The exterior walls are completed; the masons took a couple of weeks to built them all the way up. The house basically a square, with a deep verandah all the way around. The posts which will support the outer edge of the veranda are all in place, and Dad is drilling holes in the header beams which will top the masonry wall. The window and door frames are all in place. The rafters are due to be installed this month, and the roofers will come in September. Once the roof is underway, they can start with the interior walls and the drywalling— Dad is not going to do it all again himself again, it was boring enough the first time around. He is going to do a roof over part of the verandah himself, so he can set up a workshop there to do the fine woodwork for the interior. And Mom has picked out the kitchen cabinets, thanks to her friend who is going to design the kitchen for her.
We’re on schedule to celebrate Christmas this year, in the new house!
“Mom? Is it OK if we stop by the bar on the way home from Vacation Bible School?” asked my daughter one morning in the summer of 1989 or so, and I confess that I had lived overseas for so long at that point, that it took me at least five minutes to realize that to most Americans there would be seeing something seriously out of whack about that sentence. Especially since I replied,
“OK, sweetie, just call me when you get home.”
We were living then in a rental duplex home in an urbanization— a suburb, or development, on the outskirts of a pleasantly ordinary city in Spain. San Lamberto had once been the housing area dedicated to USAF families attached to Zaragoza AB. After a really unfortunate mishap involving a misplaced n*****r munition in the Med, the base was closed and the housing area sold off to individual local nationals at fire-sale rates. My present landlords’ father had snapped up several duplex units, one for each of his sons. Since the units (four-unit duplexes, two up and two down, with either deck or balcony overlooking their own generous yard) were about the only housing stock in Zaragoza resembling a garden apartment unit, they were favored by American families assigned to the base, when American operations returned to the area several years later. Most of the units which were not in the pot as rental units to Americans, or to Spaniards as summer cottages during the hot summers, were purchased by well-to-do Spaniards who liked them as up-scale garden residences year round, conveniently located just off the main road to Logronio, the main surface road out of town towards the north. A very long apartment block went up, overlooking the road and shielding the duplexes from the traffic noise from the Logronio road, and the turn-off to the municipal airport and the Garapinillas gate, which gave onto the Spanish side of the establishment. This intersection, while conveniently located for those Americans who had every-day business on the base, was also advertised in our base safety briefings as one of the most dangerous and unpredictable intersections in municipal Zaragoza, owing to a bizarre arrangement of traffic lights. Personal injury lawyers could have made an excellent living, merely by renting those apartments overlooking this intersection, and at the sound of screeching brakes and a certain metallic crunch, tossing down their business cards from their balcony onto to the vehicular mayhem down below.
The other side of the apartment block, facing inwards onto the development, or urbanization, was rather more immediately important, because the ground floor, opening onto a generous sidewalk and sheltered by the overhang of the apartment block above, was given over to a variety of commercial establishments. There was a restaurant which opened in the last few months of my residence there, after many years of wrangling with the municipal authorities, a stationary store which retailed school supplies and a wonderful variety of candies, a bakery— only an outlet and drop-off point for a commercial establishment with ovens elsewhere, although they had a delivery service that offered freshly baked loaves of bread and croissants delivered to your house every morning. Oddly enough, there was an antique store with a lovely variety of odd bits of furniture (there was a little Art Nouveau ladies’ writing desk which I shall ever regret not buying, a steal at about 350$). Because of the high-income in the urbanization, it managed to stay in business, although the larger items of inventory stayed there, year in and year out.
But the two most essential businesses in San Lamberto— and the ones of longest duration— were neighborhood small grocery store with everything that we had forgotten to get on base, and where the owners were teaching me all the Spanish I needed to purchase this and that, and the Bar Urba. The Bar Urba was the clubhouse and chosen gathering space in San Lamberto, in the tiny storefront premise and on tables and benches set out on the sidewalk outside. In the summer, they had the concession at the community pool, set up under a canvas awning, with tables set under the trees. Year round, the Bar Urba was open most hours of the day and evening, offering coffee and snacks at all hours, access to pay phones and video games. Of a summer evening, everyone was there, drinking the house sangria, at 100 pesetas a glass, while the children showed off their skill on skateboards and bicycles— the neighborhood played host to a flock of children, wheeling like seagulls on their bicycles, there in a moment and then off again— but in the evenings, the bicycles were flung in a tangled heap while the children begged a couple of hundred pesetas for a plate of pomme frites. A plate of fried potatoes, with a dollop of mayonnaise and a dash of hot sauce, a most popular tapa, a “little dish”.
My daughter and I loved tapas, the bar food of Spain, but as far above the usual American conception of bar food as haute cuisine is above a supermarket frozen entrée. Tiny toasted cheese sandwiches, just a couple of bites, perfect for a kid’s finicky appetite; slices of cantaloupe melon wrapped in a paper-thin slice of jamon Serrano, the salty dark pink cured ham of Spain— every bar worth mention maintained a whole jamon with slivers of it carved off as needed, and the supermarket Alcampo sold them in a special section that smelled like moldy gym socks. Whole roasted tiny birds, bubbling in fat, a slice of tortilla— a sturdy frittata of potatoes and eggs, crisp slices of chorizo sausage, or whole anchovies— as different from the leathery strips of salted fish jerky as you can imagine, all served with a slice of crusty bread, battered and deep-fried shrimps, and my favorite, ensalata de pulpo— a chilled salad of minced tomatoes, green peppers and onions with cooked octopus, marinated in lemon juice and olive oil. So much better than a restaurant, which was expensive, and fussy, and time-consuming; a place with good tapas already had the small plates made up, and under glass on a section of the bar; perfect for that middle-of-the-day, don’t want-to-fill-up, just-a-little-something-to-tide-you-over nibbling. Just a little plate or two, of whatever took your fancy.
A proper neighborhood bar, like Bar Urba wasn’t a nasty x-rated place, either, although there were those, downtown around the old narrow streets in what they called the Tubes. One of the low, vulgar places in the Tubes featured a stripper who had allegedly been plying her trade since before Franco. A kind of institution by the 1980ies, I always imagined her performances being met with raucous cries of “Put it on, put it on!” Male friends assured me, though, even the bars in the Tubes were fairly couth, and in most other places— there were even bars at highway gas stations! — astonishingly family friendly places. There was even a bar in Zaragoza’s amusement park, with a terrace overlooking one of the popular rides for little children. I couldn’t help thinking that was an eminently sensible way to arrange things; the children could pursue their interests on the little bumper cars and the miniature trains and merry-go-round, while their parents relaxed with something cold and alcohol-based, or coffee, if preferred.
Everyone had their interests catered to, at the same time, and in the same place, and yet they could enjoy that time together. It also had the side benefit of making alcohol rather prosaic, not glamorous and forbidden, although I had to do a lot of explaining on the day we came back to the United States, to the JFK international arrivals hall, and I decided that I wanted to celebrate with a stiff gin and tonic.
“Sweetie, you’ll have to wait outside the bar for me.”
“Why?” She said, reasonably enough.
“Because children aren’t allowed into bars in this country!”
The look of outrage on her face said two things: What?!!!!! And for two cents, I’d get back on the plane and go back to a place where bars are sensible places.
“Custom of the country, sweetie, “ I said helplessly, “They just do things differently here.”
To: Providers of our Movie & TV Entertainment
From: Sgt Mom
Re: Lack of Spine and Relevant Movies
1. So here it has been nearly three years since 9/11, two years since the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan, a year since the thunder run from the Kuwait border to Baghdad, and all we get from you is a TV movie, a couple of episodes from those few TV serials that do touch on matters military, and a two-hour partisan hack job creatively edited together from other people’s footage. Ummm… thanks, ever so much. Three years worth of drama, tragedy, duty, honor, sacrifice, courage and accomplishment, and all we get is our very own Lumpy Riefenstahl being drooled over by the French. Where is the “Casablanca”, “So Proudly We hail”, “Wake Island”, “They Were Expendable”? My god, people, the dust had barely settled over the Bataan surrender, before the movie was in the theaters. You people live to tell stories— where are ours? What are we fighting for and why, who are our heroes and villains, our epics and victories?
2. And it’s not like other media people have been laying down on the job: writers, reporters, bloggers have been churning out stories by the cubic foot: the brave passengers taking back Flight 93, the stories of people who escaped the towers, and those who helped others escape, as well as those who ran in, the epic unbuilding of the Trade Center ruins. What about the exploits of the Special Forces in Afghanistan, on horseback in the mountains with a GPS, directing pinpoint raids on Taliban positions, the women who ran Afghanistans’ underground girls’ schools? What about Sgt Donald Walters, Lt. Brian Chontosh, the 3rd ID’s fight for the strong points at Larry, Curley and Moe and a dozen others. There’s enough materiel for the lighter side, too: Chief Wiggles, Major Pain’s pet turkey, the woman Marine who deployed pregnant and delivered her baby in a war zone, the various units who have managed to bring their adopted unit mascots back from the theater. (Do a google search, for heaven’s sake. If you can’t handle that, ask one of the interns to help.) The shelves at my local bookstore are pretty well stocked with current writings on the subject, memoirs, reports, thrillers and all. Some stories even have yet to be written; they are still ongoing, and even classified, but I note that did not stop the movie producers back then: they just consulted with experts and made something up, something inspiring and convincing.
3. Of course, actually dealing with a contemporary drama in the fight against Islamic fascism would mean you would have to actually come down out of Hollywood’s enchanted world, and actually, you know… speak to them. Ordinary people, ordinary, everyday people, who don’t have agents and personal trainers and nannies, and god help them, they don’t even vote for the right people, or take the correct political line. Some of them (gasp) are even military, and do for real what movies only pretend to do… and besides, they have hold to all these archaic ideals like honor, duty, and country. (Ohhh, cooties!)
4. And since even mentioning the Religion of Peace ™ in connection with things like terrorism, mass-murder, and international plots for a new caliphate is a guarantee to bring CAIR and other fellow travelers seething and whining in your outer office… ohh, best not. Drag out those old villainous standby Nazis, or South American drug lords, even the odd far-right survivalist for your theatrical punch-up, secure in the knowledge that even if you piss off what few remains of them, at least they won’t be unleashing a fatwa on your lazy ass, or sending a suicide bomber into Mortens’. Just ignore the three large smoking holes in the ground; cover your eyes and pretend it away. Never happened, religion of peace, all about oil, la-la-lah, fingers in my ears, I can’t hear you.
5.To make movies about it all, is to have to come to grips with certain concepts; among them being the fact that we are all potential targets for the forces of aggressive Islamo-fascism, that it is not anything in particular which we have done to draw such animus, and that we are in this all together, and that we must win, for the consequences of not winning are not only unbearable for us all… but they would be very likely to adversely affect you, too. I would expect an industry dependent on the moods and fashions amongst the public at large to have a better feel for what would sell… but I guess denial is more comfortable, familiar space, Sept. 10th is what you know best.
6. Still, if you could pass a word to Lumpy Riefenstahl, about getting signed releases, for footage, interviews and newsprint. It would be the courteous gesture towards all the little people for whom he professes to care, and save a bit of trouble in the long run.
Thanks
Sgt Mom
It’s
! The book that SSDB readers have been asking for! “Our Grandpa Was an Alien”!
(Well, he was…British, and a resident legal alien for fifty years. He had this grudge about being turned down for military service by the US Army in World War I… it’s all in the book.)
Nothing really R-rated, and minimal celebrity content, avaliable through “www.booklocker.com”, and maybe at your local bookstore if you really, really pitch a fit.
In answer to the many readers who have asked about “The Book”— it will be available very soon, through www.booklocker.com. I have reviewed and approved it, and we will post links and ordering information, as soon as they are sent to us! “Our Grandpa Was an Alien” will be available in paperback, for $13.95— please order a copy, and tell all your friends about it, as I would like to be able to quit one of my day jobs, and live in luxury on my royalties!
And I can give you a little taste of an early chapter…..
This was the time of discovering things, beyond the boundaries of the White Cottages’ back yard. One afternoon, Mom and I sat on the concrete back steps, side by side, looking out at the back yard, with our playhouse and swing set, shoulder to shoulder between the two fat-leafed jade plants which grew on either side of the steps. Mom habitually emptied the used tea leaves under the one on the left, every morning when she made a fresh pot, and as a consequence of the tea-leaf mulch, it was nearly twice the size of the other.
“You and JP are going to have a baby brother or sister, soon.” Mom said, gravely. I looked sideways at her, and asked, with interest
“How do you know?”
“Because it’s growing inside me, and when it’s ready to be outside, I’ll go to the hospital, and Doctor Harris will take it out.”
”Oh,” I said, thoughtfully. I had noticed that Mom and been bulging quite obviously around the stomach, in the same way that Auntie Laura, my godmother, and one of Mom’s bridesmaids had been, and then suddenly her stomach was flat again, and she was carrying around a tiny, pink little baby. “Is that where babies come from, then? They grow inside their mothers?”
“Exactly, “Mom nodded. “It’s the same with cats and dogs… and all the other mammals. Mammals have red blood, and fur, and carry their babies inside… not like birds, or snakes, which lay eggs.”
“Does it hurt, when Doctor Harris takes out the baby?” I asked. Doctor Harris was an elderly, semi-retired family physician who had not only delivered all of us into the world, but Mom as well. He had begun practice in the early 1920ies and his office and consulting rooms constituted a perfect working medical museum, with glass-fronted wooden cabinets, metal-lidded glass jars, a heavy metal scale with moveable weights…. And the large, old-fashioned reusable syringes, which hurt like the dickens in delivering the necessary inoculations. Mom hesitated a little, before she said
“No… it’s just all rather tiring.”
I rather thought it did probably did hurt— most anything to do with a visit to Doctor Harris usually did, eventually— but it must be necessary, like the inoculations, which kept us from catching all sorts of diseases.
“Did they get their polio shots?” was Granny Jessie and Granny Dodo’s eternal worried question, for until the very year I was born, yearly polio epidemics had terrorized parents, killing and crippling children and teenagers. Every summer, a mysterious monster stalked the young and healthy, leaving behind survivors whose crippled legs needed years of therapy, or worse yet, confinement for life in a mechanical iron lung, unable to even breathe for themselves. There were still older children around with heavy braces on their legs, sometimes in small, child-sized wheelchairs, a reminder of the monsters’ rampage. Even in the kids’ books I read, ten at a time from the library, many of them written in the 1930ies and 40ies, polio and other diseases were occasional casual visitors. For TB— they lined us up at school for a chest X-ray, and the other plagues—, whooping cough, scarlet fever— all of these things had been very real, and were still a presence, held at bay with a couple of quick stabs from Doctor Harris’ medical museum syringes. And we were not allowed into the hospital, when Mom went to have Dr. Harris take our new sister out, although Dad pointed out where her window was, away on one of the upper floors, from where we waited in the Plymouth, for Granny Jessie to go up and visit, and then come back and stay with us while Dad went up. Dad passed the time by pointing out an enormous castor bean bush, growing at the end of the visitor parking lot, and explaining how the caster beans were deadly, deadly poisonous, and we should never, ever put one in our mouths.
Initially, we were rather disappointed in our new little sister; we had thought Pippy would be available as a playmate almost immediately, and were crushed to find out that babies were quite useless in that regard. They ate, and slept, and cried, and absorbed a lot of the attention that had previously been lavished upon us, and it didn’t improve much when she was old enough to be a playmate, for she was so much younger and smaller that she couldn’t keep up with us, and we had no interest in what she was able to do. As a toddler, she was fretful and desperately shy, prone to cling to Mom, which JP and I, who were more outgoing, scorned as babyish. But still, there she was, our sister, and with her, Mom and Dad felt the family was quite complete, thank you, and gave away the crib, stroller, and a bale of cloth diapers and baby clothes, as soon as Pippy outgrew them.
Stay tuned to this space, for more……
So now, it is perfectly plain, that we all should have seen it coming: Congress and CIA/FBI, and 60 Minutes and all— the muses and gods know that it was all written out plain for us, did we only have the wit and imagination to interpret correctly what had been laid out before us. Yea, even your humble author, a retired rear-echelon type with an eccentric penchant for reading all sorts of things, and altogether more books than are really called for in the household of someone not actually a PHD— oh, I should have seen it myself, even absent any meaningful connections to the law enforcement and intelligence communities. Because I read a lot, and widely, and one of those was Bernard Lewis’ article in the Atlantic, in late 1990— I went around brandishing it to all my co-workers, and friends, saying “Read this! It explains a lot! I mean, he really, really knows about why they are doing this stuff!” Stuff being things like the detonation of the Marine barracks in Lebanon, of the kidnapping and/or murder of Americans all over the Middle East, even the takeover of the American Embassy in Iran. We had been on a collision course with radical Islam for the previous decade, now I knew why, and I knew with the same certainty that I know the sun will come up in the morning, that the day would come when someone representing themselves to be acting in the behalf of Muslims would do something grisly and atrocious, and productive of screaming headlines on American soil, to Americans, and finally and seriously piss off us all. Silly me, I thought it would involve high explosives, and something like a school bus or a nursery school, and maybe thirty or forty casualties, a hundred or so, tops.
So, 9/11 blindsided me, with the sheer enormity. Call it a failure of imagination, even though such a thing had been imagined…
Imagined for movies.
One of my acquaintances told me, a couple of days after, he had been working on something deeply absorbing, that dreadful and interminable Tuesday morning, and had the TV turned on, but with the sound muted, not turned to any particular channel, and that he had glanced over and happened to catch a sequence with an airliner crashing into a tower, and thought “Cool— what movie is that?”. He watched for quite some minutes before realizing that reality had trumped imagination.
Just as Hitler announced plainly all his intentions, in books, speeches and interviews, all during the 1930ies, so did Osama Bin Laden. Just as a scattering of people with imagination took Hitler at his word, and saw a growing danger, so did the scattered handful who saw Bin Laden as something infinitely more than a beardy wierdie in a long robe squatting in a hut in Afghanistan, muttering over age old grievances, and preaching apocalyptic vengeance to a handful of lunatic followers. If, on the morning of September 10th, someone in the FBI, or Congress, or the White House even, had stood up to say,
“Umm, this millionaire Islamic fundamentalist nutcase has this plot going, to hijack four or five airliners full of passengers and jet fuel, and simultaneously crash them into some important buildings in order to kill thousands of people, and maybe incapacitate the government and economy,” I know as surely as I know anything, that a few people would have replied,
“Hmm, maybe something in that, a bit ambitious, but there are a couple of precedents,” and the rest of us would have snorted skeptically and said,
“Ok, yeah, sounds like the plot of a bad disaster movie— Tarantino or Bruckheimer?”
Even if it had been spelled out in every detail, honesty compels me to admit that I would have taken it with a handful of salt— we all would. Jews marched into the gas chambers of Birkenau, and Sobibor hoped until the very last minute that those awful stories wouldn’t be true, couldn’t be true, although the announced intentions had been on the record for a decade or so, and the actions of the Nazis were perfectly manifest.
Because, in the main, we are logical, and baffled as to why someone would want so badly to kill us, for what seems like no reason at all; that degree of paranoia is the exclusive province of the urine-stained lunatic babbling on a street-corner.
To be sure there are people and nations that we have wronged, that have a rightful grudge against us: Cuba, Vietnam, Mexico, any number of other South American countries. However, as poor, persecuted, and rightfully aggrieved as their citizens may be, they are not plotting our mass destruction— in fact, any number are, and have been plotting to get to America on anything that would fly or float for the honor of working a lot of unpleasant and less-than-minimum-wage jobs. The rest are petitioning in the courts, or the courts of public opinion for redress, not lining up to organize mass-murder, even as some Americans rack their memories for some kind of justification— what could we have done to them, that would be a reason for this. The deeds are horrible, there must have been something.
The answer is; yes there was something: our culture, descended from the Enlightenment notions of separation of the state, and organized religion, the fantastical notion that religious belief— or no belief at all, is a personal matter, and no business of the State. Free from the dead hand of orthodoxy, technology and the imagination thrive, with all sorts of interesting results. Genius, after all, is a rare plant, and when religious, or political, or social conformism lops off all unapproved thoughts and expression… well, those rare plants become all the fewer. With luck, they relocate themselves to more hospitable soil, which has the side effect of impoverishing the original location. We inherited the tontine of hatred and resentment, when a culture which thought themselves blessed by the particular favor of Allah looks around and has to admit that hard proof of this favor is particularly thin on the ground, and whose fault is that, then? It can’t be the fault of those who have followed every rule; it then must be the fault of some malign power, that they have not been blessed with honor, riches, glory and power.
And so, there we are, then, and it seems hard sometimes to grasp, even after three buildings in smoking ruin, and a hole in the ground near Shanksville. Our imagination ought to be aided by that recollection; yes, they want to kill us, as many and by whatever means possible. It does seem ironic, though, that some of those who deny that future possibility still demand to know why 9-11 hadn’t been prevented; they bathe in the waters of Denial, which is more than a river in Egypt. But grasp it we must, to see it clearly and without equivocation. We must expand our imagination to embrace the unpalatable fact; that a there are some very dangerous people who want as many of us as possible very, very dead. Just internalizing that reality makes it all the easier to decide what to do about it.
From: Sgt Mom
To: The Usual Overpaid Celebs
Re: The Brutal Squashing Of Your Brave Dissent
1. I am sorry, people— apparently you pay top price for everything in your gilded world except for a little brutal honesty. Allow me to administer some at no charge; namely that you are talented and amusing. We pay you obscene amounts of money to display that talent and amuse us. In that you have a certain commonality with a well trained and costumed performing monkey; try not to be insulted by the comparison. The performing monkeys probably are.
2. You sing and play music, dress up in nice costumes and pretend to be other people, and recite lines written by other people. On occasion the people writing the lines, and those whom you perform them for may actually either be cleverer, more experienced in the ways of this wicked world, and may just have more professional expertise in dealing with it. Take your paycheck and adjust to the fact that you live in a separate and more sheltered world than the rest of us. Only those favored few celebs who have actually come out into the larger world, and acquired some real-world expertise and credentials are allowed to lecture captive audiences, and usually not during their professional stints of providing amusement to the paying audience.
3. This does not, by the way, prohibit those of you with two brain-cells to rub together, a decent compassion for the less fortunate, or a sense of noblesse oblige from excercising those capabilities on behalf of those designated unfortunates. By all means, have at it. Many of your fellows, across a wide political spectrum have done sterling work for the movements and causes that they personally feel drawn to, and we respect them enormously for it, most especially if they are modest enough to do good work quietly and humbly.
4. Furthermore, we are tired about hearing how your dissent is being squashed. Sorry, that is not dissent. That is disagreement. And when and if your statement of dissent is so untactfully phrased as to be viewed as insulting to the intelligence of the audience or the public at large, we— your public retain the right to call you on it. And we will, as much as various intellectual lefties, university professors, and the editorial staff of the New York Times wish we ignorant proles would just sit down and shut up and let our bettors tell us what to think. If a boycott for table grapes and South African wine is a good thing for the approved social causes, then we reserve the right to boycott stuff that has pissed us off, too. Please don’t hand us a load of how one is OK and the other is (cue scary music) McCarthyism!!!
5. Finally, I find it particularly amusing that people in the entertainment industry, which, more than any other, has painted America as a violent, vulgar, lawless and uncultured cowboy country, and Americans as devoted to over-the-top religious frenzies, or deviant sexuality, are yet among the first to go abroad and condemn their own country for being seen as violent, vulgar, lawless, etc, etc, while seeming entirely clueless of their own contribution to the situation. Thank you all so very much for that.
Sgt. Mom
PS— If you are going to dish it out, best be sure you can take it in return.