Meaningful parenting.
by MichaelRyerson
11/06/2008, 12:09 PM #
I see LAM is whining about her children being confronted by some suddenly enfranchised black children. I feel her pain. But if she just thinks for a moment or two she'll see the remedy is at hand. It may be helpful if she'll instruct her children thusly and reinforce it with a little role playing in the comfort and security of their own home. First speak only when spoken to and never, ever make eye contact when you're speaking to one of your betters (the black children). Learn to walk with your head slightly bowed (again remember the all important eye contact rule), walk with a slight stoop and walk quickly so as not to prolong the time when you might be stopped and asked for an explanation as to why you are where you are and where you are going and why. If you have boys (and this is an important one) they must never, never be alone in a room with a black woman! And they should never accept an invitation into a black woman's house nor a ride in a black woman's car, no matter what! Teach your children to speak slowly and to use simple English so no one will think they're putting on airs. It will be a good idea to answer most questions with a simple, 'I don't know,' even when your children do know. This way the black children won't think your kids are being uppity. If your children do some little job for a black family to earn a little money, when the job is done, accept whatever money is offered regardless of what might have been agreed to at the beginning (remember no eye contact!). A simple, 'Thank you, ma'am.' with your head down at an appropriately subserviant angle. Oh and wait until they close the door, never ever turn your back on your employer. Cultivate friendships with several black children so your children might have a companion to accompany them when they have to go out. This will reduce the likelihood other black children may harass them. These are simple rules but they've stood the test of time. I'm sure LAM's children will get the hang of it.
michaelryerson
Showing posts with label michaelryerson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label michaelryerson. Show all posts
06 November 2008
27 April 2008
Owning a gun is a right, getting sick is a privilege.
Owning a gun is a right, getting sick is a privilege.
by MichaelRyerson
04/27/2008, 1:44 PM #
The United States is the only industrialized nation that does not guarantee access to health care as a right of citizenship. 28 industrialized nations have single payer universal health care systems, while 1 (Germany) has a multipayer universal health care system like President Clinton proposed for the United States.
Myth One: The United States has the best health care system in the world.
1.Fact One: The United States ranks 23rd in infant mortality, down from 12th in 1960 and 21st in 1990
Fact Two: The United States ranks 20th in life expectancy for women down from 1st in 1945 and 13th in 1960
Fact Three: The United States ranks 21st in life expectancy for men down from 1st in 1945 and 17th in 1960.
Fact Four: The United States ranks between 50th and 100th in immunizations depending on the immunization. Overall US is 67th, right behind Botswana
Fact Five: Outcome studies on a variety of diseases, such as coronary artery disease, and renal failure show the United States to rank below Canada and a wide variety of industrialized nations.
Conclusion: The United States ranks poorly relative to other industrialized nations in health care despite having the best trained health care providers and the best medical infrastructure of any industrialized nation
Myth Two: Universal Health Care Would Be Too Expensive
Fact One: The United States spends at least 40% more per capita on health care than any other industrialized country with universal health care
Fact Two: Federal studies by the Congressional Budget Office and the General Accounting office show that single payer universal health care would save 100 to 200 Billion dollars per year despite covering all the uninsured and increasing health care benefits.
Fact Three: State studies by Massachusetts and Connecticut have shown that single payer universal health care would save 1 to 2 Billion dollars per year from the total medical expenses in those states despite covering all the uninsured and increasing health care benefits
Fact Four: The costs of health care in Canada as a % of GNP, which were identical to the United States when Canada changed to a single payer, universal health care system in 1971, have increased at a rate much lower than the United States, despite the US economy being much stronger than Canada’s.
Conclusion: Single payer universal health care costs would be lower than the current US system due to lower administrative costs. The United States spends 50 to 100% more on administration than single payer systems. By lowering these administrative costs the United States would have the ability to provide universal health care, without managed care, increase benefits and still save money
Myth Three: Universal Health Care Would Deprive Citizens of Needed Services
Fact One: Studies reveal that citizens in universal health care systems have more doctor visits and more hospital days than in the US
Fact Two: Around 30% of Americans have problem accessing health care due to payment problems or access to care, far more than any other industrialized country. About 17% of our population is without health insurance. About 75% of ill uninsured people have trouble accessing/paying for health care.
Fact Three: Comparisons of Difficulties Accessing Care Are Shown To Be Greater In The US Than Canada (see graph)
Fact Four: Access to health care is directly related to income and race in the United States. As a result the poor and minorities have poorer health than the wealthy and the whites.
Fact Five: There would be no lines under a universal health care system in the United States because we have about a 30% oversupply of medical equipment and surgeons, whereas demand would increase about 15%
Conclusion: The US denies access to health care based on the ability to pay. Under a universal health care system all would access care. There would be no lines as in other industrialized countries due to the oversupply in our providers and infrastructure, and the willingness/ability of the United States to spend more on health care than other industrialized nations.
Myth Four: Universal Health Care Would Result In Government Control And Intrusion Into Health Care Resulting In Loss Of Freedom Of Choice
Fact One: There would be free choice of health care providers under a single payer universal health care system, unlike our current managed care system in which people are forced to see providers on the insurer’s panel to obtain medical benefits
Fact Two: There would be no management of care under a single payer, universal health care system unlike the current managed care system which mandates insurer preapproval for services thus undercutting patient confidentiality and taking health care decisions away from the health care provider and consumer
Fact Three: Although health care providers fees would be set as they are currently in 90% of cases, providers would have a means of negotiating fees unlike the current managed care system in which they are set in corporate board rooms with profits, not patient care, in mind
Fact Four: Taxes, fees and benefits would be decided by the insurer which would be under the control of a diverse board representing consumers, providers, business and government. It would not be a government controlled system, although the government would have to approve the taxes. The system would be run by a public trust, not the government.
Conclusion: Single payer, universal health care administered by a state public health system would be much more democratic and much less intrusive than our current system. Consumers and providers would have a voice in determining benefits, rates and taxes. Problems with free choice, confidentiality and medical decision making would be resolved
Myth Five: Universal Health Care Is Socialized Medicine And Would Be Unacceptable To The Public
Fact One: Single payer universal health care is not socialized medicine. It is health care payment system, not a health care delivery system. Health care providers would be in fee for service practice, and would not be employees of the government, which would be socialized medicine. Single payer health care is not socialized medicine, any more than the public funding of education is socialized education, or the public funding of the defense industry is socialized defense.
Fact Two: Repeated national and state polls have shown that between 60 and 75% of Americans would like a universal health care system (see The Harris Poll #78, October 20, 2005)
Conclusion: Single payer, universal health care is not socialized medicine and would be preferred by the majority of the citizens of this country
Myth Six: The Problems With The US Health Care System Are Being Solved and Are Best Solved By Private Corporate Managed Care Medicine because they are the most efficient
Fact One: Private for profit corporations are the least efficient deliverer of health care. They spend between 20 and 30% of premiums on administration and profits. The public sector is the most efficient. Medicare spends 3% on administration.
Fact Two: The same procedure in the same hospital the year after conversion from not-for profit to for-profit costs in between 20 to 35% more
Fact Three: Health care costs in the United States grew more in the United States under managed care in 1990 to 1996 than any other industrialized nation with single payer universal health care
Fact Four: The quality of health care in the US has deteriorated under managed care. Access problems have increased. The number of uninsured has dramatically increased (increase of 10 million to 43.4 million from 1989 to 1996, increase of 2.4% from 1989 to 1996- 16% in 1996 and increasing each year).
Fact Five: The level of satisfaction with the US health care system is the lowest of any industrialized nation.
Fact Six: 80% of citizens and 71% of doctors believe that managed care has caused quality of care to be compromised
Conclusion: For profit, managed care can not solve the US health care problems because health care is not a commodity that people shop for, and quality of care must always be compromised when the motivating factor for corporations is to save money through denial of care and decreasing provider costs. In addition managed care has introduced problems of patient confidentiality and disrupted the continuity of care through having limited provider networks.
Overall Answer to the questions Why doesn’t the US have single payer universal health care when single payer universal health care is the most efficient, most democratic and most equitable means to deliver health care? Why does the United States remain wedded to an inefficient, autocratic and immoral system that makes health care accessible to the wealthy and not the poor when a vast majority of citizens want it to be a right of citizenship?
Conclusion: Corporations are able to buy politicians through our campaign finance system and control the media to convince people that corporate health care is democratic, represents freedom, and is the most efficient system for delivering health care
cut&pasted in approximately 30 seconds from the internet. when you're ready for the truth it is surprisingly easy to find but as Jack Nicholson famously observed, 'you can't handle the truth.'
by MichaelRyerson
04/27/2008, 1:44 PM #
The United States is the only industrialized nation that does not guarantee access to health care as a right of citizenship. 28 industrialized nations have single payer universal health care systems, while 1 (Germany) has a multipayer universal health care system like President Clinton proposed for the United States.
Myth One: The United States has the best health care system in the world.
1.Fact One: The United States ranks 23rd in infant mortality, down from 12th in 1960 and 21st in 1990
Fact Two: The United States ranks 20th in life expectancy for women down from 1st in 1945 and 13th in 1960
Fact Three: The United States ranks 21st in life expectancy for men down from 1st in 1945 and 17th in 1960.
Fact Four: The United States ranks between 50th and 100th in immunizations depending on the immunization. Overall US is 67th, right behind Botswana
Fact Five: Outcome studies on a variety of diseases, such as coronary artery disease, and renal failure show the United States to rank below Canada and a wide variety of industrialized nations.
Conclusion: The United States ranks poorly relative to other industrialized nations in health care despite having the best trained health care providers and the best medical infrastructure of any industrialized nation
Myth Two: Universal Health Care Would Be Too Expensive
Fact One: The United States spends at least 40% more per capita on health care than any other industrialized country with universal health care
Fact Two: Federal studies by the Congressional Budget Office and the General Accounting office show that single payer universal health care would save 100 to 200 Billion dollars per year despite covering all the uninsured and increasing health care benefits.
Fact Three: State studies by Massachusetts and Connecticut have shown that single payer universal health care would save 1 to 2 Billion dollars per year from the total medical expenses in those states despite covering all the uninsured and increasing health care benefits
Fact Four: The costs of health care in Canada as a % of GNP, which were identical to the United States when Canada changed to a single payer, universal health care system in 1971, have increased at a rate much lower than the United States, despite the US economy being much stronger than Canada’s.
Conclusion: Single payer universal health care costs would be lower than the current US system due to lower administrative costs. The United States spends 50 to 100% more on administration than single payer systems. By lowering these administrative costs the United States would have the ability to provide universal health care, without managed care, increase benefits and still save money
Myth Three: Universal Health Care Would Deprive Citizens of Needed Services
Fact One: Studies reveal that citizens in universal health care systems have more doctor visits and more hospital days than in the US
Fact Two: Around 30% of Americans have problem accessing health care due to payment problems or access to care, far more than any other industrialized country. About 17% of our population is without health insurance. About 75% of ill uninsured people have trouble accessing/paying for health care.
Fact Three: Comparisons of Difficulties Accessing Care Are Shown To Be Greater In The US Than Canada (see graph)
Fact Four: Access to health care is directly related to income and race in the United States. As a result the poor and minorities have poorer health than the wealthy and the whites.
Fact Five: There would be no lines under a universal health care system in the United States because we have about a 30% oversupply of medical equipment and surgeons, whereas demand would increase about 15%
Conclusion: The US denies access to health care based on the ability to pay. Under a universal health care system all would access care. There would be no lines as in other industrialized countries due to the oversupply in our providers and infrastructure, and the willingness/ability of the United States to spend more on health care than other industrialized nations.
Myth Four: Universal Health Care Would Result In Government Control And Intrusion Into Health Care Resulting In Loss Of Freedom Of Choice
Fact One: There would be free choice of health care providers under a single payer universal health care system, unlike our current managed care system in which people are forced to see providers on the insurer’s panel to obtain medical benefits
Fact Two: There would be no management of care under a single payer, universal health care system unlike the current managed care system which mandates insurer preapproval for services thus undercutting patient confidentiality and taking health care decisions away from the health care provider and consumer
Fact Three: Although health care providers fees would be set as they are currently in 90% of cases, providers would have a means of negotiating fees unlike the current managed care system in which they are set in corporate board rooms with profits, not patient care, in mind
Fact Four: Taxes, fees and benefits would be decided by the insurer which would be under the control of a diverse board representing consumers, providers, business and government. It would not be a government controlled system, although the government would have to approve the taxes. The system would be run by a public trust, not the government.
Conclusion: Single payer, universal health care administered by a state public health system would be much more democratic and much less intrusive than our current system. Consumers and providers would have a voice in determining benefits, rates and taxes. Problems with free choice, confidentiality and medical decision making would be resolved
Myth Five: Universal Health Care Is Socialized Medicine And Would Be Unacceptable To The Public
Fact One: Single payer universal health care is not socialized medicine. It is health care payment system, not a health care delivery system. Health care providers would be in fee for service practice, and would not be employees of the government, which would be socialized medicine. Single payer health care is not socialized medicine, any more than the public funding of education is socialized education, or the public funding of the defense industry is socialized defense.
Fact Two: Repeated national and state polls have shown that between 60 and 75% of Americans would like a universal health care system (see The Harris Poll #78, October 20, 2005)
Conclusion: Single payer, universal health care is not socialized medicine and would be preferred by the majority of the citizens of this country
Myth Six: The Problems With The US Health Care System Are Being Solved and Are Best Solved By Private Corporate Managed Care Medicine because they are the most efficient
Fact One: Private for profit corporations are the least efficient deliverer of health care. They spend between 20 and 30% of premiums on administration and profits. The public sector is the most efficient. Medicare spends 3% on administration.
Fact Two: The same procedure in the same hospital the year after conversion from not-for profit to for-profit costs in between 20 to 35% more
Fact Three: Health care costs in the United States grew more in the United States under managed care in 1990 to 1996 than any other industrialized nation with single payer universal health care
Fact Four: The quality of health care in the US has deteriorated under managed care. Access problems have increased. The number of uninsured has dramatically increased (increase of 10 million to 43.4 million from 1989 to 1996, increase of 2.4% from 1989 to 1996- 16% in 1996 and increasing each year).
Fact Five: The level of satisfaction with the US health care system is the lowest of any industrialized nation.
Fact Six: 80% of citizens and 71% of doctors believe that managed care has caused quality of care to be compromised
Conclusion: For profit, managed care can not solve the US health care problems because health care is not a commodity that people shop for, and quality of care must always be compromised when the motivating factor for corporations is to save money through denial of care and decreasing provider costs. In addition managed care has introduced problems of patient confidentiality and disrupted the continuity of care through having limited provider networks.
Overall Answer to the questions Why doesn’t the US have single payer universal health care when single payer universal health care is the most efficient, most democratic and most equitable means to deliver health care? Why does the United States remain wedded to an inefficient, autocratic and immoral system that makes health care accessible to the wealthy and not the poor when a vast majority of citizens want it to be a right of citizenship?
Conclusion: Corporations are able to buy politicians through our campaign finance system and control the media to convince people that corporate health care is democratic, represents freedom, and is the most efficient system for delivering health care
cut&pasted in approximately 30 seconds from the internet. when you're ready for the truth it is surprisingly easy to find but as Jack Nicholson famously observed, 'you can't handle the truth.'
08 February 2006
MichaelRyerson - The Fishermen
Subject: The Fishermen
From: MichaelRyerson
Date: Feb 8 2006 2:56PM
The boy sits up, wrinkling his face
in that frown of self awareness,
waiting to come full awake,
licks his lips and looks out
at the sun slanting in at near horizontal.
'Hey,' I say
and he smiles at the rearview mirror,
'Hey,' he answers in a whisper.
We pass two bait shops on the right,
fishermen in baseball caps leaning
against their pick-up trucks drinking
coffee from styrofoam cups.
'Live Bait, licenses and tackle,
finger mullets, live shrimp,
coffee, donuts and soft drinks,
ICE!' the signs say...
a ragged, bone-colored hound
pisses on a tire
and beyond the clapboard buildings,
in the back bay,
a couple of rust-stained runabouts
rise and fall on a gentle swell,
riding their anchor chains.
03 February 2006
An open letter to locdog
Subject: An open letter to locdog
From: MichaelRyerson
Date: Feb 3 2006 8:48AM
Well, you're gone. If you're to be believed, one last time, you are now pulling on a uniform every morning. I've decided to post this letter to you now because there were still things to be said but I didn't want to talk to you. Talking to you had ceased being fun a couple of years ago. I'm not going to say good luck nor bon voyage nor thanks, I said all those things the first time you announced your imminent departure, and the second time and I was still saying some of them the third time. By the fourth going away party, I was starting to feel vaguely cheated, my arm sore from throwing confetti, my face tired from smiling that smile of gratitude saved for when the 'boys' go marching by. No, I thought the time had arrived to return the wedding gifts, call back the wedding invitations, cancel the caterer. The wedding was off, locdog was the runaway bride. But now you say you're 'in' and I'm willing to believe you one last time.
If it's true, you've begun to learn a few things you only suspected until now. At 28 you're too old. Doesn't seem fair does it? 28, too old. But the kids will be quicker and will heal faster and you can't do anything about it. Physically, you're going to work your ass off just to stay in the middle of the pack. Get used to it. Your advantage, if you have one, is maturity. You should 'see' things clearer than the kids, should understand the implications before they do. You should get a jump on the ball, a little head start. But just a little one. Don't waste it.
You are now seeing the reality of what 'the service' means in a way you never appreciated before. You raised your hand, took the oath and control of your life passed from your hands to the hands of an absolute stranger and, in some instances, a stranger who does not necessarily have your best interests at heart. You will look up, periodically, and find yourself taking orders from some mouth-breathing fucker who can't cut it on the outside, so he's hiding out in the service and now you're his meat. You'll see your welfare, maybe your very survival, depends on this prick making good decisions and he doesn't look like he could work his way through the menu down at the local Denny's. It will take your breath away.
You are going to see things and places you've only imagined. The reality will surprise you. You'll be struck at how completely different they are. How daydreaming about things, how theorizing, how hearing stories about things is no substitute for doing them. This should broaden you, should soften your view of the world, give you pause when you are ready to argue about what's right and wrong. You should begin to suspect you don't know everything, after all. 'Certainty' will make you uncomfortable. This is what should happen but there are no guarantees. I worry about you, worry about your doctrinaire view of the world. You may come back a renaissance man or a martinet. The issue is in doubt.
And finally, let me make you a promise. You are not forgotten. As control of your life passed into the hands of that stranger, a little corner of that control passed into my hands, too. You see, in a democracy, you are now my responsibility. Of The People, by The People and for The People is not an empty phrase. You are in my 'service'. I will do my best to raise a reasoned and persistent voice in your defense when I think unscrupulous men are unnecessarily placing you in danger. I will hold them accountable. I will be your advocate.
http://fray.slate.com/?id=3936&m=16812522
From: MichaelRyerson
Date: Feb 3 2006 8:48AM
Well, you're gone. If you're to be believed, one last time, you are now pulling on a uniform every morning. I've decided to post this letter to you now because there were still things to be said but I didn't want to talk to you. Talking to you had ceased being fun a couple of years ago. I'm not going to say good luck nor bon voyage nor thanks, I said all those things the first time you announced your imminent departure, and the second time and I was still saying some of them the third time. By the fourth going away party, I was starting to feel vaguely cheated, my arm sore from throwing confetti, my face tired from smiling that smile of gratitude saved for when the 'boys' go marching by. No, I thought the time had arrived to return the wedding gifts, call back the wedding invitations, cancel the caterer. The wedding was off, locdog was the runaway bride. But now you say you're 'in' and I'm willing to believe you one last time.
If it's true, you've begun to learn a few things you only suspected until now. At 28 you're too old. Doesn't seem fair does it? 28, too old. But the kids will be quicker and will heal faster and you can't do anything about it. Physically, you're going to work your ass off just to stay in the middle of the pack. Get used to it. Your advantage, if you have one, is maturity. You should 'see' things clearer than the kids, should understand the implications before they do. You should get a jump on the ball, a little head start. But just a little one. Don't waste it.
You are now seeing the reality of what 'the service' means in a way you never appreciated before. You raised your hand, took the oath and control of your life passed from your hands to the hands of an absolute stranger and, in some instances, a stranger who does not necessarily have your best interests at heart. You will look up, periodically, and find yourself taking orders from some mouth-breathing fucker who can't cut it on the outside, so he's hiding out in the service and now you're his meat. You'll see your welfare, maybe your very survival, depends on this prick making good decisions and he doesn't look like he could work his way through the menu down at the local Denny's. It will take your breath away.
You are going to see things and places you've only imagined. The reality will surprise you. You'll be struck at how completely different they are. How daydreaming about things, how theorizing, how hearing stories about things is no substitute for doing them. This should broaden you, should soften your view of the world, give you pause when you are ready to argue about what's right and wrong. You should begin to suspect you don't know everything, after all. 'Certainty' will make you uncomfortable. This is what should happen but there are no guarantees. I worry about you, worry about your doctrinaire view of the world. You may come back a renaissance man or a martinet. The issue is in doubt.
And finally, let me make you a promise. You are not forgotten. As control of your life passed into the hands of that stranger, a little corner of that control passed into my hands, too. You see, in a democracy, you are now my responsibility. Of The People, by The People and for The People is not an empty phrase. You are in my 'service'. I will do my best to raise a reasoned and persistent voice in your defense when I think unscrupulous men are unnecessarily placing you in danger. I will hold them accountable. I will be your advocate.
http://fray.slate.com/?id=3936&m=16812522
31 January 2006
10 November 2005
230 candles. Semper Fidelis.
Subject: 230 candles. Semper Fidelis.
From: MichaelRyerson
Date: Nov 10 2005 12:57PM
Today, all over the world, Marines will eat birthday cake. It is being baked this morning on every Navy ship and in every mess hall in the Marine Corps. It will be placed on every table where a Marine comes for dinner. It will be placed in green tins and sealed against the flying dust or the rain and carried in trucks or helicopters or simply by hand, to every Marine who can be reached, and they will eat cake today.
It's hard to explain these things. I can't really remember a time I didn't want to be a Marine. I was raised in a family surrounded by veterans. My father and all of my uncles, most of the men who lived on our block had been in WWII. Every man who worked in my father's grocery store had been in the war except Charlie the baker who was too old and John Toyama and Art Yuba who had lost everything they owned and been sent to Manzanar. John and May's daughter Casey had been born at the county fair grounds where they were held before the buses took them up north. But mostly the men in my childhood had served. Lots of tattoos and a scar or two but very few stories except when my uncle Dick was around and then we'd all force him to tell some of his funny stories. And once in a while, my uncle Bob would say something about North Africa. But that was all. I guess that's how it starts. Little boys are wired that way.
So today they'll have their cake. Some of them will look up and be surprised that they weren't forgotten, that somebody took the time to bag up those little green tins and ride a helicopter or a truck out to their foxhole or bunker so they could have a piece of overly sweet white cake.
It's hard to explain these things. My bus pulled through the main gate at MCRD, San Diego at about 10 o'clock on a Friday evening, passed under the Spanish arches, swung left and skirted the parade ground and came to a stop in front of the receiving barracks. We were like sightseers, tourists, everybody craning their necks, looking around, talking excitedly, until a drill instructor stepped onto the bus and shouted, 'Shut your fucking mouths! Now clear this bus!' Total silence. Guy next to me looked like he'd been punched in the gut.
In the next three hours, we boxed up our civilian clothes, took our first Marine Corps shower, pulled on our first baggy green uniforms and stood in line to get our haircuts, eight chairs, no waiting, fifteen seconds under the cutters, three seconds under the air hose and out the hatch to your left and get on the yellow footprints. Except when we cleared the hatch, a drill instructor stopped us from getting on the yellow footprints.
He stood in the dark street with his hands on his hips and watched us form into a crowd at the edge of the light from inside the barbershop.
'Do not stand on my yellow footprints. Stay off of them,' he said. There was some whispering and he shouted, 'Shut the fuck up! Just stand there like the mob you are.' When we'd all come out, he said, 'Now listen up, scum! You're a sad fucking bunch. I see fear in your faces and confusion and I can see some of you are feeling sorry for yourselves already. Here three whole fucking hours and already feeling sorry for yourselves! Well, let's get something straight. I want you to look at these foot prints and I want you to know they've been here all along, from the fucking beginning. Year after year, generations of boots have stepped onto these footprints. When we get you stinking civilians in here, we have to have a way to start the process and it starts right here with these footprints. When you step onto them you're going to form up into an actual formation, a platoon. The footprints are here because you can't do it by yourself and we don't have the time to go through all the words it would take to get you into an actual, fucking formation, so we have these foot prints painted on the ground. From now on, every single time you form up, this is how you'll form up, in this shape, with this spacing. When I, or one of your other D.I.'s, call you out, this is how we want to find you. But there's something else these footprints should tell you. When you're feeling sorry for yourself, that it's oh so hard, that maybe you made a mistake, that you won't make it, remember this, thousands of men have passed through here, thousands of men who wanted that uniform just as bad as you want it and they made it and they started by stepping onto these painted footprints. Men headed for China, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and then the men headed for the Solomon Islands, Guadalcanal, Tarawa and yes, Iwo Jima. Some of the feet that stepped onto these footprints were later wrapped in rags and walked out over the ice of the Chosin Reservoir carrying their dead and wounded. Those men were here once looking at these footprints. Now you will stop being civilians and start trying to be Marines. Form up!' And he stepped back, out of the way and we moved onto the footprints. I found myself in the first rank, second man from the left. I looked down at the painted footprints one last time and he grumbled, 'Turn to the right, forward march!...'
Two days later, we got our dog tags. No big deal. We were told to slip them around our necks and feed them into our shirts and get back to work. That night, after lights out, I could hear guys pulling them out and looking at them. In the dark, I could just barely see mine, four lines embossed on thin metal. Name, service number and blood type, religious affiliation and the fourth line, four letters, USMC. In the dark, I ran my thumb over and over those four letters.
Two years later, I sat in a bunker on the south face of Charlie 2 with fifteen other Marines and listened to the artillery shells impacting Con Thien to our north. The deep 'whump, whump, whump' went on and on. They had been taking nearly a thousand rounds a day, every day. Someone finally muttered, 'Jesus!' and the explosions just continued. By this time, we were getting shelled everyday and when they paused with Con Thien, we knew it would take the gunners in North Vietnam about four minutes and then we'd start to take incoming. Guys gathered in the doorways of the bunker and waited. 'Whump, whump, whump, whump' I looked over at Spike and he just shook his head. 'Whump, whump' and then silence. I swallowed. It was our turn. A couple of guys skidded through the door, looking for a place to sit it out. Then another guy comes running in dragging a duffle bag. Outside someone yells 'incoming' and then a moment of absolute silence, then three enormous explosions and the bunker shudders and dirt cascades from the roof and we all sit quietly taking it...the air coursing with more impacts, everybody mainlining adrenaline. Eight minutes, ten, maybe more. Someone outside yells for a Corpsman, Doc John moves to the door and waits for just a second, 'Whump, whump...' and he disappears out into the battery, wiremen crouching in the doorway hesitate and then leave to find and repair broken communications wire. The shelling goes on. Whump, whump...Then finally a shell explodes outside the bunker door and then the quiet and we all wait listening...ten seconds, fifteen, thirty...is it over? I find Spike and he shrugs. They've done this before. We wait a little longer, my ears ringing like fuckers. Finally someone looks at the guy with the duffel bag and says, 'Where ya goin'?' and everybody laughs. But he smiles and loosens the top of the bag and reaches in and pulls out a bent green tin of birthday cake. In the bag, he's got twenty five pieces of birthday cake.
It's hard to explain these things.
http://fray.slate.com/?id=3936&m=16173325
From: MichaelRyerson
Date: Nov 10 2005 12:57PM
Today, all over the world, Marines will eat birthday cake. It is being baked this morning on every Navy ship and in every mess hall in the Marine Corps. It will be placed on every table where a Marine comes for dinner. It will be placed in green tins and sealed against the flying dust or the rain and carried in trucks or helicopters or simply by hand, to every Marine who can be reached, and they will eat cake today.
It's hard to explain these things. I can't really remember a time I didn't want to be a Marine. I was raised in a family surrounded by veterans. My father and all of my uncles, most of the men who lived on our block had been in WWII. Every man who worked in my father's grocery store had been in the war except Charlie the baker who was too old and John Toyama and Art Yuba who had lost everything they owned and been sent to Manzanar. John and May's daughter Casey had been born at the county fair grounds where they were held before the buses took them up north. But mostly the men in my childhood had served. Lots of tattoos and a scar or two but very few stories except when my uncle Dick was around and then we'd all force him to tell some of his funny stories. And once in a while, my uncle Bob would say something about North Africa. But that was all. I guess that's how it starts. Little boys are wired that way.
So today they'll have their cake. Some of them will look up and be surprised that they weren't forgotten, that somebody took the time to bag up those little green tins and ride a helicopter or a truck out to their foxhole or bunker so they could have a piece of overly sweet white cake.
It's hard to explain these things. My bus pulled through the main gate at MCRD, San Diego at about 10 o'clock on a Friday evening, passed under the Spanish arches, swung left and skirted the parade ground and came to a stop in front of the receiving barracks. We were like sightseers, tourists, everybody craning their necks, looking around, talking excitedly, until a drill instructor stepped onto the bus and shouted, 'Shut your fucking mouths! Now clear this bus!' Total silence. Guy next to me looked like he'd been punched in the gut.
In the next three hours, we boxed up our civilian clothes, took our first Marine Corps shower, pulled on our first baggy green uniforms and stood in line to get our haircuts, eight chairs, no waiting, fifteen seconds under the cutters, three seconds under the air hose and out the hatch to your left and get on the yellow footprints. Except when we cleared the hatch, a drill instructor stopped us from getting on the yellow footprints.
He stood in the dark street with his hands on his hips and watched us form into a crowd at the edge of the light from inside the barbershop.
'Do not stand on my yellow footprints. Stay off of them,' he said. There was some whispering and he shouted, 'Shut the fuck up! Just stand there like the mob you are.' When we'd all come out, he said, 'Now listen up, scum! You're a sad fucking bunch. I see fear in your faces and confusion and I can see some of you are feeling sorry for yourselves already. Here three whole fucking hours and already feeling sorry for yourselves! Well, let's get something straight. I want you to look at these foot prints and I want you to know they've been here all along, from the fucking beginning. Year after year, generations of boots have stepped onto these footprints. When we get you stinking civilians in here, we have to have a way to start the process and it starts right here with these footprints. When you step onto them you're going to form up into an actual formation, a platoon. The footprints are here because you can't do it by yourself and we don't have the time to go through all the words it would take to get you into an actual, fucking formation, so we have these foot prints painted on the ground. From now on, every single time you form up, this is how you'll form up, in this shape, with this spacing. When I, or one of your other D.I.'s, call you out, this is how we want to find you. But there's something else these footprints should tell you. When you're feeling sorry for yourself, that it's oh so hard, that maybe you made a mistake, that you won't make it, remember this, thousands of men have passed through here, thousands of men who wanted that uniform just as bad as you want it and they made it and they started by stepping onto these painted footprints. Men headed for China, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and then the men headed for the Solomon Islands, Guadalcanal, Tarawa and yes, Iwo Jima. Some of the feet that stepped onto these footprints were later wrapped in rags and walked out over the ice of the Chosin Reservoir carrying their dead and wounded. Those men were here once looking at these footprints. Now you will stop being civilians and start trying to be Marines. Form up!' And he stepped back, out of the way and we moved onto the footprints. I found myself in the first rank, second man from the left. I looked down at the painted footprints one last time and he grumbled, 'Turn to the right, forward march!...'
Two days later, we got our dog tags. No big deal. We were told to slip them around our necks and feed them into our shirts and get back to work. That night, after lights out, I could hear guys pulling them out and looking at them. In the dark, I could just barely see mine, four lines embossed on thin metal. Name, service number and blood type, religious affiliation and the fourth line, four letters, USMC. In the dark, I ran my thumb over and over those four letters.
Two years later, I sat in a bunker on the south face of Charlie 2 with fifteen other Marines and listened to the artillery shells impacting Con Thien to our north. The deep 'whump, whump, whump' went on and on. They had been taking nearly a thousand rounds a day, every day. Someone finally muttered, 'Jesus!' and the explosions just continued. By this time, we were getting shelled everyday and when they paused with Con Thien, we knew it would take the gunners in North Vietnam about four minutes and then we'd start to take incoming. Guys gathered in the doorways of the bunker and waited. 'Whump, whump, whump, whump' I looked over at Spike and he just shook his head. 'Whump, whump' and then silence. I swallowed. It was our turn. A couple of guys skidded through the door, looking for a place to sit it out. Then another guy comes running in dragging a duffle bag. Outside someone yells 'incoming' and then a moment of absolute silence, then three enormous explosions and the bunker shudders and dirt cascades from the roof and we all sit quietly taking it...the air coursing with more impacts, everybody mainlining adrenaline. Eight minutes, ten, maybe more. Someone outside yells for a Corpsman, Doc John moves to the door and waits for just a second, 'Whump, whump...' and he disappears out into the battery, wiremen crouching in the doorway hesitate and then leave to find and repair broken communications wire. The shelling goes on. Whump, whump...Then finally a shell explodes outside the bunker door and then the quiet and we all wait listening...ten seconds, fifteen, thirty...is it over? I find Spike and he shrugs. They've done this before. We wait a little longer, my ears ringing like fuckers. Finally someone looks at the guy with the duffel bag and says, 'Where ya goin'?' and everybody laughs. But he smiles and loosens the top of the bag and reaches in and pulls out a bent green tin of birthday cake. In the bag, he's got twenty five pieces of birthday cake.
It's hard to explain these things.
http://fray.slate.com/?id=3936&m=16173325
21 April 2005
A short comment on spitting.
Subject: A short comment on spitting.
From: MichaelRyerson
Date: Apr 21 2005 3:45PM
Happened to catch this morning's interview on The Today Show (with MattLaurer&KatieCouric) with Michael A. Smith, who is in the news for having stood in a bookstore line for 90 minutes so that he could spit a mouthful of tobacco juice in Jane Fonda's face. He was unrepentent, saying when he returned from Vietnam through LAX in Los Angeles, he was confronted with a 'line of anti-war protestors who proceeded to spit on me'. His grievance with Ms. Fonda is, of course, for her ill-conceived trip/photo-op to North Vietnam at the height of the war. One photograph shows her sitting, laughing, on an anti-aircraft gun, surrounded by her amused and delighted hosts. It was, and remains, a hurtful image to most vets. It seems the sleek Ms. Fonda, who has led a materially privileged life, suffers from a remarkable paucity of taste and decorum but has now, with a book to hawk, come to her senses and recognises that grainy photograph and the trip it frames, to have been a monumental lapse of judgement (although, I must say, one is hard pressed to find sufficient evidence that she's displayed good judgement frequently enough to make this occasion a 'lapse'). In any event, she's now sorry and can't we all be friends and just read a good book ('like, for instance, this one I'm holding') or maybe aerobicize together. But I really don't have a problem with Jane and, frankly, I didn't have a problem with her back when she took her trip to North Vietnam. I didn't much care one way or the other. She's always seemed kinda transparent to me, she still does. But Mr. Smith is another kettle of fish. I don't know if he's really a Vietnam veteran or not. He's 54 which puts him at the youngish margin for having served in the Nam but it's possible. This morning, he was wearing a sweatshirt with an embroidered Eagle,Globe&Anchor and the word 'Marines' under it. So I guess he's saying he was in the Marine Corps. I don't know, maybe. But this makes it even more difficult for him to have been in the Nam because in 1972-73 (he'd have been 18) there were few Marines left in South Vietnam but like I say it's possible. And I hope so because in the next few days, people are going to be digging into his background. It will be simple enough to find his service records and then we'll all know if he went to Vietnam and in which branch he served. My problem with Mr. Smith is his story about the lines of anti-war protestors he found waiting for him at LAX and that they 'spit' on him. I came back from overseas through Los Angeles and no one spit on me, there were no lines of antiwar protestors and if truth be told, no one seemed to notice me at all even though I was wearing a dress uniform with appropriate rank insignia and ribbons. No one even glanced at me. Further I'll say this, if anyone had spit on me (or at me) there'd have been an old fashioned melee, someone would have needed stitches and I'd have spent some time in the brig. I don't know where that part of Mr. Smith's story is. Did he just 'take it' passively? In all my friends who are veterans, we've heard this spitting story over and over again and none of us had a similar experience, not one. And if returning Vietnam vets had been faced with this kind of treatment at the airport, I'd have gone down to the airport to be with them and I wouldn't have gone alone. But no such incidents were reported in the Los Angeles Times, no local news anchor mentioned it, Los Angeles Police and airport security make no mention of it in their histories of the period. In fact, no such story appears in the New York Times either. It was a bad time for the country.
Even after all these years, its still painful to think about. But if we're going to think about it and talk about it, let's keep it real. Mr. Smith says he was acting on behalf of all Vietnam veterans upon whom Ms. Fonda spit all those years ago. Well, he's not doing it on my behalf, I'll be responsible for my own dance card, thank you very much. I think Jane Fonda and her opinion about Vietnam are and were nearly irrelevant. I can't imagine standing in a line for an hour and a half to be close to her for any reason. I think Mr. Smith needs to get over it and move on.
http://fray.slate.msn.com/?id=3936&m=14450054
Subject: the spitting urban legend
From: Fracas
Date: Apr 21 2005 3:55PM
Sociologist Jerry Lembcke who wrote The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam thinks that it didn't. When a NYT columnist repeated the story in 2000, Lembcke challenged it:
I faxed a letter to the Times letters' editor saying that, "in research for my book….I found no evidence that such incidents ever took place. It would have been impossible for protesters with rotten vegetables to get close to a wounded soldier returning from Vietnam." I pointed out that, "stories of spat-upon veterans are apocryphal. They discredit the Americans who opposed the war and help construct an alibi for why we lost, namely, that we were betrayed on the home front by disloyal fifth columnists." My letter was never printed.
Subject: I got a kick out of Sean Hannity last night..
From: Jack_Dallas
Date: Apr 21 2005 4:26PM
He kept showing pictures of Fonda sitting on the AA Battery and called it a "Tank".
I hate the bitch, but I wouldn't stand in line for an hour and a half to see someone I like, much less someone I detest, just to tell her off. We do need to move on.
Our side lost, Fonda's, Kerry's and Ramsey Clark's side won. Let's get over it.
Jack
Subject: RE: A short comment on spitting.
From: zinya
Date: Apr 21 2005 4:32PM
hi rye,
thanks much for this posting. And for any of us who have followed and 'absorbed' your past postings about your vietnam years, i know and appreciate (well, as much as a contemporary who angsted from these shores, not those could) what it represents to you to relive those experiences and their fractured counter-interpretations then and still now...
Part of my response to your post is already in my reply above to Fracas' post.
What i decided to add here is that i had first-hand experience with something related which i can attest is NOT 'urban myth': In 1976, i volunteered in the US Senate campaign of Tom Hayden, already then married to Jane Fonda, an ultimately losing campaign. But one afternoon after work during the primary campaign, i was standing on the street in Westwood handing our campaign brochures, and out of the blue a relatively petite clearly upper-middle-class, well-dressed woman spit at ME as she looked at our signs for Hayden, seethed out the words "Jane Fonda" and her spittle landed at my feet. It was stunning.
Such was the venom then .. and i dare say the chances of more than just this one woman turning their hatred for Jane Fonda into their own spittings on whoever they came to view by association as the 'internal enemy' (us liberals!! eek!!) made me wonder to what extent the stories of servicemen being spit on were, instead, projections as 'cover stories' over conduct which instead was going in the opposite direction, toward -- not from -- the "left." Maybe my experience was a fairly isolated experience, i don't know, and it only happened once, most stunningly because of the appearance of 'decorum' from which it spewed ...
again, rye, a heartfelt appreciation for the thoughtful sincerity of your post ... good to see ya.
Subject: RE: I've no idea whether or not anyone
From: Ele_
Date: Apr 21 2005 4:56PM
sput on veterans upon their return from Vietnam. Yet, even if someone did this is no excuse for a man to spit on an old lady - and that's what Ms. Fonda is, regardless of her facelifts - thirty years later. I hope she will press charges and the brute will get something other than probation.
Having said that, I shall breathlessly wait for this top poster's article condemning delinquents who have thrown pies at Ms. Coulter
Subject: I heartily condemn anyone who would waste
From: MichaelRyerson
Date: Apr 21 2005 6:19PM
a pie on Ms. Coulter. There, take a breath.
Subject: RE: A short comment on spitting.
From: GeminiToo
Date: Apr 21 2005 5:48PM
I don't remember hearing about protesters spitting on vets until many years after the fact (in the eighties, I think). I knew a number of vets who returned and none of them reported being spat on. I also do not remember any contemporaneous reports of spitting, and I'm sure given the passions back then such incidents would have been reported had they occurred.
Subject: Well,
From: HawkEye
Date: Apr 21 2005 7:58PM
The Department of Veterans Affairs can't seem to find independent corroboration (or any Police Reports) for Vietnam Veterans getting "Spit On" upon returning to the United States of America.
There are Vietnam Veterans who "claim" (in more ways than one, as they file a claim for it) they were Spit On though... and say that they can no longer sleep well at ngiht thinking about it, or work, so they would like to be Service Connected for the injury suffered.... which they believe falls under PTSD. It does seem to have messed up Michael Smith, I wonder if he is getting Tax Payer Funds for the "Event"?
You know, a guy just off the plane from Vietnam getting spit on would most likely cause a little trouble... and there would have been a Report.... and strangely enough it is Republicans (or those who openly support Republicans) who most often report getting "Spit On" you would think they would have fought back a little bit.
HawkEye
From: MichaelRyerson
Date: Apr 21 2005 3:45PM
Happened to catch this morning's interview on The Today Show (with MattLaurer&KatieCouric) with Michael A. Smith, who is in the news for having stood in a bookstore line for 90 minutes so that he could spit a mouthful of tobacco juice in Jane Fonda's face. He was unrepentent, saying when he returned from Vietnam through LAX in Los Angeles, he was confronted with a 'line of anti-war protestors who proceeded to spit on me'. His grievance with Ms. Fonda is, of course, for her ill-conceived trip/photo-op to North Vietnam at the height of the war. One photograph shows her sitting, laughing, on an anti-aircraft gun, surrounded by her amused and delighted hosts. It was, and remains, a hurtful image to most vets. It seems the sleek Ms. Fonda, who has led a materially privileged life, suffers from a remarkable paucity of taste and decorum but has now, with a book to hawk, come to her senses and recognises that grainy photograph and the trip it frames, to have been a monumental lapse of judgement (although, I must say, one is hard pressed to find sufficient evidence that she's displayed good judgement frequently enough to make this occasion a 'lapse'). In any event, she's now sorry and can't we all be friends and just read a good book ('like, for instance, this one I'm holding') or maybe aerobicize together. But I really don't have a problem with Jane and, frankly, I didn't have a problem with her back when she took her trip to North Vietnam. I didn't much care one way or the other. She's always seemed kinda transparent to me, she still does. But Mr. Smith is another kettle of fish. I don't know if he's really a Vietnam veteran or not. He's 54 which puts him at the youngish margin for having served in the Nam but it's possible. This morning, he was wearing a sweatshirt with an embroidered Eagle,Globe&Anchor and the word 'Marines' under it. So I guess he's saying he was in the Marine Corps. I don't know, maybe. But this makes it even more difficult for him to have been in the Nam because in 1972-73 (he'd have been 18) there were few Marines left in South Vietnam but like I say it's possible. And I hope so because in the next few days, people are going to be digging into his background. It will be simple enough to find his service records and then we'll all know if he went to Vietnam and in which branch he served. My problem with Mr. Smith is his story about the lines of anti-war protestors he found waiting for him at LAX and that they 'spit' on him. I came back from overseas through Los Angeles and no one spit on me, there were no lines of antiwar protestors and if truth be told, no one seemed to notice me at all even though I was wearing a dress uniform with appropriate rank insignia and ribbons. No one even glanced at me. Further I'll say this, if anyone had spit on me (or at me) there'd have been an old fashioned melee, someone would have needed stitches and I'd have spent some time in the brig. I don't know where that part of Mr. Smith's story is. Did he just 'take it' passively? In all my friends who are veterans, we've heard this spitting story over and over again and none of us had a similar experience, not one. And if returning Vietnam vets had been faced with this kind of treatment at the airport, I'd have gone down to the airport to be with them and I wouldn't have gone alone. But no such incidents were reported in the Los Angeles Times, no local news anchor mentioned it, Los Angeles Police and airport security make no mention of it in their histories of the period. In fact, no such story appears in the New York Times either. It was a bad time for the country.
Even after all these years, its still painful to think about. But if we're going to think about it and talk about it, let's keep it real. Mr. Smith says he was acting on behalf of all Vietnam veterans upon whom Ms. Fonda spit all those years ago. Well, he's not doing it on my behalf, I'll be responsible for my own dance card, thank you very much. I think Jane Fonda and her opinion about Vietnam are and were nearly irrelevant. I can't imagine standing in a line for an hour and a half to be close to her for any reason. I think Mr. Smith needs to get over it and move on.
http://fray.slate.msn.com/?id=3936&m=14450054
Subject: the spitting urban legend
From: Fracas
Date: Apr 21 2005 3:55PM
Sociologist Jerry Lembcke who wrote The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam thinks that it didn't. When a NYT columnist repeated the story in 2000, Lembcke challenged it:
I faxed a letter to the Times letters' editor saying that, "in research for my book….I found no evidence that such incidents ever took place. It would have been impossible for protesters with rotten vegetables to get close to a wounded soldier returning from Vietnam." I pointed out that, "stories of spat-upon veterans are apocryphal. They discredit the Americans who opposed the war and help construct an alibi for why we lost, namely, that we were betrayed on the home front by disloyal fifth columnists." My letter was never printed.
Subject: I got a kick out of Sean Hannity last night..
From: Jack_Dallas
Date: Apr 21 2005 4:26PM
He kept showing pictures of Fonda sitting on the AA Battery and called it a "Tank".
I hate the bitch, but I wouldn't stand in line for an hour and a half to see someone I like, much less someone I detest, just to tell her off. We do need to move on.
Our side lost, Fonda's, Kerry's and Ramsey Clark's side won. Let's get over it.
Jack
Subject: RE: A short comment on spitting.
From: zinya
Date: Apr 21 2005 4:32PM
hi rye,
thanks much for this posting. And for any of us who have followed and 'absorbed' your past postings about your vietnam years, i know and appreciate (well, as much as a contemporary who angsted from these shores, not those could) what it represents to you to relive those experiences and their fractured counter-interpretations then and still now...
Part of my response to your post is already in my reply above to Fracas' post.
What i decided to add here is that i had first-hand experience with something related which i can attest is NOT 'urban myth': In 1976, i volunteered in the US Senate campaign of Tom Hayden, already then married to Jane Fonda, an ultimately losing campaign. But one afternoon after work during the primary campaign, i was standing on the street in Westwood handing our campaign brochures, and out of the blue a relatively petite clearly upper-middle-class, well-dressed woman spit at ME as she looked at our signs for Hayden, seethed out the words "Jane Fonda" and her spittle landed at my feet. It was stunning.
Such was the venom then .. and i dare say the chances of more than just this one woman turning their hatred for Jane Fonda into their own spittings on whoever they came to view by association as the 'internal enemy' (us liberals!! eek!!) made me wonder to what extent the stories of servicemen being spit on were, instead, projections as 'cover stories' over conduct which instead was going in the opposite direction, toward -- not from -- the "left." Maybe my experience was a fairly isolated experience, i don't know, and it only happened once, most stunningly because of the appearance of 'decorum' from which it spewed ...
again, rye, a heartfelt appreciation for the thoughtful sincerity of your post ... good to see ya.
Subject: RE: I've no idea whether or not anyone
From: Ele_
Date: Apr 21 2005 4:56PM
sput on veterans upon their return from Vietnam. Yet, even if someone did this is no excuse for a man to spit on an old lady - and that's what Ms. Fonda is, regardless of her facelifts - thirty years later. I hope she will press charges and the brute will get something other than probation.
Having said that, I shall breathlessly wait for this top poster's article condemning delinquents who have thrown pies at Ms. Coulter
Subject: I heartily condemn anyone who would waste
From: MichaelRyerson
Date: Apr 21 2005 6:19PM
a pie on Ms. Coulter. There, take a breath.
Subject: RE: A short comment on spitting.
From: GeminiToo
Date: Apr 21 2005 5:48PM
I don't remember hearing about protesters spitting on vets until many years after the fact (in the eighties, I think). I knew a number of vets who returned and none of them reported being spat on. I also do not remember any contemporaneous reports of spitting, and I'm sure given the passions back then such incidents would have been reported had they occurred.
Subject: Well,
From: HawkEye
Date: Apr 21 2005 7:58PM
The Department of Veterans Affairs can't seem to find independent corroboration (or any Police Reports) for Vietnam Veterans getting "Spit On" upon returning to the United States of America.
There are Vietnam Veterans who "claim" (in more ways than one, as they file a claim for it) they were Spit On though... and say that they can no longer sleep well at ngiht thinking about it, or work, so they would like to be Service Connected for the injury suffered.... which they believe falls under PTSD. It does seem to have messed up Michael Smith, I wonder if he is getting Tax Payer Funds for the "Event"?
You know, a guy just off the plane from Vietnam getting spit on would most likely cause a little trouble... and there would have been a Report.... and strangely enough it is Republicans (or those who openly support Republicans) who most often report getting "Spit On" you would think they would have fought back a little bit.
HawkEye
31 March 2005
Terri's gift.
Subject: Terri's gift.
From: MichaelRyerson
Date: Mar 31 2005 10:48AM
In thinking about this all-too-public tragedy, I'm struck with the one thing to come out of this, that will have a positive effect regardless of the manuvering to appropriate Terri Schiavo to one special interest group or another. I already see some commentators characterizing those saddened by her death as being primarily, or maybe even exclusively, those who had opposed her husband. I see that here on the fray. As though those of us who recognised his rights and responsibilities as her guardian weren't also deeply effected by her circumstances. We've seen this same manuver where support for the troops is concerned, that one must be a war supporter to really and truly support the troops. And now they will all pile on Terri's wasted corpse, twisting this way and that, looking for the most effective use of a new ensign. It will be a sad display in and of itself but it will not rival the profound sadness of her passing. And what 'good' can possibly come out of all this, what good that we can all share? Just this...we have all, as individuals now quietly contemplated how these personal, private tragedies play out, how long it takes to die without food or water, how resolute the living must be, we've considered in our own private moments what must be going on in the lives so closely associated with a severely injured, largely vegetative loved one. We've thought about these things in a personal way and thanks to Terri, we weren't able to simply turn away. We're all the better for it.
http://fray.slate.msn.com/?id=3936&m=14264871
From: MichaelRyerson
Date: Mar 31 2005 10:48AM
In thinking about this all-too-public tragedy, I'm struck with the one thing to come out of this, that will have a positive effect regardless of the manuvering to appropriate Terri Schiavo to one special interest group or another. I already see some commentators characterizing those saddened by her death as being primarily, or maybe even exclusively, those who had opposed her husband. I see that here on the fray. As though those of us who recognised his rights and responsibilities as her guardian weren't also deeply effected by her circumstances. We've seen this same manuver where support for the troops is concerned, that one must be a war supporter to really and truly support the troops. And now they will all pile on Terri's wasted corpse, twisting this way and that, looking for the most effective use of a new ensign. It will be a sad display in and of itself but it will not rival the profound sadness of her passing. And what 'good' can possibly come out of all this, what good that we can all share? Just this...we have all, as individuals now quietly contemplated how these personal, private tragedies play out, how long it takes to die without food or water, how resolute the living must be, we've considered in our own private moments what must be going on in the lives so closely associated with a severely injured, largely vegetative loved one. We've thought about these things in a personal way and thanks to Terri, we weren't able to simply turn away. We're all the better for it.
http://fray.slate.msn.com/?id=3936&m=14264871
13 January 2005
The Prisoner
Subject: The Prisoner
From: MichaelRyerson
Date: Jan 13 2005 8:57AM
THE PRISONER
I could hear the chopper. I could see the grunts coming up the hill with the kid trussed up; stumbling, blindfolded, head bent forward, elbows wired behind his back.
Rod came over: they got a prisoner this morning, he said. Who? The guys over on the knoll, they got a prisoner from the probe last night, found him in their wire this morning. Is he wounded? No, I don't think he's hurt at all. How the fuck did they do that? I don't know, all I know is they got him and they need to get him back to Dong Ha, turn him over to the VN Marines for questioning. Yeah, I laughed; the VN Marines and the spooks. Rod frowned and shook his head, yeah, probably the spooks, too.
Hey Chris, pop a smoke will ya? Chris looked up at us and nodded, reached up and pulled a smoke grenade from his suspender strap, pulled the pin and underhanded it onto the LZ. Yellow smoke billowed up and drifted quickly off to the south.
Rod lit a cigarette. They're going to kill him, sure as shit. Yeah - maybe. No maybe. Remember when we took that woman down to their barracks in Quang Tri and turned her over? Did you see the cells? How many were there, five, maybe, six? And how many prisoners do you think we gave them during Hastings? Twenty, thirty? Where the hell do you think they went? They went in the ground, man, in the fucking ground. The French taught them how, they question them and then they squeeze them and question them some more and when they're done, they go in a hole.
The Huey came up the valley about fifty feet above the trees, fast, maybe 70, 80 knots, then rose up and swung across our position in a wide arc with the starboard door facing straight down. He leveled off about a quarter mile to the south and came in quick with the sun glinting off the canopy and a guy hanging out the starboard door grinning. Christiansen stood at the north side of the LZ holding his rifle up over his head with both hands. The pilot dropped his tail to scrape off some speed and the yellow smoke separated into two symmetrical columns curling up into the rotor wash. The skids came to within an inch of the ground and paused before they settled down.
So they drop this kid's blindfold so he can help get into the chopper and I see he's about sixteen and his eyes are flying all over the place. And the grunts are talking to the crew chief and he's nodding and they're pointing at me. And Rod comes over and says they're going to have you escort him to the rear and turn him over. I glance at the kid with the wild eyes and know he's going to be beaten senseless and there isn't a fucking thing I can do about it. Maybe he'll talk real quick and they'll just blow his brains out. But maybe he thinks he's a tough guy or worse, maybe he doesn't know anything, and they have to be sure they've got everything he's got, so they hurt him, use the hotwires, smother him with the wet mask, beat him with the canes, revive him and punch him bloody until somebody decides he's got no more to give.
It's different with dead people, you know, different with corpses. You forget about their politics, forget about them being mean or stupid or eating with their mouth open, forget that maybe you didn't like them very much. On the ground they just seem, well, dead, like you're kinda looking at yourself maybe, but like an empty sack, sad, pathetic even. Petty differences are gone. I guess pathos is what's waiting for us all. I remember seeing a guy I knew one time on the ground dead and he had this kind of goofy last name, you know - the kind that he probably got ribbed about a lot but now, on the ground, I could read his last name on his shirt front and there wasn't anything funny about it anymore. Gook bodies are the same, except when you just finished killing them and your blood is still up, like maybe they were trying to kill you, too. So maybe then you take a leak on the body or stub out a butt on them, you know, something to reinforce your disconnectedness from the whole thing. A gesture of disrespect really meant for the living, for anyone who sees the callousness, for your own sense of lawlessness. But even then, after you calm down, when you look at them, you just see a fucking sack of meat, some poor bastard who's never going to laugh or belch or see his home again. And then you have to back up from that real quick, 'cause you can't be looking down into that hole, feeling sorry for anybody. You've got to hold your trim. Can't spend a quiet minute looking 'cause you might see something you'll have to carry around. Yeah, that's it, you've got to look hard 'at' things because you've got to do your job but you can't really afford to 'see' anything, because that's too much to carry around. You've got to see what you need to see to do your job and no more.
But with the prisoners it was really different. They were in your control. They were no longer a threat, past being able to hurt you and if they'd survived the rage of their capture, weren't bleeding to death and no one blew them to kingdom-come, then you had this guy, living and breathing and the question became what do you do with them, what good could they do you? What use were they? Did they have something you needed? How do you get it? And once you've got it, how can you be sure you got it all? And what follows is an ugly fucking business, cold, calculated. No way to avoid what it is; what it really is. This was part of it, business, maybe survival. Nobody talked about it or almost nobody. There's no adrenalin-rush-movie-music to cover up what has to happen, no posturing. This is not God's work.
Then the tail lifts and we rise into a sharp left bank and for a second I think this guy's taking us out the same way he came in and I feel my stomach knotting up and I glance quickly at Rod and he's looking down into the trees and I think we're going to take fire any fucking minute and I feel my buttocks pulling together but then the pilot swings us into a hard right and we climb up the ridge, the green curtain of hardwood trees streaming past the open door and we drop down the other side into the Ngan River Valley and level off just above the treetops and he's cranking at eighty knots and I settle back.
So this kid's going in the chopper with us and nobody's really looking at him and I'm thinking how fucking easy it would be to kick this poor bastard out, save him a lot of pain, save him from a long night under the lights at Dong Ha. How he'd be a lot better off if he'd just been killed last night in the wire and what can we get from this kid that's going to be worth a shit to us anyway. And I glance up at the crew chief and he's looking right into my eyes and he knows exactly what I'm thinking and I know he's thought the same thing before and he shakes his head as if to say it's not worth it, don't even think about it. The rotor wash is pulsing through the open door and this kid's long black hair is swirling around his face and lifting the bottom of the blindfold but he can't see anything except maybe the aluminum deck and the toes of my boots and he's shivering.
Yeah, this is what it's come down to, I'm thinking about murdering him to save him or, more likely, to lessen my own guilt from turning him over to the interrogators. What a noble bastard I am. And what if he knows something, maybe even knows something which seems insignificant to him but when you put it side-by-side with something else, it makes a picture and we avoid being overrun somewhere. Then how noble am I? No, he's going to stand it as long as he can stand it and then he's going into the ground and I'm going to live with it.
Now we're coming up on the mouth of the valley, the east end, the place where the north slope is covered with NVA antiaircraft and heavy machineguns and nobody goes through here at low-level no matter how much airspeed you've got and right on cue we rise up suddenly, pulling pitch, an express elevator, through twenty five hundred, cool air rushing in, three thousand, ears popping, air going cold, and level off at maybe four thousand feet and still pumping hard. LZ Crow is down there someplace, I used to be able to pick it out every time through here but it's harder and harder to see. Hastings was a long time ago and the jungle just keeps taking back the clearings, taking back the LZ's.
We pick up the Cam Lo River, Camp Carroll down below, off to the right, and I flash on one of those 155mm shells coming through the aircraft and I shiver involuntarily. Out the left side, in the distance, I can see dust rising from Charlie Two and beyond it, the dark outline of Con Thien. The kid has settled down, maybe accepting his fate. Do they believe in fate? Do we? Do I? And we start the long descent into Dong Ha, the engine powering back, the pitch lowering, the guy next to me fumbling for a smoke, clicking a Zippo open and, cupping his hands against the wind, taking a long, deep drag, sucking the smoke way down into his lungs with that tiny smile of satisfaction we all save for our private pleasures. I wonder if he realizes that could kill him in twenty or thirty years.
The crew chief grabs the overhead and swings in toward me; we're going to drop these other guys at Dong Ha, his face right up against mine. What? He shouts, we're going to drop these other guys at Dong Ha before we take you on to Quang Tri, he's nodding. Quang Tri? Yeah, they want this guy; he nods toward the prisoner, down there. Okay, I answer not sure how I'm going to get back up to Dong Ha. I look at Rod, Quang Tri, I shout and point at the prisoner and my chest. Rod laughs and says, I'll ride along, don't want you to get lost.
We come to a hover west of Delta Med and settle onto the pad nearest the regimental FSCC. Guys start swinging out, the prisoner moves slightly and I put my hand on his shoulder and he settles back. The door gunner leans out and looks to the rear and speaks into his microphone clearing his side of the aircraft for the pilot, the crew chief leans out on his side and does the same and we lift into a slow bank to the right, across the runway, Rod sitting on my right with the kid on the deck between us. Rod holding the radio between his feet.
I'm going to hell.
http://fray.slate.msn.com/?id=3936&m=13531356
From: MichaelRyerson
Date: Jan 13 2005 8:57AM
THE PRISONER
I could hear the chopper. I could see the grunts coming up the hill with the kid trussed up; stumbling, blindfolded, head bent forward, elbows wired behind his back.
Rod came over: they got a prisoner this morning, he said. Who? The guys over on the knoll, they got a prisoner from the probe last night, found him in their wire this morning. Is he wounded? No, I don't think he's hurt at all. How the fuck did they do that? I don't know, all I know is they got him and they need to get him back to Dong Ha, turn him over to the VN Marines for questioning. Yeah, I laughed; the VN Marines and the spooks. Rod frowned and shook his head, yeah, probably the spooks, too.
Hey Chris, pop a smoke will ya? Chris looked up at us and nodded, reached up and pulled a smoke grenade from his suspender strap, pulled the pin and underhanded it onto the LZ. Yellow smoke billowed up and drifted quickly off to the south.
Rod lit a cigarette. They're going to kill him, sure as shit. Yeah - maybe. No maybe. Remember when we took that woman down to their barracks in Quang Tri and turned her over? Did you see the cells? How many were there, five, maybe, six? And how many prisoners do you think we gave them during Hastings? Twenty, thirty? Where the hell do you think they went? They went in the ground, man, in the fucking ground. The French taught them how, they question them and then they squeeze them and question them some more and when they're done, they go in a hole.
The Huey came up the valley about fifty feet above the trees, fast, maybe 70, 80 knots, then rose up and swung across our position in a wide arc with the starboard door facing straight down. He leveled off about a quarter mile to the south and came in quick with the sun glinting off the canopy and a guy hanging out the starboard door grinning. Christiansen stood at the north side of the LZ holding his rifle up over his head with both hands. The pilot dropped his tail to scrape off some speed and the yellow smoke separated into two symmetrical columns curling up into the rotor wash. The skids came to within an inch of the ground and paused before they settled down.
So they drop this kid's blindfold so he can help get into the chopper and I see he's about sixteen and his eyes are flying all over the place. And the grunts are talking to the crew chief and he's nodding and they're pointing at me. And Rod comes over and says they're going to have you escort him to the rear and turn him over. I glance at the kid with the wild eyes and know he's going to be beaten senseless and there isn't a fucking thing I can do about it. Maybe he'll talk real quick and they'll just blow his brains out. But maybe he thinks he's a tough guy or worse, maybe he doesn't know anything, and they have to be sure they've got everything he's got, so they hurt him, use the hotwires, smother him with the wet mask, beat him with the canes, revive him and punch him bloody until somebody decides he's got no more to give.
It's different with dead people, you know, different with corpses. You forget about their politics, forget about them being mean or stupid or eating with their mouth open, forget that maybe you didn't like them very much. On the ground they just seem, well, dead, like you're kinda looking at yourself maybe, but like an empty sack, sad, pathetic even. Petty differences are gone. I guess pathos is what's waiting for us all. I remember seeing a guy I knew one time on the ground dead and he had this kind of goofy last name, you know - the kind that he probably got ribbed about a lot but now, on the ground, I could read his last name on his shirt front and there wasn't anything funny about it anymore. Gook bodies are the same, except when you just finished killing them and your blood is still up, like maybe they were trying to kill you, too. So maybe then you take a leak on the body or stub out a butt on them, you know, something to reinforce your disconnectedness from the whole thing. A gesture of disrespect really meant for the living, for anyone who sees the callousness, for your own sense of lawlessness. But even then, after you calm down, when you look at them, you just see a fucking sack of meat, some poor bastard who's never going to laugh or belch or see his home again. And then you have to back up from that real quick, 'cause you can't be looking down into that hole, feeling sorry for anybody. You've got to hold your trim. Can't spend a quiet minute looking 'cause you might see something you'll have to carry around. Yeah, that's it, you've got to look hard 'at' things because you've got to do your job but you can't really afford to 'see' anything, because that's too much to carry around. You've got to see what you need to see to do your job and no more.
But with the prisoners it was really different. They were in your control. They were no longer a threat, past being able to hurt you and if they'd survived the rage of their capture, weren't bleeding to death and no one blew them to kingdom-come, then you had this guy, living and breathing and the question became what do you do with them, what good could they do you? What use were they? Did they have something you needed? How do you get it? And once you've got it, how can you be sure you got it all? And what follows is an ugly fucking business, cold, calculated. No way to avoid what it is; what it really is. This was part of it, business, maybe survival. Nobody talked about it or almost nobody. There's no adrenalin-rush-movie-music to cover up what has to happen, no posturing. This is not God's work.
Then the tail lifts and we rise into a sharp left bank and for a second I think this guy's taking us out the same way he came in and I feel my stomach knotting up and I glance quickly at Rod and he's looking down into the trees and I think we're going to take fire any fucking minute and I feel my buttocks pulling together but then the pilot swings us into a hard right and we climb up the ridge, the green curtain of hardwood trees streaming past the open door and we drop down the other side into the Ngan River Valley and level off just above the treetops and he's cranking at eighty knots and I settle back.
So this kid's going in the chopper with us and nobody's really looking at him and I'm thinking how fucking easy it would be to kick this poor bastard out, save him a lot of pain, save him from a long night under the lights at Dong Ha. How he'd be a lot better off if he'd just been killed last night in the wire and what can we get from this kid that's going to be worth a shit to us anyway. And I glance up at the crew chief and he's looking right into my eyes and he knows exactly what I'm thinking and I know he's thought the same thing before and he shakes his head as if to say it's not worth it, don't even think about it. The rotor wash is pulsing through the open door and this kid's long black hair is swirling around his face and lifting the bottom of the blindfold but he can't see anything except maybe the aluminum deck and the toes of my boots and he's shivering.
Yeah, this is what it's come down to, I'm thinking about murdering him to save him or, more likely, to lessen my own guilt from turning him over to the interrogators. What a noble bastard I am. And what if he knows something, maybe even knows something which seems insignificant to him but when you put it side-by-side with something else, it makes a picture and we avoid being overrun somewhere. Then how noble am I? No, he's going to stand it as long as he can stand it and then he's going into the ground and I'm going to live with it.
Now we're coming up on the mouth of the valley, the east end, the place where the north slope is covered with NVA antiaircraft and heavy machineguns and nobody goes through here at low-level no matter how much airspeed you've got and right on cue we rise up suddenly, pulling pitch, an express elevator, through twenty five hundred, cool air rushing in, three thousand, ears popping, air going cold, and level off at maybe four thousand feet and still pumping hard. LZ Crow is down there someplace, I used to be able to pick it out every time through here but it's harder and harder to see. Hastings was a long time ago and the jungle just keeps taking back the clearings, taking back the LZ's.
We pick up the Cam Lo River, Camp Carroll down below, off to the right, and I flash on one of those 155mm shells coming through the aircraft and I shiver involuntarily. Out the left side, in the distance, I can see dust rising from Charlie Two and beyond it, the dark outline of Con Thien. The kid has settled down, maybe accepting his fate. Do they believe in fate? Do we? Do I? And we start the long descent into Dong Ha, the engine powering back, the pitch lowering, the guy next to me fumbling for a smoke, clicking a Zippo open and, cupping his hands against the wind, taking a long, deep drag, sucking the smoke way down into his lungs with that tiny smile of satisfaction we all save for our private pleasures. I wonder if he realizes that could kill him in twenty or thirty years.
The crew chief grabs the overhead and swings in toward me; we're going to drop these other guys at Dong Ha, his face right up against mine. What? He shouts, we're going to drop these other guys at Dong Ha before we take you on to Quang Tri, he's nodding. Quang Tri? Yeah, they want this guy; he nods toward the prisoner, down there. Okay, I answer not sure how I'm going to get back up to Dong Ha. I look at Rod, Quang Tri, I shout and point at the prisoner and my chest. Rod laughs and says, I'll ride along, don't want you to get lost.
We come to a hover west of Delta Med and settle onto the pad nearest the regimental FSCC. Guys start swinging out, the prisoner moves slightly and I put my hand on his shoulder and he settles back. The door gunner leans out and looks to the rear and speaks into his microphone clearing his side of the aircraft for the pilot, the crew chief leans out on his side and does the same and we lift into a slow bank to the right, across the runway, Rod sitting on my right with the kid on the deck between us. Rod holding the radio between his feet.
I'm going to hell.
http://fray.slate.msn.com/?id=3936&m=13531356
13 June 2003
Lyle
Subject: Lyle
From: MichaelRyerson
Date: Jun 13 2003 11:55AM
A captain approached me on the parade ground, 'Sergeant Ryerson?' 'Yessir.' "Your father is on the phone, you can take it in my office.' Having only been back from Vietnam a month, I was surprised my Dad would know how to find me on base. Two young secretaries nodded and smiled at me as I walked through to the captain's office. 'I'll pull this shut for you,' he said and I glanced over my shoulder as he closed me in. I picked up the receiver and heard my Dad's voice, 'Can you take a day or two off?' A persistent morning cough had grown to include most of the day. A long avoided visit to the doctor had resulted in a biopsy. He wanted me to come up and go with him to the doctor's office to discuss the biopsy. The captain had the paperwork done when I opened the door. I drove up that evening.
It was eighty-five and a half miles from my barracks at Camp Pendleton to my father's driveway. Eighty-five miles to think, eighty-five miles to let my mind wander over the years, eighty-five miles to fight the traffic, to cross the distance between what we wish and what we have.
My father was a grocer. He was the least affected man I've ever known. He went to work six days a week, fifty weeks a year for my whole life. He wore dress slacks, white socks and comfortable shoes. His short-sleeved white dress shirt carried a ballpoint pen or two and a pack of Camel cigarettes. Two fingers on his left hand were stained yellow.
You have to understand, when I was a young boy, it was a different world. If you dressed like a thug, you were a thug. Pool halls and bowling alleys were off limits to good girls. The growl of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle meant one of two things, either the police were nearby or you wished they were and the only men who wore earrings were pimps who came out after dark and never left downtown. Tattoos were worn with some story of drunkenness or debauchery or both. If you were a don't-give-a-shit kind of guy, you got your tattoo where a shirt couldn't cover it up and you probably dated a girl you met in a pool hall or a bowling alley. You couldn't buy pre-faded Levis and a guy riding a Harley didn't have a crease ironed into his jeans. Everybody smoked or nearly everybody did and because 'everybody' was a smoker, 'everybody' thought it 'looked' cool and only the ladies smoked the filtered kind. If you were a 'Ford man', when you made a little more money, maybe got a promotion, you moved up to a Mercury. If you were a 'Chevy man' and you found a little success you drove a Pontiac or an Oldsmobile. If the Ford guy got really lucky, a couple of promotions or his business took off, he ended up in a Lincoln. The Chevy guy was, of course shooting for a Cadillac. Morticians and bankers usually drove Buicks. If you were thirsty, you drank directly from a faucet or a garden hose. If you had a bottle with you, it certainly wasn't water and it probably sipped nicely into your hip pocket. Men's shoes had shoelaces. Pigs were farm animals and if you called a policeman, a 'cop', you probably knew how to play eight ball. If it got too hot in your house, you turned on a fan and if it got too hot in your car, you unrolled a window. You learned how to add up a long column of numbers and if the room was quiet, you could do long division, sometimes. The nightly news lasted fifteen minutes, that's all the news, including one minute for weather and three minutes for sports and the same guy did the whole thing. Banks were open from 10 am to 3 pm, four o'clock on Fridays. Mail was delivered twice a day, five days a week, once on Saturdays. If you wanted to talk to your relatives, you wrote a letter. If you got a long-distance phone call it was bad news. Last thing at night, your mom would put out the empty milk bottles with a little note and the next morning she'd bring in fresh milk, orange juice and eggs, if you needed them. Mid morning, the Helms man would blow his harmonic whistle and you could go out, into his truck and buy fresh bread and donuts. When you bought gasoline, guy in a white uniform would come out and start the pump and wash your windshield. He'd always ask if you wanted him to check your water and oil and he'd lean back and eyeball your tires to see if they needed some air. If you wanted to pump your own gas, it was okay, he'd come out anyway and do your windshield and the rest or he'd just stand there with you and shoot the breeze. If your hair touched your collar, you were down on your luck. Cup of coffee's a nickel and every time you got it cooled down a bit, girl comes by and fills it back up. Bowl of soup's a dime, soda crackers are free, chili 15 cents, soda crackers are still free, pork chops with corn, mashed potatoes and applesauce maybe 45 and you could find a steak dinner for 95 cents easy. Sold a lot of chili. When your car was caught at a railroad crossing gate, you would bet your little brother how many boxcars would pass before you'd see some men standing in a dark doorway, sneaking a ride. Sometimes he'd win, sometimes you'd win but you never saw a freight train without seeing those men sitting or standing in the doorways of the boxcars.
My father had served in the Navy during the war, his baseball days over because of a bad shoulder, which he had hidden from the Navy recruiter. My mother worked at Lockheed Aircraft Company installing radios in bombers. When I was born, my parents were poor. Not poverty stricken but not middle-class either. Not even lower middle-class. I think the fashionable term now would be working poor.
We lived in an apartment one block below Sunset Boulevard about a mile west of downtown Los Angeles. The Alfred Lee Apartments, a brick building, maybe six stories, on Descanso Drive. My father worked days at the Owl-Rexall Drug Store and at night, he drove a yellow taxicab. My mother kept house.
I didn't know we were poor. I don't think such a thing would have occurred to me. We were happy, I think, never missed a meal that I can remember and usually had money for an ice cream cone at the park where we walked on Sundays. But we also ate potato soup for dinner at least once a week or my mother would crush saltine crackers into a can of salmon and make patties.
At breakfast, my Dad would sleep as long as possible and come to the table at the last minute, but he would still have stories about driving the taxi the night before and then he'd leave for the drug store. When he would come home for dinner, before he had to go to the taxi barn on 3rd Street, he would stand in the doorway of the kitchen and tell my mother stories about his day, who he'd met, funny things that had happened at work.
One morning, he talked about driving a man all the way out to the airport in Inglewood. How this man had talked about going into business and how he was on the lookout for a smart young guy and maybe my Dad was that guy. Well, my Dad was easy to talk to and he was always hearing about some big scheme or another, so he didn't think too much about this guy. But when this guy left on his plane, he told my Dad he'd call him when he got back from San Francisco and about two weeks later, he did.
My parents were surprised. This man came to our apartment for dinner. We had spaghetti. He seemed nice and had lots of ideas and talked a lot. The next Sunday, he picked my Dad up in his car, a Ford station wagon, and they went looking for a building. It took two weeks but they finally found a building they thought would work. They opened a grocery store and my father learned the grocery business.
He kept driving that taxi every night. A year later, my brother was born and we moved into a duplex on Monroe Street near Wilton Place. My uncle Bob, who had been in the Army in North Africa, bought one side of the duplex and we bought the other. My dad quit the cab company.
In these days, we would sometimes walk up to the little diner on Santa Monica Boulevard, across from Sears Roebuck, and have dinner. My favorite times were when we'd sit at the counter and watch the cook fix our dinner right there in front of us. Once when my Dad paid the bill at the cash register, he gave the waitress too much money and she tried to give some back to him. But he just smiled and nodded down the counter toward some old guy who was eating alone and she smiled right back at him and said okay. This old guy had a bundle of rags tied with a belt sitting under his stool and I asked if we could stay around and watch him when he found out he'd gotten a free dinner but my Dad said no, it wasn't any of our business. When I asked him why it wasn't any of our business, my Dad sort of laughed and said it just wasn't. I had to think about that for a long time. I had to think about dignity and charity and why we do things.
I came back from Vietnam a hard man. Not a tough man but hard, able to hear bad news, to focus on probabilities and avoid panic. I had seen death and dying and learned not to let them in. It is a crude, necessary art. It is a dehumanizing art.
The doctor's office was on the ground floor of a nondescript hospital squatting behind an acre of broken asphalt, a hard afternoon sun glinting off of glass and steel. The interior hallway was dark and cold. My father said I'm glad you're home and I said I was too. The door was solid and heavy and closed silently on a stainless steel return. We sat down, the doctor took a breath, I saw it coming.
'Six months' he said. It hung in the air on hooks of disbelief. My mind raced, looking for another meaning in those familiar words. "Six months, I'm sorry.' He said some other things but mostly I heard, 'Six months.' And, oh yeah, he said, 'Maybe.' I didn't blink. I felt my father look at me and I know I looked focused, calm even, and in control. I asked one or two surprisingly intelligent questions. I didn't listen to the answers. I felt my stomach opening up, hot blood pouring across my knees onto the floor. I didn't flinch.
On the ride home, he said, 'This is going to be hard.' I glanced at him and he said, 'No one's to know. This is just between us, you and me.' I don't remember the rest of the drive.
We spent the next two months in a sea of casual excuses as to why we'd dropped in on rarely visited friends. As his body weight dropped, he went through a cruel moment when he was the picture of health. People would comment on how well he looked, that he was taking care of himself and how they wished they could lose some weight. He'd just laugh and say to watch what you eat. Until, finally one Sunday morning, I came by to pick him up and he said, not this morning. His shirt seemed too big. He was looking drawn. He was becoming less sure of himself. We'll stay home today, he said. We didn't go visiting again.
I remember one time, when I was a kid, on our way home from my grandfather's house, my Dad picked up a hitchhiker, an older guy with gray hair curling down over his collar, carrying a bundle tied with some rope. When he got in the back seat with us kids, I noticed his collar was frayed and stained and he sat on the edge of the seat, like he didn't want to get the car dirty. My mother got real quiet and just sort of looked out the side window. But my Dad and this guy talked about traveling and the weather and work. Seems like they'd been a lot of the same places. Anyway, it was kind of late at night but we went out of our way to drop him off down by Union Station and the Terminal Annex building. At night, there wasn't much of anything going on in that part of town, just the stockyards and the railroad switching yards. So he gets out of the car and says goodbye to us kids and my mom. And my Dad gets out too and they talk for a minute or two off to the side of the road and I see my Dad give him some money, maybe a couple of dollars. As we drove away, I watched him out the back window until he went down the slope toward the stockyards. I asked my Dad if he was a bum and my Dad said no, just a guy down on his luck.
In his last days, my father would sit in his room and gaze out into the backyard. I would sit near him and sometimes hold his hand. His favorite thing was when our two adult cats would chase each other and tumble, wrestling on the lawn. They were littermates and although they were fully-grown they apparently took great pleasure in stalking each other and would spend several minutes each afternoon, rolling and tumbling on the grass. He loved watching.
I sometimes think about the last time we do things. You know, sometimes you don't know it's going to be the last time and you don't pay attention and later you're sorry and wish you'd known you weren't going to be in that place again or see that person again and, if you'd known, you'd have paid real close attention and gotten every bit out of that last time. I wonder when the last time was we played baseball barefoot on a summer day and didn't know it was going to be the last time, or the last time I saw Mr. Ankrum walking to work at the studios. I wish I could remember the last time I heard my mother and father laughing together. I wish I'd told Ed he reminded me of my grandfather. They sold the grocery store. Strangers run it now. I wish I could remember the last time I sat on the counter with my Dad, drinking a cold soda. That's the way it is with last times, they happen and you don't know it and you just go on until, one day, you look back and they're hard to remember.
We buried my father on a Tuesday. The cortege stretched out two miles. He was just a grocer.
From: MichaelRyerson
Date: Jun 13 2003 11:55AM
A captain approached me on the parade ground, 'Sergeant Ryerson?' 'Yessir.' "Your father is on the phone, you can take it in my office.' Having only been back from Vietnam a month, I was surprised my Dad would know how to find me on base. Two young secretaries nodded and smiled at me as I walked through to the captain's office. 'I'll pull this shut for you,' he said and I glanced over my shoulder as he closed me in. I picked up the receiver and heard my Dad's voice, 'Can you take a day or two off?' A persistent morning cough had grown to include most of the day. A long avoided visit to the doctor had resulted in a biopsy. He wanted me to come up and go with him to the doctor's office to discuss the biopsy. The captain had the paperwork done when I opened the door. I drove up that evening.
It was eighty-five and a half miles from my barracks at Camp Pendleton to my father's driveway. Eighty-five miles to think, eighty-five miles to let my mind wander over the years, eighty-five miles to fight the traffic, to cross the distance between what we wish and what we have.
My father was a grocer. He was the least affected man I've ever known. He went to work six days a week, fifty weeks a year for my whole life. He wore dress slacks, white socks and comfortable shoes. His short-sleeved white dress shirt carried a ballpoint pen or two and a pack of Camel cigarettes. Two fingers on his left hand were stained yellow.
You have to understand, when I was a young boy, it was a different world. If you dressed like a thug, you were a thug. Pool halls and bowling alleys were off limits to good girls. The growl of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle meant one of two things, either the police were nearby or you wished they were and the only men who wore earrings were pimps who came out after dark and never left downtown. Tattoos were worn with some story of drunkenness or debauchery or both. If you were a don't-give-a-shit kind of guy, you got your tattoo where a shirt couldn't cover it up and you probably dated a girl you met in a pool hall or a bowling alley. You couldn't buy pre-faded Levis and a guy riding a Harley didn't have a crease ironed into his jeans. Everybody smoked or nearly everybody did and because 'everybody' was a smoker, 'everybody' thought it 'looked' cool and only the ladies smoked the filtered kind. If you were a 'Ford man', when you made a little more money, maybe got a promotion, you moved up to a Mercury. If you were a 'Chevy man' and you found a little success you drove a Pontiac or an Oldsmobile. If the Ford guy got really lucky, a couple of promotions or his business took off, he ended up in a Lincoln. The Chevy guy was, of course shooting for a Cadillac. Morticians and bankers usually drove Buicks. If you were thirsty, you drank directly from a faucet or a garden hose. If you had a bottle with you, it certainly wasn't water and it probably sipped nicely into your hip pocket. Men's shoes had shoelaces. Pigs were farm animals and if you called a policeman, a 'cop', you probably knew how to play eight ball. If it got too hot in your house, you turned on a fan and if it got too hot in your car, you unrolled a window. You learned how to add up a long column of numbers and if the room was quiet, you could do long division, sometimes. The nightly news lasted fifteen minutes, that's all the news, including one minute for weather and three minutes for sports and the same guy did the whole thing. Banks were open from 10 am to 3 pm, four o'clock on Fridays. Mail was delivered twice a day, five days a week, once on Saturdays. If you wanted to talk to your relatives, you wrote a letter. If you got a long-distance phone call it was bad news. Last thing at night, your mom would put out the empty milk bottles with a little note and the next morning she'd bring in fresh milk, orange juice and eggs, if you needed them. Mid morning, the Helms man would blow his harmonic whistle and you could go out, into his truck and buy fresh bread and donuts. When you bought gasoline, guy in a white uniform would come out and start the pump and wash your windshield. He'd always ask if you wanted him to check your water and oil and he'd lean back and eyeball your tires to see if they needed some air. If you wanted to pump your own gas, it was okay, he'd come out anyway and do your windshield and the rest or he'd just stand there with you and shoot the breeze. If your hair touched your collar, you were down on your luck. Cup of coffee's a nickel and every time you got it cooled down a bit, girl comes by and fills it back up. Bowl of soup's a dime, soda crackers are free, chili 15 cents, soda crackers are still free, pork chops with corn, mashed potatoes and applesauce maybe 45 and you could find a steak dinner for 95 cents easy. Sold a lot of chili. When your car was caught at a railroad crossing gate, you would bet your little brother how many boxcars would pass before you'd see some men standing in a dark doorway, sneaking a ride. Sometimes he'd win, sometimes you'd win but you never saw a freight train without seeing those men sitting or standing in the doorways of the boxcars.
My father had served in the Navy during the war, his baseball days over because of a bad shoulder, which he had hidden from the Navy recruiter. My mother worked at Lockheed Aircraft Company installing radios in bombers. When I was born, my parents were poor. Not poverty stricken but not middle-class either. Not even lower middle-class. I think the fashionable term now would be working poor.
We lived in an apartment one block below Sunset Boulevard about a mile west of downtown Los Angeles. The Alfred Lee Apartments, a brick building, maybe six stories, on Descanso Drive. My father worked days at the Owl-Rexall Drug Store and at night, he drove a yellow taxicab. My mother kept house.
I didn't know we were poor. I don't think such a thing would have occurred to me. We were happy, I think, never missed a meal that I can remember and usually had money for an ice cream cone at the park where we walked on Sundays. But we also ate potato soup for dinner at least once a week or my mother would crush saltine crackers into a can of salmon and make patties.
At breakfast, my Dad would sleep as long as possible and come to the table at the last minute, but he would still have stories about driving the taxi the night before and then he'd leave for the drug store. When he would come home for dinner, before he had to go to the taxi barn on 3rd Street, he would stand in the doorway of the kitchen and tell my mother stories about his day, who he'd met, funny things that had happened at work.
One morning, he talked about driving a man all the way out to the airport in Inglewood. How this man had talked about going into business and how he was on the lookout for a smart young guy and maybe my Dad was that guy. Well, my Dad was easy to talk to and he was always hearing about some big scheme or another, so he didn't think too much about this guy. But when this guy left on his plane, he told my Dad he'd call him when he got back from San Francisco and about two weeks later, he did.
My parents were surprised. This man came to our apartment for dinner. We had spaghetti. He seemed nice and had lots of ideas and talked a lot. The next Sunday, he picked my Dad up in his car, a Ford station wagon, and they went looking for a building. It took two weeks but they finally found a building they thought would work. They opened a grocery store and my father learned the grocery business.
He kept driving that taxi every night. A year later, my brother was born and we moved into a duplex on Monroe Street near Wilton Place. My uncle Bob, who had been in the Army in North Africa, bought one side of the duplex and we bought the other. My dad quit the cab company.
In these days, we would sometimes walk up to the little diner on Santa Monica Boulevard, across from Sears Roebuck, and have dinner. My favorite times were when we'd sit at the counter and watch the cook fix our dinner right there in front of us. Once when my Dad paid the bill at the cash register, he gave the waitress too much money and she tried to give some back to him. But he just smiled and nodded down the counter toward some old guy who was eating alone and she smiled right back at him and said okay. This old guy had a bundle of rags tied with a belt sitting under his stool and I asked if we could stay around and watch him when he found out he'd gotten a free dinner but my Dad said no, it wasn't any of our business. When I asked him why it wasn't any of our business, my Dad sort of laughed and said it just wasn't. I had to think about that for a long time. I had to think about dignity and charity and why we do things.
I came back from Vietnam a hard man. Not a tough man but hard, able to hear bad news, to focus on probabilities and avoid panic. I had seen death and dying and learned not to let them in. It is a crude, necessary art. It is a dehumanizing art.
The doctor's office was on the ground floor of a nondescript hospital squatting behind an acre of broken asphalt, a hard afternoon sun glinting off of glass and steel. The interior hallway was dark and cold. My father said I'm glad you're home and I said I was too. The door was solid and heavy and closed silently on a stainless steel return. We sat down, the doctor took a breath, I saw it coming.
'Six months' he said. It hung in the air on hooks of disbelief. My mind raced, looking for another meaning in those familiar words. "Six months, I'm sorry.' He said some other things but mostly I heard, 'Six months.' And, oh yeah, he said, 'Maybe.' I didn't blink. I felt my father look at me and I know I looked focused, calm even, and in control. I asked one or two surprisingly intelligent questions. I didn't listen to the answers. I felt my stomach opening up, hot blood pouring across my knees onto the floor. I didn't flinch.
On the ride home, he said, 'This is going to be hard.' I glanced at him and he said, 'No one's to know. This is just between us, you and me.' I don't remember the rest of the drive.
We spent the next two months in a sea of casual excuses as to why we'd dropped in on rarely visited friends. As his body weight dropped, he went through a cruel moment when he was the picture of health. People would comment on how well he looked, that he was taking care of himself and how they wished they could lose some weight. He'd just laugh and say to watch what you eat. Until, finally one Sunday morning, I came by to pick him up and he said, not this morning. His shirt seemed too big. He was looking drawn. He was becoming less sure of himself. We'll stay home today, he said. We didn't go visiting again.
I remember one time, when I was a kid, on our way home from my grandfather's house, my Dad picked up a hitchhiker, an older guy with gray hair curling down over his collar, carrying a bundle tied with some rope. When he got in the back seat with us kids, I noticed his collar was frayed and stained and he sat on the edge of the seat, like he didn't want to get the car dirty. My mother got real quiet and just sort of looked out the side window. But my Dad and this guy talked about traveling and the weather and work. Seems like they'd been a lot of the same places. Anyway, it was kind of late at night but we went out of our way to drop him off down by Union Station and the Terminal Annex building. At night, there wasn't much of anything going on in that part of town, just the stockyards and the railroad switching yards. So he gets out of the car and says goodbye to us kids and my mom. And my Dad gets out too and they talk for a minute or two off to the side of the road and I see my Dad give him some money, maybe a couple of dollars. As we drove away, I watched him out the back window until he went down the slope toward the stockyards. I asked my Dad if he was a bum and my Dad said no, just a guy down on his luck.
In his last days, my father would sit in his room and gaze out into the backyard. I would sit near him and sometimes hold his hand. His favorite thing was when our two adult cats would chase each other and tumble, wrestling on the lawn. They were littermates and although they were fully-grown they apparently took great pleasure in stalking each other and would spend several minutes each afternoon, rolling and tumbling on the grass. He loved watching.
I sometimes think about the last time we do things. You know, sometimes you don't know it's going to be the last time and you don't pay attention and later you're sorry and wish you'd known you weren't going to be in that place again or see that person again and, if you'd known, you'd have paid real close attention and gotten every bit out of that last time. I wonder when the last time was we played baseball barefoot on a summer day and didn't know it was going to be the last time, or the last time I saw Mr. Ankrum walking to work at the studios. I wish I could remember the last time I heard my mother and father laughing together. I wish I'd told Ed he reminded me of my grandfather. They sold the grocery store. Strangers run it now. I wish I could remember the last time I sat on the counter with my Dad, drinking a cold soda. That's the way it is with last times, they happen and you don't know it and you just go on until, one day, you look back and they're hard to remember.
We buried my father on a Tuesday. The cortege stretched out two miles. He was just a grocer.
14 June 2002
The Red Chair
Subject: The Red Chair
From: MichaelRyerson-3
Date: Jun 14 2002 7:54AM
My grandfather was a Methodist minister for nearly sixty years. He was a tall, thin, handsome man with a shock of white hair and a quiet bearing which seemed to put people at ease. He had an uncanny ability to remember names and stories and every year sent out nearly five hundred Christmas cards, each with a brief handwritten note sharing some special memory or specific event. I grew up convinced I was his favorite grandson. Later, I found out nearly all of my cousins and my own little brother, felt the same way. When he died, seven of his sons, including my father, gathered at a memorial service in southern California. Three of my uncles delivered eulogies, the Philadelphia Street pastor spoke briefly and then we filed by the open casket. I clearly remember his hands, quiet finally but tanned and strong. Following the service and a short cortege to the train station, he would go back home to Kansas. He would be reunited with his other boys. And with gentle Anna, one final time. They would lie side by side in the country of their youth, where they met, where he was ordained and where they had raised this huge, vibrant collection of sons.
After the service, my father gave me the keys to my grandfather's house. Each of the children was invited to stop by and find some small memento. Several of my cousins had already visited and I was encouraged to stop by in the afternoon. I could take someone with me or go alone but I was to pass the keys on to someone else when I was done. I watched the cars recede in the sharp afternoon sun. I had never seen my father cry.
I decided to go alone.
***********************
My grandfather's faith turned on two events. The first was a consequence of his premature birth in a 'Soddy' on the plains of eastern Kansas. The midwife was startled by his small size. The doctor arrived the next morning and gently observed that there was very little chance he would survive. His mother, my great-grandmother, sat quietly in a big, overstuffed red chair near a pot-bellied stove and sang softly to him and read her bible. She stroked his head and prayed. And prayed some more. After two days, the doctor could find no earthly reason why he had survived and again gave no hope for a successful infancy. She prayed some more. Her songs began to get a little response. She added a hymn or two. She read her bible aloud. She began to read Mary Baker Eddy. She prayed harder. His chest started to move a bit more. He began to sleep just a little more quietly. He cried out loud for the first time and the doctor admitted there was a chance. His eyes began to follow his mother's face. When she would leave for chore work, she would bundle him into that big, red chair and bank the stove with hardwood. He thrived. The family became Christian Scientists.
He grew up surrounded by women. His father died when he was two, so he was raised by his mother and his three older sisters.
The second event happened when he was fifteen. He found his mother face down in a corral with a broken hip. A mule had kicked her as she removed a harness at the end of the day. He managed to carry her into the house and turned to ride for a doctor when a deacon appeared in the doorway. No doctor would be fetched, they would kneel and pray and if her faith was strong enough, she would heal. It took three days for her to slip away. In his desolation, he searched for an answer, for a way to survive this despair. He found John Wesley and Methodism. He found his calling. He was ordained in 1903.
He started out as a circuit rider in eastern Kansas, ministering to eight or nine small towns throughout the week. He rode a horse and camped out along the way. He shot rabbits and cooked over an open fire. He took meals with church families. He spoke in barns and town halls. He performed weddings and baptisms and delivered the Word at funerals. He was regularly paid in ears of corn, live chickens or salted pork. Sometimes, he was paid with a handshake and a 'thank you.' He preached in the open air of camp meetings and in the sweltering heat of the Chautauqua tents. It was a solitary life but not a lonely one. He viewed the Bible as an inexhaustible mine from which riches could be trusted to appear. He found lessons in the people he met, in the books he read and in the life he had chosen. He once lost his way in a blizzard and took shelter in a barn. The next morning he awoke to find three men saddling horses in the barn to go out and look for the preacher. Smiling sheepishly, he stood up and everybody laughed! It became the subject of his sermon. His voice was rich and deep. He learned to use it to be heard over the prairie wind and to keep his parishioners awake. He found his way over narrow trails in failing light and then, as he liked to say, when the good Lord decided he was ready, he found Anna.
They had eleven boys. My father was number six. As the boys approached adolescence, their father would give each a bible quotation by chapter and verse. It might appear as early as ten or eleven or as late as fifteen or sixteen. Each one was unique. Sometimes it would be included on a birthday card, other times it might be discovered written in the margin of their bible. Peter found his on the top of his birthday cake. When my father was fourteen, as he sat fidgeting in the family pew during Sunday services, he began thumbing through his bible. He found his father's handwriting in the margin about halfway back, it said, 'Lyle, James 1:4'. Quickly, he turned to James and found the fourth verse of the first chapter. It read, 'Let patience have its perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing.' He looked up and found his father looking down from the pulpit directly at him and smiling.
When the Dustbowl and the Depression fractured the Midwest and the Second World War separated loved ones, much of the family was drawn down Route 66 to Southern California. Topeka, Parsons and Emporia gave way to Claremont, Pomona and Los Angeles. Muscular railroad towns and dusty farm roads gave way to long ribbons of concrete and asphalt and to sleepy suburbs. Dry Kansas wheat for California orange blossoms.
My grandfather's address was 246 Green Street. When I first learned it, I delighted in it, the obvious progression of twos speaking to a four-year old's desire for order in the world. The house was a study in modesty. A small, white stucco and wood box, plain, unadorned, and unpretentious. It sat on a quiet street facing a large, fallow field in which a dilapidated barn stood leaning amid the fireweed and alphalfa. On the northern edge of that field, hidden behind the unharvested and neglected crops ran the rails of the Southern Pacific. Twice a day, once in the early morning and once in the late afternoon, the Super Chief would thunder by, a great, primordial silver snake, right to left in the morning, arriving from Chicago to deposit folks at Union Station in Los Angeles and left to right in the evening, returning to the upper Midwest three days away. Now I didn't know these things, of course, only that when the far-off horn moaned its warning, I could run and stand in the bay window and watch as this wonder flashed by on its mysterious business. Sometimes my grandmother, sweet and quiet, would come and stand with her hand on my shoulder and watch with me. I know now, that she'd seen this train a thousand times but with me in her bay window, she would enjoy it as though it had never happened before. 'Quicksilver' she would sometimes murmur and give me a hug.
When I was four or five, I went through my 'whirling-dervish' stage. I seemed to touch everything or worse, put everything in my mouth. I would 'taste' anything within reach and tried to use chairs or kitchen stools to extend my reach. I was noisy and singularly disagreeable. My younger brother, of course, always needed an afternoon nap so one Sunday, late in the day I went for a walk with my father and grandfather. Walking between them, I reached up on each side and held their hands. Every few steps I could pull up and lift my feet and swing. We walked slowly down to the corner and back to the front of the house but instead of turning right into the yard, we swung left and crossed the street and entered the edge of the field! This was great! I was never allowed across the street and certainly never into the field. We walked slowly up the dirt road toward the old barn. We passed an old, crooked handled water pump. We stopped and inspected some old chicken coops, which had fallen in the weeds. I picked up some rocks and gave them a fling. In the evening shadows, I found a bottle cap and two empty shells from a .22. I pushed them deep into my pocket and hurried to catch up with my Dad.
We emerged from the field on the edge of the right-of-way. I looked up at my grandfather, he was staring intently toward the eucalyptus and ridgeline shadows, "Not yet", he said. In the dusky twilight the rails shone silver gray running into the shadows of the foothills. "Go and listen to the tracks," my father said and I scrambled up the low bank of the gravel roadbed and bent down, placing my ear against the near rail. The steel was warm and dry. I could hear nothing. I raised my head but my father called out, "No Mick, try it again." I leaned back down and this time there was a slight rumble, I giggled and lifted my head and then listened again, more rumble, deeper. I scrambled down and ran to stand between them, my heart racing.
Far off, a white shaft of light swept across the tracks and swept across again. Loud bells began clanging in panic at the grade crossings. And then came the warning as a breathless, plaintive horn sounded once, twice, three times! A great silver and red Cyclops stood menacing against the twilight! It rose up as on clawed feet unseen and rushed forward, closing the distance with breathtaking speed! I started to pull back but my father bent low, his face close to my ear, 'Stand still, Mick, I have you.' I stood transfixed, my feet rooted, my eyes unblinking! I felt my grandfather's hand close tightly over mine. And in a flash it was on us, the air pocket hitting us at eighty miles an hour! The hair on the back of my neck stood straight up! My heart tried to jump out through my chest! A wall of bright silver ribs thundering by, punctuated with the quaking earth! And then as quickly as it had come, it was gone, the boat tail observation car receding with the startling view of a man in a business suit calmly reading a newspaper in the warm yellow light, getting smaller. I swallowed hard, blinked once and shivered. I felt an immediate sense of being included in something special, something not for little kids. We walked back through the field but this time I stayed right between my father and my grandfather. Somehow, I didn't want to run around.
***********************
Indian Hill Boulevard runs up from the dusty flatlands through boulder-strewn empty riverbeds toward the rocky foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. This landscape is a glacial remnant tending toward coarse sand, scrub oak and sagebrush. The porous soil supports orchards and grape growers but defies most grasses. I unrolled the windows and let the dry afternoon breeze fill the car.
I had come up this road hundreds of times. I watched for the big irrigation well on the left and then counted two more blocks and turned right onto Green Street. Some new houses had been built on part of the field and the old barn had finally fallen down. Far down the street, a stray dog was trotting in the gutter, head down, sniffing for something or someone familiar. I pulled over and coasted up to the curb at number 246. I sat for a moment. The shades were drawn. I marveled at the lack of decoration. Not a scallop nor a curly cue nor the silhouette of a rooster.
Gladiolas, calla lilies and iris near the house, roses on the right, a white concrete walkway dividing a closely trimmed lawn. Dining room windows on the left, bay window on the right. On the left edge of the lawn, a narrow strip of bare earth hosted a row of short wooden stakes upon which small seed envelopes had been stapled, each package indicating what might be expected in that part of the garden. I decided to walk up the right side and admire the chest-high roses. As always, they were magnificent. Reds, pinks and whites but mostly yellow, my grandmother's favorite and although she had been gone many years, the yellow still dominated the garden. I heard a squeak and a screen door slam and looked up to find the neighbor lady coming across her lawn in her Sunday clothes. I took a deep breath. I'm not well suited for these things. We exchanged greetings and she shared her sorrow and expressed her condolences, I smiled and nodded. She wondered about the roses and I assured her that she would be welcome to take a bouquet now and then. My grandfather liked them in the garden but he liked them better in the house. They should be enjoyed. There was an awkward moment. With the roses between us, I felt I was safe but she clearly wanted to hug me. She smiled as she wrestled with this problem and I took the opportunity to say goodbye and retreated toward the house. Behind me, I heard her screen door close.
Near the house, just to the right of the walkway, someone had left a floral wreath on the lawn and several small bouquets. Two yellow rosebuds were draped on the mailbox. On the porch, leaning against the screen door, a child's doll sat with an envelope pinned to her dress. I picked her up and unlocked the door.
**********************
When I stepped into the dim interior, I immediately looked for Buddy. His 'favorite' place was under the lamp table, opposite the door, his cold amber eyes locked on the door and on any stranger who might dare to enter. But under the table only a deep impression in the carpet remained. For a moment, I worried that he had left with someone else but then I turned and saw him staring from the dining room table! He made me smile. I stepped through the archway and lifted him up. I was always surprised at how heavy he was. He had been carved out of solid hardwood and with his dark glass eyes, was the closest a little kid was going to get to a toy in this house. I put him back under the lamp table, where he belonged. I straightened up and turned on the light.
Next to the lamp table, behind the sofa is a long, narrow table displaying eleven small pictures, nine in wooden frames and two in silver. Rosewood, oak, ash and simple pine, I reached out and picked up the one in oak. A lanky, young man in a baggy baseball uniform, my father. I thought about him in that black car with his brothers. I replaced the picture and bent down. Career military, teachers, athletes, tradesmen, a doctor, one silver frame holding the picture of an child lost to a disease long since defeated, another holding a young man lost at twenty-one to an accident. Tears and laughter, a typical family.
It was getting late in the day. I wanted the house to be bright this one last evening, so I began turning on the lights. I flipped on the porch light and the lamp on my grandfather's desk. I went into the dining room. My grandmother had a specific way she liked the shades. So I reached over the side chairs and lifted the front blinds about six inches, exposing the first wooden slat in the window. I turned on the little chandelier over the table. I played with the switches in the service porch until the outside light over the garage door went on. I walked back through the house and stepped out onto the front porch. I could smell the pepper tree and the night blooming jasmine. I crossed the street and started up the dirt road, raising a talcum-fine cloud of dust. Three generations of men in my family have set their time by the railroad. I glanced down at my watch.
Near the tracks, I looked for a familiar place to stand. The roadbed seemed lower now, not so imposing. In the distance, I could hear the grade crossings starting to ring their bells. A bright white light swept across the tracks and I took a deep breath. I thought about the anticipation of a five year old standing here, of how big my grandfather's hand had seemed and how strong. Of hiding behind my father's thigh and wishing I were brave. The engine rose up bigger and bigger, the air horn and the thundering wheels and the bells ringing. I looked up and could see the engineer smiling and then the windows with people reading or eating or sleeping. The ground shook, the wind blowing my hair back, my eyes watering. And in the observation car, a small group of men in dark suits leaned and looked out the side windows across the field toward my grandfather's house and then the man with the red hair stepped back and looked out the rear window directly at me and raised his hand. I slowly raised my hand and he got smaller and smaller as the train pulled him inexorably away. They would be in Kansas tomorrow afternoon.
I walked back through the field, the little dirt road hard to see in the gathering darkness. The house sat like a bright jewel in the twilight. It was easy to hear the voices and the giggling children.
After I had turned off the lights and locked the door, I sat for a long time in my car. I thought about Buddy sitting faithfully in the dark, glaring at the door, about the wax banana with the child's teeth marks in the bowl by the table. And I thought about that old, red chair sitting in the bay window. I hadn't taken anything.
But as I drove away, I knew I had taken it all.
***********************
Six years later, we lost my father to lung cancer. He was 53.
michaelryerson, michael ryerson
From: MichaelRyerson-3
Date: Jun 14 2002 7:54AM
My grandfather was a Methodist minister for nearly sixty years. He was a tall, thin, handsome man with a shock of white hair and a quiet bearing which seemed to put people at ease. He had an uncanny ability to remember names and stories and every year sent out nearly five hundred Christmas cards, each with a brief handwritten note sharing some special memory or specific event. I grew up convinced I was his favorite grandson. Later, I found out nearly all of my cousins and my own little brother, felt the same way. When he died, seven of his sons, including my father, gathered at a memorial service in southern California. Three of my uncles delivered eulogies, the Philadelphia Street pastor spoke briefly and then we filed by the open casket. I clearly remember his hands, quiet finally but tanned and strong. Following the service and a short cortege to the train station, he would go back home to Kansas. He would be reunited with his other boys. And with gentle Anna, one final time. They would lie side by side in the country of their youth, where they met, where he was ordained and where they had raised this huge, vibrant collection of sons.
After the service, my father gave me the keys to my grandfather's house. Each of the children was invited to stop by and find some small memento. Several of my cousins had already visited and I was encouraged to stop by in the afternoon. I could take someone with me or go alone but I was to pass the keys on to someone else when I was done. I watched the cars recede in the sharp afternoon sun. I had never seen my father cry.
I decided to go alone.
***********************
My grandfather's faith turned on two events. The first was a consequence of his premature birth in a 'Soddy' on the plains of eastern Kansas. The midwife was startled by his small size. The doctor arrived the next morning and gently observed that there was very little chance he would survive. His mother, my great-grandmother, sat quietly in a big, overstuffed red chair near a pot-bellied stove and sang softly to him and read her bible. She stroked his head and prayed. And prayed some more. After two days, the doctor could find no earthly reason why he had survived and again gave no hope for a successful infancy. She prayed some more. Her songs began to get a little response. She added a hymn or two. She read her bible aloud. She began to read Mary Baker Eddy. She prayed harder. His chest started to move a bit more. He began to sleep just a little more quietly. He cried out loud for the first time and the doctor admitted there was a chance. His eyes began to follow his mother's face. When she would leave for chore work, she would bundle him into that big, red chair and bank the stove with hardwood. He thrived. The family became Christian Scientists.
He grew up surrounded by women. His father died when he was two, so he was raised by his mother and his three older sisters.
The second event happened when he was fifteen. He found his mother face down in a corral with a broken hip. A mule had kicked her as she removed a harness at the end of the day. He managed to carry her into the house and turned to ride for a doctor when a deacon appeared in the doorway. No doctor would be fetched, they would kneel and pray and if her faith was strong enough, she would heal. It took three days for her to slip away. In his desolation, he searched for an answer, for a way to survive this despair. He found John Wesley and Methodism. He found his calling. He was ordained in 1903.
He started out as a circuit rider in eastern Kansas, ministering to eight or nine small towns throughout the week. He rode a horse and camped out along the way. He shot rabbits and cooked over an open fire. He took meals with church families. He spoke in barns and town halls. He performed weddings and baptisms and delivered the Word at funerals. He was regularly paid in ears of corn, live chickens or salted pork. Sometimes, he was paid with a handshake and a 'thank you.' He preached in the open air of camp meetings and in the sweltering heat of the Chautauqua tents. It was a solitary life but not a lonely one. He viewed the Bible as an inexhaustible mine from which riches could be trusted to appear. He found lessons in the people he met, in the books he read and in the life he had chosen. He once lost his way in a blizzard and took shelter in a barn. The next morning he awoke to find three men saddling horses in the barn to go out and look for the preacher. Smiling sheepishly, he stood up and everybody laughed! It became the subject of his sermon. His voice was rich and deep. He learned to use it to be heard over the prairie wind and to keep his parishioners awake. He found his way over narrow trails in failing light and then, as he liked to say, when the good Lord decided he was ready, he found Anna.
They had eleven boys. My father was number six. As the boys approached adolescence, their father would give each a bible quotation by chapter and verse. It might appear as early as ten or eleven or as late as fifteen or sixteen. Each one was unique. Sometimes it would be included on a birthday card, other times it might be discovered written in the margin of their bible. Peter found his on the top of his birthday cake. When my father was fourteen, as he sat fidgeting in the family pew during Sunday services, he began thumbing through his bible. He found his father's handwriting in the margin about halfway back, it said, 'Lyle, James 1:4'. Quickly, he turned to James and found the fourth verse of the first chapter. It read, 'Let patience have its perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing.' He looked up and found his father looking down from the pulpit directly at him and smiling.
When the Dustbowl and the Depression fractured the Midwest and the Second World War separated loved ones, much of the family was drawn down Route 66 to Southern California. Topeka, Parsons and Emporia gave way to Claremont, Pomona and Los Angeles. Muscular railroad towns and dusty farm roads gave way to long ribbons of concrete and asphalt and to sleepy suburbs. Dry Kansas wheat for California orange blossoms.
My grandfather's address was 246 Green Street. When I first learned it, I delighted in it, the obvious progression of twos speaking to a four-year old's desire for order in the world. The house was a study in modesty. A small, white stucco and wood box, plain, unadorned, and unpretentious. It sat on a quiet street facing a large, fallow field in which a dilapidated barn stood leaning amid the fireweed and alphalfa. On the northern edge of that field, hidden behind the unharvested and neglected crops ran the rails of the Southern Pacific. Twice a day, once in the early morning and once in the late afternoon, the Super Chief would thunder by, a great, primordial silver snake, right to left in the morning, arriving from Chicago to deposit folks at Union Station in Los Angeles and left to right in the evening, returning to the upper Midwest three days away. Now I didn't know these things, of course, only that when the far-off horn moaned its warning, I could run and stand in the bay window and watch as this wonder flashed by on its mysterious business. Sometimes my grandmother, sweet and quiet, would come and stand with her hand on my shoulder and watch with me. I know now, that she'd seen this train a thousand times but with me in her bay window, she would enjoy it as though it had never happened before. 'Quicksilver' she would sometimes murmur and give me a hug.
When I was four or five, I went through my 'whirling-dervish' stage. I seemed to touch everything or worse, put everything in my mouth. I would 'taste' anything within reach and tried to use chairs or kitchen stools to extend my reach. I was noisy and singularly disagreeable. My younger brother, of course, always needed an afternoon nap so one Sunday, late in the day I went for a walk with my father and grandfather. Walking between them, I reached up on each side and held their hands. Every few steps I could pull up and lift my feet and swing. We walked slowly down to the corner and back to the front of the house but instead of turning right into the yard, we swung left and crossed the street and entered the edge of the field! This was great! I was never allowed across the street and certainly never into the field. We walked slowly up the dirt road toward the old barn. We passed an old, crooked handled water pump. We stopped and inspected some old chicken coops, which had fallen in the weeds. I picked up some rocks and gave them a fling. In the evening shadows, I found a bottle cap and two empty shells from a .22. I pushed them deep into my pocket and hurried to catch up with my Dad.
We emerged from the field on the edge of the right-of-way. I looked up at my grandfather, he was staring intently toward the eucalyptus and ridgeline shadows, "Not yet", he said. In the dusky twilight the rails shone silver gray running into the shadows of the foothills. "Go and listen to the tracks," my father said and I scrambled up the low bank of the gravel roadbed and bent down, placing my ear against the near rail. The steel was warm and dry. I could hear nothing. I raised my head but my father called out, "No Mick, try it again." I leaned back down and this time there was a slight rumble, I giggled and lifted my head and then listened again, more rumble, deeper. I scrambled down and ran to stand between them, my heart racing.
Far off, a white shaft of light swept across the tracks and swept across again. Loud bells began clanging in panic at the grade crossings. And then came the warning as a breathless, plaintive horn sounded once, twice, three times! A great silver and red Cyclops stood menacing against the twilight! It rose up as on clawed feet unseen and rushed forward, closing the distance with breathtaking speed! I started to pull back but my father bent low, his face close to my ear, 'Stand still, Mick, I have you.' I stood transfixed, my feet rooted, my eyes unblinking! I felt my grandfather's hand close tightly over mine. And in a flash it was on us, the air pocket hitting us at eighty miles an hour! The hair on the back of my neck stood straight up! My heart tried to jump out through my chest! A wall of bright silver ribs thundering by, punctuated with the quaking earth! And then as quickly as it had come, it was gone, the boat tail observation car receding with the startling view of a man in a business suit calmly reading a newspaper in the warm yellow light, getting smaller. I swallowed hard, blinked once and shivered. I felt an immediate sense of being included in something special, something not for little kids. We walked back through the field but this time I stayed right between my father and my grandfather. Somehow, I didn't want to run around.
***********************
Indian Hill Boulevard runs up from the dusty flatlands through boulder-strewn empty riverbeds toward the rocky foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. This landscape is a glacial remnant tending toward coarse sand, scrub oak and sagebrush. The porous soil supports orchards and grape growers but defies most grasses. I unrolled the windows and let the dry afternoon breeze fill the car.
I had come up this road hundreds of times. I watched for the big irrigation well on the left and then counted two more blocks and turned right onto Green Street. Some new houses had been built on part of the field and the old barn had finally fallen down. Far down the street, a stray dog was trotting in the gutter, head down, sniffing for something or someone familiar. I pulled over and coasted up to the curb at number 246. I sat for a moment. The shades were drawn. I marveled at the lack of decoration. Not a scallop nor a curly cue nor the silhouette of a rooster.
Gladiolas, calla lilies and iris near the house, roses on the right, a white concrete walkway dividing a closely trimmed lawn. Dining room windows on the left, bay window on the right. On the left edge of the lawn, a narrow strip of bare earth hosted a row of short wooden stakes upon which small seed envelopes had been stapled, each package indicating what might be expected in that part of the garden. I decided to walk up the right side and admire the chest-high roses. As always, they were magnificent. Reds, pinks and whites but mostly yellow, my grandmother's favorite and although she had been gone many years, the yellow still dominated the garden. I heard a squeak and a screen door slam and looked up to find the neighbor lady coming across her lawn in her Sunday clothes. I took a deep breath. I'm not well suited for these things. We exchanged greetings and she shared her sorrow and expressed her condolences, I smiled and nodded. She wondered about the roses and I assured her that she would be welcome to take a bouquet now and then. My grandfather liked them in the garden but he liked them better in the house. They should be enjoyed. There was an awkward moment. With the roses between us, I felt I was safe but she clearly wanted to hug me. She smiled as she wrestled with this problem and I took the opportunity to say goodbye and retreated toward the house. Behind me, I heard her screen door close.
Near the house, just to the right of the walkway, someone had left a floral wreath on the lawn and several small bouquets. Two yellow rosebuds were draped on the mailbox. On the porch, leaning against the screen door, a child's doll sat with an envelope pinned to her dress. I picked her up and unlocked the door.
**********************
When I stepped into the dim interior, I immediately looked for Buddy. His 'favorite' place was under the lamp table, opposite the door, his cold amber eyes locked on the door and on any stranger who might dare to enter. But under the table only a deep impression in the carpet remained. For a moment, I worried that he had left with someone else but then I turned and saw him staring from the dining room table! He made me smile. I stepped through the archway and lifted him up. I was always surprised at how heavy he was. He had been carved out of solid hardwood and with his dark glass eyes, was the closest a little kid was going to get to a toy in this house. I put him back under the lamp table, where he belonged. I straightened up and turned on the light.
Next to the lamp table, behind the sofa is a long, narrow table displaying eleven small pictures, nine in wooden frames and two in silver. Rosewood, oak, ash and simple pine, I reached out and picked up the one in oak. A lanky, young man in a baggy baseball uniform, my father. I thought about him in that black car with his brothers. I replaced the picture and bent down. Career military, teachers, athletes, tradesmen, a doctor, one silver frame holding the picture of an child lost to a disease long since defeated, another holding a young man lost at twenty-one to an accident. Tears and laughter, a typical family.
It was getting late in the day. I wanted the house to be bright this one last evening, so I began turning on the lights. I flipped on the porch light and the lamp on my grandfather's desk. I went into the dining room. My grandmother had a specific way she liked the shades. So I reached over the side chairs and lifted the front blinds about six inches, exposing the first wooden slat in the window. I turned on the little chandelier over the table. I played with the switches in the service porch until the outside light over the garage door went on. I walked back through the house and stepped out onto the front porch. I could smell the pepper tree and the night blooming jasmine. I crossed the street and started up the dirt road, raising a talcum-fine cloud of dust. Three generations of men in my family have set their time by the railroad. I glanced down at my watch.
Near the tracks, I looked for a familiar place to stand. The roadbed seemed lower now, not so imposing. In the distance, I could hear the grade crossings starting to ring their bells. A bright white light swept across the tracks and I took a deep breath. I thought about the anticipation of a five year old standing here, of how big my grandfather's hand had seemed and how strong. Of hiding behind my father's thigh and wishing I were brave. The engine rose up bigger and bigger, the air horn and the thundering wheels and the bells ringing. I looked up and could see the engineer smiling and then the windows with people reading or eating or sleeping. The ground shook, the wind blowing my hair back, my eyes watering. And in the observation car, a small group of men in dark suits leaned and looked out the side windows across the field toward my grandfather's house and then the man with the red hair stepped back and looked out the rear window directly at me and raised his hand. I slowly raised my hand and he got smaller and smaller as the train pulled him inexorably away. They would be in Kansas tomorrow afternoon.
I walked back through the field, the little dirt road hard to see in the gathering darkness. The house sat like a bright jewel in the twilight. It was easy to hear the voices and the giggling children.
After I had turned off the lights and locked the door, I sat for a long time in my car. I thought about Buddy sitting faithfully in the dark, glaring at the door, about the wax banana with the child's teeth marks in the bowl by the table. And I thought about that old, red chair sitting in the bay window. I hadn't taken anything.
But as I drove away, I knew I had taken it all.
***********************
Six years later, we lost my father to lung cancer. He was 53.
michaelryerson, michael ryerson
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
