Yeah!

 

What are you doing New Year's Eve?

 

Making plans to greet the new decade at a secret rendezvous.  Preparing all sorts of party snacks in advance, some my own in-demand specialties.

Selecting my own mix of sentimental favorite tunes to play as well as limbering up my fingers in case there is any call for a live performance at the keyboard.

Preparing drinks and mixers, too, although I shall imbibe discreetly lest I end up dancing on a table then projectile-barfing chunks.  Downer, man!

Wanna come?  Sure, you're invited!  The only thing you need to bring is good humor.  Masks are optional, as is clothing.  Haha!  Kidding about one of those.  Guess which.

On a serious note, 2020 will not be a year I will be sad to see go. Of course, there is all the at-large public crap that I wish hadn't happened but which I couldn't do anything about, but far beyond those things were the events of my own life and the lives of those dear to me -- the things that are really important.

A full moon tonight rising over an icy horizon into clear, cold skies.  How many full moons does a person see in a lifetime? Eight-hundred and forty or so for the biblical three score and ten.  That's not a lot.  And you notice a lot fewer than that.  So take a look at this one, the last of the year, the last of the decade.  Really look at it.  It's one less that you will ever see no matter how long you may live.

Maybe all our passion about politics and society, culture and morality is merely to distract us from the passage of time, our individual time, and how each year we have less of it until it finally runs out.  The world careens on.  But we do not.

Remember that this New Year's Eve and pay especial attention to those you love and care about.  Their time is running out, too -- perhaps faster than you know.  Be of good cheer and make the evening happily memorable.

Christmas

 

And the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness comprehendeth it not.

    John 1:5

Christmas Party!

Well, back in the good old days such things existed.  Ah, speak, memory!

Home-made gingerbread cookies, candy canes, fruitcake and pumpkin pies, candied apples and popcorn, egg nog and fruit punch, chocolate and peanut butter fudge. 

Sitting on the floor in front of the fireplace, feeding the fire a log now and again, roasting chestnuts in a wire holder, marshmallows on a stick.

Christmas tree lights flashing on and off, casting shadows and reflecting a jumble of colors, familiar carols that everyone knows the lyrics to.  Piles of presents all gold and green and red, covered in Santas and reindeer, ribbons and bows.

Looking out the window to see snow swirling around the porch lights, firs swaying in the wind that croons around the eaves, little curls of cold air puffing in around the windows. 

And don't forget the mistletoe!

 

 .

Merry Christmas!

Mother and Son

Just each other for Christmas

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And when life's sweet fable ends,
Soul and body part like friends;
No quarrels, murmurs, no delay;
A kiss, a sigh, and so away.

Good-bye, dear F, good-bye.  I loved you so much. I thought you could make it until Christmas.... 

You never made me cry until now, and now I cry every day.

This is still our song and always will be.  Always.  No matter what.

My family and Pearl Harbor

The only member of my family who I know was at Pearl Harbor  when the Japanese attacked was a great uncle who was serving with the coast artillery at Fort Armstrong.  I have only the vaguest memories of him, one of him showing me a scar on his calf  that he said was from  a bullet fired by a strafing Japanese plane. We have a photo in which he is standing with other soldiers beside what look like water-cooled .50 cal. machine guns mounted in the backs of trucks on carriages that allowed them to swing up to a very high angle, so I suppose they were anti-aircraft guns.  I don't know what he did in the war.

 Another great uncle,  whom I never met because he didn't survive the war, was a flyer in the Army Air Corps.  He had been stationed in the Philippine Islands before the Japanese attack.  He flew P-26s and P-35s.  

Yet another great uncle also did not survive the war.  He was a naval aviator who won the Navy Cross posthumously during the invasion of Saipan.  He flew an FM-2.  While reading his squadron's history, I was astonished to learn that out of a total complement of 96 air crew, 31 were killed in action before the carrier was sunk by kamikazes during the Battle off Samar.

One of my grandfathers was a pilot with a pursuit group training in the states when the Japanese attacked.  His unit sailed for Australia at the beginning of 1942 and he served there and in New Guinea flying P-39s and P-40s before returning to the States. In 1944 he was sent to Europe and flew P-51s till the war ended.  He was a fun guy and always telling hilarious stories about high jinx on leave or some snafu or other when the subject of the war came up.  I just remember he was always making my grandmother either blush or laugh and she cried and cried when he died.
During the war she worked in defense plants.  I remember she said she assembled radios.  At  the time I thought she meant regular civilian radios but I suppose she must have meant some sort of military radio equipment. 

My other grandfather was a naval aviator and at sea on an aircraft carrier when the war started.  He participated in three of the five big carrier-to-carrier battles of the Pacific war, flying F4Fs and F6Fs.  He never said much about the war or flying F9Fs in Korea War or his later service.  He did write about some of his experiences and seems at one time to have planned to write a memoir of the war.  But he never did.  He was kind of a stern guy and I was a little bit afraid of him,  but his wife--my grandmother--said that the war had changed him and made him withdrawn and cautious around people.  He was good to us,  though, and always had dogs.  He taught me how to train dogs, how to track wild animals and understand  nature. He once told me when I said I was scared to sleep in a tent in the high mountains that the farther you are from people the safer you are, and you are never more safe than alone in the wilderness, as long as you are not careless and know what you are doing.  So he taught me to know what I was doing and not be careless.

My other grandmother was a Navy nurse during the war, and served on board a hospital ship in the Pacific. The only thing I can recall about that that she mentioned was that they used to sail alone, unescorted, with searchlights illuminating the red cross painted on the side of their ship until a kamikaze dove into one of their sister hospital ships and almost sank it.  After that their ship sailed with a destroyer escort and lights off.
For each of them, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor changed their lives forever.  It was the anchor point of all that happened after and how they remembered what happened before.  I think the only comparable episode as far as changing the lives of so many ordinary Americans in our history might be Fort Sumter and the beginning of the Civil War.  I guess 9/11 has in very many ways changed us, but that seems to have been more a gradual increase in travel inconveniences and some random terrorist attacks.
Most people haven't served or had family members serve in the armed forces, and even if they have, let's face it, not all that many have been killed or wounded compared to World War II.  Those of us who have served, and have had the war touch us personally, are a tiny minority of Americans.   My direct experiences happened years after 9/11 and hardly seem related to it at all, while my grandmother dodging kamikazes off Okinawa in 1945 was very much aware of the connection to Pearl Harbor.

December, December

Come, come thou bleak December wind,
And blow the dry leaves from the tree!
~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Above the marge of night a star still shines,
And on the frosty hills the sombre pines
Harbor an eerie wind that crooneth low
Over the glimmering wastes of virgin snow. 
~ Lucy Maud Montgomery

On this bleary white afternoon,
are there fires lit up in heaven
against such fading of quickness
and light, such windy discoursing?
~ Edwin Honig 

 It is hard to hear the north wind again,
And to watch the treetops, as they sway.
~ Wallace Stevens

"The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year,
Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sere."
~ William Cullen Bryant

How cold it is! Even the lights are cold;
They have put shawls of fog around them, see!
What if the air should grow so dimly white
That we would lose our way along the paths
Made new by walls of moving mist receding
The more we follow.
~ Sara Teasdale 

White sky, over the hemlocks bowed with snow,
Saw you not at the beginning of evening the antlered buck and his doe
Standing in the apple-orchard? I saw them. I saw them suddenly go,
Tails up, with long leaps lovely and slow,
Over the stone-wall into the wood of hemlocks bowed with snow.
Now he lies here, his wild blood scalding the snow.
How strange a thing is death, bringing to his knees, bringing to his antlers
The buck in the snow.
How strange a thing--a mile away by now, it may be,
Under the heavy hemlocks that as the moments pass
Shift their loads a little, letting fall a feather of snow--
Life, looking out attentive from the eyes of the doe.
~ Edna St. Vincent Millay 

 

Ancient times

 

Colt .44

 

I found this old cap-and-ball revolver in the attic of our ranch house (built in 1881).  It was in a wooden box made with dovetail joints, inside a leather pouch, wrapped in an oiled cloth.  When I lifted it out of its resting place, I found it was a lot heavier than I had expected and I can't imagine it was worn on the hip or hanging along the upper thigh.  It must be what they called a horse pistol, normally holstered on the saddle.  Or else men in olden days were used to handling heavy (literally) weapons.  No wonder they called them shooting irons.

Fort Benton in the 1870s.

The lead balls it fired were inside the box in a paper packet that came apart in flakes when I tried to open it.  There was also a paper packet of what I think were minié balls but I didn't do more than peek at the contents, so I'm not really sure.

Also in the box was an 1876 newspaper clipping from the Benton Record, Fort Benton, Montana.  It was so fragile that after one tentative attempt to lift it out I left it where it was, resting atop a round tin box of metal caps that fitted over the nipples at the rear of the revolver's cylinder.  There was also a small brass powder horn that I did not touch and what appeared to be cotton wadding to pack between the ball and the powder when loading.

The newspaper article told the story, in a curiously jocular manner, of a "shooting scrape" that had occurred at a stable in town when a "stranger," a man bearing my mother's surname, I assume an ancestor, called three men horse thieves.  "Gunplay ensued and anon Boot Hill accommodated three more denizens."

Reading the story, I learned that the stranger had some weeks earlier been carrying wages "in specie" to pay off cow hands when he was bushwhacked, shot, his horse  and the saddlebags full of gold coins it carried stolen. Left for dead,  he nonetheless survived and tracked the bandits to Fort Benton, where he had it out with them in what the newspaper article called "a square fight,"

River boat at Fort Benton, 1870s.

killing all three armed men, recovering his horse and equipage, as well as most of the gold -- what they had not spent on gambling, whiskey and women.  The men, according to the news report, had booked passage on a river boat bound for St. Louis and were likely intending to travel to New Orleans.  So the stranger caught up to them just in time.  Another day and they would have been gone for good.

$20 gold coin

I don't know if the revolver in the box, a Colt .44, is the pistol used in this gun fight, but I assume it is, considering that the news clipping was included in the box with it.

Well, so I discovered another bit of family history I didn't know anything about.  I'll be asking older relatives if they can shed any light on the owner of this gun and how he fits into our family tree.

Blech!

I came across this passage while reading an essay about the author and poet Charles Bukowski:

“When Bukowski was 13, one of [his friends] invited him to his father’s wine cellar and served him his first drink of alcohol: ‘It was magic,’ Bukowski would later write. ‘Why hadn’t someone told me?’”

It made me recall the first time I tried drinking alcohol.  When I was eleven, I found a bottle of rye whiskey, I think it was Old Overholt, under the kitchen sink at my grandparents' house. Why it was there, I don't know; maybe it was used as a cleaner: neither of them were drinkers and otherwise there was no booze in the house and they never drank cocktails or served wine with supper.

Anyway, there it was and somehow I knew what it was -- whiskey!  That notorious stuff that Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe always had a bottle of in the bottom drawer of their office desks, the stuff that cowboys were always ordering from bar keeps and singing about -- "Rye whiskey, rye whiskey, I cry!  If you don't give me rye whiskey I surely will die!"

So, of course, I had to have a drink of it.  Looking around to make sure nobody saw me...I knew I shouldn't be doing what I was doing...I took the bottle out from under the sink, unscrewed the cap, lifted it to my lips and took a long drink.

And immediately my throat burst into flames, I began coughing violently and I rushed to the sink and drank glass after glass of water.  Oh, the stuff was horrible, horrible!  Not only did I never want to drink another drop of whiskey, I never wanted to see a bottle of it, and I absolutely could not understand why anybody would want to drink it, let alone pay to drink it or keep a bottle around to sip from. 

Later in life, to be sociable, I tried drinking again, notably in college, and found out that if I sipped very slowly, I could drink alcohol, but a few sips made me giddy and lowered my inhibitions and made me reckless.  So I learned to avoid it in any situation where such changes in my personality would be regrettable.  I'll take a drink at home among friends and family but not outside and never among strangers.

Odds and Ends

"How long, how long must I regret?
I never found my people yet;
I go about, but cannot find
The blood-relations of the mind."
~ Ruth Pitter

Overheard: "I don't start enough memos with, 'Look, you asshole....'"

Q: What does Dracula do with used tampons?
A: Uses them as tea bags.

Overheard:  "This place looks like someone lit a stick of dynamite underneath 50 pounds of tinker toys!"

"I am not allowed to have PTSD flashbacks to wars I was not in."
~PFC Skippy Schwartz

“The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch someone else do it wrong without comment.”
― T.H. White

Overheard: "If you sit him in the corner and repeatedly say, 'But we’ve always done it this way,' he will curl up in a ball and sob uncontrollably."

*sees a baby*
Pfft, I used to be a baby. WHEN I WAS TWO.
*sees you're mad*
No it's okay, listen, some of my best friends are former babies.

Overheard: "Much work remains to be done before we can announce our total failure to make any progress."  

Make-up tip: You're not in the circus.

Overheard:  "The genius of it is that it was designed for any idiot to use. I learned it in a few hours."

Meeting highlight:  "I'll consider your proposal very carefully before I throw it out."

If the story of your life had a first line, what would it be?

Three phrase you had better never say if you want to move up to your next pay grade:
"I can't do that."
"I don't know."
"Sorry I'm late."

It's hard to find a black cat in a dark room--especially if it's not there.

Overheard:  "Nothing is too good for you guys, and that's exactly what you're gonna get."

"When you have a concentration of power in a few hands, inevitably men with the mentality of gangsters get control.”
~ Lord Acton

Overheard:  "It's like being water-boarded with tequila by a rodeo clown."

"A year from now you will wish you had started today."
~ Karen Lamb

Overheard: "He knows how to stick the knife in without getting blood on his hands."

"Aloofness is the posture of self-defense.”
― Quentin Crisp

Overheard:  "Not sure if I’m out of touch or I just have good taste."

“Someone with northern European ancestry is more closely related to native Americans than to southern Europeans.”
~ Pontus Skoglund

"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."
 ~ Ernest Hemingway

Overheard:  "It's not a lot of work unless you have to do it."

Why do female black widow spiders kill their mates after sex?
 To stop the snoring before it starts.

Overheard:  "You know what I'm going to say anyway, so I'm not going to waste your time and actually say it."

Alaska--A place you can love with all your heart even while it's trying its best to kill you.

Overheard:  "Yes, things happen for a reason.  The reason is that you are stupid and make bad choices."

"If Helen of Troy had been seen eating peppermints out of a paper bag, it's likely her admirers would have been an entirely different class."
~ Djuna Barnes

There are a lot of fish in the sea, but you're the only one I'd like to catch and mount back home.

"The books we think we ought to read are poky, dull, and dry;
The books that we would like to read we are ashamed to buy;
The books that people talk about we never can recall;
And the books that people give us, oh, they're the worst of all."
~ Carolyn Wells

Acquaintances warn you when you have a bad idea.  Friends get a camera.

Overheard:  "You shouldn't have joined the Navy if you didn't want to go to sea because that's kind of what the Navy does."

War and despair

 

 

The line is from Millay's poem "Make Bright the Arrows" which is part of a poem cycle in which she dueled with Robinson Jeffers.  Millay was an Anglophile and interventionist in the years leading up to US entry into World War II.  Jeffers was a staunch non-interventionist and pacifist.  His cycle of poems is collected in "The Double Axe."  I've post a couple of poems from this previously.  

Both Millay and Jeffers were very popular poets and both had been featured on the cover of Time magazine.  Their opinions were taken very seriously by the public.  Millay's readings were so popular crowds gathered outside the halls where she recited and loudspeakers had to be set up so they could hear her.  Jeffers was too much of a Gloomy Gus to attract those sorts of crowds, and also considerably more intellectual. He also wrote about taboo subjects such as incest and was a west coast writer while Millay was a New Englander, so she got the nod among the elites.  Her views were also, of course, in line with those of the Roosevelt administration, which began conducting a covert naval war against Germany in the North Atlantic long before Pearl Harbor.

Millay went on to enjoy a still-popular presence on the American literary scene after the war, while Jeffers was unpersoned, his career over.  It was many years before he was partially rehabilitated, but by then tastes had changed and poetry was no longer popular.

Here's an interview with Hitler published in Life magazine in which he discusses FDR's hostile actions against his country, noting that they violate international law.  The unhighlighted text is a continuation of the interview in which Hitler addresses assertions made in Roosevelt's 1941 State of the Union address that Germany was planning to invade the western hemisphere.  Hitler remarkably admits that the invasion of Crete was a very difficult endeavor for German armed forces and hints that an invasion of Britain was beyond possible, so the likelihood of Germany carrying out a trans-Atlantic invasion was risible.  The only country ever to do that, as it turned out, would be the United States in Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa in November, 1942, in which the invasion fleet sailed directly from the east coast of the US.

Here is Jeffers' poem "[President] Wilson in Hell."  Written in 1942, it was excised from The Double Axe by Random House's Bennett Cerf.

Roosevelt died and met Wilson; who said “I
         blundered into it
Through honest error, and conscience cut me so deep that
           I died
In the vain effort to prevent future wars. But you
Blew on the coal-bed, and when it kindled you deliberately
Sabotaged every fire-wall that even the men who denied
My hope had built. You have too much murder on your
      hands. I will not
Speak of the lies and connivings. I cannot understand the
         Mercy
That permits us to meet in the same heaven.—Or is this
my hell?”

Another suppressed Jeffers poem is “So Many Blood-Lakes” written a few days after Germany surrendered in 1945: 

We have now won two world-wars, neither of
            which concerned us, we were slipped in.
            We have leveled the powers
Of Europe, that were the powers of the world, into rubble
            and dependence. We have won two wars and a
            third is coming…

—As for me: laugh at me. I agree with you. it is a foolish
         business to see the future and screech at it.
One should watch and not speak. And patriotism has run
         the world through so many blood-lakes: and we
         always fall in.

 The pro-war, interventionist viewpoint is clearly expressed in Edna St. Vincent's poem, "There Are No Islands Anymore," suppressed by no one, but published in The New York Times on November 25, 1940.  Here's how the poem was featured in the Times:

 Dear Isolationist, you are
So very, very insular!
Surely you do not take offense?-
The word’s well used in such a sense.
‘Tis you, not I, sir, who insist
You are an Isolationist.

 And oh, how sweet a thing to be
Safe on an island, not at sea!
(Though some one said, some months ago-
I heard him, and he seemed to know;
Was it the German Chancellor?
“There are no islands anymore.”)

 Dear Islander, I envy you:
I’m very fond of islands, too;
And few the pleasures I have known
Which equaled being left alone.
Yet matters from without intrude
At times upon my solitude:
A forest fire, a dog run mad,
A neighbor stripped of all he had
By swindlers, or the shrieking plea
For help, of stabbed Democracy.

 Startled, I rise, run from the room,
Join the brigade of spade and broom;
Help to surround the sickened beast;
Hear the account of farmers fleeced
By dapper men, condole, and give
Something to help them hope and live;
Or, if democracy’s at stake,
Give more, give more than I can make;
And notice, with a rueful grin,
What was without is now within.

 (The tidal wave devours the shore:
There are no islands any more.)

 With sobbing breath, with blistered hands,
Men fight the forest fire in bands;
With kitchen broom, with branch of pine,
Beat at the blackened, treacherous line;
Before the veering wind fall back,
With eyebrows burnt and faces black;
While breasts in blackened streams perspire.
Watch how the wind runs with the fire
Like a broad banner up the hill-
And can no more… yet more must still.

 New life!-To hear across the field
Voices of neighbors, forms concealed
By smoke, but loud the nearing shout:
“Hold on! We’re coming! Here it’s out!”

 (The tidal wave devours the shore:
There are no islands any more.)

 This little life from here to there-
Who lives it safely anywhere?
Not you, my insulated friend:
What calm composure will defend
Your rock, when tides you’ve never seen
Assault the sands of What-has-been,
And from your island’s tallest tree,
You watch advance What-is-to-be?

 (The tidal wave devours the shore:
There are no islands any more.)

 Sweet, sweet, to see the tide approach,
Assured that it cannot encroach
Upon the beach-peas, often wet
With spray, never uprooted yet.
The moon said-did she not speak true?-
“The waves will not awaken you.
At my command the waves retire.
Sleep, weary mind; dream, heart’s desire.”

 And yet, there was a Danish king
So sure he governed everything
He bade the ocean not to rise.
It did. And great was his surprise.

 No man, no nation, is made free
By stating it intends to be.
Jostled and elbowed is the clown
Who thinks to walk alone in town.

 We live upon a shrinking sphere-
Like it or not, our home is here;
Brave heart, uncomprehending brain
Could make it seem like home again.

 There are no islands any more.
The tide that mounts our drowsy shore
Is boats and men-there is no place
For waves in such a crowded space.

 Oh, let us give, before too late,
To those who hold our country’s fate
Along with theirs-be sure of this-
In grimy hands-that will not miss
The target, if we stand beside
Loading the guns-resentment, pride,
Debts torn across with insolent word-
All this forgotten, or deferred
At least until there’s time for strife
Concerning things less dear than Life;
Than let, if must be, in the brain
Resentment rankle once again,
Quibbling and Squabbling take the floor,
Cool Judgment go to sleep once more.

 On English soil, on French terrain,
Democracy’s at grips again
With forces forged to stamp it out
This time no quarter!-since no doubt.

 Not France, not England’s what’s involved,
Not we, –there’s something to be solved
Of grave concern to free men all:
Can Freedom stand? -Must Freedom fall?

 (Meantime, the tide devours the shore:
There are no islands any more.)

 Oh, build, assemble, transport, give,
That England, France and we may live,
Before tonight, before too late,
To those who build our country’s fate
In desperate fingers, reaching out
For weapons we confer about,
All that we can, and more, and now!
Oh, God, let not the lovely brow
Of Freedom in the trampled mud
Grow cold! Have we no brains, no blood,
No enterprise-no any thing
Of which we proudly talk and sing,
Which we like men can bring to bear
For Freedom, and against Despair?

 Lest French and British fighters, deep
In battle, needing guns and sleep,
For lack of aid be overthrown
And we be left to fight alone.

 

Happy Thanksgiving!

 Dear friends and family,

Thanks for all you've done for me this year and in years past. I hope I've been able to have done to you in kind and be able to do much more in the future.

Enjoy your Thanksgiving dinner, and remember -- don't eat the mashed potatoes with your fingers!  (Yes, I'm looking at you, Salathiel.)

You might be a brat if...

 

Ugh

 These sorts infest the internet, and, I suppose, the world.

Armistice Day

 

 The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of Nineteen Eighteen.  The end of the war to end all wars.  The war to make the world safe for democracy.  We mustn't forget.  Both the war and the propaganda.

Three of my relatives were killed in that war:  Pvt. Kay Tusing, Pvt. Charles Kayser, and Lt. Egbert Beach.  All were killed in France.  Pvt. Kayser is buried there still.  Lt. Beach was brought home after the war and buried in the family plot. I don't know where Pvt. Tusing is buried.

New plan

 

Memento mori

One of my uncles was a pilot with Lebanese International Airways in the late Sixties, flying the Convair 990A, the fastest subsonic airliner ever built, able to cruise at close to Mach 0.90.  

LIA's 990s, along with a number of other airliners, were destroyed by Israeli commandos in late 1968 in response to an attack on an El Al airliner in Athens by Palestinians.  My uncle was on the field at the time of the attack and tried to rush out to save his plane but was restrained by his co-pilot, an action that probably saved his life.  

LIA collapsed as a result of this attack.  My uncle and his friend and co-pilot both wore Breitling Navitimer watches and when the end came and they went their separate ways, they exchanged watches, each one being engraved on the back with a sentiment in English and French.   

Before he was able to leave Lebanon, my uncle died.  I don't know the circumstances. After his death, my father acquired his meager personal possessions, including the watch and some Lebanese pounds. No one has ever worn the watch. It stays in my mother's cedar chest along with other family memento mori.

Unresolved emotion