Who Are You? What Do You Want? Where Are You Going? Whom Do You Serve – And Whom Do You Trust?!
I can so imagine my Dad doing something as essentially demented, but completely logical as this… had he been been born somewhere like Cuba, instead of being a second-generation Brit and citizen of the US of A.
It’s a pity in a way that the “truckonauts” all apparently live now in Florida – Dad would love to swap tools and techniques with them. (Hey, Paul… you ever consider building something like this, out of an old car??!!!)
(found via Tim Blair)
So…we haven’t been camping yet this year because our old 5-Man tent is getting old and to be honest, neither Beautiful Wife (BW) nor myself are up for sleeping on the ground anymore. Takes too long to get moving in the morning and both of us get darn cranky by the end of the weekend.
We’d been playing with the idea of a popup or a 5th Wheel, but I’ve been in a popup in really bad weather and we just can’t afford a 5th Wheel. It’s getting to be that time of year in our area where the winds are kicking up again and a squall could come down off the Rockies and totally take out anything nylon.
A few months ago BW saw a special on one of the cable networks, Discovery, History, Travel, one of those, on the history of the Teardrop Trailer and we’ve been looking around for an affordable version ever since. I’ve looked at the kits and the plans to build our own and ya know, if I was that handy, that might be kinda cool. But I’m better with electrons and circuit boards than I am with hammers and nails. I’m a whiz of a rough carpenter, but free cutting arcs and the like? Not so much. My wife’s the one who looks at a fully loaded Craftsman CTK and grunts like Tim the Toolman, not me.
Anyway, on Tuesday, we’ll be bringing this home:
Marine grade plywood with a fiberglass laminate, basically a boat cabin on wheels. Got the extra little platform for stuff. It comes with a queen sized “pad” but I’m thinking a futon would serve us well.
Now, we’re going to be messing with this thing like you wouldn’t believe. BW watches just about every DIY show that’s on and is already looking for curtains and other accessories. Kitchen gear will still be pure Coleman until we can get it transplanted and integrated into the rear galley. When we camp, we don’t “rough it” when it comes to food. We don’t bring dehydrated, we don’t live on power bars, we eat well. BW has her portable spice rack in her cookie kit.
Update: Okay, so we’re not bringin’ it home until Thursday or Friday. Apparently there’s a shortage of hitches for a 2005 Santa Fe.
With all the recent photo-fakery attendent upon the fighting in Lebanon being much discussed in the blogosphere, I ran across a curious discussion of historic and iconic war photographs, and the chances that they were faked in some way, either by being staged, or having certain essential bits of information left out upon publication and dissemination.
I don’t remember hearing any of the aspersions about Robert Capa’s fameous snap of a Spanish Loyalist, caught by chance at the instant of death, but there is a rather fascinating story here, of how it was proved authentic, after all, and the soldier even given a name.
I would wonder if such a photo of a soldier today might be splashed all over the front page, above the fold… but I already know the answer to that one.
Being that I am writing away on the book every moment that I can, this means a lot of computer time, building intricate castles of conversations and descriptions. Or leafing through my own books, or googling for bits of authentic and corroborative detail to lend convincing detail to the narrative: like, what would have been used in a makeshift humidifier in the early 1800s, or what would a teamster done to have treated an ox with sore feet? What would Ft. Laramie of 1844 been constructed of (adobe and timber, actually, there are paintings of it, too), what were all the names of the children and the wives in the Stephens-Townsend party? That and a thousand other questions send me back to the books constantly, since I really need to write about them with authority, and dislike the thought of being nibbled to death by the ducks of absolute authenticity.
It all does remind me though, of what most Europeans tend to forget or don’t realize in the first place… that the continental US is really, really huge, and terribly empty, and not much like most of Western Europe, although I think maybe the Russian “outback” might come close. There are bits of Scotland, that if you squint and pay no mind to the stone walls, can look sort of, kind of a bit like Appalachia. No wonder the Scots-Irish got off the boat and headed for the hills and hardly ever came down out of them again.
That part of Southern Spain called the Extremadura can pass as a small scrap of the Southwest all dry scrub and red dirt, if you can ignore the occasional fortified hill-town, so the hard-fighting poor noblemen from Trujillo took to Mexico and the southwest like ducks to water, if they were ducks and there were water, of course. This vast emptiness must have come as a horrible shock otherwise, to those who came as immigrants, from the 17th century on, especially once over the coastal mountains, and once out of the cities along the coastline fringe: Boston, and Charleston, and Savannah… which at a squint could look like the newer parts of a European city.
As any baffled American on their first trip to Europe will tell you… gee, everything is pretty dinky over here, isn’t it? Ceilings are low, the old houses have teensy tiny rooms, the streets are narrow, and everything is really, really close together. (Unless you’re staying in a palace or a stately home, someplace, where the dining room is a good quarter mile from the kitchen.) I have always been convinced that Copenhagen, a charming and welcoming city to me as a teen-aged Girl Scout, was entirely built at 3/4th scale, somewhat like Disneyland. The Lake District to me looked like a twee and dainty pocket wilderness, carefully manicured and groomed to look like a wilderness without actually being one. And driving across Europe fifteen years later, the next town was always three or five, or at most, ten miles on. It never seemed that gas stations were more than a couple of mile apart along the major roads. As Bill Cosby pointed out, in half an hour you’re in a whole ‘nother language! No, I can very well imagine that in the middle of the 1800s the most common reaction of someone straight off the boat from Hamburg, or Bergen or Liverpool to being plunked down in the Platte River valley, or the Great Basin of the Rockies would have been to assume the fetal position underneath the nearest piece of heavy furniture.
It was big and empty then, empty of all people but a scattering of nomadic Indian tribes; no established roads, other than printed on the land by iron-wheeled wagons, and what fortresses and settlements which did exist, with the exception of a scattering of adobe towns in what is now New Mexico and California, were new and raw. No terraces of grapevines or sheep-folds, no crumbing Roman or medieval ruins poking up from the grass, like bones of the land. No castles or cathedrals, with a thousand years worth of architectural accretions, or towns with a similarly aged collection of traditions, rituals and feuds. No, none of that, just the sky and the wind, and the land beneath it all, empty to the farthest horizon. It would have taken a particular sort of daring to venture out into that vast, indifferent wilderness, stepping away from the security of the known and knowable, and going… well, somewhere.
And it’s still pretty empty… there was a stretch along I-15 in Utah where it was fifty miles to the next gas station, and there’s another out on I-40, out east of Kingman: a hundred miles to the next one, and not a damned thing constructed by man that you can see except for the road itself, and the power-lines along side.
I’m going to be buying a handgun in the next year or so.
More info as requested: Personal and home defense and of course I’m going to practice with it. I’ve already got a 12 gauge that I’m not sure works and is going to the gunsmith this week for an overhaul and test firing. It’s a 1947 Ithica Featherlite that may have been fired a total of 5 times. It was my Dad’s and it’s more of an emotional thing than anything else. I have to agree, a round being pumped into a chamber of a shotgun can stop a bad guy in his tracks. True Story: One of my Sister’s former Sister-in-laws was a cop down in Dallas. She’d flanked a bad buy in a parking lot and chambered a round of her shotgun right behind him. Heart attack killed him right there.
Boyo’s probably getting a Daisy in the next month or so for plinking and general gun safety training. He’s 10, it’s time.
What I’m seeing in the comments makes me feel good. The 45 or good ol’ 357 was where my head was going.
What would you recommend? Why?
And yes, the cost of a good, easy to open safe is already part of the plan, you don’t need to go there with me. Boyo is smart and well-behaved but he’s also all-boy and I have no delusions that he wouldn’t let curiosity get the best of him.
So, last week I was back at the Enormous Corporate Behemoth, for about the fourth time in a year. I was guessing that the temp service staff was living in the hope that if they only threw me often enough at the E-C-B that eventually I would stick. Their hopes are alas, a triumph over my experience. To them it is a mystery why I wriggle out of the E-C-B’s smothering but very well-paid embrace: “But you were military, you should love it!” they cry… well, yes I was and I still don’t. I flee, screaming (softly) at the end of every assignment, putting off my contractor ID badge and tearing up the parking permit, and swearing that this time, it will be absolutely the last time… really!
The E-C-B is one of San Antonio’s munificent and magnificent employers. I have met many people who seem to be quite happy, and enormously fullfilled, they smile in the corridors, and laugh in the lunchrooms, and decorate their cubicles with stuffed animals and family pictures, and little banners and awards for this and that… and most of them show no sign of having had lobotamies… but there are so many of them. I have never seen anyone from a previous assignment, again, the place is that big. The ranks of cubicles go on, and on, and on, as far as the eye can see.
Their main complex is a huge edifice, sprawling across the length of a ridge in the middle of a wooded and beautifully landscaped park. From a distance, the place looked like one of those sprawling and crenellated fortresses. A number of ponds and a resident herd of very tame and slightly undersized deer heighten the likeness to one of those rambling castles or palaces in the middle of a European city, or maybe a stately home in it’s own parkland. Employee appointments and convieniences are lavish: There is a Starbucks at either end of the mail building, and another Starbucks in an adjacent facility, an on-site gym, a daycare, cafeterias, snack bars and little lounges wedged in wherever there is a nook big enough to fit two cushy chairs and a table, and a bit of original art… and the place creeps me out, completely. It is just too big.
I have worked for big firms since I retired, and small ones, too. The small ones had a disconcerting tendency to either treat you like family— and in a dysfunctional and abusive family way, either that or fold underneath you. Bad sign, when the employer starts letting contracted services go, and stalling on cutting checks for work already done. Almost as bad as having employee paychecks bounce. That last hasn’t happened to me yet, but I did have an acquaintence who came to work one normal morning, and found it padlocked and empty of furniture and all the employees owed a paycheck. No, the smaller places have their perils, and even the medium-sized firm most recently on my resume had a creeply way of suddenly shedding long-time employees without warning…. to them or anyone else. Usually our first clue was the next morning,w hen the combination to the employee door wouldn’t work: we’d all be whispering to each other, “Hey, the combo is changed… OK, who got the sack this time?” This made all the slightly forced jollity of company picnics and events ring just a tad bit hollow.
Frankly, I’d rather spend my days at home writing, with Spike the Weevil I Know Nothing Of sitting under my chair, and just temp for a week or two here and there: there may be a fair amount of crap going on where I work, and I have pretty definitly lost my capacity for enduring it… but a week here, and a couple of days there pays the bills and I pack up my stuff and go well before it gets to me or I piss someone off. Or look around and realize that Ihave spent several decades in the cubicle farm.
So I’m curious, what’s on your mind lately?
We’re still working on that whole housebreaking concept with Spike, the Weevil I Know Nothing Of, or as Sgt/Cpl. Blondie calls her, “The Poop Factory”. Lately, Spike has been parking it in consistently pretty much the same place… lamentably, that place is NOT the out of doors, but we’re working on that, as well as purchasing paper towels in the multiple-roll packages. On the up side, Spike is a pretty fair and alert watch-dog, even if not a particularly intimidating one. I’m sorry, in her heart she may think she is a lion, but a six-pound-dripping-wet-pocket-puppy is not going to intimidate the crap out of an intruder, unless they are incapacitated by a phobia about small, yappy dogs… or fall over and hit their head, because they are laughing too hard at the spectacle of a tiny, noisy Shih Tzu with delusions of grandeur, bouncing up and down and menacing their ankles.
On the other hand, now I know why these people who do have these cute, ornamental toy breed of dogs, carry them around, constantly and ostentatiously! I used to think it was a kind of desperately hip affectation, and the dog was some kind of cute, trendy accessory… but now, through no fault of my own, I have one of those cute, somewhat trendy ornamental toy breeds… and let me tell you, people, it isn’t the owner’s notion…. it’s the dogs’ doing! Dogs have been associated with people for god knows how many millennia, they were bent and bred for our purposes, to do our bidding and with various specific jobs in mind; to herd sheep (border collies), or kill rats (rat terriers), to chase foxes (beagles), to assist the butcher in dispatching cattle (bulldogs), or the soldier in a similar job on enemies (mastiffs), to be draft animals (rottweilers), to dig burrowing animals out of holes (dachshunds), to run after coaches (Dalmatians), to assist dory-fishermen in hauling nets out of the water (Labradors)… In other words, for every dog breed under heaven, there was once a very specific purpose for it, and the very best of them know it to their bones and every fiber of their dog bodies, it is coded so deeply in their DNA that it comes out in their character and sometimes in the actions of those who have never otherwise come within a country mile of their ancestral mission.
I read some months ago of a young Labrador out for a walk with his owner along a scenic riverbank. The dog pulled his leash out of his owners’ hand, plunged into the water and swam to the rescue of a little boy who had been on an inner-tube excursion down the river, and had fallen off. He swam into the middle of the river, and dragged the boy back to the bank, performing as neat a life-saving exhibition as ever could be wished by the painters of sentimental Victorian scenes of the same, in response to his ancestral imperative. Everyone was properly astonished, of course… just as my close neighbors were, a couple of years ago, when they detected the presence of roof-rats, taking up residence in their garage. One of their family pets included a rat-terrier named Jessica, who enlightened them almost immediately as to the reason for the name of her breed, by her eagerness to sally forth into the garage, the resulting hunt-down of the prey and the efficient and total dispatch, once Jessica located them. She was swift, brutal, and so dedicated that she was trembling all over, once they let her loose, although to their certain knowledge, neither Jessica or her immediate ancestors had any first-hand notion of exactly what a rat was, or what indeed she should do about them. The ancestral mission came surging up to the forefront of that doggy brain, overcoming a century or so of conditioning as a family pet.
In the case of Spike, and the other toy breeds, they were bred and conditioned as companion animals, to want to be with or close by their chosen human, twenty-four-seven; in their lap, or at their feet, or as is said of the Chinese breeds, tucked into the sleeve of a long robe. Essentially, they want to be Velcroed to us… and that kind of adoration is hard to set aside. Spike sleeps in a little dog-nest under my bedside table, and when I am writing, she is under my chair, or sleeping on the bedroom rug, or in her doggie nest, in all cases not more than ten feet away. If I get up and move to another room, she follows me, watchfully. If I go outside, and she doesn’t come with me, she sits at the door that I went out of, or goes around to the slider door, or the dining-area window where she can see me, and claws frantically at the glass, until I come inside again. When I had to go to a temp assignment at the Enormous Corporate Behemoth for a week of administrative and creative work (to pay the bills, dontcha know, while I work on the latest Book) she was left in the crate for a good few hours. Even though Sgt/Cpl. Blondie came home at lunch from her job, and let her loose, Spike was so frantic by the time I came home, I had to carry her around in my arms for about fifteen minutes until she calmed down. All that time, of course, she was plastered to me, as clingy as a small child. Don’t even ask me about how she was, when I left her at the groomers’, the week before: talk about the huge-eyed and tearful look of betrayal, leaving a kid at pre-school has nothing on that.
So you see, all those celebs, carrying around those little toy dogs?— It’s the dog’s fixation, it isn’t the owners, I am convinced. Considering some of the celebrities involved, it just might be the dog is the intellectual powerhouse of the two, anyway
Am I the only one who thinks this latest cease-fire just ain’t gonna happen?
Connie Willis wrote a haunting novelette, ages ago, called “Firewatch” postulating a future where students of history could actually go and do their finals as a practical exercise, in the past. The hero of “Fire Watch” finds himself in London in 1940, as one of the cadre of volunteer fire watchers, sleeping in the crypt of St. Paul’s , and working feverishly during air raids, to protect the great church from bombs— not the high-explosive, but the incendiary kind, defending it with buckets of sand and stirrup-pumps— all the while haunted by the knowledge that seventy years after his practicum, St. Paul’s has been atomized by a terrorist with a nuclear weapon. In his own time, all that is left of it is part of the memorial stone, dedicated after the Second World War, honoring the work of the firewatchers:
“ “Remember men and women of St Paul’s Watch who by the grace of God saved this cathedral.”… Part of the stone is sheared off. Historians argue there was another line that said, “for all time,” but I do not believe that, not if Dean Matthews had anything to do with it. And none of the watch it was dedicated to would have believed it for a minute. We saved St Paul’s every time we put out an incendiary, and only until the next one fell. Keeping watch on the danger spots, putting out the little fires with sand and stirrup pumps, the big ones with our bodies, in order to keep the whole vast complex structure from burning down. “
So it appears this time we are saved, from the horror of airplanes falling out of the skies, spilling their contents prodigally over the earth, or as it seems to have been planned, over the ocean. Saved by watchfulness, and luck and dedication, saved by good policing, saved by those who know in their soul that we are at war, that there are indeed those few predators amongst us who are planning to kill, and kill and kill again, sating themselves with oceans of our blood, and the assurance of an eternity spent in the hereafter, rewarded as the clients of a particularly well-stocked celestial whorehouse. Perhaps this was the one big action, promised or threatened ever since 9-11, and perhaps it will take another five years to bring the next one to full and ghastly fruition, with another dozen small and ugly murderous actions in between. The saying is that the terrorists only need to be lucky, once… those who defend against terrorists must be lucky, over and over and over again.
We may continue to be lucky, and dedicated, and go on putting out all sorts of little fires with the equivalent of sand and stirrup pumps for many nights and for many years, but deep in my heart, I know that eventually there will be the day when we will not be lucky, and stome time, and in someplace… someplace that I may know, or someplace that I have only read about… will be gone, with nothing but a few blasted foundations left of it. Connie Willis wrote “Firewatch” in 1982, when the Cold War was cooling down, before the Wall fell, and it could still be barely credible to imagine a Communist as the villain, a nihilistic terrorist setting off a bomb to destroy the church of St. Paul’s, twenty years before we watched the towers fall in a shimmer of debris and a great cloud of smoke and fire, inspired by a terrorist of another horrifying and more potent ideology.
“We saved St. Paul’s every time we put out an incendiary, and only until the next one fell.”
In light of news reports of British authorities’ disruption of a terror plot, I should like to say that I hope they have got irrefutable evidence… like the perps on tape, or caught red-handed, or something.
Otherwise, we shall all be deafened by unimaginable levels of whining about how a certain community is being unfairly targeted, and how it is all a worked up plot by running dogs/minions of the “BUSHITLER junta” anyway.
Said seething, whining, and excuse-making to commence in 3…2….1…minutes after they wake up this morning.
Have any of y’all had a dog who just abso-frickin-lutely drove you up the wall?
A dog that for the first 3 months after bringing her home had you wondering what drugs you were on, to even think of bringing this senior-citizen-aged adolescent into your home, and seriously considered returning her to the rescue group that gave her to you?
A dog who within the first 6 months after bringing her home had totally wormed her annoying little self totally into your heart so that you can’t imagine going back to how things were before she moved in with you?
My little Jessie, the italian greyhound, who’s 1/3 the size of my greys, and thinks she’s twice their size, is that kind of dog. We’ve lived together for almost 2 1/2 years now, and I’ve watched her become a senior citizen before my very eyes. She came to me with health issues, and we’ve kept those under control. Enalapril for the heart murmur, 5mg daily. Prednisone for the hepatitis, 5mg MWF. There’s nothing we can do for the cataracts – the pred exacerbates them so she’s probably 95% blind. And her hearing’s been going for the last year or more, so I’m figuring at this point she’s probably 80% deaf, if not more.
But she hangs on, like the tough little biddy she is. She hates to be carried, and would rather walk beside me, even if it means bumping into things she can’t see. She’ll hit the wall (or the flower pot, or the tree), bounce back, shake her head, adjust her course, and soldier on until she hits the next obstacle. It’s painful to watch sometimes, and yet laughable, in a sick, twisted sort of way. Or she’ll sit where she can see me, and not notice that I’ve moved. I’ll come up behind her and she’ll still be alertly staring at where I used to be, and be utterly surprised to find me behind her instead. As soon as she realizes it’s me, her turbo-tail starts wagging – I’ve never counted how many revolutions per minute, but I’m sure she could rival some propellers.
But she’s not a young dog. She’s definitely a senior citizen. My vet says we can only estimate, but she estimates at least 12. I figure it’s probably closer to 13. She’s been with me for over 2 years, and was with her previous owner for 9 years. So there’s 11 years right there, and she’s a rescued dog, probably from a puppy mill (she’s had pups, we can tell), and they usually get rescued at about 2 years. So she’s either 12 or 13, if not older. And prednisone ages them too, doc says. But without the pred, she’d be dead in 3 weeks from liver failure.
I found out today that enalapril has side effects, too – it can affect the kidney functionality, and make it less efficient. I took Jessie in this morning for her annual dental, and they did the routine blood work before putting her under. Doc called me about 1/2 hour ago. There are 3 things that indicate kidney function – it’s all greek (ok, latin) to me, and the only word I recognized was creatinine levels. Anyway, all 3 are high, which indicates decreased kidney function, and it’s not advisable to put her under becuase that could precipitate the kidney failure.
So we’re holding off on her dental, and putting her on a kidney-friendly diet (translate – buying special food from the vet instead of the pet-food store), and checking the levels again in a month. And I’m sitting here at work, looking at her pictures in my cube, taken in the first month or so she lived with me, and trying to picture my life without this little bundle of arrogance in it. It’s a very empty picture, believe me.
Doc says she’s seen dogs get better when put on the special food, she’s seen dogs maintain the high levels but have normal functioning, and she’s seen dogs not get better. So we don’t know what’s gonna happen with her. We’ll check her levels again in a month and see how they look. That will give us a better idea of where we are in terms of what decisions need to be made, and how much longer she’ll be around. She has an indomitable spirit, and that counts for a lot.
UPDATE: She’s home with me, sleeping peacefully in her cushioned basket that my neighbor salvaged from somewhere – it’s the perfect size for her, and when she’s not taking over the big dogs’ beds, she loves it. The vet had her on IV fluids all day – she hasn’t been drinking a lot of water lately, but i hadn’t really noticed how very little she was drinking. Doc said she saw a marked difference between Jessie this morning and Jessie this evening, after all the fluids.
We have these little scares with her every few months or so, any more. Not always the same scare, it just seems that since last August, I’ve had 4-5 times of wondering if it was her time, and she’s still here. Doc agreed with me when I said that at this point, I could have her for another 6 months, or another 3 years. I talk to her (it’s a side-effect of living alone – I talk to all 3 of my dogs), even though she can’t hear me. I’ve long believed that communication is not limited to the physical realm. And I’ve told her that I will not send her to the rainbow bridge early, but I won’t make her wait when it’s her time to go. It’s not her time yet, which is a good thing.
And today’s little scare was a good thing – I sometimes forget how much I care about these four-legged kids of mine, and take them for granted. They are more precious to me now, after today.
HT, we’re going to start with the diet…if it seems to be working, great. If not, we’ll be able to tell that before hte month is up, and get her back in. My travel schedule is about to go through the roof (again), but my dog-sitter is a very savvy lady, who knows Jessie well enough to know when she’s not being normal. She should know her well enough – with my travel schedule, we’ve started calling my house their vacation home. *sigh* I have total faith in my vet, and see her frequently, because Jessie’s my first experience with an aging dog, and I’m a big fan of “peace of mind” exams. It’s well worth $20 or whatever from my pocketbook to have my vet confirm – ‘yes, she seems to be deaf now,” or “yes, that’s just part of getting old.” (I love my vet) Our rule of thumb with Jessie is “what would you do if she were your dog?” and within my budgetary constraints, that’s what we’re doing.
So, another day at work at the Enormous Corporate Behemoth, the largest three-dimensional Skinner-box in the world. This being my fourth time out there, I am able to easily find my car at the end of the work day.I took a short assignment to pay the bills… it looks like one of the cats may have cystitus, so there may be a vet’s bill to add to it all. This assignment is a short one, and may even become shorter, should anyone find out that my Excel graphing skilz are not that mad, that I am almost completely innocent of interest in banking and insurance (other than my own accounts, that is) and would much rather be at home, writing.
Yesterday, I printed out six chapters of the latest Book… yes, that one, the story of the greatest frontier era emigrant party that no one has ever heard of, and send it off via Fedex.
I hope to hear something by next weekend. I have really been spoiled for office work, the two weeks of staying home and writing, writing, writing.
Blackfive has LTC Randolph C. White Jr. delivering the graduation speech for the newest batch of Infantrymen to complete training at Ft. Benning, Georgia, on April 21st, 2006.
Absolutely the right thing to say at the right time. LTC White, thank you and your grunts for everything.
Unaccustomed as I am to giving a good goddamn about the blatherings of movie stars and other reality-challenged morons in the entertainment industry— we pay these people inordinately large salaries to dress up and pretend to be other people for our amusement, and I have always just tried to think of them as a breed of well-trained performing monkeys— I am a little surprised to find myself even considering a blog-post about Mel Gibson’s drunk-driving arrest and his subsequent widely publicized anti-Semitic outburst, recorded apparently in its very ugly entirety. It’s been all over the entertainment industry media, to which I never (well hardly ever) pay attention, but Blondie does – and if her reaction to the whole thing is anything typical, the very photogenic Mr. Gibson may have a big-post rehab problem. She was honestly revolted by the whole nasty diatribe, will probably not see whatever his next movie is, and is even put off by the thought of watching any of the old Mad Max movies again. In vino, veritas, you see, truth at the bottom the wineglass; she and I have been around long enough to know that an over-sufficiency of alcohol doesn’t really change a person. It just loosens inhibitions, and their grip on whatever façade they maintain over their true personality. Everyone knows people who are kind, funny and amusing sober, and even more so when smashed – and conversely, at least one individual who only appears to be kind, funny and amusing, when sober. When that kind gets a skin-full, the real underlying person comes out, and it is usually a memorably nasty piece of work. So, while drunk on his ass, a movie star who has a public persona of being a rather genial, fairly devout sort of family man is revealed to be – well, something rather less genial, to put it kindly. And since he is in the entertainment business, this has implications for more than just his family, circle of friends and therapist.
It’s enough to make one madly nostalgic for the old studio morality clauses, actually. On the whole and over the long run, we rather prefer our entertainers to have a private life pretty much be congruent with what they play on the screen, assuming that we have to know anything about their personal lives at all. Frankly I’d rather see someone like Meryl Streep or Judi Dench spend three decades or more playing a great many different and interesting characters, and living a dull and blameless personal life out in the suburbs between movie shoots. Or even a Robert Mitchum, who seems to have in real life been pretty much the same kind of two-fisted, hard-drinking brawler he often played. I’m fairly sure that Rock Hudson would never have been as big a movie star as he was, if everyone had known that in real life he played for the other team, although we can now appreciate him being a much better actor than we thought back then, playing all those love scenes with women. If he had been outed in the 1950ies, Rock would have been dropped – er, like a hot rock. What he was in real life, was just not congruent with the roles he played, and the public personality he appeared to be. I get the giggles myself, picturing him in a passionate movie cinch with Doris Day, knowing what I know now. So, how many people will giggle cynically when they see Mel playing a regular guy?
As I wrote here last month, anti-Semitism in the US never quite has attained the virulence that it has in Europe, for a number of likely reasons. Not to say it anti-Semitism never appeared in the American cultural or political body politic; there are plenty of examples to the contrary. But set against that are even more accounts of how in a lot of places, and on a lot of occasions, it was something that, to use an English expression, was just not done, being neither condoned or approved of, and on one famous occasion, it brought down a bigger hero than a movie actor, a man whose credentials for being an American hero were somewhat more substantial than being able to recite lines in front of a camera; Charles Lindbergh, the Lone Eagle, Lucky Lindy himself, who by 1941 had spent nearly two decades in the public eye, after his epic crossing of the Atlantic, solo and non-stop in a single-engine and the ghastly kidnapping and death of his first child and the resulting investigation and trial. Aviator, writer, scientist and traveler, he had become a passionate speaker, and one of the leading lights in the America First Committee, a group formed to oppose any American involvement in what would become the Second World War. Many of the founding members- intellectuals, businessmen, and politicians alike- were honorable, and passionate patriots, who were convinced that the war in Europe was none of our affair, and that involvement in it would not end well or to American advantage, and had the example of the first war to go on. Conventional wisdom of that time had it that America had been suckered into participating in World War One by an unholy cabal of slick politicians and greedy arms merchants, and as war broke out in Europe in 1939, Americans very rightfully felt they’d better not get fooled again. But there were other, less honorable motivations motivating members of America First, traditional dislike of Britain’s imperial and financial powers, admiration for or fear of Germany, deep dislike of President Roosevelt – and as historian David Gardner wrote “Anti-Semitism was the most inflammatory issue in the isolationist debate. Jews had good reason to hate Hitler… Jewish interventionists could therefore be motivated only by a desire to help co-religionists in Europe. To save them, Jews appeared willing to sacrifice American lives. The fact that interventionist sentiment was strongest in the traditionally conservative south and southwest, areas of small Jewish population, had done little to change popular belief that Jews were leading the drive for war.”
And by the fall of 1941, events had skidded way beyond anyone’s control, least of all the passionate anti-interventionalists of America First. Rooseveldt had won re-election the year before, a military draft had been instituted, Lend-Lease aid and volunteers flowed towards Britian, along with considerable American sympathy. After a U-boat fired on an American destroyer, President Rooseveldt authorized the US Navy to shoot back. Passions ran high, as events converged, and Lindbergh addressed an America First rally in De Moines, saying “The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration. Behind these groups, but of lesser importance, are a number of capitalists, Anglophiles, and intellectuals who believe that their future, and the future of mankind, depends upon the domination of the British Empire … These war agitators comprise only a small minority of our people; but they control a tremendous influence … it is not difficult to understand why Jewish people desire the overthrow of Nazi Germany … But no person of honesty and vision can look on their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy, both for us and for them. Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way, for they will be among the first to feel its consequences� Their greatest danger to this country is in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government…”
Lindbergh had long been a hero to most Americans, even as he had become so deeply involved in America First, and certainly viewed by many, especially in the Rooseveldt administration as an admirer of Hitler, and the Nazi Party, but this speech— described as intemperate and inflammatory — brought down a storm on his head. The America First Committee, fractured and was made irrelevant by Pearl Harbor, and Lindbergh himself was all but made a political outcast by the opprobrium that descended upon him.
Curiously, the speech that killed his political career was made on September 11th.
(More fascinating stuff about America First Committee… much of which seems curiously relevant, these days)
Geneva Convention.
In the general interests of reader knowlege, this link is posted.
Do particularly note the bit about taking hostages, and the bit about engaging in directly war-supporting work on the premises of a hospital.
And also the bit about uniforms, ID, orders of a clearly-identified superior, etc.
I am off tomorrow, back to the Enormous Corporate Behemoth, on a well-paid temp assignment for the remainder of the month, which will keep the wolf from the door (or at least, at the bottom of the driveway) while an interested agent looks over the first third of “To Truckee’s Trail”.
Ta, then!
But then again, I’ve always had a problem with rats. It probably stems from the early-mid 1970s, when we moved to our house in the country. Before we built the house on our land, it had been a soybean field. In fact, when they were digging the basement, there were still soybeans around the edge of the field, left over from harvest, available for anyone to glean, or for the wild critters to add them to their winter stockpiles.
We built a large house – I’m hazy on the square footage, as I was only 12-13 when we were first planning it, but thanks to the internet I can confidently declare that it was over 3900 sq ft (I’m sure that includes the full basement), with 8 rooms, 4 of which were bedrooms, and 2.5 bathrooms, with an attached 2-car garage. Our dream house, this was supposed to be, but it quickly became the nightmare instead. But that’s another story, full of unfulfilled dreams, broken health, and failing finances.
This story is about rats. BIG rats. Field rats, that looked to be 12 inches long BEFORE adding in the length of their tail. The soybean field was THEIR home, and we dared to intrude. Normally, in a well-built house (which ours was), that wouldn’t be a problem. Why be normal?
In October 1974, our house was still just a shell. In a stroke of brilliance, we had had the house company build the parts that had to be inspected, and planned to finish the rest of it ourselves, leisurely over the winter and early springtime, always sparing time to work in the half-acre garden that would provide us with delicious fruits and veggies over the summer and the coming winter. So when the shell was finished, with the roof shingled, and electric boxes peeking at us from the bare studs, and an extension ladder serving as the basement staircase, we gathered our friends and family and began finishing out the house. My dad was a truck-driver, and instead of working 70 hour weeks, he chose to only work 40-50, so we could spend as much time as possible working on the house.
In February, the shell looked more like a house, but was still without plumbing, electricity, or sheet-rock. We needed to wait for spring to drill the well, as I recall, once the dowser found the proper place for it. And the septic tank still needed to be installed, once we knew where the well would be. Even so, we knew it was coming together nicely, and we knew that older houses such as the one we were living in took longer to sell, so we put our 1930’s city home on the market.
Imagine my parents’ shock when a nice family viewed it during an open house, and made an offer on it within a matter of days. They offered us $100 over our asking price, and wanted to close on it by the end of Feb. Early March at the latest. More »
Funny old world, that… what with everything else going on in the world, this part of south Texas is being overrun with… butterflies, more of them than I have ever seen in any other year. First it was swarms of small, drab brownish and dark orange things, with wings about the size of a man’s thumbnail. They are called snout-tailed something or others, or so my neighbor Judy told me; not the least bit spectacular, but they are everywhere in perfect swarms. In the evenings, they cover certain trees and shrubs to the point where they make the tree look as if it is entirely covered in small, trembling leaves, and gather around shallow puddles where anyone has just watered. The dogs and I have run thru a perfect whirlwind of them during the morning for the last few weeks, but this last weekend we noticed more than the little drab things.
We walked by a bed of gerbera daisies in a neighbor’s front yard on Sunday, on our way to get the newspaper, and a perfect storm of sulfur-yellow and creamy white butterflies rose up from it. These new interlopers are several times the size of the snout-tailed something butterflies, and much more discriminating. They very much favor the flowering bushes like the gerberas, and the rosemary bushes in the front of my house, which are now covered in spikes of tiny blue flowers and fairs of butterflies. The firebush next door is orbited by a constant mob of yellow, like an animated flock of postit notes. At the DIY home warehouse store on Sunday, we spotted a gold and brown Monarch with wings a big as my hands, lazily orbiting over a table of flowering annuals, along with all the smaller brown, yellow and white sorts.
We have never seen so many, in the time we have lived here, and have no idea why: it’s been hot, but not as hot as some years, not as rainy as others, there are just about as many flowering plants in bloom this year as others… it is a mystery.
Another mystery: one of my neighbors, several blocks up the road have suddenly, and horrifically contracted the urge to decorate their garden with a huge variety of healthy flowering plants and shrubs in an array of containers which have absolutely nothing in common, aesthetically speaking. It is almost as if they hit every nursery and DIY store in town, impulsively buying hand over fist every plant and pot that caught their eye, without consideration of all the stuff they had bought previously. About the only thing to hold plants that they haven’t bought so far is that nadir of low-rent taste, the automobile tire turned inside out, laid on the side, and the top edge cut into zig-zag shapes and gaudily painted. No, the assortment of pots would be quite striking of itself, but the statuary puts it painfully over the top.
Not gnomes, but all those elaborate , sentimental cast-plaster, or concrete statues of Victorian children, sitting on benches, or under umbrellas, or playing with the bunnies and duckies… dozens of them, and Blondie swears there are more of them, mysteriously appearing every day, as if they were replicating themselves in some revolting and not-to-be-closely-considered-by-the-squeamish fashion, partaking in mysterious rituals performed during the darkest hours of the night…. No, the thought of all those statues of creepy children coming alive at night, and throwing off their pinafores and trousers and tormenting the bunnies and ducks with… no, no, no. I’ll bet that when they smile, though, they have needle-sharp teeth, like the little gnomes on that planet in “Galaxy Quest”. During the day, the serried ranks of statuary make it look like a monumental graveyard for hobbits. And that’s the front yard, we don’t like to think of what might already be in the backyard, because at some point, the statuary will overflow their yard entirely, and come marching down the road, and then where will we be?
On, the other hand, the horrible marching army of statues will have to come by the house with the tree full of wind chimes, the place where they have ripped out the lawn, and covered it all pavers, and raised beds full of native flowering shrubs, whirligigs, painted sheet- metal flowers and crystals on metal poles…all very pleasant on a mild day, but what it must be like during a wind-storm, I shudder to imagine. Probably no one can hear themselves think, for the clamor of wind chimes, let alone call City Code Compliance to complain:
“Hello (bonnn-ggg! Bo-nnnn-g!) Code (Bonnnnnnggggg!) Compliance, how may we (BOOOONNNNNNGGG!) help you? (BONNNNNNNNGGGG!)…. I’m so sorry, ma’am, (BOOOONNNNNNGGG!) but I can’t hear you (BBBBBOOOOONNNNNG!) over the wind chimes!” (BBBBBBOOOOOOOONNNNNNNGGGGGGG!)
I love the look of the wind-chime place, but personally, I’m happy to be living a good distance away. I think it would drive my dogs and cats into nervous breakdowns. I blame global warming. Or global cooling. Or climate change, or Al Gore, or somebody. Maybe even Martha Stewart, whom I am happy to blame for anything.
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You Are 40% Cynical |
 Generally you give people the benefit of the doubt. But there are exceptions. You buy into many of the things that mainstream society believes, but you’re not anybody’s fool. |
h/t Blonde Sagacity
It’s going rather well, which is the reason I have not posted much over the last week…umm, since being let go from the last installment of pink-collar wage slavery. Timmer has been writing about that still little voice that whispers “It’s time”, when you have to let go and move on… and I just kept thinking, as I was driving home with my personal stuff thrown into a cardboard box (and it took about five minutes to clear out all of it from my desk) “Whoopee! I can stay at home tomorrow, and finish that chapter!” Maybe it’s time to do what I really, really love doing!
They gave me a decisive push, just as I was working up the nerve to jump, and I have hardly thought of the place at all this week, although I did wonder on Monday if anyone could call the house, asking if something had been ordered, or delivered, or whatever; although frankly I can’t see how they would have the nerve, and they can figure that out from my files anyway. And I swear, I was that close to snarling, the next time someone asked me for copies of this or that, “The copier is over there, and your legs aren’t painted on!” No, time to move on.
So, another milblogger, blessed be his name, referred me to a literary agent, who read the chapter and loved it, extravagantly. (I googled him, of course… do I look like a fool? Me, who worked for an intellectual property firm for three years?) This agent wants to see more, basically about a third of the projected work, just to be assured that I can, actually carry through with it. It seems that a discouragingly large number of first-time writers have a failure of nerve at about the 15,000 word mark, and as I have mapped out an outline for “To Truckee’s Trail” of 19 or 20 chapters of 5,000 to 6,000 words…. Well, that works out to 100,000-120,000 words. Or more, if I really start to get into it.
I am working full time at this, and if I keep to my schedule and detailed chapter outline, I will have six continuous chapters by next Friday. Half a chapter a day of at least 3,000 words of polished prose, witty conversation, exciting narrative, and vivid descriptions. Piece of cake, people, piece of cake.
So, that is where I have been, back in the 19th century, coping with flooded rivers, recalcitrant ox teams, quarreling emigrants, cooking over smoking campfires, and generally keeping everything moving; all those cute children, brave women, and gallant men… and there’s a bit with a dog, too. Everyone likes a funny bit with a dog.
On 9/11/2006, 2996 names will be blogged about, by 2996 bloggers. I read about it on Sgt Hook’s blog, and he points back to the originator of the idea.
The concept is to remember the fallen, not their murderers. So far, 995 people have signed up. That will cover 33.2% of the names, so there’s still a ways to go.
I’m certain that some TDBers will be signing up, either for here or their personal blogs. If you want to sign up, click this link.
Thanks to the 995 who have signed up so far, representing not just the USA, but at least 10 other countries (maybe more, by now – that was as of June 20). Those who died deserve to be remembered.
This is what I have been doing on weekends for the past couple of months, in the name of a more beautiful and dog-proof backyard, with really rather striking results, once the finished product is set on a layer of sand, and surrounded with pea-gravel.
Go to a craft supply store like Michaels’ or Hobby Lobby, or even the aisle at Walmart where they have the flower-arranging supplies. Buy a couple of bags of those flattened glass marbles, or the sea-shell shapes, ornamental polished pebbles, or the pieces of tumbled sea glass, or little square tiles, or whatever, in whatever colors work for you as a truly creative human being.
Go to Lowes’ or Home Depot, or whatever they call the home DIY outlet in your neck of civilization and buy:
A bunch of those heavy, clear plastic plant saucers… the 14” to 21” ones work best, but last weekend Blondie and my neighbor Judy from down the road seriously came down on me for wanting to buy a 30”+ one! I wanted to seriously create! Help, help, I’m being repressed! The best ones are about two inches deep, or have regular ridges along the sides, which allow you to easily set a level.
As many sacks of mortar mix as the back of your car, and your own back can handle. It comes in 40lb bags which tend to leak, somewhat.
A bag of those rubber gloves they sell in the paint aisle. Seriously, working with mortar mix is not something you want to do with your bare hands. If you don’t have a large bucket or some kind of cement-mixing trug at home, buy one of those, too. I have a large bucket which once held about 10 gallons of kitty litter, and a small GI-issue shovel, which works for me.
A couple of stiff plastic and/or wire brushes. They have inexpensive ones in the same general area where they sell paint-stripper.
Set out the plastic plant saucers on a level surface.
Mix the mortar mix with water— generally about one quarter to a third of water, to the amount of mortar mix. It should be just damp and slushy enough to stick together. (Do not use too much water. It will not work well, trust me on this.) Stir well with whatever you have, and only handle the stuff with gloves on.
Slop enough gloppy mortar-mix into each plant saucer, and slap with your hands to pack into place. Don’t worry, if it seems too dry, at first. The water will rise to the surface, and saturate the whole mass of stuff in the mold.
When the mortar mix is packed into mold (one forty pound sack fills one large, two medium and a couple of small saucers, although your mileage may vary) level it off, and set the marbles, glass, pebbles or glass onto the surface. Slap it gently to embed them in the mortar. Be creative, this is when you let your inner artiste have free rein. Don’t worry if some of the mortar slops over the glass a little bit.
Allow to sit for at least 6 hours. If you haven’t added too much water to the mix, it will be solid enough to un-mould. Let them sit for another six hours, or overnight, and brush the dried surface with the wire or plastic brushes, to clean off the glass inserts, and make a nice roughened surface of the mortar.
These will look really cool. You can also lay flat leaves onto the wet mortar, and press them in just enough to make leaf-printed stepping stones.
Note: I have used purple and green marbles, and real grape leaves to make a lot of stones with bunches of grapes set in them. But remember to wear plastic gloves, this stuff is hell on your hands, otherwise.
This is tasty sample of the latest book, tenatively titled “To Truckee’s Trail”, the one for which I have a complete proposal all ready. The select few who have seen the story so far are fascinated, and I myself think it could be very, very big… could it be “Gone With the Wind” big, or “Harry Potter” big? Let’s see if the blogosphere can make it so…
I want to be able to sit at home and write the rest of it, I am deeply interested in the people I am writing about, enthralled by the process of working out how they pulled off their very daring adventure. I have had enough experience as an amateur “unknown” to know that just sending the proposal off to a handy selection of publishers listed in the Writers’ Guide is a waste of time and postage. Been there, did that, have a large collection of impersonal rejection slips that gave no indication that my submission envelope had even been opened.
I am posting this to show it off, and to get a serious publisher interested. I am bouyed by optimism, and the knowlege that big money has been paid for stuff that IMO is much, much worse than this. (Oh, and I have copyright protection for this. I did not spend three years working for an intellectual property firm for nothing.)
From Chapter 11, “To Truckee’s Trail”.
From Dr. Townsend’s Journal: “14th November, 1844 In the wilderness at the fork of Truckee’s River. This day, I can scarce put pen to paper, being distract’d with grief and worry. Our party is split yet again, this again being of our own decision. My own Dearest Darling is gone ahead with five others, judged fit and sound, and without the care of little ones to attend. Yesterday, our labors brought us to where a tributary came down from the mountains, athwart our path, and leading to the south…We made camp in late afternoon, and Captain Stephens called a meeting….”
“We can’t take the wagons much farther,” said Young Martin flatly, as if daring anyone to argue with him. “Unless we follow the west tributary.” He dropped down onto an upturned cask that he was using as a stool, and wincingly pulled off his waterlogged boots. He peeled off his socks, which were also soaked.
“Out of our way,” murmured Old Man Hitchcock, looking into the fire, past his eternal whittling, and the knife-blade. “The long way around.”
“The long way around, may prove the shortest, “said Stephens gently. “We done well before, always heading straight west. At the Green, and again from the Sink. I’ll wait to hear what Isaac says.” He sat a little way back from the fire on a half-rotted fallen log, Dog at his feet. Her great fawn and black head lay on her forepaws, golden eyes going back and forth as if she was paying intelligent attention to the conversation. The fire was the smallest of the three outside the circle of wagons and tents, set up on the lee side a barrier against the icy breeze roaring down from the high mountains, and the cold that came at sundown, the cold that was most particularly felt when the exertions of the day were over. Allen Montgomery, and the Murphy brothers, Jamie, Daniel, Bernard and Johnny hunkered around the fire. It had the air of an informal meeting of the men, while the women cooked a sparse, but much anticipated meal. The horses and Hitchcocks’ precious two mules were close-picketed for the night, just on the other side of the wagons, inside the circle jostling each other for mouthfuls of tall dry grass bristling up from the day’s accumulation of snow and armfuls of green rushes cut from the riverbank by the women and older children,. Around that fragile shelter of canvas, brush and fires, the snow was trampled to a muddy slush. At other fires, Isabella and Sarah, and the Murphy women moved in an intricate ballet, skirts, shawls and sleeves carefully held back from the fire, as they cooked the evening meal: stew and cornbread that tasted like sawdust with no butter to spread richly on it, dried apples stewed with a little spice Even Isabella’s milk cow had gone dry, months since. Mary-Bee Murphy sat with Mary Miller on a wagon-bench, dandling the baby Ellen, while her sons and Willie Miller and their cousin Mary leaned on Old Martin’s knees, or sat bundled in shawls at his feet as he told them another endless story about miracles, and goblins and old heroes of Erin. It was hard to judge by a casual looking, John thought, of how far along Mary-Bee was, all bundled in shawls as she was, but she still walked lightly. She was not far enough gone in pregnancy to be awkward, but she tired easily.
His glance was drawn finally, as it always would be, to his own Liz, her hair silver-gilt in the firelight, wrapped in two shawls and the buffalo robe that Old Man Hitchcock had traded for her at Fort Laramie, from the tribes. Sitting on another wagon-bench, she had Sadie in her lap, Nancy and Eddie leaning confidingly against her, under the shelter of that buffalo robe. Poor Liz, she had never been any shakes as a cook, had never even had to be, let alone over a campfire. But to do her fair, she tried her best, at a cost of some burnt fingers, scorching her own apron, and upsetting a pot a beans and near to putting the fire out, whereupon Isabella spoke out in tones of mixed exasperation and affection, somewhere back along the trail when the three families had begun to share a campfire. Elizabeth would do them all favors if she could but stay away from the fire and the hot kettles; chop the vegetables, if she would be so kind, and read to the children, give them lessons and keep them out from underfoot. In that mysterious way she had, of seeming to know when he was gazing at her, her eyes lifted from the book and met his for a smiling moment, quiet communion among the crowd around the campfire. He was here, she was there, and yet they were alone together. And then she went on reading to the children, and he was supposed to be also paying attention to the needs of others in the party.
They had all become a tribe, John realized, a tribe of nomads as like to any of the Indians, bound together, sharing hardship alike with those moments in the evening, those rare moments of rest. Across the trampled circle, Moses and Dennis Martin stepped out of the darkness between two wagons, each with an armload of firewood. They piled their burden roughly beside the largest of the fires, and a storm bright burst of sparks flew up like fireflies meeting the stars overhead.
“… tonight, after we’ve supped,”
“A meeting?” John was startled back from his nearly simultaneous contemplation of his own dear Liz, and of Young Martin’s left foot, dead white, nearly bloodless, propped up on his knee. “Pardon…I was lost, considering this interesting combination of foot-rot and frostbite. Dry socks, Martin, dry socks and liniment. And contemplate sealing your boots with tallow and paraffin… other than that, consider staying out of the water, as much as you can…”
There was a dry laugh, shared around the circle around fire. In the last three weeks, they had been forced into the river-bed time and time again, as it provided the easiest, and on occasion, the only passage for the wagons.
“We must consider what we should do now,” “Stephens said. “We might send a party ahead, along the south branch…” He fell silent, as Mary-Bee Murphy came with a basin and a steaming kettle and Isabella, bearing a dry cloth and her box of medicinal salts.
“Doctor, tell him to soak in this for a bit, and dry them carefully. We’ll bring a set of dry stockings, presently, and dry his boots beside the fire.”
“Mrs. Patterson, you are a tonic, “Extravagantly, John caught her hand, and took it to his lips.”And an excellent nurse; I shall see that the patient follows your advice to the letter.”
Isabella gave him a very severe look, as Mary-Bee awkwardly set down the basin and filled it with steaming water. Isabella added salts, and gathered up the socks and the sodden boots. Mary-Bee looked as if she would say something more, but she merely patted her husband’s shoulder and followed in Isabella’s wake.
“See that he does then, Doctor Townsend, see that he does.” Isabella shot, over her shoulder. When she was gone back to the cook-fire and out of hearing, Stephens remarked,
“A good woman is above the price of rubies.”
“I long to meet the man who would play Petruchio to her Kate,” John said, just as Greenwood appeared as silently as a ghost in the circle of firelight, shadowed by Britt, and heralded only by the scent of tobacco smoke. Stephens grinned, a flash of teeth in his whiskered face. “Nearly as much as I’d like to be warm again, and over those pestilential mountains; he must be a formidable man… I imagine a very Ajax.”
“Not so,” said Hitchcock seriously. “M’son-in-law’s a very mild-tempered man. Never has much to say for hisself.”
“Married to her, who’d wonder?” ungallantly ventured Bernard Murphy sotto voice, as Greenwood sank onto his heels, and held his hands to the fire, looking every day of his four-score. Britt took up a seat next to Stephens on the log, and casually gentled Dog’s alertly-raised head. She lay down again, with an inaudible “woof”.
Stephens merely lifted his brows, and Greenwood sighed;
“Not so good for wagons, Cap’n. Not ‘less you had a month of good weather and a hundred strong men and them with an ax in either hand. Horses? Yeah, easy enough. We blazed it, two, three miles, far as we could, ‘fore sunset. Horses and pack-mules. It looks right promising, otherwise… but I’ve always said if you want to be over these mountains by Winterset, you’ll have to leave all your traps and ride hard.”
“No.” It was Isabella’s voice. She had returned unobtrusively to the fire-circle, joining the men, as was her right as a wagon-owner and the head of a family. ”We cannot just leave our traps, as you say. We have chosen out all the most valuable and useful of goods, and brought them all this way; we cannot just drop them by the wayside as things of no consequence. ”
Greenwood shrugged. “They’re only things. You can get back things, or something like them.”
“Things?! Things, as you say, but they are our things! We considered them very carefully; these are things that are not only valuable to us, but things that we need! They are not frivolous possessions, but necessary tools to earning our livelihoods… without those “things” we should be beggars, dependant upon charity.” Her keen hawk-glance went round the circle of faces, and John thought of his books, the case of surgical instruments… Liz’ precious china tea set, that came from her grandmother, whose family had brought it from Germany and cherished through generations.
“And what about the children? Can they ride hard? Can Mary Miller ride, with a baby at breast, or Mary-Bee Murphy, so close to term? The wagon is our shelter, our home! I’ll not be a beggar, I’ll not be destitute. What if any of us fall sick, though lack of shelter? What do you say, Doctor? How many of us would be fit to leave all behind and ride hard?” Her hard, inimical hawk-glance pinned him, challenged him to speak, to venture his opinion.
“The very youngest or those of a weak constitution could not endure very long in such conditions as this without shelter, “John stammered. As many times as he had talked this over with Elizabeth in the privacy of their bed, be was still stuck on the two-horned dilemma, having never come to any conclusion in his own mind, “Nor the very old…” Old Hitchcock snorted derisively at this, and would have said more but for his daughter’s fierce gaze swinging around towards him. “The wagons… they are at least of some shelter. I would not choose to leave them.”
“I do not think we could carry enough food and blankets and tents on our backs for the weeks of traveling we still must endure… not if we had to carry the weakest of us, “ Stephens sighed, lines of weariness and responsibility harshly grooving his features in the firelight. “Our supplies diminish every day that we spend, this side of the mountains… I know that my own do, so I assume the same of you all. Old Man, how far do you think we might be from Sutter’s Fort?”
“I do not know for sure, “Greenwood said, bluntly. “Maybe a week’s journey on a good horse to the summit, maybe longer. Sutter’s place is down in the flatland, on the river, a good piece from the mountains on the other side.”
“What sort of man is he? If we sent for aid for ourselves, would he send it?”
“Aye, he would. I know nothing of him at first hand, though. But he is accounted to be generous, and he has ambitions.”
“As do most men… I’ve a hankering to know what he has ambitions for…” Stephens stood, wearily and stretched, “Doctor, I’d like to call a meeting… not now, after we’ve all supped. Not just the wagon-owners. Everybody. Tell them it’s to consider sending out a small party ahead. He saluted Isabella with a touch to his hat-brim, “Pardon, all. I shall check on the stock. No, “he added as Greenwood looked to get to his feet. “You’ve earned some rest, Old Man. ” Dog’s eyes had snapped open as soon as Stephens moved, and now she lurched to her feet and padded after him into the darkness outside the firelight. John sighed; he was wearied to his very bones, how Greenwood must feel after his long scout today, he could only imagine. The old man must be made of iron and buffalo sinews, to have endured this kind of odyssey for years.
“Supper’s ready,” said Isabella abruptly. “The table is set… that is, if we had a table.”
John stood, and bowed, elaborately offering her his arm,
“My dear Mrs. Patterson, may I then escort you to… our lack of table and our evening repast?”
Isabella nodded, regally, her lips twitching with her effort not to laugh.
“How very kind of you, my dear Doctor.” She took his arm with a flourish, and they moved with elaborate gentility across the trampled mud to their own fire, where Elizabeth watched them, laughing, while the children stared in baffled astonishment.
“La, Mrs. Patterson, I fear you are flirting with my own husband!” she said, while Isabella dissolved into hearty and infectious giggles.
“My dearest, I am wounded at the heart!” John slapped his chest theatrically, “How could I consider being unfaithful to you, even in thought!” He sank onto the bench next to her, as the children had sprung up to help Isabella pass out tin plates. He added in a low voice, “Although I confess, Darling Dearest, I now can see how Mr. Patterson’s affections might have been drawn towards our own Kate.”
“Because she is altogether splendid, “Elizabeth replied, “But too many men are fools. A pretty face and a kind regard is all that is necessary for their attentions. A strong mind and a stout heart are not obviously apparent.”
“I am properly rebuked,” John said, and they sat together in perfect companionship under the buffalo robe, while Sadie brought around the tin plates and her brother a pan of cornbread. Isabella carried an iron Dutch oven, from which the most savory scents emanated. She carefully doled out a ladle and a half to each. Across the fire, John noticed that Allen and Sarah sat next to each other, but separate. Elizabeth followed his gaze, and intuited his thoughts, perfectly.
“They are not happy, Dearest Darling. I doubt they will ever be. They married in haste, thinking they would come to love each other… but I cannot think how that will happen, under the trials of such a journey as this.”
“Perhaps when we get to California…” John ventured, “It may yet work out….” He took a mouthful of the stew. “Oh, this is truly succulent fare… or am I just amazingly hungry?”
Elizabeth twinkled at him.
“It is a most Luccellian feast, is it not?”
“This cannot be a potato, surely? I thought we had eaten the last of the potatoes months ago… Murphy made such an event of it; I made a note in the trail diary.”
“No, “Elizabeth replied, serenely. “Those things that taste somewhat potato-like are roots of water-reeds. The Indians eat them, even dry and grind a sort of flour out of them or so Mr. Hitchcock says. And we found stands of wild onions when we first came up into the mountains. Truly, this wilderness is a garden if you know where to look.”
“Ah, well… “John looked with new interest into the contents of his tin plate. “We are well served, and well fed, Darling Dearest. I could not ask for better companions in all the world.”
“So…” Elizabeth ate with renewed interest, “What does Mr. Stephens think we should do next?”
“He wants to hold a meeting.” John replied, “I think he wants to send an advance party, following the creek towards the south, whilst we move the wagons west along the main body. We cannot spare too many men, or horses, though. But at least, they could bring fresh supplies and teams from Sutter’s.”
“Who will he send?” Elizabeth looked around the camp. “Who can be spared? Who can be asked to leave their families behind?” John followed her gaze. Across the fire, Moses and Allen laughed together. Sarah’s back was to her husband; she talked quietly with Isabella, who seemed to be listening with half an ear while she supervised the children. A tiny line worry-line appeared between Elizabeth’s level brows.
“He’ll ask for volunteers, first.”
“Moses will ask, I am sure of it.”
“Darling Dear, he is not a child any more. He is a man, or close enough to it. And we will talk it all over tonight after we have supped.” Elizabeth’s merry mood seemed to have fled, though, and they ate in companionable silence, until they could see that other men were drifting to Stephens’s campfire, carrying benches and stools; Old Martin Murphy and his sons and James Miller, Patrick Martin and his boys, young Sullivan, and the various drovers. Sarah and Elizabeth hastily scoured the plates clean, and followed Isabella. John clambered up into the wagon for his little writing-case; he had a sense that he ought to be taking the minutes.
The wagon-owners settled themselves in the first circle around the fire: Stephens and Greenwood, Isabella and her father, Allan, Martin Murphy and his sons, and James Miller, John Sullivan and Patrick Martin. Wives, and older children, brothers, and the hired men filled in the spaces, and spilled over to a second circle, and stood in the gaps behind benches and chairs brought out from the wagons. Coming to the confluence of waters meant a very real decision about what route to take now, a decision with nearly unbearable consequences, now that snow had been falling for weeks. No wonder Old Martin looked particularly worn, and cosseted his grandchildren. Fully half the party was his blood kin, and he the person most responsible for bringing them here, too.
“Aye, we must send for assistance, while we can, “Old Martin agreed. Like Isabella, he would not countenance abandoning the wagons; consensus regarding taking the slightly more open but possibly longer route along the creek was complete. “And how many shall we send? And who can we spare, when we’ll need every strong man to move the wagons, hey?”
“No more than six, “Greenwood replied. “Strong riders, with little gear and just enough food. Eight of the horses are in fair condition, still— six to ride, two for spares and packs.” He cleared his throat and spat thoughtfully into the fire. He seemed almost to hesitate before saying more. “Whoever they be, ‘twill be six less on the foodstuff left to the main party. And they need not all be men, either.”
That was a notion to cause an intake of breath around the fire, and a sudden, thoughtful silence. Old Martin was the first to break it.
“I’d not countenance asking a mother or a father yet, to leave children behind in a place such as this… no, no, never, ‘tis an unnatural thing you would be asking. Not even the heathen savages would ask such.”
“No,” Agreed Old Man Greenwood, “But among the tribes, women without children commonly ride with the hunting parties. They do the butchering and dressing out, and cooking and all.”
“What a wonderful time they must have, doing all the work of it!” Sarah said, in a voice that carried just far enough, and there was a rustle of wry laughter from the women on the edge of the campfire.
“So how do we choose the six; should we draw lots from among those of age, young, fit and without children?”
“Aye,” agreed Old Martin readily, “But it is in my mind; we should first pledge to assist the families of those chosen, in whatever they may require. Our needs might leave them short of a provider, and ready hands.”
“So… are we agreed on that, then? To draw lots for a place and to see to the needs of any family left short.” Stephens’ ugly, lined face appeared more than usually like a grim, fire-gilded gargoyle, looking around the circle. “We are agreed then? Are there any exceptions?”
“None but you, Captain…and the Doctor. You are more needed here with us.”
“I had no intent of leaving this company, until we are all safe,” replied Stephens, dourly. “Nor does Doctor Townsend; so, how many will draw?” He leant down and began pulling stems of dried grass from the brown tufts which were still un-trampled around his log seat.”
The quiet murmurs ran around the campfire, quickly tallying names; Alan and Sarah, Greenwood’s two sons, and Stephens’ young drover, Tom Flombeau, Oliver Patterson, old Martin’s youngest children, Daniel, Bernard and Johnny, and their sister Helen. The four drovers, Edmund Bray, Vincent Calvin, Matthew Harbin, Oliver Magnent, and Francis, John’s own hired man. Joseph Foster, and Moses’ close friends, Dennis and Patrick Martin. Not the Sullivans, though, after some discussion, since John and Mary had the care of their younger brothers. But that left Moses himself… and his Elizabeth. John’s heart seemed to turn over in his chest; all of them, fit and strong and young, and childless, twenty of them, nearly a half of the party. Stephens cut twenty straws, and then cut six of them in half. He set them in his palm so they were all level, and then closed his fist. He held out that fist towards Allan Montgomery first, then Britt and John Greenwood. Allan and John Greenwood drew long straws, and so did Britt. Moses also drew a long straw. His disappointment was obvious, but John hoped that his own relief was not. The hired men drew in a body: the Irish drover boys and Stephens’s drover lad, the dark Louisiana French boy whose name was such a tongue-twister, all drew long straws, but Oliver Magnent, and Francis Deland both drew short. Joseph Foster stepped forward to draw: another long.
“Ach, another two months of this!” he said, in good-humored disappointment. “And all on short rations, too!”
“Daniel… Johnny, ye and Bernard step forrard… and where’s Helen?” Old Martin chided his three youngest into the circle and looked on with a deathly countenance, when Helen, Johnny and Daniel all drew short straws. Oliver Patterson stepped forward into the firelight to draw, and Stephens looked at him with a particularly severe and interrogatory frown.
“Boy, are you of age for this venture?” and Oliver blushed deep red as Isabella said, white-lipped.
“He will be eighteen in three months.”
Oliver drew a long straw though, leaving a pair of wispy straws in Stephens’ fist; Sarah and Elizabeth stepped forward, and John’s heart felt like was turning over entirely within his chest. Sarah drew a long straw, and could not hide the disappointment on her face. And Elizabeth then took forth the last of the straws from Stephens’ hand: a short straw for the horse party.
Elizabeth, not Moses; John was shaken down to the soul. Old Martin looked hardly better. Stephens let the murmurings of excitement and sympathy die down and quietly said,
“Doctor, take down their names into the trail journal… I’ll want to talk to them, all together. They must leave in the morning, as soon as we are ready.” He spoke a little louder, to the gathering at large. “Thank-ee all, sitting out in the cold for this. It’s only trail business we had to settle tonight.” Taking their cue, the women began chivvying away the children who already had not been settled to bed. The younger men and the families of those who had not been chosen drifted away from Stephens’ campfire in their wake; after such a day of travel, a warm bedroll had a powerful and irresistible allure. As the evening meeting broke apart, Greenwood thoughtfully sized up the six chosen.
“You were well-guided, Cap’n… they are well-suited. Among the women, Mrs. Townsend has the best seat, and little Helen is young and strong. It is good that her brothers are among them, they are both good hands with the beasts, and fearless about venturing into wilderness. Magnent and Deland are good shots, and as trail-wise as they come, besides being used to the cold and the snow…”
“For myself, I am glad Mrs. Townsend is amongst them.” John said. His voice sounded hollow to his own ears. “The cold and the hardships are so extreme, I fear for her, under these circumstances, and welcome any means for her to escape farther exposure.”
“Aye, it may be best at that.” Old Greenwood sighed, grimly. “Would that I could urge all to travel so light, and escape these mountains. At least, they will be six less appetites upon the supplies we have left.”
Old Martin and his children, Elizabeth and the two French lads, all of the chosen lingered by the fire as they were bidden. In the firelight, Elizabeth looked as young as they; all of them so eager, fired by the prospect of adventure, just as they all had been six months ago at Council Bluffs, when the grass was lush and deep, escaping the drudgery of a mundane existence. Now they looked fair to escape another one, of everlasting cold, and the brutal labor of moving the wagons another mile or so farther up the river, the river whose jaws were closing in on them like a trap. Stephens looked at them, and smiled, wryly,
“No great words… wish I did. Ride hard. Look after each other and the horses. Get to Sutters’ place and bring back help.”
“We shall!” Elizabeth’s chin lifted, and her eyes were fired with determination. “We are leaving our kin and dearest ones, and our friends, knowing that their very salvation depends on us. Depend on us, Captain Stephens, we will not fail.”
And even if Old Greenwood seemed to hide a half-cynical smile, the others; Helen and her brothers, the two Frenchmen, all shared the same look of bright dedication. They could not fail; they would throw themselves at the high mountains, the rocks and rivers and the ice, they would win through it all, they would come through, rescue their families, and John’s heart felt as if it would burst with a combination of pride and dread.
“And we will not fail, “Elizabeth whispered, when they lay tucked together in their bedroll of blankets and quilts, and the trusty buffalo robe, all spread out on top of the platform of boxes and flat-topped trunks in their wagon. The drawstrings and flaps were drawn tight against the cold, and a kettle of coals taken from the fire lent an illusion of warmth to the tiny, canvas-walled room. A pair of flat stones heated in the fire, wrapped in a blanket and tucked in the bottom of their bed produced a slightly more convincing degree of warmth, together with the warmth of each other, curled into each other, spoon-fashioned. Around and outside this fragile shelter, came the quiet, near-to sleep voices of Isabella’s children, Allan Montgomery’s irritated voice, raised and quickly hushed, a quiet crunch of regular footsteps in new snow, the horses pawing the frozen ground, searching for more of the thin dried grass. Under it all, a nearly-imperceptible yet menacing rustle, the constant sound of more snow falling, brushing the canvas and pine branches; fat flakes like feathers, like falling leaves.
“I wish…” said John, into her hair, hugging her dear and familiar self into the shelter of his own body, “…I wish that we…”
“Had not taken this journey?” Elizabeth picked up the thread of his thoughts as expertly as she had always done. “Dearest Darling, never wish that. No, never. For I am glad that we have, even if this would be the last night we spend in each others’ arms… and it will not be, “she added firmly, and took his hand in hers, and held it first to her lips, and then her cheek. After a moment, she continued, thoughtfully. “I almost feel as if my life before we started this journey was lived in shadows, a sort of half-life, and then I came out into bright sunshine. Did not we decide upon this great adventure partly because of my own health? And now I am in good heath, and have shared your life in a way that I never could before… in our present emergency, I am accounted strong enough to be given a great task, a responsibility? There should be no greater reward, I do not ask for any such. My Dearest Darling, there is nothing to regret… I love you all the more for having made this possible. Have no fear for me… I will be safe, and we will not fail.”
“I pray that shall be so, “ John tightened his arms around her, at once wishing for this night with Elizabeth never to end, full knowing it would be the last they would spend together for months, and yet wishing that it were tomorrow already, and the agony of parting already over. He was torn between pride in her courage, and worry for her that shook him down to his bones. “We should go to sleep, Dearest Darling, you’ll need as much rest tonight as possible.”
“Mmmm. Don’t stay awake yourself, watching over me, “Elizabeth said, teasingly, but John did try to fight off slumber for a while, until sleep claimed them both. And then too soon it was dark morning, and snow still falling, and he was standing, wretchedly tongue-tied in front of people, for once. He had promised Elizabeth, back in the desert, that he should not have to go on a long scout again, and be separated from her. And now, ironically, she was riding on a long scout, leaving him to plod behind. “Promise me rather, that wherever one of us will go, the other will follow after in a little while,” she had said, and so he would be following after, but it was bitter, bitter. Moses and he had saddled Beau, had rolled up the buffalo robe and two or three blankets around a pitiful bag of dried meats and hard-tack, and a little ground coffee and strapped them behind her saddle. Isabella and Sarah had fussed over what to send with her, just as the Murphy women had fussed over Helen, Johnny and Daniel. Old Martin had tears rolling down his cheeks as he gave his youngest daughter a boost into the saddle. Daniel’s paint pony danced impatiently, crunching the fresh-fallen snow underfoot; the lads were eager to be away.
“Dearest Darling, I must go now.” She leaned down from the saddle, and brushed his cheek with her lips, and then she was gone, following the rest of the mounted party. They were veiled in falling slow before they reached the first bend and were lost to sight, but he was almost sure she turned in the saddle and lifted her hand in one last farewell.
Well, this is one of these good-news, bad news things— I was let go this afternoon from my latest job. I am wondering it it isn’t a case of cosmically being pushed before I could work up the nerve to jump, because for the last two months or so, I have been thinking constantly about how I didn’t want to be doing this, and I didn’t want to be there. The whole place and the duties inolved it bored me rigid … and I would rather be at home, writing.
I had worked up a proposal for a book, and I was spending every minute that I could working on it. The “book” is something– and about people that I would just rather be spending time with. I’ve been thinking about this— how increasingly discontented I have been with the pink-collar wage slavery. I am at a stage in my life when I want to do what satisfies me, what I feel good about doing 24-7. I hate the thought of stealing a little time to work at what I am good at and keeping it as a sideline, a hobby, when I know that working at something boring keeps me from what I am good at, and could concievably earn a living from.
Well, I need that living, now. I have a severance, and a pension, but I am just old enough to want to spend my time and energy at what I am really rather good at, and want to spend my time doing. Any good offers will be carefully considered, of course. And I have a Paypal account. Writing prospects greatfully accepted, or at least carefully considered.
Don’t worry about my long-term economic survival, I have a spare job and an AF pension and am hooked up with a couple of temp agencies, who offer me enough of a paycheck… I just would like to spend time, doing what I really want to be doing. I went to a sort of executive job counselor last year, when my last job went under, and the counselor there told me flat out that I should be doing what I really love, and am good at.
At this point, I really agree.
(Additional Note added the following morning)
Looking back on my most recent stint of employment, it strikes me now that there were a lot of people let go, while I was working there. Whenever the combination on the employee entrance was changed, we’d all be looking at each other and whispering, “OK, who got the chop this time?” One of the last things I took off the fax machine was a couple of resumes… it appears that a new receptionist was being advertised for. And I completely overlooked one of the key warning signs: a great deal of turnover in the position I held until yesterday afternoon, and none of them staying in the company or moving up. Hmmmm…
Our TI, Sgt. Petre’s pre-liberty lecture as regards the possibly alien mores and amorous intentions of various foreign military members that we might encounter was all of a piece with other informative lectures, mostly tinged with a certain air of dark warning. The famous Dempsy-Dumpster story was featured prominently, presumably as a cautionary tale for those of use whose lusts were so uncontrollable and whose aesthetic senses were so un-fastidious as to pick exactly that venue for a tête-à-tête. The choice of venues for engaging in sexual congress were pretty slim, on Lackland AFB’s training side, where total privacy was by practice and edict impossible. For that substantial portion of the world who has not gone through USAF basic training during the last four decades, the Dempsy-Dumpster story involved a male and female trainee who chose one of those enormous metal industrial trash containers for their particular brief encounter, only to be brutally interrupted in coitus by one of those enormous trash trucks, mechanically picking up the dumpster, and dumping all contents into the back of the truck. Hilarity ensued, along with least one broken limb, a considerable amount of embarrassment and a folk-tale for the ages. It might even have really happened, sometime in the early 1970ies, but I myself would have to see the contemporary incident report to believe it.
Anyway, we were forewarned, and presumably forearmed about the dangers posed to our virtue… although I thought it was very amusing that we had the birth control lecture a couple of days before we had town liberty, by an NCO who frizbee’d a diaphragm the entire length of the classroom, by way of catching our attention. Which she certainly did for some of us; that was the first time in my life I had actually seen any such thing. It was probably lost on others, though; one of our number included the wife of an E-6 who had four children. Others women were married, or had been married, or hoped to become married, and had practiced a bit… but we didn’t have much in the way of illusion about some of the foreign troops, after what happened to four of us, one drear December day.
It was at the point in our training when we were allowed in pairs and fours to go to various places on base by ourselves, on formally sanction errands… after overcoming a certain amount of disorientation. Like: how the hell can you find your way back to a place when all you have ever seen of the way there, is the back of the neck of the girl in formation ahead of you? And what the hell do you do, when the four of you are marching along, two and two— as you have to, because your TI said so— when you are about to intersect with a full flight of fifty or so other trainees, with their TI and guidon and all the pomp and majesty of a flight of trainees marching on their way to somewhere or other? Why, of course, just has you have been told— stand at full attention, until they have marched by, and then you can go about your own business.
But this flight was a flight of Saudi tech school trainees, and I had the dubious honor of standing at rigid attention on the sidewalk, while an entire flight of them marched by, making every sort of vulgar comment, sotto voice out of the ranks; bird-whistles, crude suggestions, rude noises, low whistles… the entire armory of disgusting guy behavior, all in one fell blast, on four female Air Force trainees, who were under orders to stand there at attention, without responding, in obedience to military protocol, as we were verbally treated like whores in a particularly disreputable neighborhood. Sgt Petre looked particularly black, when we reported this to her, afterwards. We were distraught, and particularly outraged that this would happen to us, on a military base, and when we were constrained from showing any kind of reaction. It was a thoroughly nasty experience, and during twenty subsequent years in the military, nothing quite equaled it for the feeling that it gave me of slugs crawling over my bare flesh. We all agreed that if we were ever out and about again, and spotted a Saudi flight, we would turn around and go a couple of blocks out of the way. No one wanted to repeat the experience, although Airman Duncan— tall, gawky, plain and outspoken— was haunted for the rest of her base liberties by a short, squat and silent Saudi student who magically appeared in any place were Duncan was, and spent the time watching her yearningly from across the room. We couldn’t figure out how he always knew where she was. Efficient information pipeline among the male students, I suppose. I had developed my own admirer, but at least he could bring himself to make pleasant conversation.
On Christmas Day, we had liberty base liberty for all of that afternoon, but no better place to spend it than the bowling alley. The snack bar was open, and a half dozen or so of us were making the most of a couple of hours of freedom; free to drink soft drinks, to laugh with the usual constellation of male trainees. After a certain point, I noticed that one of the Iranian trainees had been drawn into the happy little group. We knew he was Iranian because his uniform was hung with a lot of ornament, and in two clashing shades of blue. Oddly enough, he reminded me of Kiet, my Vietnamese foster-brother; the same air of gentle diffidence, even shyness. He lingered on the edge of the group, not speaking very much at first, but eventually he began talking to me. His name turned out to be Nassir. He had a picture of the Shah in his wallet, and one of the Empress Farah, too. We pointed out Dunc’s admirer, watching her as per usual from across the room, and Nassir laughed and told us how the Iranian students looked down on the Saudis as uncouth and ignorant country bumpkins— hicks from the sticks, with no culture.
We met a couple of more times, after that, and spent some pleasant hours in the darker corners of the Skylark, holding hands and kissing shyly, while he paid me elaborately flowery compliments… which amused me no end. I had never met a man in real life who could unreel yards and yards of it, like Elizabethan love poetry. I never took this gallent compliments seriously, being fairly level-headed about my own attractions; knowing that my own citizenship probably featured rather highly among them. No, I took his attentions not the least bit seriously, but I liked him and wished him well. He wrote to me a couple of times, after I departed for tech school and that real world outside from those stolen hours of base liberty. I fell in love with someone else, and went on to Japan, and about four years later the whirlwind of Khomeini’s Islamic revolution swept away the Shah’s government. I’ve always hoped that Nassir was able to avoid being caught up in that, or the war with Iraq that followed; it would have been such a bad place for a gentle, courtly poet, who was so proud of being a Persian, and had a picture of the Shah in his wallet, and stole kisses from the girl I used to be, in the shadowy corners of the Skylark.
I suppose a lot of midnight oil is being burned, in the Manchester Guardian editorial offices, at the UN and other various Euro-Transnational entities, the various offices of CAIR, and departments of Middle East Studies at universities everywhere, where the denizens thereof are trying to figure out and explain just why the general run of Americans— despite every inducement; intellectual, political and economic— continue in their stubborn, sentimental and persistent attachment to the State of Israel, and ensuring it’s continuing, if perilous existence. (Hey, wow! Totally complicated sentence— do I get any prize for this from the 19th Century literary appreciation wonks? No? OK, then, on with the explanation.).
I think there are a great many reasons for this; chief among them being that Jews have been part of the American scene, and more or less integrated into the great nation-building adventure since Colonial times. There has always been— depending on the time, place and social caste— a certain degree of social anti-Semitism, but generally achieving nothing like the degree of virulence it takes to achieve a pogrom, a Dreyfus Affair or a Holocaust. Congress making no law respecting a particular religion left us in the habit of seeing ones’ particular religious beliefs as a personal one, however outre they might be. Frankly, more political outrage and general suspicion was expended on Catholics— Popery! The Bishop of Rome! The Whore of Babylon! — at the time of the great Irish migrations in the mid-19th century. It was pretty difficult to work up much alarm about off-standard religious beliefs when Jews were compared against groups like the Shakers (no sex, communal living, workshops and free enterprise!) and the Mormons (plural marriages, communal living, free enterprise and separation!) and a whole other range of non-standard and extremely creative social and religious communes. All our base impulses leading towards rioting, lynching and intermittent attempts at genocide were pretty much focused during the 19th century on parties other than those of the Jewish persuasion; towards blacks, Hispanics, Mormons, and Native Americans, mostly. From reading various 19th century American writers, one gets the general impression that they knew of anti-Semitism, but didn’t quite grasp what all the fuss was about and relegated it to the intellectual back burner. Some time ago I had read of a famous American literary personality — I believe it was General Lew Wallace (the author of “Ben Hur”) who was asked what he felt about Jews, and he replied in all seriousness (IIRC) that Jesus had been born a Jew, and for him that pretty much settled the matter.
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