Homecoming

Although I am lauded as an accomplished cook, I rarely cook for myself; being content to dine haphazardly, in disparate moments.  Just as one hurries to be rid of a headache by whatever means at hand, so I prepare food to sate my hunger in a count of minutes-- the microwave a saving grace--come in the nick of time.  A baked potato in six minutes, while a steak grilles itself in the oven.  A small can o' peas to follow the spud with a momentary zapping; and the devilish business is done.

I sit alone trying not to despoil yet another keyboard with slopped food, the dorks hovering close to lick the finished plate.  People who live alone should identify with this repast of haste.  One can attend a restaurant only so many times without seeking the succor of a home cooked meal.  And one is never at liberty to dine out in their underwear or to pull through a drive-in so adorned.

After cups and cups of coffee no longer dull the pangs, I surrender to this inevitable routine—which comes usually in early afternoon.  A feeding at 3:00 PM is no one’s idea of lunch or dinner; yet this has become the mean time for me. 

To recount my eating habits to my primary physician always causes her a bout of eye-rolling and silent tsk-tsking.  She views the rising numbers of my diabetes labwork and cannot comprehend why I would ignore them with such a cavalier air.  I sometimes wish I could assuage her fears for the train wreck so clearly looming: from bad culinary habits, a three-pack-a day habit and caffeine at all hours of the day and night; but I can offer her no hope.  None at all.

People in recovery (there are no ex-drunks or ex-addicts) soon learn of this inexplicable inability to explain their behavior to others. Friends and family, doctors and therapists, wives and lovers observe this phenomenon of self-destruction with frustration and, eventually, despair.  Knowledge is one thing; explanation is as distant as the outer planets: out there, somewhere beyond vision or rational thought.

This is all presage to a ditty about PTSD, my own, to be precise.  So, let me tell you where I think it all began:

If you have heard me tell the prelude of this in meetings or elsewhere, please bear a little patience as it now becomes integral to a larger view.  About ten days after arriving in California from Viet Nam, following the final indignity of a digital examination with fifteen other guys, all of us naked and bent over, I was separated from active duty, given a military stand-by airfare, and sent on my merry.

At LAX, I went directly to the men’s room, removed my Donald Duck whites and mirror-shined black shoes, stuffing them all into a trash can, then putting on the clothes that had been tailor-made for me in Hong Kong.

Even in 1970, the outfit was over the top. Starting with the shoes: square-toed alligator black patent leather, with a garish brass buckle and stacked heels; gray wool slacks with a subtle gray pinstripe; then the piece de resistance—A pink pima cotton shirt with Tom Jones sleeves, cut to fit me like a second skin.

My flight was the red-eye from Los Angeles to DC Dulles, non-stop.  I stepped up to the ticket counter and had the standby ticket upgraded to coach.  I believe, at this precise moment in time, somewhere in the middle of June 1970, the PTSD began to gel.  I was tanned like a beitel nut, close shorn of beard and hair, wearing an outlandish costume and travelling not as a returning sailor, but as some ordinary schlub in coach.  Who the fuck was I kidding?

I think I was one of about four passengers on board that night.  In 1970, the airlines had not yet begun packing passengers on board like kosher pickles in a jar.  As often as not, these late-night flights were practically empty.  So, paying more for a seat that would have been mine anyway was ludicrous.  In my delusion of denial, and the shroud of shame just now descending upon me--for the rest of my life--I was fooling everyone that I was NOT coming home from Viet Nam; that I was NOT to be made an object of derisive jeers; that I was NOT to be held responsible for a war I hated as much as the rest of the world hated it.

As this uneventful flight approached the east coast, it was announced that fog had Dulles socked in, that the aircraft was being diverted to Baltimore.  At 4:00 AM, the news would not reach my parents, who had dutifully set out to retrieve their son. Upon landing, we debarked for a charter bus which would take us all back to Dulles.

On the Beltway coming up to the Montgomery Road exit, I had the driver pull over and let me out.  The fog in my brain was equal to the morning fog of the DC Metroplex. I clambered up a steep embankment through tall weeds, thoroughly soaking the bottom half of my classy gray slacks.  I do not remember how I got from that point to the stoop of my parents’ red brick Georgian in Rockville.  I just remember that that is where they found me, waiting for this last minute confusion to unravel.

They had met the shuttle at Dulles, and then drove to Baltimore when I wasn’t on board the bus.  After a futile search there, they finally headed back to the house.  We greeted in the somber half-light of dawn, my folks delirious at having their boy returned without mark or blemish; their boy quite a bit less enthusiastic at being home and safe at last.

That’s what they thought.  That was what everyone thought.  They mistook the silence as evidence of no-harm-done.  The very few who spoke out, like Secretary of State Kerry and such, ended up making a political career for themselves.  To borrow a phrase from writers more gifted than I, the silence was deafening.

For the remainder of that summer, I lived on the side porch, mostly drunk and stoned, to give credence to the quiet numb quiescence in which I found myself.  No one came to ask me questions about the war.  No one ever did from that time to this.  Because my existence was totally devoted to the business of denial and distraction—from that vague summer all those years ago, for the next forty-two years—it never occurred to me that my way out of the miasma was to finally tell my own story.

This is the last of my Viet Nam monographs.  Of all of them, this was the most painful to write; because after this came…the rest of my life—of those distractions and denials that demonstrate the unseen marks and blemishes that riddled me through and through.  So, you see, the essence of PTSD for many many of us is not the act that created it; it is the act that followed.  In one sense, I am still waiting on the redstone Georgian stoop, waiting for something to happen.

To amuse myself, and perhaps a few of you, I will press forward with tales of the blond headed yeoman after his war was done.  It may well be nothing more than something to catapult my sorry sad consciousness onto another track; on the way to that last whistle stop, the one that nobody expects will ever arrive for them…   

Painting Churches By Tina Howe

“It’s all true, but none of it happened”  I was puzzled by this rather odd remark by Playwright Howe until I watched her play and saw the characters on stage meld and become reflections of my experiences with my own parents.

I understood Gardner’s bewilderment at having returned from the bar with no ice, because he had forgotten where it was.  I understood Fanny’s dark rage at her husband’s recalcitrance for the move to the cottage, now imminently near. Finally, I understood why Mags made such infrequent visits to her parents’ home.

Dad died a sudden death in 1998, a week away from his 79^th birthday.  I went back to Pensacola, to help my mother make the transition from 55 years of marriage to singular isolated widowhood.  It became apparent that Dad had covered up Mom’s encroaching dementia to such an extent that seeing her without him there to protect and care for her brought her vulnerability into stark view.  Like my siblings and in-laws, I chose to stay the course of denial and soon returned home after the funeral, to let Mom fend for herself.

Months later, a call came from my sister (who lived nearby) informing me that Mom had been discovered stuck in the bathtub after eight helpless hours, unable to extract herself.  They removed her to a nursing home.

Another call two months later informed me that ‘something’ had to be done.  Once again I flew to Florida to find my 84 year old mother literally parked at the nurse’s station in a wheelchair ‘where they could keep an eye on her’.  She had apparently taken to standing at the bus stop in an attempt to return home.

My sister’s MS by that time rendered her unable to care for herself; much less our mother; and my brother-in-law had only the means and ability to care for his invalid wife.  Mom became my responsibility.

I took her back to the house, to give her two days of respite before the next shock to her frail mind: returning to Texas with me--to be warehoused in some facility yet to be named.  On the day before our departure, I left Mom with Joanna and Chuck, to allow me the time to do what needed to be done.  With a package of those luminescent red dot stickers reserved for garage sales, I went through my parents’ house marking those items that would be loaded on the van in the morning for the move to San Antonio. 

When Franny fretted about moving to a space the relative size of a postage stamp from their spacious house, I knew the feeling and my heart sank, as it did that frantic dismal afternoon when I consigned the vast majority of Mom and Dad’s lifelong collection of treasured holdings to an estate sale, to precede placing the house on the market.

Mags Church was stoic…and detached…from any sense of the enormity of what was about to happen to her parents.  While she attended to her father’s attempts to prod the parakeet into poetic verse, I saw myself on the morning of our departure, cutting the last enormous bouquet of prize roses from Dad’s garden.  I saw the tears of recognition in my mother’s face when she beheld them on the kitchen table moments before we left for the airport. The roses were left there, to wither in the quietude of any empty house.

If you have aging parents, living or dead, if you have found yourself in the unenviable role of untutored caretaker, I would urge you to go see Painting Churches.  Perhaps you too will find insight to the plight of growing old and the universality of one of life’s cruelest conditions.

I will remember this play as long as I remember my departed Mom and Dad; until my own memory fails and I enter those dimming years…for myself.

2014 Bring it!

In 1963, I was a junior at Robert E. Lee; back from Europe for three years.  In 1973, I was a Viet Nam veteran, back from the war three years. In 1983, I was a claims adjuster with a drinking problem, three years after the first marriage.  In 1993, I was a claims supervisor, three years after Hurricane Hugo and six years sober.  In 2003, I was at the City of San Antonio, three years away from retiring to go chase Katrina and other storms. Today, 2013, I am gathering up my life after three years I would rather forget.

But things are as different now as they were through the foregoing five decades of life on Earth.  I have my friends; in the Fellowship, in the Arts, in the Media and in mobile home parks all over America.  My private relationship is with my 8 pets—far more serene and manageable than any one human, I can tell you!

And I have my friends on Facebook; the global village than Marshal McLuhan envisioned so long ago…before PC’s and the World Wide Web.  You are such a diverse collection of Humans!  Some of you I know very well on the ground, some of you are recent acquaintances and some of you I know only through this window to the planet at large.

Some of you are just out and out lunatics (Oh! Throwing stones in glass houses again!); some of you are too sane for your own good.  You can figure out for yourselves which is which (Do NOT succumb to denial on this point!).

Social networking is changing us all; indeed, it is changing the world.  It is better than Star Trek’s talking computer; we are instantly informed and aware of each other and we are all reaching out of our small private boxes to find information and ideas to bring back to the village square…to share with our friends.

I have had a Facebook account for four or five years, in that time it has grown from an amusing dalliance to plugged-into-my-cortex vital.

In the guise of entertaining ourselves, we have grown together, as a family grows together.  We learn, delight and grieve at the fortunes and follies of each other. 

We need each other.  

Let 2014 come on!  Bring it!  The fiscal cliff is no more daunting than the Suez Canal Crisis of 1956.  And who, but a few history buffs among us, remember that calamity? 

I have high hopes for the New Year.  I have high hopes for all of you out there in my fabulous Ether-ether Land!  Happy New Year and God bless us…everyone!

Death Throes of the Two Party System

A recent post declared the 112^th Congress to be the most unproductive since the 1948 80^th Congress, which stonewalled President Truman and tried the same desperate means to unseat him in the ’48 election as the 112^th tried on Barack Obama.  Much to his credit, President Obama demurred from castigating the Congress for their obstinate mulish attempt to derail him.

Not so, Harry S. Truman of Independence Missouri.

Harry overcame his nemesis with a 22,000 mile campaign trip by railroad, speaking at every stop at small towns across rural America of that ‘Do nothing Republican 80^th Congress’; and won the election of 1948 over a dead certain shoo-in for Governor Dewey of New York. 

If Truman had lost the election, we can now speculate that it would have been the death knell of the Democratic Party.  With the left wing splinter of the Progressive Party and the right wing ‘States Rights’ Dixiecrats, led by Strom Thurmond, The cohesion of the FDR years would have fractured; the chances of reconstruction dismal.  But that didn’t happen, because Truman won.

Out of the history primer and into the present, Romney’s loss and the Tea Party’s rise to power may very well be the harbinger of a permanent dissolution of the Republican Party.

The Tea Party isn’t going away, despite the growing disgruntlement, to use a mild explicative, of large voting blocs of Americans who are beginning to see a visible threat to their well-being caused by the obstinacy of these ultra-ultra conservatives, nesting in the Congress like so many hatchling Cuckoo birds, pushing the reasonable eggs out on the ground.

No matter what happens with the fiscal cliff, people are pissed and the talk is now of throwing the bastards out in 2014.

Well, fine; but it’s going to take more than one eye-opening election to unravel the snake pit of gerrymandering that has cleverly disenfranchised the poor, the minorities (I use that term rather gingerly here), the blue collars and others not of the conservative ilk.

 

My opinion is that we are witnessing the end of the American two-party system as we have known it.  This is not a Chicken Little wringing of hands; but I don’t know what it may eventually portend.

We are used to one party in domination, with the other party providing a check and balance; the political see-saw-Marjory-Daw as it has been played through all the years of the last century up till now. What happens next?

Will the landscape be composed of divisive splinter parties—the Progressives, the Liberals, the Tea Party, Tea Party wannabes, a new Populist Party, a new Dixiecrat Party, a revitalized Raza Unida, a done-over African Congress?

All this in addition to Democrats and the remnants of the old Republican Party.

I am like most, not desiring change of something as venerable as the system I grew up with; however, I am reminded that change is only painful when it is not readily accepted.

I guess it’s a good thing we never scrapped the Electoral College for selecting the Executive, huh?  I think we’re gonna need it.

A Word or Three on Celebrity

Where have we gone, and what have we done?

The news on the wire today is  the suicide of Jacintha Saldana, the nurse who disclosed information about Duchess Kate to a pair of Australian disc jockeys posing as Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip.

On August 31, 1991, Princess Diane was killed in an auto accident in which her car was speeding to elude the paparazzo photographers following in high speed pursuit.

This is the price of celebrity, we all rejoin, sadly shaking our collective heads.  It’s what happens when you are famous…or infamous.

Let us not delude ourselves.  We, the public sea of voyeurs, create celebrity by ghoulishly following every nook and cranny of people’s private lives, like so many naughty children peering over a garden wall—to spy on Princess Diane then, and now the Duchess of Cambridge.  Sunning themselves in bathing suits—on holiday—to escape the ever present exposure which they and those like them must endure.

Allow me to take a straw poll:  is there anyone out there who would NOT like to hear that phone conversation with Jacintha and the fake Queen and Consort?

Is there anyone who did not view those bathing suit photos of Diane and Kate?  I myself must regretfully answer no.  I am guilty.  All of us are guilty, save the Dahli Lama and persons like him who have elevated themselves above the mire of humanity’s daily perusal of celebrities.

If we did not crave the latest crude exposure of other people’s personal lives, perhaps that distraught nurse with a husband and two children might be alive.  Indeed, perhaps Princess Diane might still be alive.

To bring a curse on myself by quoting the Scottish play out of context, “What hath we wrought?”

My only consolation in all this, as cynical as it may sound, is to imagine what those two Australian jerks are going to have to endure when the floodlight of celebrity is turned on them…