LIVING MANY LIVES IN A LIFETIME
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu,
“peacemaking” at pepinsky.blogspot.com
January 12, 2018
As Jill nears retirement from
Ohio State next August, and we prepare to move from my 1957 family home in Rush
Creek Village in Worthington, Ohio, the town where I started first grade in
1951, to our new home near (grand)children in Durango, Colorado, I think of our
good fortune, in effect lived many lives with many relations in many
places. I remember growing up thinking that
I as an academia brat had grown like military brats—moving with parents from
place to place. Born as I was just
before World War II ended, when housing was short and my dad, having been
denied a faculty appointment because he was Jewish, moved alone to East
Lansing, Michigan, to find housing for my mom and me, who lived with
grandparents in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and in Haverford, Pennsylvania, for
most of my first year of life. It took
two more university jobs for my parents to move with me to Ohio. Spending my last year of secondary school as
the only foreign (language) student in my class profoundly influenced my social
perception…then college and law school and grad school and three jobs to keep
one in Bloomington, Indiana, where our daughter Katy was born and lived all the
way through high school. In a word, my
life, has been nomadic in all my relations save one: My life with Jill since 1973 with a few years
of commuting in between, in a town where I lived nearly half my life, where Katy
was born, grew up and retains childhood friendships, and our pending return to
a life with our only child and her family, where I expect to die close to my
nearest and dearest lifetime companions.
There have been times in my life
when I envied, felt left out from, those who were more rooted, close to home—looking
for ways to belong, most acutely as an isolated foreigner in a new language,
wanting a home. Now, rooted in an
enduring marriage and (grand)parenthood, I have found privilege in having been
able to live with and learn from people in so many times and places in my life,
now always with a family to come home to…and as I’ve been able to do in U-Hi,
in Worthington, and in returning to neighborhood life in Rush Creek Village,
and often continue to do on visits back and forth, to stay connected.
My mother sent me up the road
from our Worthington apartment to “learn about the Bible” at the Methodist
Sunday school now just 3 blocks from home, where I got focused on the question
of life after death. I came to realize
that, as Elise Boulding put it, I had a window of living memory that extended
from the great grandparents, refugees from Eastern Europe whose remains are
interred in the Jewish cemetery in Evansville, Indiana, to my grandparents and
(great)great aunts and uncles from Mississippi/Louisiana, now to Jill’s and my
grandchildren, Mila and Evan. Mila and
Evan now also have visited cousins in Poland and seen ancestral Prague…AND the
many people I have known and learned with and from outside extended family,
from colleagues living and now long dead in and around, and students past and
present, and the many people who have shared their worlds with me. It is true that many of my relations have been
transitory. In that sense, I know more
people perhaps more shallowly than those of us who never leave home know our neighbors
and local friends, but some do linger, as with my high-school classmates, and with
those I have taught and worked with.
I’m open to the possibility that
the souls of my parents and all my relations somehow live on in their own right
as in their consciousness. Meanwhile,
instead of dreaming what I might do in a next life, I feel as though each place
I have lived has in a single lifetime given me the adventure, the experience
and the learning and teaching that go with it, of single lives in different
places among different people in a lifetime…quite a teacher, a series of
adventures, a privilege. As to
immortality, I expect my name and some writings to appear for a while after I
die—already do—and when that passes, hope that the blessings and learning I’ve
passed on, toward making peace out of conflict, richness out of diversity, will
pass on under names and practices to come.
In that sense, in relations I have lived and learned, my life and sense
of value I have received, and the safety and security of enduring relations,
remains immense. Will my consciousness
return in another human being, and if so will my memories be loaded in a single
being? That comes up against my
agnosticism, but I don’t expect to suffer in any hell, and leaves me to
recognize what a wealth of experience, love, friendship and learning life has
already, long since, brought me. What a
privilege my lives have been, and the relationships I’ve enjoyed. Most of all, I’d like my neighbors, fellow
singers, schoolmates and new friends to know what a pleasure it has been to
live back home in Central Ohio, and what a wonderful community Rush Creek
Village remains to live in. Come next
September, Jill and I will have room for visitors in Durango…come on by.
I can’t help thinking these thoughts just as I have managed to pass my
eye test and renew my Ohio Driver’s License for the last time, as my 73rd
birthday approaches. Love and peace, hal
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