Hidden Gems
Fireside chats and the spirit to live.
As I was searching through a litany of old memories this week, greeting cards once lovingly sent, now unaffordable, barely a thought for most people, odds and ends, savored images thrown in a box, I came across a gem.
In a blue folder, that I thought was empty, among John’s mother’s remaining treasures, was a 12-page transcript titled “Max Vaucher’ Tape.”
In March I posted a story about my husband’s grandfather titled “When the Last Ship Sails.” During my research I only knew how Max came to the U.S. and some of what he did here. We are uncertain much was known to their children, prior to that, as a “new beginning” was made so very young in the U.S.
This gem, that I only wish I had the real recorded tape to, felt like I found a surrogate grandfather, a man with a heart much like my own. If only I could have heard more about my own grandparents and how they felt about their lives. The words spoken in this tape were a window to what it means to love passionately. Love of humanity, love of art, love of creation. The deep desire to share and connect with others that would understand love on this level. How it was to be without work for three years in the Great Depression and how a leader during WW2 held Fireside Chats on the radio that spoke comfort and hope into the homes of many Americans.
For some reason every thing that crossed my path this week related right back to the transcript. Love, life, humanity…
This week laced together with a grandfather’s transcript:
I read John Leake’s, with Robert F. Kennedy visiting Lahaina for a relief event for displaced survivors - “Words of Hope, Consolation and Wisdom” where there were no press, just the kind of love and support the people of Lahaina, Maui needed to hear. What stood out was this:"My mother was accustomed to grief, and she had figured out how to process it in a way that was really dignified and admirable. I asked her if the hole that people leave in us when they die ever gets any smaller. My mother told me that it never gets any smaller, but our job is to grow ourselves bigger around that hole, and the way we do that is by incorporating the best virtues of those people that we lost into our own character, and in making that effort, we build ourselves—we build our character, and we give those people a kind of immortality, because we’re thinking every day about how to improve ourselves by incorporating the lessons of their lives and the virtues they displayed when they were with us, and at the same time, we grow ourselves into bigger people. And when we do that, that hole gets proportionately smaller. This very admirable path that you have committed yourselves to shows us that you have used this incident not to allow yourselves to be shattered and destroyed or overwhelmed, but rather to bring yourselves together—not wait for the government to rescue you, but to bring yourselves together and to rebuild a sense of community (note: spoken as the truth is coming out about how the actual police were ordered to block the pathway out of Lahaina as cars piled up, waiting to escape. The lines of cars were eventually overwhelmed by a firestorm, dying as they waited. If only they could have just ran, rather than obeyed). God talks to as through each other, through organized religion, through the great books of those religions, through wise people and prophets, through art, music, literature, and poetry—and through nature and the creation." - RFK
The Free Press first annual high school essay contest:
Beginning with the winner, A Constitution for Happiness, by 17 year old Ruby LaRocca, an old soul who realized in the fall of 2021, upon entering her senior year, in public high school, that she needed to save herself. Ruby represents, to me, those spirits in our world that sense their “soft imprisonment.” Ruby is a young modern day heroine who escaped a generation of kids that succumbed to screens, ideology and indifference. The final blow being the pandemic. In the three winning essays, the other two runner-ups were also bold to save themselves, begging their peers, as Ruby does in her essay to overcome their “listlessness.” It seems to me that adults have been at the helm of taking away childhood for a long, long time. Now, more than ever, we need the human spirit to wake up and save itself. So much of what Ruby and her teen co-winners wrote aligns with what she says here (and there’s a lot more to take in):
"Like human happiness, teenage happiness does not flourish when everyone has the freedom to live just as they please. Where there is neither order nor necessity in life—no constraints, no inhibitions, no discomfort—life becomes both relaxing and boring, as American philosopher Allan Bloom notes. A soft imprisonment."
I follow, and contribute, when I can to two local private Los Angeles animal rescues. They do tremendous work for the innocent creatures of our local communities. This week I watched a desperate plea on one the rescue sites, shared from one of our seven government ran animal shelters in Los Angeles. It honestly cannot be worse for animals in a first world country. At the same time the same rescue posted this. The City of Los Angeles issued a homeless man, living out of a shopping cart on the sidewalk, a $300 dog breeding license. The picture of these two poor dog captives was gut-wrenching. There is no help coming. Just more government imprisonment, broken promises, hopelessness and degradation of society.
Dinner Out With Girlfriends Thursday Evening: This week I met my original girlfriend tribe, minus one, who is now temporarily living out of state taking care of a parent with dementia. After much talk about family, grandparenting and the state of family and grandparenting, which is a whole other topic, we took a walk around the small downtown. Hearing of my friend’s young son who has never given up hope with his goals, despite a disinterested wayward father, he’s been creating music and writing to agents and producers for over five years, believing that at some point he would hear back from an actual person. This week, he finally did and was accepted into a well known agency in Los Angeles. This week he also stunningly lost a dear friend, the one that was becoming his best friend, to suicide. It had only been five years since high school and the loss of another friend to suicide.
As I was reading an article on Imperialism: Lessons From History by Victor Davis Hanson (Classicist, military historian, political commentator) he quoted a stanza at the end, from Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “Recessional,” read for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubliee:
Far-called, our navies melt away; On dune and headland sinks the fire: Lo, all our pomp of yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget!
Surely The British Empire the most civilized and “humane” of any “empire” in history with 420 million people under it’s rule, covering 12 million square miles of territory, seven times the size of the Roman Empire might have learned, heeded the warning. It seems our Sleeper/Pro-Holiday-Maker-In-Cheif, here in America, let the anniversary of the fall of Afghanistan go right on by this week, right as we are falling into a certain weak and unsustainable abyss.
An old Facebook post from 2018
Today, September 2nd, Facebook reminded me of this post. I’ve done several like it and during the aftermath of 2020 never cared to be on it much anymore.
"I keep talking about how life is so very fragile. Spend time with your loved ones and friends when you can. Grab every moment and say yes to time. Unplug. Reflect. Take reverence. There are so many families deeply hurting from suicide and whatever we can do to honor them, to take care of them in their grief, to seek out others that you believe are hurting and be their accountability partner, we are being called to do this. To also take away the stigma, the unspoken words and pain of suicide. We moved two weeks ago today and in that time span, in our valley, I have heard of eight suicides. The youngest being a 5th grader. Whatever we can do to turn the tide of pain around, we need to make mental health an open conversation and we need to consider stepping back, just a little, (maybe a lot) to a place where face to face relationships come first (or a phone call if you can't see someone). We need to eliminate extra pressures that take thought and time away. Additionally, I believe our new world of social media, apps, is positive in many ways. It can be so convenient. We can get something fast to our front door, meet our future mate, share our pictures with each other, donate money fast, save lives and find lost people so much quicker, for example. But... I also believe that this new instant technology has had a staggering isolation and especially "self-doubt" effect. I also believe that many people are so caught up in social media that they cannot manage anything else. I'm hearing it daily from talking with people wherever I go. I met a person last week that told me they are nervous about a big promotion at work because of the pressures of their Instagram account. Another person told me that her friend with a husband and children is so obsessed with growing a social media following that she rarely connects with her family. I believe that this has to enter the conversation of mental health as well. It has to be considered as we raise children or hang out with grandchildren, nieces and nephews, etc."
The Gem: Max Vaucher Tape
Recorded in 1979, it would not only be the year he passed away, but he would talk about 1979 as the worst year for loss and grief. What we didn’t know is that “Grandpa Max,” traveled to Turkey, at the age of 20, to teach at the American College of Smyrna. Not only did he have a full and natural Swiss education behind him, this would be where he “encountered Americans” for the first time in his life. Most of his students were 22 and as he said, “from east to west, they knocked me over because I never seen before anybody like those Americans.”
Max was fascinated with what was the difference between an east coast and a west coast person and he learned about California in the process. After three years teaching in Turkey and one year back in his homeland of Switzerland, with a stop between in Greece, where he met his wife, Yvonne, or “Vonnette,” he decided to head west to “the foothills where there was nobody, nobody, nobody there.” Alone, Max was grateful to have his wife and their first child, but by 1930, the Great Depression was upon them and eventually he faced no work for three years.
This is what he said about this time:
"If we didn't have a president, President Roosevelt, the way he was at the time, I do not know what the USA, what I would have done without him. He was wonderful. He would talk to us, the whole nation, every week on the radio and it was wonderful to the ear what he had to say. So he really, he saved the U.S. through his intelligence, his feelings for everyone. He was wonderful and, of course then later on, a few years later, the war, and again it was something, it was. It was something to be here and to see the USA in peacetime and in wartime, what we did, what we did in the war time. It was wonderful, it was wonderful. Everybody worked like everything, everybody tried their very best, and I had my greatest admiration for high school kids in factories where I worked too. They were working very, very, very hard, those whom I was working with in Pomona, California."
and this is where I begin to have some tears for our country today.
Max goes onto say:
"It was, fortunately, there was always Art behind me or with me. Without this, without art, I could not have gone on, I could not."
“Purpose.”
and.. after explaining that he had to find people to talk to about art, and being alone with it, saying it was “up to you to do something or not to do something,” he was always under the impact of a landscape. It is a part of us. “Everything, everything has to come from you.”
"I couldn't take my eyes off those mountains, those forms, those beautiful, tremendous forms. All those hills without any forest; they are denuded. They are just as they are. So by and by, I became more attached to those things, those landscapes and so, it created a new life for me which at the time I put into black and white in linoleum cuts."
He goes on to talk about art, his family inspiration, the hours of printing, creating albums of his work, finding critics and mentors. How he was also “crazy about running” and had ran for over 50 years, even being sent to Zurich, as a young man, for the games, the university games of running. He was overjoyed to include his passion for running into his early teaching in Turkey, mentioning the roads outside of the college that lead to a place called “Vuja,” where Byron had been writing for some years before. During Grandpa Max’s time teaching in California, he volunteered at CIF track meets.
There is so much expression, wisdom, spirit, purpose, force. I could hear his accent and feel his desire to make it here in America. What is real about this transcript and real about my encounters this week, is the force Max mentions here:
"Yes, everything has a relationship within my own personal life. Love, there is nothing greater than LOVE in the world. This is the number one, that's the number one which inspired me, the, the force, the force."
Love, as he put it.
There is so much more I want to share. and I will continue with the lessons of this transcript. For now, I am reminded that there is no saving us unless we know what love is.
Thank you for reading a long… a long one… deb ox
If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. - Corinthians 13
John's grandfather Max was like a buried treasure that you were able to unwrap, little by little. A fascinating glimpse into his character, background, beliefs and talents.