vol. 2 issue 2
Greetings,
It seems we’ve moved on from “finding our tribe”, as was the thing to do in the 2010s, and are now onto identifying our “family of origin”. There are even so-called “family of origin” therapists. I haven’t ever spoken to one, so I don’t know what that’s all about, but it seems iterative to me. Really? We’re only now starting to consider that the pain of our progenitors is our inheritance?
Well, okay then. Here’s my own entrance into that pursuit of inquiry.
The character actor Harry Dean Stanton will be best known to you depending upon your generation, as the singing convict in Cool Hand Luke (not Paul Newman, the other one), Travis in Wim Wender’s Paris, Texas, or Roman the arch patriarch of a polygamous Mormon family on the HBO show Big Love, or the star of Lucky. I know him as the family member who shows up in nearly every dang movie I am casually watching, unsuspecting that at any moment he’s about to appear.
In fact, Harry Dean was in hundreds of movies, but with the exception of Travis, never had a lead role. He co-starred with a young Emilio Estevez in Repo Man, but that was it. He died in September of 2017 at the age of 91.
Of the four boys born to Ersel Moberly Stanton McKnight of West Irvine, Kentucky, only one remains: my father, Harry Dean’s youngest sibling and half-brother, making Harry Dean my uncle.
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