STUDEBAKER MEMORIES

The other day, I saw a less than complimentary memory test that was entitled the “Older Than Dirt Quiz”. The test named a list of seventeen outdated things and ranked those tested by approximate era according to how many of the items they were familiar with—categories were Whippersnapper, You’re Getting There, and Older Than Dirt.

I was a little depressed by the fact that I knew them all first-hand, which got me ranked as Older Than Dirt. But, at the same time, like just about everything else from my admittedly lengthy past, many of the things they mentioned brought me a certain twinge of nostalgia.

For instance, drive-in movie theaters…what wasn’t to like? Especially if you were with a carload of friends and somebody was old enough to buy a couple of six-packs. Or if you were on a date with somebody you really liked a lot and the movie was either a hot romance or something so scary you wanted to cuddle up. Although, that being said, I remember seeing Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho at the Midway Drive-in on Route 33 between Wapakoneta and St. Marys, and I was so spooked I couldn’t do anything but keep glancing into the rearview mirror to make sure Tony Perkins wasn’t sneaking up in his momma’s dress with a butcher knife in his hand.

Candy Cigarettes were a nickel a pack. I liked the ones that came in a mock Camels pack. A perfectionist, I refused to settle for the little red-dyed tip and would set a match to the end so as to give it a genuine ashy look. I’d suck away contently on the sugary end in my mouth, only slightly perturbed that my cigs got shorter from the mouth end and my father’s and my grandfather’s got shorter from the burning end. At twelve, however, I decided I’d had enough of the fake fags and started pinching the real thing from Whitie (my dad).

Remember 45 rpm records? Hell, I remember 78 rpms and recall too when 33-lps were a rarity. (Now they’re a rarity again, but are known as items of boomer vinyl nostalgia). The first one in our house was my sister’s recording of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and she and I played it until it was practically transparent. Then we started working on Brahms’ First.

Telephone party lines were common in my hometown of Wapakoneta when we were kids. I don’t think we had our first “private line” until I was about eleven or twelve, and it was a very big deal. There was nothing like a “private phone conversation” in that era. If you wanted to talk about anything you didn’t want all the neighbors to know as soon as you hung up, then you needed to actually meet the other party for a chat, or write them a letter and mail it at the Post Office.

Telephone etiquette dictated that if you picked up the phone and other parties were on the line having a conversation, you hung up and waited until the line was free. Patience was a virtue in the days of party lines, but it wasn’t one of Whitie’s. He was very short and to the point on the phone and expected his neighbors to be as well. I can remember several occasions on which, after he’d unsuccessfully attempted to place a call for a half-hour or so, he would interrupt some neighbor’s conversation by shouting into the receiver, “Hey, how ‘bout gettin’ the hell off the goddamn line for five minutes so somebody else can make a call!”

You could have your phone removed for that sort of discourtesy, but nobody ever dared to report Whitie.

Over in the nearby village of New Knoxville, phone communication was even more rudimentary. My Aunt Marilyn lived there back then, and still had a box phone with a crank on the side and had to make her calls through an operator. There, people knew which calls were for them by how many and what kind of rings the operator signaled them with. For instance, Aunt Marilyn’s code was “two longs and a short.” Village busybodies learned those codes by rote and knew just which neighbors would have the juiciest conversations to listen in on.

Pop machines with glass bottles were a given back then because glass was all bottles were made of. That, my friends, was a better world, in which we weren’t choking ourselves and the entire environment in plastic. Returnable glass bottles were a great invention and should be brought back. But go tell that to the climate deniers.

Butch wax—there’s a blast from the past! As long as he was paying for my haircuts, Whitie insisted that I should have either a butch, a pineapple or a flat-top. A butch was also known as a crewcut and was basically a shaved head with enough hair to see but not comb. A pineapple was essentially the same but with a little topknot up front to run a comb through. Kids that had them seldom bothered to comb them so they usually hung on their foreheads like a horse’s forelock. I thought they looked geeky and resisted Whitie’s attempts to convince me that they were “just as good as long hair but without all the bother.” (Ha! You wouldn’t have caught him wearing that haircut). The flat-top, however, appealed to me, because as short hair went, it was the most elaborate style. Crewcut short around the edges but with a square, even, brushable if close-cropped finish at the top. And you couldn’t have a flat-top without also having butch wax to make it stand straight up. I was never without a jar of butch wax in the bathroom cabinet until I was twelve, and old enough to start paying for my own haircuts, so I could have whatever style I wished.

Blackjack gum was the best. It came in an eye-catching sky-blue and jet black pack, was deliciously licorice-flavored, and was, unlike other gums, black!  My little brother and I liked to stretch it over our front teeth so that it looked like we were toothless. Very cool!

Home-ec classes weren’t something I, as a male, ever took part in—back then schools thought a woman’s place was in the home and a man’s was in an office or factory—but all the girls I went to school with had to take it. I still remember my highly intellectual sister cussing her way through all of the sewing and baking assignments.

Five and Dimes I’ve written about extensively. They were one of the most useful and incredible inventions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I once wrote that the G.C. Murphy’s five and dime in our town fascinated me as a boy. “When I was small, it seemed to me that there was nothing you could possibly want in the world that Murphy’s didn’t have: everything from a dazzling range of toys to a variety of ladies’ lingerie, from shoelaces and stationery to zippers and lace, from artificial flowers and dress patterns to sturdy work clothes and bandanna hankies, from floor mats and door mats to galoshes and snow boots, from wire trouser-stretchers and ribbons to dime-store cowboy novels and oilcloth tablecloths, from lavender cologne and bay rum to Sen-Sen breath mints and horehound cough drops, and so on and so forth. But the center of attention for me was the big oak and glass candy case at the front of the store. They knew right where to place it so that kids couldn’t help but feast their eyes on it both coming and going...smack in front of the door.”

Metal lunch boxes were part of my grade school years. There was never a time that we didn’t have a cafeteria in the excellent schools that Wapakoneta had to offer, but back then I was a picky eater. I knew the menu at school and on the days that there were things I didn’t like—tuna noodle casserole and rice soup spring to mind—I would “carry my lunch” (that was the expression).

I remember that I would wonder from about ten o’clock on during morning classes what Reba Mae, my mother, had packed for me. There were always, to my chagrin, carrots and celery. I ate those first to get them out of the way, so I could enjoy the rest of my lunch. If I left them in the box, I’d just have to eat them with supper because Reba Mae wasn’t one to take no for an answer. And, morally, I didn’t dare throw them in the trash because, you know, there were “the starving children in Europe” to think about in those post World War II days. Never could quite figure out how my cleaning up my plate would save a starving child in Europe, but suppose it was more about not being an ingrate.

The fare usually included a generous sandwich of cheese with bologna, summer sausage or honey-loaf ham on Wonder Bread with French’s mustard. Sometimes there would be a little bag of potato chips. There was always an apple. And there might be a couple of oatmeal, chocolate chip or peanut butter cookies if my mother had been baking. But I considered it a real jackpot if Reba Mae had been to the grocery and generously decided to include a two-unit package of Hostess cream-filled cupcakes, Snowballs or Twinkies. Nice to have two. You could share. I mean, you could if you were generous. I wasn’t. I always ate them both. In winter, a small Thermos bottle was added to the mix, filled with Campbell’s tomato, vegetable or chicken noodle soup. To drink, the school provided half-pint returnable glass bottles of milk for two cents each—in our schools’ case, supplied by the locally owned and operated Brown’s Dairy.

Books with records were the interactive tools of the day when I was a kid. The idea was that kids could listen to the record and read along in the book. It was a nice idea, but, left to their own devices, kids usually conveniently lost the book and kept the record. These were relatively expensive items, and I don’t recall our having many, but I do remember two. They were very attractive since as a novelty, instead of being regular black paste records, the stories were recorded of bright-colored vinyl. We had Alice in Wonderland, which was recorded on translucent yellow vinyl, and Mighty Paul Bunyan the record for which was bright blue—like Paul’s legendary ox, Babe.

My sister Darla loved the Alice in Wonderland record. I found some of the tunes on it catchy—I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date / No time to say hello, goodbye / I’m late, I’m late, I’m late! / I’m overdue / I’m in a rabbit stew / No time to say hello, goodbye / I’m late, I’m late, I’m late!

But I considered Paul Bunyan “my record” and played it until it was scratchy and full of skips. I particularly liked a tune about The Big Rock Candy Mountain.  It went like this: Oh the buzzing of the bees in the popcorn trees / Near the chocolate ice cream fountain / Where the jelly beans grow and the milk shakes flow / Down the big rock candy mountain. / Oh the children eat their fill of the whip cream hill /And no one's ever countin' / There's so much to eat /Life is one long treat / On the big rock candy mountain…

Boone’s Farm “wine”… Drank a lot of it the year I was stationed in Los Angeles with the Army at Fort McArthur. It wasn’t what I would consider wine today—the most famous of its “varietals” was strawberry—but it was available and it was cheap. My wife and I got married while I was stationed there. She hailed from Argentina, a country with a fine wine culture into which Boone’s Farm just didn’t fit. So I started raiding a basket at the local PX that was labeled “Wines of the World”, where you could get a passable chianti or burgundy for ninety-nine cents.

Metal ice cube trays were the best. Ours had a lever at one end that you pulled up to release the cubes. They were clean and efficient and never got that “refrigeratory” smell that the plastic ones do if you don’t use the ice right away.

Roller skate keys—why they only asked about the keys I don’t know. But these were keys (miniature wrenches actually) used with a type of roller skates that were popular in the fifties and sixties and that were strapped onto the skater’s shoes rather than having leather uppers of their own. I never had roller skates—though I would eventually get ice skates—but my sister Darla did. And she was really good on them. I can still see them strapped to her two-tone saddle shoes. And I can remember, when I was very small, the satisfying roar of her metal-wheeled skates rolling up and down the sidewalk in front of our house on North Defiance Street.

The key was used to loosen and tighten adjustment screws that permitted wearers to widen or lengthen the skates to fit their feet. It was important for the skates to fit the foot snugly, since they were dangerous enough without the added hazard of a sloppy fit that would allow the ankles to be easily twisted or broken.

Back then, just about every little girl in town had a pair of these adjustable skates. It was a skill set—like playing jacks—that middle class grade school girls were just about expected to know. There came a time that Darla sort of outgrew skating, but I can recall her skates languishing at the bottom of our toy chest for years to come.

Milk in glass bottles we got through home delivery by the Meadow Gold milkman. You left the empties out on the porch with a list of what you needed written on a roll-up piece of paper that you stuck in the neck of one of the bottles—quarts of milk, butter, heavy cream, chocolate milk, etc.—and he got the things off of his truck and left them in the exact same spot by your door.

People who knew they were going to be out all day might leave instructions for the milkman to go on into the house and leave the things in the fridge. Back in those days, in Wapakoneta, crime was negligible, and almost no one locked their back door, which was almost always close to the kitchen, so there was no need to leave the milkman a key. And everyone trusted the milkman to come in and leave the dairy order. He was the milkman, after all.

When I think about this sixteenth one, it does seem like a stretch for anyone nowadays to believe, but when I was a kid, wax Coke bottle sweets were a treat we enjoyed. Actually made of “edible” grade paraffin, the wax bottles were molded to look like miniature Coca-Cola bottles. They contained a sweet syrupy, cola-flavored liquid which, Coke generation that we were, our taste buds were attuned to love. You could either bite off the top and suck the syrup out, or you could simply chew the whole thing like chewing gum until the flavor was gone. That wasn’t our only paraffin treat. At Halloween time, we always had flavored paraffin false lips, mustaches and teeth that, once you got done looking monstrous wearing them, you could also chew.

Our mothers were wise enough to tell us back then not to swallow the paraffin—which was made from a combination of solidified vegetable oils and synthetic resins—but to spit it out like used gum once it had the “good” chewed out of it. We now know that so-called “edible” paraffin can’t be digested, so just sort of sits around in your insides. In other words, if may not kill you to swallow it, but it surely can’t help your health any either.

But out of all seventeen items, the one that sparked the greatest nostalgia in me was the Studebaker. It’s a name and a car that is always present in my memory. So when I saw that “Studebaker” was one of the seventeen items on the “Old As Dirt” list, my first thought was, “Studebaker? Who doesn’t know what a Studebaker is?” But just as suddenly, I realized that I really am “old as dirt”, since to anyone under age sixty living today, that automotive name must surely sound like when my generation heard our grandparents extoling the virtues of the Stutz Bearcat sports car. We had no idea what they were talking about.

My Grandpa Murel (Whitie’s dad) was an avid Studebaker fan. Before the South Bend, Indiana, car manufacturer went out of business in 1963, he owned at least three of their vehicles. As an insurance man who was constantly on the road, he was sold on the Studebaker Champion.

The Champion was a sedan of ultra-modern design. And although it was a fairly common family and business vehicle, it had a simple but classically tasteful interior design as well. Its body design was based on the idea that “weight was the enemy,” and as such, it was among the lightest cars on the road for its size. That combined with its 2.8-liter flathead straight-six motor also rendered it highly economical. When other major car brands considered “good mileage” to be sixteen or eighteen miles to the gallon, the Champion boasted better than twenty-five under ideal conditions. And its engine was so reliable that it quite often outlasted the car itself.

It was, however, enough for me that my grandfather was sold on it. I took his word for it and became a fan. For me, it was the best car in the world. And Grandpa Murel’s was unique, because it had a mother of pearl steering knob on the wheel, and ever-swiveling compass on the dash, and camp stools, fishing rods and tackle in the trunk.

I liked to ride along wherever he went, when he let me. Sometimes I ended up sitting in the car forever, waiting for him to get done selling a life insurance policy to someone. But there were times when the wait was worth it. Times when he’d say, “Wanna see if the fish are a-bitin’?” And we’d stop a while at Indian Lake to sit together on folding camp stools in the sunshine or under the drizzle and try to coax a fish onto our hooks. That’s what the name Studebaker means to me.

Time, as Einstein pointed out, is relative. And in a certain sense, memories are matter. What I mean by that is that things aren’t just things. They are also the stuff of memories. And no matter how outdated younger generations might find the things we “older than dirt” people can still recall, as long as someone can still feel, smell, taste, hear and see those items in their mind, they continue to exist.  Indeed, when writers write about them and painters paint them, and photographers capture them for posterity, things of the past or not, they live on forever.               

SMALL MIRACLES

 

My bedtime reading the last few nights has been very pleasantly occupied with a book of essays by Ann Patchett entitled These Precious Days. I was struck in one of the essays, The Worthless Servant, by the truth and wisdom contained in a quote by Robert F. Kennedy that she includes. It goes like this:

Robert F. Kennedy

“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

I’ve had first-hand experience with this. When I first started working for the Buenos Aires Herald as a young idealistic writer-wannabe in my mid-twenties, believing in “the power of one” was a mere act of faith—a platitude that I repeated as a high ideal but that was, in the end, hard to seriously believe in at any practical level.

Former Buenos Aires Herald Editor Robert Cox

But as the difficult years of my earliest days in South America went on, and as I watched Editor Robert Cox take on first the right-wing death squads working undercover with the elected government of Isabel Perón and then, the ruthless power of the military regime that was to follow, I began to see that one small voice, one small newspaper, one small but courageous editor, could make a difference. He could, single-handedly, change minds. He could influence foreign policy in Europe and the United States. He could, in the end, save lives and shine a spotlight on something heinous and morally wrong. He could defend his rights and the rights of others simply by not being too afraid to raise his voice in their defense, while accepting that the risk to his own life was worth it in the larger scheme of things.

In this essay, Patchett was telling the story of an assignment she once accepted to write about a saint. At first she rejected the offer because she couldn’t see the value in writing yet another glowing tribute to some long-dead individual, canonized by the Vatican and afforded the official honor of sainthood. She told the editor making the offer that if she were asked to write about someone she considered a living saint, it might be different. But one more story about a long-accepted saint? It seemed like an overkill to her.

To her surprise, the publication acquiesced, asked her to submit the story of “her saint”, and Patchett took up the challenge. She decided to write about a Nashville priest whom she’d known since childhood. This priest, this man, was someone who had devoted his entire life to helping the troubled and destitute in any way he could.

Ann Patchett

This was a lot more than mere “thoughts and prayers.” This was about finding homes for the homeless, lifting people out of abject despair and hopelessness, helping the destitute, the forgotten, the addicted, the morally and spiritually crushed to take a first step in a series of baby steps that could lead them to “something better” even when a smashing success might never be a possibility.

Father Charlie, Patchett’s priest friend, refused to throw up his hands and consider certain social situations hopeless. He settled instead for the small miracles that could be worked by doing something even when it was next to impossible to do everything to solve the problems of the world—his world. You had to start at your own doorstep in exercising humanity. You chose to help or not to. But you couldn’t be a true Christian if you failed to love your neighbor, no matter how “undesirable” that neighbor might seem to you. That was his message.

Patchett’s Nashville priest reminded me of one I’d known in Buenos Aires, back in the late 1970s. His name was Padre Argentino. Or at least, that was his nom de guerre. He was, at the time, the subject of persecution, which began in the mid-seventies when the Triple-A, a far-right splinter of the vastly eclectic Peronist movement, in the person of former policeman José López Rega, had usurped the government of an all too accommodating President Isabel Perón, and was purging just about everybody left of Adolf Hitler from the party of Perón. They considered Padre Argentino—along with scores of other so-called “third world priests”—to be dangerous Marxists, who were seeking to incite revolt against the “Western and Christian” far-right.

Father Carlos Mujica, murdered by the Triple-A

A Triple-A (Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance) thug had already murdered unabashed third world cleric Father Carlos Mujica, whose work in the slums of Buenos Aires and his philosophy regarding empowering the poor had caused him to run afoul of not only López Rega and far-right Peronism, but also of Buenos Aires Archbishop Juan Carlos Aramburu, long a champion of Catholic conservatism, to whom Mujica’s fraternal relationship with the poor and his chapel’s unfettered service to them he found dangerous, distasteful and offensive to the Church hierarchy. The Triple-A would also, shortly before I met the padre, slaughter seven priests and seminarians of the Pallottine Order while they were at prayer at Saint Patrick’s Parish in the Belgrano neighborhood on Buenos Aires’s North Side. 

For his part, Padre Argentino had narrowly escaped an assassination attempt while running a soup kitchen for the homeless in midtown Buenos Aires. He was no more a communist than I was. He was merely a priest doing the job that he felt God, not the Church, had set out for him. He identified with the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth and with the likes of Saint Francis of Assisi and Mother Teresa of Calcutta, not with those of the upper-class, conservative, Argentine Catholic hierarchy and their friends in the military establishment. And as such, he found himself consistently threatened with death at the hands of the Triple-A and with being defrocked by the Church leadership, which was equivalent to a death warrant in the climate of the Peronist far-right’s war on leftist ideals.

After the failed assassination attempt, friends helped him escape to Bolivia where he hid out for a short time, but his mission to the poor in his native Argentina seemed far more important to him than his own safety and he slipped back across the border under the radar. He set up a new mission in an impoverished industrial suburb of Buenos Aires, where he was never known as anything but Padre Argentino. It was a neighborhood where overcrowding, incest, chronic alcoholism, poverty and ubiquitous toxic industrial waste tended to foster an inordinate number of birth defects and cases of retarded brain development in children. Padre Argentino saw that these were kids who simply fell through the cracks, who had no place to go, were rejected by the education and social welfare system, and seldom received sufficient care and guidance at home.

He took the bull by the horns, commandeered an abandoned, shot-up, half-burned house that had once been the hideout of a gang of delinquents summarily wiped out by the provincial police, fixed it up as best he could with the help of a few friends and scant cash and material donations, and created the Little School of St. Francis of Assisi. The school’s main lesson was love and caring. He fed the children and taught them whatever their distinct capacities permitted them to learn. He also became the spiritual leader of that interurban subsistence community, creating his own ad hoc parish for people disenfranchised and disdained by the official Catholic community, performing marriages, funerals, confession and any other services and rites his presence called for, ever assisted by a Down Syndrome boy called Minguito, who was his loyal superhero acolyte—and who, whenever he wasn’t occupied with ecclesiastical matters, was busy being El Zorro or Batman.

He did all of this in a climate of abject poverty in which every plate of soup, every loaf of bread, every pencil and sheet of paper, every storybook depended on his ability to effectively beg every day of his life in the very best of Franciscan traditions. His days were eighteen hours long and utterly exhausting, but he did it all without complaint, though with not infrequent fits of rage at the injustice of the system and at the complete apathy of Mother Church.

A few years back I wrote a series of pieces about how I was responsible for wrecking Padre Argentino’s mission. I can’t recall right now the titles I put on those essays, but collectively they could have been called No Good Deed Goes Unpunished. It’s a long and complicated story, but the long and the short of it is that, in the brashness of my youth at that time (I first met and wrote about the padre when I was twenty-nine), I thought I had all the answers. I could solve everything. It was easy. I’d just go to the people with the money and get them on board. Nobody better for this, I figured, than the American expatriate business community.

I took Padre Argentino’s case to the American Society of the River Plate, enthused a critical mass of the community and we set to work forming a foundation to fund the Little School of St. Francis. Thing is, nothing like that happens in an expat American community without the US Embassy finding out. And since the wife of the military attaché was one of the most enthusiastic promoters of the project, it wasn’t long before the ambassador’s wife was involved, and then the ambassador himself.

When I told Padre Argentino what I’d been up to, he looked worried. “This could backfire, m’hijo,” he said.

He was right. It wasn’t long before I got a call from the military attaché, Colonel Skip McDonald. Skip said the ambassador had wanted to get involved.

“Great!” I said.

“Well, maybe not. He’s not going to be able to get personally involved. When we ran a background check on the priest…”

“Background check?”

“Well, yeah. You know, Dan, the ambassador can’t be associated with anybody we don’t know anything about.”

“So, tell him not to get involved,” I said, starting to get irritated.

But it wasn’t that simple. The background check had been done already and it seemed that Argentine military intelligence had the padre on a list of “suspected subversives”.

I was like, well okay, so no ambassador. Who cares? But Skip was quick to make me see the light. “Before, the Argentine Army didn’t know where this guy was. Now they do. We’ve shined a light on him. If he’s your friend, you might want to give him a heads-up.”

So off went Padre Argentino to exile again and furious with me for my infernal meddling. But not without telling me that it was my responsibility to fix what I’d broken. I told him I had no idea where to begin. He told me not to worry, that God would provide. I rolled my eyes and said, “Yeah, right.”

For a while the fate of the school hung in the balance. The folks at the American Society were still willing to back the project if I would run it or would find somebody else to do it.

Almost on cue, a young Canadian woman called Martha Thompson showed up at the newspaper where I worked. She was living with her Argentine boyfriend in Buenos Aires now and was looking for something to do involving social issues. I said perhaps she could do some writing for us in that area and asked what her background was in the field of social work. She said that although she had most recently been recovering from tuberculosis, which she’d contracted while working in India, she’d gained a lot of previous experience there. What was she doing in India, I wanted to know?

“Working with Mother Teresa in Calcutta,” she said, as casually as she might have said, “Working at Burger King.”

I said, “Girl, do I have a job for you!”

So things sort of worked out in the end—but not for Padre Argentino, whose mission I ended in one fell swoop. The point being, that sometimes a willingness to help isn’t enough. You have to know how to help without ending up being a bull in a china shop.

That was the lesson that this experience taught me, and from then on, I’ve taken a much humbler approach to helping when I think I can make some difference. And I’ve learned too that those tiny ripples that Bobby Kennedy talked about do indeed have an effect. But the more thought you put into each pebble of care you cast, the more effective those tiny ripples will be.   

Juan Bautista Bairoletto

I have a neighbor in Patagonia with whom I’ve been friends since he was fourteen and I was forty-three. Back then, he was a wild kid riding a horse bareback and raising hell with his other roughneck buddies everywhere. They liked to think of themselves as modern-day Billy the Kid type characters, or, more accurately, as the new embodiment of Argentina’s legendary Juan Bautista Bairoletto, who roamed the pampas as an outlaw after he shot and killed a rural policeman in a fight over a prostitute whom both men were courting—an almost mythical character known to the rural rich as a dangerous bandit and killer, and to the poor as a Robin Hood hero.

The young adolescent had it rough, growing up without a father and having to help his mother make ends meet as she struggled to bring up his seven younger sisters and brothers. Despite being barely more than a boy, when I first met him, he was already an extraordinary horseman and was working, whenever tourism allowed, out of the riding stable of a well-known member of the Anglo-Celt community. In spite of his youth, he was leading tourists on long horse-trekking excursions along mountain trails that he already knew like his own backyard, for fees that were meager, to say the least.

As I got to know him, he admitted to being very nearly illiterate, never having had time to attend more than a few years of school, despite federal laws making grades one through six compulsory, and only on a hit and miss basis even then. The majority of his time was devoted to survival—his own and his family’s. As the eldest male, he was the man of the family at fourteen, and then as now, he commanded the respect of his siblings.

He started doing some work for me when he was seventeen. But he always came as the assistant of a Chilean boy of the same age who hailed from a farming family, was much better educated, and had accumulated considerable skills working with his far older stepbrothers who were all handymen and proficient as carpenters, brick masons, gardeners, lumberjacks and fence-builders.

The better I got to know him, the more I realized just how intelligent my young neighbor was. He wasn’t just smart. He was unimaginably bright, a careful critical thinker, a super-quick learner and a guy with a highly creative mind. What he lacked was confidence in himself, often describing himself as “an ignorant jerk like me” and fairly content (or perhaps relieved) to let others lead while he labored under their orders.

After my experience with Padre Argentino, I found myself being highly critical of my first impulses. Who the hell was I to meddle in other people’s lives, to tell them how to improve themselves, to grab them by the scruff of the neck and drag them kicking and screaming to “empowerment”, whether they liked it or not? I mean, after all, was I such a smashing success that I could now devote my efforts to giving others life-lessons? This kid already knew many times more about life and survival than I would ever be able to learn.

Still, if I knew I could make suggestions that might change his life for the better, wasn’t it wrong and selfish of me not to get involved? So one day when I saw him alone, I struck up a conversation with him. I told him that I’d watched him work. That I couldn’t understand why he was always the assistant when he had skills of his own. Fence-building, rustic construction, lawn care, land-clearing, logging, painting…he seemed to be as good or better at them than the people he worked for. But he didn’t seem very convinced that I was right.

Nevertheless, I started hiring him directly for certain jobs, both at home and in the seventy acres of natural forest for which I was the private warden. He responded to my confidence and did an excellent job at everything I assigned him. He created a team with his two younger brothers. I recommended them to the handful of other neighbors that I had at that time. Back then, there were no services of any kind in our area except electricity. People had to heat with firewood. And there were only a few of us who gathered, sawed and chopped our own. The rest bought theirs from providers elsewhere. My young friend and his team got in on the unloading and chopping but were not equipped to handle any other stages of the firewood process because they didn’t have a chainsaw, this despite the fact that they often were given firewood as part of their pay on land that they cleared for construction. But they had to saw in situ only as much as they could use, because they had to borrow their clients’ saws to cut it. And then they had to pay somebody with a truck to haul it to their homes.

I couldn’t afford to buy him a truck, but I could indeed buy him a chainsaw and did. I gave it to him unconditionally. Suddenly, he was an entrepreneur, cutting and selling firewood, pruning dead branches from trees in people’s yards, cleaning up fallen timber, cutting rough-hewn lumber from felled trees and doing just about any job that called for a chainsaw and the skill to use it. My recommendations to anybody who asked me whom they could hire for firewood, lawn care, fence-building house-painting and so on, placed their minds at ease about hiring him since most of them only knew him as a wild little bandido-wannabe who ran with the wrong crowd.

As he got more and more work, he invested in the other tools of his trade. He improved himself personally as well, taught himself to read and write, learned to drive, bought a car with a hauling trailer and then a full-sized pick-up. Soon, I no longer had to be his promoter. His work and his seriousness spoke for themselves and he and his team eventually had more work than they could handle.

I’ve watched over the years as he has grown from an underprivileged kid putting on a brave face as he struggled to help his mother make ends meet, into a skilled handyman, with a family of his own and a thriving rural services business in which he is now seconded by his eldest son, and hires others to work for him. At forty-two, he is a respected member of our growing mountain community, where every new family that comes to settle here is a likely new name on his satisfied clients’ list, since everyone who has used the services of him and his family is sure to recommend him above any outsider.

He owes nothing to anyone for this success. But I have the tacit inner satisfaction of knowing that when I saw someone I knew had the potential to overcome the insecurity into which he was born—to leave behind a path that could only have led him to delinquency, to seek to improve himself in every way imaginable and to build a life of dignity for himself and his loved ones—

I stepped out of my comfort zone and gave him the tiniest of nudges in the right direction. Little ripples that cross over each other and exact inexorable change for the better.

These are the ingredients that small miracles are made of, and observing how the ripples from one small pebble I once threw into the water had such a far-reaching trajectory, I never again doubted the wisdom of reaching out wherever I could make the tiniest of differences. I haven’t done much. But I’ve done something on one occasion after another. And doing something because you can always seems to have a multiplying effect.

The point that Ann Patchett makes in The Worthless Servant is that the person who truly benefits from every act of service we perform out of love and/or empathy for our neighbor— simply because we can—isn’t the receiver but the giver, whose life becomes so much richer every time we realize how lucky we are and share our abundance instead of clinging not only to all of our stuff, but also to the idea that we need so much more.

 

FROM 2011—FIFTY YEARS AGO TODAY

 

Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway died at sixty-one, and today is exactly sixty-one years since he passed away. To mark this anniversary, I felt it would be fitting to repost this piece that I published fifty years later in 2011, when I myself was sixty-one. How time flies!

They all needed a night out. His ever-worsening mental state was weighing heavily on his wife, Mary. His friends were mostly trying to ignore it, pretend it wasn’t as bad as it seemed. He was a tough old bird. He was just going through a rough patch. That’s what they thought.

His buddy Hotch, who was twenty years the old man’s junior, had become a good friend over the years and the old man seemed more at ease with him than with a lot of other people. He could talk straight to Hotch. This was a guy who could chronicle the old days, when life was grand, so that they read like a fine novel.

Truth be told, though, Hotch was putting on a brave face and trying to act like the old days were coming back again, that everything was going to be okay. But things weren’t okay. This old man, who now was looking his age and more, was going fast and it was sad to see. He’d made a name for himself as a hunter and adventurer—a huge name, in fact, bigger than life. And now he was so messed up that even a little wing shooting in a farmer’s field had him spooked.

Hotch had thought a little hunting would buck him up and had assembled a party of four other old buddies for the occasion.  They were out in some large, open fields, land where one of the guys had been told by the owner that he could hunt anytime. But after somebody pulled down on a couple of woodcocks that fluttered up out of the cornstalks, and  missed, the old man started dawdling and fretting. Wanted to wait, he said, to see if the shots brought anybody scrambling out to tell them to get off the land. The assurances of the others that everything was okay didn’t help. Far from the often boastful big game hunter of yesteryear, the old man looked hunted himself now, prey to his own unreasonable fears.

He finally got one of them to knock on the door of the farmhouse and ask for permission right there in front of him, so he’d know everything was okay. The farmer’s wife said, sure, no problem. The fields were harvested and nobody minded that they were hunting there. It was all right.

But back out in the field again, after a pheasant broke from the stubble and another of the hunters picked it off as it flew over, the old man stood looking pale, staring down at the ground where the bird lay dead and started saying maybe they’d better get the hell out of there. So what if they had the farmer’s wife’s okay? What if the farmer himself came home and saw a bunch of guys tramping around shooting up the game in his fields? What if he just pulled a shotgun out of the truck and took a potshot at them? This didn’t feel right. It was trespassing. He wanted to go.

So that night Hotch and the old man and the old man’s wife went out to eat. At first it was fun. Mary needed a night out in a nice restaurant. Things were not good. He was getting to be a handful and she was exhausted.

The old man, who had a well-earned reputation for being able to just about hold his weight in liquor, was lately sticking to a regimen that bordered on the abstemious. Of course, it had always been a hard reputation to keep up and sometimes made him do some pretty stupid things. Like the time he tried out a new pistol by firing it into the toilet bowl at the Ritz in Paris and flooded the room. Or that other time, also in Paris, when he’d thought he was pulling the toilet chain and ended up pulling a rickety skylight down on his head. That caused a pretty severe head injury. And then there were other head injuries in those two different plane crashes he was in down in Africa. It was uncanny how accident prone he was. But also how lucky. He’d always been lucky. He’d always survived. He was a tough guy.

That night, however, he was being careful. Everything worried him lately and he was taking care of himself. He ordered a single cocktail before dinner and had a single glass of wine with the meal. But still, the alcohol seemed to cheer him, warm him, brighten his mood. After a while he started talking about old times and laughing about things he and Hotch had done together  and things he’d done alone. And for a fleeting moment, he was kind of acting like his old self. It was nice to see him like that, and Hotch and Mary would have done anything to keep that mood alive.

But then, suddenly, he froze, dropped his eyes and muttered something about “the two guys at the bar”. What about them? They were Feds…FBI…G-men. And they were there because of him. They were tailing him wherever he went. How did he know? Just by looking at them. Didn’t Hotch and Mary think he knew a damned Fed when he saw one?

At the clinic the doctors decided electroshock treatment was in order. Nobody’d wanted to put him through that, but the doctors thought it was necessary.

Desperate times required desperate measures. Mary was scared. It frightened her that he kept talking about killing himself all the time. She was scared he might do it. She told Hotch that sometimes she’d find him just standing staring out the window while holding one of his guns in both hands. It was unnerving. She was afraid to leave him alone. She showed Hotch a letter that the old man had tried to write to his bank. It looked like gibberish. He couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t write any more, though he kept trying. So maybe the shock treatments would work.

They gave him more than ten in a month, December. The old man spent Christmas at the clinic, Mary in a nearby hotel. When Hotch went to visit him at the hospital he was shocked by the old man’s appearance. He’d always been an imposing figure. Always carried well over two hundred pounds on his big frame. But now he didn’t weigh one-seventy-five. He looked terrible.

But when they began to talk, he kind of seemed like his old self. There was something, though. Something Hotch couldn’t quite lay his finger on. Something exaggerated, not quite right. The old man got Hotch to ask if they could take a walk. The nurse said no problem and brought the old man his clothes.

Hotch made small talk, said it seemed the shock doctors were really helping him. Everything was okay until the old man indicated, very confidentially, that the walls in his room had ears. He hadn’t wanted to talk there. He said he’d tried to turn himself in to the local authorities, but that the Feds evidently hadn’t told them about the rap. He wanted to turn himself in. He was afraid of hurting innocent people around him who didn’t have anything to do with his problem with the FBI, people who’d covered for him.

Hotch was astonished. None of this was working. The old man had them fooled.

The doctors didn’t seem that worried. If he was still clinging to a delusion or two, that’d probably go away when he started working and his recovery was such, they seemed to think, that the old man now couldn’t wait to get back to his writing. Did they realize, Hotch wondered, that they were working with someone extraordinary, a remarkable man who was perfectly capable of outsmarting the smartest shrink around? They knew. Not to worry.

So they sent the old man home. He tried to work, but it was no good. The electroshocks had knocked the hell out of his memory. He was confused, couldn’t pull it all together again, couldn’t write. He was depressed, though he tried to pretend he was doing okay. But then one day Mary came home and found him standing in the vestibule with a shotgun with the breach broken open in one hand and two shells in the other and she knew he wasn’t going hunting.

Back he went to the clinic. He fought it. Tried to kill himself again before they took him back and was saved from himself by an obviously strong friend who managed to wrestle a gun away from him.  This time the doctors told Mary to stay away. They were going to keep him isolated from the outside world. Try to concentrate the treatment, focus on a cure.

More drugs. More electric shock treatments. More bitterness and confusion.

Then, he started seeming better. He quit talking about suicide, started talking about going home. Mary wanted to make sure he was well. She didn’t think she could take three more months like the ones she’d had with him the last time they’d declared him well and sent him home.

They started letting her see him again. He was irritable, furious about what the treatment was doing to his memory. He was a writer, goddamnit. He needed his memory. But at least he wasn’t talking about suicide.

When Hotch finally was able to visit him again, he and the old man took a walk, like the other time. While on the walk, he gave Hotch a horse chestnut, a lucky piece he’d been carrying around for years. Hotch didn’t know what to make of this, or of the old man’s telling him that if anything happened, he, Hotch, should take care of Mary. He also talked about how fighters could retire, how people understood when a fighter lost his legs or the power of his punch. But if you were a writer, everybody wanted to know what you were working on.

The conversation left Hotch ill at ease. He absentmindedly picked up a pebble from the beach, but the old man stopped him. Leave it, the old man told him. Nothing good could come from this place.

Mary wanted to go to their place in the mountains for the summer that year. Should she? The doctors thought so, even thought maybe the old man should go too. He was doing much better they thought. He too seemed to want to. Maybe there he could get back down to work. She wasn’t so sure. She wasn’t sure at all.

But eventually that’s what happened. They drove from the clinic, the old man, Mary and an old friend who acted as driver. It was a three-day trip and the old man seemed to enjoy it thoroughly. It was good, it seemed, to be out of the clinic, to be going home to a place he loved, where he could be in the great outdoors.

On the night of his first full day back in that mountain home that he’d loved so well, the old man enjoyed a pleasant dinner and seemed at ease and happy to be home and free of the clinic.

Early the next morning, July 2^nd, 1961, Ernest Miller Hemingway, shoved the barrel of a twelve-gauge shotgun into his mouth and ended one of the most formidable lives in modern American letters. This inimitable writer, considered, by then, the old man of American letters, this popular American superhero, known since he was in his late thirties as ‘Papa’, was still a few weeks shy of his sixty-second birthday.

It happened fifty years ago today.

This piece is a tribute to Ernest Hemingway, one of the greatest writers of our time and is dedicated to A.E. Hotchner, the greatest of his biographers.