THE THINGS YOU REMEMBER

Virginia and Dan in Paris, 1972

 The other day I came across a photo of Virginia and me in Paris. That was the second year we were married, so half a century ago. How time flies! On the one hand, some of the memories seem as clear as if they had happened yesterday. But on the other, it seems like it happened to someone else in another life.

That set me thinking about what it is we—or at least I—remember. Like, it’s never the monumental reality of being given the opportunity to live in the cultural center of the world, or even that what I recall was part and parcel of three years of my life that I handed over to the military. No, it’s the little memories. Things that happened on a day to day basis in the midst of one’s reality at the time. And I’ve realized that it’s all like that. That your life is all about what you’re doing while you’re making plans for what to do with the rest of your life.

At the particular time of this photo that I found, we were living, courtesy of the US Army, in Germany, a short distance by train from the French border and about five hours from Paris. It was, perhaps, the most bohemian time of our lives because I’d made Spec-5 (sergeant’s pay grade) by then and was doing some playing with a jazz trio on the side, so we were feeling more flush than at any time since we’d married in LA the year before. If we weren’t playing a tour —“we” being the 30^th Army Band that I was assigned to, attached to the 32^nd Army Air Defense Command under Major General C.J. Levan—our days were usually short. I mean, let’s face it, the “lifers” weren’t any more anxious than we three-year Regular Army and two-year draftees were to work a full day. So there were a lot of hours in the day to just enjoy living in Europe. And since we played tours where we were on the road during weekends and holidays, we also racked up a lot of compensatory time off. That meant we frequently had three, four or even five days off when we hung our soldier suits in the closet and lived like college kids bumming our way around Europe.

Barracks rats - Newland and Hardin (foreground)
Berg and Orcutt (rear). A little foosball after work.

For me, it was sort of like “a junior year abroad” without the benefit of the family money or university education that usually go with that institution. All I had to do in return was the job my Uncle Sam paid me to do—that, and put up with what Whitie, my dad, would have called “the usual Army chickenshit.” The rest of my time was mine to do with as I pleased.

Before Virginia arrived, I spent a month alone, living on the base. I stayed busy after work looking for an off-base apartment for us to live in, since despite being Regular Army, I wasn’t eligible for on-base housing. Those official quarters were only for guys who were already career soldiers and had “re-upped”. But living off-base would make the illusion of bohemian life all the more authentic.

For that month, I lived in a barracks, but nothing like the rough wooden barracks I’d live in as a single soldier during two of my earlier Stateside postings. This was a former German barracks (Kaserne as the Germans call it) and was a large three story stucco-sided brick and mortar building with a cadre office, storage and shops on the bottom floor and work area, sleeping quarters and spacious bathrooms on the upper floors. We rehearsed in the work area, and there were also foosball tables in there for after work. We barracks rats slept on single beds instead of bunkbeds and each was partitioned off with lockers where we kept our clothes and gear.

Kleber Kaserne - US Base at Kaiserslautern

I made friends right away with a group of other three-year RA troops—Tressler, Toy and Rice. Rice and Tressler were cultured guys, sound intellectuals and Yankees like myself. Toy was a Kentucky boy, born and bred, with excellent musical training and a passion for orchestral trumpet. Hardin, a six-foot-five, two-hundred-fifty-pound Texan who drove a Fiat 1100 that he barely fit into and put on like a shirt when he drove it, was the comic relief. He played baritone horn and was a pretty terrible musician. So you would have thought he’d be a really good soldier, but he wasn’t that either. He simply didn’t have much of a career choice, since everybody in his family, including his aunt and his mother, were, or had been, in the Army. Well, almost everybody. I once asked him if there was anybody in his family who hadn’t been in the Army.

“Yeah,” he said. “My daddy’s little brother.”

“How’d he manage that?” I asked.

“Died when he was fifteen.”

“So that’s the only one, in the whole family?”

“Well, there’s my momma’s older brother. He’s kinda the black sheep.”

“What is he, a pacifist?”

“Nope. A goddamn jarhead Marine.”

Hardin had tried to dodge the draft for a while. Wanted to sow some wild oats before he’d inevitably have to join the family business. So he went down and got lost in Juárez for a time. But he couldn’t stay out of trouble. Got into a fight in a Mexican cantina—something about cards and a señorita, he claimed—and ended up in jail.

His daddy, who was a command sergeant major, had contacts in Mexico and Hardin, after a few days in the clink, availed himself of a phone call to ask his ol’ man to come bail him out. The next day a couple of American MPs showed up. When they stood in front of his cell looking at him like he was a cockroach, he said, “Hey guys, what’s up? Y’all here to take me home?” one of them said, “Not so fast Hardin. Your ol’ man gave us specific orders. We take your ass outa here and accompany you to the recruiting office in El Paso, where you will sign up. Otherwise, pal, Top says you can stay here and rot for all he cares.” And that was how he’d enlisted.

Tressler and Rice both despised Hardin, and Toy was simply embarrassed by him, but I usually found him a comedic addition to any social gathering. He was always saying things like, “Man, I think you could fuck up a steel ball with a rubber hammer.” Or, “Y’know, son, I think the best part o’ you run down yer daddy’s leg.”

Luxembourg

I recall one occasion when I was picked as dance drummer with a four- piece combo to play at an elegant garden party thrown for the American consul on the grounds of a mansion in Luxembourg. Hardin went along as our driver in an Army-issue, olive drab station wagon.

The Luxembourg government treated us like VIPs and assigned a minor ministry official to accompany us to at a very nice restaurant when the garden party was over. I’d gotten my Spec-5 promotion by then so was the ranking member of the group. My colleagues and I made polite conversation with the gentleman accompanying us while we had drinks before our food arrived. Hardin, who was a notorious beer-drinker, was out of sorts because, as our official driver, he couldn’t drink—I made sure he didn’t—and was having a Coke.

Bored with the conversation and anxious for the food to arrive, during a lull he said, “Scuse me, can I ask you a stupid question, sir?”

The other four of us cringed at the thought.

But the polite official smiled, turned his full attention to Hardin, and said, “But of course, please do!”

“I know Luxembourg’s not very big, but just how big is it?”

“You mean surface area?” the official asked and Hardin nodded. “It’s about, but not quite, one thousand square miles.”

Hardin stared at him for a beat as if he thought maybe the guy was pulling his leg. Then he whistled, shook his head and said, “God-damn! You know you could fit six o’ this little bitty country in my county back in Texas?”

Lunch was pretty quick and quiet after that.

The things I remember best about barracks life there, however, were the little get-togethers after work with my buddies. There were only two private rooms in the living quarters. All of the ranking NCOs but one had on or off-base quarters of their own to go home to after work, so it was just us barracks rats who stayed behind. The one room was occupied by a lifer buck sergeant known to us as Sky King, who was always polite and friendly but never mixed with the rest of us and never left the base except on assignment throughout his entire tour. The closest he came to knowing anything about Germany was the minibar type fridge in his room that he kept chock full of a cheap locally brewed beer called BBK.  

My friend Rice was my same rank but I was a newbie and he was “short” (about to be discharged). He had a year’s time in grade on the rest of us so, other than Sky, he was the ranking NCO at night and had dibs on the room. That was where he, Tressler, Toy and I would retire to after work to play poker or Yahtzee. As the only Midwesterner, I also introduced euchre into our game mix and they all became immediate fans.

Typical Gasthaus

But it wasn’t really about the cards. It was about getting together and chewing the fat, sharing common interests, usually while enjoying good Chianti that we could buy cheap through the PX on post.

The thing I remember best, though, was the little supper adventure the four of us would have when we got hungry. We’d been warned to stay out of the woods behind the base. There was a Gypsy camp in the middle of it and it was considered an insecure place for soldiers. However, on the other side of the woods and across a two-lane highway, there was a wonderful gasthaus that made the alleged risk worth it. The Army never bothered to mend the hole in the fence that we made to slip through, so we had our own back door off the base.

The food there was inexpensive and absolutely delicious German fare. It was a homey atmosphere with a narrow dining room occupied by one very long and broad table and a few other smaller ones. It was attended by its owners and when you sat at the table, the lady of the house, in typical dirndl, apron and head-kerchief, would set out heavy ceramic plates and sturdy stainless silverware that she retrieved from a large hand-carved china cabinet and sideboard that had probably been in the family for generations. Typically, she would offer us schnapps and shot glasses while we waited for the meal and then bring us beer with the food. My mouth still waters at the thought of her wonderful Jägerschnitzel with mushroom gravy, or her sausage and homemade kraut with hand-mashed potatoes. Whatever the dish, it was preceded by hot soup, usually pea, and was served with homemade sourdough bread and butter.

As for the Roma people in the woods, with their luxurious tents and colorful wagons, they didn’t bother us and we didn’t bother them. They got so used to seeing us that they’d wave and bid us guten Abend as we passed through.

Virginia in the window of our attic flat
in Kaiserslautern

Even after Virginia arrived and we moved off-base, I, and sometimes both of us, would still get together some evenings with my buddies, but in downtown Kaiserslautern, at a place called Spinnrädl (Spinning Wheel). To Americans like us, it seemed utterly amazing that we were guzzling beer and schnapps in a tavern where workers had been doing exactly the same thing daily for well over two hundred years—or perhaps longer since that was just how far back the first historical reference to that place dated.

Anyway, about the picture…

The Spinnrädl, a centuries-old tavern 

That picture was from our first trip to Paris. We had been doing some local sight-seeing in Germany, taking daytrips to Heidelberg, Frankfurt and Worms, hiking to nearby Frankenstein Castle, taking the bus or train on a short trip to Landstuhl and so on. We had ventured in to France to see the incredible Metz Cathedral, but that was still close to home. Voracious readers that we were, Paris was the city that both of us were dying to see. That day when my then brand new Cannon Quickload camera snapped the portrait of us, I remember in vivid detail.

We had taken the night train from Kaiserslautern, and it was in the grey light of early morning that we were seeing Paris for the first time. Our first real glimpse of it was the dauntingly huge Gare de l'Est train station, with its endlessly sprawling switchyard. For Virginia, born and bred in Buenos Aires, it was exciting because it was Paris. But her own city was long known as “the Paris of South America” so the sheer size of the urban architecture wasn’t intimidating for her. For my part, however, I can still recall being nervous as a dog in a canoe as the train made its bumpy way over the numerous switches that lined it up with its assigned track in the station, and the butterflies that suddenly took flight in the pit of my belly as the train pulled into the impossibly high-ceilinged station proper, from which our Parisian adventure would begin.

Garre de l'Est, Paris

I had started traveling at eighteen. I had been to South America twice and had traveled from coast to coast with the Army. But the small-town boy in me shrank at the sight of the City of Light. This was Paris, a city that was previously a mere fantasy, a place I knew only through the descriptions of the likes of Hemingway, Joyce, Orwell, Henry Miller and Georges Simenon. I was glad to have Virginia there to snap me out of my daze and get me moving because the mere emotion of arriving had me so mesmerized that I could barely make my way out of the station.

I have vague sketches of Paris in my brain, the rainy Paris of impressionist paintings. There are clear snapshots of certain street corners and neighborhoods. I see the Arc de Triomphe not as a clear-cut memory but as a picture. And I’m not at all sure that it is a memory, but perhaps actually a photograph I’ve seen of it. The image of the Sacré-Coeur Basilica is, instead, authentic, since I found its interior, at least on that rainy day, somewhat dark and forbidding, and that’s exactly how I recall it. I remember little of the interior of Notre Dame, but I clearly recall standing on an outer balcony marveling at the gargoyles along the sides of the building and the view of the Seine from up there.

The Louvre, for its part, was nothing short of overwhelming. I can see a few of the great works housed there in my mind’s eye, and the art students who gathered with their sketchbooks for hours on end to try and capture the essence of one work, one detail or another, with the goal of learning by replication. But what I remember best about that unique treasure trove of great art was how neither Virginia nor I could sleep that night because our brains were overloading with the colors, textures and images that we had taken in as we tried to see as much as we could in a single day. On subsequent visits we learned to concentrate on a single area since trying to take in the Louvre in its entirety is a little like trying to drink Lake Superior in one sitting. I could have gone every day for years and only scratched the surface.

But what comes most clearly to mind when I remember that, and subsequent trips to Paris, aren’t the landmarks that tourists will ask one another about: Did you see this or did you do that. Instead, I have a sharp memory of the down-at-heel hotel we stayed in on the Left Bank. I remember the room with its creaky wooden floor, tall sooty windows overlooking a narrow, crowded street, a four-poster bed with a dusty, fringed canopy, a lavatory and mirror close by, as well as a bidet, but the bathroom—a rudimentary shower and a toilet with a roll of toilet paper that resembled nothing as much as birch bark—down the hall and shared by a few other occupants. And the thing is, I don’t remember it as horrific, which it was by almost any standard, but as romantic—as a room Miller might well have stayed in during his lean early Parisian days, or as that of almost any Lost Generation artist before they achieved fame.

I also have a clear memory of the Jardin du Luxembourg between the Latin Quarter and Saint-Germain, which is where the “Jurassic” selfie in question was shot. I can visualize the beauty and color of those verdant gardens on the morning when we went to walk there. I remember thinking about how Hemingway would take his infant son John, whom he called “Mr. Bumby”, in his baby buggy for a stroll in the park and, along the way, would surreptitiously catch pigeons, wring their necks and slip them under the covers with the baby so that he and his wife Hadley could broil them later like Cornish hens.

Sidewalk café in Saint Germain

I recall a lovely sidewalk café in Saint-Germain where we breakfasted on crusty croissants with big bowls of coffee and milk, which, to our surprise, also included a melted bar of chocolate. And leaving that same café, I remember colliding with a pretty young French woman in stylish clothing who smiled and said, sincerely, “Je suis désolée.” It was the first time I’d heard the phrase, which Virginia translated for me, and I thought it must be the most wonderful way in any language to say, “I’m sorry.”

My memories are similar about other places we visited during the fourteen months that we lived in Europe. They aren’t “big picture” memories, but tiny moments.

Like when our band was one of several that marched in a parade through a small town during the Fasching (Carnival) holiday and every time there was a pause along the route, florid-faced ladies from the town would mix into our ranks and serve us shots of cognac or schnapps.

We played at a beer tent afterward, where the organizers showed their appreciation by plying us with free locally brewed beer or mugs of cold white Moselle wine. People all danced, changing partners frequently, even when we played marches (Alte Kameraden—Old Comrades—was always a favorite, but they loved the Sousa marches as well), and one chunky man in his sixties even cheered us on as he climbed up onto one of the tables, bumping and grinding to the music as he stripped down to his undershorts. Nobody got upset or tried to stop him. Everyone was having too good a time, while outside the tent, wherever there was a semi-secluded spot, couples were making out or making love as others walked discreetly on by. The beer tents of Fasching and Oktoberfest quickly dispelled any learned cliché I ever entertained about the Germans being a cold and stodgy race.

The bohemian life - picnicking in Bad Homberg

I have many memories of certain places in Germany that I visited numerous times—Heidelberg, for instance—but there were many daytrips that now afford me a single, simple memory. One of these was a visit with an Army buddy and his wife, who were also our neighbors, to a town called Bad Homburg, located near Frankfurt.

I recall it because, despite the fact that its history dates back to the eighth century, there were no remarkable tourist attractions there. Long a residential haven for the upper classes, it was best known in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for its thermal waters and the spa that gave it its modern era designation (Bad, meaning bath). My memory, however, is of a lovely, sunny afternoon, a relaxing walk with our friends and a little picnic of some good Gouda cheese and French bread that we had brought along and a bottle of wine that we bought there, and that we enjoyed in the local park. It was all very impromptu and unplanned, which was what made it so special. 

Another memory of an impromptu picnic is from Genoa. We were staying at a threadbare little pensione that was high enough that the picturesque view from the balcony was of the surrounding hills and the orange-tiled roofs of the many old buildings. I remember little about the room except that it had a tiny balcony with a wrought-iron rail on which we hung our perennial jeans to air out at night. We were traveling light so didn’t have a lot of clothes—pretty much what was on our backs and a single change of underwear and sock. Everything we could, we rinsed out and let it drip dry while we slept. But jeans take a notoriously long time to dry, so they didn’t get washed. By this far into the trip, they were, thus, getting pretty gamey. A nightly airing helped a lot.

The other thing that I remember about the “accommodations”—clearly a figure of speech here—was that bathing was done on another floor in a bathroom with a large claw-foot tub. But the first time we decided to have a bath, we found that the faucets had no handles to turn them on. I went down to the concierge to ask him what the story was. Using pantomime and a few words of Spanish since I knew no Italian, I eventually managed to get him to understand that I wanted to know where the hell the faucet handles were for the tub.

Old Town section in Genoa

As if a lightbulb had switched on, he suddenly smiled, reached under the counter and handed me two handles, one for hot and one for cold. I was given to understand that it was how he made sure no one left the water running and how much time any occupant spent in the bath. So much for a leisurely scrub!

The picnic came after a morning of exploring the strange and ancient city from which Columbus had first set sail for the New World. Over the centuries Genoa had expanded up the steep and varied terrain that surrounds the port. So what I mostly recall is narrow, tortuous streets that twisted and turned in keeping with the lay of the land. Some leading down into the bowels of the city where shopkeepers’ lights are lit the whole day through and where sunlight seldom makes a real dent.

It was down in there that, not having eaten breakfast and feeling quite hungry by forenoon, we stopped at a rosticceria, where we bought a small, beautifully roasted chicken. Further along, we came to a bakery, where we bought a large, crusty shepherd’s loaf. Making our way upward, we came across a wine store where I bought a bottle of deep red spumante wine. Looking for a lovely place to have our lunch, we ended up climbing for nearly an hour into the hills surrounding the city, and there, found a beautiful park overlooking the many layers of the Genoa landscape as it tumbled toward the glistening harbor. There, near some ancient and crumbling stone walls, we flopped down cross-legged in the grass and, eating like savages with our hands, devoured the crispy chicken and delicious bread, and washed it down with the sweet, red spumante.  Seldom have I found a meal more delectable.

In Monaco I remember little or nothing about the Grimaldi’s palace, or the many yachts in their slips. But I vividly recall the pleasure of having nothing to do but sit on a castle rampart above the sea feeding the gulls that would pluck pieces of French bread right out of my fingers.  

Feeding the gulls in Monaco

In Milan, I remember the spectacular sight of Il Duomo Cathedral by night. But I have a clearer memory of wandering with Virginia, quite hungry, and quite by accident, into a wonderful neighborhood pizzeria where we stuffed ourselves on thick-crusted pizza alla Margherita with black olives.

 My recollection of a visit Virginia and I paid to the famed city of Cannes has nothing to do with either the beaches and marinas of the Riviera or the yearly film festival that the place is known for. Instead, I remember a pleasant park flooded with golden light at sunset as we sat on a bench there and watched the people go by.

I also remember our room in an old hotel with tall narrow windows that looked onto that park. Each window had a set of vintage wooden jalousie shutters. I was looking out the window as night fell when I heard a knock at the door. When I opened it, I was facing a tall, expressionless, hatchet-faced man who reminded me of no one as much as Lurch, the Addams Family’s butler. Without a word, he nodded toward the windows. I stepped aside to let him in. He strode across the room, opened each of the two windows, and, in turn, pulled closed the shutters with a bang and latched them. Then, just as silently and expressionlessly as before, he crossed the room and left without a single word. And the following night, at precisely the same hour, he did exactly the same thing. Clearly, having the shutters open or closed wasn’t a question of the occupant’s free will.

Another memory is of getting off the train, on a whim, at the Golfe-Juan-Vallauris station just three miles from Cannes and close to Antibes. There had been no plan to do that. It was all about Virginia remembering that she’d read something somewhere about the town of Vallauris and couldn’t recall what it was. It was nearly noon when the train left us and we started hiking up a winding road from the coast to the town proper. I can still feel the warm sun on my back and shoulders as we climbed.

That turned out to be a pleasant afternoon spent visiting the same streets Pablo Picasso had walked for the seven years that he lived there. Although today Vallauris has grown to the place that it is essentially a suburb of Antibes, back then it was a town of twelve thousand, barely larger than it had been seventeen years before when Picasso had last lived there. An artist of incredible scope and energy, Picasso didn’t move to Vallauris until he was sixty-seven. But his vitality and artistic longevity were such that his life and work would span nearly another quarter-century.

Picasso in his Vallauris studio

That afternoon, on that unexpected side-trip, we learned that the French town was best known for its pottery, and that medium was what would pique Picasso’s curiosity. He enthusiastically embraced the local potters, became their disciple and quickly learned from them the best ways to turn earth into art. Once he had made clay a medium of his own, he became obsessed with pushing beyond the known limits of ceramics into new frontiers. Vallauris became, in a very real sense, a place where the already celebrated painter and cubism pioneer re-invented himself as an artist.

Vallauris

His closest collaborators in those days were Suzanne and Georges Ramie of the Madoura ceramics shop. With them, Picasso created art objects that are among some of his most sought-after—plates, dishes, jugs and vases. Ever the painter, although his interest in earthenware itself was keen and inventive, his most powerful focus was on the firing process and everything that went with it. He worked with enamels, glazes and metal oxides in ways that they had never been used before to create stunningly decorated fire-clay ceramics. But he also created a new ceramic medium called white paste, which was decorated in relief and required no glaze.

It was also in Vallauris where the artist gave rein to yet another new passion: linocuts, the art of engraving linoleum block as a print-making medium for poster art. It was while in Vallauris that he would revolutionize this art form as well by introducing innovative designs and more vibrant colors than had ever been used before. Prolific as always, the combined ceramic and linocut works that Picasso produced there number into the thousands.

War and Peace

I recall being curious about a unique statue that stands in the main square of the town. That too turned out to belong to Picasso, perhaps one of his strangest and most controversial works: Man with Sheep. It was the artist’s first sculpture. He created it in 1943 and 1944, while living in Nazi-occupied Paris. He gave it to the town of Vallauris in 1949, in gratitude for the warmth shown to him during his first year living there. We later visited a chapel which is dominated by another Picasso work, entitled War and Peace, an abstract diptych mural that occupies the arched ceiling and both walls of the tunnel-like room—another gift from the artist to the town he clearly loved.

A momentary decision to get off the train, a whim to see what we could see, and an afternoon in Vallauris became another of those memories that last a lifetime.

These are the memories that we have, the ones that are less about the big picture and more about living every day, the ones born of surprises.  Ralph Waldo Emerson said it best: “Life is a journey, not a destination.” It’s all about the ride, not about “getting there”.