SATURDAY MEMORY
January 11, 2025

It was the night my sister was to be baptized in the Mormon Church. My sis (13 years old), my brother (3 years old), me (16 years old), and my parents had arrived early, so the church was still closed. When the bishop arrived, he told us he could not find the keys to the church and was hoping there was a way in. He and I walked around the building and found a partially open window. I boosted him up and he managed to get through.

I heard a splash. He had fallen into the baptismal pool.

Dripping wet, he opened the door, and we filed in as well as others who were arriving. Everyone assembled in the baptismal room. There were several young girls to be baptized, and after a while, they appeared, wearing simple white gowns. At the bishop’s invitation they entered the pool, and he proceeded to baptize them, one by one, by immersion. I’m not sure anyone noticed, but I clearly did. The wet gowns became at least a bit transparent. I did not mind this at all. The bishop laid his hands on each girl's head and confirmed the presence of the holy spirit in his announcement.

But this is not what stands out in my memory.

My brother at the time had an imaginary friend that was a bird. Everyone in the family was used to dealing with my brother and his imaginary bird. But no one was prepared for what my brother loudly shouted out in the midst of the solemn baptismal ceremony:

“Where’s my fuckin’ bird?

Saturday Memory

January 4, 2024

I was eight. It was the summer of 1947. It was Sunday. My parents had dropped me off at the Methodist Church for my weekly religious education. The pastor was lecturing us on The Book of Revelation. Being a little scientist at the time, having microscopes, chemistry sets, telescopes, and a large bug collection, I was not so interested in the fire and brimstone of Revelation (about which I had already read) as I was in various questions related to evolution. When the pastor called on me after I raised my hand, I said, “I don’t have any questions on Revelation, but could you talk about evolution?” As I remember it, he looked at me for a long time and then said, “No, I will not talk about evolution, but I will talk to your parents.”

When my parents picked me up, he called them into his office while I waited outside. When they emerged, I asked what happened. They told me the pastor did not want me to attend Sunday school anymore.

That was my last experience of church.

Yet, I minored in religious studies in college and took several classes with the distinguished professor and Methosit pastor John Wesley Robb at USC, the best teacher I ever had. I chose him as the pastor to marry my wife and me. Later, The Book of Revelation became a deep object of study and influence on me. My fictional “lost gospel” of John the Baptist (the actual author of The Book of Revelation) plays a large part in my novel, Dreams: The Final Heresy.

For whatever reason, I have often felt a kind of gratitude to that pastor in my childhood.

SATURDAY MEMORY

December 28, 2024

I did my analytical training in the late 60s and early 70s. I was

fortunate to have met and been taught by many people who

had direct experience with Jung.

One such figure was the gnostic scholar, Gilles Quispel, an

extraordinary man. He was instrumental in securing the Jung

Codex purchased by the Institute in Zurich as a birthday

present for Jung.

The memory that stands out to me is one training seminar

in the early days. At one point, as we were discussing the nature

of “mystery,” he stopped us. He put his index finger to his lips

as if telling us to hush. Then he said something I’ll never

forget:

Mystery is not to be solved, or resolved, or dissolved. Mystery

is to be embraced and loved, and out of that will come one’s

deepest sense of life, meaning, and purpose.

I remember thinking then that dreams are a mystery and

what Quispel was saying was true of dreams as well.

SATURDAY MEMORY
December 21, 2024

Sometime in the 70s, I invited Dora Kalff to do a seminar for analyst candidates in the training program at the C. G. Jung Institute in Los Angeles. Dora Kalff was the developer of Sandplay Therapy (1950), which used miniature figures placed in a small sandbox. The therapy was useful for both children and adults to express themselves non-verbally. Kalff's method was a further and specific development of Margaret Lowenfeld’s World Technique (1920). Dora presented a Friday night lecture on the Theory of Sandplay and then on Saturday had the candidates do sand trays and she would point out various configurations and analyze and interpret what was presented. At one point, Dora asked me if it would be OK to continue on Sunday. She said the material had brought up so much that she wanted to explore it further with the candidates. Everyone enthusiastically agreed. So, it was arranged.

Then Dora asked me to take her to the phone. I did. She made a call. She called Johns Hopkins University. I then heard her explain that she had to cancel her scheduled lecture there because she was not finished with her work in Los Angeles. I was stunned by this. She saw my stunned expression, smiled, and said, “Russ, always go where the depth leads you.”-

SATURDAY MEMORY

December 14, 2024

I was a junior in high school in 1955, and I fancied myself a tennis player. My fancy was reinforced by winning a major tennis tournament for juniors. The prize for winning that tournament was a series of lessons from Pancho Gonzales. Pancho was ranked the number one professional tennis player in the world, and winning this prize swelled my head big-time.

The lessons occurred on the lone court at Exposition Park in Los Angeles. Panhco called me “boy.” After instructions and a bit of small talk, Pancho said, “OK, boy, let’s get to it.”

I walked to one side of the court, and he took the other. He had the tennis balls, so I presumed he was going to serve. He was known for having the best and strongest serve in the game. “Lesson one,” he shouted and motioned me to come to the net. This struck me as odd because you don’t serve at someone standing at the net. Volley, yes, but not serve.

But he served.

His serve came straight at my eyes, and I barely fell out of the way in time. As I got up, he came to the net and he said, “Boy, what’s that on the ground?” “My racket,” I responded. I had dropped it as I fell. “And what’s it for?” he asked me. “To hit the ball.”

“OK. Lesson two.” He walked back to the service line; I picked up my racket and I somehow knew I was to stay at the net. Again, he served straight at my eyes. Somehow, I managed not to duck or to fall. But I mainly used my racket to protect my face, and the ball went flying off it out of bounds.

“Do you know what lesson three is?”

I took what seemed like a lot of time to come up with the answer. I felt embarrassed, ashamed, and worthless. But somehow, I knew what lesson three was. I didn’t say, what lesson three was, but I did say, “Yes.”

I took my position at the net. I swung my racket back and forth. I looked Pancho in the eye. I said, “serve!” He did. I kept my eye on the ball. I stepped into position, and I hit the ball squarely at Pancho. To my surprise, he let the ball hit him.

He laughed. He came to the net. He shook my hand.

“You got what it takes, kid.”

From that moment, I wanted to be a pro.

SATURDAY MEMORY
December 7, 2024

In high school, I was extroverted in ways I have not been since that time. In my senior year, I was Boy's League president. I was a Squire and a Knight and was other such honorary things. My girl friend was editor of the student newspaper, Girl's League President, and I was business manager. We led the dancing at the senior prom. One of my jobs at the time, was to arrange speakers for school assemblies. I arranged for Ronald Reagan to speak. At the time (1956) he gave speeches for General Electric on themes of freedom, economic progress, and the threat of communism. Another job was to arrange the annual auto show. These two events coincided in time.

I had arranged for a special car from Bob Yaekel, an Oldsmobile dealer in Los Angeles. Bob was crippled and the car he had specially made was all controlled by hand controls on the steering wheel. I had picked up the car for the car show. I was also to pick up Ronald Reagan from the airport. I did this using Bob Yaekel's car.

On the way from the airport back to school, a driver went through a red light and my foot searched frantically for the brake pedal. Only then did I remember I had to use the brake control on the steering wheel. We avoided a collision with the errant driver, but not by much. If I had not stopped in time, the impact would have been on the passenger side.

Reagan laughed off the incident and congratulated me on being able to stop in time.

I remember Reagen being very funny the rest of the trip.

I have often mused on muffing my chance to change history.

SATURDAY MEMORY

November 30, 2024

I learned the importance of being silly from my father. His sense of humor was infectious and an aura of laughter colors my earliest memories. He could turn anything into jest. I remember endless times when my stomach ached and tears flowed from laughter I could not stop. When he chased me down to admonish or punish me in some way, my collie dog, Blackie, would get between us and let out rapid-fire threatening growls at my father until we all ended up rolling on the floor with sides splitting, punishment forgotten, perhaps, humor as punishment was lesson enough.

It was the forties and times were simpler. Our first TV, a 1950 Packard-Bell, came with a record-making machine. As fascinating as TV was in the beginning, and what I remember most is wrestling —Wild Red Berry and Gorgeous George and my grandmother throwing her shoe at the new TV because Red was doing bad things to Gorgeous — what occupied us most was the recording machine. My father set up regular Sunday “broadcasts” duly recorded on those 45-rpm-sized vinyl disks. He would announce at the beginning that this was “station FART operating on 10,000 kilosquawts.” Everyone in the family became a reporter and we tried to outdo one another in good old Scot’s scatological “funning,” as we called it. I remember when we would all be laughing hysterically, Blackie would go running in circles, adding to the mirth, but the cats, all silver Persians that we raised for sale, remained untouched and aloof as is the pride of cats.

The dinner table was an arena for food games. My favorite was tossing peas into my sister’s gaping and eager mouth. When my father would make scrambled eggs with squirrel brains, he’d wear a coonskin cap while frying up (he’d been a short-order cooked when he escaped the hills of West Virginia and came to California) and would pose us puzzles to see if we were getting smarter as a result of such fare. To the extent I have any “smarts,” it is a result of those squirrel brains, I am sure.

SATURDAY MEMORY
November 23, 2024

This memory visited me this week. I’m not sure why. I have written this up before (see “Some Strange and Weird Experiences” in Words As Eggs). It’s in two parts.

Part 1. Back in 1963, I was a bit late for my analytic appointment with Marvin Siegelman at his Beverly Hills office. I was a bit out of breath from rushing as I went into the lobby and pressed the elevator button. My attention was called to an old man who was hand-painting a sign on the window. Unaccountably,  I ignored the open elevator door and went over to the old man. He turned to me and said, “You will want to know this is a dying art.” He told me he was the only one in the area doing it the old way. It was all mechanical now. He said, “No one wants to pay the price for this work. I spend a lot of time at, just like Ghiberti. You know, he spent 50 years working on his doors. That’s love. But who has time to love anymore.” I was so affected by this old man’s words that I walked out of the building. Halfway down the block, I remembered my appointment and now I was quite late. Still, the old man’s words stay with me and seem ever more relevant as I become an old man, like the sign painter.

Part 2. Five years later, I was in my university office working on final preparations for a trip the next morning. I was to present a paper at the World Congress of Psychiatry in Milan, Italy. I answered a knock on my door. It was a man about my age wanting to know if my colleague Professor Lovejoy was around. We searched and called but Lovejoy could not be found. The man had just stopped by on the off chance of connecting the with professor. He was on his way to Los Angeles to return to Europe the next day. A few days later, I flew from Milan to Pisa. It was madness at the airport because of a power failure and all the lights were out. Retrieving one’s baggage in the dark with only flashlights to assist was very tiring. By the time I got on the bus to Florence, I was exhausted. About halfway to Florence, the bus pulled over and stopped by the side of the road. I was not amused by this delay. A car had broken down and the driver had hailed the bus. When the man had got on the bus and came down the aisle where I was sitting I was shocked to see that it was the man that had knocked on my door a few nights earlier looking for Professor Lovejoy. He recognized me as well and sat with me and we discussed the potential meaning of such a strange and weird experience. He said, even though we were both tired, that walking around the streets of Florence at midnight was called for. He said we must go to the Cathedral and see the Bapistry of St. John and there we could see Ghiberti's doors.

Ghiberti. Taking time to love. Lovejoy. Strange and weird. You never know what or when psyche will gift us.

 Saturday Memory  

November 16, 2024

I was eight years old. A Cub Scout, hiking in the mountains with my mates. We got to roughhousing, as we often did. At one point, I lost my balance, fell off the trail, and started rolling down the mountain. I banged into shrubs and rocks and was getting scratched and pretty banged up. As I rolled, I saw a huge owl in the sky, and it said: "Grab hold of the tree." I then crashed into a small tree and I did what the owl said. By that time, I was likely in shock. I know I was terrified. I could hear my mates yelling, but I could make nothing out. The last thing I saw was that the tree I was holding onto was at the edge of a cliff. The huge owl vision was still in the sky, but all faded to black as I lost consciousness.

This memory is intense in the extreme whenever I call it to mind.

As a kid, I didn't know what to make of the owl vision, but I realized fully that the owl saved my life.

Even now, I feel the owl is never far away.