Voici mon secret

 

 

 “The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.”

 “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 

 

The conservative "go" years

 The 1950s were a curious cultural blend.  On the one hand, the decade was the era of the organization man and conservative fashion, epitomized by the man in the gray flannel suit, as well as the era of the stay-at-home mom and pleasant if predictable suburban life of Donna Reed, Ozzie and Harriet, and Leave It to Beaver.

But the cars of that era, especially towards its exuberant climax, seemed to have been styled by people on drugs, all fins and wings and weird shapes. And chrome. Lots of chrome.  They were powered by giant V-8 engines -- the Cadillac offered a 500cid and the Lincoln a 460cid -- that seem like they could have powered World War II fighter planes.

And the music; I mean the music adults listened to, not rock'n'roll -- that was pimple music for teens -- was also far from conservative, but hip and swinging, like the Kirbystone Four's version of "Baubles, Bangles and Beads," rendered in their "go sound" -- new for 1958! -- or Bobby Rydell's finger-snapping take on "Volare!"  Somehow, it all fitted together: Bishop Fulton Sheen and Hugh Hefner, Bunny Yeager and Debbie Reynolds, Dwight Eisenhower and Jerry Lee Lewis, Edward Teller and Albert Schweitzer....

Well, maybe it did.  Willoughby!  Next stop Willoughby!

Things he says to me

"I was thinking that I like knowing that a guy complimented your ass." 

  "When I saw that guy trying to pick you up, I didn't get mad, I got turned on.   It arouses me to know other guys want you.  I can have you any time I want, and they can never even have a cup of coffee with you."

"You might not believe this, but whenever I know you're coming, I get excited.
I drop whatever I'm doing to be ready to be with you.  And when I see you I am just happy."

  "If  I may be honest and blunt, I think your breast size may be ideal.  Any bigger and I suppose they could cause some strain and get in the way."

 "Even when you are being snarky, you give me a raging hard-on."

Him: "I need my dose of Vitamin W."
Me: "What's that?"
Him: "Vitamin Wanda!"

"I think when it comes to sex we are very much in tune.  We both like the same things.  I'm never shy to tell you what I want you to do." 

"I used to worry a lot about you when you were in Afghanistan. I kept thinking, no filthy raghead is touching my Wanda."

"I have a stash of pics of you, a lot of them that I took when you didn't know.  I just like looking at you.  Sometimes when we are out together, even only grocery
shopping, I lag behind just so I can look at you and think I wish I had a girl like that and then I think hey I do and go up to you and slide my hand over your rump or hug you from behind and grab your boobs and you say cut it out!  But you smile."

"If you were the last person in the world, I'd be content with that.  I really do appreciate you, more than words can tell."

 "I bask in the memory of our times spent together, as I'm sure I will our future memories." 

                       "The thing is, I care so darn much for you even if at times perhaps it seems like I don't.  But God knows I do, and I always want to be here for you."

 "Wanda, you don't have to believe me, but there's not a day that goes by that I don't think about you.  And whenever I think of you, I ask God to watch over you.  You're far too precious to me to simply shun the times we've shared through good and bad, and, well...,  I should shut up now."

 

Old memories

A grandfather's jotted memories --

 

 

 

 (A division is four airplanes divided up into two elements of two airplanes): 

First combat:

"I rev'd my engine up to take-off rpm and manifold pressure, holding my brakes, and when I got the signal from Fly One I released my brakes and started rolling down the flight deck.  It's all as close to me as yesterday, the feel of the air and the sun, and thinking of all that lay ahead.  About two-thirds of the way down the deck, I popped my flaps and we floated into the air.
"I joined up with the rest of my division and we climbed to 25,000 feet.  I could hear over my radio, 'Bombers approaching from 270 degrees, 40 miles...bombers still coming from 270 degrees, 30 miles.'  And then, 'Flight of Zeros coming five minutes behind bombers, course 270 degrees.'
Finally the whole horizon filled with planes.  There were 56 of them, 26 bombers and 30 Zeros.  There were so many, and so near, that I couldn't really believe that they were enemy planes and that I was about to engage in actual combat.
"My division leader led us into a high-side run against the bombers, Type 97 Mitsubishis.  I'd seen the Zeros above and behind the bombers before we began our attack--painted brown with a big red ball on each wing--but I didn't notice them now, I only saw the bombers.  I selected one and opened fire at 450 yards which is a lot too far off.  But as I closed in I saw my tracers going apparently right in front of the wing, which means they were going right into the wing; when they seem to be hitting the wing, they're actually going behind it.
"The left engine began to smoke, not gradually, but with a big black puff.  I fired a long burst and the engine began to flame, then the whole plane was on fire--bing, just like that.  It just fascinated me.  The bomber had looked so big I didn't see how I could do anything to it.
I was watching the Mitsubishi fall when all of a sudden my whole windshield disintegrated right in front of me.  I felt a sharp pain in the right side of my head, and my left foot went kind of numb.  Glass blew all over the cockpit.  Something got in my eye.
"I knew somebody had me right, so I did a half-roll and got out of there, straight down for a couple of miles.  There was nothing behind me when I leveled off and looked things over.  There was glass all around me.  The bulletproof windshield was a mass of cracks.  My left eye was pretty bad and there was a slug of metal sticking into my left shoe.  The prop felt funny, too.  There were three bullet holes in it, I found later.
"I felt woozy but I found the ship and caught the wire and the deck crew helped me out of the cockpit.  In the rear of the plane were a bunch of six-inch holes made by cannon shells.  The radio equipment in the fuselage was all blown to hell.  Evidently a Zero had made a high-side pass on me."

He was patched up in sick bay and back on flight status after a night's rest.  One of the pilots in his division was shot down, bailed out, swam and treaded water for 48 hours before making it to shore on an island, where he was marooned for five days before being spotted by a passing flight of SBDs and picked up by a J2F.

The next day, another combat:

"I can remember every cloud in the sky as we climbed up into it.  We were intercepting two flights of nine bombers with 13 Zeros escorting.  At 27,000 feet we got off to the side of the bombers and began edging above them to make our pass when the Zeros dropped down on us.
I got separated from my division.  I was watching the Zeros coming down and not paying enough attention to where the rest of the boys were going.  I was too inexperienced.  I was too green to remember everything that had been hammered into our heads.
"Pretty soon I found myself scissoring with a Zero.  That is to say, he had the altitude to keep diving at me, and I kept turning into him, trying to stay behind and below.  We scissored five or six times, and every time I made a sharp, steep bank, I lost altitude.  Altitude is what pays off in an air fight, and this looked bad.  He forced me to keep making those quick turns to keep him off my tail, and with each turn my plane shivered and shook and lost altitude.  It was hell.
"He passed above me and did a steep wing-over.  I dived and started to climb.  It wasn't an intelligent thing to do, but I was lucky.  He couldn't quite get his guns on me.  Then he did the damnedest thing you ever saw.  He came down from above and behind, and instead of riding it out on my tail and filling me full of bullets, he let himself go too fast so that he went by me.  He should have dodged off to one side and got out of there, but instead of that the fool rose right up under my nose and did a roll.  What was he trying to do?  Maybe he thought I couldn't hit him if he kept his plane tumbling like that.  As a matter of fact, he was just making himself a bigger target.  I used a three-second burst, and he was dead before I stopped firing.
'"We had scissored all the way down to eight thousand feet--to show you how he had been driving me into the ground--but even eight thousand feet is a long way when you're looking down.  He made a splash no bigger than a porpoise.  Then he was just part of the soup."

The next day, the Japanese came back again:

"Vee after Vee of bombers came down on us, escorted by dozens of Zeros.  Our squadron CO told us to stay with them and fight, no matter what the odds were, no matter how bad the position might be.  That day we showed him we'd heard what he said.  We went after the bombers but the Zeros were up there watching us the way cats watch mice.  As they closed on us we turned into them head-on and they broke off.  I went after one and got him in my sight and let him have it, knocking a big puff of white smoke out of him. He rolled left onto his back and dove away.
"Then I found myself rising underneath and behind another Zero.  He did a split-S and I lost sight of him.  That is the trouble.  Things change so fast in the sky.  You have your man, you miss him, you lose him--and maybe you've lost the whole world and yourself along with it.  It happens while you're snapping your fingers a couple of times, in just that short a time.

"But I saw my Zero again, pulling up and heading northwest.  I poured wide-open throttle to it and went right after him.  I got above him, closing the gap a little more and a little more.  In the meantime he'd been doing S turns, and I kept sliding over so that he wouldn't see me.  Finally I got up to 20 yards--just like opening a door and walking into a room it was so close.  Then I fired the shortest burst I ever used, not more than 20 shots, but they were all smashing right home into him, and he blew up all over the sky--up there at 12,000 feet--and it was just like putting a stick of dynamite into a room.  I was hoisted up in my seat by the force of the explosion.
"I saw the pilot blown up 30 feet in the air.  The chute he had on didn't open fully and he dropped, the chute flapping above him.  Little pieces of the plane hung like leaves in the air.  I followed him down and watched him hit the water.  The shroud lines of the chute were holding him, and he was lying there as though asleep."

He landed back on his ship, was rearmed and refueled and launched again against another incoming bomber force, a division of four F4Fs against 18 bombers and six Zeros:

"As we climbed to 26,000 feet, far away among the clouds now and then we could see little drifts of planes fighting, like a whirl of leaves.   We attacked the bombers straight in.  I made my pass against mine, went under him, climbed up again, and while I was doing a wing-over I saw 15 more Zeros, a whole cloud of them.  It's hard to straighten out a fight, even when I try to remember every detail.  I recall asking over my radio for  a little help, but everybody was busy.  After that it all came fast, the Zeros were everywhere, taking punches at me.  I punched back, making one smoke and spin and another drop away in a ball of flame, but the rest kept coming at me.
"I dove on another one and was closing the range, ready to fire, when a Zero opened fired on me from behind.    Machine gun bullets and cannon shells shook my plane.  Two 20mm shells smashed into my cockpit, and the shrapnel from the bursting shells hit me in the right side and knocked my leg off the rudder pedal, which caused my plane to roll over on its back and start spinning.
" I pulled out of the spin at about 19,000 feet.  The Zeros hadn't followed me down and I was alone. I realized that I was wounded when I discovered that I couldn't move my right leg back to the rudder pedal.   I looked at it.  Shrapnel had torn up my thigh.  Two pieces had driven down into the muscle, another fragment had open a big gash.  I didn't see much blood then, and my leg was numb, not painful.
"The flying was not so good.  I had to lift my leg with my hand and put it on the rudder pedal.  So I called the ship and said I was coming in for an immediate forced landing.  Pretty soon they called back and told me to wait.  I made a circle of the ship and dropped my wheels and flaps.  Once more they called to  tell me to wait.  They said, 'You can't land.'  I simply said, 'The hell I can't!' And by that time I was on the deck.
"I don't know why they warned me off.  I didn't see any enemy planes around.  It still makes me mad to think of that voice telling me not to land when I was pretty fortunate to be able to get down without crashing.
"My plane was junk.  They stripped off a few parts that they could use, but the rest of it just went over the side."

 His wounds were severe enough that he was evacuated to a shore-based hospital to recuperate. 

I'm not a believer

 

Take a walk...

... through others' minds...

 “But as God said,
crossing his legs,
I see where I have made plenty of poets
but not so very much
poetry.”
― Charles Bukowski  

 “The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.”
― Ross McDonald 

 “I went to the library. I looked at the magazines, at the pictures in them. One day I went to the bookshelves, and pulled out a book. It was Winesburg, Ohio.. I sat at a long mahogany table and began to read. All at once my world turned over. The sky fell in. The book held me. The tears came. My heart beat fast. I read until my eyes burned. I took the book home. I read another Anderson. I read and I read, and I was heartsick and lonely and in love with a book, many books, until it came naturally, and I sat there with a pencil and a long tablet, and tried to write, until I felt I could not go on because the words would not come as they did in Anderson, they only came like drops of blood from my heart.”
― John Fante

 “So black was the way ahead that my progress consisted of long periods of inert despondency punctuated by spasmodic lurches forward towards any small chink of light that I thought I saw...As the years went by, it did not get lighter but I became accustomed to the dark”
― Quentin Crisp

  “I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was hurricane.”
― John Green

 “One existence, one music, one organism, one life, one God: star-fire and rock-strength, the sea's cold flow
And man's dark soul.”
― Robinson Jeffers

 “I looked and looked at her, and I knew, as clearly as I know that I will die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth. She was only the dead-leaf echo of the nymphet from long ago ― but I loved her, this Lolita, pale and polluted and big with another man's child. She could fade and wither ― I didn't care. I would still go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of her face.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

  “Someday no one will remember that she ever existed, I wrote in my notebook, and then, or that I did. Because memories fall apart, too. And then you're left with nothing, left not even with a ghost but with its shadow. In the beginning, she had haunted me, haunted my dreams, but even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone else's, dying again.”
― John Green

 “Lost, yesterday, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, two golden hours, each set with sixty diamond minutes. No reward is offered for they are gone forever.”
― Horace Mann 

 “The world is very lovely, and it's very horrible--and it doesn't care about your life or mine or anything else.”
― Rudyard Kipling

 “Don't you know who you love, Pudge? You love the girl who makes you laugh and shows you porn and drinks wine with you.”
― John Green

 “I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.”
― Vladimir Nabokov 

 “The past was filling the room like a tide of whispers.”
― Ross Macdonald

 “No one but Night, with tears on her dark face, watches beside me in this windy place.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

 

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Good times...I've had a few....

 Well, it was fun while it lasted. All good things come to an end.  But we can remember them all, at least for a little while longer.  Just a little while longer.