Memorial Day, Herman, Captains and Kings (5/24/1989)

Herman was a good friend from my boyhood. We lost track of one another, but when I first visited The Wall in D.C., I remembered him….with the impact off a howitzer. I wrote a column about him every Memorial Day for several years. Maybe I should have kept it up. We seem to have forgotten the lessons of that war.

 

Every year for Memorial Day I write a column about Herman.

Herman and I were in the same Boy Scout troop a long time ago. He was a garrulous, goofy, tow-headed farmboy with an endless supply of brothers and an infectious, horsey grin.

I remember one night at Camp Rainy Mountain, Herman set the whole troop laughing when, tossing in his upper bunk, he rolled out of bed and tumbled six feet to the ground.

Faking the voice of a little boy, he cried out: “I fall down go BOOM!”

Less than 10 years later, two days into his second tour in Vietnam, Herman stepped on a landmine and came home, accompanied by the usual telegram and flag.

At the Vietnam Memorial in D.C., Herman’s name is there, along with those of 57,000-plus other men and women who died for something they couldn’t see, feel or touch.

I didn’t believe in the war. I was one of those hippies who stood on the sidewalks and yelled obscenities at busloads of soldiers going to the war. I know now that I was yelling at the wrong people.

I don’t know if Herman believed in the war. But he believed in the system, however flawed it was. I suppose, coming from a large family, he knew that something could be imperfect  and full of dissent and still work.

Maybe that was stupid. Herman didn’t think so.

Now and then I get into D.C. and stand before the Black Rock. If you’ve never been there, the black granite from India is polished to a mirror finish. Into this surface is incised the names of the dead, in the order in which they died. It is that long fog of names stretching out in either direction, and the awful chronology of it, that helps chill one’s heart, makes one’s breath come hard.

I am told that there is no time of day or night that there is not somebody standing vigil at the wall, near some name that once went with a living person, some Herman that someone came to remember.

I once saw a grizzled old biker, his gray hair in a braid, his bare arms purple with tattoos, weeping unashamedly at the wall, his fingers resting on one name.

People often touch the names they know. It’s that kind of place. In the polished surface, reflections stare back silently at the visitors, like ghosts.

War is the stuff of history, a convulsion against which the milder records of treaties and coronations serves only as a backdrop. It is the breast at which callow historians nurse and the last tonic they imbibe in their dotage.

But it is not the historians who pay the price of the show, nor the policy-makers, who ordain that such things should be, but Herman, multiplied by 57,000, by however many millions of farm boys and store clerks who fell forever silent into some forgotten mud.

“The tumult and the shouting dies,” wrote Rudyard Kipling. “The captains and the kings depart.”

A wall full of names is too great a thing to contemplate. Who, after all, can envision that many deaths, individually, one by one hurling through the air like broken dolls? Not I.

I just think of Herman, and try to hope that in some way his short final arc through the jungle air meant something more grand than it seemed at the time.

 ==============================.

 

© 2007 Marsh Creek Media,

Gettysburg, Pa.

“Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.

Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:

http://burger2go.wordpress.com/

http://burger2goclassics.wordpress.com/

 

A slip in Time: Pictures on the ‘Fridge (1/7/1989)

In my job, I am occasionally called upon to use a camera.

It’s not one of those complicated rigs used by the pros. Mine is a little box with a minimum of buttons and no folderol. One points, sights through the little window, and pushes the button.

Over the years, I’ve stopped a lot of moments with that little camera; happy times, silly sights, mundane civic ceremonies, fender-benders, and tragedies.

Often, people ask me not to take their pictures. Sometimes I go along with them. I know how they feel; I get a funny, naked sort of feeling inside when somebody points a camera at me.

Members of primitive societies are often fearful of cameras and photographs. They believe that the camera contains a demon that steals their soul, imprisoning it on the photographer’s paper. Some aspiring actors, actresses and politicians might agree, when photographs of themselves appear, taken years earlier in inconvenient situations or positions. The devils, in these cases, are usually those in possession of the photographs.

What the photographer really does, of course, is steal time.

Perhaps “steal” is inaccurate. The photograph is more like a tracing of an event, inexact, often blurry, certainly only two-dimensional and lacking the sounds and smells and motion of the event depicted. It is a whisper, a hint, as fossil dinosaur footprints imbedded in shale only hint at what may have been the drama of the creature’s final moments.

As a traditional repository of family snapshots, the refrigerator is a sort of fossil bed, an enameled steel La Brea Tar Pit of our abbreviated histories. Under cute magnets disguised as everything from doughnuts to farm animals are pinned grocery lists, notes to remind us to pick up Aunt Harriet at the bus terminal, invoices from the kid who delivers the Sunday paper, and photographs, of friends, children, kith and kin.

Part of this past holiday season I spent at the home of my cousin Tom in western Pennsylvania. Like other families in what the social scientists are now calling the Post-Industrial Age, ours is as scattered as papers on a windy street, to Ohio, Pennsylvania, Georgia, California. The holidays are the one time of the year when as many of us as can manage come together.

I can remember Tom driving me around in my uncle’s yard in his first car. He piloted the vehicle self-consciously over the brown summer grass. I don’t remember what kind of car it was, only that it was huge, black, and round as a beetle, and it smelled like all old cars smell. Tom was 16, then, and I was 8.

Now he is 48, graying, an engineer. In his garage, aloof from the two everyday cars in the drive and hidden under a tarp in the semi-darkness is a Corvette. It lurks there, muscular and sexy under the canvas, like a secret passion, an incarnation of what that first car probably was in his teenage dreams. It seems to be waiting for a secret release. I don’t know. I have never ridden in it, never heard its engine.

The visit to my cousin’s house carried with it all the emotional depth that such things bring with them. Mostly, that is a good thing. Caught up in my job and with the everyday details of my immediate family and acquaintances, it was good to go back to the center, to tap into the root of blood, time and experience and rediscover, if not who I am, then at least the common cloth from which I was cut.

Notable by their absence, even after some years have passed, were those who had died. Their likenesses peered down from the walls and from desktops, smiling outside a Florida condo or staring stiffly from a brown studio portrait taken sometime in the early decades of this century.

There are faces I have never seen in person, yet behold echoed in the mirror every morning, and glimpsed, transformed and altered by heredity, standing and sitting in the living room of Tom’s house.

On the refrigerator in the kitchen, along with the memos and grocery store coupons and notes are photographs of Tom’s sister, Lynn, and her two children. The photo of the youngest, Nicole, looked so much as her mother had as a toddler that I had a giddy moment when I slipped 30 years back, when smiling people carried a sleeping girl into our home in Georgia after a long drive through Appalachia on two-lane highways.

Of course, it was only an illusion, a trick of the brain. Memory and perception had tangled with predictable results. I was only looking back a little way, seeing a few links in a long chain of time and converging ancestry.

Looking at the picture of Nicole, whom I had mistaken for her mother, I had a moment of sudden fear, as though I had found myself standing at the very edge of a dark abyss.

I realize then that on the night I remembered, when the weary travelers had come through the door in the small hours of the night, that I am now the same age as were the adults who stood in that room.

With only two exceptions, all have now gone, their atoms returning to the still earth, leaving behind a few material items, some photographs, and some moments in the minds of a few who still live.

I carefully put the photo of little Nicole back under its magnet. In the reflection of the oven window I could see the ghost of my father walking in the bones of my face. I saw others in there as well, looking out from time, from a particular mix of genes.

From the next room came a loud burst of laughter; there was conversation and merriment going on out there, and I was standing in the kitchen, communing with ghosts. I picked up my coffee cup, grabbed an extra Christmas cookie from the tray while no one was looking. I looked back at the reflection, gave us all a wink and went back to the party.

I don’t think anyone took any photographs that night. I hope they did. And, who knows, maybe someday, 30 years from now, a young woman named Nicole, visiting her Uncle Thomas’s home in Pennsylvania will look at a dimming old photograph in the family album and wonder who all those laughing people were.

 

 

==============================.

© 2007 Marsh Creek Media,

Gettysburg, Pa.

“Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.

Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:

http://burger2go.wordpress.com/

http://burger2goclassics.wordpress.com/

 

 

Down The Well: A Lackey of Prudence (Nov. 1988)

This column first ran in November of 1988. A year later, the “family” I wrote of was long gone. Much has happened in the nearly 20 years since then. But somewhere tucked away in a box is an old vinyl briefcase full of letters, more brittle every year….

 

I was writing the date on a check the other day when I thought of her. The figures I had just scribbled onto the paper were the same as her birthday, September 28.

Part of my mind focused on keeping up the light-hearted social banter at the checkout counter. The rest of me went tumbling down a well of memory. It was a time when we were going to save the world. We looked at the lives of our parents and decided we would be different; nobody was going to tie us down, gnaw away at our time with worry about mortgages. We had nicknames for one another that could have come straight out of The Lord of The Rings.

All that was a long time ago. But there is something about a first love, a first marriage, a first divorce. Autumn is a time for looking backward, with the cold coming and flames of the world burning low.

My sudden melancholy had as much to do with me as with the season, with the number of hairs I’ve been finding in my hairbrush the last few years, with my thickening middle and thinning expectations.

The last time I saw her was about this time of year, a wet, sullen time in the weather of the south. We had sat through the divorce hearing holding hands, which perhaps puzzled the gnarled old judge. We drove away, I alone in my car, she and her sister in a huge, lumbering old Chevrolet sedan. I happened to look up into the rear-view mirror just as the behemoth behind swung left at the intersection. That was the last sight I had of her, a silhouette in the smudged window of an old car.

Everyone said we were too young. They were right, but we were in love and who can reason with love? I was 19 and she nearly a year younger when we got married. I was visiting her in Mississippi when we decided to “elope,” with her mother’s blessing. We got married across the river in Arkansas, because the waiting period was shorter and we didn’t need the permission of her father, who was in Vietnam.

The man who performed the ceremony was a justice of the peace and a mechanic. He crawled out from under a car, swept some things off the counter, and did the thing right there, grease and all. At least, that’s how I remember it. I gave him the two dollar fee and he gave it right back. He said he wanted to give us our first wedding present.

We got lots of wedding presents, the one from Ray the JP, and more traditional ones from relatives; appliances, crystal, china. Within the first year we had hocked most of it just to pay bills.

It was like that throughout our entire marriage; just one step ahead of the bill collector. I suppose it’s like that for a lot of people. We never got out of it. Probably a lot of other people never do, either.

I still have an old vinyl briefcase full of the letters we wrote to one another when we were in high school. The letters are what you would expect; gushing, full of that damn-the-torpedoes sort of love of which only the young and the hopelessly inebriated are capable. Even alone, the rest of the house fast asleep, I blush reading them. Or maybe I redden because the dreams failed, as dreams do; the world intrudes, we compromise, we become less-and somehow more-than we had intended.

And then, one day, we awake, middle-aged, worrying about mortgages, drugs and schools, car payments, dental bills. These are all the things that should properly concern me, I know. And yet…

Last summer I went through the letters in the vinyl pouch. I was packing to move, and thought, as I do every time I move, that I’ll throw the old pages full of tortured prose away, every last, heavy-breathing one of them.

“I don’t need them,” I tell myself. “They only take up space.”

Then, I zip the old case back up and find a space, somewhere, in all the other flotsam of my life.

Today, I thought about those letters and how I feel, even now, when I see, like a scratchy old film, that green Chevy, forever and ever turning down that street in the rain. Nostalgic? Only for who I was, and who I thought then that I was going to be.

Do I miss her, in the same sense that I would miss my current family should I lose them? No. We were unhappy together for good reason: as we grew and matured, we grew apart. By the time it was over it was well over.

But one can’t annul the years spent with another person, the way one would erase a recorded tape. In half a dozen years she and I shared a lot of fine moments, and some beguiling dreams.

In his work Jurgen, James Branch Cabell wrote: “At the bottom of my heart I no longer desire perfection. For we that are taxpayers as well as immortal souls must live by politic evasions and formulae and catchwords that fret away our lives as moths waste a garment: we fall insensibly to common sense as to a drug; and it dulls and kills that which in us is fine and rebellious and unreasonable: so that you will find no man of my years with whom living is not a mechanism that gnaws away time unprompted. I am become the creature of use and wont; I am the lackey of prudence and half-measures; and I have put my dreams upon an allowance.”

It has been at least a dozen years since the Chevrolet turned that corner. I do not look backward wishing to be where or who I was then. All told, I was immature, childish, self-centered. Now I am middle-aged, childish and self-centered. Progress comes slowly. I love my family and would kill to stay with them. But I look down at the other end of that long well and I sometimes wish I had more of that: “which in us is fine and rebellious and unreasonable,” because there is still enough vinegar in me to resent being the lackey of prudence.

I heard that she remarried, that she is successful, that she has two kids. That makes me happy: she always wanted children. I hope she is well and happy, I hope that the world is giving her all the things that she needs, and I hope maybe somewhere she has an old briefcase, full of letters she doesn’t need and can’t throw away, a well of time with some spirited and unreasonable faces swimming in its deeper waters.

© 2007 Marsh Creek Media,

Gettysburg, Pa.

“Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.

Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:

http://burger2go.wordpress.com/

http://burger2goclassics.wordpress.com/

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!