Category: Essential Posts

Usually long, usually very personal narratives of personal adventures with the hope they might ultimate take book or eBook form. They are only a few now, and mostly unfinished. Bear with me. Works in progress.

OF THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH

A man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether in doing anything he is doing right or wrong….I shall obey God rather than you, and while I have life and strength I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy.

–Socretes, as quoted by his student Plato in the Apology.

Socrates had been accused of “corrupting the youth” of Athens and was, as such, to become an ancient — and perhaps the first — victim of the “cancel culture”.

As to the calculation of whether he’d live or die — they killed him.

WINDSWEPT

We are windswept in 2022. Doors are slamming shut all about us.

We stand on an open, windswept plain, questions of the most intimate and critical nature swirl in a vortex — celibacy, friendship, marriage….

Those, at least, are the questions swirling about my individual consciousness at the moment — admittedly essentially spiritual/religious interpersonal matters.

The storm has been raging for decades….around me, around multitudes. But we are all individuals, ultimately alone before whatever earthly or (for those who believe such things) heavenly realities that judge and govern us.

So it was, forty years ago, that I read what someone wrote (rather heavy stuff) — and I pondered it too lightly, and not nearly long enough. But I never forgot it.

I read:

In the tradition of Catholic Christianity, there is a tension between celibacy freely chosen as an image of God’s sacrificial life and marriage freely chosen as a different sort of image of that same love. Celibacy looks to the eschatological* meaning of that love, matrimony to its incarnational** meaning.

I never said it was light reading. Catholic stuff, too, repugnant to multitudes.

Secondly, friendship… is not alone a strong enough word to carry the meaning of marriage. The married have experienced other friendships. The friendship of marriage is of a different order indeed: searing, intimate beyond description, full of mystery and terror, excruciatingly painful, profoundly suited to our nature. ***

Now, that’s peculiar. Pain, suited to our nature. Hmmmm.

By the way, the above is from…

Michael Novak (1933-2017), Catholic philosopher journalist, diplomat, writing in the fall, 1981 issue of the journal Communio, which had been gifted to me and was devoted to the subject of the relations between the sexes. Novak’s contribution was entitled, “Man and Woman He Made Them.”

I’ve always enjoyed Novak’s writing. I think I mentioned elsewhere in this blog that I was once reading a slim volume of his, called. The Experience of Nothingness as I lay recovering from my first kidney stone episode in Doctor’s Hospital in Lanham, Maryland. I think the male nurse attending me was wondering, based on that title, about my overall mental state. Hope that I didn’t scare him too badly. That was 1983, several kidney stones ago. I want no more stones. But I do want to understand the nature of our modern….nothingness.

And I read the treatise on men and women so long ago, forty-one years to be exact. Tom Brady was a toddler, probably barely able to throw a football. A Hail Mary was still just a prayer to his apparently Catholic parents. There was no super model spouse as yet to affirm to him that — Man and Woman He Made US. (Don’t know why I picked on poor Tom as my benchmark.)

But I digress, sort of. I like and admire Tom B. but, come to think of it, he’s my benchmark because he’s my gold standard for what the average, decent and accomplished family man will accept and believe. (And as I update this on a September afternoon in 2023, Tom and his supermodel wife have been divorced for some time and his stellar NFL career is over. Divorce and a subsequent broken family and shared custody, and the forced acknowledgment of age’s onset and accompanying physical limitations — they all might be seem, in our time, as more of what the average, decent, accomplished “family” man is swept — or, windswept — into accepting and believing.

And, no matter how earnestly we undertake them, many-to-most of us born after the atomic year of 1945 no longer believe either permanent marriage or permanent celibacy will be possible for us. Friendship seems to thrive. But how genuinely? How real or intimate are our friendships?

I don’t know what Tom Brady believes. His earned fame and fortune might invest him with the capacity to insolate himself, at least publicly, from caring one way or another about these things or, God knows, publicly talking about them — and maybe that’s the best philosophy. Live, eat well, don’t take yourself too seriously — but take life seriously. (Here I guess I’m putting words and ideas in Tom’s head. And here’s another truth: we don’t really know other people, much less what their thinking.)

Footnotes on the above:

*Eschatology: From the Greek, eschatos (“last things”, i.e., death, resurrection, immortality), logos (“knowledge of”)

**Incarnation: The religious doctrine or belief that God will or has embodied Himself in human form.

***I first read this Novak treatise when I was 34. A son was born to me that fall. Out of wedlock. So, I was reading in one universe, living in another.

I was not, nor have I ever been, married. Friendship is not marriage. Cohabitation is not marriage. Man and woman — woman and man, if you will — He made us. Parents are a man and a woman, and they are married, though they may be divorced. They have made a convenant. They have entered into a state implying obligations, toward one another, toward the children, toward society.

They are a family. Modern philosophy is obsessed with the problem of the individual and the state. Novak feels we have, for the most part, “systematically” neglected the family and asserts that “human experience is primordially familial.” Mother, father, offspring.

I chose, back in 1981, as, ultimately, did multitudes, to try to stand apart from all this — to believe it in abstract, but not believe in necessarily was real or applied to me, or, God knows, everybody.

Thus He made us. Man and woman.

No, many no longer believe this., if they ever did. We think we’ve moved on. This assumes God has moved on, too.

Celibacy. Friendship. Marriage.

You can chose God, or the Zeitgeist, Novak, Lord rest his soul, wrote in that same essay….

The Zeitgeist (spirit of the world) is nearlay always both wrong and arrogant. The pendulum of history customarily swings too far. To find the just measure, it is wise to lean against prevailing winds.

But for now, we are windswept.

Hold onto your hats.

Or, if hatless, your souls.

“LOOK AT THE CRYSTALS!”

I suddenly find myself, only an hour advanced from the night’s sleep on this late October morning, thinking of a fine and innocent moment with a childhood friend, long lost, named Lorraine. It had snowed….we were walking. There were — crystals.

Meanwhile, each moment is nudging me further away from thd memory of those crystals into this new October Florida day; I sit here, the exterior southern darkness only slowly lifting on the street bearing the falsely evocative name Caribbean Way, as I hear reports of a great, raging Nor’easter sweeping into New England. It is full of rain, not snow.

But I ‘m familiar these damp autumnal Nor’easters; I have stood inside and seen them batter the window pane; had them, as I walked in them, lash my face, seep into my shoes. They can do much harm, but like all weather, can also sweep clean the gray prison cells of our lives; can necessarily, in nature’s way, alter the humdrum routines and compacencies of the average sunny day. As they flood and blow and knock down, they make a benchmark in our memories as can no sunny day.

To paraphrase Tolstoy: all fair and sunny days are alike, but stormy days are stormy in their own way.

In the darkness without at this moment, I hear the bleating of the truck backing into the ugly utility area one door down. It is trash day. I must put out the trash as I put out these material memories

In exactly one moment, at 7:30 a.m., the little hockey puck-size automatic voice machine in the dining area will send the pleasant, comforting disembodied, faux-human voice of a faux-human named Alexa — send it throughout this tin and vinyl space announcing the weather for this Florida day

There, I hear it…..

Right now in Largo, it is 54 degrees. Today’s forecast calls for mostly sunny weather, with a high of 84 and a low of 62 degrees.

So, at last, it is cooling here in the subtropics. The dank, relentless, unchanging heat of the five-month summer may at last be breaking — but, again, perhaps only for the moment.

Meanwhile, it promises to be yet another sunny day.

As for the lingering night’s darkness — darkness, like cool weather, can be a comfort in Florida, for it sometimes seems a clime in which, like the prison cells (speaking of prison cells) of convicted and sentenced savage miscreants, the lights are always left on so the guards can keep an eye on them. But that is only my perception. There is a fair amount of ragged, palm-blown private beauty here, too, between the typical American landscape of macadam, utility poles, warehouses, junk car graveyards and strip centers.

The sun will shine on all of it. It will, to a degree, transform it. Hordes of people will awaken from their beds and move among them.

The fact is, people, like raindrops in a gale, are blowing into this ‘paradise.’ Or, escaping to it. I did. Or I tried to. To escape, that is. But, as the old saying would have it, you can run but you can’t hide — from life. And there absolutely is no geographic cure from our troubles.

Good grief!

I had not meant to turn into a ruminative, wandering cow. I had meant only simply to write of that moment with little Lorraine, my friend.

Her name was Lorraine Peters. Her older sister was a friend of my older sister Anne. On that winter’s day, both Lorraine and I would have been wearing winter coats. We were, perhaps, nine-years-old, maybe ten. I don’t recall how we happened to be together on a winter’s evening walking down steep, snow-covered Pope’s Hill Street to the corner of what had once been a dirt road named Sewell Street and eventually a paved street named Salina Road. ( A far cry from the street out my window now named Caribbean Way.) I lived a half block to the southwest on Neponset Avenue. Lorraine lived perhaps two hundred yards to the southeast across an empty field on Freeport Street.

If the field was still there and not yet built over with Elm Farm supermarket, or perhaps the excavation of a supermarket under construction, then it was perhaps winter, 1956. If the market had been built and had its grand opening one snowy night, it might have been 1957. I can’t be sure. Can’t pinpoint it. What does time matter? It was just one of those yesterdays.

It might have mattered to us children at that time that it was time for both Lorraine and me to be home for supper.

The snow that newly dark evening was fresh and unblemished, the air clear and cold. The new snowfall — it had only been a moderate snowstorm, perhaps three or four inches — would soon be soiled with city grime, sand or salt and dog urine. But now, it was pure and blue in the new darkness.

Lorraine would have been wearing a stocking cap. She was not especially pretty, but sweet enough to make her a beautiful companion.

Had we been sledding on Pope’s Hill? Did we have our sleds with us? Was it before or after Christmas? I don’t recall. Lorraine was an intelligent little girl. Mature, good company. But I was not often in her company.

Suddenly, at the corner of Selina and Pope’s Hill (a short street likely named for some long-ago Yankee merchant long before we Irish moved to the neighborhood), Lorraine and I paused to admire a little bank of the new snow at the corner of Selina and Pope’s Hill by the Desmond’s house. It glowed — was there a dim street light nearby or was it after dinner already and perhaps a full moon illuminating this patch of whiteness?

Or did that moducum of snow just seem to glow of its own cold magical inner essence? The fragile glow of the beautiful, as inward beauty shone forth from Lorraine.

And suddenly I heard Lorraine in her high, buoyant voice say, “look at the crystals!”

She was talking of those moist pinpoints of light, like a tiny, starry firmament, that are the property of all freshly fallen snow.

And the pure essence of civilization, springing up among people even so young as we were, is the capacity to discern beauty in nature, and to note it to another human. Look at the sunset! Look at the waterfall! Look at that butterfly!

Had I been with one of my young male friends, would he have pointed out that sparkle imbedded in the new-fallen snow? Were we young boys quite that “civilized” yet? Wasn’t it in the feminine nature to see it and, more especially, to note it? Am I permitted to speculate in these contentious times that the feminine spirit might well be the vanguard of civilization? For a snowbank should never just be — a snowbank.

Look at the crystals!

Yes, everyone. Look!

Even for Lorraine to see that glow and to name it “crystals” was to leave a crystalline impression on my nine (or ten) year old imagination.

I believe we parted soon thereafter. Perhaps we were pulling our sleds.

Over the next few years, Lorraine and Anne Peters from Freeport Street would be a presence in my young world, though I did not see that much of either of them and Lorraine was not among my immediate friends.

Then one day, well before I became an adult, the Peters family moved away.

But my sister Anne was one who, throughout her life — especially after the advent of the internet age — seemed to strive to re-connect with lost, almost forgotten neighbors. And while she was closer in age to Anne Peters, and knew her better, she received one day — I forget how or why — an internet correspondence from Lorraine Peters who was now living somewhere like Connecticut.

An exchange continued for a period between them. I know I mentioned to my sister that vivid moment of the snowy crystals and, as I sit here (with the sun up now behind the blinds, the day advancing), I hope she somehow passed that observation on to Lorraine, though I doubt she would have recalled that shared moment that made such an impression on me.

Then one day my sister informed me that she’d learned from Lorraine that she was mortally ill, probably with cancer. She would have been in her sixties, not that terribly old, probably married with children, even grandchildren. News of her death followed soon thereafter. The girl who’d seen the crystals was gone.

Five Septembers ago, my sister also fell mortally ill (with cancer) and left us. Therefore any further details about how she came to be in contact with Lorraine Peters is gone. So much left the world with my sister.

But that crystalline childhood moment remains, fleeting as that vanished snowbank, imbedded in memory. A young girl’s sensitive awareness, leading to an instant of shared perception. A civilizing bond in the early hours of two lives.

God rest you, Lorraine. Thank you for the crystals. Though I am in Florida, I will always long to see the winter’s first snow. I must see it again, with all its hazards. I must not forget you, my little neighbor, as, at this hour, in the year 2021, rain and wind assault the bare corner of Selena and Pope’s Hill Street, and washes the odd candy wrapper down the gutters in the gray light.

By the way, it’s not trash day. That’s tomorrow.

THE SOUR MILKMAN

There was that milkman, his cantilever-doored conveyance paused on the hillside, that door still open. This was Boutwell Street, Dorchester. This was long ago. We were children. Who were the other children with me? Forgotten. I think there were three of us. I wonder if they remember this incident as I am remembering it? I wonder if they are still alive?

We always asked the milkmen, when we saw them, if we could have some ice. They always had ice packed around their bottles of milk in their wooden crates, keeping them cool before delivery. Refrigerated trucks certainly existed. But for these neighborhood deliveries, there persisted these rattling, quaint, squared-off wagons, probably cheaper to operate.

The milkmen, genial fellows, would reach in back and give us smooth, dripping chunks of ice. It would be a hot day. We would happily suck on the big ice chunks, our hands cold and wet, and we would be summertime-content in our idle childhood, following in the icy tradition of kids who’d gone before us, observing the tradition of asking the milkman for ice.

Then came that day — under the trees on the slope of Boutwell Street, right about in front of the Trabucco’s house. Our encounter with the “sour” milkman.

“Hey, can we have some ice?” we sang out, as usual

This milkman , poised to let up the brake and to pull away after a delivery, startled us by glowering at us. His age? Not young, not old. But to us kids, every adult was “old.” (The milkmen usually worked, if I recall, for Hood or Borden or perhaps other more local dairies. And those trucks — do they still exist anywhere other than in automotive museums? )

“‘Can I have some ice,” he said, snidely, mockingly. “Can I have some ice,'” That’s all I hear. Did you kids ever think maybe the people who do this job have better things to do than to be handing out ice? We need that ice, can’t you see that? Or are you just too selfish, thinking of yourselves? Isn’t it time you grew up? That ice is what keeps the milk cold. I’m not the ice cream man. You act like you’ve got some right to this ice. Some privilege. Didn’t your parents ever teach you about manners? About respecting working people? Do I hear ‘please?’ Do I hear common courtesy? Just, ‘can I have some ice, can I have some ice’, day in and day out.”

At this point, we children were shriveling into ourselves like blossoms withering in sunlight. Never before had we heard — nor would we ever hear again– stern words from any other member of that benign breed known as The Milkmen. Never before had our simple childish solicitation been defined as sheer effrontery and greeted as a towering imposition.

After this chastisement, if memory serves me, there ensued a moment of stunned silence in which the scolding Milkman allowed his message to sink in and in which we wretches of children were expected to bow in shame. But in truth, we somehow understood, for the first time in our lives, that this tormented soul belonged to a common class of adult outliers who, though once children themselves, resisted the notion that we, the immature, the new-to-this-world, should be indulged our innocent but no less self-centered predilections.

We would have a lifetime to remember this poor sour Milkman and speculate at his anguish — was there a shrewish wife? A wayward offspring? A divorce? Depression? Anger issues, as yet undiagnosed? Was he childless? Loveless? Underpaid? working for a tyrannical boss? Had he fought in the Pacific or in Korea or some other hellish battle zone and was he now suffering from PTSD?

Or was he just a jerk? We’ll never know.

He did, ultimately, give us the ice. There was a pathos about that concession, too. He truly did not wish to deny us, or be seen as a mean man, unloved. He could have just up and driven off. No, he put those ice chunks in our chastened hands. And we, still a bit stunned, commenced to walk off.

“Yeah, just as I thought,” he said, “No ‘thank you’.”

So, we had culminated our heedless ingratitude with a final insult, a crowning failure, a bold period.

“Thank you,” we sang tardily, and truly ashamed.

Then the Sour Milkman drove off — and out of our lives, but not, obviously, out of my memory. And for us kids, cold lumps dripping in our thankless hands, The Iceman had Commeth. A childhood idyll had been chilled, a street corner tradition curdled.

I don’t recall ever again asking another milkman for ice.

REMEMBERING DORA

She died years ago – on New Year’s Eve. That’s probably why I’m thinking of Dora Ronca today (New Year’s Eve, 2020 as I write). She was the Gypsy Violinist, Vaudeville legend, “last rose of summer.” I believe I interviewed her in ‘76. The nation had turned 200. Dora, at 97, was nearly half as old – but slender, be-rouged, be-jeweled in flowing skirt, her aquiline face bordered by witchy strands of black-dyed hair. I was Norwood Bureau reporter for the Daily Transcript. A local merchant told me of the old lady with the great story who regularly wheeled her shopping cart up Dean Street, and lived in a modest Cape with her widowed niece.

She was an outrageous flirt, patting the narrow sofa space next to her by way of invitation. “I’ve had many beaus,” this nonagenarian told this twenty-something reporter, “but I never cared for any of them – until you.” Charmed , amused, adhering to future pandemic-era social distancing protocols, I smiled, reached over and accepted from her long tapered fingers a plastic sack of jumbled memories – news clips, photographs, reviews by hyperventilating early 20th Century show biz scribes describing “the handsomest girl in the extravaganza, a “stunning brunette with a wealth of black hair, large brown eyes and a fine figure” decked out in faux Gypsy regalia – head scarf, sleeves of red velvet edged with ball trimming, dress embroidered in white chrysanthemums as she performed “a crashing Hungerian melody” with “fire, abandon and verve” on her exquisite 1645 Stainer violin.

The gypsy persona was Vaudeville shtick. Dora was French Canadian, if anything (Roncoeur) One reviewer-wag thought her name, Dora Ronca, made her a cigar, but added, “her name is the worst that can be said about her.” The clips revealed that she’d shared the footlights with better known legends – Eddie Cantor, W.C. Fields, then just a “droll juggler.” Asked about them, she said, “yes I know them.” No past tense. To Dora they were still out there , still performing.

She’d played Boston, New York, Paterson, Seattle, Victoria, Vancouver, Paris…Newspapers ran obituary for her Boston Terrier. A Syracuse musical instrument dealer named violin strings in her honor. The plastic sack contained, among other mementos, a receipt for a meal in Monte Carlo.

Vaudeville faded, her career ended, the violin disappeared. The rest of her life’s drama was blank. The plastic sack contained an unopened letter returned from WWI-era France informing her that a soldier-correspondent had been killed in action. A lost beau (and I’ll be she did care for him). Her last husband – there had been many – had been military, so she had VA privileges. Months after my story ran, she fell ill and was admitted to the VA hospital in Providence. (New Year’s Eve.)Her niece told me Dora looked up at the hospital building as they wheeled her in and said, “I played here.”

At the funeral home viewing, I saw laid out before me a very old woman with cropped snow white hair – not the fiery, flirtatious rock star of yore.

It was at the Columbia Theater in Cincinnati, November 4, 1906 that she played her violin sweetly as the audience sang sadly, “Tis the last rose of summer, left blooming alone. All her lovely companions are faded and gone.”

Goodnight and Happy New Year, Dora. It was fun.

OF SOUTHIE (AND DORCHESTER) NICKNAMES

South Boston writer and all-around good guy Brian Wallace recently made a Facebook post about the nicknames on characters that, over the course of his baby-boomer life span, populated Southie’s streets. The Irish are famous for their nicknames. In Dorchester, among us Irish-American Bostonians, we had “Pickles”, “Tarps”, “Sniffles” — the list goes on. Of Southie nicknames, Brian wrote….

You know you are from Southie when you know the last names of Injun, Emo, Tuffy, Snuffy, Snoopy, Weed, Peaches. Mocha, Tumac, Wacko, Libby, Ace, Bunzo, Hun Bun, Mucka Ducka Doo,Satch, Killer, Lep, Scoop, Wacky Jacky, Juggie, Puffy, Chicken Head, Chinky, Shoo Shoo, Shoes, Boob, Dada, Doodie, Todda,, Maury, Fingers, Hokey, Dudso, Hooker, Tiny, Brother, Champ, Burger, Pecker, Dodo, Porka, Bulky, Bull,Tinker, Yaka, Rardy, Bunka, Noonie, Duba, Jabber, Sleepy, Dukie Part 2 tomorrow.

I’m waiting for Part 2 — but I reminded Brian about a nicknamed soul I met during my initial year at Gate of Heaven High School on East 4th Street, back around ’61-’62. He was “Scratch” Scarcella. Yes, Italian rather than Irish. As it happens, I couldn’t tell you his real first name — not to this day. And I met him only once, when “Gatey” freshmen played “Gatey” 8th-graders in football. (Yeah, schools always have nicknames, too.) Scratch, a very tough kid and great athelete showing great promise early on, came crashing through the line and I, playing defense at that moment, grabbed him around the hips and proceeded to be dragged about ten yards. It probably took a couple of other guys to stop him. But beyond his early physical and athletic prowess, Scratch was notable for his quiet, humble decency. You saw that in him even when he was so young. He went on to have a high school career as a football player and boxer. He was not a bully at a time when Southie and Gatie were full of bullies. That’s what made a welcomed impression on me. The genuine tough guys are never bullies.

Brian, as it happens, said he did a story on Scratch recently for some publication. I hope to get a link. Scratch is still with us. He doesn’t know me from Adam but I’m happy to pay tribute to him here.

TAMPA’S LOST GRAVES

The Tampa Bay Times — formerly the St. Petersburg Times —  has lately been doing a great service for regional Florida history –and for humanity. It is joined in this effort by the Hillsborough County School District and, unfailingly, all of official Tampa Bay as it learns of the project.

I’ll repeat the lead paragraph of a story in the November 25th edition by Times staff writer Paul Guzzo:

The Hillsborough County School District on Wednesday announced that 145 graves had been found beneath largely vacant land on a corner of the King High School campus. Continue reading “TAMPA’S LOST GRAVES”

QUID PRO QUO

Quid Pro Quo: Something for something.

QUID PRO QUO!

QUID PRO QUO!

GIVE ME THAT BANANA

AND I’LL GIVE YOU SOME DOUGH!

Read this midnight ramble, or I’ll sulk in my tent. That’s my quid pro quo.

There was rain at sunset, heavy rain. a spasmodic Florida rain as the nation freezes. Someone — some creatures — have been digging these recent overnights in my little backyard.  Possums, perhaps? Raccoons, perhaps?

Or, Little Green Men, perhaps?

Many believe we’re due for a visit from them. Little Green Men, bulb-headed E.T.s, surreptitiously digging in the dead of night for clues to the nature of this Blue Planet, choosing my grubby little back yard for their excavation, thinking we might have something better than what they’ve got back home.  I’ll bet they’d be very “green”, these Little Green Men. Martians with trowels, scooping up and examining clumps of  this Earth and my yard’s green bahia grass and dog poop before being beamed back up to The Red Planet with their specimens.

It’s November 12th for a few more minutes, the birthdays of Grace Kelly and Charles Manson.  Light, perhaps false lights and images, collide with the darkest of realities at every waking hour in our world.  “Stars” and fiends are born, neither, perhaps, exactly what they seem. They dissemble “reality” long enough to entertain, beguile or kill us. Do any of us know who they are? Do we know who we are? Do we pray every moment to be spared The Dragon?

THE DRAGON IS BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD , WATCHING THOSE WHO PASS. BEWARE LEST HE DEVOUR YOU. WE GO TO THE FATHER OF SOULS, BUT IT IS NECESSARY TO PASS BY THE DRAGON.  – St. Cyril of Jerusalem

Could that be who is digging in my backyard? The Dragon?

The day has drawn to a close. It is dark. There is too much darkness lately. On the brighter side, it is the eve, perhaps, of YOUR birthday. It is, as I write, the eve of many birthdays, of many deaths, of many things.

On the darkest side of our planet, it is the eve of the day many rodents will begin nibbling at the poisoned biscuit of Impeachment. Can you hear them? Nibbling?  It’s on the air, on the internet, in the papers, for those of us still reading papers. It’s news. News is noise.

Are we no greater than the noise we make?” wrote Edward Arlington Robinson in ” Man Against the Sky”

For the record, by November 8, 2021, I’d come to loath Donald Trump for his horrible, rampantly egoistic de-railing of our political norms and his lingering impact likely to make persons such as me more vulnerable, i.e., nearly naked, to our ideological/political enemies. But, still….

I’ll trade you a Latin biscuit of Quid Pro Quo for a French cruller of Que Sera Sera.

*    *   *   *   *

It will be the 13th or well after by the time you read this. ( At the time I am re-reading it and re-writing this, it is the eve of the date, i.e., November 9th, that has so many resonances that I have written of it here in this block. And and the time I originally wrote this rumination — and now,  the world is still raging like a crazed soul on a doorstep….raging, raging, raging.

The Dragon will be prowling. And most likely, you won’t read this, quid pro quo or no quid pro quo.  So, Que Sera Sera. 

Feel free to surprise me, as I ramble at 10:11 p.m.

Listen: and here commences the first installment of the occasional saga of an obscure (and entirely fanciful) edge-of-Boston watering hole….

Two guys are the last patrons of a Revere, Massachusetts bar called The Last Mile. They are talking.

They are talking about bricks.

“You ever been to Europe?” asks Jackie the Crow of Stickie Sammartino. Jackie is a brick-layer. “Back in the day, they started making bricks and then making things out of bricks. I guess they ran out of drywall, huh, Stickie?”

Stickie chuckles. They are side by side at the bar. Noise from the street has faded. There’s a juke box, but it’s broken. Joe Barron won’t fix it. Joe owns this joint. Fix it for what? Joe would say. It’s a nice antique, just sitting there in the corner. All glass and tin and plastic. All silent. Bless Joe. He likes silence.  Who’ll use it? A jukebox. That’s his argument. No one wants it, none of the regulars. They forgot about music. They sing sometimes and they drink and they talk. Or they play Kino and dream of getting rich.

Joe Barron is in Florida. Some people say he’s rich. I don’t doubt it.

Yes, it’s last call, Tuesday night at The Last Mile and it’s just Stickie and The Crow. Presently, they both sip their drinks, first from the highball, then the beer chaser. They are, as noted, alone, save for Dean, the bartender, who is cleaning up.

“I’m talking way back, ” Jackie the Crow says. “After Jesus and before they came up with the bricks for Fenway Park.”

“You’re funny, Crow,” says Stickie.

“They ran out  of stone,” Jackie says. “I’m talking along the Baltic. You been to Europe, Stickie?”

Stickie head-shakes a no. “I stay away from the airport,” he says.

“The Baltic’s my roots, Stickie. Me and the ex took a tour. I  ever tell you that?”

“Stickie head-shakes a yes. “You and her still talk?”

Jackie sips first his ball, then his beer. “Christmas Eve, Fourth of July, maybe Easter, we talk. Thanksgiving’s coming up. We’ll talk.”

“Nice.”

“Her and my people are from Poland, you know.”

“I know,” says Stickie. “You get any good food on that tour?”

“Tons,” Jackie says. “But the bricks were the best part. They  took us around in a bus, showed us churches and stuff, all brick. It was interesting.”

“You sure you didn’t dream this?” Stickie says.

“Positive,” Jackie says. Even he doesn’t know when everybody started calling him The Crow. Or why.

“I told them I was a brick-layer soon as the bus pulled up and we’re getting back inside the hotel. They says them bricks got put down by guys like me, way back in the day.”

Jackie’s in the brick-layer’s union. Plans to lay bricks until he drops. Stickie Sammartino was a carpenter. Now he’s retired, sick of driving nails. They’ll  finish their beers and balls and go home. Guys they used to meet here or on the benches under the pavilion at the beach have already gone home, one funeral at a time.

“Some of them brick churches went down when the Nazis come through,” Jackie says. Just like that, Jackie the Crow is, all of a sudden, talking about The Dragon. They’ve both seen the dragon, many times.

Sticky’s thinking of his grandfather, back in 1919 at the famous molasses explosion in Boston. Piles of bricks. Downed people and horses. Everything sticky and smelling of molasses. Somebody had built something wrong, and knew it. So, molasses everywhere. You could smell it for years, like sweet death. Everything sticky, or so they said.

Sticky’s grandfather told Sticky and everybody else that story a million times. After the millionth telling, they started calling his grandfather “Sticky”. About the millionth time Sticky told the story, they started calling him “Sticky”, too. His given name is Sal, just like his grandfather. But at The Last Mile and on Revere Beach, he’s Sticky.

It’s near closing time, but Dean the bartender will let the regulars stay for a while, finish their beers and balls and their stories. It was raining out before. Now, it’s actually snowing a little. Snow in November. The big freeze is pushing east, making history. Sticky and The Crow walked here, for God sake. They live in this rooming house Joe Barron owns. It’s a good little walk in the snow or rain.

“All goddamn Europe got broomed in the war, ” Jackie says.

Sticky sees Europe, like one long street, deep in molasses.

“You know how you talk about the molasses?” Jackie says to Stickie, like he was reading Sticky’s thoughts.  “You sure you’re not dreaming that?”

Sometimes, Sticky isn’t sure. So he doesn’t answer. Silence is better. But then he says, ” it was in all the papers.”

Tomorrow Jackie the Crow will be laying bricks for a new sewage treatment sub-station in Lynn. He can hardly bend, but he likes picking up that trowel and spreading a  nice, smooth layer of cement and laying down those bricks, one at a time. Plus he gets paid for it. He’s trusting that the sub-station walls that he and his fellow brick-layers rise up tomorrow will survive wars, fires, broken pipes, explosion of molasses —  and all the depredations of time, as long as there are people around to take a crap.

In the November night, I see Stickie Sammartino and Jackie the Crow on their bar stools, chasing daylight.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

Let us pause, as we leave The Last Mile, head out the door into the chill of the outer world, and consider the holy mystics who first came looking to save souls on our continent — before any white man laid a single brick. Before everybody had a warm indoor place to take a crap.

(I know. This is all crazy. Yes, I am sober. No, I can’t stop.)

I dreamed of a very beautiful place. Here there was a man garbed in white, wrote Blessed Marie of the Incarnation,  surveying the harsh lands and savage souls all around her in 17th Century North America. She had a mystic vision, grand enough to overcome this wild darkness —  which, she wrote, aroused as much compassion as fear…

She had vision of Christ.

I said to him: You understand, Oh Love, You understand.

Then, words failed me completely and I remained in this silence. 

Let us, God, remain in silence, not noise. And let us save souls.

I think I will rise in the silence of the dead of night to see what or who is digging those holes in my back yard. Little Green Men, I must confess, I don’t believe in.

So it must be possums. Or maybe raccoons. Or maybe The Dragon. I believe in The Dragon who prowls about the world, seeking souls to devour.

Back at The Last Mile, Sticky and Jackie have left their bar stool. Protect them and all of us from the Dragon, O Lord. They shall be walking these dark streets where I am walking just ahead of them.

I won’t pay attention to politics tomorrow, just as, two years ago, I didn’t pay attention to the Impeachment Hearings.  Here in November, the Trump despisers are consumed by another date, January 6th. So be it. On and on it goes.

I don’t know what I’ll be doing tomorrow, actually. Maybe I’ll see if a neurologist can tell me why I can’t shake this — shake, meaning what is defined as “an essential tremor.”  And I’ve been a little dizzy lately. But then, who isn’t dizzy these days?

LONE SURVIVOR

I’m a proud U.S. Army veteran. Today, I’m going to try to make a Veteran’s Day call to Cary Durham in Moonville, South Carolina. I’ve taken to making the call every year. Sometimes I reach him, sometimes not.

I’ll tell you Cary’s military story — his Veteran’s Day story — and why I hope to talk with him today.

His given name is Cary Julius Durham. He’s 72-years-old now, an affable Southerner, widower and father of two grown sons, currently living alone, battling a few health problems, some of them service-related.  I did a television story about him when I discovered, through a little research, that he was in the same Army infantry unit as Edward “Buddy” Scahill, a kid with whom I’d grown up in Boston’s Dorchester section.

That unit – Cary and Buddy’s unit — fought a desperate jungle battle on Thanksgiving Week, 1966 in the early stages of the Vietnam War. I did a television story about it. It aired on the 35th anniversary of that battle, November 21, 2002. It was a battle that brought Cary, Buddy and about twenty other young Americans together. I located Cary through a little library research. Buddy Scahill and I were far from close friends, but we happened to have been born the very same day in the same Boston hospital. For a kid, that’s kind of a special bond. Our families – Buddy’s many sisters and younger brother — were Catholics and fellow parishioners at St. Ann’s Church. We lived about a half mile apart. Our fathers were friends through the Knights of Columbus. Each November 27th, our birthday, we exchanged greetings in the school corridor, or in the classroom, if we happened to be assigned to the same home room.  “Happy birthday, Greg,” Buddy would say to me. I’d return the greeting. We spent some time together in those early years, talked about many things, misbehaved together in Sister Innocentia’s class.

I envied Buddy’s athleticism, daring male youthful brio, toughness and antic sense of humor. Cary Durham says he didn’t know him well, since Buddy came to his platoon months after him. But he smiles at the mention of Buddy’s name, recalling him as a blond “cut-up” and “prankster.”   From time to time growing up, Buddy protected me from his mean-spirited companions who plainly didn’t like me, no matter how much I wanted to be liked and accepted by them. We’d all gone to the St. Ann’s School, played at the same playground and in time, visited the same teenage haunts. Buddy was prominent in that wilder cohort that gradually settled down to the point where Buddy was inviting me to join the Knights of Columbus along with him and some of those other guys.

After high school, Buddy had no college plans and – according to his sisters – couldn’t get work because he hadn’t fulfilled his military obligation. All males of a certain age had a military obligation in those days of the Selective Service draft. I went off to college, barely getting in and cherished my 2-S deferment until being draft and inducted into the Army in the fall of 1969. I’m proud of my service, but admit the prospect of landing in Vietnam was unwelcome. I wound up in Korea, a quiet war zone.

I believe Buddy enlisted – and, from all accounts, wound up loving the Army. He even went to paratrooper school down in Georgia. Meanwhile, Cary Durham had worked in South Carolina textile mills before enlisting and winding up, first in Germany, then in Vietnam. He loved it enough to stay on to become a staff sergeant.

At the end of October, 1966, Buddy and Cary were in the 2nd Brigade, 5th Cavalry, 1st Cavalry Division of the U.S. Army. (If you ever see the image of an Army patch or veteran’s decal with a yellow shield crossed with a black slash and an image of a horse, you’re seeing the automobile or house of a 1st Cav veteran. From the time of the Civil War and Indian Wars, the 1st Cav has been a distinguished fighting unit. From horseback, it had evolved to traveling in quick-strike helicopters and in Viet Nam was called the 1st Cavalary/ Air Mobile.) Buddy and Cary, arriving in country, as noted, months apart and were assigned to the 1st Cav pretty much by the luck of the draw once they got off the plane in Pleiku. Buddy, based on his letters home, had expected to be assigned to the 173rd Airborne, not a “leg unit.”

.

The objective for all four of the 1st Cav’s Paul Revere missions was an extensive “search and destroy” operation against Viet Cong Communist guerrilla forces in the areas of Chu Pong and the Ia Drang Valley, in and around the Central Highlands, up against the Cambodian border. The Vietnam War was still young and hopes of victory were still high.

Barely a year before all this, in November, 1965 ( when Cary, Buddy and all their fellow soldiers were far from that battle zone), Army General William Westmorland had dispatched thousands of troops to pursue and fight the Viet Cong enemy across some 2500 square miles of jungle. A week before the campaign ended, the vastly outnumbered elements of the 7th Cavalry, under Col. Hal Moore, was set upon and encircled by a battalion of the North Vietnamese Army’s 66th Regiment. The close-quarter fighting was savage and terrible. It became known as The Battle of the Ia Drang and was the subject of  a book by Colonel Moore and Mel Gibson’s movie, We Were Soldiers. It was the U.S.’s first big victory against the odds, a proud but bloody moment for the 1st Cav and was taken as a sign that total victory might not be far off. It wasn’t. We all know that now. But we should also remember veterans of that terrible battle today. Many are still among us.

It was a year later in the same region, and the 1st Cav, along with Cary Durham and Buddy Scahill, was still fighting in the jungles of Ia Drang Valley, setting out on missions from their base camp farther south at An Khe. Buddy’s letters home give strong hints that he’d been in danger. In a letter to his mother, he wrote, “I could almost cry when I think I’m going to be here another ten months.” Buddy wasn’t the crying type.

A military record of this period notes rather dismissively that, during the course of Operation Paul Revere IV, “only light contact with the enemy was achieved.”

This is what “light contact” felt like, as both Buddy and Cary experienced it:

In the mid-morning of November 21, 1966, Company “C”, 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry “was searching south of Duc Co along the (Cambodian)  border. This was Buddy and Cary’s unit. The record reads, “suddenly, 2nd Platoon began trading fire with an NVA force of significant size.”

“Significant size indeed. They’d encountered, and would soon be surrounded by a battalion of the 10 NVA Division that had crossed over from Cambodia and was obviously been lying in wait for them.

The military record says 3rd Platoon, hearing a radio distress call, gathered itself up to the aid of 2nd Platoon which was a considerable distance off.  “I bet we hadn’t move ten yards when they attacked us,” Cary told me. 3rd Platoon’s radio man was quickly cut down. That loss and the dense jungle foliage prevented effective artillery or any air support from helicopter gunships. They were completely cut off. While all this was happening, 2nd Platoon, which had made the initial contact with the enemy, was suffering 50 per cent casualties and was saved only by the arrival of of the 1st Platoon and a flight of Skyraider jets. The dwindling group of boys in the 3rd Platoon fought desperately in isolation but soon everybody was either wounded or dead from automatic weapon fire and hand grenades.

“We did pretty well for the situation,” Cary told me, his voice tightening, recalling it all.  But they were very soon overrun. Buddy Scahill, according to his family, was shot six times and at this point probably lay dead or bleeding to death. Cary says a soldier close to him named Smythe spoke his last words to him, saying, “I’m hit real bad, Sarge.” Cary was bloodied from a gunshot to his arm. The fire power had slowly gone silent all around him and the NVA soldiers were moving among them, collecting guns, ammo and web gear and executing the wounded. “You’d hear a guy scream and then you’d hear, bang!” Cary says.  There were only about 20 to 25 in 3rd Platoon — well under full strength due to months of combat attrition.  Cary says he felt he had no choice but to play dead where he lay in the grass– and soon an NVA soldier was standing over his prone figure. He grabbed Cary’s M-14 rifle, kicked off his steel pot helmet and put the barrel of his AK-47 to the back of Cary’s head. Cary held his breath, tried not to move — but in that eternity of seconds, assumed he was about to have his brains blown out.

“Then, he just walked away,” Cary says of the NVA soldier, either assuming he was dead or not wishing to carry out the execution. Either way, Cary was the lone survivor of 3rd Platoon at that point and would lay in the grass for a long time, waiting for help that ultimately came.

The record says “A” Company located the ambush site of 3rd Platoon and medevaced the one survivor. That was Cary Durham. The jungle foliage was too think to cut a landing zone. It is chilling to read that the dead of 3rd Platoons, including Buddy Scahill “were placed in a cargo net and lifted out by a Chinook helicopter.” He was waked toward the end of November at Mulry’s Funeral Home on Neponset Avenue, had a funeral mass at St. Ann’s and was buried with full military honors. His sisters and his friends – who, though a little mean and wild in youth, all grew up to be generous and respected family men, some of them also veterans. They told me Buddy’s mother never recovered from that death.

Cary Durham received the Army’s second highest honor, the Silver Star, pinned on  him personally by General Westmoreland, for his leadership and combat behavior under horrible circumstances that day. He spend time in a Japanese military hospital, then was transferred to the DMZ in Korea, staying in the service until the early 70s, then going to work in his wife’s family’s grocery business.

He had his share of nightmares. “Time heals a lot of things,” he says. “But you never forget. You never forget.”

So let’s remember him today, and remember Buddy Scahill.

Now it’s time for me to make that phone call.

OF MAGIC LANTERNS…

A man who climbs a mountain to see the sunrise sees something quite different from that which is shown in a magic lantern to a man sitting in an arm-chair.  — G.K. Chesterton.

Gilbert Keith (G.K.) Chesterton was offering up a luminous metaphor when he wrote those words. Believe it or not, he was writing about broadcasting.  Chesterton died in 1936, during the adolescence of radio and long before television. But in this case he seems obviously to be writing about the emerging capability of broadcasters to reproduce visual images on a universal scale, hence the reference to a magic lantern.

Chesterton’s life bridged Victorian and modern times. In his experience, a “magic lantern” was an image projector that — and I did not know this — dated all the way back to the 17th Century as a source of entertainment. It originally projected hand-painted slides through a light source, probably a candle. Ultimately, as time went on, it could project photographic images with the help of an electric light source. That could include things like, well….sunsets. (Chesterton’s contemporary Oscar Wilde said we did not value sunsets because we cannot pay for them. Check your cable bill this month and see how much you’re paying  for sports, news, entertainment — and maybe a few sunsets.)

Grand as were Chesterton’s many paradoxical insights on many subject, he seemed, for the duration of this short essay —  and the duration of his relatively brief 62-year life — to be casting a  cold eye on this new broadcast technology, seeing it as an unworthy and potentially duplicitous substitute for the real world. He feared it would make us lazy; inclined to settle for the mock reality over reality itself — among other evils. To his mind, that would probably include the mass propagation of audal and visual dross, trivia, lies, and other garbage on line, and on big and small screens. Chesterton, Catholic apologist and Victorian curmudgeon, was foretelling our wired future.

Paradoxically, Chesterton seems elsewhere in the course of the same short and obscure essay to acknowledge the undeniable mass social function of the coming mass media. I sense, however, that he might have wanted that function limited to letting us know when we’re about to have a bomb dropped on our heads. In the years after his death, many bombs would be dropped on many heads, or be planted in backpacks. I was two blocks from the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing and I definitely heard the bombs with my own unaided ears. But only my colleagues the videographers made it possible for me and millions, after the fact, to see and hear the explosions and their horrible aftermath by means of the prostheses known as cameras, microphones and TV. We may not have wanted to see or hear them.

Beyond sunrises and sunsets, we would all, in our lifetimes, be seeing “movie pictures” of things we were not certain we wanted to see, the World Trade Center attacks, for instance. But there’s no turning back the clock — or turning off the camera. Feel free to turn off the TV. But if you’re sitting in a Fifth Avenue bar/restaurant, you may find yourself encircled with flat screens instantly replaying, in living color and sometimes with sound,  things that very recently happened everywhere, from Afghanistan to Gillette Stadium. I guarantee on nightly news, you’ll see lots of cellphone video of the undesirable. Cell phones — now we all have the entire virtual world in the palm of our hands — good, bad, ugly.

Speaking of Fifth Avenue, I’ll always remember the time walking down  “America’s Street” sometime back in the 70s and seeing a guy sitting under an inverted cardboard box with the equivalent of a TV screen cut out of the front of it. His face was in “the screen” and he was talking to passersby on the busy sidewalk, as if he were on TV. Wonderfully crazy people, God bless them, stand on sidewalks and chatter all the time to people, especially in a place like New York City.  This guy must have figured he’d command more attention if he looked like one of those corporate oracles known as “broadcasters” — especially “news” broadcasters —  than if he were merely standing there in his ragged street clothes holding forth on matters he deemed important. Call it, thinking inside the box. ( An added anecdote to this anecdote is that, immediately after taking note of this boxed broadcaster, I looked up to see, about five paces away,  Tom Wolfe approaching from the other direction, gently easing into a refined but appreciative smile at the sight of this bit of performance art. (And how did I know it was Tom Wolfe? Well, I’d seen him in many a “magic lantern” — unmistakable in a double-breasted, yellow pinstriped suit and distinctive hoary coiffure. The modern media have made it possible for us to recognize and even believe we know people we may never see or really know. But I know I saw Tom Wolfe, and I’ll bet the “boxed man” was glad to see him, in all his trademark sartorial splendor, perhaps hoping he had Wolfe’s consequential attention.

As for Chesterton and broadcasting: In 1931, The BBC invited him to give a series of radio talks. It’s been noted that he accepted “tentatively,” but, beginning in 1932, gave forty talks a year. Some scratchy recordings have been preserved by the mass technological means Chesterton foretold and may be heard somewhere on that trash barge of the internet.

I think, had he been born at another time, old G.K. could not have resisted the allure and undeniable power of the coming “magic lantern” that is television.