Category Archives: Brian Columns

Brian’s Column: Additional Notes on the Running Start

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5. More on our family’s preschool setup for bro and me in the Overland Park years
Brian R. Wright

[Link to Episode 4]

Note: These columns are a series, I will make into a volume of my memoirs. You may follow the links at top and bottom of page to go to preceding or succeeding episodes. The series starts here. {If the [Link to Episode <next>] at the  bottom of the column does not show an active hyperlink, then the <next> column has yet to be written.}

This column dedicated to my brother, Forrest Steven Wright (1951-2007), in commem-oration of the 10th  anniversary of his death, May 7. RIP. 

From the previous episode’s closing, you can see I feel betrayed by my parents, to some extent, but mostly shanghaied by these strange adults who seem to have some unstated power over my parents. They are the ones filing me into this wretched regimented Romper Room setting called kindergarten.

But before proceeding with my personal seminal story of this maiden forced-schooling voyage, here’s a little more info on the family context and setup.

First instead of hitting you over the head with yet another of the cute pictures of my brother and me being bundled up to go to the house of God on Sunday, let me show off my mom on one of those occasions. As most women, she liked to dress and get out of the house once in a while. When else would she get the chance? [In those early years, my parents did not go out much at all, but they did have friends—Jim and Jean Clark, and Bob and Virginia Love—who lived within a few miles and the couples would visit one another’s homes, in sequence, on Friday nights for food, drink, and cards.]

Yes, as early as I can remember we were a churchgoing family. I’m sure it was a joint decision. Dad’s mother came from a large Chicago family, the Elliotts, who had roots harking back to the War for Independence…  I believe the Elliott clan had a staid upper-middle-class Presbyterian preference. Even if Dad had personal misgivings about the church’s teachings or, if on his own, he might have not attended at all, he was not one to take a stand against the social conventions of his significant others. Continue reading →

Brian’s Column: Playtime Overture

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4: Pregnant days of first memories of (who knows, may yet be) a special life
Brian R. Wright

[Link to Episode 3]

Note: These columns are a series, I will make into a volume of my memoirs. You may follow the links at top and bottom of page to go to preceding or succeeding episodes. The series starts here. {If the [Link to Episode <next>] at the  bottom of the column does not show an active hyperlink, then the <next> column has yet to be written.}

This is truly strange for me, because I rather vividly remember Le Gran Tricycle Launch by my brother, as described in Episode 2. And that was before we moved to the Overland Park digs described in Episode 3.

I calculated that Episode 2 took place when I was 3 to 3 1/2 years old, so the following awareness—which at the time I told to myself that that instant I would subsequently remember as my first self-conscious moment—occurred after- ward, at age 4 to 4 1/2. In Overland Park.

Dawn of the Independents’ Movement?[1]

And it was very simple: I was outside on the grass in the front yard between our home and the neighbor’s home, the Browns. Nothing else. Just 1) nice sunny day, 2) standing on the grass, 3) and taking a view toward the north. That’s it. Plus the fully conscious knowing that this moment was going to be the very first of my special ‘Brian Wright’ self-aware life. Freedom and the joy of being rolled into one. Now, I speculate, was this a foretelling of some kind that I would, indeed, choose psychological independence and maintain it thru all the forces seeking my conformance until today? Continue reading →

Brian’s Column: Here Comes the Neighborhood

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3: First steps into Brave New Homestead and Environs
Brian R. Wright

[Link to Episode 2]

Note: These columns are a series, I will make into a volume of my memoirs. You may follow the links at top and bottom of page to go to preceding or succeeding episodes. The series starts here. {If the [Link to Episode <next>] at the  bottom of the column does not show an active hyperlink, then the <next> column has yet to be written.}

From the staging flat in Kansas City, where brother Forrest’s abrupt, determined mission to to defy gravity ended badly, we moved into the new home in Overland Park in 1953ish. Understand that my dad was an early adopter in the vision for this particular development. You can see from the photo that our back yard ended at a stream behind which rose an open field on which you can still see the farm house. We’re looking eastward in the photo, so that whole area behind us hasn’t even been subdivided yet.

Now, thanks to Peeping Tom-worthy Google Maps, here’s what it looks like today:
A little more background on the parental units

Mom and Dad both were four-year graduates of Western Michigan University, which is where they met and fell in love—Dad from Chicago, only child, always loved flying, lied about his age (17) to get into the Air Force for WW2, rose to B24 bomber captain, several runs, shot down over Italy, parachuted, gathered his men, got to safety, thus a genuine war hero (though he NEVER talked about the war). Mom loved him lots more because he was one of the few men on campus with an actual car. Continue reading →

Brian’s Column: Speaking of “A Christmas Story”…

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2: Previous column, “To  Change a Tire,” unleashes a golden memory or three
Brian R. Wright

[Link to Episode 1]

Note: These columns are a series, I will make into a volume of my memoirs. You may follow the links at top and bottom of page to go to preceding or succeeding episodes. The series starts here. {If the [Link to Episode <next>] at the  bottom of the column does not show an active hyperlink, then the <next> column has yet to be written.}

In that column, I was referring to a rite of passage from boyhood into teenhood, which was the simple act of learning to successfully change out a flat tire on the family car. And I pointed to the scene in A Christmas Story, where Ralphie Parker goes to help his dad to do just that… having a slight misadventure in the process. 🙂 The movie and that funny little sequence conjure up a remembrance of my own nuclear family life in middle America, and one of my very first images…

… where my little brother Forrest, the would- be passenger in the photo right, tries to turn his tricycle into an airplane! It was 1951, or thereabouts. The Wrights had just rented a small flat in Kansas City, as we waited for our home to be built ‘out in the country’ of suburban Overland Park. Dad had been promoted to a sales job for paper products of the Kalamazoo Vegetable Parchment (KVP) company, for whom he had worked since coming back from the service (WW2) then graduating from Western Michigan University (go Broncos!).

It occurs to me now that we were well off enough to be able to afford to give both Forrest and me fairly new and modestly appointed tricycles at a young age. [My parents, as many of the aspiring middle class of those days, were Sears & Roebuck mail order fans. Sears typically had three models of everything, from wagons to lawn mowers: 3) the cheap, economy version, 2) the reasonably priced, higher quality, middle of the road option, and 1) the highest priced, bordering on bragging rights, top of the line Sears product. Mom and Dad always bought the #2 model.] On this fateful night I was about 3 1/2 and Bro had just turned 2. Continue reading →

Brian’s Column: To Change a Tire

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1: Ode to a onetime necessity and dimming rite of passage
Brian R. Wright

Note: These columns are a series, I will make into a volume of my memoirs. You may follow the links at top and bottom of page to go to preceding or succeeding episodes. {If the [Link to Episode <next>] at the  bottom of the column does not show an active hyperlink, then the <next> column has yet to be written.}

Let’s see if I can tweak the famous Jack London’s opening paragraph from his short story, “To Build a Fire,” to describe my experience this morning:

My fast is broken at Kerby’s Coney, ordinary fare, exceedingly ordinary, and I turn north on the Haggerty Trail, climbing the bank approaching Nine Mile, a rise where in the right lane- less-traveled sits obscured an Oakland-County spring pothole the size of a moon crater. Wrong pair of glasses, yet were it not for a brief self-excused glance at the watch, I’d have seen the damned thing and missed it by an inch to the left. Right tire hits the far edge, far up, at 40 mph, like a balloon on the blade of a dull butter knife. No worries, I have a jack, a spare, and instructions.

Okay, enough inspiration from Mr. Jack. Survival is not at stake, just a routine flat. The thing is, here in AD 2017 already, that I don’t even think to call road service. I’m a man, for chrissakes, tho of 67 well-tread years, and in this family of one we take care of our own problems, by golly! Just a routine change of a tire it is. Except for the extra effort, heavy breathing, and kneeling on pavement—I drive on the flat for half a mile into a CVS drugstore parking lot to do the work—in half an hour I’ve gone through the ‘to change a tire’ motions like a pro. [Yes, to answer some readers, I AM successful in this enterprise. “I may be dumb but I’m slow.”]

Note: the clipart image above is entitled “young good-looking man changes a tire,” I kid you not. And undoubtedly that’s the automated image I had of myself before getting down to it. Clearly, for self-preservation purposes, I need to to realize that those days are gone, and I need at least to pace myself.

Continue reading →

Brian’s Column: The ‘Love’ Catalyst

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Could ‘love’ projection be the Missing Link for the (good) cause-oriented?

“… the greatest of these is love.”
— Jesus, 1st Corinthians 13:13

Just yesterday I was kicking around this notion that I had heard or read during my own spiritual Chautauqua, perhaps in conjunction with reading James Redfield’s, The Celestine Prophecy. [There was a passage where the main character projects his whole inner body core of positive energy toward a plant, or maybe a tree, resulting in a reciprocal receipt of the plant’s life energy into him. That is the meaning of love I’m using for this column, and what I believe Jesus is referring to in the Biblical passage I remember from my Lutheran upbringing. ]

As one who has been embarked for years now, 60+, with some major detours, on causes of one high kind or another, I can tell you it’s easy to fall into the trap of reactive mind —IOW just putting your heart on the shelf and cranking out concepts and judgments that you continually try to tie together in a logical, idealistic manner. Sadly, I’m only just learning my way out of such mental snares, which often render one’s words, however logically sound, bereft of feeling to one’s audience. [And then I wonder why so few really care what I have to say. It’s a common affliction in the truth, justice, and liberty movement.]

A Specific

Perhaps a week ago, seeking a way to popularize several of the salutary ideas presented in my novel, The Truman Prophecy (2016)—and in other immediate causes where the truth warriors are stymied—I delved into Twitter in more depth to see if it could be deployed as a tool to penetrate Good Big Ideas (GBIs) as memes through what I have called the “Barrier Cloud” of the Men of the Power Sickness. [The Barrier Cloud is a concept I created in my first major prescriptive cause-based book, The Sacred Nonaggression Principle. It refers to a sociobiological mind-control network that impedes the progress of humanity toward a society based on the nonaggression principle.] Continue reading →