Looking for something to hang my sadness on Pain in the arm physical not mental More real or not Sitting in a plane Long flight Scrunched up Dislocation One continent to another One hemisphere to another Out of joint Pain surges Why did you leave Go Where to Where from You’ll never know If nothing else It has to be the trees
Note: Eugene Purdy shot and killed my grandfather E.S. Hutchison in Tulsa Oklahoma on 13 January 1925. Purdy went to trial but was found “not guilty due to temporary insanity”.
Hello Pamela,
I just read your book and want to share information about Charles Eugene Purdy with you. Eugene Purdy was my grandmother’s older brother. I’m sorry your grandfather and family suffered the loss inflicted upon them by Eugene. But more importantly, I want you to know that my grandmother told me that the crime ruined his life and he was very remorseful about it. Her exact words were “it ruined his life”. I will share with you what I know. Gene raised the two boys that he and Helen had together. We were told that Helen left the boys with Gene. She was gone. As you may know Charlie Purdy – Gene’s son with Helen, got hit by a car and died in Tulsa. My mom told me that Helen came back for the funeral and they never heard from her again. The other son was Robert Purdy. Gene and son Robert left Oklahoma and moved to Los Angeles for a short time. Then they moved up to San Fransisco. There Gene would live out the rest of his days- quietly working as an accountant. He remarried and died in 1963. He became a Christian Scientist- the coincidence that he was surprised me when I read your book. His son Robert joined the Navy for WW2. The family pretty much lost touch. The whole murder was painful for the family. So I guess it was natural for the relations to slip away. Gene was buried in the veteran’s cemetery in Northern California.
Per my Mom-Gene’s niece, he was a quiet and soft spoken person. You may know he was an accountant and worked for an oil company in Tulsa. His father, also Charles Purdy, had been the town banker in Billings, Missouri and he was a traveling judge for the Springfield area. (Another coincidence with your family) He died before his son Eugene committed the crime. Gene came from a good and happy family. So the whole situation was a big shock. My grandmother told me that she had to testify at the trial- she was 20 years old. It was a ordeal. She also told me that Gene’s employer really helped him and pulled for him in the trail. Apparently this employer was very well to do and very well connected. We all know that if this happened today Gene would have gone to prison. I have photos of Gene and one of Helen. I will share them if you like. Again, please know that Eugene Purdy was sorry for what he did. My grandmother was there and she knew him well as her brother. She is the person that told me of his lifetime regret.
Sincerely,
Laura, a relative of Eugene Purdy
A rocky shore
A place to share
With whales, wallabies, lizards
Not mine alone
Put aside thoughts of control
No limits of rocky shore
Lines of whales
Twisted gum trees
Yellow flower vines
No limits to sharing
Freedom of small children
Gleeful exchange with wallabies
Walking by twos low tide
Colourful hats on beach
Joyful seen from above
Objects around
are not mundane
Each one is unique
Handmade by someone
I purchased them
Their provenance forgotten
Their creator unknown
Undocumented
The objects are here
Surround me
Everyday
Do I see them?
Do I overlook them?
The strange polka-dotted beast
from South Africa
A gift from Gabriel
The soft sculpture of a woman
Diddy-wa-diddy
A craft shop visit with Pilar
in the Midwest USA
Once my best friend and confidante
who years later rejected our friendship
The horse and carriage
from recycled bits of metal
Made in Pakistan
The Kansas City ceramic cow
The Kibera 8 collage, a slum in Nairobi
The beachside print by Sheila
inspired by Tucacas
Emerald Suites Venezuela
The camel train oil painting
from a door-to-door salesman artist
in Islamabad Pakistan
The Faberge glass cat
from my aunt in Florida
How did it get to me?
Muddled past
All are here now
Objects around me
Rereading The Heart’s Garden
The Garden’s Heart
By Kenneth Rexroth
has sustained me
through decades
His words continue
Almost unknown
Almost forgotten
But they are there
And re reading
Tears of recognition
of thanks and also of sorrow
What else have I forgotten
What else have I left behind
What else is there
To think
To do
To write
To paint
To believe
To remember
What happens to the environment
the earth
the forest
the birds
the plants
the animals
encased in layers of concrete
glass and steel
overwhelming the natural
yet doomed to failure
to falling
Thank you Kenneth Rexroth
Underwater
There is so much
we do not see
We watch the waves
Maybe the whales breaching
But what I want to see
is there
underneath
demanding I change
my frame of reference
from warmth to chill
from light to muted
Adjust your body
Adjust your eyes
Head down
Keep looking
immersed
in water environment
as you never are
in air
walking standing breathing
seeing objects colours
floating in the ocean
Adjust
Accept
Lose track
So that
Astonished
When you raise your head
out of the water
the world is still there
And you will return
I would like to share information about my book Tracking the Human: nobody’s a long time which I finished writing in January 2020. Because of the COVID19 pandemic there was no possibility of traveling from my current home in Canberra, Australia to the USA to launch the book.
Many years after being disowned by my father and after his death (1971), I made a decision to reconcile with him – with his memory – to construct a portrait of a human being that I could respect. I wrote a novel Tracking the Human: nobody’s a long time based on data I collected about my father’s contacts with the justice system in the USA. He was in and out of jails, prisons and mental health institutions (known as asylums) for many years.
The book Tracking the Human: nobody’s a long time is available on line at www.lulu.com.
Also available on Amazon, but they pay the authors very little.
If you do purchase and read the book, I would very much appreciate your feedback,
on my blog http://www.familyfiction.comor by email at pamela@tucacas.info.
Here’s a comment about Tracking the Human: nobody’s a long time from my friend Martha Woodmansee, Case Western Reserve University Professor of English and Law, emerita.
It being Presidents Day here, I took the day off from politics and paperwork (a euphemism for my present stasis) to read your novel. So delicious! It’s really, really good. I do really wish you’d been able to launch it in Kansas City MO.
If you want to situate your novel thematically in our American literary tradition I’d like to stress its fit into our deeply held embrace of the individualistic self-made man myth — so
destructively sexist and racist in my view — as set forth so brilliantly by F. Scott Fitzgerald in *The Great Gatsby.*
Thanks for your interest!
Pamela Hutchison Collett
To my family, friends and readers of my blog,
A year ending. Over and over again people made comments that this year 2020 was “unprecedented”… Yet there are always precedents… previous bush fires, previous pandemics, previous elections…. This year they all came together in a powerful punch.
I finished a book in January 2020, but because of the COVID19 pandemic there was no possibility of traveling from my current home in Canberra, Australia to the USA to launch the book. I ordered a few copies for myself and put the books in a closet, postponing my plan to launch the book in Kansas City, Missouri, Vinita and Tulsa, Oklahoma.
I had spent a few years thinking, researching, writing, rewriting… a book about my father W. Lon Hutchison… about a person I didn’t really know. To say I should have known my own father is not correct. At the time of my upbringing, (born 1945), at the place of my upbringing, (Kansas City, Missouri, USA), parents were unknown quantities to their children. Parents were power, control, but not people. Children had no “rights” to know anything about their parents. Children were just there to do what they were told to do, go where they were told to go, like objects on a chess board… moved around according to their all powerful, all knowing parents.
Many years after being disowned by my father, many years after his death (1971), I made a decision to reconcile with him – with his memory – to construct a portrait of a human being that I could respect.
I wrote a novel based on data I collected about my father’s contacts with the justice system in the USA. He was in and out of jails, prisons and mental health institutions (known as asylums) for many years.
With the current reality of COVID19, travel from Australia to the USA to launch the book is very unlikely for many months. Meanwhile, the book Tracking the Human: nobody’s a long time is available on line at www.lulu.com.
If you do purchase and read the book, I would very much appreciate your feedback, on my blog or by email at pamela@tucacas.info.
Thanks!
Looking out the window
through the glass sliding door
Clouds moving across the sky
Grey underbellies
White above
Illuminated by the sun
Blue patches in between
Always moving
Changing shapes
Cloud diversity
Tree diversity
Branches straight
Branches convoluted
Branches intertwined
Branches bare
Branches with leaves
Moving with the wind
Trunks stationery
Roots underneath
Out of sight
Pushing earth
Enveloping rocks
Clinging to the side
of eroded stream beds
Invisible movement
of trees
Visible movement
of clouds
Look up again
Sky more blue
Clouds
motionless
Suspended
Swallowed up
One wisp drifts away
Dissolving in the blue
Shapes slowly shifting
Grey and white masses
Silhouette flying across
small black bird
How long will I stay
in this expanded space
Walking through life
with increased senses
Aware of nuance
Listening to a talk
about the intelligence of birds
Thinking of a book
Thinking of a friend
Thinking of family
Thinking of life
Advising a friend
to write a fictionalized
story of her family history
To put her father in the world
To respect his life
Not to honour or elevate
That’s what I’ve done
with my father
Tracking the Human: nobody's a long time 