Hi Rosie,

I think you've got the essence of the Joerndt family tragedy and its lasting effects exactly right, from what I know. Carolyn added the detail that Marshall was "playing with matches" but that raises other questions: who was supposed to be watching him? Hmmmm... Another element was that Mary Miller Joerndt was (as they say) institutionalized, I think after the divorce, and I don't know when she returned to the outside world, or when she died, or any of a number of other bits of fact that I should have asked about when there was still somebody who knew anything. Alice said that she didn't remember anything useful, and Eunice told me just what you report, no more. Surely the "German family" setting was not irrelevant. Eunice and Carolyn's father William wasn't the immigrant (he was born in New York in 1861), that was his father Karl (1824-1902)... so the family was pretty much Americanized by the time Carolyn and Eunice were born (only a bit of German was spoken at home, Carolyn said).

As for David and his unresolved stuff: I often heard him on the subject, but he tended to repeat the same stories about Carolyn attempting to draw him into her own personal crises when he was maybe 20 or so, and it always seemed that there was much more that he wasn't saying or remembering, and I'm sure that a lot of it had to do with his early experiences. Again, Alice said that she "didn't remember" ... I didn't buy that either, but didn't look deeper when I might have. I agree that David never intended the woundings that all of his children still deal with, and I think he understood circuits much better than he did people. I was fortunate to spend time with the pleasant, funny, insightful David of the early 1960s, in the Waverly Oaks days, but rather lost touch with him in late 60s and early 70s, alas.

The lives of Carolyn and Franklin were so tied up with Swedenborgian concerns that I don't really understand and hadn't much sympathy with after I left home at 15 (well, I stayed at school in California when they went to Urbana in 1958, and only saw them at Christmas after that, never spent more than a few nights in Urbana myself). There was a large measure of wisdom in both of them, but I didn't recognize that until they were gone.

As for ourselves, http://oook.info/ has links to many facets of present-day life, which is very comfortable and productive (retirement, 16 years now, the best career I've had). Kate splits her time between here and the house in Nova Scotia, and that's a joy. John we see by Skype these days, and I think our days of cross-country drives are finished. We may fly to California sometime, but don't feel comfortable about it in present circumstances. 

http://oook.info/imagining/ and http://oook.info/FT/ and https://oook.info/musics/JakeWildwood.html are other facets of current life...

--Hugh