Author: gwayland

LOST FOREVER, FOREVER SWEET

“I found this the other day,” said Joe Dunn.

Have I mentioned him before? He stops in the Mile once in a while. The Last Mile Lounge. When I saw him at a table, I went over and sat with him since I hadn’t seen him in a while. I think he used to live in the neighborhood, lives in New Hampshire now and stops by the Lounge when he’s in town to say hello to Deano at the bar and anybody else he recognizes. I think he’s retired. I’ve seen him get real gray all of a sudden.

He was holding a little envelope. He’d pulled the card out of it. It had a nice picture, a painting on the front, colorful, cartoonish, very whimsical — of ramshackled little cabins, two of them side by side, presumably on some tropical island with a palm tree and boat up on blocks behind it, a pudgy cat sleeping on the porch of one, old screen door swung open on the other,a couple of plants on the railing of one, one next to the steps of both cabins, broken down white picket fence between the two. It’s the sort of happy slovenliness that denotes ultimate away-from-it-all oceanside leisure, typically of a Gulf-side Florida fisherman’s village. It was just a painting, of course; an endearing bit art on a greeting card. But looking at it took me someplace I’d like to have been at that moment, away from cool, gray Boston. I guess it took Dunn there, too.

“I found it with some letters, old letters I didn’t know I’d tucked away,” Dunn said. “It’s from when I was working in Florida, going back to the early Eighties. A long time ago. I was doing a shift at a little radio station on a little Gulf coast island.”

I’d forgotten Dunn had been on the radio; been kind of a start-up disc jockey at the smallest possible wattage station. Sounded like fun. But he didn’t stay there long. He was trying to build his broadcast career. He took a job in St. Petersburg.

“I’d spent some time with these people,” he said. “This couple, they were some of the people I’d get together with, party with, sail around with when I was down there living on the island. I’d been to their place a few times for parties. There were some beautiful island nights. We weren’t real close friends, I wasn’t there long enough to make close friends. They had a boat. A sailboat.

“Take a look at what she wrote,” he said. “I mean what Estrella had to say. Her name was Estrella. She was pretty, about my age. I think she was –oh, Hispanic, I guess. Maybe second-generation Mexican or Puerto Rican. Whatever. Last name was Querrero. Her boyfriend was a nice guy. I don’t think they were married. His name was Keith.

“Like I say, I didn’t really feel like I knew them that well. I was just another guy. Just another guy going to parties. We were all kind of young. And this note, it came from Estrella, not him. Look at that neat handwriting. She took the time to write this to me on this neat little card.”

Ole Joe Dunn was getting carried away.

I set down my bitters and soda, a little concoction I like to drink once in a while since I don’t drink. (I come to The Mile for company, and memories. Dunn came with his memories, that’s for sure — and on this night, his memories were w ritten on that little card he’d found — and saved. ( I save some letters, too, but all the way back to 1981?) But here was Joe with his letter at the Last Mile — he brought with him to have a beer over, remember old, probably better, maybe more innocent times. Maybe was — now that he thought about it — might have been the start of a romance that he missed! (We can all be foolish this way once in a while.)

“I remember thinking when I got it how surprised I was Estrella was writing me,” Dun said. ” No mention of Keith. It’s when I realized I’d left the island without saying goodbye. And I didn’t think Estrella ever really noticed me that much when I was around. We talked. Hell, I talked to everybody. I guess maybe we talked more than I realized. We didn’t flirt, just talked. Maybe I talked to her more than Keith. Maybe she was lonely. He worked at the local planning office. Probably worked long hours. He was big on protecting the environment. Like I say, nice guy.”

I held the card and read it. It was dated 2/2/81. It said,

Well, darn! What are you doing in St. Petersburg?! I’m glad you received our xmas card and let us know where you are. Wish we could have seen more of you, though. If you’ve ever got a few days off, or just happen to be in the area, please come see us, OK?

There was more — about days sailing on the Gulf and around Pine Island Sound, about the bad winter of so far that year, the rain that was falling that day she was writing that letter. This Estrella packed a lot into that little card — and, yes, in very nice, neat handwriting.

She ended the little note saying, Everyone here is doing fine and sends their regards and best wishes. Keep in touch.

Dunn looked at me. “Never once did she mention Keith.”

“No, she never did,” I said, still holding the card, which I looked down at again. At the very end of the note, almost off the edge of the card at the bottom (very neatly, almost, it seemed, with even a little more care, like a person pausing in conversation so their next few words will get your attention), she wrote, “love you.” Not just, “love.” But love you. The ink even seemed a little darker, as if she were moving the pen more slowly, perhaps trying not to wind up going off the card altogether, but also not wanting the reader to miss it. Joe Dunn was the reader. He looked at me and said, “what do you think?”

“I don’t really think anything, but I guess you think she was sweet on you,” I said, which is what I figured he wanted me to say — and, truthfully, I didn’t know, one way or the other. I handed the card back to him. He looked at it for a long time, then slip it back into the envelope bearing a 15 cent stamp. (It was 1981; postage was cheaper). “She may still be wondering where you are,” I said, though I truly believed she’d probably forgotten all about him. “Did she ever marry that boyfriend?”

Dunn looked a little stricken. He said, “they broke up right about that time. I heard that through the grape vine.” He put the envelope down on the table next to his Budweiser. Three or four people came in the bar at that point. I’d never seen any of them before, but they looked local and were kind of noisy. Some shift at some restaurant must have ended and these were the employees coming in for a night cap.

“So maybe Estrella was trying to tell me something,” Dunn said over the noise. “Maybe that she was going to be –free. Maaybe she was breaking up with Keith.”

“I don’t gdt that in that note,” I said, truthfully.

“They got my Christmas card,” he said addressed to both of them, in response to their Christmas card. She did say ‘we’ in that note. Not ‘I.” They seemed happy together. I was surprised to hear about the breakup.

“But look at the date on the letter — 2/2/81. That was the very day my first wife came back looking to start things up again and wound up taking all the oxygen out of my life, kind of took me hostage.”

“That’s a little strong,” I said.

“Maybe so,” he said. “But the fact is, I got this letter when my options had suddenly shrunk — or disappeared. I must have been preoccupied with my new situation, because I don’t remember seeing that, ‘love you” or giving any thought to responding one way or another.”

I felt it was my obligation then to say,”don’t read too much into that note, Joe. Women write that kind of stuff a lot to friends, male and female. They don’t mean anything by it. She probably –they both probably just liked you as a person, as a friend. You are a fun guy, after all. Very charming.” I patted him on the back. “That’s what the women tell me, anyway.” I laughed and he laughed. He sipped his beer. I sipped my bitters.

“And you hardly knew her,” I added. “She was about to break up. So what? Maybe you’d have gotten together, found out you didn’t have anything in common.”

Dunn was thinking about all that. “She was really attractive, really nice, really smart,” he said. I must not have picked up on what she was thinking or feeling about me.”

“She might have been feeling nothing,” I said. “You’re just reading into it.”

“You just said maybe she was sweet on me,” he said.

“Yeah, I did, didn’t I? Well, the truth is, how do I know? I’m just saying…”

Then iin dawned on me and i I pointed out to him that there was a phone number in that note on that card. I think I saw a light bulb light up over his head. He quickly took the car out aof its envelope gain. “Sure enough,” he said. “She included a phone number.”

I reminded him that there were no cell phones in ’81. . So it must have been ‘their’ number. A house phone. Were they living together?”

“Yes.”

“So it was their phone. A landline house phone.” Then I sat back and got a bold idea.

“Joe, did you ever call that number?”

He had to think for a minute, then said, “no. And I never went back down to the island again– or not that year or any time until the nineties. Well after ’81.

“Call it,” I said. “Call the number — just for the hell of it.”

“That’d be crazy,” Dunn said. “This was forty-three years ago. She’s probably married to somebody, got kids, the whole works. Probably moved away — miles away.” But he was plainly thinking about it.

“I wish I’d picked up on — whatever,” he said. ” I’m starting to remember being swiming with her kinid of alone, and another time when she was was pulling herself back up into the sailboat and I was behind her, climbing in after her — she had on this nice bathing suit, she really had a nice figure. She had dark hair, she was wearing nice sunglasses as we sailed around. She and Keith took turns handling the sailing duties…I decided right then I’d take up sailing….” He just sat there, remembering. He looked down at the number. “I never did,” he said. “And I never called this number.”

“Call it, ” I said. “Sometimes people stay in the same place, keep the same numbrer forever. Was it her place or his?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, if he answers, just say, ‘hey, remember me? Just found this number and was wondering how you’re doing? ‘ If she answers –well, it’ll be one of those, ‘I don’t know if you remember me but, funny thing, I just found this card…'”

“Greg,” he said, staring at me. ” Neither of them would remember me. It would be awkward as hell, really stupid.”

“But, I said, “you’d like to think she remember you, right? It sounds like you made an impression on them — especially on her.”

He sat back in his chair, flipping the little card side to side on the table. “Right,” he said.

“You’d like to think Keith would pick up and say,’Hi, Joe, great to hear your voice. Say Estrella really liked y ou and she’s living in Boston now. And she’s single and she’d really like to hear from you. She really liked you.’ That’s what you’d like to hear, right?

Joe looked at me, smirked, shook his head. “This is all ridiculous. Any call like that would be awkward as hell…”

“Right, but it’s bothering you, so you could say you were interested in that island and wanted to talk to the only people you recalled — and hope she recalls…

Joe said, “I knew them for, what? a summer and a fall? On a Florida island, where nothing ever seemed part of the real world….hot breezy summer days, tourists all around, sparkling Gulf of Mexico waters. Unreal. Truth is, until I found this card, I’d probably forgotten about both of them.”

At that point, I tried to talk about something else — it was definitely time for that — like the fact the Bruins were out of the running for the Stanley Cup. But Dunn, even being a big Bruins fan, was transfixed, staying somewhere back in his past –with Estrella. I could tell.

I knew from talking to him in the past that his ex-wife went out of his life just about as quickly as she came back into it back in ’81. I knew he started drinking kind of heavily and had a bunch of relationships, got married again, divorced again. But tonight, all he could think about was Estrella.

I decided it was time for me to go. I shook JOe’s hand. He smiled. “Thanks for listening,” he said. I stood up and said, tapping the little letter with my finger. “Call that number. I know you want to do it. You’ve got nothing to lose.”

Greg,” he said, giving me a sharp knife’s glare, “I know you don’t mean that. You’re a sensible guy. It was a long time ago. I’m dreaming, living in that island past. We’re old, you and me. You can call up the past in your mind — but you can’t call it up on the telephone.”

What could I say? He was right. I’d been wrong to even encourage him to dream about something that was long gone and might never have been there in the first place.

But, for the hell of it, I said, “Maybe you can –pull up the past on a telephone, that is.” I was pulling on a light jacket as I said it. It was a little chilly out. “Maybe this is the Twilight Zone,” I said. “Maybe you’ve got a mysterious phone that can call up the past.”

He chuckled, then waved goodbye, tucking the card back in the envelope and stuffing it in the breast pocket of his shirt. I took my empty glass up and set it on the bar in front of Deano, who thanked me. It was Sunday night but quite a few people were sitting along the bar, bracing for Monday, including those three late arrivals.

As I walked to the door, I looked back at Dunn. He had the card back out on the table, was reading from it. He had his cell phone out, and looked like he punching in the number off the card. At this hour? It was about nine at night. You don’t even call people you know that late. Could it be? Could he — or maybe his Budweiser — be making that call? He didn’t have a wife anymore (that’s another whole story.) I’d made the mistake of suggesting he had nothing to lose (thought he might quickly lose his illusions. The number was so old, he might get some old man or old lady on the island, even wake them from a sound sleep….

Lonely people drinking beer can do stupid things.

But then, I saw him pause, stuff both the card and his phone in his pocket and just sit back, a look of profound resignation traveling all around his Irish-American face under his thinning gray-haired head.

Joe Dunn ultimately was a man for whom the Iceman had Cometh, as it were, as it comes for all of us sooner or later. He knew that what romance might have been– for what little it was worth or as briefly as it might have lasted — was irretrievable. Estrellas ,a lovely name for an undoubtably lovely, once-young woman of Joe’s acquaintance, was back there in 1981, living on an island of lost time, unreachable other than by the small, frail boat of memory.

And I knew he’d never call that number.

ONCE UPON A CHILDHOOD…

Schnectady Union-Star, November 23, 1954:

Mrs. C. D. Livingston, 952 Wendell Ave., entertained Saturday afternoon in honor of the ninth birthday of her daughter Diane.

Tommy Atkins entertained with puppets “Magic” and her two ventriloquial friends, “Cookie and Oogle.”

Guests were Marnie Morris, Kathy Vinick, Emmy Tischler, Ceil Cummings, Donna Cole, Peggy MacAndrew, Maxine Dehncke, Enid Hart, Eileen Casell, Betty Lou Ragland, Elain Cramer, Elaine Fifield, Anne Gates and Diane Durante.

The two-story brick house at 952 Wendell Avenue stands occupied but freyed from the urban life that has circled and gnawed away at it for seventy years. As a brick dwelling, it has done better than many. It has two spacious front porches with nice railings.

Schenectady, New York is a hard scrabble box of memories — The Electric City for its General Electric association. G.E. and its steam turbine division have dwindled to an iconic brick building and a sprawling, mostly empty parking lot.

Tiime rushing in a torrent along the Mohawk River.

I’ve driven by that house on Wendell Avenue in sunlight and shadow, in all seasons — Diane has pointed it out to me — driven up the gentle hill that is that sidestreet toward a main street — the street and neighborhood having slowly gone to seed.

Diane Livingston became Diane Harrison in 1963, pregnant at 17, mother ultimately of four children by David Harrison. The other little girls…she knows the fate of some, not of others. Not of Tommy Atkins.

There are home movies of that November day, shadowy, puppeteer Tommy Atkins? It is a woman, an elegant woman, the puppets floppy, silly and delightful, talking. Tommy’s lips move barely perceptibly. The movies are silent, the girls delighted, their small voices only imagined, shy before the camera, all dressed up by their mothers.

Mrs. C.D. Livingston died in 1999.

One of the girls, Marnie, became a ballarina in New York City.

The sweet, aching dance of time.

Out of Childhood.

Away from Innocence.

Diane turned nine on November 26, 1954

I turned eight the next day.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

-F.C. Fitzgerald, 1925

TIM CUDZILO AND THE EXTRA MILE

I didn’t know this guy real well, the guy who came in The Last Mile with the woman Bo Cherry Burkhardt, nice woman, very pretty. The guy did some time in the Army, his name was Simonetti, damned if I knew his first name. But since I knew Bo, and Bo had asked me to sit down, I sat at a table at the back of the room, a small table and Deano at the bar saw me and brought me something I don’t usually like to drink, but I guess Deano was rewarding me that night. He brought me an Odoul’s.

Bo’s story was that she was divorced, been married to some guy named Burkhardt, and was obviously hanging around for the night with Simonnetti who, I believe, was also divorced.

Now it had rained slightly that night, this was a couple of weeks ago, just into April. I’m always thinking about things in April — spring easing in, baseball begun, and rain.

Simonetti was friendly enough, a kind of tall guy who’d served with the Army in Korea in the early Seventies, just like me, so he’s no spring chicken, as they say. No, no spring chickens in spring and April always reminding you of that.

Bo and he were chatting (Bo is maybe fifty. She likes Chardonney and drinks nothing else, one, maybe two glasses max. Simonnetti was having a draft. He’d only have about two as well.)

“Greg, you were in Korea, right?”Bo s aid.

I nodded.

“So was Charlie,” she said. And now I knew Simonnetti’s first name. I knew he came from Everett originally, lives in Arlington now, has a couple of grown kids, owns some kind of import/export business at the airport and so he found his way to The Mile once, met Bo, and comes back every so often. We talked for a minute about which Army outfits we’d been hooked up with.

“I met a lot of good guys in Korea,” Simonnetti said. And I stayed out of Vietnam.”

“Same with me,” I said. And then — I don’t know how it happened, I thought of one guy in particular that had done me a great favor over there at a crucial moment. He was a guy a lot of guys didn’t like — one of those guys who took his job lightly even though it involved being on a mountain looking into North Korea and keeping track of any hostile or other tramsmissions. Serious stuff. Crucial stuff. Serious business gathering information that went all the way back to the National Security Agency at Fort Meade on a daily basis. The guy I was thinking of just decided to laugh in the face of life at all the serious moments, maybe be a bit of a clown, maybe a little immature. Whatever. I liked the guy.

I was saying all this to Bo and Simonnetti and he asked me, “what was the guy’s name. I might know him.”

“Cudzillo,” I said. Tim Cudzilo. Blond, average height, big smile.”

“I knew him, can you believe that?” Simmonnetti said. “A real goddamn small world.”

This did surprise me.”How’s you know him?”

“Met him in Japan on leave. Spent some time with him walking around the clubs in the Ginza. A fun guy. Met him at the USO. He said a lot of guys over there in Korea didn’t like him. He never said why. He didn’t seem to care. “

“I think it was that he goofed off a lot, am I right? You knew him. Sounds like you were both in a spy outpost.”

“Army Security Agency.”

I was thinking how a lot of those guys were pretty serious when they had the headsets on and were up the mountain. It’s when they came down to the main compound and all the quansett huts and concrete buildings, every one of which had probably been zeroed on some chart by the North Koreans. They went to the Enlisted Men’s club, got drunk, mixed it up with the women.

But Simonnetti and I both knew Cudzilo to be very serious in his own way. He wasn’t a big drinker. Didn’t get mixed up with women.

Simmonnetti said, “I think C, as I started calling him that night, was pretty steady with a girl back in the world, back in Arizona, if I recall correctly,” Simmonnetti took a drink of his draft, thinking about those times. “He was probably kind of a cut-up, right? But he didn’t mess around with women. He had that over me. He pulled me back from the brink a couple of times that night.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess that describes him. I just know one guy on our compounmd told me how they kept a daily weather report on the mountain look-out and electronic monitoring post and somebody suddenly noticed that for a couple of weeks, Cudzilo, or ‘C’ as you call him, had been writing, CHILI TODAY, HOT TAMALI for the weather report. He could have gotten an Article 15 for that. Or court marshalled if the weather report ever became important on any given day when we came under enemy attack which, thank God, we never did.”

“So,” said Simmonnetti, ” what’d he do for you?”

So I told the story….nothing really dramatic, but important and meaningful to me….

How I had gone into Seoul for a break just before I was due to take Temporary Duty Leave in Japan. They called it a “duty” leave, but it was just a technical way to be granted a vacation leave. It was a leave from duty, not for duty.

“Well, I didn’t know it was a big Korean holiday, some kind of harvest festival, kind of their Thanksgiving, in September and I had real trouble getting a little bus back out to the remote island where we were station, there were so many Korean people traveling. I’d stayed over at the USO in Seoul and should have only stayed one day rather than try to get back and finish packing for my trip.

“It was real tense for me, because I was going to have to turn right around and head back into Seoul in time to board the military flight that night out of Kimpo Airbase for Takoda Air Base outside Tokyo. I mean it was a nightmare — had to get off the bus in the village catch a cab out the dirt road to the compound, turn right around and find my way back to Kimpo thirty miles away. If I missed that flight, that was it. I was stuck for the night or more in Seoul.

“I don’t know how it did it — but I got my piece of luggage, got back to the village, then down the road to Seoul, everything still busy from the Korean holiday. And I really had been looking forward to this trip, so I was eager not to miss that flight.

“To my considerable relief, I made it to Kimpo Airbase with not much time to spare and I got to the counter to give the Air Force guy my ticket before boarding and I’m putting all my stuff — my I.D. and the ticket — on the counter in front of him — and he says to me, ‘do you have y our shot record?’

“Suddenly it hit me. That was the one piece of paper, this little booklet record of inoculations, that I didn’t have and that I’d been told you have to have for military flights out of the country. I couldn’t even make eye contact with the Air Force guy, hoping he’d just say, ‘forget about it,’ but he didn’t look like that kind of guy — all business. no sympathy. He said, very coldly, “sorry, you can’t get on that flight without a shot record.” I froze, then sadly started gathering up my other paperwork, still not looking at him. I could have cried. I was real upset. I couldn’t believe it.

“The thing was, I knew nobody looked at the shot record. It was just one of those military things –‘ have it with you because we say so.’

“I was in a miserable pickle. What do I do now? Go thirty miles back to the compound for a third time that day — in the dark? And travel all the way back for the one and only flight the following night?

I had one shot at remedying the situation. I could call the compound, see who the hell answered the phone — hopefully somebody I can get who would go look in my open locker in my barracks room and find my shot record and bring it to me. I was serving with a lot of good guys, but are they going to go to all that trouble? Go search for my shot record? Take an unauthorized jeep? Travel thirty miles on dirt roads to the airport? It would take a real rule breaker willing to take that risk. (My roommate, by the way, was out of town. He couldn’t help me. Even if it he were there, it was a lot to ask. He’d have probably said, tough break, Greg.)

“Yet, almost in despair, nurturing a faint hope, I called the number for the Orderly Room. I had to use an airbase pay phone — and there was no guarantee anybody would be in the orderly room at that hour to pick up.

“Well, goddamned if someone doesn’t pick up. It’s Cudzilo. He must have been filling in for the clerk for the night or something. I tell him my predicament. And he says,’ sure I can do that for you Greg.” Just like that — he says he’ll do it. Keep in mind I don’t really even know him that well. But he WAS a guy who liked to bend the rules. As I said, that’s what I needed at that moment — the only guy on the compound willing to bend the rules like that.

“As I’ve thought about it over the years, thinking about what few facts Cudzilo had told me about his life before the service, I think he was kind of a happy rebel. Probably had had long hair and a penchant for mischief in his teenage years. I know he’d almost been killed in a motorcycle accident — told me he saw his whole life flash before him as the cycle went off the road.

“He told me he couldn’t make it that night ( of course not), but he’d get hold of a jeep in the morning and bring it to me — to meet him at the airport, and for me to hang out for the night at the USO in Seoul. He assured me he’d get a jeep –not an easy task — and get the shot record to me, said he’d wear a disguise if he had to, pretend he was a sergeant or something. (He was kidding, of course, and maybe he had a legitimate reason to be driving a jeep into Seoul that day, though he wasn’t assigned the mail run. Whatever. He assured me he’d meet me at the terminal. I told him where to look for the shot record in my locker.

“Next day, he shows up at the terminal right when he said he would. Maybe he simply offered to do an errand for a sergeant or something. I’ll never know. Fortunately for me, he didn’t have duty on the mountain that day. He couldn’t have gotten out of that. Go AWOL on that and you would get courtmarshaled.

“He handed me my shot record, a little yellow booklet — had gone into my barracks room and got it — and it wasn’t exactly lying out in the open. Cheerful as anything, gives it to me. Says he had no problem. Wishes me bon voyage for Japan, tells me to have a good time. I get on the flight, hand the shot record to the same guy who barred my entry the night before. (And, of course, no one at the other end at Tokoda asks my shot record. Just as I figured).”

“It sounds like a small thing Cudzilo did for me– and maybe it was a small thing. But it took effort by a guy, once again, I did not work with regularly, a guy who barely knew me. I think I’d even yelled at him once for goofing around too much. But I never forgot that gesture, thinking about it as I had my memorable two weeks in and around Tokyo.

“I don’t know when his tour on that compound ended — we were actually on an island near the DMZ. His tour must have ended while I was out there, because, one day he was gone. I didn’t see him around anywhere. I never even saw him to say goodbye, though I’d thanked him for bringing me the record whenever I saw him after that. And, as I say, guys didn’t like him because he was such a cut-up.

“I wish I knew what ever happened to him,” I said.

And Simmonnetti said, “I can tell you that. I looked it up two years ago. This time of life y ou start wondering about people and, just to make sure they’re alive, you search through the on-line obituaries. I typed in ‘Timothy Cudzilo in Arizona.’

“Up pops his obit, Timothy Jason Cudzilo, dead on December 8, 2015 in Tucson, cremation services by Desert Rose Funeral Services. That was a downer. For the hell of it, I added a long memory on the on-line guest book –this was back in April, 2021. Told about all the fun we had in Tokyo, all the nice things he said about his girl (which maybe I shouldn’t have — don’t know if he married her), asked for someone to get back to me about how he died.”

Bo and I were listening to this, and I’m thinking I’ll write about what Tim did for me. “Did anybody get back to you?”

“No, Simmonnetti said. “Nobody. And there was no sign anybody ever read it.”

Now Bo and I were feeling very sad. She said (thinking the same thing I’d been thinking), ” what about that girlfriend. I wonder if he ever married her.”

Somebody played the juke box right about them. Just the noise we needed, maybe, to break through our mood. It hadn’t been played even once that night. I forget the song. But over the sound of it now, Bo said to me, ” you should write his family. Forget the on-line guest book. Do a little detective work. Write a real letter.”

And I thought, yes, I might do that.

And then again, I thought: forget about it. What’s the use? Nobody in any family is going to care about Simmonnetti’s or my brief memory of a very brief time with a guy we knew for only a brief period early in his sixty-six-year life. A guy who came and went in our lives in the Army where guys were always coming and going.

People come and go. Bo, Simmonnetti, me. We’d all come and go.

“I wonder if he had a good life after that time in Korea,” Simmonnetti said. “I mean he didn’t drink a whole lot , but — well, I wondered that night in Tokyo if maybe he didn’t do some pills or something. I believe he may have smoked a little weed once in a while from what he told me. Didn’t everybody back then? I forget if he smoked cigarettes — probably. And as for pills, lots of guys did pills out there in Korea and you didn’t necessarily know about it. There were lots of pills around. Otherwise, how do you stay that ‘up’ all the time?”

“Some guys can,” I said. “I can’t. And I’d never take chances like he did.” And I got thinking hard at that moment. I said to Bo, “I wonder if I would have done the same thing for him if I’d happened to pick up the phone in the Orderly Room that night. Go digging around in his locker, somehow get a jeep and drive thirty miles over dirt roads to the airport, through checkpoints where the Korean M.P.s might have been suspicious of me. Risk getting in trouble all around? Would I have said instead, ‘Tim, you gotta just face the music that you made a mistake, you spend too much time clowning around. You gotta come back out here to the compound and get your shot record. You can always catch another flight. Yeah, you’ll miss a couple of days of your leave — but that’s life. You’ve got to pay attention.’ Is that what I would have said to him?’

I really felt rotten, thinking that. I took a swig of my O’Doul’s.

Simmonnetti said, “tell you what, let’s all have a toast to the late Tim Cudzilo, a toast at The Last Mile to the guy who went the EXTRA mile for Greg here and traveled a glowing Tokyo mile with me one fine night.”

And we clinked our bottles and Bo’s wine glass and it was a slow, solemn sad ‘bottom’s up’ for a man lying in ashes deep in Arizona — a ceremony of remembrance for the young G.I., clowning around years ago in a dangerous time atop a dangerous mountain above No Man’s Land, who decided, in a devil-may-care spirit, to record the military weather forecast as — CHILI TODAY, HOT TAMALI.

I said a prayer for him, too. Rest in Peace, Tim Cudzilo.

APRIL 19, 1934

The bride was my mother. The groom my father. A Saturday. Marathon Day. A Canadian would break the ribbon at 2:32:53. A sunny spring day. St. Mark’s Church on Dorchester Avenue, Dorchester, Mass.

Ninety years ago.

William Douglas Wayland was 25, born June 11, 1909 in Dorchester. Josephine (Johanna) Aherne was 31, born October 1, Mitchelstown, County Cork, Ireland.

William (Bill) died May 30 (Memorial Day), 1964. Josephine (who was, in fact baptized Johanna but the name was thought to be too “old fashioned” though it was the name Josephine that was, and became in time more, old fashioned. Everyone knew her as Jo. She died August 5, 1986.

St. Mark’s Church, Dorchester.

In time, five children, the first on September 16, 1935. He is William. He is currently in nursing care in North Andover, Massachusetts.

Anne came in 1938. She died September 23, 2016.

Ronald and Douglas came on December 12, 1938. Ron is in Winthrop, Mass, Doug in Denver.

Then there’s Greg

All (but Greg) married. All have children.

Moments.

Yes.

Moments.

NIKKI HALEY

I usually avoid politics in these politically hyperventilating times. . But a recent tortured political enterprise, now ended, has provoked me into the arena. I’ll say my piece, then slip back into the shadows.

I speak of Nikki Haley’s quixotice candidacy.

Nikki probably never really had a chance, and ultimately probably did nothing more than douse a certain portion of the American electorate with purple dye so Democrats know where to hunt for wobbling, disgruntled voters to rescue their senescent blowhard placeholder from the morgue reserved for one-term losers.

At the outset, when it seemed she just might have a shot at the White House, she endured the predictable, execrable slanders from the Left, beginning with the dreadful , narcissistic Don Lemon, formerly of CNN, who dismissed her as a woman NOT in her prime.

The so-called Progressive Left has no shame. Theirs and the Democratic Party’s appalling influence from Washington to Hollywood is probably why Republicans wound up with the convex carnival mirror opposite with the likes of Marjory Taylor Green and Lauren Boebert who, as one pundit has commented, appear to mistake regular appearances on cable news and social media taunting thier opponents –wearing MAGA hats — with the business of governing. Indeed Green famously suggested we split up as a nation with “a national divorce from the Left.”

But, back to the demise of Nikki Haley….and the Left’s abuse of her.

Recall how Donald Trump was (rightly) attacked for engaging in “birtherism” during the presidency of Barrack Obama. The hypocritical Left did the same with Nikki Haley over her Indian heritage, suggesting there should be a search of South Carolina probate records to see just who and what she is. MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan declared that Haley, former U.N. Ambassador and South Carolina governor, should not be understood as a positive example of how successfully minorities can advance in the United States because she “uses her brown skin to launder white-supremacist talking points.”

I guess she wasn’t black or brown enough for them. It’s the old Clarence Thomas exceptionalism.

And they asked about her name (as Barrack Obama was quizzed about his name). Mary Trump, a favorite of the Left for her regular excoriation of her uncle Donald, tweeted, “First of all, f*** you Nimrata Haley.

(Yes, these are dreadful times. Perhaps I should refrain from such harsh words for the President. It’s just that I loath his obvious and toxic and manifest phoniness and his rosary-bead-rattling Whited Sepulchre Catholicism while he actively, aggressively attacks the pro-life moment at every turn, pledging now to negate the hard-won, generational victory of that movement by reimposting the legally insupportable national abortion license known as Roe V. Wade rather than let the people decide where and how much they wish to be pro-abortion. Fear not, those of you who support abortion rights. You’ll be winning in the long-short term. But the other side deserves some bargaining power. I fear you fear our national conscience will be awakened to this horror and it will cease. That, my friend, is a long way off.)

Nikki Haley ultimately probably hoped to be the face of traditional institutional Republicanism and traditional conservatism in the post-Trump era. –a noble aspirtaion, but I fear that ship has sailed. And it didn’t help that she indulged in her own form of identity politics, speaking of how her family, “wasn’t white enough to be white, weren’t black enough to be black.” Enough already! Let us finally usher in a truly post-racialist era.

So, she fought on, resisting Trump’s pressure to withdraw. I have to admire her for that, up to a point. But it was a rolling example of futility that, again, just let the Democrats know where the reluctant Democrats and renegate, non-MEGA Republicans might be lurking.

I don’t know if she’ll ever be back or might, more likely, drift into political oblivion. She never, ever truly cut a very strong or forceful figure –no fault of hers. A University of New Hampshire poll at the outset of her candidacy had her only at 8 per cent. This improved as time marched on and other challengers dropped out. But not by much.

Nice try, Nikki. You just weren’t what we were looking and praying for.

Now, pray with us that we somehow survive the coming four-year hell that the purgatory of bad choices has left in your wake.

UNANSWERED “NEWS” TIP

This is about a letter from a man ‘alleging to have information,’ as the saying goes. It was an unknown man –likely an old man. The man, forever nameless, the moment, forever lost, have been on my mind lately — for some unknown reason.

It goes back to a letter I received one day in the mid-Seventies. I was the Norwood Bureau reporter for the fledgling Daily Transcript suburban Boston newspaper. It, too, has been lost. About fifteen years ago, it vanished. It began in the early 1970s by collapsing four suburban weekies into one daily newspaper. Having never totally caught on with the reading public, struggling along lamely for years, it finally was converted into a weekly serving a far smaller area – and may, for all I know, have vanished altogether by now. Newspapers, in our time, regularly shrink or die. So it goes.

As the newest daily in the Boston area, the Transcript didn’t get a lot of attention. The residents of those four towns had resented the loss of their beloved weekly newspapers with their exclusive focus on their towns’ news. And their local news was thinned out in order to squeeze in the news of neighboring towns about which they cared little or not at all.

The towns were Dedham, Norwood, Westwood and Needham, all in southwest suburban Boston.

Back to that letter:

I forget if it was addressed exclusively to me. It would have been nice to know some reader was paying attention exclusively to my by-line.

But–it was more likely addressed to the Bureau office on Washington Street.

I think it came from one of the town’s nursing homes. This might automatically prompt some editors to dismiss it, suspecing it came from some soul suffereing dementia. The writer was, indeed, a resident in that nursing facility. The letter is lost but, as I recall, its author wrote, in longhand, something like this:

Dear Editor (or Reporter), I have some information I believe is newsworthy and that you might find very interesting. Please excuse my handwriting — I’ve got a touch of arthritis. But you can reach me at (was there a phone number? Just an address? Just his name ( forgotten) along with the name of the nursing home? Don’t remember.

I just know that I somehow felt, way back then, that I should “check this out,” as they say. I just had — a sense. It might have been sympathy for the hopelessly obscure of all “senior” facilities languishing away — and w riting unasnwered letters to editors.

Nonetheless, I felt I should check it out for two reasons: first, the writer, whom I believe was a male, might actually have something newsworthy to tell me. There was always that possibility, though the multitude of news tips go nowhere, r egardless of their source. Second: it’s not nice to ignore an elderly person looking for attention and maybe just a little company.

But also, how many times in my career as a reporter did I or other reporters or editors fail to follow up on a request for coverage of something or other–that turned out to be legitimate and important? Innumerable times, no doubt, during the busy course of multitudes of spinning news cycles in the history of the busy earth!

In truth, I suspected it wasn’t a “news” tip, as such, at all. I wondered if it was just one of those fabulous stories of the kind the elderly stand ready to pass on about their participation or involvement in some epical moment in Massachusetts, America, World, or just Personal History.

Everybody has a story.

If one lets one’s imagination range, the possibilities are infinite….

Perhaps this fellow was present when they exploded the Atom Bomb and saw some terrible flaw in the design andplanning that would one day, if left uncorrected, end civilization. Maybe he was a shadow Oppenheimer.

Perhaps he knew the identity of the men behind the deadly 1920 payroll robbery that got Sacco and Venzetti — innocent and, in the minds of millions across the globe, falsely accused — sent to the electric chair.

Perhaps he was a retired doctor who’d been a personal physician to H0ward Hughes.

Perhaps he WAS Howard Hughes.

Perhaps he was the doctor who delivered Elvis.

Perhaps he had good informtation about the whereabouts of Amelia Earhart and her plane.

Perhaps he had secret information about the Kennedy assassination. (Who doesn’t?)

Perhaps he knew the location of illegal uranium deposits and other nuclear waste buried under a nearby residential neighborhood.

Perhaps he was the grandson of a Scotland Yard Detective and had irrefutable, long hidden DNA evidence about the identity of Jack the Ripper.

Perhaps he played football with Jim Thorpe

Perhaps he’d once been a drummer for The Rolling Stones.

Perhaps he was a scientist whose theories about the causes of cancer had been unjustly supressed by a major medical institute.

Perhaps he was just an old man with nothing special for me, but who would have been delightful by a visit — from anyone! Especially a reporter.

Considering that, about that same period of time, I managed to respond to a call from excited Norwood parents who insisted their little daughters, currently trading off bouncing a ball in their backyard, were bound and determined to break the Guinness Book of Records for the number of hours spent bouncing a ball. Consider the absurd fact that I actually found time to write a dumb story about that utterly quixotic, silly parentallly-generated endeavor ( I don’t recall if the bouncing continued even past sundown).

Certainly, considering this, I could have found time to visit this poor man even if just pretending to check out his tip. I could have brought him an ice cream.

But I didn’t. The moment, the man, my reporter’s career, and whatever this guy had to tell me and whatever his human needs — are all long gone.

But, I’ll probably always wonder — if I should happen to hear of the collapse of a generations-old Norwood building with a long-ignored construction flaw, or the long-standing, long concealed poisoning of a Norwood water source due to the action of 1970s engineers, or the investigation and prosecution of individuals behind a decades-long suburban nursing home scam — or (why not?) the discovery that the illigitimate son of a member of the British Royal family lived out his last days in a Norwood nursing home — yes, I’ll always wonder…..

The moral:

Never as a reporter totally ignore even the most dubious news tip.

More importantly, never ignore the elderly and their stories.

And whoever you were, Mister I’ve-Got-Something-That-May-Interest-You, please forgive me. Your story probably died with you.

Or maybe, after being ignored, you simply wrote instead to the Patriot Ledger, the Boston Globe, The Boston Herald — or even the New York Times….and you had a huge story.! Huge!

No, not likely.

Whatever.

Wherever you are, whoever you were, these dozens of words are in your memory.

NIGHTHAWKS

Sunday night, 10:20, The Last Mile Lounge. Tash Silva’s at the bar. Deano’s night off. Tash is keeping an eye on Jimmy Jammin, a chronic tipler. But Jimmy’s not drinking tonight. I heard him tell Tash he hasn’t had a drink in three months. No alcohol. He’s drinking ginger ale. He’s here for the company. He’s talking to Bill Kirner, a regular. Kenny Foy is here with a guy I haven’t seen before, sitting at a table near the front door. Two guys at the end of the bar, strangers, are playing Keno. We’re all kind of strangers tonight. There are only three booths, only one of them in occupied — by two women. I’ve seen them before. They work at concessions at the airport and stop in after work. They have beers. Athena, the real estate agent from Lowell is here. Strange, on a Sunday night. She’s drinking a Manhattan. I can see the brown water and the cherry. She’s with a guy, probably a date. I’ll bet they stopped in on their way back from a movie in Boston. She does that, comes here at odd times, likes it here for some reason, though not a big drinker. She had that little revelation several months back. Seemed to change her. (I wish I could change.) She suddenly lost her depression, which might be why she comes back here, the scene of the loss of something bad, like somebody flipped a switch in her head.

The juke box is working again. But tonight, it’s silence. Nobody’s touched it. Everybody is silent, no laughter, you can barely hear anybody talking. The TV over the bar is off.

Knox, the artist who lives upstairs is at a table in the middle of the room, drawing something on sheets of paper.

There are seven tables. But, as you know, this is a small place, the Last Mile.

I’m alone at a table by the side door. I’m not sure why I came by tonight. I’m drinking a cup of hot green tea. Yeah, I know. Strange. Tash made it for me. I’d been drinking ice water, believe it or not. I tip Tash, no matter what I drink. He says to me, handing me the cup, “good night for tea.”

The light is soft. They made that change in this place. No harsh lighting.

And I’m thinking. I’m meditating, really. I’ve stepped out the side door, looking down the street toward the beach. I hear the wind. The jet goes over headed for Logan. I hear a siren, then – silence.

I need this silence. I need a moment to look at the windows of houses, soft rectangles of light, some dark. The street wet. There has been savage weather in the nation but here along the coast –just a damp, shining street.

And I’m thinking, meditating, trying to think. Getting a little chilly, I go back inside. My jacket is over the chair. No one will join me. Everybody wants to be unjoined tonight, except maybe Jim and Bill at the bar — and they aren’t talking anymore. Tash is reading a magazine, leaning up against the wall behind the bar.

Knox, the artist, looks up for a second, looks at me, smiles. We talk from time to time. He looks around then. I wonder — is he drawing this scene? Will he paint it later? Make it permanent.

The wet, shining, empty street. He can paint that if he looks out there…but in here, this is the painting. Paint the silence. Paint the light, the people…but make us see the silence.

I hear a breeze out there. A wind off the ocean. It grips the place.

I am full of fear, worry, why? Nothing to worry about. Or — so much to worry about but, why worry?

I look at my watch. It is now 10:37 p.m. And then I remember: The old clock over the old phone booth in the corner stopped at 10:37, either a.m or p.m., on some lost day in some lost month many lost years ago here at The Last Mile.

I stare at it, at stopped time, which is now exactly this time — stopped. I hear the damp wind.

The old bar glass of ice water is still on the table before me with the tea cup. The ice is mostly melted. It’s just a still, clear, half-full beeker of chrystal brightness now. I sip the hot green tea.

A Sunday night in silence. The tea is still steaming.

In stopped time. Steam and still water and memories —

before and all about me.

I half dream. For a full minute, I am fully — at peace.

THE GREAT SCATTERING

Why, oh why this bizarre reign of what we’ve come to call “identity politics”?

Damned if I know, if, that is, I confine my thoughts to those thoughts I can just peel off the top of my agitated head. Go deeper, like one diving with full oxygen into a murky lagoon, and –why, there you find a tangled subaqueous plethora of reasons why a reasonable race of bipods such as we are should find ourselves so messed up.

I’m helped –after being launched upon — this deep dive by writer Mary Eberstadt whose 2019 book Primal Screams (plural) explores our penchant for dividing along racial lines and other related common contemporary phenomena such as the insane excesses of modern political correctness, frequent compus demonstrations over every perceived injustice and what has been called the “cancel culture” in which, at the whim of some influencer, you or I can be discredited and banished from public discourse. Throw in radical feminism, gender-bending ideology, the excesses of the Me Too movement and all manner of unhinged activism.

I confess that Eberstadt’s book is on a heap of unread books on my library wish list. I just happened to stumble upon an old review. Therefore, I’ve read excerpts in that review that assure me the author’s analysis is free of rancor or any diatribe against “cultural Marxism.” It feels like a good book for the times.

She maintians our current state of affairs is not all about “power” — a charge I often level against the activists. She claims all such contemporary social-justice rebellions, now so tiresome to so many of us, amount to a “survival strategy” for the alienated. (Come to think of it, I, too, in my vigorous push-back against it all might also be engaging in such a strategy. I’m feeling alienated, too.)

“Such phenomena are indeed bizarre,” she writes, “if we examine them with the instruments of Aristotelian logic. But if instead we understand them against the existential reality of today –one in which the human family has imploded, and in which many people, no matter how privileged otherwise, have been deprived of the most elementary human connections –we can grasp in full why identity politics is the headline that just won’t go away.”

Eberstadt calls this process “the Great Scattering.” Because so many people below a certain age no longer enjoy a traditional family. They are, indeed, scattered.

Her first salient point: there has been a breakdown of family and familial bonds — our “natural habitat.” What is the connection between blood and personal identity? Haven’t we all become disoriented in search of intimacy — and personal identity? The human animal is now a flock of sheep without a shepherd. We now place more emphasis than did our ancestors on voluntary associations rather than on our once far more solid family environment. Feel free to challenge all these assertions. By themselves, they can feel gratuitious.

That’s why we should read books not reviews. But Eberstadt’s conclusions were there for me to ponder, such as that a healthy sense of self, and our moral maturation, among other essential developmental stages, have not only been delayed; they have, in many cases, been entirely stunted in the individual. I encounter a fair number of colleg-age students who seem to be crying out for protection from, rather than exposure to life.

So, we must ask, who are we? Who are people who will protect us? What is our “family”?

Eberstadt goes further, and here no doubt she rankles modern sensibilities with a thesis that is truly politically incorrect: she blames the sexual revolution for the advent of identity politics.

How? Why?

Well, ask yourself what has been the impact of the sexual revolution on marriage, family life, romance as reflected in everything from modern anthropology to popular culture? She does not write or speak here in religious terms. This is not an evangelical screed. Not, at least, so far as I can tell from the aggregate of quoted passages, though I know Mary Eberstadt to be Christian religious and so her thinking on all matters will doubtless reflect that, however subtly.

Nonetheless, consider how the pervasive use of artificial contraception, so essential, as is abortion, to the sexual revolution, has released us from consequences, led to mutual objectification between the sexes. A popular series such as “Sex in the City” reflects that, not without an entertaining level of self-analysis. I only chanced to watch one episode in which one comically sex-obessed female character blurts out, “I hate religion. It f**ks up your sex life.”

And nowadays, one wonders if it isn’t only the religious — and specifically the Catholic religious — who abstain from the dartificial regulation of birth. And far from all of them, or even, maybe, most of them. I guess that’s what’s called Modern Love.

But….

Biology once pushed us toward marriage and family life, even if it was a less than perfect family life. Traditional sexual mores imposed restraints. And we have viewed the casting off of those restraints as liberating. We were free! But — free of what? And for what? Chronic anxiety, crushing loneliness — at least in some cases. Or so Eberstadt believes, as do I. I see it in Generations X, Y and Z –and, to some extention, in us Baby Boomers who first cast off the yoke of convention in the 60s.

We’ve come to place a high priority on individual freedom and autonomy over against the maintaining of the integrity of the traditonal family in an ordered social whole.

And (laughing) I say, Yow!!…

I’ve suddenly begun to think of those Progressive Insurance TV commercials — so funny I make a point of watching them — dramatizing mock classes in which youngish people are instructed how not to turn into their parents. Yes, very funny. Of course, those amounts to only gentle raillery against superficial life habits –and, of course, insurance-buying practices — of superanuated adults; not to those deeper, more serious ways in which we might profitably emulate those who nurtured and raised us.

But I’ll challenge my own thesis here — and wonder if it isn’t, in our modern world, far more appropriate for children to explore their own talents and interests, search on their own terms for a spouse and occupation and a social situation suitable to them personally.

I’ll also ask if that can lead to true human flourishing unlinked from deep families ties and identities.

As for the impact on personal identities, destinies, attitudes and human outcomes of the sexual revolution — I know the Genie is not going back in the bottle. But I will always maintain that this particular revolt against our biology and ( I believe) human emotional reality has set us on a dark, unknown moral and spiritual path that may one day erupt in an entirely unforseen counter-revolution short of a reversion to Puritanism. The Genie will climb voluntarily back in the bottle. The so-called hook-up cultural, among other negative outcomes, unquestionably led to the course correction of the Me Too movement.

Perhaps human intimate and familial relations will ever hence exist suspended in a kind of utilitarian, humanistic malaise altered only by these new non-family, racial associations and identities –until the end of time.

Whatever.

Meanwhiile, you might want to explore these question, no matter where you fall on the political spectrum. You might even want to read this book, even if you disagree with its conclusions — just for the vital questions it raises.