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.  Okay, sometimes I do forget.
 

 Ain't she a pretty one?

 I finally got my familiarization training completed for the jolly 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 his money's worth, and a few other guys as well!  My mother, the hot disco babe, was the same way, and so was my grandmother back in her day when the big swing bands were laying down the hot licks and the soldier boys had their pay burning a hole in their pockets. 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 a soldier 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 For 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 in eight semesters 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.

 

 

 

 

Woof!

“In every woman, I came to realize, there is a desire to be naked, a desire to be seen naked.”
 ― Chloe Thurlow
 
“I think on-stage nudity is disgusting, shameful and damaging to all things American. But if I were young with a great body, it would be artistic, tasteful, patriotic, and a progressive religious experience.”
― Shelley Winters

“To bark or not to bark, that is the question—
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The squirrels and the mailmen of outrageous fortune,
Or to raise a leg against a sea of troubles
And by peeing end them.”
~ Anonymous

 

 One of the things I did when I was in college was to be an artist's model for art classes, as I've mentioned before. I was also a photographer's model, both for professionals and for amateur photo clubs. It was easy work that paid okay and I got to be an actual calendar girl. No, really. 

I mention this because el jefe, my husband, likes for me to be his photo model. Photos he particularly likes he enlarges and prints out and hangs up in his office and workshop (he loves woodworking, making furniture, cabinets and that sort of thing as a hobby). So, naturally, when men are in his office discussing business matters and what not, or guys are in his shop helping him or just hanging out with him, they see those photos -- of me in all my refulgent glory, just as the great God above made me. El jefe says that when God made me he was just showing off, lol.  The dope sure knows how to send a girl's vanity soaring.

Anyways.... What I was getting to is that one of our couple friends, for whom el jefe is making a chiffarobe, dropped by the other day and visited his workshop to see how things were going. The wife stayed chatting with me for a bit before we joined the men in the workshop. 

When we showed up, her husband was standing in front of one of my photos checking it out and saying something to my husband. His wife cleared her throat and he turned and said, "Oh, hello, dear, we were just waiting for you, what do you think of it so far?" going over to the work in progress and waving a hand at it. 

She glanced that way, then shifted her gaze to the photo he had been examining with some interest. When she realized it was me, she gave me a look. Such a look. Oh, such a look. I shrugged, looking as innocent as possible.

Other than that, nothing happened and the visit carried on normally, except that her husband more than once sidled toward me to chat and she interposed herself most adroitly. My husband appeared not to notice what was going on, as did I. We had a nice lunch, they approved of the chiffarobe and we talked about the weather and the stock market and whatnot.  

When they left, I punched el jefe on the bicep and he grabbed me and swung me around.

"What did that guy say to you when he was looking at my picture?" I asked.

"Oh, he just said you were a hot number."

"A what?  He did not! That's like slang from the 1930s or something."

"An HB 10. That's a hot number."

"He didn't say that.  Come on, what did he really say?"

"Well....  He said he wished he could fuck a piece like that every night like I do."

"But his wife is very attractive. And you don't do me every night anyway. And I'm not a 'piece,' thank you very much."

"Well, you know how guys are -- and I would like to fuck you every night and twice on Sunday."

"Before and after church?"

"That sounds good.  Thanking the Lord for blessings bestowed."

"Uh huh. Besides, you're usually asleep and snoring when I get to bed. I could blow a whistle in your ear and you wouldn't wake up. And how guys are, huh? So do you want to fuck his wife?"

"Well, no, Wanda.  She's not my type."

"But if she were your type?"

He sighed, shook his head.  "Wanda...."

"A non-answer...that means yes."

"No, it does not! You drive me crazy sometimes, you know that."

"But in a good way, right?"

"Not always.  Look, why do you think I like to take photos of you and hang them where I can always look at them.  I like you.  I like seeing you. I like hearing you.  Even when you are in another room talking to someone else, on the phone or whatever, I like hearing your voice. I like the sound of it. You don't know how much. It makes me feel...relaxed. And you know what else?  I like guys looking at you, at the photos I take of you, and saying things like that they would like to fuck you."

"What if I did? Fuck them, I mean."

"Oh, come on.  I know you. Ms Germophobe of 2025."

"True.  Just the thought of some strange man's sweat on me gives me the shudders, let alone.... But I wouldn't anyway.  What would be the point? You're the only man I want.  You know that."

"You're insecure, Wanda. But you don't have to be.  Not with me."

"What brought that on? And I am not." 

"What you said about me and his wife.  It's not true and it was offensive to me. You can't really think I'm such a man who would --"

"No, I don't really think you are.  I just said that.  I don't know why. Teasing you, maybe.  I didn't mean to be insulting. I never want to insult you.  I have no reason to. I'm sorry."

"Well, you were and for that you deserve a good spanking.  Get over here!"

"Catch me if you can, you big lummox!"

"Why, you little.... You're going to get it now!"   

Why tell this dumb story? Well, because while lesbian bed death is mentioned as a thing, nobody seems to mention, let alone take seriously, heterosexual bed death, which is a very real thing in marriage.  I think it wrecks a lot of them and needs to be taken seriously, not so much by men, those hound dogs, lol, but by their wives.  Hey girls, don't you get that your husband desires you? Wants you to be a hot number, an HB10 that other guys envy him for having married.  I honestly think it hurts a man when his woman doesn't hide the fact that she'd really rather not have sex with him, considers doing her wifely duty a chore to get over with as quickly as possible.  And I think that's one reason a lot of women let themselves go, so they'll be unattractive, undesirable, so they won't be pestered for sex by their husbands.

Now, there might be a lot of reasons for this that are not the woman's fault. Hubby could be a slob -- clean yourselves up, guys!  He could have let himself go -- beer guts are not attractive. He could also be a jerk. Even if he doesn't physically abuse her, he could verbally abuse her, ignore her, just not be a decent person. 

So when he decides he wants to do the horizontal hula, she decides she doesn't. Why would she? 

She gets a new dress, fixes her hair, tries to look nice for him -- and he doesn't notice.  Or, when she asks him what he thinks, he just grunts or says, "Yeah, it's nice," while not even really paying attention. She spends hours preparing and fixing a special dinner and he says nothing, just eats it and goes to watch some stupid sports crap on TV. Or, if she adds candles and uses the best china, he says, "What's all this for?" And if she says, "Oh, I thought it would be nice to have a romantic dinner for a change," and he just shrugs, looks at the meal and says "What is this stuff anyway? You know I like meatloaf not...whatever this is," how do you expect her to feel about him?  How can you expect to have a good sex life if regular life is like that?

And I'm not even getting in to physical causes for a woman's lack of interest in sex, number one being painful intercourse, then there is FSAD -- look it up! I could go on.  Believe me. 

Look, if you want to have a good sex life in your marriage, the rest of the marriage has to be good, too. And that means both of you being considerate to your spouse and not being a self-centered jerk. 

Well, I've said enough. 

 

 

I don't remember

 "Do you want to live?  Or do you want to die?

"I've forgotten it, just to live. I may look all right to you, but that's just the outside of me.  Inside ...  if you knew what's inside ... it's terrible. It would scare you.

"Losing those you love: I suppose there is no greater grief than that, because the one who still lives is not only left with a great load of sorrow, but a load of love and nothing to do with it. Failure, rejection, poverty, illness ... these are all trivial causes for depression.  The profound sorrow lies in the loss of those you loved and will go on loving after they are no longer there to be loved. 
"Love and loss. Love and loss.  It is the metronome of life. And it is not always death which occasions the loss.  Jealousy, contempt, estrangement, even boredom can accomplish the same thing. But even then, the faint memory that love once lived and animated the world brings grief unutterable.
 "To receive love is a wonderful thing.  To give love is even better, but the fundamental, the most important thing of all, is to possess, and to know that one possesses, the capacity both to give and to receive.  To be deprived of this capacity is the greatest misfortune that can befall anyone.
"No one knows precisely what love is, though poets and philosophers have tried for centuries to define it. I doubt that any one of us has been satisfied with any of the definitions. Yet we go on trying, desperate to know, desperate to feel, desperate to find, because we sense that without it we are lost."

  Beyond Belief, first broadcast by CBS Radio Mystery Theater on December 17,1979.

Jada Rowland

Protagonist Jada Rowland was educated at the King-Coit School and Children’s Theater. In 1949, at the age of six, she began acting on Broadway, starring alongside Katharine Cornell, dubbed “the First Lady of Theater,” in That Lady. There followed a string of roles in Broadway plays and early television series, including Producers' Showcase, Armstrong Circle Theater, The United States Steel Hour and Pond's Theater. 

But she became most well known for her roles in soap operas, in particular The Secret Storm, in which she played Amy Ames for almost 20 years. She also appeared in As the World Turns and The Doctors, where she portrayed Carolee Aldrich for six years. 

Her husband of many decades is astrophysicist David Helfand, professor of astronomy at Columbia.

 

 

 

 

 

 

October!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Soon enough

 I'm not looking forward to this.  My mini-me is going to be the same pain in the butt to me that I was to my mother. But my mother steered me right in the end, and now that it will be my turn, I have to do the same for my daughter.  As my mother often said, heaving a sigh and looking up at the sky (or ceiling), "Lord, give me strength!"

 
Shopping Urban

by Jane Shore

Flip-flopped, noosed in puka beads, my daughter
breezes through the store from headband to toe ring,
shooing me away from the bongs,
lace thongs, and studded dog collars.
And I don't want to see her in that black muscle tee
with SLUT stamped in gold glitter
shrink-wrapped over her breasts,
or those brown and chartreuse retro-plaid
hip-huggers ripped at the crotch.

There's not a shopper here a day over twenty
except me and another mother
parked in chairs at the dressing room entrance
beyond which we are forbidden to go.
We're human clothes racks.
Our daughters have trained us
to tamp down the least flicker of enthusiasm
for the nice dress with room to grow into,
an item they regard with sullen, nauseated,
eyeball-rolling disdain.

Waiting in the line for a dressing room,
my daughter checks her cleavage.
Her bellybutton's a Cyclops eye
peeking at other girls' armloads of clothes.
What if she's missed something—
that faux leopard hoodie? those coffee-wash flares?
Sinking under her stash of blouses,
she's a Shiva of tangled sleeves.

And where did she dig up that new tie-dyed
tank top I threw away in '69
and the purple wash 'n' wear psychedelic dress
I washed and wore
and lost on my Grand Tour of Europe
and my retired hippie Peace necklace
now recycled, revived, re-hip?

I thought they were gone—
like the tutus and tiaras and wands
when she morphed from ballerina
to fairy princess to mermaid to tomboy,
refusing to wear dresses ever again.
Gone, those pastel party dresses,
the sleeves, puffed water wings buoying her up
as she swam into waters over her head. 

 

 

 

 

Little Sisters

by Sonia Gernes

This birthday I have reached the age
where my mother bore
the last of her dead daughters—
one that was whisked away
before its first clean cry
could scour the naked room, the later two
a blue that refused to brighten.

"Baby Girl, Infant Daughter of ..."
the little markers said
and I listened from behind the stove
in her last pregnancy,
watched her body swell and sag,
knew from the shape
of those whispered words
that something was amiss—
she was weighted already
with two small stones.

Summer mornings I called them forth—
the little sisters I had never seen—
made them faces
from the old ache
in the air above the garden,
hair like mine
from the grassy space
where root crops should have been.

I learned of blood tests, transfusions,
the factor called Rh,
my little sisters
dreaming their aquatic days
on lethal ropes, my mother
almost dead.

Now at the kitchen table
lighting candles on a cake,
I am empty-handed,
empty-wombed,
no daughters to give her
as she counts again
my miraculous birth,
fourth and forceps-born,
her last survivor in that war
of blood with family blood.

I reach for her hand and hold it,
but there are spaces here,
tender lacunae we cannot fold away.
Still somewhere the hand-stitched garments,
the gingham quilts, the counting game.
Still the soot-smudged corner
where I crouched beneath the stovepipe
and fingered like a rosary
the small pebbles of their names. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Things I don't need to know about anymore

 I've had three careers in my life and learned a lot of things that I don't even remotely need to know about anymore.  I sweated blood, stayed up late night after late night, studying and memorizing and practicing to not only learn, become proficient in, but to excel in them.  And now, and now ... none of them matter at all. I might as well never have bothered.  I probably would have been happier, have had a better life, if I had never gotten involved with any of them.

Wait, I don't know about that, especially my first career. That one, my research career, was the one I wanted and dreamed about achieving since I was, I guess, in the sixth grade.  And that's the one that came crashing down first and hardest -- dreams do die hard.

The Navy paid for my schooling, in exchange for which I owed Uncle Sam a fairly large number of years of my life.  But I was fine with that because after graduation I expected that I would be continuing the research that I was interested in, knew a great deal about and was very good at doing.  But, alas, that research program was defunded. 

Poof! Gone. But since I was an indentured servant, so to speak, I couldn't just go looking for a similar research job at another institution.  

So, owing years of my life to the big blue machine, and considering that my mother had been an army nurse and my grandmother a navy nurse, I opted to go in that direction and black shoe it.  Big mistake.  What I was trained and assigned to do was just too much for me.  I've written about that episode in my life, as much as I ever care to, and now only strive to forget it.

So I took my father's advice and applied for and was accepted at OCS then SNA and joined the brown shoe navy, which suited me much better, clean and simple in its way, emotionally neutral. I would still be doing that job today except that I had some health problems that led to my separation.  Like they say, you may love the navy, but the navy doesn't love you back.

 

 

 

 

 

 

So anyway,  all those years of my life, all that effort, all that striving, all that money spent and the end result: nothing.

What brought these musings about?  Oh, I came across some old training materials for stuff that I put all my effort into mastering, and it was not easy, but I did it, and today ... totally irrelevant to my life now and forevermore.  Then I thought about how things went before that and before that .... 

Oh, well.

 

 

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