Seven🌞Postcards

Season-opener for shorts, news-survival satire...& a divine Miz E summer

Warm wishes for Father’s Day, and this favorite week it shares with the Thursday Solstice.

Yes, those reading awhile may recall I’m one of the weird lovers of summer. The heat, the humidity, the storms, the super-long daylight — even the bugs, especially cicadas — affect me like one of those storied energy-vortex things. (Desert areas, the Dead Sea and Masada in Israel have, too.) From depth psychology and soul-tracking standpoints there’s rich associated seasonal art, music, myth, literature, drama, imagery and symbolism.

As may be the case for many, Father’s Day weekend kicks off a different kind of busy season and jammed calendars, both in news and on personal fronts. This year that’s compounded with this most bizarre of presidential campaigns, amid historic levels of political and cultural polarization.

For newShrink the summer ahead will be one of many “summer🩳 shorts” postcard editions. That’s mainly due to practical logistics, plus a need for some of the self-care so often recommended by us psychologists… (for others!)

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#1. Father’s Day

Some images here may be familiar. Previous newShrinks have held memory and reflections about my beloved late dad, Richard (Dick) Stoker, gone too soon at the start of this century during Y-2K weekend. (Mostly on recent years’ Father’s Days and at January 6th Epiphany — my late parents’ wedding anniversary —these are browsable in Posts or Archives at newShrink.substack.com.)

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These items and photos are generally from when I was a little person (and one here from when he was.) Dad’s lifelong artistic expression’s represented here in the self-caricature from his young-adult years in newspaper advertising; his leather-working tools for making sandals, belts, purses, small furniture pieces; and the pen & ink watercolor of his and my mother’s long-revisited honeymoon spot in the Florida Keys.

The latter is for me a cherished, very recent discovery among my mother’s memorabilia. It seems I was, in a way there, too: The signed, dated piece is from their first-anniversary trip in January the year that I would be born the following September!

Throughout my young childhood, my dad was a very personally engaged, active-participant father in the baby boomer era when that was not necessarily the norm or common, particularly for daughters. He clearly enjoyed being a dad, was curious, interested, amused by and creative with me, all of my friends of both genders at every age. Not by desire or plan I turned out to be an only child, but he and my mom routinely brought carloads of me with cousin or friends on family outings and trips. My parents taught Sunday School and church stuff with kids and teens a bit older than I was, rather than my age group. Mine were the parents my friends confided in, who took 20 high school girls on weeklong beach trips (remaining mostly sleepless, as twice as many boys camped out on porches or slept in cars in the yard!)

Most of all, and probably most important “psychologically” for me even as a very young daughter, my dad saw and related to me as a person, with respect, genuine interest, curiosity about what I thought, felt, believed, did. He was actively involved in whatever I was — eg. timing and judging my swim meets in the years I swam on a team, making sure I traveled when trip opportunities came.

Dad never treated or spoke of me as though I were some little doll who existed to be daddy’s girl. There were ritual times at least every week, when basically he’d just make sure we were in the car alone together for talking on the way to and from something. He read, had ideas; he expected and wanted me to do the same and to share them. If I disagreed with him, that was respected, and I was expected to make a good case for why and how. I was blessed that he, like my maternal grandfather, was quite comfortable expressing feelings and physical affection. (This was the case with most all of the family women as well — a lot of backing up to one another for shoulder rubs and back-scratches.)

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In recent weeks and months, a couple of news events and issues — particularly the antiwar student and faculty protests on college campuses this spring — have brought several of Dad’s patterns to mind in a couple of ways that are more fresh and current

This second collection of images illustrates more of Dick in his (and my own) more maturing years.

#2. a dad who was a dad, for times like today…

The photo at top left is one of those multiple-college-bound-girl beach trips. (Btw, he wasn’t a drinker! His happy-but-loopy look here is probably about five days into one of those trips that always included complications requiring interventions after sunset.)

I have written before about the VW campers he favored, the great pickup truck (and our very VW family back in the day.) Slightly visible at top right column is either his Obie (“Orange Bus”) or BB (“Brown Bomber”). The two were beloved, well-used VW bus/camper-vans he had opted-for with his longtime corporate employer in the newspaper printing ink business. He’d had decades of traveling on business in company cars, staying in hotels, even having use of a high-rise corporate apartment for a time.

I’ve described how, from the time of my college years at UNC-Chapel Hill on, in lieu of his company cars and hotels, he instead had the VW buses (the word he used for them) in the last two decades of his corporate career, then retirement life.

Pictured in front of the bus is the best-ever ,white combo pick-up/flatbed truck that served the extended family, my college and post-college friends, then next generations of us.

By his own accounts, Dad was weary of the tedious business-travel routine with stays in sterile, uninteresting lodging and often culturally isolated places. He had taken up bicycle riding for health reasons and wanted to keep to a regimen when traveling on business, etc.

But there was a large, "rest of the story” aspect I had not thought about for many years. It’s come to mind often, with this spring’s nationwide protests against the Israel-Gaza war, with even violent actions and some severe consequences for protestors. The Kent State National Guard shooting of four students protesting the Vietnam War occurred the same spring of my own high school graduation. That fall ,on arriving at UNC-Chapel Hill, the first large, campus-wide event all of my friends and I attended, even before the first football game, was antiwar activist “Hanoi Jane” Fonda speaking in a packed Memorial Hall.

My parents were as concerned, afraid, at times outraged etc. as about any of their peers. Those times were turbulent, for well over a decade, in ways unique to that time (just as are the events of today, despite obvious comparisons.)

My Dad didn’t do anything publicly attention-grabbing or heroic. He just proceeded to lean-in to what what was so very up for my generation and peer group, put himself in every way possible in a position to listen, learn, and stay connected no matter what.

He came through Chapel Hill twice a week, on his way from and back to Charlotte on business. He’d take carloads of us out for meals, deliver clean laundry — and sometimes us — back and forth from hometown. His was the truck everybody (and their parents) used for all our transitions.

Oh, and he routinely picked up hippie-era hitchikers in years when that horrified his peers and friend-group. He wanted to know where they were going, what they had to say, how and why and so forth. He visited a lot of artists’ events, developed a wide music listening and appreciation range. Still a teetotaler with alcohol, he had similar restraint regarding drugs (including Rx); he made a point of learning all he could about evolving drugs and drug-culture, and talking with me along the way.

All of which in many situations, over many years into my adulthood, made my dad the go-to person who’d calmly and quietly help people, often in my age group, to safely navigate all kinds of crises common to the times.

Those VW campers in retro photos may seem just colorful period-pieces — and they did make for lively conversation among their friend-group of my mom’s life-long native “Olde-Charlotte” peers!

But the Obie, BB, and their driver were a whole lot more as well… something life-giving, hopeful and rare.

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Below are illustration images from two previous Father’s Day newShrinks, which perhaps top my list of revisited and shared pieces both from seasonal topic and depth psychology or cultural perspectives.

# 3. Soul Men/Whole Men: Smiles of a Summer Solstice

For time and energy-bandwidth reasons these are browsable at links here:

Smiles of a Summer Solstice (2022.) and …Soul Men/Whole Men (2023)

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#4. news-survival through satire

In signs of the season, the giant Trump-flagged boats, some of them also with huge “eff-Biden” ones, are starting to spend raucously loud weekend days anchored across our backyard cove. Selfie-shooting tourists are stopping at the Trump National club entrance that’s an unavoidable landmark. This is along the long, only road in and out of our neighborhood of the past 28 years — which my late mother routinely described as “having to drive through Trumpville to get to Tish’s.”

All just in time to brace for the annual, pre-July 4th holiday decision-dump by the U.S. Supreme Court.

So on Thursday, of course the Wordle-solve word (pictured here at center) was…

In fair disclosure, I solved in three tries, not the two here. In first row edited-out here I use the same starter-word like a mantra each day, which I keep private…. unless/until my special word is the Wordle-word. Which actually happened, to my startled, utter delight, this past Christmas-Eve Sunday morning! I had to come up with a new one.

Exploring etymology of angst, I was interested to discover the term as used today originated with philosopher Kierkegaard (1813-1855), who wrote an essay, The Origin of Anxiety (Dread). His main premise was that whereas non-human animals are guided unconsciously and by instinct, we humans find our conscious freedom of choice both appealing and terrifying. Kierkegaard saw the dread or anxiety as the result of understanding our freedom to consider undefined possibilities of our lives, vs the concurrent immense responsibility of having the power of choice over them.

Rather a timely concept; just what I needed to peel me off the ceiling…

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On more upbeat notes — and as needed antidote for this summer:

From some weekday Camp Tishie adventures in Asheville to several long weekends of fun back at Lake Norman,

# 5. summer-season of (and with) divine Miz E

Here the consolidation of multiple grown-up calendars is on paper. That’s for maximum hands-on involvement and planning by Miz E, whose screen-time is limited. (At 8 she’s already a better, more engaged planner than many of us grown-ups.)

Note the color coding! Miz E is pink, I am blue (the purple highlighter having been too dark for text to show through.) Her other grownups are orange and green.

In addition to her chosen camps some weeks this summer, during the other midweeks there will be Tishie fun and exploring in Asheville. Also slated are several weekends like this one, here at the lake with her and her parents. Then for five weekdays in mid-July, while she and her parents are at the beach, I’ll be in Asheville enrolled in my first OLLI — lifelong learning institute — class. I want the student experience before presuming to take on a teaching one. This one’s in a pure-fun/interest course topic. Perhaps more on this for a future newShrink postcard.)

In between, I’ll continue to be enjoying friends and reconnection with prior community causes, boards etc. in Charlotte, as I have been doing increasingly in recent months.

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Circling back to today’s lede illustration, here is a refresher about this week’s return of celestial and calendar summer.

#6. June solstice (summer in the Northern Hemisphere)

• (This article has some facts you may not know about June Solstice.) Pictured are the Northern Lights’ 24-hour daylight in Norway at this first of the year’s two solstices. That happens because the sun is directly overhead as far north as the Tropic of Cancer.

• Solstices arrive at the same time in every time zone — summer in the Northern Hemisphere, winter in the Southern. At solstice it seems briefly as if the sun has stood still, as the earth’s tilt then moves the sunlight in the other direction.

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Finally…

# 7. dreamtime

As for closing today, it’s simply impossible without first citing the play itself.

And, that is all I have! Talk to you soon.

🦋💙 tish

… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”

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