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.

APRIL 19, 1934

The bride was my mother. The groom my father. A Saturday. Marathon Day. A Canadian would break the ribbon at 2:32:53. A sunny spring day. St. Mark’s Church on Dorchester Avenue, Dorchester, Mass.

Ninety years ago.

William Douglas Wayland was 25, born June 11, 1909 in Dorchester. Josephine (Johanna) Aherne was 31, born October 1, Mitchelstown, County Cork, Ireland.

William (Bill) died May 30 (Memorial Day), 1964. Josephine (who was, in fact baptized Johanna but the name was thought to be too “old fashioned” though it was the name Josephine that was, and became in time more, old fashioned. Everyone knew her as Jo. She died August 5, 1986.

St. Mark’s Church, Dorchester.

In time, five children, the first on September 16, 1935. He is William. He is currently in nursing care in North Andover, Massachusetts.

Anne came in 1938. She died September 23, 2016.

Ronald and Douglas came on December 12, 1938. Ron is in Winthrop, Mass, Doug in Denver.

Then there’s Greg

All (but Greg) married. All have children.

Moments.

Yes.

Moments.

NIKKI HALEY

I usually avoid politics in these politically hyperventilating times. . But a recent tortured political enterprise, now ended, has provoked me into the arena. I’ll say my piece, then slip back into the shadows.

I speak of Nikki Haley’s quixotice candidacy.

Nikki probably never really had a chance, and ultimately probably did nothing more than douse a certain portion of the American electorate with purple dye so Democrats know where to hunt for wobbling, disgruntled voters to rescue their senescent blowhard placeholder from the morgue reserved for one-term losers.

At the outset, when it seemed she just might have a shot at the White House, she endured the predictable, execrable slanders from the Left, beginning with the dreadful , narcissistic Don Lemon, formerly of CNN, who dismissed her as a woman NOT in her prime.

The so-called Progressive Left has no shame. Theirs and the Democratic Party’s appalling influence from Washington to Hollywood is probably why Republicans wound up with the convex carnival mirror opposite with the likes of Marjory Taylor Green and Lauren Boebert who, as one pundit has commented, appear to mistake regular appearances on cable news and social media taunting thier opponents –wearing MAGA hats — with the business of governing. Indeed Green famously suggested we split up as a nation with “a national divorce from the Left.”

But, back to the demise of Nikki Haley….and the Left’s abuse of her.

Recall how Donald Trump was (rightly) attacked for engaging in “birtherism” during the presidency of Barrack Obama. The hypocritical Left did the same with Nikki Haley over her Indian heritage, suggesting there should be a search of South Carolina probate records to see just who and what she is. MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan declared that Haley, former U.N. Ambassador and South Carolina governor, should not be understood as a positive example of how successfully minorities can advance in the United States because she “uses her brown skin to launder white-supremacist talking points.”

I guess she wasn’t black or brown enough for them. It’s the old Clarence Thomas exceptionalism.

And they asked about her name (as Barrack Obama was quizzed about his name). Mary Trump, a favorite of the Left for her regular excoriation of her uncle Donald, tweeted, “First of all, f*** you Nimrata Haley.

(Yes, these are dreadful times. Perhaps I should refrain from such harsh words for the President. It’s just that I loath his obvious and toxic and manifest phoniness and his rosary-bead-rattling Whited Sepulchre Catholicism while he actively, aggressively attacks the pro-life moment at every turn, pledging now to negate the hard-won, generational victory of that movement by reimposting the legally insupportable national abortion license known as Roe V. Wade rather than let the people decide where and how much they wish to be pro-abortion. Fear not, those of you who support abortion rights. You’ll be winning in the long-short term. But the other side deserves some bargaining power. I fear you fear our national conscience will be awakened to this horror and it will cease. That, my friend, is a long way off.)

Nikki Haley ultimately probably hoped to be the face of traditional institutional Republicanism and traditional conservatism in the post-Trump era. –a noble aspirtaion, but I fear that ship has sailed. And it didn’t help that she indulged in her own form of identity politics, speaking of how her family, “wasn’t white enough to be white, weren’t black enough to be black.” Enough already! Let us finally usher in a truly post-racialist era.

So, she fought on, resisting Trump’s pressure to withdraw. I have to admire her for that, up to a point. But it was a rolling example of futility that, again, just let the Democrats know where the reluctant Democrats and renegate, non-MEGA Republicans might be lurking.

I don’t know if she’ll ever be back or might, more likely, drift into political oblivion. She never, ever truly cut a very strong or forceful figure –no fault of hers. A University of New Hampshire poll at the outset of her candidacy had her only at 8 per cent. This improved as time marched on and other challengers dropped out. But not by much.

Nice try, Nikki. You just weren’t what we were looking and praying for.

Now, pray with us that we somehow survive the coming four-year hell that the purgatory of bad choices has left in your wake.

UNANSWERED “NEWS” TIP

This is about a letter from a man ‘alleging to have information,’ as the saying goes. It was an unknown man –likely an old man. The man, forever nameless, the moment, forever lost, have been on my mind lately — for some unknown reason.

It goes back to a letter I received one day in the mid-Seventies. I was the Norwood Bureau reporter for the fledgling Daily Transcript suburban Boston newspaper. It, too, has been lost. About fifteen years ago, it vanished. It began in the early 1970s by collapsing four suburban weekies into one daily newspaper. Having never totally caught on with the reading public, struggling along lamely for years, it finally was converted into a weekly serving a far smaller area – and may, for all I know, have vanished altogether by now. Newspapers, in our time, regularly shrink or die. So it goes.

As the newest daily in the Boston area, the Transcript didn’t get a lot of attention. The residents of those four towns had resented the loss of their beloved weekly newspapers with their exclusive focus on their towns’ news. And their local news was thinned out in order to squeeze in the news of neighboring towns about which they cared little or not at all.

The towns were Dedham, Norwood, Westwood and Needham, all in southwest suburban Boston.

Back to that letter:

I forget if it was addressed exclusively to me. It would have been nice to know some reader was paying attention exclusively to my by-line.

But–it was more likely addressed to the Bureau office on Washington Street.

I think it came from one of the town’s nursing homes. This might automatically prompt some editors to dismiss it, suspecing it came from some soul suffereing dementia. The writer was, indeed, a resident in that nursing facility. The letter is lost but, as I recall, its author wrote, in longhand, something like this:

Dear Editor (or Reporter), I have some information I believe is newsworthy and that you might find very interesting. Please excuse my handwriting — I’ve got a touch of arthritis. But you can reach me at (was there a phone number? Just an address? Just his name ( forgotten) along with the name of the nursing home? Don’t remember.

I just know that I somehow felt, way back then, that I should “check this out,” as they say. I just had — a sense. It might have been sympathy for the hopelessly obscure of all “senior” facilities languishing away — and w riting unasnwered letters to editors.

Nonetheless, I felt I should check it out for two reasons: first, the writer, whom I believe was a male, might actually have something newsworthy to tell me. There was always that possibility, though the multitude of news tips go nowhere, r egardless of their source. Second: it’s not nice to ignore an elderly person looking for attention and maybe just a little company.

But also, how many times in my career as a reporter did I or other reporters or editors fail to follow up on a request for coverage of something or other–that turned out to be legitimate and important? Innumerable times, no doubt, during the busy course of multitudes of spinning news cycles in the history of the busy earth!

In truth, I suspected it wasn’t a “news” tip, as such, at all. I wondered if it was just one of those fabulous stories of the kind the elderly stand ready to pass on about their participation or involvement in some epical moment in Massachusetts, America, World, or just Personal History.

Everybody has a story.

If one lets one’s imagination range, the possibilities are infinite….

Perhaps this fellow was present when they exploded the Atom Bomb and saw some terrible flaw in the design andplanning that would one day, if left uncorrected, end civilization. Maybe he was a shadow Oppenheimer.

Perhaps he knew the identity of the men behind the deadly 1920 payroll robbery that got Sacco and Venzetti — innocent and, in the minds of millions across the globe, falsely accused — sent to the electric chair.

Perhaps he was a retired doctor who’d been a personal physician to H0ward Hughes.

Perhaps he WAS Howard Hughes.

Perhaps he was the doctor who delivered Elvis.

Perhaps he had good informtation about the whereabouts of Amelia Earhart and her plane.

Perhaps he had secret information about the Kennedy assassination. (Who doesn’t?)

Perhaps he knew the location of illegal uranium deposits and other nuclear waste buried under a nearby residential neighborhood.

Perhaps he was the grandson of a Scotland Yard Detective and had irrefutable, long hidden DNA evidence about the identity of Jack the Ripper.

Perhaps he played football with Jim Thorpe

Perhaps he’d once been a drummer for The Rolling Stones.

Perhaps he was a scientist whose theories about the causes of cancer had been unjustly supressed by a major medical institute.

Perhaps he was just an old man with nothing special for me, but who would have been delightful by a visit — from anyone! Especially a reporter.

Considering that, about that same period of time, I managed to respond to a call from excited Norwood parents who insisted their little daughters, currently trading off bouncing a ball in their backyard, were bound and determined to break the Guinness Book of Records for the number of hours spent bouncing a ball. Consider the absurd fact that I actually found time to write a dumb story about that utterly quixotic, silly parentallly-generated endeavor ( I don’t recall if the bouncing continued even past sundown).

Certainly, considering this, I could have found time to visit this poor man even if just pretending to check out his tip. I could have brought him an ice cream.

But I didn’t. The moment, the man, my reporter’s career, and whatever this guy had to tell me and whatever his human needs — are all long gone.

But, I’ll probably always wonder — if I should happen to hear of the collapse of a generations-old Norwood building with a long-ignored construction flaw, or the long-standing, long concealed poisoning of a Norwood water source due to the action of 1970s engineers, or the investigation and prosecution of individuals behind a decades-long suburban nursing home scam — or (why not?) the discovery that the illigitimate son of a member of the British Royal family lived out his last days in a Norwood nursing home — yes, I’ll always wonder…..

The moral:

Never as a reporter totally ignore even the most dubious news tip.

More importantly, never ignore the elderly and their stories.

And whoever you were, Mister I’ve-Got-Something-That-May-Interest-You, please forgive me. Your story probably died with you.

Or maybe, after being ignored, you simply wrote instead to the Patriot Ledger, the Boston Globe, The Boston Herald — or even the New York Times….and you had a huge story.! Huge!

No, not likely.

Whatever.

Wherever you are, whoever you were, these dozens of words are in your memory.

NIGHTHAWKS

Sunday night, 10:20, The Last Mile Lounge. Tash Silva’s at the bar. Deano’s night off. Tash is keeping an eye on Jimmy Jammin, a chronic tipler. But Jimmy’s not drinking tonight. I heard him tell Tash he hasn’t had a drink in three months. No alcohol. He’s drinking ginger ale. He’s here for the company. He’s talking to Bill Kirner, a regular. Kenny Foy is here with a guy I haven’t seen before, sitting at a table near the front door. Two guys at the end of the bar, strangers, are playing Keno. We’re all kind of strangers tonight. There are only three booths, only one of them in occupied — by two women. I’ve seen them before. They work at concessions at the airport and stop in after work. They have beers. Athena, the real estate agent from Lowell is here. Strange, on a Sunday night. She’s drinking a Manhattan. I can see the brown water and the cherry. She’s with a guy, probably a date. I’ll bet they stopped in on their way back from a movie in Boston. She does that, comes here at odd times, likes it here for some reason, though not a big drinker. She had that little revelation several months back. Seemed to change her. (I wish I could change.) She suddenly lost her depression, which might be why she comes back here, the scene of the loss of something bad, like somebody flipped a switch in her head.

The juke box is working again. But tonight, it’s silence. Nobody’s touched it. Everybody is silent, no laughter, you can barely hear anybody talking. The TV over the bar is off.

Knox, the artist who lives upstairs is at a table in the middle of the room, drawing something on sheets of paper.

There are seven tables. But, as you know, this is a small place, the Last Mile.

I’m alone at a table by the side door. I’m not sure why I came by tonight. I’m drinking a cup of hot green tea. Yeah, I know. Strange. Tash made it for me. I’d been drinking ice water, believe it or not. I tip Tash, no matter what I drink. He says to me, handing me the cup, “good night for tea.”

The light is soft. They made that change in this place. No harsh lighting.

And I’m thinking. I’m meditating, really. I’ve stepped out the side door, looking down the street toward the beach. I hear the wind. The jet goes over headed for Logan. I hear a siren, then – silence.

I need this silence. I need a moment to look at the windows of houses, soft rectangles of light, some dark. The street wet. There has been savage weather in the nation but here along the coast –just a damp, shining street.

And I’m thinking, meditating, trying to think. Getting a little chilly, I go back inside. My jacket is over the chair. No one will join me. Everybody wants to be unjoined tonight, except maybe Jim and Bill at the bar — and they aren’t talking anymore. Tash is reading a magazine, leaning up against the wall behind the bar.

Knox, the artist, looks up for a second, looks at me, smiles. We talk from time to time. He looks around then. I wonder — is he drawing this scene? Will he paint it later? Make it permanent.

The wet, shining, empty street. He can paint that if he looks out there…but in here, this is the painting. Paint the silence. Paint the light, the people…but make us see the silence.

I hear a breeze out there. A wind off the ocean. It grips the place.

I am full of fear, worry, why? Nothing to worry about. Or — so much to worry about but, why worry?

I look at my watch. It is now 10:37 p.m. And then I remember: The old clock over the old phone booth in the corner stopped at 10:37, either a.m or p.m., on some lost day in some lost month many lost years ago here at The Last Mile.

I stare at it, at stopped time, which is now exactly this time — stopped. I hear the damp wind.

The old bar glass of ice water is still on the table before me with the tea cup. The ice is mostly melted. It’s just a still, clear, half-full beeker of chrystal brightness now. I sip the hot green tea.

A Sunday night in silence. The tea is still steaming.

In stopped time. Steam and still water and memories —

before and all about me.

I half dream. For a full minute, I am fully — at peace.

THE GREAT SCATTERING

Why, oh why this bizarre reign of what we’ve come to call “identity politics”?

Damned if I know, if, that is, I confine my thoughts to those thoughts I can just peel off the top of my agitated head. Go deeper, like one diving with full oxygen into a murky lagoon, and –why, there you find a tangled subaqueous plethora of reasons why a reasonable race of bipods such as we are should find ourselves so messed up.

I’m helped –after being launched upon — this deep dive by writer Mary Eberstadt whose 2019 book Primal Screams (plural) explores our penchant for dividing along racial lines and other related common contemporary phenomena such as the insane excesses of modern political correctness, frequent compus demonstrations over every perceived injustice and what has been called the “cancel culture” in which, at the whim of some influencer, you or I can be discredited and banished from public discourse. Throw in radical feminism, gender-bending ideology, the excesses of the Me Too movement and all manner of unhinged activism.

I confess that Eberstadt’s book is on a heap of unread books on my library wish list. I just happened to stumble upon an old review. Therefore, I’ve read excerpts in that review that assure me the author’s analysis is free of rancor or any diatribe against “cultural Marxism.” It feels like a good book for the times.

She maintians our current state of affairs is not all about “power” — a charge I often level against the activists. She claims all such contemporary social-justice rebellions, now so tiresome to so many of us, amount to a “survival strategy” for the alienated. (Come to think of it, I, too, in my vigorous push-back against it all might also be engaging in such a strategy. I’m feeling alienated, too.)

“Such phenomena are indeed bizarre,” she writes, “if we examine them with the instruments of Aristotelian logic. But if instead we understand them against the existential reality of today –one in which the human family has imploded, and in which many people, no matter how privileged otherwise, have been deprived of the most elementary human connections –we can grasp in full why identity politics is the headline that just won’t go away.”

Eberstadt calls this process “the Great Scattering.” Because so many people below a certain age no longer enjoy a traditional family. They are, indeed, scattered.

Her first salient point: there has been a breakdown of family and familial bonds — our “natural habitat.” What is the connection between blood and personal identity? Haven’t we all become disoriented in search of intimacy — and personal identity? The human animal is now a flock of sheep without a shepherd. We now place more emphasis than did our ancestors on voluntary associations rather than on our once far more solid family environment. Feel free to challenge all these assertions. By themselves, they can feel gratuitious.

That’s why we should read books not reviews. But Eberstadt’s conclusions were there for me to ponder, such as that a healthy sense of self, and our moral maturation, among other essential developmental stages, have not only been delayed; they have, in many cases, been entirely stunted in the individual. I encounter a fair number of colleg-age students who seem to be crying out for protection from, rather than exposure to life.

So, we must ask, who are we? Who are people who will protect us? What is our “family”?

Eberstadt goes further, and here no doubt she rankles modern sensibilities with a thesis that is truly politically incorrect: she blames the sexual revolution for the advent of identity politics.

How? Why?

Well, ask yourself what has been the impact of the sexual revolution on marriage, family life, romance as reflected in everything from modern anthropology to popular culture? She does not write or speak here in religious terms. This is not an evangelical screed. Not, at least, so far as I can tell from the aggregate of quoted passages, though I know Mary Eberstadt to be Christian religious and so her thinking on all matters will doubtless reflect that, however subtly.

Nonetheless, consider how the pervasive use of artificial contraception, so essential, as is abortion, to the sexual revolution, has released us from consequences, led to mutual objectification between the sexes. A popular series such as “Sex in the City” reflects that, not without an entertaining level of self-analysis. I only chanced to watch one episode in which one comically sex-obessed female character blurts out, “I hate religion. It f**ks up your sex life.”

And nowadays, one wonders if it isn’t only the religious — and specifically the Catholic religious — who abstain from the dartificial regulation of birth. And far from all of them, or even, maybe, most of them. I guess that’s what’s called Modern Love.

But….

Biology once pushed us toward marriage and family life, even if it was a less than perfect family life. Traditional sexual mores imposed restraints. And we have viewed the casting off of those restraints as liberating. We were free! But — free of what? And for what? Chronic anxiety, crushing loneliness — at least in some cases. Or so Eberstadt believes, as do I. I see it in Generations X, Y and Z –and, to some extention, in us Baby Boomers who first cast off the yoke of convention in the 60s.

We’ve come to place a high priority on individual freedom and autonomy over against the maintaining of the integrity of the traditonal family in an ordered social whole.

And (laughing) I say, Yow!!…

I’ve suddenly begun to think of those Progressive Insurance TV commercials — so funny I make a point of watching them — dramatizing mock classes in which youngish people are instructed how not to turn into their parents. Yes, very funny. Of course, those amounts to only gentle raillery against superficial life habits –and, of course, insurance-buying practices — of superanuated adults; not to those deeper, more serious ways in which we might profitably emulate those who nurtured and raised us.

But I’ll challenge my own thesis here — and wonder if it isn’t, in our modern world, far more appropriate for children to explore their own talents and interests, search on their own terms for a spouse and occupation and a social situation suitable to them personally.

I’ll also ask if that can lead to true human flourishing unlinked from deep families ties and identities.

As for the impact on personal identities, destinies, attitudes and human outcomes of the sexual revolution — I know the Genie is not going back in the bottle. But I will always maintain that this particular revolt against our biology and ( I believe) human emotional reality has set us on a dark, unknown moral and spiritual path that may one day erupt in an entirely unforseen counter-revolution short of a reversion to Puritanism. The Genie will climb voluntarily back in the bottle. The so-called hook-up cultural, among other negative outcomes, unquestionably led to the course correction of the Me Too movement.

Perhaps human intimate and familial relations will ever hence exist suspended in a kind of utilitarian, humanistic malaise altered only by these new non-family, racial associations and identities –until the end of time.

Whatever.

Meanwhiile, you might want to explore these question, no matter where you fall on the political spectrum. You might even want to read this book, even if you disagree with its conclusions — just for the vital questions it raises.

DISILLUSIONMENT

How shall I define disillusionment?

With an anecdote. A memory.

Summer, 1967. I’ve wrapped up work at a national park in east central California. I visit San Francisco for the first time with about a half dozen co-workers. It is the first time in the fabled city for most of us. We were excited during the long drive and we are excited now upon arrival.

We find our way to a deli-style corner restaurant in the heart of the city for an early dinner. There is nothing special or famous about the place. It might have been part of a California chain for all we know. But it’s bustling and a little noisy and feels special because it’s in San Franciso. The customers, most of whom are probably tourists like us, all seem equally excited to be there before their big night looking for Fisherman’s Wharf or the Cable Cars or some other attraction. The waitress is zany, friendly and memorable. A friendly older guy is sitting with his wife at the next table. They are most likely out-of-towners like us. He says to me that the waitress reminds him of the comedian Martha Ray. I’m thinking — well, maybe or maybe not and who but an old guy would be thinking about Martha Ray in 1967, but I appreciate the intergenerational comraderie.

Young and old and excited, we’re all together. The food comes and is nothing specials, but it’s not expensive and we’re all still excited, and we leave excited and I’m thinking I’ll always remember that place, that meal and that moment.

Some years later, I found myself in San Francisco again. As I sit here, I can’t recall if it was during an anxious California trip in 1969 which ended when my draft notice caught up with me and I had to rush back east to report for military duty — or if it was in 1971 when I was visiting my brother, then living in the San Franciso area, after my Army discharge up in Washington state. During each visit, San Franciso seemed less and less special, despite its abiding charm and many attractions. After my overseas military experience especially, I was feeling a little wizened and jaded and lonely and thinking of my old California co-workers and wondering where they were or if I’d ever see them again. One of them had been a summer of ’67 girlfriend, a lively Mexican-American girl. I’d lost touch with her. They were all gone.

For old time’s sake, on one of those visits, I found my way back to that same restaurant. Business was slow, it was quiet. It didn’t seem at all special — in fact, it seemed very somber and ordinary, as if it might be on its last legs.

I don’t recall the waitress (or waiter) or what I ordered.

But I do recall that there was a small bug crawling on the lettuce.

That’s disillusionment.

AN OUTERMOST WINTER MOMENT

When I was working as an editorial assistant and occasional free-lance reporter for the Boston Globe back in the early 1970s, a reporter named Ann-Mary Currier, who occupied a desk near mine, wrote a splendid feature story about the little house that then stood along the shoreline on the far reaches of Cape Cod. It was called, Fo’castle, as on a ship. It would later come to be known as The Outermost House and evolve into a naturalist shrine surviving by the open ocean.

The book’s story, more than anything, was about Henry Beston, the 1st World War Navy veteran and nature-lover who moved into the tiny house for an entire year, that year being 1926-27. I don’t believe he built the house, which stood within the town of Eastham.

As I write about the house and Beston, I realize I may have written here about it and him before. No matter, I believe him — and the house — worthy subjects, and regard that year in which Beston lived alone with nature to be especially worth our time.

But when Ann-Mary’s story appeared in the Globe, it was the first I’d heard of either. I’m going to say the year was 1972. She interviewed, as I recall, surviving friends and relatives of Beston, who thought of himself as a writer-naturalist. I also recall a picture of Ann-Mary walking the wild, open stretch of beach with her interview subjects. Those photos appeared along with the story.

Nonetheless, it would be decades before I somehow came to do a televison story about the book, Outermost House, Beston and the society — The Henry Beston Society — that grew up around his book and his legacy.

Beston was a gifted writer who would turn out other books about New England seasons, but nothing remains as famous as Outermost House, published in 1928. A French edition of the book is called, Une Maison au bout du Monde (A House at the End of the World)

Beston spent that year in virtual seclusion making copious notes about everything he observed of the sea and the wildlife and the raw, active nature and impact of the tides encircling and buffeting his outermost locale. It is also a story of a fruitful solitude in what was essentially a two-room white cabin.

What prompted me to write about all this today was a desire, living in a Florida winter of only slightly dipping temperatures and grayer than usual skies in a community of vinyl, tin and wood modular homes, to write about a northern winter. They are having another fierce one up there.

But I also want to share with you a sample of Beston’s prose. Yes, I’ve probably done it before, but was it winter?

There is a chapter called, Midwinter. And Beston writes, after coming out of autumn, about the journey of the sun which he says is a far greater adventure than “(A) year indoors…(and)…”a journey along a paper calendar.

“…a year in outer nature is the accomplishment of a tremendous ritual. To share in it, one must have a knoweldge of the pilgrimages of the sun, and something of that natural sense of him and feeling for him which made even the most primitive people mark the summer limits.”

And so, Henry Beston has personified The Sun. The song writer wrote of Old Devil Moon. In fact, the moon gets lots of ink. I see both sun and moon as also having endearing female qualities — of warmth and nurturing….

But I’m wanderingly stupidly here, ruining things with my prattle. Back to Henry Beston….

“When all has been said,” he writes, “the adventure of the sun is the great natural drama by which we live, and not to have joy in it and awe of it, not to share in it, is to close a dull door on nature’s sustaining and poetic spirit.”

Beston is really no “sun worshiper.” He is — was — obviously just a naturalist- writer with the eye and soul of a poet. And poets see human qualities in everything, or so it has seemed since the time of the Romantics.

And, of the change from a Cape Cod autumn to a Cape winter, most likely in the autumn of 1926, Beston writes, “(T)he splendor of colour in this world of sea and dune ebbed from it like a tide; it shallowed first without seeming to lose ground and presently vanished all at once, almost, so it seemed, in one gray week. Warmth left the sea, and winter came down with storms of rushing wind and icy pelting rain. The first snow fell early in November, just before the dawn of a gray and bitter day.”

Then comes a visit to Outermost House by the postman. Henry certainly welcomed that visit as much as he welcomed the visit of the sun. He gave the postman a letter for mailing. Henry was alone, but, like me, he liked to stay in touch with people.

The postman departs, and he write…

“My fire had gone out, the Fo’castle was raw and cold, but my wood was ready, and I soon had a fire crackling.”

Beston died on April 15, 1968 at the age of 80. The Fo’castle — The Outermost House — was washed into the sea during the Blizzard of 1978. I believe a replica stands in hits place.

The memory of the original house survives, as does Henry Beston’s most original ruminations about his year on what writer Robert Finch (a Beston booster) has described as “that great glacial scarp of Cape Cod’s outer beach.”

Finch has written an eloquent introduction to later editions of the book. If y ou love nature and nature-writing, you’ll want to read his and Beston’s words on a region of my home state that, however drearily and insistently it gets overdeveloped, retains an enduring beauty.