Nothing much

 

The more I read various posts and comments on Substack and elsewhere, the more I realize how little in common I have with these writers and maybe most of the rest of society.  This is not a new conclusion so much as it is a reinforced one.  As an armed services brat (born, raised and transferred), I grew up mostly overseas and so lived a life far from that of a normal American.  

US military bases in Japan.

I was left out of most of the cultural references and key social highlights of a typical person of my generation. I didn't see the TV shows -- never saw an episode of Friends or South Park or Sex in the City -- only heard a selection of the popular songs of the day, certainly didn't hear anything out of the Top 40, especially not anything niche, localized or otherwise appealing to a limited audience, never saw the the TV commercials that everybody liked or hated -- the Geico caveman, Donald Trump and Pizza Hut -- wasn't aware of the political squabbles or the politicians and political commenters involved, didn't participate in the fads and fashions of people my age in the States -- I never planked or wore jeans under my dress or sported a whale tail, never wore fake nerd glasses and posted selfies of myself, hands raised, fingers curled like claws, with the caption "Rawr!" I never used L33T speak, never even heard of it. I did used to tYpE lIkE *t*H*i*S oN y*A*h*O*o  I*M W*i*T*h mY ¡hOmE! ¡cReW! And I used Yahoo audibles with enthusiasm and frequency -- this one below left was my favorite. But that's about it.

I wasn't really from anywhere and had no hometown. But I had lived in lots of places -- Misawa, Yokosuka, Atsugi, Sasebo in Japan, Sigonella, Gaeta and Naples in Italy, Souda Bay, Crete, Rota, Spain, Guam, plus Whidbey Island and North Island.... One year, I went to 11 different schools.  "Class, this is our newest member. Go ahead, introduce yourself."  "Thank you, Miss Gump. My name is Wanda and...." -- out comes the Shepherd's crook and I'm jerked away to another school maybe in another country, maybe on the other side of the world.

I learned to shut up about all that when I settled stateside to finish high school, the same as I learned not to mention I was fluent in Japanese. The other kids thought I was lying or just weird. "Wait, what? You've climbed Mt. Etna and Mt Fuji? And skied both the Italian and Japanese alps? Oh, sure you have!" (belly punch)

Then in the service myself it was more time overseas, often in the same places I grew up in and in some cases where my parents and grandparents on both sides, they having been in the service, too, also lived. My grandfather was stationed at Atsugi, as was my father, and as was I, and now my little girl has, not been stationed (yet), but lived there, too. At one point, I served aboard the same aircraft carrier as my father had.

Another grandfather, in the Air Force in the 1950s, lived with his family in Washington Heights, the American housing complex in Tokyo located where the 1964 Olympic Stadium and Yoyogi Park are today. Before we Americans took it over, it was a Japanese Army Air Force facility; in fact, it was where the first airplane ever flew in Japan.

 I once saw an old Mainichi Graphic, a sort of clone of the picture magazine Life, that they had saved that had published a picture of them barbecuing in their back yard. The photo was taken through a chain link fence with a telephoto lens.  The caption read that American military in Japan were so poor that their houses didn't even have kitchens so they were forced to cook outside.  

That photo was a lesson to me in how people willfully misunderstand each other and willfully spread those misunderstandings to denigrate others and assert their own superiority.  In this particular case, the Japanese author of the story could simply have asked American military public relations to explain what was happening in the photograph and written about American customs and pastimes unfamiliar to Japanese.  But he didn't do that.  He wrote negatively about Americans to assure his Japanese readers that they were superior to these foreigners polluting their homeland.

I've walked around that area of Harajuku and Yoyogi and probably have been in the same spot or near it where the house my grandfather lived in back in the early 1950s once stood. 

I come from a long
line of service members
and their brats.

Anyway, growing up I was familiar with all the cool places to hang out in Catania in Sicily or where not to venture in Naples, or where that crashed F4U from World War Two is on Big Navy, Guam, or which trains to take from Sagami-otsuka to get to Nikko, bicycled downhill from the base gate to Rota town, gobbled up trabancos in Jerez de la Frontera, saw the monkeys on the Rock at Gibraltar, wandered around the palace at Knossos, hiked  down to the Grotta del Turco at Montagna Spaccata and so on and on.  But I had never been to New York City or New Orleans or Chicago or the Grand Canyon or....  The only America I knew was some dumb ranch and environs in Montana that I flew to, seeing only the airports in EWR, LAX or SFO.

Phi Gamma Delta. Stupid wars.

"So," you might say, "you were a citizen of the world, at home wherever you found yourself."  Uh.... No.  What I was was a citizen of nowhere, an alien outsider wherever I went.  The perpetual one who did not belong. Ask any brat.

He had baby brats.

You might think that I am bragging to mention all these foreign places, but I'm not.  Transferring from one duty station to another was just ordinary life, and while outside the gate the world was different, inside it one Navy base was pretty much like any other, with an MWR, NEX, fast-food franchise, commissary, movie theater, base housing, office buildings, hangers or port facilities looking the same, painted the same, in Guam as Japan as Spain as Italy as Greece.  But once in a stateside civilian high school, I learned that what was normal to me was seen merely as boasting so I kept quiet.

For a while, I suffered pangs of homesickness and wished I was back aboard a Navy base in a foreign land.  Homesick for a stupid Navy base? Are you brain damaged? Get out of here! No, really, I was.  Brats will understand, not you slacker landlubbers.

So what's all this blabbering leading up to?  Not that much, just the realization that still, and I guess always, I will be alienated from the American mainstream, not quite a foreigner, maybe more like an out-of-phase American.  

There are lots of stories of the dumb things I did when I first settled in as a civilian.  At the time, they weren't dumb to me.  It was just that I didn't know the correct protocol, didn't understand what things to do and not do, how the ... well, it doesn't matter.  I almost lost my life twice because I didn't understand there were no-go zones in American cities, or that a female should not be out alone too early in the morning or too late at night even in supposedly safe areas. 

You say that doesn't matter? Of course, it did then.  I was shocked and terribly frightened. But it's in the past and I learned that in some ways and in some places, America is  no country at all. It's a land before civilization. I didn't .... It got too much for me.  It really did. So as soon as I could, although I never thought I would, and when fate stepped in, I put on a uniform and escaped. And when fate stepped in again, I took it off.

Am I complaining about my childhood and I should just put a sock in it?  Well, the latter is always good advice in any circumstance, but I'm not really complaining so much as noting and evaluating how growing up as I did has influenced who I am as an adult.  I'm not a nowhere (wo)man sitting in my nowhere land, as the song has it, but I'm familiar with the feeling.

Bottom line, when I read others' personal accounts of life in these United States I feel like a stranger in a, not strange, but unfamiliar land that I thought was my own, my native land.  It is, but the people in it are not quite mine. Or I am not quite theirs.

Santa Ana lover

When I was in southern California, I liked the nights when the Santa Ana winds blew.  The breeze was like black velvet sliding across my skin. The air was so warm and dry it felt like, walking outside, that you didn't need to wear any clothes at all.  But in the clothes you did wear, you didn't sweat, even if the temperature in that deep dark was 90 degrees.  Oh, your body would perspire but the moisture would evaporate as soon as it left your pores so it was as if you didn't.

I remember skateboarding fast down 28th Street in San Pedro one night during a late September Santa Ana with views of the harbor, all the lights of the cranes loading and unloading container ships, wearing nothing but cut-offs, a tee shirt scissored off at the midriff and chucks, the wind bouncing off the hill and houses, my hair flying behind me, my arms stretched out at my sides like wings, screeching a right turn at Pacific and coasting with the wind pushing me a dozen blocks to road's end, land's end, at the parking lot where my lime green Mustang GT convertible was, stepping off the board and flipping it up, walking to the edge of the cliff and gazing out across the sea at the lights of Avalon and Two Harbors on Catalina, the wind rushing past me. I felt if I jumped the wind would lift me up and I would soar like a kite.

But I didn't jump.  Instead, I hopped in my car, put the top down and sped north in the fast lane on the Harbor freeway, then the Glendale, towards the mountains where the gale was born, listening to Stevie Ray Vaughn, Dick Dale, Jan and Dean, the Beach Boys...musty, moldy, golden oldies from the groove yard of the past, the devil wind curling into the passenger seat beside me and caressing my cheek, kissing my ear, whispering secrets.

 

In Chandler Country

California night. The Devil's wind,
the Santa Ana, blows in from the east,
raging through the canyons like a drunk
screaming in a bar.
                              The air tastes like
a stubbed-out cigarette. But why complain?
The weather's fine as long as you don't breathe.
Just lean back on the sweat-stained furniture,
lights turned out, windows shut against the storm,
and count your blessings.
                                          Another sleepless night,
when every wrinkle in the bed sheet scratches
like a dry razor on a sunburned cheek,
when even ten-year whiskey tastes like sand,
and quiet women in the kitchen run
their fingers on the edges of a knife
and eye their husbands' necks. I wish them luck.

Tonight it seems that if I took the coins
out of my pocket and tossed them in the air
they'd stay a moment glistening like a net
slowly falling through dark water.
                                                        I remember
the headlights of the cars parked on the beach,
the narrow beams dissolving on the dark
surface of the lake, voices arguing
about the forms, the crackling radio,
the sheeted body lying on the sand,
the trawling net still damp beside it. No,
she wasn't beautiful - but at that age
when youth itself becomes a kind of beauty --
"Taking good care of your clients, Marlowe?"

Relentlessly the wind blows on. Next door
catching a scent, the dogs begin to howl.
Lean, furious, raw-eyed from the storm,
packs of coyotes come down from the hills
where there is nothing left to hunt.

"In Chandler Country" by Dana Gioia

 The Santa Ana air does not taste like a stubbed out cigarette.  It tastes like chaparral, chamise and California lilac, and I loved breathing it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dolton, Illinois

 Considering that the new pope hails from Dolton, Ill., I thought I'd repost my blog entry from May 12, 2023.  I'd thought about reposting it before when the mayor of Dolton was in the news for what I read somewhere is called being mayor while black.

Re-reading this piece and trying to imagine what it was like for the upright citizens of the suburb, I thought of a civilized people being attacked by encroaching barbarians.  Their own brave warriors were able to fend off the initial, probing attacks for a while, but eventually they were overwhelmed  and forced to flee, leaving all behind, all which the barbarians, being barbarians, could not maintain and ruined.

Anyway, here it is:

 **************************************************************************************************************************************

Happy days in Dolton

Digging through a bunch of old papers and other junk in a store room, I came across a cache of photos from my relative the news man's early days as a police beat reporter.  I've written about him before, how he never intended to get into the news business but planned to be a journeyman printer with his own shop, but because he knew how to touch type, when he was drafted, the army put him to work on a division newspaper and that, ultimately, led to a 40-year career in the news biz, mostly newspapers, but also radio and television. He got to hang out with people like Len O'Connor and Mike Royko.

Anyway, one of the stories he told me about his early days working the cop news on the south side of Chicago and the suburbs in that area was how blacks would prey on the businesses and homes of such bedroom towns as Riverdale, Dolton, South Holland, Harvey and others in that area.  These towns when he reported on them in the early 1970s were pleasant white communities enjoying a solid middle-class life thanks to all the nearby factories and steel mills that provided  employment at good wages.

Each town had its own police force, which diligently kept the peace and enforced the law.  Of course, the homeowners were peaceable and law-abiding.  It was the outsiders who raided to loot and rob who had to be guarded against.  My relative told me of how when you called the cops they responded immediately to a break-in, burglary, armed robbery, whatever it was, and they would pursue the felon no matter what until they got him. Since each town's cops only had jurisdiction in their community, they would hand off a hot pursuit of a perp to the next town's cops as the bad guy fled through them.  The Cook County Sheriff's Dept. would also join in the pursuit, as would the Illinois State Police.  He told me of several such chases in which multiple police cars were wrecked, one, in which, if memory serves, 14 police cars crashed chasing a bad guy, and another where the bad guy crashed into a gas station fuel pump, which exploded in a huge fireball.  But they did get the bad guy.  And usually alive, without gunplay.  And, he said, regarding fleeing felons, never mind what the judge would hand them, the cops would tune them up on the spot.  Only then would they face a judge.

Anyway the second, here are some photos of his that I thought were interesting illustrations of those days.  Most of the photos in his archive, if I may call it that, are just negatives, only a few prints.  So I only had a handful to select from.

This one on the left looks like a press conference with cops...I don't know.  But what interests me is the uniforms and the hair styles, and that guy in the background who looks like a Weegee-type news photog. He's even wearing a trench coat!  Note the photo of President Nixon, which fixes it in time.

The photo on the right is of a cop dusting for fingerprints after a burglary.  Thieves climbed up on the roof of the building and cut a hole in it and climbed down into the business to rob it but the alarms went off and the cops were on the bad guys like that.  Note the policeman is armed with a revolver.  Probably an old reliable Smith & Wesson .38.  And I bet should he have ever had to use it, he would have administered a pistol whipping, not emptied the cylinder.  Those times were far less shooty than today. Maybe that's because the police were more respected in those days, even by criminals, and cops had the authority and backing for what they needed to do on the spot, and were certain that any bad guys they nabbed would do hard time.

This photo on the left shows the end of one of those epic car chases, ending as they usually did with the perp crashing his stolen car, and the cops swarming him and hauling his sorry ass off to the calaboose.  It looks like a Cook County Sheriff's Department deputy and an Illinois state trooper were in on this bust.  I think the car is a Lincoln, but I'm not sure.  Usually the bad guys stole Cadillacs or Lincolns.

To the right is a photo of the Cook County Sheriff Department deputy pictured above left counting the recovered loot the robber got.  It would be cataloged and then returned to the store keeper, sometimes the very same day.  They didn't dawdle back then and the red tape was minimal.  Crook robs, cops catch, your money returned, crook goes to the slammer.  

Now this photo below is different.  It shows a neighborhood get-together in suburban Dolton in 1973.  The back of the photo says "pet parade."  I suppose it was a kind of street party where neighbors would gather with their pets and enjoy a nice time together.  I've colorized it to bring out just how pleasant and enjoyable it must have been, with lots of families, lots of children, lots of dogs -- and, you will notice, everybody is white.  It was Leave It to Beaver land for real, prosperous, safe, peaceful and pleasant.

Today, the factories and steel mills have long since closed and Dolton is more than 92 percent black and just barely 5 percent white, mostly elderly who can't afford to move. It's plagued by crime, drugs, gangs and street violence.  Here's a photo I found from a Sun-Times article about Dolton in 2022:

The photo, taken by Anthony Vazquez, shows Martin Luther King Blvd in Dolton.  The story says the suburb is like a ghost town with abandoned stores and buildings infested with druggies and the homeless.  A crime stats website describes Dolton today thusly:

"Dolton has an overall crime rate of 7,484 per 100,000 residents. This is one of the most dangerous regions in the United States. This means that your chances of becoming a victim of any type of crime in Dolton is 1 in 13 if you reside there for a year."

Dolton, Ill. Crime Rates

A couple of more end of police chase photos.  The bad guys never got away and never got far.  Too bad about those stolen Cadillacs: