running after me, howling in my ear.3
This is only one incident, but when I think of all the mounting anxiety I felt over the years (in many forms, such as “I’m a failure,” “I’m an idiot,” “I’m incompetent,” “I’ll never amount to much,” “My son is just lazy,” etc.) then I think you get the picture.
When you’re young and vulnerable, you’re just figuring it out.
Sometimes it takes years to realize that who you are is more than enough.
Sometimes you never do.
This Is Now: He’s Leaving Home
THIS WAS ALL BACK during that thing we called “the 20th century.”
Some people seem to cling to the ol’ song and dance, even after the events of September 11, 2001. And I’d say a lot of people are still mentally living in that horrible century, or working like the devil to bring it back.
Truth is, there’s no going back. It’s toast.
Maybe the smart thing to say is, “Good riddance. Addio, Casablanca.”
But seriously, that early “I’m leaving home” incident has been played over and over again my entire life—like a fucking broken record. It’s time to lift the needle and put on some fresh tunes.
But first one last look at it before we chuck it in the basement. Here’s the current lay of the land: (Nearly) everyone died. Mom, spring of 2008. This September marks 16 years since Dad followed her. Grandma Mamie was second after Grandma Hazel, dying of a heart attack in the early 1980s. The men generally outlived the women, with Grandpa Ray passing away at the age of 97. Old friends have died or moved away. My aunt and uncle, Dad’s only sister and her husband, are just cracking 80 and are devoted to some wacky political and religious netherlands I can’t even wrap my head around. My cousins have gone through divorces and the deaths of spouses. My only brother went through a bitter divorce and life challenges that, I believe, set him in a better direction. He’s retired now and soon to remarry next year. In short order, he found a new family. That’s marvelous.
My Now actually began in 2019, after the most difficult decade of my life. I found a comfortable apartment not far from downtown Minneapolis, have a full-time job and freelance opportunities, some savings (*sigh* it’s never enough) so I’m not struggling like I was between 2009-2019.
Where’s my family? Well, I never married and don’t have children. (I’ll delve into this more in the final post of this series.) My friends are essentially my family, wherever and whenever I can find them. But, you know, people can only do so much. That I’ve learned over the years.
You see, there’s an important aspect missing from the first part of this story I’ve neglected to tell. It’s a gift my parents gave me that I didn’t realize I had all the time.
Religion.
The word literally means “to bind together.”4 Revisiting the roots of the Daytalking, Nightwalking, and Stargazing tree (the WordPress blog), it’s all there.
For example:
Sunday school class was run by a dour old woman with hairs sprouting out of a mole on her chin. It was one of those things you just couldn’t ignore, and a source of more fascination than the mysteries of the Eucharist, the Apostles’ Creed, or the Transfiguration combined. The church basement smelled vaguely of mold and rotted wood. The kids in Sunday school were cowed, quiet, indifferent. We often worked on poster projects with paint and colored construction paper. I was completely bored.
How could you not be wise to this bullshit? Little boys and girls shepherded by an eerily ambiguous Jesus Christ—did he mind if you wore denim or had a house in the suburbs or spent hours in the bathroom doing unmentionable things to yourself or that you put up your hair in pigtails? He just wanted you to get excited about eternal life! But I had it pegged: They wanted you to be excited about this “idea”—[they being] parents, adults, authority figures, teachers—an idea not much different from their Sanka coffee commercials or daytime soap operas.
Really, I tried—mightily tried—to invest some emotion in all those biblical stories with their angry God and Daniels in lions’ dens, their fiery furnaces, beheaded prophets and creepy handwriting on walls. Our parents bought us a [Children’s Illustrated Bible] that still haunts me—a dead body face-up in a river (much like Ophelia in Hamlet), parapets, tapestries and horsemen, beguiling princesses who betray the king (like Guinevere in Le Morte d’Arthur)…all fine and exciting, but this “Angry God thing” just seemed, well, tacked on. I didn’t buy it at all.
So I found a foil: art, poetry, expression, music, all as ripe with imagination as the honeysuckle bushes beyond the school jungle gym.5
Look, this stuff is comin’ at a kid right out of the gate. A toddler staring up at a crucifix, thinking “…what the—?” It’s a lot to take in.
And my parents were relentless about it, full-bore into the early 1970s, at the height of the media-overhyped “Jesus Revolution.” It spread like the ’flu until even the family dog had Jesus Fever, and then I got sucked in:
At Calvary [Church], Pastor Myers was a likeable guy whose son, Andy, was the penultimate “preacher’s kid”—a huge troublemaker. [My brother] and I went to church summer camp with Andy: his practical jokes and raucous laughter kept the other kids on their toes. Andy was proof to me that God definitely works in mysterious ways. It’s not a direct matter of being good, or doing good works, or even striving to please God. You were what you were. And if you were Andy that was enough.
But a 13-year-old hardly feels that way on the inside. I was going through an insecure time, about how I saw myself as a person, what I believed in, what really mattered to me. Attending the [Christ Crusade] only served to fuel that insecurity. I wasn’t sufficient unto myself—apparently I needed Jesus to show me the way.
So at one point that summer [of 1971], in tears and shaking visibly, I walked to the front of the auditorium and declared my faith in Christ. Looking back on it, it was not unlike any love affair I’ve ever been through: first sight of the potential beloved; then the soppy, smitten ruminations; eventually leading to openly declaring love and possibly facing rejection. And, like any love affair, set to play itself out as time goes by and other objects of desire present themselves…
Oh, and it didn’t end there. It never does. That just swung open the gates wider. As the CITD post concludes:
I wrote to the national United Methodist Church when I was 18, renouncing my faith. Later I dabbled in Zen Buddhism, Unitarianism, and even attended Quaker service occasionally. I read horoscopes more for amusement [and] I’m not particularly superstitious. If there’s a God, he/she/it is like nothing any human being can remotely conceive. And at this point in my life, I’m cool with that.6
Truth is, I wouldn’t have arrived at all that if it wasn’t for my late parents plunking Toddler Me down in a church pew in the early 1960s. No doubt.
And you know what?
I’m to-the-moon grateful for it.
Circling back, home is where you make it. If it’s not with someone else (which can be as wonderful as it is horrifying), then you need to make it with yourself (because as you know, wherever you go, there you are).
I’m not done with family. Oh, no.
If my brother can reinvent his family, surely I can too. That might take some work, but what doesn’t take work if—in the end—it’s valuable and worthwhile?
This is part of the work: Toddler Me joyfully throwing a rock beside a Michigan lake in the early 1960s. It’s also Twenty-first Century Me digitally moving these rock words around with one intention—to keep on creating and include others in that act and serve the world wherever and whenever I’m needed.
With full attention and an open heart and mind.
That’s my religion, friends.
That’s the work. And this is representing that.
How about you?
When Was Your Then, and What Is Your Now?
Let’s hear it in the comments…
How has your family shaped who you are today? Are there memories of a “previous you” that you no longer recognize?
What does home mean to you? Is it a place, a person, or a way of being?
When in your life have you decided to take a different path, even against the wishes of those who feel they know you better? How did you react? What do you regret? What is it about that path that you value?
Notes and extra texture
Chicago, “(I’ve Been) Searchin’ So Long” (1974, writer: James Pankow)
From The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin (Penguin Press, 2023).
From Completely in the Dark, “Nursery Birds” (June 10, 2010, WordPress).
From Completely in the Dark, “Sons and Fathers” (March 3, 2011, WordPress).
The English word “religion” is derived from the Middle English “religioun” which came from the Old French “religion.” It may have been originally derived from the Latin word “religo” which means “good faith,” “ritual,” and other similar meanings. Or it may have come from the Latin “religãre” which means “to tie fast.” (Retrieved from Philosophy of Religion, CUNY. Emphasis mine.)
From Completely in the Dark, “Mitch Millison’s Last Act” (December 18, 2011, WordPress).
From Completely in the Dark, “Confessions of a Recovering Jesus Freak” (March 21, 2011, WordPress).
Not to compete with your lawn mower story, but I crashed our Ford Pinto through the garage door in high school when I was leaving for school. My mom had left it in gear and I didn't know it would jump forward if I forgot to compress the clutch. She told me to take the other car and leave right away before she killed me. We were kids being expected to comprehend things like adults. I now realize that it was their fault, not ours, but it took years of therapy and a degree in psychology for me to understand that.
And I agree, so many people I know are stuck in the 20th century, including many family and friends. They want it to be the 80s or 90s again and act as if everything is still that way. I've stopped talking anything but daily trivia with them. It helps to find new tribes here on substack that are trying to understand what's going on and engage with it.
And hurrah that you're not done with family and know that you can reinvent yours too. Of course you can, and once you put that intention out into the world, things will start happening to you. The fates will move to help you. I'm excited for you!
Hold dearly that intention of yours, Michael, it's a noble one. And throw some stones to the water, make some noise so the world can hear you :)