Category: Memories

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.

August 31, 2023. Woodstock, Georgia….

I knew it would fly, this summer, this year. Hot, so hot. Time in the hills and by the mountains of upstate New York. And the Mohawk. Gone. Memories now. Another summer gone. Another year going….

I write from Woodstock, Georgia (again), having made perhaps an extreme decision to go an extreme distance to be away from the first of the season’s Gulf of Mexico hurricane threats. A long drive, but some peace at the end. I’m always in search of peace.

I guess almost every Labor Day, whether I realize it or not, I think of Joe O’Donnell. He was my peer, an intelligent childhood neighbor who grew up, like me, on Neponset Avenue. We were never in any school class together, never really truly close friends, though friends for a significantly memorable period. I think he wound up a year ahead of me at the Catholic school after tonsil and adnoids removal in third grade caused me to repeat the year. So we weren’t classmates.

Joe always had a crewcut, always seemed a trifle more intelligent than his years. I watched him, at least once, be the victim of a bully. He seemed to brush the experience off. To this day, I harbor anger on his behalf for the bully whom I met some years back at a wake ( which is where people from the old neighborhood always meet over the bodies of fellow neighbors and chums). The bully had become a somber, probably harmless working class adult with a perfectly nice, even pretty, wife, although I did sense a certain hostility enveloping him — and me. He’d grown up poor with probably a poor family life. I’ll make that excuse for him. We all, most of us, grow up. He might have done a better job of it than me.

But back to Joe O’Donnell

Joe’s father had been a World War II paratrooper who’d spent time with a broken leg as a P.O.W. of the German’s. Joe, by contrast, was not paratrooper material, nor was I. Riding our bikes was about as daring as we got. We were once both on a youth basketball team and mutually fretted about not being called upon to play. But, inwardly, I knew I could hardly dribble the ball and had been spared humiliation and was masking my relief with false indignation. Joe, perhaps, the same.

Joe’s mother was a wonderful woman who, come to think of it, masked her emotions pretty well in order to deal with life’s challenges. I say this because I met her at a 1989 Catholic neighborhood reunion and learned how upset she’d been when a raised multi-pane porch window at the O’Donnell’s house slipped free of its hook-and-eye overhead latch while roofers hammered overhead and came smashing down on me, putting my head right through one of the panes, leaving a scatterring of broken glass on my head. I wasn’t hurt, or even upset. I was half amused. Perhaps I’d been nicked and perhaps there was a little blood. Mrs. O’Donnell came rushing out, obviously concerned. I asked, calmly,”am I cut?” She said, “you’re ears hanging off, now stand still.” And, paradoxically assured by this and the absence of pain, that I was fine, I stood still while she commenced to clear away the mantel of broken glass and lift the window to free me.

But at that meeting with her three decades later, I became aware that she’d been deeply upset by the incident. I assured her it was a non-event for me, and how much I appreciated and was reassured by her tough-minded intervention. It did not seem to ease her own traumatic memory and, perhaps, guilt. So, yes, Joe’s mom knew how to hide her true feelings, at least at the point of impact.

And now, as I come to think of it — why wasn’t Joe at that 1989 reunion? I believe I asked about him, and got no good answer why he was absent.

Again, about Joe, and as regards our friendship….

What is it that makes companions of people in their very early years other than proximity — people who will probably drift far apart when they move? Joe never moved — not for many years, anyway.

He seemed smart, but given to masking childhood’s typical petulance and easy emotions and tears, unlike his only younger brother Kenny or his young sister who were open books. In that sense, he always seemed a little older than his years. We were just kids who lived three houses and a short street crossing part. I don’t recall how we started hanging out together at maybe age eleven or twelve. What did Joe see in me? In him, I saw, as enumerated, a bundled up temperment that somewhat mirrored my own. Maybe that was the attraction — and the fact that you could have an intelligent, albeit still immature conversation on what we knew of the world.

Then, suddenly we were teenagers, probably both thirteen, still unathletic, perhaps only beginning to be interested in girls. There were no girls around that Labor Day weekend, though I was very interested in one. I never recall talking to Joe about girls, but we probably did. They were something else we were probably still a little afraid of.

And why do I think of Joe specifically at Labor Day? Because on our bicycles we rode from Neponset all the way out to the Blue Hills on Labor Day weekend on what I think was 1960. The Blue Hills were quite a distance, at least five miles. But I don’t recall anybody driving us there. Once there, we peddled all the way up one, probably the principle one, called Big Blue. It was not overly steep, that winding uphill blacktopped road, but still a bit arduous as he stood up to peddle and peddle and peddle, likely criss-crossing the road, on our very ordinary bikes of no particular brand.

It might have been the first year before full-fledged adulthood that I understood or cared about Labor Day’s significance as summer’s end point, and, accordingly, felt, again for the first time, that wistful sense of seasonal passage to fall and the end of unbridled childhood freedom and the looming return to classroom drudgery. For though technically now a pubescent teenager, I was still, in essence, a child who’d relatively belatedly mastered the balancing act that was riding a bike. It was still three years before I would be old enough — and more or less required — to “labor” for money, five years before I had a license to drive a car.

But it was still a time when summer was understood to be a period of unburdoned childhood freedom and, for me, that coming start of the school year registered an inordinate sense of dread, for I did not like school. (In retrospect, I sense that Joe O’Donnell, on the other hand, probably enjoyed school.)

It was warm. There were a good number of people out enjoying the weekend at the picnic areas we passed and at nearby Houghton’s Pond. But we peddled laboriously in tandem and in solitude on the shoulder of the two-lane road, for probably for over an hour, wondering when the ascent would ever end for us.

Then –suddenly — we felt ourself briefly to be on more or less level ground, still peddling gently for several yards. Then came our reward, a slow, steady downhill coast, riding about twenty-five yards apart, Joe in front…a slow, gently winding journey of –how long? Was it just a half mile? As much as a mile? It seemed, happily, very long, and cooling to us in jerseys and jeans we still called dungarees.

When it was over, I pulled up next to Joe and he said, like an adult, “it was a great feeling, wasn’t it?”

So, I guess Joe DID share his feelings. He did then, at least.

In our subsequent teen years, Joe and I drifted apart. He went off to Latin High School, the very best public high school in Boston and the oldest public school in the nation. I chanced to see him perhaps just once at Field’s Corner rapid transit (now MBTA) station, both of us either enroute or coming back from school (I was at Gate of Heaven in South Boston.)

I talked to him about the way famous authors’ stories we were being taught, as I recall, and how I disapproved of the method of the teachers. And he said, in that slightly sententious boiler plate adult way he had –“no, that is no way to enjoy a book.”

I presume he did well at school. He was bright. But somehow, I sense that science or math probably interested him more than literature, regardless of how it was being taught.

Flash forward….I learned he became an accountant….and flash further forward….

In 1999, six firefighters died in the burning of the Cold Storage facility in Worcester. Joe’s younger brother Kenny had become a Boston fire captain. I met him outside the church where the first of the six funerals for the men was being held. He was there with hundreds of other Boston jakes, paying his respects. I was covering the event as a Boston TV news reporter.

“How’s Joe?” I asked.

“He died,” Kenny said.

I was shocked. He would have been just a little over fifty, like me.

This was December. It had just been a matter of months. Pancreatic cancer. All very quick. Joe had become an accountant and a father. He was living up in New Hampshire. Kenny said he’d been fishing with him shortly before the diagnosis.

So I was doubly sad on that sad day of a funeral — for a fallen firefighter, and for Joe, now a figure in distant memory. I wondered, did he still have a crew cut? Did he still enjoy riding a bike? Obviously, he’d taken up fishing

But, again, almost without fail, I think of Joe on Labor Day. I pray for him. There must have been a widow and children. I pray for them, too.

And I suppose there are people enjoying the day all these years later in the Blue Hills where we made that little memory. I wonder if Joe recalled it as fondly as me — or recalled it at all.

So….time…..memory

Tonight, here in Woodstock, Georgia, I’m due to go to a high school football game. It’ll be some other kid’s memory.

The hurricane has swept off. Wind, a precarious life, a movie playing in the next room. I’m feeling it all, anxious, not quite at Labor Day rest.

What was that about boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past? (Fitzgerald)

(And I wonder as a matter of fact –why wasn’t Joe at that 1989 reunion with the rest of the family? Okay, he lived in New Hampshire and now had a family of his own. Distance puts up borders. But sometmes family borders go up, too. Was he keeping his distance for other reasons? His mother, now also deceased, told me (when I met her long after that reunion and when she again brought up her trauma over my head through the window) that Joe’s death deeply affected his ailing and seemingly tempermentally far more rugged dad. Again, hidden emotions.

And now I remember — she told me this at the father’s wake, for she’d lived on past both her son and her husband.

Rest in peace, Joe O’Donnell — and all O’Donnel family members.

Wishing Labor Day peace of mind — to workers, and to all of us who labor, compulsively, at remembering life’s little joys and sorrows at summer’s end and all through the year. They don’t always make for a Happy Labor Day, or peace of mind.

Let’s settle for gratitude. A grateful Labor Day. We’ve made it to another September. Go for a bike ride.

Amen.

For I missed your beautiful smile.

What –and who — on earth am I talking about? Well…

It occured to me last night — and I cringed at the memory — that there were embarrassing moment during my TV career when I had to cancel interviews with people I know were, for various reasons, eager to tell their story to a television audience — and this despite their trepidation about going before the camera. Often you’d find yourself gently pleading with them to put aside their timidity and consent to appear, only to be forced later to cancel out.

For some reason, I’m especially recalling the time working for Channel 7 in Boston when I was reporting on efforts to end dog racing in Massachusetts. Accordingly, I had set up an interview with a trainer at Wonderland race track in Revere, Mass. I was to meet him —and his champion greyhound, named Night Gent. This excited me. Yes, I love dogs, but more than that, viewers love seeing animals and they liven up a story.

Then, for forgotten reasons doubtless beyond my control and perhaps frivilous and unnecessary as often happens in TV (e.g., allegedly important “breaking news” somewhere), I was forced to cancel the interview. Thereafter, because the news cycle keeps turning, I wound up never doing the interview or the story.

The next day, I made a point of calling the trainer, apologized, and sheepishly asked if the cancellation had greatly inconvenienced him.

He was cordial and forgiving, but immediately noted, in a wry tone, that in order to make his celebrated canine ready for his close-up, “I even brushed his teeth.”

Boy, did I feel terrible! I’m sure old Night Gent felt even worse. What dog likes having his teeth brushed?

Come to find out: In 1986 (about the time I was going to meet him),Night Gent captured the Derby Lane Sprint Classic down here in Florida and was named to the All-America team. I believe he may even be in the Greyhound Hall of Fame. He was a super-star! I’d have brushed my teeth to have my picture taken with him –and, of course, feed him a biscuit or two.

But, alas, the moment, and Night Gent, have gone gently into that goodnight of dog racing, for the sport is on the wane and, at least in Massachusetts and other states, been banned outright, perhaps for good reasons.

I hope Night Gent‘s years in retirement were restful and rewarding, with naturally sparkling teeth. And that, first of all, they retired his toothbrush.