A Rough Beginning

I lived with him for six years, and yet I have no memory of him at all. Nothing. Not his voice, not his touch, not his size or the texture of his skin. I have no memory of him ever speaking to me or holding me or playing with me — or yelling at me.

And yet, he was, biologically speaking, my father. But I never call him my father, because he wasn’t one, except for the sperm he provided inside my mother. And so I always refer to him as my “sperm provider,” never my ‘father.’ I didn’t get an actual father until I was 10 years old, when my mother re-married to a man who took me on as his child and adopted me and did everything a father should do for child.

Most of what little I know about the sperm provider came to me from my mother. And she wasn’t exactly objective, although she tried to be. That’s because he was drunk much of the time and would beat her. The one thing I do remember about him was the time he came home drunk and hit my mother in the face, as she was ironing at the ironing board.

He punched her and she fell against the ironing board and went down on the floor. I was about five years old at the time and was standing on the couch in the front room. My mother crawled across the floor and wrapped her arms around me and the two of us huddled on the couch, while the sperm provider left the room.

It all played out in front of me. I was just a little kid watching my father hit my mother and she collapsing on the floor. This was in my home. It was not what I thought homes were for. For the rest of my life, I would make sure that any home I had would be safe, even if I had to live alone to make sure that no one would be hurt. I learned early that it was best to take care of yourself. You couldn’t always rely on someone else.

This was in the early-1940s and women didn’t usually call the police when their husbands beat them. I don’t think we had a phone, anyway. He was a reporter for the local morning newspaper and worked the police beat. He probably could have talked his way out of being arrested. Beating wives in those days wasn’t much of a crime.

We stayed together as a family for a few more months. I attended kindergarten at Abraham Lincoln grammar school off Shelton Avenue. I would walk by myself back and forth to school every day. It was only a few blocks away. I remember kicking some fallen autumn leaves one sunny afternoon, as I walked home. I also remember nap time in school, when the teacher would pull down the tall shades on the windows and would bring out the thin mats we brought from home to lie on.

I remember the mats and the shades and the afternoon sunshine and the autumn leaves on my way home. But the only thing I remember about the sperm provider is the time he slugged my mother and she fell to the floor and crawled over to where I was on the couch.

She finally left him and we took the bus to the next town, where her parents still lived, and we stayed with them for the next four years. And that’s where I finally discovered what it was like to be safe and happy.

My grandfather came from northern Germany. My grandmother came from Croatia, when it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They had five children, my mother being the oldest.

They lived in the country, surrounded by trees and miles of wild grass. They had to walk through the woods and over a small stream to collect their mail.

They built their house themselves at the bottom of a dead-end road. No traffic passed by. They had a garden in back and a dog named Buddy. My grandfather was a house painter trained in Germany and his reputation for fine detail made him well sought-after.

He kept a sword under his mattress, in case there was trouble.

But there wasn’t any trouble. Not for me. Not anymore. Not for a long time to come.

The Train That Wasn’t

The basic mistake that Yevgeny Prigozhin made that cost him his life — and the lives of nine other people — was flying his private jet plane from Moscow to St. Petersburg.

When you live in a country ruled by a tyrant you’ve embarrassed, it’s always best to keep your feet on solid ground. If that tyrant wants to kill you — and it’s plain the Putin wanted Prigozhin dead — he will have to do something that involves hand to hand. It could be a gunshot or a poisoned pill or poison in your tea or a jab from an umbrella tip.

But whatever it is, it will take some complicated, hand to hand maneuvering to make it happen. If you’re smart and think in military strategies, you can defend against such attacks. You can surround yourself with bodyguards. You can make your own tea. You can keep strangers away.

And most important of all: you can take a train. And on that train you can lock yourself in a compartment. Your feet are on a floor that’s on an under carriage that’s on wheels that are on the ground. You are tucked into a cocoon that shields you from deadly air attacks or lethal missiles.

Of course, missiles have destroyed trains in the past and will do so in the future. But usually not during peacetime. And Russia is presumably at peace within its own borders. Its war is on the other side of the Ukraine border.

But it appears to have been a missile that knocked Prigozhin’s airplane out of the sky and caused it to crash and kill everyone onboard.

Obviously, people can be and have been killed on trains. But if you take precautions, it’s harder to do. That’s if you keep your wits about you and make sure you have friends nearby who have guns.

Lenin famously traveled by train to Moscow when the revolution was in full bloom. He arrived safe and sound, despite many czarist enemies eager to kill him. He took charge of the revolution that, in theory, is still working (although it isn’t).

Prigozhin could also have made it to St. Petersburg safe and sound, if he had stayed on the ground and taken a train.

The distance between Moscow and St. Petersburg is only 631 kilometers. One of Russia’s fast passenger trains can make it in 3.3 hours. A slower train takes about 5.27 hours. Both times are short enough to make the trip reasonable. And when you arrive, you’re right in the middle of the city. That’s the great thing about trains. They take you right into the middle of where you want to go.

When you fly, you have to go outside the city to an airport to take off and then when you arrive, you’re in another airport that’s outside another city when you land. Especially when you’re dealing with major cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Here in New Haven, the small airport that launches flights to such domestic spots as Florida and South Carolina is just an easy 20-minute drive away. But when you get to big-time travel, the whole picture changes.

I would never fly to a city that was only three to five hours away. Trains are more comfortable, more efficient, safer and easier on the mind and body.

I would never fly to Boston or Philadelphia or Washington or Albany. And I don’t even live in a country controlled by a dictator. At least, not yet.

Nothing that Prigozhin had to do in St. Petersburg couldn’t have waited until he arrived by train. He even could have gotten work done on the train and arrived refreshed and in a good mood.

And most importantly, he would have arrived alive.

But no. He insisted on flying in his private jet. It was a deadly decision based more on his egotism than on his strategic commonsense.

As it turned out, he didn’t even get half-way to Petersburg.

That day’s train, however, arrived on time. There was even some food left over in the dining car.

Once There Was A Chasm

Amy Hempel ends her short story, “The Center,” with this paragraph:

“You see, in the beginning, in the garden of Eden, man and animals had perfect accord between them. But when man discovered sin, a chasm opened up that divided man, on one side, from all of the animals, on the other side. The chasm widened, our mother said, until at the last possible moment, it was only the dog that leaped across the abyss to spend eternity with man.”

I believe that story, even though it’s a myth. Myths are not to be taken literally. But in my mind’s eye and in my soul’s heart, I see that dog hurling across the abyss toward humans and their corrupted side of the cosmic divide.

The dog sees us for the imperfect species we are. But he chooses to stay with us anyway. He forgives us our trespasses, despite our inability to forgive others theirs.

It isn’t Jesus or any of the other holy human figures of history we should emulate. It is the dog, who walks among us with a spiritual grace and a natural moral sensitivity that gives us a dignity we can’t manage on our own.

So when people around the world saw the front-page photo in this morning’s New York Times of a broken-hearted man in burned-out Maui saying goodbye to his beloved dog, hearts broke on nearly every continent.

The man had rushed into his burning house to rescue his dog and then saw his house burn to the ground. And that destruction left him and his family homeless in a devastated world devoid of practical options. And so he felt he could not adequately take care of his beloved dog, now that he and his family had no home,. And so for the dog’s sake, he had to give him up to a foster family.

And in the surrendering of his dog, the man felt a shred of that treacherous chasm reappear, with his dog forced to leap backwards out of the man’s life. A second photo inside the newspaper shows the man crushed by the sadness of giving up his beloved dog. He sits in a chair, his face a wreck, his heart shattered, his tears above and beyond mere sadness.

His world has collapsed. His house, his street, his neighborhood, his town, his work, his savings, his plans, his hopes, his promises to his children, his joys with his partner, are all gone.

And his dog. His beloved dog now living somewhere else with someone else. The man’s love turned into a kind of emotional suicide. He saves his dog, so the dog can live, and in the process, the man dies inside.

Everything is lost. . . even the most intimate of all.

Perhaps a way can be found. Perhaps someone can deliver a solution.

Perhaps a chasm can be re-crossed.

Meanwhile, there is still today and the aftermath to deal with. Maui hangs over local life like a shroud. People wonder where to begin. Diapers sit in packages, next to the water bottles. People rake ashes, looking for DNA.

And all the while, the future is put on hold, while a piece of paradise floats further off-shore, and businessmen prepare to rush in to buy property cheap.

To Mark An Anniversary

I am writing this on Wednesday, August 9, 2023. I don’t know when you’ll be reading it. But it’s important that I name the date. That’s because it’s an anniversary date. Today is the 65th anniversary of my being discharged from the Army.

I had enlisted on August 12, 1955 and was discharged on August 9, 1958. They let me out a couple of days early because a weekend was coming up and the Army figured I might as well go now since they figured I was halfway out the door anyway.

And it didn’t hurt that I had enlisted. The Army liked enlisted soldiers. It meant we were committed in ways that draftees weren’t.

So I packed my Army duffel bag with my soldier clothes and put on my civilian clothes, said goodbye to my friends and walked out to the bus stop and waited for the bus to take me to Fayetteville, North Carolina..

I had spent the past 29 months at Fort Bragg — which now has a new name — as part of the Continental Army Command. That was the outfit created by George Washington. We had evolved over the years from a fighting group to a research group. We tested different types of war machines before the Army committed to buying them. My specialty was cryptography. I dealt with codes and coding machines and the sending and receiving of secret messages back and forth.

I worked eight hours a day and then had every night off and weekends too. It was just like a regular civilian job, only I wore a uniform during the day with a “Secret” badge and photo clipped to my fatigue jacket.

We had elite parachuters assigned to our outfit from the 82nd Airborne, which was headquartered at Fort Bragg. They would jump out of airplanes with our equipment to make sure it could handle the rough and tumble.

I had my own jeep and could come and go as I pleased. I often rode out to the drop zone to watch a massive practice jump by the 82nd guys. I once saw a “streamer” go straight down, without the chute opening. A young life ending for nothing.

I had taken my basic training at Fort Dix in New Jersey, where I had learned to kill using a rifle, a pistol and a bayonet. I crawled under barbed wire during the day and at night, while machinegun tracer bullet were fired overhead. I had run and stabbed a dangling bag with my bayonet, shouting “kill, kill, kill,” as I ran. I had thrown a live hand grenade.

After that, I went to electronics school at Fort Gordon in Georgia for six weeks, and was then shipped off to Fort Sill, in Oklahoma. I was at Fort Sill for a month, before the Army discovered it had made a mistake and that I was supposed to be at Fort Bragg. And so I packed my bag yet again and took the train to North Carolina, where I remained for the rest of my tour.

But now it was over. I had done my duty. I had protected my country and lived an easy Army life. Really, a privileged Army life. I never fired another weapon. (You never, ever, said “gun”!). I had been promoted to Spec 5. I had an interesting job and the freedom to handle it anyway I thought best.

The company commander had even called me into his office and asked if I’d like to go to West Point. I said no. I had already been accepted at Boston University and would study literature and philosophy.

A few years later, some very bad business would take place in Southeast Asia and American soldiers would never again get to live the kind of Army life I had led.

I had been a member of the last of the peacetime American military. From now on, the world would be full of the firepower of hate. American soldiers would pay bitterly with their lives. And a peacetime military would be a fairy tale told by veterans like me, who were now either dead and speechless or too old to convince anyone of anything. We were eyewitnesses to a world that no longer existed.

But sixty-five years ago today, I stood in the train station of Fayetteville, North Carolina, and climbed aboard a late-morning Atlantic Coast Line Railroad car and settled into one of the big, over-stuffed seats and looked out the dusty window at a town I would never again visit. I was no longer a soldier. I was a veteran, a free person, a civilian with a history. I had thrown a grenade. I had stabbed a paper tiger. I had made life difficult for spies.

It would take many hours for me to travel through the south and then into the north, and there would be a couple of changes of trains. There would be Goldsboro and Greenville and Charleston and Washington and Philadelphia and Baltimore and Newark and Manhattan and Bridgeport and New Haven and finally the tiny station in Guilford, Connecticut, where my parents and my brother Bill were there to welcome me back.

And I put my duffle bag into the trunk of the family car and we drove to our summer cottage at Leetes Island and I walked out onto our porch and looked out to Long Island Sound and saw the boats bobbing in the harbor and felt the breeze passing through the tall trees in front and watched the late-afternoon shadows begin to form along the sides of the cottage next door and I listened to the quietness of a mid-August day.

And a bird sang.

And I stood there quietly for a minute and thought that this would be — must be — the happiest day of my life.

And as it turned out, it was.

A Dog In A Tuxedo

“The dog went to dancing school,” wrote poet Charles Simic in his short book, “The World Doesn’t End.”

“The dog’s owner sniffed vials of Viennese air,“ Simic continued. “One day the two heard the new Master of the Universe pass their door with a heavy step. After that, the man exchanged clothes with his dog. It was a dog on two legs, wearing a tuxedo, that they led to the edge of the common grave. As for the man, blind and deaf as he came to be, he still wags his tail at the approach of a stranger.”

I am too old and too single to have a dog now, pretty much like Simic‘s blind man. I should have made my move years ago when I was younger and more likely to live longer. But at 86, I am more likely nowadays to live shorter. That is not helpful for a dog, especially one in a tuxedo.

Having a dog would have made it difficult for me to sail on a Yugoslav freighter. Or to take a train to Zagreb. And then to spend three months with Joan traveling through Austria and Germany and Italy and Greece and then back into Yugoslavia and then to Switzerland, where she and I said goodbye. And them me on to Paris and London and finally Cornwall by myself.

But a dog would have loved Cornwall and I would have loved him so much that I would have happily exchanged clothes with him. We could have sat together at the edge of the North Sea and watched the waves crash against the Cornish granite.

But then I returned to America and became entangled. With women, especially. And I floated in mid-air.

And then Paris arrived and stole my heart for four years. And there was no room for a dog in my overnight bag. I gave away my tuxedo to a street musician in the metro.

And then there was this, and then there was that. And then one day I looked in the mirror and discovered that I had grown old. Old and living alone and no longer fleet-footed enough to gandy-dance with a dog.

But not too old to give them treats, as I walk through the world each morning. I am the neighborhood dog’s favorite treat-giver. They look for me out of the corners of their eyes. They open their mouths like angels receiving communion.

When they move away to other cities, as they invariably do, I miss them terribly, the way I miss being young. The way I miss Fritz, the German Shepherd my family had when I was in high school and still living innocently.

I have a framed photo of Fritz in my sun room, where he sits next to me like the Hound of Heaven. We are both smiling.