tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16167695137022554592024-03-15T22:12:16.403-03:00The Southern Yankee: A Writer's LogDan Newland celebrates his addiction to storytelling and writing in a twice-monthly blog. Essays, stories and comments on writers, writing and life in general. Publications are announced on Facebook to the following address: https://www.facebook.com/patagonian.yankee/ and through The Southern Yankee mailing list, which readers can join by requesting inclusion and sending their email addresses, in a private message, to the same FB address.Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01054536465220812092noreply@blogger.comBlogger239125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1616769513702255459.post-16059158347132206802024-02-27T12:31:00.001-03:002024-02-27T12:35:33.322-03:00 A BRAND NEW WORLD<p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;">Since last Thursday, I’m
living in a brand new world.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Over the course of last
year and the year before, I had three surgeries on my left eye. One on the
retina, one to remove a cataract the first surgery caused, and a final one, a
laser procedure, to improve the results of the first two.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_e23hLqPMrONYTHTcTrQz2TYWoHHdX5Se_Y200UEaoPkOW0-Z4dcHU-7e_C0KaabwTNZHbjHvu7j3TVUfdP04rNkx2sagdX6h4vmzDoLu7EIHNRKO7E159MIMs-ThLYTQ5TkRzoZwO43vMYqsTLaXJd1X1OH6tt37BA9DblRLo6KFq40k_yE88gfe2I1y/s975/Magoo.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="975" data-original-width="506" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_e23hLqPMrONYTHTcTrQz2TYWoHHdX5Se_Y200UEaoPkOW0-Z4dcHU-7e_C0KaabwTNZHbjHvu7j3TVUfdP04rNkx2sagdX6h4vmzDoLu7EIHNRKO7E159MIMs-ThLYTQ5TkRzoZwO43vMYqsTLaXJd1X1OH6tt37BA9DblRLo6KFq40k_yE88gfe2I1y/w208-h400/Magoo.jpg" width="208" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Suddenly, I had a left
eye that could see quite well. At that time, that was a major advancement. But
after that eye healed—the cataract operation was more traumatic than normal
because of the previous retinal procedure and because the cataract had been in
there so long that it had grown tough and hard to remove—the lens prescriptions
the surgeon wrote me were less than effective for reading, and for writing on the
laptop, which are my principal activities. But when I complained about this,
the surgeon gave me another eye test and insisted that, with corrective lenses,
I was seeing “one hundred percent in both eyes.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The guy who turned me on
to the nature of the problem was the optician, who is a highly experienced
professional. I went to him to see if I could finagle a more powerful mid-range
prescription for my computer glasses. He refused, saying, “The problem you’re
having isn’t one that can be solved with more augmentation. It’s that your left
eye is now almost perfect and your right eye requires a plus-4.75 augmentation.
I think that’s causing you to have a problem of focus.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">In other words, it wasn’t
that, “with corrective lenses, I was seeing one hundred percent in both eyes,”
but rather that, with glasses, I was seeing one hundred percent with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">each</i> eye. I just wasn’t able to focus
when I put the two together.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I took this theory to the
surgeon who scratched his chin and said, “Hmmm, yes, maybe. But the
prescription I gave you is correct.” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">So for a while, more than
a year, in fact, I took that to be the new norm. I was just never going to see
correctly again. It was what it was and I’d have to live with it. Part of getting
older. I should be grateful, I told myself, that my vision was, at least, now close
to perfect in one eye. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioRbPmK7rKFvYO-HLOmXUWcO010tfBhtIEOxKquy_4y00A4jDPRvy5z9Fdmt7S4yWKkr9bR82piwdfbkRrB1nR-LHU9No9CTEkTg6nDsWX3AvsbBe7Vjjyd3T3d8mCpQd6Idg4KDW308NcglH9Q6eYz6wVLuNjT1eGk-7bwJwbeHk6N01WsqRHdcvBD_ww/s604/Eye-Chart.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="604" data-original-width="261" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioRbPmK7rKFvYO-HLOmXUWcO010tfBhtIEOxKquy_4y00A4jDPRvy5z9Fdmt7S4yWKkr9bR82piwdfbkRrB1nR-LHU9No9CTEkTg6nDsWX3AvsbBe7Vjjyd3T3d8mCpQd6Idg4KDW308NcglH9Q6eYz6wVLuNjT1eGk-7bwJwbeHk6N01WsqRHdcvBD_ww/w173-h400/Eye-Chart.jpg" width="173" /></a></div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">But, I being me, I decided to go back to the ophthalmologist I’d had
prior to the three left-eye operations. She said the eye that had been operated
on was doing quite well and that I’d recovered almost twenty-twenty vision in
it. Other than a remaining small distortion from a defect in the macula that
the retina operation had failed to correct, that eye was seeing as well as it
possibly could. “Actually, she said, for
long-distance vision, you see better with <i>no</i>
prescription than with the slight augmentation you have in your glasses now for
the left eye. As for the other eye, the plus-4.75 prescription I was using was
correct, but she wanted to run more tests.</span><br /><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">So I had another
appointment with a colleague of hers, who moved me around from one machine to
another, showing me all sorts of light shows and running a tomography scan.
Then, I got sent back to her. “That eye,” she said, “has a pretty major
cataract. That, combined with your need for such a high augmentation in that eye,
and the fact that the other one has almost perfect vision…well, I’m not
surprised you’re having trouble seeing properly. That cataract should be
operated on and a lens put in. You can take these results back to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">your</i> surgeon, or, we can operate here. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Let’s do it,” I said,
“and the sooner the better.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Within a week, I had an
appointment with their surgeon, who was also the head of that ophthalmological
institute, which was named after him.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg29vsq-M0VeELqG3YQ7k0KyNfBBk8rUq4L0l9LrPHsr8q_ziH80HL0zUe0Ivebeaz2HrH2QnFI3rAedt0arG_Q5A61uZaXT5dEIrYpU12v-6YOVl3A_9xnwEAhuoL-H6v88mhUDwjut6hdy9n_0AoqfkYyJTLL0l7V2USU09yKLZCbKzcIh5rV62QWIbs8/s685/Cataract-Surgery-image-2.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="685" data-original-width="664" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg29vsq-M0VeELqG3YQ7k0KyNfBBk8rUq4L0l9LrPHsr8q_ziH80HL0zUe0Ivebeaz2HrH2QnFI3rAedt0arG_Q5A61uZaXT5dEIrYpU12v-6YOVl3A_9xnwEAhuoL-H6v88mhUDwjut6hdy9n_0AoqfkYyJTLL0l7V2USU09yKLZCbKzcIh5rV62QWIbs8/w388-h400/Cataract-Surgery-image-2.jpg" width="388" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I quickly learned that,
besides being a crackerjack eye surgeon, Patricio, the doctor, is also a people
person. He’s interested in everyone else’s story, and has a whopper of his own.
I knew right away, from his accent in Spanish, that he wasn’t originally from
Patagonia or from Buenos Aires. Patagonia is in southern Argentina and his
accent was definitely from the north. Tucumán Province, it turns out, a lush, green
place known as “the garden of the Republic.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I later found out that he, like myself, has lived in Patagonia for
nearly thirty years, but, fortunately for me, divides his professional practice
between the ski resort town near my home, and his own province in the north. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">He also picked up on my
accent in Spanish and asked where I was from originally.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“The US,” I said. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“I know a bit of the US,”
he said. “Where abouts?” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Ohio.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“That’s in the north,
right?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Yes, just below Michigan
and between Pennsylvania and Indiana. Borders on the Ohio River in the south
and Lake Erie in the north.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Which city?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Well, I’m not from the
city. I’m from a small rural town.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Oh? What’s it called?”
he asked.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Wapakoneta.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Say again?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Wa_pa_ko_ne_ta.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“A Native American name,
of course,” he said more than asked.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Exactly, I said. “It was
the chief council house of the Shawnee Nation, before the whites screwed them
over, went back on a reservation deal, and marched them off to Kansas. The
tribe is now based in Oklahoma and numbers less than eight thousand today, I
think.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“I’ve been to Oklahoma!”
he said. “Tulsa.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_70YaM-j-Dmrn1FJ9aPHyzm_x_XxPLbAcIyQi-EgHm2HMmGzjv3wZjDvXj7Xzwh_5jfF0dZkH-FhNryihgiEtStU0bWl_3TNfWR1kPpdfOm6-kWWLBAA42Q11zYANpSQut8lnRkH4Y72tfYmrWv2GwK-z6C5DGBhkGT_P883DJfIXTE69k1ZnAEM3uuBa/s300/One%20small%20step.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="168" data-original-width="300" height="224" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_70YaM-j-Dmrn1FJ9aPHyzm_x_XxPLbAcIyQi-EgHm2HMmGzjv3wZjDvXj7Xzwh_5jfF0dZkH-FhNryihgiEtStU0bWl_3TNfWR1kPpdfOm6-kWWLBAA42Q11zYANpSQut8lnRkH4Y72tfYmrWv2GwK-z6C5DGBhkGT_P883DJfIXTE69k1ZnAEM3uuBa/w400-h224/One%20small%20step.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>One small step...Neil lands on the moon</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Other than that,
Wapakoneta is famous for pretty much only one thing,” I said. “Being the home
town of Neil Armstrong, the first…”<o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“The first man on the
moon!” he broke in. “Of course, I know who Neil Armstrong was!”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Turns out eyes aren’t
Patricio’s only interest. He is also a knowledgeable aerospace enthusiast and a
civil pilot himself. In that regard, he said, “When we have more time, I’ll
tell you about how my flying and Tulsa are connected.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDVVISIkZDS97PD00WPyr6rQqMcLKYZy5I-w9MiSIMxy1ecr9wQRBdU-BD5aOtujqXbZZGMWyhbfTk4i0QOsHxhb6PckqlPrOGvhcCvRsYVJUKPsrqFZUOhDKhysQ7RSABDeCrdRY_g7oXj1QYV-k1gCS6zopJclLRxIdbkCF0B9DZIEHaiCNgfJOiXWub/s352/Viola.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="352" data-original-width="293" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDVVISIkZDS97PD00WPyr6rQqMcLKYZy5I-w9MiSIMxy1ecr9wQRBdU-BD5aOtujqXbZZGMWyhbfTk4i0QOsHxhb6PckqlPrOGvhcCvRsYVJUKPsrqFZUOhDKhysQ7RSABDeCrdRY_g7oXj1QYV-k1gCS6zopJclLRxIdbkCF0B9DZIEHaiCNgfJOiXWub/w333-h400/Viola.jpg" width="333" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Neil's mom, Viola...I was her paperboy</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">For right now, however,
he was fascinated with every detail I could tell him about Wapakoneta, Neil Armstrong
and Ohio’s history in aerospace. I told him every anecdote I knew—the Armstrong
Museum, the bike Neil rode to deliver papers and save money for flying lessons,
the legend about his having a pilot’s license before he could drive a car, his
adventures as a test pilot and America’s first civilian astronaut, and so on. I
also told him about how Neil had played basketball with my Uncle Don in high
school, and how I’d been Neil’s mother’s paperboy, how she’d invite me in on
cold winter days to warm up and have some hot chocolate, and how she’d let me
hold a scale model of Neil’s X-15 rocket plane, “if I was really careful with
it.”</span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The doctor was spellbound
and added stories of his own from his aerospace research. And that led us to
talk about the Wright Brothers, my visits to Kitty Hawk when I was in the Army,
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, UFO research…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Only when we were
finished with that conversation did we talk about my eyes. He patiently
explained that when one eye is twenty-twenty, if the augmentation needed in the
other eye is anything over plus-3.00, “The brain simply can’t compute it,” he said,
“and there’s no way that the eyes are going to function correctly together. The
good news is that the retina, macula and eye in general on that side are in
great shape. I can operate on that, put a good lens, like a Bausch and Lomb, in
there, and you won’t need glasses except to read.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjR5Ehfg993JZbCD82gvml17Q6fymRtBjogg-gnbSSRyV9-3gsPBcYmxKpzTlsBiRUrV6iTqWDjFdqqPPdmVU0tbgsZbLxORtJ9novrMFOjLduOJAFmYuEVX-HRQCa3ps0yKDUuBpoqAuJFpOaif_wQ6NqBSy-ro26YZVBldkVr1oe-2z_o9SqxFTXTrGql/s914/cataract-surgery.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="899" data-original-width="914" height="315" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjR5Ehfg993JZbCD82gvml17Q6fymRtBjogg-gnbSSRyV9-3gsPBcYmxKpzTlsBiRUrV6iTqWDjFdqqPPdmVU0tbgsZbLxORtJ9novrMFOjLduOJAFmYuEVX-HRQCa3ps0yKDUuBpoqAuJFpOaif_wQ6NqBSy-ro26YZVBldkVr1oe-2z_o9SqxFTXTrGql/s320/cataract-surgery.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Patricio scheduled me for
the operation just three days later. His assistant gave me a regimen of
eye-drop applications for that morning. I began with that early since it’s a
long drive to town. My wife, Virginia, drove me and as she did, I kept checking
my watch and applying drops as required. <o:p></o:p></span></p><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">We arrived more than an
hour early. I talked to Patricio’s assistant. She said I should do one more
application of one of the eye-drops and three more, one every fifteen minutes,
of the other kind. That one was to dilate my pupil. While I was sitting there,
my optometrist passed by, said hello, then laughed and said, “Your pupil’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">this big</i>,” and she made a circle with
her two hands about the size of a saucer. “Good luck!” she said and slipped
into her consulting room.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">One after another,
patients were being called into the operating room. One about every half-hour
to forty minutes. While one was being operated on, another was being prepped. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The doctor was running a
little late. After three procedures on the other eye, it should have been a
walk in the park for me, but I’m always antsy before a medical procedure, and
especially anything to do with my eyes. My surgery was supposed to be at
ten-thirty, but it was well after eleven when my name was called.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZ2BIkXlAJrn0vgnO27qwjJaL3Lsj1LQqGta3Bfi-XNcjTjjA7rDCawAeOSio1zFZbnPL4OXv21bbhytVCsAvW89-aw4PmPsFTTJNUhbXYNA9OJTTgxbKqvfClz2nZ2JyVGnTlHAdkG7MpSAOuSf4ykNd50JXMapcr3m7kt9xoEyf6IcGFtBzZpH__2m-n/s259/Magoo03.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="194" data-original-width="259" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZ2BIkXlAJrn0vgnO27qwjJaL3Lsj1LQqGta3Bfi-XNcjTjjA7rDCawAeOSio1zFZbnPL4OXv21bbhytVCsAvW89-aw4PmPsFTTJNUhbXYNA9OJTTgxbKqvfClz2nZ2JyVGnTlHAdkG7MpSAOuSf4ykNd50JXMapcr3m7kt9xoEyf6IcGFtBzZpH__2m-n/w400-h300/Magoo03.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">A very nice young woman,
masked up and in operating room garb, led me into what was, basically, a one-person,
pocket-sized eye clinic. It was modern, bright, immaculate and fully equipped
with ultra-modern gadgets. She showed me into a dressing room with a
comfortable armchair, invited me to strip to my underwear, and left me with a
folded pile of things that included a disposable hospital gown, a hairnet and
two similar nets to cover my feet. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“I’ll be back in a few
minutes to get you,” she said amiably. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">When it was time, she led
me into a miniature operating room that truly looked like it belonged to an
aerospace enthusiast. As soon as the doctor saw me, he said, “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dan!</i> Good to see you! Climb up onto the
table and we’ll accommodate you.” As the two women assisting him adjusted my
head in a kind of restraint, strapped a blood pressure cuff on my arm and
helped him disinfect my face, which I had already washed thoroughly with iodine
soap, and place a surgical drape around my eye—there was no IV sedation drip as
in my first two operations—he was regaling the two women with all of the
Armstrong anecdotes that I’d told him the day before. He also told them about
Wapakoneta, about Ohio, and about everything he could remember from our earlier
conversation. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJ4ddDjfciQZk98XdzT4MssfuBYZ7zu5dPikM67WXJjFdJo2pdYqh2nyGi5XovbFXti4MGIMqJJM-yIUxErpUPfir65wgoSVL6ZnPI9-lI2z_q1164_m9LSR-yudYkSDrARqCkWE-fefDvNvKC_vXGMviErme96iDkFrsO7I1KKYBGptMYpW0RROLWJpg1/s1313/IOL-Lens-Implant..jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="670" data-original-width="1313" height="204" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJ4ddDjfciQZk98XdzT4MssfuBYZ7zu5dPikM67WXJjFdJo2pdYqh2nyGi5XovbFXti4MGIMqJJM-yIUxErpUPfir65wgoSVL6ZnPI9-lI2z_q1164_m9LSR-yudYkSDrARqCkWE-fefDvNvKC_vXGMviErme96iDkFrsO7I1KKYBGptMYpW0RROLWJpg1/w400-h204/IOL-Lens-Implant..jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">As one of the women was
dripping local anesthetic into my eye, the doctor said, “So, I told you I was
going to tell you how I ended up in Tulsa. What I didn’t tell you is that it
was also where I accidentally met up with Obama.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">And from that moment on
until the operation was done, Patricio was storytelling nonstop. I kept
wondering, “How does this man do it?!” Telling stories, one after another,
while handling such a precise operation. The only answer seems to me to be that
he’s a genius and an extraordinary eye surgeon. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“So anyway,” he said,
“there were three of us flying some Cessnas from the US to Argentina. Tulsa was
a logical rest and refueling point. So we land in this small Tulsa airport. I
found the security quite lax for pilots…Dan, you’re going to feel a little
pressure now, but you shouldn’t feel pain—if you do, let me know…So we go into
this room where there were maps and a screen with flight route and weather
information. There was this index with details on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">every airport in the world!</i> Really incredible stuff…A little
pressure again now, Dan…So we’re there basically playing. I mean there’s
nothing there we really need. It takes a while for us to notice this guy who’s
standing by the door, obviously waiting for us to be done. His uniform was
razor sharp, and he had close-cropped hair and a carefully trimmed
mustache…Look down, Dan. Good…And he just stood there politely waiting his
turn. You know who it was? Obama’s pilot!<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“We had no idea the
president was coming to that airport. Outside now, there was a big military
escort and a motorcade maybe two hundred meters long on the tarmac. It seems
the US presidency has several planes. This was a small jet, not the huge Air
Force One Boeing 747 that most people think of as the president’s plane…Okay,
roll your eyes up now…Good…<o:p></o:p></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnscejSjIlfS-epptDIkIE6siwtnexGFeGhlrULVL85eTK9XdX4XQgFoAaVYJFUlT8qyU2I4EQ-S6K3I2pjU1ZqSkosPBkbk5ep2zwdYBTbOL65VB-s8WpAuEB7d2u2vBNT8j_OV5V5ufjds5-YbbGp2fQ59Oropv_QC7f0OOEsQZ4zX2CrTXP5F5XENXt/s997/Obama%20plane.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="997" data-original-width="562" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnscejSjIlfS-epptDIkIE6siwtnexGFeGhlrULVL85eTK9XdX4XQgFoAaVYJFUlT8qyU2I4EQ-S6K3I2pjU1ZqSkosPBkbk5ep2zwdYBTbOL65VB-s8WpAuEB7d2u2vBNT8j_OV5V5ufjds5-YbbGp2fQ59Oropv_QC7f0OOEsQZ4zX2CrTXP5F5XENXt/w225-h400/Obama%20plane.jpg" width="225" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Obama - presidential plane</i> </td></tr></tbody></table><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Seeing us there with our
mouths hanging open, Obama took a minute to say hello. The entire contingent
was super polite and amiable, and the following morning, when we went back to
pick up our planes and move on, you never would have known that the president
of the United States had been there the day before. Not one vestige of his
passing remained. I’ll never forget it.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I said, “I don’t think
anything would happen like that now. Obama was a very special president.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And with Trump? Well, they’d probably have
had the three of you on the ground with your hands behind your heads.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“There.” Patricio said,
removing the drape from my face. “You’re good to go! Sit up on the edge of the
table a minute before you get up. Are you okay?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“I’m great,” I said.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“So, no more glasses for
you except to read. It’s probably a little blurry now, but you can tell, right?
You can tell how much better you’re seeing, can’t you?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Amazing!” I said. “Thank
you, Patricio.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Don’t mention it. My
assistant will take you back to the dressing room now. Great talking to you,
Dan!” he said, as if we’d just had coffee together rather than my having had
eye surgery.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">After I put my clothes
back on, I had to go down a narrow corridor past the ceiling-to-floor glass
wall of the operating room to get to the entrance. As I passed, the surgeon,
who already had another patient on the table, waved and called out, “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Chau,</i> Dan! Talk to you tomorrow.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Outside, the receptionist
scheduled me for a post-op check-up the next day at one. Virginia and I left
the clinic and went around the corner to a coffee shop for an <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">express</i> and croissant. I kept my dark
glasses on—polarized clip-ons that I’d attached to a frame from which I’d
removed the lenses—because my pupil was still dilated and the light flooded in.
But already I was amazed at what I could see. I found myself reading my phone
without glasses and the details of everything I saw were sharp and clear. When
we returned home and I looked at myself in a mirror for the first time, and I
was amazed to see that my eye wasn’t even red—the other eye had been red for
days after two of my earlier surgeries. In fact, looking at the two eyes
together, I’d never have guessed which had been operated on.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Not wanting to strain the
eye, I left my phone in my studio and stayed away from my laptop. I had a nap
and then began an ever-decreasing routine of eye-drop applications that is to
last about three weeks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But that night I
found myself watching TV without specs for the first time since I was twelve. I
was amazed at how much light there was in this new world, how much detail, how <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">different</i> colors and textures were. It
was like an old-age miracle. No, it <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">was</i>
an old-age miracle. A few months before, I’d been worried about whether I could
pass the eye exam to renew my driver’s license. Now, I figured, I could pass a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">pilot’s </i>license exam <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">without glasses</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbhqVBwwCdym0-8XDDKzY7V-tQPJ2tZwuO6hyphenhyphenWLEOdR_UHhUIakTv4WpemzSHc4vWpFHU-7SX9Y-G4_qBbgUdjMEP6etqdY8xS6MUzLcF6qHUO6zjg7XTyNn9bDXAsC8lZmlUbZWacad0CN8q7wB21JSLlq7hCecNpPJ8yqa84mUF60iHobAufyHrfrdhyphenhyphen/s246/Magoo02.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="205" data-original-width="246" height="333" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbhqVBwwCdym0-8XDDKzY7V-tQPJ2tZwuO6hyphenhyphenWLEOdR_UHhUIakTv4WpemzSHc4vWpFHU-7SX9Y-G4_qBbgUdjMEP6etqdY8xS6MUzLcF6qHUO6zjg7XTyNn9bDXAsC8lZmlUbZWacad0CN8q7wB21JSLlq7hCecNpPJ8yqa84mUF60iHobAufyHrfrdhyphenhyphen/w400-h333/Magoo02.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">For twenty-four hours, I
simply enjoyed being able to see. To see every detail. To see the tiny leaves
on bushes and plants, to see the texture of the cloth of my shirt to see light
and color the way I recalled them in my early childhood memories. The world was
no longer a toned-down sepia place, but bright surroundings with a varied
palette of amazing hues.</span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">After more than six
decades of a life in which the first thing I did in the morning was put my
glasses on and the last thing I did at night was take them off, it was
downright strange not to be wearing glasses. But <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">good </i>strange. By the next day, I was getting accustomed to having
twenty-twenty vision and loving it. “Today we’ll go in the truck,” I told my
wife, and climbed into the driver’s seat.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqj3Nh207i2b0rlRTt_gi8vz_Jqw1OK4I0s9QdpLsE5vY00gaIpkAVwCWjBBzzlEd5M3zh8Scn7Pm2bvM1IztgDUdP_IKsROw1id_Frbm5IXdpabv_b6z7maiFfAck8Yt-qPIbaVQ2uWwVMwlsvpwH-RfyTu_vJT_qzzzGj15GsPsm3krzIFmyxpYDP_IY/s1296/6th%20grade.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1296" data-original-width="905" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqj3Nh207i2b0rlRTt_gi8vz_Jqw1OK4I0s9QdpLsE5vY00gaIpkAVwCWjBBzzlEd5M3zh8Scn7Pm2bvM1IztgDUdP_IKsROw1id_Frbm5IXdpabv_b6z7maiFfAck8Yt-qPIbaVQ2uWwVMwlsvpwH-RfyTu_vJT_qzzzGj15GsPsm3krzIFmyxpYDP_IY/w279-h400/6th%20grade.jpg" width="279" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Age 12 with my first specs</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">As soon as I was called
into the surgeon’s consulting room, I shook his hand with both of mine and
said, “Before anything else, Patricio, I want to thank you from the bottom of
my heart for this gift, this miracle that you’ve given me. I’ve worn glasses
since I was twelve and before that, I had a lot of trouble in grade school because
no one seemed to realize that I couldn’t see. It wasn’t until I got my first
glasses that I saw, for the first time, what chalk actually looked like on a
blackboard. So this, for me, is incredible, to be able to see, and see
twenty-twenty, without glasses…well, you can’t imagine what it means to me,
especially at seventy-something. So, thank you, it’s an invaluable gift.”<o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">He was visibly moved. He
checked the eye and pronounced it a total success. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I said, “How soon can I
start reading and writing again?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Right now!” he said.
“Let’s just check to see what prescription you’ll need for your readers.” He
did a quick eye exam and gave me a prescription. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“But I want you to be
able to work right now, so, you know these throw-away glasses they sell in
Walmart or the pharmacy? Get yourself a pair of plus-twos until the optical shop
finishes your prescription ones. Those should work just fine for you.”</span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzZuW1sOfpUJuCx_Q1oRGoSC2BEm_V8ncoDvdaHWJ87pjYWP2MBi7KHG7s2WsDQQVxEBDbByW_zezZIf3-k-qJB3iCl6yql2dE_gwQsbawaLamsuDpi3KPdkZMmUT_lXfDHKSHlpVq0Z0VLnE9nBEgc5adljapWkGOhSryuqvBottFVMB2uze_J2fiqbAM/s834/First%20Grade.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="654" data-original-width="834" height="314" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzZuW1sOfpUJuCx_Q1oRGoSC2BEm_V8ncoDvdaHWJ87pjYWP2MBi7KHG7s2WsDQQVxEBDbByW_zezZIf3-k-qJB3iCl6yql2dE_gwQsbawaLamsuDpi3KPdkZMmUT_lXfDHKSHlpVq0Z0VLnE9nBEgc5adljapWkGOhSryuqvBottFVMB2uze_J2fiqbAM/w400-h314/First%20Grade.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>First grade. That's me, clear at the back, just left<br />of Miss Long, the teacher. I would get bored, because <br />I couldn't read the board or reading charts, so I talked to my<br />neighbors instead. Miss Long said I was "too talky" and <br />seated me as far back as possible. Sitting at the back, I was <br />basically blind to anything that went on up front.<br />Not exactly an auspicious start to grade school. </i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">He then told me to come
back in a week. But then he asked me something else about Ohio, I asked him
about Tucumán, then it was politics, then back to aerospace and Neil Armstrong,
and just when I was about to leave, he asked how I ever came to live in
Argentina…and that’s a long story.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Outside, my wife was
getting worried because it was taking so long. She asked one of the staff, who
have been in and out of the consulting room a few times since I’d arrived. “Oh,
they’re all done with the eye exam,” she said, “they’re just in there chatting.”
And gave Virginia a knowing look like, “This could take a while.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">This morning I was
thinking, as Rubén Blades sings in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pedro
Navaja</i>, <br />
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">La vida te da sorpresas<br />
Sorpresas te da la vida, ¡ay, Dios!</i><br />
Or in other words,<br />
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Life gives you surprises, <br />
Surprises life gives you, oh Lord!</i> <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">And you know, some days,
you discover it’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i> all downhill
from here.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01054536465220812092noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1616769513702255459.post-31082493913015788552024-02-10T22:46:00.004-03:002024-02-10T22:54:39.279-03:00BUENOS AIRES, MY SECOND HOME<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;">I arrived in Buenos Aires
a week ago in the mid-afternoon. The city, my second home, gave me a warm
welcome. A South American summer welcome. Ninety in the shade and a heatwave
that’s planning on sticking around for a good part of my stay. After the
relative coolness of Andean Patagonia, where I live, the heat was like a
sixteen-pound sledge that hit me in the chest as soon as I stepped off the
plane. But then, you survive and move on. Or as my drill instructors at Fort
Bragg, North Carolina, used to growl if you complained of heat exhaustion on a
seven-mile forced march in heat-category-four weather, “Take two salt tablets
and drive on, maggot!”</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0LvtvDFAB8lnQJX51Ko-hoBOZQJdBQ_pxwXPGNdZhNxY8jCHPCsF_VRCsELw4kgZC2-1-7txWaTfS_G75C1wwMuALeJQ3UbBghK3ckySK0boglxBntX20NirdneN8YkRlaWNRmDDMR6GOgwFC3dwwjNLmNj4vAnRhs9eISqA16GVhdulpITC_9DJVe-G7/s770/bs.as.%20heat.jpeg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="423" data-original-width="770" height="220" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0LvtvDFAB8lnQJX51Ko-hoBOZQJdBQ_pxwXPGNdZhNxY8jCHPCsF_VRCsELw4kgZC2-1-7txWaTfS_G75C1wwMuALeJQ3UbBghK3ckySK0boglxBntX20NirdneN8YkRlaWNRmDDMR6GOgwFC3dwwjNLmNj4vAnRhs9eISqA16GVhdulpITC_9DJVe-G7/w400-h220/bs.as.%20heat.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Admittedly, I was twenty
and weighed a rock-hard hundred seventy-five pounds back then, while now I’m
seventy-four, weigh two fifty and have a touch of cardiac insufficiency, but
you know what I mean. What are you going to do? As Mark Twain<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>once quipped, “Everybody talks about the
weather, but nobody does anything about it.” It was funnier back then, when
there wasn’t enough knowledge to think we could change the weather, but it’s
still just as true today, though no longer humorous, when we <i>could</i> do
something about it, if only we wanted to, instead of living in abject denial
and hoping it’ll get better on its own.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPvZxPBaZ30ehYwzY-frrFtUw6EsL_2elMfhQjuo7ELFEheeDUQvKq1cYtrA_hK2Q89F5AnNaHQyLAnGDjCa-6C-HJjD3UdK_TcitcacoV98lvzl2Momf0cBCvSiasze0vy0s40G0iTpGcyAf1W1vgFopExs1J0q_Baqw7j8aEl31eHFY3qEXSSRzXpeOw/s850/Twain.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="850" height="151" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPvZxPBaZ30ehYwzY-frrFtUw6EsL_2elMfhQjuo7ELFEheeDUQvKq1cYtrA_hK2Q89F5AnNaHQyLAnGDjCa-6C-HJjD3UdK_TcitcacoV98lvzl2Momf0cBCvSiasze0vy0s40G0iTpGcyAf1W1vgFopExs1J0q_Baqw7j8aEl31eHFY3qEXSSRzXpeOw/s320/Twain.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">I saw a guy die like that once. From the heat, I
mean. Right there, at Fort Bragg. We were each issued a little box of salt
tablets that clipped onto on our dog-tag chains. We were expected to take them
periodically over the course of training—no Gatorade for the soldiers of the
early seventies—and we were also expected to dissolve two of them in each
refill of water in our canteens. </span><br /><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEDqCNf36DSAHCAG9PFkG94HO7X_QEaYt4kkqkIOfDFRC3vFjSRv506_6wT3eKzUb2_lJMgRmQTngGO58s8zMOBLKNXTzLE4kgBROaYVr1yy6yBQr3nRH58ykn49jibqSN3qQFNiDBcpOoBKa0abRTrJ7DgpewVgdIeknLE4f-gNu4GEzVzN_b6VY9fm5L/s180/salt%20tablets.jpeg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="180" data-original-width="153" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEDqCNf36DSAHCAG9PFkG94HO7X_QEaYt4kkqkIOfDFRC3vFjSRv506_6wT3eKzUb2_lJMgRmQTngGO58s8zMOBLKNXTzLE4kgBROaYVr1yy6yBQr3nRH58ykn49jibqSN3qQFNiDBcpOoBKa0abRTrJ7DgpewVgdIeknLE4f-gNu4GEzVzN_b6VY9fm5L/s1600/salt%20tablets.jpeg" width="153" /></a></div><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">This guy, the one who died, at every refill of
our canteens, he’d always reiterate that he “wasn’t drinkin’ no goddamn
saltwater”, as the rest of us dutifully dropped our recommended two tablets
into our canteens—or cheated and dropped in one only—and shook the contents.
Nor did this guy take salt tablets as a preventative measure. “Don’t see no
goddamn Massai a-drinkin’ saltwater and takin’ no goddamn salt tablets, and
them boys can run all day in the African heat.” Of course, nobody bothered to point
out to him that the Massai he was talking about were tall, willow-thin members
of an African people whose origins stretched back to the beginning of time, and
that he was a short, stocky American, who, like a lot of us, was doing the
first really extenuating training of his life.</span><br /><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZdmQXa-ZVJh-uGVhbhSyggzTghyphenhyphenFIsItn8pRwgnUTdL3jSx09ijZn01RcBnLw1R_ijRiwD3ebNOJ6Vww-EiBo82z5UkIs27YMfjDN-wx7RJkS12aEiyJgDvUe2R6cfa6VjG8uAQV4KVRJERUO28k0nY3ZO36amCSsYQLpm2FaxL0frF7HhF-s6fCkkEmp/s218/basic.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="180" data-original-width="218" height="330" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZdmQXa-ZVJh-uGVhbhSyggzTghyphenhyphenFIsItn8pRwgnUTdL3jSx09ijZn01RcBnLw1R_ijRiwD3ebNOJ6Vww-EiBo82z5UkIs27YMfjDN-wx7RJkS12aEiyJgDvUe2R6cfa6VjG8uAQV4KVRJERUO28k0nY3ZO36amCSsYQLpm2FaxL0frF7HhF-s6fCkkEmp/w400-h330/basic.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">So anyway, on a
particularly long forced march with full gear, on a particularly hot day, this
guy suddenly dropped out, meandered to the edge of the dirt road and puked. The
senior DI, a whet-leather tough combat veteran who, not one doubted, could
probably double-time from Fort Bragg to Fort Meyers with no more than a
ten-minute break to check his compass and map, started running circles around
the guy where he stood, shouting for him to “Get back into that goddamn formation
before I put my size-nine jump boot up your young ass.” <o:p></o:p></span></p><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But the guy didn’t
respond, just stood there wavering on his feet. Then suddenly, there in front
of the bellowing DI, he dropped to the ground like a sack of potatoes. By the
time the other drill sergeants had halted the formation, the senior DI and
another sergeant were down on their knees doing everything they were
well-trained to do to try and save the kid. But by this time the trainee had
rolled up in a ball like a dung beetle, his entire body one big cramp, and when
it finally relaxed and lay out flat, it was because he was dead, and there was
nothing anyone could do for him.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Amazing how that sort of
incident becomes a mass learning experience that no amount of theoretical
instruction can replace. After that, none of us cheated on the salt we put in
our canteens or the salt tablets we took during training. We drank the
piss-warm saltwater, and found it the most refreshing beverage on earth. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It was just like on the
infiltration course, where you crawled through mud and concertina wire on the
stormiest night of the year with flares and quarter-pound charges of TNT going
off around you and two fifty-caliber M-60s strafing the air a barely safe
distance above your head with red tracers every so often to give you an idea of
just how close to sudden death you were. In preparation for this training
event, instructors repeated again and again that if you panicked, if you
ventured out of the “dying cockroach” low-crawl position, if indeed you “lost
your shit” and, god-forbid, stood up, you were going to die. This wasn’t a
game, they emphasized. This was the real thing. Nevertheless, every few cycles,
some faint-of-heart trainee would panic, jump up to run and, in technical
military terms, “get his shit blown away.” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">That served as a
practical lesson for the cycle the deceased was in, and for a couple of cycles
to come where news of the unintentional homicide would reach the ears of the
newbies, until the lesson wore off and some other poor jerk panicked and died. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaLHNUUNSh2NeXgCmcvs1EXNp8SF1ReOVzr2KqiC_pBQyQkrigrRA87C9s2ze_GKsA2sMKvQdTwyZ2mozDq9n0W3KPq1B0djIXyS78f4lxI0uNNy7CYTOSo6siQ9dnMGxi8kD4dRDxu5m1xoJyZCtq2UlvB3Z58PUw_v4-Pp_gcNoBsYBW5vRvcX78ZVdR/s1004/Keeping%20cool.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="704" data-original-width="1004" height="280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaLHNUUNSh2NeXgCmcvs1EXNp8SF1ReOVzr2KqiC_pBQyQkrigrRA87C9s2ze_GKsA2sMKvQdTwyZ2mozDq9n0W3KPq1B0djIXyS78f4lxI0uNNy7CYTOSo6siQ9dnMGxi8kD4dRDxu5m1xoJyZCtq2UlvB3Z58PUw_v4-Pp_gcNoBsYBW5vRvcX78ZVdR/w400-h280/Keeping%20cool.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Beating the heat in Buenos Aires</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I refer to Buenos Aires
as my second home and indeed it is, and keeps on being. I have a lot of life
lived here. The formative years from my mid-twenties to my mid-forties. <o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But I’ve actually had
three homes in my life. Wapakoneta, the rural Ohio town of my childhood and
youth; Buenos Aires, where I built my career as a journalist and translator,
and the mountains of central Patagonia where I’ve made my home ever
since—thirty years so far, the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere. In between, I
spent a year in Columbus (the Ohio capital, not the one in Georgia), eight
weeks at Fort Bragg, seven months at the Naval School of Music in Norfolk
(nobody trusts the Army to have its own music school, which would be like
expecting gourmet food in an Army mess hall), a year in Los Angeles with the
Seventy-Second Army Band, and fourteen months in Europe, based in Germany, with
the thirtieth Army Band. The rest has all be travel, not residency. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzGvrngXk_ALB4xmM85_GKULuI9kDi16J1SIxqWDmB9qo0DXpsA2K_U-HjsdKfvv7w8-hAwWGkcYg0U_AUD8aDgV4ZnuF2MbthfcS9Hj0D9_3swKhFd6UBaL9qf48b2Hr-12oX_YYxzcP-A5Wl97MgJgPHm6vVkrS4JxTZcly-GkJgRWSuGGlAMzJspxGQ/s1286/Miguel.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1286" data-original-width="966" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzGvrngXk_ALB4xmM85_GKULuI9kDi16J1SIxqWDmB9qo0DXpsA2K_U-HjsdKfvv7w8-hAwWGkcYg0U_AUD8aDgV4ZnuF2MbthfcS9Hj0D9_3swKhFd6UBaL9qf48b2Hr-12oX_YYxzcP-A5Wl97MgJgPHm6vVkrS4JxTZcly-GkJgRWSuGGlAMzJspxGQ/w300-h400/Miguel.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Says Don Miguel, It's the environment.</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Regarding the sweltering
weather here in Buenos Aires, my brother-in-law, Miguel, said it the other
night, when we were having supper together and, true to Twain’s dictum, we were
talking about how unbearable the heat was. “It’s the environment,” he said. And
he’s right. But I still can remember some real dog day afternoons in the
metropolis, even from the first time I visited the city, when I had just turned
nineteen and Miguel was still seventeen. (That’s how long he and I have been
friends and brothers—basically, forever). Fainting-hot days b ack then too.
Still, if he’d said it back then, he probably also would have been right.
Already in those days, thirty years before the turn of the century, huge swaths
of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil and of the Misionera jungle in northern
Argentina were being cleared, creating what amounted to progressive
lung-failure for the earth and doing its part to help indiscriminate use of
fossil fuels raise worldwide temperatures at an alarming—and perhaps
irreversible—rate.<br /> <o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbAn0tBitFXjpDkjb1rvy80uueSkiEDmi6E5DOFKL9Lp0i0twfsImLzAit6yP2DHyXEXMldqqCjC-luPWN9PTuvzOovUBTSe7si57aTvrh8yeXmCEpAEqJS236Fs12S3o-jf2xNZBtMuCpgA0JVdqgHqHak5gLj6a6YfIF6Z5F17o3vAuP3TZl2VaEscTK/s1286/The%20lighthouse_03.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1286" data-original-width="966" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbAn0tBitFXjpDkjb1rvy80uueSkiEDmi6E5DOFKL9Lp0i0twfsImLzAit6yP2DHyXEXMldqqCjC-luPWN9PTuvzOovUBTSe7si57aTvrh8yeXmCEpAEqJS236Fs12S3o-jf2xNZBtMuCpgA0JVdqgHqHak5gLj6a6YfIF6Z5F17o3vAuP3TZl2VaEscTK/w300-h400/The%20lighthouse_03.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>The view from Miguel's "lighthouse".</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Speaking of my
brother-in-law. He lives in a small condo on the seventeenth floor of an
apartment building in the Flores neighborhood. That’s about eighty blocks from
downtown. The place overlooks Plaza Flores in front of which stands the Church
of San José de Flores. The populous, bus-choked streets down below may be
sweltering, but of a summer evening, if anyplace will be cool and breezy, it
will be his little balcony. That’s where I was last night, chatting with
Miguel—we always have a lot to say since, as I say, we’ve known each other and
a lot of the same people and neighborhoods for the past fifty-eight years. It’s
the second longest relationship I’ve had, the first being with his sister. <o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">That narrow little
balcony has an added advantage to the prevailing breezes of Buenos Aires,
which, by the way, is a very apt name, since it means, literally, “good air”,
but could just as easily be called fair winds. The Copernicus Eyes on Earth
report might, on any given day, show LA, Santiago, Mexico City and Sao Paulo
with a soaring pollution rate of four or five. But Buenos Aires always shows
category one, clean air. That, despite its being a densely populated city of more
than fifteen million in the capital and surrounding metropolitan area, with
hundreds of bus lines, taxis, trucks and privately owned vehicles vying for
spaces on the main streets and avenues. Why? Because to the east is the River
Plate Estuary, twenty-five miles wide at its narrowest point between Argentina
and Uruguay, and to the west, north and south, beyond the city limits, lie the
endless plains of the pampa grasslands. Well, as I say, the other advantage of
Miguel’s balcony—his sister calls it The Lighthouse—is that it is so high up
that you can look out over the urban sprawl all the way to the vast horizon of
the River Plate. It’s truly spectacular.</span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1OOzL27Zy_uiTVDR_QVLSmbA2JHN8pjvV9gunLW3bEgZZpjN2SA0AI_JeMJSbq-_gli2kCMgym91mR7AHlNOm63l5SDwcFSn6cqqicQ1fLcGyPaUgq-S8UMyHKrifTexw7lFk-sb6Y7hovsT3yXMuwRK1NK4QuzYVQxUFCzF2W-6CIGnOHDpE7SZkc_Ck/s1286/The%20lightjouse_01.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1286" data-original-width="966" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1OOzL27Zy_uiTVDR_QVLSmbA2JHN8pjvV9gunLW3bEgZZpjN2SA0AI_JeMJSbq-_gli2kCMgym91mR7AHlNOm63l5SDwcFSn6cqqicQ1fLcGyPaUgq-S8UMyHKrifTexw7lFk-sb6Y7hovsT3yXMuwRK1NK4QuzYVQxUFCzF2W-6CIGnOHDpE7SZkc_Ck/w300-h400/The%20lightjouse_01.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>From the "lighthouse". Spectacular!</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Speaking of heat, I
remember once, when I was still a “young blade”, a day a lot like these, when
it was insufferably hot. Back then, I was reporting for a major Argentine
business magazine. They had assigned me a story that, if I could make it work,
would be the cover for the next issue. It had to do with a major multinational
whose local management was being increasingly suspected of corrupt business
practices that violated the law in the US, where the firm was based. I had my
stuff together. I’d done more than three thousand pages of reading on the
subject and interviewed competitors and former employees of the firm, as well
as talking to whistleblowers in the government, who knew precisely how the
corruption was carried out. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But if I was going to get
the story to work, I would also have to trick top executives in the firm into
admitting to some of the things I already knew from other sources. I had first
talked to wary department heads who, under careful questioning, came close to
saying what I wanted to hear, but not close enough. I decided I would have to
get an interview with the local CEO. Get it straight from the horse’s mouth, as
it were. But it would be no easy lift. They guy was as street-smart as they came,
which was the reason why, in accordance with his Italian heritage, he was
known, behind his back, as “The Godfather”.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">So, the day of the
interview came. I had a previous interview that morning with a source who was
to be key in my preparation because the guy knew just what information I would
have to go after if I was to catch The Godfather off guard and get him to say
some things he had no conscious intention of saying.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The prior interview ended
up lasting longer than expected and<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
was running late for my meeting with The Godfather, and being late was
something I couldn’t afford to do, since this fellow was one of the four or
five most important CEOs in the country.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Now, my decidedly Nordic
blood has never taken the heat well. It gets anywhere above seventy-five and
I’m sweating like a pig. That day it was already hovering in the high eighties,
heading for the low nineties, with overcast sky and relative humidity of eighty
percent. Add to that the tension of the interview ahead of me, and the double-breasted,
pinstriped business suit I was wearing, and it was a formula for disaster. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">When I stepped out of the
elevator on the top floor of the towering office building where the CEO held
court, I was still panting from dashing four blocks from the subway station to
get there on time. I composed myself in the passageway, and then stepped up to
the reception desk in The Godfather’s waiting room. “Hi,” I said, “I have an
interview with the CEO.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The young woman looked at
the schedule and said, “Mr. Newland?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Yes.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“He’s running a little
late. Please have a seat.” But then, she turned and glanced out the panoramic
window behind her with its spectacular view of the port and the endless expanse
of the River Plate Estuary. Then she looked back at me, cocked her head
quizzically, and said, “Is it raining?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I said, “Uh, no. Feels
like it might. But so far, it’s not. Why?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Oh, um, no reason.
Please have a seat.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It wasn’t until I sat
down on a comfortable couch and tried to relax, that I glanced down at myself. To
my chagrin, there were rings of soaked-through sweat under the arms of my
jacket, my tie was wet halfway down from absorbing the perspiration under my
collar, my white dress shirt was nearly transparent, and indeed my lapels were
spotted with sweat drippings, as if I’d been caught in a downpour before I
could run for cover.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWyDr9YAeMNlansg_tey0_3LHqkicKmIGyr4KiS7kBBXi1m7QEVZjPGuWrwzv4jdO0d8Ew0rA-ziJGkTWwTptyvawJ2gVAEB__oQbI_1cLdlF-AW2HvgTx7PaZBIm1Zn5Nusu-8YuE4U0ObMDLu7croI0pk3YceumQ1pGIfz73zlCWXQKk1CN_sVDGcGWV/s1214/Friends%20and%20colleagues_02.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1135" data-original-width="1214" height="374" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWyDr9YAeMNlansg_tey0_3LHqkicKmIGyr4KiS7kBBXi1m7QEVZjPGuWrwzv4jdO0d8Ew0rA-ziJGkTWwTptyvawJ2gVAEB__oQbI_1cLdlF-AW2HvgTx7PaZBIm1Zn5Nusu-8YuE4U0ObMDLu7croI0pk3YceumQ1pGIfz73zlCWXQKk1CN_sVDGcGWV/w400-h374/Friends%20and%20colleagues_02.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>With my friend an award-winning author Esteban Lozano</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I’ve had a stroke of luck
on this trip. Whenever I come, I get together with my writer friend Esteban
Lozano. Over the years we’ve had different haunts, some of which were the kind
of old traditional bars we loved, but that have since closed down as their
owners grew old or died. But for close to a decade now, we’ve favored a place
downtown, a few blocks from Congress, called the Bar Celta. <o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">We used to<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>meet there at night and often closed the
place with long beery sessions of talk, food and abundant drink in which we discussed
and debated writing, writers, cinema, politics and people and places we’d known.
Esteban has a wry, quick wit, so there was always a lot of laughter as well.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Lately, we’d had to admit
that neither of us is getting any younger, and Esteban went on the wagon a few
years back, nor can I drink like I used to. So we now get together at the same
bar, but for lunch that we wash down with lemonade (Esteban) and tonic water or
Pepsi Zero (me), when we don’t meet in the afternoon for coffee. But nothing
else has changed. The conversations are still lively and stimulating and our
friendship has only deepened over time. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But this time we had an
added treat. When I met up with Esteban on my arrival, he said, “What a
coincidence. Claudio is here. He’s at the seaside right now but will be back
next week.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">He was referring to our
mutual friend, Claudio Remeseira, whom Esteban knows from their youth and with
whom I worked for a few years in the nineties when I was special projects
editor for the Argentine magazine <i>Apertura</i>. It was, in fact, through
Claudio that Esteban and I met and ended up working together for a decade with <i>Luxury
Road Magazine</i> out of Panama. The magazine and the work we did for it
sucked, but the pay was okay, and our back-and-forth repartee in the messages
we shared was enough to make it all worthwhile. We managed to have fun, in
spite of the work.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">So it was that, this past
week, the three of us got together for the first time in years, because, since
just after the turn of the century, Claudio moved to New York where he’d won a
master’s degree scholarship to the Columbia University School of Journalism and
ended up living in Harlem ever since and working for a wide range of media and
projects. We met, as per custom, at the Bar Celta. Claudio presented each of
his with a signed copy of his latest book, <i>Ñuórk!</i> It’s a book of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Spanish verse that charts his early life in
New York, beginning with the nine-eleven terrorist attack on the Twin Towers.</span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhK4h_CZn4LAZzvVV_r4vCNPc_T8BVcIq8rul7f_g1rNdWPMYJt2FscfNCKDTtFTANshKHaYgU_hhrEFkJNGEvj_g2_X4fcMrI9DTwXNDT1lppbvNWAhBQbPMG8gTg0NbAPwGw2uJjmpB2e2sFPciAInbDuDuJSiq1s_L44lJLl2NvoS-k9klVaXBbCOn6r/s1286/Friends%20and%20colleagues.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="966" data-original-width="1286" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhK4h_CZn4LAZzvVV_r4vCNPc_T8BVcIq8rul7f_g1rNdWPMYJt2FscfNCKDTtFTANshKHaYgU_hhrEFkJNGEvj_g2_X4fcMrI9DTwXNDT1lppbvNWAhBQbPMG8gTg0NbAPwGw2uJjmpB2e2sFPciAInbDuDuJSiq1s_L44lJLl2NvoS-k9klVaXBbCOn6r/w400-h300/Friends%20and%20colleagues.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Added treat, mutual friend Clauio Remeseira dropped in.</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It was a great meeting full
of news, humor and chats about old times. We ended up commandeering the table
by the window for more than three hours. Old friends. Good times. Better
memories.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I usually don’t visit
Buenos Aires at this time of the year. Even in the best of cases, it’s always
too hot for me in the South American summer months. I try to come in autumn
when the weather is fine and the sky a deep china blue, or in winter when it’s
cold and often drizzly. But this time I had no choice. My US passport expired this
week, so I had to come to the US Consulate here in the city, a thousand miles
from home, to renew it.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Speaking of which, I’ve
been around long enough to remember when passport renewal cost twenty bucks. If
I remember right, it was fifty that last time I renewed it a decade ago. It now
costs one hundred thirty! <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">So anyway, right before I
came to renew it, I had an appointment with my cardiologist because I’d been
getting more fatigued than usual walking. It was getting so I’d have to stop
every block and take a breather, and I found that intolerable. So I went to see
him to see what we could do about it. He ended up doubling the dosage of one of
my medications and said when I got back he wanted me to go to a specialist for an
artery scan, even though the EKG and the doppler he did on me were normal. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I said, “Listen, I have
to renew my passport in Buenos Aires and it’s going to cost me a hundred and
thirty bucks, so I’ll make you a deal. The renewal lasts ten years. You have to
try and keep me alive long enough to enjoy it for a while.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">He laughed and said,
“Don’t worry. I figure you’ll have to renew it again.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01054536465220812092noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1616769513702255459.post-78194568999594557642024-01-15T23:30:00.006-03:002024-01-20T09:57:00.495-03:00RETURN TO THE FOLD<p> </p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: center; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">This is an excerpt from my as yet unpublished novel
entitled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Process.<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: center; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">It is a passage from Chapter 5 – <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Return To The Fold.</i><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">On my twenty-eighth birthday, <i>Doña</i><b> </b>María
presented me with a Miraculous Virgin Medal. It was decidedly elegant—a small,
meticulously engraved oval shield, with the image of the Virgin, arms
outstretched as if gesturing her flock around her, to the shelter of her
flowing robe. The medal was made of fine silver and hung from a strong but
exquisitely crafted Paraguayan silver chain. The gift was to be <i>worn</i>,
she made it clear, not shut away in a drawer somewhere.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2Kip6lZoI1s3e3Yt6-UrdP_7Lygz-12PXH1fIQ7YlUZp8ywgp2veFU6c2jNy5W36CNpF10HDhpyz-6sk2y8LA-0J9UUCOuvrOoKOPE-Ts4jZyTZt6AMJrWOijdqBdluvmIbZ3lpS79nd1gG92PHRVUCM2HzKeHl4_lEQOCSU_awr0oDZtwWN44xCSV89T/s1588/medalla_03.jpeg.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1588" data-original-width="1383" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2Kip6lZoI1s3e3Yt6-UrdP_7Lygz-12PXH1fIQ7YlUZp8ywgp2veFU6c2jNy5W36CNpF10HDhpyz-6sk2y8LA-0J9UUCOuvrOoKOPE-Ts4jZyTZt6AMJrWOijdqBdluvmIbZ3lpS79nd1gG92PHRVUCM2HzKeHl4_lEQOCSU_awr0oDZtwWN44xCSV89T/w349-h400/medalla_03.jpeg.jpg" width="349" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">I remember being <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>grateful and moved by the gesture, knowing as
I did what sharing her faith meant to <i>Doña</i><b> </b>María. But at the same
time, I felt called upon to have a lengthy discussion with her concerning all
the reasons why I should <i>not</i><b> </b>wear a Catholic religious medal. I
was, I explained, born of a Protestant family that would be hurt to see me
using a Catholic symbol. Since when, she wanted to know, did I worry about my
family's happiness. If I were so concerned about it, I would be living in the
United States, not thousands of miles away.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I went on
to say that the long and the short of it was that wearing the thing—although I
appreciated the thought more than she would ever know—meant that I believed in
what it stood for, the organized Church, that I had faith that the Virgin was
capable of guiding and protecting me. I explained that I simply wasn't
convinced that this was true. To start with, I wasn't even sure I could believe
in something as unlikely as the Immaculate Conception and the Virgin Birth.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">At first she listened with patience and urged me
every so often to make an effort to believe until I actually did. But this last
statement she considered an affront to the Virgin and she wasn't about to
tolerate it.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“</span></b><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">¡Basta! ¡Basta!”</span></i><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"> </span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">she hissed. I'm in no
mood for blasphemies.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">Realizing I had upset her, I placed my hand over
the back of hers where it lay on the glass-topped coffee table in the patio. It
was there, over a demitasse of her deliciously strong coffee that she had
presented me with the gift.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">D<i>oña</i><b> </b>María,”
I said, “please try and understand. I'm not a complete heathen. I believe
in...I don't know...<i>something</i><b>.</b> Cosmic forces, the release of some
spiritual energy into the universe when we die. Ectoplasm or whatever. I think
I may even believe in contact between mortals and spirits that have crossed
over into another dimension. I believe in the forces of good and evil and the
power of the spiritual over the physical. But I just can't translate those
beliefs into something as imperfect and intrinsically corrupt as organized religion
and certainly not into a system as authoritarian, repressive and narrow-minded
as Roman Catholicism.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“You make
it sound so monstrous! For me, my church is such a beautiful, wondrous place.
Do you know the comfort religion can bring? The strength it can offer? The
shelter it can provide? Why, I think I'm beginning to feel sorry for you. Don't
make me pity you, Carlos!”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“I'm not un-spiritual, María,” I offered rather
condescendingly. “I'm not <i>anti</i><b>-</b>religion either. That's precisely
what I'm trying to tell you. Religion is whatever works for you, I guess, is
what I'm trying to say. What works for me is all very personal and intimate and
yet somehow universal because I think that the different expressions of
religion, as suggested by the hundreds of varieties of organized congregations,
are all signs of belief in one and the same thing—the existence of something
superior to us, or rather something superior to this existence as such.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“Of course, but an organized church with
studious leaders provides a vehicle for learning, an authority to instill
discipline. We can't go around thinking ourselves so smart and superior that we
can guide ourselves.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“And you'd entrust that job to somebody else,
just because he wears his collar backwards.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“No. Because he has the studies and knowledge I
don't.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“You don't really believe that, do you, María?
Why, you must be one of the most well-read and intelligent people I've ever
met. I'm sure you know more about your own faith than the majority of the
priests you've known. You must question many of the things they try to blindly
feed you, don't you?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Such as?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“Such as, such as all this business about an
idyllic heaven, a fiery hell and that universal waiting room called purgatory.
You can't really believe it! Not an intelligent, worldly woman like you. It's
just a lot of cock and bull made up by the ancient high priests to scare the
ignorant into doing the will of the Church and the will of the kings of those
times.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiz6Z8PgSb7jCYRvvGvHK7TJe6dANgpaSlS16ecqBS-um9IA95KHcxDRQkFqOkop0OzqN-bti9oZ9vJbjbTWgBYIXOBnRN9jDdK4HudWORiuix9MuvSpzaf7bY6VN-CsmhVgLN4jGxq78SpmPOKu4uIa72a3HH0eomEVSULB4-7bbAfLTCx68gs_kF6ES-t/s563/medalla_01.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="465" data-original-width="563" height="330" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiz6Z8PgSb7jCYRvvGvHK7TJe6dANgpaSlS16ecqBS-um9IA95KHcxDRQkFqOkop0OzqN-bti9oZ9vJbjbTWgBYIXOBnRN9jDdK4HudWORiuix9MuvSpzaf7bY6VN-CsmhVgLN4jGxq78SpmPOKu4uIa72a3HH0eomEVSULB4-7bbAfLTCx68gs_kF6ES-t/w352-h330/medalla_01.jpeg" width="352" /></a></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">As I spoke, ranting on about the domination of
the ignorant through the corruption of religious beliefs at the service of
politics, she sat shaking her head sadly, almost imperceptibly. When I had
finished, she sat, hands folded on the patio table and looked me in the eyes.<o:p></o:p></span></p><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“Carlitos,” she said, “Everybody knows that many
priests are corrupt and ignorant. It is up to each one of us to separate the
grain from the chaff, to seek out the ones who are truly called to their
vocation, to find the ones who are capable of leading us, elevating us to a
higher plane, understand?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">I nodded but started to protest saying, “But
what about...”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">She held up a staying hand. “Listen Carlitos,”
she went on, “Everybody knows that the government of the Church is not always
on the level, that there are clerics that steal and cheat and defraud and break
their vows by abusing the confidence of their followers and failing to maintain
themselves aloof of the weakness of their own flesh. But they are no more the
Church than I am. The Church stands alone, perfect and indestructible, no matter
what a handful of bad priests may do. Because the Church is the expression of
the Trinity and the priests, no matter how high some of them may reach, are no
more than mortal beings, who, like all of us, will answer for what they do when
they meet their Maker. I go to church to establish communion with the Church
itself not the priest, you see?” Then she wagged her finger in my face and
sternly admonished me, “As for that business about not believing in heaven,
hell and purgatory, young man,” she warned, “I hope, for the sake of you and
your immortal soul, that you are not in for a terrible surprise! In the
meantime, make me happy, Carlitos, <i>humor</i><b> </b>me. Wear the medal, for
me.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">I stood up and went around to the other side of
the patio table, bending to kiss her cheek.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“No. I won't wear it for you,” I said. “I'll
wear it for me, because you gave it to me, and because it is charged with all
the love and good luck I know you wish for me as your daughter's husband.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">She smiled up at me, squeezed my hand and said, “I
wish those things for you because you are my daughter's husband, but also
because you have become my son, Carlitos.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">It was not, of course, the last time we would
clash over religious beliefs. One such encounter was caused by my insistence on
treating the Miraculous Virgin Medal as no more than a good luck charm. It
wasn't as if I went around rubbing it in on purpose. But it was obvious in at
least one thing I did, which, for <i>Doña</i> María, was unforgivable. I had
long worn a charm on my key chain. A footloose and much-loved great-uncle had
given the charm to me when I was twelve. He claimed he had gotten it from an
Indian <i>diablero</i><b> </b>in the Arizona desert and although I sometimes
found that hard to believe, it was a story that charged the little figure with
adventure and psychological power. The charm was made of silver and turquoise.
It was a totem of some sort, used, my uncle claimed, in the famous sun-dance
ceremony of certain southwestern tribes. But for me it was loaded with
something else—the magic that would never let my uncle settle down, the itch
that kept him moving, the energy that made him yearn to know what lay over the
next rise or around the next bend in the road. Every time I looked at it I
thought of my uncle the incurable wanderer, switchblade in his hip pocket,
duffel on his shoulder, making his way as best he could, from one strange place
to another, trying to soak up a commonsense education in the backwater towns,
hard-living waterfronts, wide-open countryside and adobe pueblos, from coast to
coast, across America, back and forth, to and from wherever his cash for a bus
ticket would take him, or as far as a hitched ride lasted. It was a beautiful
little piece of jewelry—simple, small but weighty for its size, pleasing to the
eye. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">I had always worn it on my key chain because I
had never worn anything around my neck. But the Miraculous Virgin was to be
worn, as per the giver's instructions, as a necklace, so that the medal hung
close to one's heart. It sounded logical enough, and I thought I might as well
concentrate all of my good luck in the same central location. So I slipped the
little totem onto the chain with the Virgin and hung both around my neck.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">At first the chain was a constant presence that
at once comforted and irritated me. But it wasn't long before the necklace with
its two amulets became so much a part of me that I would have felt naked and
unprotected without them. It was many weeks after my birthday, when the medal
and totem were as familiar to my body as a mole or a birthmark, that <i>Doña</i><b>
</b>María noticed for the first time that the Virgin was no longer alone on the
chain. It was a particularly sultry Sunday forenoon and I was sitting shirtless
in the patio wading through the <i>Clarín</i>'s weekend supplements as María,
Mo and Magda made <i>ñoquis con tuco</i><b> </b>in the kitchen. About half an
hour before time to eat, María brought me an appetizer of salted anchovies,
hard cheese and a glass of ice-cold white wine to tide me over. It was as she
was setting the snack on the glass patio table and I was thanking her for her
thoughtfulness that she saw the totem hanging with the Miraculous Virgin from
my neck.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“¿Qué es eso?”</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"> she asked sternly, the
pleasant, motherly smile of a moment before draining from her face.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“What?” I asked, oblivious to the now familiar
amulets and wondering if perhaps there weren't an ugly spider or a cockroach
crawling on me, given the look of disgust on my mother-in-law's face.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“¡Eso!”</span></i><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"> </span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">she hissed, pointing at
the charm on my chain.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">I tucked my chin and followed the tip of her
finger to my chest. I picked up the charm between my thumb and forefinger and
held it out toward her.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“This?” I asked, as she visibly recoiled from
the totem.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“Sí, eso.”</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“It's an amulet, a good luck charm. My favorite
uncle gave it to me when I was just a young boy.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“Take it off.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">I stiffened. “Why should I?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“Because it doesn't belong there.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“Why not?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“Because it doesn't.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“But it means a great deal to me.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“It has no place there next to the Virgin.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“It's a religious symbol.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“It's a pagan image and it's a sacrilege for it
to be there with Her.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“This totem was as much a symbol of strength and
power for the Indians as the Virgin Mary is for you.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“¡No digas estupideces!</span></i><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">Take that trinket off my chain.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“</span></b><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">Your</span></i><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"> </span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">chain? I thought this
was a gift. If it's borrowed, I'll give it back.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“Don't be an idiot, Carlos. Just do as I say
before your disrespect comes back to haunt you.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“Oh come on, María. Let's not start with the
hocus-pocus because I don't believe in it and you know it.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“Then you don't need that<b> </b><i>macumba</i><b>
</b>around your neck.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“Right. I don't. Not either one of them.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“</span></b><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">¡Basta!”</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“But I like them there because two people I love
gave them to me and because I think they'll bring me luck.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“</span></b><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">¡Basta! ¡Basta!</span></i><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"> </span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">I had that chain and
medal blessed and took them to the image of the Virgin myself and I think I
deserve better than to have them associated with a pagan image.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“What makes the Indian religion any less
respectable than Catholicism?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“</span></b><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">¡Basta!”</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“What's going on here? Stop it you two.” It was
Mo. She was standing in the kitchen door looking out into the patio as if she
were a stern mother come to break up a fight between two squalling children. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“</span></b><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">Pero nena</span></i><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">,” </span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">her mother cried, “look
what he has on that chain with the Virgin!”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“Hey,” I said throwing up my hands, “if she
wants her medal back, she can have it.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“</span></b><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">¡Cállense los dos! Mamá</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">,<b> </b>mind your own
business. You gave him that medal, now it's his to do with as he pleases.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“But <i>nena...”</i><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“But <i>nena</i><b> </b>nothing. <i>Te jodés</i><b>
</b>for giving it to an infidel.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“Look,” I began, “I don't mean to hurt anybody's
feelings, but...”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“And you shut up too, Chaz. Why do you have to
be such a big baby? If you see that it bothers Mom for you to wear that stupid
totem on the same chain with the Virgin, what would it hurt you to take it off?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">Doña</span></i><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"> </span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">María and I sulked a
little at the beginning of lunch, but I had my shirt back on so that the totem
was out of sight and soon we were back to normal. To save face, I continued to
wear the two amulets together under my shirt, but took off the totem any time I
went shirtless where <i>Doña</i><b> </b>María might see me.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">I soon began to realize that by wearing the
Miraculous Virgin Medal I was becoming part of a kind of secret order, an
unchartered, unspoken union of souls including <i>Doña</i><b> </b>María and a
number of her oldest and dearest friends, all of whom wore the Miraculous
Virgin around their necks and believed fervently in its special powers.
Although María had a myriad of wallet-size reproductions of saints of every
sort under the glass of her night-table and desk, in her purse and in small
frames on top of her chest of drawers, the Miraculous Virgin was the only one
with which she appeared never to be offended, discouraged or down-hearted.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4qjkL7qU4KyGwpzpMuAk8w1RgVnZ-G9kwPFe_zgUFzIO40YmKZqAmR9IBX34RHK5xpmJMQl25iCxXO6izNh4EYX0uJRWBwK-mzijBN-hPvNQ7gI3i0EGKXsFzclDXIx5gnOPcYUBf5OLcAXXv3w1oWIh1vnxY2spSciBqQYVSyvEv9RiBp6KhtaI7rl66/s275/medalla_02.jpeg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="183" data-original-width="275" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4qjkL7qU4KyGwpzpMuAk8w1RgVnZ-G9kwPFe_zgUFzIO40YmKZqAmR9IBX34RHK5xpmJMQl25iCxXO6izNh4EYX0uJRWBwK-mzijBN-hPvNQ7gI3i0EGKXsFzclDXIx5gnOPcYUBf5OLcAXXv3w1oWIh1vnxY2spSciBqQYVSyvEv9RiBp6KhtaI7rl66/w400-h266/medalla_02.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">Doña</span></i><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"> </span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">María's own Miraculous
Virgin Medal was a heavy gold one, oval-shaped like mine, but about the size of
an American fifty-cent piece. It hung from a thick golden chain around her
neck. The medal had been a gift from her father-in-law to see her through when
she was carrying Mo. It was a difficult pregnancy, the last few months of which
she spent nearly bed-fast. She nearly died in labor. The idea of the gift her
father-in-law had given her was to make sure that she didn't die and María was
convinced from Mo's birth on that it had, indeed, saved her life. If it hadn't
been for the Miraculous Virgin then, <i>Doña</i><b> </b>María once reminded me,
I wouldn't have had a nagging mother-in-law to worry about, but then neither
would I have had a wife, since Moira had come with the cord around her neck and
probably would have suffocated before they could save her.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">Doña </span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">María lived the last
twenty years of her life troubled by cardiac insufficiency, a condition which,
other than being somewhat careful not to overexert herself, she did relatively
little to remedy. She liked her wine with meals and she wouldn't hear of
cutting down on salt or red meats, although she had always been moderate in the
amounts of everything she ate and drank, since she was more than a little vain
about her ever-trim figure.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">About five years after Mo and I were married, <i>Doña
</i>María had a massive coronary. She was, fortunately, at home with Magda and
Alfonso at the time and they were able to get her to the hospital quickly. By
the time they got to the emergency room, however, the doctors could hold out no
hope for her survival. When Mo and I arrived at the hospital, we were told that
Mo's mother was not expected to last the night. One whole wall of the heart had
been destroyed and it had not been a strong heart to begin with. Doña<i> </i>María
was in such bad shape that even her closest relatives had not been permitted to
see her, despite the boisterous protests of her three children.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">Seventy-two hours after she was admitted to
intensive care, we were still in the waiting room awaiting word of a turn for
the worse while praying for a miracle. Most of that time, the Miraculous Virgin
was warm in the palm of my hand and a silent prayer kept running through my
head: “If you're real make a miracle. Do it for her, the one with the faith,
not for me.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">At one point we got Alfonso and Magda to go
home, telling them that if there were any change we would let them know right
away. Shortly after they left, a nurse came to my exhausted wife and said her
mother had asked repeatedly to see her. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“I'll let you in,” the nurse said, “but you have
to promise me you'll only stay a few seconds. The doctor ordered no visitors
and it could cost me my job if they find you there.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">Mo grudgingly nodded and followed the nurse down
the corridor. When she returned she was sobbing softly and said, “She doesn't
even think of herself when she's dying. She asked if we were eating all right
and said we should go home to sleep, that it made her nervous to think of us
out here all the time.” Then she added, “Go in, Chaz. She didn't even ask about
Alfonso and Magda. She just insisted on seeing you.” I looked around for the
nurse. “Go on,” Mo said firmly. “She knows what's good for her. Go see her.
She's asking for you.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">I had to duck the nurse twice before I could get
down the passageway and into the room. But there was no observation booth
looking into the room as in some of the more modern intensive care wards. It
was just a small, hospital-green, cell-like, private cubicle with a bed and a
monitor and nothing else to get in the way of the cardiac team in the highly
likely event that they should have to respond to an emergency.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">The patient looked very small and frail in the
high-mattressed bed, which was rolled up so that she was in a semi-sitting
position. The monitor's fluorescent-green face shone from a little shelf over <i>Doña</i><b>
</b>María's head. It blinked with comforting regularity and bleeped softly each
time it blinked.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">Despite her reported condition and obvious
pallor, María's head snapped enthusiastically toward me as soon as I entered
her room.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“¡Hola, Carlitos!”</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"> she chirped cheerily,
as if she were seeing me walk right into her own patio, where she was just
about to serve up a few strong <i>mates</i><b>.<o:p></o:p></b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">I smiled a restrained, concerned smile and
placed my hand over hers where it lay in a loosely closed fist outside the
starchy white hospital sheet on her stomach. A heavy golden chain spilled out
of the fist and meandered over hill and dale of the sheet like some volatile,
auric liquid that had escaped her grasp.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“Listen to me, Carlitos...” she began, but I put
a finger to my lips to silence her.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“You should be resting,” I whispered, giving her
hand a gentle squeeze, my mind inescapably tuned to every nuance of the
monitor's bleeps.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“I'll have plenty of time to rest once they've
nailed me into the box,” she snapped. “Listen, Carlos,” she said, and I
listened, although all I could really think of was the doctor saying she could
die at any moment, “I'm worried about you and Moira.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“Worrying about everybody but yourself is how
you got here,” I said.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“Bueno, basta,”</span></i><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"> </span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">she said, “I'm in no
mood for lectures from upstarts. I only asked for you to come in because I want
you to take Moira home.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">I was looking at the patient with real amazement
now. This was a woman with what the doctors described as a semi-destroyed
heart. A woman who was expected to die of coronary thrombosis and infarct at
any moment. And yet, her voice and manner carried the same matriarchal
authority as ever and her eyes were clear and sharp and willful. This didn't
sound like somebody at death's door and I was beginning to feel that my usually
skeptical view with regard to doctors and their prognoses was well founded. I
had expected to find someone hanging onto life by her fingernails, fighting for
breath and filling the room with the eerie sound of her death rattle. Instead I
found the same strong woman as always, her fears and pain under control, her
act together, directing family business even from her sickbed.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“They told me that Alfonso and Magdalena had
gone home to rest and that relieved me somewhat,” <i>Doña</i><b> </b>María went
on, “but now I want to know what you and my Moira are still doing here.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“We're just here in case you need us,” I
whispered.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“Need you? Why would I need you? Are either of
you doctors? Ha! I<i> wish</i><b> </b>one of you were a doctor. Maybe this
family would have a chance to generate some wealth for a change.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“You're exerting yourself, María. I'm leaving
now.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“Yes. Do, and take Moira with you. Go home. Eat.
Rest.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“You're the typical cardiac patient, María.
Always fretting about something or someone. Why don't you try to clear your
mind for a minute or so and get some rest yourself?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">She cast her eyes downward in a little-girl-shy
gesture that was typically contradictory in her. She was at once stubbornly
authoritarian and coquettishly coy in dealing with others—a carrot-and-stick
ploy that helped her impose her will.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">I bent and kissed her forehead and turned to
leave the room, but her stern voice stopped me at the door.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“Carlos, “she called, “take Moira home right
now! Do you understand?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">I smiled weakly and shrugged.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“Carlitos, please. If you want me to get well,
take her home. She doesn't look good at all. I'm worried about her. She needs
to eat and get some sleep.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">Still I didn't say anything.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“You won't miss it, I promise,” she said with an
ironic grin.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“Miss what?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 28.65pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 28.65pt 0cm 0cm; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">“My death,” she said good-humoredly. “I promise
I won't die until you've both rested, bathed, eaten and come back, and I don't
want to see either of you here until at least tomorrow morning. I'll still be
here. You have my word.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01054536465220812092noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1616769513702255459.post-28910082579355666812024-01-08T23:30:00.054-03:002024-01-10T10:27:27.365-03:00SAVING SERGEANT WHITIE<p> <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;">The other night I watched
</span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;">Saving Private Ryan</i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;">. It was probably
at least the twelfth time or so that I had seen it since my father’s death.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">A week from next Monday
will mark the twenty-first anniversary of Whitie’s passing. He died on January
15, 2003, aged eighty, after a four-year-long struggle with lung cancer. It’s
hard for me to fathom that he has been gone that long. He was such a major
influence in my life that it’s almost as if he’d never left.</span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAxJmFaR6tqC0bcONhI1T2OfF2CPmvexStodkVjgR7rxTRrLaDFfKXdcw36llwtfITZtkVBuYp9Yf5SctpRRsYWm-9mXAveJ-bn-2U-Ecla2N5XpF8ZtqCZ0_9yy1zKD87UNefT0kRz4mtyNS0EudLzrsbgF6zPG83rntE1LLPoMpcqS6E0YBC3rQBLbe2/s3791/Whitie_04_edit.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3791" data-original-width="2728" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAxJmFaR6tqC0bcONhI1T2OfF2CPmvexStodkVjgR7rxTRrLaDFfKXdcw36llwtfITZtkVBuYp9Yf5SctpRRsYWm-9mXAveJ-bn-2U-Ecla2N5XpF8ZtqCZ0_9yy1zKD87UNefT0kRz4mtyNS0EudLzrsbgF6zPG83rntE1LLPoMpcqS6E0YBC3rQBLbe2/w288-h400/Whitie_04_edit.jpg" width="288" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Sergeant Technician "Whitie" Newland</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I probably don’t mean
that in the way that most people might think. I mean, yes, Whitie influenced me
in some very positive ways by his own example of being honest, hard-working,
and as good as his word. But his effect on me has been peculiar in very
specific ways—for better or for worse, I guess you might say. My relationship with
Whitie was never an easy one. I at first spent a lot of time trying to win his
love, approval and pride in me, and then, a lot more time, later, trying to get
over never having been able to. It took a long time to learn how to eschew his consistent
criticism from every accomplishment I struggled to make, and to force myself to
realize that I was worthy of unconditional love and respect, no matter how
Whitie had made me feel growing up. That said, probably the greatest lesson he
left me with, whether inadvertently or not, was that I was on my own. I was
working the high wire without a net.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Despite that difficult
relationship, I never stopped loving him or trying to win even the smallest approval
from him. But it was only as a very mature man that I started to understand
that a lot of what was broken in me stemmed from what was broken in him. The
mistake in my early years was thinking that he was authoritative and infallible.
It was only with age that I began to realize that we are all, in one way or
another, broken children, who must learn to deal with the pain of our childhood
wounds, and that while some of our inner children were less traumatized than
others, we all struggled with our childhood insecurities. In that sense, I’m
Whitie, and Whitie was me.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></i></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicRWM_nZXk5T6g5oeDytSPSIvVYl1WuJDGGmo2gBdbutKIUJuHZFMcjPoFd2ebGn-yOQVvGBdVsQl-zTihWdAkwUlLCzqvSSs9whcxp_85DlxuWzdiDHwJxIxhQNiREELoNjKvGiVGrl1p_noLbavBQMCsYXRsyi55Pj2-IrlaOgHtb77VJCFQWKPIIRQs/s1824/Saving%20Pvt%20Ryan_02.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1143" data-original-width="1824" height="251" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicRWM_nZXk5T6g5oeDytSPSIvVYl1WuJDGGmo2gBdbutKIUJuHZFMcjPoFd2ebGn-yOQVvGBdVsQl-zTihWdAkwUlLCzqvSSs9whcxp_85DlxuWzdiDHwJxIxhQNiREELoNjKvGiVGrl1p_noLbavBQMCsYXRsyi55Pj2-IrlaOgHtb77VJCFQWKPIIRQs/w400-h251/Saving%20Pvt%20Ryan_02.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Spielberg's D-Day</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><i><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Saving Private Ryan</span></i><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"> </span>is a constant reminder of that fact. That
motion picture has provided more of a connection between my father and me since
his death than we were ever able to establish while he was alive. The reason
is, that every time I watch that extraordinarily well-made film, I can only
feel the deepest pain and empathy for my father during those three or so
horrifyingly formative years of his young life, the bulk of which he spent in
mortal combat in the European Theater of World War II. <o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisl_3dlhrbZsHAw_cRaZIaqwKqUwT4V3Mnz9_qys6Gk1lq-RBvBXA22v36CaMr6XfeQ0a-TS6wkLF6U6OinvdasSE0Rh-qKiyY9LRNYrS9ULeUWJsc29CmZQRtDd8WTgnlt52tII5ixnbpvzo3tOhmxITx_YcrDZ4F3L-uZE4sTM3qJXnHcjq7CMSXf20s/s402/Whitie_06_edit.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="402" data-original-width="254" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisl_3dlhrbZsHAw_cRaZIaqwKqUwT4V3Mnz9_qys6Gk1lq-RBvBXA22v36CaMr6XfeQ0a-TS6wkLF6U6OinvdasSE0Rh-qKiyY9LRNYrS9ULeUWJsc29CmZQRtDd8WTgnlt52tII5ixnbpvzo3tOhmxITx_YcrDZ4F3L-uZE4sTM3qJXnHcjq7CMSXf20s/w253-h400/Whitie_06_edit.jpg" width="253" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Sgt. Whitie somewhere in France</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">There are particular
scenes that are almost too poignant for me to bear. I find a lump forming in my
throat and tears welling up in my eyes in spite of my every effort to maintain
control of my emotions. It’s that there are certain characters and situations
that painfully remind me of everything I’ve been able to piece together about
Whitie’s War. About a time when my father wasn’t yet my father. When he was
barely more than a boy who had to burst into manhood and take on
responsibilities that were far beyond his years and experience. Three or so
grueling years in which he traversed the terrible grinding tragedy of the last
and most terrible part of the worst war in history, in which tens of millions died,
and on a road along which he won four bronze stars and a commendation from the
government of France, all honors we, his family, would never know about until
his death.</span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I once wrote about how, shortly
before my father died, my brother Dennis had brought him the video of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Saving Private Ryan</i>, thinking that it
was something that might “entertain” Whitie, since he had actually “been there
done that.” For a long time, the video cassette sat on top of the hardwood
cabinet of the TV. Every once in a while my mother, Reba Mae, would ask when he
planned to look at the movie Dennis had brought him. Whitie would say he’d get
around to it. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoikS0j66EZrgOzg4XBYlPPyr1MBjTDCQAGrw-vVEy-mdGGD1JFbmjYlf1QhfE7PeLJhyphenhyphen175pc3LRwXO1ds1Zt7zAwxFAnFIUX6xUniaH65lspY3QWFrJ2G6waWa3IPwFP5j37vPK1Kn6f0MF9VZqCIRTix51CwT0DP_93FRYA6oLa1JKyWeG0FXueWHG6/s984/Saving%20Pvt%20Ryan_01.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="555" data-original-width="984" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoikS0j66EZrgOzg4XBYlPPyr1MBjTDCQAGrw-vVEy-mdGGD1JFbmjYlf1QhfE7PeLJhyphenhyphen175pc3LRwXO1ds1Zt7zAwxFAnFIUX6xUniaH65lspY3QWFrJ2G6waWa3IPwFP5j37vPK1Kn6f0MF9VZqCIRTix51CwT0DP_93FRYA6oLa1JKyWeG0FXueWHG6/w400-h225/Saving%20Pvt%20Ryan_01.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"<b><i>Pvt. Ryan" - authentic horrors of war </i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Finally, one day while my
mother was out shopping with her younger sister, Whitie popped the video
recording into the cassette player and sat down to watch. When Reba Mae got
home the box was still sitting open on top of the TV, the cassette was in the
player, but the TV was off. <o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Oh, so you finally
watched that movie?” she asked.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“The first part,” Whitie
said. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“What? You didn’t like
it?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“It’s not that,” he said.
“It was just too much like it really was over there. I couldn’t keep watching.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Having spent three years
in the Army myself, but never having seen combat, my only experience with being
under fire was infiltration and night patrol training at Fort Bragg, North
Carolina, where our Airborne Ranger instructors subjected us to live machinegun
and small arms fire, as well as carefully triggered explosions, to simulate, as
closely as possible, what combat would be like if we were ever in a battlefield
situation. It would have been easy for me to speculate, then, on viewing the
movie, that Spielberg, king of the special effect, might have gone overboard in
staging the horrific battle scenes. Whitie’s reaction to it made me realize,
however, that Spielberg hadn’t. That, in fact, it was well-documented and as
close to reality as he could make it. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXS0dL6GkwQiAwoiayo0Lsn8vPONLoT6k50mqvJmqi-fMmLD3Jky_WkDp2sny9mvXQ_-n8n7XW0PE7Uqicej1p4iO4VRHYf_fTSHd2fluuzyvwnbH03r2bfd14nny8AukefVmfJ5K0HO99cJAEB9ItZT1ppEfmkIDIrXH9GU7EwoMwiYV0AX586nsgAPLh/s631/Saving%20Pvt%20Ryan_05.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="380" data-original-width="631" height="241" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXS0dL6GkwQiAwoiayo0Lsn8vPONLoT6k50mqvJmqi-fMmLD3Jky_WkDp2sny9mvXQ_-n8n7XW0PE7Uqicej1p4iO4VRHYf_fTSHd2fluuzyvwnbH03r2bfd14nny8AukefVmfJ5K0HO99cJAEB9ItZT1ppEfmkIDIrXH9GU7EwoMwiYV0AX586nsgAPLh/w400-h241/Saving%20Pvt%20Ryan_05.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Captain Miller and Sgt. Horvath (Hanks and Sizemore)</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">For those who have never
seen the film, it opens in the midst of D-Day, June 6, 1944. We follow Captain
John Miller (Tom Hanks) and his second-in-command, Tech Sergeant Mike Horvath
(Tom Sizemore) as they lead ashore their squad, attached to the Second Rangers Battalion,
under impossibly heavy fire. Their mission, like that of all other landing
parties, is to attempt to punch holes in the powerful German defenses, so as to
provide a path for the invasion of Nazi occupied France. <o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The back story,
meanwhile, reveals that two of the D-Day fatalities—not under Miller’s command—
are brothers from the Ryan family of Iowa. In earlier action, a third of the
four Ryan brothers has been killed in action in New Guinea. When Army Chief of
Staff General George C. Marshall is made aware that these boys’ mother will be
receiving simultaneous notifications of the deaths of three of her four sons,
he orders that a detail of men carry out an urgent search, with the mission of
finding Mrs. Ryan’s fourth son, Private James Ryan of the One Hundred First Airborne, and getting him out of
harm’s way. The rest of the movie deals with the ultimate sacrifices that
Miller and his men will face in accomplishing that mission, and the reluctance
of Private Ryan to be saved, which would mean turning his back on the only
brothers his has left—his comrades in arms. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxwWNLVKJcz44XojZvCrlsjUN7tNUMdivBWYQg335C-It4UCAWDR6GsUjwvj5KUJJTO6Ip_gxqDs53wXDCzp1SwkUcFlhoqOvm6xP4MDxzee4Yykp9m7pVS6TGtzaJcbD4B_jJxVjgMUVLAgOOtPqS8gCmUKJVYrqUmOZNuxTULXNwb6kk0iQ7xiVGCK_l/s1406/Saving%20Pvt%20Ryan_04.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="939" data-original-width="1406" height="268" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxwWNLVKJcz44XojZvCrlsjUN7tNUMdivBWYQg335C-It4UCAWDR6GsUjwvj5KUJJTO6Ip_gxqDs53wXDCzp1SwkUcFlhoqOvm6xP4MDxzee4Yykp9m7pVS6TGtzaJcbD4B_jJxVjgMUVLAgOOtPqS8gCmUKJVYrqUmOZNuxTULXNwb6kk0iQ7xiVGCK_l/w400-h268/Saving%20Pvt%20Ryan_04.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">The fear that the movie portrays, particularly in the opening D-Day
scene, is suffocating. You can almost smell it. The amount of fire from the
Germans being taken by the massive landing parties is withering. And it is a
little like shooting fish in a barrel, since the Nazis are well dug-in with
concrete gun emplacements established along the shore. The surf is running red
with the blood of Allied soldiers who fail to make it off of the landing craft
and to get to cover on shore before becoming casualties. In real life, more
than four thousand four hundred Allied troops died in the D-Day landing. Well
over half of them were Americans. That was more fatalities in a single day than
either the Union (3,155) or the Confederacy (3,903) lost in three days of
bloody fighting at Gettysburg.</span><br /><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0tw3VKGMAE9JlyfLTfqxwO1TBtH6F5tEqK4HOFqXJZtvIioGS-mLmq7iQr878K6DHK5MFf19TraFfQ2y52Zmhw_OqOQBdKY79i98MDUUlF-VoZAd0PnS0ujTQW1aswWBy4_kpGSMMnTOhjVERtNP87icjVkOLp_s5O0thFQLMJxPbkZy6grJoISegLnZi/s305/Saving%20Pvt%20Ryan_06.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="165" data-original-width="305" height="216" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0tw3VKGMAE9JlyfLTfqxwO1TBtH6F5tEqK4HOFqXJZtvIioGS-mLmq7iQr878K6DHK5MFf19TraFfQ2y52Zmhw_OqOQBdKY79i98MDUUlF-VoZAd0PnS0ujTQW1aswWBy4_kpGSMMnTOhjVERtNP87icjVkOLp_s5O0thFQLMJxPbkZy6grJoISegLnZi/w400-h216/Saving%20Pvt%20Ryan_06.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">The fortifications that the Allied beach assault troops faced as they
poured from jammed-packed amphibious landing craft and tried to wade ashore without
being shot or blown up, were incredibly formidable. The erection of them was
ordered directly by Hitler, and, as a whole, they were known as "the
Atlantic Wall". They were veritably cyclopean in terms of their extension,
stretching some two thousand miles along the European coast, and were built
specifically to stymie an Allied invasion. In accordance with Hitler’s
Directive No. 40, they included innumerable gun emplacements, some five million
land and sea mines, rows upon rows of so-called “Czech hedgehogs”—those strange
X-shaped metal things strewn along the Normandy coast—as well as bunkers and
fortresses manned by thousands of German troops. </span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Spielberg very aptly
demonstrates how impossibly difficult the landing was and how determined the
Germans were to halt it. He reportedly spent eleven million dollars—which seems
like a paltry sum today, a quarter-century later—and used a thousand extras to
recreate the landing on a concentrated area of beach. He even hired amputees to
pose as soldiers with limbs blown off, and obviously compiled a great deal of
military advice and intelligence in order to successfully pull it off. It
worked.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuUe-gq3HcHxbGnFlN_I8b1jxpPzl6e_M8gPRGw2k4-S4KWfXdlIJVTzkBg8aGH29FVEgPfzVC0m6-Bszi1BUO8VWat4xTD84BGf7mQ4onPGrjDRrHjkpsSCYY-r6CXmynFgJKM32m_hJ771plxkKn_QSvOCTOSGFs7PrULSnG8Vfacc9E3L9o2eos-vKL/s2484/Whitie_01_edit.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2484" data-original-width="1669" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuUe-gq3HcHxbGnFlN_I8b1jxpPzl6e_M8gPRGw2k4-S4KWfXdlIJVTzkBg8aGH29FVEgPfzVC0m6-Bszi1BUO8VWat4xTD84BGf7mQ4onPGrjDRrHjkpsSCYY-r6CXmynFgJKM32m_hJ771plxkKn_QSvOCTOSGFs7PrULSnG8Vfacc9E3L9o2eos-vKL/w269-h400/Whitie_01_edit.jpg" width="269" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A lighter moment and a bit of <br />sparring on the front lines in Europe</td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Long after hearing my
father’s take on it, I read the observations of a vet from my own time. In
2019, the Vietnam era Army veteran wrote in a brief review of the film,
“Fictional, yes, but combat authenticity was genuinely real. Twenty-one years
ago this movie was released and I finally watched it in 2019. I really
struggled to watch and I cried and I wept through most of the movie. I did two
tours in Nam. This movie was like being back in country. I will never watch it
again. It just eats my guts out.”<o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">This couldn’t help but
remind me of friends of mine who, less lucky than myself, endured the battlefield
hell of the Vietnam War while I was assigned to NATO forces in Europe. A cousin
who was as close as a brother to me, and who managed to come back but left part
of himself, for life, back on the Southeast Asian battleground. A friend who
joined the Army so young that by age nineteen, he was already a staff sergeant,
leading squads of men in firefights in the rice paddies and jungles of Vietnam.
Another friend who, tragically, came home in a box and whose funeral I attended
in uniform, just after completing my basic combat training. The many posthumous
awards ceremonies I played for in my time with the Seventy-Second Army Band at
Fort MacArthur in Los Angeles. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhU_bZcUV_Pj6sslu8oqHBXeL7WluauMYdExIaN_fZ5G5TxyZBMGWk2SWQrsBFLNPaJYvOf_0ITeee68tpaniY1wSno5p0w8B2of97564vuVuzCuRxMNjBPeCorznJ2uaQ4bxlLubqvgqD_OY-ci2qCa3M2hSdaY8gjG7tm1cY4VtDAMOFw1L9QXRSmdiZB/s3335/Whitie_03_edit.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3335" data-original-width="2915" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhU_bZcUV_Pj6sslu8oqHBXeL7WluauMYdExIaN_fZ5G5TxyZBMGWk2SWQrsBFLNPaJYvOf_0ITeee68tpaniY1wSno5p0w8B2of97564vuVuzCuRxMNjBPeCorznJ2uaQ4bxlLubqvgqD_OY-ci2qCa3M2hSdaY8gjG7tm1cY4VtDAMOFw1L9QXRSmdiZB/w350-h400/Whitie_03_edit.jpg" width="350" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Whitie in camp, somewhere in the European Theater</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I remembered too, when I
was stationed in Germany and Whitie came to visit. I asked what he was thinking
as we drove along the Autobahn from Frankfurt to Kaiserslautern, because he
seemed so pensive and uncharacteristically quiet. He said he was thinking that
he’d seen a lot of this before. That he had crawled over much of it.</span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Whitie always downplayed
his role, claimed he “didn’t do much” and “wasn’t part of the first wave.” As
far as I can tell, from poring over the history of the outfits he served with,
he was elsewhere in Europe and didn’t form part of the troops that took part in
the initial D-Day landing. But he was indeed one of the thousands of soldiers who
would take part in the Southern France landing that would come two months later
in August of 1944. And from there he would be involved in the swift and massive
push northward with the Seventh Army that would eventually contribute to the
definitive defeat of Nazi Germany. This all happened within the context of
Operation Dragoon, in which, over the course of a month of initial fighting,
seventeen thousand Allied troops would be killed, while seven thousand of the
enemy would die, ten thousand would be wounded, and another one hundred thirty
thousand would be captured.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkJrO11UKJ5XtogJgvCmcGz5_bdozd9WTZ3dcHH5RS55SubR6ksCOQQCX6BuLC0vDTMpFajY28PnWaZgESN3-_80JzA6q9ujnNi9T4gBhplbxE2ClFg_2uT71Igq81_XRXgfo_uJ5wxfcaslCK-lD9FbMN5ztNW-ZYqJBNAh41bEhgefgHwIP1vZUheHLw/s1200/Saving%20Pvt%20Ryan_03.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="675" data-original-width="1200" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkJrO11UKJ5XtogJgvCmcGz5_bdozd9WTZ3dcHH5RS55SubR6ksCOQQCX6BuLC0vDTMpFajY28PnWaZgESN3-_80JzA6q9ujnNi9T4gBhplbxE2ClFg_2uT71Igq81_XRXgfo_uJ5wxfcaslCK-lD9FbMN5ztNW-ZYqJBNAh41bEhgefgHwIP1vZUheHLw/s320/Saving%20Pvt%20Ryan_03.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Throughout all of this
and until the end of the war, Whitie would be a buck sergeant technician in
charge of a nine-man demolition squad that would follow armored and infantry
into the worst battle zones in the European Theater. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Saving Private Ryan</i> never ceases to make me keenly aware of
precisely what that sort of commitment and sacrifice signify.<br /><o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It’s all of these things
and more that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Saving Private Ryan</i>
brings home to me every time I see it. So it is no more “entertainment” to me
than it would have been for Whitie. It is, instead, a heart-rending lesson, a
learning process that helps me understand my unreadable father better—a graphic
glimpse into the horrors of his youth, and those of so many other young men
like himself, in his generation and my own, who lost their innocence and earned
a lifetime of trauma on the battlefield.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01054536465220812092noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1616769513702255459.post-31223089390969839192023-12-15T23:30:00.008-03:002023-12-20T12:09:13.207-03:00A MINIATURE ROAD TRIP<p> <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;">When I was back in Ohio
in November, one of the things I had on my to-do list was a mini road trip I
wanted to take. I had never been to Alger, Ohio, and felt it was about time I
paid it a visit.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I called up my friend
Mary Jo Knoch, who is an incredible photographer, and asked if she wanted to
come along and maybe snap some pictures. Mary Jo wasn’t very sure why I, or
anyone else, would choose to go to Alger as a tourist destination, but said,
“Hey, you know me. I’m always up for a road trip.</span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijhfOwCCCqbBmvr-_-qhUZwXjIP5fLud_GHz2d2fvZcO_WbYF6EiPpvkXP6K9UCm1f-hK0HAMw0_qUX4OLIYKmO9jKi0P0xoUHMsNJU_a88U2MmenFbd6sUDSzznz42IT9b_AFcQ9jgPqSKaci8eLPs2M1_K1Gr5tnluu3l5aWgXDB394mjf-_QkE5jjV0/s1311/Alger%20postcard.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="826" data-original-width="1311" height="253" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijhfOwCCCqbBmvr-_-qhUZwXjIP5fLud_GHz2d2fvZcO_WbYF6EiPpvkXP6K9UCm1f-hK0HAMw0_qUX4OLIYKmO9jKi0P0xoUHMsNJU_a88U2MmenFbd6sUDSzznz42IT9b_AFcQ9jgPqSKaci8eLPs2M1_K1Gr5tnluu3l5aWgXDB394mjf-_QkE5jjV0/w400-h253/Alger%20postcard.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>A vintage postcard of the Alger of yesteryear</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Alger, for any of you who
are unfamiliar with it, is a village of fewer than nine hundred souls, located
in Marion Township, in Hardin County. It hasn’t always been called Alger. When
it was first founded in 1882, it was known as Jagger, named after Elias Jagger,
the man who laid out the plans under which the town first took shape. The name
was later changed, however, in honor—and don’t ask me why because the village
is nowhere near the northern state line—of twentieth Michigan Governor Russell
Alger. It was finally officially incorporated in 1892. The town is located on
Route 235, a few miles south of Ada, Ohio.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The village covers a surface area of 0.28 square miles. As my mother,
Reba Mae, would have said, if you’re driving through, make sure you don’t blink
or you’ll miss it. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">For every one hundred
women over eighteen in Alger, there are only eighty-two men. That might mean
that men are in high demand in Alger. Either that or Alger women “order out.” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgj7TgIQOwVpn-w3YXrLSYwhH2Zz1duuUIo1qLa5GRq2CBw0DM5bBrPKXZF-oeRTx6ExKCCfTX07_4euldz90r9bvdZC8eviqkMYOcwhvKTHviXcYYjJGVMT8uR-xBRNAjIYS2kOg5rOqUbpuV5WCjUXUuslaPXi_60iRDFrEXK-_fR8UYwapGc6DrAOKFz/s236/Ray%20Brown.jpeg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="236" data-original-width="214" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgj7TgIQOwVpn-w3YXrLSYwhH2Zz1duuUIo1qLa5GRq2CBw0DM5bBrPKXZF-oeRTx6ExKCCfTX07_4euldz90r9bvdZC8eviqkMYOcwhvKTHviXcYYjJGVMT8uR-xBRNAjIYS2kOg5rOqUbpuV5WCjUXUuslaPXi_60iRDFrEXK-_fR8UYwapGc6DrAOKFz/w290-h320/Ray%20Brown.jpeg" width="290" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Ray Brown</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Not surprisingly for a
small town in rural Ohio, the population is more than ninety-nine percent white.
But oddly enough, then, the most famous person ever born in Alger was an
African American. I’m talking about Hall of Fame pitcher Ray Brown. Born in
Alger in 1908, Brown played for Pittsburgh’s Washington Homestead Grays, a
major team in the Negro National League.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Brown led the league in wins eight times between 1931 and 1944 and led
it three times in strikeouts in 1931, ’37 and ’38. He was one of five famous
black players named by the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pittsburgh
Courier,</i> in a 1938 wire to the Major League Pittsburgh Pirates, as being definite
major league material. Accompanying him in that sports writers’ assessment were
“Cool Papa” Bell, Buck Leonard, Josh Gibson and renowned Hall of Famer Satchel
Paige.<br /><o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Thinking about Ray Brown
I can only reflect that it has to have been frustrating for truly great black
players to always be relegated to the “semi-pro” Negro League, as if they would
never be “good enough” for the majors because they were born with the “wrong
color” of skin. Paige, who once played for the Cleveland Cubs Negro League
team, provided an inkling of that frustration, saying:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>"I'd look over at the Cleveland Indians'
stadium, called League Park... All season long it burned me, playing there
in the shadow of that stadium. It didn't hurt my pitching, but it sure didn't
do <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">me</i> any good." <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">So anyway, why Alger?
Well, whether I’ve ever been aware of it or not, like Ray Brown, there’s Alger
in my veins. Let me take a moment to explain.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Murel Newland, my
grandfather, didn’t often talk about his childhood. I always got the impression
it had been less than fun. But I once heard him say something about “when he
was a kid in Alger.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I recall one story that
my grandmother told about how Murel was always brawling. One of the times at
school that he got into it with another kid, the teacher couldn’t find out who
had started it, so decided to give them both a whipping—and I mean <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a whipping</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For that purpose, her weapon of choice was
the long-strapped buggy whip she used to drive the horse that pulled her cabriolet
carriage—this was sometime before 1910, perhaps 1908—the same year Ray Brown
was born in Murel’s home town.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Murel was scrappy, if
small, and known for being a capable and resilient streetfighter, as was the
other boy. Indeed, the fight had been about who could take whom.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They really didn’t have anything major
against each other except the need to protect their tough-guy reputations. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">So, when it came time for
their punishment, they both wanted to go first, to show who was the bravest.
The teacher decided for them, taking the other boy by the ear, and leading him
to a space open enough for her to get a swing at him with her whip. Murel
listened from behind a divider to the repeated slap of the whip. Ten lashes,
and the other kid didn’t let a whimper slip from his lips. He came out from
behind the divider red-faced but tearless, and murmured, “Your turn Newland.”
And then he waited there on the other side of the divider while Murel took his
beating. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Murel’s opponent couldn’t
have been more surprised when he saw Murel emerge from behind the divider
with tears streaming down his face. According to my grandmother, the other kid
came forward, put a hand on Murel’s shoulder and said, “Hey Newland, don’t let
that ol’ bag see you cryin’. Come on! What’re you bawlin’ about. I’ve hit you a
lot harder than that and you just bounced back up and tattooed the hell out of
me. What’s the story?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Murel looked down at his
vest that was hanging open and askew in front.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>“I’m not cryin’ about the beatin’,” Murel said, “I’m cryin’ ‘cause her
goldarn whip cut the buttons off o’ my vest. My mom could barely afford this
suit o’ clothes and she’s gonna be furious.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Murel was, however,
incorrigible. One of the other times he felt the lash at school was when he was
climbing the stairs behind his teacher and couldn’t resist reaching up under
her bustle and goosing her. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhOg1zGlg5g3Xha25S4ptKQ-sfZkHNLe4QM_Y3aX6xBUYelCDYaOH6zrEnt7fjDLldvNz21R7LepCIrAHr8UHEsGS0APrAgtDoxusN8OSvwtnA8dVo01-JPazIG9KntU2tERX5bBBtfv7cmm52pV9ZgrgrPPvBRDWhR2GkyYF3yRChAgLh0IkV0WCX0ZMJ/s502/Elmer%20Scott%20Newland%20probably%20with%20Mayme.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="502" data-original-width="336" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhOg1zGlg5g3Xha25S4ptKQ-sfZkHNLe4QM_Y3aX6xBUYelCDYaOH6zrEnt7fjDLldvNz21R7LepCIrAHr8UHEsGS0APrAgtDoxusN8OSvwtnA8dVo01-JPazIG9KntU2tERX5bBBtfv7cmm52pV9ZgrgrPPvBRDWhR2GkyYF3yRChAgLh0IkV0WCX0ZMJ/w214-h320/Elmer%20Scott%20Newland%20probably%20with%20Mayme.jpg" width="214" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>The only image I have of<br />Great-Grandpa Elmer,<br />accompanied, I believe, <br />by Murel's only sister, Mame.</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I never saw any pictures of
Murel as a boy. In fact, I never saw pictures of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">anybody </i>in my Grandpa Murel and Grandma Alice’s families until my
father’s generation. It wasn’t much of a picture-taking family. I never knew Murel’s
father, Elmer, but he appears to have been a rather severe, joyless man. And
Murel’s mother, Maude Bowers Newland-Numbers, never struck me as an at all
sentimental woman. She outlived two husbands—Elmer, and then Roy Numbers—as
well as a “gentleman caller”, by the name of Mr. Hemingway, in between. But she
never waited around for a man to provide for her and was always working at one
thing or another. This included owning and operating a diner across from the
Allen County courthouse in Lima, Ohio, a jail that is most famous for once
holding notorious bank robber John Dillinger. Holding him, that is, until two
other gangsters, “Handsome Harry” Pierpont and “Fat Charley” Mackley, walked
in, shot the sheriff, and broke Dillinger out.<br /> <o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Just as famously—at least
in our family—Maude, unbeknownst to her, served the two killers a meal just
before they crossed the street and murdered Sheriff Jess Sarber. That was in
October of 1933. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1DueC6GKHknNIsI-2g1oCfxOU_eTF74WZXrViQCCaP96Xt0TXeQ5BlDiMiJWetd7VV93LGRTpE8aTiQKGJloDVYM7TSJjn1WRjJ-F6sVCXvZXnPtp2OXP1z49nbzGA3vM5yUpP8mDkyCYIIIdkebCRfUhJQrru4vVgXf9esRxXbRi5eu20kqBPwKeNFFX/s186/Sheriff%20Jess%20Sarber.gif" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="186" data-original-width="145" height="186" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1DueC6GKHknNIsI-2g1oCfxOU_eTF74WZXrViQCCaP96Xt0TXeQ5BlDiMiJWetd7VV93LGRTpE8aTiQKGJloDVYM7TSJjn1WRjJ-F6sVCXvZXnPtp2OXP1z49nbzGA3vM5yUpP8mDkyCYIIIdkebCRfUhJQrru4vVgXf9esRxXbRi5eu20kqBPwKeNFFX/s1600/Sheriff%20Jess%20Sarber.gif" width="145" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><b>Sheriff Sarber</b></i></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Although Murel lived much
of his life in Lima, before moving, in his forties, to Wapakoneta, twelve miles
away, he wasn’t, as I say, born there. He was a native of Alger. Elmer made his
living as a barber there, and as soon as Murel was big enough to stand on a box
and reach the clients in the barber chair, he became Elmer’s apprentice. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">One of the first things
Elmer taught him, oddly enough, was one of the hardest: how to give a proper shave
with a straight-razor. I can still recall my grandfather using a straight to
shave when I was a boy. And he still made a barber’s ritual of it, heating
water, soaking a hand-towel in it, and wrapping his lower face and neck in the
steaming towel to soften his beard. He would then whip up a froth of shaving
soap with his brush in a mug, and lather up slowly and fully with that same
brush, before tuning up his fearsome blade on a razor strop, and then carefully
scraping off his beard with it. I was in junior high before he deigned to
switch to a safety razor in which he always used Wilkinson Sword Steel blades.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRoDaeIS4yqIPl-mFPcj9MTCnBlmPBDCt-slISglge5NksfWLPMGWMEQB8r3Fv0wxKDLEoZrHKgcvSbIOrWRIHK0V4XBeoQ56Rmh-HLuIdnUUvCR4gOB81UWc53xDp5bqAoDjTHJob9g-TPU6N24iZ6pPdHJlIUz0wTT_QB-f4xptd1t6WsSVS7MMzvsMX/s413/Maude%20Numbers_crop.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="413" data-original-width="170" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRoDaeIS4yqIPl-mFPcj9MTCnBlmPBDCt-slISglge5NksfWLPMGWMEQB8r3Fv0wxKDLEoZrHKgcvSbIOrWRIHK0V4XBeoQ56Rmh-HLuIdnUUvCR4gOB81UWc53xDp5bqAoDjTHJob9g-TPU6N24iZ6pPdHJlIUz0wTT_QB-f4xptd1t6WsSVS7MMzvsMX/w165-h400/Maude%20Numbers_crop.jpg" width="165" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Great-Grandma<br />Maude Numbers</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Murel would later—back
when Lima, Ohio, was still nicknamed “Little Chicago”— get a job in the city, working
in an upscale barbershop in a major Lima hotel. He would then go on to join
another barber in opening a barbershop of his own at 38 Public Square, in the
heart of downtown Lima.<br /><o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"></p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Although I always enjoyed
any stories of the “olden says” that senior members of both my father’s and my
mother’s families would tell me, </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;">and although I had a more than a passing
interest in talking to people from my parents’ and grandparents’ generations
from the time I was very young, it has only been in the past decade or so—much
too late to matter, perhaps—that I’ve lent even minimal interest to our
genealogy. It started with random thoughts about how complicated the spreading
branches of a family tree can be. I was considering, despite thinking of myself
as a combination of the Newland and Weber clans, how many other families I was
blood relation to: the Henrys, the Hamiltons, the Cavinders, the Leningers, the
Hatterys, the Bowerses, the Gossards, the Landises, the Kennedys, etc., etc.
Who were these people? Where did they come from, and how far back did our
mutual roots reach?</span><div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;">However, there always
seems to be something more pressing to occupy my time than actually taking a genuine
interest in doing a serious genealogical study. Besides, knowing myself and my
natural and professional bent for research, taking up a task like that could
end up occupying the bulk of my time for the rest of my life.</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTLjOvWDrUPCUjmah806jP4da3ARLtcmD_ucMzWIA_qx8ijtBhwc1dz8sEzLYyvCqKmnElBIMtGNu7gtqSxYZW5NaW7Ls8Dxo39FRQUciako7uRKotJ2Utyjossc1y3OAYHQNcMzCIJhBA1Gd2Rkgt7Csts2I5E9Xvvyn8MeFzDDpSemsFCUqaIN5N-w5G/s655/Murel%20Newland%20barber%20shop%20Lima%20Ohio%201926_crop.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="507" data-original-width="655" height="310" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTLjOvWDrUPCUjmah806jP4da3ARLtcmD_ucMzWIA_qx8ijtBhwc1dz8sEzLYyvCqKmnElBIMtGNu7gtqSxYZW5NaW7Ls8Dxo39FRQUciako7uRKotJ2Utyjossc1y3OAYHQNcMzCIJhBA1Gd2Rkgt7Csts2I5E9Xvvyn8MeFzDDpSemsFCUqaIN5N-w5G/w400-h310/Murel%20Newland%20barber%20shop%20Lima%20Ohio%201926_crop.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Murel (wearing tie, standing) in his Lima barbershop</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">So, making the journey to
Alger was a mere gesture, a one-day genealogical fishing expedition, and having
an enthusiastic travel partner like Mary Jo along promised to make it fun. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Moreover, once we discussed it, she took a
more than pedestrian interest. After all, besides being my long-time friend,
she is also an honorary Newland, having been my first cousin Greg Newland’s
significant other for forty years before his death.<o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The thing that had really
piqued my interest was that a reader, who had seen a piece I wrote about
Murel’s Lima barbershop, in which I mentioned, in passing, his “Algerian”
origins, wrote and told me that she was from Alger, and that Newland was a
well-known name there. There was even a diner there that was still run by some
people named Newland, she said.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It didn’t take much
research to find out that my family’s roots in Alger stretched back to at least
the time of my great-great grandfather, Abraham Newland. Born in 1812, he was
originally from somewhere in Pennsylvania, but had moved, as a young man, to
Hardin County, on the site of Alger, in the Ohio Territory. I was excited to
find evidence that his mortal remains had been laid to rest, in 1883, at Preston
Cemetery in Alger.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Then, as usual, I got
sidetracked. Although I made a mental note to visit Alger the next time I was
back in the US for a visit, my research stalled at Abe. So when Mary Jo and I
agreed on the road trip, it was more of a random long ride in the country with
the Newland connection to Alger as an excuse for it. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Google Maps suggested
there were several ways to get to Alger from Wapakoneta, where I was staying,
but I just clicked START and let the Google lady’s voice guide me along the supposedly
fastest route—Wapak to Lima on I-75, exiting at the Hardin Pike, and taking it
to Route 235, which runs through the heart of Alger.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">After we got off the
Interstate, it was a lovely, bucolic journey, through the rural Ohio countryside,
on a really gorgeous, crisp, blue-and-golden autumn Saturday. The trip took
less than an hour. (There are shorter ways to get there from Wapakoneta, but
the Google lady liked I-75, which, I now realize, took us out of our way).</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgh8almBY23nF-1vKasD3UaQZ3sQq_j0iUy5XyebasShyphenhyphen_q_3sSOkLiJ5hw2sL9N5wP2ZKzS52bL9Sc-5Rqr4wjqwJcufvi3shkTek-MBrKrERX2zRY8D2l4vvgTuqbha5BDWkZbxjPXOntCi8BaPrflE-HoHSh1eBR4Hv76ifb3-9O_paBz-muqhGqAe96/s285/Welcome%20to%20Alger.jpeg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="177" data-original-width="285" height="199" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgh8almBY23nF-1vKasD3UaQZ3sQq_j0iUy5XyebasShyphenhyphen_q_3sSOkLiJ5hw2sL9N5wP2ZKzS52bL9Sc-5Rqr4wjqwJcufvi3shkTek-MBrKrERX2zRY8D2l4vvgTuqbha5BDWkZbxjPXOntCi8BaPrflE-HoHSh1eBR4Hv76ifb3-9O_paBz-muqhGqAe96/w320-h199/Welcome%20to%20Alger.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Now, I should note that
Mary Jo is a planner, and I could tell that my footloose, no-plan approach to
things was making her uneasy. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“What’re we looking for?”
she asked as I started coasting around the village at an almost pedestrian
pace.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Damned if I know,” I
muttered. “A diner, I guess.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Take Lee Street,” she
said, “It looks like kind of a main drag.” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">We did, but you can’t go
very far in Alger before you find yourself out of town again. Eventually,
however, we did come across a place that looked as if it was, or had been a
diner. But it was closed. Indeed, it looked permanently closed. Then, on Main
Street, we came across another place with a big PEPSI sign outside. Mary Jo had
a Google Map of Alger open on her phone. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">"This appears to be a
diner,” she said. “I think it’s the One Fourteen Diner.” But it
was apparently closed on Saturday afternoons.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I said, “Okay, let’s try
and find the cemetery, then we’ll come back.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><br />Consulting her phone map
again, Mary Jo said, “Okay, turn left…Now turn right. Looks like it’s a couple
miles out in the country.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Shortly, we came to the
cemetery entrance. It was a small, typical, rural graveyard, pretty much
surrounded by fields, with the exception of a nearby truck repair operation.
The internal streets were one-car narrow, and the graves came right up to them,
so you couldn’t pull off without parking on somebody. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“If you want to get out,”
I said, “I’ll drive to the back and find a place to put the car.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Mary Jo, amused, glanced
around in all directions. There was no one else in the cemetery. No one passing
by on the road.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">She grinned at me and
said, “Doesn’t look like there’s much traffic.” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Just in case,” I said.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“O-<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">kay</i>,” she shrugged, and got out of the car. I found the only
cross-street, which dead-ended at the edge of a field, and left the car there. <o:p></o:p></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9m0p_0dLvFIH0TXdJhaUSflvzhlk_LvamDkuIiZT1T0SwP_SNJGh-s3G0-gvpbjinuauUvuwEoNyfas-4TiI6AdIjhxvfA8WlAmaKA-Rma0HC3mNnMk0v3dB36GS4lJciyio_bLOyPSIpr8j_tipGMNp5Nk1yE90TeTs9fywY5XgT14PxSOg3Aom4PVX7/s2010/Jodi_08.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1510" data-original-width="2010" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9m0p_0dLvFIH0TXdJhaUSflvzhlk_LvamDkuIiZT1T0SwP_SNJGh-s3G0-gvpbjinuauUvuwEoNyfas-4TiI6AdIjhxvfA8WlAmaKA-Rma0HC3mNnMk0v3dB36GS4lJciyio_bLOyPSIpr8j_tipGMNp5Nk1yE90TeTs9fywY5XgT14PxSOg3Aom4PVX7/w400-h300/Jodi_08.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>"Found it!" cries Mary Jo before I even get started.</i></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“We’re looking for
anything that says Newland,” I called to her. “You go that way. I’ll go this
way.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Smart girl, Mary Jo had
started perusing the inscriptions on the graves nearest the road. It stood to
reason that the ones there would be the oldest graves in the cemetery. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Found it!” she called
before I even had a chance to start looking.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Mary Jo was standing in a
section of the graveyard where the tombstones were quite old. So old, in fact,
that the inscriptions on most of them were nearly illegible. I kept wishing I
had some big sheets of paper and a chunk of charcoal to lift their reliefs. In
the midst of all of these old stones, however, was a fairly new, modern
headstone with the name Andrew Newland emblazoned on it. He was born in 1838
and died in 1910. I can only guess that there were still members of his immediate
family or that he had been a pillar of the community, since his was the only
Newland grave with a new headstone. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But what had Andrew been
to me and to my cousin Greg. Both Mary Jo and I whipped out our phones and
began an immediate, on-the-spot research project.</span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1LTL5Z6wggMoLoMpRZ25wZtWcpHzr0ZUIyDzZOwGxAQ1IPWBjLIToigD28HswPK5Uvm6A4VkURtx6jV2Fwjb9TTINxyq6CxTrIb3rxVKD1hdWREgnNrDAAbD7Q08PNx4-xP-R3gqFWhV40acuaNlFZhJsvYH4fbSVV1190Q5ebQw-3iekbAKzwArGdmFw/s2010/Jodi_01.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2010" data-original-width="1510" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1LTL5Z6wggMoLoMpRZ25wZtWcpHzr0ZUIyDzZOwGxAQ1IPWBjLIToigD28HswPK5Uvm6A4VkURtx6jV2Fwjb9TTINxyq6CxTrIb3rxVKD1hdWREgnNrDAAbD7Q08PNx4-xP-R3gqFWhV40acuaNlFZhJsvYH4fbSVV1190Q5ebQw-3iekbAKzwArGdmFw/s320/Jodi_01.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Andrew's new monument</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Looks like he was
Elmer’s brother,” I said. “So our great-great uncle?” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Mary Jo found a site that
gave more of the family genealogy and listed Syrus Elmer (strange spelling, but
our great-grandfather’s actual first name, which may be why he went by Elmer)
and Andrew as siblings.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“But wait a second,” I
said, “Andrew was born in 1838, and Elmer wasn’t born until 1874!” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Further and deeper research was apparently
going to be necessary.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Right then, and in the
coming days, I would find out that Andrew and Elmer were half-brothers. Abe had
lived to a ripe old age for those times (seventy-one) and outlived his first
wife, Mary Kerns Newland, by twenty years. The couple had six children:
Jeremiah, Andrew, William, Rachel, Sanford and Nancy.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhr3MhBjyYiX2cr_paCw_OGKPyUfZhksqfSdYoUKp7-wLkCdyzk3GXFN37lyO-SOduHl5LvYu_zSg0lQYCKQnMxNC-A9i-61AfRPPYYGzN5U9HhiYw-ttcDjOiXRBt-APn76BAXKcOTRdT5LdRjFnL-QJ3nj7yr3Y7LDNnFQ7Dw4KImFtpYJD6HY4UQgTTw/s444/Nancy%20Newland%20Goubeau.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="444" data-original-width="252" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhr3MhBjyYiX2cr_paCw_OGKPyUfZhksqfSdYoUKp7-wLkCdyzk3GXFN37lyO-SOduHl5LvYu_zSg0lQYCKQnMxNC-A9i-61AfRPPYYGzN5U9HhiYw-ttcDjOiXRBt-APn76BAXKcOTRdT5LdRjFnL-QJ3nj7yr3Y7LDNnFQ7Dw4KImFtpYJD6HY4UQgTTw/s320/Nancy%20Newland%20Goubeau.jpg" width="182" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Nancy Newland's grave<br /> in the Hattery plot.</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Abraham later remarried,
taking Rebecca Hattery, who was thirty-two years his junior, as his bride.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With Rebecca, Abe sired four more
children—Melvin (1864-1920), Charles (1867-1943), Mary (1873-1938), and Great-Grandpa
Elmer (1874-1932). It was interesting to find out just how closely linked to
the history of the Village of Alger my family was. Even up to the time of Elmer
and my Grandpa Murel. Of Elmer’s siblings, two, Melvin and Charles, are buried
in Preston Cemetery. The body of Elmer’s sister, Mary Newland Shaw, lies in the
cemetery in nearby Harrod, probably in her husband’s family plot. Elmer, for
his part, is buried next to my Great-Grandma Maude, who lived to be eighty-six,
in Memorial Park Cemetery in Lima, where my grandfather and grandmother were
also laid to rest. <o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Of Elmer’s half-siblings,
the only one not buried in Preston Cemetery is Jeremiah, a Sergeant in the 82<sup>nd</sup>
Ohio Infantry of the US Army, whose body lies in a cemetery in Cass County, Nebraska.
He was twice wounded during the Civil War at Chancellorsville, Virginia, and at
Wauhatchie, Tennessee. I can only assume that it was the Indian Wars of the
eighteen-sixties and seventies that took him to Nebraska, where he was probably
discharged and later died, in 1886, aged fifty-one. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is no record of the burial of their
mother, Mary Kearns Newland, but she is listed as “probably buried in Preston
Cemetery.” Nor does Abe have a tombstone any longer—natural wear and tear,
vandals? Who knows? But there is indeed a record of his burial there. His
second wife, Rebecca Hattery, is also buried at Alger’s Preston Cemetery, and
we saw a Hattery monument within the area where the Newlands are buried while
we were visiting the graveyard. We also found William’s tombstone, broken off
of its base and lying flat in the grass under a walnut tree. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixknuy_b-J_vWlvkrHDCoosx_ksT2QMd9jl0nvmKXH3QhEUWEMSxX3ucmek2TqzpnXGZgZaS5n3ulNTeffSSwzFSusjreB7KQe2Hm966mglDuuowX9BCgiBPlokzxycwvvQ36VVTojw5T8VJLVeqmH2vEJW1CwNRAZzPDpSji9gWxWvjJKIXc7dhzQD1iQ/s333/wm%20Newland.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="333" data-original-width="250" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixknuy_b-J_vWlvkrHDCoosx_ksT2QMd9jl0nvmKXH3QhEUWEMSxX3ucmek2TqzpnXGZgZaS5n3ulNTeffSSwzFSusjreB7KQe2Hm966mglDuuowX9BCgiBPlokzxycwvvQ36VVTojw5T8VJLVeqmH2vEJW1CwNRAZzPDpSji9gWxWvjJKIXc7dhzQD1iQ/s320/wm%20Newland.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>William Newland's stone, broken<br />off and lying in the grass</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Andrew, like Jeremiah,
served with the Union Army during the Civil War. He was a corporal, also with
the 82<sup>nd</sup> Ohio Infantry. He was severely wounded at the Gettysburg,
during the bloodiest battle of the war, in July of 1863. His wounds were such
that he was discharged from further service and returned home to Alger. Despite
this, he would live for another forty-seven years.<o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">All of this rich family
history, Mary Jo and I were able to glean from clues we found in the little
cemetery on the outskirts of the Village of Alger, the town where the Newlands’
Ohio history appears to have begun.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Let’s go back to town
and see if we can find anybody who knows some Newlands that aren’t dead,” I
suggested, and Mary Jo concurred. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Easier said than done. It
seems Alger pretty much rolls up the sidewalks on Saturday afternoons, so it
wasn’t like we had throngs of people on the streets to talk to. But we did find
a convenience store open, where people were actually lining up inside to buy
this and that. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When there was a lull, I
walked up to the young woman behind the counter and said, apropos of nothing,
“Hi! Do you know any Newlands here in town?”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQCzffgAtjvrjBoql_aosE7hr8KDaK2CaW1fmDJVpCWcDvF6xmyIiDGGWHzcjF8TiFhWdbNoEeIi6wvqb4HnZBqxuAArKSU-2cHncaMpfVlhrmM2-e7UQMDKJm7vVRjYFS9dapNDeEOR5zN-jv-4f3aBLWhmjwbXyM7JfR21czg39zxak-e2WHWVwuR-eb/s1600/Jodi_03.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQCzffgAtjvrjBoql_aosE7hr8KDaK2CaW1fmDJVpCWcDvF6xmyIiDGGWHzcjF8TiFhWdbNoEeIi6wvqb4HnZBqxuAArKSU-2cHncaMpfVlhrmM2-e7UQMDKJm7vVRjYFS9dapNDeEOR5zN-jv-4f3aBLWhmjwbXyM7JfR21czg39zxak-e2WHWVwuR-eb/s320/Jodi_03.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Eroded to nearly illegible</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">She smiled amiably, but
looked at me as if I were a lunatic.<o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Sorry,” I said, “I’m a
Newland. That’s why I’m asking.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Newland?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Yes.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“You know, I don’t, but
I’ve heard the name.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Yes,” I laughed.
“Preston Cemetery’s full of them.” And then added, “Are you from here
originally.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“All my life,” she said.
She was in, probably, her early twenties, so in all fairness, “all her life”
didn’t cover a lot of history. “Maybe check the phone book?” she suggested helpfully,
but she didn’t seem to have one. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Thanks anyway,” I said.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Outside, Mary Jo had
struck up a conversation with a guy in a pick-up truck. She introduced me and
said he was a local contractor. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Yeah,” the guy said, “we
do just about everything you can think of in building and remodeling.” He
handed Mary Jo his card.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Well listen,” I said, “you
must know a lot of people around here. My people are originally from here. Do
you happen to know any Newlands?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“I know there are some
around,” he said, “but I don’t know them.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">After he left, I turned
to Mary Jo and said, “Okay, I’m googling Newland – Alger, Ohio.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Right away I got a hit:
Newland’s Landing.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Landing?” I said. “Is
there water around here?” Then I saw the marker on the virtual map and
calculated that it was nine miles south of Alger and was located on Newland
Drive. I clicked START once again and let the Google Lady dictate a few twists
and turns, until I realized that we were heading for the backwaters of the
sprawling Indian Lake Reservoir. The fact that the Google Lady had taken us to
Alger via I-75 North and the Hardin Pike had kept me from realizing that we
could have approached from State Route 33, which runs right by the lake through
Russells Point and Lakeview. In Alger, we were only a stone’s throw from the
lakeshore.<o:p></o:p></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgacnlyMdPbKt3mFq3uZakvGegZzhBTpewuRaejmIfIoVBpRS0Y99hEemnoVvNVn3UrdkEvfpjFL7tEO1sVaIDtLpqxfqjtZnaMWOBUfxkv_hvavzE01CsDwnc3NcuTvhXNt5gqsuIR0XxHYXI4MUj286y5RX02Pdr48OvVLa-7iF4wNXOJVWPfBot4Q5wr/s1608/Jodi_05.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1608" data-original-width="1208" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgacnlyMdPbKt3mFq3uZakvGegZzhBTpewuRaejmIfIoVBpRS0Y99hEemnoVvNVn3UrdkEvfpjFL7tEO1sVaIDtLpqxfqjtZnaMWOBUfxkv_hvavzE01CsDwnc3NcuTvhXNt5gqsuIR0XxHYXI4MUj286y5RX02Pdr48OvVLa-7iF4wNXOJVWPfBot4Q5wr/s320/Jodi_05.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Look more animated...</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Shortly, the Google Lady
ordered me to turn left onto Newland Drive. As soon as we made the turn,
however, Mary Jo said, “Well, we’d better stop and get a few pictures of this.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“What?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“The road sign!”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Oh right!”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">So I pulled over onto the
grassy berm of the narrow gravel road. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Go over under the sign,”
Mary Jo instructed. I stood there under it, stiff as a cigar store wooden Indian.
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I heard Mary Jo go
“Ummm…” But she didn’t finish the thought. She said, “Uh, okay,” and shot a
couple of frames. I smiled and started to walk back toward the car. “Listen,”
she said, “we’ve gotta do something about making you look more animated.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVzzKIcsCC5UBJwWsg5vvnp52wr0E7Rktj-mHxZHyyQ0V16B6AoE5swTEEOxkQ-rlY8rhIlHWIHyGk70LI41uwCNmeYdqHIXg2I-jPjC6_ZhPYsVs5X4KUnamEt5cL83sCHO7Jty17W26bT_AdNjAySuCxv3F8nSMrgZqhhwt4i0CJs1ePtGMY0M-rqemp/s2010/Jodi_09a.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2010" data-original-width="1510" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVzzKIcsCC5UBJwWsg5vvnp52wr0E7Rktj-mHxZHyyQ0V16B6AoE5swTEEOxkQ-rlY8rhIlHWIHyGk70LI41uwCNmeYdqHIXg2I-jPjC6_ZhPYsVs5X4KUnamEt5cL83sCHO7Jty17W26bT_AdNjAySuCxv3F8nSMrgZqhhwt4i0CJs1ePtGMY0M-rqemp/s320/Jodi_09a.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>...like this!</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Animated?”<o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Yeah, you know, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">alive!</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Here,” she said, “I’ll pose and you take a picture.” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I got out my phone and
looked at the viewfinder as she used the sign post to strike a sort of
pole-dancing pose. I took the picture.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Mary Jo said, “See what I
mean?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I went back over, grinned
like a self-conscious moron, and pointed up at the sign.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Mary Jo shot a couple
more frames, and said, “Well, that was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">better</i>…”
with the unspoken continuation of that phrase going “But, man! You have <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">got </i>to lighten up!”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnGBjHYtJY-dvrWiglztcUpZdfAG4_Ktv1P9B6VEAFAKGELFFCLUtt4yootKJkwv0eyxGdEX_hRzWmKAL-B8KhzlYccQZ_5x2iPkIinyEoW2RjnYW0drGJcimg09Ni4RkCpt-whFpZ2STZ44zX9Lsch9QIbqkWNG3UxpSqd87rLNmkhCIpen9pNl0GfJH7/s1529/Jodi_06.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1529" data-original-width="928" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnGBjHYtJY-dvrWiglztcUpZdfAG4_Ktv1P9B6VEAFAKGELFFCLUtt4yootKJkwv0eyxGdEX_hRzWmKAL-B8KhzlYccQZ_5x2iPkIinyEoW2RjnYW0drGJcimg09Ni4RkCpt-whFpZ2STZ44zX9Lsch9QIbqkWNG3UxpSqd87rLNmkhCIpen9pNl0GfJH7/s320/Jodi_06.jpg" width="194" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Um...better.</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">We then got back into the
car and I drove down Newland Drive, which dead-ended in a really lovely little
resort. Newland’s Landing, obviously. If you were to look in the dictionary
under the term “landing”, there probably would be a picture of this quaint
little place. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was on a picturesque
back channel of Indian Lake. It had tidy docks and a boat livery with a
concrete slip to launch small-craft off of boat trailers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The administration was housed in a pretty
cottage-style building that fronted on the channel. But most of the boats were
covered and everything looked closed for the season. Indeed, although a chained
dog was barking at us from a nearby house, the only two human beings stirring
in the place were Mary Jo and me.<br /><o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It was as we were taking
a few pictures that I realized we had just debunked a family myth. Back in the
day, my grandfather had done a lot of fishing in the Lakeview and Russells
Point area. Sometimes he even took me along. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">When he found out that
there were Newlands in the area, Murel being Murel, he started knocking on
their doors. To a man and woman, they said they knew of no connection between
the Indian Lake Newlands and the Wapakoneta Newlands.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg99-Vt2_TBcPyZeGYzTg3NhiWoLThwBtKgrQ7STpuvn-p85lsuw7zG8HI8yD4WJYNKx15Xg0Y_MMzoDwDz8xUuMDGdqDxcHzAGKOzfQJ7p0PC1rygntcH0VixoC8XevsvsGmCq4WF_tHPo-HK8cRLjtLZW0gODYkwTj-ziAON8T2j2_J-Y0h5pq8BNBJXS/s1608/Jodi_07.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1208" data-original-width="1608" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg99-Vt2_TBcPyZeGYzTg3NhiWoLThwBtKgrQ7STpuvn-p85lsuw7zG8HI8yD4WJYNKx15Xg0Y_MMzoDwDz8xUuMDGdqDxcHzAGKOzfQJ7p0PC1rygntcH0VixoC8XevsvsGmCq4WF_tHPo-HK8cRLjtLZW0gODYkwTj-ziAON8T2j2_J-Y0h5pq8BNBJXS/s320/Jodi_07.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">Now, something you should know about Murel is that for the last
twenty-five years before his retirement, he was the quintessential
high-pressure life insurance salesman, and his territory included the entire
Indian Lake region. I’m quite sure—because he even tried to sell <i>me</i> life insurance—that whatever
genealogical inquiries he made, were prefaced by a foot-in-the-door insurance
sales pitch. So who, in their right mind, would admit to family ties, when
letting this guy in would surely end up in an hours-long pitch designed to make
you feel like dirt if you turned him down and refused to “provide for your family’s
future?”</span><br /><o:p></o:p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg28HyVADU2TEbQahLCczDrAXmJ6kCgwCsanxHTP_6t6GEYwdAGRfn10avcss8r1MGcd0jmQLFxyJFTqhS_wWZgigs2bNPEKW15Wqud6_uEwrTNvZQfb6nXL6reSXfHmcu2BBhmGcuTYsvc32-z6w_u1kVvPg6Xg1_-DGc7DQWD_uIcIFaVuur1IJnVvmAA/s4102/Newlands%20Resort.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4102" data-original-width="3082" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg28HyVADU2TEbQahLCczDrAXmJ6kCgwCsanxHTP_6t6GEYwdAGRfn10avcss8r1MGcd0jmQLFxyJFTqhS_wWZgigs2bNPEKW15Wqud6_uEwrTNvZQfb6nXL6reSXfHmcu2BBhmGcuTYsvc32-z6w_u1kVvPg6Xg1_-DGc7DQWD_uIcIFaVuur1IJnVvmAA/w300-h400/Newlands%20Resort.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Newland's Landing, Indian Lake</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The no-link myth was
further underscored by Murel’s second wife, Floetta—a tee-totaling Methodist,
and my grandmother’s first cousin—who, when my brother and I once mentioned the
Indian Lake Newlands, told us, “Oh no, no. They’re no relation. Those are the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">drinking branch </i>of the Newlands.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">This struck my brother
Dennis and me as hilarious, since back then, in our thirties, we mutually
prided ourselves on being able to drink each other, and everybody else, under
the table. I said, “So, Bro, we’d better go hang out at the lake!” Floetta was
not amused.<br /> <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But now, standing here at
Newland’s Landing, on Newland Drive, and with a slew of my Newland ancestors
pushing up daisies in a graveyard just nine miles up the road in Alger, I
couldn’t help but ask myself if the Indian Lake Newlands and the
Lima-Wapakoneta Newlands “not being related,” wasn’t a bit too much of a
coincidence to be credible.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Right then, I vowed that
the next time I came back home to Ohio, I’d make a point heading for the lake, finding
some members of “the drinking branch” of the Newlands, and toasting their good
health. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p></div>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01054536465220812092noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1616769513702255459.post-58404648277698891532023-11-30T23:30:00.097-03:002023-12-02T18:12:53.867-03:00YANKEE REDUX – GOING ROGUE IN THE GOLDEN YEARS<p> <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;">This may sound strange,
but lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about Ohio-born writer Ambrose Bierce.
Bear with me. At my age, this makes sense to me, and I think it might make
sense to some of you as well.</span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTnHyvWvH10hEiP40VvgZywPnpSuFiFY1_nxSgCJwAUM8TmsAZKsQNTky7z5qeLUpfRYd0i4ZH-wa0npWqEfHPO6eSsXZAhvAJXXuT396_td9RA52UUBXSew8K2ChmQtILCT0JxI4j-40AaQPL5V-Oi507Rw7lZjV4CMWDuKaXySPfJucuGXdqJNKnSE9T/s380/Occurrence%20at%20Owl%20Creek%20Bridge.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="212" data-original-width="380" height="224" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTnHyvWvH10hEiP40VvgZywPnpSuFiFY1_nxSgCJwAUM8TmsAZKsQNTky7z5qeLUpfRYd0i4ZH-wa0npWqEfHPO6eSsXZAhvAJXXuT396_td9RA52UUBXSew8K2ChmQtILCT0JxI4j-40AaQPL5V-Oi507Rw7lZjV4CMWDuKaXySPfJucuGXdqJNKnSE9T/w400-h224/Occurrence%20at%20Owl%20Creek%20Bridge.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Scene from a French film adaptation of <br />"An Occurrence at Owl Crrek Bridge"</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">For those of you who
don’t remember Ambrose Bierce, he was a famous nineteenth-century American
writer, journalist and poet. He was an extraordinary short story writer.
Perhaps his best known story—and one of the best known of all stories in modern
American literature—is <i>An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge</i>, a Civil
War tale which, in short, is a description of everything that runs through a
man’s mind as he is hanged from a railway trestle, from the time he is pushed
from the bridge with a rope around his neck until the noose snaps his spine.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Not your lighter, more
optimistic literature, mind you, but a masterpiece all the same. Published in
1890 and anthologized for the first of many times in 1891, it is also
considered one of the great early examples of stream of consciousness.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Contemporary bestseller
Kurt Vonnegut once described the story as “a flawless example of American
genius, like ‘Sophisticated Lady’ by Duke Ellington or the Franklin stove.” (He
also defined as “a twerp” anyone who’d never read it).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Biographer Richard O’Connor
said that “war was the making of Bierce as a man and a writer.” O’Connor
praised Bierce for his grim and graphic style, observing that he was “truly
capable of transferring the bloody, headless bodies and boar-eaten corpses of
the battlefield onto paper.” Even the often jaundiced and disdainful <i>New
York Review of Books</i> and <i>Washington Post</i> critic
Michael Dirda concedes, if snottily, that Bierce “is arguably the finest
not-quite-first-rate writer in nineteenth-century American literature.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">There’s a substantial
literary reason, then, why other later extraordinary writers (Stephen Crane,
Ernest Hemingway, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar and Vladimir Nabokov among
them) were influenced by Bierce’s writing—just as he was influenced by Charles
Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe and other great and innovative authors who preceded
him. But Bierce wasn’t just a writer. He himself was to become the stuff that
fiction is made of—the subject of a mystery that remains unsolved and is the
topic of vast research and speculation up to the present day. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Like me, as I mentioned, Bierce
was born in Ohio, but on the opposite side of the state, in Meigs County, which
today borders on West Virginia, an area which is part of the Appalachian
region. The tenth of thirteen siblings—all with given names beginning with the
letter “A”—while he was still a small child his parents moved to Kosciusko
County, in north-central Indiana, where he grew into adolescence. He would
eventually attend high school in the town of Warsaw, the county seat.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4OULTXUe4AVMzsYQpkPkr9xA0_SX8nxMfy6foKQAsp-e-JkvQAEEHMAZQP9REKbXQwHtBFLVVb-dS4JSHHC_1KhgnehPnrzaVLxAtgbao80H22Mg9jsJyh-bTT1t2N0joQPWJgPwxE8cdTuevhfMgdVbmTwUXF3zfDnRlRSzJJfzx7KgaXD3O39cJPWgU/s367/Lt%20Ambrose%20Bierce%201862.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="367" data-original-width="232" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4OULTXUe4AVMzsYQpkPkr9xA0_SX8nxMfy6foKQAsp-e-JkvQAEEHMAZQP9REKbXQwHtBFLVVb-dS4JSHHC_1KhgnehPnrzaVLxAtgbao80H22Mg9jsJyh-bTT1t2N0joQPWJgPwxE8cdTuevhfMgdVbmTwUXF3zfDnRlRSzJJfzx7KgaXD3O39cJPWgU/w253-h400/Lt%20Ambrose%20Bierce%201862.jpg" width="253" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Lieutenant Abrose Bierce, 1862</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">If he wasn’t born with
ink in his veins, young Ambrose would quickly be immersed in it when he struck
out on his own at age fifteen and went to work as a printer’s apprentice at an
Ohio abolitionist newspaper called, oddly enough, the <i>Northern Indianan</i>.
Working at a newspaper was not a random choice. Although he came from a home of
humble means, his parents were highly literate people and obviously encouraged
him in his love of books and his penchant for storytelling and writing.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">From the print shop, Ambrose
would edge his way into journalism, but that career ended up being interrupted
by the US Civil War, in which a still very young Bierce would attain the rank
of first lieutenant in the Ninth Indiana Infantry Regiment of the Union Army,
and would lead his men in such famous (and infamous) confrontations as Shiloh,
Chickamauga, Chattanooga, Lookout Mountain, Missionary Ridge, Resaca, Kennesaw
Mountain, the Atlanta Campaign and the Battle of Nashville, among numerous
others.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Bierce was cited for
bravery in one of the earliest battles in which he took part (and indeed, one
of the first of the Civil War) and was seriously wounded at Kennesaw Mountain.
Although he spent several months in 1864 on medical furlough because of the
head wound he had sustained, he returned to battle in September of that same
year and was only discharged from the Army in January of 1865, a few months
before the war ended. However, his former commander, General William Hazen (who
had recommended Bierce for admission to the military academy at West Point)
re-commissioned him in 1866 to take part in an inspection tour of Great Plains
Army outposts, a journey which ended up in San Francisco, California. There,
Bierce was awarded the largely ceremonial rank of “brevet major” and resigned from
the Army forever.<o:p></o:p></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzAyw44yVl8P-ay_e4xbJUzrRDr0bLrQpagWkg9fz9NHbfWWX-uaVCxNnj8TLnuhj3PFEk_Hn7c1R5jUc_ElgnBA4RcqQWradQ9WINklyooaI0m2KbGEu3BD09bHLdfBTwqJOIvV9Zz_cQb0uwzRRzXigBvGmOICadoGCq3-c4228cpgpHce_573L_mdq7/s377/Battle%20of%20Kennesaw%20Mountain.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="259" data-original-width="377" height="275" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzAyw44yVl8P-ay_e4xbJUzrRDr0bLrQpagWkg9fz9NHbfWWX-uaVCxNnj8TLnuhj3PFEk_Hn7c1R5jUc_ElgnBA4RcqQWradQ9WINklyooaI0m2KbGEu3BD09bHLdfBTwqJOIvV9Zz_cQb0uwzRRzXigBvGmOICadoGCq3-c4228cpgpHce_573L_mdq7/w400-h275/Battle%20of%20Kennesaw%20Mountain.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Battle Scene from Kennesaw Mountain, where 3,000<br />Union soldiers and 1,000 Confederates died, and<br />Bierce was critically wounded.</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It was there, in San
Francisco, however, that Bierce seriously delved into his career as a
newspaperman and writer. As a journalist, he attained great acclaim while
working as a reporter and columnist for the Hearst family’s <i>San Francisco
Examiner</i>, as well as for other publications. He would continue to write for
Hearst papers until 1909, just five years before his disappearance and presumed
death.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Bierce’s trenchant
commentary and in-depth reporting not only brought him fame, but also the
rancor of many of the powerful people he wrote about. It is to the credit of
the highly controversial William Randolph Hearst—who in the 1880s inherited
the <i>Examiner</i> at age twenty-three and with whom Bierce had an
often combative relationship—that, despite what must have been intense pressure
to fire Bierce with the aim of silencing him, the famed newspaper owner kept
the writer on his payroll for decades. The opposition pressure on Bierce
himself was such that he is said to have started carrying a pistol with him
wherever he went. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">As I have learned in my
own career as a journalist, if you please everyone with what you write, you’re
not doing your job. If you write an in-depth piece or an editorial that elicits
praise but no opposition, you need to ask yourself what you’re doing wrong...or
find another profession. The irascible if cruelly witty Bierce was the clear
embodiment of this principle.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But he was also—like many
journalists who are writers first and foremost—a multi-faceted artist who also
excelled in satire, short story writing, fantasy and early sci-fi, humor,
criticism and poetry above and beyond his notable work as a newsman. Some of
his best known work, as O’Connor points out, was based on his vast military and
combat experience during the Civil War.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">What I’ve been mulling
over recently, however, is less about his writing than about his way of
approaching life. After an admirable career as a man of letters, Bierce could
easily have retired, written the odd story or commentary, traveled a bit, dabbled
in his memoirs and been the toast of the town. But that would have been
completely out of character for Ambrose Bierce. He was a man of action.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnFlVvYHLodfnK26yaZdngUqPVFA_7KwMAJgOzJqboNiXTVOhlaVlwaRd_IhVcN24VMHxgSkIqrBB8Zv3f-J4hIgTeq5A1oWNjdID1fZNd_2s0bsPM2YXTwbDK9_-nLfsAEto1_r9ZcmmzQDsMR7hsfv9PtRbHny8ZYz_idwoNWoRzhAZgJwPZ_JGnHf4B/s384/Bierce_early%20%2020th%20century.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="384" data-original-width="255" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnFlVvYHLodfnK26yaZdngUqPVFA_7KwMAJgOzJqboNiXTVOhlaVlwaRd_IhVcN24VMHxgSkIqrBB8Zv3f-J4hIgTeq5A1oWNjdID1fZNd_2s0bsPM2YXTwbDK9_-nLfsAEto1_r9ZcmmzQDsMR7hsfv9PtRbHny8ZYz_idwoNWoRzhAZgJwPZ_JGnHf4B/w266-h400/Bierce_early%20%2020th%20century.jpg" width="266" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Bierce in the early 1900s.</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">In 1913, at age
seventy-one—in an era when the average male life-expectancy in the US was
between forty and fifty—Ambrose Bierce had already lived to a ripe old age. But
what was left, he must have wondered, to sit in a rocker on the porch and wait
for death? Not likely. He hadn’t been a particularly good husband or father,
but now even those tenuous ties were pretty much gone. His former wife, Molly
Day, had died some time before this, but he had already been estranged from her
for years by the time she passed away. Of his three children, only his
daughter, Helen, who was nearly forty years old by this time, was left. One of
his sons, Raymond Day, had committed suicide in 1889 at age seventeen, and the
other one, Leigh, had died of alcoholism-related pneumonia in 1901, aged
twenty-seven. <o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Some accounts claim that
the thought of being put out to pasture was weighing heavily on Bierce when he
decided that sitting still wasn’t an option if one was alive, and set off on
what was very probably his last great adventure. There are a number of
conflicting accounts of where Bierce went and what happened to him, but the
most plausible story appears to be that he started out from Washington DC on a
research tour of Civil War battlefields that eventually led him to the Texas
border with Mexico. He is thought to have crossed the border at El Paso.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg707-CWc3NPWU8A4SxocZVwqzUlSw4hbqkgCZFCdMhh75QNsYAdTpNf_HYJ2YAm2TtgfFrXNgpDAW4gJNTzrT_Kp4rPOZUwvYiVWqKx47uNdMqyOodTAjKeQcl6rulLgkFNPE9WJSnsQJ8-nUYJpca7pH6rIm9VCwz3yTDotl5YVIk7RxNcthHoeUgsP8E/s359/Francisco%20Pancho%20Villa.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="272" data-original-width="359" height="303" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg707-CWc3NPWU8A4SxocZVwqzUlSw4hbqkgCZFCdMhh75QNsYAdTpNf_HYJ2YAm2TtgfFrXNgpDAW4gJNTzrT_Kp4rPOZUwvYiVWqKx47uNdMqyOodTAjKeQcl6rulLgkFNPE9WJSnsQJ8-nUYJpca7pH6rIm9VCwz3yTDotl5YVIk7RxNcthHoeUgsP8E/w400-h303/Francisco%20Pancho%20Villa.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Francisco "Pancho" Villa</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">In Mexico, Bierce supposedly
gave free reign to a fantasy he had entertained for some time of catching up to
famed Mexican revolutionary Francisco “Pancho” Villa and riding with him as an
observer. Some accounts say that he joined up with Villa in Ciudad Juárez and
was at least with the revolutionary for the Battle of Tierra Blanca, which was
fought thirty-five miles south of Juárez and was considered a major win for
Villa over forces loyal to Mexico’s dictator, Victoriano Huerta.<o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">From there on, the story
becomes hazy and speculative. Some versions have Bierce being executed by a
detachment of <i>federales</i> for his relationship with Pancho
Villa. Others have him being shot as a spy by a rebel firing squad. One town
even claims that it was there that he died and has erected a monument that is
visited by tourists. But the body of Ambrose Bierce was never
found. </span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivzU0bnACsMfTPaBdXiwfzPHgXR2o68ZETXddCoA2kVW4tkIHGldXgzjnwfn_vKaCpVjpEqprdVlXagcKRKd9SU_AkzuasebKFaLNbWPvAIt4429F2E29pb4o_X_pf9629lzQAFFH7aupJTEeode9DkU-foU_Y5l9EnQImlGsWToEos0jr9HjtircIJvhY/s258/Mexican%20dictator%20Victoriano%20Huerta.jpg" style="clear: left; display: inline; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="258" data-original-width="172" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivzU0bnACsMfTPaBdXiwfzPHgXR2o68ZETXddCoA2kVW4tkIHGldXgzjnwfn_vKaCpVjpEqprdVlXagcKRKd9SU_AkzuasebKFaLNbWPvAIt4429F2E29pb4o_X_pf9629lzQAFFH7aupJTEeode9DkU-foU_Y5l9EnQImlGsWToEos0jr9HjtircIJvhY/w267-h400/Mexican%20dictator%20Victoriano%20Huerta.jpg" width="267" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Mexican dictator Victoriano Huerta</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">There are strong
indications that Bierce accompanied Villa’s army to the city of Chihuahua in
northwestern Mexico. In a last letter to his niece, Lora, Bierce is purported
to have said that he was writing to say good-bye. “What an intolerable world
this would be,” he wrote, “if we said nothing but what is worth saying! And did
nothing foolish—like going into Mexico and South America.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">He added that “if you
hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please
know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age,
disease, or falling down the cellar stairs.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">His last communication
read: “I don’t know where I shall be next. Guess it doesn’t matter much. <i>Adios</i>.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Much of Bierce’s fiction
is said by critics to highlight “the inscrutability of life and the absurdity
of death.” His own disappearance and probably violent death ended up being as
inscrutable as it was absurd for a man of his age and literary stature.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Whatever the case may be,
while some observers have claimed it was tantamount to suicide for Ambrose
Bierce to wonder into the Mexico of Huerta and Villa like some <i>ad hoc</i> septuagenarian
foreign correspondent, I consider it a declaration of independence and freedom,
and an act of uncommon courage. It was a clear choice to live life to the
fullest, right up to his last breath. It’s a philosophy each of us coping with
the so-called “golden years” might do well to ponder and, to the extent that we
can, and each in our own way, to imitate, in the interest of making the absurd
worthwhile.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01054536465220812092noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1616769513702255459.post-58521940382355249052023-11-22T19:33:00.005-03:002023-11-25T11:47:34.484-03:00JIM BOWSHER - LIFE 101<p> <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;">My friend and writer
colleague Jim Bowsher has the Big C.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">That statement deserves a
paragraph of its own. So does the next one:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It’s Stage Four. That’s
usually thought of as the “ALL She Wrote” stage of that rotten scourge of a
disease.</span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLjriH6S3DzY6lDwlFeVYd-EBq41bs9J4NVsGt9HiwnZvnKtbCMP3q-dZHIWBwNsO734kAs97wEzQHcST_MmCr49uTpt7IddS_qnL0oFS78l1eWjvWDrpfeBvsaIwbCSIbfm0TVvBfGG8SN2iiITP3rjP3rN-MFhUFo8fC4lXVoLonafszDFFHW-5Fy0XO/s4310/Jim%20Bowsher_by%20Mary%20Jo%20Knoch.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4310" data-original-width="2870" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLjriH6S3DzY6lDwlFeVYd-EBq41bs9J4NVsGt9HiwnZvnKtbCMP3q-dZHIWBwNsO734kAs97wEzQHcST_MmCr49uTpt7IddS_qnL0oFS78l1eWjvWDrpfeBvsaIwbCSIbfm0TVvBfGG8SN2iiITP3rjP3rN-MFhUFo8fC4lXVoLonafszDFFHW-5Fy0XO/w426-h640/Jim%20Bowsher_by%20Mary%20Jo%20Knoch.jpg" width="426" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Jim Bowsher in his fabulous Rock Garden<br /><span style="font-size: x-small;">Photo by Mary Jo Knoch - All rights reserved</span></i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I know a little bit about
cancer. My father died of it. So did my mother. Both aged eighty. My father’s
mother died of it at sixty-six. My father’s older brother at seventy-five, my
father’s middle brother at about the same age as his mother, and their youngest
brother, the reverend, who fought it with all of his grit and faith, managed to
beat it until he was in his mid-eighties, when it finally took him. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">One thing I’ve learned?
It’s not a good death, I mean if there is such a thing. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I take after my mother’s
side of the family. Despite her death by cancer, they mostly die of some sort
of cardio-vascular disease. Somewhere that statement may hold out some glimmer
of optimism for me—cardio-vascular is no picnic, mind you, but it’s not cancer
either. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">My little brother was the
spitting image of the Newland clan—actually the cancer trend appears to have
originated with the Henrys, my Grandma Alice Henry Newland’s family—but he
flipped a giant bird to that part of the family’s cancerous medical history by
dying of what appears to have been a massive stroke, in his sleep, at age
fifty-one. It was exactly the sort of “bite me” thing he was famous for. But
still, I think I might have been willing to give up part of the nearly two
decades that I’ve survived him just to have him around a while longer. You
couldn’t help but love that boy, and the world is a much less interesting place
without him.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I also know something
about diagnosis and prognosis. They’re not infallible. There is a great deal to
be said for will, and what some of my British friends have been wont to call
“sheer bloody-mindedness.” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Good example? My dad,
Whitie. Bloody-mindedness got him through years of combat during World War II.
And, despite having been a man who was often suicidal due to decades of chronic
depression, he took on the challenge of cancer as if he were going to war. His
was lung cancer, which has a five-year survival rate of only nine percent. When
the diagnosis was made, and an attempt to remove one lung failed, he was told he
probably had about six months. For all of his talk of suicide in earlier years,
telling Whitie he <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">couldn’t</i> do
something—like live—was a sure-fire way to get him to do it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Result? He lived for another four years.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRHWUibYscqwmgXr1eIWV2Ef6BkzBksQ2d1gbOSuzdB33zrB-DkctuP7GdQd-fOichwLFGbhyPzjPFmDbEenMdOgYZhUx2JdrFFY5Z9QLDzMY-OkOW9ypgynkqBLIkNRJBvRbbWxDSHlXcms9kLZCfEDQWQW4AgCSCDHuxsB0sSA3sMx3M1MOglUGqGI5l/s502/print%20book%20cover.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="502" data-original-width="335" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRHWUibYscqwmgXr1eIWV2Ef6BkzBksQ2d1gbOSuzdB33zrB-DkctuP7GdQd-fOichwLFGbhyPzjPFmDbEenMdOgYZhUx2JdrFFY5Z9QLDzMY-OkOW9ypgynkqBLIkNRJBvRbbWxDSHlXcms9kLZCfEDQWQW4AgCSCDHuxsB0sSA3sMx3M1MOglUGqGI5l/w268-h400/print%20book%20cover.jpg" width="268" /></a></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">In that sense, Jim
Bowsher reminds me a lot of Whitie. Some
time back, before I went to visit him, I called to see how he was doing. When
he failed to answer the phone for a few days—in all fairness, that’s not
unusual for Jim, who always has better things to do than answer the phone—I
began to worry. The thing is, Jim only has a land line with an answering
machine. He doesn’t own a cellphone or a computer (he still writes on a manual
typewriter). He doesn’t have an email address. He isn’t on social media. In a very
real way, for Jim it continues to be the sixties, when he and I were both
growing up in Wapakoneta, Ohio, where he still resides, in his phenomenal
museum of a house on the edge of his artistic masterpiece, the Rock Garden, which
surrounds his Temple of Tolerance. I
wrote about both, and, indeed, about Jim, in a book titled <i>The Rock Garden and Other Stories</i> (available on Amazon, and at the
Riverside Art Center in downtown Wapakoneta). As that book reveals, Jim lives
in an analog world of his own making. It’s as if his entire environment were
the contents of an enormous time capsule.<o:p></o:p></span></p><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">He does have a website,
created by his friend and collaborator Scott Bruno. But other than knowing what
content goes into it, Jim is completely estranged from that technological process.
He’s incurably old school. But google his name and the references to him on the
Web go on and on, references from Wapakoneta, from Ohio, from all over the
United States and from around the world. So, Jim doesn’t <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">really</i> have to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">go</i> to the
Web. The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Web</i> comes to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">him</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Anyway, after three or four
tries I finally get him on the phone—Jim seldom if ever calls somebody back
even if they leave a message. And even though he is a dedicated writer—who is a
disciplined keeper of the old rule, “Writers write every day”—he also
discourages epistolary contact. Long ago I once offered to write back and forth
via snail mail. “It would be a waste of your time,” he told me. “I’m a terrible
correspondent. You’ll write me, I’ll read it and enjoy it, and I’ll never write
you back.” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">At the time, I said okay
and left it at that. Now, however, when things are as finite as they’ve always
been, but with my awareness of that fact heightened, I’m thinking I wish I’d
written him anyway all these years, even if I’d never gotten an answer. It was
selfish and lazy of me. I offered, he said don’t bother, and I didn’t. Such is
life. Such is ego.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Jim! Finally! So glad
you picked up.” I shout into the phone. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Yeah, I heard your
messages and was listening for the phone. So how are you?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“I’m fine. I mean other
than a few old-man issues. The more important question is, how are you?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“I’m doing great. I
continue to be a medical phenomenon. Nobody can understand how I’m doing so
well. I mean, I’m a dead man walkin’, but I’m just fine. The thing is, I’m so
busy, I keep forgetting I’m <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">dying</i>!”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Dead Man Walkin’—the term
used for a condemned prisoner on the walk to execution—is what some of the
little hoodlums that hang out in Jim’s yard will sing out when he emerges from
the house. A lot of these troubled kids have been mentored by Jim. Some he has
accompanied to juvenile court or visited in the reformatory. They, more than
anyone else, will surely miss him when he’s gone. The dead-man-walkin’ thing is
a private joke between them and Jim, which they both find amusing. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“The other day,” says
Jim, “there was this really nice lady visiting here. She knew about the cancer
and wanted to stop by.” So, we walk out into the yard and one of the kids goes,
“Dead Man Walkin’!” really loud. Well, you should have seen that poor woman’s
face!” says Jim. “She goes, ‘Oh my <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">god</i>,
how <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">awful!</i>’ And I say, ‘Oh no, it’s
fine. It’s just a joke between me and the guys. It doesn’t bother me, really,
don’t worry.’ I’m like trying to comfort <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">her</i>,”
Jim laughs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjByEd51mNy30h6DxmmP443JuO1apCwF9jzMbm0xoiAs1h8UOGbvvXodnxI83JmG7iCgQJC4ixdCoiLvfwzcipc7NWhMWrijTpU71JsgYtRKF-YlQg5v26D217HuQ8Hzb1edNyb5vQGZdo9Gjf9G_E1MTvVQau91mO5E1m5QQQl62tDhJbxrQTG6VArKhm/s921/Jim's%20house.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="921" data-original-width="843" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjByEd51mNy30h6DxmmP443JuO1apCwF9jzMbm0xoiAs1h8UOGbvvXodnxI83JmG7iCgQJC4ixdCoiLvfwzcipc7NWhMWrijTpU71JsgYtRKF-YlQg5v26D217HuQ8Hzb1edNyb5vQGZdo9Gjf9G_E1MTvVQau91mO5E1m5QQQl62tDhJbxrQTG6VArKhm/w366-h400/Jim's%20house.jpg" width="366" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Jim's house on Wood St. in Wapakoneta</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Later, he tells me about
the advancement of his historical framing project. All of his energy right now
appears to be going into that, and into creating a foundation to ensure the
continuation of his permanent art installation (the Rock Garden) and his local
historical research project after he is gone. Every stone, item, artifact, picture
and clipping in Jim’s divinely and eclectically cluttered house and yard has a
story behind it. He refuses any item that doesn’t. Somebody comes to Jim with
some interesting and/or vintage doodad, Jim says, “What’s the story behind
this?” If the person says, “I have no idea. It’s just something I picked up at
a flea market,” Jim will say thanks but no thanks. “What’s important is the
story. If you don’t know the story, why have the thing?”<br /><o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It appears that it wasn’t
until very recently that Jim began to realize he was mortal. That was when Scott
Bruno began to collaborate with him, taking on the daunting job of photographing
each of the tens of thousands of items in Jim’s story-artifact collection, as a
means of documenting this unique historical inventory.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Out of that gargantuan
task grew Jim’s “framing project”.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“So tell me more about
these frames you’re doing,” I say when we’re talking on the phone (a call between
Jim and me never lasts under an hour or so).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“It’s kind of hard to
explain,” he says. “I’ll show some to you when you come. I’m taking pictures of
everything and framing them with their stories. You’ll see. You <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">are</i> still coming, right?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Wouldn’t miss it!”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Good, it’ll be great to
see you.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“So how’s treatment
going?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“They keep telling me I
shouldn’t feel this good,” he laughs. “The other day when I went in, this
oncology nurse—she and I have gotten to be good friends—she goes, ‘Jim, would
you like more pain medication?’ I tell her no, that I take one now and then, but
I’m really not having a lot of pain. She goes, ‘But Jim, at this stage, you’ve
really <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">got</i> to be having a lot of
pain.’” Jim’s cancer started out as prostate cancer then spread first from
there to his hip. “So I tell her, ‘Look, I can drag a leg if it’ll make you
feel better, but I’m doing great. No real pain, see?’”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A doctor friend whom he laughingly tells
about this says he’s not the typical case, not what people in oncology are used
to seeing. “Yours is all a matter of will and attitude, Jim, of not giving in
to the disease.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It’s true. Clearly, Jim
is refusing to give in, refusing to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">become</i>
the disease. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He is refusing to become
Jim Bowsher Stage Four. He is striving to remain, Jim Bowsher Phenomenon, which
is who he has always been. And for now, at least, it’s working! “The other day
at the oncology unit, I told one of the (baffled) staff, ‘Well, at least you’ll
remember me when I’m gone.’” He said the woman answered, “That’s for sure, Jim.
You’re unforgettable.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Jim says he likes to
cheer up the others awaiting oncological treatment. He finds it so depressing
to walk in and see all of their sad, doomed faces. He wants to help them
realize that they’re not dead yet, that any day they still open their eyes is a
good day, or as Whitie used to say, “a helluva lot better than the
alternative.” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“As soon as I walk in, I
start hitting them with one-liners,” says Jim, “and pretty soon I’ve got the
whole waiting room laughing. There’s this one guy who, when I walk in goes, ‘Oh
christ! Here he is again, the stand-up comic of the oncology ward.” Jim
guffaws.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s good, says Jim. Laughing’s
good. It helps them feel better. Not so down and hopeless.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Toward the end of
October, after a couple of days in Miami, where my plane from Buenos Aires
landed, I fly up to Dayton, and then rent a car and drive to Wapakoneta, an
hour away. I could just as easily have flown into Cleveland, where my sister
Darla lives and where I have my Stateside residence, but I was really anxious
to see Jim right away and see for myself how he was doing. I got there the
night of the twenty-fourth, had dinner with my childhood friend—a mutual friend
of Jim’s—Mark Gallimore, and was supposed to see Jim the next day, and then
drive on up to Cleveland on the twenty-sixth to spend a couple of weeks.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9HYbEUXF36BSFs8tCTnTqiKIeyekEh8IGmISKZES8kAycPGa3ZKXT3zzzw7ymD_rXdz6O7kLzpOojlMlACg2PlK7UNPsaCaPk4-PI9Q4LjfcEO_fu5413Y9AZk9LAC0oq_KtIvX_-WktxfEvKapwFP2D4PmrW7pMiVS-w_uwUahGVIVET12inYfu-ctaG/s400/Coffey%20Cup_02.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="274" data-original-width="400" height="274" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9HYbEUXF36BSFs8tCTnTqiKIeyekEh8IGmISKZES8kAycPGa3ZKXT3zzzw7ymD_rXdz6O7kLzpOojlMlACg2PlK7UNPsaCaPk4-PI9Q4LjfcEO_fu5413Y9AZk9LAC0oq_KtIvX_-WktxfEvKapwFP2D4PmrW7pMiVS-w_uwUahGVIVET12inYfu-ctaG/w400-h274/Coffey%20Cup_02.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">So, the next morning, a
Wednesday, I had a pleasant breakfast with a few former classmates—including
Mark—at a local eatery known as the Coffey Cup, and was all set to go to Jim’s
in the early afternoon. Another mutual friend, who pretty regularly visits Jim
on Wednesdays, sent me a text, however, saying that Jim had told her he wasn’t
up to seeing anybody. She said he was too nauseous to talk to anyone but hoped
I’d get in touch and be sure and see him later.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I was worried. This
didn’t sound good.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I tried without luck
to reach him several times, then gave up and headed for Cleveland. Two weeks
later, I was back in Wapakoneta for a week-long stay. One of the first things I
did was start trying to get hold of Jim. I called three times without success
and had decided to just go knock on the door. I was only staying a block away
at the Moonflower Inn, a lovely little cottage for one that I rent when I’m
back in town. Finally, however, I got him on the phone.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Wow, Jim!” I said. “I’ve
been worried.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Why? I’m fine.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Well, when Phillipa told
me you were too ill to see us on the twenty-fifth, it worried the hell out of
me, and then I had to go up to Cleveland for two weeks. I left you a couple of
messages.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Yes, I heard them. I’m
fine. That thing on the twenty-fifth was just some stomach thing. Nothing to do
with the cancer. Just indigestion or something. I was fine the next day! Sorry
I missed you. I was really hoping you’d be back” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">We make plans to see each
other the following day, a Saturday. We always meet at Jim’s place and there, surrounded
by his inspiring chaos of stories and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">things</i>,
give free rein to our imaginations and talk about everything and everyone under
the sun. But this time Jim says, “We can’t stay at my place. I have all the
stuff for my frames spread all over the house.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“I don’t mind. I love
going to your house.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Yeah, but there’s no
place to sit!”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">He suggested we meet as
Woody’s Diner, a bar and grill on Wood Street, just up the block (between Jim’s
house and the Moonflower), which he and I have always favored.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But we were also supposed to be meeting our
friends Mark Gallimore, Tom Shaw (who had flown in from Charleston, South
Carolina), and Mary Jo Knoch. When I mentioned Woody’s to Mary Jo, she said,
“No, it’ll be hard to talk there. Just come out to my place. I’ll make a barley
beef soup and some cornbread.”</span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_zY6FQPwGN3F4Z3jCO4G0mbNhkfUzY2KGoeD3HImJ5w7r3Wzl4FeebP9DENI1DwzNuAUkNOMqyABR0_Jf2wCaBzn6m-uX84pANJrEZEfzuDyKrtZbS2D0FO7v96vyl0DFrbTYHnKvm7o2iyNrtOUSrCf90RB4LiL2wQsm4JoMCvjw1tJMujy37jqUGZIi/s1286/Mary%20Jo's%20Place.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1286" data-original-width="966" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_zY6FQPwGN3F4Z3jCO4G0mbNhkfUzY2KGoeD3HImJ5w7r3Wzl4FeebP9DENI1DwzNuAUkNOMqyABR0_Jf2wCaBzn6m-uX84pANJrEZEfzuDyKrtZbS2D0FO7v96vyl0DFrbTYHnKvm7o2iyNrtOUSrCf90RB4LiL2wQsm4JoMCvjw1tJMujy37jqUGZIi/w300-h400/Mary%20Jo's%20Place.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Mary Jo's place near the Village of Fryburg</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;">“What should I bring?” I asked.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Pie,” she said. So I
went and bought an entire three-berry pie at Bob Evans.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">When I called Tom and he
asked what he should bring, I said, “Beer.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">So we were set.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">When I went to pick up
Jim to take him to Mary Jo’s, he wasn’t quite ready, so he invited me in. I
immediately saw what he had meant about “nowhere to sit.” Everywhere there were
picture frames and stacks of content to mount in them—pictures, cards,
carefully-typed texts, drawings, etc.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Stuff everywhere, on tables, in chairs, on the couch, up the stairs…<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">every</i>where.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I got out my phone to
take a picture. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Don’t take any
pictures,” said Jim brusquely.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Why not?” I said. “This
is great!” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Please don’t, Dan,” Jim
said tersely. This was one of those moments when Jim Bowsher would suddenly
become a stranger, an enigma, even to his friends. This was when, in his own
words, he was “at the service of his muse.” This was Jim Bowsher the writer,
the historian, the collector. This was the Jim Bowsher who was friends with no
one—Jim in Jim’s own world, a world to which no one else had passage.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I looked disappointed and
said, “Come on, Jim. This is me. I can’t help myself. I’m a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">journalist</i>.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">He squirmed and said, “I’d
rather you didn’t. I never let anybody see the process when I was creating the
Rock Garden. And I don’t want anybody to see the process while I’m creating the
frames.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I put my phone away and
sulked while he went off to finish getting ready to go. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">In the car, he said he
was worried about his brother Walt, that he’d been calling him and Walt didn’t
answer. Walt was only very recently widowed and still trying to cope with his
wife Aida’s death.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I said, “Oh, don’t worry.
Mary Jo said she’d invited him out to her place too, and that he said he was
going.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Jim looked relieved. “Oh,
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">great</i>, so he probably went out there
already.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTXKNJSBvIpwlSjOHDnQjoC0q-Mh3SrUvbRN9Ohe06NW5qkiM13Qw4nxU4YA_px5RqC0gMKaO3pweglKospzw-B-_c5zZddLEwoQ9t84KHSFEO4R1qj1yXpGrEosUrh1lE2_J-3LkWj6f3NzAnVF4jL9zJ2MkZW-z_Sng6Hl9uUE28msWHHV6eU9NlYGfr/s1286/Walt.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1286" data-original-width="966" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTXKNJSBvIpwlSjOHDnQjoC0q-Mh3SrUvbRN9Ohe06NW5qkiM13Qw4nxU4YA_px5RqC0gMKaO3pweglKospzw-B-_c5zZddLEwoQ9t84KHSFEO4R1qj1yXpGrEosUrh1lE2_J-3LkWj6f3NzAnVF4jL9zJ2MkZW-z_Sng6Hl9uUE28msWHHV6eU9NlYGfr/w300-h400/Walt.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Walt Bowsher</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Sure enough, when we get there,
Walt is already ensconced in the most comfortable chair in the living room, and
is chatting with Gallimore and Mary Jo. <o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It was a beautiful autumn
day—brisk, with azure sky contrasting with the last of the brightly changing
foliage. Mary Jo’s place is a quarter-mile off the road, just past the Village
of Fryburg, a few miles south of Wapakoneta.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It’s a little old shingled farmhouse with a good shed and a tumbledown
old barn on a few acres of land, surrounded by rolling fields and a nice
woodlot. It’s a lovely, peaceful place, and on this bright fall day it seemed
utterly idyllic.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">At first, in Mary Jo’s
comfy living room, we chatted inconsequentially and took turns spoiling her
three cats, Fred, Bill and the venerable old Captain Jack. Over beer, however,
we entered into more controversial territory—small towns versus big cities,
Israelis versus Palestinians, conservatives versus liberals. The tone rose
occasionally, and Jim, far from presenting the profile of a dying man, held his
own and gave as good as he got. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But in
the end, it was a civilized discussion of issues among intellectually sound
individuals who understood the value of different points of view and respected
each other’s conclusions even if they might not agree with them. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9PMzdXF-nR33grW0ufQiTHKu3uPfV6QfvIUTQpHdxNN3IW6162F0kdw4tv7KtS32jUyIcbrHo413q1RuDCS5EdxyARD0Zr5MjvWb8v9Fw7dhYmlUXj2v7ZW8wDvot0IFV2q4AMWQ0Xns9jwapaGZcA2VXEzxMn8l_DycjobKEkF38rVbkR442FS0Bk1UU/s1392/Tom%20and%20Jim.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1392" data-original-width="1208" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9PMzdXF-nR33grW0ufQiTHKu3uPfV6QfvIUTQpHdxNN3IW6162F0kdw4tv7KtS32jUyIcbrHo413q1RuDCS5EdxyARD0Zr5MjvWb8v9Fw7dhYmlUXj2v7ZW8wDvot0IFV2q4AMWQ0Xns9jwapaGZcA2VXEzxMn8l_DycjobKEkF38rVbkR442FS0Bk1UU/w348-h400/Tom%20and%20Jim.jpg" width="348" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Tom Shaw and Jim debate small towns v big cities</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Walt, through all of
this, sat smiling quizzically while he petted a very contented Bill. He occasionally
offered some contribution, but mostly remained attentive, moving his gaze from
one debater to the other, as if watching a ping-pong match. He was the first to
leave, because he had a jam session with a group of other amateur musicians.
But he was sure to let us all know how much he had enjoyed the afternoon, and
thanked Mary Jo profusely for the invitation. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Mary Jo’s wonderful,
nutritious soup overrode debate, as did her cornbread and warm butter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We then switched from beer to coffee and pie
and later sat contently together, playing with the cats again. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Jim had brought along a
few of his frames and passed them around, waiting to see our reactions. For me,
it was like a light had suddenly been turned on. I got it, understood the
dichotomy that Jim was seeking to project with each frame. One story on the
front, the same, but another, story on the back. The frames were a stroke of
genius, the projection of a voiceless debate between two opposing points of
view, or between fact and legend, reality and fantasy. Once again, as in the
past when I was writing about him, I was blown away by the profound yet simple
messages with which Jim was striving to imbue his widely varied audience.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was a didactic, thought-provoking idea, and
nothing short of analog brilliant.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">In the car, as I drove
Jim back to his home in Wapakoneta, I half-expected him to revisit the issues
debated. Instead, he said, “Wow, did you see Walt’s face? He was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fascinated!</i> With his friends, who are
mostly of like mind, he doesn’t get a chance very often to hear this kind of
debate. He really enjoyed it! I could tell.”</span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZE1PoEpSFklPzmGik2sQk5dUdqZWe3gCIR1w4dl4_RLq-In_G0-Hw_nMXhvdNzDSjHRHfxTa6DMw5Nq_pWxpIinXUsRpDQHwYAPbi3apTghBIzxWBR_m_SvNaXkjZg_updgtToB4sAB94JswskJUJYp1hHWvc0XHWnA-BfnA9fdmYl7ZXBV4zDiIHu6Zd/s1057/Jim%20with%20frames.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1057" data-original-width="827" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZE1PoEpSFklPzmGik2sQk5dUdqZWe3gCIR1w4dl4_RLq-In_G0-Hw_nMXhvdNzDSjHRHfxTa6DMw5Nq_pWxpIinXUsRpDQHwYAPbi3apTghBIzxWBR_m_SvNaXkjZg_updgtToB4sAB94JswskJUJYp1hHWvc0XHWnA-BfnA9fdmYl7ZXBV4zDiIHu6Zd/w313-h400/Jim%20with%20frames.jpg" width="313" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><b>Jim explains one of his historical frames</b></i></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Any thought of the issues
had flown the coop. Jim was entirely focused on his brother, his best friend,
and on the great afternoon he’d had, at a time when he was in pain. A time when
it was exactly what he needed. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The next time Jim and I
met, it was for breakfast.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I picked him
up and we went to the Coffey Cup. The weather was accompanying me for my stay.
A beautiful blue and gold morning with a light frost. I had asked Jim the day
before when he wanted to go.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“You tell me,” he said.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“I can go whenever you
like.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“How about nine-thirty?
Too late?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“That’s fine,” I said.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">When I arrived and
knocked on door at nine-thirty sharp, it took a while for Jim to answer. When
he finally came to the door, he said, “Sorry, I slept in. I’ll be right with
you.” And he went off again upstairs to finish getting ready. I spent the time
to once again browse among the extraordinary collection of items that cover
every surface in the house—walls, tables, shelves, everything crowded with
vintage pieces, but more than anything else, with countless mementos of life in
Wapakoneta and its environs for the past two hundred years and beyond, clear
back to the lives of its indigenous peoples before Europeans had ever heard of
America.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You couldn’t get bored waiting,
especially if Jim had told you the stories of some of the pieces. And in my
case he had already, many times, in the past. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">By the time we reached
the Coffey Cup, the place was burgeoning with the breakfast crowd. It was the
kind of place where breakfast diners weren’t the type to eat and run. They had
time to dawdle over eggs and meat and potatoes and pancakes while drinking hot
coffee and engaging in neighborly conversation. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-tF1VJRV-XCmukFeFEm9g-wBxe2LHsPOByr87wgFKceNM4bxbh4enCO2w11YYtPg2v7hrhQPtsqjXUMar6JD5gtqJrupM9ovtxG70tFtgEwJFVBalGbu9r_EYYdosBsiq2XXsWuFGtPGNHD6tXOGmDv16QKXgicRzq4AKwsEnvTdCfr-qhzg8hJwteCA_/s400/Coffey%20Cup_04.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="262" data-original-width="400" height="263" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-tF1VJRV-XCmukFeFEm9g-wBxe2LHsPOByr87wgFKceNM4bxbh4enCO2w11YYtPg2v7hrhQPtsqjXUMar6JD5gtqJrupM9ovtxG70tFtgEwJFVBalGbu9r_EYYdosBsiq2XXsWuFGtPGNHD6tXOGmDv16QKXgicRzq4AKwsEnvTdCfr-qhzg8hJwteCA_/w400-h263/Coffey%20Cup_04.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>The Coffey Cup from the inside.</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Fortunately, Jim and I
found a great table by a window near the cash register where someone had just
cleared out. This table wasn’t going to be much of a money-maker this morning.
More than occupying it, we were taking it hostage. And Jim, who said he no
longer had much of an appetite in the morning, only ordered whole wheat toast
and butter, while I decided on the cinnamon French toast with maple syrup. We
both ordered black coffee, but that was going to be a losing proposition for
the proprietor as well, since we never said “no” to refills, every time someone
passed by with a fresh pot. <o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This time the meeting was one on one. We were,
as we say in Argentina, “in our sauce,” talking about the things of interest to
the two of us—his yard, his house, his projects (didn’t it seem <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">astonishing</i> that a man with stage four
cancer was still awash with projects for the future?) I talked about my books
and blogs. We talked about writing and writers. He recalled anecdotes about his
youthful adventures when he traveled far and wide making a pest of himself
until he could meet some of the writers he most admired. I couldn’t help but
recall that when Beat Generation writer Hunter S. Thompson blew his brains out,
one of the items pinned with a magnet to the refrigerator in his kitchen where
he did the deed was one of Jim’s haiku poems, in Jim’s own hand. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">And we talked about his
poetry—his haiku. Earlier, during one of our long-long-distance phone calls he
had told me that he was finally considering publishing them. During the
reorganization of his house, he had decided to see if he had enough for a book
of haiku poetry. Turned out he did…more than enough, in fact: approximately ten
thousand haiku by James Bowsher. He told me that he was now writing haiku about
cancer. “You write what you know.”<br /> <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">He had tried one out on
his oncology nurse friend. In the waiting room, she saw him scribbling in the
notebook he carries in his hip pocket and said, “Jim, can I ask you what you’re
writing?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Sure,” says Jim. “A
poem.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“What about?” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Cancer.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEij5t8rTKa1k-LV43Tz4PIOAjb0-run3j2Fg9ViGzlC1oR7qynYQd4N8uGJDFCeokHZmBXwURsX1mXugDGe9DRyF8bcfLBUGy0qhWuMc1_fYls0iPInRNykJBnDO009N8EQ2zXpWJEq674azVc9zF6dKUQmRlKuAeamHxnjG4zoM-NGLAm38oJTvljZaAnA/s1608/Jim%20story.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1608" data-original-width="1208" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEij5t8rTKa1k-LV43Tz4PIOAjb0-run3j2Fg9ViGzlC1oR7qynYQd4N8uGJDFCeokHZmBXwURsX1mXugDGe9DRyF8bcfLBUGy0qhWuMc1_fYls0iPInRNykJBnDO009N8EQ2zXpWJEq674azVc9zF6dKUQmRlKuAeamHxnjG4zoM-NGLAm38oJTvljZaAnA/w300-h400/Jim%20story.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Do you remember it? Can
you tell it to me?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Sure,” Jim says. And
right then and there, as if I were the nurse, he thinks for a few seconds,
looks at the ceiling, and recites the little three-line poem. It compares
cancer to a predator shark, swimming in his blood, waiting until the time is
right to attack and rip him apart. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“It made her cry,” says
Jim. For writer types like us, making somebody cry (or laugh, or think, or
remember, or rejoice), well, that’s a bullseye. Says Jim, “She goes, ‘That’s
exactly right Jim. That’s exactly what it’s like.’”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The breakfast crowd thins
out. For a while we’re almost alone in the place, still drinking the coffee
they generously keep offering us. Then, the lunch crowd starts drifting in. And
still, we remain holed up in our corner under the window by the door. And soon
the place is loaded with patrons again. But when we’re on a roll like this,
it’s hard to break it, even though neither of us has the stamina we once had
any more. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Finally, it’s Jim who
suggests we call it a day. After all, we’ve confiscated this table for the past
four hours. It’s the first time in any of our marathon conversations that Jim
has ever been the one to suggest a pause. Whenever someone he enjoys talking to
suggests ending a conversation, Jim is famous for saying, “Okay, but just one
more story. You’re gonna <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">love</i> this
one!” I figure he must be getting tired. It’s only natural. But then again,
maybe he’s just anxious to get back to his frames. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Jim has always been a
fanatical baseball fan. And if there was one thing that had become clear to me,
it was that Jim’s philosophy on life had a lot in common with that of baseball
great Yoga Berra, who once famously quipped, “It ain’t over till it’s over.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">In the car on the way
back to his house to drop him off, Jim says, “Thanks Dan. This was great! I’m
so glad we got together.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The week in Wapak goes by
like a lightning flash. Suddenly, it’s my last day. Again, a gorgeous autumn
day. Cold, but clear and windless. There’s thick frost on my rented car when I
get up. I go in the morning to have breakfast with a friend and former
employer, Leslie Rigali. I worked for her for a year as a consultant in
nineteen-ninety, when she was the owner of Davanti Media in Lima, an industrial
city twelve miles north of Wapak. We created some interesting media projects
together.<br /><o:p></o:p></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBQW87V69BxI6cyhiu_qLjS3Cs3U4rHwC7pF8KglylnliXhSqAfo8zotTzeGK0ErqlSq5hUYxmhNcMHP9aNoW_QAGJYDAjdYR_SY6zbLgsJAFIjOkBRqS9k4VfHa_tl0z63FqDWq1E-WZ45RI99ruOcG594Lz1kJblcHUZNJWJi1fwZ0e6dYU_runK4d-C/s1264/moonflower.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1264" data-original-width="1208" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBQW87V69BxI6cyhiu_qLjS3Cs3U4rHwC7pF8KglylnliXhSqAfo8zotTzeGK0ErqlSq5hUYxmhNcMHP9aNoW_QAGJYDAjdYR_SY6zbLgsJAFIjOkBRqS9k4VfHa_tl0z63FqDWq1E-WZ45RI99ruOcG594Lz1kJblcHUZNJWJi1fwZ0e6dYU_runK4d-C/w383-h400/moonflower.jpg" width="383" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Moonflower Inn, "my home back home" in Wapakoneta</span></i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">We haven’t seen each
other in thirty years, but when we meet at the Harding Highway Panera in Lima,
it’s almost as if no time at all has passed. It’s a relaxed, newsy conversation
that lasts a good hour and a half.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Toward the end, it occurs to me, as we’re talking about my books, that
this is precisely the person—a crackerjack businesswoman with years of public
relations and advertising work behind her—who might be able to help me improve my
book circulation in the Lima area.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I self-consciously bring
the subject up, explaining that I had no intention of doing so, and she is
immediately all over it, with ideas and suggestions based on her long
experience and impeccable contacts. She says she would be more than happy to
help me. We both come away from our breakfast happy to have renewed our
friendship. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It’s a great start to my
last day back home in Ohio.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">As the hours tick by, I
try to pack as much as I can into one day. Mary Jo and I meet up for coffee in
downtown Wapak. We go to Winans, a place with great coffee and even better
chocolates, both of which I try. It’s still such a lovely day, if chilly. that we decide to sit at the single table that Winans has on the sidewalk. A chance for
me to revisit my home town at street level. Mary Jo knows a lot of people in
town and a few of them stopped to chat a while at our sidewalk table. A little
later, after we had finished our coffee, we also stopped a little further up
the street to talk with the two amiable ladies who run Macky’s Health and Hemp.
The store is a medical cannabis dispensary. Had you told me a few years back
that someone would be selling cannabis on the main drag in Wapakoneta, I would
have said you were crazy. Later, one of the ladies approaches us again while I am
taking some pictures and holds up my book, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Visions
of What Used to Be</i>, and says, “I just realized…this is you, right?” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I nod. “Would you sign it?”</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWgCSSW_cOEhf86GP5FMHpII-QUCW9pB8FCdKibQC0jLLQdPLKkYr3UIm1IGidhBHaVDV9CnTmXxmTV12fSlmZKFRR8iow5U6CRebMuKrAbofG-LY5fgLBwNrGUdxtC97hSsZvx6qA42vEKN7Wj8ktZLLUxV5kgXixLxCt6NvQuERiyB2NGpD8uYwv_yPB/s1286/RAC%20my%20books.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1286" data-original-width="966" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWgCSSW_cOEhf86GP5FMHpII-QUCW9pB8FCdKibQC0jLLQdPLKkYr3UIm1IGidhBHaVDV9CnTmXxmTV12fSlmZKFRR8iow5U6CRebMuKrAbofG-LY5fgLBwNrGUdxtC97hSsZvx6qA42vEKN7Wj8ktZLLUxV5kgXixLxCt6NvQuERiyB2NGpD8uYwv_yPB/w300-h400/RAC%20my%20books.jpg" width="300" /></a></span></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">She made my day. So did
seeing that my books were once again in a brick and mortar store, and right in
the front window of the Riverside Art Center, a Wapakoneta cultural venue, where
I had earlier left ten signed copies of each book. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Mary Jo and I walked
around town some more, acting like tourists and taking pictures as if this were
the first time either of us had ever set foot in downtown Wapakoneta.
Eventually, however, it was time for me to go back to the Moonflower and pack.
It was about four when I got back. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Meanwhile, Mary Jo
arranged with Gallimore to meet her at six at La Grande Pizza, and then she
arranged with Jim Bowsher to pick him up and take him as well. I was to get
there as soon as I could. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My packing and
straightening up of my quarters at the Moonflower finished, I arrived just
after six at La Grande and met my three friends at the door. We sat, fittingly,
in a place that was once occupied by what was then known as “the front table”,
back when this same building was my father’s place of business for a
quarter-century from the mid-forties to the late-sixties. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOu7JOLzZZH4-WwD2lj4gzDV09tOSqknBpkzkBX23p1bgKjfGbyaL005xCsUOP-G9QKPGkOY486EnHK792dsseR7kkHAg7QaLmqLnR4SxeUQzVH6Ra-775IPhrbktowQ2PU4HugBs2HHcHI0AOvn9QoQGCP-tdef-tsJZPkFoK4VTeSQGWiOZUElwAQJJs/s382/Whitie%20with%20Pudge%20Hepp.png" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="306" data-original-width="382" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOu7JOLzZZH4-WwD2lj4gzDV09tOSqknBpkzkBX23p1bgKjfGbyaL005xCsUOP-G9QKPGkOY486EnHK792dsseR7kkHAg7QaLmqLnR4SxeUQzVH6Ra-775IPhrbktowQ2PU4HugBs2HHcHI0AOvn9QoQGCP-tdef-tsJZPkFoK4VTeSQGWiOZUElwAQJJs/w400-h320/Whitie%20with%20Pudge%20Hepp.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>The Teddy Bear, with Whitie at the head of the front table</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Back then, the place was
called the Teddy Bear, and for many years, the “front table”, a long,
Formica-topped table with eight chairs, was where some of the town’s movers and
shakers met for breakfast and to exchange gossip. My grandfather, Murel Newland,
had hired local contractor Walter Steinbaugh to build the building toward the
end of World War II, so that his three oldest sons would have a place of
business to come home to when they returned from military service. In the early
years, Whitie was in business with his older brother Red and his younger
brother Chuck, but they both eventually moved on to other activities and the
Teddy Bear became our family’s business, which my father and mother operated. <o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhY_B15cQ_Fag1yxtXLO5UqBfNRGYEfudB9OCHGwJQn-f6BFi8xgCLLwohQerdp0eQSl4nkeaYp2vhQYwmBSDBrhFWHXJsRnfdswW-SCbHyyLnz8MDbvcPh1CWxiDMdxmrGCdTGpabWGt3G-YsSAt9gLxkKsXzIdrdlhlFLZXy0fQcaXddU6JAW7k6gCQR8/s1608/At%20La%20Grande.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1608" data-original-width="1208" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhY_B15cQ_Fag1yxtXLO5UqBfNRGYEfudB9OCHGwJQn-f6BFi8xgCLLwohQerdp0eQSl4nkeaYp2vhQYwmBSDBrhFWHXJsRnfdswW-SCbHyyLnz8MDbvcPh1CWxiDMdxmrGCdTGpabWGt3G-YsSAt9gLxkKsXzIdrdlhlFLZXy0fQcaXddU6JAW7k6gCQR8/w300-h400/At%20La%20Grande.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><b>The gang at La Grande<br />Jim, Mark, Dan and Mary Jo</b></i></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It was only the third
time I’d been in that building in more than fifty years since my father had
sold it. It was greatly changed. But in my mind’s eye, I could visualize it
exactly as it had been. The typical diner, all chrome, Formica, glass blocks
and fifties colors. I could remember the cigarette machine beside the door, the
jukebox just behind where Mark was sitting and the cigar and candy case at the
far end of the counter against the kitchen wall. I could see the old kitchen
too, and the backroom and storeroom, the booths along the side wall of the
dining room and the tables in the middle, the wrap-around glass-block counter
with two stools at the end—one of which now formed part of Jim’s eclectic
collection of Wapakoneta memorabilia.<br /> <o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">We enjoyed excellent
pizza and cold draft. The conversation was more nostalgic than political,
remembering people and anecdotes from the town, this town, where we had all
grown up. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Eventually, however, it was
time to say good-bye. Good-byes seem temporary when you’re young, but over
seventy, they begin to have a permanence about them, a lack of certainty, a
sense of hope without expectation. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Outside in the street, we
all hugged each other and, for lack of anything better to say, said, “See you
next time.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">When I hugged Jim, I
couldn’t help noting how small he seemed. Light as a cat. I said, “Jim, it’s
been great. Hopefully, I’ll be back in a year or so.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Jim said, “I’ll be here.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I believed him.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01054536465220812092noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1616769513702255459.post-2576039132251420282023-11-15T11:31:00.000-03:002023-11-15T11:31:24.366-03:00RUNNING LATE<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvVsaE_0Oq9LginHaiqVFhAnM0B96uyVTKEsZ37k5H0hz05BGsva-fCy90zsLQdVQViIFsiFBEYiMRdmtruZHA6KvPNgHTqPowQ59aDSyxF4LPdyGR_E9BR-mVjLogH-wwFXSbjdQeSIeqI9wxP0Z9nzX78MQ34A10O424-kgjr4YQ-FfEftmk9YaVLlJM/s400/running%20late.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="274" data-original-width="400" height="438" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvVsaE_0Oq9LginHaiqVFhAnM0B96uyVTKEsZ37k5H0hz05BGsva-fCy90zsLQdVQViIFsiFBEYiMRdmtruZHA6KvPNgHTqPowQ59aDSyxF4LPdyGR_E9BR-mVjLogH-wwFXSbjdQeSIeqI9wxP0Z9nzX78MQ34A10O424-kgjr4YQ-FfEftmk9YaVLlJM/w640-h438/running%20late.gif" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><span style="font-size: large;">Hi everybody!<br />I won't be getting a blog out today. I'm traveling. I'll be back in my studio sometime after the seventeenth. We'll catch up then!</span><p></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01054536465220812092noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1616769513702255459.post-15791048149494439052023-10-30T12:55:00.003-03:002023-10-30T13:27:46.954-03:00YANKEE REDUX - FORT AMANDA: PICNICKING IN THE GRAVEYARD<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;">When I was growing up in rural Ohio, in
the 1950s and ‘60s, we, like a lot of other Midwestern families back then,
liked going on picnics. Our major family reunions on both sides back then were
almost always picnics, some held in places a couple of hours away or more by
car.</span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzNql5xI9TT82FACRjRPTFF7fuwYA_V42D0baRVTUbgNzGREQtWzJoqFavuvljxxsTksM211j8Mw_JO9Bez5yp8Mlv91g5wBZuojiCVkKf_55PQwgDx9eYYDKspNKs8jGPfbd5DKY_4V5zvlM9yTD5i3dfwWuFb_ltbDgJ7_ulutuEGKc2IEP5suRO4sEE/s400/Artist's%20conception%20Ft%20Amanda.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="166" data-original-width="400" height="166" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzNql5xI9TT82FACRjRPTFF7fuwYA_V42D0baRVTUbgNzGREQtWzJoqFavuvljxxsTksM211j8Mw_JO9Bez5yp8Mlv91g5wBZuojiCVkKf_55PQwgDx9eYYDKspNKs8jGPfbd5DKY_4V5zvlM9yTD5i3dfwWuFb_ltbDgJ7_ulutuEGKc2IEP5suRO4sEE/w400-h166/Artist's%20conception%20Ft%20Amanda.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Fort Amanda 1812-1815 - Artist's conception</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">On these occasions, my mother,
grandmothers and aunts would spend the night before and the early morning
preparing some of their tastiest dishes to take along and share and no one
skimped on what they brought, so that such outings turned out to be veritable
gastronomic events of Viking feast-like proportions: Picnic baskets, covered
dishes, grocery sacks and dessert carriers arrived heavy-laden with
finger-lickin’ pan-fried chicken, succulent baked ham, cheesy scalloped
potatoes, sweet-and-sour coleslaw, deviled and pickled eggs, macaroni and
relish salad, potato salad, three-bean salad, garden-fresh sliced tomatoes,
baked beans with franks, potato and corn chips, syrupy fruit salad,
marshmallowy heavenly hash, devil’s food brownies, white cake with creamy white
or fudgy chocolate frosting, rhubarb pie, lemon merengue pie, chocolate
merengue pie, Dutch apple pie, cherry pie, peach pie...just about any delicious
thing you could think of, accompanied by gallon Thermos jugs of strong hot
coffee, iced tea, lemonade and several flavors of Kool-Aid.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The farthest we went, and on several
occasions, was with my mother’s family to the Indiana State Park, an exciting
place that featured sprawling woodlands, a small herd of bison, a tall, scary
smoke-watch tower that you could climb if you had the nerve, and lots of trails
to hike near the picnic grounds. But we also went to places like the
campgrounds at Lake Loramie or Sidney’s hilly, wooded city park (both in Shelby
County where my mother had lived as a little girl), to Faurot Park in the
industrial city of Lima fifteen miles north of our town, where my father had grown
up, to nearby Grand Lake Saint Marys, or to any of a number of locations that
my Grandfather Newland decided were halfway points between wherever my father’s
youngest brother—a Methodist minister—was posted and Wapakoneta, where the rest
of us lived.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But the location where most of our family
picnics took place, the one we went to on the spur of the moment, when somebody
said, “Hey, let’s meet for a picnic this Sunday,” or “It’s such nice fall
weather...How about a weenie roast?” was always Fort Amanda.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgGkw_4TmDXKnsnNCLqSkNQ7plP4JnFFhBgEcrwqZb3n8IYVGp0hERx1t9jQjIytrCMOJ5J3AO1T0Y_8UkURELownzCnMZtMMVhJCbsvmsoU98flEEusG4eJ_12b41bsd6n4JrwJ_eg0UakXIOofU8nXGbiPbstG5K5EVq1nRNIt9rbdD-5iYLShwTCoCY/s400/Ft%20Amanda%20National%20Cementery.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="400" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgGkw_4TmDXKnsnNCLqSkNQ7plP4JnFFhBgEcrwqZb3n8IYVGp0hERx1t9jQjIytrCMOJ5J3AO1T0Y_8UkURELownzCnMZtMMVhJCbsvmsoU98flEEusG4eJ_12b41bsd6n4JrwJ_eg0UakXIOofU8nXGbiPbstG5K5EVq1nRNIt9rbdD-5iYLShwTCoCY/w400-h300/Ft%20Amanda%20National%20Cementery.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Ft. Amanda National Cemetery</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">Now, what might seem odd about this to anyone
not from our area is that Fort Amanda is best known for being a designated
National Cemetery, dating back to the War of 1812. At some point, somebody
decided to declare the site a State Park and, later on, somebody else thought,
as Ohioans are wont to do, that the grounds adjacent to the cemetery would make
a good place to have a few picnic tables and grills, and then a shelter house
and hand-pump—to bring up water so sulfurous that the rotten egg smell was enough
to knock you down—were added, and an outhouse for women and another one for
men, and suddenly, next to the graveyard, was Fort Amanda Memorial Park.</span><br /><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Oddly enough, despite being sort of the
backyard to a cemetery, Fort Amanda isn’t a depressing place at all. Or at
least it never seemed so to us. Located nine miles northwest of my home town,
you get there along lovely State Route 198, a two-lane road that wends its way
through some slightly rolling, rural, West Central Ohio countryside. Some of
what were once green and fertile farms when I was a boy have been sold off
piece by piece to the wealthier members of what has become, essentially, a
bedroom community—since the super highway, a more urban society and corporate
farming carried away jobs, local trade and our small-town culture to other
places—to build their sprawling country-squire dream homes. But much of the
landscape still looks a great deal as it did when I was young, and I take great
pleasure in driving that road whenever I’m back for a visit.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8JsgHweeC_Ra7ofcJ_C2uymurIuplhm9olgG5D1FG5jr1Dq_6y6UjaPPkYkCS6Qas5VzHFVGw8vaki3Db2Zyd_1PUYdSq-mRZBVKeSTIQ1hdTkGDs72KWZRm8ajC9EGgAoHmKri6NxzVAY5aN9yXu1994CQOJ9XqSv4gGmyRXlN9yMpHHQjIcoxOox7N4/s400/Woodlands%20on%20the%20banks%20of%20the%20Auglaize.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="400" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8JsgHweeC_Ra7ofcJ_C2uymurIuplhm9olgG5D1FG5jr1Dq_6y6UjaPPkYkCS6Qas5VzHFVGw8vaki3Db2Zyd_1PUYdSq-mRZBVKeSTIQ1hdTkGDs72KWZRm8ajC9EGgAoHmKri6NxzVAY5aN9yXu1994CQOJ9XqSv4gGmyRXlN9yMpHHQjIcoxOox7N4/w400-h300/Woodlands%20on%20the%20banks%20of%20the%20Auglaize.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Woodland along the Auglaize River</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The park and cemetery have been carved out
of the once vast Ohio woodlands, from the times before our Scots-Irish and
German ancestors immigrated and leveled the forest to make way for farming. So
going to Fort Amanda is a little like cupping your hands, blinder-style, around
your eyes, gazing in through the window of an intricate dollhouse or toy train
station and trying to imagine what it would be like to actually go in there and
walk around. Except that in this case, what you’re looking at through the wrong
end of your impromptu telescope, is a tiny piece of Ohio that probably looks
quite a bit like it did two hundred years ago, when the land was just first
partially cleared to build the fort. Gently rolling woodland peopled with
hickory, oak, maple and sycamore, among other forest species, a deep gorge cut
by the tawny waters of the Auglaize River, on which the fort was built—and
which also runs through the center of our town—and its accompanying bluffs that
afford picnickers timeless, bucolic views from the picnic grounds.<o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSishpbUuglReIr4i-UnaokJphYMteFE-J0RcACj0v03Y-_fgZVUaDhiBUPmCnHtojmbVbfMYtasA1ZfvtsRVvFugH_MG5TS3snIQk3XDvL1jfggaBS8ibvksUNbdbHkwGr8vkMFjPHKwgl2heWazRTihGTRxLubIF-fY0qUphh0FfOh0Cj9Z2dgzcn8DZ/s400/Ft%20Amanda%20Picnic%20Area.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="400" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSishpbUuglReIr4i-UnaokJphYMteFE-J0RcACj0v03Y-_fgZVUaDhiBUPmCnHtojmbVbfMYtasA1ZfvtsRVvFugH_MG5TS3snIQk3XDvL1jfggaBS8ibvksUNbdbHkwGr8vkMFjPHKwgl2heWazRTihGTRxLubIF-fY0qUphh0FfOh0Cj9Z2dgzcn8DZ/w400-h300/Ft%20Amanda%20Picnic%20Area.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Picnic grounds at Ft. Amanda</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">To us, this wooded paradise in the midst
of Ohio farm country was so familiar that, despite our playtime fantasies, it
was hard to believe that Fort Amanda had ever been as important as it was in
American history, but it indeed had a key purpose in the Early American
struggle to maintain US independence. The defeat of American General William
Hull at Fort Detroit had already blasted a major hole in US defenses against
the British and Native American onslaught in the War of 1812, and now most of
the Michigan Territory had fallen into enemy hands. The neighboring Ohio
Territory was thus left vulnerable to continuing British expansion.<o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">American commander, General William Henry
Harrison, realized that the only hope of containing the British advantage and,
hopefully, winning the war would be to ensure that their edge didn’t extend
beyond the Michigan border. Having no federal troop strength in the area, he
called up the Ohio and Kentucky militias to defend the Ohio Territory. But
Nature presented him with a formidable enemy of its own: the Great Black Swamp,
a twenty-five-mile-wide, hundred-mile-long strip of glacial marshland in Northwestern Ohio that
lay in the former bed of an ancient precursor to Great Lake Erie. Trying to
move men, animals, weaponry and supplies through that difficult terrain,
Harrison knew, would be logistical and strategic suicide. So he decided instead
to make use of barges on a Western Ohio supply route formed by two rivers: the
Saint Marys and the Auglaize, both of which flow generally north, about a
hundred miles toward Lake Erie.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhANt_EFAWkHwczSnptEP2oXyVt56SxWdVxBkeibBatj4GIJabEAeapeQWBGC9k1u0ggoX5QozulgFGMjdQSHwuoOLRp2IQ01HVTMSfad9JuvIX2hF5pwS_a7leF9_ibwhEoFtdfTk_EhVkTU43rygjEZXfuaM86PhUAFkaN6fOGHZUeZpEAl6ZLI3pWDfy/s400/Map%20of%20Great%20Black%20Swamp.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="400" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhANt_EFAWkHwczSnptEP2oXyVt56SxWdVxBkeibBatj4GIJabEAeapeQWBGC9k1u0ggoX5QozulgFGMjdQSHwuoOLRp2IQ01HVTMSfad9JuvIX2hF5pwS_a7leF9_ibwhEoFtdfTk_EhVkTU43rygjEZXfuaM86PhUAFkaN6fOGHZUeZpEAl6ZLI3pWDfy/w400-h400/Map%20of%20Great%20Black%20Swamp.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>In November of 1812, General Harrison
mapped out a spot in West-Central Ohio for the establishment of a supply depot
on the high western bank of the Auglaize—where an Ottawa village had once
stood—and sent orders to Lieutenant Colonel Robert Pogue of the Kentucky
Mounted Militia, and a veteran of the decisive Battle of Fallen Timbers in
1794, to build a frontier fortress at that site. Pogue and his men complied
immediately, swiftly erecting the fortress in timber-stockade style. They built
four two-storey blockhouses at the corners of a square area measuring about one hundred sixty by one hundred sixty feet and connected them with eleven-foot-tall timber palisades all
around the perimeter. Colonel Pogue decided to christen the finished fort
“Amanda”, after his twelve-year-old daughter, Hannah Amanda Pogue.<o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">In February of 1813, a company of Ohio
militiamen arrived to re-garrison the new fort, under the command of Captain
Thompson Ward. Ward and his men would almost immediately expand the
installations to handle an ever-increasing flow of men and goods that included
not only victuals, munitions and whiskey, but also livestock and other bulk
rations to help make the fort a sustainable source of food for combat troops. Fort
Amanda thus was to become a key debarkation destination for men and supplies
being sent north in the American thrust to recapture Fort Detroit in Michigan.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRysIH7yUjsslik20ZWr1UQwYxWYMIeBKh_9iWpkC6klAS58GtugSPhH0hHFRzHsyx8G5hOl6yxB0mHw51mGJkY5lWLnJMQpcA_DjQl3DRV6QTbwfa7EiGUSSbUZs2D47DE08rfY6ccwkW5DWBjnGFis1zJPEIr5RtAKH439Q3SBsp4uvkQLP2S27OMC-8/s400/Painting%20by%20Edward%20Percy%20Moran%20depicting%20Perry's%20crossing.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="298" data-original-width="400" height="297" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRysIH7yUjsslik20ZWr1UQwYxWYMIeBKh_9iWpkC6klAS58GtugSPhH0hHFRzHsyx8G5hOl6yxB0mHw51mGJkY5lWLnJMQpcA_DjQl3DRV6QTbwfa7EiGUSSbUZs2D47DE08rfY6ccwkW5DWBjnGFis1zJPEIr5RtAKH439Q3SBsp4uvkQLP2S27OMC-8/w400-h297/Painting%20by%20Edward%20Percy%20Moran%20depicting%20Perry's%20crossing.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Painting by Edward Percy Moran of <br />Perry's crossing to the USS Niagra</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">In early September of that year, a fleet
of nine vessels of the fledgling United States Navy, under the command of
Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, engaged six ships of the British Royal Navy at
Put-In-Bay on Lake Erie off the coast of the Ohio Territory. The superior
firepower of the British ships placed Perry at a disadvantage at the onset of
the battle and his flagship, the USS Lawrence, was hammered to pieces by the
British guns. But as it was adrift and sinking, he and the handful of still
able men aboard set off a final salvo of cannon fire before abandoning ship.
What was left of his crew rowed Perry in a small boat through heavy cannon fire
to the USS Niagara, from where he directed the rest of the naval battle. Far
from retreating or surrendering as the British commander expected, Perry
ordered his subordinate officers to move American schooners closer to the
battle and then, he himself sailed the Niagara into the breach, pounding the
British vessels with gunfire at close range until they were disabled and forced
to surrender, with Perry ultimately capturing them for the US Navy. He then
sent his now famous message to General Harrison: “We have met the enemy and
they are ours; two ships, two brigs, one schooner and one sloop.” <o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">This decisive battle cut main supply lines
to the British troops and their coalition of Native American allies under Chief
Tecumseh at Detroit. With the US in control of Lake Erie until the end of the
war, and with Americans being supplied from the south through outposts like
Fort Amanda, General Harrison was eventually able to rout the British and their
Native allies, recovering Detroit and then pursuing the fleeing enemy to a
final showdown known as The Battle of Thames, where Tecumseh was killed, and
his Native coalition dismembered.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMB5yltPr-z_0jN0I5lrKmViexe1DX451Gbob6YCWGcO9YVYIHTTMah8w1PuD1VcFqiH26aXzrf0yb-fmEdZTX-53Gq75vLJR1cfPwyJNmmv7Rwyxv0g52MYF27MmH23PqbFdNIjyAto7ut-vtR9s3gKThj4e1kFi6ERq-xBsE-LTJPFtF0RCZUZJhGak6/s400/Soildier's%20grave.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="338" data-original-width="400" height="338" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMB5yltPr-z_0jN0I5lrKmViexe1DX451Gbob6YCWGcO9YVYIHTTMah8w1PuD1VcFqiH26aXzrf0yb-fmEdZTX-53Gq75vLJR1cfPwyJNmmv7Rwyxv0g52MYF27MmH23PqbFdNIjyAto7ut-vtR9s3gKThj4e1kFi6ERq-xBsE-LTJPFtF0RCZUZJhGak6/w400-h338/Soildier's%20grave.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>A soldier's grave</i></td></tr></tbody></table><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Fort Amanda remained active until the end
of the war in 1814 (the final battle was actually fought in New Orleans—with
victory going to General Andrew Jackson—in January of 1815). Troops abandoned
the frontier fort in 1815, but it immediately became an outpost favored by
settlers who moved into the area following the war. <o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">When my sister, brother, cousins and I
were kids, the place seemed huge and mysterious to us. Now when I see it, I
realize how tiny it is—a scant few acres of what remains of primitive Ohio. But
back then, for us, it was replete with the echoes of history, and although our
parents didn’t know a great deal of its background, the little that they told
us filled our heads with fantasies about the Native Amerians who had
originally lived there, the French hunters and trappers who had frequented the
region and gave our river its name (loosely translated as muddy waters or frozen waters depending on whose interpretation you believe), and
the first US settlers to push west into the Ohio Territory from the frontiers
of the original thirteen American states.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisLcoQrOMNaxeou8TZWhwhb-1YXcMFo_-zh-eJ595WKPrhSzLnyvEyOcMvPwMBrFTSulxpcXF5j81naBErnbHFwmekNwLf0GG_7JiUDHNYZeoJWCA-ykKjj9GFIYxZsUpR8I_kGN_cyNAI5re6-UHVL1YhGXbMGfNIH9dsZnXzttlCTmBhUCSyjQZf1Ch9/s400/Ft%20Amanda%20Monument.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="400" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisLcoQrOMNaxeou8TZWhwhb-1YXcMFo_-zh-eJ595WKPrhSzLnyvEyOcMvPwMBrFTSulxpcXF5j81naBErnbHFwmekNwLf0GG_7JiUDHNYZeoJWCA-ykKjj9GFIYxZsUpR8I_kGN_cyNAI5re6-UHVL1YhGXbMGfNIH9dsZnXzttlCTmBhUCSyjQZf1Ch9/w400-h300/Ft%20Amanda%20Monument.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>The monument at Ft. Amanda</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">We imagined the soldiers there manning the
fort, dominating the high ground and fighting off the British troops and
Indians who tried to attack them from the opposite bank of the river below,
pretending we were them as we gathered around the Fort Amanda monument as if it
were the fort itself, a monolith in the midst of open country that was a
magical place in which we were invulnerable to enemy fire. While our mothers
were back in the picnic area, busy setting the tables for lunch, my cousin
Greg, who was my same age and my closest friend—and who could climb just about
anything from the tallest trees to light and telephone poles—would grapple his
way up the base of the monument and then shinny up its tall obelisk, pretending
he was the sentry, and telling us when the enemy was drawing near, so that we
could open fire on them. Munitions were always short in our fantasies, and we
had to make every shot count. “Don’t shoot till you see the whites of their
eyes,” was the standing order for an entire generation of Golden-Age-Hollywood
movie-goers.<o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But since both Greg and I had been told we had Native
American blood flowing in our veins as well (both on our mothers’ sides) we
also, in some renegade corner of our minds, understood the rage of the Indians
as their territories were wrested from them by the white man, so we would also
sometimes pretend to be Shawnee or Ottawa braves. We sheltered in the trunks of
two huge hollow trees near the river (Greg was sure Indians really had lived in
those trees, “since that’s what they did when they didn’t have a teepee,” and
it was exciting to believe he was right and that we were where some aboriginal
ancestor of ours had huddled before us, despite the fact that our mothers
warned us that the only things huddling there were maybe black widow spiders).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">On those days I envied Greg his dark skin,
straight black hair, brown eyes and slight build as we tried to “be quiet as
Indians” hiking through the woods and sneaking up the steep slopes to make a
surprise appearance in the picnic areas, where our mothers were calling us for
lunch. I, with my German frame and light skin, eyes and hair, as well as my
natural lack of physical grace, was no match for him when it came to claiming
our Native heritage.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyEM3kZOpgjHf4Xke3RBMkD2Z19sUFJn6Zf9Ni09VK68cxISF2KIu7Uek1p_JjBAZWuMvR0FrFC9ZrWdSUS3UIqMIvSGB0aO-E5Vt43fWz3kabLGRyCD-ltFA7ld9zh7arI5sD6ZkfQBG_2C6NmLmp9CHW9ZHpJSyAR9UZiIlQa9elUIhhhX1Qqu7tSuTC/s320/Bridge.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="240" data-original-width="320" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyEM3kZOpgjHf4Xke3RBMkD2Z19sUFJn6Zf9Ni09VK68cxISF2KIu7Uek1p_JjBAZWuMvR0FrFC9ZrWdSUS3UIqMIvSGB0aO-E5Vt43fWz3kabLGRyCD-ltFA7ld9zh7arI5sD6ZkfQBG_2C6NmLmp9CHW9ZHpJSyAR9UZiIlQa9elUIhhhX1Qqu7tSuTC/w400-h300/Bridge.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;">After lunch there was also always a walk
with the adults through the cemetery, to peruse the inscriptions on the
nineteenth-century eroded gravestones, before crossing a wooden bridge—its
timbers smelling in summer of the acrid tar with which they were preserved—
over a ravine, leading to the Fort Amanda monument on the site of the old fort.
But not without a stop at the grave, just over the bridge, of Captain Edward
Dawson, which lay within a wrought iron fence, separate from the cemetery
proper. Legend had it that the captain had been off on a sort of nature hike
outside the stockade, picking grapes from some of the wild vines that still
formed part of the forest thicket when we were children, when he was killed by
Native archers who spotted him from the other side of the river. It chilled us
to read the inscription on his headstone: Captain Edward Dawson—Murdered by
Indians.</span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBiPPp3MKxAsRFvcrp3MM3wqfnz6yJ5i-t3d6TUkLoMiRPbfaK3LtUImHqA6kQEWoPdDj7yjWCx2J6q0Ep8PVscSv2al1-bZQIHTDKG5o0uuh1vxpMP_OUhhv-6Op8axSTPiEq6IKiNZkwYWDWDnJ0L9tOwRQpbgkz4hVpgwwpAnDOrBpIUwNu8_xnOEis/s320/Dawson's%20tombstone.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="240" data-original-width="320" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBiPPp3MKxAsRFvcrp3MM3wqfnz6yJ5i-t3d6TUkLoMiRPbfaK3LtUImHqA6kQEWoPdDj7yjWCx2J6q0Ep8PVscSv2al1-bZQIHTDKG5o0uuh1vxpMP_OUhhv-6Op8axSTPiEq6IKiNZkwYWDWDnJ0L9tOwRQpbgkz4hVpgwwpAnDOrBpIUwNu8_xnOEis/w400-h300/Dawson's%20tombstone.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Captain Dawson's chilling epitaph</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Up by the monument itself, we were
ever-fascinated by a heavy, round, concrete cover, which, our fathers
conjectured, was probably the entrance to an old munitions magazine where black
powder and other military supplies had been kept. I have little doubt that if
it hadn’t been as large and impenetrably heavy as it was, we boys would have
found a way to move it aside and find out what secrets it was hiding. As it
was, we could only speculate that, if there were only some way to get down
there, we would surely find old muskets, uniforms or cavalry sabers. Or at the
very least, some telling sign of the soldiers who had passed this way a century
and a half before us.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">On a recent trip back to Ohio, I walked
the grounds at Fort Amanda again. It was a weekday, and I was alone. It was a
pleasant, personal and nostalgic experience. Now, I was accompanied not only by
the ghosts of the soldiers who had manned the fort in 1812 and ‘13, or of the
ones who here ended their days and are buried, but also by the remembrance of
loved ones who have long-since died and with whom I had first come here so long
ago on pleasant summer and autumn outings.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I can see it now for what it is. A small,
quiet place for a pleasant picnic, an almost forgotten National Cemetery to
commemorate the final stage of the struggle for American independence that had
begun three and a half decades before, a short hike through the hilly, wooded
terrain of primitive Ohio, a tiny spot on the map, maintained by the efforts of
the Ohio Historical Society that few tourists are ever likely to see.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But for me it will always be a venue that
nurtured my childhood fantasies and a place where my family—both immediate and
extended—shared some precious, happy days. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01054536465220812092noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1616769513702255459.post-13027888168450193242023-10-15T19:51:00.005-03:002023-10-17T12:22:58.960-03:00YANKEE REDUX — SNOW DAYS<p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;">Winter was long and cold this year in Patagonia. Spring is finally here. The
wild apples and plums are blooming and the Spanish broom in budding. But the
accumulation of snow on the mountaintops is incredible for this time of the year,
and the mountain lakes are so brim full that their beaches are practically
non-existent.</span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXXqtWRRZiR4eGW8icfx7DO3_roIZm53D0LbCX5EhyduRafmU8J8KIGTXKqal5Sbkj0cOlr7JNgPZ3NnNcLfEe16YReaOd7jjWJ1XfMODTRf2Hfe8GjLSUn_nIlgQMbuoYETGtIKZU78wMfbTlCcNyVQjqXVoGUnQvespRJxNNPxePt5IjjibaVa7IprPI/s4150/Snow%20days%2005.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4150" data-original-width="3118" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXXqtWRRZiR4eGW8icfx7DO3_roIZm53D0LbCX5EhyduRafmU8J8KIGTXKqal5Sbkj0cOlr7JNgPZ3NnNcLfEe16YReaOd7jjWJ1XfMODTRf2Hfe8GjLSUn_nIlgQMbuoYETGtIKZU78wMfbTlCcNyVQjqXVoGUnQvespRJxNNPxePt5IjjibaVa7IprPI/w300-h400/Snow%20days%2005.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Winter in my corner of Patagonia</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I was just thinking about
how, here, in Patagonia, we’re all breathing a sigh of relief that sunny days
are ahead, while back in my home town of Wapakoneta, Ohio, friends and relatives are enjoying the blue-and-gold
days of autumn, but already bracing for the coming winter, which can be as
inclement as winters in Patagonia. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Some years ago, I
reflected on my mixed feelings about snow. In the dead of Patagonian winter, the
sound of heavy winter rain would often awaken me when it transitioned into snow.
The rhythm of it on the galvanized metal roofing of my cabin in the mountains
in Patagonia. The sound of it, gentle, deceivingly soothing if I didn’t
know what it meant. Muffled, it sounds, drumming rather than pattering,
thumping now and again as well, plopping as rain turns to wet snow and slithers
off the branches above the house to fall like a heavy cream pie on the roof.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I raise myself on my
elbow, draw back the curtain over the window next to my bed and peek out. It
won’t be dawn for another few hours and from this angle, all I can see are the
undersides of the boughs of the ancient beeches that surround the house,
towering over it, to the east, south and north. With the waning moon behind the
clouds, it’s hard to tell the state of affairs: rain, rain mixed with snow, or just
snow—the dangerous kind, heavy and wet.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I hear three or four
soggy, weighty plunks on the roof and know I can no longer hope for rain. It’s
snow, no question. Kneeling on the mattress to get a better look, even in this
pre-dawn darkness, I can see how the Spanish broom and smaller trees—laurels
and junipers—are hunkering down under the crushing burden of a very wet and
heavy snow.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Back then, I would almost
immediately get a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach and start getting
anxious. Better charge the battery on my laptop, charge up the flashlight
batteries. Oh, and my cell phone. If the land lines are down, the cells are all
we’ll have. I get up as quietly as possible so as not to wake up my wife and
pad barefoot into my studio, where I plug in various and sundry chargers and
devices. I then go back to bed. I try to relax and go back to sleep. I look at
the luminescent hands of the alarm clock. Four a.m.—too early to start the day.
But who can sleep? I lie there staring into the darkness, trying to gauge the
weight and type of the snow. The worst, I conclude, heavy as lead. Like
industrial quantities of lemon ice-cream piling up on the branches of the trees
in the windless pre-dawn hours. That means downed power lines, snapped phone
cables, blocked roads. It means days of work lost, clients upset, deadlines
missed.<o:p></o:p></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuAt2pInst9a1kNUBEmY6V8hXtua0tUydgYzCE8XpRic27L8sgtZszD2EwXIiYhtczkvOc4BcIN-1xbDCVLSVuqlRSRjBXS5YIAyQpwev87nbF7Xk7sZs6PxhyphenhyphenjYMJgUp4IOB2upCMDwbYZ6XhIb0hCXxghM4JNU3ObTVqFMa2lV5M-le9cDih2MrUVmss/s402/Snow%20days%2001.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="302" data-original-width="402" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuAt2pInst9a1kNUBEmY6V8hXtua0tUydgYzCE8XpRic27L8sgtZszD2EwXIiYhtczkvOc4BcIN-1xbDCVLSVuqlRSRjBXS5YIAyQpwev87nbF7Xk7sZs6PxhyphenhyphenjYMJgUp4IOB2upCMDwbYZ6XhIb0hCXxghM4JNU3ObTVqFMa2lV5M-le9cDih2MrUVmss/w400-h300/Snow%20days%2001.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I’ll never get back to
sleep this way, so I decide to change focus, to think about something else, or
to think about this but in a different light. I think about when I was a little
boy. Oh, how I loved the snow back in Ohio! I wanted it to snow always.
Back then, when I was small and, in fact, until I was middle-aged and moved
to Patagonia, I was a snow fanatic. I knew when it was coming, had an
intimate relationship with it. I even fancied I could <i>make </i>it
snow, so intimate was the bond. I literally had a nose for it. Could smell it
on the air, the same way I could smell frost, before it came.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">When I was in my forties,
I traveled back in Ohio, alone, for a visit with my folks in October. It
was the last time everybody was still well —my father, Whitie, and my mother, Reba
Mae, and my aunts and uncles, my little brother, whom nobody would ever have
guessed would be dead less than a decade later. Nor would my sister and I have
guessed that we would be each other’s only immediate family by then. The last
time, in other words, when things would be normal and going “home” would just
be that, going home.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Ohio had been having that
crisp, gold and blue weather of Midwestern autumn. October blue days, Reba Mae used
to call them. A gorgeous, euphoric kind of weather in which it seems nothing
could possibly go wrong. Cloudless, china-blue skies, the tawny wheat still in
some fields, waiting to be harvested, the cornfields just hard dry dirt and raw
stubble now, strewn and studded here and there with missed ears and scattered
kernels of sun-parched maize, the soft maples already standing stark and
stripped against the azure sky, their silver and golden foliage lying like fine
lingerie passionately shed at their feet, the sugar maples putting on the
last act of their fiery red-leafed show before also letting fall their autumn
hues, the oaks looking plucked and sparse with just a single dark-reddish-brown
leaf still clinging here and there to their branches, as if trying hard to
withstand the temptation to simply let go and allow a random autumnal breeze to
carry it drifting down to the ground, where <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>grey and red squirrels scrambled to collect acorns
for their winter hibernation.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxtBJgKYVJOcpc8GDVnbty-5Y8uIUVShPOWHByROhD78sVjnvMCkaoz5JThDIz96f9nqSmLt3uQmdYNRCXHEcjB2q5DRrw1KkifiyDf-Vvqt4Eebq-E_67ddLw5CM1u6OTx7llXbngc-wgNo2tIKb0wznsJCodEOfsmC4Xu-pjggfJBOSeZok-7az4rJAe/s854/autumn-around-country.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="554" data-original-width="854" height="260" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxtBJgKYVJOcpc8GDVnbty-5Y8uIUVShPOWHByROhD78sVjnvMCkaoz5JThDIz96f9nqSmLt3uQmdYNRCXHEcjB2q5DRrw1KkifiyDf-Vvqt4Eebq-E_67ddLw5CM1u6OTx7llXbngc-wgNo2tIKb0wznsJCodEOfsmC4Xu-pjggfJBOSeZok-7az4rJAe/w400-h260/autumn-around-country.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Autumn in Ohio. Photo by Bren Haas</i></b> </td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Paying my respects to my
native land—this particular rural land solely of which I am a citizen—on the
day before I was to return to Argentina, I had gone for a drive in a borrowed
car on the familiar back roads of West-Central Ohio. In the auric autumn-light
of late afternoon, alone on the Buckland-Holden Pike, I had been privileged to
watch a large white-tailed buck, his head holding high his impressive rack of
antlers, bolt from the open field where he had been grazing on abandoned corn,
make a dash ahead of my on-coming car, vault the seven-strand fence in one
impressively graceful leap, gallop and skitter across the pavement, so close I
fancied I could see the white of his startled eye, and jump the fence on
the other side of the road, before cantering off into a nearby woodlot, where
he disappeared from view. It was a sign, I thought, a blessing, an omen: Life
was good.<o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">That night, after supper
with my parents, in the house where I had been brought up from age twelve, and
where they would live for more than forty years, I went for a last-evening walk
around town, stopping off at the Alpha for a couple of drafts, bellied up to
the gorgeous old African mahogany bar that was owner Bill Gutman’s pride and
joy, before trekking the mile or so back home. When I came out of the Alpha, I
noticed the weather was changing. My light windbreaker was insufficient for
this new twist and I shivered when I exited the homey warmth of the stuffy bar
onto the main drag of town. There was a strange, frigid breeze out of the north
and the sky was fast clouding over. The air seemed charged and somehow
“electric” and, walking home, when I looked back from where I had just come,
the streetlamps of Main Street were casting that eerie orange glow,
so typical of winter nights, against the clouds. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It was only October 22<sup>nd</sup>,
but when I breathed in the night air, the scent was unmistakable. Even after twenty
years of living in Buenos Aires, my rural Ohio nose knew right
away what that indescribable fragrance was. Snow!<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">When I got back, Reba Mae
was dozing in front of the TV and Whitie was in the kitchen dishing himself up
a sundae of chocolate ice-cream, peanut butter and Hershey’s chocolate syrup.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Hey, Dan!” Whitie said
when I waltzed in through the back door.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Hey yourself, Dad, how’s
it going?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Okeydokey. Want some
ice-cream?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“No thanks. Hey Dad, know
what? I think it’s going to snow tonight.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Snow!!”</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"> he
cried, so loudly that it jolted Reba Mae out of her nap in the living room. “No
way, Dan. It’s <i>October</i>, for chrissake! Hell, you aren’t gonna get
any <i>snow</i> around <i>here</i> till Thanksgiving
at <i>least</i>.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Whitie had never been a
fan of snow, but his last job before he retired had been as a route salesman
for a local cheese manufacturer and after sixteen endless winters of slipping
and sliding around on rural Ohio roads and city streets in a truck loaded with twelve
tons of cheese, he had grown to unequivocally <i>hate</i> snow. “Look
at that white shit comin’ down out there,” he would say when it started
snowing. I didn’t get it. For me snow was about the most amazing and beautiful
thing on earth.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“I don’t know,” I said,
shaking my head. “The air sure smells like it.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“<i>Smells</i> like
it?” he grinned dubiously, “Aw, com’on now, Dan, don’t try an’ bullshit your
ol’ man."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“No, <i>really</i>, Dad,
I can smell it on the air.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Naw, never happen.
November, maybe. Christmas for sure. But <i>October</i>? I think you and
your schnozz have been in South America too long."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Okay, Dad, if you say
so. But I’ll tell you what, if it doesn’t snow tonight, it’s gonna miss a
helluva good chance.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Nah, not to worry, Dan.
I’d wager good money on it.” Strong words for the Whitie, who had a reputation
for being more than just careful with his money.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Actually, I’m not
worried,” I said. “I’d kind of <i>like</i> for it to snow.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Well, yeah, because
you’re <i>leaving</i> tomorrow, and going back to sunny South
America, but the rest of us have to stay here and put up with it after you’re
gone and it’s too damned early for it to start snowing already, damnit.” He was
so adamant that I half expected him to <i>forbid</i> me to ‘make it
snow’. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjO50BdgfhafSmtdvB2nTNNdZBNbLdgks4qb4i3eF9B9rerV_0_XmMoLn2U_DBOK1fPRQGuE3u8Ufyr-9wEb6qWA3UnFk2niVf4Hk6SSUrgnkVP-INm_s1J2PipV5pRx7nWKLsxlZgADOohRSfrv_GeRC8zzgUhnAhSem_r0u-Zh_gybcloeuUzBRVEWmwN/s402/Snow%20days%2004.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="302" data-original-width="402" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjO50BdgfhafSmtdvB2nTNNdZBNbLdgks4qb4i3eF9B9rerV_0_XmMoLn2U_DBOK1fPRQGuE3u8Ufyr-9wEb6qWA3UnFk2niVf4Hk6SSUrgnkVP-INm_s1J2PipV5pRx7nWKLsxlZgADOohRSfrv_GeRC8zzgUhnAhSem_r0u-Zh_gybcloeuUzBRVEWmwN/w400-h300/Snow%20days%2004.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>An early snow in Wapakoneta, Ohio</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;">But in the morning, we awoke to a four inches of pristine white covering everything. It was beautiful. But I wasn't anxious for my father to get up and see it.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;">When he did, he was almost furious. Whitie took this miraculous
autumn snow personally—a personal affront—and blamed me for it. I had </span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;">wished</i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;"> it
on him!</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“You drive,” he said,
holding out his car keys to me with two fingers in a gesture whose disdain was
only thinly veiled. “I had sixteen years of driving a truck on this white shit.
Any time I can let somebody else do it, I will.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I shrugged, smiled and took
the keys. I opened the garage door and then climbed into the big Mercury Grand
Marquis and started it up. I had tried to explain to Whitie on numerous
occasions that these modern, fuel-injected, computerized cars didn’t have to be
warmed up like the cars of the thirties, forties, fifties and sixties that he
grew up and matured on. But it was no use. It was easier not to try and fight
his routines or soundly developed opinions. His rule of thumb was a warm up of
at least ten minutes, so ten minutes it was. His house, his car, his way.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">As the exhaust from the
big Merc billowed white into the unseasonable chill of this October morning, I
went back into the house, retrieved my luggage from the room I had shared as a
boy with my kid brother, carried it out to the garage, popped the trunk and
loaded it in. It was all decided: We would go right from the pancake breakfast
to the airport. “Hard telling how long it’ll take us to do sixty
miles in <i>this</i> damn weather,” Whitie said.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Reba Mae and I got into
the car and waited. We knew this ritual by heart. We had been participants in
it ever since our family was a family. The rest of us would sit in the car and
wait while Whitie ran his checklist. Holding his one hand under the spigots in
the kitchen and bathroom and tightening the faucets with the other hand he
would do the check, a liturgy as strict as that of any religion: “Left faucet
off once…off twice…off three times. Right faucet off once…off twice…off three
times.” And so on throughout the house checking windows, appliances, anything
that might run or leak or in any way operate uselessly while he was gone. Off
one, two, three…Closed one, two, three…obsessive/compulsive by the numbers.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">My mother and I sat
there, saying nothing, waiting patiently, or impatiently but wordlessly, for
him to be done. We knew the drill. We waited for it to be over.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Finally, he was visible,
at the back door of the house: “Door locked once…twice…”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">And as usual this was the
point at which Reba Mae’s patience wore thin. She rolled down the window on the
backseat passenger’s side, where she was sitting in order to let Whitie sit up
front with me and she called out to him, “Norman, will you <i>please</i> come <i>on</i> and
get your <i>butt</i> into the <i>car</i> sometime today so
that we can <i>get going</i>.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Noooowww, <i>Mother</i>,”
he said as he approached the car, “don’t go being a dybbuk.” Then he climbed in
beside me and said, “Take ‘er away, Dan.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Already the snow had
stopped, the morning turning crisp, a good ten degrees under freezing. The snow
crunched and squeaked, a frozen powder, under the tires of the Merc as I backed
it down the driveway and onto the road. The county snowplow hadn’t been by yet,
but some neighbors had already laid tracks on the road. I followed them and
coaxed the Merc gently up the hill to the Hamilton Road Bridge. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These big eight-cylinder engines were entirely
too powerful for snowy streets and if you gave them too much gas you just spun
the tires and went nowhere.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">As I turned left onto
Hamilton, I saw in my rearview mirror how, although it was still early on a
Saturday morning, the county snowplow was already crossing the bridge and
turning onto our road to do its work. When we were kids, we loved to watch the
snowplow, and it was the same kind now as it was back then, a big five-ton
dump-truck the back-end tipped slightly to keep feeding rock salt into a hopper
and feeder that scattered the salt on the pavement, the front-end fitted with a
huge blade, set skewed toward the passenger side of the cab so as to throw the
snow off to the side of the road. Effective, efficient, a powerful tool with
which to keep things open and moving.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The main streets of town,
as we cruised through it, were also already cleared and salted. This was a
Northern town where people were used to handling snow. Everything was geared to
snow’s not being a problem: Even as it snowed, the streets were being cleared.
Cables were mostly underground and those that weren’t were over open terrain
and were tested and approved for use in heavy snow and high winds. This
was Ohio, with its rich rural and industrial tradition.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">When we arrived at the K
of C Hall, ceded on this occasion to the Lions for this annual fundraiser, its
blacktopped parking lot was also cleared. And the machinery used was still in
evidence: An aging John Deere tractor with a scoop on the front sat parked off
to one side. It almost certainly belonged, I speculated, to a volunteer from
the Knights of Columbus, the Lions or both, and he was just as certainly now
inside getting his just due—all the pancakes and sausage he could eat, with
plenty of hot coffee. There were already quite a few cars parked outside. It
was a farm town. People here were early-risers.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgOTZOC46rwbNpph5xXLL3GfUdOo2V680M7J-n7O_YCgTsMdmFF-f9RLVkeN8XcUW5V53g36sVmN0WaggD9wqwKJYZ7GI5JyUpoWrb53_SMQ7Z5jtoEanqzjvXXSggpkt6pKkO72o6QHBuuIXO81MENio7qyq7KyxD6UEp-OS25sUOgHlA7W8AusWfTzMd/s300/pankcake%20breafast.jpeg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="168" data-original-width="300" height="224" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgOTZOC46rwbNpph5xXLL3GfUdOo2V680M7J-n7O_YCgTsMdmFF-f9RLVkeN8XcUW5V53g36sVmN0WaggD9wqwKJYZ7GI5JyUpoWrb53_SMQ7Z5jtoEanqzjvXXSggpkt6pKkO72o6QHBuuIXO81MENio7qyq7KyxD6UEp-OS25sUOgHlA7W8AusWfTzMd/w400-h224/pankcake%20breafast.jpeg" width="400" /></a></span></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Inside we were greeted by
the warm sweet and spicy smell of hot buttered pancakes, warm maple syrup and
pork link sausage. Drifting above it all, the aroma of brewing coffee, and the
cheery salutations:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Hey, Norm! How are you
Reba? Did you guys order this weather?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">"Not me, Charlie,” Whitie
responds. “I hate this shit and it’s too damned early for it.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Why, it’s just enough
snow to be pretty, Whitie!” Another familiar face cries.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Pretty my <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ass!</i> Not if you have to <i>drive</i> in
it, it’s not,” Whitie responds.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Well, you <i>don’t</i> because
you <i>retired</i>, so have some pancakes and stop your bitchin’,” says someone
else, and then in a sunny tone, “Hey! Is this Dan? Hey Dan’el, how ya <i>doin’</i>?
Haven’t see <i>you </i>in a coon’s age!”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It never changed. You
went away twenty years, came back, and it seemed like they were all still
there. Robust, red-faced, thick-waisted men, being jolly and friendly on a
Saturday morning, wearing bibbed aprons and serving up breakfast to their
neighbors to raise funds for charity. It was the very best of small-town life.
Reliability, solidarity, efficiency. This wouldn’t change, I was thinking—hoping.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjN1ykvGfohNJBwyi0c6mecEgDbTHNyiCfTkVNilpFOXP1BKLbnMriA2bmqsMvTprWYdD14tOM9e2d_cl6ngHrRUFsI_cAUvUlX_Tp7kVyo6DbDq6D9amfPX-BE8euQeXctlWMnjNqjnhBco6x7Mv5F-QEWz31lEciBKibPDCRIN95kJF4o1-fUkEtGSAgY/s320/Snow%20days%2003.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="240" data-original-width="320" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjN1ykvGfohNJBwyi0c6mecEgDbTHNyiCfTkVNilpFOXP1BKLbnMriA2bmqsMvTprWYdD14tOM9e2d_cl6ngHrRUFsI_cAUvUlX_Tp7kVyo6DbDq6D9amfPX-BE8euQeXctlWMnjNqjnhBco6x7Mv5F-QEWz31lEciBKibPDCRIN95kJF4o1-fUkEtGSAgY/w400-h300/Snow%20days%2003.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Early winter in west-central Ohio</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But it was on that snowy
autumn morning that it came home to me that, even if the traditions survived, the
faces wouldn’t. These men were mostly of Reba Mae and Whitie’s generation,
World War II and Korea vets who would soon be gone. Even now, my generation was there too, Classmates, Vietnam vets, who were doing the grill work ceded to them
by their elders, who now did the greeting and the dishing up and the ticket-taking.<o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">My generation and theirs
dropped by the table to say hi as we enjoyed our pancakes and coffee. They all
wanted to know the same thing: “Did I order this weather?” Whitie responded—not
without certain acrimony—that, yes, I had… “It’s all <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">his</i> fault,” he would say, pointing an accusing finger at me. Said
he could <i>smell</i> it, if you can believe that”. They also wanted
to know how South America was treating me. “Brazil, wasn’t it?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“No. Argentina.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“So, what do they speak down
there?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Spanish.” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“So where was it they
speak Portuguese?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">And that sparked other
inquiries. Was it true that we were going into summer there now and didn’t that
seem funny somehow? Huh, Christmas in the summertime, imagine that! But at
least you didn’t have to drive in the snow, huh?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It was funny: After all
these years, it wasn’t just my family I started missing as soon as I took the
plane and headed south. It was this—this place, my town, what it meant, how it
felt when I sought it out in my heart and held it cupped in my two hands like
something ever-cherished.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">On snowy nights, I’ll
sometimes think about this, especially about that unique October morning, as
I’m standing in the darkened kitchen of my house in Patagonia, gazing out
the window at the snow that is gathering on the lawn under the Patagonian
beeches. I’m thinking how all of that, which once seemed so permanent, so
inexhaustible, is now gone: Whitie, Reba Mae, my Little Brother Dennis, friends
and relatives who have passed on, the house I spent my teen years in, people
and landmarks I thought of as anchors in my life and keys to who I was, my very
links to that town and the land around it.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I’m also thinking of the
snow, how it’s a test of individuals and of peoples. How you cope with snow,
whether you can love it in spite of itself, whether a people has the solidarity
to live with it and make it work for them. I remember that morning, when it
snowed in October and surprised everybody. But how everybody in that small,
rural-Ohio community knew just what to do, knew there was no use complaining,
knew that what you did if you were from that town was clear the roads and
parking lot in time for that pancake breakfast you had been planning for
months.</span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjME3TcY9fxgemhIM6ptoEXepYocSl6GXx8Zne4ou8hL06JUrOTc-hnFq0ksMY1YyuuZVMMvDdx7YAmmqMQvc7mmwN8QFYKL4YzSDXLXKFaTuWQhJ7NwcD1Oh12Aws7Sah8bHGPia98HE_GFQjVKoJ3stNN2rUgzH_LRt7Uf2ed7TYLnMLsJ3ASvPM2UFxJ/s402/Snow%20days%2002.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="302" data-original-width="402" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjME3TcY9fxgemhIM6ptoEXepYocSl6GXx8Zne4ou8hL06JUrOTc-hnFq0ksMY1YyuuZVMMvDdx7YAmmqMQvc7mmwN8QFYKL4YzSDXLXKFaTuWQhJ7NwcD1Oh12Aws7Sah8bHGPia98HE_GFQjVKoJ3stNN2rUgzH_LRt7Uf2ed7TYLnMLsJ3ASvPM2UFxJ/w400-h300/Snow%20days%2002.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Patagonian winter scene</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I feel bad, I’m thinking,
about how I can no longer see snow like I did when I was a kid, that it’s no
longer just pretty. It means grownup things now, especially here in remote
Patagonia—hours, a day, a week waiting for the electricity to be restored. Translation
clients in Buenos Aires, Houston or Madrid being
incapable of understanding how anybody, anywhere, can be without power for a
week, but understanding one thing for sure, that it’s not a problem they are
going to stand for ever again. Trying to make it the two kilometers down to the
main road in my four by four pickup to leave tracks for my neighbors and me to
follow before it gets too deep to move at all, because heaven only knows when
the local municipality will get around to sending a road grader out this far.
Hoping against hope that no branches break and fall on the telephone lines
because repair orders are already normally backed up for weeks on end, hoping
the snow will turn to rain, hoping the sun will come out, hoping this won’t be
the worst winter ever. Wishing that things were like “back home”, where
everybody knew what to do and did it, immediately and without complaint.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Even as I’m thinking this,
I hear the UPS alarm on my computer upstairs and know the electricity is gone.
With aerial lines, one broken beech bough is enough to knock out an entire
sub-station. I climb the stairs with a flashlight and shut down the UPS and my
computer. I go to bed to wait for daybreak. There’s nothing else to do.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Lying there still unable
to sleep, I think about how this may actually be good in its own way. It’s a
more real world. Here, the snow is just the snow and you are just you. It
teaches you self-reliance. You cope without expecting anything of anyone else.
Whatever you do to cope with Nature, you do on your own. In the meantime, there
are no false hopes, no misunderstandings, no thinking anything or anyone is
permanent. There’s just you and how you handle what comes at you for as long as
you are still breathing.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">There’s something to be
said for that, and it doesn’t make the snow any less beautiful. On the
contrary, it is a thing of beauty that is indifferent to your condition or your
problems, which are all of your own making. It just is what it is, and how you
live with it is all about who you are. The beauty of it is all its own. It’s up
to you to take it or leave it.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01054536465220812092noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1616769513702255459.post-19766757673905943032023-09-30T20:36:00.012-03:002023-10-01T08:10:43.531-03:00 A BEAUTIFUL CHILD<p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;">I had a very strange
dream last night. I know that by telling you this I’m breaking my wife’s No
Dreams Rule, but perhaps some of you can relate. If not, I apologize in advance
to you (and to her).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">So here goes…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I’m sowing a miniscule garden.
It’s at the bottom of a twilit ventilation shaft between two multi-storied
buildings. The wall on the other side of the shaft is blank concrete with a
dirty grey whitewashed surface. The patch of ground I’m working on is an ad hoc
“patio” between the buildings. My place has a sliding glass door that gives
onto it. But the buildings are so close together that the space is nominal. The
garden patch is about the width of the handle of the hoe I’m using. Widthwise,
the length of the hoe handle will span the garden in either direction.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSzn0qyJ6KH8gpz6MJW_MtaG5VnMBz4yXLFHFBzkbZWALJkU9BaA17iIUaouDJOp-Q_yBQpBMhigxaAu96MAUe6JG62WVuWzlsAI1DoGNY-HlnrNOgX9GuQIyxnx37r4s1OeBJDQSfDwPQ935xJdKJXiFhuVXBRVTUFy5LgtqQZajZ6DcI8NzF1tkgulZC/s1028/Garden_02.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1028" data-original-width="774" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSzn0qyJ6KH8gpz6MJW_MtaG5VnMBz4yXLFHFBzkbZWALJkU9BaA17iIUaouDJOp-Q_yBQpBMhigxaAu96MAUe6JG62WVuWzlsAI1DoGNY-HlnrNOgX9GuQIyxnx37r4s1OeBJDQSfDwPQ935xJdKJXiFhuVXBRVTUFy5LgtqQZajZ6DcI8NzF1tkgulZC/w301-h400/Garden_02.jpg" width="301" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">On a tiny strip of
concrete bordering it, I’ve arrayed a trowel, a small watering can and a number
of envelopes of seeds. There too, trying hard to stay out of my way, but at the
same time, not wanting to miss a thing that is going on, is a delicate, pretty
little girl. She looks to be about five or six. She isn’t dressed for
gardening. She looks more as if she were on her way to Sunday school. She has
on a belted, cranberry-colored coat. Below it, a fringe of lovely blue dress
with a crinoline underskirt is visible. She’s also wearing dark leggings and
shiny patent-leather shoes with straps and silver buckles. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The little girl’s dark
hair forms long, corkscrew curls that reach past her shoulders and is tied back
at the temples by a large pink bow at the back of her head. She has a bright,
open face, with large, intelligent eyes, the color of which is an almost
mahogany brown. Their expression is intense and wiser than her years might
indicate. Her facial complexion and the skin on the backs of her hand are the
color of a burnished buckeye, a rich, luminous brown. She is really a quite
beautiful child. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Although, as I say, the
little girl is working very hard to stay out of my way, it is also clear that
she is very excited by the project of a garden in such a squalid, joyless
little place. It is also clear to me that she’s my ward. I’m responsible for
her. I can tell that she is already imagining what that drab, ugly patch of
ground will look like once the seeds I’m planting sprout, grow and start to
bloom into a stunning, multi-hued bed of vibrant, floral joy. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But in order to be
allowed to stay, she has to put up with my grim, joyless concentration on the
task at hand. And on my ill-humor, my own lack of imagination to already see
the future as she, in her innocence, already does. She must cope with my lack
of hope and faith that make sowing these seeds a last-ditch exercise in
futility rather than an expression of an inner confidence and of the certainty
that beauty will triumph. As such, she is forced to repress her overwhelming
joy, to tone down her bubbling enthusiasm, to mask her certainty that planting
a flower bed in such a lugubrious place is an act of unshakeable faith in a
brighter, more beautiful future.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCMcAzD0k8yVhKqTWY1MQ_7zqE33eij4SMFJBPOAprAS2kpizA50pgYIafFTzmA20QbHxFXaYu4w1W5cbZAj-aXIxnojOPGffn_k1WZtVBf4Ogweab_h-YfJdSTiO9voTcgotHylxjyl13DHjuRD5P50ZzcnkoAOmSyf5k7xhFS-watiSIBaj7qW4Lc-ng/s506/Garden_04.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="502" data-original-width="506" height="396" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCMcAzD0k8yVhKqTWY1MQ_7zqE33eij4SMFJBPOAprAS2kpizA50pgYIafFTzmA20QbHxFXaYu4w1W5cbZAj-aXIxnojOPGffn_k1WZtVBf4Ogweab_h-YfJdSTiO9voTcgotHylxjyl13DHjuRD5P50ZzcnkoAOmSyf5k7xhFS-watiSIBaj7qW4Lc-ng/w400-h396/Garden_04.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">As I toil without
anything like happiness or hope, I’m constantly barking at the sweet little
girl to stay out of the way and let me finish “my” work. She is virtually
vibrating with her enthusiasm and desire to be part of the project. But she is
aware that, with me in charge, the price of her being here is for her to hide
and suppress any outward manifestation of her almost uncontrollable excitement.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">She stays on the
sideline, smiling and almost visibly tremulous with emotion, waiting for me to
finish making meager furrows with the trowel and sprinkling in the seeds,
before raking the loose soil over them with my hoe.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“There!” I say finally.
“Finished.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I take my tools and duck
backwards through the sliding door into the gloom of the ground-floor flat,
leaving the little girl alone in the “patio”—such as it is. The point of view
momentarily shifts and the focus is on the little girl. Alone at last, she is
now beside herself with happiness in the newly-planted garden. She squats at
first, surveying my handiwork from the concrete strip that I have marked as her
“in bounds” territory. But then, she can no longer resist the temptation, gets
down on her hands and knees, and gently starts to caress the cultivated earth. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjit6-aJ_cYzUG5bUfCRaoXrZK6x4VsXLMn-8XiSl7EXremaoSM-fqvFG9rn7AojXpedBiUc7Hx5KNnANT9o7paFSz0v3SX7g4l08WdPCSQKZIfr1GhVNPhQ0GhYL8Toe8U3FHCGoW19E8yDdoOhtp3enK_FBsqIn_K-X8gRFxLxQzcdvH2XlNhvYjmVuv9/s628/Garden_05.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="628" data-original-width="628" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjit6-aJ_cYzUG5bUfCRaoXrZK6x4VsXLMn-8XiSl7EXremaoSM-fqvFG9rn7AojXpedBiUc7Hx5KNnANT9o7paFSz0v3SX7g4l08WdPCSQKZIfr1GhVNPhQ0GhYL8Toe8U3FHCGoW19E8yDdoOhtp3enK_FBsqIn_K-X8gRFxLxQzcdvH2XlNhvYjmVuv9/w400-h400/Garden_05.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">With her tiny hands, she pats
each ridge where the seeds have been sown. She leans close and whispers to
them, murmurs and coos. She tells those seeds, tucked into their warm berth
beneath the soil, how beautiful they are and how much more beautiful they are
all going to be once they’ve grown and are in bloom. <o:p></o:p></span></p><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">She picks up the little
watering can and starts to sprinkle the soil, seeking to nurture the seeds, so
as to ensure their health and progress. She knows that water is the key, the
fountain from which all life springs. Not too much, mind you. Not enough to
drown the tiny seedlings. Just enough to make them grow and flourish, strong
and healthy. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The whole while that she
is doing this, the pretty little girl keeps talking to her seed friends. She
keeps telling them encouragingly that she loves them, that she will never
abandon them, that she will be back every day to visit them and to water them.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But then, suddenly, I am
back. And I’m angry, intimidating, asking her just what the hell she thinks
she’s doing and why she always has to make a nuisance of herself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Didn’t I tell you to keep out of there?
Well, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">didn’t</i> I? What have you got to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">say </i>for yourself?” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">At first she stands with
her head down, letting my overwrought tirade wash over her like a cold, heavy
rain. But as I go on and on, as if that tiny patch of miserable dirt were the
last shred of anything I still possess, she eventually lets the watering can
fall to the ground and looks up into my face. Her eyes are filled with tears
and incomprehension. They look wounded, full of sorrow. They reflect hopes
dashed, love betrayed, joy choked and murdered.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQBa48fHZaWA6PQ6VdiFeeAkoDPhZ1qFubF6gYBSlBfLp4AptFzljooQK3BFAj-7oOCyd2MnxkLfgCjv2uiCjOivYpRtnSuSQ7Znucs2lpBTbXiOFEwzAv2ypEONujPYdHyjp0RsM8YZ-zwQ93GF_5fugqHCGuWUS-EQOXcMjtZKPRJuPGPwuAl_hv-E5V/s1006/Garden_01.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1006" data-original-width="1006" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQBa48fHZaWA6PQ6VdiFeeAkoDPhZ1qFubF6gYBSlBfLp4AptFzljooQK3BFAj-7oOCyd2MnxkLfgCjv2uiCjOivYpRtnSuSQ7Znucs2lpBTbXiOFEwzAv2ypEONujPYdHyjp0RsM8YZ-zwQ93GF_5fugqHCGuWUS-EQOXcMjtZKPRJuPGPwuAl_hv-E5V/w400-h400/Garden_01.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Quite suddenly, my anger
melts into remorse. I am awash in deep regret. And then, looking into her dark,
wounded eyes, I’m feeling everything she is. I am not talking about just
“knowing how she feels,” but rather, feeling it first-hand—the humiliation, the
incomprehension, the frustration, the fear and pain. It is the terrible,
shattered sensation of a cruelly broken moment of happiness. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Just as suddenly, I am
gripped by a revelation. It is the lightning knowledge that the little girl is
not “my charge”. Rather, she is an integral part of me, a piece of my very own
soul, one face of my own inner child.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
am she and she, I. We are both victims of my inability to resolve issues of the
past, to enjoy the miracle of each moment of life. She is a better, more
innocent, more perfect <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">me</i>. She soars
above petty frustration, futile remorse and crippling pessimism.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">In short, she is the best
of me, and as such, the part of me that I consistently bully, repress and
abuse. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01054536465220812092noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1616769513702255459.post-53613468904411660952023-09-15T23:30:00.013-03:002023-09-18T11:53:39.283-03:00OLD SCHOOL DRUMMING<p> <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;">I recently joined a
Facebook group called Old School Drummers. I did it at the invitation of a
friend and former fellow drummer, Mark Paulus of Lima, Ohio. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I also did it against my
better judgment. Mainly because I haven’t been anything like a real drummer in
decades. But then, again, if you’ve ever been a drummer, it’s something that
stays with you for the rest of your life.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyH89W8idnMrjz5bh-zBpd6RW2ig63dwBVuZPt1QpraDpkQNxudHusgBTBbSAvBWMefx6eg7BLXQqk-aYChr1xnrP1uVkkNLJNO8e5v5U8byXfkrMo9fnbuzO3qegwgkqxB0pLH8kHF8G2JMKd4_8K4kgQy9kI7SbQA3C19SMSzSXncBf3dBW7HDDd62if/s1094/Dan%20at%20set.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1094" data-original-width="878" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyH89W8idnMrjz5bh-zBpd6RW2ig63dwBVuZPt1QpraDpkQNxudHusgBTBbSAvBWMefx6eg7BLXQqk-aYChr1xnrP1uVkkNLJNO8e5v5U8byXfkrMo9fnbuzO3qegwgkqxB0pLH8kHF8G2JMKd4_8K4kgQy9kI7SbQA3C19SMSzSXncBf3dBW7HDDd62if/w321-h400/Dan%20at%20set.jpg" width="321" /></a></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Truth be told, I can
still read the music and hear the licks in my head, even if my hands and feet
stubbornly refuse to reproduce them with anything close to accuracy. And I have
instant recall of the feeling of being at the top of my game—never great,
surely, but good. Maybe even <i>very</i>
good. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Every day, I find myself
lamenting the fact that I ever stopped playing. I know that if I’d continued,
still today I would be as good as I was way back when. Perhaps better. But after
having stopped for several decades, having timidly taken it up again is, I
suppose, self-indulgent. I will clearly never be even a shadow of the performer
I once was. Playing now will never be anything but a salve to help relieve the
sorrow of having neglected and lost something once so hard-earned, precious and
vital to me. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But, okay, it is what it
is. No crying over spilt milk. And here we are. Starting over, like a false
toddler learning to walk again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">In the end, I decided to
take up my friend’s invitation to join the group, because, as I say, the acute
memory of what it’s like to play and play well makes me conversant on many of
the subjects that this group generates. Even though, I can’t, like many of the
other older members who <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">never</i> quit,
post videos of myself cookin’ on the drum kit at age seventy-something. The
reality is that, if I were to post myself playing, the proverbial jig would be
up!<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">People talk about all
sorts of things on the OSD site. It’s a highly populated and very active
community. Drumming, it seems, is something we’re really passionate about. It’s
incredible the range of topics members find to discuss. There are all sorts of
opinions about which drums are the best and why. The size, weight and quality
of drumsticks. Which bass pedals and hi-hats are most effective. Why one brand
of cymbals is better, brighter, mellower, etc. than another. And, by the way,
what’s the best way to clean cymbals…or should you clean them at all? How to
best restore pearl finish and metal hardware. Best drum heads and why. Drum
tuning and how it affects sound quality. Different configurations of drum kits
and why one might be more effective than another. Ways to get around symptoms
of aging like arthritis and hand and wrist pain and still keep drumming.</span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg28ofOR7MosmFeoeHnDCXOjegWGs2t6zOB7JjqA53LS_njHj2ep_-QkFMVdpmfRFyriAAB6nyyl_Yeasd4k3NpvY_k7m9YZtORyTlYCtYS7sN-DMUZmroSLHhNyZD1XCBW1DoDIhhVppDqG0k9k0zqy5PdkyxCQSdkcPhz-5re8ff0Xzw9YLNzG0V2S2f9/s949/Band_Senior%20Year_3.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="884" data-original-width="949" height="373" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg28ofOR7MosmFeoeHnDCXOjegWGs2t6zOB7JjqA53LS_njHj2ep_-QkFMVdpmfRFyriAAB6nyyl_Yeasd4k3NpvY_k7m9YZtORyTlYCtYS7sN-DMUZmroSLHhNyZD1XCBW1DoDIhhVppDqG0k9k0zqy5PdkyxCQSdkcPhz-5re8ff0Xzw9YLNzG0V2S2f9/w400-h373/Band_Senior%20Year_3.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Dan (middle) with fellow Wapakoneta High School <br />drummers Jane Siferd and Mike Krebs.</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"> <o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">And then the more obvious
discussions about who “the world’s best drummer is/was.” Which groups from
which eras were the most outstanding in the worlds of jazz, hard rock, soft
rock and fusion music. Which learning aids are the best to buy. And then there
are myriad videos of great drumming to wow us and bring back memories of some
of the greatest old school drumming ever heard.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">So anyway, the other day,
there was a sort of “remember when” post that featured a pair of VeriSonic hollow
aluminum drumsticks from the nineteen-sixties and asked if anyone remembered
them. I did. Quite well. I immediately recalled when we got them in at Porter's Music Store, where I worked in Lima, from age sixteen through eighteen. We
had them in a special display in all sorts of sizes, from light jazz sticks to
thick 3S sticks used for marching band. I also remember that, for a little
while, the Wapakoneta High School drum section I was in had them in the school
team colors of red and white—red shafts, white tips and butts.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLo6-cohisL7r9JnXEACnOpE_Nyfl8nAxIhdnBJf-nybILcaxcaee7X87KGIM8u_scKE-e1I5jQsmyQF5QBrAxz70u8u96yuhLf16ezRKpNOpC5rzy7_FCLB9-nM-x_TCyL1x2COH0diJmhvqxCCEq5HDpJlWX6wmhJ6mK2t0K7OUQNYLULEwDvL17xmYK/s449/aluminum%20sticks.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="449" data-original-width="432" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLo6-cohisL7r9JnXEACnOpE_Nyfl8nAxIhdnBJf-nybILcaxcaee7X87KGIM8u_scKE-e1I5jQsmyQF5QBrAxz70u8u96yuhLf16ezRKpNOpC5rzy7_FCLB9-nM-x_TCyL1x2COH0diJmhvqxCCEq5HDpJlWX6wmhJ6mK2t0K7OUQNYLULEwDvL17xmYK/w385-h400/aluminum%20sticks.jpg" width="385" /></a></div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">They came in a variety of colors—all with white tips and butts: metallic
red, green, blue and gold being the most popular. Most of the Facebook Old
School Drummers reacted with laughing face emojis. Some said they’d remembered seeing
them but never bought any. Others said they’d bought a pair but never could see
the advantage or didn’t like the sound they produced. One guy said he’d had a
pair and that they’d lasted him about ten minutes. Most, obviously, being old
school, thought them an absolute travesty. If sticks weren’t oak, maple or
hickory, they simply couldn’t be considered sticks. </span><br /><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But I can still recall
how trendy we were in the sixties. It was a time when the new generation was
out front and emerging, an era when even many older middle-class people were
trying to keep up with the trends, wanting to be cool and hip. It was the Age
of Aquarius. The New Age, when liberal was the height of cool and conservative
was the enemy Establishment. Clothes, music, art and writing were all embracing
the trendy nature of the times. If it was new and cool, we wanted it. So would
I try aluminum drumsticks? <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hell</i> yeah!
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">So, here’s a funny story.
I had just bought myself a couple of pairs of VeriSonics. One pair metallic
green, the other gold, if I remember right. I wasn’t convinced they were what I
needed for my work as a nightclub musician. I felt good old hickory lent itself
better to jazz and fusion music. But in my “sage” seventeenth year, I had a
theory about why the VeriSonic sticks were better for concert work than
traditional wooden sticks. They were, I reasoned, identical, and so, perfectly
balanced, with perfectly molded and matching tips. That meant, I told myself,
that they were much better designed, scientifically speaking, for the absolute
precision required by symphonic band and symphony orchestra work. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">No matter how much I sought
to reason and justify my trendy purchase, the truth was unavoidable. I’d bought
them because I thought they looked cool as heck. The rest was just
window-dressing. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh45dchT425MJu4O_FVvE7DMVEnUZEDiR7873XAw5XqCj6PByu2EzTBqgcMSs5Dka-vGySO-8kJ7YKhVrdsKyQxnsU2g55U1nehgb_F6HZO-3AjAqO7-Bkkp-oWDEWNoGU4rbeufaexA2lH_ExAJZOHznQ033n3qK8b9IqYXCfBnAmogh1xcRvAbV9lISIS/s986/Band_Junior%20Year_4_crop_01.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="986" data-original-width="718" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh45dchT425MJu4O_FVvE7DMVEnUZEDiR7873XAw5XqCj6PByu2EzTBqgcMSs5Dka-vGySO-8kJ7YKhVrdsKyQxnsU2g55U1nehgb_F6HZO-3AjAqO7-Bkkp-oWDEWNoGU4rbeufaexA2lH_ExAJZOHznQ033n3qK8b9IqYXCfBnAmogh1xcRvAbV9lISIS/w291-h400/Band_Junior%20Year_4_crop_01.jpg" width="291" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>With fellow scholarship-winner Dave Stroh</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Well, shortly after I got
the new aluminum sticks, I won a scholarship to attend the renowned Ohio
University Summer Music Workshop (now known as the OU Music Academy). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was
a summer music clinic for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">supposedly</i>
gifted young musicians. (I mean, most of the kids I met there, ages fourteen to
seventeen, were indeed musical prodigies, but that only served to make me
wonder what the hell I was doing there).<br /> <o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I ended up doing well,
however, being chosen in performance challenges to be the head percussionist
for both the symphony orchestra and the symphonic band. Personally, I think it
was because I was the only percussionist with broad knowledge and ample
experience playing tympani (kettle drums), on which the others failed to
impress, but who knows? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The orchestra was
directed by talented Ohio musical educator Charles Minelli. It was my first
experience with a real symphony orchestra. I thoroughly enjoyed it, mostly
sticking to tympani for challenging pieces of classical music including the
Grieg Piano Concerto, which featured my new friend from Cleveland and
extraordinarily talented pianist Curtis Jefferson, Cesar Franck’s Symphony in D
Minor, and Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, among others. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But it was in the
symphonic band that I felt most at home, since I had been playing in local and
all-area concert bands since junior high. The man in charge of the band was probably
the most renowned of the instructors at the workshop—Lt. Colonel William H.
Santelmann, US Marine Corps (retired), who had been the twenty-first director
of "the President's Own" First Marine Band, which was founded at the end of the
eighteenth century and one of whose directors had been “the March King”, John
Phillip Sousa. The colonel's own father, William F. Santelmann, had been the band's nineteenth director.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJjAV_Oqs05ZwXNBE1NhxfkuE8guc0LHKXE-5nJob6YFuUfmjfJGVKnykUQcUBsKYtlHF-fAO63vOCNtnKACv_cGeiwusWwegAvmorPEaAUoLjbn_cUIH8wz4mAd1E0mPs1KpVpQzzHMkza_aAhNqkQWpjdV_b5dMq07YB2tVkORj1AQvnJ-MCWiR4Vb_w/s1769/Lt.%20Colonel%20Santelmann.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1769" data-original-width="1361" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJjAV_Oqs05ZwXNBE1NhxfkuE8guc0LHKXE-5nJob6YFuUfmjfJGVKnykUQcUBsKYtlHF-fAO63vOCNtnKACv_cGeiwusWwegAvmorPEaAUoLjbn_cUIH8wz4mAd1E0mPs1KpVpQzzHMkza_aAhNqkQWpjdV_b5dMq07YB2tVkORj1AQvnJ-MCWiR4Vb_w/w308-h400/Lt.%20Colonel%20Santelmann.jpg" width="308" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Lt. Colonel William H. Santelmann</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Santelmann was an incredibly
talented and highly intimidating conductor. I doubt any other director could
have gotten what he did out of a symphonic band made up of high school teens in
the short couple of weeks that he had to work with us. I had seen him
absolutely demolish several of my peers in the band during the days of
rehearsal leading up to the closing concert, and I wanted to make sure I was
never on the receiving end of his fury. <o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Anyway, all went
swimmingly, with me performing at the top of my game, also mostly on kettle
drums, while meticulously keeping the rest of my section in check as well. But
during the last rehearsal before the event, I decided to play the snare drum
part in Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. And, of course, I broke
out my lovely gold VeriSonic sticks for the occasion.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It was as we were playing
the climactic crescendo to The Great Gate of Kiev that, for the first time, the
colonel's ice-cold eyes locked on me, and he suddenly cut the band off in
mid-crescendo snare roll. You could have heard a pin drop—and might well have
heard me peeing down my leg, had I not quickly gotten my panic under control—when
he stared me down and said, "Young man, are those knitting needles that
you are using?"<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I laughed. He didn’t. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">"No sir," I
said, recovering a bit. "They're balanced aluminum sticks for a cleaner,
more even sound."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I think I half expected
him to say, "Oh, how interesting. May I see them?"<br />
Instead, he gave me the most withering of glares and hissed, "Newfangled
trash. I hope you have a traditional hardwood pair with you, or you can leave
now and not come back."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Luckily, I did.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Yes, the colonel was
indeed, old school. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01054536465220812092noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1616769513702255459.post-62387033284736226032023-08-30T23:30:00.089-03:002023-08-31T21:24:08.682-03:00YANKEE REDUX – MICHIGAN DAYS: SIDETRIPS<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;">A week each summer was
such a short time to be in northern Michigan, especially when I would gladly
have stayed all summer long. And I wanted to cram all of the living I could
into those seven days.</span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtX_Q6SYMrbw1e2SMKrsiWRC9oXM-1ic8-AgewIRmZM4TkSGlh8TDkIhglR2oqAknbQ9QXv88eBKHqicmmhj7Q4YRsUu7nMd_9T6nVsdk_wzR_DyrIxrkuVlDLyHYNpLPYgYg3trWE0yDQBBt_kv8psybmDsw-feFiWP2nLPGiJMpFpK5ocIoxzo2Gz61e/s400/Lake%20Manistee_Photo%20Thomas%20Harvey.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="400" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtX_Q6SYMrbw1e2SMKrsiWRC9oXM-1ic8-AgewIRmZM4TkSGlh8TDkIhglR2oqAknbQ9QXv88eBKHqicmmhj7Q4YRsUu7nMd_9T6nVsdk_wzR_DyrIxrkuVlDLyHYNpLPYgYg3trWE0yDQBBt_kv8psybmDsw-feFiWP2nLPGiJMpFpK5ocIoxzo2Gz61e/w400-h300/Lake%20Manistee_Photo%20Thomas%20Harvey.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Lake Manistee (Photo by Thomas Harvry)</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Tahoma",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Still,
I was in two minds about our side trips—always the same ones, one to Traverse
City, and the other to the Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes—since both involved a
lengthy are-we-there-yet car ride that took up precious early morning and late
afternoon time at Lake Manistee, where I could have been fishing or swimming or
enjoying the woods or running around trying to find my backwoods idol and
Buckeye Rustic Resort owner Morris Butcher. But once we got to our
destinations, my sister Darla and I (and later our little brother Jim, when he
grew old enough to join the fun) would turn suddenly ecstatic. These excursions
generally came about mid-week, one after the other. In Traverse City, we
usually lunched at a sandwich shop of my thrifty father and even thriftier grandfather’s
choosing. But for the dunes, my mother and grandmother would get up early and
pack a picnic, which never lacked a large supply of pressed ham and cheese
sandwiches on Wonder Bread liberally slathered with delicious butter, potato
chips, potato salad, a thermos of coffee and another of Kool-Aid (grape, if I
had anything to say about it) and some homemade cookies (usually peanut butter
or chocolate chip).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Although the population
of Traverse City couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen thousand
back then, it seemed to us, who came from a small Ohio farm town, like some
bustling exotic port city, especially since we were usually there about the time
of the yearly Cherry Festival when the city came alive with thousands of
visitors. Traverse City is known as the cherry capital of the United States and
at that time of the year, it was always peopled—in addition to the very
“Middle-America” local population and American tourists—with colorfully
dressed, Spanish-speaking migrant workers, whom my Grandma Alice referred to as
“Gypsies” (even referring to the language they spoke as “Gypsy”, so that for
years afterward, whenever I heard Spanish spoken or heard the word Gypsy, I
immediately imagined the migrants I had seen year after year in Michigan).</span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBdpFy3GbmrvxcS7h8CncZ1PIv7RmiAhYU4J0bYWkwZix-qEt_Ibtg9IKeLxHdsO9qlA3cRpYgSeqoDSfoBqe3gkbF1bSFcPkKweBzfM_KWZKg470JlFNnvp3_VDAI0tMs3gc1smA9rhNklZx4UBQFR0nv4zgOMda9MFuZzuPjtAHObIdAFwnT0248CAKu/s400/Traverse%20City.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="252" data-original-width="400" height="253" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBdpFy3GbmrvxcS7h8CncZ1PIv7RmiAhYU4J0bYWkwZix-qEt_Ibtg9IKeLxHdsO9qlA3cRpYgSeqoDSfoBqe3gkbF1bSFcPkKweBzfM_KWZKg470JlFNnvp3_VDAI0tMs3gc1smA9rhNklZx4UBQFR0nv4zgOMda9MFuZzuPjtAHObIdAFwnT0248CAKu/w400-h253/Traverse%20City.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>We thought Traverse was the big city.</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span face=""Tahoma",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span><span face="Tahoma, sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Traverse
City took its name from the eighteenth-century French trappers and explorers
who called the long voyage across the mouth of the huge bay on which the city
would later be built “<i>la grande traverse</i>” (the long crossing). The first
settlers in the area, then, referred to the body of water—separated by a
peninsula from the vast freshwater sea of Lake Michigan—as Grand Traverse Bay.
And the village that they would erect on its shores in the mid-nineteenth
century would eventually be known as Grand Traverse City, later shortened
simply to Traverse City. </span><span face="Tahoma, sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It began, humbly enough,
as the enterprise of a ship’s captain from Illinois named Boardman, who bought
land at the mouth of a river where it flowed into the western branch of the bay
and founded a sawmill there, obviously with the idea of shipping lumber on the
great lakes. He gave his surname to the river on which settlers were to build
their homes, attracted by the sawmill and the excellent surrounding land.
Besides being the cherry capital, the area has long had abundant other farming
and is a major Midwestern vineyard region as well.</span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcnmXv-FDLjMkSkUm1vfLk-49EesY6p4QiCX8qfnm067R_kcvQfqCvUsaDBz4uQX6yWoD6UGYFrPLScGHrw_ux8ltolYJ90ttJXnwfcX3MTQHUM5qxvDN5dEp8igeXjGTIacQpG5ovl46l6EqfNhpPW0RU8fA8Sa7S-hcjc5mfxPt-QlkPY62GhSwZfbkO/s400/Boardman%20River.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="327" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcnmXv-FDLjMkSkUm1vfLk-49EesY6p4QiCX8qfnm067R_kcvQfqCvUsaDBz4uQX6yWoD6UGYFrPLScGHrw_ux8ltolYJ90ttJXnwfcX3MTQHUM5qxvDN5dEp8igeXjGTIacQpG5ovl46l6EqfNhpPW0RU8fA8Sa7S-hcjc5mfxPt-QlkPY62GhSwZfbkO/w328-h400/Boardman%20River.jpg" width="328" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Traverse City , Boardman River</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Tahoma",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Captain
Boardman would later sell his sawmill to the progressive partners of Hannah,
Lay and Company. The firm invested strongly in the lumber operation and it was
around and fueled by that business, in the 1850s, that Traverse City began to
grow.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">For us, it was just a
pleasant outing, walking around the city, buying tiny souvenirs, saltwater
taffy and baskets of shiny red and scrumptious black cherries—some of which we
were allowed to eat as we walked (“but not too many, because they’ll make your
belly ache”), and the rest of which were saved for making pies back at the
cabin. We gaped at the stunning views of the bay, with its turquoise strip of
water in the shallows along the shore that sharply contrasted with the navy
blue of the sudden drop-off.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Drop-off!</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"> That
word on my father’s lips had a mesmerizing effect on me. When you
swam in a place like that, he warned, you wanted to swim parallel and stick
close to the shoreline, in the “green” waters, because it got deep “right now”
at the <i>drop-off</i>. The sound of the word conjured up
images of lost ships and deep-sea monsters, of dark places the sun couldn’t
penetrate and of hidden whirlpools that would suck you down to unknown depths
from which there was no return. As I got a little older, I sometimes imagined
mermaids with the dark, pretty faces, flashing eyes, long dark tresses and
pierced ears of the “Gypsy” girls I’d seen in the port, saw them take me by the
hand and lure me to the drop-off where I would gladly follow them, at the risk
of mortal peril, because their beauty was so irresistible. The colors of the
water kindled my imagination and filled me with wonder since it was hard to
believe that something so Technicolor-beautiful could exist in nature.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Thirty years afterward I
would wonder if Grand Traverse Bay had ever really been as spectacular as it
had looked to me as a small boy. Probably not, I figured, because nothing is as
big, as awesome, as indescribably wonderful when we grow older as it was back
then, is it? But on going there on a whim when I was already past forty, I
proved myself wrong. The contrasting turquoise and navy blue waters of Grand
Traverse seemed just as incredible then as when I was nine or ten. I couldn’t
help thinking it must surely be one of the most beautiful bays in the world.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-1flMZm3iIXpuCeEenViYv7nd3fa7BHreoLm8i6vtyRBTtimCUxzxzHG7V4IeQMJRlQMPROlI3srDCEvHIIKpetvUkeE2A9SE0DBWhFEv5JcF8TVPU-Qf0pJ36fF0ruosq1KrVDkqVX0ZlJ1qUEAtdUvX-2B6z30UoJIRpe2lo-I3iOdViYsmp3ikndZp/s400/On%20the%20City%20of%20Petosky.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="267" data-original-width="400" height="268" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-1flMZm3iIXpuCeEenViYv7nd3fa7BHreoLm8i6vtyRBTtimCUxzxzHG7V4IeQMJRlQMPROlI3srDCEvHIIKpetvUkeE2A9SE0DBWhFEv5JcF8TVPU-Qf0pJ36fF0ruosq1KrVDkqVX0ZlJ1qUEAtdUvX-2B6z30UoJIRpe2lo-I3iOdViYsmp3ikndZp/w400-h268/On%20the%20City%20of%20Petosky.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Reba Mae, Grandma Alice, Whitie, Darla and Danny<br />aboard the "City of Petosky"</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Only once did we vary
from the dual-destination Traverse City/Sand Dunes side trip and go on a
different kind of adventure: a Mackinac Island ferry boat voyage on Lake Huron.
The great Mackinac Bridge—the world’s third longest suspension bridge, which today
links Michigan’s Upper and Lower Peninsulas—was still on lead engineer David B.
Steinman’s drawing board at the time, so ferries were the only way to get
across the Straits of Mackinac between the non-contiguous peninsulas, if you
didn’t want to drive all the way around. So a fleet of nine ferries was
constructed with a total capacity of nine thousand vehicles per day, which
signified major progress in northern Michigan land communications. But we just
went for the ride. </span><span face=""Tahoma",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkIYQX_3dXf-xOkXH4ne3pEHA27saIJ6APB6tX-SX9ie9z_sj8l6G4rJxdSaeHZKlzCeK0XC19mNw1Qe4Y4sNQiXyRKbx4Km2nO1lfOalGk1dLXKeeW4IDDKVSlMSgcRnT6xdRmMzgR94R-c7-1DU0TIOWbK89qtkpPk9wob7ZiIvmODYGvUa-x30PwRgD/s400/Grand%20Traverse%20Bay.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="213" data-original-width="400" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkIYQX_3dXf-xOkXH4ne3pEHA27saIJ6APB6tX-SX9ie9z_sj8l6G4rJxdSaeHZKlzCeK0XC19mNw1Qe4Y4sNQiXyRKbx4Km2nO1lfOalGk1dLXKeeW4IDDKVSlMSgcRnT6xdRmMzgR94R-c7-1DU0TIOWbK89qtkpPk9wob7ZiIvmODYGvUa-x30PwRgD/w400-h213/Grand%20Traverse%20Bay.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Grand Traverse Bay</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;">The lake journey was part
of one of our earliest Michigan trips. I must have been three or four at most.
But I still recall the strange, scary sensation of our driving the cars on
board the boat, and then the exhilaration of standing on the nodding deck, the
breeze in our hair, the sky so blue and clear and the spray of the waves
misting our faces. I also recall an old man with very long, very white and
carefully parted and combed hair and a face like a leather mask, who held aloft
pieces of bread in his gnarly fingers for the lake gulls that, amid their
excited screeching, would swoop down and deftly snatch the offered treat from
the man’s hand. It was a beautiful day and it remains in my memory as a real
adventure, as exciting as any trans-Atlantic voyage.<br /></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><br />Before the days<b> </b>of
the white man, before the times of written history, the <i>Annishnaabeg</i> people
told the story of a great forest fire on the sunset side of the great
freshwater sea that they called <i>meicigama</i>. It was so intense and
extensive that many animals perished. But a mother bear was determined that she
and her two cubs would survive. She pushed her cubs into the great waters and
the three of them began to swim toward the shore of the rising sun. But the way
was long and arduous, and though the mother bear called to her young as she
herself struggled to make the great crossing, the exhausted cubs lagged ever
further behind.<o:p></o:p></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2PV1csxdKbqWDtuYaGyUUO23c01ovkBlfz8z9MPk_ejLW5FEMjTvOyaQOaL-Href38iipBTCthF_Up_guQ242ICugBAEDCBum4G5wpK9yf_x3vC0-tbNkzzjaUEryhFS5AbrlucRIZd4qEIexc08s04sxeu79xJ5H7ZG0yFmv5AhZMZuJ6lHtswnijJ-n/s400/Vintage%20souvenir%20postcard%20from%20the%20Dunes.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="230" data-original-width="400" height="230" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2PV1csxdKbqWDtuYaGyUUO23c01ovkBlfz8z9MPk_ejLW5FEMjTvOyaQOaL-Href38iipBTCthF_Up_guQ242ICugBAEDCBum4G5wpK9yf_x3vC0-tbNkzzjaUEryhFS5AbrlucRIZd4qEIexc08s04sxeu79xJ5H7ZG0yFmv5AhZMZuJ6lHtswnijJ-n/w400-h230/Vintage%20souvenir%20postcard%20from%20the%20Dunes.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Vintage Souvenir postcard, Sleeping Bear Dunes</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Tahoma",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"> Eventually,
the mother bear arrived on the opposite shore, and there, looked anxiously back
hoping to see her babies right behind her. After a while, she climbed up onto
one of the high bluffs beyond the shoreline, and there settled down to wait and
watch, but her cubs were nowhere to be seen. Still, she waited, never giving up
hope, and finally, she slept, a sleep so deep that nothing could awaken her.
And so, there rose a wind, that gently began to cover her with a blanket of
sand until the land took on her shape and paid homage to her love,
determination and bravery. And witnessing all of this, the Great Spirit paid
tribute also to her cubs, causing two islands to rise from the great waters
of <i>meicigama.</i><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">This was how the region’s
Native Americans (dubbed Chippewa by the French) explained the formation of the
Sleeping Bear Dunes and the Lake Michigan islands of North and South Manitou,
which, since 1970, have formed part of the Sleeping Bear Dunes National
Lakeshore Park. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Back when we used to go
there, it wasn’t yet a Federal park, nor was it yet the huge natural tourist
attraction it is today—even more so after being declared Good Morning America’s
2011 pick as the “Most Beautiful Place in America.” It was never crowded, but
there were always people there who knew the area and never missed a chance to
go and enjoy a day of climbing and the magnificent views to which you were
treated once you reached the summit. Back then too, you could still make out
the bear where she slept under a grassy knoll overlooking Lake Michigan (a
landmark that, so I’m told, has since eroded to almost unrecognizable remnants
of the natural effigy). The “infrastructure” was pretty much limited to a
parking lot and a wooden building where souvenirs were sold. Everything else
was the incredible natural beauty of the dunes towering more than 400
feet above us and inviting us to explore them.</span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiq3dSmimQ5JQrK-liNx5WO4m7QgvFe6nbqH83kmOQU4hCY3r-I-VYYxooPHREB-WkQTgY7DwLtbpERWH2ANRq5bsJnX0EzEKHp3uR2Jk581OSgproVF1U6r9TY5xho_ErCv4xu8Ef668D7tbsEwd9CmxMqNYtsm7EjNpWkmi1zf3u4O0mEvLLuiT5NG2-N/s400/Sleeping%20Bear%20Dunes_Photo%20Kerry%20Kelly.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="299" data-original-width="400" height="299" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiq3dSmimQ5JQrK-liNx5WO4m7QgvFe6nbqH83kmOQU4hCY3r-I-VYYxooPHREB-WkQTgY7DwLtbpERWH2ANRq5bsJnX0EzEKHp3uR2Jk581OSgproVF1U6r9TY5xho_ErCv4xu8Ef668D7tbsEwd9CmxMqNYtsm7EjNpWkmi1zf3u4O0mEvLLuiT5NG2-N/w400-h299/Sleeping%20Bear%20Dunes_Photo%20Kerry%20Kelly.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Sleeping Bear Dunes (Photo by Kerry Kelly)</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">You climbed the dunes
barefoot, digging in with your toes, the sun-kissed sand scorching the soles of
your feet. Dad, Mom, Grandpa and Grandma, my brother, sister and I, all of us,
were suddenly children on the dunes, laughing and panting and scrambling as we made
the strenuous climb. We kids would always climb to the top two or three times
over, just for the pleasure of the descent—a descent that was sheer abandon,
since these were mountains of sand unbroken by rocks, or other obstacles, so
that getting back down was a simple matter of throwing yourself off of the top
and rolling, sliding, tumbling back down to the bottom. But on the
last ascent, we would linger in the desert-like dream world of sand and
razor-sharp grasses at the top, taking in the awesome landscape below with its
peacock blue inland lakes and the huge, horizon-less, deep-blue expanse
of <i>meicigama</i> (the big waters).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgFGoxDHEptHvj9ffRBKCu1bGyMhWQCsSmUcjNErHEb_YSRIjWSMhgx2MzsMZbchpocxHY_fibYMyqwoNEkMlCDPc8yHcx0bFFWWGorL42wsCMsVJxtTa7VvReCZjCC7ma3Rs1FQoyk_95TM9Iq2Q13DnmOLGl6Ffsi4FjHu3cgOwXvuQS57qHAhViPkYB/s308/Sleeping%20Bear%20Dunes_03.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="227" data-original-width="308" height="295" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgFGoxDHEptHvj9ffRBKCu1bGyMhWQCsSmUcjNErHEb_YSRIjWSMhgx2MzsMZbchpocxHY_fibYMyqwoNEkMlCDPc8yHcx0bFFWWGorL42wsCMsVJxtTa7VvReCZjCC7ma3Rs1FQoyk_95TM9Iq2Q13DnmOLGl6Ffsi4FjHu3cgOwXvuQS57qHAhViPkYB/w400-h295/Sleeping%20Bear%20Dunes_03.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">I never can recall a drive back to Manistee from the Dunes. After such
an amazing and exhausting day, we kids always fell fast asleep in the backseat
of the car and stayed that way until we once again turned in at the Buckeye
Rustic Resort.</span><br /><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It was after just such a
day<b>, </b>when I was, perhaps eight or nine that we arrived back at the
resort an hour or so before sundown. I didn’t wake up until Dad pulled the car
in next to our cabin. I was sleepy and grumpy and my hair, ears and clothes
were full of scratchy sand. I dawdled outside the cabin for a while, dumping
sand from my pockets and picking it out of my ears, vaguely depressed that the
following day would be our last full one at Lake Manistee.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But just then Morris
Butcher pulled up in his dusty, battered Ford station wagon. The tailgate was
open and the backend was loaded with garbage cans into which he had been
depositing refuse from the different cabins. Seeing me standing there, he took
his ever present corncob pipe from his mouth and spontaneously asked, “How’d you
like to come with me to the dump and see the deer?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Deer?” I asked.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Yep. That’s where they
hang out this time o’ the day.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I nodded and smiled
enthusiastically.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Well, all right, Danny,
then go quick and tell your mom. Tell ‘er we’ll be right back...maybe an hour.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I started to go, but he
stopped me: “But listen up now, son, whatever you do, <i>don’t</i> tell
your granddad! Why, hell, if Murel goes along, the way he runs his mouth, there
won’t be a deer for miles around. Scare ‘em off just like he scares all the
fish!”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I ran and asked my mother
if I could please (please, please, please, <i>please!</i>) go, and since
it was Morris I was going with, she finally acquiesced. So off I went, sitting
up front with Morris, on the bench seat of his station wagon.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">After a short drive on
the main dirt road, we turned left onto a much narrower one—more a track than a
road and so hidden in the underbrush and forest that you would never have seen
the turnoff if you didn’t know where to look. We wended our way back through
the birch and pine forest, made magical by the slant of the waning sunlight
that filtered through the trees and highlighted this bit or that of foliage
while casting the surrounding areas into penumbral gloom. The Ford pitched and
jostled over the rutted, unkempt lane, the garbage pails clunking and clanking
in the rear, until we finally pulled to a stop beside a large, open garbage
tip. The smell of rotting fish heads, innards and other organic debris was
overpowering. I held my nose, a gesture that drew a chuckle from Morris. When
he’d finished emptying his pails and stowing them back in the station wagon, he
took his Missouri Meerschaum from his mouth, tapped the tobacco out of it
against his heel and shoved it into the hip pocket of his well-worn dungarees.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Okay, Danny,” he said,
“from here on, we go on foot, and quiet as Indians, okay?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Morris led and I
followed, trying to show just how quiet I could be and attempting to walk, as
I’d been assured Indians walked, with one foot placed straight in front of the
other. We negotiated a path so faint that I’d never have seen it without this
old woodsman as my guide. At one point, Morris turned to me and placed a finger
to his lips to indicate complete silence. Then he histrionically shoved his
short, thick index finger into his mouth to wet it, held it up, pointed in the
direction the wind was blowing and then indicated, with that same finger, the
opposite direction. We were going to head upwind, his hand signals were saying.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">We hiked briefly along a
short ridge. Through the trees, I could see the sunset reflected in an
irregularly shaped lagoon, the edges of which meandered in and out of the
forest and were lined with dead trees that had rotted at the roots over the
course of a hundred flood seasons but remained dramatically upright, colored
stark grayish white, like bleached bones. Finally, we came to a kind of blind, crudely
erected using tree boughs and brush, that afforded a clear view of the lagoon
shore, and there we hunkered down to wait.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPZVEoPi1V85kClo14451hhgxL6nmTg7FnNpdifFTF7RPPE5Nls4x0Sv6gOTZdMGXe1KD40B6myWBU4HDchn0F1IexDDsS-O44qgDiJnInJjKvZGXgLoXY4-lV_GxMGE-jaAjFilaFTww6AeOvYkFhPAsVTqukdQ-25J5q-gv1dAx5sI8VmvKVpphL7NMe/s400/Deer.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="396" data-original-width="400" height="396" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPZVEoPi1V85kClo14451hhgxL6nmTg7FnNpdifFTF7RPPE5Nls4x0Sv6gOTZdMGXe1KD40B6myWBU4HDchn0F1IexDDsS-O44qgDiJnInJjKvZGXgLoXY4-lV_GxMGE-jaAjFilaFTww6AeOvYkFhPAsVTqukdQ-25J5q-gv1dAx5sI8VmvKVpphL7NMe/w400-h396/Deer.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Where are they?” I asked
in a barely audible whispered.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Again, Morris touched a
finger to his lips and pointed in the direction of the lagoon. As if on cue, a
family of white-tailed deer made their cautious way down out of the woods to
the edge of the water to drink: first an old stag that stood alert, head
raised, sniffing the air and twitching his long, mule-like ears, massive
antlers spotlighted in the sun’s last rays. Then with a snort he seemed to let
the others know the coast was clear, and along they came too, a younger buck
with less elaborate antlers, a young doe and a little fawn. Warily, they waded
a few steps into the shallows, stretched their long necks downward and began to
drink. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It was a magical moment,
an almost religious experience of communion with nature, in which we had faded
into the surroundings and were thus privileged to share this intimate day’s-end
moment with these stunning creatures. It was a Michigan experience that would
remain with me forever, a place to go in my mind whenever all else failed to
convince me that life was beautiful. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01054536465220812092noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1616769513702255459.post-70742592666458755472023-08-15T23:30:00.064-03:002023-08-17T19:33:20.791-03:00YANKEE REDUX – FIRST STRIKE<p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;">Doing some historical
research on organized labor one day, I suddenly recalled, in very vivid detail,
when I first heard the word “strike”. I can’t remember the political details
involved, but I assume it was during a prolonged strike (one hundred fifty-six
days) by electrical workers at Westinghouse plants all over the United States
that took place in 1955-56. I would have been about six years old at the time. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">My pristine little home
town of Wapakoneta, Ohio, was located about twenty minutes south of the once
thriving industrial city of Lima (pronounced “lie-mah” not “lee-mah”, although
it was indeed named after the Peruvian capital). Or, better said, perhaps, Lima
is located twenty minutes north of Wapakoneta—since the founding of our town
pre-dates that of Lima by a couple of decades. It lies about halfway between
Cincinnati and Toledo on Interstate 75. The land where both towns were built
all originally formed part of the Hog Creek Reservation, the traditional tribal
homeland of the Shawnee Nation, wrested from their hands through a series of
broken promises, ignored treaties and forced relocation operations, in which
these noble natives were “invited” to make a new life for themselves in Kansas
on the distant opposite side of the Midwestern region. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"></p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjF1tAOdttODUhqMP9YcJ5A9Jm60QOBpEvBTydc694wTzUkUc_l1Tx_dMQR-drx8rVn0Sw__bg70XvQgHrLpfMAx_Y02_6dcpFjgrfB9BiYxpnlSttAiYH7QiQWf7hY5HB-CBBNLVgvnOtVqoDka6SIzRpWarzg0RTchk8ODVRw2pzUk-Kf055u13jEB8dd/s1146/Lima-refinery-sweetening-stills.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="803" data-original-width="1146" height="280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjF1tAOdttODUhqMP9YcJ5A9Jm60QOBpEvBTydc694wTzUkUc_l1Tx_dMQR-drx8rVn0Sw__bg70XvQgHrLpfMAx_Y02_6dcpFjgrfB9BiYxpnlSttAiYH7QiQWf7hY5HB-CBBNLVgvnOtVqoDka6SIzRpWarzg0RTchk8ODVRw2pzUk-Kf055u13jEB8dd/w400-h280/Lima-refinery-sweetening-stills.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Oil origins - early Lima sour crude sweetening stills</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table>Back in its day, Lima was
best known for its oil industry—boasting, as of the early twentieth century,
one of the largest oilfields in the United States and one of the country’s
largest oil pumping operations (the Buckeye Pipeline), as well as a major
refining and petrochemical operation (which continues to function today, almost
a century and a half after its founding). </span><div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Such was the Lima oil boom that
John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, headquartered at the time in Cleveland,
decided to set up refining operations there and to open a major office. Rivalry ran high between JDR and the Lima oilmen. Some historical reports suggest that when at first they resisted his attempts to buy them out, Rockefeller, whose vast family fortune could easily take the hit, started a price war to force their hand. Whatever the case may be, Standard Oil, known locally as SOHIO (Standard Oil of Ohio) when I was growing up, was to become a Lima institution. <br /><o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But oil wasn’t all that
Lima was about. It was home to one of the country’s most important locomotive
builders, its most important builder of school buses, a major steel foundry,
one of the country’s most important military tank and amphibious vehicle
construction plants, and the Westinghouse Small Motors manufacturing division,
among other industries. This last business, Westinghouse, as I mentioned
before, was where I first learned the word “strike”.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Back when I was a little
boy, I-75 was still being built and the only way to drive into Downtown Lima
from Wapakoneta—unless you wanted to come in from the west and cross the entire
West Side—was either on the North Dixie Highway or on what we called “the back
way” along country roads. But both of these routes took you through the grimy,
industrial area known as the South End. There, the highway ran past endless
fields of enormous oil storage tanks and industrial plant gates. The air was
usually thick with the sulfurous stench of sour crude and ammonia from the
refinery and by night was eerily lit by the sullied orange flames of the
operation’s venting towers.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2LnxGChcXUVRXRCRGBZdoIH-Se3UzQfo1PouS8wwEJdZjZMl-PZQASXkTui7zYux9qetw7bXqBZ-SXMa3EIIffM1oGsv_TfoPCd9vCS_kdcX0oe5XNNhuBBVMSeT5oZZSiro771hkphl47ro54Hcychg-CCt0LoRLaE2bJnXkZPc7vrmLqJry7J03hA4C/s358/Black%20Legion.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="278" data-original-width="358" height="310" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2LnxGChcXUVRXRCRGBZdoIH-Se3UzQfo1PouS8wwEJdZjZMl-PZQASXkTui7zYux9qetw7bXqBZ-SXMa3EIIffM1oGsv_TfoPCd9vCS_kdcX0oe5XNNhuBBVMSeT5oZZSiro771hkphl47ro54Hcychg-CCt0LoRLaE2bJnXkZPc7vrmLqJry7J03hA4C/w400-h310/Black%20Legion.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Black Legion members in ludicrous attire</i></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">The South End was also home to some rough neighborhoods and some even
rougher slums. Although when I was growing up there never appeared to me to be
a lot of surface racial tension between blacks and whites in Lima, the city had
a bad reputation for racism dating back to when my father, Whitie, was a kid.
That was when Lima was a major center for an infamously violent branch of the
Ku Klux Klan that was known—ironically enough—as the “Black Legion”. It was,
regrettably, a homegrown Ohio racist organization that originated as the “Black
Guard”, the armed band of black-hooded thugs whose original job it was to
protect KKK officers and their families. In a city with an estimated population
of around fifty thousand at the time, the KKK openly held a parade in the
center of Lima in 1923, a year after my dad was born, that drew a crowd of a hundred
thousand.</span><br /><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Against this background,
Whitie grew up in a mostly white enclave of the South End during the hard times
of the nineteen-twenties and thirties—an era in which the natural grit of both
he and his older brother Red got well-honed living there. Neither of them were
guys you wanted to mess with, even before they went off to train and fight
during World War II.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAsaB8jVICk-mbhVA8gG35F_6ceBCANrc8VIcWuYjU4xmWnJenR3PR_nj0zPjtPN115KnqhDSohC2GhwyNL6dlEm82L2p8n6mKUY0b2NSw3JKHqypQcjwIj2eIWjUTq_zDAbj9z9y1clcRly4lBinH6Dr1azNeihGihd_o5_doBIgSDIxRf2y0fNf5v6o_/s365/Petrochem.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="246" data-original-width="365" height="270" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAsaB8jVICk-mbhVA8gG35F_6ceBCANrc8VIcWuYjU4xmWnJenR3PR_nj0zPjtPN115KnqhDSohC2GhwyNL6dlEm82L2p8n6mKUY0b2NSw3JKHqypQcjwIj2eIWjUTq_zDAbj9z9y1clcRly4lBinH6Dr1azNeihGihd_o5_doBIgSDIxRf2y0fNf5v6o_/w400-h270/Petrochem.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Lima Petrochemical in the South End</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But Red and Whitie were
educated in a bi-racial environment and while they weren’t exactly chummy with
the African American kids they went to school with, neither were they hostile.
Living daily, blacks and whites together, they weren’t imbued with many of the
prejudices and irrational fears of the majority of the people in all-white Wapakoneta.
For Whitie, the South End was home and we always felt fairly at ease when we
traveled through it with him.<o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">That was not the case
with our mother, Reba Mae, who had grown up in the all-white conservative rural
community in and surrounding our town. She had nothing against blacks,
inheriting her mother’s tolerance for all rather than her father’s open and
virulent racism. But she was indeed permeated from childhood with the
fear-mongering that was common in many carefully preserved white communities
back then. And if we kids accompanied her on a shopping trip to Lima, we knew
that when we passed through the last “friendly territory”, crossed an old
concrete abutted bridge and started entering the South End, she would
invariably begin to almost literally prick up her ears, sitting forward, tense
in her seat, gripping the steering wheel hard at ten and two and murmuring,
“Are your doors locked, kids? Answer me. Are your doors locked? Roll up your
windows. Danny! Lock your door!” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgL84fTcVjUwj3J56ehGetg0MquBU4xMLYWrzpQeM_bvS8ES7NbcoB27pyUcQqddIj3ORIc8sdLtrIvmuJuEBbq-H41ovai-dP4HnSZjZqIMyjNRkhLgQrHBu7S6HCVichReX81Y6rqhB_xAIKxDz6xMNPu8jL1vOEwssMP0iIkLkJ5UFAGeAIVZxVglUgA/s356/BLH.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="229" data-original-width="356" height="258" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgL84fTcVjUwj3J56ehGetg0MquBU4xMLYWrzpQeM_bvS8ES7NbcoB27pyUcQqddIj3ORIc8sdLtrIvmuJuEBbq-H41ovai-dP4HnSZjZqIMyjNRkhLgQrHBu7S6HCVichReX81Y6rqhB_xAIKxDz6xMNPu8jL1vOEwssMP0iIkLkJ5UFAGeAIVZxVglUgA/w400-h258/BLH.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Switchyard at Lima Locomotive </td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">So there was always a
certain apprehension when we drove through the smoky, oily, steely South End of
Lima. But on this particular day there was something new. </span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I think Whitie was
driving us all to downtown Lima for a dinner of hamburgers, fries and frosted
malts at the Kewpee sandwich shop—a kind of busman’s holiday for Whitie, since
he was, at the time, part-owner of the Teddy Bear Restaurant, back then, the
go-to place for hamburgers, fries and malts in Wapakoneta. I was, as usual, on
my knees on the backseat of Whitie’s ’49 Ford, my nose pressed to the window,
because I always liked to be watching once we passed the Westinghouse plant and
the car climbed the tall bridge over the railway-yard below, to take in that
gritty, grimy industrial view—which today promised to be more wintry, grey and
thrilling than ever. I especially liked to observe the long rows of air ducts
on the roof of the massive locomotive works building, looking for all the world
like so many large rusty tin hens come to roost in a row on the soaring heights
of the structure far beneath the bridge.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFo8NSRnjsrrDIgoqTEgoZwmhd60eCkb2nS-8UWalkVtD_DL2vmHcGBIJ7aifnospLgVCk8yYXEkInUcXUSRWdUpS4u7t2SHacSZs3m6xeboCGddLdkmD6n7np6wZAjmkcde3se59BHQojEYntd2b_Nlk5BXVJ24O5EgvObAo2vHh9lqYMS4aOSkTMxm_s/s362/Kewpee.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="293" data-original-width="362" height="259" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFo8NSRnjsrrDIgoqTEgoZwmhd60eCkb2nS-8UWalkVtD_DL2vmHcGBIJ7aifnospLgVCk8yYXEkInUcXUSRWdUpS4u7t2SHacSZs3m6xeboCGddLdkmD6n7np6wZAjmkcde3se59BHQojEYntd2b_Nlk5BXVJ24O5EgvObAo2vHh9lqYMS4aOSkTMxm_s/s320/Kewpee.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">Today, however, something else caught my attention first. Directly
across the street from the Westinghouse plant, the sidewalk outside of the
factory parking lot and the tarmac on the other side of a tall fence, within
the lot, were lined end to end with scores of men. Conspicuous by their absence
were women and children. The men inside and the ones outside were grimly facing
one another. It wasn’t hard for me to tune into the mood that was very
apparently unpleasant and hostile. I noticed that my mother and father were
purposely looking straight ahead as we drove by very slowly, directed by
traffic cops around the part of the crowd outside the fence that had spilled
off the sidewalk onto the pavement, but I gawked unabashed at the scene.</span><br /><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">A number of the men on
the outside of the fence were uniformed police officers, most holding long
clubs at port arms with both hands—one gripping the butt, the other palming the
tip. A few of them were carrying riot guns instead. Others on the outside of
the fence were men in plain clothes. They mostly wore overcoats against the day’s
dank chill, the brims of their felt hats pulled low over their eyes, so much so
that their indistinguishably colorless grey clothing also resembled uniforms.
And some of them, too, were carrying clubs.<o:p></o:p></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMR_vJrE3o1TdGgC_1WqMNQ7kD41_N_0IG5LuNvWDanCNuadD02o7-AFMmOlKwuIm6rbi86xAEPS8l1BwV4iRlms3lhOC0m1DCvi4c0XD7dZCA_ADAlQiK5E4moqknSA59PS-svF_X0W9g4I0j6Tb2vD0k0tzj6EXNKJQOTg3ZvbR9QEzhUNJmx6k8edVQ/s363/Wesringhouse%20strikers.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="237" data-original-width="363" height="261" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMR_vJrE3o1TdGgC_1WqMNQ7kD41_N_0IG5LuNvWDanCNuadD02o7-AFMmOlKwuIm6rbi86xAEPS8l1BwV4iRlms3lhOC0m1DCvi4c0XD7dZCA_ADAlQiK5E4moqknSA59PS-svF_X0W9g4I0j6Tb2vD0k0tzj6EXNKJQOTg3ZvbR9QEzhUNJmx6k8edVQ/w400-h261/Wesringhouse%20strikers.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">On the inside of the
parking lot fence, men stood pretty much shoulder to shoulder as well, but in
less uniform style. They came and went and milled about and spelled each other
at the fence. Some warmed their hands at a few metal drums from which
yellow-orange flames sometimes leaped, others shared steaming coffee from metal
Thermos flasks, and still others stood with their fingers laced through the
diamond-shaped wires of the chain-link fence, staring down the men outside,
their faces challenging and angry. Some of the men inside also wore overcoats
and hats pulled low. But others were wearing leather bomber jackets or denim
and sported billed caps with ear tabs, ball-caps or snap-billed tweed cloth
caps. There were men carrying hand-lettered, poster-board signs nailed to
two-by-fours. A few, I recall, had their heads bandaged in gauze underneath
their hats.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">As we advanced past the
scene, I heard my mother mutter to my father, “I wonder when this is going to
be over so people can get back to work.” Whitie said hard telling, but probably
whenever the damned union got its way...or when the company’d had enough and
run that bunch of goldbrickers out of there. I leaned over the seat between
them and asked what was going on.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“It’s a strike,” my
father said.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCUwp0rw-CdGEUvp87Kwx_5VoCIqrFxEhgCuoYy6mIOUs-UH9xQpG68rQwJnHO9ugaE_uuTiusakhZiILIlix0cumJCl9wFI4ehP0uxVyXh7nvcUCPFg1bG9I3yzSaDeJIHxr8Nr0xY4ooBm6UziJz06zxydECW3vWEBcInO7SKdNlTFB5e9mUc9FTqsLZ/s362/Cops%20and%20workers%20clash.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="310" data-original-width="362" height="343" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCUwp0rw-CdGEUvp87Kwx_5VoCIqrFxEhgCuoYy6mIOUs-UH9xQpG68rQwJnHO9ugaE_uuTiusakhZiILIlix0cumJCl9wFI4ehP0uxVyXh7nvcUCPFg1bG9I3yzSaDeJIHxr8Nr0xY4ooBm6UziJz06zxydECW3vWEBcInO7SKdNlTFB5e9mUc9FTqsLZ/w400-h343/Cops%20and%20workers%20clash.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“What’s a strike?” I
asked.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">And that question got me
my first abbreviated and editorialized lesson on labor relations. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">My parents’ view was
pretty much the norm among conservative business owners, small and large, in
our area of the country. Indeed, Whitie identified completely with a
factory-owner in our town who, when threatened once by his workers with
unionization, told them that he was a wealthy man. He didn’t need a job. They
did. He treated them fairly, he claimed, and said that if they wanted to
unionize, to be his guests, that he would simply shut the place down, put a
for-sale sign on the door and send them home. Result: The workers practically
lynched the union activists who had tried to organize them, and sent them
packing. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">In short, from what I
gathered, the guys on the outside of the fence who were defending corporate
interests were the "good guys", and the ones on the inside of the
fence defending their livelihoods and their families’ lifestyles were the
"bad guys". They were anti-American, socialists who wanted to
undermine the American economy. I remember feeling afraid of the strikers,
being glad they were being contained behind the fence, inside the parking lot,
by the “good guys” with the clubs on the sidewalk outside.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It would take me years to
figure out that this wasn't always—hardly ever, in fact—the way things actually
worked. And it wasn’t until, as a professional musician, I became a union
member myself, that I really began to think about the anti-union prejudices I’d
been brought up with and to realize that, whatever certain big-labor unions had
morphed into, the idea behind unions had started out, and often continued to be
a good one: people standing together, without discrimination, to defend
themselves and others against helplessness and exploitation. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p></div>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01054536465220812092noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1616769513702255459.post-54039352646866561712023-07-30T01:00:00.000-03:002023-07-30T18:43:33.470-03:00BLACKOUT<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0urWrz-brdt2W8xKULt3uNm9TyE_VjCJXHOdcAclyPVHhgUmrDquRxpuItD1Tt5RS97Rog9CA0Z_9l_D3AWGZ0r4yVME8Bpqd1tNoFFGJn1thKhVv4qqd2lW9WtgXxyoXBhpQUyxwtkkWi2a6mAcVhQer8QAB1gtKcfESxU6kA8ewwHthsKtMNZTAJTcJ/s1206/Blackout%20skyline.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="773" data-original-width="1206" height="256" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0urWrz-brdt2W8xKULt3uNm9TyE_VjCJXHOdcAclyPVHhgUmrDquRxpuItD1Tt5RS97Rog9CA0Z_9l_D3AWGZ0r4yVME8Bpqd1tNoFFGJn1thKhVv4qqd2lW9WtgXxyoXBhpQUyxwtkkWi2a6mAcVhQer8QAB1gtKcfESxU6kA8ewwHthsKtMNZTAJTcJ/w400-h256/Blackout%20skyline.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;">Every now and then we get
to be a tiny particle of history, a grain of sand in the hourglass. I was
thinking about this because I’ve recently been re-reading George Orwell’s </span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;">Homage to Catalonia</i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;">, in which the author
describes his experiences in the Spanish Civil War.<br /></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I guess I identify with
this particular work of Orwell’s because, like me in Argentina, he sort of
bungled his way into Spain as a volunteer soldier, with no real knowledge of
Spanish politics or of what was going on and, keen observer that he was,
learned on the fly. Orwell, who, unlike me, was already a rather well-known
writer by then, went to Spain with only one thing in mind: to fight fascism.
And Spain was the war front for that fight at the time, though it was growing
clear that Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany would also have to be faced
eventually. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGD5t4nVAthTDwCSkt_y5Q_YgKn5X_WLjxWO0fRm1smgvsl0kL4QrerCOJatlDPTb_rgBoigueRihWTD5q9uyIcwELfHtZrmD0HJQ3mnFHu6IxJRIj1z1szq1gC1UxflTI-UgMbXv8eKwKnEIkTims3bUueTsKrQH6r9g4v0ZYmzDdLkbkHUFBccBLVqRb/s243/orwell.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="243" data-original-width="160" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGD5t4nVAthTDwCSkt_y5Q_YgKn5X_WLjxWO0fRm1smgvsl0kL4QrerCOJatlDPTb_rgBoigueRihWTD5q9uyIcwELfHtZrmD0HJQ3mnFHu6IxJRIj1z1szq1gC1UxflTI-UgMbXv8eKwKnEIkTims3bUueTsKrQH6r9g4v0ZYmzDdLkbkHUFBccBLVqRb/w263-h400/orwell.jpg" width="263" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Orwell</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">That was a lot like the
way I entered the world of journalism in nineteen-seventies Argentina, with one
and only one mission: to write for a living. I knew only vaguely about former strongman
General Juan Domingo Perón and the all-pervading Peronist movement that had grown
up around his personality. And less still about the varied and fragmented guerrilla
and militant movements that had backed the push for Perón’s return from exile
with armed actions, but each with a different political agenda. Orwell, a
democratic socialist, was to get a crash course in the complexities of Spanish
politics while serving as a frontline fighter with a leftist militia. For my
part, I was to get a crash course in the equally (if not superlatively) complex
politics of Argentina, while taking my first baby steps in a big city newsroom.
<o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">In nineteen-thirties
Spain, Orwell would, after great suffering and sacrifice at the front, see
infighting on the left practically turn into another civil war within the
broader Spanish Civil War, Communist dominance in that fight, and the weakening
of anarchist and socialist movements through attrition, persecution and
execution to the point where the left as a whole lost ground to the fascists
and permitted Francisco Franco to consolidate and install his absolute power
over Spain for the next thirty-six years.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8EEiPbBEEye1U6SvEEqUWxZ-zybKBPw9nJUPMvWzFVzY186xAsEQa6S_e5-gJh33HdklmQxIIjrWykDQX7SynIwjeDSyOojGGzrdAk4RdnBBbGC5Beb0H2N_Z873AyRbdOVdnW227d4e1Bwvkkg0rwcR1lj89RVliRu7Mxq76TrvfQ6QuKzyB_6KtF_Z_/s261/Per%C3%B3n.jpeg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="261" data-original-width="193" height="261" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8EEiPbBEEye1U6SvEEqUWxZ-zybKBPw9nJUPMvWzFVzY186xAsEQa6S_e5-gJh33HdklmQxIIjrWykDQX7SynIwjeDSyOojGGzrdAk4RdnBBbGC5Beb0H2N_Z873AyRbdOVdnW227d4e1Bwvkkg0rwcR1lj89RVliRu7Mxq76TrvfQ6QuKzyB_6KtF_Z_/s1600/Per%C3%B3n.jpeg" width="193" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Lt.Gen. Juan D. Perón</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">In Argentina, I would
witness Peron’s return after nearly eighteen years of exile in his friend
Franco’s Spain, his utilization of the armed left to regain power, before re-embracing
his fascist roots and sparking a violent purge of leftists in the armed Neo-Peronist
and Marxist segments of his movement. He would then die, and the country would
be plunged into tit for tat violence between the left and the right that would
eventually lead to a military coup and more than seven years of state violence
and repression. I would also witness and play a small role, as a newspaper
editor, in a brief but bloody war between Argentina and Britain. All events
that would be recorded in world history, and all also, almost accidentally, a part
of my own personal history.<o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Anyway, I was thinking
about all of that when I saw something the other day about the New York City
blackout of 2003. Again, one of those historical events that you end up being a
passive participant in against all odds. What were the chances that a native of
Wapakoneta, Ohio, who had been an expat in Buenos Aires and Patagonia for three
decades by that time, would end up in New York City, on an unplanned trip,
precisely on August 14, 2003, when the lights went out? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">My trip back home to Ohio
prior to that date hadn’t been planned either. My mother had died on July 22<sup>nd</sup>,
and I was back for her funeral and then to help my sister and brother put the
posthumous affairs of our parents, who had died six months apart, in order. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_CIFrx9rr5mg2KUD7WWYYh2USwxAcsv5xliVoBaxuvEZ8DElPNG11PUPRqbBlw7OgYpJ6IklSVCNyuDIp0nw6eOVrsrC3ZQG_ZJeaVbJKCjkgTYCwDAim7707uRP1iP8g2f8HhwbsKJ65sskAhD3H5YJMkOaw7VEEWzB7i4LsERjTr9sEuvWU-QjUi2gb/s1696/Dan_Parque%20San%20Mart%C3%ADn%20cerca%201978_by%20John%20Claude%20Fernandes.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1292" data-original-width="1696" height="244" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_CIFrx9rr5mg2KUD7WWYYh2USwxAcsv5xliVoBaxuvEZ8DElPNG11PUPRqbBlw7OgYpJ6IklSVCNyuDIp0nw6eOVrsrC3ZQG_ZJeaVbJKCjkgTYCwDAim7707uRP1iP8g2f8HhwbsKJ65sskAhD3H5YJMkOaw7VEEWzB7i4LsERjTr9sEuvWU-QjUi2gb/s320/Dan_Parque%20San%20Mart%C3%ADn%20cerca%201978_by%20John%20Claude%20Fernandes.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Dan Newland, Buenos Aires, 1978</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The trip to New York was,
despite the sadness of the circumstances, sort of a lark. I’d been invited by a
friend and former Buenos Aires colleague to take a break and spend a few days
with him and his wife in Manhattan. They had moved there in the nineties after
he won a full master’s degree scholarship to the renowned Columbia University
School of Journalism. Claudio, my friend and former office mate in Buenos Aires,
had been one of only two recipients of the prestigious annual scholarship, and,
savvy journalist that he was (is), had made immediate and influential contacts,
which meant that, by the time he had his degree, he was also involved in
several academic projects, including being a founder of the Hispanic New York
project, and teaching part-time at Columbia and at the College of New Rochelle.
His wife, Marcia, meanwhile, found intense and interesting work at a center for
abused women and continued her studies for the psychology degree that she would
eventually earn. Like me, who had gone to Buenos Aires “for a year” and ended
up staying for twenty, Claudio and Marcia had remained in Manhattan and had
been there a decade when I dropped in for a visit. <o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I had been in New Yok
City several times before. Once with a New York area native with whom I was assigned
to the Army Element of the Navy School of Music near Norfolk, Virginia. I
greatly admired this guy and he was something of a fluke in the Army, because
he’d been drafted in the last possible year that he was eligible (aged twenty-six)
after earning his doctorate in liturgical music. Although I met and worked with
some truly fine musicians and performers in the military, someone of his
erudition and intensive formal schooling was a unique phenomenon. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Anyway, he organized a
little three-day trip for several of us who could get passes, and we drove up
to New York from Norfolk. This guy, Paul, hated driving so I, who loved
driving, was behind the wheel for most of the trip in his sleek and lovely Olds
98. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitMC-I3x7B_GdVt7AKyFCdfRJ9_0-gR7QaMHngVZI5jykv_ncR7NYeCE7j0VqsuIeGJxmfgGD25H1w39g5uIz5Mefh_5ayGt5Crx91Bu70PdQ0ExxT13zo7M7SZ_Hen1xW7r5fMy_5ENKugUPkj10AHU1EeycCbZ4ZegGM3cJwFKKj9wougFgA8-d9_IyJ/s227/Church%20of%20the%20Heavenly%20Rest.jpeg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="222" data-original-width="227" height="391" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitMC-I3x7B_GdVt7AKyFCdfRJ9_0-gR7QaMHngVZI5jykv_ncR7NYeCE7j0VqsuIeGJxmfgGD25H1w39g5uIz5Mefh_5ayGt5Crx91Bu70PdQ0ExxT13zo7M7SZ_Hen1xW7r5fMy_5ENKugUPkj10AHU1EeycCbZ4ZegGM3cJwFKKj9wougFgA8-d9_IyJ/w400-h391/Church%20of%20the%20Heavenly%20Rest.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>The "Celestial Snooze"</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Paul took all of us who
had never been to the city, on a tour of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">his</i>
Manhattan: Union Seminary, where he had done part of his specialization
studies; the Cathedral Church of Saint John’s the Divine, and the Church of the
Heavenly Rest, which he familiarly referred to as “the Celestial Snooze”. But
he also took us to see the sights, introduced us to a few of his New York
friends, and invited us to go to several of his favorite haunts for drinks.
Everywhere he tried to give us little local insights and anecdotes to take with
us. Just one example, he said locals referred to the two tiers of the George Washington
Bridge, which we all knew from the movies, as “George and Martha”. Martha, he
said with a sly chuckle, was on the bottom. <o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Shortly after I got out
of the Army, Paul invited my wife and me to go visit again, since he was also
out of the service by this time and had a very classy post as choir director
and organ master at a suburban Protestant church with a very exclusive
congregation. One of the church’s benefactors provided Paul with a reconverted
thoroughbred stable apartment on the family’s rural property in the suburbs. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Paul met us at the
airport in the company of his partner, whom I immediately recognized as Gary, the
Navy petty officer in charge of the music library at the Naval School of Music
when both Paul and I had been there. In those days of don’t-ask-don’t-tell in
the US military, this was the first time I realized that Paul was gay. I was
glad that he and Gary seemed happy and that they were both out of the closet. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Paul’s mother was in
Florida for the winter, and kind, civilized and generous as always, Paul lent
me the keys to his mother’s car, and her apartment in the lovely area of Lake Hopatcong,
New Jersey, a short commute from New York City. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He also again served as our tour guide and
invited us to an off-Broadway show as well. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzDbljDE4ELdgyszndeuhQ5BLx6jCz5LO2wX70wShsteoGXr9IIM36bQJqVkZ86npu9xV_jA2edUtAPhZckndb-nxnrLqSvo5SEf1R9gQkFIyNOF9W8bZhHQqbrxF-JvN-9kPy_ZX0GdROMYdwrAQNA07UCrE-YGRvnFZwtAmOsOwBiW1lXbJ427UNzfNi/s2606/ABC%20Radio.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1950" data-original-width="2606" height="299" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzDbljDE4ELdgyszndeuhQ5BLx6jCz5LO2wX70wShsteoGXr9IIM36bQJqVkZ86npu9xV_jA2edUtAPhZckndb-nxnrLqSvo5SEf1R9gQkFIyNOF9W8bZhHQqbrxF-JvN-9kPy_ZX0GdROMYdwrAQNA07UCrE-YGRvnFZwtAmOsOwBiW1lXbJ427UNzfNi/w400-h299/ABC%20Radio.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I went back to New York
twice in the late seventies. Once when I was back in the States from Argentina
on a visit and decided to go meet the assignment editors at ABC Radio News, for
whom I was a part-time foreign correspondent in Buenos Aires. I remember that
my appointment with them was in the evening and it was one of the coldest
winters on record with a wind chill that night of something like minus twenty. My
wife Virginia and I were eminently underdressed for it, she in a lovely dress,
hose, princess-heel pumps and a short astrakhan coat, and I in a three-piece
business suit, wingtip dress shoes and topcoat. Still, we decided to walk the
four or five blocks from our hotel and by the time we got there we almost
required treatment for hypothermia. We pretty much had Sixth Avenue to
ourselves that evening, since everybody appeared to have fled to their homes
early. It was eerie, like an episode of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Twilight Zone</i>, with us portraying a couple of out-of-towners, who wake up
in a New York City abandoned by human life.<o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The other time was also
in the late-seventies and in winter, but a much nicer winter. One of those
magical New York Christmastime winters, with the city swathed in snow, holiday
season lights glittering everywhere, and people skating in front of Rockefeller
Center. This time was all about fun, a six-state and Toronto road trip with
Virginia and her brother Miguel. We went to museums, hung out in pubs and saw
the sights, as well as visiting an Argentine friend and his family who were
long-time New York City residents. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">And then there had been a
third time in the early nineties, when I was special projects editor for a
major Argentine business magazine called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Apertura</i>.
I had presented a special edition of our magazine at the IMF-World Bank annual
meeting in Washington and had then taken the air shuttle to New York for an appointment
with a colleague called Christian Frost, who was more or less Steve Forbes’s
right-hand man. The idea was for me to negotiate with Frost for republication
rights in Spanish on Forbes Magazine articles. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0zmwVVKR9Eyhy6fxfXlEZU0bU9_8imyuUKky80pGY7XAnDICTQZJWbamJo7B-JKDoapmqiyHEarbEe3zb6Z2wZ23sGv5gDYGL9OUBCEZ6eutCet7dO2ktpSpgYg7JrK5sQHlVIWw2-LSqa0juSOX4zqP5jfUr5cpgqw3-FGWcQqhH5rYjikhsAsWePL34/s253/forbes.jpeg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="199" data-original-width="253" height="315" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0zmwVVKR9Eyhy6fxfXlEZU0bU9_8imyuUKky80pGY7XAnDICTQZJWbamJo7B-JKDoapmqiyHEarbEe3zb6Z2wZ23sGv5gDYGL9OUBCEZ6eutCet7dO2ktpSpgYg7JrK5sQHlVIWw2-LSqa0juSOX4zqP5jfUr5cpgqw3-FGWcQqhH5rYjikhsAsWePL34/w400-h315/forbes.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">It was there that I learned that the building at 60 Fifth Avenue, where
Forbes Magazine was headquartered, also housed a small museum on the ground
floor where Malcolm Forbes’s extraordinary collection of Fabergé eggs was on
display. I was also told that Steve Forbes had had a chalet built on the roof
to stay in any time he didn’t want to leave the office building. I was never
able to confirm this, however, so it may just be an urban legend. </span><br /><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But I think what I
remember best about that day was a wonderful lunch my wife and I shared at a
soul food restaurant a short distance from the magazine’s offices. I recall a
steaming platter of Southern-fried catfish, collard greens, black beans and
rice, with plenty of cornbread and warm butter. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Anyway, as I say, my last
trip to New York in 2003 was to visit Claudio and Marcia. Claudio and I had
been close friends as well as workmates in Buenos Aires. They seemed genuinely
glad to see me and were cordial and generous to a fault. They took me out to
dine at their favorite places and on a walking tour of Greenwich Village, where
Claudio proudly showed me the house where Henry James had once lived. He and I
also visited Hispanic community literary and journalistic friends and contacts
of his in different parts of Manhattan, and he gave me a guided tour of his
alma mater, Columbia University. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">They lived in Spanish
Harlem, just off Broadway. Most of their neighbors were Dominicans and Puerto
Ricans, but there was a mix of other ethnicities as well, including African
Americans and, I noticed, a sprinkling of East Europeans. I couldn’t help
wondering what my small-town friends in my hometown of Wapakoneta, Ohio, would
say if I told them I’d been vacationing in Harlem. At least back then, I’m
sure, they would have been shocked and thought me a bit of a hero, or at least
less than prudent. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Personally, I have a
theory that people are people wherever you go and there will always be “good”
and “bad”, and it’s important to keep your wits about you and remain alert, but
not to live in fear of any particular place or people. That philosophy
permitted me to explore and get to know a lot of interesting places and people
in my decades as a reporter.</span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7P-C9xg9bR5xridWydEXJsgU3hjzZ5QlbZfMf9WY-ivT0MN8Tm1GvUTTHPJcCXCr0Bho0GiXjR4XOK7jM2UWJsuUMPJnEB9lmCLt8TKsttKVDyo8EQzwS0lZXvDQixXd5Bitqz4a9w16DqJFIkPC4-lEEqFoydNBV5Uc133BoWQTWSQZIJfNgf6Kz-jF0/s275/East%20Harlem.jpeg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="183" data-original-width="275" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7P-C9xg9bR5xridWydEXJsgU3hjzZ5QlbZfMf9WY-ivT0MN8Tm1GvUTTHPJcCXCr0Bho0GiXjR4XOK7jM2UWJsuUMPJnEB9lmCLt8TKsttKVDyo8EQzwS0lZXvDQixXd5Bitqz4a9w16DqJFIkPC4-lEEqFoydNBV5Uc133BoWQTWSQZIJfNgf6Kz-jF0/w400-h266/East%20Harlem.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>East Harlem</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But whenever I went to a
new place, and especially places with folkloric identifications and
reputations, the first thing I always had to overcome was my inherent
small-town fear of the new and unknown. It’s a natural enough sentiment for
anyone born and reared in a small town. If and until you venture out into the
broader world, the only universe you know, if you’re from a town like mine, is
a patch of urbanized countryside of completely manageable size and of
homogenous population, where, most of the time, little happens to disturb the
peace or the orderly march from one day to the next. And most people in such
towns like it that way.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">There was a time when I
was growing up that New York City in general and Harlem and the Bronx in
particular were almost universally portrayed as dangerous environs, which
white, small-town Midwesterners should steer clear of because they might as
well be sheep that local predators would attack and take down as soon as they
crossed the imaginary line separating these places from the glittering tourist
spots in the city. That was never entirely true—although the city has indeed
seen some times that were more lawless than others—but especially not in 2003,
which was just after Rudy Giuliani left his post as mayor of New York. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">In recent times, I’ve been
prompted repeatedly to shake my head and ask, “What the hell happened to you,
Rudy?” Today Giuliani tends to be seen as a shady lawyer, conspiracy theorist
and Donald Trump whipping boy. But back then, he was known across the political
spectrum as “America’s Mayor.” And the city had arguably never been safer than
on his watch. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">This was mostly thanks to
his having supported NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton’s adaptation of James Q.
Wilson’s “Broken Windows” theory about crime and punishment. The theory being
that ignoring minor offenses in crime-fighting only increased major crime, as
felons, thinking enforcement was weak, would naturally conclude that they could
get away with ever more serious offenses. Under Giuliani and Bratton, the NYPD
started cracking down on small crimes and misdemeanors like vandalism, parking
tickets, turnstile-jumping, soft-drug possession and aggressive panhandling,
and, employing such policies as stop-question-and-frisk. This sent out a clear
message that order would be maintained at every level in New York City. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKkkZ6dFMwAWZGbOW2x_KQzwdjipmUNTlnH4182eS7kIqoJu-HBd4hI8JysqGtInyZdSAlnFZeqKaeCQwW7WRd9XeHoZg3pUub229V0ocmdtAOhocnKI88ukwYytitW9Xei9vFRlofe67to0M9-viscXaZ73RmeZbsB3HhMeQ8cPNAAuEW3DYv5N1Xt5wv/s234/NYPD.jpeg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="234" data-original-width="190" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKkkZ6dFMwAWZGbOW2x_KQzwdjipmUNTlnH4182eS7kIqoJu-HBd4hI8JysqGtInyZdSAlnFZeqKaeCQwW7WRd9XeHoZg3pUub229V0ocmdtAOhocnKI88ukwYytitW9Xei9vFRlofe67to0M9-viscXaZ73RmeZbsB3HhMeQ8cPNAAuEW3DYv5N1Xt5wv/w325-h400/NYPD.jpeg" width="325" /></a></div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">Controversial though this policy might have been—and with good reason
when it came to aspects like racial and social profiling—it would be hard to
argue that it didn’t work. And people tended to breathe a greater sense of
safety and security than at any other time in recent history. The relative residual
benefits of that policy were still in effect when I was there in 2003.</span><br /><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">That wasn’t the only
factor, however. There was a different, friendlier attitude in general this
time than the other times that I had been in the city, and I put that down to Nine-Eleven.
It had only been a little less than two years by then since foreign terrorists
had attacked America’s most iconic city, destroyed two equally iconic
skyscrapers, and, in one fell swoop, murdered some three thousand New Yorkers.
The incident had brought New Yorkers together, and in the aftermath, had given
them a new sense of pride in the city and empathy with each other, and with
visitors to their home town.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Claudio was quick to
remind me, however, that it was far from idyllic. His neighborhood was still an
area that fostered street-corner drug dealers, gangs and snitches. But it all
seemed to me pretty much live-and-let-live on those streets of Harlem—a
significant part of which today is being upgraded to “gentrification” status.
Over Claudio’s protests that I shouldn’t take safety for granted in my
self-guided walking tours, I said, “I haven’t felt the least bit scared or
threatened anyplace I’ve gone, and I’ve been walking all over the place.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Yes,” he said. “But have
you seen yourself? You’re huge! And dressed in your khakis, military vest and
cap, you’re getting spared because they probably think you’re the meanest
sonuvabitch who ever strolled out of Vietnam!”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I laughed, thanked him
for his concern, and promptly ignored his advice. Back then, whenever I was in
a new place for any length of time, I tried not to think of myself as a
tourist, but as a new, if very temporary, resident. The fact that I was fluent
in Spanish helped me blend into the Spanish Harlem landscape. And the way to
get the feeling for a place, I knew, was to walk it. So that’s what I did when Marcia
was at her job and Claudio was off doing what journalists do—chasing up
contacts, doing interviews and following leads. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGCILoQgVtB_ZHdf8RvS767K5X4V8OIm7tey7bW8w1FSo8HROUTjpVUocHuFIwwgzFV56qfSwpC3DkN1DmCsmBxV4CauSgjm4NBVz7yKWCRjAZ7DPjKXYX99M2H23Sy9xwNPs1p5khqmu3aO3ocTL3xDcbEWsrPIVhhVDfqdkMWx7lVwWZPe0R5ky2iRba/s1028/Columbia%20Broadway%20entrance.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="687" data-original-width="1028" height="268" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGCILoQgVtB_ZHdf8RvS767K5X4V8OIm7tey7bW8w1FSo8HROUTjpVUocHuFIwwgzFV56qfSwpC3DkN1DmCsmBxV4CauSgjm4NBVz7yKWCRjAZ7DPjKXYX99M2H23Sy9xwNPs1p5khqmu3aO3ocTL3xDcbEWsrPIVhhVDfqdkMWx7lVwWZPe0R5ky2iRba/w400-h268/Columbia%20Broadway%20entrance.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Columbia University, Broadway entrance</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">On these walks, I would
usually make my route from their place down Broadway toward the Columbia campus
which was about twenty-five blocks. Along the way, I would check out
side-streets that looked interesting, or stop for Cuban coffee, or check out
some quaint shop or bookstore. And if I felt like getting out of the New York
summer heat for a while to have a rest, I would drop into Saint John’s the
Divine to enjoy the cool quiet of its interior. Just sit in a pew at the back
for a spell and chill. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">This had been my brief
routine for a few days before August 14<sup>th</sup>—good times with Claudio
and Marcia when they were available and the rest of the time entertaining
myself by getting a feel for the island of Manhattan. Claudio and I were just
coming back from visiting the office of a friend of his and then taking a walk
and stopping off for coffee when the blackout occurred. We had traveled by
subway and were very lucky to have exited the underground tunnels only shortly
before the power went out at a little after 4p.m. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhX3btH4DWnViSUjHkB2c9O5A7fY9vyyS3iXUiVIT6UZxZZVZDGc5tjka1IPa1QGH8zBKqnEj6FFwn5szkSyTMDV5kyYvPZKD1wmA-F_qVHgplzBmbjTx-xDNZdI2ZwzhKKYqMH_tMgtbVWSIAYNfiIfjLkPKTcDBVKopBX5xyMGwKpusZESDjRvBPrbqe3/s966/Street%20scene%20afternoon%20Blackout.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="667" data-original-width="966" height="276" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhX3btH4DWnViSUjHkB2c9O5A7fY9vyyS3iXUiVIT6UZxZZVZDGc5tjka1IPa1QGH8zBKqnEj6FFwn5szkSyTMDV5kyYvPZKD1wmA-F_qVHgplzBmbjTx-xDNZdI2ZwzhKKYqMH_tMgtbVWSIAYNfiIfjLkPKTcDBVKopBX5xyMGwKpusZESDjRvBPrbqe3/w400-h276/Street%20scene%20afternoon%20Blackout.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">There was almost
immediately pandemonium in the traffic as the signals were snuffed out and
crowds waiting for trains in the darkened subway tunnels started pouring out
into the streets in search of some other form of transportation. It was
suddenly gridlock all over town. The NYPD turned out fast, with cops showing up
on practically every corner. <o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It was a hot afternoon,
with temperatures peaking at ninety-one degrees. Near Claudio’s place, a
harassed-looking rotund police sergeant in short sleeves, collar open and a big
cigar jammed in one corner of his mouth, made a hole in the wandering crowds
with his squad car, climbed out in the intersection and began energetically
directing traffic in an attempt to break up the snarl that had formed there.
Claudio’s neighborhood, where the sidewalks seemed always to be occupied by
throngs of neighbors, was now jammed with pedestrians who had ventured out of
their myriad apartments to see what was going on. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKHLP-VqLOO0cMEeGnQ8RA9jwAy3fiagwUOAMs0czGMRvbVYljVoMf7LcJTuWbLZXt1lj3nq_AVvEJTkT4p1568VCMV_ZjGyVSIszJyZCotvONP-1saZPqsbXa3P1dlloSgUtgCqitXd4H2ESkhlxpY2cwExVtExN13XhpWJPEvYaom2PfvTL9IeMZUWPL/s904/2003%20blackout_cops.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="606" data-original-width="904" height="269" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKHLP-VqLOO0cMEeGnQ8RA9jwAy3fiagwUOAMs0czGMRvbVYljVoMf7LcJTuWbLZXt1lj3nq_AVvEJTkT4p1568VCMV_ZjGyVSIszJyZCotvONP-1saZPqsbXa3P1dlloSgUtgCqitXd4H2ESkhlxpY2cwExVtExN13XhpWJPEvYaom2PfvTL9IeMZUWPL/w400-h269/2003%20blackout_cops.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Reporters that we both
were, instead of taking refuge in his apartment, we started roaming the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">barrio</i> to observe the events. It didn’t
take long for us to realize that this was some kind of major screw-up that wasn’t
ending anytime soon. Claudio suggested that we should probably start finding a
way to get to Marcia’s office a couple of miles away and accompany her home. I
suggested that we’d better hoof it and hope for some kind of transportation
along the way. <o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But suddenly, almost as
if he had been called, a young Hispanic guy pulled up beside us in a mini-van
and asked where we were headed. Claudio gave him the location and he said, “I’m
going that way and still have room. I’ll take you.” I have to admit that I was
stunned by such generosity and solidarity. But I was to see a lot of the same
that evening. A New York where, at other times in its history, one might have
almost expected rioters and looters to take advantage of the chaos, in this
post-Nine-Eleven Manhattan, everybody seemed bent on being of whatever help
they could be to each other.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEHM7xt1T9anVsif6DQVXxr83XGfGCRvgO3MwslA_HAPjjkKlMh6sbHT7j8gytpOvy46x6onxhrPGZyzKE6FfutlgbdVmtEdFH922kpuwav4tky7kEk4JNZH7w1ejCqeSAs2nYKqqFAQsPOJBhv80hOuVYhxGttjM_SH4XCL56pJmAc6OdnvYOXqDqGONu/s994/2003%20blackout_cops_3.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="653" data-original-width="994" height="263" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEHM7xt1T9anVsif6DQVXxr83XGfGCRvgO3MwslA_HAPjjkKlMh6sbHT7j8gytpOvy46x6onxhrPGZyzKE6FfutlgbdVmtEdFH922kpuwav4tky7kEk4JNZH7w1ejCqeSAs2nYKqqFAQsPOJBhv80hOuVYhxGttjM_SH4XCL56pJmAc6OdnvYOXqDqGONu/w400-h263/2003%20blackout_cops_3.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">We squeezed into the car
with other passengers that the Good Samaritan had picked up along the way. We
made it a full house. Everybody but me in the car was Hispanic. They fell quiet
when I got in. I realized it was because they figured I was an English-speaker.
I spoke up right away and said, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“¡Buenas
tardes a todos!”</i> They answered, “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">¡Buenas
tardes!</i>” And then they resumed the conversation they had been having when
Claudio and I got in, everyone talking about where he or she had been when the
blackout started, and where they were trying to get to now. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Claudio and I told our
story too, and said that we were trying to get to his wife’s office at the
women’s center to accompany her home. There was a pretty young Puerto Rican woman
sitting next to me in the backseat of the van. Every time I talked, I could
feel her gaze fixed on the side of my face, observing me as I spoke. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvQmiEe3DHjvAybyT7RU0FLQfm8i7bQFYgU0Ng7F-gcDr8vTrZO1VkjzMdy1JrMrK57PMGs558nmFYTD7HuBlxonEqUKl6f-7WO0XiueJG7W4Wz0dhJcmBVjhOTM_4fNk3aKnXArCYGoP4-8Vhh6rBffmHBf1bGdwTDfNzIuEpj0VhgvpnsP5HVfbjUNW6/s1608/2003%20blackout_subway.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1072" data-original-width="1608" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvQmiEe3DHjvAybyT7RU0FLQfm8i7bQFYgU0Ng7F-gcDr8vTrZO1VkjzMdy1JrMrK57PMGs558nmFYTD7HuBlxonEqUKl6f-7WO0XiueJG7W4Wz0dhJcmBVjhOTM_4fNk3aKnXArCYGoP4-8Vhh6rBffmHBf1bGdwTDfNzIuEpj0VhgvpnsP5HVfbjUNW6/w400-h266/2003%20blackout_subway.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>People poured out of darkened subway tunnels</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Eventually, the people in
the rear of the van were dropped off, and then, a lady who had been riding in
the passenger seat up front. It was now just the Good Samaritan carefully
picking his way through the heavy traffic, with Claudio, the Puerto Rican woman
and me in the backseat. For a time, none of us spoke. Then, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">apropos</i> of nothing, the Puerto Rican
woman leaned forward and addressed me. “You speak such excellent Spanish,” she
said.<o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Oh, ¡<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">muchas gracias</i>!” I said.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Then after a pause she
said, “But you’re so <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">white</i>!”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Everybody laughed. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Where are you from?” she
asked. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">With no other
explanation, I said simply, “Ohio.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">She remained perplexed
for the rest of the trip.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgltgc3n2Flh710V3WbLdf_zCgTS2bpRsN_dMOSYD54Jy-oao1DbeMdh1nqtUCTHLWnsx2nfJyWYYneWp1NcaCt8beF3aG4_sB8WkprhwxYOCvRI-3DMhR8YK4TuQ3ySfV5_eqLMJIw_j7HR9L5VcKYVYS9BGtcwa8MBwHYdqAzLHQC0qjKlY1ez5Mi8_Ng/s964/Commuters%20waiting%20for%20ferry%20to%20cross%20husdon%20to%20jersey.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="634" data-original-width="964" height="263" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgltgc3n2Flh710V3WbLdf_zCgTS2bpRsN_dMOSYD54Jy-oao1DbeMdh1nqtUCTHLWnsx2nfJyWYYneWp1NcaCt8beF3aG4_sB8WkprhwxYOCvRI-3DMhR8YK4TuQ3ySfV5_eqLMJIw_j7HR9L5VcKYVYS9BGtcwa8MBwHYdqAzLHQC0qjKlY1ez5Mi8_Ng/w400-h263/Commuters%20waiting%20for%20ferry%20to%20cross%20husdon%20to%20jersey.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Commuters waiting to take the ferry to New Jersey</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">That evening at Claudio’s
seemed almost festive. A friend of Marcia’s from work accompanied us home. She
had a long commute—Long Island, I think—and decided to wait out the power
outage in Manhattan. She was witty and funny. We all had drinks and snacks by
candlelight and chatted, while their friend checked every so often by phone on
commuter rail services. When transportation services began to be gradually
brought back on line, she decided to leave for home.</span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">What I then thought of as
the New York City Blackout would actually become known as the Northeast Black
of 2003. The outage spread between the Midwestern US and Northeastern states to
Ontario Province in Canada. Most places were able to restore power by midnight
and some areas were back on line by earlier in the evening. The New York subway
system was, admirably, operating on a provisional basis by 8p.m. But full power
wasn’t restored in New York and Toronto until two days later.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcg5DgDaor3523CuGTYLybRCwBRJ8sZaTiZxKIhPOZ9BlCKbpBByzFC-stv-sC1vrsI379sWXM_obMEIK2vJ3c6bwC9Kdlf3hvmwXgCCnaN_MzWYWkoCZLXSVVC7FN2HWKgQDIXqrAymSQIqVciava6qw2F0zGjzspx-olZdxzneMALkQW4pQCkPbZ5rsx/s2010/Traffic_blackout.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1543" data-original-width="2010" height="308" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcg5DgDaor3523CuGTYLybRCwBRJ8sZaTiZxKIhPOZ9BlCKbpBByzFC-stv-sC1vrsI379sWXM_obMEIK2vJ3c6bwC9Kdlf3hvmwXgCCnaN_MzWYWkoCZLXSVVC7FN2HWKgQDIXqrAymSQIqVciava6qw2F0zGjzspx-olZdxzneMALkQW4pQCkPbZ5rsx/w400-h308/Traffic_blackout.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The outage was much more
widespread than the famous blackout of 1965, which inspired such works as the
musical <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Fly By Night</i> and the book and
film, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Where Were You When the Lights Went
Out?</i> And it was second in scale only to a blackout that took place in
Brazil in 1999. In a New York City still reeling from the Nine-Eleven terrorist
attack, rumors were rife regarding the causes of the 2003 blackout, ranging
from a terrorist attack on vital infrastructure to data interference by Russian
or Chinese spies. The facts were much more mundane and it all started in my
native Ohio, from which I had come for the visit. High-voltage lines that had
slunk down into foliage, a resulting fire, a bug in an alarm system at
FirstEnergy of Akron, which failed to warn operators that they needed to
redistribute the power supply from overloaded lines, and suddenly, everything
went dark. <o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">A technicality that in
human terms resulted in a major snafu, it became a date that left its mark on history.
And, as fate would have it, like other times before, I just happened to be there.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01054536465220812092noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1616769513702255459.post-8816009982368561742023-07-15T23:30:00.001-03:002023-11-07T11:59:43.819-03:00YANKEE REDUX — DOC: THE TANGO KING<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;">The first time I played
with Doc, it was by pure coincidence. I was working as a relief drummer, but
with a band I often played random gigs with, whenever their regular drummer
couldn’t make it. They’d had a piano-player who, when he played solo gigs,
played the Cordovox instead. One night they’d played a place that didn’t have a
piano. He’d taken his Cordovox along instead. They’d loved the fresh new
sound that, in his able hands, the strange instrument gave to their dog-eared
gig book. They’d decided to incorporate it full-time.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6srzkAhAsSmsROabQkyBT9qVcmh7yQ313Ho7cdRkqocDKvSds6kTfLWNk1Td-AJ83kg-TFYF35knnunV448ugItkNt2HznI6BVcLHHquusk6qN-slyM959i9IEHC8gz0WUGnqGhaL1wNLWLbLfR6JoQOJMD5zw8n3N8M1DV0a6TTcBX9W4KcUpt0kzrbl/s400/Cordovox%20hands-on.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="274" data-original-width="400" height="274" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6srzkAhAsSmsROabQkyBT9qVcmh7yQ313Ho7cdRkqocDKvSds6kTfLWNk1Td-AJ83kg-TFYF35knnunV448ugItkNt2HznI6BVcLHHquusk6qN-slyM959i9IEHC8gz0WUGnqGhaL1wNLWLbLfR6JoQOJMD5zw8n3N8M1DV0a6TTcBX9W4KcUpt0kzrbl/w400-h274/Cordovox%20hands-on.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">So anyway, one night when
their keyboard man couldn’t make it and neither could their drummer, they
called me—because I was available—and Doc, because Cordovox-players were scarce
as hen’s teeth in the roster of Lima Ohio Local 320 of the American Federation
of Musicians, and that was Doc’s exclusive “axe”. Their guy was an
extraordinary Cordovox-player, but Doc had nothing to envy him. He had all the
technique, but with a slightly different, more melodic, less aggressive style.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It was a jazz and swing
sextet. Everybody was a little nervous at first with two subs working the gig,
but after the first couple of tunes, we were cookin’. I had been a relief
drummer for the better part of a year when I was seventeen, and now was back at
it. I was used to accommodating myself to the different styles of the different
bands, and Doc was a natural, a guy with an ear and a feel for every tune,
every style, every tempo. This cat had listened a lot and everything he’d
listened to had sunk in and become an integral part of him.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The Cordovox was a crazy
instrument. Unfortunately, they quit making them, because they had a unique and
wonderful sound. To the uninitiated, it looked like an plain accordion, but it
was so much more. It was practically a synthesizer in “squeeze box” format.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It was by chance that I
had earlier worked with a Cordovox player when I landed a steady gig while I
was still in my senior year of high school. That was when I was with an
outstanding band called The Doug Price Trio, the trio being thrilling Berklee Jazz School-educated trumpet-player and front man Doug Price, myself, and an
absolutely amazing Cordovox-player called Gene Wollenhaupt, a veteran musician
who was also a high school band director. Wollenhaupt’s exciting and
multi-faceted sound eliminated any need for a bass-player (part of the usual
trio format: piano, bass and drums) and added an incredible range of
accompaniment and rhythm capable of giving us the sound of a much larger
musical ensemble. Put that together with Doug’s absolutely wailin’ trumpet and
the band was amazing. The final touch was added by Doug’s brother-in-law, Tom,
with his easy-listening style voice, who sang a few songs a set between
instrumentals.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZTweeQbKOSo7tMt3_SBDilNohqoz2-O3C4nuR6jjCLFgYccbNzDz6VcuMYa9V6zYYU2OD-2cBwlkD3igJFokpXtsPDuuJ4R-gZuHylcJmSP-D0QCqNZMocZs_lQYdkIk4cOjHM7AePaeiK2fm-6yMIUbmkPdkoPbc5fE1Ro0z6T3aeexKRQz3l-HjS_Q-/s387/Cordovox%20Manual.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="387" data-original-width="306" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZTweeQbKOSo7tMt3_SBDilNohqoz2-O3C4nuR6jjCLFgYccbNzDz6VcuMYa9V6zYYU2OD-2cBwlkD3igJFokpXtsPDuuJ4R-gZuHylcJmSP-D0QCqNZMocZs_lQYdkIk4cOjHM7AePaeiK2fm-6yMIUbmkPdkoPbc5fE1Ro0z6T3aeexKRQz3l-HjS_Q-/w316-h400/Cordovox%20Manual.jpg" width="316" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Anyway, Wollenhaupt used
to get really irritated when anyone mistook his mega-versatile Cordovox for a
simple accordion and was always dumbfounded when we’d just done an eclectic set
of everything from Miles Davis and Duke Ellington to Herb Alpert and Burt
Bacharach, with a smattering of sophisticated fusion music thrown in for good
measure, and some drunk would stumble up to the bandstand and ask, “Hey guy,
can you play the <i>Hoop Dee Doo Polka</i> like that guy on the
Lawrence Welk Show?” It drove Gene insane and at the end of each set, when we’d
take a break, you could hear him mutter, “Next sonuvabitch that asks if I can
play <i>Lady of Spain</i> or the <i>Beer Barrel Polka</i>, I’m
deckin’ ‘im.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I had quit the trio at
the end of the year before and traveled to South America to visit the exchange
student I’d fallen in love with during my senior year. That’s why, now that I
was back, I was just gigging again on the weekends with whatever band needed me
and attending classes a couple of hours away at the Ohio State University music
school during the week.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But back to Doc. It
wasn’t until the first break on that gig with the sextet that I first
noticed that Doc was blind. It was when we all bellied up to the bar
and Doc and I ordered Cokes (he because, I assumed, he didn’t drink, and I
because I was still underage for hard liquor and never even drank three-two on
a gig), while the rest of the band ordered beer or whiskey. I know that
nowadays it’s PC to say “vision impaired”, but Doc wasn’t vision-impaired. He
was lights-out blind. I noticed when I talked to him and he looked toward my
voice but seemed to be focusing on a point somewhere over my shoulder. Before
that, I just thought he was one of those musician-types who liked to wear shades
even in the low lights of a nightclub.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But no. The super-dark
shades were to cover his disability. Still, they made him look cool, with his
trim well-groomed, dark Italian look and sharply-pressed dark blue suit.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1hr8gFKws_rBrZ4LuDI1OvAQ76CbcYw25_45Aw_HNoWFyrmCaghTGz08y0cxxQEw9MvpZMPcg5QTFuurLmmGapqmRsI4oOiHG-rmeRUigrDJ0MAQX2o-PQXur9KsjR0BWgYXHjeswU9f2-oWOkpWkix261h6CLF-x_L47n9urdsgI8YA4O5RvI-3KeRmE/s358/Dark%20glasses.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="153" data-original-width="358" height="171" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1hr8gFKws_rBrZ4LuDI1OvAQ76CbcYw25_45Aw_HNoWFyrmCaghTGz08y0cxxQEw9MvpZMPcg5QTFuurLmmGapqmRsI4oOiHG-rmeRUigrDJ0MAQX2o-PQXur9KsjR0BWgYXHjeswU9f2-oWOkpWkix261h6CLF-x_L47n9urdsgI8YA4O5RvI-3KeRmE/w400-h171/Dark%20glasses.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">We liked each other right off and started feeling each other out and
matching each other’s licks on the thirty or so different tunes we played that
night. Doc lent a new feel to the band. He knew every tune we played like he’d
learned them in the cradle, but since he couldn’t read the fake book, he gave a
new dimension to the arrangements, a new skillfully-improvised feel that sought
to blend, even as it modified the sound.</span><br /><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It turned out to be a
really fun gig.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">After the show was over
and we were tearing down our equipment, Eddy, the trumpet-player, came over to
me and said, “Hey Danny, you and Doc are both from Wapak. Would you mind taking
him home?” and I said sure thing.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I went over to Doc and
said, “I didn’t know you were from Wapakoneta, so am I,” and he asked me my
last name and I told him and he asked, “Are your folks Whitie and Reba Mae who
owned the Teddy Bear restaurant.” And when I said they were indeed, he said he
knew them well.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But it wasn’t until we
were back in Wapakoneta and I’d pulled up to his house and recognized it that I
realized that, besides being a helluva musician, he was also the well-known
chiropractor that both my dad and my grandfather had gone to for their sciatic nerve pain. Granted, Whitie and I didn’t talk to each other much back then, but I was
surprised I’d never heard him mention that his chiropractor was blind.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Anyway, it was as we were
unloading Doc’s stuff from the backseat of my ’63 Chevy Nova—the trunk was full
of my drums—and taking it inside, that Doc said, “Hey Danny, I like how we play
together. I’m about to start a gig every Saturday for the summer, and maybe
beyond, at a place in Bellefontaine. I thought maybe we could form a duo if you
don’t have anything better to do.”</span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEPWl9S-6PhAGMtCIq8xH9DwPMcapOlQ0GfAky3DSIC14Ojy2YI4xa3wTUG3LQoaF1kzQr4711cFrwIS6_VD-7tmXfi-GhRXhFb_7gXaK--KG4JEF7TaXToKAJbUh1GAvctZmD8vsFlK6DoXPYzTlYvlzV-9jqyNlGILzs2O_qlBCcyL8hkyR6adr_aehC/s666/1963-chevrolet-chevy-ii-nova-front-1.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="532" data-original-width="666" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEPWl9S-6PhAGMtCIq8xH9DwPMcapOlQ0GfAky3DSIC14Ojy2YI4xa3wTUG3LQoaF1kzQr4711cFrwIS6_VD-7tmXfi-GhRXhFb_7gXaK--KG4JEF7TaXToKAJbUh1GAvctZmD8vsFlK6DoXPYzTlYvlzV-9jqyNlGILzs2O_qlBCcyL8hkyR6adr_aehC/w400-h320/1963-chevrolet-chevy-ii-nova-front-1.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>My '63 Chevy Nova was just like this one.</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">And that’s how I started
working with Doc for a string of Saturdays, the summer before I turned
twenty. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Doc and I didn’t share
the usual musical relationship, where you meet up at the site of the gig, say,
“Hey man, how’s it goin’?” and just about all communication after that is
through the music. No, in this case, I spent a lot of time with Doc. I drove us
there and home, obviously, every Saturday night and on two-lane roads back
then, it took the better part of an hour each way, so we talked—a lot. But I
also always arrived a little early at his house to pick him up and his wife,
who was also his nurse and receptionist, would invite me in to wait for him to
finish getting ready.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">She would show me into
what was essentially Doc’s waiting room for his chiropractic patients. But
honestly, it felt a lot more like a comfy sitting room with overstuffed
armchairs and a big old couch of the type that we called davenports back then.
The house itself was of the rambling old two-storey type with a dark varnished
staircase up to the second floor and wall-papered walls, like many other of the
turn-of-the-century places that formed the core real-estate in Wapakoneta, with
the more modern ranch and modified A-frame houses being relegated to peripheral
neighborhoods known as “additions” in those days.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Doc had a pretty German
shepherd seeing-eye dog called Pepper, who would always find her way into the
waiting room when I was there. We got pretty friendly after a few Saturday
evenings. I was a young wise-ass and so naïve that I actually thought if I
could keep Pepper from going to Doc when he came downstairs into the room, he
wouldn’t know I was there. So when I’d hear the stairs creak, I’d hold onto
Pepper and pet her to see how long it would take Doc to figure out that I was
in the room. I was always amazed that he was never more than halfway down the
steps before he’d call out, “Hi Dan!”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDdPQH813GgLbiOp39dOTdiqEq0rUS8JHJGiHp_4f72aYh81QsRQWylWlUzumBNTEqx5cvQPhkqAt8eXzezIyXZD5p3Gtv-PRaQx2F8HOUviq3L5utJRQzvw0Ewt-Lha6hpSBGcty-APrnIY0h8yVdt78w2suuBPnOJAfzO69FKtv6mMCfePETNHolvndG/s395/GSD-guide-dog.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="365" data-original-width="395" height="370" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDdPQH813GgLbiOp39dOTdiqEq0rUS8JHJGiHp_4f72aYh81QsRQWylWlUzumBNTEqx5cvQPhkqAt8eXzezIyXZD5p3Gtv-PRaQx2F8HOUviq3L5utJRQzvw0Ewt-Lha6hpSBGcty-APrnIY0h8yVdt78w2suuBPnOJAfzO69FKtv6mMCfePETNHolvndG/w400-h370/GSD-guide-dog.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Once I said, “How the
hell do you know I’m here, Doc?”<o:p></o:p></span></p><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">And he said, “Well, let’s
see...you smoke both pipe and cigarettes. Not sure of the brand, but the
cigarettes are menthol and the pipe tobacco’s probably Sir Walter Raleigh.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“How do you know that
when I never smoke in your house?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Well, hell, Danny, I’m
just blind, not dead! I can smell it on your clothes...And then there’s that English
Leather cologne you wear that Pepper and I can smell a mile off. You know, Dan,
you shouldn’t be so friendly with Pepper. She should only be friends with me.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I laughed. Doc didn't.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“I’m serious,” Doc said.
“A pilot dog’s no good to a blind person if it’ll make friends with any Tom,
Dick and Harry who comes along.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Adolescent that I still
was, I was hurt, but after that, Pepper and I never shared anything more
intimate than a handshake. Doc didn’t take her along on the gigs, so he had to
teach me how to be his guide dog.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I always remember Doc
when I see the Al Pacino version of <i>Scent of a Woman</i>, the scene
where Pacino’s character, Lt. Colonel Frank Slade, who has lost his sight,
turns on a street-corner to his weekend chaperone, a private school
kid called Charlie Simms, and snaps, “Are you blind? <i>Are </i>you <i>blind</i>?”</span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8LXjbdP4Oap84TRGu4pNV6FfNiGVL2m5Tg5SziH0mVk9dPPU8qC7Cs32u0hUOSBaqTdKpm6C3Nfbs7kX9URhrlZSq2BS_WQU2c54_Mk-uK9YsEck7rELn1DenLm8fOS4wxG_UqIEpjOyjx_MonrwfJvkQyrzIn5K0GafOXvnA4ADHE5BLxUKXKUMWvkSn/s400/Scent%20of%20a%20Woman.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="293" data-original-width="400" height="293" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8LXjbdP4Oap84TRGu4pNV6FfNiGVL2m5Tg5SziH0mVk9dPPU8qC7Cs32u0hUOSBaqTdKpm6C3Nfbs7kX9URhrlZSq2BS_WQU2c54_Mk-uK9YsEck7rELn1DenLm8fOS4wxG_UqIEpjOyjx_MonrwfJvkQyrzIn5K0GafOXvnA4ADHE5BLxUKXKUMWvkSn/w400-h293/Scent%20of%20a%20Woman.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>"Are you blind?"<br />"Then why do you keep grabbing my goddamn arm?"</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Of course not!” Charlie
says.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Then why do you keep
grabbing my goddamn arm? <i>I</i> take <i>your</i> arm.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Well, Doc and I had that
same conversation on a street-corner in Bellefontaine, Ohio. “Don’t grab my
arm,” Doc said. “You’re not <i>dragging</i> me anyplace, see. Just
let me rest my elbow in the palm of your hand, as if you were my dog’s harness,
so I can feel when you step up or step down. And for chrissake don’t go telling
me, 'Careful now, there’s a step here or a curb there.' I’ll feel it by how you
move. It’s like when I’m on a plane and ask for a cup of coffee and the
stewardess comes and says, ‘Here’s your coffee, sir. Careful now, it’s <i>hot</i>!’
Well, <i>of course</i> it’s <i>hot</i>! If it <i>wasn’t</i>,
I wouldn’t <i>want</i> the damn thing!”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">He was always telling me
that I was a terrible guide dog. Pepper had me beat all to hell, he’d say. When
we got to know each other better, if he bitched and told me what a bad dog I
was, I’d lead him into a parking meter for spite and then laugh about it. I was
easily entertained back then.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Funny Dan. Really
funny,” he would say with half-mock anger. “Playing tricks on a blind man. Real
nice!”<br />
<br />
Once when I showed up early, I was amazed to find Doc sitting cross-legged on
the floor, rewiring his Cordovox sound mixer. This, I figured, would take <i>ages</i> with
a blind guy doing it.<br />
<br />
"Hey Doc," I said. "What gives?"<br />
<br />
"Hey Danny," Doc answered, "a minor wiring problem...And you're
just in time! What color's this wire? And how about this one? And this one over
here?" And just like that, bing, bang, boom, he had the complicated
circuitry rewired and the cabinet put back together.<br />
<br />
Once I asked him about being blind. Thinking aloud, I said I didn't know what
I'd do if it were to happen to me. I was sure I'd be desperate.<br />
<br />
"Look Danny," Doc said, "being blind's a pain in the ass, but
it's not the end of the world. You can't see, so you just learn to do other
things a lot better." <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The hour-long drive was
always interesting. I remember having an attack of hay fever one summer
evening, as we were driving along with the windows down in my
non-air-conditioned car, and having a sneezing fit over near Indian Lake.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“What are you allergic
to?” Doc asked.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“No idea,” I said.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Because back there where
you started sneezing there was ragweed, golden rod and ryegrass among other
things.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Another time, we’d ridden
along in silence for a long time, when all of the sudden, Doc said, “Coming up
over the next rise, there’ll be an S-curve. Coming out of the second one,
you’ll see a big white farmhouse with a barn right up close to it.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Sure enough, as I pulled
out of the second curve, there was the house.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Damn!” I said. “You’re
right!”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Don’t sound so
surprised. Of course I’m right. Listen, if we’re still playing this gig in the
wintertime and get into bad weather coming back, we can always stop there for
the night. They’re old friends of mine.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The place we played on
the main drag in Bellefontaine was a bit “divey” and was frequented by
beer-mellowed rednecks and belligerent rural roughnecks as well as a
crazy-quilt mix of local regulars. But they tended to be an appreciative crowd
and Doc and I enjoyed their applause. Still, we enjoyed playing together even
more. It never felt like “a job”. It was always fun.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZP8sf5NlA3N6Wqu80-0Ea7XuPW1WxC3v2H5krctziFecpIaAKwPgLz3hURWI528PMs6GchgDaasP5TJMsR1b4j_nNNJHIHftSO5GKXoSpW-2kyzH-EwbOyGELRQ_Ny3v8YBW8JNprkRk0lHImepSJQVuFt8l1Zt1Z1rH83bJYvjGDcNuXjYh7-WZ88LuJ/s376/Dive.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="376" data-original-width="349" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZP8sf5NlA3N6Wqu80-0Ea7XuPW1WxC3v2H5krctziFecpIaAKwPgLz3hURWI528PMs6GchgDaasP5TJMsR1b4j_nNNJHIHftSO5GKXoSpW-2kyzH-EwbOyGELRQ_Ny3v8YBW8JNprkRk0lHImepSJQVuFt8l1Zt1Z1rH83bJYvjGDcNuXjYh7-WZ88LuJ/w371-h400/Dive.jpeg" width="371" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The only time things got
dicey was once when this mean drunk came up to the tiny bandstand (on which Doc
with his Cordovox and speakers and I with my full drum set barely fit), and
wanted to sit in on the drums.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Sorry, pal,” I said,
“Doc here’s real touchy about who he plays with, and I never lend my drums
to <i>anybody</i>.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I thought that would end
it, but the guy was back every few tunes to ask to sit in and every time, I
tried as nicely but firmly as possible to get him to understand that it wasn’t
happening. Finally, I said, “Look buddy, how about going back over to the bar
and having a beer and coolin’ it. Just stop annoying us before I ask the
bartender to throw you out.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The guy had a few choice
words for me, but in the end, turned and weaved his way across the barroom and
out the door.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Good riddance,” I
thought, and figured it was over.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But as we were playing
the next set, I was riding the high-hat and looking toward the wall when I
heard a whoosh and whistle and then the clatter of a tire iron hitting my ride
cymbal and then the floor. Doc’s right arm was over his head blocking the
skull-crushing blow the mean drunk had tried to lay on me, and now, with his
left he was punching the guy in the face with a haymaker that knocked him off
the stand onto the barroom floor, where the bartender and a couple of other men
were already picking the guy up and giving him the bum’s rush into the street,
opening the door with the top of his skull.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“What the hell are you
doing for eyes?” Doc turned and shouted at me. “You almost got your goddamn
skull split!”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">All I could say was,
“Thanks for the save, Doc. Man, you are <i>amazing</i>!”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">There was this one very
special night. On the way to the gig, I had told Doc about the time I’d spent
in Buenos Aires. He knew I had a “foreign girlfriend” but I’d never told him
about the adventure of traveling on my own to South America when I was only
eighteen.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">He asked if I liked tango
and I said that I loved it, but that “nobody in the States knew how to play
it.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">He didn’t say a word in
response. But that night, during the second set, he said, “Let’s do a tango.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">And I thought, “Oh god,
get ready for <i>Hernando’s Hideaway</i>.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But then he said, “Sit
back. I’ll play this one solo. And with that, he played an amazing version of
what was practically the national anthem of tango, <i>La Cumparsita,</i> and
followed it, almost DJ style, with <i>La Canción de Buenos Aires,
Caminito, Sur </i>and<i> Adios Muchachos.</i> He followed those
with a couple of progressive tango pieces by Astor Piazzolla, <i>Adios
Nonino</i> and <i>Oblivion</i> and I could have sworn that he
had turned his Cordovox into that quintessential instrument of tango, the <i>bandoneon</i>.
I just sat back and listened, dumbfounded.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">After that, I would
always think of him as Doc, The Tango King. He was nothing short of
incredible. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">We did indeed get that
gig for the rest of the year and even played New Year’s Eve. But I decided not
to go back to school that spring. I wanted to travel a while. What actually
happened wasn't what I had in mind, but travel, I did. By March, I'd been
“invited” by the US government to serve in the Army. I joined instead of
letting myself be drafted and for the next three years played with Army Bands
in the States and Europe following Basic Combat Training and a stint at the
military school of music.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I couldn’t have imagined
at the time that I’d never see Doc again after that Bellefontaine gig was over.
Never imagined that warm, friendly relationship Doc and I had formed would end
with a handshake and a “see ya” after our last night on that steady gig. But
sometimes that’s just the way things work out.<br />
<br />
</span><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">NOTE: It's really
hard to find anything on the Internet even remotely close to the way guys like
Doc and Wallenhaupt played the Cordovox but the closest thing to their style
from when I was in the duo with Doc and or the trio with Gene is the jazz style
of Wynton Marsalis and Richard Galiano. Take a listen:</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="https://youtu.be/dVxBDEqmwSA">https://youtu.be/dVxBDEqmwSA</a></span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="https://youtu.be/Dtd4OhP8rvg">https://youtu.be/Dtd4OhP8rvg</a></span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><br />
<b><a href="https://youtu.be/Tl21YlEVkl0">https://youtu.be/Tl21YlEVkl0</a></b><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01054536465220812092noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1616769513702255459.post-91043572439752362992023-06-30T19:46:00.002-03:002023-07-02T13:41:46.415-03:00FOR JIM – THE STORY I OWED YOU<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt;">Dad wanted to call him Rusty because when Mom
first brought him home from the hospital he had an impressive crop of rusty red
hair. I kind of liked the name, and still do. It's a real guy's guy name. It's
the kind of name that gives a kid an edge before he even starts out and puts
him a leg up on the Hermans and the Percys and the Lyles and the Francises and
the Normans.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgL9DkjbMpHWfFyU7zPqnKs1XfzyI1x9Qq-wSqPcDY_cwzA18E1dWAcqcFJYhbvbbGnqKZFL_RFFcODgRUvpMGV2lk6upt1aV4baHRYPm8DbclqinAv-JmXF3kquKqVbsrUgs7LFc7dcqpAkZNwiFkVp8IkenyisfpJClPZ0zAlHiwJ69-dP1XS-IynKiAd/s2708/Jim_grade%20school.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2708" data-original-width="1948" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgL9DkjbMpHWfFyU7zPqnKs1XfzyI1x9Qq-wSqPcDY_cwzA18E1dWAcqcFJYhbvbbGnqKZFL_RFFcODgRUvpMGV2lk6upt1aV4baHRYPm8DbclqinAv-JmXF3kquKqVbsrUgs7LFc7dcqpAkZNwiFkVp8IkenyisfpJClPZ0zAlHiwJ69-dP1XS-IynKiAd/w288-h400/Jim_grade%20school.jpg" width="288" /></a></div><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: ES;">Dad's name was Norman, which was probably a good
reason why he voted for Rusty, although most of the people who knew him from
the time of his youth called him Whitie or Norm. Only the preacher and his
mother and dad called him Norman…well, and Mom, whenever she was pissed off at
him. I figure he must have liked the nickname Whitie, since his big brother Bob
(not Robert, mind you, but Bobby Junior—why do parents <i>do</i> things like that to their kids?) was known as Red and Dad always
looked up to him, so maybe that had a lot to do with the Rusty thing too. </span><br /> </span><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">But I guess Rusty kind of smacks of
nickname, like people are going to ask, "What's it short for?" or
"So what's your real name?" Besides, Mom said she thought it was a
dumb name unless it was for a dog. And she didn't want him having a name he was
going to go around hating all his life like she did. (Mom's name was Reba–Reba
Mae, actually–and she was always saying that every time she heard that someone
was called Reba, it turned out to be a bloodhound bitch, or some woman from a
hollow so far back in the hills that it had to have daylight pumped in. I do,
however, recall her being fairly pleased when Nashville star Reba MacIntyre
made the name famous later on. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">But, of course, none of that kept her from
naming me Danny – not Daniel, not even Dan – because her mother had always
loved the song <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Oh Danny Boy</i>, or from
giving me my father's name as a middle name, so that my full name, Danny Norman
Newland ended up having the <i>nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyahah-nyahah</i> quality of
childish taunting. But anyway, Reba Mae nixed Rusty out of hand and with her
usual bent for whimsical criteria decided that a great name would be that of
her favorite TV sports announcer and game show host, Dennis James, who also
advertised for Old Gold cigarettes. It didn't matter that the Jersey-born actor
cum wrestling announcer's real name was Demi James Sposa. Reba Mae thought he
was suave and looked so sophisticated puffing his Old Gold, and she fell in
love with his moniker, so the name stuck.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">Now, it wasn't until several days later
when Reba Mae and Whitie actually started <i>saying </i>his name —"<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Coochi-coochi-coo</i> Dennis, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">coochi-coo</i> Dennis James, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">coochi-coochi</i> Denny"—that they realized,
with a histrionic slap to their collective forehead, that people were probably
not going to call him Dennis or Dennis James, but Denny. And this <i>was</i>,
after all, Ohio, where, particularly up on the lake, in places like Toledo,
Akron and Cleveland, people didn't make much of a distinction between their
pronunciation of short E's and short A's (as in "I'm going beck to
Clevelend" or "I live near Ekron"), so Denny and Danny were going
to end up often sounding almost indistinguishable from each other. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">This meant that before the poor little kid
was even able to pronounce <i>goo-goo</i> and <i>gah-gah</i>, his given name
had been usurped in deference to his older brother and he was being called by
his middle name. And then, not James either, but Jimmy and later, just plain
Jim.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">Of course, from kindergarten on, whenever
roll was called at school it was with "real" names. So in the
classroom little Jimmy quickly became Dennis (Denny, Den). Thus, his friends
and classmates called him Dennis and his family called him Jimmy and the whole
thing must have been really confusing to the little guy. I remember his first
shaky-lettered attempts to print his name. After struggling through the six
letters of his first name, he went to the considerable trouble of learning how to
draw parentheses, and within them he scrawled, somewhat smaller and surely
shakier, (<b>J I M</b>). Little wonder that he occasionally went dyslexic and
turned the S in Dennis or the J in Jim inside out in his head and wrote it <i>bass
ackwards</i> on the wide-lined, light green pages of his spelling workbooks.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">Despite the fact that it might have been
easier on his little-boy psyche, however, it was a good thing that Rusty never
stuck, because it wasn't long at all before his prenatal shock of oxide red
hair turn almost as blonde as Daddy Whitie's. I don't know whether it was the
stress of not having a single first name to call his own or whether it was
simply his nature, but if he wasn't born to be a redhead, he was certainly born
with a redhead's temper. That was abundantly apparent from the outset. Never
have I witnessed a more strongly emergent personality prior to the age of one in
anyone else I've ever known. And it just kept getting stronger as he grew. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhys2RqtLieHoYsWbQOykqp2YdOBb3-F4Zhtaj_i6BMBpivp8tPfwyN1iMbjq02yw_3TsBW6xw_4a2t0sXArRzEg1tJgUhFWTkF8sNYyrgb8fjQRXHDKf87JA7OkhUOlu5RUQ4FWELMJpN8dba__l5B4C_slEn2X0tvUu5LVVEMri0KYOzh7ykiH-LyPI-C/s3550/Jim%20baby.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3550" data-original-width="2509" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhys2RqtLieHoYsWbQOykqp2YdOBb3-F4Zhtaj_i6BMBpivp8tPfwyN1iMbjq02yw_3TsBW6xw_4a2t0sXArRzEg1tJgUhFWTkF8sNYyrgb8fjQRXHDKf87JA7OkhUOlu5RUQ4FWELMJpN8dba__l5B4C_slEn2X0tvUu5LVVEMri0KYOzh7ykiH-LyPI-C/w283-h400/Jim%20baby.jpg" width="283" /></a></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">He was the most cantankerous toddler you could
possibly imagine. Interested in everything from the time he could crawl,
grabbing, touching, pulling and throwing everything in sight and crawling so
fast that he almost moved at the rate of a small dog from one place to another
on all fours. This meant that my beleaguered mother had to have eyes on him all
day long in order to avoid catastrophe. For example, the time he spread the
tines of a metal bobby pin he had found on the floor and plugged it into the electrical
outlet, knocking himself for a loop, severely burning his index and middle
fingers and (fortunately) blowing a fuse. Or the other time that Reba Mae was
ironing in the dining room and cooking in the kitchen at the same time and left
her ironing board for a few seconds to go check on whatever was in the oven.
Jim’s screams brought her running, to find the hot iron on the floor, the cord
in Jim’s hand and his tiny arm severely blistered from forearm to shoulder from
the sizzling iron sliding down it. Indeed, he carried a scar on his shoulder
from that burn for the rest of his life.<o:p></o:p></span></p><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">Screaming, by the way, was something at
which he truly excelled. He was kinetically hyperactive from the start, and
learned quickly to bow his back, kick his feet and scream bloody murder if he
was picked up or otherwise restrained from doing precisely what he wanted to
do. Screaming, in fact, became his main bargaining chip for getting his way,
since he was nothing if not astute from the very beginning. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">He had a scream that was shrill,
incredibly loud and blood-curdlingly persistent. He had powerful lungs and was
fully capable of screaming–not screaming and sobbing, mind you, just plain, ear-splitting,
intolerably high-pitched screaming–for minutes on end, until he was provided
with whatever it was he was screaming for (the toy he had been playing with and
that had fallen out of the playpen, the household item he was told he couldn't
touch, his pacifier, his “little blue blanket”—which he called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">boo-bukuck</i>—whatever it happened to be).
And he was just as capable of shutting off the screaming mechanism immediately,
no tears, no sobbing, no wind-down, almost as if it were an electric siren with
a switch, the split second that the desired item was placed in his hands. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">My parents were really distraught with
this trait of Jim's and asked friends and family members for advice. Coming
from immigrant Scots-Irish and German stock as they did, the most usual tip my mother
and father received was to give the kid a sound spanking. But they seemed to
realize, somehow, that this method not only wouldn't work but might also even
make matters worse. The little guy was headstrong and resilient. And corporal
punishment wasn’t likely to do more than make him madder and shriller.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">My father, for his part, seemed to recall
his older brother's having a similar screaming habit when he was a small boy
and my Grandma Alice's having cured him of it forever by once heaving an entire
dishpan full of ice cold water into his face in mid-scream. He had lost his
breath, turned blue and fallen faint to the floor from the shock and my
grandmother had had to whack him smartly on the back to get his respiration
going again, but it had been the last screaming fit he had ever had. By this
point Whitie thought it was worth a try, but Reba Mae felt it was too extreme. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">She finally asked Dr. Clyde W. Berry, our
family physician, what he thought and his advice was, "Ignore him. He'll
get tired of screaming after a while if he realizes it won't get him
anywhere."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">So my parents tried that for a while and
found it to be less than sage advice when dealing with someone as hyper-active
and willful as little Jimmy. When he realized he was being ignored, he added
new embellishments to his repertoire. First he would scream constantly for
about five minutes, and if that brought no parental reaction, he would lie down
on his stomach on the floor and continue to scream while pounding his fists and
the toes of his shoes on the resounding hardwood. This he would do for another
five-minute interval before still continuing to scream but now with his palms
and toes planted firmly on the floor while slamming his forehead repeatedly with
a sickening thud into the oak-wood grain. This always brought a reaction from Reba
Mae, because the one time that she had ignored him, he had butted the floor
with his forehead until it had knots the size of goose-eggs on it and until his
nose had started to bleed.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">But Dr. Berry, a World War II Army
physician and former Lieutenant Colonel, insisted that infants didn't commit
suicide and that Reba Mae should just let Jim pound his head on the floor until
he got tired of doing it. When Reba Mae said that she simply couldn't stand
Jim's screaming, Dr. Berry suggested she lock him out on the porch and let him
scream to his heart's content. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">She said that was easy for him to say but
it was another thing to actually do it. Especially since, with as disturbing as
his screaming could be, the neighbors were likely to think he was being beaten
within an inch of his life. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">Heartless as the medical advice appeared
to be, however, she did finally take it. And doing so would provide an indirect
solution. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">One day when Jim was about four years old,
and in a particularly vile humor over some unattended whim, our mother reached
the end of her tether and locked him out on the screened-in porch of the
rambling old house on the main street of town—which wasn't Main Street but
Auglaize, although there was a Main Street in town, which wasn't the main
street—to which we had recently moved. The raised wood-plank floor of that
porch appeared to have a really satisfying resonance when my infuriated little
brother battered it with his fists, forehead and feet. He became one with the
sound, simply fell into sympathetic vibration with the reverberating porch
floor, and it seemed that he might just go on forever producing that rumbling
din and accompanying it with a singularly crystal-shattering scream that could
be heard a block away...And was. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">A delivery man who was passing by on the
busy street in front of our house heard little Jimmy's screams over the noise
of traffic and the sound of his own truck engine. Fearing the child was trapped
or being murdered, he slammed on the brakes, left his truck idling by the curb
and stormed up our driveway to the side door off of the screened-in porch. Jim
was still pounding head, fists and feet on the echoing wood flooring, totally oblivious
to the fact that the man was hammering on the hooked screen door to try and
raise someone's attention. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">Finally, over the intensity of the shrill
screaming, the delivery man shouted, "Are you hurt, Sonny!? Are you <i>hurt!</i>?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">Obviously taken by surprise, Jim abruptly stopped
screaming, as if his “screaming plug” had just been pulled, sat up cross-legged
on the floor in one swift movement and scowling disapprovingly at the poor
shaken man, yelled, "<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">NO!</i>"<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">The man stalked back to his truck, shaking
his head and muttering under his breath, and Jim just sat there looking after
him as my mother stood snickering to herself in the kitchen, mortified but
tickled both by the man's reaction and her irascible little boy's response. As
she watched him through the kitchen window, she saw little Jimmy stand up,
brush himself off, then sit back down and start playing with a toy truck that
he had conveniently had with him when he was exiled to the porch. From that day
on, he never again had a screaming tantrum. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01054536465220812092noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1616769513702255459.post-29038182345115429832023-06-15T23:30:00.014-03:002023-06-18T12:17:23.822-03:00YANKEE REDUX – DUDLEY NICHOLS, LOCAL BOY MAKES GOOD<p><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt;">If you’ve ever heard of Wapakoneta, my home
town, you’re probably a “moon freak” who knows the story of Neil Armstrong by
heart, you stopped off at the Wapakoneta-Bellefontaine (which we say like
bell-fountain) Street exit on I-75 to go to the Bob Evans and discovered that
there’s an aerospace museum next door—can’t not have one of those in the town
where the First Man on the Moon was born—somebody told you about Jim Bowsher’s
incredible Temple of Tolerance and, even though you’re not an Ohioan, you
decided to go see it for yourself (Johnny Depp did, and so did a number of
other notables over the years), or you are a reader of this blog.</span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrNTB1l877AVyXS-mZj_Z9fUixt0tFotd5p0P1xQr6b5MTxP5YB5iZW5UrPZt6b6lGKcbh92HjMW2GTVTK4A1rRs6E8G7UiPlf1lybmwHX3FuZs9cgHKcE8TuWI52nhCG8wkHwgNo4WJ7I3qkT9BiqfXSRH1s6g6YXUXOU73e2i67Czqk0fBiDDRImHQ/s261/Dudley.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><img border="0" data-original-height="261" data-original-width="204" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrNTB1l877AVyXS-mZj_Z9fUixt0tFotd5p0P1xQr6b5MTxP5YB5iZW5UrPZt6b6lGKcbh92HjMW2GTVTK4A1rRs6E8G7UiPlf1lybmwHX3FuZs9cgHKcE8TuWI52nhCG8wkHwgNo4WJ7I3qkT9BiqfXSRH1s6g6YXUXOU73e2i67Czqk0fBiDDRImHQ/w313-h400/Dudley.jpg" width="313" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i><span style="font-family: trebuchet;">Dudley Nichols</span></i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">But unless you were a real Hollywood
connoisseur, you probably wouldn’t make a pilgrimage to Wapakoneta to walk the
same streets that saw Dudley Nichols grow to manhood, or to try and get a
selfie in front of his family’s home. (If you did, you would be, as my father,
the inimitable Whitie, used to say, “shit outa luck”). That house, where
Dudley’s stepmother, Kitty, lived until her death, and that used to stand at
the corner of Blackhoof and Main, has long since been torn down. Despite the
good work of the Auglaize County Historical Society, Wapak (as we natives
lovingly call it) has often been less than sensitive to historical value. Not
long ago, for instance, what had once been the main station for the
late-nineteenth-century Interurban Streetcar Line was purchased and torn down
to provide more parking space to the pizzeria next door. But, <i>c’est la
vie</i>.</span><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Whether you’ve heard of him or not, Dudley was
once a highly renowned personality—one of Hollywood’s most influential writers
and a film director and producer in his own right. Born in 1895, the son of a
Wapakoneta doctor, Grant Nichols, and his wife, Mary, Dudley got in on the
ground floor of the golden age of cinema, the early years of “talking movies”,
and earned a place for himself as a true Hollywood icon. He is credited by some
film experts with having elevated the status of the Hollywood screenplay to a
level of literary excellence, and with having almost single-handedly elicited a
whole new realm of respect for the American screenwriter.</span><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The pizza place that I mentioned earlier is in
the same building that my grandfather, Murel Newland, built in 1945-46 so that
three of his sons, who had gone off to service “for the duration” during World
War II, would have a place of business to come back to. And it was there,
shortly after the war, that Whitie, his big brother Red and their younger
brother Chuck opened the Teddy Bear soda fountain and sandwich shop, which,
over the years, would morph into a family restaurant. The Nichols home was just
a couple of doors away at the corner of Blackhoof and Main, and Dudley’s
widowed stepmother Kitty lived there alone but rented part of the house to a
single schoolteacher named Jessie Crawford. Kitty was a "stepmother"
in name only, since she and Dudley’s were only eight years apart in age. Dr.
Nichols, her husband and Dudley's father, died in 1944 at the age of eighty-two
and Kitty never remarried. Curiously enough, she and Dudley both died in 1960,
Dudley aged sixty-four and Kitty seventy-two. </span><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Kitty became a Teddy Bear regular from the
outset. She mostly liked the coffee and the pie, but would now and then eat a
meal as well. I was only a little boy when Kitty used to come into the
Teddy Bear daily, but I remember her well. She seemed somehow regal and a
little intimidating if you didn’t know her. I thought she was one of the most
beautiful women I’d ever seen, elegant with her long silver hair pulled back
tight and tied in a kind of ponytail with a velvet ribbon, her makeup ever
perfect. I loved her full, pleated, ankle-length skirts and starchy white
blouses, her slender hands with their red-painted nails, the long fingers that
held her cigarettes the way female-lead movie stars did, up close to her
scarlet lips, her elbow propped on the table.</span><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="color: black; font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Kitty liked Whitie and he liked her. She often
came in between rush hours, and when he had time, Whitie would sometimes pour
both of them a cup of fragrant, steaming Continental coffee and sit down with
her to chat for a while. She never sat in a booth, always at a table, usually a
square table for four right at the end of the counter.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJzNewpu17TL1JnksQk1TGZbO3j3zLAnP9I9fbYIffx5kMGVDBNnsuTVr3KNRbGK4AnZKcCmvZSInIzU9z2GYazQXHG1FsdVvXFouazkvan3Bid-dfBKyokMLaZTEq3NVem0ccPrtcgatnIu-NqrywgXKcqTIdogmYRuAFskaSR_K2x0Cq2N33t6np5A/s402/plaque.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="302" data-original-width="402" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJzNewpu17TL1JnksQk1TGZbO3j3zLAnP9I9fbYIffx5kMGVDBNnsuTVr3KNRbGK4AnZKcCmvZSInIzU9z2GYazQXHG1FsdVvXFouazkvan3Bid-dfBKyokMLaZTEq3NVem0ccPrtcgatnIu-NqrywgXKcqTIdogmYRuAFskaSR_K2x0Cq2N33t6np5A/s320/plaque.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Kitty wasn’t much for small talk. She could be,
in fact, a bit cantankerous, so her conversations with Whitie usually verged on
serious. Whitie, who was obsessive-compulsive to a fault, often tried to steer
the conversation toward religion, or at least toward “belief”. My father had
been brought up to be a devout Methodist and it was inconceivable to him that
anyone could be an atheist, which Kitty was, and didn’t care who knew it.</span><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This bothered Whitie. It bothered him for her,
he said, because he liked her a lot, and he felt that anyone who believed in
“nothing” was damned from the get-go. So he tried, as subtly as he knew how
(which, if you knew Whitie, was anything but subtle) to convert her. Or at
least to get her to say, unequivocally, that she believed in <i>something</i>.</span><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">One day, Whitie came home crestfallen. He said
that he had suggested that Kitty <i>must</i> believe in <i>something</i>.
He just couldn’t <i>believe</i> that she believed in <i>nothing</i>.
So after he had badgered her into a state of acute ill-humor, it seems Kitty
snapped, “I didn’t say I didn’t believe in <i>anything</i>, Norman. I said
I didn’t believe in <i>God</i>. I do believe in <i>something</i>. I
believe in <i>money!”</i></span><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Although few people I’ve ever met were more
interested in money than my father—perhaps because he never was able to figure
out how to make a ton of it and had to make do with being just
“comfortable”—this statement of Kitty’s shocked him. “How could she say that?”
he wanted to know. “Money couldn’t buy happiness, could it?”</span><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“It will buy a hell of a lot more of it than
poverty will,” Kitty Nichols responded. “The more money you have, the more
insulated you are from hardship, and therefore, the happier you’ll be. Money is
the solution to almost everything.”</span><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Despite this answer that was very apparently
designed to get Whitie to put a sock in it, however, he persisted, for as long
as he knew Kitty, in trying and get her to admit she was a believer at heart.
He felt that he should know. He’d been through several years of combat during
the war and he’d seen it time and again. When shit started flying, even the
most ardent non-believers started praying. But he never managed to convince
her, even though they remained friends for years.</span><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="color: black; font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1iP1dcQ8uJjZpFWQSNoZaPpznsOMRvrvjEn2tQPRQohnp0i27N5azXX2A2WE-Dvee9r3XvoGlRbR5tmXo6G4BCgbl3Rtu1urwPLlE3m4oK3NGO-6tF5qnWcgT0r7JDuRrK6QJiEvqFfNJk_4CXoY-t7__1VVFXResRrJKE3fR0NZyiDqW5Yemd_e9vQ/s400/Fear%20fences.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="268" data-original-width="400" height="268" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1iP1dcQ8uJjZpFWQSNoZaPpznsOMRvrvjEn2tQPRQohnp0i27N5azXX2A2WE-Dvee9r3XvoGlRbR5tmXo6G4BCgbl3Rtu1urwPLlE3m4oK3NGO-6tF5qnWcgT0r7JDuRrK6QJiEvqFfNJk_4CXoY-t7__1VVFXResRrJKE3fR0NZyiDqW5Yemd_e9vQ/w400-h268/Fear%20fences.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">There was lots of talk over the years about
Dudley and Kitty. Some said that they didn’t get along at all, that there was a
lot of resentment over his father’s having married a much younger woman. Others
said they got along very well indeed. Too well for some of the worst
tongue-waggers around town. Still others said they had practically no
relationship at all, since Dudley left home quite young and, basically, never
went back. But it was through Kitty, via my father, that I knew that Dudley was
a famous writer, and since I was in awe of writers and, more than anything in
the world, wanted to be one myself, I always fantasized that Dudley might drop
by for a visit and come to the Teddy Bear, where I might meet him while he was
having coffee and pie. But, no such luck.</span><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Already at age eighteen, Dudley was getting his
first communications experience as a radio operator aboard a ship on the Great
Lakes. From 1914 through 1917, he furthered his education at the University of
Michigan. There, one of his activities was working as a student assistant in
the university’s radio laboratory.</span><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="color: black; font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQTBxzyzpzBQpC2DtQHJ6Q55IC6HPydwQWptDlVaO_n8wanBqG3vBmk8CkS1RzZSdnrY-8UwpRGnBsLWxO0c42q5cTMKznIxy-AqOefw0TdJa6mxl1kibeLnKsE5HrlgeY6ZQEhJRWPjK1NGagIR6Y_XZghaUQRCzK0jZzdbiK-dtJPEzUlYlx6-JkVA/s363/presses%20andn%20revolutions.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="363" data-original-width="242" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQTBxzyzpzBQpC2DtQHJ6Q55IC6HPydwQWptDlVaO_n8wanBqG3vBmk8CkS1RzZSdnrY-8UwpRGnBsLWxO0c42q5cTMKznIxy-AqOefw0TdJa6mxl1kibeLnKsE5HrlgeY6ZQEhJRWPjK1NGagIR6Y_XZghaUQRCzK0jZzdbiK-dtJPEzUlYlx6-JkVA/w266-h400/presses%20andn%20revolutions.jpg" width="266" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This experience both on the Great Lakes and at
the university, served him well during the two years that he spent in the Navy,
right at the end of World War I. Such was his expertise that, while in service,
he created two highly useful inventions. One was a new kind of electronic
discharger that would find application in commercial radio following the war,
and the other was a new method of electronic protection for naval minesweepers.
The new Nichols Method was successfully used in the sweep-up of some fifty
thousand mines in the North Sea after the war. It was because of these
inventions that Dudley was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal in 1920. And
it was during this period that he honed technological skills that he would
later be able to apply to movie-making.</span><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">After his discharge from the Navy, Dudley went
straight to the Big Apple to start accumulating the skills that he would need
to become a successful writer. Hollywood was nowhere in his plans at the time.
Like many writers before him, he believed that the best place to learn writing
skills was in journalism, and there was no better place to do it than in New
York City.</span><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="color: black; font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlIs7BZvJyMzXYMgie2w_jZ8cb4_b4OMBlcBLkVSScOZt8xeg-FOvPhPAQrpuHogGb6SY2hGpe4y1fFxhs2lLJshl2lBZG3rTNoa3PrcaXI5Icm4KFrDFgHE-UlNByC_0LXhIPRTb3vfDFQpDH2a9qvNBpOkDxpxl1ByjqWbuUIx5fZUCsxnJ5oFPUFg/s364/world%20bldg.jpg" style="clear: left; display: inline; font-size: 14pt; font-style: italic; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><img border="0" data-original-height="364" data-original-width="248" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlIs7BZvJyMzXYMgie2w_jZ8cb4_b4OMBlcBLkVSScOZt8xeg-FOvPhPAQrpuHogGb6SY2hGpe4y1fFxhs2lLJshl2lBZG3rTNoa3PrcaXI5Icm4KFrDFgHE-UlNByC_0LXhIPRTb3vfDFQpDH2a9qvNBpOkDxpxl1ByjqWbuUIx5fZUCsxnJ5oFPUFg/w273-h400/world%20bldg.jpg" width="273" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i><span style="font-family: trebuchet;">The World Building</span></i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">His first writing job was at the <i>New
York Evening Post</i> in 1920. Before long, however, he sought and got a
job at <i>New York World</i>, which operated out of New York’s World
Building. The paper, which was founded in the 1860s, and had featured the likes
of Mark Twain, among other renowned writers, was owned by the Pulitzer family.
Joseph Pulitzer himself commissioned construction of the World Building,
located at 99 Park Row, specifically to house the paper. Built in the 1890s, it
was one of New York’s early skyscrapers, a “towering” twenty floors, designed
by famed architect George Browne Post. If you’re planning a trip to New York,
however, you won’t be able to visit it, since it was razed, unfortunately, in
1955.</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">At <i>New York World</i>, Dudley not only
met, but worked alongside such writing legends as Dorothy Parker—the brilliant
satirist and short story writer who would also later turn to screenwriting,
only to be blacklisted for her left-wing politics during the McCarthy Era—and
Heywood Broun, founder of the American Newspaper Guild. Dudley would spend the
next decade in New York City, working as a court reporter and theater critic
for the <i>World</i>, and eventually as one of its columnists. He also
free-lanced for other publications during that time.<br /></span><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="color: black; font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBHHEpibTFh4rddZPkT40tDsubC7_KO3dlQfa-eXsEx2cTZyrCfUmNzA-zWdDM-_EkdydHUEjvjoY-yOg5nYyVNtoXjqiIb-PhMCwfbVGJrS1Zls57XWqf2aHi-3w9a_eKNFAMFLBjziiI3f3QB0_fZSNaAD3qmwTJwUh5Zm-NDWYao_-mJe5256DYSg/s400/Du7dley%20in%20Hollywood.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><img border="0" data-original-height="342" data-original-width="400" height="343" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBHHEpibTFh4rddZPkT40tDsubC7_KO3dlQfa-eXsEx2cTZyrCfUmNzA-zWdDM-_EkdydHUEjvjoY-yOg5nYyVNtoXjqiIb-PhMCwfbVGJrS1Zls57XWqf2aHi-3w9a_eKNFAMFLBjziiI3f3QB0_fZSNaAD3qmwTJwUh5Zm-NDWYao_-mJe5256DYSg/w400-h343/Du7dley%20in%20Hollywood.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i><span style="font-family: trebuchet;">Dudley in Hollywood</span></i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Dudley fit beautifully into the glimmering world
of Hollywood. He was over six feet tall, a handsome, slender man who wore a
suit well. And his elegance and intellect, combined with his superior writing
skills, made him an almost overnight success. During the 1930s and 1940s, he
was one of the most sought-after screenwriters in Hollywood.</span><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Despite his enormous success, Dudley remained a
highly principled man, a democratic liberal with a strong sense of solidarity.
I never tire of saying that Wapakoneta has had two major firsts: the first man
to walk on the moon, and the first person ever to refuse an Academy Award.</span><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This last happened in 1936, when Dudley Nichols
was granted the Academy Award for best-written screenplay, for the 1935
hit, <i>The Informer</i>. The movie, directed by iconic film-maker John
Ford—with whom Dudley would work on another dozen pictures—is set in 1920s
Ireland and is about a former Irish rebel named Gypo Nolan. The plot finds Gypo
recently ousted from the rebel movement and on the point of starving. When he
finds out that his destitute lover Katie has turned to prostitution in order to
make ends meet, Gypo decides to accept a twenty-pound bribe from the British
authorities to rat out a former fellow rebel and the tense storyline recounts
the consequences of that decision.</span><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="color: black; font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitXJec67YW0K_eFCt6DH15MBRn-rTnRIuFPHX173EPT4cfTL6zMtB0OA4vcyQk-xyhOOcXWSSXWGSxQdBRwvE068PstCjdi8ApPXuOxqT7espMHUQ5eFJZN6eauQyKTb_iFGGxl5mZothZNEdW7aC6u5JpUhyyPaVutmXDsejciJiUCJg2t2GkVudmPQ/s400/The%20Informer.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="256" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitXJec67YW0K_eFCt6DH15MBRn-rTnRIuFPHX173EPT4cfTL6zMtB0OA4vcyQk-xyhOOcXWSSXWGSxQdBRwvE068PstCjdi8ApPXuOxqT7espMHUQ5eFJZN6eauQyKTb_iFGGxl5mZothZNEdW7aC6u5JpUhyyPaVutmXDsejciJiUCJg2t2GkVudmPQ/w256-h400/The%20Informer.jpg" width="256" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">At the time, film companies were involved in a
stand-off with screen writers and other unions in the industry. For obvious
reasons, the Academy opposed independent unions, claiming that the Academy
itself was the sole representative of all people working in the motion picture
industry. If the Academy refused to recognize his guild, Dudley reasoned, he
would refuse to recognize the Academy by turning down its award and boycotting
the Academy Awards ceremony.</span><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Twice the Academy tried to mail the Oscar to
Dudley, as a de facto means of forcing acceptance, since his unprecedented snub
was a slap in the face to film industry leaders. But both times, Dudley mailed
it back.</span><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">His stubbornly ethical stance paid off, and, in
1938, two years after the boycott, the Academy finally certified the Screen
Writers Guild as a bona fide and representative labor organization, and Dudley
finally accepted his Oscar for <i>The Informer</i>. By that time, Dudley
had been elected president of the guild, a post he held in 1937 and 1938.</span><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEBL496fzCwuOCzy3Ew-JEzSV3AS0J1nr8EsIMVY2oC0RD4FUahvdD91E4inS82rNShICa8DNXaChS94ittkZYWP9qOGHCWA5ErpOkMLtYA-_tgr8iz_2wUlrVK8fD2cjnP8xFYfNu8zi49fHD0H9E4m_tn8HfnMl0i5kHX8b3SQo5pNOxaN5M4OQ-xQ/s320/Tin%20Star.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><img border="0" data-original-height="320" data-original-width="214" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEBL496fzCwuOCzy3Ew-JEzSV3AS0J1nr8EsIMVY2oC0RD4FUahvdD91E4inS82rNShICa8DNXaChS94ittkZYWP9qOGHCWA5ErpOkMLtYA-_tgr8iz_2wUlrVK8fD2cjnP8xFYfNu8zi49fHD0H9E4m_tn8HfnMl0i5kHX8b3SQo5pNOxaN5M4OQ-xQ/w268-h400/Tin%20Star.jpg" width="268" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Over the course of his career, Dudley Nichols
garnered numerous honors. The same year that he won the Academy Award, he also
won the Venice Film Festival Prize for best-written screenplay, also for <i>The
Informer.</i> In 1940, he was nominated for an Oscar for best-written
screenplay for <i>The Long Voyage Home</i>. He was nominated again in 1943
in the category of Best Original Screenplay for <i>Air Force.</i> He
received the Writers Guild Laurel Award in 1953 for his contribution to screen
writing, and was nominated again for an Oscar in 1957, for Best Writing and
Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen. It was for his original
story, <i>The Tin Star</i>, which became an Anthony Mann movie starring
Henry Fonda, Anthony Perkins and Betsy Palmer.</span><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">He had one spectacular flop—the 1947 screen
adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s play, <i>Mourning Becomes Electra</i>, for
which Dudley wrote the screenplay as well as directing the picture, for RKO. It
starred Rosalind Russell, Michael Redgrave, Kirk Douglas and Raymond Massey.
Despite the fact that it was critically acclaimed and that Michael Redgrave was
awarded Best Actor for his role, the picture was a box-office disaster on which
RKO lost 2.3 million dollars—at the time, the most money a film company had
ever lost on a movie. But he bounced back in the fifties with new hits
including not only <i>The Tin Star</i>, but also films like <i>Rawhide,
Return of the Texan, The Big Sky, Prince Valiant, Run for the Sun, The Hangman</i> and <i>Heller
in Pink Tights</i>.</span><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWhpS2Mac0M8tR7J1jiJhDEeFUzcF111T0lnd4d9-2ZuZW-Ln0_SXBvvT5V9iqX_bBn6bqMdtbyINMpZ8sqfasgVNW1KCXczKdNzxGJeq2MFNABE3QhBw8RCx32RSVPELo_DBSDziCvIeWhlpKhXzgZiApafPK4Za18GpWtU7bw9npP7pzb-7GkakNeQ/s320/letter%20from%20Chaplin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="320" data-original-width="320" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWhpS2Mac0M8tR7J1jiJhDEeFUzcF111T0lnd4d9-2ZuZW-Ln0_SXBvvT5V9iqX_bBn6bqMdtbyINMpZ8sqfasgVNW1KCXczKdNzxGJeq2MFNABE3QhBw8RCx32RSVPELo_DBSDziCvIeWhlpKhXzgZiApafPK4Za18GpWtU7bw9npP7pzb-7GkakNeQ/w400-h400/letter%20from%20Chaplin.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></span></div><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In all, Dudley Nichols—Wapakoneta boy made
good—wrote, directed and/or produced over sixty motion pictures, including some
like <i>Bringing Up Baby, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Stagecoach</i> and <i>The
Bells of St. Mary’s</i> that were destined to become film classics. But he
never forgot his activism for democratic and humanitarian causes. In 1947, at
the outset of the so-called “Red Scare” and its attendant “McCarthy Era” of
persecution, paranoia and anti-democratic witch-hunts that wrecked numerous
lives and careers—nowhere more than in Hollywood—all-time emblematic silent
film star Charles Chaplin wrote a letter to Dudley praising him for his
independent stance. On meeting Dudley at a mutual friend’s house, the
British-born Chaplin, who, himself, would be persecuted and deported for his
socialist political stance, seemed to recognize a kindred spirit, and wrote in
part: “It is deeply gratifying to know that in these reactionary times of hate
and conspiracy, there are still voices of protest and sympathy for what is
being done to individuals by the so-called ‘free press,’ which is so violent
and crude that intelligent criticism is inadequate to cope with it.”</span><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Small-town people, like those of us from
Wapakoneta, all too often think that “nothing ever happens here.” But it’s not
true. Quite often, stars are born among us and we fail to see them until they
wander elsewhere and then streak through a different sky with blinding
light. </span><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"> </span></o:p></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01054536465220812092noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1616769513702255459.post-70868984530761844402023-05-30T23:30:00.004-03:002023-06-01T11:58:31.877-03:00YANKEE REDUX — HEM AN' ME<p><span face=""Trebuchet MS", sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt;">When I first met up
with Hemingway, I was eleven-and-a-half years old. I didn’t actually </span><i style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">meet</i><span face=""Trebuchet MS", sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt;"> him.
He had already been dead for a couple of weeks or so by then. But you could say
that was when he first came to life for me.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I was visiting my
Grandma Myrt. It was summer and I had ridden my bike over to her house. Just to
visit. I did that frequently, rode over to the house of one of my grandmothers
or the other when I didn’t have anything else to do and it was still too early
to go to the public swimming pool or to tool around town on our bikes with one
of my neighborhood friends or with my cousin Greg. Other kids slept in on
summer mornings when there was no school to worry about. But I liked to get up
and see that new day stretching in front of me, full of possibilities and
promise.</span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFZky4renhBfd7yDCIUXN61oIK_Jelzak52iQ3N5rJmya1HIASjzzrmwHmL_iwK7zUXE_0__MZ7qqbesVJMr3m18zVfCxANbFNc17TlOZxxHEuhSRFKjxf4urUkg0PHiCoOBgdI7Sr3h9QxAxdfhkmBq5p7LwTgBeUKvMqOo8w47CoXywJt9eESvEnbA/s320/Jim%20and%20me%20at%20Grandma's.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="222" data-original-width="320" height="278" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFZky4renhBfd7yDCIUXN61oIK_Jelzak52iQ3N5rJmya1HIASjzzrmwHmL_iwK7zUXE_0__MZ7qqbesVJMr3m18zVfCxANbFNc17TlOZxxHEuhSRFKjxf4urUkg0PHiCoOBgdI7Sr3h9QxAxdfhkmBq5p7LwTgBeUKvMqOo8w47CoXywJt9eESvEnbA/w400-h278/Jim%20and%20me%20at%20Grandma's.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Me with little brother Dennis at Grandma Myrt's</i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Grandma Myrt was an
early riser, like her daughter, my mother, Reba Mae, and I had inherited that
trait. My dad Whitie and two of his brothers had a restaurant called the Teddy Bear and
Whitie opened at 6 a.m. for the breakfast crowd. Grandpa Vern was
superintendent at Greenlawn, the town’s main cemetery and started work at
seven. Mom and Grandma always got up around five to see them off and to start
the day’s chores. They seemed optimistic about it always, the women, I mean—the
men always seemed grim—with their cups of black coffee right there handy on the
kitchen counter and their radios on low, tuned to the local AM channels from
Dayton and Lima, or to WOWO, <i>the big voice of the big Midwest</i>, out
of Fort Wayne, across the West Ohio line in Indiana. And I never wanted to miss
that magical time when working people rose to meet the dawning of a new day. In
fact, on summer mornings, I took finding out what the day had to offer almost
like an occupation, getting up, having my breakfast and getting out into the
world like a man with a mission.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">On this particular
morning, a beautiful July summer morning, with a spanking new blue sky and some
sparkling dew still on the grass, I decided to pedal on over to Grandma Myrt’s
to hang out and talk to her for a while, “but don’t make a nuisance of
yourself,” Reba Mae warned, “because Grandma’s busy”. It probably wasn’t much later than nine when I arrived, but for a woman that got up with the chickens,
that was mid-morning, and when I rapped on the back screen door and then strode
across the enclosed back porch and into the kitchen, she was just pouring
herself a second cup of coffee. Two in four hours might seem like slow
coffee-drinking to some country folk but Grandma Myrt had this habit of making
it last. She called it “letting it rot”. It involved pouring a big mugful of
black coffee for herself at about a quarter to six when Grandpa Vern got up and
setting it on the shelf in the cupboard. And as she took care of her morning
duties, she would go from time to time to the cupboard and take a sip of java
from the cup. Obviously, the longer she took between sips the cooler the coffee
got, until, finally, it would be stone cold. But she didn’t seem to mind
drinking cold coffee, as long as it was piping hot to start with. That too, I
inherited from her—not from Reba Mae, who always drank hers hot enough to skin hogs—and I can still make a mug of coffee last hours while I’m working at my desk.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Anyway, what
immediately grasped my attention on this morning, after Grandma had said, “Why
hullo, honey!” and given me a hug and offered me a glass of milk and one of the
sugar cookies she had made, was a magazine that was lying on the kitchen table,
and which she had apparently been perusing. I recognized the masthead. It
was <i>Life</i> and in those days, when television was a relatively
new medium—if wildly popular—and print media still reigned supreme, it was hard
to go into a Midwestern home that didn’t have a copy of the major “picture
book” magazines like <i>Life</i> or <i>Look</i>, with their
captivating, artful photography, on coffee tables, or in the living room
magazine rack, or on a “library shelf” in the bathroom. But at Grandma Myrt’s
it was odd to see a magazine—or anything else, for that matter—out of place and
that’s probably what drew my eyes to it.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Although the house was
on the edge of town, it was a big country barn of a place, with all of the
inviting simplicity of country life and all of the clean, tidy look of the old
German farms in the area. There was no big library of any kind in the house.
Books cost money and my grandparents didn’t have much of it. What books there
were, were Grandma’s and she kept them tucked away upstairs in her room.
Grandpa had learned to read as a grown-up and liked cowboy novels but I suspect
that once he had read them he passed them on to Grandma’s younger brother
Jessie, who was way poorer than her but had scores of adventure novels and
magazines, kept in neat stacks along with his arrowhead collection and other
paraphernalia on a big table in the living room of the tidy but tumbledown
house he shared with my great-grandmother. Grandma Myrt, on the other hand, had a
really good education for a rural woman born in 1900, having graduated eighth grade with a vocational certificate. She had a love
of learning and reading, which she passed on to my mother and Reba Mae to my older sister
and me. And she was always looking up where any of her grandchildren was at any
given time—in the United States or in the world—in her geography books, or
reading to us from books of tales by Andersen or Aesop or the Brothers Grimm.
And then too, we had a good public library in town. But there was a magazine
rack in the living room and both she and Grandpa were partial to “looking at”
magazines, as they said. It’s just that you were never going to find either
books or magazines strewn around there. <i>A place for everything and
everything in its place</i>: Their house was an illustration of that adage.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The cover of the
magazine lying on the linoleum table top showed a huge head shot of an aging
man with a still powerful face, big-boned, grey-bearded, uncommonly
intelligent-looking, sensitive, yet every bit as intimidating as my own Grandpa
Vern's face<span style="font-size: 18.6667px;">—</span>and, believe me, Grandpa could look a hole right through you. It
was a cover I would see many times after that, a classic, a collector’s item,
the famous cover story of July 14, 1961, that <i>Life</i> published
to honor perhaps it's most famed contributor ever.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Who’s that?” I asked.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Ernest Hemingway,
honey,” Grandma said.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Who's he?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Oh, a very famous
American writer.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">And then she told me a
little about him, about <i>The Old Man and the Sea</i>, about some other
books. But mostly she told me about his being bigger than life, an American
icon. Although she didn’t say he was an icon because people didn’t call other
people icons back then. She said he was a hero, an adventurer, like somebody
out of a storybook. I asked if she knew him and she laughed and said no but
that he was so famous that it was as if just about <i>everybody</i> knew
him. It was really sad, she said, a big strong man like that taking his own
life.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">And, of course, that
launched us on a discussion of a grave we had seen once in a cemetery in some
other town—we sometimes "looked up" old relatives in west central
Ohio cemeteries when she and Reba Mae and we kids would go on a Sunday afternoon
drive—that had a wrought-iron fence around it and of how she had told me that
in some places they did that, fenced off the graves of suicides, because they
didn’t figure a person that took his own life was fit to lie in hallowed ground
with the rest of the Christians.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But when she said she
had to get busy with her chores, I asked her if I could have a look at the
magazine and she gave me permission “if I was very careful with it”. And I sat
quietly on the back steps of the house studying the pictures and reading the
text, understanding what I could of it and trying to get as deep into the
scenes as I could. So that when Grandma Myrt finally said, “Your Mom just
called and said you’d best be getting home for lunch,” I was already hooked on
Hemingway and was feeling a distinct loss, sad that I had missed out on knowing
him, sorry I never would, that there would be no chance, even if, someday, I
too became a famous writer.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">That was the point at
which I decided I <i>really</i> wanted to be a writer, stopped
playing around pretending to be one and started trying my hand at writing
little stories and puttering around with plotlines and reading more and more. I
had done a lot of reading when I first learned how and now I returned strongly
to the habit, going to the library with my studious sister, Darla, and asking
her to recommend books that she had read when she was my age.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The following year or
the year after, I really can’t recall exactly, I saw <i>Hemingway’s
Adventures of a Young Man</i>, the 1962 film directed by Martin Ritt. It was
based on Hemingway’s famous Nick Adams series. This was a collection of short
stories that he wrote over the years whose main character was an adventurous
young man called Nick Adams, who was obviously the writer’s surrogate. The
screenplay was put together by Hemingway’s long-time friend and biographer,
A.E. Hotchner (<i>Papa Hemingway</i>), and the cast included Richard Beymer
(of <i>West Side Story</i> fame, as Nick), Paul Newman (as the
punch-drunk fighter from Hemmingway’s <i>The Battler</i>), Diane Baker (as
Carolyn), Corinne Calvet (as la Contessa), Ricardo Montalban (as Major
Padula) and Jessica Tandy (as Mrs. Adams). The cast also included such
heavyweights as Eli Wallach, Dan Daily and Susan Strassberg.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The film got badly
panned by the most elite of critics, despite its five Golden Globe nominations.
It was a time of growing interest in the psychological novel and in the film
thriller, and critics who were busy learning psycho-babble probably found it naïve.
But those stories were “boy’s life” tales at their finest and that picture
brought them to life in my early-adolescent mind. I wanted to do exactly what
Nick Adams had done: run away from home and go off to see the world. Following
the lines of the short stories, the film has Nick riding the rails until a
mean-spirited railroad agent heaves him off of a freight train. He then meets
up with a has-been fighter (Newman) and a booze-sodden advance man for a
traveling burlesque show during his journey in search of a job as a newspaper
reporter. But after getting laughed out of a newsroom he finally ends up
volunteering for duty as an ambulance driver in the Italian medical corps
during the First World War, where he is severely wounded. While recovering, he
falls in love and has his first real romance with a Red Cross Nurse (the part
played by Diane Baker), before returning home a hero and bent on pursuing his
writing career now that he has something to write about — all based, of course,
on the real earliest adventures of Hemingway himself.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It was the summer after
seeing that picture that a friend and I started climbing an apple tree onto the
roof of the shelter house in the picnic grounds at Harmon Field, our town park.
We would sit there after dark talking and smoking filched cigarettes, while listening to the freight trains that rattled and blew through
town at practically all hours of the day and night, imagining the exciting
places they were going and dreaming of riding along. That was also the year
that I started gradually working my way through every one of Hemingway's books,
buying them with money I earned selling papers and cookbooks, cutting lawns,
raking leaves, shoveling snow or working as an usher at the local movie
theater. And by the following year, when I had turned fourteen, I was not only
writing short stories but had started working on a novel, a cross between <i>Moby
Dick</i> and the Nick Adams series, about an irascible retired sea captain
and a young man who becomes his only friend. I would work on that book in fits
and starts clear through high school, before promptly ripping it up and
throwing it into the trash after showing it to my English 101 professor in my
freshman (and only) year at Ohio State and reading her comments.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The point is that I cut
my teeth on Hemingway and although hundreds of other authors came after him in
my life, my real, first, deep and serious interest in writing grew out of not
only reading him, but also reading about him. And that, I think, is how it should
have been, because Hemingway made a difference in American literature, marked a
before and after, set a standard for concise, stark, yet beautiful writing that
has influenced the writing of just about every American male author who has
come since and a lot of foreign authors as well.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Hemingway matters, and
later I’ll talk about some more reasons why. But as far as I myself go,
although I have developed a natural style of my own over the years, Hem an' me are bonded for life.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01054536465220812092noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1616769513702255459.post-51427553251377688642023-05-15T23:30:00.008-03:002023-05-19T12:18:00.222-03:00TELL ME YOUR DREAMS<p><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS", sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt;">Brilliantly breaking a
long-held unwritten rule that claims dream sequences in novels are tough to
bring off at best and should probably be avoided entirely, author Cormac
McCarthy ends </span><i style="font-size: 14pt;">No Country for Old Men</i><span face=""Trebuchet MS", sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt;">
with one. And it’s one of the most perfect endings ever. There also couldn’t
have been a better actor in the film version to play the part of the dreamer,
Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, than an aging Tommy Lee Jones.</span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXkwHveOwe4aWeHvWjsisiKt-PjgE8Z6aJAcNUafeX1Xx-58xb6RapFm_rhVZfkCw-lYAEVa_OOOnjUX3k_nNYLfhATCVT4WHRPWuCUMzkAO1u9IjXpGoWpczMCl4MhawNnlgmIdU7adYzzkmL5p2XNXoME12C1iU70mg4ixXGc5I_Vm-kPzOsBJkjcQ/s1294/Tell%20me%20your%20dreams.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1294" data-original-width="974" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXkwHveOwe4aWeHvWjsisiKt-PjgE8Z6aJAcNUafeX1Xx-58xb6RapFm_rhVZfkCw-lYAEVa_OOOnjUX3k_nNYLfhATCVT4WHRPWuCUMzkAO1u9IjXpGoWpczMCl4MhawNnlgmIdU7adYzzkmL5p2XNXoME12C1iU70mg4ixXGc5I_Vm-kPzOsBJkjcQ/w301-h400/Tell%20me%20your%20dreams.jpg" width="301" /></span></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The images Sheriff Bell
describes matter-of-factly to his significant other, Loretta (Tess Harper),
while sitting at the breakfast table, are nothing short of compelling. The
sheriff, who has just decided to retire, after a very dangerous and utterly
failed case, in which he admits feeling “outmatched”, describes how, in the
dream, he and his father are making their way through a mountain pass on
horseback in the snow. He says it’s “peculiar”.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“I'm older now'n he ever was by twenty years,”
says Sheriff Bell, “so in a sense, he's the younger man.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">He describes what he saw,
as if it were perfectly recorded in his mind.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“It was cold and
snowin', hard ridin'. Hard country. He rode past me and kept on goin'. Never
said nothin' goin' by. He just rode on past and he had his blanket wrapped
around him and his head down. And when he rode past I seen he was carryin' fire
in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light
inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was
goin’ on ahead and that he was fixin' to make a fire somewhere out there in all
that dark and all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he would be
there. Out there up ahead.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Then Sheriff Bell
pauses, as if still seeing the images in his mind, before he says, “And then I
woke up.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But the part of that excellent
final scene that I most identified with was that quiet morning portrait of Ed
Tom and Loretta sitting there at the kitchen table, where she has just poured
them each a cup of coffee.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“How'd you sleep?” Loretta
asks. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“I don't know. Had
dreams,” says the laconic sheriff.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Well you got time for
'em now,” says Loretta. “Anything interesting?” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Well they always is to
the party concerned,” says Ed Tom.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Ed Tom,” says Loretta
patiently, “I'll be polite.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The reason I identified
was because, up until that moment, the scene could have been taking place in my
own kitchen. Except that, re-written for Virginia and Dan, it would have gone
like this.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“How'd you sleep?” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“I don't know. Had
dreams.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Which you’re <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><u>not</u> </i>going to tell me about!”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“But they were <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">really</i> interesting.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Maybe, to the party
concerned.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“But not to anyone
else?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Exactly!”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">And there the
conversation would have ended. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW_0pg7wJVBDbMsRaFi-z0AkqI_LQHUFTMM867fs8Xv89IDAy-8NNXqdlg_iIGOqqe-F0R6OYNN6bh4nF77o6JwqwBjqmwmr2__4gQUbc3UX0dYHftNC7tU8V0uwSqGVoFx2iaJprzuHhlm-7sMGxfUGOKRyODHazP55uwRdbaMVrVwZRN2U4s9uGPpw/s1222/Dreams%2003.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><img border="0" data-original-height="690" data-original-width="1222" height="226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW_0pg7wJVBDbMsRaFi-z0AkqI_LQHUFTMM867fs8Xv89IDAy-8NNXqdlg_iIGOqqe-F0R6OYNN6bh4nF77o6JwqwBjqmwmr2__4gQUbc3UX0dYHftNC7tU8V0uwSqGVoFx2iaJprzuHhlm-7sMGxfUGOKRyODHazP55uwRdbaMVrVwZRN2U4s9uGPpw/w400-h226/Dreams%2003.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">Virginia’s right, of course. Dreams are most
often one of those “you’d have to have been there” propositions. They seem so brilliant and revealing when
you’re in the midst of them, but in the clear light of day, when you try to
articulate them, they can become a really amorphous hash.</span><br /><o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But hey, you’re my
readers, a captive audience, so today, boys and girls, we’re going to talk a
little about dreams. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I used to not think of
my dreams as dreams. I tended to think of them more as a sort of separate
reality. A world I lived in beyond the material world. A place where things
might look familiar, might even imitate reality effectively, but a world where
none of the rules of everyday life applied. In dreams, anything was possible if
you could learn to focus and place yourself at their disposal. They were
important to me, a kind of twilight zone where, I fancied, I could resolve
things that vexed and escaped me in the waking world, in which I was, all too
often, powerless.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I was reading a lot of
Carlos Castaneda back then. And that led me to read a number of Native American
writers as well. They all only underscored my suspicion that dreams weren’t <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">nothing</i>. They were <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">something,</i> I sought to convince myself. A real place, a real world
that inhabited a separate reality. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">One of the things I
discovered in reading Castaneda was his quandary about the advantages and
disadvantages of disembodiment in the dream world. One of the major problems
with our flights of fancy in the real world is how our necessarily physical
state fails to accompany them. In this earthly world, everything takes
tremendous physical effort. A simple example is the very real physical
difficulty and stress involved in traveling long distances. Cars, buses,
trains, boats and planes, to say nothing of ports, stations, airports and
terminals, as well as security, immigration, customs and so on and so forth,
are factors that tend to dampen dreams of all travel, foreign and domestic. If
you want to see something, first you’ve got to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">get </i>there. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And that’s complicated.
In fact, it quite often becomes the deciding factor in not entertaining any
such desires. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Dreams simplify that.
For those lucky enough to learn to fly—I, for instance, don’t possess that
dream-world art and have never gotten off the ground in any of my dreams—it’s
just a matter of spreading your “wings” and soaring to wherever you like. And since
time, as Einstein suggests, is an invention of the conscious world,
dream-flying from place to place can often take no time at all. My wife and I
haven’t talked about dreaming in a very long time, but I recall that she used
to be a “frequent flier”. She indicated that she could usually just leap into
the air and soar off over whatever destination she wished. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHzI2oGdSBVwhJSVmysGVoJjiND10bZrQRcb67TYMRgEKc3FQxOYuBZAV0GzN5gSeI1Sx1zCS3TLvm4xCbj01p765sFxpQyPRKKntrSqJ1DHceptADRPKU0LV6TtnxmgBrDj_aF9a2Bhp0XmfQBygn022j1LFLXP7rsPIhIUei5h27C0uiU94nWrsNww/s373/Castaneda.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><img border="0" data-original-height="373" data-original-width="309" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHzI2oGdSBVwhJSVmysGVoJjiND10bZrQRcb67TYMRgEKc3FQxOYuBZAV0GzN5gSeI1Sx1zCS3TLvm4xCbj01p765sFxpQyPRKKntrSqJ1DHceptADRPKU0LV6TtnxmgBrDj_aF9a2Bhp0XmfQBygn022j1LFLXP7rsPIhIUei5h27C0uiU94nWrsNww/s320/Castaneda.jpg" width="265" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Indeed, she couldn’t
understand why I <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">didn’t</i> fly. For her
it was like, “But it’s so <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">easy</i>. You
just let yourself go and you <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fly</i>!”
Well, I never knew how and never learned. Perhaps, better said, what I never
learned to do was “let myself go.” The best I could sometimes manage was to take
very long, elastic, gliding strides that helped me to cover ground quickly. <o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But in my dream world,
I eventually opted, as on earth, for conveyances. Big American sedans from the
fifties and sixties that were so versatile they could take me from one season
to another, from Europe or South America “back home” to Ohio, and from my
remote mountain home to the avenues and dark bowels of a major metropolis. And
those fabulous cars could do it in the blink of an eye. Or sometimes I would
“fall asleep” at the wheel and wake up again in a brand new dream-world
location. In other dreams I traveled by train, either on the surface of a world
the tracks knitted according to their (or my) whimsy, or else I might take a
subway that would plumb depths beyond the normal underground routes and wend
its way into perilous caverns with sulfurous air and steaming pools, where the
stations were caves in which passengers hurried on, but no one got off. I
occasionally was on horseback in landscapes I’d seen before, or simply on foot
but finding that my walks no longer took me to the places I knew but to what
they were “now” in some dystopian future where nothing remained of how it used
to be. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">As I say, back when my
dreams were of far more interest to me than they are now, I started taking
Castaneda’s advice (or better said, the advice of the Yaqui mentor, Don Juan,
that he claims to have had) and, when a dream began to overwhelm me and make me
feel powerless to change its outcome, I would try to look at my hands. That’s
right. That, according to Don Juan, was how to gain a measure of control over
the action. If you could see your hands, you weren’t some virginal and
disembodied spirit completely at the mercy of ancient powers much stronger than
you were. If you could see your hands, you were <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">you</i> and could command reason and self-control, avoiding
immobilizing panic.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Now, looking at your
hands sounds easy-peasy in the waking world, but it is exceedingly hard in
sleep. Or at least it is for the non-flying dodo likes of me. It took me a long
time to be able to do it. The first thing was to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">remember</i>, while still conscious, that once you fell asleep and
started dreaming, you were going to have to attempt to see your hands. After
consciously working on that unsuccessfully for, perhaps, months, I finally, in
the midst of a terrifying dream in which I was paralyzed with fear, heard a
little voice say, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“Look at your hands!”</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And suddenly, there they were, my hands,
completely recognizable. Incredibly, once I could see them, I was able to take
charge of the situation and either cope with whatever fearsome enemy I was
facing, or run and manage to get away. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0uz9GbVvMzD1rV0SJdTn6vsYbG3m4knviwNPi70zaKKHnuTmH-PCeMzsoVal_pT5qquZeet1NH75xllaDnkJIZFSu1xVyfD0oUQyofugX9HZYzZoEJxhUxJ2bZoPjpmhOQwkfy-pLbv6uS5Zn-Lrff5qK3_pi8cBwEB1_8v21tSiuHzrK237Es-BXeg/s607/Dreams%2004.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><img border="0" data-original-height="406" data-original-width="607" height="268" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0uz9GbVvMzD1rV0SJdTn6vsYbG3m4knviwNPi70zaKKHnuTmH-PCeMzsoVal_pT5qquZeet1NH75xllaDnkJIZFSu1xVyfD0oUQyofugX9HZYzZoEJxhUxJ2bZoPjpmhOQwkfy-pLbv6uS5Zn-Lrff5qK3_pi8cBwEB1_8v21tSiuHzrK237Es-BXeg/w400-h268/Dreams%2004.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">It wasn’t a perfect method, of course, but it
worked more often than not. And overachiever that I tend to be, I figured if
looking at your hands in the dream world could imbue you with a certain amount
of power, how much more so if you could see your face. So I started working on
that, with the ultimate goal being to look into my own eyes. With a great deal
of practice, I got so I could see parts of my face in a dream-world mirror—my
jaw, an ear, my lips and chin, a piece of my forehead, my hairline. And those
things gave me an added measure of control over the action. But I was never
able to look into my own eyes. I assumed, for a time, that no one could. But I later
found out there are indeed people who can…just not anybody I’ve ever talked to.</span><br /><o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Ignoring, like Cormac
McCarthy—well, not exactly <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">like</i>
McCarthy, but in the (lesser) style of him—I’ve included dream sequences in at
least one unpublished novel of mine. Indeed, I did that long before I’d ever
read Cormac McCarthy. That novel has been lying around in my desk drawer for a
spell (like, say, twenty years or so). <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Anyway, two friends got
me in touch with two different Manhattan literary agents who agreed to have a
look at the manuscript and see if they wanted to represent me. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The first one read it (or
at least part of it) and said she, “hadn’t fallen in love with it”. And right
away I figured the dream sequences were part of what she didn’t fall in love
with. But then again, maybe she thought the whole thing stank, who knows? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The other one said it
was “quite well written,” but wasn’t the sort of writing he represented. When I
asked why, he said, “It’s just not the sort of thing that, say, my friend John
Updike would write.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Now, I’ve read a lot of
Updike and my impression has always been that he is an incredibly good writer,
but with just as incredibly little of importance to write about. So I couldn’t
help but respond to the agent and “Updike friend” by saying, “Yes, indeed, I
agree. It’s not. Thank you and good-bye.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Even now, re-reading
it, I wouldn’t take the dream sequences out of the book. Don’t tell Virginia
I’m doing this, but if anybody’s still here reading this essay and has not yet
dozed off, here are a few excerpts from one of the dreams, which wasn’t fiction
at all, but a real dream of my own that I incorporated into the manuscript. Perhaps
you’ll tell me what you think…or not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Here goes…<o:p></o:p></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirOuPlRWzo6I_a3X5-hQX9plgETqMzrW9cEYHfYzGCWAaVVAMEsg6CLE7NpXooSUAJCuH4CBOp9ZlgR3Cwo8Qtovo9NCgHhSXRqVMv9IXN6a3IYRYZyohrHlaBdX5BASkm6DIqxh9RKhj4KlzX5ZZ4mz-82EeG2w2N0KyLqtDhcWOM12Hymns6JbEuXA/s3600/Dreams.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2700" data-original-width="3600" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirOuPlRWzo6I_a3X5-hQX9plgETqMzrW9cEYHfYzGCWAaVVAMEsg6CLE7NpXooSUAJCuH4CBOp9ZlgR3Cwo8Qtovo9NCgHhSXRqVMv9IXN6a3IYRYZyohrHlaBdX5BASkm6DIqxh9RKhj4KlzX5ZZ4mz-82EeG2w2N0KyLqtDhcWOM12Hymns6JbEuXA/w400-h300/Dreams.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></div><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">…As
I turn onto this road, I know that I have seen all of this before, but I can't
recall where or when. I only know it is poignantly familiar, something more
than <span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">déjà vu</span>. It is the
absolute knowledge that I have been in this place at another time, and that on
the other side of the next rise there is a destination that fills me with
apprehension, yet attracts me like a magnet, irresistibly, inexorably toward
it.<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I
continue over the rise, almost beyond my own volition, and a church suddenly
looms before me—a huge, cathedral-like church, a European-style cross-shaped
colossus, complete with soaring towers bedecked with fearsome gargoyles and
stern, immutable saints. It stands alone and monstrous amid the sterile-green
hills, imposing and awesome, a terrifying intrusion on the otherwise uneventful
landscape.<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I
fight my relentless compulsion to continue, knowing full well that the
cathedral is my unyielding destiny, that I have been here before, driven to it
like now, unable to help myself… <o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The
chilling monotony of muffled Gregorian chants mesmerizes me, drags me forward,
even while filling me with almost uncontrollable dread. Now inside the building
without passing through any portal, without the slightest idea of how I have
arrived, I am nearly overwhelmed by the certain knowledge that this is not what
it appears to be, not a sanctuary, not a haven of peace and tranquility. The
cathedral seems shrouded in a force-field of foreboding, cloaked in darkness, a
place where details are frighteningly unclear, where twilight, candlelight and
dusty, stained glass-filtered daylight anemically permeate the dense atmosphere...
<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">…The
chanting remains muffled—a droning, constant background from somewhere behind
the dense stone walls. It is almost not a sound, but a monotonous, maddening
hum inside my head. Despite the incantations, the silence in the nave is such
that I can actually hear the hot drippings of the sputtering red candles as
they spill from their gutters and spatter the altar stones, beneath which, I am
suddenly aware, lie blood-filled chalices, teeth, bones and hair, relics of
ancient, nameless martyrs.<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Abruptly, the chanting is absorbed through the
normally impenetrable walls and becomes an undeniable presence all around me in
the desolation of the nave. I turn in a cautious circle to see the owners of
the advancing voices but find myself totally alone… <o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">My
feet itch to run, but I am riveted on the course my captive brain is setting.
The chanting is now as loud as if I were in the midst of the chorus of hooded,
faceless singers and yet they are nowhere to be seen. They chant to the
deafening pounding of my own heart that throbs painfully in my head and ears,
as my feet carry me involuntarily toward the main altar, where I can now
clearly see an ornate burial casket on a sumptuous brass and hardwood bier. I
am still beneath the raised altar and can only see the coffin — fine, burnished
mahogany trimmed in gold so soft and pure that it glints instead of shining and
clearly contrasts with the brass of the bier. I focus on details, the smoky
gloss of the waxed wood in the unsteady candlelight, the delicate filigree
designs of the gold trim, the solid weightiness of the hardware and carrying
rails attached to the sides of the casket.<o:p></o:p></span></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqZ2luhWZyTngZoi-2lhzKZMlNZaRoiAmetmZKkXlDM577eQtf-kL4PQuU95URot_PoeKN17z9VFWsslBrqy1P4ap65tu-ttC_NTDNaBBHXjToTGlRQXw5LaOXE5v5sgSUKcGrwQXJ8BOcM7SsOKqej5ZOLnOoIccs23Nap9rm3349DZrcDp9z2B52mA/s654/Dreams%2002.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><img border="0" data-original-height="463" data-original-width="654" height="284" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqZ2luhWZyTngZoi-2lhzKZMlNZaRoiAmetmZKkXlDM577eQtf-kL4PQuU95URot_PoeKN17z9VFWsslBrqy1P4ap65tu-ttC_NTDNaBBHXjToTGlRQXw5LaOXE5v5sgSUKcGrwQXJ8BOcM7SsOKqej5ZOLnOoIccs23Nap9rm3349DZrcDp9z2B52mA/w400-h284/Dreams%2002.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></i></div><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Hypnotized,
my brain pulls me forward with morbid curiosity. I suddenly have an urgent need
to see inside the coffin. But at the same time, my mind is split and one half
is trying to pull back, stop my feet, turn me around, make me reverse my
course. But the morbid side is stronger, involuntary, impossible to quell. And
as it draws me forward, I can hear the other side of my brain whimpering and
protesting to no avail… Again I wonder too if, in fact, God, whatever God might
be, has anything to do with this place, because what I feel here is nothing
like goodness.<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am now standing beside the casket on its
bier. But for some reason the sides of the coffin are still incredibly high—
too high for me to see over, high as a garden wall that must be climbed to
satisfy one's curiosity about the mysterious world on the other side. I stretch
my hands high over my head and barely grip the slick-waxed edge of the casket.
As I start to heave myself upward, I have a sudden twinge of apprehension, the
same pit-of-the-stomach, scrotum-tightening chill I used to feel as a child,
when I would leap into bed from a yard away to make sure the ax-murderer who
lurked beneath my berth would be unable to grab my ankles, draw my child's body
effortlessly under, and cleave my head from shoulders with one smooth, razor-honed
stroke…<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Chinned
up over the "wall", elbows straining as I hang from the seemingly
ever-taller side of the coffin, I can now see its contents. In this position,
my face is only a few inches from the waxy-yellow countenance of the deceased—a
bishop, I discover, laid out in royal purple regalia, ebony crucifix and rosary
wound between the death-stiffened fingers of his inter-laced hands. At a
distance, the cadaver would look impeccable, wax-figure-like in the absolute
stillness of death. But at such close-quarters, my view of the body is
practically microscopic. <o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Though
I try to ignore it, though I make an effort to retrieve my vision from the
spot, I cannot turn my eyes away from the bishop's miter. It is not the
liturgical headdress itself that interests me. I am, instead, inescapably,
morbidly drawn to the constant, evil trickle of yellowish-brown fluid that
escapes from the golden and white headband and is channeled down behind the
stiff, dry ear of the corpse, to soak, almost (but not quite) out of sight,
into the purple head cushion of the casket, just above the dead cleric's
shoulder. <o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">A
large, hairy blow-fly buzzes past, banks a hundred and eighty degrees and
returns to perch on the deceased's cheek. It crawls over the cool-dead flesh,
toys with an eyelid, then makes a brief flight to my lip, where it comes to
rest an instant until I feel its tickly legs and sputter in desperate disgust
to make it fly away. It returns to the corpse, sits on the miter, studies the
fluid that my obsessive eyes refuse to abandon and crawls blithely down behind
the shell of the dead bishop's dehydrated ear. I try to shut my eyes to the
horrific sight but can't, as if it were an act beyond my will.<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Just
behind my left ear, a hoarse, unnerving whisper advises me, as if I were blind
and couldn't see the truth for myself, that "the bishop is rotting"
("<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">El obispo se pudre</span>,"
the voice advises almost gleefully) and my face is involuntarily drawn nearer
the sick-colored liquid coursing slowly but steadily from under the episcopal
miter. I hold my breath. I struggle. I try to let loose of the box and drop to
the altar, but I can't. Nor can I shut my eyelids, no matter how hard I try. I
grit my teeth, hear myself groan, strain until my neck feels as if it will
break, but I am inescapably locked on the image of the dead cleric.<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Then,
just when I think I might die of panic, a clear, calm, reassuring voice, this
time close behind my right ear, says simply, "Come with me." I
suddenly go limp and let go of the coffin, only to find that I am not hanging
from a steep wall as I had been so sure I was. My feet are on the ground, and I
am looking into the casket at the bishop's body, which, even perched on the
bier, is only about chest high to me. Then, I turn effortlessly and walk away
as commanded by the disembodied right-side voice...<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Things grow even more
horrific after that, but you get the idea. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">In short, maybe my wife
is right. Maybe dreams are nonsense, all chemistry, electrical short circuits
in the brain, too much food and drink too late at night, mental flatulence, as it
were. Who knows? Or perhaps it’s more like Castaneda suggests, and there are
dreams and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">dreams</i>. “Power dreams”, as
he calls them. The mystery is, what—on earth—are we supposed to do with them?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Pleasant dreams!<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01054536465220812092noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1616769513702255459.post-63504200322872521692023-05-14T16:22:00.001-03:002023-05-14T16:24:06.628-03:00REBA MAE DAYS<p><span face=""Trebuchet MS", sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt;">Two days from now will
be my mother, Reba Mae’s, one-hundredth birthday. I have no idea where she’ll
be spending it, but clearly someplace where I can’t send her flowers and
chocolates or take her out for lunch. Wherever it is, I hope, this Mother’s Day
and birthday, that she’s footloose and fancy free, because her life here was
anything but a walk in the park.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-uRASteeXFGYoN7NggeuGs3sgP4DVjFq2PBMjABgWibCW67i3EVrQM-eaDw3EKFGIvRekWWtofLY1u8b2CufyA6RrGLH5o3QFqVd1J3bhA1kjuInc2YZFRNqPPGn5voTClxwOHxyTsqPHJZ76glPonqi6_PmGEUTT1kItZV51H15H3qrlRQiKmdfMGw/s402/Reba%20Mae%201992_age%2069.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><img border="0" data-original-height="371" data-original-width="402" height="369" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-uRASteeXFGYoN7NggeuGs3sgP4DVjFq2PBMjABgWibCW67i3EVrQM-eaDw3EKFGIvRekWWtofLY1u8b2CufyA6RrGLH5o3QFqVd1J3bhA1kjuInc2YZFRNqPPGn5voTClxwOHxyTsqPHJZ76glPonqi6_PmGEUTT1kItZV51H15H3qrlRQiKmdfMGw/w400-h369/Reba%20Mae%201992_age%2069.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i><span style="font-family: trebuchet;">Reba Mae at sixty-nine</span></i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">That said, she was
always looking for a silver lining. But at the same time, there was nothing
silly or naïve about her. She was quick with a smile and a funny line. She had
a sharp wit and a great sense of humor, and she expressed that humor in her
ever-mordant observations of the world around her.<o:p></o:p></span></p><o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">She joyfully embraced
middleclass life and availed herself and her home of every luxury the crocodile
that inhabited Whitie’s hip pocket would tolerate. But she nevertheless had a
lot of pleasant memories to share about her rural childhood, despite its
unfolding against a background of subsistence-level tenant farming in the years
of the Great Depression. Her childhood and early youth were spent on three
successive tenant farms in Auglaize and Shelby Counties in Ohio.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>None of them had electricity, indoor plumbing
or running water except for a pump in the kitchen sink. But her family lived
with a stubborn pride and dignity that formed part of her personality for life.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Although she never
wanted anything more to do with farm living after she moved to town in her high
school years, her upbringing left her with a deep love and understanding of
nature which she passed on to me. She found solace in her plants and flowers
and never ceased to find inexplicable beauty and wonder in the sunrise and
sunset. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPTaz2Mlg28ShYXmPgMlh3tidZdn9IbUyv9qxasqgDMhJixwwQ9u1K241QnZgS6DCh_yBLCHMiiCB7uZ5VYB0-ZF9Uv0nHqWFFAQu1m5C_4y6TQSrKlLTFgxTqD3zDyiWjNH6cvi3WsZo8fNHeiCuksppzIhaaF-HUzHoWSHcv3MEoVrRkbN5BHoBoRQ/s400/Reba_Gene_Kenny.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><img border="0" data-original-height="274" data-original-width="400" height="274" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPTaz2Mlg28ShYXmPgMlh3tidZdn9IbUyv9qxasqgDMhJixwwQ9u1K241QnZgS6DCh_yBLCHMiiCB7uZ5VYB0-ZF9Uv0nHqWFFAQu1m5C_4y6TQSrKlLTFgxTqD3zDyiWjNH6cvi3WsZo8fNHeiCuksppzIhaaF-HUzHoWSHcv3MEoVrRkbN5BHoBoRQ/w400-h274/Reba_Gene_Kenny.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><b><span style="font-family: trebuchet;">Reba Mae with older brother Gene and younger<br />brother Kenny, on the farm in the twenties.</span></b></i></td></tr></tbody></table><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Her life can best be
described as one of hard work, sacrifice and worry. She started out waitressing
as a teen on her own. During World War II, a nineteen-year-old newlywed left on
her own while Whitie, my father, went off to war for nearly three years, she
took a job in a nearby defense plant helping build tanks and amphibious
vehicles. She remained there throughout the war and eventually became an
inspector. <o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The early years
following the war she spent as a busy homemaker with a growing family. Despite
that, she worked part-time in the Teddy Bear Restaurant that Whitie and two of
his brothers opened following the war. And once all three of her children reached
school age, she also took a job working as part of the kitchen staff in the
town’s school cafeterias. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">As if that weren’t
enough to keep her occupied, Whitie had the first of a series of nervous
breakdowns that would occur repeatedly throughout his life when I was five, my
sister going on eight and our little brother not yet one. That would be the
start of decades of variously diagnosed bipolar and obsessive-compulsive
disorders that he suffered, and that would wreak various and sundry collateral
damages on the entire family. It would also mean that, during these many crises,
in which Whitie was either too depressed to work or was hospitalized in search
of treatment, Reba Mae would, first, take up the slack at the family restaurant
while my father’s two brothers were still his partners. And then later, when
they both went their separate ways, it would be Reba Mae who would step up and
very effectively run the business whenever Whitie couldn’t. Whenever he was
well enough, they ran the place together. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">There were good times
as well, of course—as with all manic depressives. Times when Whitie was flying
high and had the intelligence, will and strength to whip the world. But those
were never times one could count on as permanent or lasting. Reba Mae learned
to take them when she could get them, but always waiting for the other shoe to
drop. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Modern pharmaceuticals
eventually helped Whitie cope for longer periods of time. Often years at a
time. The longest of which were the sixteen years he spent as a highly
successful route salesman for a local cheese-maker. During those years, Reba
Mae herself found considerable personal satisfaction in the two successive jobs
she held as a highly capable office manager, first for an insurance broker and
then for a law office. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But when Reba Mae and
Whitie decided to retire, those years would bring new bouts of mental illness
that, as any family who has experienced it knows, never affects the victim
alone. There is always collateral damage. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I didn’t realize fully
how all-pervading that illness had been for Reba Mae until Whitie lost a
four-year battle with cancer in January of 2003, a couple months short of his
eighty-first birthday. I spent some very high-quality time with Reba Mae after
that and tried my best to convince her that her life was now completely hers
and hers alone. She was free to travel, to move, to spend time with old friends
and make new ones, to take up a new hobby or resume old ones. It was all about
her now, after all this time. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">She listened. She nodded.
She even sometimes said, “I guess I can, can’t I?” But she clearly wasn’t
convinced. At one point she turned to me and said, “The thing is, I’ve been
with your dad—<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">been him</i>—for so long
now, I can’t find <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">me</i> anymore! I just
don’t know where <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Reba</i> is!”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSoBTiQqBrHYUSn-Zes0Km88YPXYZ5Q6h2tvvKQB7Wc5qB0awLdDj3IU9FnEsg0Z_TdHLgv50hVKQ6iDEb6j6v0JJfiqyAF1mdRabV7PI4q6H4bytSA9sOVADqDXEguOvwW9QEoM6ti9Su3POpJ_A7jxuqHdb4vdlhxfNj9xOKEAKodd4TMBMjx-Pofg/s400/Reba%20Mae%201941.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="280" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSoBTiQqBrHYUSn-Zes0Km88YPXYZ5Q6h2tvvKQB7Wc5qB0awLdDj3IU9FnEsg0Z_TdHLgv50hVKQ6iDEb6j6v0JJfiqyAF1mdRabV7PI4q6H4bytSA9sOVADqDXEguOvwW9QEoM6ti9Su3POpJ_A7jxuqHdb4vdlhxfNj9xOKEAKodd4TMBMjx-Pofg/w280-h400/Reba%20Mae%201941.jpg" width="280" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">When I said good-bye to her at the end of that
visit, I could see it in her eyes. She was saying good-bye permanently. That in-person
visit would be our last. She would die a few months later, at age eighty, just
six months after Whitie, in 2003.</span><br /><o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">One way or another,
however, she’s with me every day. Her memory, I mean. I make no fantastic claim
of my mother’s watching over me from heaven or any of that other nonsense. I
truly hope that, if there’s anything beyond this, the dead go on to bigger and
better things, schooled by their trials and tribulations in this life. I’d hate
to think they stayed hanging around seeing what sort of mundane inanities we’re
all up to. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I envision them flying off
like a bat out of hell and never, ever, looking back.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">As for my constant hope
for Reba Mae, it is that, wherever and whomever she might be now, wherever the
life-force she unleashed has ventured, the world she lives in is a happy one,
one in which she’s all about being herself and getting the most out of every
moment. I sometimes fantasize that she’s twenty now, as beautiful as she was at
that age here, with her whole life lying ahead of her. And in that fantasy, the
only thing she plans to hitch her wagon to is a star. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Happy Mother’s Day and
happy birthday, Reba Mae. And may you be footloose and fancy free forever.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><o:p></o:p></span></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01054536465220812092noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1616769513702255459.post-26455644910796862562023-04-30T12:28:00.005-03:002023-05-01T16:24:12.751-03:00YANKEE REDUX — GREENLAWN: BEGINNINGS AND ENDINGS<p><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: large;">The main cemetery in
Wapakoneta, my hometown, is called Greenlawn. Like cemeteries in other towns,
for most people it's "a sad place". But for me, Greenlawn was never
sad. Growing up I had registered it as a venue for beginnings rather than
endings.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: large; line-height: 107%;">Until he was
middle-aged, my maternal grandfather, Vernon Leroy Weber, known to me as
Grandpa Vern, was a tenant farmer. He worked his youth away on the Herbst
Farms, which belonged to a large landowner of that surname whose holdings were
mostly in Shelby and Auglaize counties. Grandpa Vern moved his family
consecutively to three of those farms, that I know of, as my mother and her two
brothers and her sister were growing up. One was in the middle of the country off
of the South Dixie Highway (Old US Route 25) in Shelby County. Another was near
the village of Botkins in Auglaize County on that same route. The last one on
the Middle Pike just east of Wapakoneta, roughly where Interstate-75 now scars
the gently rolling farmland.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhtpLdFOljvfKGJaL7sf-psKyHu3rwWetzX3d0unUd8hleoefJCLxnzCycfokRz02EGsRk6M6W5oIp3RDpqr3i3gVy6srfNTzSVWIamd8AmxaQ024Rmc2-ZRUWvGgCTFzUg6oxOlc3sGBHj5aF-yVPfdLKcZXUMCdcTGvhKQa0UhTw93teOmVGhWBm-Q/s259/Greenlawn_00.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: large;"><img border="0" data-original-height="194" data-original-width="259" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhtpLdFOljvfKGJaL7sf-psKyHu3rwWetzX3d0unUd8hleoefJCLxnzCycfokRz02EGsRk6M6W5oIp3RDpqr3i3gVy6srfNTzSVWIamd8AmxaQ024Rmc2-ZRUWvGgCTFzUg6oxOlc3sGBHj5aF-yVPfdLKcZXUMCdcTGvhKQa0UhTw93teOmVGhWBm-Q/w400-h300/Greenlawn_00.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><b><i>Greenlawn Cemetery, Wapakoneta</i></b></span></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: large; line-height: 107%;">There was never any
danger of Grandpa Vern's earning enough to save up, buy land and start a farm
of his own. Mr. Herbst culled skilled farmers from people he could trust,
immigrants from the old country, other Germans like himself, and their first-generation
American-born children—the case of my great-grandparents, and their
American-born son, Vern. Wherever they put him, my grandfather worked the land
as if it were his own, making roughly the same monthly wage paid to cattle
drovers at the time (of which he had been one in his youth), about thirty
dollars a month. Of course the advantage the tenant farmer had over a drover was
that, if he and his wife could find the time, they could have their own
vegetable garden, chickens for eggs and poultry, and a few other perks. They
got one hog a year to slaughter, could keep enough milk from the dairy cows for
their own table, even buy and board some livestock of their own. There was
always a woodlot for fuel and usually good pheasant, rabbit and squirrel hunting,
in and around it. It wasn't poverty by any stretch of the imagination. In fact,
life, if hard, was often good. But economically, it was never enough to do more
than get by.<o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: large; line-height: 107%;">Until they moved to the
Middle Pike, my mother, Reba Mae, never lived in a house with running water or
electric lights. There was a hand pump in the kitchen and the bathroom was out
back. In winter, homework was done by the light of a coal oil lamp, and the
milking was done before school (Reba Mae and Grandma Myrt's job) by the light
of a barn lantern. School was a one-room country schoolhouse a mile and a half
away from home, where at least six grades were taught simultaneously. Reba Mae
walked or rode her Shetland pony, depending on the weather. But the education
she got was amazingly complete. When she went to high school in town—highly
applied student and avid reader that she was—she not only had no problem
keeping up with the new curriculum but was also often ahead of it.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: large; line-height: 107%;">My grandmother, Myrtle
(née) Cavinder instilled the love of reading in her. Grandma had an excellent
education for a woman of her times (she was born in 1899), having finished the
equivalent of eighth grade. Had she not married a farmer, her schooling would
probably have permitted her to work in a mercantile business or office as a
clerk or secretary. Grandpa Vern, for his part, had only had three years of
formal schooling, which he got largely by accident. As soon as he was old
enough to do farm work, he was needed on the land. Reba Mae once told me that the
only reason he even got the three years of school that he did was because, at
the time, there were sometimes bears in the woods that his sister Clara had to
cross to get to the one-room schoolhouse she attended. Until she was considered
old enough to walk alone, he accompanied her. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: large; line-height: 107%;">He managed, however, to
learn to read and write quite well with my grandmother's help. Before the
advent of television in our neck of the woods, long after Vern moved the family
to town, he entertained himself reading the dime store cowboy novels that were
popular at the time. He also entertained himself and his family (including us
grandchildren later on) by sometimes grabbing a scratch pad and the stub of a
pencil and sketching out comic drawings of lanky cowboys, sway-backed horses
and busty ornery-looking country women. Sometimes the cowboys and their mounts
both wore the same perverse toothy grins and I remember that when my little
brother was about four years old, Grandpa Vern tried to make him a gift of one
of these drawings, but was turned down. "I don't want that horsey,
Grandpa," my little brother said cowering from the pencil drawing.
"He will bite me!"<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: large; line-height: 107%;">Hard as a tenant
farmer's life was, however, you never heard complaints from any of them. Not my
grandparents, or my mother, or her siblings. That was just the way country life
was and it had a lot of joyous and beautiful aspects to it. There was a
communion with nature and the weather, a love of the countryside. Things my
mother inherited from hers, both of them gentle intelligent women who had a
special love for all things natural.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: large; line-height: 107%;">As for Grandpa Vern, he
was a force of nature all his own. He was an active man with the strength of an
ox, the obstinacy of a mule, the grit and endurance of a marathon runner and
the ever-seething violence of a tornado. As it affected him personally, he
ignored the weather. As it affected the farm, he worked around it. He neither
loved nor hated it. He accepted and reacted to it, period, an attitude quite
different from that of Myrt and Reba Mae, who were practically instinctive
meteorologists. They could forecast what was coming just by watching the
animals, the plants, the sky and the trees, by smelling the air, by the feel of
the wind.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: large; line-height: 107%;">The knowledge that
Grandpa Vern had of all things practical was astonishing. He was a capable if
not particularly sophisticated carpenter (he built the first bungalow he and my
grandmother lived in on his father's farm, for instance), an able mechanic and
a consummate farmer. He knew a great deal about animal husbandry and was an
excellent judge of horse flesh. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjK6xtdoz8DenyOEGnJ1agKJ7kVd9azhQvXiAekiVGLobcDBdXX4arfYlYTc6K32Pfr-2ATTBeqzVo-Q6Vs8pn2fhCAvbksLpoF87qU0fQYQfPwbyc7YJyRmJ3TiEl-aeQG340e44rEw6eQRpvSlnBvNBeFvMSwAPHeC60hu1ttilmwGfPB2b4V1OwjBg/s610/Vern%20on%20the%20tractor%20he%20made.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: large;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="610" height="295" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjK6xtdoz8DenyOEGnJ1agKJ7kVd9azhQvXiAekiVGLobcDBdXX4arfYlYTc6K32Pfr-2ATTBeqzVo-Q6Vs8pn2fhCAvbksLpoF87qU0fQYQfPwbyc7YJyRmJ3TiEl-aeQG340e44rEw6eQRpvSlnBvNBeFvMSwAPHeC60hu1ttilmwGfPB2b4V1OwjBg/w400-h295/Vern%20on%20the%20tractor%20he%20made.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><b>Vern on the tractor he built.</b></span></i></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: large; line-height: 107%;">For much of the early
part of his farming days, the work was done with draft horses and hand plows
that he followed on foot, a job that called for the man to have almost as much
strength as the beast that preceded him. But when it became hard to compete
with the first tractors in terms of time and crop yield, he boned up on farm
equipment mechanics and built his own tractor. He was nothing if not inventive
and a living example of the adage that claimed necessity was the mother of
invention.</span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: large; line-height: 107%;">I don't know what the
circumstances were surrounding their moving to town—perhaps the belated effects
of the Great Depression, perhaps a desire to see their children properly educated—but
sometime between the time my mother and her older brother Eugene started and
finished high school, the family moved to the big barn of a house on Van Horn
Street, where my grandparents would live until their deaths. Grandpa Vern
landed a job on a State Highway Department crew building, improving and
repairing Ohio roads. Eventually, however, perhaps through the
influence of the Herbst family, he ended up working at and later being in
charge of Greenlawn Cemetery.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: large; line-height: 107%;">Cemetery work was hard
in those days. The six-foot-deep graves were dug by hand and people were
inconsiderate enough to die in all kinds of weather—from the blistering heat
of Ohio summers to the Arctic chill of northern winters and from the
torrential rains and mud of spring to the golden days of autumn. But the only
recognition of the seasons that my grandfather ever demonstrated were
changes of headgear and outerwear—a broad-brimmed hat for rain and sun, a
wide-billed canvas cap for mid-seasons and a lined cap with ear-flaps for the winter,
accompanied by various and sundry combinations of woolen jackets, rain
slickers, flannel or tropical twill work shirts and khaki or woolen work pants,
always with the same heavy work shoes, sometimes covered with buckle-up,
shin-high rubber snow-boots for the most inclement weather.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: large; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHiQupzh6H6KhweiMMFZH7ox-WKmT29irClsPt3R9Yh5Dr5duWlm99JEo_RQ6QDlZOq4atbblyEfUGWZlxvo018Y0p5FdNsPVt0ngzFryTC-_oPXxyoDjuSzFGlbxF2e9BLP9o3IYWICXRxYY2dhWW8UGLLiTSz5jshvY8raWH3R5LsrcqNSOADM3BpQ/s296/Vern%20circa%201960.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: large;"><img border="0" data-original-height="296" data-original-width="214" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHiQupzh6H6KhweiMMFZH7ox-WKmT29irClsPt3R9Yh5Dr5duWlm99JEo_RQ6QDlZOq4atbblyEfUGWZlxvo018Y0p5FdNsPVt0ngzFryTC-_oPXxyoDjuSzFGlbxF2e9BLP9o3IYWICXRxYY2dhWW8UGLLiTSz5jshvY8raWH3R5LsrcqNSOADM3BpQ/w289-h400/Vern%20circa%201960.jpg" width="289" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i><span style="font-family: trebuchet;">Vernon Leroy Weber, cemetery boss</span></i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">So for me, the cemetery was always a place of
solace, where, on any given day, I could find my much-admired grandfather hard
at work. It was a comfort to know he was there. There was even an underlying
feeling that since he was in charge of burying the dead, his mission was so
important that perhaps he himself might never die.</span><br /></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: large; line-height: 107%;">When I reached an age
at which I had certain autonomy (perhaps ten years old), I was allowed to ride
my bicycle pretty much any place in town. So, I would sometimes ride all the
way out to the city limits where the cemetery was located and hang out for a
while. It wasn't as if you could make a nuisance of yourself. My grandfather
was stern and had little patience with children. But as long as I just watched
and didn't get into the way, I think he found it flattering that I should want
to spend time out there with him. Besides, whenever he got tired of my being
under foot, he would simply say, "You best get on outa here now," and
I knew better than to ask why.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: large; line-height: 107%;">When he was in the
mood, however, he taught me a great deal. By the time I was twelve, I knew the
common name of every tree and plant in the cemetery. He wouldn't give me master
classes or anything, but if he saw me looking at some particular species, he
might say something like, "Know what that is, Dan'el?" And If I shook
my head, he would say, "That there's a star gum," or "that'n
over there's a dogwood," or "that there's a juniper pine."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: large; line-height: 107%;">But this kind of
intermittent communion wasn't limited to the cemetery, although Greenlawn was,
nevertheless, where most adventures began. From the time I was old enough to
walk all day without becoming a burden, he started taking me with him when he
went hunting. Not always, but whenever the spirit moved him. He first tested me
on hikes he took each fall with my older sister, Darla, so that she could add
new species to her leaf collection. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: large; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPMUN9-_lPyoD48N1n88tHlMyQMC6TuvzoWBkk7CFmDAQuj1nIgJBi863uiuAO6g9R5TAdz0p3JAhB8guMoPZPHPD73-WJh_AR4QiYPSQgN4K0u1uR4-SuKaK1S2LMdztPZlXCGoVmnLtN2W1-1GQuX-j6UfNQ6zHC9f2_N5aEVAAF0XJDWV17nDcSNw/s402/Greenlawn_01.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: large;"><img border="0" data-original-height="302" data-original-width="402" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPMUN9-_lPyoD48N1n88tHlMyQMC6TuvzoWBkk7CFmDAQuj1nIgJBi863uiuAO6g9R5TAdz0p3JAhB8guMoPZPHPD73-WJh_AR4QiYPSQgN4K0u1uR4-SuKaK1S2LMdztPZlXCGoVmnLtN2W1-1GQuX-j6UfNQ6zHC9f2_N5aEVAAF0XJDWV17nDcSNw/w400-h300/Greenlawn_01.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i><span style="font-family: trebuchet;">Greenlawn, dominated by the Herbst monument</span></i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">Leaf collecting probably sounds like a strange
pastime to children of today who might have trouble understanding why anyone
would go to the trouble of <i>collecting</i> and leaves when there's
sure to be someplace that you can see gorgeous full-color photos of them on the
Internet with all of the data that you could ever hope to find right there for
the asking. But back then, computers were hideous business machines that only
scientists understood and that shot out information on unintelligible punch
cards, and our mindset was so different that we never would have been able to
comprehend why anybody would settle for a picture of a leaf when you could hold
the real thing in your hand, press it with a steam iron and waxed paper to
preserve it and paste it into a scrapbook. Especially when you had your very
own grandfather to tell you what it was and to which tree it belonged, which
fruit the trees bore and roughly the age of the specimen you were looking at.</span><br /></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: large; line-height: 107%;">Anyway, the first hike
we took, the three of together, was when I was still quite small, perhaps eight
or so, and I was only permitted to go because I bawled and hollered and carried
on until, at her wits' end, my mother told my sister that if she were going
with Grandpa she would have to take me too or she wouldn’t be allowed to go. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: large; line-height: 107%;">Clearly, Darla wasn't at
all happy with the arrangement, so she did little or nothing to help me keep up.
On the contrary, she was probably secretly hoping I would simply get lost. She
had been on a couple of such expeditions before with our grandfather and knew
that he was not some kindly old granddad who would make allowances for the weak
or faint of heart. You kept pace or became buzzard bait.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: large; line-height: 107%;">I was, then, shocked at
the apparent irresponsibility and lack of understanding of both of them, when
Grandpa parked his Hudson at the back of the cemetery, negotiated a
seven-strand barbed wire fence, dropped lithely into a cornfield on the other
side and said over his shoulder, "Ready, Dard?" To which my sister
said yes, gleefully scrambled over the fence and took off after him as he made
his way down a corn row with incredible haste, while I was still meticulously
seeking to get over the fence without scratching myself on its threatening
barbs, since, my mother had warned me, if I were to hurt myself on rusty barbed
wire, I was going to have to have a tetanus shot.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: large; line-height: 107%;">Grandpa Vern was very
close to six feet tall, slim as a birch sapling and with unusually long legs
that, sure-footed as he was, allowed him to cover rough terrain at astonishing
speeds. He would move down the corn rows with a kind of violent grace, elbowing
the shoulder-high plants out of his way and snapping off or trampling down any
that had the audacity to try and block his path. And my naturally strong and
agile sister managed to dog him so closely that she was often in danger of
stepping on his heels—a very real danger, since if you <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">were</i> to step on Grandpa Vern's heels, you could pretty much expect
to get elbowed in the nose. I lagged behind at a trot in mortal fear of losing
sight of them. And even after we broke out of the dense, stifling corn-row hell
into open pasture and woodlots, the pattern remained pretty much the same. My
day ended up being mostly about keeping up.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: large; line-height: 107%;">But I must have done a
pretty good job of it because my reward was that many times after that I was
invited to go along, without my sister, when the mission was a more important
one than mere leaf-collecting— namely, hunting for pheasant and rabbit. When I
was still small, he put my inexpert awkwardness to good use, utilizing my
dubious talents as a surrogate hunting dog by sending me off to the left and
right of him to inadvertently crash around in the thicket and scare the game
over his way. But I eventually became enough of a woodsman to no longer be of
any use to him in these endeavors and was allowed to join the hunt proper.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: large; line-height: 107%;">The rules were simple
enough: Don't be runnin' you mouth all the damn time; it scares the game. When
you get to a fence, get the hell over the goddamn thing some time t'day. When
you do, break down and unload your shotgun first. Make sure your muzzle is
always pointed away for the other hunters. And don't <i>ever</i> get
in front of another hunter, no matter what. Any and all of these were offenses
for which you could expect an immediate response, which usually consisted of a
rap on the skull with Grandpa's hard, boney knuckles, or a good swift kick in
the seat of the pants—one that was pretty much sound enough to make your nose
bleed.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: large; line-height: 107%;">This is not to say
that, when pressed, Vern could not be innovative with his punishments. Once
when I had been dilly-dallying around, in seeking to negotiate a particularly
rickety barbed wire fence for what, to him, must have seemed an inordinate
amount of time, he shimmied and twisted a rotting fencepost out of the ground
and with a movement not unlike shaking crumbs from a large tablecloth,
undulated the entire fence in such a way that I was heaved on my head and
shoulders onto the ground on the other side, as if thrown from a bucking
bronco. And with that he picked up his shotgun, reloaded it and moved off in
search of game. I knew it was useless—even dangerous—to protest, so I simply
picked myself up, dusted myself off and moved off quickly behind him. After
that I was a miraculously agile fence-climber.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: large;">Anyway, the point is,
Greenlawn was, until I was old enough to have lost some loved ones, always a
place where new adventures began. Depending on your religious views, that might
be true for just about everyone who goes there. But then, who knows?</span></p><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: large;"><o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: large; line-height: 107%;">When my grandfather
himself died in 1976 at the age of 79, and when my grandmother followed him two
years later at about the same age, they were laid to rest in the shadow of a
monument to the very man whose farms they had kept for him in the early half of
their lives.<o:p></o:p></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnieIX50-OYGH1sDYN03yFj72yBPiQz0TyTuen6Qlx0Fu2LN5_qszcDH5RzdxS4IJD78g1-J8x0Dq2Tcub2WdO_ri8ZDVf8C8fhPaL1TEsHokOnjP9DsPYXepFQUC4DIFe-vz96B3WD8iSbe09C5IWZar4GJGfBmetxezlHJI2r2yKE5imDDrJBobbOA/s144/Greenlawn_02.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: large;"><img border="0" data-original-height="144" data-original-width="90" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnieIX50-OYGH1sDYN03yFj72yBPiQz0TyTuen6Qlx0Fu2LN5_qszcDH5RzdxS4IJD78g1-J8x0Dq2Tcub2WdO_ri8ZDVf8C8fhPaL1TEsHokOnjP9DsPYXepFQUC4DIFe-vz96B3WD8iSbe09C5IWZar4GJGfBmetxezlHJI2r2yKE5imDDrJBobbOA/w250-h400/Greenlawn_02.jpg" width="250" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i><span style="font-family: trebuchet;">The back of the chair</span></i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: large; line-height: 107%;">The Herbst monument is
a veritable landmark at Greenlawn. It is a huge steeple-topped monstrosity,
made of deep-grey polished granite. The base is a heavy rectangular monolith
perhaps four or five feet wide on each side with the name HERBST inscribe on it
in huge block letter. Just above that, there is a larger-than-life
armchair—an empty armchair, as if to signify that its owner has taken leave—surrounded
by four classic Greco-Roman columns. Continuing above the chair is the steeple,
a pyramidal spire that ends in a kind of amphora. The whole thing rises some
fifteen feet or more into the air.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: large; line-height: 107%;">I've talked to my cousins,
and they’d heard the same urban legend as I did. It’s the now-traditional story
about how, when our parents were in high school, as a prank, some youngsters
grabbed a boy they had always liked to bully and, somehow, managed to haul him
up to the armchair, where they hogtied him fast to it. Nobody heard the boy's
shouts for help. When workers found him the next morning, after he had spent
the entire night bound to that tomb in the cemetery, his hair, legend has it,
had turned white from fear and he had gone mad.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: large; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;">The ironic thing about
our family plot—where my grandparents, and now, also, my own parents and
brother have all been laid to rest— isn't just that it lies in the shadow
of that ostentatious monument, but also that Mr. Herbst's empty armchair
is oriented so that it gives its back to my grandfather and his family. Fitting,
it would seem, if, in all likelihood, wholly accidental.</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: large; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01054536465220812092noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1616769513702255459.post-43732551021805090482023-04-15T18:22:00.003-03:002023-04-16T16:56:11.532-03:00STAGE FOUR — A ROOM OF MY OWN<p><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt;">I’ve been taking stock
the last few weeks. I just realized that was the exact term: taking stock.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUePQ83ChbQovCEwX2-9CdYOFS8IwZWUcG2RDw3dlC5CV-zjgV6IcwoHVYGwyQJuZM_RmC_Mqnzf6YC48IWKHy1awg6omsAbnrsT0FVGm90QtUeOl3LzcQj1m2MgjpHLEqIVSb-K6fua7y40VfZ9g68wGh3HexdmJ-wuR-JNU-gznTAZsmKfT15ai_Fg/s1600/Studio_04.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUePQ83ChbQovCEwX2-9CdYOFS8IwZWUcG2RDw3dlC5CV-zjgV6IcwoHVYGwyQJuZM_RmC_Mqnzf6YC48IWKHy1awg6omsAbnrsT0FVGm90QtUeOl3LzcQj1m2MgjpHLEqIVSb-K6fua7y40VfZ9g68wGh3HexdmJ-wuR-JNU-gznTAZsmKfT15ai_Fg/w300-h400/Studio_04.jpg" width="300" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It all started when I
decided to have the outside of the house painted and repaired, and to paint and
repair the inside myself. This time, I also decided to start painting the
interior with what I loosely call “my studio”—a tiny room of approximately
eight feet by six feet, where I spend a very large portion of my life.</span><br /><o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Over the three decades
that we’ve lived here, my studio has most often been pushed to the end of the
line on the To Do List. So, by the time I decided it was time to give it
priority, it had become a sort of third world corner of the house, so to speak,
a slummy place where way too many things with no particular utility were
stored, where the bookcases were littered with all sorts of things that had no
business being there, where two large storage tubs and a lidded wicker basket
were heavy-laden with god-knew-what, because nobody (meaning me) had sorted
through them for at least twenty years, and where every manner of obsolete hard
and software lurked in the corners, just in case some use might eventually be
found for them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCtZQKfLbyRYzbKyV2FirLlTU6pGoW0W0Vilc29ijR1qOsX-J92DYOYkBEvTOYmorEQKwlaR1xrSUGRyVDskOgR2Ov91oGc4Zj-uCHIM975ZUXmj5KZ2e5j77oVJLc4e2NtXz3qdctuKTgLgDvKhgfilNaERhlIsusTguGQAC04Q9Kpdy7Jy7ODt4tVQ/s3039/Studio_00.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3039" data-original-width="1697" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCtZQKfLbyRYzbKyV2FirLlTU6pGoW0W0Vilc29ijR1qOsX-J92DYOYkBEvTOYmorEQKwlaR1xrSUGRyVDskOgR2Ov91oGc4Zj-uCHIM975ZUXmj5KZ2e5j77oVJLc4e2NtXz3qdctuKTgLgDvKhgfilNaERhlIsusTguGQAC04Q9Kpdy7Jy7ODt4tVQ/w224-h400/Studio_00.jpg" width="224" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><b><i>A doorway but no door</i></b></span></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Be that as it may, although
I suffer from classic claustrophobia—they once tried to roll me into a
coffin-like tunnel and run an MRI on me, but I raised such holy hell that they
had to pull me out and send me to another facility that had a different sort of
scanner—I’ve never thought of my studio as cramped. For one thing, it has a
door<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">way, </i>but no door, so I’m in
contact with the rest of the house. My wife coming and going, our six cats
chasing each other up and down the stairs (oh, by the way, the studio is
upstairs), the sounds and smells of meals cooking, the chug and whir of the
washing machine, or the sound of music or the TV when either happens to be on.
And then too, practically one entire end of the room (all six feet of it) is
windows: two, a fixed pane and a hinged window that opens in. They look onto
the great outdoors—our unruly broom sedge and towering centenarian beeches, as
well as the wooded side of a tall crag. As I work I only have to turn my head
to look out and see the green and sun of summer, the blooming colors of spring,
the golden tinges of autumn and the glistening rain and blankets of snow in
winter.</span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVf-bIprmAbCFlIXRpht_zFANDoKwLZ0oDyNI5cdrwyNHzOl-gWb7WJTFlFJREBp4DvLcK7fQ_ap2hNxqeFw2l-lI5VfNqXKFSUas76zcb-8s49aBKqkqKL0D9uwc6QpaHA-Ewch1wujEl08Y_hC4mpR1zd-H7nQG9Gr4-eUM4vte0pfSAfVs57Z3mtg/s4102/The%20view.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4102" data-original-width="3082" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVf-bIprmAbCFlIXRpht_zFANDoKwLZ0oDyNI5cdrwyNHzOl-gWb7WJTFlFJREBp4DvLcK7fQ_ap2hNxqeFw2l-lI5VfNqXKFSUas76zcb-8s49aBKqkqKL0D9uwc6QpaHA-Ewch1wujEl08Y_hC4mpR1zd-H7nQG9Gr4-eUM4vte0pfSAfVs57Z3mtg/w300-h400/The%20view.jpg" width="300" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i><span style="font-family: trebuchet;">The view</span></i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Then too, since it’s the
place where I do my writing, it’s also a creative space, a “room of my own” as
Virginia Woolf might have said. And as such, it seems way bigger. Boundless, in
fact. It’s where all my thoughts and memories come to the fore. Never mind that
I put it on like a proverbial overcoat when I sit down at my desk. It’s as big
as my mind is willing to make it.</span><br /></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But for many years, it
was also the “salt mine” I went to every morning and often stayed long into the
night, cranking out millions of words of translation, writing and editing for a
variety of clients in several different countries. It was the scene of
all-nighters and abject exhaustion. The terrain of my professional ambitions. But
it was also the headquarters for a one-man business that paid bills, put food
on the table and generated life savings. So while it was often a place where I
felt if I had to spend one more minute in it, I might lose my mind and burn it
down, it was also a space to which I was grateful for the opportunity to make a
living doing what I knew how to do best.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">My intimate
relationship with this little room, where I’m sitting at my desk writing at
this very moment, is also enhanced by the fact that, in one way or another, I’m
the creator of practically everything in it. The main two-inch thick,
thirty-inch wide, sixty-three-inch long varnished desktop, attached to the wall
at one end and resting on a tongue and groove support at the other. A marine
plywood side desk under the window. The bookshelves above my desk and corner
storage shelves at my back. The closet that runs from those shelves to the
other end of the room. The varnished pine sill beneath the windows. Even the
walls of the room itself, made of insulated twelve-millimeter plywood clad with
white pine tongue and groove. They are all my own handiwork. Perhaps not
beautiful, but utilitarian and indestructibly strong.<o:p></o:p></span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhk-30sSIqoSHv-96HFFZwEBqoJ4xco_fUPjdQUFPibaJ4glJs8z64hLrL4siHzD5ItzibXE0YsXLks1SxDPiLHo_N0m6LUwYzOK2WiO3RQLgcTWgKJnUdOqY_DrDp2d4S_c2otdFxcop3UclZZp5n1QFPBdqlQDxd2iXhc8gEXQAEEDtRGH400SH2GnQ/s1600/Studio_06.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhk-30sSIqoSHv-96HFFZwEBqoJ4xco_fUPjdQUFPibaJ4glJs8z64hLrL4siHzD5ItzibXE0YsXLks1SxDPiLHo_N0m6LUwYzOK2WiO3RQLgcTWgKJnUdOqY_DrDp2d4S_c2otdFxcop3UclZZp5n1QFPBdqlQDxd2iXhc8gEXQAEEDtRGH400SH2GnQ/w300-h400/Studio_06.jpg" width="300" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i><span style="font-family: trebuchet;">A tight reference library that accompanied<br /> me through decades of translation <br />and reseach.</span></i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Sometimes it’s hard to
remember building all this stuff. But paying attention to it, painting and
varnishing it, working under and over it, has gotten me back in touch with it
and given me a glimpse into the past when I enthusiastically put this little
corner of mine together after hauling out the ragtag jumble of tables,
sawhorses and random lamps that originally made up my workspace when we first
moved in.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But the real
stock-taking began when I started digging into decades of papers, diskettes,
magazines and documentation that had accumulated to the point of squalid
overcrowding and unhealthy mildew. Not normally a hoarder, when it came to
work, I suddenly realized, I had an intrinsic preoccupation with throwing anything out for
fear of “needing it someday”—in case of repeated work, future reference,
possible lawsuits, or simply a client’s request for something he or she had
misplaced. And in Argentina, where bureaucracy is utterly stultifying, this
care in keeping personal records also reached ridiculous proportions. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Paper trails from
international court cases I translated in the nineteen-nineties and at the turn
of the century. Background materials and hard copies of books long in print
that I’d ghosted and/or translated ten or twenty years ago. Background data for
articles long-since written and published in international periodicals, myriad
notebooks for projects completed when I was still in my forties and fifties. Paper
road atlases from the turn of the twenty-first century (just yesterday to my
mind but already a quarter-century in the past). Reams upon reams of hardcopy
that there was no conceivable reason to hang onto. All of these things have now
been piled into boxes and placed where they belong, with the kindling with
which we’ll start our morning wood fire in this and future winters to come. <o:p></o:p></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZSuCgp6IXoQOlPty2UBHy_AvmBGBHEB4NH2DhCw0ptvyV019-Z6osNyFoAHf-g5Pi0opvh4Vfqcgw3J8KkFnpRggVCKOdp6hAuHpS3dOnlwcl3zbrJ10z8g6milbi_Han0Vz9VSWKV38R9JX0pEJDyklJS4SLNnoCchbjLB8PxMRJxmBT-KY4piecXQ/s4102/Studio_00a.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4102" data-original-width="3082" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZSuCgp6IXoQOlPty2UBHy_AvmBGBHEB4NH2DhCw0ptvyV019-Z6osNyFoAHf-g5Pi0opvh4Vfqcgw3J8KkFnpRggVCKOdp6hAuHpS3dOnlwcl3zbrJ10z8g6milbi_Han0Vz9VSWKV38R9JX0pEJDyklJS4SLNnoCchbjLB8PxMRJxmBT-KY4piecXQ/w300-h400/Studio_00a.jpg" width="300" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i><span style="font-family: trebuchet;">Corner shelves cleared for a facelift.</span></i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Computer discs! I
heaved a sigh of relief that, at least, I was no longer the owner of any 7-inch
floppy discs. But 3.5-inch computer discs? Hundreds, perhaps thousands. Kept as
backup until they were obsolete, but still here. What to do? Could I, in good
conscience, just bag them up and heave them into the neighborhood recycle bin?
The answer was “no”.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">For one thing, I had to
find out what was on them, since a small portion of them held, not work for
hire, but my own creative writing, some of it forgotten fiction and non-fiction
that might perhaps be worthwhile having a second look at. These I would sort
out and set aside to take to Gonzalo, my computer genius, and have him rescue
them and place them on a pen-drive for future reference. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">For another thing,
however, I had to consider the privacy of the many clients I’d served over the
past thirty years. Everything I’d done was copyrighted material for magazines,
reports for government agencies, procedures and testimonies for the courts,
international litigation, safety and procedural manuals for nuclear projects,
confidential reports from investment banks, insurance and oil company studies,
environmental impact reports, and the personal stories and data of people for
whom I’d been a biographical ghostwriter. For many of these jobs, I’d signed
non-disclosure agreements, even one for the translation and re-writing of
scripts for an eight-chapter Hollywood miniseries and catalogues for the
Argentine National Museum of Fine Arts.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Only one thing to do:
Go through each and every diskette, reading the labels and either placing them
in a tiny pile of files to be downloaded onto pen-drives, or breaking them physically
to render them useless and tossing them into a large black garbage bag—which
then became <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">two </i>large black garbage
bags full to the brim with the remnants of broken discs. <o:p></o:p></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCDYWnPPIpzLw0reSGowbVIWdEVOOEM0U9nxEV9DDTgTeEEyfD4YeOVZ56whijMC8pv0VsIKKonlqttuJUAFcG0iSHBGhAfwwgVhy57pS3VqnCpRSw10v5GoiPGJcpHtqcUFG5YKWWbFUfTT8zSv8L4E_zSBTmjxdySPBbcsBn0nSdNCrVu9CHxBdhkA/s1608/Studio_01.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1608" data-original-width="1208" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCDYWnPPIpzLw0reSGowbVIWdEVOOEM0U9nxEV9DDTgTeEEyfD4YeOVZ56whijMC8pv0VsIKKonlqttuJUAFcG0iSHBGhAfwwgVhy57pS3VqnCpRSw10v5GoiPGJcpHtqcUFG5YKWWbFUfTT8zSv8L4E_zSBTmjxdySPBbcsBn0nSdNCrVu9CHxBdhkA/w300-h400/Studio_01.jpg" width="300" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i><span style="font-family: trebuchet;">Bookcase now free of extraneous items <br />and in alphabetical order by author.</span></i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Then there were the
thirty years of personal records: tax records for Argentina and the US,
international banking records, old investment papers, personal and business
emails, transactions for properties long-since sold to others, documentation
for vehicles I no longer owned, evidential data for my Argentine Social
Security claims (despite the fact that I’ve been drawing retirement for the
past seven years and copies of all of this evidence were presented at the time),
pictures of people whose names and relationships to me I no longer recalled,
copies of newspaper front pages I’d designed in the seventies, pocket notebooks
where I’d jotted down data no longer relevant to anything, a copy of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Internet for Dummies</i> for the early
nineties, a copy of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Useful Computer Terms</i>
from the eighties, step-by-step hardcopy instructions for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">How to Install Windows ’98…</i> You get the picture.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Pre-USB cords and
computer connections, a spare keyboard for a nineteen-nineties Compaq laptop,
old console computer keyboards, computer transformers of every vintage, two and
three-button pre-optic mice, and other devices whose purpose I no longer
recalled. I took all of these to my computer guy along with the discs I would
ask him to download to drives. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“I brought this stuff
along in case any of it is of any use to you,” I said.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">One look into the bag and
Gonzalo whistled low. Smiling into the bag, he said, “Wow, this stuff is like
to start a computer museum with.” I watched as, one by one, he hurled the
artifacts into the trash, except for a lone transformer, which he turned over in
his hand like an archeological find and, shrugging, said, “Well, I might be
able to use this one for something.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But I got to reflecting
that little or nothing of any of this transformation of my studio had anything
to do with the physical clean-up of a room. It was, instead, mental and
spiritual, all about whisking away a three-decade accumulation of cobwebs and mental
refuse. About refurbishing my mind and soul. About having, as Hemmingway once
described, “a clean, well-lighted place” in which to conduct my creative
endeavors for the rest of my life. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It was also about Stage
Four. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I’ve come to think of
my time here—I mean here on planet Earth, not here in Patagonia—as four stages.
In fact, practically four separate lives. Perhaps these separations or chapters
in a lifetime become clearer to an expatriate than they do to some other people
who never leave home. I don’t know. But my life has been clearly divided into
episodes. My childhood and adolescent years in Ohio. My youth traveling in the
US and Europe with the Army and then continuing my travels to South America,
where, after several random adventures, I initiated my life-long career as a
journalist and writer. My middle age and older years in which I was striving to
build and maintain a career and a name for myself. And now, Stage Four.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgX5VodTM0F48LU7ik9Bfy0N_rwHLl71kseQgpSiLPx8VPl-IM6BNfRODOGtPF3vHh_fYnV2uKSo9PxnGa8in9LJCo9zJABQyaRHobBc-36DxQB_LD8A7gfyXTO1pLsxgQ1IjhOkranVjIAdRUN_oDvlcCZOW4GF0J-dkW5jmwwy-x7k4oFeEBV8dSWPg/s1043/fresh%20start.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><img border="0" data-original-height="448" data-original-width="1043" height="195" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgX5VodTM0F48LU7ik9Bfy0N_rwHLl71kseQgpSiLPx8VPl-IM6BNfRODOGtPF3vHh_fYnV2uKSo9PxnGa8in9LJCo9zJABQyaRHobBc-36DxQB_LD8A7gfyXTO1pLsxgQ1IjhOkranVjIAdRUN_oDvlcCZOW4GF0J-dkW5jmwwy-x7k4oFeEBV8dSWPg/w413-h195/fresh%20start.jpg" width="413" /></span></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Reading back over the
previous paragraph, I realize it all sounds very clear-cut. It’s not. After young
childhood, I immediately wanted to “be big”. In the summer between my twelfth
and thirteenth years, Grandma Alice, Whitie’s mother, handed me an old Gillette
safety razor and told me I might want to think about starting to shave. It was
true. There was a sparse blond fuzz growing on my cheeks and upper lip and
chin. Still ignorable except in strong sunlight, but definitely a presence. I
was kind of embarrassed at first, but then grateful to her. She, at least, had
realized I was growing up. But then again, having raised four boys herself, how
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">wouldn’t</i> she notice? She knew all the
signs of male adolescence. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">She also gave me my
first pack of Gillette Blue Blades, and that same evening, I had my first
shave. As an afterthought, however, I decided not to shave my upper lip. It
was, as I say, summertime, the perfect time to see if I could grow a mustache. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">A week in, Reba Mae
said, “You smell nice. Is that aftershave?”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Skin Bracer.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“You’re shaving?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I nodded.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Where’d you get the
razor?”</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnd2hd1pAKvFUx83rYxBViuxW41MBcc_XnjWBJb0DDxdptTFCAKMz14rCWxxF-UaGoJcXYUMxcLmYjN2Q8jhqt4CzVbzz_7cLwnaoKRa-yCCFdRTiCv86n354OfmnciX7a6slWey39rQlu1fSYd812zLvApVtptiln8UQn4LUhRKmfDNeCwX1b9KNi1g/s1608/Studio_02.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1608" data-original-width="1208" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnd2hd1pAKvFUx83rYxBViuxW41MBcc_XnjWBJb0DDxdptTFCAKMz14rCWxxF-UaGoJcXYUMxcLmYjN2Q8jhqt4CzVbzz_7cLwnaoKRa-yCCFdRTiCv86n354OfmnciX7a6slWey39rQlu1fSYd812zLvApVtptiln8UQn4LUhRKmfDNeCwX1b9KNi1g/w300-h400/Studio_02.jpg" width="300" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><br /><o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Grandma Alice.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Figures,” she muttered
under her breath as she continued preparing supper.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">A few more days passed
before Whitie said, “What’s that piece of toilet paper stuck to your chin. You
shavin’?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I nodded.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Well, you missed a
spot on your lip there.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“No,” I said, “I’m
growing a mustache.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Y’are, huh,” he said
and grinned. “Well, good luck with that.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">When my Uncle Ken saw
me, he wryly said, “Hey, Danny, I think your lip’s dirty. Better go wash up.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Eventually, I found an
old discarded mascara case of my mother’s. It still had the little brush and a
small amount of black mascara in it. I figured that, perhaps, with the slightest
of touch-ups, I could make the incipient growth on my lip more visible. I
shaved the light fuzz down to a shape more or less imitating the
pencil-mustaches of actors like Errol Flynn or Douglas Fairbanks, and then,
ever so lightly, touched it up with the mascara. Pleased with the result I was
sure that I looked like a grown man now. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Reba Mae said, “I sure
hope you haven’t been into my mascara.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Mascara?” I said, my
face reddening. Oh this? No, it’s just turning darker is all.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Right, uh-huh.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Uncle Ken asked if I
was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">still</i> going around with a dirty
lip. But my mother’s mother, Grandma Myrt, asked Grandpa Vern if he’d noticed I
was growing a mustache already. He said, no, he hadn’t. But he couldn’t think
of a young man who’d look nicer with one. I really appreciated that. And it was
uncommon, since Vern wasn’t the complimentary type. He usually warned one not
to “go around lookin’ like Raggedy-Assed Bill,” or would tell you that the
trousers you were outgrowing looked “like you're expectin’ high water.” Thanks to
Grandma Myrt, his own rural work-clothes were always impeccably clean and with
creases rigidly ironed.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7DU8jBiuOySTWpDW3Z0PwwAKNNMBQ8DL6LD53UOPSVGNNRCOwK6oYC95v_3GTnJOD5omnZNnMoS6n7uBvNZEsMJjmZe7JUP0xQq6bS5Ja9LJBzNX2WobLIR_mbtgGfa4VeJg2LtB3gxzWeEbJ4vkkgKLZ_jetGhpc1jKy8IClrmnoXQA1GW6fcxVmAQ/s604/Dan_the%20sixties.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><img border="0" data-original-height="412" data-original-width="604" height="272" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7DU8jBiuOySTWpDW3Z0PwwAKNNMBQ8DL6LD53UOPSVGNNRCOwK6oYC95v_3GTnJOD5omnZNnMoS6n7uBvNZEsMJjmZe7JUP0xQq6bS5Ja9LJBzNX2WobLIR_mbtgGfa4VeJg2LtB3gxzWeEbJ4vkkgKLZ_jetGhpc1jKy8IClrmnoXQA1GW6fcxVmAQ/w400-h272/Dan_the%20sixties.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;">My 1960s persona, age eighteen.</span></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But that facial hair
episode was short-lived and I didn’t grow another mustache until the summer
after my junior year, when it came in full, if still quite blond. That was the
year I started playing nightclub gigs with a jazz trio and, at least until I
had to return to high school at summer’s end, the “stash” helped me maintain
the illusion of being older than my years, which I reinforced with the clothes
I wore—suits, sport coats and gabardine slacks, ties, cufflinks, topcoats,
wing-tipped shoes and snap-brimmed hats.</span><br /></span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Suffice it to say that
I’ve spent half my life trying to look older and the other half trying to look
younger. I really didn’t get comfortable with who I was until I was a very
mature man. In fact, I never came into a writing or even personal style that I
could really call “my own” until I was nearing fifty. Until then, I was always
striving to be more than anyone ever expected me to be. And it was only from
then on that the only person I felt it was worthwhile surprising was myself. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">That’s the attitude
with which I’ve come to Stage Four. When does Stage Four happen? Hard to say.
Probably different for everyone. But it’s when you realize that something has quite
apparently ended and something else has clearly begun.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikfZHGClSNcpGjeNvXN7W2jugrQ9TokpRiytQLyslnNBd3w4O1LlLrwYpou8mN0giql7ukyrufpM8so3aOIsB11H0VzsWGvtLf_eyws22mecbvMbKeaxicKgCwBaocLmYLiTIW7g9NUQPkeXYBFMbS0zpn6ZT9UMLAmLUZrFQvaxGXsqgwd0xg5N9mkw/s2262/Rolling%20Bones.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1512" data-original-width="2262" height="268" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikfZHGClSNcpGjeNvXN7W2jugrQ9TokpRiytQLyslnNBd3w4O1LlLrwYpou8mN0giql7ukyrufpM8so3aOIsB11H0VzsWGvtLf_eyws22mecbvMbKeaxicKgCwBaocLmYLiTIW7g9NUQPkeXYBFMbS0zpn6ZT9UMLAmLUZrFQvaxGXsqgwd0xg5N9mkw/w400-h268/Rolling%20Bones.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i><span style="font-family: trebuchet;">The Rolling 'Bones' still going strong</span></i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Now, for some folks,
admitting you’ve reached Stage Four is like admitting your life is over. But I
don’t see it that way, and neither do the most creative people I’ve known, or a
lot of others I <i>haven’t</i> known. Mick Jagger is still rockin’ on
with what’s left of the Rolling ‘Bones’ (Stones’ drummer Charlie Watts recently
played his last gig), as are Graham Nash, John Fogerty, Pete
Townshend, Bob Seger, Eric Clapton, Gladys Knight, Boz Scaggs and Roger Waters, among a raft of other septuagenarians, who continue to pack
the venues where they perform. Writers still going strong in their seventies
include such famous names as Margaret Atwood, Russell Banks, Sue Grafton,
Isabel Allende and Stephen King, among many others. And Joyce Carole Oates, who
published her first novel in 1963, last year published her latest one, <i>Babysitter</i>,
at the age of eighty-four, and she continues to work.</span><br /></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2ikir229ZOELrXGGE2Vsv3tLgpZjPivoHIRP3JL7Itz_hwVlRFGJrtRd17-M6wMAgb1_tWFbXqwUrdDnflSt0Gqqtbmg1bh_L6ZXcVjAj_LX5F67b15EW2ke4e05UPmVuzLyPvroL9GaQMzBah5Xzj8pT5zd0UKJBaiijBMaTghN22TWSAWQ1-RXPFw/s1600/Studio_05.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2ikir229ZOELrXGGE2Vsv3tLgpZjPivoHIRP3JL7Itz_hwVlRFGJrtRd17-M6wMAgb1_tWFbXqwUrdDnflSt0Gqqtbmg1bh_L6ZXcVjAj_LX5F67b15EW2ke4e05UPmVuzLyPvroL9GaQMzBah5Xzj8pT5zd0UKJBaiijBMaTghN22TWSAWQ1-RXPFw/s320/Studio_05.jpg" width="240" /></span></a></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">I guess
my point is that age is inexorable, but being “elderly” isn’t. I’ve known a
handful of people who weren’t elderly at ninety. I’ve also known some who <i>were </i>elderly
in their sixties. Health, of course, is a factor. I’m not denying that. But all
things being equal, it’s all about attitude and purpose. A hobby, a profession,
a craft, a skill, a passionate interest, a December love affair, or just a
commitment to enjoying life to the fullest, they are all the key to aging not
merely with dignity, but also with continuing <i>joie de vivre</i>.</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Anyway, my studio is
now neat, clean, uncluttered and, finally, the place where I will no longer be
doing “other people’s work.” Only my own, the ideas and writing that have long
been my passion, the stories I’ve longed to tell “someday”, the place where I
can give free rein to a world of my own. The cobwebs and extraneous
distractions have been swept from my workspace and from my mind and soul. It’s
a brand new room, a brand new day, a brand new mindset, and a brand new life,
in which, for as long as it lasts, I have never been freer.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01054536465220812092noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1616769513702255459.post-29674950181042234262023-03-15T11:27:00.008-03:002023-03-16T10:39:36.093-03:00YANKEE REDUX — MICHIGAN DAYS — WHAT’S IN A NAME?<p> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">A
decade ago, I wrote a series of pieces about my boyhood love affair with the
Michigan Upper Peninsula. This was the first story in that series.<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;">When I was a boy, from
the time I was about four until I was twelve, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Michigan</i> was a name that plunged me into instant joyful reverie. It
was the place and the dream I longed for. I wanted to awake one morning to find
that I was there and that it was to be my life from then on. Anywhere that I
saw water with the blue sky and white clouds reflected in it—even in large
puddles after a sudden summer downpour—the word that came to mind was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Michigan</i> and it never failed to fill me
with an instant sense of yearning. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;">Michigan, to my mind,
wasn’t a vast state with some of the major, smoke-laden industrial towns of the
American North. It was, rather, whispering pine and birch forests, crystalline
lakes, sandy dirt roads, cold mornings and warm lingering afternoons with
Technicolor sunsets. It was a land of tawny deer and multi-colored snakes, of
herons and cranes, of pumpkin seed sunfish, bass and bluegill, of perch, walleye,
and the great northern pike.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was the
smell of pine pitch and wood smoke, the scent of twenty coats of dark varnish
on log cabins in the afternoon sun. It was a place far from where my father was
often worried sick, a place we went just for fun, a place where I felt there
was nothing to interfere with our happiness. Michigan, for me, was synonymous
with bliss, and Michigan was also synonymous with Lake Manistee and the
surrounding area.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdqpZ1vpzw7BnkS9vwRQpPpRVF4g74ZOdGJ6NqVbMHTjSrcrdVOu7gGwWYvdyekj9MUf3_OlImaFRVtHRtTTdB1YusSdHzWOfBn8ysBI61RSc904Ud2ssAWID3hDOY64bkTT0Br5WLzrD9w0-BIzHBTMm0BTQOGNhZK0AlLCCKb7HOwnyKGp8GQfiWgg/s400/Dan%20swimming%20at%20Manistee.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="284" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdqpZ1vpzw7BnkS9vwRQpPpRVF4g74ZOdGJ6NqVbMHTjSrcrdVOu7gGwWYvdyekj9MUf3_OlImaFRVtHRtTTdB1YusSdHzWOfBn8ysBI61RSc904Ud2ssAWID3hDOY64bkTT0Br5WLzrD9w0-BIzHBTMm0BTQOGNhZK0AlLCCKb7HOwnyKGp8GQfiWgg/w284-h400/Dan%20swimming%20at%20Manistee.jpg" width="284" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">I should clarify that when I speak of Manistee,
I’m not talking about the better-known lake in the county of the same name that
opens onto that great freshwater sea that is Lake Michigan, the Manistee that
has been so poisoned by years of heavy industry on its shores—logging, paper
pulp mills, salt-mining, steel foundries, etc.—that consumption restrictions
have been long in force for the different species of fish that still manage to
survive there. No, I’m referring to the 860-acre inland lake located over a
hundred miles further north, in Kalkaska County, which, when I was a boy, was
about as close as you could get to <i>the
wilds</i>.</span><br /><o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;">From the time I first saw
Lake Manistee and its dense and dazzling wilds, I thought of myself as being
part of it, as being from rural Ohio, but also as being from Michigan—<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">that</i> Michigan, the one of my dreams.
That landscape was mine. It belonged to me by right of enduring love and
loyalty to it. And indeed, some of my most lasting memories are of the precious
few vacations my family spent there. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;">Nor was it as if we ever
“summered there”. At the time, my father and two of his brothers owned a family
restaurant in my hometown and for the twenty-five years that he remained in
that business, Dad never felt as if he could take any more than a week off each
year. A week your “regulars” might stand for. Shut down for two, and you’d lose
half of them to the competition. That was his logic. I despaired that the time
we spent at Lake Manistee was so short, and counted “the days left” on my
fingers each night before I fell asleep in the cabin, with a pinewood and birch
fire still crackling in the potbellied stove, June bugs buzzing against the
screens and the drowsy murmur of the adults still playing five hundred rum at
the kitchen table. But then again, perhaps it was how limited the time was that
made it all the more precious to me.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;">Grumpy
Old Men.</span></b><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"> Most years we went with my Grandpa Murel and
Grandma Alice. That was how we started going in the first place. Grandpa had
been a life insurance salesman for many years, but I think the occupation he
cared most about in his life was fishing (or “feeshing”, as he referred to it).
His insurance debit was partly located in the area around Russells Point and
Lakeview, both towns built on the shores of Indian Lake (originally known as
the Lewistown Reservoir), in Logan County, Ohio. So he never went to work
without rod, reel and tackle in the trunk of his car. Murel was one of the
company’s top salesmen in the area, but he was also a cantankerous,
quick-tempered and rebellious man, who had never let anybody tell him how to
live his life or do his job. So it wasn’t at all unusual for him, in the middle
of a workday, to stop for a little while to see “if the feesh was a-bitin’.” Also
in his trunk were other essentials for the well-prepared angler: a see-through
plastic mac in case of rain (when the crappies bit best), a battered and
stained everyday greenish felt hat, a galvanized catch bucket with a lid (in
case he got lucky), a pair of rubber galoshes to protect his fancy two-tone
shoes, a square boat cushion to sit on so that he didn’t get the seat of his suit
trousers dirty, and an old plaid woodsman’s jacket with worn-slick suede elbow
patches to protect his white shirt and replace his suit coat, which he would
leave in the car while he tested the waters at places with such enticing names
as Sassafras, O’Connor’s Point, Turkeyfoot, Blackhawk and King’s Landing.
Everyone knew him over there and he could fish just about wherever he liked
undisturbed—unless it was by a Fish and Game warden, since he never was
convinced of the need to buy a fishing license.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;">Now, for a while, Murel
had a workmate at the Western and Southern Insurance Company who was even more
enthusiastic about angling than he was. The man’s name was Morris Butcher, and
Morris and Murel spent a great deal of their time together talking (vociferously
debating, actually, since never were there two friends more like Walter Matthau
and Jack Lemon in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Grumpy Old Men</i> than
Morris and Murel) about the best methods for catching a wide variety of
freshwater fish. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;">Morris was a wiry, leathery,
piercing-eyed, corncob pipe-smoking man, with a sardonic gold-toothed grin, who
looked like anything but a life insurance salesman. And clearly, that wasn’t
what he was cut out to be. It was simply a job where a savvy judge of
character, which he was, could make the money he needed to do what his heart
really desired. Anyway, there came a time before he reached retirement age when
Morris reckoned he’d had enough of pounding a debit trying to sell life
insurance and decided he wasn’t waiting any longer to start doing what he’d
always wanted to do: live on a lake and fish whenever the spirit moved him. So
he bought a nice piece of land on a lake he’d discovered in Kalkaska County,
Michigan, and, with the sweat off of his brow, built a summer resort there—the
Buckeye Rustic Resort, on the shores of Lake Manistee. It was on Morris’s
invitation that Murel had first decided to try the fishing on Lake Manistee and
found he loved the place—plus, thrifty Scot that he was, the discount he always
managed to wheedle out of his friend couldn’t have hurt his decision to go
there year after year. Then one year he talked second son Norman (Normie, as my
mother called him, Whitie to his childhood friends) into going, and a fleeting
family tradition was born.</span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_t7ST8PywP7wV7olUhiHDNtuqjTmGhrne5lsdoGRDyE2ZD126nLID4B3xVhRvp_2uxDHNF1qVAlxjK4poeeFGVkqpsHil_6ejGVvh5b8zn5pSkcUr9tcBY_zKJm7jKsKsftLE4OcrPvKBceMF10hM0nFTHUaTU0EXox9daFv20P_VkDXvCMa6NX8wGw/s400/Beach%20at%20Manistee.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><img border="0" data-original-height="329" data-original-width="400" height="329" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_t7ST8PywP7wV7olUhiHDNtuqjTmGhrne5lsdoGRDyE2ZD126nLID4B3xVhRvp_2uxDHNF1qVAlxjK4poeeFGVkqpsHil_6ejGVvh5b8zn5pSkcUr9tcBY_zKJm7jKsKsftLE4OcrPvKBceMF10hM0nFTHUaTU0EXox9daFv20P_VkDXvCMa6NX8wGw/w400-h329/Beach%20at%20Manistee.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i><span style="font-family: trebuchet;">Beach and woodland at the Buckeye Rustic Resort</span></i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;">Getting
There. </span></b><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;">My excitement would crescendo to an almost
unbearable fever pitch in the days leading up to our Michigan vacations. It was
always well into summer, late July or early August at least, before we could
get away and the waiting was agonizing after the first year we went and I could
picture Manistee in my mind. It was always there, like Shangri-La, beckoning me
in the mist of memory. I remember my unmitigated sorrow and disappointment the
year Dad announced that we wouldn’t be going anywhere on vacation because the restaurant
needed painting and remodeling and there would be no time or money for going to
the lake. They would close down for ten days and use the time and money entirely
for reinvestment in the business. I was devastated.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;">The years we did go, I
started savoring Michigan before we ever left the house, watching my older
sister Darla neatly lay out the clothes she wanted to take, following my mother,
Reba Mae, from room to room as she retrieved the suitcases—with their wood
frames, tan fabric covering and brown leather and brass trim—from the spare
closet and started to fill them, and getting together my own sparse fishing
gear (the first years, no more than a section of a bamboo cane pole, a bit of
line and a yellow and white cork bobber that my grandfather had given me).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Murel equipped us all since Dad always said
he was “no fisherman so why buy a rod and reel,” but he would go out in a boat
and drown a worm or two while in Michigan just to appease his father. However,
he was such an obsessive over-achiever that if the fish started biting, it
could be pitch black out, so that you could no longer see your cork in the
water, and Whitie wouldn’t say die until his father forcibly grabbed the oars
and rowed us back to shore. And since one was as competitive as the other, that
usually didn’t happen until we were chilled to the bone and half-eaten by
mosquitoes.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;">For the trip up from
Ohio, we would steal away like thieves in the dark of night, at three or four
o’clock. Though the trip back then, on two-lane roads through towns and cities,
took all day, Dad had a theory about “making time” that hinged on pre-dawn departure.
Which was okay by me, since <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Night
Before Michigan</i> might just as well have been <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Night Before Christmas</i>: There was no way I was going to go to
sleep and maybe be forgotten and left behind. But Darla sometimes had to be
wrapped in a blanket and carried to the car once everything else was packed
because she flat refused to get up so early. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;">I particularly remember
a trip when we left in the middle of a fierce electrical storm. It added to the
excitement since I could feel Reba Mae’s tension even from the back of the car.
She was always game for a trip—though, if she’d had her druthers, it wouldn’t
have been to a log cabin in Michigan and it wouldn’t have been with her father-
and mother-in-law—but she had an innate dread of wind and thunderstorms.
Knowing this, Whitie kidded her as he drove, by saying things like, “It’s raining
cats and dogs, honey!” or, “If this keeps up we’re gonna need oars!” or, “Damn!
Did you see that lightning? It’s rainin’ pitchforks!” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;">That was the first time
I’d heard this last expression and it stuck—rather like a pitchfork—in my
brain. It was cozy in the backseat, wrapped in an old Army blanket, Darla
slumped on the other side of the car fast asleep under what was known then as
an “Indian blanket”. (The first couple of years it was just she and I, then
came our little brother Dennis James—whom we called Jimmy—who traveled between
us in back, or up front on our mother’s lap). And now I had this new image of
some angry god hurling trident-like pitchforks at us from on high. But here in
our car, we were immune. Whitie wasn’t scared. He knew we were untouchable. He
wouldn’t let anything happen to us. He deftly maneuvered us through the world’s
dangers. So while Reba Mae fretted up front and chewed her Juicy Fruit to keep
calm, I raised my half-closed eyes to the bottom of the window and, in a
semi-dream state, watched the flashes of lightning over the cornfields, trying
to imagine them as fiery-blue tridents that were barely missing our speeding
supercar and grounding themselves out around us, rendered harmless by our
special powers.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;">Whitie underscored that
image, since for him, trips were serious business with numerous performance
factors to be taken into account: the “time you made”, “what kind of mileage
you got”, and “what you spent on the road” before you ever got where you were
going. So stops were minimal, speeds were as steady as possible and gasoline
was only purchased where it “wasn’t high as hell” (a penny or two more or less
a gallon was enough to qualify, so that we were often dangerously close to the
Empty peg before he would give in and stop). This meant that by the last leg of
that long, stressful trip in the midst of a tri-state storm, he began to
resemble a mad Captain Ahab, lashed to the wheel, indefatigable and invincible,
forging on despite mutinous calls for stops to pee, to eat something, to,
for-godsake-get-a-cup-of-coffee-at-least-Normie.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"></span></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZriWBsuUZIqU9HhgrUjm83HUI36F2Zjss8Jf3OiDqgwxaos9dfW7Ld_AXzU6eT3sYCNf26h1KSoLykCcBoUVtZqG4uh7rRiiqarpCIAsTW6yb2qlRwQ5PO-gCUKlh3-M0GrTUNkTb00_7xsQVIaWlacezjtQ-E2kOv1NGt0u0-AfUuVhONjhFZP7NRg/s652/UP%20Scenery.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><img border="0" data-original-height="490" data-original-width="652" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZriWBsuUZIqU9HhgrUjm83HUI36F2Zjss8Jf3OiDqgwxaos9dfW7Ld_AXzU6eT3sYCNf26h1KSoLykCcBoUVtZqG4uh7rRiiqarpCIAsTW6yb2qlRwQ5PO-gCUKlh3-M0GrTUNkTb00_7xsQVIaWlacezjtQ-E2kOv1NGt0u0-AfUuVhONjhFZP7NRg/w400-h300/UP%20Scenery.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></b></div><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Being
There. </span></b><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;">And then, like<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">
</b>magic, the landscape began to change as we headed into the north on the Peninsula.
The pitch was rolling, the air turning cool, the late afternoon sky clearing
with dark storm clouds now shredded and blown out against a clean azure field. The
berms turned sandy. Oaks and maples gave way to yellow birches and trembling
aspens contrasting with the deep green of pines and hemlock. Log and varnished
wood structures along the road replaced sawn and painted lumber and brick
houses that were the norm back home. There was an outback look to everything so
different from the regimented tidiness of Ohio farming communities, an
individualism that rendered one house or store completely different from
another and each with amusing accessories everywhere: toy windmills and
pinwheels, colorful birdbaths, a plethora of garden gnomes and painted plaster
stable boys, wind chimes of metal, glass and bamboo, shacky stands along the
road selling watermelon, wild cherries and berries, Indian souvenirs and live
bait and tackle. And then...nothing. Nothing but hills, forest and the road
stretching like a ribbon before us, already drying in a stiff breeze.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I rolled down the window part way and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">breathed Michigan</i>—that crisp northern
air on which you could smell the clear water of a thousand lakes and streams.<o:p></o:p></span></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;">After what seemed (to
me) like an eternity, we left the narrow two-lane pavement and hissed almost
silently along a narrower still sand road, now packed and firm from the rain.
And finally, we came abreast of the red-shingled cottage where Morris and his
wife, Ines (which everyone pronounced aye′-ness), made their home. We turned
int atthe Buckeye Rustic Resort on the opposite side of the road. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;">The car had barely come
to a stop when I was already out and running down to the edge of Lake Manistee,
with my mother’s words of warning about not getting too close to the water on
my own, lost on the wind behind me. The air was chilly from the storm and the
crystal clear water was freezing cold. But shivering in the late afternoon air
after the warmth of the car, I kicked off my Redball Jets, rolled off my socks
and waded in just over my ankles. Smiling to myself, I gazed down at my little-boy
feet through the clear water against the tawny sand and round greenish lake
stones and heaved a sigh of relief. I was at home again, in Lake Manistee.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01054536465220812092noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1616769513702255459.post-30400308560875224482023-03-02T19:07:00.005-03:002023-03-02T19:10:47.149-03:00YANKEE REDUX — HOW I NEVER MET SORIANO<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><i><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">This year is the 26<sup>th</sup>
anniversary of the death of Osvaldo Soriano, one of Argentina’s most
celebrated contemporary writers. This is a rewrite of something I wrote about
him in 2008, when I first created this blog. Actually, it’s the re-edited story
of how, oddly enough, our paths never crossed in the exciting and
violent Buenos Aires of the 1970s or later on when democracy
returned. But it’s also about how, through his work and reputation, I got to
know him all the same.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Funny thing, I’ve often
thought, how I never met Osvaldo Soriano. We were colleagues, contemporaries
pretty much (he was born six years before me), and we haunted some of the same
environments in the bad old days leading up to the 1976 military coup in
Argentina. Our turf back then were streets where hookers, sailors, printers and
newsmen were about the only people stirring long into the wee hours of the
night. And we started hanging out in those places in the same era, he having
come to Buenos Aires from the Argentine interior and I from abroad.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I suspect we both got
into journalism for the same reason, as a way of writing every day and earning
a living at it. He did it all his life, despite his fame as a novelist, becoming
one of the original founders of the controversial daily, <i>Página 12</i>,
when he returned to Buenos Aires from European exile. There—there
being Paris—he had written for such noted publications as <i>Le Monde,
Libération</i> and <i>Il Manifesto</i>.<br /> <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Some people go into
journalism because they have a passion for the news. Others because they like
telling people’s stories. These others are the ones people talk about when they
say they never met a journalist who wasn’t writing a novel. In Soriano’s case
it paid off big-time. From what I know about him—I became a huge fan of his
from the very outset—I figure his enormous popularity surprised no one as much
as himself. His novels have sold into the millions of copies (you can even buy
them at Walmart!) and have been translated into more than a dozen languages. And
still the more asinine among critics are wont to discuss whether he was, in
fact, a “good writer”. What was it Hemingway said? Something like, “Critics are
men who watch a battle from a high place then come down and shoot the
survivors.” Soriano probably would have agreed. <o:p></o:p></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiM4PY0Q7D642KKVOOyciTCQdRcruVDkuIaVEsrrsuSG1XF5TTT_9qkZEbZsqb0Wu8lwArmEmsXwpDZrx__n4mwd0NuwqvCj3tmCsGTDp0cHq68rJHQOGTtG6Mka2BIyzM-XBDlsGbmNV7INHHN1lO_S44AbP_WyG4YyO-i1ilQ2WCNYlTxkym7ROto_w/s250/Soriano-smoke.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><img border="0" data-original-height="173" data-original-width="250" height="277" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiM4PY0Q7D642KKVOOyciTCQdRcruVDkuIaVEsrrsuSG1XF5TTT_9qkZEbZsqb0Wu8lwArmEmsXwpDZrx__n4mwd0NuwqvCj3tmCsGTDp0cHq68rJHQOGTtG6Mka2BIyzM-XBDlsGbmNV7INHHN1lO_S44AbP_WyG4YyO-i1ilQ2WCNYlTxkym7ROto_w/w400-h277/Soriano-smoke.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i><span style="font-family: trebuchet;">Argentine journalist and author Osvaldo Soriano</span></i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Anyway, at about the
time that Soriano was writing for owner/editor Jacobo Timerman at <i>La
Opinión</i>, I was sub-editing and reporting for editor Robert Cox at the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Buenos Aires Herald</i>. Our editorial
departments were more or less around the corner from each other in the then-red
light district, in the vicinity of 25 de Mayo and Tucumán. Both of our papers
printed at Alemann & Compañía, which was handy and one of the biggest
printers of the day. It was a location that was a stone’s throw from
the SAFICO Building on Corrientes and San Martín,
where major international news agencies and correspondents had their offices, a
few short blocks from the local agency <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Noticias
Argentinas</i>, and walking distance from the press offices of all major municipal
and federal government departments and ministries. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Back then, it was hard
to go into any of the bars or cafés in that district without meeting up with a
colleague or two. So you would have thought that Soriano and I would have been
almost bound to run into each other. But, as fate would have it, we didn’t. It
was hard <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i> to run into novelist,
journalist, one-time radical Peronist and later fat-cat diplomat Jorge Asís,
for instance. Asís was a sort of politically aggressive omnipresence on that
circuit. But Soriano was, from what I hear, a somewhat retiring if friendly
sort, and I was never really much of a joiner myself. I suppose we both spent a
lot more time in front of a typewriter than some, even in the days before
computers made it easier still to become a functional hermit.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8pFsA2dqVQV4Gi-qJFb9VoGXk47uf0JuCMar3zF_SYT4ZuR3lWF6BbbD6SDCXpu0G7KQk4JcmCrPsFs5kRvnT4C0myEKeV2HSpKBdcgLtAVlL619BaaLxUw4xPCnN7G_GV41DNp5g7n54Uo9U3-_02YUhwRtzqaK7l4kP2VzA-768AUAS0ND_HUbbsw/s1700/Dan_Parque%20San%20Mart%C3%ADn%20cerca%201978_by%20John%20Claude%20Fernandes.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1254" data-original-width="1700" height="295" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8pFsA2dqVQV4Gi-qJFb9VoGXk47uf0JuCMar3zF_SYT4ZuR3lWF6BbbD6SDCXpu0G7KQk4JcmCrPsFs5kRvnT4C0myEKeV2HSpKBdcgLtAVlL619BaaLxUw4xPCnN7G_GV41DNp5g7n54Uo9U3-_02YUhwRtzqaK7l4kP2VzA-768AUAS0ND_HUbbsw/w400-h295/Dan_Parque%20San%20Mart%C3%ADn%20cerca%201978_by%20John%20Claude%20Fernandes.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i><span style="font-family: trebuchet;">Dan Newland, circa 1977, Buenos Aires Herald<br />reporter/editor and correspondent for the London<br />Daily Telegraph, World Environment Report and <br />ABC Radio News, New York. <br />Photo:John Claude Fernandes</span></i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I stayed on at the <i>Herald </i>while working as a stringer for papers and magazines in
the United States and Britain, and thus started building a
career of sorts. It wasn’t on purpose. I mean, the ultimate goal was to become
a novelist. It was just that, in the meantime, I was limited to the <i>Herald</i> if
I wanted to write in my own language, and besides, once the military junta shut
down <i>La Opinión</i> and locked up Timerman, there was basically no
other place but the <i>Herald</i> to write a semblance of truth about
what was happening in Argentina. The times grew frighteningly interesting and
one year just kind of led to the next.</span><br /></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Soriano, for his part,
graced the pages of not only <i>La Opinión</i>, but also of <i>Primera
Plana, Noticias, Confirmado</i> and <i>Panorama</i> with his
inimitable prose. But his leftist bent and his uncompromising objectivity made
it dangerous for him to remain in Argentina after the 1976 coup
d’état, and he made a decision to live in exile until the military returned to
their barracks in 1983. He was off to Belgium and would later
gravitate to Paris, where he would co-found <i>Sin Censura</i> with
venerated Argentine exile and author Julio Cortázar. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">At the <i>Herald</i>,
our news editor and my immediate boss, Andrew Graham-Yooll, made a similar decision
at about that same time and was off to London practically overnight.
I got bumped up the ladder to the news editor’s post and former <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">McLean’s Magazine</i> journalist James
Neilson was brought in as associate editor under Cox.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It was in this
editorial management post that I started to get a chance to write regularly
under a by-line and thus to become mildly well-known in certain circles. So it
was too that I got to know Soriano for the first time, without ever actually
meeting him.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It happened one
midnight (dreary) in 1978, as I was sitting at my desk, struggling with the
first lines of an op-ed piece while waiting for the press to roll in our new
installations on <i>Calle </i>Azopardo. Momentarily stymied, I
decided to procrastinate by going through the day’s mail that was still piled
untouched on the corner of my desk. I found the usual readers’ letters (which I
dutifully separated and filed for future publication), some magazines, a few
brochures (from merchants who wanted some free hype and which I put in the out
tray for the advertising department), a couple of formal invitations to lunches
and cocktails and, finally, a small rectangular package, the size of a book. It
was addressed to my name in black marker, postmarked from Spain, had no return
address and was wrapped in plain brown paper, as if to conceal some
pornographic content.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijTwJQ4bYBf3yWoa2shuLRIqm2JkKEDtUJCNyaE-iWNNUW93-35_uPjDUM3biyx5y-QmxpXOOw4m3g_lkK2CNdhLNfOaQGXRPfElfxG9odV3kk-dZy7hywGUHOp1ACY6ohi5tYQK8aPCJP6tQP8ZU-DBSAtEYAkYM-bwm_1tk0a3VhZFsOJU02fqILvw/s338/Tapa%20No%20habr%C3%A1%20m%C3%A1s%20penas.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><img border="0" data-original-height="338" data-original-width="200" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijTwJQ4bYBf3yWoa2shuLRIqm2JkKEDtUJCNyaE-iWNNUW93-35_uPjDUM3biyx5y-QmxpXOOw4m3g_lkK2CNdhLNfOaQGXRPfElfxG9odV3kk-dZy7hywGUHOp1ACY6ohi5tYQK8aPCJP6tQP8ZU-DBSAtEYAkYM-bwm_1tk0a3VhZFsOJU02fqILvw/w236-h400/Tapa%20No%20habr%C3%A1%20m%C3%A1s%20penas.jpg" width="236" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Justifiably paranoid as I was in those days,
given the constant threats the newspaper received, I sniffed the package,
flexed it, shook it, picked at it, and tweaked it a bit, before finally
deciding it was probably harmless. When I opened it, what I found was a rather
thin little paperback book with a title as Argentine as tango itself: <i>No
habrá más penas ni olvido</i>. So Argentine is that phrase from the classic
tango, <i>Mi Buenos Aires querido</i>, that it is almost impossible to
translate it correctly. I mean, one could try, say, No More Sorrow or
Forgetfulness, or No More Sorrow or Oblivion, but what the devil does that mean
in English. It is only within the context of <i>porteño</i> lore—of
immigrants far from home, of families separated by destiny and longing to be
together once more, of perennial hope against a backdrop of barely veiled
despair, of terminal melancholy turned outwardly to false cheer, of romantic
abandon and unrequited love, of vengeance and remorse, of arrivals and
departures, of European Americans with heartstrings stretched taut between
continents—that those words make sense, even in Spanish. They would probably
make sense in Italian…if they were spoken in America (especially South
America). But in English, it’s like: Huh? Anyway, as a title for what was to be
an incredibly succinct and immortal synthesis of something as Argentine as the
phenomenon of Peronism in the 1970s, it could not have been more fitting.</span><br /><o:p></o:p></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I scanned the first few
paragraphs and was immediately, irretrievably hooked. I kept telling myself,
“One more page and back to the op-ed piece…One more page and I’ll go down to
put the paper to bed…One more page and I’ll put this thing down! But it was
impossible. It wasn’t until I felt the rotary press shaking the floor of my
office like a small, benign earth tremor that I tore myself away from the plot
and characters that peopled the story to go down and do my duty, plucking a
copy of the latest edition of the <i>Herald</i> from the downstream
end of the press and having a quick general look to make sure everything was
okay before bidding the press crew good night over the din of the machinery.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Arriving home in our tiny
mid-town condo at nearly two-thirty in the morning, I took up where I’d left
off in the book while I ate the supper my wife had left out on the kitchen
counter for me and had a glass of wine. But when I’d eaten my meal, I poured
myself some more wine and kept right on reading. By the time I fell into bed
around dawn, I’d read half of the book, and before I went in to work the next afternoon,
I had finished it. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I was spellbound.
Political analysts of all colors and nationalities were straining their
intellects to the point of mental hernia to try and paint a clear if complex
picture of the Argentine phenomenon. They were seeking some even vaguely
objective definition of Peronism, attempting to explain in some feasible way
what had gone so horrendously wrong that the country had stumbled headlong into
total chaos, only to fall into the gnashing jaws of unbridled repression and
ironclad authoritarianism. And by and large, they had failed miserably. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But here was Osvaldo
Soriano, high school drop-out, street-beat newsman and natural genius, who
created the perfect allegory. He didn’t try to tell the story from the
standpoint of the big picture, where cloak and dagger political intrigue made
it next to impossible to get to the core of truth. Instead he took the demise
of Peronism as Perón had defined it to a tiny town in Buenos Aires Province,
where everybody knew everybody else. Into that microcosm, he injected the
poison of political avarice, added the catalyst of petty jealousy, sowed the
seeds of gossip and doubt, and fanned the flames of a witch-hunt that would
turn a quaint and even comic village into a tragic nightmare of civil strife,
torture, revolt and murder.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Thanks to this
incredible portrait of the Peronist phenomenon following the death of populist
strongman General Juan Domingo Perón, the question of what happened
in Argentina in the nineteen-seventies becomes graphically
crystal-clear, with never a mention of any of the major players, except, of
course, for the all-pervading, omnipresent name of Perón.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">But even though the
story could not have been more Argentine in every sense, it was, I realized,
also brilliantly universal. As universal, say, as Golding’s <i>Lord of the
Flies</i>, Huxley’s <i>Brave New World</i>, or Orwell’s <i>Nineteen
Eighty-Four</i>. It was an allegory on politics gone awry, a regime’s running
rampant, movements placing themselves above the people in whose name they acted
and above systems that sought to guarantee the rule of law. It was about an
ideal turned caricature, a political thought gone psychotic. It was about human
foible—complacence playing into the hands of dictatorial design, rebellion
providing an excuse for free-wheeling repression and about what happens when
two extremes come full circle and see each other in near mirror image. It was
about how no one wins, but how power is retained, at least for a time, by whomever
swings the biggest club. But it was also about how moral victory can only
belong to those who maintain their principles at all costs, even at the cost of
their very lives.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The next day I told a guy
I knew in the shop about the book. He was what one might call a closet Peronist
revolutionary. He had been, rumor had it, a leftist activist before the 1976
coup. He and I often discussed politics while putting the paper to bed. He had
read a lot and I asked if he had ever read anything by Soriano, since this was
my first encounter with the author. He said he didn’t think so. Would I lend
him the book to read?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Sure,” I said, “but I
want it back.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Tomorrow,” he said.
“I’m a fast reader.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The next night when I
went down to the shop and said hello to him, he grunted, glanced over both
shoulders to see if anybody was watching, reached into a dark little cupboard,
where he also hid his little brown bottle of Bols Ginebra and retrieved the
book from the darkest recesses. I couldn’t help laughing aloud when I saw that
he had very carefully covered it in heavy black plastic sheeting, obviously to
keep the title from showing through.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Here, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">jefe</i>,” he said. “Get it out of here.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“You didn’t like it?” I
laughed.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“It was great,” he
whispered, “but not worth <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">dying</i> for.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“What the hell are you
talking about?” I asked.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“You know the security
guy at the front desk? He said that if I didn’t want the <i>milicos</i> to "give me a ride in their truck", I’d better get that subversive book under wraps,
because the author was a terrorist and the book was banned.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I lost that copy
of <i>No habrá más penas ni olvido</i> in a move some time back, but
for all of the years that it remained in my library, right up to the beginning
of the nineties, it wore that black shroud. That cover, like the book itself,
was a symbol of those times and of the exile from which Soriano so aptly
described them.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">I recently came across
a picture of me when I was a news editor and foreign correspondent in Buenos
Aires in the seventies and one of Soriano when he was exiled in Paris. I couldn’t
help but reflect that the historical phenomenon that had forced him to flee for
his life from the country he loved was the exact same one that had inspired me
to remain in the Buenos Aires that he had left behind. We had both chosen to
become expats because of the same thing, but for opposite reasons. Just one of
the ironies of dangerous times. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> <br /></span><o:p></o:p></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwLIyhmSsBfcPVUrUeXro4TqKwJmgBAdHvC7XxGGSaywx7BjM2mdv2T0Uih_xhxEqHjqTp_MbmocXWjzQ5yYfiGNroXBjS0UD2KqWrjDFZix4xKBtCv8D_C09J2aBwnM4rqprw6tlw7n437QpubTWFHAiImM3Hn6Nc1FCFJg894O3o4tdXvsrMOsaSIg/s1875/Soriano%20in%20Paris.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1297" data-original-width="1875" height="276" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwLIyhmSsBfcPVUrUeXro4TqKwJmgBAdHvC7XxGGSaywx7BjM2mdv2T0Uih_xhxEqHjqTp_MbmocXWjzQ5yYfiGNroXBjS0UD2KqWrjDFZix4xKBtCv8D_C09J2aBwnM4rqprw6tlw7n437QpubTWFHAiImM3Hn6Nc1FCFJg894O3o4tdXvsrMOsaSIg/w400-h276/Soriano%20in%20Paris.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i><span style="font-family: trebuchet;">Soriano in Paris</span></i></b></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">In the early nineteen-nineties,
several years after I quit my post as managing editor of the <i>Herald</i> and
went free-lance, I had the honor and pleasure of sharing an office
in Buenos Aires with a brilliant journalist and writer by the name of
Claudio Iván Remeseira. We did a lot of talking, mostly about fiction and
writing, when we should have been working for a living, and in the course of
those conversations, Soriano’s name came up. I ended up telling Claudio the
story about how Soriano’s work first came into my hands. He thought it was a
great story and that a guy like Soriano would probably like to hear it. I said
that chasing after a big name like Soriano (he was indeed big by then) seemed
so sophomoric and unprofessional. He would surely think I was a jerk.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Years later, when I had
already moved from Buenos Aires to Patagonia, and when Remeseira was about to
pursue his own brand of self-imposed exile in New York, he again approached me
on the subject, saying he had told my story to a guy who sort of knew Soriano
and the fellow had said he was sure Osvaldo would be delighted to hear it. I
said I’d think about it, because to me, hermit that I tend to be, it just
seemed like a too extroverted, off-the-wall thing to do. But Remeseira managed
to get me Soriano’s home phone number and made me promise that the next time I
was in Buenos Aires I would give the best-selling author a call. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">And I did, repeatedly,
always getting an answering machine with the voice of Soriano’s French-born
wife on it. Some time later, I met up with Remeseira in Buenos
Aires and casually mentioned over drinks that I’d tried Soriano on
numerous occasions but none of my calls had been returned.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">“Haven’t you heard?” he
asked. “Soriano’s got lung cancer. He’s only seeing a few close friends. They
don’t think he’s going to make it.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Even this seemed like
another of his universal images, a passage from his last book, <i>Piratas,
fantasmas y dinosaurios</i> (Pirates, Ghosts and Dinosaurs), the book’s
first image, in fact, where he writes: “Every New Year’s Eve, I remember, if
only for an instant, the last one my father was alive. He was wrapped up in a
threadbare robe, on the doorstep of the house he rented in Santo Tomé. There
was still a butt between his lips, but by now it was killing him. He raised his
arm to wave good-bye to me as firecrackers and colorful roman candles burst
around him. We had quarreled, I think, because I hated the holiday season as
much as he did and couldn’t figure out what stupid custom made us get together
to toast one another and wish each other things in which neither of us
believed...”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">It seemed to me a
universal portrait. His father’s. My own father’s, some years later when he was
dying of that same disease and I couldn’t help hating myself for having
quarreled with him so often. Perhaps it is, in a way, a scene from the lives of
nearly every father and son. And, in the end, a self-portrait as well.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">That, I realized, was
the universal genius of this author, whose life had run parallel to mine for a
time, and whom I would never know. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 6.0pt; margin: 6pt 0cm 0cm;"><span face=""Trebuchet MS",sans-serif" style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Dan Newlandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01054536465220812092noreply@blogger.com4