Memories – Page 3 – 19 Cent Notebook

LIKE GLASS

Summer 2024 everything moving quickly, too quickly, toward its outer edges. Chaos, as usual, all around. Sameness. So much sameness. And fear.

I’m thinking of last summer — borne backward, against the current, by easier memories — to when I spent all of July in Upstate New York; Rotterdam Junction, to be precise, in flight from the Florida heat that I could not escape this year.

I had stayed at a friend’s house, just up a steep little protective grassy bluff from the Mohawk River, just down from Lock#9. It is a serene, fairly wide stretch traveled by the occasional cabin cruiser likely bound for the Hudson River where the Mohawk flows into it. There is a grape arbor and a shed by a fence. My friend built a little porch on the shed, facing the river.

There used to be a little boat, if I recall correctly, in a little shaded opening of trees down the slope and near the water’s edge. It was — again, if I recall correctly — gone last year, as was the little pier my friend once had for that boat. Getting on in years, he might have tired of maintaining either, and seldom, if ever got out onto the water for fishing or leisure. But he also could not bring himself to move himself and his wife away from this humble riverside haven where he’d lived happily for so many years.

I’ve never been out on the Mohawk, but loved being near it.

If I were my friend, I couldn’t have moved, either. (He did, in fact, once move to Florida, but wound up selling his mobil home down there for far, far less than its value, and hastening back to the realm of seasons, snow, ice, complex family memories. Back to the river. )

During my month on the river, on a pleasant but unaccountably anxious July evening, I wrote, simply:

The Mohawk tonight, as the light dies.

Good to be near it, to stand on the cool grass

Reflecting, on all that can be shattered.

A life, a river

Like glass.

DRIFTING MOUNTAIN CLOUDS

This was around 1996. Probably the fall.

I was sitting in the small library of little Lees-McCrea College in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina in the town of Banner Elk. I was just browsing, using up some time. I’ll always go in search of a library. A college library, however small, is usually rich in the better books and even richer periodicals. Under the best of circumstances, libraries are still quiet places. This one was quiet. Maybe I would learn something. I was doing a lot of thinking, too.

I was also in between broadcast jobs, thinking of leaving the business, uncertain of my next move. I’d traveled up from Florda after leaving my TV job there, and was halfway back to what I will always call home — Massachusetts, especially Boston, for better or worse. I was living with a group of people (long story) and working at a little radio station which I liked, but being required to sell advertisement in addition to being on the air. I didn’t like visiting merchants and auto dealers selling ads. I like meeting people –especially Southern people — but didn’t like or feel competent about figuring out how to convince them to spend money, then write up a contract.

Suddenly, as I sat reading and thinking, what appeared to be smoke began drifting by the window and between the library building and the neighboring campus building. For a fraction of a second, I was alarmed -but then, consoled and quietly beguiled.

For this was not smoke. These were clouds. None of the few other people in the library seemed to think the sight unusual. We were in the mountains, after all, high up among some low drifting clouds. I suddenly loved that peculiar reality, and those white ephemeral phantoms. I began to think pleasant mountain thoughts.

But my bright thoughts, at any moment, illuminated, as by the sun, often darken. Moods, like dark clouds, can drift across and block the sunshine. It was true at that moment, true always. Nostalgia, too, (in which I’m indulging now) can turn sorrowful, especially over memories of wasted time. I’ve wasted a lot of time since that day, and squandered a great deal of mental and emotional resources that should have gone into writing. (Facebook and blogs did not exist then, and are still not the best forums – or fora – for a true, which is to say, “professional” writer.)

That cloud-hidden moment was around the month I turned fifty. It was mid-life and, since I’d started my broadcast career late( at thirty-two) I was more or less at mid-career (though I’d put in prior years as a newspaper reporter).

I’d ultmately work until right around my 69th birthday in 2015. That was in the future.

But at that moment in that little college library, I wasn’t even sure I’d resume my broadcast career. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. I knew I couldn’t stay in the mountains, among the clouds, barely getting by on the salary of a tiny mountain radio station located in a tripple-wide trailer. (Yes, it was fun, but it wasn’t the time to make a career of it.)

Either during that library visit or on another day peacefully among the stacks, I’d been reading about the writer Flannery O’Connor — about how she’d “accepted” her vocation as a writer — not easy for her, wracked by the degenerative disease lupus and destined to die at age 39.

I had pondered what it means to “accept” one’s vocation, even when it’s difficult, but when it nonetheless feels like the only path to fulfillment, or what analysts call self-actualization (whatever that means). I had read of many writers saying this about their “vocation”–that it felt like accepting its joys and burdens was the only life path forward. That’s doubtless true of any vocation, but writers of any genre at any level often speak of the trial of filling that white blank space before them out of the sometimes meager resources of their imagination or memory, nonetheless feeling compelled to do so. I once heard the writer Catherine Anne Porter, during an interview, say she’d often felt she’d have been much happier with another vocation and more than once vowed to give up writing –only to find herself writing out that vow. Jessamyn West wrote that good days practicing her craft were like heavenly bliss, while bad days were equivalent to working off any punishment she might have earned with her sins. Sports writer Red Smith famously said, with beautiful sarcasm, that writing wasn’t difficult; you just sat in front of the blank page and opened a vein.

One can too easily exaggerate those difficulties — to oneself or to others. It’s a cheap excuse for giving up.

And a writer might work forever in obscurity. Franz Kafka asked a friend to burn all his writings, many of them incomplete, after he died. Fortnately, the friend did not honor that promise.

On or about that mountain day, meditating among drifting clouds, I learned very belatedly about the necessity of “accepting” a writer’s vocation, even though I might die before I got any good at it, or got any readers.

But soon thereafter, I continued my journey north and resumed my broadcast career and mostly neglected this true vocation, making it into an occasional avocation. TV news writing was easy. Real writing is hard.

Now, in what little time is left, I must “accept” my writer’s vocation. I might even enjoy it.

And I will be grateful for that brief moment of illumination, beguiled and consoled among drifting clouds by my drifting thoughts at 3700 feet above sea level.

And I must write.

GOODBYE, BARCELONA

(Fourth and final installment in the Barcelona Quartet)

It was raining hard in Florida’s Panhandle the day I labored to recover these fond memories. I was staying in a borrowed waterfront cottage. It was August ,2016. Up in Massachusetts, my sister was dying of cancer, the world, then and now, was wracked by war and violence. The Gulf of Mexico was gray, roiled to the horizon, rollers breaking white against the rocks along the coastal road only fifty yards away. It was a road that, in a matter of days, was destined to be broken apart and washed away by a Hurricane Hermine.

I would be gone by then – done recalling that day, fifty years before when I left the city of Barcelona….

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From my 19-cent travel notebook:

“The train is very dark as I write this.”

I’m 19. The train, a Spanish train, is still in the station. About to head north to France, July, 1966. It began moving suddenly….clack-clack …clack-clack…. Those old tracks that would take me to the railroad border town of Port-Bou. I’d been a stranger in a strange land.

There is a statue of Columbus in Barcelona along a wide waterfront boulevard. Columbus is high up on a thin, ornate pedestal, pointing out to sea. To the New World, presumably (although he’s actually pointing toward Algeria).

The New World was far, far away from this Old World. I was homesick.

Remembering Barcelona’s brief encounters — too brief, just two days — I wrote: The view was wonderful, the gardens beautiful. Not another word about those gardens, that view. And why no mention of Antoni Gaudi’s sacred, eccentric Sagrada Familia basilica? – “with its profusion of decorated spires and neo-Gothic arches and its bright, throbbing colors, intricately detailed sacred carvings and riotous modernists stained glass…”as one writer so beautifully wrote of it anonymously in a journal I’ve since stumbled upon. The Church of the Holy Family would have dominated any view. Did I miss it, that wild, beautiful work in progress, begun in 1882 — called sensual, spiritual, whimsical, exuberant. said to resemble sugar loafs and anthills?

Some hills I do remember from my brief tour — mounds of rubble in vacant lots. Were they lingering scars from Spain’s Civil War? Barcelona had briefly belonged to the Anarchists during those terrible times. Peaceful and equitable in many ways, or so it seemed initially to George Orwell, writing of it in Homage to Catalonia. He would become disillusioned with the Spanish Republican Loyalists.

Chance observations became indelible memories. A taxi, horn blaring, rushing a sick child to a hospital. Three family members, late for their train, spilling out of a taxi with their luggage, racing frantically into the station. I remember the heat. I feel as though I just crawled four hours through a field, I wrote as I wandered. But I have only unrecorded memories of the night before, desperately lost, unable to locate my youth hostel, wandering in darkness along a steep hill street leading up to wherever one boarded additional transportation to The Benedictine Abbey and Holy Grotto of Montserrat, trolleys noisily ascending and descending under the trees. I only glimpsed them– but that glimpse would become one of those indelible memories — children and their clerical guardians packed aboard those trolleys – nuns and young priests, pilgrims all. (I need someday, to figure out how those pilgrims on those particular trolleys were managing to make it miles away to the Abbey.)

When I was lost, I was praying, and prayer brought me back to my hostel, finally. May I always go on praying, because, I often feel lost.

I’d wandered lost for hours and will never forget that. Barcelona preserves in me the necessary sense of a lost and searching soul.

On that last day, I met a Boston University student from Connecticut. Forget his name, or how we met. He’d be sailing to Majorca. I’d never heard of Majorca. He told me about it as we walked through Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter; medieval churches, prayers in stone. He embarked for the island, said farewell. Alone, I explored the city some more, thinking of Majorca. (Thinking as I write, of him, that brief companion. I also, very briefly while alone, encounterd a couple of fellows from Wrentham, Mass.)

I wrote: Bought a post card in a shop, the woman very helpful. Finally, boldly I was navigating the city that had so intimidated me, my American smile a thin substitute for rudimentary Spanish. Had a Coke in a café. Wrote out a postcard to my godmother. I was at ease, however briefly, in the city in which I’d once felt eternally forsaken. But still undeniably a stranger in a strange land.

I wrote:

Took the ferry to the breakwater. Mediterranean very beautiful.

There was a little café out there.

Had shrimp and Vina Pomal for 173 peseta.

Light-headed, I walked along the breakwater, found a bench. Thinking of home, I watched a huge gray ship of the U.S. Sixth Fleet — possibly a light cruiser — pass close by in bright sunlight, heading for open water, all its sailors “manning the rails” in their dress whites, the U.S. Navy’s mandatory ritual of departure upon sailing out of any port. Did I wave to my fellow Americans? Did any of them wave back? Do any of them today remember seeing that lone fellow countryman on the jetty as they left? Waving goodbye?

It was time for me to leave port as well. And to say goodbye.

In near darkness on the train, I wrote: I had to buy an ice cream to get rid of the last of my change (Spanish pesetas). Not changeable across the border. The train lurching forward. The station, the city fading. Sun setting on the factories outside Barcelona….Martini Rossi billboard passes by. Fields with bundles of hay. The fields getting dark. We have come to a stop amid children’s voices in the distance. The train moving again. Luggage rocking, more dark fields….

…clack -clack….clack-clack….”

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The rain had stopped at this point on Alligator Point back in August, 2016. I was done recalling and copying these memories out of my 19-cent notebook. The light was fading, wind rising. Palm trees, live oak, tossing wildly. The sky overhead a pastiche of El Greco’s View of Toledo, taking me back to Spain.

A guy in a cowboy hat, earlier that week while I was pulled up to the gas pump in a neigboring town, spotted my Massachusetts license plate and asked with a sly turn of the head, “You from Baws-ton?”

“Yup, originally.”

“You talk funny?”

“Yup. I pahk the cah.” He laughed. I laughed. Happy once again to be a stranger in a strange land, even though it was my land. Happy to be in a place where people talk to you. Sorry that time was passing so quickly.

It’s kept passing. That was nine years ago.

I must go back to Barcelona someday. Must see Gaudi’s Basilica. Filled with blessed spaces. Attend Mass there. Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus.

Then, maybe,I’ll also sail out to Majorca, see its cliffs, it deep blue coves….but, above all, see all of that city I barely glimsed so memorably, as in a magic lantern, when I was so young.

Goodbye, Barcelona. Goodbye.

THE DANISH KID

(Part 3 of the 4-Part Barcelona quartet)

Mid-summer, 1966. Sparse, elliptical entries dot my flimsy 19-cent travel notebook from that period. Especially entries about my two-days in a broken down Barcelona youth hostel: Voices in the barren dusty hall below…. (sound of) a broom against the hard floor…children’s voices outside…it is cool and cloudy….I must write some letters and determine how I will get back to France….

Thereafter, unaided memory and only a few random, barely legible pen scratches help me reconstruct the moment in the wee hours when I woke to find a leg dangling by my bunk, then another, then both legs wiggling down to the floor below, using, if I recall accurately, my small suitcases for a stepping stone. Whoever’s legs these were had obviously missed curfew – probably a midnight curfew — and was climbing into the dormitory through a window. This particular window, right by my bed, had a broken screen, flapping loose, making possible this stealthy, illicit entrance. (Small wonder the dormitory was hungry with mosquitoes.) My initial annoyance was tempered by the memory of wandering lost in the city the night before. I could just as easily have missed curfew. A tolerant sense of fraternity seemed in order.

Presently one, perhaps two other youths slipped through the same window and quickly found their bunks. But the original arrivee, a lean and frenetic youth, circled briefly and restlessly in the dark, the hot red dot of a lighted cigarette arcing occasionally up to his mouth.

Someone smoking? In this fire trap? Again, tolerance, compounded by exhaustion, must have overridden outrage or alarm. I dozed off. Everyone else was snoring.

I met this smoker and curfew-breaker in the morning over the hostel’s meager bread and hot cocoa breakfast. He was a Danish boy about my age, his name forgotten. I don’t recall him smoking again, in or out of the hostel. Indoors, in sight of hostel proprietors, this would have violated strict rules – though this fellow seemed the kind of soul who was careless about rules: high-spirited, affable, dark blond, about nineteen. I don’t recall anything we spoke about, nor do I remember asking him the reason for his peculiar late night entrance. He was outgoing and lively in conversation, an ice-breaker among strangers. At some point, both of us must have befriended a young Scottish hostel guest. My notebook says: The Dane and Scot rode with me to the Placa Cataluña. I’d doubtless heard of the Placa’s splendor and decided to invite a hostel guest – the Scott – to travel there with me for lunch. By now, the Dane had gone off somewhere.

Sadly, I have no memory of this Scot. It’s obvious he struck me as a congenial travel companion. But once again, the Danish boy made himself memorable by rushing toward us as we headed for the door. Where were we going? He was eager and curious to know. Could he go, too? I realized then that, for all his sociability, this Danish kid was a solitary, perhaps lonely, traveler. He urged us to “wait a minute, will you?” speaking that axiomatic English phrase clearly and deliberately, making it unintentionally sound like a demand.

We must have traveled by taxi. I’m sure we had lunch. Sadly, I have no memory, written or otherwise, of the Placa Cataluña’s grand, storied ambiance and architecture or of my conversation with these newfound friends. Tweaking my subconscious, however, I believe I can see us in flashes – three strangers at an outdoor café table, the Danish boy doing much of the talking. Or did he become more reticent as the hours wore on?

Later, packed up, briefly idle, ready to depart the hostel for a final walk around central Barcelona before catching a night train to France, I was again approached by the Dane. He asked if I’d join him for a (quick) game of chess, if such a thing were possible. I agreed out of courtesy. We pulled chairs up to a ping-pong table and he removed a square plastic novelty from his belt where it had hung by a little chain. It was essentially a puzzles — a chess puzzle — with sliding black and white pieces designated as kings, queens, bishops, rooks, knights and pawns. He put this minute chessboard between us at one corner of the table. Then, speaking of puzzles, there followed a puzzling deliberative silence of a mere second or two. Without looking at me, the Dane suddenly asked, “do you like boys or girls?”

A very peculiar question at a time such as this. “Girls,” I answered quickly and with considerable emphasis, still puzzled, but suspicious — whereupon the Dane, giving a little chortle, abruptly flipped the tiny chessboard so that the tiny white squares faced me and the black squares faced him. He muttered something to the effect that his inquiry was merely a means of determining who’d play with which colored chess pieces.

Really? Why not just say, ‘do you prefer black or white?’

Was this just another among the multitude of trans-lingual misunderstandings or trans-cultural vagaries I’d occasionally encountered during my European travels? Musing over this antic moment after many years, I can’t say for certain, naïve as that sounds.

But, no matter. Only one or two rooks or pawns had slid about the miniature plastic board before we both, with a glance at our watches, declared it time to move on – I to the heart of Barcelona for a final look; him to wherever wild Danes went in that wide open decade.

His was among my briefest human encounters of that summer, although also among the more memorable. I now and then think of him – even say a little prayer for him — whenever I see a window with a broken screen.

LOST IN BARCELONA

(Sequal to NIGHT TRAIN TO BARCELONA)

On a Spanish morning fifty-eight years ago, in my nineteenth year before God, in a ramshackle European youth hostel, a Danish boy asked me if I liked boys or girls. And my mind, lifted up in a prairie whirwind, instantly flew off to Oz. And I thought: No, Dorothy, you and I are definitely not in Kansas anymore.

But let me begin at the beginning of that particular chapter of my travel chronicles which took place during a serendipitous mere 48-hour visit to the city with the rhapsodic name: Bar-ce-lo-na.

Among other things, I got lost there. It was July, 1966.

My Continental journey (as recorded in my 19-cent notebook) had brought me to the French-Spanish border.

I wrote :

Night train from Paris. Traveled all night. Awoke in my couchette. We had stopped; light crept under the drawn shade. There were only a few people left in the compartment of six couchettes. The Pyrenees. Baking heat. Arrive at Port-Bou, French-Spanish border. Hungry, I buy a ham sandwich, chips, and a coke in the little station. The gauge of the tracks changes. Therefore I must change trains. The Spanish train bumps rhythmically, slowly, along…clack-clack…clack-clack….Glimpses of the vivid blue Mediterranean. Stony remains on a hillside. They resemble castle ruins. Long, slow, bumpy ride continues. The train was very old. I kept hoping we’d pass by the sea again, but there were only the hills and dusty fields, small villas, seemingly abandoned, sitting in the baking sun. Farmers working the fields with horse-drawn plows, women driving donkey carts over narrow, winding roads.

There’s a young Swede in my compartment. Bound for the home of a wealthy Spanish family. He’ll tutor their young daughter.

…clack-clack…clack-clack….

It’s getting hotter. Barcelona’s poverty-stricken environs roll by. There were dumping areas and factories and rows of shacks. Midday clouds darken crooked rows of scarred, broken rail side houses. Laundry hangs limply from sagging lines, lifts gently in some filthy breeze. Grim factories come next. Odors like cheap perfume, then like medicine. They roll into our open window on waves of hot air. We lurch to rest in the station. It is dark and gloomy. I bid the Swede goodbye and good luck, get a taxi to my youth hostel. I’d written down the address from a hostel directory. Tip the driver. (Grossly over-tipped him. His good fortune. I’m just learning the deal with the Spanish peseta.)

Imagine the Alamo after the siege. That is a tiny exaggeration. But to this day, recalling its stucco exterior and abysmal state, it’s how I remember that hostel on the Avenida Virgen de Monserrat. For about 10 peseta. It was home for two nights.

Once settled, I took a long, long walk, all the way into the center of the city. Evening in Barcelona changed my mood. She glowed as Paris had glowed. I had found one of the central squares where the people, all in all, seemed ripe with Mediterranean amiability and the city itself bustling and happy. Then as evening arrived and the lights came on, I came upon a playground filled with children and their mothers watching over them. Oh, how I would soon need a mother watching over me….

I rode the Metro, walked some more. But I’d failed to take the hostel’s address, or even note its location, except to remember that it was up a hill. Could there be more than one hill in Barcelona? (Dozens, you idiot!)

Darkness found me walking up one hill, down another, lost, my Spanish shamefully limited to “si” and “no”. The word “hostel” meant nothing to anyone I met. The hostel had a curfew. As I walked I began to face a terrible prospect: locked out once I found the hostel, or sleeping on the street. I simply had no idea where I was and, ast noted, I spoke no Spanish.

Rain was threatening as I walked. Two rats pursued one another on a gravel patch. Cat’s eyes gleamed in darkness. People stood in the pallid light of doorways. I pass houses both lavish and poor. Heard a child crying, saw women laughing in a brightly lighted kitchen. Does no one speak English? I saw a couple kissing in the dark. I wasn’t going to bother them. (In my notebook I have written, “the Spanish women and girls are the most beautiful I have ever seen.”)

Some streets were paved, others were dust and dirt. Trolleys squealed slowly down one tree-canopied hillside avenue bearing nuns, priests and children from their visit to the Montserrat Benedictine Abbey and Holy Grotto at the top. (Seeing them, hearing them, I believe I prayed. I was becoming oh, so disoriented, isolated and desperate.)

The rain began, softly. I came upon police lining a wide, bright boulevard. Some dignitary would be passing (was Franco visiting?) I approached one cop; a friendly face under the menacing visor and chin strap. The language barrier frustrated us both. The rain was suddenly heavy. The cop must have directed me to a taxi. My notebook says the (taxi) driver was whistling an American tune. He took me to a police station. A kindly desk sergeant, gesturing, suggested a route. Seems I was mercifully close to my hostel at last. More walking. The rain stopped, another mercy. The streets gleamed.

Finally! I came upon a dark tree-lined passageway. My broken down Alamo of a hostel was at the end of it, looking like Shangri-La to me at that moment. I drank Orange Fanta from a vending machine, found peace and, ultimately, sleep in a bunk bed, though I was preyed on by mosquitoes.

The following night I would wake in darkness to find a leg dangling by my bunk. Someone climbing through a window.

This would be the aforementioned Danish boy.

But that’s another story.

And it will be my next story from those Spanish moments during those long-ago hours in that unforgettable summer of 1966.

NIGHT TRAIN TO BARCELONA

I arrived in Paris 58 years ago on June 17, 1966, the first stop in a summer rambling via rail or by any other available means, including hitching rides with acquaintances. So far, it has been my only full-scale trip to the Continent. It began with a voyage aboard a Norwegian freighter out of Red Hook, Brooklyn. (If you aren’t adventurous when you’re 19, you never will be.) The name of this blog is taken from the little 19 cent notebook I carried with me that summer.

I have many Paris memories from my three-week stay there. But below is my memory –composed previously — of a trip I took by night train from Paris to Barcelona in early July, 1966, with a serious mis-adventure in between:

Night train to Barcelona. Dusk coming on, the lights of Paris behind me, gone. The music playing in the streets of that enchanted city, still. I miss it already. Darkness spreading over fields out there, rushing by….

So begins a July 5 entry in my 19-cent notebook. It’s 1966, early in my 19-year-old continental ramble.

Boarding at the Gare de Lyon (I believe), I check two small suitcases. A porter escorts me to my sleeping quarters – middle bunk in a narrow couchette of six bunks, three to a side, window in the middle. Thin mattresses, blanket, clean sheets. I assume I’ll meet my fellow sleepers later, imagining five French ingénues, a slumber party. (Remember, I’m 19, bursting with newly acquired Parisian esprit d’amour.)

The train underway, I roam narrow, mostly unpopulated passageways, traversing rocking gangways, purchase with my remaining francs a French bier from a mid-train concession (knowing soon I must learn to call this beverage cervesa). I pour it into a stomach still unsettled from cheap snacks gobbled down before boarding. I meet two Canadian soldiers on leave from some base somewhere. Good company, at least for a few rollicking moments of military braggadocio. (Where are the girls? I’m wondering.) Boisterously gung-ho, these two fellows from the north country assure me the Canadian forces are the toughest in the world (I don’t dare doubt it) and speak of the allegedly intercepted WWII German correspondence that admiringly describes how the fearsome Canadian troops were “drunk all the time” and “always shooting from the hip.” Now, I’m no military strategist, but I’m privately thinking this sounds more characteristic of the last men standing at, say, Gallipoli or The Alamo. It’s also slightly less probable than that my couchette at that moment, is, indee, filling up with jolies filles.

Which, by this time, I’m thinking it’s high time I check and see.

I wend my way back past multiple sliding doors, slide open “my” door – and find that my middle bunk – in fact, the entire couchette has been usurped by a snoring (probably French) family – husband, wife and kids. Only a top bunk, entirely stripped of bedding, is free.

Furious, I crash the slider shut, search for a porter, wishing I knew the French word for “invaded” – until my stomach and bowels suddenly redirect me to a closet-sized train privy.

Here I encounter the fabled drop-chute toilet. Lid up, you look down at tracks whizzing by in black obscurity. Sitting bare-bottomed in the draft, I recall the ditty: “when the train is in the station, we must practice constipation…” It’s a flimsy diversion from my hard predicament, bedless aboard the night train to Spain.

Cold, exhausted, resigned, with no porter in sight, I return to the couchette, slip off my shoes, clamber — grumbling, indignantly thrashing my legs – onto the naked top bunk, devoid even of a mattress, hearing incongenial grunts from those I bump during my ascent. I lay several sleepless minutes, fully clothed, hearing in my head that new Beatles song (Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away….).

This won’t do!

I repel down, exit, slamming the slider shut, return for my shoes, slam the slider again, find –finally – a porter who speaks no English, but who lets me guide him back to the couchette where he flings open the door, apologizes to the occupants but commences to interrogate,in French, the father of the sleeping brood. He, from his lying position, spouts French vitriol, the approximate translation of which I imagine to be, “this little American shit kept barging in here, woke us all up, kept slamming the door….etc..”

The porter seems enlightened by the exchange. But, facing a language barrier, he takes me in tow to another distant couchette where he rouses an amicable French-speaking American to act as translator. Never did English sound sweeter.

The matter is quickly sorted out – and to my eternal embarrassment. Though stone-cold sober, being an utter rube when it came to navigating railroad sleepers, I’d stumbled into the wrong couchette. I must have had something – a ticket, a slip of paper that might have helped solve the mystery.

With unmerited paternal gentleness, the porter guides me across one, perhaps two, gangways to an altogether different car. (I guess all those damned sliding doors looked the same to me.)

My couchette is absolutely empty – of girls or anyone else – which, at this point, is absolutely fine by me. I have my choice of bunks, all with immaculate, undisturbed sheets and blankets. Deeply abashed, feeling ever so much the ultimate Ugly American, I thank the porter with a heartfelt, merci. He smiles and gives a parting glance that seems to say, ‘young man, you’ll be telling this story fifty years from now.’ (He’s right, of course. Except, make that fifty-eight years!)

In welcomed solitude, I crawl into a middle bunk and sleep deeply until a Pyrenees dawn.

ON THIS DATE…

in 1966, after a trip across the Atlantic in a Norwegian freighter, and on the same day that freighter docked at Antwerp, Belgium, I traveled by train to Paris, arriving at the Gare du Nord at dusk, arriving by taxi at 20 Avenue Victoria, Paris.

And I began a three week stay in Paris, and a stay of eight weeks or so in continental Europe.

I’ve been back to the Continent only once, to cover the death of a pope.

I see the city, Paris. Many friends have visited. Two friends have lived there. I’ve seen a picture of a woman I briefly called a girlfriend during the Seventies posing with a female companion in front of the famous Left Bank cafe Deux Magot.

The summer Olympics will open there soon.

City of Light. City of so much history.

I must get back.

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.