Slade Schuster Books

My grandfather, Fred Schuster, seemed a strangely marvelous figure in my early memories of him, though he died when I was only seven in 1945. I have no real recollections of any words or thoughts that passed between us while he lived, but what I learned of him in family lore later was impressive. Born just 40 days after the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, he was a rugged, handsome young man of 20 in an 1883 grainy photo we have (above). That was about the time his own father died and left him a growing brewery business in Rochester MN. He and his brother built the business into the largest commercial entity in early Rochester until prohibition closed them down 1922. Undaunted, he transitioned seamlessly into real estate, buying downtown properties, and before he passed, he was on the boards of many banks and businesses of our city. He and grandmother Roxie had a fine brownstone home with wrap-around porches upstairs and down and a chauffeur to drive them, as many wealthy families did in the early days of the automobile.

In old family albums from his last year, Fred appears in a three-piece suit, balding, inexpressive, and much shrunken in stature, seated in the living room of that house. His fixed glaze reveals nothing really, but in my young imagination, it hid a worldly wisdom I could only guess at.

He was 82 when he died, an age I have recently surpassed myself, and I think I can say more about his blank gaze now. Mythology, which I taught in my own career, says we travel a circular course if we make the full journey, returning finally to the senescence of second childhood and then back to the earth from which we came. As I reflect on all the expensive learning that is slipping from me, my failing vocabulary, my lost recollections of youth and career generally, and my growing confusion about modern life and its direction, I feel inclined to regard grandfather Fred’s fixed gaze differently. If his journey followed the ordained course, that look was not one of proud wisdom, but more likely one of sad and helpless befuddlement. Thank God, for the day we are finally put to pasture where we can move slowly, read a little, decline in peace, and watch the sun go down.

I still have strange dreams, however. This one began as a night fantasy, but has continued as a kind of day dream that obsesses me … a strange pome, perhaps, that I struggle to follow to its end.

In this dream, I am walking down a long path or garden promenade. It is actually two parallel paths, mine is on the right, but about fifty feet to my left is an exactly similar path. I have been on this path since the beginning; it is clearly my life journey’s pathway. On the left hand across a green boulevard walks another figure like my own. We see each other but do not speak. I have tried to make out his distinguishing characteristics as we move along, but he has only one. This aspect of the stranger grows more and more stark and clear as we go. He is NOT ME. That is all I can say about him, but that is clear.

The parallel paths are leading us in a westerly direction, evident because the sun can be seen beginning to set on the horizon ahead, exactly where the paths appear to intersect as such parallel lines seem to do. For most of the journey, I had thought of myself as a bi-pedal hominid like the rest of us. So my traveling companion also appeared so. In advanced age, however, beginning to deteriorate as described above, it is clearer that the idea of ME, is, and always was just that, an idea, a thought no more stable or certain than any other thought in a world where certainties decay. So as we move toward the setting sun, NOT ME also becomes more or less a mere thought as well. This split reality has been the central attitude of my whole trip. From the start, there was ME and NOT ME, and that about summed it up.

I’m also aware this journey has been a long effort to learn all I could about NOT ME, who is in fact everything, the whole world that is NOT ME. And I used to think I had done a fair job of work learning many, many things about NOT ME. Slowly, though faulty and incomplete, it began to seem that everything I knew about NOT ME was in fact a fair description of ME. So that were I somehow to lose everything I thought I knew about the NOT ME world, would I not be losing ME as well? And late in life is that not exactly what is happening as my decline comes on?

When I say the ME - NOT ME split was the basic attitude of the whole journey, however, that is not quite true. Our early infancy does NOT divide reality so. EGO development is a slow process during childhood. We are not born into a split world. If we are headed to second childhood, may we not come again to undifferentiated infancy as well?

And what was that undivided ONENESS of infancy like? None of us can remember. But when I behold a happy babe-in-arms, I think I see a BEING to whom every selfless, timeless second is an infinite glorious revelation. How nice is that.

As the two paths move steadily westward, I am also reminded how 9th grade geometry taught us parallel lines on a flat plane never converge. But since 9th grade, we learn our universe contains NO extended flat planes; space-time is curved and parallel lines in fact always converge.

The sun is setting ahead now, and I wonder if NOT ME is feeling as indistinct as I am. Strange, how all my life staring directly at the sun was impossible, the glare too blinding and dangerous. But ahead, as it begins to touch the horizon just where our paths meet, how restful, glorious, and amenable to our fixed gaze it has become, a Celestial Rose. I wonder if Fred sees it … from the other side … or perhaps from this too in 1945 as I now do.