9/11

  What I learned from 9/11: if someone wants to hurt you or your country bad enough, if they plan with diligence, raise money, keep secret their secrets, wait for the right time no matter how long and martyr themselves in the process, they can do it. Twenty years later we are still licking our wounds, grieving the loss. The ‘Never Forget’ thing is about venting frustration in the moment. Next week it will drop off the radar for another year before we make a show of remembering again. I remember exactly, where I was when the plane hit the second tower and when the Pentagon was hit. I will not be dismissed for lack of caring or someone's idea of a callous character flaw but twenty years is enough. I don’t need to relive that terrible day or comfort those who lost loved ones. Somewhere, they are still remembering Pearl Harbor and that’s alright. But I have remembered enough. When someone swears an oath to never forget I am reminded, never say never. Today has been a good day. If I wake up in the morning I will be thankful for another day. I have lost track of so many terrible anniversaries that 9/11 can’t fade away fast enough. Man's inhumanity to his own kind is incurable. I am afraid that selfish revenge will masquerade as righteous justice and no one will notice. That’s what people do with their high minded, best intentions. King Solomon was wise as they said he was. There is a time for everything, for every purpose under the sun and it is my time to bury old bones.

HARDCOPY

  Falling behind with any tedious task can be disheartening to the point of walking away as if it should self engage and complete itself without you. Even though it might feel liberating, that strategy is doomed from the start. My writing has been a key part of how I process experience (the cards life has dealt me and the way I have played them). Nearly all of my (writer) writing since the early 1970’s has been filed away where they can be retrieved and revisited. More than half a century’s worth of journal and creative writing has been homogenized and stored in a computer file. I know how computerized documents can disappear or crash and never be seen again. My stuff gets backed up in the cloud now but old dogs (like me) are creatures of habit. It would be foolhardy choosing hard copy over the cloud but, call it another layer of security. I have eight, 2” and 3”, three ring binders full of my writing that date back to 1972. At the time, the IBM Selectric Typewriter was high tech and I felt privileged having access to one. Instead of all those old fashioned arms with two characters on each one, the Selectric had a single, type-ball with all the letters and characters on it. You still had to use correction tape to strike over errors but that was great, it didn’t get any better. Some of my earliest works have survived as Selectric originals. 
Some of my original typewritten work had worn thin, frayed, smudged and I retyped what I thought was worth keeping, only this time on the computer. It was floppy discs and folded print paper that fed the printer, not unlike toilet paper scrolling off a roll. What hasn’t changed is that computers still crash and documents still get lost. In the late 80’s and early 90’s I started backing up the computer with hard copy. If I couldn’t take the computer home with me at least notebooks travel well. I still back up everything with hardcopy and the pages accumulate fast while I move slow.
If I get caught up by the end of the month every month I could stay caught up. If I forget or fall behind it is easier to keep letting it accumulate like dust under the bed. When you realize how far behind you are, procrastination becomes even easier and the task compounds. I can’t blame Pandemic, I had fallen far behind before that. I had a little over three years of journaling on the bubble just waiting for a crash. Having such a backlog felt overwhelming. Still, I am the only person who could do it. If it were just printing, anyone could do that, just hit Select All and Print. If I still have it in the file I consider every written piece to still be in progress. Nothing is ever finished, like me; you can leave me in the basement for as long as you like but when I come out I will need a shave and a haircut. 
When I notice something that needs revision, I revise. That is the rule for any and every article, all the way back. Before I print the page it needs to be reread, overlooked spelling & punctuation errors need correcting, word selection may need tweaking, reframe sentence structure as needed, delete whole paragraphs that, in retrospect, serve no purpose. Editing is the real work of writing. Reassuring myself with the old axiom, “Every journey begins with a single step.” I figured; do a few copies at a time and keep the three ring binder on top of my desk where it would be a nagging reminder.
It has been over a month, maybe two since I started the 2019-2020 binder. Now all I have left to catch up on is this year. Funny, reading your old, fermented writing with New Eyes it changes things. With New Eyes, I am much more auto-critical than the creative, storytelling writer (me) was at the time. When writing is still fresh you can feel good about shaky syntax. I get little or no feedback so the critic has to be me. I don’t want to make public anything that rings of me that felt good in the moment but failed the test of time. When I was active with my writers guild I got plenty of important, necessary, critical peer review. Writers like to show off now and then with a wide and deep vocabulary or using complicated but correct, compound sentences; stuff only other writers appreciate. New Eyes are nearly as keen as Other Eyes, they notice every stroke and what felt clever or righteous at the time might not age very well.
A long time ago I stumbled across several song lyrics that my teenage daughter and I wrote, traveling in the car between Michigan and Missouri. She wrote everything down as we drove. Years later I found the clipboard and yellow legal pad with the lyrics in her hand writing. I typed a copy but misplaced the page in a box on a top shelf in the basement. Rediscovering it I shared it with her we were delighted, a snapshot reboot of a benchmark place in time. Leave it to her as an adult, latching onto the lyrics again and to serve me notice. “Put this in a notebook. Keep it in a safe place and don’t lose it again.” 
Maybe a decade later the song, Chicken Skin from that collaboration found its way into our conversation and she amended her earlier ‘Notice’. She told me she wanted all of my writing in print, hard copy. Certainly there would come a day when either the computer or I would crash and the half-century journal would be lost. “I will want all of it.” she said. 
They say, for as long as someone remembers your face and your story, your legacy lives. The same could be true about your words, the ones you put to the page. For as long as they are pressed between the pages, on a shelf or in a box, even if they go unread your story survives with a life of its own. It just has to be intact and available. I like that. It comes as close to an afterlife as anything I would ever imagine.

GETTING BACK UP

  August 29, sixteen years to the day after Katrina dropped in on New Orleans; Ida has Grand Isle (to the west) in the crosshairs. That will put the Big Easy on the ‘Dirty Side’ (more wind/surge/rain). In ’95 the ‘Eye’ went to the Mississippi coast and N.O. dodged that bullet, not that it helped but you never know, maybe it could have been worse. They are predicting landfall this afternoon. I’m afraid it will be flashlights and generators in south ‘Weeziana’ tonight. 
I could spin off on environmental issues but I won’t. Name calling and pointing fingers may vent anxiety but the kind of change required to resolve manmade climate issues will call for much umbrage and and even more time. I watched a two hour episode of the Ken Burns series on World War Two last night. I’ve seen it several times but some of the visuals and their stories bear watching again. He chronicled the war through four towns; in Minnesota, Alabama, Connecticut and California. It began with young men who went off to war and loved ones left behind, it looked at cities with wartime industry, workers who relocated to fill the wartime job slots. Racism softened, at least for a while. The story Burns offered up was complicated and overlapping. I’ll not rehash the program but I was reminded that war is not and has never been a noble endeavor. It is a ruthless, gruesome struggle with young men following orders, killing each other in the name of God or country, and where innocent bystanders die grizzly deaths for simply being in harms way, where human suffering is the rule. Leaders and profiteers would paint it otherwise but their cause is the universal constant; ‘To the winner go the spoils.’

The segue back to hurricanes and Ida in particular is that by war or natural disaster, people are resilient. Whatever horror we encounter, life looks to the future rather than dwell on the past. This is cliché I know and I don’t like clichés but long suffering, partisan bloodshed is not something one gets over, people persevere and go through. Getting over suggests recovery while going through just means you come out the other end. That was true with war and no less, a devastating hurricane. After Katrina in ’05 they salvaged and repaired what they could, replaced what they couldn’t fix and moved on. If we weren’t resilient we would dry up and perish. After Ida leaves her mark, those people will salvage, repair, replace and move on. Concerning the pressure of his job, former President Harry Truman said, “If you can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen.” You don’t have to  live on a stormy coastline but those who do, they know about getting knocked down and getting back up. Ida is the storm today, between the one before and the next one up the line. The next deadly landfall is out there, on the way, we just can’t say when.

        I have concern for a friend who lives there. We talked earlier today and they are prepared as they can be. They have a permanently installed, industrial grade generator that can meet their (essential) electrical needs for several weeks. With enough elevation (20’) and set back far enough, several miles from Lake Pontchartrain’s north shore, storm surge is not much of a threat. High water (flooding) and wind damage can be. So she prays at the Catholic Church and I simulate Voodo ceremony on the patio with dance (shuffling feet & waving arms) rattle chicken bones in a brown paper sack, chant some gibberish and sprinkle some brandy (not too much) on the ground. My Faith in Voodo is nil but I like the idea of ancestor worship. Between the two of us, I don’t think our collective ritual can change the weather but neither can it do any harm. I know I feel better after I shuffle my feet to some gibberish and sip a little brandy.

THREE WORDS TOGETHER

  At eighteen my parents thought my life trajectory would parallel that of the steam ship Titanic. My high school diploma demonstrated the Peter Principle to perfection. Self absorbed I graduated neither learned, ambitious, reliable nor skilled but I did lack discipline (humor). The thought of working a mundane job for minimum wage was unthinkable. There was a girl who would hold my hand but otherwise, if I did’t have anything then I didn’t want anything. I was the prodigal son, reluctant to leave the nest. The folly of my growing up left me neither ashamed nor proud, it just was.
I start this way, not as a precursor to the rest of the story but as a reminder that all of us live out our own story and it begins somewhere, it has to. I am convinced this life is driven by struggle more than reward. One’s place in time is not negotiable; wherever you thought you were going, when it is that you find yourself, wherever that may be, there you are. Like beads on a string, my years add up to eighty two, something I think about a lot. When your body can’t keep up like you think it should it’s not a choice.
So as much as it feels like (hung out to dry) my plate is full. I earned my pay in another profession but I identify as a writer and storyteller. All the reading, writing, shuffling ideas, I have a lot to work with. I employ words and phrases like my mother did her yarn and knitting needles. So no surprise when I take language to task for what it should convey and how that makes us feel. Storytelling might be dismissed as clowns reciting silly rhymes to preschoolers. If one thinks Story need be childlike and banal then it would seem so. But without Story there would be no history, no tradition, no humor, little more than yes & no. There would be no way to answer the simple question; Why? Human beings are storytellers, all of us, since the day we first put three words together.
The Titanic metaphor was good but I am still afloat. I finally learned to read, how to work and I’ve never been in so deep I couldn’t make my way. In a nutshell, that is my story. Like a fiber in a thread, woven into a fabric, sewn into a tapestry, my little rhyme is a very small part of a larger work. Still, that little rhyme is all I can muster. It began somewhere, somehow, under circumstances not of my choosing. You get what you get and go from there. If we are lucky we grow with experience. Good luck would seem too much to hope for but sometimes we flourish in spite of ourselves. I would agree with Lefty Gomez, New York Yankees’ Hall of Fame pitcher who said, “I’d rather be lucky than good.” 

ALL THERE IS

  Sometimes I come to the journal page with a purpose and other times I come empty handed. There was a time (I think all writers go through this) I felt protective, as if my words on the page were precious eggs in the nest. Someone need nurture them or they never hatch, never fly. That feeling wore thin a long time ago and went away. Now that page is more like dirty footprints on the carpet begging, “fix me.” You either breathe new life into the idea or abandon it.  Maybe that says something about my politics. If I think a twelve week human fetus is expendable, why trouble myself over questionable writing. It was also conceived by giving in to a natural urge. I am playing God with words again, OMG. 
Processing casual thought on the page, you can redact or delete as you please. When the same package shows up again with predictable frequency it becomes a pattern. My journaling is starting to follow a pattern and I need to make a disclaimer. My long measure of human experience (old age) is an asset but also a hinderance. When you have sky dived from enough airplanes the excitement ebbs dramatically. I stopped recording my free fall jumps sometime after #200. The leap was still worth the ride up but more like getting a nibble, nothing like catching your first fish. It holds your attention, you focus and you’r pulse rate may gain a few ticks but excitement no, not really. 
In the twilight of her career, singer Peggy Lee recorded, Is That All There Is, a bitter-sweet reflection. It seemed to say, life has been sweet at times but short as well and I would like to know, is that all there is? I suppose that should be my disclaimer as well. I remember the Cold War in the 1960’s when Soviet and American bombers flew 24/7 armed with hydrogen bombs enough to destroy civilization. They flew nonstop, around the clock, waiting for the command to destroy the wold. It went on for years. We made it through that crisis but even if they know the story, people born after that seldom give it a thought. In 2001 a group of angry, disillusioned martyrs hijacked four airliners but that crisis is still festering. Over the next two decades we would spend trillions of dollars, sacrifice nearly four thousand American lives and many thousands of devastating, life altering injuries. It was all metered out as justice but it reeked of revenge. My culture has difficulty distinguishing between the two. Yes, we killed BinLaden but as of this week it seems our righteous response has gone to seed a dismal failure.
I am old and my conscience has hardened. I try to diffuse crises, whatever they may be. Balance comes from watching the bubble, not from how it feels in the gut. My cohorts (by race & generation) are predominantly conservative. I think it comes with White Privilege, as if blessed by our white, conservative God, the one that authorized misogyny and slavery. I love us but our sins are such that I can neither dismiss nor ignore them. I feel like a whistle-blower, an insult to the myth that my cohorts venerate and I can feel them pushing back. I care, I really do but then it doesn’t matter; just words. They can dismiss me as easily as they would any other renegade and they do. Is that all there is? I know better, not that naïve. I was just hoping for more, something better.
Anthropologists study human history, civilization in general and they concur for the most part. Over the long stretch of recorded history the quality of human life gets better and continues to improve. Depending on how you group populations and break time down into units, there is less war, less slavery, better food, better health and less violence against vulnerable populations. But that takes in every culture, every beating heart. Here in my culture, with the most powerful economy and military on the planet, we agonize over losing hegemony and sustaining a tunnel vision, self serving morality. Being Number #1 has an ego stroking effect as well as a sobering responsibility but the latter is more lip service than practice.
If this has downgraded into a Rant, that wasn’t the intent. I’m never sure for sure where the muse will take me and I don’t know how this story should end. Thursday afternoons we (the team I’m on) make ham and cheese sandwiches for the homeless and the hungry. A few hours later I watch desperate, grateful people, struggling with their burdens just not on empty stomachs. It is something I can do and maybe that is all there is. 

WE IMPROVISED EVERYTHING

     Our house was a two bedroom cottage on Tracy Street in Kansas City, so close to the house next door that we could see what they were having for breakfast from the bedroom window. Then we moved out of town to an old, dilapidated, two story farm house. That was back in early summer of 1945. Our growing family, five of us, we needed more space and they (Mom & Dad) wanted a place where they could grow a garden, have animals, a barn, a place without sidewalks where kids could roam without leaving the yard. I turned six the first week of August. A week later the ‘atomic bomb’ ended World War 2. Three weeks after that I began the 1st Grade in an 8 grade school with 3 teachers and as many classrooms.

Most of what I remember about the house on Tracy Street has been drawn from old snapshots and posed photographs. Still I do recall the icebox on the back porch. The ice man came in a horse drawn wagon every second or third day to deliver a block of ice. The icebox itself had a drain that dripped melt water into a pan beneath it. The living room’s centerpiece (the radio) was warm colored, polished wood with a wide base and an arched top. It sat on a small table that must have been made for that purpose. There was a single, on-off/volume switch and a round tuning-dial for changing stations. It looked like the speedometer in our car. Its knob was the center of the dial, geared so you had to turn it a lot just to make the needle move a little. It was our source of information and entertainment and we sat around it like kids at the feet of a magical storyteller. 

At our (old) new house the radio was still the living room’s main feature. From WW2 to the early 1950’s the program we never missed, the one I remember best was Grand Central Station. Its introduction was irresistible with the sound of hissing steam engines and the hollow sounds of many people scurrying through a crowded railroad terminal. The narrater, with his deep voice and resonant echo announced; “Grand Central Station, the crossroads of a million private lives, a gigantic stage on which are played a thousand dramas daily.” Then, one particular person either coming or going, maybe meeting someone, their story unfolded perfectly. Funny, romantic, serious or dramatic their stories kept us glued to the spot. I can imagine now the chuffing locomotives and the baritone voice reverberating: “. . . a thousand dramas daily.” 

I remember being a child and that imagery has not dimmed or dulled a bit. The serious side of growing up was necessary, the freedom and the responsibility that came with it might have swept childhood under the rug in some cases but not this one. The five year-old who sipped cold water from the icebox drip pan is still in there and we’ve been best of friends all along. I’ve grown old but he is still sitting cross-legged in front of the radio.

Growing old is not so bad, not considering the alternative. From that end, long life would seem a blessing. Maybe that’s what this little piece should be about, blessings, unmerited gifts. The word is usually cast in religious context but it need not be. I can offer my blessing any time, for any reason. With it comes my approval and at least the pretense of privilege. Nobody with right mind would think me religious but I do like the Bible. I like the sermon on the mount in particular, not only for what he said but also what he didn’t say. He blessed the poor, the meek and the merciful but not the mighty or the greedy. Nowhere can I find, ‘Blessed are the powerful for they shall kick ass.’ 

I am blessed to find myself both old and healthy in the same breath. My children are well on their way to old age but still, they don’t see it coming. My grandchildren think their electronic device is a portal to the future, and who am I to say it isn’t? In the movie, Grumpy Old Men, 80 year-old Burgess Meredith scolded Jack Lemon, his 50-something son for not pursuing the beautiful widow, Ann Margaret. He told him; “. . . when your time comes, all you get to take with you is your experience. So get busy.” With a movie you can write cool stuff like that into the script. The best actors get the best, most unforgettable lines but my dad was nothing at all like Burgess Meredith and my experience came with melt water, the radio, baseball and bicycles. We never followed a script, improvised everything and that turned out alright. 

DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

  On hot summer nights I slept in the yard on a lawn chair. That was when I was eight or nine. One night in the lawn chair I had a dream. A UFO came to rescue me in the middle of the night; I had been left on the earth by mistake and they had come to take me home. They left without me but It felt so real I’ve never forgotten. Over seventy years later that memory is still fixed, real or imagined, it is part of my life story. 
For decades I’ve slept straight through without interruption, waking up recharged like my iPhone. But everything changes so I shouldn’t be surprised. Nowadays, dreams and getting up to pee are the norm. They say (whoever they are) that any lawyer who defends himself in court has a fool for a client. The same said (I would think) for anyone who tries to interpret their own dreams, as if they had access to the ‘what it means’ file. If there is a message or a lesson there it would be, don’t take yourself too seriously. We learn by trial and error, the brain does not have an owners manual. The fact that I remember the dream is probably just a speed bump on the memory disc and certainly not a riddle to be solved. 
With run-amok Conspiracy Theory at every turn, the urge here is to risk being the ‘fool’ thing with another pass at my UFO dream. By their nature, conspiracy theories more than suggest, they dictate that  the greater the odds against any one thing, the more compelling the argument to believe it. Actually, I believe that disciples of conspiracy (feel like) they gain a leg up on experts who have made a career of separating fact from fiction. If you know better than the experts, you must be brilliant and you didn’t need to waste ten years on a PhD. If one out of a hundred proves true then you have proved your point, like a baseball player with a batting average of .001. Out of a thousand times at bat he finally got a hit, proof that he can hit MLB pitching. So I’m flip-flopping, not going with the summer night dream. Still, the dream part was real, it takes me (makes me think about) places and invites ideas I never would have imagined without it. 
Every time I dive down the (self analysis) rabbit hole it just reaffirms what I came away with the first time. I am in a fragile, Love/Hurt relationship with my own kind (Humanity). I am really disappointed with Homo sapiens, the species. For a while I thought is was a mild case of misanthropy (love/hate) but the animosity has never been there. Yes I love people in the same way you love the home team when they lose, even when they lose poorly. But that doesn’t ease the disappointment (the hurt) of the ugly duckling disconnect. Truth is you were right to begin with, we are ugly ducks and all the swan talk is just a lot of denial and vain ego. We are animals with a remarkable brain, hard to control (the brain) but remarkable none the less. Is that what the UFO dream was all about? Maybe I was supposed to go to another world where human emotion informs but it is reason that prevails. Wouldn’t that be something!
I’ve been told that I am overreacting. Sure people do stupid things but we are the captains of our own destiny (Right!). With good judgment and good decisions life is good. Still, you can’t know if the judgment and decision that felt so good at the time were all that good. You have to wait for the judges score you. You can always trust what you were taught (good enough for good old dad) but success and failure are both peopled by folks who went with what they learned. Can you believe: The 30 yr-old guy who went to a Covid-19 party to prove it was a hoax and caught the virus. Just before he died (dead) he told his doctor, Jan Appleby at San Antonio Methodist Hospital “I think I made a mistake.” I’m afraid that ‘Free Will/Destiny’ thing is more Swan/Ugly Duck propaganda. I don’t expect anyone to agree with me, they would have to be crazy. But they were not left behind on a planet full of ugly ducks. They were already here.