Category: Current Events

Reflections on the “revolution” that is defining contemporary 21st Century American life, avoiding, as much as possible, any overly harsh opinions, but never, when necessary (which is almost always) avoiding giving way to great dismay.

A NORWEGIAN VISITOR TO ‘THE LAST MILE’ RECOUNTS CHILDHOOD MEMORIES OF RUSSIAN DARKNESS

She entered quietly on the arm of a periodic visitor to The Mile who lives a block away and occasionally comes in for a hot dog at lunch tme. The neighor’s name is Ingrid and we knew her to be Norwegian-born. The woman, a striking-looking figure with gray hair and sharp, clear features, was named Sigrid. I’d come to find out that she spoke clear, faintly accented English. I knew the neighbor well enough to be greeted by her as they entered and she saw me chatting with Deano at the bar. “Come meet my aunt,” she said.

I sat with them for a full hour, ordered a hamburger at the bar (no table service in The Mile) , and was so glad I’d stopped in and so glad I spent the time — for Sigrid, it turned out, is a very stalwart and healthy and beautiful 90-years-old and, as a small girl, visited all over Europe and Scandanavia and was speaking of her Russian sojourn — of having seen crowds at Lenin’s Tomb. She spoke perfect English though she’s live in Oslo most of the year. She visits her neice, I learned, at least once a year and loves Boston.

“I did not see Lenin’s mummy,” she said of her long-ago Russian journey. “But I saw the queque which stood for hours and waited to get into the mausoleum. And I have seen the Red Square lie as barren as the steppes of Asia when the mausoleum was closed -but along the outskirts of the square the river of people would stream. The side streets poured their tributaries into it, and people walked, walked, walked. I have never been down in the Moscow subway, but a time or two I tried to board with my mother the packed street-cars with people hanging in clusters inside and outside. It would be a hard ride, for at that time, the streets everywhare in Moscow were full of holes and humps, probably heaped and broken by the cold weather such as you here in the United States are having now, and by war.”

“What were you doing in Moscow?” I asked. “The Soviet Union at the time, of course. It could not have been easy to get in and there might have been a fear of getting out.”

“I believe my mother — Ingrid’s grandmother –was on some kind of a misison of charity for her church. She never spoke of the reason for her travel to me, a child, and I, sadly, lacked the curiosity to ask.”

“Was it a secret, why she was there?”

“I don’t believe so,” said Sigred, “but there were a great many secrets in those days in eastern Europe. And I believe the devil had come to visit that region and has never left. And my mother might have feared speaking of it so long as there might be agents, even in Norway. Communist agents, that is.”

A somber remark, to be certain. She went on.

“For a child, there was something hypnotic to finding myself, a child, walking among streams of total strangers in the cold, for it was winter. I have not been a stranger to cold or to winter in my native Norway. But, beyond the weather, there was something cold about the people I saw. My mother spoke to no one, and the faces I saw when I looked up were empty. I was perhaps nine-year-old. I did not see one Russian who smiled, except the attendants on the Trans-Siberian Railroad.

“The English word ‘stolid’ might best describe the expressions on the faces of the Russians I encountered. Not ‘solid’ –though they were solid in a way, but ‘stolid.’ And there seemed to be no individual differences in the faces and demeanor. In an American or a Eurpean crowd, one encounters all manner of persons. This has been my experience during a long life. But my childhood impression of the Russians I saw was very bleak–and this was immediately after the end of hostilities in the World War when much of Russia had been ravaged by the German Armies whom Russia and the Allies ultimately defeated and drove off. There was rubble everywhere. But the weight of the dictator and the shadow of Lenin fell once again over the vast Russian territories. For Norway, under the heal of collaborators and for America and the West, victory meant freedom. Not so for the Russians. My mother later told me how she had been told stories of both glory and of wretchedness. But if you wish to know, I believe what my mother ultimately believed was that we were walking in a universe of miserable lies.”

I reminded myself of the definition of “stolid”: unemotional, expressing little or no sensibility.

And then, darkening my mood at this narrative, Sigrid began to speak of what had perhaps most impressed her about the heart of the Soviet Union she experienced with her young senses: it was the unaccountable stench– that made her welcome, on the day she and her mother departed Moscow, the distant rumble of thunder somewhere distant from their hotel room, and the sight and sound of warm summer rain falling on the city of millions and hoping it was washing it clean.

And, as I sat there with aunt and daughter, I thought of the stinking darkness that closed over the vast Russian heartland after 1945 and that has yet to depart entirely, though I have not been there and dare not judge too harshly the Russian soul when we all know there have to be good, brave, noble, pure souls in that nation always longing to be free either to defeat their overlords or to escape, as we may need someday to escaape — if we’re not careful –from our own country. I know how so many feel about the current government. But what of the alternatives to which an alarming number seem drawn.? I can see New Yorkers one day, even in this present day, choosing to flee that grand city by degrees — escaping the slow imposition of a kind of rancid socialist dream that, again, by degrees, might be realized by its handsome, smiling elected acolyte. New Yorkers and, potentially, all of us might come to know what the late Arthur Koestler wrote of in Darkness at Noon.

Far-fetched? Maybe. Maybe not. I leave the likes of Solzhenitsyn and Doestoyevsky and Tolstoy to go on post humously warning us of the horror that crept over their homeland and was hatched out of a Faberge’ egg that was Tzarist Russia, and that finally spilled its yoke out onto the streets in 1917 and that keeps spilling onto all manner of places around the globe, doing horrible things — Vietnam and Cambodia come to mind — and that is constantly seeping into new places, far and near.

Dumb metaphor, I know. But you get the point, I hope.

I thanked Sigrid and Ingrid for that bracing hour of conversation in the cold monthy of February at a little table in the little place called The Last Mile.

WHAT NOW IN UKRAINE?

Direct from today’s New York Times, December 8, 2025

When the war began, Ukraine’s Western allies wanted to figure out how to send money to Kyiv without seeing it vanish into the pockets of corrupt officials. To protect the money, they insisted that (President) Zelensky’s government allow groups of outside experts, known as supervisory boards, to work as watchdogs.

But ( a Times investigation has found) the Ukrainian government has sabotaged that oversight, allowing corruption to flourish.

Zelensky’s administration stacked the supervisory boards with loyalists, left seats empty or prevented boards from being set up at all. Leaders in Kyiv even rewrote various company charters to limit oversight, which allowed the government to spend hundreds of millions of dollars without outsiders asking questions about where that money was going.

Zelensky has blamed Energoatom’s supervisory board (Energoatom is Ukraine’s utility company) for failing to stop the corruption. But, according to documents and interviews with officials, it was the government itself that prevented the board from doing its job.

Zelensky’s role

Zelensky himself has not been directly implicated in the corruption.

But his policies may have enabled it. After Russia’s invasion, Zelensky relaxed anti-corruption rules in the name of boosting the war effort. He worked with political and business figures he had once called criminals and, this summer, he tried to curtail the independence of anticorruption investigators as they pursued the case that ultimately implicated his associates. (He reversed course after Ukrainians poured into the streets in the country’s first large antigovernment protests during the war, saying that Zelensky was threatening Ukraine’s fragile democracy.)

In the course of the investigation, Zelensky asked for the resignation of two ministers and his powerful chief of staff, Andriy Yermak.

Were we warned of this possibility?

Yes, mainly, in my memory, by certain American pundits and figures characterized as “right wing.”

But, left or right, it’s the only story: where there’s money – be it Ukrainian hyrvnia, Russian rubles, American dollars or, once upon a time, Roman denarius, there is greed to currupt us.

MACKERELS IN MOONLIGHT

I’ll take a rare, reluctant excursion into a topical area I most often avoid (contemporary politics), but I do so in the interest of the worthy topic of language, specifically words, their use and abuse.

I’ve read that during the presidential administration of Gerald Ford, Hollywood comic Don Penny was brought into the White House communications office to improve the president’s wooden delivery.

Now, Gerald Ford was a good man. His transitional tenure in the highest office in the land was marked, as I remember, by steady, mostly uncontroversial initiatives (if you rule out his pardon of Richard Nixon, for which even the liberals ultimately gave him an award and told him he did the right thing in declaring an end to “our long, national nightmare,” i.e., Watergate.

He said of himself, after assuming — in a most unassuming way –the Oval Office ( going from vice president to president in the wake of Nixon’s resignation) that he was “a Ford, not a Lincoln.” He was a humble man.

But it is true — his delivery of speeches put you in mind of another word — soporific (sleep enducing).

So it has been written that, after one trying session with Ford, Don Penny said, “Mr. President, these are words. They mean something.” It was a joke, meant to cure Gerald Ford’s inarticulacy.

But yes, we must all remember — words DO mean something.

The current president is part way through a second term in his broken tenure. His inarticulacy is well-known and, one might suppose, deliberate. He comes under enough fire from the Left without me repeating one wag’s suggestion that he functions with a fourth grade vocabulary. His supporters would say he is plain-spoken. You may notice that he repeats himself often, seemingly in a failed search to find a better. clearer way to say what he’d just said. One might also theorize that this is calculated to drive him point home — twice.

Nonetheless, in Donald Trump’s and all of our mouths, words DO mean something, whether you like them or not. Among the things for which he will be remembered is extreme rhetorical recklessness. This has been noted often by friend and foe alike, and it is clear he never intends to change, short of a divine rhetorical intervention –such as God having Lincoln, Gladstone, or even just Ted Sorensen appear to him in a dream to scold him like a Christmas ghost. “Mind your words, Donald!”

His most recent venture into rhetorical recklessness was to suggest that some members of Congress should be executed for, in an undeniably blatently political gesture, creating a video in which they remind military service members that they don’t have to obey illegal orders.

Well, this is true, if an order can objectively be judged to be illegal. That, of course, is not at all a clear, easily recognizable matter to determine. It could be decided after the inevitable courtmartial.

The subsequent furor among Democrats and the liberal media was a predictable — and partisan – tempest in a tea pot. But even Trump’s partisans were inclined to call it –reckless. Another in the inumerable instances of rhetorical recklessness on the part of Donald Trump. It does not serve him — or the nation — well.

This sort of thing is boundless in our society now dominated by the impulsive world of social media. Trump is our first truly social media president.

There is a way to discuss all matter — to object, affirm, criticize — that is powerful, creative, respectful, useful — if the president would only pay attention to the impact and value of his own words.

To which I’ll add, in despair, ‘ain’t never gonna happen.’ Trump is Trump –rude, crude, ineducable on this score. (How did he ever pass the verbal SATs to get into Yale??) And he is reckless. One prays his recklessness is a superficial calculation to shock on the surface while, again, one prays, he is actually more deliberative in private when he makes the decisions that affect our national and international fortunes. The jury is still out on that.

TRump is given to insulting people. I dislike that very much. That’s recklessness. Perhaps he could at least learn to be creative in his insults and denigrations, like John Randolph of Roanoke who, in describing the corrupt nature of another politician’s speech, famously said, “thy words stinketh like a mackerel in the moonlight.”

I guess that would be an improvement. Better still, Mr. President, how about you just stop hurling insults?) It stinketh!

IN THE WAKE OF MELISSA…

I don’t listen to a great deal of rock music since I stopped drinking thirty-eight years ago. Much of it heard with sober sensibilities, filtered through my brittle predispositon and frank prejudice seems merely visceral, hedonistic and superficial — mass enterainment at its most venal. But, that’s just me.

And here I go praising the work of a couple of late, inspired, long-haired souls who wandered about out there in the red clay and neon rain between Macon and L.A..

I refer to keyboardist and vocalist Gregg Allman who died on May 27, 2017 in Richmond Hill, Georgia. He and his slide-guitarist brother Duane (dead in a motorcycle wreck on October 29, 1971 at age 24) formed the core of the Allman Brothers Band and, with their many sidemen, made a real impact on recorded popular music. Their Filmore East recording of “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” is supurb improvisational, live rock, artful far beyond top 40 or studio-produced album rock fare. I’m only occasionally a fan of their blues/ rock genre but have often marveled at the craft, range, energy and improvisational near genius of these Georgia boys. I speak of “energy,” but that does not properly characterize the lolling Southern, half-staff stasis that was typical of a band, like most country or blues-rock bands, that seemed just to stand in the spotlight and play — and play and play. And that was and forever will be their glory. Just singing and playing. (Duane, by the way, was born exactly a week before me, Gregg the next year. I never knew this until I started to write this of a Sunday night.)

A guy who bought used vintage guitars and called himself a guitarcheologist, once showed me a picture of the stark, unlovely, chain-link-bordered suburban Macon, Georgia intersection where Duane, traveling at a high speed, collided with a flatbed truck and began his journey to death. There was nothing distinct or special about it — just roadside America. But this Allman Brothers fan and rock guitar afficianodo felt the need to photograph it. The band’s bassist Barry Oakley died close by, also on a motorcycle, a week later, drinking heavily and grieving. The world — it seems especially the world of rock music — seems to have its share of these dark, booze and drug-induced tragedies. I recall while in the Army reading of Janis Joplin’s and Jimi Hendrix’s substance-related deaths about a week apart.

Gregg Allman was married seven times, including to Cher ( who was also a serial spouse). It would seem then, that he had difficulty finding true and lasting love. He’s not alone, of course. But perhaps his best song was the love song “Melissa”. His brother Duane thought so. I happened to hear it recently as incidental music on a TV series in which a guy is saying goodbye to his girlfriend — who was not named Melissa. I’d heard it before, of course, but it struck me as sweetly, sadly fetching and so I made a point of calling it up on Youtube and listening to it — and to its elliptical, purposely ambiguous but evocative lyrics, which approach but are not real poetry. Just, as I say…evocative. Isn’t that what the best pop lyrics do? Evoke images and emotions? We don’t listen to most pop music for the chord structure.

And so, Gregg wrote and sang (I pluck phrases here), Crossroads, seem to come and go, yeah…There’s no blanket where he lies…In all his deepest dreams the Gypsy flies…With Sweet Melissa…”

No, not great poetry. Maybe not even a great lyric. Just evocative of some unseen, imagined and absence and longed-for “Sweet ” Melissa…

I’ve read that Gregg Allman wrote the song as early as 1967. He’d apparently tried and failed to write dozens of ballads, and “Melissa” was among the first that, by his measure, made the grade. It is written that the band was staying in a Pensacola motel and that Gregg picked up brother Duane’s guitar” which was tuned to open E and immediately felt inspired by the natural tuning.” The title’s love interest was almost called Delilah. Gregg allegedly settled on Melissa while in a grocery store late one night buying milk. That’s how he tells it in his memoir.

And that title made all the difference to a Youtube commentator writing three years ago under the handle of RoseandRichie. I don’t know if it’s Rose or Richie that says, This song is treaasured by my dad. My sister’s name was Melissa. She died at 26 Yr old. We often listen to it and cry together. Nothing unmanly about it. My dad is a war hero veteran and when he cries, we all cry.

So it is that songs touch us — evoke, remind.

For some on the long Youtube thread following the singing of the song, there are testimonials to its personal impact that seem hyperbolic, exceeding anything I personally could claim for any pop tune, such as when mariazimmerman8639 said five years ago, this song does things to me….brings me back to every wonderful thing in my life…the whole song is just mesmerizing…alweays will be.

You read that and think of Gregg Allman, himself now gone over the horizon into the unknown bourne, simply strumming in a motel room and on a late night errand to buy milk but summoning from within something that will move mariazimmerman years afterward –well, such it is that makes songs such a splendid, eternal form of human inter-communication.

hectorthewonderhalibut6331 (a person, based on his handle, with a playful streak) declares, or, you might say, prays…God I miss the times when this song first came out. Those days and those friends. Damn.

Yeah. Damn indeed. But southerngirl300 goes right over the hedges and declares, one of the greatest songs to ever be recorded in the last century.

Well, for some, probably so. Right up there with Frank Sinatra singing anything by Cole Porter. It’s all a matter of taste. Those cultural/ generational/aesthetic barriers do unavoidably divide usf

As for times when this song came out, it was the early 70s, when romantisizing nostalgia for the 60s was already kicking in. hectorthewonder is obviously a boomer. (And, by the way, the guitar work on the song sounds to me like the work of Duane Allman who would have been dead by the time the song was released, right? One account has “Melissa” being recorded in December of 71, another in February of 71. Duane’s fingers and spirit seems, to my ears, to be on the frets and strings in and between brother Gregg’s third-person choruses of lonely longing (Crossroads, will you ever let him go? No,no,no….I know that he won’t stay without Melissa.

The brothers are gone. Their band with its distinctive sound but a shadow of its former self, lingers on, still touring, even dropping into Madison Square Garden last April.

Meanwhile, maybe for all of this century, moonlighting balladeers in roadside saloons up and down America’s highways will likely be crooning about “sweet Melissa” to slow-dancing embracing couples in dimmed romantic lightiing. No doubt many babies born to Allman Brothers fans, like the lost but not forgotten sibling of Rose or Richie, might be among those shuffling about on the dance floor.

As for weddings and funerals where the bride or deceased happens to be named Melissa…those slow, sad, sweet strains will drift out over church and lawn.

Crossroads seem to come and go….with sweet Melissa.

THE LIGHT WE CANNOT DULL

“The word ‘gay’ has always rubbed me the wrong way,”  James Baldwin told the writer Richard Goldstein, who interviewed him for the Village Voice in 1984. “I never understood exactly what it meant by it.” Baldwin also thought that the word “homosexual” was not a noun. (By which I assume he meant it was just an adjective, modifying a noun or nouns. Now it’s a word, whether noun or adjective, that has basically been declared inoperative by “gay” advocates–for some reason.)

One of Baldwin’s first pieces, published in a journal called Zero in 1949, was an essay on homosexuality in the novel. Novelists, he argued, know that human beings are not reducible to such labels: “Once the novelist has created a human being he has shattered the label and, in transcending the subject matter, is able, for the first time, to tell us something about it and to reveal how profoundly all human being interlock.” (Emphasis added.)

There are a multitudes of ways we mortals have found to be unatural and disordered in these insane times that are disordered morally and emotionally. This has been true, from the evidence, from the dawn of time.

James Baldwin was a gifted, troubled soul who, as often happens with gifted souls and gifted artists, managed to shed some light in darkness, even as he -we, us — linger in darkness and insist on dulling the light.

It’s the human way.

 

A SINGULAR SOUL IN SEPTEMBER

I saw someone today that I decided will be famous in some circles someday, small circles, unless she wins the Nobel Prize for Literature.

I say this, without a bit of sarcasm. We must all be aware that the voices of our national life that will turn up in small magazines, in poems, in novels of the future will be the product of the several generations of parents that were my contemporaries (though they are grandparents now) and by Generation X and the Millenials. Their experiences of life were different to some degree from us Boomers, but, of course, in many respects just the same. They have populated the planet with adolescents and teenagers who, in mind, soul, dress and demeanor, resemble this young woman. So I surmise — and imagine.

She is an individualists — though many young individualists seem to blend into a herd of expressive uniformity.

The young woman in question might be in high school — or she might have been in her late twenties. She had that universal ageless look about her. But — she had quite a look about her. Again –a solitary individual broken away from an army of individuals, and wearing the “uniform.”

She was checking the Large, Florida library screens seemingly in search of a book. Then I saw her wandering among the stacks in the second level — near the poetry and plays, but she might have been checking out the non-fiction areas, too. Or the theater.

She had clipped, short, blondish — blondish, almost boyish, seemingly natural — hair. She stood about five feet. She wore a gray top under a light gray hooded sweater — even on this Florida September day of typical humidity and heat. But — those who spend a great deal of time in library air conditioning might find their temperature dropping.

She was a study in blacks and grays.

She wore black high-top sneakers — and, in keeping with the expressive individually of our time that turns our bodies into tableaus, she had on one leg (and I did not notice this until my second glance) a thicket of black interlocking tattoos all the way up to the high-level top of her short. On the other leg, an equal tangle of vine-like tattoos only went up half way on her pale skin. Perhaps that leg is a work in progress.

She wore round glasses with clear rims. She had a bright orange sack slung over her shoulder. Her only dash of color.

She was, yes, a human study, and, I expect, rather studious in her own right.

She would soon blend back into the world external to the library, and not necessarily be easy to spot or single out for these enumerated physical attributes, for thought she caught my eye, she looks –as I’ve already said –like a major percentage of her generation looks these days — having made a conscious choice to express herself satorially and physically as an individual in that army of individuals.

Expressive Individualism! (Was it Robert Bellah who came up with that phrase?) Nothing all that unusual about trying to be unusual these days.

I will be left forever guessing –even should I chance to see her again and unless I make so bold as to approach and interview her, just what she thinks about life. I’d like to find out if such knowledge be obtained without offending her or rightly arrousing her suspicions or hostilities. (“Hi, I just think you’re interesting-looking and could I ask a few questions about, ah, your choice of dress or what’s on your mind….”)

Yeah, right. Someone call the cops.

But this future prospective Nobel Laureat or Poet Laureat or singer of ballads in New York or Amsterdam cafes– once she leaves home and becomes an ex-pat — this highly decorated, expressively individualistic soul nonethless is ( and do I repeat myself? Yes!) entirely typical of so many other late members of Generation Y, OR the ubiquitous members of Generaton Z. She just, as I’m saying here, caught my eye — and her understated, black and gray earth tones contrasted happily, to my eyes, with the splashy rainbow-colored conscientously eccentric types of her generation -like the “goth”s who must so deliberately put on a mask of primeval ugliness.Black on black.

And she seemed studious (as I said) and serene (perhaps I didn’t say that). I wonder what she keeps in that orange sack?

Let me say a very peternal thing: God go with her — to New York, Amsterdam, Stockholm — or just home to mom and dad and dinner tonight. And to her similarly decked-out bedroom. And to sleep.

May she find what has eluded so many who wished to make more than a ripple on life’s surface — including me.

Or, isn’t it far more likely she just wants to be alone? For, that was the other things about her — her solitude.

She is Young Miss Solitude. I like that, too. No jabbering of gossip, no noisy friends gathered around a table, challenging the library’s silence.

She was alone. A singular soul. On a September afternoon.

JULY 4: BANG BANG BANG BANG BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BANG

I wrote a nasty piece about all the whistling and thudding explosions going off around me this night on lawns and in backyards and in the sky, unnerving me and causing my little dog to tremble miserably, perplexed -as, to some degree, am I — by all the excessive noise and why mortals find this incendiary mindlessness so entertaining.

I’ll bet the folks hiding underground in Kiev these days don’t find the explosions overhead entertaining -or the sound of their homes being demolished (Mr. Trump would say “obliterated”) by Russian rockets.

A fierce thunder storm and torrents of rain briefly drove the mad neighborhood bombers indoors and filled the air with even louder, more terrifying flashes of lightening and bursts of thunder. I shrugged and decided man (humanity) and nature had conspired to kill my dog with a heart attack. (She survived, semi-sedated with pieces broken off CBD-laced peanut butter-flavored, bone-shaped treats. But I hate drugging a pet. I may have to do it again tonight.)

Each July 4th, my sister used to have to comfort a Lithuanian-born neighbor who, in her youth during World War II, heard the incessant explosions of ordinance as she and her family were caught between dueling warring Nazi and Soviet tyrannies, destined to see millions of her fellow Lithuanians die around her and be forced into exile.

Okay, I know. Lighten up. It’s all just a — celebration.

Happy Independence Day, everybody.

CROWS, GULLS, AND AN EVENTFUL MAY UPON US…

The crows, maybe one needy crow, comes and stands on The lights stanchion by the carport. Caws that rhyrmic vocal tattoo, his message: I’m here, time to feed me.

And so the ceremic plate hoisted its three-foot stand gets filled with cat food kibble and grapes, an apparent crow delectation. (The cats, too, come around for the kibble that, I supposed, is rightly theirs. And the rats.

They crows come, they take. This one crow — my friend Diane believes it is always the same crow, her friend — comes, dips, takes a grape or some kibble, flies off.

It is said crows will bring you a gift. So far, there has only been a chicken bone. a treasure from one of these black-winged carnivor.

The poet Ted Huges meditated on the crow’s blackness:

Black the brain with its tombed visions

A black rainbow bends its empitness over emptiness.

Dark. Very dark.

Brighter and so white are the gulls that sat, days ago, high up on the tiled roof of the Sistine Chapel nearby the tin stove pipe that would eventually emit the white smoke and announced the choice of a new Catholic pontiff.

White fellows from the sea that can be found wherever offal or discarded protein can be found. They now and then tilted their heads sharply back, as they will do, and screeched their keow or cow-cow-cow.

Long live the Pope!

But how long will those gulls, so amusingly unaware they were being seen by billions of mortals, gathering, as birds will gather, on the ancient chapel roof for unknown reasons (probably hoping someone in the multitude in the wide square below would drop a pizza crust.) — how long will they live? How long pursue their career foraging in Roman garbage?

Who, coming upon one of those seabirds down an alley or devouring their cast-off cafe table scraps along the Via Venito , will realize that there is a worldwide celebrity under their table, a guardian of the pipe that was soon to spew its portentious white cloud announcing a new chapter in Christendom’s history?

Where and when will their airborne journey end — for those crows in Largo? Those gulls in Rome?

Remember Jonathan Livingston Seagull? Literary hero of the distant Seventies?  Steeped in personal reflection far exceeding the likely capacity of the average bird’s brain. That’s fantasy for you.

But those are real birds in Rome, real crows in Largo. But now just beeks in the avian crowd.

But somebody should paint them, from memory, of course. They’ll never pose.

I don’t know how Audubon did it.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE

Time was, long, long ago, when it was bad form –as well as rare –to see anyone wearing a hat while dining publicly. That time is far distant now — and I’ll add that the ettiquette is rightly suspended in the case of veterans –especially war veterans.

And thus it was that ….

Morning sunlight was spilling into The Golden Bear breakfast place this morning when I spotted a black cap on an old head. That cafe is in a little strip center on Starkey Road. I’d had my one egg (suddenly a little more expensive), sausage links, grits, toast and coffee and was on my way to the cashier when I saw, in the second booth by the front windows, a decidedly elderly man wearing –yes –one of those black veteran’s caps — a real nice one, too. It seemed newer and more regal to my eyes than most such caps, perched tall on this vet’s otherwise humble, white-haired head.

Here was the special part — the cap was emblazoned with WWII VETERAN. You see that disignation only rarely now and therefore are more inclined to take more serious note of it and the person under it. The WWII on this particular cap struck me as unusually big and bold. But that might just have been the big, bold impression it made on me. Yes, it was a nice cap. Very nice.

As I passed his booth, I could not fail to offer the accustomed saluation (thank you for your service)– especially to a soul so modest in appearance yet so rightly proud of having lived long enough to realize that, as his and his fellow WWII veterans’ days dwindle down, there is nothing immodest about celebrating one’s role in America’s last clearly victorious, least politically frought, dubious, and inconclusive military adventure.

I laid my hand gently on his frail shoulder as I greeted him with the accustomed saluation. He smiled but seemed startled, perhaps, too, uncomprehending, not hearing me right, perhaps wondering, do I know this person? ( I think I saw a hearing aid). I glanced toward his white-haired wife sitting across him. She’d heard me right and was smiling gratefully. There were two clear, thin plastic oxygen tubes running to her nose.

I then held my hand out, the vet grasped and shook it, looking up at me through glasses. I doubt I was the first person to accept his black cap’s invitation to honor him with a hello.

I was abidingly curious and thought it appropriate to ask only one question: “What outfit were you with?”

He didn’t get that. I should have said, ‘what branch?’But I was looking for something specific, like 25th Infantry Division or 1st Marines. That would have told me what action he might have seen.

I asked again, louder, maybe changing “outfit” to “what company?” — which was even less clear or precise.

But he said, quetly, “Navy”

And that was that. Mutual smiles, another warm glance toward his misses and the encounter was over.

But, out in sunlight, my head was awash in –the Pacific, the Coral Sea, The Philippines, Linguyen Gulf, Layte, Guadalcanal, Guam, Saipan, Tinian, Sarabachi Bay, The Battle of the Atlantic — Pearl Harbor.

So I wish I’d had time to ask him –where were you, what ship or submarine? Which campaigns?

Of course, he might have spent his time at a desk in Newport, or Pearl, or like the poor sailors in that WWII saga Mr Roberts, have been unhappily stranded far from the action while their beloved commander finally broke free of the boredom and all the shipboard military nonsence and finally been dispatched to the action, only to be quickly killed in action. (That’s a designation you see so often where war veterans, especially decorated ones, are concerned: K.I.A..

But it doesn’t matter where our vet was. No, it really doesn’t. Our veteran at breakfast on this March morning had been there in some fashion, been part of it, was proud of it, and was still with us.

Yet still, I say to our breakfast vet — and his equally frail wife (who’ve gone back to their home by now), be proud, be at peace and, for as long as possible, be in good health. You answered the call. From some vantage point, you witnessed and outlived that horror. I wish we’d had more time to talk.

Thank you for your service.