Category: Memories

It’s good that I wrote this down,  a white memory from a green spiral notebook.

The notebook turned up in the turmoil of a move; another move, foolish and dismal, leaving only a vision of the dim patch of coarse grass and weeds beyond the metal door to the shed of this new place.

So: an old notebook, things recorded barely legibly or consciously, dream scribble. It contains a memory of an incident in Seoul;  an incident during G.I. times when I journeyed there from a Korean island at the edge of The Yellow Sea. Spring or maybe summer, long ago. Continue reading “RETURN TO THE WHITE ROOM”

Unfortunately, I don’t have my copy of that famous “Greeting.” And, I believe, it was, for some reason, “greeting,” not “greetings.”  Was that some bureaucratic effort that was allowed to stand for generations. I’m talking about my draft notice. And if I don’t miss my guess, this is the fiftieth anniversary of the day I reported for the draft at the Selective Service Office at the corner of Byrd Street and Columbia Road in the old Dorchester Municipal Building, where there was a basketball court upstairs and I forget what else in that grim edifice, which still stands today.

I need to get in touch with Larry Donahue today, and the day is already well advanced. He has, in the past, reminded me of this day. Larry and I met after so very many years when I was covering Ted Kennedy’s funeral and he was in the long line of mourners out at the library at Columbia Point. We’d arrived the same day at the draft office, along with some other draftees. We’d gone to the sprawling old Boston Army Base on the waterfront, been sworn in, boarded a bus for Fort Dix, rode through the night, wound up in different platoons of the same basic training company, both been sent to Fort Gordon, Georgia for Military Police training ( not our choice, but a blessing, considering many draftees wound up in the Infantry — then  in Vietnam, a war that was still raging.

Then Larry and I were both assigned to the ASA company on Kangwha Island, Korea, came back on the same plane after fourteen months and both got off the bus in Seattle, civilians again. I would see him twice out at UMass where he was a student thereafter, living with his wife. Then, never again until the Kennedy wake.

I have many memories — many bad, some good — of the basic training experience that commenced fifty years ago. And I probably wondered if I would live fifty years to tell of it. Well, here I am. Grateful. Other than Larry, I’m in touch with only a few other veterans of that period. I think I’ll try to reach out to them. It feels as if I should be marking this occasion — but, then, I’m marking it here, in my 19 Cent Notebook which, so far as I can tell, no one reads.

Oh, well. Thank you, God, for letting me live all these years. May I cease making a mess of things and be free and healthy and maybe even happy for what remains for me.

Amen.