What scares me

 Found on Tumblr some years ago and just rediscovered.  It was written by a girl identified only as Taylor: 

 "A lot of people ask me what my biggest
fear is, or what scares me most. And I know
they expect an answer like heights, or
closed spaces, or people dressed like
animals, but how do I tell them that when I
was 17 I took a class called 'Relationships
For Life' and I learned that most people fall
out of love for the same reasons they fell in
it. That their lover's once endearing
stubbornness has now become refusal to
compromise and their one-track mind is
now immaturity and their bad habits that
you once adored are now money down the
drain. Their spontaneity becomes recklessness
and irresponsibility and their feet up on your
dash is no longer sexy, but just annoying.
Nothing saddens and scares me like the
thought that I can become ugly to someone
who once thought all the stars were in my
eyes."

That thought scares me too, both that I might become that to him I love or that he might become that to me.  I don't want that to happen.  Dear Lord, I don't.

Doesn't it scare you, too?  How many marriages have foundered on the rocks of tiresomeness? 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bridge of Time

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Wedding Vow

by Sharon Olds

I did not stand at the altar, I stood
at the foot of the chancel steps, with my beloved, and the minister stood on the top step
holding the open Bible. The church
was wood, painted ivory inside, no people—God's
stable perfectly cleaned. It was night,
spring—outside, a moat of mud,
and inside, from the rafters, flies
fell onto the open Bible, and the minister
tilted it and brushed them off. We stood
beside each other, crying slightly
with fear and awe. In truth, we had married
that first night, in bed, we had been
married by our bodies, but now we stood
in history—what our bodies had said,
mouth to mouth, we now said publicly,
gathered together, death. We stood
holding each other by the hand, yet I also
stood as if alone, for a moment,
just before the vow, though taken
years before, took. It was a vow
of the present and the future, and yet I felt it
to have some touch on the distant past
or the distant past on it, I felt
the silent, dry, crying ghost of my
parents' marriage there, somewhere
in the bright space—perhaps one of the
plummeting flies, bouncing slightly
as it hit forsaking all others, then was brushed
away. I felt as if I had come
to claim a promise—the sweetness I'd inferred
from their sourness; and at the same time that I had
come, congenitally unworthy, to beg.
And yet, I had been working toward this hour
all my life. And then it was time
to speak—he was offering me, no matter
what, his life. That is all I had to
do, that evening, to accept the gift
I had longed for—to say I had accepted it,
as if being asked if I breathe. Do I take?
I do. I take as he takes—we have been
practicing this. Do you bear this pleasure? I do.

Thinking About War on Veteran's Day

 

War is something every man I have ever known was deeply interested in.
Why?




 

 

 

Calm and full the ocean under the cool dark sky; quiet rocks and the
birds fishing; the night-herons
Have flown home to their wood...while east and west in Europe and
Asia and the islands unimaginable agonies

Consume mankind. Not a few thousand but uncounted millions, not a day
but years, pain, horror, sick hatred;
Famine that dries the children to little bones and huge eyes; high-explosive
that fountains dirt, flesh and bone-splinters.

Sane and intact the seasons pursue their course, autumn slopes to
December, the rains will fall
And the grass flourish, with flowers in it: as if man's world were perfectly
separate from nature's, private and mad.

But that's not true; even the P-38s and the Flying Fortresses are as natural
as horse-flies;
it is only that man, his griefs and rages, are not what they seem to man, not
great and shattering, but really

Too small to produce any disturbance. This is good. This is the sanity, the
mercy. It is true that the murdered
Cities leave marks in the earth for a certain time, like fossil rain-prints in
shale, equally beautiful.

~ Robinson Jeffers



In bombers named for girls, we burned
The cities we had learned about in school
Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among
The people we had killed and never seen.
When we lasted long enough they gave us medals;
When we died they said, "Our casualties were low."
~ Randall Jarrell

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is not bad. Let them play.
Let the guns bark and the bombing-plane
Speak his prodigious blasphemies.
It is not bad, it is high time,
Stark violence is still the sire of all the world's values.
 

What but the wolf's tooth whittled so fine
the fleet limbs of the antelope?
What but fear winged the birds, and hunger
Jewelled with such eyes the great goshawk's head?
Violence has been the sire of all the world's values.
 

 

Who would remember Helen's face
Lacking the terrible halo of spears?
Who formed Christ but Herod and Caesar,
The cruel and bloody victories of Caesar?
Violence, the bloody sire of all the world's values.
~ Robinson Jeffers

You would think the fury of aerial bombardment
Would rouse God to relent; the infinite spaces
Are still silent. He looks on shock-pried faces.
History, even, does not know what is meant.

You would feel that after so many centuries
God would give man to repent; yet he can still kill
As Cain could, but with multitudinous will,
No farther advanced than in his ancient furies.

Was man made stupid to see his own stupidity?
Is God by definition indifferent, beyond us all?
Is the eternal truth man's fighting soul
Wherein the Beast ravens in its own avidity?
~ Richard Eberhart

 

 Reconciliation
Word over all, beautiful as the sky,
Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly
lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash
again, and ever again, this soiled world;
For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,
I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin--I drawn near,
Bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.
~ Walt Whitman

 

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work--
I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?

 

I am the grass.
Let me work.
~ Carl Sandburg

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sometimes you play the game and lose, and that's just how it goes.

 

"I've got 5 contacts in my phone that will never call me again. Friends, colleagues, associates that have all lost their lives in airplanes. I was notified of two of those accidents, including the one that has hit me the hardest, literally as I was getting into an airplane to go fly. It can feel helpless sometimes when you see an accident that was entirely unpreventable. Sometimes you play the game and lose, and that's just how it goes."
~ Some guy

I don't have five contacts on my phone, but I have one.  I still keep it.  I even transfer it when I get a new phone. I'll always have it.  

******

When you wake up in the morning you really don't know what the day will bring. While I was running errands in Gotham City, Jr., the other day, having flown over in the King Air and aced the landing, the wheels chirping on the runway just as the stall warning sounded, and still feeling quite proud of myself about it, I ran into el jefe's friend Jason, and since it was around noon he invited me to lunch and we got seats at the counter of a nearby diner, the only ones available during the lunch rush. 

We both ordered the blue plate special, sliced roast beef with mashed potatoes and gravy with a side of peas and a dinner roll. I had coffee black, he had coffee with cream, no sugar. We chatted about this and that as we ate. How're your kids?  They do grow up fast, don't they? How's your mom? That's good.  What's Jeff been up to? Giving you any grief is he? My eldest is working down at Rayfield's. You know the place. He's making some good money. Oh, the wife is fine, she's working on a new quilt with material from some kimonos she found at that thrift store down on -- and so on.

But as we finished up our coffees and waited for the check, the conversation veered. Definitely veered.

"Say," Jason said out of the blue, "I was was scrolling through some amateur rape porn looking for something good --"

I looked at him with an expression a cross between 'excuse me?' and 'say what now?' 

"-- to whack off to and --" 

He caught my expression.

"Sorry to be so blunt, Wanda, but I wanted to explain the circumstances and think it's best to just be direct and to the point."

"Uh...maybe I should get going."

"No, wait.  Hang on a sec. The thing is," and he pulled out his phone and fiddled with it, "I came across this video.  It's really a rocker and I definitely got hard when I saw it.  Here, look --" and he slid his phone over to me with a video playing.

"See what I seen?  You see?  That's you, isn't it?  That's you!"

Not quite comprehending what was going on and what he was babbling about and thinking I sure should have turned down this lunch, and wait till I tell el jefe about this, I looked at the video.

And froze. It was me.  Being gang raped. July 19 of Year One. For real.  Everything rushed back in to my mind. Every detail of every second.  But my expression didn't change. I pushed the phone back to him. "That's not me."

"Yeah, it is, Wanda.  I know you and I know what I seen."

"No.  It's not.  I don't even see a resemblance.  It's just some blonde, and it's probably fake or staged anyway."

"Oh, no, it's real.  This site specializes in videos of real rapes that people send in." 

"I see. Well, it's not me."

Jason scrutinized my face, then looked down at his phone, where the video was still playing, not even on mute, then looked back at me.

"Yeah.  It's you. I don't care what you say. It's you.  What happened anyway? Does Jeff know? Boy, if he doesn't --"

"God damn it, Jase, I told you it wasn't me.  It is not me!  I've had enough of this.  I'm getting out of here."

"Okay, Wanda.  I'm sorry I brought it up but you know I just had to know and you know what, it's really a great video, boner heaven.  I mash one out every time I watch it."

Every time, I thought, as I got off the counter stool. Oh, that's great. Jesus Christ.

"I'll mash another one out thinking about how I showed it to you and you watched it with me."

"I did not watch it with you, damn your soul!"

Other people in the diner had stopped eating to watch us.  The counter server, bill pad in hand, was staring.  "Thanks for the lunch, Jason Bowfield," I said loudly, saying his full name.* "Be sure to leave a big tip!"

And I left, not looking back. I heard him say, "Wait up, Wanda! Don't be --" before the door closed behind me.

When I got outside the air was fresh and crisp and I took a deep breath. I wasn't in the mood to do any more shopping and went directly back to the airport and got in my plane. I sat in the cockpit and realized I was shaking.  I was in no condition to fly.  I got out and walked up and down the ramp, then out past hangers and the FBO office to the parking lot and back to the ramp, then back to the parking lot again, thinking a lot of things. Such a lot of things. After about an hour I was calm enough to get back in the plane and go home.

Once there, I said nothing about the incident to el jefe, Jeff, my husband, other than to say I had run into Jason and had lunch with him and Jeff asked how the old reprobate was doing and I said okay I guess. When we went to bed, Jeff fucked me and I just stared up at the ceiling. When he finished, he asked me if I was okay, I didn't really seem to be into it, and I said that I was just tired and sorry to be a buzzkill. He said, no, no, he should have realized I'd be tired and not bothered me and I said he was never a bother and I always enjoyed his weight on me.

He kissed me, rolled over and went to sleep.  I lay awake staring into the darkness.

So.  You want to know was it really me, don't you?  Yes, it was me.  I was gang raped, the men coming back for seconds, even thirds. Yes, everybody videoed it with their cell phones. My surprise at what was happening, my shock, my fighting back, kicking, being slammed down and held immobile by arms far stronger than mine, wrists and elbows twisted so hard the pain was unbearable, the left wrist broken in a colles intra-articular fracture, the thumb carpometacarpal joint dislocated, complex dislocation of the elbow, other injuries...my clothes ripped off, torn and tossed aside, breasts bitten, legs pinned wide, cocks slammed into ever orifice, men laughing, kibitzing, and grunting as they came, saying things to me and about me, urging themselves on.  

Okay, I know you want to know did I, at some level, enjoy it?  The men jizzed two or three times each.  How about me, did I orgasm? Yes, I did. More than once.  But I did not enjoy it.  I was shamed and humiliated, angered, that that happened.  I did not expect and certainly did not want that to happen.  But my body...I don't know.... It did. Being hurt, in pain, fearing you are going to be murdered, that the last minutes of your life are this horror...and you orgasm.... Maybe it's your body distracting you.

 If you are a man reading this, think if you were grabbed by a bunch of homo creeps, say gym bro types much stronger than you, and they overpowered you and violently sodomized you repeatedly, face-fucked you, and during the course of the ordeal -- and yes, it's an ordeal -- you got an erection and ejaculated, not because you were aroused but simply through the...I don't know, friction...some part of your brain reacting.... And the men raping you saw that and laughed at you -- hey, look, the little punk likes it!  How would you feel about that? Would you be turned on? Or would you be utterly humiliated and hate your body for betraying you?

Did what happened to me affect my life?  In those days, yes. And  I still have a somewhat weak left wrist and elbow.  They ache sometimes, as does my left hip joint. My right knee can be twitchy. But it's my personality to refuse to let the bastards get me down -- they may be able to do it to me physically, but they can't do it to my mind -- That's it? That's the worst you can do to me? Pfft! Can't touch me! I refuse to let you. That was the thrill of a lifetime for you, wasn't it? But it was nothing, less than nothing, for me. You think you have power over me? Not in this world or the next. I am the captain of my soul. Not you. Never you.

The next morning, Jeff asked if I was feeling better than last night and I said yes, and I was, and he fucked me again and I enjoyed him enjoying me.  While we were at, it my mini me came unnoticed into the bedroom and sat down. When we were through she said, "Mom, can I make breakfast this morning? I want to make French toast with cinnamon."

So a normal day was starting and I thought the whole episode was passed.  The sun was shining on a fresh morning and I had things to do.  But, of course, it wasn't over. Jason sent Jeff a copy of the video, with a text saying, "Hey, I found this video of your wife Wanda being gang raped.  I showed it to her yesterday and she says it's not her but I am sure it is. What say you?" 

Jason sent the video in the morning but it wasn't till after supper that Jeff mentioned it. I asked if he had watched it.  He said a few seconds of it.  

"I don't think it's you," he said.  "It sort of looks like you, but I don't think it is. It's not, is it?" He looked closely at me.

"No, it's not," I said.

"I didn't think so. I knew it couldn't be you."

___________________________

*Not his real name, of course. 

 

A thought or two...or three

The other day I bad-mouthed my stateside magnet high school and, thinking about it, one reason I was not fond of it was that it didn't have a football team.  Can you imagine a high school without a football team? I mean, really.

My DoDEA high school had a football team and I was a cheerleader and loved it. Oh, boy, did I.  I had a boyfriend on the team.  Classic Americana, huh?  

So what's the deal with football, anyway?  Well, I think, for one thing, among all the team sports it is the most blatantly an id roar.  Sex and violence.  Crush your enemy (the other team) and get the hot babes (the cheerleaders).  Right out there in the open with everybody watching, knowing deep down what it is, and cheering it on. And, in high school, throw in all the fresh hot hormones of teen time raging through the bodies of those perfect human specimens.  And it's in the fall, echoes of harvest festivals in the homecoming bacchanal with that big bonfire and the couples pairing off in the shadows to, um ... you know ... their ecstatic writhings only half-concealed by the flickering flames, all overseen and approved by the homecoming king and queen, harvest gods straight out of the Golden Bough.

This is my curse: I should be a self-centered bastard out for myself.

  El jefe keeps telling me that I should think about myself rather than always thinking about others first.  He's right, but I can't help it.  It's just the way I am.  It does stress me out, though.  That's why I need to get away and be by myself from time to time.  That helps a lot. I'm not as bad as I used to be. Not even close. Time and experience toughen one up. Especially when you are trying to be accommodating and helpful to someone and you discover they just consider you a pushover. Okay, buster, lesson learned. Over and over again. Now when dealing with outsiders I wear emotional ceramic-plate armor, my mental firearm at Condition One, cocked and locked.  Well, sometimes I do forget.
 

 Ain't she a pretty one?

 I finally got my familiarization training completed for my jolly new King Air 260.  It's got some swell aftermarket upgrades, that, among other things, really enhance its short-field capabilities, climb rate and cruising speed. I would like to take the family to Europe in it next summer -- assuming there still is a Europe then, or at least one that anyone would want to visit. If not there, Alaska, flying above the weather for a change.  Oh, so nice. Will be keeping my eye out for power lever migration.

 

A thought that I have had is that we human beings are the nerve endings of God, the way that He connects with the material world.  That's why He created us, created life in all its splendor and horror.  Pain and boredom, tension, anticipation, hope, disappointment, despair, rage, joy, happiness, sadness, exuberance, lust, envy, jealousy, hatred, love...all of it, all our emotions, the feelings that mean everything to us and that make us who we are...all these are how God senses the physical reality of the universe that He created.

So it's our duty, our obligation to God, to experience everything that we can, all our body is capable of, all the emotions this life lays before us, embrace our physicality and everything it means to be alive.  

Thinking about this, I believe that I have done my share to give God his money's worth, so to speak, when he created me. I was commenting the other day that all that I have done has in the end resulted in nothing.  But I don't think I can really say that, don't think I have a right to say that; saying that is forgetting what it was like at the time I was doing those things, what I thought, how I felt -- in the instant of that then eternal now.

I used my brain and my body to the maximum. I helped unlock secrets of the mind, I have held brutally wounded men in my arms, I have flown faster than the speed of sound a hundred feet off the ground, I have enjoyed the passions of the flesh, I have fallen desperately in love, I have faced bitter disappointment and despair, I have --  

I have had my moment.

Does all this sound like egocentric boasting?  It might be if I were addressing an audience, but I am only talking to myself, reflecting on my life as it once was and now is not.  Today, I have a different role, bestowed on me by God, if you like, or bestowed on myself by my own free will.  That role is to prepare the next generation of life to embrace this world, to be worthy nerve endings of God. I'm thinking, of course, of my children.  I am subordinate to their lives now. My sole purpose is to ready them for their moment in the sun.

“What is this thing called life? I believe
That the earth and the stars too, and the whole glittering universe, and rocks on the mountains have life,
Only we do not call it so--I speak of the life
That oxidizes fats and proteins and carbo-
Hydrates to live on, and from that chemical energy
Makes pleasure and pain, wonder, love, adoration, hatred and terror: how do these things grow
From a chemical reaction?
I think they were here already, I think the rocks
And the earth and the other planets, and the stars and the galaxies
have their various consciousness, all things are conscious;
But the nerves of an animal, the nerves and brain
Bring it to focus; the nerves and brain are like a burning-glass
To concentrate the heat and make it catch fire:
It seems to us martyrs hotter than the blazing hearth
From which it came. So we scream and laugh, clamorous animals
Born howling to die groaning: the old stones in the dooryard
Prefer silence; but those and all things have their own awareness,
As the cells of a man have; they feel and feed and influence each other, each unto all,
Like the cells of a man's body making one being,
They make one being, one consciousness, one life, one God.”
― Robinson Jeffers 

On a lighter note: 

Blondes, A religious poem

Blondes are tempting me day and night.
Blondes in dreams trouble my restless sight.

With silken heads they rampage through my thoughts,
Full-bosomed in their sweaters and their shorts.

Or lie sunbathing on an impossible beach
Naked, aloof, continually out of reach.

 

 On the mind's promenade, above the rocks,
Blondes go sauntering by in gauzy cotton frocks

Or flatter cameras with their negligent poses
While the sunlight all their buxom charms exposes.

While I am eating, smoking, working, talking
Through long romantic gardens they are walking.

Protect me, Lord, from these desires of flesh,
Keep me from evil, in Thy pastures fresh,

So that I may not fall, by lakes or ponds,
Into such sinful thoughts about hot blondes!

~ Gavin Ewart

I sure gave God what he paid for.  My mother, the hot disco babe, did the same and so did my grandmother back in her day when the swing bands were laying down the hot licks and the soldier boys had their pay burning a hole in their pockets. Hey, big spender! But we all settled down to be good wives and mothers, just as our husbands, after sowing their wild oats, became the best of husbands and fathers. And so the generations proceed.

 

 

 

 

 

Almost Heaven

The Cheat River in Preston County in the Allegheny Highlands.

I got an invitation to join a gathering of descendants of William Hebb.  I'll quote here from an earlier blog post I made about him:

 Among my ancestors was one William Hebb.  Born in England in 1755, he came to America in 1776 as an officer in the British Army to fight the revolutionary colonists.  But he had no love for the King and felt sympathy for the Americans' cause and deserted.  He then joined  the Third Continental Light Dragoons, aka Lady Washington's Dragoons, which formed the life guard of George Washington, serving under Lt. Col. George Baylor.  

He fought at Germantown,  Brandywine, and survived the so-called Baylor Massacre at Tappan, New Jersey, in 1778.  This latter was a night ambush in which 67 of the regiment's 116 men were killed or wounded and Baylor was captured. Hebb was seriously wounded in this action and he was discharged and returned to Virginia to recuperate.  While there, he married a cousin of George Washington, the widow Jemima Washington Jenkins.    

The regiment was reformed under Lt. Col. William Washington and sent to the Carolinas where, after recovering from his wounds, Hebb rejoined his regiment, which had amalgamated with the First Continental Light Dragoons due to the heavy casualties it had sustained, and fought at Cowpens, Santee River and Eutaw Springs. Hebb was wounded at Gilford Court House and returned to Virginia, but recovered in time to participate in the siege of Yorktown.   

After the Revolutionary War, he became an active abolitionist and was forced to leave Virginia and settle along a tributary of the  Ohio River.  For his service during the war, he received a pension of $8 a month.  He died in 1833 at the age of 78.  His son, Thomas Hebb, fought in the war of 1812, serving in the Virginia militia. Five of William's grandsons fought for the Union in the Civil War.  

Dunkard's Bottom is in the center of the map.

The tributary of the Ohio River he settled on was the Cheat River in what is now West Virginia, so the meeting will be held in that area, Monongahela County or thereabouts. While I'm in the area, I want to visit Dunkard's Bottom along the Cheat in Preston County.  The Germanic Dunkards were the first whites to settle west of the Allegheny Mountains. I have a lot of Dunkards in my ancestry and I've been engrossed in learning about them lately.  Among the things I've learned is that there was a settlement of about three dozen Dunkards, men, women and children, established in 1756 at this spot -- it's where Camp Dawson is today.  They bought their land from the local Lenni Lenape Indians, who were mostly farmers working the river bottom lands, with whom they traded horses, and converted to Christianity. 

One day, two of the men traveled to Fort Pleasant for supplies.  They were arrested there by the British, who thought the Dunkards were spies for and in the pay of the French.  They were forced to lead a contingent of British soldiers back to their settlement, where the Brits planned to hang the leaders and arrest the others.  

Dunkards were Schwarzenau  Brethren.

But when they arrived at the settlement they found it burned to the ground and no soul alive. What had happened was that the French thought the Dunkards were spies and in the pay of the British and had sent a force of Ottawa Indians to seize the leaders and bring them back to Montreal.  What the French intended the Indians to do with the rest of the Dunkards is not clear, but what the Indians did was kill them all, men, women and children, steal all their horses, then burn the settlement to the ground.  

While I'm in the area, I'd also like to visit the site of the Battle of Rowleburg. That was what has been described as a "pivotal engagement" in April, 1863, in which a small force of Union troops defended the strategic B&O Railroad bridges crossing the Cheat River, called Lincoln's lifeline, from a larger Confederate force. After fierce fighting, the Confederates, led by General W.E. Jones, were repelled. General Robert E. Lee, in sending General Jones to destroy the bridges, told him their destruction would be worth an army to him.

I would like to walk the ground, see what the land looks like, think about all the history, much of it quite terrible, that our people went through to create this country.  That these United States would come to exist was never a sure thing, never guaranteed.  

Plus I'd like to eat some buckwheat cakes and country sausage for breakfast.  Wouldn't you?

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Les jours s'en vont, je demeure

A lot has happened to me in the last 17 years, but I'm still me and in the deep core of me I still think and feel and believe just as I did then.  I hope that I always will.

 

From those bygone days:

  

 

My philosophy of life

 "All we know is that life is sweet and that it does not last long. Why should people be envious of each other? Why do we hate each other? Why can't we live in peace in a world that is so beautiful and so wide?" 
~ William March, Company K

 That's it.  Sgt. March said it as well as I, or anyone, could say it.  I ask the questions he did. He got no answers.  Neither have I.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fate? Luck?

 

I was thinking about bad marriages, reminding myself how lucky I am to be in a good one and not to screw it up, when I remembered a woman I used to know when I was stationed on Guam some years ago.  She was an Electrician's Mate PO-1 on the Frank Cable (AS-40) that I met at the old submariner's bar the Horse & Cow in Tamuning, which has been closed now for almost exactly a year after being in business for more than 70 years. The much tamer one in Bremerton is gone, too, I think (see the short video below for a taste of it, then imagine a crazier version; that would be Guam's).  Man, nothing lasts, does it? She and I had some fun times there.  That's where I found out I could not hold my liquor.  Lordy, lordy. Heh. (No, I didn't dance naked on the bar, I hurled. Chunks. Totes awk.)

Where was I?  Oh, yeah. 

Um, well, this woman was married to a man who became very abusive to her, both verbally and physically. For a long time, she thought that she was the one at fault and tried not to do things to set him off and to make home life as pleasant as possible. But nothing she did was good enough for him. 

What ended it all was one evening when she had spent some considerable time making a special meal for his birthday, potato gnocchi, which she remembered his mother telling her was his favorite meal. He got home, surly and uncommunicative as usual, and sat down at the dinner table. When she served him, he took one look at what was on his plate and said, "Is this to eat or has it already been eaten?" 

That broke her. She got her coat and purse and walked out of the house, leaving everything else behind, and never went back.  She walked all night, not knowing where she was going, just away, just away. The next morning she found herself at a strip mall and bought something to eat.  While eating, she saw a recruiting office a few doors down, went in and signed up. She'd never thought about joining the service before that minute. Why the navy?  That was the only recruiter not already talking to somebody.

The Frank Cable in the distance. 

When I met her, she had been in the navy nine years, which, considering her rank, says she was pretty darn good at her job.  So all's well that ends well, right?  She had found a home in the navy and the story had a happy ending.

Well...no.  See, one day riding her motorbike home from work, a guy who had just gotten out of jail after serving a sentence for drunk driving celebrated by getting drunk at a bar, climbed into his car and careened into traffic just as she passed by. He slammed into her and dragged her body under his car for almost a mile before another driver who had seen the accident was able to force him to stop.  She was taken to Naval Hospital Guam where I saw her brought in. 

She was pronounced dead without any need to examine what remained of her body. 

 What's the moral of this story? That life sucks?  Expect the worst to  happen to you sooner or later?  That if your life is okay now, if you are in a decent marriage, if you have a good job, fall to your knees thanking God and praying that your good luck continues because it very well may not...probably will not? 

I don't know. 

 

 

______________________________________________________________________________________________

Now I've gone and depressed myself.  Wanda....  

Well, what I do when I'm feeling down is play a happy tune and dance.  Fixes me up every time.  Try it!

 

 

 

Future talk

"Nothing has concerned man longer or more consistently than the future. Before we could write, perhaps even before we could talk, we scanned the skies for signs of sun or rain, made sacrifices to ensure the success of undertakings. Always the inner eye gazed with fear and trepidation on what John Milton called "the never-ending flight of future days." Always we have asked of no one in particular -- or anyone -- what will happen? 
"In Roman times, it was the oracle who read the future in the entrails of sacrificial animals. Nowadays, we're more refined and we call the oracle the clairvoyant, but the idea is the same, and so is the purpose: to know what is coming tomorrow, the better to take the fear out of our eyes.
"What horrors lie ahead for us we do not know. We do not wish to know. We would rather stumble along blindly than know we are heading for disaster. And yet what joys are ahead, what happiness? Do we wish to know? Perhaps it is just as well that we do not know, that we wait, silent and patient for whatever the future brings."   

 The Clairvoyant, first broadcast over CBS Radio Mystery Theater on October 1, 1976. Written by Elspeth Eric.

Tammy Grimes

Tammy Grimes dated
singer Sammy Davis,Jr.
at a time when such
things were ... or 
were they?

The protagonist of this radio play is portrayed by Tammy Grimes. A veteran of stage, screen and television as they say, she was the daughter of a spiritualist and a night club owner who made it big on Broadway, winning two Tony Awards for appearing in such plays as The Unsinkable Molly Brown, California Suite and 42nd Street among many others. 

In movies, she starred in Play It as It Lays, Can't Stop the Music and Arthur? Arthur!, again among many others. 

On television she acted in such series as Route 66, The Love Boat, Mr. Broadway and her own series, The Tammy Grimes Show.

Grimes also had a career as a cabaret and cafe review singer at such venues as The Downstairs Room and The Rendezvous Room in Manhattan. She performed a long-running one-woman show, Downstairs at the Upstairs. Three albums of her songs were released by Columbia Records: Julius Monk Presents Tammy Grimes, Tammy Grimes and The Unmistakable Tammy Grimes. She was the narrator for the BBC Radio production of Lord of the Rings.

Although she married two white actors, Jeremy Slater and Christopher Plummer, she dated several black entertainers, including impresario Julius Monk and singer/actor and member of the Rat Pack Sammy Davis, Jr., gaining some notoriety for doing so. 

As you can see in the accompanying news article, from the March 12, 1965, Chicago Tribune, Grimes was involved in what the police determined to be a fake "hate crime" long before the term was invented. It seems there is a long history of some people really, really wishing that white people were strongly racist, far more than reality would indicate that they are.

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Confederates

by Neal Bowers

My father was only two in 1915
when he sat on Walter Denton's lap
and heard the old man dragging in
his heavy chain of breath, each link
stuttering down the back of his throat.
"Floyd," he whispered, saying the baby's name
like a question, "look yere,"
and he placed my father's hand
on a scar the color of moonlight,
a shrapnel wound from the Yankee boats
that shelled Ft. Donelson.
Then both of them began to cry,
there in the ladderback chair
someone had dragged into elm shade,
away from the stifling house,
until a woman came and saved them
from each other, leaving one
to go into the past and disappear,
the other to follow by way of the future. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Maybe my home town...?

 So, outside of Japan, where did I spend a lot of my childhood?  Where did I enjoy my life the most? Guam!  I'm still a Guambat at heart and was very happy to be stationed there as an adult.  Why was that?

Here ya go:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
I Meet My Grandmother in Italy

by Katrina Vandenberg

I find her where I least expect her,
Santa Marguerita, with yellow roses
in her hair. She laughs, deep

in the arms of that American GI,
her hair rolled like Hepburn's, her lipstick
red as tiled Verona roofs. Then I remember

the Saturday before she died, the way
we stopped at a greenhouse and she said,
I'll take for my granddaughter all

the plants you have with yellow flowers,
ignoring my protests until the Pontiac
was heaped with roses and verbena,

with lemon gladiola perfume I could gather
in my hands. She said, Take them
all; you need to have a happy life. 

 

 

 

 

 

Uh oh

I'm in trouble now!

Reading through blog and substack posts, twitter feeds and all that, I realize that not only do I have nothing in common with many of these people, I don't understand them or their lives at all.  They seem very class and status conscious, which to me is fundamentally anti-American.  I guess I am naive. 

As I've written, I have lived most of my life overseas as a service brat or in the service myself, so there's that:  America is, in many ways, a foreign country to me, as are Americans. Sure, lifer navy pukes are Americans, after a fashion, but a very distinct subset with little in common with your average slacker landlubber.

Then there is the fact that I don't drink. I don't like the taste of alcohol and if I take more than a few sips at one time, I get sick.  Otherwise it just makes me sluggish.  So I've never been drunk. And I am not impressed by Chateau Snooty Pants wine or 50-year-old single-malt rot gut. Take the alcohol out of that stuff and who would drink it? So admit it, guys, all you want to do is get hammered and all that la-de-dah talk is just cover.  

So, not being a drinker, I've never gone into a bar voluntarily; I mean, like, walking down the street go, hey, there's a bar, I think I'll stop by for a shot of rye.  I've gone in with other people to be sociable, of course.  I've never gone into a bar in order to meet men. Like Mickey Spillane, of all people, said, the only kind of men you meet in bars are men who like to hang out in bars.  Pass. But if you want to spend time with friends in the evening, bars can be a fun way to do it, even if you only have one drink that you nurse the whole evening. Not being a prude, I have enjoyed some memorable times, more memorable because I can remember them, lol.

I've never taken drugs, never snorted cocaine, never smoked a joint or eaten a marijuana brownie. So I've never been "high," and don't understand the attraction. The results of addiction are so obvious and appalling that it baffles me why anyone would ever touch the stuff.  Anyway, my research specialty was the brain, so I'm well aware of the damage, down to the neuron level, that drugs do to the brain.  If you've taken drugs, you're brain damaged and not the way you were before you indulged.  That is fact.  Cold, hard fact.

Oh, I don't smoke cigarettes, either.  I had an aunt who smoked a lot, but she died before I was born. Neither of my parents smoked. Well, at least not since I've known them, so to speak.  I learned not long ago that my dad smoked when he was a young man.  I did smoke now and then in Afghanistan because, well, you can imagine.  Putting out a cigarette once saved my life there.  Yeah.  Chance rules all.  I wonder if my mother smoked when she was in Viet Nam. I've never thought to ask her. Considering cigarettes were included in C rations in those days, she very well might have. That was the era of coffee and a cigarette.

I'm not a big fan of coffee, although the navy lives on it. Coffee's okay, but I'd rather have tea or hot chocolate. These days, I use plain cocoa powder to whip up my hot chocolate, adding a dash of vanilla and homemade simple syrup along with the milk. When I make it for my kids I add little marshmallows.  Hubby wants coffee, strong and black.

I'm not really interested in politics and don't follow it.  When I read about it, I very often don't recognize the names of the politicians and don't know if they are Republicans or Democrats or what they are promoting or opposing. I've tried to be more informed about it in recent years, things being as dire as they are, but everybody involved seems to be so hostile and nasty, even wanting to kill those they are against.  Psychopaths.  I can't influence anything that's happening, so I just avoid it.

As far as movies and TV go, I generally don't know the names of the stars let alone the directors and all that.  Most of the movies and TV series people talk about I've never seen, often never even heard of. I haven't watched any television at all since 2016.  I never did watch much. Why did I stop watching TV in 2016? I was looking for a nice Christmas show and came across The Simpsons and Krusty the Klown jumping out of a manger laughing, and I thought, all right, that's enough of that.  No more.  Forever.  And so it has been.

It's pretty much the same with popular music.  Oh, sure I "consume" it; quite a bit actually, everything from Annette Hanshaw to Hey Monday, and like it. And I'm always discovering more that I like.  But I tend to like music nobody else cares for anymore.  So I will groove on performers like jazz singer Nancy Wilson or Jay and the Americans, not necessarily the current idol. There's no particular reason for that. There's just such an enormous warehouse of popular music that I get lost wandering down forgotten corridors and discovering tunes I like. So I'll say to a friend that I love some song by, say, the Spaniels and they will say "Who?" and I respond, "No, not the Who, the Spaniels," and from there it goes into an Abbott and Costello routine.

On none of these subjects could I hold a conversation, nor would I want to.  I don't care enough about them to be interested.  That doesn't mean that I think I am superior to those who do care and can talk or write about them with knowledge and enthusiasm. Not at all. I often read with interest such writing or listen to someone talking about these things and enjoy doing so.  It just means that I'm not dining at their restaurant, if you fetch my meaning.

It also means that I don't hold the popular opinions of the day.  Generally, they baffle, bemuse or appall me.  I stick with what I was taught, and growing up in an armed forces family, and attending Department of Defense schools, you can pretty well figure out what those are. Or maybe you can't, being ruled by prejudice and false stereotypes. 

I could tell stories (and have!) about how I was put down by students and teachers at the highly gifted magnet school I finished up high school in because of my accent and military background. Oh, and also because of my race and religion and the fact my family comes from flyover country.  Wypipo, hicks and Christians are so déclassé, don't you know. And military?  Stupid losers.  Just watch Two-and-a-half Men on TV.  TV tells it like it is. 

And being a blonde on top of it just meant I was really stupid.  And sexually promiscuous. So all the call-center Indians, Iranians (or whatever they were) and squinties hit on me. Cue the dry heaves. And if I hear one more dumb blonde joke.... (Somebody told me that actually they are shiksa jokes, Catskill humor, along with dumb Pollack jokes. I had no idea what a shiksa was or what Catskill humor was.  It had to be explained to me.)

"You're racist because you won't go out with me!"  

"Your dad kills People of Color!"

To the first I initially said, "No, I'm not.  I grew up surrounded by all varieties of people.  The American armed forces are the most integrated society in the world.  You live and serve with every race, creed and color." But even my teachers weren't having that.  Military are all stupid, racist losers.  Period.

Okay, fine, I'm a stupid racist. Whatever.

I didn't bother saying that my father retired as a flag officer and I grew up on officers row, often within walking distance of a golf course.

Only losers with no other choices join the military. Yeah, sure.

To the second, at first I would say things like, "Hey, look at South Korea compared to North Korea.  It only exists because the American military fought hard to prevent it being conquered by communists. South Viet Nam would be similar if we had won there.  Look at Japan, how prosperous after we defeated the fascist death cult that had taken over the country, look at...," but they weren't having any of it. 

So, finally, I would say, "Oh, yeah.  Between them, my father, grandfather and uncles have killed thousands of gooks, chinks, slopes and motos.  Torpedoed their ships, sank their submarines, shot their planes out of the skies, rocketed their tanks, blew up their artillery, napalmed and machineguned their troops, burned their cities to the ground. Every time the the zips tried to fight them, they got shredded.  I spring from a race of warriors and conquerors. Unlike you and your loser cultures and countries. You're only here in my country -- my country! -- because the ones your people created are no damn good, and you know it."

Both my mother and father served in the armed forces.

That didn't go over very well, duh, but people left me alone after that. You know why?  Because it was true. I was heir to the mightiest civilization the world has ever seen and they were not. I was aware of that and proud of it because they made me aware of it and proud of it. Their attempts to belittle me had backfired.  

I wasn't a racist before I went to that school, had never even thought about such things.  I'd been taught by the DoDEA schools that the only thing that mattered was that we were all Americans, whatever the color of our skin or our religious beliefs or our politics, male or female.  E pluribus unum and all that. But I was a racist when I graduated. Thank you, civilian educators. Maggots. 

Yokosuka Navy base 3rd grade class. Photo by Tyler Hlavac.

It took me some time to shake that and get back to the original attitudes inculcated in me by Uncle Sam's finest. 

Why did I go to that school if it was so awful for me?  My parents thought it would be good for me to get some exposure to a real American high school, have a chance to participate in extracurricular activities, summer internships and all that.  They also thought that the gifted programs the school offered would be better for me than regular high school.  

That last was true. I was able to take college-level courses so that I was able to get my bachelor's in10 quarters and move right into my Ph.D program.  That, coupled with the fact that I skipped 7th grade, meant that I got my doctorate as a pretty young whippersnapper. And if you bust up your brain in a car crash and the neurosurgeon can fix you up well enough that you know your own name, you can thank the research I was doing before I was old enough to legally drink --  had I wanted to drink. Um ... don't thank me, just send money. 

Were all my teachers at that high school bad or mean to me? No.  Two stand out in memory as especially good and professionally friendly.  Another was an ex-Marine who took a shine to me (in a platonic way!) and gave me good advice.  But that's about it. 

Looking back, I wish I had just finished out high school at my DoDEA campus with all my friends, taken four years or even five to get my BS, then three or four more for my Ph.D.  Taken it slow and enjoyed things more.  What was my hurry?  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
The Continuous Life

by Mark Strand

What of the neighborhood homes awash
In a silver light, of children hunched in the bushes,
Watching the grown-ups for signs of surrender,
Signs that the irregular pleasures of moving
From day to day, of being adrift on the swell of duty,
Have run their course? O parents, confess
To your little ones the night is a long way off
And your taste for the mundane grows; tell them
Your worship of household chores has barely begun;
Describe the beauty of shovels and rakes, brooms and mops;
Say there will always be cooking and cleaning to do,
That one thing leads to another, which leads to another;
Explain that you live between two great darks, the first
With an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest
Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur
Of hours and days, months and years, and believe
It has meaning, despite the occasional fear
You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing
To prove you existed. Tell the children to come inside,
That your search goes on for something you lost—a name,
A family album that fell from its own small matter
Into another, a piece of the dark that might have been yours,
You don't really know. Say that each of you tries
To keep busy, learning to lean down close and hear
The careless breathing of earth and feel its available
Languor come over you, wave after wave, sending
Small tremors of love through your brief,
Undeniable selves, into your days, and beyond. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

No More Than A Memory

Everyone needs a ghost.  No matter how busy our lives, how interesting our pleasures, there are depths of loneliness  that neither work nor pleasure can plumb, a little core of ourselves that needs someone to talk to or simply be with. Who can fill this need better than an understanding ghost?
Each of us not only needs a ghost but has a ghost.  We cannot see it or touch it or hear it, but it is there and keeps us company when there is no one else. A ghost, perhaps, is no more than a memory of someone once well loved. 

The Intruders, first broadcast by CBS Radio Mystery Theater, March 30, 1976. Written by Elspeth Eric.

The narrator is Lois Nettleton. She studied acting at the Goodman School of Drama at the Art Institute of Chicago before beginning a long career in television, appearing in episodes of The Twilight Zone, Naked City, Route 66, Mr. Novak, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, The Eleventh Hour, Hawaii Five-O, Dr. Kildare, Twelve O'Clock High, The Fugitive, The F.B.I., Cannon, Bonanza, Gunsmoke, The Virginian, Kung Fu, Daniel Boone and The Mary Tyler Moore Show and others. 
Nettleton was the first caller to raconteur Jean Shepherd's late-night radio program on WOR, later becoming his wife. She was a regular guest, known to the audience as "the listener."

A secondary role in this play is portrayed by Fred Gwynne, who lived a varied life, at one point being a radio operator on a Navy sub chaser, was a cartoonist for The Harvard Lampoon,  one of his cartoons causing the Middlesex County district attorney to try to ban the publication on grounds of obscenity. He worked as a copywriter for J. Walter Thompson, got into acting with some minor Broadway roles, then into the movies with a brief appearance in On the Waterfront, then got into television with roles on The Phil Silvers Show, which led to a starring role in Car 54 Where Are You? and then to his most remembered role as Herman Munster in The Munsters.