Ruth Green beside the Sphinx & Great Pyramid.

Today, March 10, 2005 the ashes of my mother Ruth Jane Green and of my father James A. Green Jr. are coming together again after 22 years of separation, on their wedding anniversary, to be stored here in the Old Mission Mausoleum together in a brass-and-wood niche close to the stone grave of my Uncle Charles R. Mayfield, who passed away in 1976, 7 years ahead of my father, who died in 1983. It is happening this way because of the foresight of my parents, who willed it thus by investing in a scheme that paid for it, and because of the determination of my brothers Rick, Tom, and David that things should come together in this fitting way, so that the couple that sired us would be laid together in a heroic hall close to the grave of our most successful family champion.

I myself quailed at the sight of the costs involved in making this dream come true, and if nothing had been done by the thinking couple and the determined brothers, I would have probably failed to transport my mother's body to this handsome site all the way from Tucson, Arizona. In fact, I might have been looking for a place to hide!

As I recall from family stories, both Ruth and my father James Jr. arrived in Wichita from out of state, my father from Springfield, Missouri and my mother from Claremore, Oklahoma. They moved into houses just 2 1/2 blocks away from each other. He was born in 1920 and she in 1923, and both of them attended Robinson Junior High School and East High. She was a travel buff who vacationed all over the USA with her parents every year, and never gave up the habit of exploration and discovery. She visited Yellow Stone, Washington D.C., Dinosaur monuments, the Rocky Mountains, and many other U.S. Monuments, such as Mount Rushmore. Dad fought in World War II in the Battle of the Bulge while Mom's brother John fought in the Pacific Theatre during the initial stages of the invasion of the Japanese islands. After picking up a purple heart from a shell fragment in his knee, my father became involved in administering a prisoner-of-war camp for German prisoners in England, then returned to America to study chemistry and geology and join forces with his father James A. Green Sr., who became the President of Mesa Oil and Petroleum Company. Mother Ruth, on the other hand, graduated with distinction in business administration and joined an office of IBM. They married on March 10, 1948, and my birth certificate on May 13, 1949 shows that Dad was running a Bendix home laundry at that time. As time went on he became a petroleum geologist working with his father, while Uncle Chuck (Charles R. Mayfield), got a degree in the same topic from Wichita State University, and finally went on to become quite a successful petroleum geologist after some months working as a ticket salesman for TWA.

Simulating Mom's Appearance Coming Down the Stairway as an Angel from Heaven. (as Christiaan Huygens, Halloween, 2000).

I remember how my father described meeting Mom on a blind date: she came down the stairs at the Mayfield home on Fountain with sparkling hair that excited wondrous admiration in my father, who lived at Quentin and 3rd with his parents. He had never seen her before. She seemed to descend to him from above like an angel from heaven.

Dad was an Eagle Scout with a scouting troop that used to meet at The First Presbyterian Church, where I still attend. His parents were proud members of the Sons of the American Revolution and the Daughters of the Revolution, descended from a James Green born in 1758 who died in 1821, my great-great-great grandfather, who was a private in Captain Robert Porter's company during the American War for Independence. James was born in Tryon Country, North Carolina, married to a Sara Hicks, and would have been about 63 when he died, just like my father. Granddad Green used to explain about James by saying that our relatives fought under Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox, who I remember watching on his TV set with big eyes in Disney programs when I was a child in the 50s. However, I have recently got better data on it from Phillip A. Little at First Presbyterian Church, who checked out Granddad Green's Kansas application 558 (national # 51308) to the Sons of the American Revolution.


The Ghost of George Washington, Chin over Wichita, on July 4, 2004.
See Kansas SAR.

Ruth was involved in a sorority in college in Colorado, and Dad was in a fraternity at WSU that paddled a man on his way through a spat line as part of the hazing process. Dad took analytical chemistry from the professor who became our next door neighbor, Dr. Robert Christian. Dad loved to play golf, cards, and dominoes with men a Sims Park in his spare time when I was a child, and sometimes took me with him on geology field trips to Texas, where he would stop the car on the road to show me how a tarantula rears up on his hind legs if probed with a rolled-up newspaper. Later on, I found out where chemistry glassware was stored on the WSU campus, and used to go up regularly and buy myself flasks and beakers for my chemistry lab. We lived on Minnesota when I was born, then on Edgemoor Street, the on Harvard where the Trombold family lived at the end of the block and Dr. Christian lived next door.

They gave me a very happy childhood with 3 long-lasting grandparents, many aunts and uncles, and Granddad Harold E. Mayfield, who saw me as a little child only, dying young at 49 in 1949. Ruth Mayfield went to the Church of Christ Scientist, and Harold was famous for how much he could ignore doctors and rely on faith healing measures as promoted by Mary Baker Eddy. I turned around and he seemed to have vanished except for table-top photos, stories, and mementos like his Masonic Lodge books. They told me he was a humorist whose company I'd have found very enjoyable.

Mom was looking over the Pyramids and vacationing on the Nile with Tom when Uncle John died in 1999. She brought back many fascinating travel documents and photos she and Tom had taken along the Nile, including photos of The Pyramids, the Sphinx, Abu Simbel, The Colossi of Memnon, and numerous artifacts and samples of papyri. I also remember that she visited Machu Pichu and the ruins of the Incas after Uncle John passed away. For some reason, in old age when we begin to resemble an old ruin, we may experience a sympathetic desire to hike around old ruins where men lived when the world was young, though it is now decayed. Towards the end she seems to have arranged to haunt herself with antiquities, but in the company of her youngest and closest son.

Weather Visions. Great Balls of Gas!

Grandmother Mayfield died in 1988, and from about that time I seem to have been haunted by images in the clouds. I began to look up to the ghostly reality of a haunted world. By that time I had been divorced twice, and reproduced just once. "I had all boys", Dad used to say. "You'll probably have all girls." The farther into the future I got, the more relatives seemed to drop away until I lost all of my Wichita relative friends at 53, after Mom had her 4th stroke and left town with Rick and Lien May, finally winding up in Arizona to die 2 years later in a hospital there on February 28, 2005. Finally, Internet had me on top of the world with satellite photos of the ghostly planet haunting me from the other side of the sky as I myself drew closer to the end. Some of the weather photos seemed to show Ruth languishing in a hospital in Arizona, while I appeared headed back to Kansas as a gigantic peacock with its tail over her bed in Tucson, as if I were preparing to shed an ancestor.


As a Peacock with Bottom over Tucson, about to shed Ancestor Ruth.

Life had become a kind of stairway to heaven at Murray Court. Ruth gave me some time to think at home after 14 years of work in the field as an engineer, and so I managed to derive quite a few theorems in physics and engineering and publish 17 scientific and technical books that took me deep into the stars, the universe, and the recent high-technology achievements of men. Divorces and dismissals from firms crushed by new patented developments like the ink jet printer seemed to help return me to my Father's world, where I took many a walk in the theater of the 4 seasons. My father used to say that after his World War II service "Each day with Ruth was just another day of grace". I thought so, too.


As a graceful Captain Hook accompanied by a Tampa Bay Buccaneer.

Mom, being in the Greek sororities, liked to describe herself as a Stoic. But she and my father were Christians, married in the First Presbyterian Church. I was conceived of before I was born, toward the end that Jesus Christ might resurrected in newness of life, as one can easily see from an inspection of the chapel's magnificent stain glass windows. Where the Sun rises against the East Window, Christ seems to ascend from a tomb in the ground a bit like the constellation Orion arising like a Phoenix from its ashes. Ashes to ashes, star dust to star dust. Mom and Dad had me baptized as an infant, explained to me that they were White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, and marched me to Sunday school as a youngster many times until my adolescent years, when my mind was firmly on the victories of the scientific method in medicine and the glories of Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, and armies of scientists armed with the instrumentation of technical progress. But my baptism helped me feel that I had something to return to in the Presbyterian Church, and my hero James Clerk Maxwell, the father of the electromagnetic field equations for the True Light of actual reality had been a Presbyterian, too. So as everyone began to die and pass away, I could return gracefully to the Grand Old Party of the coffee fellowship before the Sunday service, attend church classes and church services, and visit with friends as my parents intended. A grand design nested in an inspired system to protect our lives and glorify God was coming true.

---

2 Grace be to you and peace from God our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
3 Blessed be God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort;
4 Who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God.
- St. Paul, 2 Corinthians 2-4


It seems it might be The Spirit of Jesus Christ pointing through Tampa Bay
for the 2nd Time. What a tale, the tale of truth! God's soul in Heaven!
Music: Got My Mind Set on You, by George Harrison, MP3.