The Stories of Stu: Star City, Me and You

(The best time to plant a tree, wonder more about Why, and know what you know now…is twenty years ago. So it goes.)

BAM, and spring sprang—with a big bang, and the birds had no words, but they sang and sang…

It was 2018, and Bug Stu had already come into my life in a big way. We weren’t actually talking much yet, but because of Stu I’d seen how a tulip tree with a big “Y” in it represented a culture that grows from shared roots but splits into two sides, and continues to create different worlds of assumptions, which is the secretive biggest part of life.

Stu, blue and green, in my mind, sat in the fork of the tree and looked up and down. A single trunk and root system below, but two different worlds above. It didn’t matter if it was left and right or east and west, they were just different, and the worlds were mostly oblivious of the roots and whatever else was below ground.

The roots and other underlying things were tree top topics of conversation at times, but with all the opaqueness and complexity of roots and soil, and with other thoughts and things occupying their time, the tops didn’t consider the bottom much. Or, as Stu would say, the Is of the left or right didn’t have time for a serious conversation with Why—and Why was hard to understand anyway.

But I Restore Windows. But, But, But, But…(Background)

When I, weirdly, left my wonderful teaching job eight years earlier to practice and promote architectural restoration (only partly for the sake of architectural restoration itself), I didn’t expect to end up working in Lafayette, Indiana. But if I was going to demonstrate my sanity, earn a living, and make the point or a precedent I’d set out to make, I’d need to start on one thing, window restoration, and generate enough volume and recognition for a sustaining revenue. Maybe I chose windows because I was intrigued by the misrepresentations on their energy impact. But anyway…

Sure, Lafayette had lots of great old buildings with lots of great old windows. But it wasn’t an emaciated tiny town, and it didn’t need a different self-image. Tiny rural towns were what needed a re-imagining of their purpose and potential role—and resulting self-image. Also, Lafayette was an hour drive, and those costs needed to be figured into things. On the other hand I think best when I’m driving, and the hour drive from Lafayette, aka Star City once-upon-a-time, to my home in Kentland, aka The Land of Kent for Stu’s story, gave me the best time to think.

Stu first appeared to me on one of those drives home. It was Stu, sitting in the tulip tree, that got me thinking differently. In fact, I felt like he had such an important perspective, and so many stories to tell, that I considered putting my restoration aspirations on pause and tell some of his stories. My sister helped me, or maybe him, by making a little stuffed version of Stu. Here’s a picture of Stuffed Stu I often use.

This is my sister’s stuffed and felted rendering of Bug Stu as a youngster—before glasses, before his green spots enlarged to continents, and before he even knew Allie Space-Owl. We don’t really use Stu’s childhood in these stories, except to say that in the mid-1700’s he lived in the Sussex area of England, in a marsh. Someday we’ll get to that and how it ties into some of his favorite British music among other things.

Culture Wars Beget Culture Chores

I was raised on a farm long before the “culture wars” of the 1990’s started and persist today unmentioned or with different labels. I’m ten years too young for the high-point of hippie sensibilities around 1970, but the pros and cons of hippiedom have been on my mind since I was old enough to disc with the 560. There might not be a more mindless task than discing flat fields with a small old tractor (therefore a narrow disc and many many trips back and forth). A mindless task but in steady motion, which helps me think, like a long drive in the car.

Once a question is raised, such as the implied and explicit questions raised in the 60’s and 70’s, farmers sometimes sieze the opportunity, given the time on their hands, and start thinking about questions behind the questions (very much like Bug Stu does). Customs, religions, reformers, and revolutionaries make getting to the answers seem pretty straightforward a lot of the time. These days we talk about getting to Core Values in order to answer questions, but I wonder…

Sometimes questions don’t need answered, they need questioned. It’s not meant as a challenge to the question or questioner, it’s just a necessary chore, digging, and we also need to leave lots of time for wondering. Lots of people think the study of ethics and power structures provides answers, but I think it obscures something bigger and less prone to disparate philosophical assumptions. I think we dabbled in it just prior to World War I and few times since, most recently in the 1970’s and 2000’s with the back-to-the-land movements, but there’s a complex thread that runs through them besides the back-to-the-land or simple-living/wellness themes.

Dig and Till, or Don’t, But Know Why and Why and Why

Genuine free thinking requires digs in many directions, and heretical or non-orthodox digging…is in the eye of the beholder, like many things. In my own digging, while I was teaching, I’d decided that we’d all benefit if more of us spent more time being deliberate about health, wellness, mindfulness, understanding how things work (including economics), and ecological effects. Restoration and repair actually figures into this in several ways, as does sense of purpose and what I’ve called easy access to sense of purpose.

My hunch was that there was way more latent supply-and-demand for this than we were realizing. That is, we know that a certain mix of lifestyle elements, a varied mix, has lots of benefits for lots of people, and there was an almost biological, or exactly biological, self-supporting expansion possible. This was Bug Stu’s niche. But what about the growing political/philosophical divide? But what about the growing animosity between the young and old? Is it mostly natural, cultivated, or contrived? That’s where I’ve often allowed myself to stall out in terms of making progress. But then…

A former student that was living in West Lafayette had become an instructor in the realm of wellness or LOHAS. I introduced her to Bug Stu. She had young kids, and even though a lot of Stu’s stuff gets dense in philosophical explorations, he’s appealing to kids. My own thoughts were that if Stu’s stories were ever going to matter, they’d need to occupy both the kid and grown-up realms. Nicole seemed like the mom that Stu needed to talk to…to learn more about what us humies were thinking about.

After Nicole had read some of my Stu-inspired stuff, she explained that she liked it, but she wasn’t sure what it was really all about. She said, bluntly, “There’s lots of hay, but where’s the needle? What’s the real point?” And I realized that I wasn’t sure how to express a “real point”. Yes, there was a point, but some points don’t make much sense without a lot of other stuff. Maybe this was one of those?

So, inspired by Nicole’s comments and inspired with Bug Stu’s attraction to rhymes and alliterations, I started writing a long-ish poem. But it became two poems, with one poem introducing the other. And it far surpassed long-ish and became plain long or very long. It’s at around 3,000 words now. I’m not sure it’s finished.

But it was a start. And it was the start—to discovering how Lafayette, or Star City, was the place where the primary path we’ve all set out on, since the early 1800’s, has to be the place where our path changes, just slightly, according to Stu.

Here’s an excerpt from the poem that grew and grew, thanks to Bug Stu. (Kinda like the egg in that book up there!)

…So all along I’ve had this thought,

that Earth’s a farm, and so we ought

to study it and understand

just How Things Work – from man to land.

Then yesterday, Nicole and I,

had a chat, and she asked why

I don’t come out and plainly say

what it’s about, beyond the “Hay”.

She said…

Where’s the needle? What’s the point?

What’s this fix that you’d anoint?

(What’s funny is, on that same day

I’d called it “A Way Funner Way”!)

But yes, the hay, it’s always there,

and though I try, I always err,

and haul it in – but not today,

the Needle’s what I’m going to say.

(Just in a sheath, and box, not hay)

However, everything needs context, right?

So I wrote some history that same night,

The history is the box, let’s say,

and rhymes’ the sheath - I swear, no hay.

Here’s how it went…: )

A Way-Funner Way

I taught them then I checked back in,

some ten to twenty years since then. 

I’d left the school and left the field,

seeking things with better Yield.          (Yield=flourishing people, better outcomes)

I loved the place and loved the kids,

but I saw hope—some light that rids

at least a bit of suffering

(brought on by ways not buffering

the tides of minds not qualified

to lead a herd, since their one-eyed

and weak “insight” ignored the blight;

their foggy view had left us to

just face the night and blindly fight).

But then…

Okay, the rest will have to wait. You don’t have time, and it takes some explaining, but the poem is kind of like some vine that grows around things to highlight important conceptual changes that have happened in the last century, leading to…maybe 7th Pie Theory, as Stu and Allie call it. But we seem to be ignoring the options and implications right under our noses. These stories will explore some of them.

Honestly…

I always wonder if it’s weird that this story goes from “Bug Stu” to the “7th Pie.” They say subtle little off-putting subconscious things can push a potential audience away, and the Bug/Pie pairing might be one of those. Well honestly, the 7th Pie represents only 14% of people (1/7), according to Stu, so maybe it will work out. Not everyone likes anything all the time, right?

(And the 14% doesn’t literally mean only 14% of people would enjoy or benefit from the The 7th Pie. It’s more than that, but it’s complicated. That will get cleared up here over time. I actually need to clarify that last sentence, relate it to tipping points, fractional attention, and to some other complexities. There have been lots of poems and lots of pondering in this project. I guess it’s time to dig them up and put them here soon.)

Maybe we’ll find out that you really don’t need to have a simple point, and that the hay is valuable, and that literal hay is valuable, in ways we haven’t been paying attention to in our effort to streamline and simplify and…and what? What are we going for? What balance is it that we really want? (Very few things are all-or-nothing, and this isn’t either.)

That’s one of the kinds of digging I’m talking about. From personal experience, the digging often turns up fun things even before you get to the bottom. And Lafayette, Indiana is the place to do it, according to Stu.

If this sounds like it might be the the kind of digging you like, you can check out the About page to see the type of totally-necessary-meandering (like creeks, rivers, or roots) we do.

More soon. Thanks for reading.

Next stop: Teays River, Say’s Firefly, and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

Tim