by Dorien Grey
All of the above comes down to the fact that we shouldn’t limit our giving thanks for our gifts to one day in November, but consciously try to make it a part of our everyday lives. And of all our gifts, by far the most important is simply the gift of life. It’s all too soon taken away; so every now and then, it might be a good idea for us all to sit back, think a moment, and truly appreciate what we have.
* * *
THE TROMPE L’OEIL MIND
I seem to be talking a lot about memory of late, but then the more past one has, the more there is to talk about.
Memory is a painting of the past done by the mind. The result may seem totally lifelike, but in fact it is not. The artist takes small liberties, lightening the background here, touching up an area there, sometimes using heavier or darker hues than the actuality warrants. We display these canvases proudly, and are certain that they reality recaptured, when in fact they are trompe l’oeil.
My brief and checkered Navy experience, oddly, provided me with several of my most treasured and vivid of these trompe l’oeil paintings, many of which I have shared in earlier blogs. Perhaps these stand out because my military “career” was so totally different from any of my other life experiences, and because they are all backed up by “certificates of authenticity” in the form of letters written at the exact time (or within days) of the events pictured. But my two of the most outstanding hang in honored places along the walls of my mind.
The first while I was learning to fly as a Naval Aviation Cadet, which has something of a “certificate of authenticity” in the form of one of two years’ worth of kept letters to my parents.
The skies over and within 50 miles of the Pensacola Naval Air Station normally swarm with pilots-in-training, like fruit flies around a bowl of ripe bananas. But on one solo flight, I found myself totally alone in a “valley” surrounded by huge, whipped-cream cumulus clouds. Just me, looping and spinning and soaring between the clouds, and the green quilt of the earth below. I’ve seldom had such a sense of pure joy.
The second is the week before the U.S.S. Ticonderoga, aboard which I was stationed, headed for home after eight months in the Mediterranean, while the ship was anchored off Cannes, France. It, too, is detailed in my navy letters and adds verisimilitude to the memory: days and evenings spent diving and swimming off an old quay with two French and two German young men, dinners at a tiny restaurant found totally by accident high in the hills above the city, walking down the twisting streets late at night singing old WWII songs, seeing the lights of the ships (including the fabled ocean liner, Ile de France) in the harbor below. My chest aches, remembering and wanting to be there/then now.
My main problem with memory, other than its tendency to reposition the elements of whatever picture is being recalled, is that it is too strongly tied in with emotion. As I’ve mentioned, even the most pleasant of memories are tainted by the tangible sense of loss and longing. I can’t just enjoy memories of things and people past, I must reach out to them, and the knowledge that I cannot touch them, cannot relive them, cannot be at that time and in that place, fills me with sadness.
But like Dorian Gray’s portrait in the attic, there are memory paintings best avoided, and we all have many of them, stacked against the wall in some dark, cobwebbed place.
There are also a few memories, as I flip quickly through my enormous collection, that oddly evoke absolutely no response. Primary among them is my seven-week stay at Mayo during my treatment. I remember quite vividly the daily routine: my large, comfortable room at Hope Lodge, provided free by the American Cancer Society, the fact that it did not have a TV set (how ungrateful of me even to think that!)—a deliberate decision on their part, I think, to encourage residents to get out of their rooms and mingle with others—the five-times-a-week two block walk to Radiation Oncology for 25-minute radiation treatments (35 in all); the decision to request a stomach feeding tube when trying to swallow became simply too difficult. I look back on all of it with a very strange detachment and no recognizable emotion at all.
Every moment that passes becomes memory; one more pebble on the beach of time, lying there waiting to be picked up and examined.
* * *
NAVY TALK
Looking backward through time is like peering through a Vaseline’d lens. The sharp edges blur, the harsh colors soften. I look now at my military service with far more fondness than I felt when I was actually experiencing it. Time, indeed, changes all things. Usually for the better, but not always.
Much of the romance seems to have gone out of the Navy. Glorious names for marvelous ships—Enterprise, Valley Forge, Intrepid, Ticonderoga—names which echoed the traditions, power, romance, and adventure of the sea and our American heritage have been replaced with the drab, colorless names of politicians: U.S.S. Ronald Reagan? U.S.S. George Herbert Walker Bush? Come on, those aren’t names for warships, they’re phone book listings! And ships, regardless of their names, have always been referred to as “she.” I find it hard to imagine the crew of the Reagan or the Bush referring to their ships as “she.”
The navy has always had a language of its own, and I’d assume much of it remains the same as when I was in. Rumors are “scuttlebutt,” the truth is “the straight skinny” (like a lot of navy terminology, double entendre is a strong factor); garbage cans are “shitcans,” westerns…movies or books…are “shitkickers.” While ocean liners may have stairways, military vessels have only “ladders,” which they very much resemble. “Upstairs” is “topside,” “downstairs” is “below decks,” and there are no “floors,” only “decks.” The front of the ship is the “bow” and the back of the ship the “fantail.” You don’t go to the front or to the back, you go “forward” or “aft.” Left is “port,” right is “starboard.” Doorways are “hatches,” bathrooms are “heads.” Dining areas are “mess decks” and those who serve three-month stretches of time working in the kitchens and dispensing food are “mess cooks.”
Life aboard ship is (or was) ruled by the bosun’s whistle. Every activity had its own set of notes, always followed by an announcement over the loudspeakers. The clanging of bells alerts the crew to General Quarters.
Some shipboard traditions are quite impressive. On a carrier or on a Naval base ashore, everything and everyone stops and stands at attention during the raising and lowering of the flag at sunrise and sunset. To see a vast hanger deck on a carrier bustling with activity suddenly snap to attention and turn toward the ship’s stern as the flag is lowered at sunset is quite a sight. Coming aboard or leaving the ship at any time requires halting at the top of the ramp, turning to toward the stern, and saluting. You also must ask the Officer of the Deck for permission to either come aboard or leave.
Unlike commercial ships, which must have lifeboats for every passenger, warships do not have the luxury of the space required for them. The Ti carried three or four large motorized “liberty boats” and a covered “captain’s boat” to ferry the crew from ship to shore, and which could double as lifeboats if there were time enough in an emergency to get them from their storage on the hangar deck into the water. But otherwise, the several thousand members of the crew would have to depend on life vests and inflatable rafts for survival.
Naval ships were cities of men. That one day men and women would serve together on any Naval vessel, let alone a warship, was all but incomprehensible.
I am fully aware of the softening effect time has on memory, and I remember clearly how I hated the Navy with every fiber of my being while I was in it. So why is it, I wonder, that I would give anything to relive those days?
* * *
DON’T ASK, DON’T TELL
Since this blog was written, the egregious “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law has been repealed and, as I fully knew would be the case, it sank beneath the surface without a ripple. But it should never be forgotten that at one time, gays and lesbians were not allowed to serve their country openly.
Were you aware t
hat there is only one employer in the entire United States of America which is free to fire its employees on the basis of sexual orientation? Care to guess which one? Why, the United States Military, of course—an arm of the U.S. government. By refusing to comply with the very laws it has mandated for everyone else, it thereby sets itself as being above the law (hardly a first-time event, but disgraceful nonetheless).
Since the inception of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” rule, well over 12,000 American servicemen and women who volunteered to serve their country have been kicked out of the military simply for being gay or lesbian. Enlisted men and women, officers, highly trained specialists, badly needed linguists/interpreters, holders of medals. No matter. They’re gay, they’re out. This at a time when the military is stretched dangerously thin, and they are lowering their recruiting standards. Well, of course, allowing convicted felons to enlist is far better than keeping a college graduate who has never had so much as a parking ticket, but is a faggot, and therefore a serious danger to the “cohesion”—whatever that is supposed to mean—of the unit.
Is the average heterosexual American soldier, sailor, or marine such a delicate emotional blossom, or so insecure in their own sexuality, that they would feel “threatened” by serving beside someone who was openly gay?
The United States is one of the last major countries in which homosexuals are not free to serve openly in the military. Why? Israel, Canada, Norway, England...are our moral standards so much higher than theirs? Or are we afraid our service men and women are too frail to survive sleeping in the same compartment as a homosexual?
The bitter irony here—one of many, actually—is that there are already tens of thousands of gays and lesbians in the military who chose to serve their country despite the knowledge that they can be kicked out any time they dare to reveal their sexual orientation.
I was one of those who served in silence, and who lived with the sword constantly hanging over my head. I witnessed first hand what happened to anyone who was discovered to be gay aboard an American warship. (I’ve told the story often before, but a guy I knew, a nice, innocent, naive kid, was called into the personnel office. “We arrested a man in Norfolk who said he had sexual relations with you. Now, we don’t want to do anything against you, but if you’ll sign this paper to verify you had sex with him, we can prosecute him.” The poor kid signed the paper and was flown off the aircraft carrier in the middle of the night. Flown off an aircraft carrier in the middle of the night lest he contaminate his fellow crewmen! My mind still reels to think of it.)
That the moral standards of my fellow (but heterosexual) sailors were infinitely higher and more refined than my own, and that they were therefore far more worthy human beings than I was evinced every time we went ashore. Apparently one can get a far better education in bars and brothels than in a museum. Museums are for faggots: bring on the girls!! One of my shipmates contracted gonorrhea no fewer than seven times in the course of our eight-month cruise. He was held in high regard by everyone for being a “real man.”
It appears that finally, finally the days of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” may be coming to an end, and one more outrageously discriminatory ruling will be overturned. And within one year of its repeal, I guarantee you that everyone will not give it a single thought other to wonder what the hell all the fuss had been about in the first place.
* * *
TAR BUBBLES
When I lived in Los Angeles, I used to enjoy going down to the La Brea Tar Pits to stare out over the still surface of the largest of the pools and watch gas bubbles slowly form little black igloos, linger a moment, and then more melt away than burst. They’ve been doing that for millions of years, and never seem to run out of the gas to create the bubbles.
My mind’s a lot like that. Thoughts and ideas will just suddenly work their way to the surface of my consciousness, remain for just long enough for me to acknowledge them, then vanish. Where they come from and how they were formed I have no idea. I suspect it is some sort of short-circuitry in my thought processes.
I was thinking of doing a blog entry on my school days, and realized that putting 16 years into a one page blog might be a tad difficult. But here are a couple of bubbles that rose to the surface:
Because of my broken leg, I was unable to enter first grade when I should have, and had to wait until the next year. I first attended Loves Park Elementary, though I’m sure it had another name. Shortly after I entered first grade, the United States entered WWII. I distinctly remember my prize possession being a military-type jacket that made me feel very grown up. However, looking at the photo above, I see I may have been mistaken.
I loved The Weekly Reader, a very early form of news magazine made especially for elementary students.
I remember going from door to door selling packets of vegetable seeds to raise money for the school to buy a motion picture projector. I hated going door to door selling packets of vegetable seeds, no matter how noble the purpose. And just before the projector was purchased, we moved and I transferred to another school, Harry Morris…which was located on the south-west outskirts of town and had a total student body of 68. And after more than 60 years, I am once more in contact with two of my Harry Morris classmates, Dan Sable and Marion (then) Bender.
I remember the mothers (mine specifically, of course) taking turns walking to the school in winter to make hot soup for us for lunch. I remember “milk money” and buying pints of chocolate milk. I remember The Bugville News, my first literary effort, which was a “newspaper” relating the various disasters befalling the insect citizens of Bugville. I would tack each “edition” to the school’s front door.
I remember hating recess if organized sports were going to be involved. They would always choose up teams and then argue over who had to take me. Not a fun time.
I remember many a happy hour, walking home from school, spent wandering around a side-of-the-road dumpyard, breaking bottles.
I remember learning to ride a bike. My dad bought me a used bike much too big for me...I could barely reach the pedals...and one day riding down the hill from school directly into cross traffic and being hit by a car. Luckily, I wasn’t hurt. But I was very badly shaken. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, I all my life have avoided anything that I think might cause me physical harm.
I remember with great, great fondness my teacher, Mrs. Larson, who always reminded me very much of Eleanor Roosevelt. Mrs. Larson was who God had in mind when he created teachers. Her exact opposite was Mrs. Heinz, a redheaded harridan who, for punishment (which was frequent), would make us write every verse of the Star Spangled Banner.
Oh, Lord, I remember so much. So many people; so many more lost to memory. If I allow them, the bubbles rise faster and more thickly, until the surface of my mind is like a vast, rapidly boiling pot and I can no longer separate one memory from the next. I seem to be approaching that point as I write this, so it is time to turn off the burners for now. But don’t be surprised if the bubbles start rising again before long.
* * *
OBSESSION
There I am...right there!…standing on the left wing of a bright yellow U.S. Navy SN-J trainer (number 233) in my brown one-piece flight suit, watching a sailor in a white hat and blue work shirt with the sleeves rolled up fill the plane’s tank with aviation fuel. When he’s done, I bend down to put the cap on the tank, then climb into the cockpit. My instructor joins me, sitting in the seat behind me. I start the engine, taxi down the runway, and the buddy to whom I’d given my camera catches me taking off.
And there I am…right there!…see?…in my dress blues standing under a row of bougainvillea in downtown Pensacola, hands on hips, staring into the camera.
And there, wrapped in a towel with my NavCad friend Harry Harrison on Pensacola Beach. We went out for pizza and beer later, and the jukebox was playing “Unchained Melody” and to this day I cannot hear that song without being there again.
And I had absolutely
no idea, at the instant those films were shot, of what I would be doing twenty minutes from that time, let alone that I would be watching them 56 years later with a sense of longing so palpable my chest actually aches.
The occasion for this almost dizzying tidal wave of nostalgia was the viewing of a DVD I just had made from a VCR, which was in turn taken from 8 mm movies of my time in the Navy. And the longing is mixed with the agony of the fact that I did not realize at the time just how beautiful (relatively, of course) I was, or that I would not always be so young.
I don’t think I have ever met anyone more obsessed with time than I. It’s inexplicable, really and the fact that I truly believe that every nanosecond of time is still there, somewhere, and that we relive them time after time after time, on some endless cosmic loop. So that should give me comfort. But it doesn’t. I want to be there on the wing of that plane, and under that bougainvillea and on that beach with Harry NOW! The fact that I am, somewhere, doesn’t help me at this instant.
A recent blog entry centered on the Seven Deadly Sins, and right now I am totally consumed with Greed…greed for what I once had and no longer have; a greed so consuming that even the belief that time is constantly repeating doesn’t help.
It’s sort of like being on a roller coaster ride. Even knowing that I will be riding the same coaster again and again throughout eternity doesn’t prevent me from being aware that this ride is inexorably coming to an end. I don’t want it to end but I am not quite so foolish as to think that stomping my feet and pouting will push that end one inch or one second further ahead than it is fated to be.
Though I know full well I won’t, I’ll just have to learn to settle back, enjoy however much of the ride remains to me, and know that somewhere, sometime, somehow, I am stepping yet again onto this roller coaster just as I stepped onto the wing of that plane so very many years ago.
