Category Archives: Memoir

Nork

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I did a tour in Korea in 1993-94, which hardly makes me an expert on the place, seeing that I have that in common with a fair number of Army and Air Force personnel over the past half-century plus. Reading about the expected fallout from the change of régime-boss north of the DMZ I think of that tour now as something along the lines of being put into place rather like an instant-read thermometer: there for a year in Seoul, at the Yongsan Army Infantry garrison, where I worked at AFKN-HQ – and at a number of outside jobs for which a pleasant speaking voice and fluency in English was a requirement. One of those regular jobs was as an English-language editor at Korea Broadcasting; the national broadcasting entity did an English simulcast of the first fifteen minutes of the 9 PM evening newscast. I shared this duty with two other AFKN staffers in rotation: every third evening, around 6PM, I went out the #1 gate and caught a local bus, and rode across town to the Yoido; a huge rectangular plaza where the KBS building was located, just around the corner from other terribly important buildings – like the ROK capitol building. Once there, I’d go up to the newsroom – which was a huge place, filled with rows of desks and computers, go to the English-language section, and wait for any of the three or four Korean-to-English translators to finish translating the main news stories for the evening broadcast, correct their story for punctuation and readability, stick around to watch them do the simulcast at 9 PM, critique their delivery.

These various activities put me out and about in Seoul, and made me Korean friends and working acquaintances that had nothing to do with the military, especially at the KBS job. I got to know the translators fairly well. They were all native Koreans, whose education or life experiences had led to them being a fairly cosmopolitan bunch and fluent in English – translators, particularly Miss Min, since we would catch the same bus after work, heading back to the neighborhood of Yongsan, and the old elevated traffic roundabout. I think now, that was one of those times that I liked best – the bus ride; seeing the lights of the city reflected a thousand times in the dark-serpentine shape of the Han River as the bus went over one of the many bridges, back towards the Christmas-tree-topper shaped tower that crowned the Namsan Hill. There would be the scent of vanilla cake baking, when the bus passed by a certain place where there was a commercial bakery; even with the bus windows closed against the winter cold – and Seoul was bitter cold in winter, with a wind that came straight off Siberia – we could still smell vanilla cake.

I liked Seoul very much, at those particular moments, as much as I liked the Koreans that I worked with, and encountered on the subway or riding the bus: tough, jolly, out-going and hard-working people, possibly the most snappy dressers on the face of the earth outside of the Italians, but intensely patriotic. Someone once described them as the Irish of Asia, and that struck me as a fair parallel.
But all the time I was in Korea – being at an Army base – we couldn’t help being aware of the situation; that the DMZ was just a short distance away, that Seoul itself was in range of heavy artillery fire from the north, and that as regular as clockwork, the NorKs would indulge in a bit of sabre-rattling; Another internet commenter called this the “Korean Motherland Unity Game of Repeated Chicken” – every six months to two years there would be a bit of public theater intended to remind everyone that the North Korean establishment was there, bellicose, somewhat relevant – and that there was some kind of concession to be extracted from the outside world. The old-time Korea hands that I knew and my Korean friends were relatively blasé about it all. Perhaps the Norks could level Seoul, if they wanted to – but Miss Min and the other interpreters doubted very much that any but the most well-disciplined and elite Nork troops could make it past the first well-equipped grocery store south of the DMZ, let alone Electronics Row … and the Nork military anyway hasn’t fought an all-out war for real since 1953. But figuring out what is going on inside North Korea anyway was a bit like looking at a sparse scattering of accounts from inside, and consulting a Magic-8-Ball. Riddle wrapped in a puzzle wrapped in an enigma doesn’t even begin to come close. Will the Norks go out with a bang, or whimper? What does the Magic 8-Ball say?

What is pretty certain to me at this point – and I’m not nor ever have been any kind of intelligence wonk – is that North Korea likely can’t last very much longer. The dynasty of Kims and their allies are like an extended crime family, sitting at the apex of a structure that looks more and more like a country-sized labor and concentration camp. The place is stripped bare – even the mountainsides are stripped of trees for firewood. When it comes to food, North Korea isn’t even able to economically support itself, having nothing left to trade to the outside world, save possibly nuclear arms. How long have regular famines been going on? Twenty years or so – long enough to physically stunt the growth of ordinary North Koreans, as is evident when they defect to the South. Possibly even China is tired of the antics of their psychotic little pet, after having enabled them for fifty-plus years.

So, whither North Korea? Damned if I know – but I guess that it will probably not last much longer. My Magic 8-Ball guess is that it will implode, without much warning at all, in the manner of Ceausescu’s Romania; just poof-like that. How the ordinary people of North Korea will cope with such a suddenly revised world is anyone’s guess. I don’t think they have been kept quite so hermetically sealed away that it will take a good few decades to readjust and catch up. They are, after all, the same basic physical and cultural stock as the South Koreans – who have come an amazingly long way since my father was stationed there, at the very end of the Korean War. Your thoughts?
(Earlier post here on this subject: http://www.ncobrief.com/index.php/archives/korea-meditation-revisited/
Also – Crossposted at Chicagoboyz.net)

Remembering Spain

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This year, my mother has decided to break the family custom for Christmas and send an actual, delivered by UPS present, in a large carton which arrived on the doorstep Friday morning. We don’t know quite why she decided to do this, since the usual present for the last decade or two has been a check discretely tucked into a Christmas card. Maybe it’s because it will be the first Christmas without Dad. Possibly Dad was the one who thought just a plain unadorned check in a Christmas or birthday card was the most welcomed gift by adult children, and didn’t want to futz about with shopping or mail order catalogues – anyway, Mom sent is an awesomely lavish gift basket from this place, La Tienda – the foods of Spain, and we went through the basket and the catalogue enclosed with happy squeals of recognition. We came home from Spain twenty years ago, October – after living in the city of Zaragoza, while I was assigned to the European Broadcasting Service detachment at the air base there. Which wasn’t an American air base, as we reminded people with tactful delicacy; it was a Spanish air base, and we merely rented a small, pitiful portion of it, a few discreet brick buildings and a scattering of ancient Quonset huts, going about our simple and purely transparent business, humbly supporting those various American and European fighter squadrons coming down from the clouds and fog of Northern Europe and practicing their gunnery skills at a local military range set up just to accommodate that kind of trade. Really, there was no earthly reason for anyone to hassle us … not like it had been in Greece. Still, we religiously abstained from wearing uniforms off-base. The local terrorists were mostly interested in blowing up the Guadia Civil; which I thought regretfully was hard luck for the Guads, but made things easier than they had been for American military stationed in Greece… Continue reading →

Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Great Uncle Will

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(A repost from the archives, for today)
It is a sad distinction, to be the first in three generations to visit France while on active duty in the service of your country, and to be the first to actually live to tell the tale of it. For many Europeans, and subjects of the British Empire— especially those of a certain age, it is not at all uncommon to have lost a father or an uncle in World War Two, and a grandfather or great-uncle in World War One. It’s a rarer thing to have happened to an American family, perhaps one whose immigration between the old country and the new allowed for inadvertent participation, or a family who routinely choose the military as a career, generation after generation. Ours is but lately and only in a small way one of the latter, being instead brought in for a couple of years by a taste for adventure or a wartime draft.

When JP and Pippy and I were growing up, the memory of Mom’s brother, Jimmy-Junior was still a presence. His picture was in Granny Jessie’s living room, and he was frequently spoken of by Mom, and Granny Jessie, and sometimes by those neighbors and congregants at Trinity Church who remembered him best. JP, who had the same first name, was most particularly supposed to be like him. He was a presence, but a fairly benign one, brushed with the highlights of adventure and loss, buried far away in St. Avold, in France, after his B-17 fell out of the skies in 1943.

Our Great-Uncle Will, the other wartime loss in the family was hardly ever mentioned. We were only vaguely aware that Grandpa Al and Great-Aunt Nan had even had an older half-brother – a half-sister, too, if it came to that. Great-Grandpa George had been a widower with children when he married Grandpa Al and Great-Aunt Nan’s mother. The older sister had gone off as a governess around the last of the century before, and everyone else had emigrated to Canada or America. I think it rather careless of us to have misplaced a great-aunt, not when all the other elders managed to keep very good track of each other across two continents and three countries, and have no idea of where the governess eventually gravitated to, or if she ever married.
“She went to Switzerland, I think,” Said Great Aunt Nan. “But Will— he loved Mother very much. He jumped off the troop train when it passed near Reading, and went AWOL to came home and see us again, when the Princess Pats came over from Canada.” She sighed, reminiscently. We were all of us in the Plymouth, heading up to Camarillo for dinner with Grandpa Al and Granny Dodie — for some reason; we had Great-Aunt Nan in the back seat with us. I am not, at this date, very certain about when this conversation would have taken place, only that we were in the car — Mom and Dad in front, Nan and I in the back seat, with Pippy between us, and JP in the very back of the station wagon. Perhaps I held Sander on my lap, or more likely between Nan and I, with Pippy in the way-back with JP. Outside the car windows on either side of the highway, the rounded California hills swept past, upholstered with dry yellow grass crisped by the summer heat, and dotted here and there with dark green live oaks. I can’t remember what had been said, or what had brought Great Aunt Nan to suddenly begin talking, about her half-brother who had vanished in the mud of no-man’s land a half century before, only that we all listened, enthralled — even Dad as he drove.

“He fairly picked Mother up,” Nan said, fondly, “She was so tiny, and he was tall and strong. He had been out in Alberta, working as a lumberjack on the Peace River in the Mackenzie District.” She recited the names as if she were repeating something she had learned by heart a long time ago. “When the war began, he and one of his friends built a raft, and floated hundreds of miles down the river, to enlist.”
(William Hayden, enlisted on October 13, 1914 in the town of Port Arthur. His age was listed as 22, complexion fair with brown hair and brown eyes— which must have come from his birth mother, as Al and Nan had blue eyes and light hair. He was 6′, in excellent health and his profession listed as laborer, but his signatures on the enlistment document were in excellent penmanship)
“He didn’t get into so very much trouble, when he walked into camp the next day,” said Nan, “Mother and I were so glad to see him – he walked into the house, just like that. And he wrote, he always wrote, once the Princess Pats went to France and were in the line. He picked flowers in the no-mans’-land between the trenches, and pressed them into his letters to send to us.”
(There is only one family picture of William, old-fashioned formal studio portrait of him and Nan; he sits stiffly in a straight ornate chair, holding his uniform cover in his lap, a big young man in a military tunic with a high collar, while a 12 or 13year old Nan in a white dress leans against the arm of the chair. She has a heart-shaped face with delicate bones; William’s features are heavy, with a prominent jaw— he does not look terribly intelligent, and there isn’t any family resemblance to Nan, or any of the rest of us.)

“His Captain came to see us, after he was killed,” said Nan, “Will was a Corporal, by that time – poor man, he was the only one of their officers to survive, and he had but one arm and one eye. He thought the world of Will. He told us that one night, Will took five men, and went out into no-mans’-land to cut wire and eavesdrop on the German trenches, but the Germans put down a barrage into the sector where they were supposed to have gone, and they just never came back. Nothing was ever found.”
(No, of course— nothing would have ever been found, not a scrap of the men, or any of their gear, not in the shell-churned hell between the trenches on the Somme in July of 1916. And the loss of Great-Uncle William and his handful of men were a small footnote after the horrendous losses on the first day of July. In a single day, the British forces sustained 19,000 killed, 2,000 missing, 50,000 wounded. Wrote the poet Wilfred Owen

“What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,–
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells”)

And that war continued for another two years, all but decimating a generation of British, French, German and Russian males. Such violence was inflicted on the land that live munitions are still being found, 80 years later, and bodies of the missing, as well. The nations who participated most in the war sustained a such a near-mortal blow, suffered such trauma that the Armistice in 1918 only succeeded in putting a lid on the ensuing national resentments for another twenty years. But everyone was glad of it, on the day when the guns finally fell silent, on 11:00 o’clock of a morning, on the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

“Amazing,” Mom remarked later, “I wonder what brought that on— she talked more about him in ten minutes than I had ever heard in 20 years.”
I went back a few years ago, looking for Uncle Jimmy’s combat crew, and found them, too, but even then it was too late to look for anyone who had served with Great-Uncle Will – although, any time after 1916 may have been too late. But there is an archive, with his service records in it, and I may send away for them, to replace what little we had before the fire. But they will only confirm what we found out, when Great-Aunt Nan told us all about the brother she loved.

(added – a link to haunting photographs of WWI battlefields today. Cross-posted at Chicago-Boyz, and at my Celia Hayes Blog.)

3,650 Days

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Three thousand, six hundred fifty days, more or less,depending on leap years – since the end of the 20th century. Oh, I know, calendar-wise, only a year or two off. But we don’t count strictly by the calendar. Afterwards, we count by events. Myself, I have the feeling that the 19th century didn’t truly end for good and all until 1914. That’s when the 20th century began, in the muddy trenches of WW1. All the previous comfortable understandings and optimistic assumptions of the earlier world were shattered right along with three monarchial dynasties, over the course of four years. When it was over, the world of the time before seemed impossibly far removed, to those who could remember it – a number which, as the decades passed, became steadily fewer, until that world was entirely the stuff of books, paintings and relics, rather than true human recollections. We eventually adjusted and accepted the new reality of things. The old way, and the shattering events in which it passed – became a date on a monument, a paragraph in a history text, a book on the shelf.

Being that humans are mostly optimistic and pretty adaptable, we patched together some new understandings and assumptions, which worked pretty well – or at least we became accustomed to them . . . until the 20th century ended on a glorious autumn morning, ten years ago. One day. And then we had to become accustomed to the new reality. More than three thousand dead, a hole in the New York skyline that will never be filled in again – the ghosts of twin silvery towers showing up in the backgrounds of movies, now and again, drawing your sudden attention with a catch at the heart and memory.

And three thousand-something men and women who went off to work one morning, families who took a vacation, catching an early morning airplane flight, firefighters going on shift, everyone living out those thousands of petty daily routines, most of them probably quite boring. I am certain that practically every one of those who became casualties on that morning – a name and a face on a makeshift poster, a black-framed picture on the mantel or in the obituary pages – were looking forward to the end of the workday, the end of their journey – to coming home for a good dinner, wrapping up that business trip and getting on with that portion of our life that is ours, and belongs to us and our families and loved ones alone.

But they were never allowed that luxury, of having a tonight, a tomorrow. Those lives which they might have had, would have – were brutally wrenched from them, in an organized act of terrorism, wrenched from them in fire and horror and blood, while the rest of us watched or listened – watched in person, on television, or were glued to a radio – ten years ago today.

Ten years. Time enough for children to grow to middle-school age, never remembering that time before, or the loss of a father or mother, who worked in a department in the outer ring of the Pentagon, or in an office on a high floor of the World Trade center. A foreign country to them, is that place, where once you could go into the airport terminal and go all the way to the gate to meet an arriving friend . . . and for travelers not to have to take off their shoes to go through security. Or even have to go through security, come to think on it. A world where one could have no reaction but idle curiosity upon noticing a woman in full black burka, or a nervous-appearing man of Middle-eastern appearance, taking pictures of an otherwise undistinguished bridge or power station. A world where a familiarity with the dictates of the Koran and the Hadith, the maunderings of Sayyid Qutb as regards America and the workings of a desert tribal autocracy are an eccentric interest and hobby – not a professional necessity.

Ten years. The world that was passes from memory, and we have the brutal world of ‘now.’ As an amateur historian, one of my own comforts on this anniversary is that – it was always like this. We will survive, we will live in a world that is made new and eternally renewed by events, events that will eventually fade . . .

But today, we remember.

Past anniversary posts –
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
I didn’t write a specialized post for 2009, and last year I only reposted some music videos.

RIP Clarence Clemons

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In late August of 1975 I was 13 just a week away from 14 and a week and a half from high school when music for me suddenly changed drastically.  If you were like me, you fell asleep with a small FM transistor radio under your pillow playing soft enough so Mom and Dad couldn’t hear it.

One of those nights it was so hot that I actually left my bedroom door open so a breeze could run through the apartment.

On that night, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band’s “Born to Run” came over the radio in it’s entirety.  From Thunder Road to Jungleland.  That big block of wood guitar.  Those keyboards that sounded like they come straight off a midway.  That bass and drum-kit driving, driving into the night, and that saxaphone…that soaring magical flow of brass that rose me above the street right down the gangway between our apartment and the next.

I can’t tell you how many times that saxaphone literally saved my life through the rest of the 70s.  Some of it’s just normal teenage hormonal angsty bullshit, some of it was real insanity that comes from living in as a teen in a major city in the 70s.

Thank you Big Man.  God bless and keep you in his band.

The Grand Adventure

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“You’ll simply have to read his books, if you want to understand about Greece,” my next-door neighbor told me, very shortly after my then-three year old daughter and I settled into Kyrie Panayotis’ first floor flat (which is Brit-speak for second-floor apartment) at the corner of Knossou and Delphon streets in the Athens suburb of Ano Glyphada, early in the spring of 1983. Kyrie Panayoti did not speak any English; neither did his wife, or his wife’s sister, Kyria Yiota, who lived upstairs with her husband. The only inhabitants of the three-story apartment house who did were Kyrie Panayoti’s middle-school aged sons, who were learning English at school. And I – dullard that I am with languages aside from my native one – only retained a few scraps of high-school and college German. Given the modern history of Greece, and the long memories of older Greeks, a German vocabulary was neither tactful nor useful.

I can’t recall exactly when we hit the first linguistic snag, but it must have been within days of me moving in, lock, stock, barrel, toddler child and household goods. In mild frustration, Kyrie Panayoti leaned out the kitchen door of his apartment, and shouted in the general direction of the apartment block next door, a distance of about twelve or fifteen feet away.
“Kyria Penny!”
Almost immediately, a woman’s head with an old-fashioned kerchief tied around it, appeared out from one of the first floor (or second floor windows) – and that was my first introduction to Penny. She was English, married to a genial Greek accountant named George. She was slightly older than my own mother, her two sons were teenagers. Penny had been the British equivalent of a State Department employee, and in that capacity she had been assigned to various British consulates in Europe until she came to Athens, met and married George, and settled down into tidy domesticity in the three-floor, three-flat apartment building next to Kyrie Panayoti’s. Penny’s mother-in-law lived on the ground floor, Penny and George lived on the first – or second floor, exactly opposite mine – and George’s widowed brother and his two children lived in the top-floor flat.

I rather think Penny missed speaking English regularly, anyway – and we became excellent friends because of a mutual love of books and mad passion for Greece, ancient and modern. A love for Greece in general, on the part of us English and American eccentrics is one of those inexplicable things – rather like enduring affection for an exasperatingly self-centered boyfriend with one or two bad habits. He’s devastatingly handsome, scenic in all the right ways, erratically but theatrically devoted – but just when you have given up all hope and resolved to cut him off – he does something so heartbreakingly gallant, at something of a cost to him and with no thought of personal gain – that all is . . . well, not forgotten or overlooked (until next time). Anyway, I loved Greece, being a history wonk, and cheerfully overlooked all kinds of disincentives . . . a very real terrorism problem, endemic anti-Americanism, and a certain slap-dash approach to everything from driving habits to telephone company service. No exaggerating there: getting a phone in Greece in those days was . . . interesting, and supposedly took years, well above the time that any Americans serving at Hellenikon AB were prepared to wait. Kyrie Panayoti’s flat and Kyria Yiota’s each had a telephone jack. Mine might have had one also; I never cared enough to look for it. But there was only one telephone between the two families. They passed it between themselves, I guess according to need. Many was the time that I heard someone calling between apartments, and observed the telephone being hoisted or lowered past my kitchen window, in a plastic market bag at the end of a long length of rope.

Among the first books that Penny advised me to read – was Gerald Durrell, who wrote about his childhood in Corfu in the 1930s. He was Lawrence Durrell’s little brother; I rather think that Dad must have been a child like Gerald Durrell; entranced by wild animals of whatever sort, to the mystification of his parents – eventually being a zoologist and all, and giving us all the very best nature-walks ever, as the four of us grew up.

And the second of Penny’s recommended authors – Patrick Leigh-Fermor, especially his books about Greece: Mani and Roumeli, respectively southern Greece and Northern. Penny’s redoubtable mother-in-law was from the Southern Peloponnesus – the Mani. I read them both, traveled down into that part of the country when I could, and read the first of his books – A Time of Gifts – about the journey on foot that he had made at the age of 18; as the title goes, “On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube” in the fateful year of 1933. He took a little more than a year to make that journey, but writing about it took up the rest of his life. I bought a copy of the second installment, Between the Woods and Water as soon as it came out, the year after I had left Greece. At the time of his death earlier this month, the last installment of that journey was unfinished.

Of Patrick Leigh-Fermor’s greatest adventure? He never really wrote about that himself, although in certain circles his exploits as a British SOE agent during Crete in WWII became legend. He another SOE officer, in a daring strike by Leigh-Fermor’s band of Cretan guerillas kidnapped the German officer commanding the whole island, spirited him across the Cretan hills and mountains, and had him evacuated from Crete to North Africa. His co-conspirator, W. Stanley Moss wrote about that in his own book, Ill Met by Moonlight – which was made into a movie, in the days when movie-makers appreciated such real-life exploits. One of the grace notes to this adventure is that Moss and Leigh-Fermor left documents behind; clearly explaining that it was British commandos who had taken the general-commanding, so no point in going all reprisal-ish on the local Cretans.

About thirty years later, a Greek television version of This is Your Life reunited many of those participants. And Patrick Leigh Fermor lived for most of the rest of his life in Greece, regarded with awe and wonder, almost as a local saint.

Easter Eggs – A Repost from the MT Archive

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Grannie Jessie, who had grown up on a farm in Pennsylvania, and imbibed all those do-it-yourself virtues when it came to vegetable gardens, home canning, and making ones’ own clothes, drew the short straw when JP and I were small. Lucky Grannie Jessie got to supervise the dying of the Easter eggs. We would usually be spending part of Easter Week in Pasadena, since Mom would be fitting us all out with new shoes, and the proper accessories: in the early years, Pippy and I would have new hats, wee white gloves, and ornamental ankle socks to wear to Easter services with the new dresses that Mom had sewn herself. JP would have a new suit, a miniature of Dads’, with a smart pint-size fedora.

When Grannie Jessie did the shopping that week, walking around the corner to Don’s Market on Rosemead Boulevard with the wheeled wire basket, she would buy extra eggs— three dozen white eggs—and let us pick from the modest selection of packets of Easter egg dyes. You could buy just the basic packet, just a strip of cellophane sealing in six or seven concentrated little pills of dye, but we always yearned after the fancy boxes with the circular perforations on the back which could be punched out to make a holder for the dyed eggs to sit while the dye dried, which also contained a couple of wire holders, a set of transfers on thin tissue paper, and a plain wax crayon, with which JP and I could demonstrate our artistic prowess. Grannie Jessie always relented, and bought the fancy box of egg dye with the transfers and implements.

On the appointed day, she boiled up all the eggs in her biggest kitchen pot, and brought out an assortment of egg-cups, old teacups, small bowls and measuring cups, and the battered old spoons. The kitchen table was already covered with an oilcloth, but she brought out a couple of Grandpa Jim’s old shirts, and aproned us in them, back to front and rolling up the sleeves. Then she boiled up a kettle of water, while we opened the dye packet, and placed the little colored pill of dye at the bottom of each cup or bowl. Grannie Jessie’s kitchen was never fashionable, in the way of the women’s magazines: functional in the way of a farmhouse kitchen, a gas range with a metal match safe on the doorjamb next to it, and bead-board cabinets with varnish which had gone slightly gummy with age and wear. The sink was enormous, the size of a baby’s bathtub, and the plain vinyl countertops were edged with a band of metal. Her original Kelvinator fridge, with the round metal coils on top was replaced about the time I was born with something slightly more up to date. Her kitchen things were an assortment from the dime store, sturdy but worn — Depression era jelly glasses, tin metal measuring cups given away by the flour mill companies. (Many of them, disposed of at garage sales when she moved into the Gold Star Mother’s home in the mid-1970ies are now the sort of thing I see for sale in the antique malls for quite astounding sums.)

The kitchen table at Grannie Jessie’s was wedged into a narrow ell, against the wall where three windows, their sills a little above the level of the table, overlooked the driveway, the next door neighbors’ back yard, and Mt Wilson in the far distance. In the morning, the sun came into her kitchen through these windows. Grannie Jessie’s chair was wedged into the space between the head of the table and the hutch, where her crossword dictionaries were shelved next to the old-fashioned coffee grinder. Grandpa Jim’s chair was at the foot of the table, an elbow-length from the door to the utility porch, with its concrete sink and the old-fashioned washing machine with the rollers on top to squeeze the water out of the clothes and sheets. The long side of the table, facing the windows, could accommodate two chairs, three at a pinch, and was where JP and I sat for meals, where Mom and Uncle Jimmy had doubtless sat in their turn.

When the kettle boiled, Grannie Jessie brought out the bottle of vinegar and the tin tablespoon measure.
“It sets the dye properly,” she explained. A tablespoon of vinegar in each cup, and a splash of boiling water, and we watched, breathlessly as the dye pill dissolved instantly, transforming the water into opaque, vividly colored liquid. She put on another kettle of water to boil, and brought over the pot of eggs, now cooled to luke-warm, and only a few of them cracked or broken, while the steam and the scent of vinegar rose up around us. (Grandpa Jim would have egg-salad sandwiches for a couple of days.) Carefully, loading each egg into the wire holder, we slid them each— carefully, carefully— into the cups of dye, where they sank to the bottom. If the cup was one of the shallower ones, we would have to turn the egg over and over— otherwise there would be a paler oval on one site of the egg. As we gained in experience and expertise, JP and I experimented with different colors— holding an egg half in the dye of one color, then turning it over in the wire holder, and dying the other half in another. The wax crayon came into play, first resulting in pastel eggs squiggled over with a white pattern, and then JP upped the ante by dying an egg yellow or pink, then patterning it with the crayon, and then putting it into a darker color. He spent twenty minutes one year, cutting finicking tiny squares and triangles of scotch tape, to color an egg in checkers of yellow and maroon.

Even when we had dragged out the process long enough and all the cups of dye had cooled, and only one or two eggs were left, the fun wasn’t entirely over. Grannie let us pour a bit of each dye into the largest cup, and the last egg ceremoniously dipped in the murky mixture— it usually came out a rather subdued greenish or bronze color, contrasting with the pastel blues and pinks and yellows. She cleared away the cups and poured the dye remnants down the sink, but we weren’t done yet. She poured boiling water into a washbasin with a couple of clean white dishtowels in it, and while they cooled, we cut apart the delicate paper transfers— flower and bunny motifs, and crosses and mottoes. Placed bright sides down against the dyed egg, and closely wrapped in a hot towel; the transfer inked itself blurrily onto the eggshell within a few minutes. There were always more transfers than eggs— sometimes we tried two of them to one egg, but there was always the difficulty of getting the transfer to be pressed against the eggshell without wrinkling.

Eventually, that job would be done too, and the finished eggs replaced in the paper cartons they had come from Don’s Market in, and put away in the refrigerator, until Saturday when Mom would drive over in the green Plymouth station wagon, and take us— and the eggs— home. She and Dad would hide them after Easter dinner, for JP and Pippy, and I, and the children of any families who had been our guests, and we would have the fun of finding them, which was somehow never quite as much fun as that of decorating them.

Lately, I have noticed that at Easter-time, the grocery store stocks ready-dyed eggs; what possibly can be the fun of that, I ask you?

Shaker of Worlds

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I was stationed for four years at Misawa AB, in the very north of Japan, from early 1977 until the very end of 1980. It’s a very rural part of Japan, relatively speaking; very cold in the winter. Misawa was a pretty smallish city, as Japan goes, about seven or eight miles from the coast; the countryside around is as flat as a pancake, and not terribly far above sea-level. There was a nice little mountain range to the north, within a short drive; very scenically wooded. Up to the mountains to see Lake Towada, over the mountains to Mutsu Bay; it was a very pleasant place to spend four years: Misawa’s mission then was as a security service base; a support system for a huge monitoring complex called the Elephant Cage, or just “the Hill.” Which was maybe thirty feet above sea level, which was enough to constitute a considerable height in that part of Japan.

The next big city to the south of Misawa City though – that would be Hachinohe; which was known for a peculiar style of carved and painted wooden horse sculpture. In the late 19th century and into the 20th, Hachinohe was horse-country, and the original Imperial Army establishment at Misawa had been a cavalry post. The next big city to the south after Hachinohe is Sendai – closest to the epicenter of the latest earthquake. It looks from the news headlines that a whole train full of passengers is now missing, from near Sendai. I visited Hachinohe once, maybe Sendai, too. Coming back from leave Stateside, I traveled by train from Tokyo to Misawa, coming home from leave, so I must have passed through there at least once.

There were constant small earthquakes, all during my time there; most usually just a small rattle and shake, rather like being inside a small frame building with a heavy truck rumbling past outside. In fact, sometimes it was hard to tell of it was an earthquake, or a heavy truck, the physical sensation was so similar. If we hadn’t heard a truck, then it was an earthquake. Slightly more emphatic earthquakes shifted furniture, sometimes . . . and at the old AFRTS radio/TV station where I worked, our usual indicator that it was a serious shake would be rolls of teletype paper falling off the shelves of the tall metal bookshelves where they were stored. If the paper rolls began toppling from the shelves, it was time to vacate the building. Which isn’t the recommended practice, generally – but in this particular case, there was an extenuating circumstance. That would be that the base water-tower sat about 100 feet away from the station, a creaky wooden water-tower standing on spindly 90 foot tall wooden supports. If there was ever a shake hard enough to collapse those spindly frame supports, there were good odds that however-many gallons of water in that tower would pour onto a rattle-trap frame building stuffed full of powered-up electronic equipment. So – mad dash by all staff, when stuff started rocking hard enough to fall from shelves.

Being from California, and having been through some small quakes and the big Sylmar shake in 1971 – I could be fairly blasé about the whole Pacific Rim of Fire/seismically active thing. Many of the other members of the unit weren’t – not at first. But with little ones, all the time – they’d get pretty blasé after a couple of months. But every once in a while, there would be much bigger one, which would grab everyone’s attention; once it was a pair of tremors on a Tuesday evening, almost exactly an hour apart; that was a quake which collapsed a department store in Hachinohe, or Sendai. Another time, a girl was briefly trapped in her barracks room, because her dresser slid across and blocked the door. Another shock caught one barracks resident in the middle of a shower; she shot straight out of the bathroom, down the corridor and out of the building, stark naked.

The one thing that struck me about the big quakes was that there really was a noise to them; an absolutely horrific noise. The one thing that I can easily compare it to is to imagine standing on the platform of a railway station, when a long fast train roars straight through the station without stopping. That’s what it sounds like – a long, rumbling and roaring sound; of course, part of this noise is the sound of things falling. In the Sylmar quake, I remember hearing the sounds of the sash-springs in the window-frames rattling like mad. And unlike all those movies of earthquakes – people don’t run and scream much. Most usually, they are getting underneath something, and trying to make themselves small, maybe shouting to someone in the same room or in the same building to do the same – but no running and screaming like a banshee.

This quake off the coast of Japan was several times the magnitude, and the pictures and video emerging are horrific. 8.8 on the Richter scale is something almost impossible to imagine – and to be compounded by tsunamis sweeping in from the sea, and the debris catching on fire – that just adds to the horror.

Snakeproofing the Kids – An Archive Post for Dad

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My father died very suddenly, the day after Christmas, at the age of 80. He was a research biologist, a veteran of the Korean War, and an excellent parent to all four of us; my brothers JP and Sander, and my sister Pip, and a grandfather to all of our children. I first began writing about my family in 2002, when I first began contributing to this blog. Those were the posts that everyone seemed to like the most, and it led to my first book … and which led to other books. In all of this Dad was one of my biggest fans. So – I am going back and re-posting some of the very earliest posts – those which are presently lost in the bowels of the internet.

I’ll be flying out to California on Wednesday afternoon to help Mom and my brothers and sister sort out things, all thanks to Proud Veteran for her gift of Delta miles. My parents didn’t have internet at the house, and I probably won’t have much time … but then again, I might. In any case, I’ll be back for sure around the middle of January.

* * *

When I was about three and a half, and my brother JP a toddler of two, we lived in a house away back in the hills. My parents had a penchant for howling wilderness, and any property at the end of a couple of miles of dirt road was their dream house, never mind that when it was going to rain heavily, they would have to leave the cars by the mailboxes, about a mile and a half away. The house seemed to me to be as large as a cathedral: it was actually a small cottage, as I discovered when we visited years later, and I could see out of windows that had once been far above my head. It had a graveled drive, and sat in a grove of trees, mostly manzanita and eucalyptus. There was a range of pyracantha bushes, with bright orange berries that Mom told us time and time again to NEVER put in our mouths. (JP, obedient and logical stuffed one up his nose, instead.)

Almost immediately upon moving in, my parents made a very unsettling discovery: the hillside was alive with snakes; primarily rattlesnakes of a dismayingly large and aggressive nature… dismaying because they did not stick to their usual habitat of brush and rocks, but sought out the sunny, sheltered flats around the house… where JP and I were likely to be playing. Rattlesnakes and toddlers are incompatible life forms, and no alternatives were viable. We could not be kept in the house all day, and Dad could not kill every snake on the hillside. He made a gallant try, his favorite weapon being a long handled hoe wielded with pinpoint accuracy and considerable force. Scarce a dent was made in the population, and Dad considered a revolutionary solution: knowledge.

JP and I were immediately enrolled in Dad’s seminar on “Snakes, General knowledge pertaining to, with special attention towards the dangerous varieties” and an ancillary course on first aid for snakebites.

He captured king snakes and the other harmless varieties with a snake hook, showed us the holes and shelters they preferred, let us handle them, lectured us on what they liked to eat. We were drilled on identifying them by their colors and markings, the patterns they made in the dust. For a time, there was a picture of me calmly handling a six-foot long specimen, about twice as long as I was tall.
“They eat rats and mice, “Dad lectured, “They are useful, keeping things in balance.”

Then he upped the ante and captured a rattler, keeping it in a large aquarium with a sturdy lid on the top in his study, so we could study it.
“Look at the diamond markings on the back…. Also it has a neck. In this part of the country the dangerous snakes almost always have a pronounced neck…. Listen to the sound it makes. “Dad tapped the side of the aquarium, and the snake coiled into a taut spring, tail rattling madly. “When you hear that sound, you should hold still until you see where it is coming from…. Then back away, slowly. They strike if they are cornered; given a chance they will go away. Be careful about large flat rocks, snakes like to lie out to get themselves warm. And never, ever put your hands or your feet into a place where you can’t see in.”

Grandpa Al and Granny Dodie were visiting, while Dad was keeping the rattlesnake in the den, and from the living room they could hear the sound of it buzzing distantly.
“What on earth is that sound?” Granny Dodie demanded, and Mom quickly replied.
“Cicadas!”

First aid for snakebites was the final segment of the seminar:
“The bite would look like this,” Dad showed us the picture in the First Aid Book, “You would first need to make a tourniquet, and put it on your arm or leg between your heart and the bite.”
How to make a tourniquet from a belt or shoelaces, how to widen the wound and suck out the venom and blood, being careful not to swallow any of it, Dad drilled us and made us practice: it’s outdated practice now, but we were letter perfect. I honestly think if I ever did have to administer snakebite first aid, I would revert automatically to what Dad taught us so carefully.

It turned out that this knowledge was so powerful, we never actually encountered a snake in the wild, except at the end of Dad’s snake hook. And we grew up with no fear of them, whatsoever. In fact, I think the zoo snake house is really neat, and snakes are way cool. It’s spiders that give me the creeps, but that’s another story.

Christmas Day Nature Walk

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Our family was always rather traditional about the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. Since Mom and Dad were both only (or only surviving children) it made deciding whose house to go to for the holidays rather easy: alternating Granny Jessie and Granny Dodie for Thanksgiving, but Christmas . . . invariably everyone came to our house. One of those things which we would do – after opening presents on Christmas morning, and while Mom and Granny Jessie (who usually stayed with us, for Christmas after Grandpa Jim died) got Christmas dinner assembled – was for Dad and all four of us, and the dogs, to go out for a hike in the hills for a couple of hours. Dad, being a research biologist, did terrific nature talks during those hikes, pointing out the various sorts of sage, and the animal tracks and scat to be noticed. I think this tradition was carried on with for a couple of years after I went away to serve in the Air Force, in some fashion. I know that when I did come home for Christmas now and again, to my parent’s retirement house in Valley Center, Blondie and I and my little brother Sander dragged out the nieces and nephews for a hike down through the abandoned orange grove above the Guejito. One year we had the teenage niece of my brother JP’s significant other, who thought that a walk meant a gentle turn around the block . . . not a hard slog down a rutted dirt road, and a clamber up to the top of a knob of stone that stuck out of the hillside. The rock knob offered a wonderful view of the valley below, and the cattle that moved so slowly and were so far away that they looked to be the size of fleas. She was wearing low-heeled pumps – didn’t appreciate the need for something a little sturdier.

Christmas and nature hikes. I didn’t ever think to take a camera along, when I led my niece and nephew into a muddy slough halfway down the hill – which they enjoyed terrifically, of course – although I think Pip was pretty horrified at how much mud they still accumulated on their persons. I did, for some reason, remember to take a camera on one of our hikes with Dad, though. It must have been Christmas of 1974 or 1975 – by Christmas of 1976 I was away in Basic Training, in San Antonio, where I live now. I took that picture at the top of one of the hills in the San Gabriel Mountains – Pip, Sander, Dad and JP, with Toby and Duchess, all sitting or laying down for a rest after a long slog uphill from our house. That’s Tujunga – La Crescenta in the background, with the mountains of the Angeles National Forest on the horizon.

Christmas, nature hikes and Dad . . .

I wasn’t planning to go to California this year – just plain couldn’t afford it again, and when I talked to Mom and Dad about it, two weeks ago Friday, they said – well, never mind, Pip and her husband were going to his family, Sander and his wife and their kids were going to hers . . . and well, don’t feel bad about not coming. They were going to have a nice quiet Christmas by themselves, and Dad had a case of walking pneumonia, which made him feel a bit under the weather.

Except that it didn’t work out that way. Dad suddenly felt worse the next week, was admitted to the hospital on Friday last with a diagnosis of bleeding into the brain, was operated on that night and seemed to be responding well, but there was a setback on Christmas Eve . . . and Mom was chipper and hopeful and altogether reassuring when we talked to her on Christmas Day. So I was reassured, and made plans to come out to California and stay with them for two months, to help when Dad was out of the hospital, and all.

But she and my brothers and sisters were called to the hospital Sunday morning, and Dad died about 1:15 in the afternoon. The last time I talked to him by telephone, I said “Dad, ya sound like shit!” and he said, “Yeah, I feel like shit!” and I told him to take care of himself. I wish I had said I loved him, but I still thought I would have the chance to say it one more time.

Korea Meditation, Revisited

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In the early 1990s, I did a tour in Korea; a year at Yongsan Garrison, working at HQ-AFKN, barely a stone’s throw from where my father had spent a couple of weeks at Camp Coiner in 1953. Camp Coiner was where new troops were processed for assignments in-country, and it was still a self-contained miniature garrison with a dining hall, movie theater, club, PX and chapel. Processing new arrivals takes only a day or two these days. When I was there, Camp Coiner housed soldiers assigned to Yongsan in a series of Quonset huts that had been covered in such a thick layer of foam insulation that they looked like nothing so much as a row of enormous Twinkies.

Camp Coiner to my father was a bunch of canvas tents in a field of mud, surrounded by deep rings of barbed wire and a deeper ring of hungry refugees, watching them intently. It quite took away one’s appetite, said my father, to have people watching you eat every bite of your C-rations; and it’s not as if C-rations were a gourmet treat to start with. The soldiers were forbidden to give away their food, but my father said a lot of them did anyway, tossing cans stealthily over the wire. Seoul was a wrecked place fifty years ago. While I was there at AKFN that year, I edited an interview which the late Col. David Hackworth had done for AFKN, where he described how he himself had first visited the place, retreating across the only bridge over the Han River. Nothing but rubble, and rats nibbling at corpses in the gutters, the only live people being his squad and the Chinese snipers shooting at them. What Colonel Hackworth and veterans like my father saw in the 1950ies and what they see when they visit Seoul now leaves them rubbing their eyes in astonishment.

I had the incredible good fortune to be put in the way of doing a lot of voice-over narration jobs while I was at Yongsan, as well as a regular part-time job copy-editing the English language simulcast of the regular Korea Broadcasting System evening TV newscast. Most evenings or Saturdays after I finished my day job, I was taking the subway or a bus to a production studio somewhere (a taxi if I was feeling extravagant), and reading an English-language script on practically anything that someone felt would go over really well if they did a version in English.Amonger other things, I did a script about the manufacture of soju (which put me off ever drinking the stuff), an assortment of company puff-pieces, some fiendishly complicated English lesson tapes, a kid’s storybook, unless they have re-done the whole thing since, I am the English-language version of the recorded information for Kimpo Airport. I was a skilled and experienced production technician, working with other skilled audio technicians, away from the post. I developed friendships with the people I worked with in the KBS newsroom, who laughed at me because I had never gone to any of the tourist things in Seoul. I had, I explained, gone close to them, or had seen them from the outside on my way to a job; just like a native does.

Modern Seoul is a sprawling city of high-rise buildings, eight-lane highways, a splendid subway system, a golden glass tower 63 stories tall close by one of the fifteen or twenty bridges spanning the Han, and the Namsan tower glittering like a Christmas tree topper on a green hilly island in the middle of the city. In the evening, coming back from KBS on the bus, I could smell the bakery smell of vanilla cake from a commercial bakery close by. Sometimes at KBS we talked about the North, wondering if the discipline of an invading army of North Koreans would last past the first big grocery store, or electronics shop. When the old Supreme Leader died, I sat in the newsroom and watched half an hour of newscast cobbled out of the same fifteen minutes of stock video of the North, plus new footage of the bereft Northerners mourning ostentatiously. It seemed to me the KBS technicians were horrified and embarrassed by the elaborate demonstration of grief; I and they could only wonder what sort of coercion could force such undignified displays from people.

I liked working in Seoul, I liked what Koreans have built in fifty years, these tough jolly people on the south side of the DMZ. Cosmopolitan and professional, possibly as a nation the sharpest-dressed people on the face of the earth, every salaryman or woman turned out fit to be on the cover of GQ; as different from their cousins and second cousins north of the DMZ and still be on the same planet.

OSer Don Rich poined out in a post yesterday that the North Koreans regularly perform what he called the Korean Motherland Unity Game of Repeated Chicken – every six months to two years, there is some kind of saber-rattling game, a bit of public theater intended to remind everyone that they are there and bellicose. The old-time Korea hands that I knew over there, as well as my Korean friends were relatively blase about it all, for several reasons. One of them was that – well, mostly it was a bit of theater; it would die down in a week or so. Another being that for all the sprockets and medals hung on Nork generals – they really haven’t fought a serious war, balls-to-the-wall-and-all-guns-blazing war since 1953. There’s been a lot of evolution since then. But – lest the South Koreans get too over-confident about calling the North Korean bluff; the city of Seoul is well within range of Nork artillery, and quite a lot of it, too. Which is a very good reason to keep a cool head. And the other great argument for the status quo being maintained – is that if the DMZ magically evaporated and the Koreas were united once again, the South would be carrying the burden of the North … pitiful, starving, traumatised and hermetically isolated for sixty years, a country-sized concentration camp with all the brutality and horror that implies. The North has been in such bad shape for so long that teenage refugees from there are actually physically stunted, in comparison to their Southern cousins. So – while everyone gives lip service to reunification, in actuality, not so much.

But this week the Norks opened fire, shelling civilian areas on Yeonpyeong Island – an action which will be a little harder to brush off on the part of the South, Japan, and the United States. That ratchets up the Korean Motherland Unity Game of Repeated Chicken to a whole new level. So – who acts first? At this point, any guess is as good as any other.

Noggin’ Bloggin’/Product Review, Headblade (100802)

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About a month or so ago I got another trim at another one of those discount “Master Care Hair Care Performer Care Clips Care” places and realized that the “stylist” was messing with my hair in such a way as to make sure the ever growing thin spot on the crown of my head was covered.  Sigh.  Beautiful Wife, bless her heart, insists this isn’t technically a comb over.  Just one reason I love her, she doesn’t slam my ego at every turn.

Since I retired from the Air Force (can you believe it’s been three years?) I’ve tried various and sundry hair/beard configurations.  While I’d like to have the patience to go for Billy Connolly in “Boondock Saints,” the best I can really hope for is Jeff Bridges in anything from the last dozen years, but with a Monk’s Bowl where the crown of my head is.  I don’t think The Dude prevails with a bald spot.

A couple of Saturdays ago, it was hot and we hadn’t quite got the air conditioner thing worked out for the summer yet and I had beads of sweat running down my neck and back etc., so…out came the clippers.  A quick buzz and then into the shower with the good ol’ Gillette and poof, back to the cueball look.

I’ve tried going back to AF short.  I’ve tried medium.  I’ve tried medium-long.  With my hair thinning more and the weird color pattern that seems to refuse to balance out, and the fact that it’s just plain easy, I think I’m going to keep it shaved at least for the foreseeable future.

So six years ago when I first shaved the dome, I tried this thing called a Headblade.  It’s a razor specifically made for shaving your head.  It looked cool.  It’s well-designed.  It’s got kind of a YinYang logo.  They supported the UFC.  It was an American invention from the 90s, back when Americans were still inventing things that worked better.  But I digress.  Six years ago when I first tried the Headblade Classic, I pretty much shredded my scalp.  It used a two-blade cartridge and I never quite got the balance of the thing.  You’re supposed to put NO pressure on the blade end.  I somehow couldn’t get my hand to to figure that out.

The latest version, the Headblade Sport, ran $12.99 at my local Walgreens and works so well it’s kind of scary.  Yes, it looks like half a Hot Wheel.  And it’s got three blades vs two so the blades are a bit more pricey.  However, one pass and the hair was gone, leaving all the skin intact and smooth as a baby’s butt.  So not only did it shave amazingly close, it did it with LESS irritation than my (insert ridiculous number)-blade face razor because I only had to make one, maybe two passes to get the hair gone.  I don’t know if it’s the wheels or the three blade configuration or that I’ve mellowed considerably over the past six years, but this thing works!