brusque and businesslike,” Don says. “But she was nice to me. She would have been a bad grandma for a young child, but she was a good one for an older person.”
Years later, Don and his family crowded around the computer and started typing the names of relatives into a search engine. They were astounded when Clare’s name filled the results.
“There was nothing about my grandfather Frank,” Don says. “We thought he was more famous than her.”
When I ask why they divorced, there is a pause.
“We have a whole family of eccentrics,” Don says, laughing. They stayed together until their kids were fully grown, but their personalities were just too similar. Grandfather wanted to be chief of the roost. He was a big man—six feet, eight inches tall. His sons saw him as overwhelmingly powerful.
“But he was gentle with me,” Don remembers. “He gave me some Chinese art once.”
Don recalls that Clare didn’t have a lot. Sometimes, when she needed extra money, she would work the switchboard at the Brookmore, plugging wires in and out. She was supposed to inherit a great deal of money from D. C. Stover, but by the time it eventually reached her, the estate had been plundered. Others tried to warn her of this, but she was reluctant to believe it. She was a loner.
“They found her in the hall,” Don says. It was October 26, 1968. She was seventy-seven. “I’m not sure any of us knew what it was. A heart attack? She didn’t waste away. She was very healthy.”
All three of her sons came to California for the funeral. There was the elder Don, who flew missions in World War II. There were rumors he had flown over Dresden. Someone whispered that during one flight, one of his copilots got hit and had his head severed. Don flew back with it in the plane with him.
“He came back darker,” says Don, who was named after him.
Lynn was a Marine who came back with a little bag of gold teeth. He showed them to Don. Lynn was very close to Clare. But he was always getting into trouble, says Don. He lived in the Yucatan and she had to bail him out of various problems. When Clare died, Lynn was accused by the family of looting her apartment.
“He took the TV,” Don says. “I have some stuff of hers, mostly books. She didn’t have much. She was relatively reclusive.”
When I ask if the family was influenced by her work, or at least the spirit of it, Don says that his dad was the biggest fan. Clyde Harris was a physics nerd who worked on heat-seeking missile systems. Don, a liberal, would often argue with his dad and try to guess at his various projects, which were classified. His dad would often cave, and they would argue about the ethics of it all.
“It was all in good fun,” says Don.
After his dad died, Don traveled to Nepal with his wife. They went to Lumbini, the windswept birthplace of the Buddha. Don attributes his interest in Buddhism to his grandmother Clare, who he said was one of the first in southern California to embrace it.
Don takes a breath that I can hear over the phone. He explains to me that he saw something very strange on that trip. Something weird.
“There was a dog,” he says. “Only I looked into his face and I saw my dad. I can’t explain it. But I saw it. My dad told me something then, just by looking at me. I had a big change after that.”
Donald Lynn Harris is the grandson of Clare Winger Harris and lives in a house in the California woods. When he was younger, he was into drag racing. He joined the Back to the Land movement, bought land, and set up probably the first solar panels in the county. He started small-scale hydro systems to encourage renewable energy resources. He set up similar systems in Nicaragua, where he met Benjamin Linder, the American engineer who was murdered by the Contras in 1987. Infuriated, Don became vocal and political, drawing the attention of the government. Years later, he would end up, for a moment, on a long list of suspects in the Unabomber case. Don laughs when he tells me this. He is still very political but gives me the advice to choose my battles. But, he says, thinking aloud “the older I get, my belief system means more to me than my own aging body.”
Don must radiate out from his remote home to get a good wireless signal. I picture him under an open sky, his voice beaming through the ether like the radio waves in his grandmother’s stories. He wouldn’t have it any other way, living along the outer rim of society, even though it’s getting a little harder to chop his own wood.
Don has no children. His wife of forty-two years recently passed away. When I offer my condolences, he tells me it’s okay.
“We believe in other dimensions,” he says, using the present tense. “So, keep an open mind,” he tells me, cheerily and full of wonder.
“We believe in that stuff.”
Brad Ricca
September 2018
The Artificial Man and Other Stories
The Artificial Man
I.
In the annals of surgery no case has ever left quite as horrible an impression upon the public as did that of George Gregory, a student of Austin College. Young Gregory was equally proficient in scholastic and athletic work, having been for two years captain of the football team, and for one year a marked success in intercollegiate debates. No student of the senior class of Austin or Decker will ever forget his masterful arguments in the question:—“Resolved that bodily perfection is a result of right thinking.” Gregory gave every promise of being one of the masterful minds of the age; and if masterful in this instance means dominating, he was that—and more. Alas that his brilliant mentality was destined to degradation through the physical body—but that is my story.
It was the Thanksgiving game that proved the beginning of George’s downfall. Warned by friends that he would be wise to desist from the more dangerous physical sports, he laughingly—though with unquestionable sincerity—referred to the context of his famous debate, declaring that a correct mental attitude toward life—he had this point down to a mathematical correctness—rendered physical disasters impossible. His sincerity in believing this was laudable, and so far his credence had stood him in good stead. No one who saw his well-proportioned six-foot figure making its way through the opponents’ lines, could doubt that the science of thinking rightly was favorably exemplified in young Gregory.
But can thinking be an exact science? Before the close of that Thanksgiving game George was carried unconscious from the field, and in two days his right leg was amputated just below the hip.
During the days of his convalescence two bedside visitors brightened the weary hours spent upon the hospital cot. They were David Bell, a medical student, and Rosalind Nelson, the girl whom George had loved since his freshman year.
“I say, Rosalind,” he ventured one day as she sat by his bedside. “It’s too bad to think of you ever being tied up to a cripple. I’m willing to step aside—can’t do it gracefully of course with only one leg—but I mean it, my dear girl. You don’t want only part of a husband!”
Rosalind smiled affectionately. “George, don’t think for a minute that it matters to me. You’re still you, and I love you, dear. Can’t you believe that? The loss of a bodily member doesn’t alter your identity.”
“That’s just what gets me,” responded her lover with a puzzled frown. “I have always believed, and do now, that the mental and physical are so closely related as to be inseparable. I think it is Browning who says, ‘We know not whether soul helps body more than body helps soul.’ They develop together, and if either is injured the other is harmed. Losing part of my body has made me lose part of my soul. I’m not what I was. My mental attitude has changed as a result of this abominable catastrophe. I’m no longer so confident. I feel myself slipping and I—oh it is unbearable!”
Rosalind endeavored to the best of her ability to reassure the unfortunate man, but he sank into a despondent mood, and seeing that her efforts