The Loneliest Liberal: Past wisdom

By James Knudsen

Conventional wisdom holds that those who forget the past are destined (or is it doomed?) to repeat it,  or at the very least elect a reality television star/white dwarf President. And while I don’t advocate for living in the past, as it is impossible to make anything great again, I do recognize the value of keeping select pieces of history. Museums, libraries, parks – these places, along with any home owned by myself or my siblings – are well stocked with pieces of history. How selective we have been in the keeping is open to debate. For the most part we just aren’t very good at throwing anything away. And when you add in the fact that since the beginning of this century, Dad and his two siblings have passed on and left a trove of over 200 combined years of accumulation…well, there’s a lot of history to consider.
    Proof of the difficulty my family has with throwing things away was on display in my March column, where a letter from the 1950’s addressed to my Aunt Margaret found its way into the digisphere via Moristotle. That letter is 67 years old. A series of letters that were exchanged between my father’s parents clocks in at 100 years. There’s mention of the flu epidemic in one of those letters. I mention these vintages because the letter I found recently pales by comparison at only 35 years. And yet the knowledge it had to impart.

Thirty-five years ago I was living in Tennessee – Millington, Tennessee, to be exact. Millington at that time was home to Naval Air Station, Memphis, now Naval Support Activity Mid-South (good lord, who writes you “U.S. Navy”?). I arrived in mid-April and would spend the next six months learning the ins and outs of avionics. Back in California things were much less humid and much more shaky. At 4:42 p.m. on May 2, 1983, a 6.2-magnitude earthquake struck near the California town of Coalinga. This event figures prominently in the letter I recently found.

    It was written by none other than Morris Knudsen. It is two pages on a single sheet of stationery bearing the name and address of his father, Vern O. Knudsen, PhD. The text is Dad’s familiar, unadorned longhand, a mix of print and cursive, written in blue ink with a Sheaffer fountain pen. Much of the letter is Dad in a contrite mood for not having sent a letter sooner.

It was only when I got to Page Two that I encountered something I had long forgotten, and, it turns out, had not taken the time to investigate when I first read the sentence and the word contained therein.

The sentence reads:

Our chthonic dramatics are few and far between, (Yes, you’ll need an unabridged!) and aftershocks do persist.

    Most if not all readers instantly assume that unabridged refers to a type of dictionary. At the time, early May, 1983, putting my hand to an unabridged was not an easy task. Marines are issued a number of useful things, but an unabridged dictionary is not one of them. I suspect it has something to do with the physical dimensions. A quick inspection of The Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition, unabridged, copyright 1939, from the estate of my late uncle, Dr. Robert T.A. Knudsen (I told you we can’t throw anything away), reveals the following: length 12 and 1/8 inches, width 9 inches, depth 6 inches, and weight…wait for it: 16 pounds. Sixteen. By comparison, the standard issue infantry radio of that era, the AN/PRC-77, FM transceiver, unaffectionately known as the “Prick 77,” weighs only 13.75 pounds.

    Still to be explained is the word “chthonic.” The rumblings in Coalinga are a clue, but I still had to consult the 16-lb. vessel of knowledge for an answer:

Chthonic or chthonian, designating, or pertaining to, gods or spirits of the underworld; esp., relating to the underworld gods of the Greeks.

The irony is that this most recent discovery does nothing to make disposing of the past easier.

Copyright © 2018 by James Knudsen