Currents of Faith: Open and Unfolding Reflections

I was born during the Great Depression in the community of Twin Falls in Southern Idaho, surrounded by Harrys, my father, older brother, and uncle. Some would add my younger brother also, who was named Harold. Earlier I had been accustomed to saying that I was the middle of three boys until I remembered that there had been an earlier stillborn infant whose gravesite bears the simple name, Baby Brizee.

Even though my birth year of 1933 was in the midst of the Depression, I had little awareness of it, since we had a lovely home with many comforts and my father was a successful business owner in the community. Free chocolate milk on Fridays at school and public housing nearby signaled hard times. My father and his first wife, Josephine, chose to move from Morgan Hill, California to Twin Falls. He founded Brizee Metal Works in 1909, the first Lennox furnace dealer west of the Mississippi River.

Josephine died four years before I was born. In my father’s Bible are these words in his beautiful handwriting: “Harry A. Brizee Twin Falls, Idaho, March 7th, 1919 from Josephine R B” Poignantly he later added these words,  “Passed away March 7, 1929  Just 10 years” Sadly, March 7 was his birthday!

My father met my mother on the train returning from taking Josephine home to California for inurnment. I heard my mother say many times that she wished she had ignored my father’s introductory words as they sped along: “Isn’t that an interesting rock formation.” These would be among the milder statements my mother would later speak about him.

At age 47, the eldest son of a family of ten children, Harry Alfred Brizee, whose first marriage was ended by death, married an eldest daughter, Margaret Lucile Cartwright, age 29, the eldest of two, who had ended an earlier marriage by annulment. Harry had an eighth grade education, Lucile a two year teaching certificate.

I was fortunate in terms of physical possessions. I suffered because of violence in my family. I have fragments of memories of the shattered window in the hall door, blood stains on the wall nearby, and my older brother hiding overnight in the car in the garage. My most vivid memory of violence is my father running down the basement steps with a broom in his hands pursuing my older brother Harry. My mother and I, crying and filled with fear, followed. My father caught and beat my brother while I sat on the steps horrified, clutching my mother. This scene and my failure to rush in to help my brother was the first of many that taught me to name myself “coward.”

I learned to be the little soldier, figuratively standing at attention with a hand salute. Ironically, both of my brothers as adults would become career Army officers. I was extremely cautious, working carefully to be unseen and stay out of trouble. When I colored in a coloring book, I would first firmly trace the lines then meticulously color within them. When in school we moved from printing in pencil to cursive writing with ink, I would first write in pencil then trace with pen. In high school, as I learned to type, I would practice moving my fingers, tapping the various letters of a word though there was no typewriter in sight. Memorizing license plates was another habit. Why? I could give no reason. I later came to know that this was obsessive compulsive behavior which served to grant me some control in a world that was out of control. Others did not know who I was. What they saw was not me! They saw behavior which kept the peace, pleased others and allowed me to be safe.

Another nervous habit was biting my fingernails, a habit I still observe in moments of uncertainty. I learned later that my nail biting helped to control the anxiety, of which there was ample in my home.

I have made no mention of God thus far because I had no awareness of God. Now, as I look back on how I coped in these moments, I know that God was offering me realistic possibilities in those events. A boy who is a coward or standing at attention, though painful and not easy to do, is clearly better than a boy who has a broken arm or a bloodied face. My experiences also confirm that as a boy I did not have to be conscious of God’s presence for God to be actually present, another firm conviction I hold today. I was not conscious of much that was important in my life then.

My elder brother, Harry Alfred, Jr., is a year and one-half older than I and my younger brother, Harold Ray, is four years my junior. It seemed that Harry and I had a humorous division of labor in our family. He would actively engage in fighting with the Catholics and Mormons in the neighborhood while I stayed home helping our mother making beds and washing clothes. We spent most of our play time with two friends: Don Bell, who lived down the alley on Buchanan Street, and Melvin “Swede” Swenson who lived one block beyond  Lincoln Street on Blue Lakes Boulevard. My father had built a large wooden frame supporting three swings in our backyard and a basketball hoop above the garage doors, so the Brizees’ was often the meeting place of our neighbor friends. Added to that were two dogs, Reuben and Mitsie, and a hutch of rabbits to enrich its local attraction.

Outside the home it would appear that life was quite normal. In fact, several years ago when I spoke of the violence to my cousin, Dick, who had inherited the family business, he was truly shocked and disbelieving. My father must have been a different person to Dick. I know now these differing personae are not unusual. At the age of five, I was enrolled in St. Edwards Catholic School because they would accept children at this earlier  age. While the other students attended catechism class, Harry and I were given piano lessons. I spent the second grade through the first part of the sixth grade at Washington School, a block away from our home. I recall no unusual or dramatic events in these school years. I was a member of the traffic patrol, we played marbles on the playground, in winter we ran as fox and geese in the snow. I regularly visited Washington Market to purchase a package of chocolate Hostess cupcakes which I placed in my desk and  tried to eat secretly during class.

One thing was clear to me during these years. I was confused. I knew that I was not like my father, a man who was aggressive, angry, and hurtful, yet neither was I like my mother, a woman who was passive, afraid, and helpless. Was I male? Was I female? I did not know. In retrospect, perhaps, God was luring me away from both these options toward a day when I would understand and make a much more informed and loving choice about my identity and sexuality. Again, invitations from God to be confused and unsure were definitely less harmful, given my circumstances, than to firmly embrace either option.
 
One morning in July, 1942, we noticed that the pickup truck was still parked in the driveway, unusual in that my father usually left early to open the sheet metal shop. Later I learned that earlier in the morning, Harold, who was sleeping with him, came into my mother’s bedroom to say that the bed was wet. My father had died in his sleep.

I watched in shock as they carried my father on a gurney through the hallway to the hearse. I stood totally paralyzed in disbelief. Later that day, I vividly remember sitting in the large leather chair staring aimlessly out the window filled with a collage of feelings–wordless, numb, lost. Prominent among them were guilt and self-disgust. For several years my mother had confided in me that she wished my father, “the bastard,” would die. I heard her utter these words many times and joined her in that wish.

I had wished him dead and he died. My wish had been granted. I should be punished for what I had done. I felt strongly that I did not deserve to live. My solution for justice was for me to be punished by exactly what I had caused. I would kill myself. I did not know how in those moments, yet someday, as this castigating feeling continued to live on within me, I would know. Alas, as I matured, so would my knowledge of how to suicide. As an adult in my professional training I learned that I had acquired a “suicide script.”

I am certain now that God was with me as I sat in that leather chair, unable to change the circumstances and my raging feelings, but luring me to stay safely in the chair and not rush to harm myself.

We boys were not allowed to attend my father’s funeral service in Twin Falls. We did not experience the comfort and healing which is the purpose of such a memorial. I recall my grandmother being with us while my mother now took a journey as my father had  some twelve years earlier, returning my father to San Jose for inurnment. Time flowed like thick molasses as we waited the return of our mother. In later days, when she and we boys would visit her friends there would be a point where the conversation would turn to my father’s death. At that time we were ushered out the door by my mother and told to “go outside and smell the roses.” The phrase was used so often that we made jokes about it, repeating it humorously to one another. I had no opportunities to speak of my feelings or the dreadful part I thought I had played in his death, yet the closed off feelings and unspoken beliefs lived and moved within me.

I feared revenge from my father. He would surely return as a vengeful ghost to haunt me, hurting or killing me. I was afraid when alone at night, jumping into bed and quickly pulling the covers over me after turning out the lights. The basement became a scary place! When told to get a jar of canned peaches from the basement fruit cellar I would run as quickly as I could both ways never looking back. A storage room in the basement contained some of Josephine’s belongings, stored in a long cedar chest which we boys would play was a casket. We were obviously re-enacting a terrifying event, the sudden death of our father,  in an effort to tame it. Though not the usual game to play, I wonder if the divine lure toward such play was the healing effect of this re-enactment.

In later years I learned to administer the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale for Children, in which the exact age of the child must be recorded on the clinical report. This boy was 9 years, one month, and 8 days old when the shattering death of his father occurred. This boy was in deep trouble.

I had slight brushes with God during these years. At the conclusion of a Vacation Bible School, in which my mother was recruited to teach, Harry and I were the only children to refuse to walk to the altar to be saved. I clung to that pew as tightly as I had grasped my mother on the basement stairs. I have since wondered if our reluctance was the reason we were given red beet sandwiches at the picnic following the altar call! Our closest friends, Don and Swede, were Latter Day Saints, so we attended some Primary Classes at their church. We as a family, either before or after my father’s death, were never involved in any church congregation, nor did we engage in blessings at meals or prayers at bedtime. My only thread to the church is learning later that we were baptized as infants in our home by a Methodist minister. As thin as it was, this connection would become important in my later years. As best I can recall, I was not thinking at all about God, having any questions about meaning or wondering about my life. I was getting by.

Since my father did not leave a will the court required that every check my mother wrote  be countersigned by the attorney. She sought employment working nights at the hospital, then later in her field of education. She had earned a two year teaching certificate at San Francisco State College and as a young graduate had taught in Lost Hills, California. However, in our community in the early 1940’s the public schools would not hire married teachers, even widows. The county superintendent of schools and a friend of my mother, Doris Stradley, found her a position at a one room school of eight grades located on a cattle ranch forty miles away. Thus began our adventure in being cowboys!

On January 1, 1944 Ormis Bates loaded our belongings into his pickup truck and began the journey from Twin Falls, through Buhl and Castleford across Lilly Grade to a large cattle ranch called Roseworth. We followed in our 1934 Chevrolet which my mother had bought after a relative died in Nevada. My mother was 43, Harry 12, I was 10 and Harold was 6. Arriving on that New Year’s Day we came to a white building beside which was a tiny house called a “ teacherage,” two outhouses, and a corral surrounded by a barbed wire fence with a large gate. To say the least, this was a change of venue. My mother was, indeed, a courageous woman, in contrast to her helplessness with my father. She was the “School Marm” and her boys made up three of the nine students in the school.

Surprisingly, we thrived there. Having had a number of childhood illnesses in town, we were largely healthy on the ranch in spite of a pot bellied coal stove heating the small house, the cistern filled by running water through an open ditch, Saturday night baths sharing the same water in the wash tub, kerosene lamps to light any reading, and the outhouses a distance from the house. Exceptions to our healthy status were my brother picking up “the itch” and sharing it with the rest of us and my late night forty mile ride to a physician. I had run into a barbed wire fence at my neck level during a twilight game of kick the can.

Everyone wore cowboy boots and hats. All the children rode their horses to school, thus the necessity of the corral. Students took turns feeding the coal stove in the one room school. Dances were held there as well, all ages swirling around the oiled wooden floors. Half empty beer bottles were placed on the sills of open windows, a ready invitation to boys who wanted to steal a little drink. The Utah Land and Cattle Company gave us a retired cow pony and Harry and I took turns on Saturdays riding with the real cowboys, quite aware that we did not know how to cut out a steer or herd the cattle but assuredly the horse did. The apricot brandy passed around in the bunk house afterwards smelled wonderful and tasted awful!

My mother fell in love with a ranch-hand who worked at the home ranch, a man whom everyone admired and respected. He would be recognized quickly as the tall thin man with the three-legged dog, Tippy. We stayed in the bunkhouse while they went to be married at the courthouse in Twin Falls. The death of President Franklin Delano  Roosevelt on April 12, 1945  led to the closure of all public facilities that day. Our stay in the bunkhouse was longer than expected. When they returned we had a stepfather, Berry Garrison, and we moved from the teacherage to the brown house a quarter mile away. When asked early on if I approved of this marriage, I profoundly stated, “Yes, now we can get three square meals a day!” I really liked Berry and often rode the cleated  Caterpillar tractor with him while he was dredging ditches.

For the second time I was pushed ahead in school to help my mother—to get me out from under foot. Since I was the only student in the sixth grade, the next year during seventh grade I did both seventh and eighth grade studies with Harry and two other boys. Now I really was “The Kid,” two years younger than my classmates in Roseworth. Looking many years ahead, at my twentieth high school reunion I was voted the one who had changed the most. I replied that this was easy—I had reached puberty!

I passed the county achievement test, so was eligible to attend high school. The problem: there was no high school nearby. Harry and I would have to leave home and attend school elsewhere. My mother arranged for us to attend Albion State Normal School, a teacher training school in southern Idaho which had a campus school. We would drive to Buhl, catch the train, the “Galloping Goose,” to Burley, and board a van for Albion. This complicated travel meant that we went home only on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter. I was now twelve and cried a lot that year. The dormitory, because it was the end of World War II, housed one male student, the resident hall advisors and Harry and me. At least now there were eight in our freshman class, a quantum leap from Roseworth.

It was during this year that I had experiences which were emotional and touching then and still live in modified form within me. In dreams and daydreams there was a woman who would come to me, tenderly gather me up in her arms, and carry me to a better place. These experiences were powerful for a young, lonely boy. They were not overtly sexual since at age twelve I had not reached puberty. Though deeply comforting at that time they posed a danger for me in later years after I did reach puberty. Then the visions did feel sexual and more importantly they confirmed that when in dire straits a woman will rescue me. It would be like my asking, Where is that woman?
 
As I reflect on this image, I wonder if the woman was a form offered by God to provide comfort when I direly needed it. I would not be the first person to have an experience of the divine in a human form. I am affirmed by learning of archetypes and Dr. Carl Jung’s “Beatrice,” his imaginative feminine figure.

After the year in Albion, we returned to our home in Twin Falls, as my mother had accepted a teaching position in the elementary school at Buhl. Although I found it largely uneventful, I jokingly say that my sophomore year was ruined by Latin and Geometry. One critical moment, however, stands out for me in my fourteenth year. I became so exasperated with Harry that I smashed my fist through a glass window. I knew that if we fought I would once again lose, but felt so angry at him that I needed to do something. I spent several hours in surgery having the wound in my left forearm sutured and was fortunate that the glass did not sever tendons, thankfully just the sheath around them. Today I still bear the v-shaped scar on my left arm as a reminder of my angry frustrated feelings.

My mother and Berry bought a farm in the Snake River canyon eight miles from Buhl.
My mother continued teaching, Berry engaged in his love of farming. I changed my name from Robert to Bob. It was no surprise that everyone honored the change except my family. We bought Black Angus heifers, became active in the Future Farmers of America, sold calves at the Saturday livestock auction, and helped  build the new Ag shop at Buhl High School. This would be the third high school I attended and where I would graduate. I was certainly not a student, priding myself that I never took a book home in my senior year. My grades were Bs, Cs and a few Ds. I didn’t care. Today I would never make it into college, but in that era in Idaho a C+ average would gain admission.

My older brother and I continued to battle constantly, violent fist fights which left every bracket on our bed frame broken, mattress springs supported by bricks or a bucket. We seemed to be caught in a pattern from childhood days, father beats brother, brother beats younger brother. The formula seemed to continue even without a father in the equation. Had someone asked us why we engaged in this fighting I think both of us would have had no idea. Our fighting ended only after high school graduation. We went to distant locations in our nation– Harry to a non-commissioned officers school at Fort Benning, Georgia and I to college.

A tragedy occurred shortly after graduation for which I was ill prepared. Our boyhood friend, Don Bell, while hiking with Swede and several others in the Snake River Canyon, lost his footing and fell to his death. Don had everything. He was handsome, likeable, popular, winsome, admired, motivated and  positive. He was elected Twin Falls High School cheer leader. I wondered as I gazed at him lying in his casket in a beautiful white suit: Why does someone who is so good and so loved by so many die and I go on living? It seemed as if something were very wrong and unfair. I felt the wrong person died. Surely, the nine year old boy who sat in the leather chair condemning himself was speaking within me.

I worked for Ralph Baughman and lived at his nearby farm above the canyon walls my final two summers in high school. Thinning rows of recently sprouted sugar beets— bending over, hoeing, and carefully unwinding one final unwanted sprout from the one left to grow—was nearly as boring and lonely as carrying around a spray unit on my back  to use on the undesirable white sweet clover interspersed with the red sweet clover grown for seed. These experiences actively motivated my desire for something better. Education was the lure, a way out, an escape! I would climb out of this boring routine. Little did I know the unexpected adventures which this lure would bring.

Graduation was May 20, 1949 and I turned sixteen the next month on June 17. My mother wondered if I wanted to stay in high school another year rather than starting college. I considered that option. College won. I chose my major in the same way I would later choose Methodism, without thought. Again, my mother suggested, “pharmacy is a nice clean job.” After milking cows morning and night and working in the fields by day, I was attracted. My journey was from farm to pharmacy. Pharmacy at Idaho State College, Pocatello, it would be.

My story thus far begins to identify the cast members and sets the stage for my drama. I was a boy, youth, young man who largely did not think. I was taken up by getting along, not getting hurt and hopefully getting out. I had no awareness of God in my life and no recognized curiosity about God.

The cast was ready for act two of the drama: the Scaredy Cat, who would jump into bed and hide under the covers after turning off the light;  the Soldier standing at attention saluting, who would stay safe and be pleasing to others; the Obsessive Compulsive Boy, who would live within the lines of life’s coloring book while biting his fingernails; the Coward, who would desperately avoid anger and conflict; the Death-Wisher, who would feel that he did not deserve to live; the Roseworth Boy who would be frugal and accepting of whatever came his way; The Kid,  who would always hurry because in any situation he was already behind all the others, and Comforted  who would repeatedly dream of  and imagine the coming of the tender woman.

I name these as parts of me, members of the cast in my drama. Professionally I know that they would be defined as ego states in the Transactional Analysis of Eric Berne and sub-personalities in Roberto Assagioli’s Psychosnythesis.

These assembled characters who formed my past would later be transformed in varying degrees while new ones would be added in yet to come events. Obviously, some cast members had not yet been created. Some situations of relatively short duration would have significant influence on who I was to become. Such was the case with the time I spent on the Roseworth cattle ranch, at school in Albion, and in Marine boot camp at Parris Island.

As I reflect upon these parts of me, I marvel that I heard God’s whispers at all. Yet this complex of Roberts and Bobs created in real life situations is where God would speak simply because that was where I was. From my perspective today, I know that God was accompanying me and actively participating in the shaping of each of these parts, however limited and inadequate, calling forth the best possible for me in each situation. Somehow in the inner recesses of my unconscious was a divine shadow, not yet even a still small voice. So, I exclaim today: “I just didn’t know you were there, O Gracious One! But, You knew my name!”

Now, on to college.