Cute Meet

My mom met my dad on a ship sailing from Yokohama,  Japan, to Khabarovsk, USSR, in the late summer of 1973.  She had just finished working at the Barsky Unit in Saigon.  This specialized in burn victims. It was part of the Center for Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery funded by Children's Medical Relief International, name after Dr. Arthur Barsky.

Surgery on a child suffering from napalm  burns.

Prior to that she had been a nursing student and then when her brother, who had been drafted, was killed in Viet Nam, she joined the Army and served as a nurse at Cu Chi.  The only thing she has ever said about that episode in her life is that she thought she would never be able to get the blood out from under her fingernails.  She's never said anything at all about her time with CMRI.

Army nurses in Viet Nam. A tough bunch.

So anyway, she decided to return home by way of Japan and the Soviet Union.  It was the era of detente and American tourists were being allowed to visit the USSR I think for the first time since the start of the Cold War.
Her travel plan was, after visiting friends in Japan,  to sail to the Soviet Maritimes and and travel by the Trans-Siberian Express train to Moscow, thence to Europe where she would travel by Eurail pass and other public transportation to as many countries as she could before her money ran out.  She had no job and no schedule, but she didn't have a lot of money.  In fact, the route she chose to get to Europe, her main destination, was the cheapest one she could find.

A Navy F4J over North Viet Nam during Linebacker II.

My dad was on leave from the Navy and had 30 days.  He had been serving with a carrier battle group off North Viet Nam, and had participated in Linebacker II, before being sent to Japan.  He wanted to visit the Soviet Union and took the same itinerary as my mother except, as he had little time, he would fly from Khabarovsk  to Moscow and

Aboard ship from Yokohama to Vladivostok.

On the Trans-Siberian Express.

only from there take the train to Western Europe.  While her initial destination was Frankfurt, Germany, his was Ostend, Belgium.  He would take the ferry to  Dover, and on to London to visit a British friend, then fly to Munich to visit another friend, a German immigrant to the States who had joined the US Navy and become an aviator like my father, but as a civilian

BSA posed next to a Spitfire at RAF Biggin Hill.

worked for BMW's motorcycle division.  Together they would spend a week or so riding around the Alps on R90S sport bikes borrowed from the BMW factory.  Then he would fly back to London where he would buy a BSA Thunderbolt and ride around the British Isles, mostly visiting old World War II-era airfields and the like before flying back to the States and his next duty station.
As I've heard the story, my future mother and father got to chatting as they wandered about the ship, at meals and whatnot, and found, having both served in Viet Nam (though my father never set foot there -- if he had he would have been having, as he said, a very bad day at the office).  They spent time together walking around

Park in Khabarovsk.

Khabarovsk and otherwise spending time together before dad took an Aeroflot Il-62 to Moscow, where he stayed at the Hotel Metropol and spent a few days sightseeing before taking a train for Belgium.

He recalls a few things from Moscow.  One was that there were kiosks selling some clear liquid from a dispenser, but instead of having disposable paper cups, there was only one drinking glass, attached to the kiosk by a chain that everyone drank from.  The other was that there were a lot of pedestrians but few stores and no advertising.  The city was very dark at night with

GUM department store, Moscow.

no neon signs and not much traffic.  At the hotel restaurant, which was quite grand, the menu extensive, but everything he asked for was not available, so he finally asked what they had.  That was chicken and rice, and that's all he ate his whole time there.

 The train trip west was memorable for his noting the fact that whenever the dual-track rail line approached a river crossing the two lines separated widely and there were two bridges far apart.  Having just finished flying combat missions over North Viet Nam, it was obvious to my father  that the crossings had been built with air attack in mind and any raiders would have to deal with destroying not just one, but two bridges.  

Sight seen from the trans-Siberian Express.

My mother recalls the train trip across Siberia as incredibly tedious and seemingly never-ending, without much to see but trees and the occasional rail yard in a small town, and some farms or road crossings that swiftly passed by her compartment window.  Whenever she tried to take a photo, the old lady concierge at the end of her car told her in English "No pictures!"  But she managed to take a few anyway. 

Most of her fellow passengers were Japanese students traveling to Moscow to

View from train compartment window.

study at the university there.  They largely kept to themselves and seemed not to be interested in the other passengers on the train, including her.  She did make friends with a Russian traveler who said he was a musician.  This was not too long after Salvador Allende had been overthrown in Chile and she brought this up as a conversation starter but all he would say is, "I'm a musician.  I don't know about politics."  And that was that.  

She did manage to make friends with one Japanese student, a girl who seemed quite nervous and ill at ease.  Mostly she wanted to know what my mother thought about Japan.  She promised to meet her at her hotel when they arrived in Moscow so they could sight-see together, but she never showed.

Both my mother and father remarked that there was an amazing transformation passing from East Germany into West Germany:  Lights at night!  Lots and lots of them.  It was like transitioning to another planet.  Both also remarked that the doors of their train compartments were locked without notice and they had no food until they arrived at their destinations.  Both were relieved to have passed through the Communist Bloc countries safely, feeling that, arriving in Western Europe, they had reached paradise.

By chance, they ran into each other again when they lodged at the same zimmer near Salzburg, Austria.  She rode pillion on his motorcycle to Munich for Oktoberfest, after which he turned in his BMW and flew to England and she continued on to Italy, the Balkins, Greece and Egypt.

They didn't meet again until 1975, when they ran into each other quite by chance in San Francisco.  Both were walkers and San Fran in those days was still a safe and pleasant city to walk around in, the cable cars not yet mere tourist attractions and no hoards of aggressive homeless, junkies and panhandlers.  So they walked and talked for hours.  They kept in touch over the next couple of years, and spent as much time together as they could, finally marrying in 1977.

What dad's are for

 Both of them will remember this day for the rest of their lives.

Politics

 

How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics,
Yet here's a traveled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there's a politician
That has both read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war's alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms.

~ W. B. Yeats

I wish I was a baby boomer!

Not that I wish I was an oldster, but that...hmm...I wish I had been born 35 years earlier than I was and had enjoyed the life my parents did.  Truly, the early baby boomers were a blessed generation and enjoyed a wonderful era, at least until the the stupid Viet Nam War and all the rest of that crap ruined everything.  Why couldn't you just leave things alone and let America mind its own business and just be that wonderful thing, a country for ordinary people to enjoy their lives?  Okay jobs that paid well, dumb novels, dopey movies and TV shows and goofy music.  What's wrong with that?  Why couldn't we have just had that? 

What we lost -- glorious frivolity and enthusiastic fun (not to mention a father-figure of a president who warned us):

 

>

School...

 

 

 

Me to a T!

 

I really love the way Suzuki gets her teeth into this tune.  I listened to Doris Day's version, as well as a couple of others, and they were utterly forgettable.  Day sounded like she was bored.

Anyway, yeah, I'm a girly girl, at least when I can be.  The world being what it is, though, mostly you have to be neutral in all aspects of your public personality and appearance.  I don't really have a problem with that.  It's the insistent, extroverted narcissists  imposing themselves on us normies that cause so many of the problems these days.

Of course, a song like this couldn't be composed or performed today.  I don't think it would even occur to anyone to do so, and, of course, should they do so, their career would almost certainly be over.  So this song is a relic of a vanished era, and I suppose my attitudes about myself, which I picked up from my mother and other female relatives -- boomers! -- is also a relic of a vanished era.  Alas! Alackaday!

Winter blues

 “I don’t know what’s worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what you’ve always wanted to be, and feel alone.”
~ Daniel Keyes 

 “I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow.”
~ Edgar Allan Poe 

 “I went to bed and woke in the middle of the night thinking I heard someone cry, thinking I myself was weeping, and I felt my face and it was dry.
Then I looked at the window and thought: Why, yes, it's just the rain, the rain, always the rain, and turned over, sadder still, and fumbled about for my dripping sleep and tried to slip it back on.”
~ Ray Bradbury

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape -- the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter.  Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show.
~ Andrew Wyeth

Let it snow!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oh, carrier!

The epic of the aircraft carrier in 45 seconds.

 

Old Year ~ New Year

The Old Year's gone away
To nothingness and night:
We cannot find him all the day
Nor hear him in the night:
He left no footstep, mark or place
In either shade or sun:
The last year he'd a neighbor's face,
In this he's known by none.

All nothing everywhere:
Mists we on mornings see
Have more of substance when they're here
And more of form than he.
He was a friend by every fire,
In every cot and hall --
A guest to every heart's desire,
And now he's nought at all.

Old papers thrown away,
Old garments cast aside,
The talk of yesterday,
All things identified;
But times once torn away
No voices can recall:
The eve of New Year's Day
Left the Old Year lost to all.
  John Clare

 

New year, new decade...new ~ ?

 

 

 

 

 

What do these things have to do with the new year?  If you can guess that you win the first booby prize of the decade.  Game?

I wish I could shimmy like my sister Kate.

All the boys are going wild over Katie's dancing style!

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.