The Face in the Jar by the Door

“When you saw the word mask, was your first interpretation protection, covering up, persona, or performance?”

The NaBloPoMo theme for this month is Masks, presumably owing to Halloween at the end of the month.  I don’t know about the rest of the world, but in the USA, Halloween – All Hallows’ Eve – has taken on a life of its own.  When I was young, it was an excuse to shake down your neighbors for all the candy your mother wouldn’t let you eat the rest of the year; when my mother was young, it was an excuse to commit minor mayhem in the neighborhood (if I recall correctly, letting the air out of car tires was a popular prank).

Nowadays, though, there are costume parties for adults, and people seem to go all out for the scariest persona they can dredge up.  Zombies are so ubiquitous that my son has actually declared that he’s sick of them – and there’s a road in South Carolina marked, “Zombie Crossing.”  (I suspect my daughter is responsible for that – zombies figure large in her fiction.)

I myself am one of those cranks who think the whole thing has gotten out of hand, and we don’t participate.  We don’t ever have our porch light on – the signal that a house is open for trick-or-treating – and should someone wander up to our doorstep by mistake, we hand out nickels.  I think the word’s gotten out about the nickels, since no one has come to our door for the past two years.

None of this is where I wanted to go with this post, but I couldn’t resist the detour through the Land of the Cranky Old Broad.  In reality, when I hear the word “mask,” my first thought is of the Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby, “wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door – who is it for?”  What an image:  When you are home alone, you wear your real face, but when someone comes to your door, you reach into a figurative jar and pull out whatever face you think is appropriate to the situation, Welcoming or Polite Inquiry or Take-a-Hike-NOW-If-You-Know-What’s-Good-for-You.  But none of them is really you.

Do we all do this, I wonder?  I do.  Although it’s true that I do truly care about the people I know and love, it doesn’t always register that there are Expectations as to how one shows that one cares.  So, for example, I have to remind myself to send birthday cards, and I have to force myself to send Christmas cards – even though I’m genuinely glad that these people are celebrating another year of life, and I love getting Christmas cards – just not sending them out.  When I meet people in the street, I know how to greet them with the appropriate level of enthusiasm for whatever they have to share about their lives – but it’s all a reaction I’ve learned over many, many years of watching other people and how they handle encounters; it’s nothing I do naturally.  Once my acquaintances go their way, they’re off the radar screen.

So…what face do I wear when I’m by myself?  Darned if I know – it’s usually buried in a book, or a cross-stitch project.  But I can say – and this is all I will say about my true face – when I wear my true face, it’s when I’m at prayer.  No point wearing any other, since God is no respecter of masks!

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“Chewing Gum for the Eyes”

“Frank Lloyd Wright said, ‘TV is chewing gum for the eyes.’  What are your favourite shows to chew?”

First:  This should be my last post on the subject of vision, at least under the prompts of NaBloPoMo (National Blog-Posting Month).  Tomorrow, the Metropolitan of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia is visiting my parish, and I plan to be on hand for that.  Readers who are Orthodox will know what a Hierarchical visit entails, and I fully expect to be gone all day.  (And for anyone reading this blog who thinks, “Oh, goody, a chance to break in and steal stuff” – nice try. My husband isn’t Orthodox, hates driving in Massachusetts, and won’t be coming with me.)

Frank Lloyd Wright was, as all good architects should be, something of an artist.  He appreciated that all media should have, as its goal, the ability to move a person onto another plane, to make one think beyond one’s usual pathways and parameters, to expand one’s experiences, even if only vicariously.  For him to comment on television as “chewing gum for the eyes” strikes me as a profound statement, for after all, what is chewing gum?  It’s nutritionally devoid.  It’s worse for you than ice cream, which at least has some dairy content in it, in addition to all that sugar and fat.  Chewing gum has nothing.  I guess it stimulates salivary glands, since I see people chewing it everywhere nowadays – I think the last time I had a piece of chewing gum, I was thirteen years old – but I know that when I see people chewing mindlessly, I don’t think much of whatever is going on in their heads.

And the same with television.  It doesn’t have a lot going for it, especially nowadays, especially in the USA.  That said, there’s really only one show I will only give up during Lent:  NCIS.  I got into it because I once worked for someone who had been an investigator with the old Naval Investigation Service (now Naval Criminal Investigation Service).  I’m well aware that the television show bears very little resemblance to the job my old boss did, and not just because of all the high-tech gadgetry; it’s television, it’s supposed to be escapist and unrealistic.

But there are a number of cultural gags that I just can’t resist.  Primary among them is the “family” aspect.  The show is billed as being like “one big dysfunctional family,” and that about describes my family, too.  Abby is my little sister to the life (except for being a goth).  McGee is just like the oldest of my younger brothers, and Tony is definitely my nosy middle brother (the now-retired Treasury agent, so at least his bratty nosiness did serve a useful purpose n his life).  (In case you’re reading this, Donald, that was a compliment.)  Jimmy Palmer, the assistant medical examiner, is a lot like my youngest brother, who also has a very weird sense of humor, and to whom I owe my use of the word “distructions” as a cross between “directions” and “instructions.”  Ziva is me.  Definitely.

One of the other, really funny, aspects of this show is the generation gap.  Every once in so often, they’ll run a show where the electricity goes out in the building, and all the high-tech gadgetry fails.  The young people will start talking about “where will we find a dinosaur to figure out how to do this” – and up pops their boss, who not only knows how to get the job done, but also how to operate the ancient equipment that people of my generation always used.  And in his ability to pop up seemingly out of nowhere, especially just as a young staff member makes a rude observation about him, Gibbs is just like everyone’s dad or mom, with the eyes in the back of his head.  Ducky, the medical examiner, is like a kindly old grandfather with an endless well of stories, all delivered in an inimitable bumbling-old-Scot style – but his job expertise is unparalleled, and his knowledge of and comments on the dark recesses of the human mind, which result in the necessity for his job, are trenchant.

I miss that kind of family, all arguing with each other endlessly, tormenting one another with truly stupid gags, but all pulling together to get the work done.  And caring about one another – that comes through very clearly, episode after episode.  When one has a crisis, all the rest rally around him.  When one is in danger, all the rest go all out to rescue her.  Last season ended darkly, with the destruction of  NCIS headquarters, and this season, the office “mascot,” Abby, is having trouble getting back to her usual upbeat self – I was reminded of the trauma so many of us felt around 9/11, and I wonder if this season will be a way of exploring that and helping people to find ways to slot it into perspective, so that we never forget – but can still go on with living.

So for me, this show has depth and perspective, definitely not chewing-gum material.  It feeds a part of me that would otherwise go neglected, the point in time where my brothers and sister and all our cousins lived within a few blocks of one another, the part where we were Together.

There are other shows I watch – All Creatures Great and Small, primarily, Mystery! occasionally, and I do wish that the British television series around the Miss Read books would be imported, as that would be nourishing in a different way.  But to get back to my Roots – NCIS, every time.

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Like ICare

I’m finally beginning to understand why old people get so fixated on the past:  They have no idea what people are talking about in the present.

Recently I got an e-mail (Mother:  “What’s an e-mail?”) from Consumer Reports, wanting to know about my cell-phone service.  I felt like an idiot answering it; they had all kinds of questions about my SmartPhone and my IPhone and my IPad and my Tablet (I know what Tablets are – Moses came down from Mount Sinai with them.  And the newspaper for the Brooklyn Diocese was named The Tablet).  Really, what is an IPhone or an IPad?!  What’s wrong with just using a cell phone and a laptop!?

My husband and I hear ads on television all the time for these things, along with MP3 players and BlueTooth Capability, and look at each other in bewilderment – and what the heck is a Blue Ray?  Is it any relation to a stingray?  I’m sure that if we still had a Younger-Generation Person living in the house, they’d be only too happy to explain these things to us (eye-rolls included gratis), but the offspring are long gone, and when we do see them – mostly him, she living a thousand miles away – we have more important things to talk about than IShouldn’tUseThatLanguage.

Listen, I don’t even like cell phones.  I have one in case of emergencies, so that if I get stuck on my way to one of my two churches – one is forty miles away, one is fifty miles away – I can call for help.  (Is there an app called OHelp?  What’s an app?)  But I see far too many people glued to their cell phones like it was an umbilical cord or something – and the most pathetic ones of all are the young mothers who are out walking with their little children, gabbing away on their phones, oblivious to the little person right next to them.  And the most painful one was the father and son in a restaurant, the son looking totally miserable while his father gassed on the cell phone, like anybody on a telephone could be more important than the person in front of you.

Actually, if it comes to that – I’m not all that crazy about telephones, either.  Again, they’re good for emergencies, which is why I have one.  And speaking of telephones, when is Congress going to break up Wal-Mart the way they broke up Bell Telephone?!  Wal-Mart on a bad day is a far worse monopoly than Ma Bell ever was.

The world makes less and less sense to me, so I guess that means I’m officially Old.  And to prove it, there are days when I wake up with three men in my bed:  Will Power gets me out of bed despite Arthur Itis and Charley Horse.  But the first man I see in the morning is John, and the man I go to bed with is Ben Gay.  Sorry, I had to find a way to work that oldie in; it has become embarrassingly relevant in recent years.

But, as I’m always telling people – getting old is better than the alternative.  Meanwhile, I don’t suppose there’s an app for IAche??

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“Faded Photographs…Memories in Bits and Pieces…”

“Do you prefer to have still photographs or videos from important moments?”

That’s a no-brainer:  stills, every time.

Sure, they’re posed, and they aren’t “spontaneous,” like that’s a virtue.  But let me tell you about photos.

My Aunt Mary, whom I’ve mentioned a few times in this blog, was the de facto Family Archivist.  If there was an important event in my mother’s family, Aunt Mary kept a record of it.  She must have had a photo album for every year of each of her children’s existences:  Birthday parties, graduations, First Communions and Confirmations, and then she had pictures of all the wedding and baby showers she hosted over many, many years.  If relatives came into town to visit, she had photos of those visits.  Every photo was put into an album, with those black gummed tricorner thingies that were once ubiquitous – you could buy them at any stationer’s – and the black pages, the consistency of blotter paper (for any of you that use fountain pens), had the name of the event and the names of the people photographed written in in special white ink that wouldn’t bleed on the paper.

They were works of art, those photo albums, and on rainy summer days, when we kids had nothing better to do and my mother and her sister didn’t want to have us underfoot, Aunt Mary would take out those photo albums and we’d sit poring over them for hours, reminiscing about the happy times we’d had.

Seven years ago, Aunt Mary died.  My sister, who cared for her in her last illness, was one of the ones to clean out the house.  We knew that the photo albums properly should go to her sons; what we didn’t know was what would become of them, and of the memories in them.  So she took one, filled with the events and people she remembered, and I took one, filled with the events and people I remembered.  Since we are literally a generation apart, there being fifteen years between us, we felt we had a fair representation of family history; and the other albums went to the people they properly belonged to, her sons and their children.

Now I look at those albums and remember.  “There’s Aunt Clara!” who’s been dead for nearly 50 years.  And, “Oh, my goodness, there’s Grandma Carey!” – my great-grandmother, surrounded by her four great-grandchildren.  And, “I remember when Aunt Loretta and Uncle Bob came in from Buffalo,” or, “…when Aunt Gerry and Uncle Richie got married.”  I even found a photograph of my cousin’s first military ball, him in his Junior ROTC uniform with his date – me – at his side.  Hey, when you’re fourteen years old and Catholic, girlfriends are in short supply.

Our own photographs are not nearly in such good order, mostly because I just can’t stand the thought of putting them into those soulless plastic albums.  Recently a local craft store began carrying scrap-booking supplies.  I like the dedicated pages – you know, the ones that have “Generations” watermarked onto them, or “School Daze,” stuff like that – and the fact that you can put together a unique document of your own memories.  I even like the funky little decals you can buy to decorate the pages.

And it was in among the funky little decals that I found them:  tricorner photograph thingies.  They aren’t gummed anymore; they have backing that you can peel off, and they’re self-stick, which is a vast improvement over that vile-tasting gummy stuff.  And they come in a variety of colors, not just black.  But – tricorner photograph thingies.  And pens in many more hues than white.

I think I know what I want to do, come winter.

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Triumph of the Philistines

This has not been an easy week for me.  In another post, I mentioned that we are having some major renovations done to our house, both badly needed:  a new roof (think of the sound of nails being pounded overhead, all day long), and a new bathroom, which will be lovely when finished, but is most disconcerting just at present:  Where do we keep our toothbrushes? where did we put the toothpaste? where’s the shaving tackle? where’s that box of Unmentionable Personal-Care Products?  You get the idea.  Not to mention that during the day, the toilet is disconnected so that the contractor can work on the walls.  My hairdresser wanted to know if we were getting a whirlpool tub, and I had to say no, we aren’t; we’re pretty minimalist people.  But the concern with this project was that the caulking kept pulling away from the old tub, and we were concerned that there was water damage to the walls; so we really needed to have the whole  room redone.  Thankfully, no water damage, and the new bathtub has a raised lip that precludes the necessity of caulking.  A clever solution to a common problem; wish we’d known about it years ago.

And on top of all this chaos – our favorite radio station has signed off the air.  As of 5:00 p.m. on Thursday, WBACH has disconnected its Southern Maine transmitter; its frequency was sold at a bankruptcy auction to a group that has replaced classical programming with yet more rock ‘n’ roll, as if, you know, the cultural scene of southern Maine is going to fall apart if we don’t have one more venue for angry screaming.  All is not quite lost, as we can still access programming on our computer (and thank goodness for that – I can still remember the emptiness when New York’s WNCN went off the air the first time, in 1974), but our computer is in the office, and the office is nowhere near the living room.  We’re looking into getting a wireless router (or something along those lines) that will allow us to pick up the signal off the computer.

In light of the events of this past week – I refer, of course, to Libya – these concerns seem almost insultingly trivial.  And there are people out there, people whom I love and care about deeply, who are suffering real tragedies and crises, so if your reaction is, “You’re in mourning over a classical-music station?!  Get real!” that’s understandable.  But I’m not sure the two are entirely unconnected.

Just this past week, I wrote about classical music under the topic of beauty being in the eye of the beholder, and I noted that classical music’s reputation began to take a hit when “searching-for-the-lost-chord” compositions came into vogue.  Thinking about it further, I’m not entirely sure that that’s the actual cause; on another level, I think it might (also) have something to do with an American trait that suspects anything Intellectual.  When I was growing up – and certainly when my parents were growing up – classical music was firmly associated with the College Crowd.  In those years, college was only for the wealthy, or for people who were going into High Finance; they came out of college smoking pipes, if male, or wearing twinsets and pearls, if female, voting Republican and listening to classical music.  Then came the 1960s, and since then, the College Crowd seems to wear denim and eschew bathing and vote Democrat.  Listening to classical music is still associated with Rich People, and as any student with loans up the wazoo can tell you, college students are by and large not Rich.  (Nor are they educated to the standards formerly set by colleges, but that’s another story.)

A college education used to include mandatory music-appreciation courses, and the music on offer was exclusively classical.  That’s no longer the case – even where music appreciation is offered (as an elective), the music studied is only marginally classical – so lovers of classical music continue to dwindle.  And so does intellectual life, the life of the mind – dare I say, the life of the soul?  My point, if there is one, is that people who like classical music not only are suspected of being slightly weird, but have always been suspected of being – well, not like the rest of mankind, anyway.  Do they even know what hard work is?  (Only someone who has never tried to master a musical instrument can ask this question with a straight face.)  What kind of a brain actually likes that stuff?!  What does any of it have to do with Real Life, you know, that place where people get their fingernails filthy with embedded grime and their hands are cracked and bleeding from hard work?

I first encountered the term “philistine” when WNCN went off the air and was replaced by a rock station.  It seems to be a term describing anti-intellectualism, a dumbing-down of the prevalent culture to some level of lowest-common-denominator, a lack of appreciation for making the effort to become more than one step above Animal.  Think about that, an animal’s purely visceral reaction to what goes on around it.  Eat or be eaten.

Then think of the images out of Libya.

Then ask yourself what was refined about anything you saw in the news.

Then tell me that the loss of a classical-music radio station – of one more level of refinement – of being human – of being more than Animal – is trivial.

This week, the Philistines triumphed.

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Splitsville

Goodness, a whole week without having posted.  For awhile there, I felt as if I was shooting for a whole year.  Anyway, “back to our sheep,” as I’m told they say in Russia:

“What is the best thing you ever had for dessert?”

Let’s see, I’m in my seventh decade of life, and the question is, what is the very best dessert I’ve ever had?!  Scanning…scanning…scanning (back over 60+ years)…  Got it.  Believe it or not.

A banana split.

Nobody in my mother’s family was very demonstrative, but her older sister was especially close to my mother and to all us kids.  Mind you, I’m sure my brothers would have been very happy to have her farther away:  She lived around the corner from us when I was growing up, and my mother babysat her kids while my aunt went out to work, so on the rare occasions when my mother needed a babysitter, Aunt Mary was It.  And when it came to concocting scenarios of disaster, Aunt Mary had an imagination that made the legendary Jewish Mother look like a rank amateur.  My brothers still talk about the day she tied them into chairs – I find that hard to believe, but it is just possible, considering that my aunt’s explanation was that she was afraid Something Would Happen to Them.

I myself never experienced this side of her personality.  On the other hand, I could be relied upon to disappear into my cousin’s bedroom and not come out till it was time to come home, due to the fact that my cousin, her older son, had the largest collection of comic books in our entire town.  I think he had a charter subscription to Mad Magazine.

Anyway, back to dessert.  When I was sixteen, I met my aunt on the main street of town for a reason long lost to the mists of Time, and she invited me into a local candy store for a banana split.  I had heard of these concoctions, but had never had one; they were expensive treats, and I had more important uses for my allowance, like books and classical-music records, which were also expensive.  So I said I’d love to, more out of curiosity than for any other reason.

WOW.  That’s all I can say about it, just – WOW.  All that whipped cream!  All that ice cream!!  Bananas, and a cherry atop each peak of whipped cream!!!  And I didn’t even have to share it; my aunt bought one for herself, and a whole ‘nother one just for me.  If I had been hit by a car on the way home, I’d have died a happy girl:  I’d finally had the famous, infamously caloric, legendary Banana Split.

I had one other banana split in my lifetime, interestingly also in my aunt’s company, and I was somewhere in my forties at the time.  My girlish figure was long gone, due not to an excess of banana splits but to early-onset menopause, and I probably should not have been indulging.  But my mother, my aunt, and I had gone out to lunch, my aunt had seen it on the menu and pounced – it turned out it was her favorite dessert – and as she did so, it suddenly dawned on me that I hadn’t enjoyed that treat since that long-ago winter day when I was 16, so I joined her.  And it was just as good the second time around.

I haven’t had one since.  At this point in my life, I doubt my elderly insides would be able to handle all that richness.  But the memory of that slushy winter day, all holed up in a candy store on the corner of Metropolitan Avenue and 78th Street, with my favorite relative, spooning up a banana split all to myself – that still stands out as the best dessert I ever had.

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Barque-ing Mad

“What candy did you eat once that you wish you could get again?” is the prompt from NaBloPoMo, and in the meantime, WordPress’s Daily Post has issued a challenge:  Going from Mundane to Meaningful.  Goodness, two tasks.

As strange as it sounds to me – I can’t think of a single candy I would wish to eat again.  Not even the handmade chocolate bunnies that my mother used to buy at Easter, from a candy shop owned by an in-law of her father’s.  I’m sure it was excellent candy, but like pearls cast before swine, we little piglets just wolfed it down (so to speak), and I can’t even remember what it tasted like anymore.

Not even the fruit bonbons that my grandmother kept in a dish on her coffee table, desirably mainly because if we had touched them, we would probably have lost a hand – my mother somehow had this idea that Other People’s Candy was out for show only.  Maybe it was.  But over the decades, the appeal of hardened sugar water, or whatever candy consists of, has waned.

No, wait a minute.  Come to think of it…I actually do have a good candidate.  The year I was fifteen, my grandfather came to New Hampshire to visit his son, and I was spending the summer with that same son, who happened to be my godfather.  My grandfather, a great lover of walks, invited me for a walk with him, and as I also loved a good long walk (before arthritis caught up with me, anyway), I accepted gladly.  We ambled down Central Avenue together until we came to a candy shop – not one of those places where they sold candy like Snickers and Three Musketeers, but the kind of place just like where my mother used to get those Easter bunnies.  All their candy was home-made.  He bought a couple of pounds of good milk chocolate, then said to me, “How about some white barque?”  I expressed my ignorance on the subject, and was I surprised to learn that it was white chocolate.  White chocolate?!  Who ever heard of such a thing?  But he bought a pound, and I had a sample, and – yeah, I was hooked.  It was really good.  It had almonds in it, and even though it was high summer, that chocolate hardly melted at all.

For years and years afterward, I lusted after the memory of that chocolate.  Shortly after that visit, the candy shop closed for good; it’s now a bar.  How things change…I mean, the juxtaposition of the innocence of candy versus the kinds of things that go on in bars just seems to smack me in the face, as I’m thinking about it.  And to top it all off, the Food Police have us all convinced that Candy is Bad, and they’re strangely silent on the subject of booze.  The FPI – Food Police Investigators – do give a grudging nod to dark chocolate for its reputed Health Benefits, but I think they’d be just as happy if it too disappeared off the planet.  People tend to feel too darn good after chocolate.

Recently, I’ve discovered that there are producers of candy who offer white chocolate.  These tend to be either smaller manufacturers of “organic chocolate,” or manufacturers of high-end chocolates, like Lindt; in any case, the chocolate is mass-produced, and it doesn’t include almonds (from what I can tell, nuts are what set barque apart from plain ol’ white chocolate).  I’ve tried it; it’s good.  But it’s not homemade.

And it’s not the gift of a grandfather who wasn’t all that affectionate and not at all good with words, but who understood very well what children, even teenagers, like.

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Sweets to the Sweet

Back to the prompts.  Thank goodness – I’ve had enough of Depth for one week, anyway.

“What was the first candy you ever tried?”

Now that takes some mental exercise.  After all, we’re talking over sixty years of candy-sampling.  But I think I’ve got it.

As I know I have mentioned more than once, my mother was widowed very young – I was two – but as it turned out, she met her life partner at a cousin’s wedding, a month before my father was killed in a car crash.  He must have started coming around almost as soon as my father died, and because, to be frank, my mother had already begun to regret her first choice for a husband, and because she had a young child to support, she didn’t discourage the attentions of this second suitor.  In fact, they were married less than a year after my own father’s death, and that marriage lasted just over fifty years, ending with my mother’s death.

Dad – my stepfather – was nothing if not conservative and traditional, as most working-class folks are.  Flowers and candy were a de rigeur component of this courtship, and the candy came in boxes, with each piece wrapped in its own individual little piece of paper.  Each piece was chocolate, but each piece came with a different-flavor filling – I know there were caramels, and I suspect that a few of them were filled with brandy or another liqueur, because I was forbidden to touch the box on my own – my mother shared her candy willingly, but she got to choose which pieces I got to eat.  On rare occasion, she would give me my favorite:  chocolate-covered cherries, filled with a cherry liqueur.

In those days, before the Nanny State, it was perfectly permissible for children and alcohol to interact, to a limited extent.  At the numerous gatherings of my stepfather’s large Polish family, kids were always cadging “sips” of beer from the adults.  However, it was incumbent on the adults present to keep a close watch on who was giving in to the cadging, so I never actually got drunk, nor did my cousins.  Nor, for that matter, did the adults; although they might have gotten pleasantly snockered, I never once in my childhood saw an adult who was, as we used to say, “falling-down drunk.”  (That’s not to say there weren’t any, as I learned in adulthood, just to say that most of the family was careful not to let the children see them in that state.)  The purpose of a beer, on a hot summer afternoon, was to cool off, not to get drunk.  And although there was hard liquor, it wasn’t in plentiful supply; it was kept for special occasions, like toasting the announcement of an impending new baby.  (“Let’s drink to the baby.  Let’s drink to the crib.  Let’s drink to the carriage.  Let’s drink to the high chair.”  Etc.  Sometimes I think about that research relating adult drinking to fetal-alcohol syndrome, and I wonder if any of those researchers was remotely Slavic.  I’m betting not.)

Back to the candy.  I really loved those cherry-flavored candies, but usually got stuck – in more ways than one – with the caramels.  Hey, candy is candy.  My next-favorite part of the candy box, though, was bizarre, to say the least:  When all the candy had been eaten, I got the empty box of little papers.  I have no idea why the papers were returned to the box as the candy was eaten, but at the end of a week or so, I had a box full of empty papers, and I would shake it to listen to the rustle.  I called it my “pigeons.”  For some reason, a lot of men in post-war Brooklyn and Queens kept pigeons, Dad and his friend Steve among them, so from the time my mother began dating my stepfather, I was familiar with the rustle of caged pigeons in the back yard.  I should add that my mother hated the pigeons – in the early years, she and my stepfather had more arguments about those pigeons than about anything else – but Dad kept his pigeons until I was a teenager.  And when I was a very little girl, it was understood that those empty boxes of candy were my turf, a little girl’s “pigeons.”  It’s amazing how creative you can get when you’re poor.

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“How Could They Let This Happen?!”

Some few years back, I took advantage of my new “involuntarily retired” status to follow a lifelong dream to learn Russian.  I still don’t speak it fluently – it’s a tough language – but at least I can express myself grammatically.

The language courses were augmented by cultural courses that were mandatory for Russian majors, and strongly encouraged for everyone else.  Part of the culture component was watching Russian-language movies, all of them Soviet-era, despite the fact that the Soviet Union has been history for over twenty years at this point.  (I did suggest my favorite post-Soviet film, Ostrov – The Island – but was turned down.)  Most of the films were comedies.  A couple were from World War II, very Workers-Overcoming-the-Imperialists in content.  And then there was The Chekist.

For those who don’t know, the Cheka was the great-grandfather of the KGB, the original post-Revolution Secret Police.  They set the tone for every agency that followed, in terms of terror:  the knock on the door at 3:00 a.m., the mass roundups, mock trials, and executions for “counter-Revolutionary activity,” which could be as simple as being out of work (being out of work was considered “parasitism,” being a parasite on the productive Working Class).

The film opened with a wedding scene, a young couple, very obviously very much in love, being married in a Russian Orthodox ceremony.  Then the camera slowly panned through the crowd to the back, where a man could be seen garroting a woman.  As the wedding concluded, doors were thrown open – and only then did you realize that the wedding had taken place in a prison cell, that everyone there was slated for execution, and that the incongruous garroting had been a mercy killing.  The prisoners were directed to strip off completely naked, then herded to a wall with troughs in front of it, positioned so that they were facing the wall, and then gunned down, in the back.  In the seconds before the opening salvo, the young couple – now separated by the priest who had married them, who stood between – reached behind him to hold hands.

The next scene cut to a group of men around a kitchen table, drawing up lists of people to be executed.   Subsequent scenes made it clear that these lists were actually quite arbitrary.  You would expect to find priests being executed, and they were plentiful, but often someone ended up on the list because a co-worker wanted a promotion, and someone stood in his way; that person’s name would be placed on the list.  Over a ten-year period, more or less, the lists continued to be drawn up by the same people at the same location – until the final scenes, when the protagonist, the Chekist, was missing.  You saw him again in the very last scene, standing stark naked with his face to the wall, alone at the troughs, and laughing at the cruel irony of his fate.  Then  the shots rang out, and the screen went black.

As you can imagine, it wasn’t easy watching.  There was a stunned silence in the classroom for a couple of minutes, before one of the students asked, in a shaking voice, “How could they let this happen?!”  I wanted to laugh.  What a question!  It was clear, from this young fellow’s attire, that he was a believer in Marxism-Leninism (the slogans on the shirt were a dead giveaway, for one thing), and that he couldn’t imagine such a thing taking place in the enlightened Workers’ Paradise.  And I wanted to laugh because the Hate Speech bill had just been passed, making it a federal crime to speak one’s mind on a whole variety of topics.  Homosexuality was covered, and of course racism.  Over time, hate speech against Islam has made it to the list.  Judaism was implicitly covered.  Not, evidently, Christianity.

I’ve been thinking about this fellow a lot lately, primarily because of stuff like this:  http://michellemalkin.com/2012/03/07/the-war-on-conservative-women/  And this:

indicative of the war on the Catholic Church.  That, of course, has been going on for a very long time.  But the objection of the Catholic Church to those provisions of the Obama health-care bill that deal with contraception, has renewed the attacks, and they have become more and more vitriolic; note the comments to a local story out of the New Hampshire Statehouse.

So, bottom line:  the Left has absolute freedom of speech, but when the rest of us try to exercise the same freedom of speech, it’s hate speech?

That’s how they let it happen.

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It Was the Worst of Times, It Was the Best of Times

A couple of Sundays ago, my husband and I were chatting with the wife of a now-retired priest, and reminiscing about our early married life in Germany.  My husband was talking about the cold-water flat we lived in, describing how we used to move the space heater from one room to another in order to warm up the next room we would be occupying, and she said, “But then, why did you like it so much?”

Her question brought me up short, because actually, why did we like it so much?  Why do we still talk about those three years in Germany as the best time of our lives?  Because actually, our living conditions were primitive, by modern standards.  We did have running water; at least we didn’t have to use an outhouse.  But cold water was literally all we had, when I wanted to wash dishes, or when my husband wanted to shave.  For bathing, we did have a five-gallon tank that hovered over the bathtub.  At night, before we went to bed, I would set the timer on the tank heater, and in the morning it would be just the right temperature for *one* of us to have a bath (no shower).  While my husband washed, I would fill up a teakettle and boil water; it was done by the time he was done, and he had hot water for shaving, while I made coffee.

When we rented the apartment, it had an electric “stove” that was supposed to heat the whole place.  Unfortunately, it died on us within the first two weeks of winter, so we went out and bought a space heater, a little thing that we could (and did) carry from roon to room.  The worst was in the morning, when the whole apartment was cold; I’d move the thing into the kitchen and get it going to warm up, then turn it off while I went out on my daily errands.  In the afternoon, it kept me warm in the living room; around  4:00 p.m., I’d move it into the kitchen to warm up that space again, so it would be toasty when my husband got back from the base, and while we ate supper, the space heater warmed up the living room.  While we decompressed from the day, the space heater warmed up the bedroom; and so it went, all winter long.

The whole time we lived in Germany, I didn’t drive, at my husband’s request; German drivers really are wild, and he feared for my life.  But that was, and is, a country where bicycles and trains never went out of style, so getting around wasn’t a problem.  The supermarket was around the corner, the base only a couple of miles through a bike path in the woods; my husband and many of our neighbors cycled to and from work every day, and if I needed to get on base for any reason, so did I.  The forest was so beautiful!  Germans love their forests, and the Town Forester kept the path clear of branches, and soft with a good bed of pine needles.  Throughout Germany, hiking trails were not only maintained and clearly market, but labeled with the amount of time you could expect to spend on them; they had fifteen-minute trails, half-hour trails, trails that could take as long as three hours to hike the whole thing, and all the trails were marked along the way, too, via different-colored markers, so that you would end up back where you started.  You couldn’t get lost.

And yes, we could have bought provisions on base.  We could have washed our laundry on base (when the laundromat worked; it was frequently closed for repairs).  We did that, for the first year we lived there.  Then I learned to speak German, which my husband could already speak.  We were already going to weekly Mass at the church in town, so we were a known quantity in the community; after that first year of learning German, we began to live German.  And what a difference it made, to see my neighbors at the supermarket or the hairdresser’s, to buy our breakfast rolls and coffee at the local bakery, to cycle to the laundromat on laundry day, as all my other neighbors did.

For entertainment…oh, for entertainment!  We belonged to two music clubs, one a semi-professional concert choir and one a folk-music choir that was an extension of our church choir, to which we also belonged.  Did you know that despite the devil’s many arts, he can’t sing?  Did you know that every morning, “white veils of mist appear to herald the morning sunrise before it breaks through the clouds”?  Or that the “golden sun is full of joy and wonder”?  Those are just three of the folk songs I learned; there were so many more, full of the joys and miracles of everyday living.

Then there was the concert series at City Hall.  We paid the equivalent of a dollar to hear student musicians play music that stays with me to this day:  Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler, Schubert, Handel, to name just a few.  These were serious musicians, who took their art seriously, and whose education was completely funded by the State of Hesse, where we lived; presumably, the other states of the Federal Republic of  Germany had similar programs for their young musicians.  We had no television; we didn’t need one.  We had books from the library and light classical music from Hessischer Rundfunk, “our” radio station (there were three.  One was talk, one was rock, and then there was Hessischer Runkfunk).  We had no telephone; who were we going to call?  We wrote letters home once a week, and received letters from home.

It was, all in all, a good and quiet and very low-key way to begin married life.  We had time to adjust to each other, unhampered by the storms of anti-war movements and feminist rebellion that rocked the rest of the country.  I think I was back in America for three years before I learned that the Beatles had broken up.  Because everything was so new – nothing in life was anything like what we had known – I think we absorbed the shocks of married life better than other newlyweds.  Our expectations were minimal, our horizons limitless.  We had the greatest gift of all, time to meld into a single united entity, which stood us in good stead when we did return to the USA and had to weather our families’ expectations of who we were – so different from who we had become.

(By the way, anybody familiar with military life will surely be asking by now, “Why weren’t you in base housing?”  Simply put, enlisted personnel who weren’t career military didn’t qualify for base housing.  And my husband’s college degree, not being in a “critical field” like engineering or flight, wasn’t considered sufficient reason to grant him officer status.  It should have been, but it wasn’t.  You want to talk about government waste?  It’s nothing new.)

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