Blame it on Rio

 

 

I grew up at a time when World War 2 was a recent memory. It was a part of the collective Zeitgeist

Children played war games, and everyone wanted to be a GI. No one wanted to be a “kraut” or a “nip.” We though being a soldier was considered your patriotic duty and an honor, untarnished by Vietnam and the politics of the post war era.  It was a time when buying a car from Germany and Japan were considered un-patriotic; when goods from Japan were considered second rate, if not junk, and all things Germans, were viewed suspiciously.

The war was real to me. Not in a history book sort of way. I did not know then that 60 million people had died in the war. That even though I knew that Jews had been murdered in camps I had no idea that it was 9 million. And if I had known those figures as a child those numbers would not have meant anything to me.)

It was real because I could walk into my friends home and see souvenirs that their fathers and family proudly showed off. I recall a friend proudly showing me a German helmet with a bullet hole in the temple. Another buddy proudly showed the deactivated pineapple grenade t his father used as a paperweight. Or the German luger that another’s father had liberated from a dead “kraut” and now kept in a locked trophy case. As a very young child I remember telling my father, with great excitement about an American helmet a friend had shown me.  After describing it to him he proudly showed off his firsthand experience by telling me that the helmet was missing its inner liner which was key to keeping it from falling off and then reminding me that GI’s never buckled their helmets else an explosion would blow their heads off.

My father’s mother proudly carried around a fragment from a hand grenade in her change purse that my father had sent her claiming that it had just missed him.

The War was a tangible part of my childhood in other ways. When we went to Europe with my parents in the early 60’s we saw first-hand evidence of the war. The elevator operator at the old Excelsior Hotel on Piccadilly had a stool to rest the part of his leg that remained after a land mine had taken the other part.  The rubble in vacant lots in Rome. The roof of St. Stephens cathedral in Vienna still bearing the damage from allied bombing raids. Even the comic books we bought bore the imprint of the as they were printed in black and white due to shortages.

It was real when relatives told of their escape from the Nazi’s. They told tales of hiding, degradation and deprivation that were scary but so captivating I hung on every word.  Relatives, including my grandparents would tell tales of lost parents, brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, and cousins who were never heard from after the war.  Their sadness and sense of loss was conveyed through spirit more than words for they rarely gave details of their experiences or showed their grief other than a sense of sadness even a child could perceive.

The 2^nd World War was the social currency for kids and adults alike.  Either you served or you didn’t. If you didn’t you better have a good excuse like being too young or having a heart condition.  Even then, it would not provide an antidote for the shame of not being a part of the generation that tackled fascism and made the world safe for democracy. It mattered on the playground and at cocktail parties.

Without question during my childhood the US was giddy with the glow of “we did” and the imagination factories of the entertainment industry were turning out epics to remind us of our glory.  “The Longest Day,” “The Guns of Navaronne,” “The Great Escape,” “Kelly’s Heros”, to name just a few, headlined in theatres. At home we could watch, on our 5 channels of programming classic movies such as “Casablanca,” “Stalag 17,” “Run Silent Run Deep.” “Sands of Iwo Jima,” “From Here To Eternity” and so many others that I can see say with  confidence that not a week of my childhood went by without a snip of it World War 2 deposited itself within my consciousness.

Television was equally adept at keeping the coals of our success in the war glowing. My brother and I loved the television show Combat! (the exclamation point being a bayonet)  an episodic television how that recounted the adventures of a platoon of American soldiers fighting Germans in France shortly after D-day. We loved that show so much we would often play “Combat!” with our friends in the neighborhood fighting who would play “The Sarge” or The Lieutenant. Behind a friend’s home there was a dirt “mountain”,  in which we would  stage elaborate battles based on imagination and of course what we learned from television and movies.

These games were often augmented by the toys we had been given to us by our parents like Tommy Guns  (like the Sarges).  Children’s combat uniforms including helmets and other accessories.
There were bazookas that “really fired”. Cap hand grenades. Legions of toy soldiers and models by Revel where you could make submarines, tanks and all sort of aircraft.  Our camping gear mimicked what GI’s had been given during the war. The tin mess that folded onto itself that was a pan and plate, the tin cup that wrapped around it, the l shaped flashlight that could be clipped to your belt and often came with a red filter as not to be spotted by the enemy.

Even in the early morning hours, the time between when we got out of bed and when our parents awoke we found our way to World War 2. It was not uncommon for Sunrise Semester or Modern Farmer to lose our attentional, though we did get quite an education on the importance of nitrogen to the soil and Robert Frost’s poetry, and turn to my parents bookshelves. One book we returned  to often was called “Up Front”, a collection of cartoons drawn by Bill Mauldin for Stars and Stripes. It depicted two grizzled GI’s, Willie and Joe, citizen soldiers, as they made their way from Normandy to Germany and their experiences with battle, Army bureaucracy, and life in a war zone. We didn’t understand much of it on a deeper level than a puddle but it made us laugh. One such cartoon, that is indelible to this day,  depicted a US Calvary soldier next to his jeep whose axel is broken pointing his pistol at the Jeeps hood and covering his eyes as if he was putting down a horse. We earned that GI’s spent a lot of time in mud, didn’t shave often, and the beverage of choice was something called Cognac.

There was another book that attracted our attention. It had an army green cover with an image of a Blue Devil holding a shield in one hand and a sword in the other. Titled “The Blue Devils In Italy: A History of The 88^th Infantry Division in Italy. We knew this was Dad’s “outfit” and while we either couldn’t or didn’t want to read the book, we looked at the cool photographs and imagined what it must have been for pop. Had we shown more curiosity at the time (I am not really blaming myself as I was child whose reading skills were still with Dick and Jane) we might have noticed that the rosters in the book that listed the men who served in each unit in the division. Had we paid attention to those rosters it might have saved a lot of questions later on.

The war even managed to find itself into our night time story. We knew my father’s story. It was part of our family lore. An immigrant, who escaped Nazi Austria just in the nick of time, was inducted into the Army at the age of 18, fought his way up the boot of Italy with the 88^th Infantry Division as a 2^nd Lieutenant in the artillery. We were told he was the youngest Lieutenant in his division and that the only reason my mother’s father had accepted my father as a suitor was because he had been an officer in the army.

We would ask Dad about his exploits during the war. He, like many of that greatest of generations, was reluctant to discuss his service. However, at bedtime when he asked what story we wanted him to tell us, he would, from time to time,  share little blurbs of his life in the service. He would tell us about Cookie the pilot of the piper cub observation aircraft that was assigned to his artillery unit. Or was Cookie his driver? Time has a way of eroding childhood stories. In any case Cookie was always doing something interesting like placing sandbags underneath his seat in case they ran over a mine  so it would blow his nuts off. (The word nuts would always make my brother and I giggle.) Or the story of my he told of crossing a bridge in a jeep to see if it could support the weight of 105 mm howitzers when the span collapsed and being saved from drowning when his trench coat, inflated with air due to the fall, had served as a life preserver.

The bedtime story I loved and asked for most often, I didn’t even realize was a war story until much late. The story was of two boys who were walking along the banks of the Danube one afternoon when they happen upon a broken-down old rowboat. They are desperate to leave Vienna because of the Nazi’s, so they scheme to convert the rowboat into a submarine. They could then float past the Nazi’s patrols to the Black Sea and escape to Israel. The stories were episodic, recounting the adventures the boys had trying to get the materials they needed for their ship and avoiding detection by the Germans and those who wished them harm.  Similar to old time movie serials they often left us hanging just before we would go to sleep.

Once,  when I brother and were both in single digits,  we were playing on the street with a bunch of friends, a kid threw a piece of wood that had an nail sticking out it. The stick hit my brother in the back of the head. I still remember the wound, a bloody whole surrounded by scalp. I am sure at the time that I thought it penetrated my brother’s skull but in retrospect I don’t think so as I saw no bone or gray matter. I am not sure why it fell to my father to treat the wound nor why I was included in that triage.  To comfort my brother he told him how he used to be bullied on his way to school. How they would call him vile names and try to beat him and how he too had a spear hit him in the head.

Or when visiting Vienna in the early 60’s with my parents we visited with my father’s boyhood best friend Paul.  They delighted in telling my brother and I stories of their gang and the trouble they got into while growing up on the streets of Vienna. We especially loved the story of how my father and Paul had gone into the sewers to go beyond police lines to see the fire that was burning at the site of the old World’s Fair.

Although I did not know it then many of the stories were from the time when they Nazi’s denied Jewish boys the ability to go to school.

As we grew older, more of my father’s life, the World War and his life in the service became known to us and incorporated in our family’s mythology.

My grandparents, through the intercession of my grandfather’s brother Max, has managed to get visas to enter the United States three months after the war began and a year after Kristallnacht. A night in which my grandfather was arrested, and jailed for a week. The night the synagogue my father and his parents belonged was burned to the ground denying my father the opportunity to become a bar mitzvah. A sadness he carried with him for the rest of his life.

Part of the story of his arrival here was his first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty and how it made him feel like he was finally safe and how the darkness of the past years had been shed.  He bestowed on her the honorific “ladily”, perhaps a bastardization of the little English he knew at the time, which he would call out to her whenever he saw her. Even 70 years later he could tell you the make and model of the car his Uncle had picked them up (Buick)  in and how on that first meal on American soil he ate a pound of butter because he was hungry and he thought it cheese.  America was a land of plenty.

When I first heard this story as a child I had no concept of hunger. What real deprivation was all about… We were not a rich family but I had never missed a meal or lacked anything I needed so I had no real understanding of what it meant to escape and find safety; to know deprivation and hunger and suddenly have your fill. But what I did know was when my father told these stories I knew what it meant to him. Not because he was melodramatic or overtly sentimental about it but because of the joy in which he told this story. It was a hallmark of the optimistic spirit that was a part of him until the very end.

We were told that we he entered the Danbury Ct school system at the age of 14 they initially placed him elementary school because of his lack of English skills. He found this humiliating so he focused on learning English. He claimed he learned much of his English by going to Ronald Coleman movies and reading a dictionary,  facts borne out by a slight English accent when he spoke and the fact that he often used words so obscure that most native speakers would never  have uttered them. And once the English hurdle was overcome he moved through the grades quickly because of his intelligence and excellent Viennese schooling. (This is even more impressive when you consider that he had not attended school since shortly after Kristallnacht as the Nazi’s were denying Jews access to a secondary education.) Remarkably, perhaps incredibly, he graduated at 17 and entered Syracuse University as a Freshman just three and half years after his first glimpse of “ladily.”

We were told that my father was desperate for an education and to get a college degree. As a consequence, instead of waiting until the fall semester and enter with the majority of the class of 1947 he matriculated that summer. So by the time he appeared before his draft board in December of 1943 he had already completed his Freshman year of college. Drafted into the US Army. He served basic at Ft. Wolters Texas where he was naturalized and went on to Ft. Sill Oklahoma for OCS and Artillery school. On completion of his training he was shipped to Italy where he became a member of the 88^th Infantry Division, The Blue Devils, who fighting their way up the boot of and ultimately being stationed in Gorizia, north of Trieste, a little less than 300 miles from Vienna where his adventure began.

One of the stories my father used to tell us about his service was his struggle to get to Vienna at the war’s conclusion. It was no secret that the Nazi’s had been carrying out atrocities against the Jews, although the extent of it was still not fully known, and my father was desperate to go to his native city to see his family and those few friends he had left behind. He was stymied in his attempt by his commanding officer who my father often described as a “son of bitch,” no doubt an expression he had picked up in the army. Eventually, after many repeated requests being denied, my father had an opportunity to speak with the commanding general who overruled my father’s superior officer and granted my father leave in Vienna.

The route my father took to Vienna is unclear or is just not remembered by me. But it was by rail and there were many stops and several places where he need to switch trains. At one of these stops, he had decided to walk around the town to stretch is legs and perhaps scare up a little breakfast when he came across a British Army office bent over examining something in a store window. My father called out “Walter!” and the man turned around and was in fact my father’s cousin Walter and to my father’s last breath he claimed that he recognized him completely by the outline of his derriere.

It was usually there that my father would cut off his stories about his return to Vienna. Or if he were to discuss he would just tell us that he found no one. But details about those days he spent in Vienna were harder to come by than a fact at a Donald Trump press conference. And for the most part I was willing to let it go at that.

February of 2006 found me at Byrd Library on the campus of Syracuse University. I had to come to the campus, as I had most winters since my graduation in 1979, to see a basketball game with a group of guys with whom I had gone to Syracuse. It was our annual trip into the way back machine where we could relive much of our college behavior such as eating slices of pizza at the Varsity or late night donut runs to satisfy the munchies brought about by other behavior we had enjoyed in college or going to crowded bars and pretending that we were still a part of the mating dances that occurs in speak easies near college campuses. These weekend’s always left me nostalgic about the very good times I had a college…I had a hard time remembering the bad…and often a little sad as my life didn’t seem as well planned or lived as my friends who were by and large happily married, raising kids, and doing well in their respective careers. And while I had a good job, was in a steady albeit stale relationship, I still had the niggling feeling that I was not living the life I was meant to live. I knew I was not living the life that I wanted to live.

Shortly before I left for my trip, my father and fellow SU alum, had asked me to see whether I could find for him a poem he had published in the campus literary magazine….The Tabard shortly after he had returned to Syracuse 60 years previously. So while “the boys” had taken off on a self-guided tour of the new buildings on campus and to smoke a joint on the quad I took a walk to the Library to see if I could find a copy of this lost poems of my father: Bar Adriatic. The woman at the research desk was very helpful. Yes, they did have copies of the Tabard from 1947. Yes, I could look at them. And was there something in particular that I was looking for so I told her. She told me to wait and within a few minutes I was handed an actual, not digital, copy of the The Tabard’s Summer 1947 issue. Calling a magazine would be generous as what it was a collection of verse mimeographed on colored paper and stapled together but it clearly meant much to my father.

I had copies made and went to a carrel to read.

Bar Adriatica by Ernst Rothkopf

Their Streets are narrow, dark, and full of people.

Strange people,

Saying what I cannot understand.

Their Virgin Prostitutes, their children dirty,

Full of strange deals, crying to me:

HEY JOE, CIGARETTES TO SELL, JOE?

 

And in the shadows of their great cathedrals,

On the sidestreets , in the parks,

Their misery bears fruit for me.

In a night’s entertainment,

ME MOLTO GOOD JOE, SLEEP WITH ME.

The day is coming to a close.

The sentry watches

As soldiers streaming to the city

Pass by his lonely post,

The chilly, windswept road is endless.

And lined with strange facades.

NOT AT ALL LIKE AMERICA

 

Where are going, Al?

The passing soldier hails me,

And, not knowing the reply, I answered “The Bar Adriatica”

And so we joined in our Journey…

TO FORGET.

 

On the outskirts of the town is a tavern,

Full of lights and a band blaring.

The Cognac good

The women pretty

Not a bad place to forget,

Here on the Border.

 

Now out I look from the Tavern’s window

And see,

That the streets are filled with howling angry people,

Crying for what might bring

What they have not,

And hating all which is not them.

 

You, crowd, jamming the Main Street,

Serb and Croats,

You have tilled your poor, ungrateful soil.

Education is the privilege of your rich,

The burden of your Poor.

HOCEMO TITO!

 

Your hunger and your cry for self-respect

Need Something,

And across the border they will say:

Comrade, let us be your guide.

All others hate you, dwell under our star and cry:

ZIVEL TITO!

 

Plato and Aristotle lived on more fertile plains.

Ignorance is a horrible disease

And yet without pain.

And through the ruins of the world are shivering

with memories and balcomies,

Your own soil soaked with blood.

You cry:

WE WANT TITO! WE WANT JUGOSLAVIA

 

Italian Youth in the Side Street,

Laugh not,

Your hunger weaves a different, equally horrid pattern

You have a marble God that does no wrong,

A marble God, a State

VIVA ITALIA

 

Glorious regiments, Queens of Battle,

Colors bright and waving

The mutilated dead are but monuments,

The ruined villages, crossed swords on History-maps

DEATH TO BOLSHEVISM!

 

That extra wrinkle in your mothers face

Is called Tunisia

Long ago, rouge has covered the sorrow on

Your brothers window’s face.

And the rattle of the guns is remembered only

In the need that their destruction has created,

And yet you shout,

VIVA ITALIA! DEATH TO BOLSHEVISM

 

They meet on the corner,

Insult each other,

Lie, then shout, then stones hurl through the air,

Clubs, Tear-gars, Pain and Screams

The scene, familiar as a summer-storm approaching

Brings all the long forgotten sorrows to my ear.

And behind THIS window the band plays,

A WALTZ.

 

No longer could I stand the noise around me.

Their cries of hate,

The laughter of their women,

I drained my glass and flow into the street.

Cringing.

For I knew my friend would say

WHERE ARE YOU GOING, AL?

 

Reading the poem I knew It described the part of his military experience that had to do with the occupation of the Trieste region of Italy and the post war arguments that the Italian’s were having with Yugoslavs over the border. I knew he was trying to describe what it felt like to be a member of an occupying army and trying to keep the peace. I knew that like many soldiers he was trying to describe experiences and emotions that civilians can’t really appreciate. I knew that he wrote well and that at the time his poem must have resonated with those who read it.

And the poem resonated with me as well. Just in a different way that the author had intended.

When my father had written this poem, he was barely 21 years old. Yet by that time he had survived a childhood of poverty and depravation in Vienna; He had survived Kyrstalnacht and the fear hatred and persecution of the Nazis since the Anschluss, He had immigrated to a new country mastered the language and the schooling well enough to attend a prestigious University. He had fought a war and survived and returned to a quiet campus in upstate NY where the war was fought in factories and students main concern was how to remove salt stains from their shoes and pants. I wondered if he could share his experience with other returning GI’s or was his experience so unique that it could only be expressed through poetry or was it part of a code returning soldiers adhered to do where silence about your experience was part of the experience. We did what we needed to do so let us move on. The stoicism of the greatest generation personified. Maybe this is why he had been quiet about his experience all these years.

What I didn’t notice at the time was a clue about his service which had I noticed would have prompted me to ask him many questions that perhaps  there would not be such a big mystery after his death. But for now I was happy to find the poem for him, I knew he would be delighted to have unearthed it from its tomb in Byrd Library.

The drive home from Syracuse the following morning was rough. The “boys” and I had spent the evening practicing college drinking habits on nearly 50 year old livers and the result for the following day included the need for massive quantities of coffee and Gatorade, and an intolerance for food and noise of any kind.  This was exacerbated by the fact that Central New York was producing one of its most famous products, snow, causing the highway to become two black tracks where car tires had cleared the snow and produced a deliberately slow driving experience despite my Black Grand Cherokee’s four wheel drive. A focus on the road, a cerebral cortex recovering from alcohol, the quiet of being alone in a car without radio or passengers, was as good as place as any to be reflective and the uncovering of my father’s poem the day before provided fodder for thinking of his life and mine.

What must have been like for my father to return to Syracuse at the beginning of his junior year? I had no doubt it was different from mine.  During the summer previous to my junior year  my beloved father had read me the riot act about my grades. While I was not in any danger of flunking out I was struggling academically. Mostly C’s with an occasional B and D to keep things interesting. My father’s message was that there were far less expensive institutions in which I could have an average academic performance and that if I didn’t get my act together that is where I was going to end up. I had returned to campus with a focus I had not had before. I set up a routine. Morning classes. Then working at an on campus restaurant, The Rathskeller, from lunch through dinner and then on to the library where I studied from early evening until 9 or 10PM. It worked. C’s turned to B’s, no more D’s and the occasional A.

When my “pops” had returned to campus before his junior year for the winter term in 1947 had he gone directly from the Army to school? Had he taken time off to decompress or had he plunged back in? How had he coped from the regulations of the army to somewhat more free spirited academic life. Had he just considered himself just another GI returning to the states from Army service or had he felt like he had done something special. What must of it felt like coming back to a college campus untouched, except the building of Quonset huts, after spending the better part of the past two years in a place ravaged by war…after seeing the city he was born in rubble, its populace used to confections and pastries, reduced to begging GI’s for chocolate.

Wasn’t my father’s true year junior year spent fighting in Italy and experiencing a continent pull itself back from the brink of Armageddon. And it shamed me to realize while I had blithely navigated the stacks at the Byrd Library hoping my father would not pull my ticket on school he was navigating Army bureaucracy and a destroyed Europe trying to find his way back to Vienna to find out whether his family and friends had managed to survive the Nazi’s and the war.

By now dawns first light had turned the black and white of driving in the snow into a uniform grey. Snow had begun to fall a little harder and a difficult drive became harder.

Perhaps one of the hardest thing for anyone to do is to recognize one’s shortcomings. I am no different. Most of the time I move through my life without as if I were devoid of faults or foibles. It takes triggers for me to realize my shallowness and lack of introspections. For example, on 9-11 I was living in NYC, had heard the first plane fly overhead and seen the second plane crash into the second tower with my own eyes. I had seen both buildings collapse and had to walk home while fighter jets had circled overhead. That night as I lay in bed and watch CNN play the collapse of the towers over and over I fell into a fitful sleep marked by dreams of people unable to tell those they loved their final thoughts, apologies for unintended slights, or express their gratitude for the love and kindness people had shown them.

When I woke I called my Dad. I told him that I had never really thought much about the sacrifices that he and my mother had made to raise me and to put me through school and how grateful I was for the life they had given me. He had initially tried to downplay my gratitude telling me that they were happy to have been able to give me what they could. But I persisted and when eventually he told me “your welcome” which made me feel as if, at least in a small way, had become a better person for showing gratitude where only acceptance had been shown before.

I realized on that snowy, hungover, painfully slow drive home that one of the things I had never done enough of with my father is ask him enough questions about his time in the army. The 2^nd World War had been a central theme of my childhood. My father’s service and his history had been a source of pride and even wonder all my life yet other than a story or two I knew nothing deeper than a very few times, and places. I had no idea of his feelings and his emotions. For reasons I can’t explain except for perhaps the sense of storytelling that I possess I fixated on the return of my father to Vienna. I wondered what it must have been like for a boy of 14 who had fled his home fleeing from religious persecution, personal violence and war, to return a foot taller and officer in the conquering army. It was beyond anything that I could comprehend and it was a story that I not only wanted to know but one that I would love to share.

It was a week before I could make it out to my parents’ home to give my father the poem he had written 60 years before.  As it was a Saturday, and I wanted to grease the skids for a favor I was going to ask my Dad I stopped at Barney Greengrass, “The Sturgeon King” on my way out of the city to buy some of my father’s favorite foods: Smoked salmon, sable, Natches Herring, chopped liver and bagels. My father love to eat, perhaps because of a childhood of deprivation, perhaps because he could support it with his 6’2” frame but it seemed a good idea to ensure good favor with good flavor.

My father was a a contradiction in many ways. He was a slim man who liked to eat. He was optimist even though he had every reason to be a pragmatist… to name just a few of the contradictions that defined him. One of his incongruities was that he was both guarded with his feelings and capable of expressing great emotional simply but powerfully. For example, when I came back from visiting Auschwitz, a place where many of our relatives had been murdered including my grandfather’s sisters, I  brought him a stone from one of the camps crematoria. I didn’t say anything and just handed him the stone. He looked at it and his face became tight with an understanding of where that stone had been and as he placed the rock in his pocket he said, in a choked voice, “thank you” and with that simple expression and phase I knew all that it meant to him. Years later this was confirmed when after his death, I discovered it in his bedside table.

Sitting in his office I watched as he re-read his opus magnus from his return to academic life, a poem he liked enough to send me looking for and whose publication quite probably stirred the fire of the writer he always wanted to become. I watched as the emotion streamed across his face like a creeper on at the bottom of all news channel. I could see pleasure on his face akin to finding a five-dollar bill in a pair of pants you have not worn in a while. I saw reflection in the way an 82 year old man looks back on 60 years…the roads taken and the paths not followed.  The opportunities lost and memories found. I wanted to tell him what the poem had meant to me but sensed that the timing was not right. The moment belonged to him so I said nothing.

Eventually we made our way to the kitchen where my mother had laid out all the goodies I had brought from Barney Greengrass. My parents have always been the people I enjoy talking to the most. Both are highly intelligent, engaged with the world and read the ink off the NY Times on a daily basis. So, while I cannot remember what we discussed that day I have no doubt the conversation was lively and engaged but eventually the conversation turned to my upcoming 50^th birthday and how I would like to celebrate it.

I told them that I didn’t want a big huhu over my birthday. Turning 50 was not necessarily a milestone that I wished to dwell on. However, there was something that I did wish for.  I looked at my Dad and told him that I wanted to go to Vienna with him. He said “Why the fuck would you want to do that? “

I told him that his poem had made think about a lot of things. How despite what I knew of his army service I really knew very little because he didn’t talk about it very much. That while I knew about his arrival in this country I knew very little of his departure from Vienna nor his return 6 years later.  That the poem had inspired in me the desire to understand what it was like to flee a city as a boy, a refugee from hate and terror,  and then return a young man, and officer of the conquering army and that I didn’t think it was something that I could understand by just talking about it at the kitchen table or his office.

For me to truly understand what that experience must have been like I needed to go there with him.

His response, was pretty typical for him. “So what? A lot of people experienced the same sort of thing. What I did was not that special.”

I said “We can agree to disagree on whether your experience is unique. No matter what it is unique to you and to our family. But are you asking what is the point?”

“Yes. What’s the purpose? What are you going to do with it other than have some kind voyeuristic understanding of what I went through.”

He was being difficult but I knew what he was driving at. My father always wanted me to write. He thought that I had a gift and he thought I was wasting it by trying to earn a living in the advertising business. I replied “I want to write a story about it. I want to understand what it must have been like because I think it is more universal than just your experience. I think that what you went through and how it ended up for you is something that people not only can relate to and I do think it is special  but I also think that is a story that is fading fast with time and deserves at least the chance to be told. “

He shook his head, a Mona Lisa like half smile on his face, untranslatable but I took as him feeling complimented by my desire and a wish to make my desire a reality but a reluctance to relive those experiences again. For a few moments he was silent and said “Let me think about it.”

 

I saw a post today that stated the most important lesson, we have learned from the Covid 19 crisis is which of our friends are racists.

While there is no doubt that is true, I think there is a bigger lesson.

The most important lesson we have learned from the Covid crisis is which of our friends, acquaintances and elected officials are Daffy. As in duck. In other, words Looney Tunes. (I classify racism, especially in its benign form where people do not realize they are racist, as a form of crazy e.g. self-delusion, etc. This does not make it any lest pernicious and awful. Just sadder.)

 

The other day I heard Mike Pence talk about the federal government response to the Covid 19. He was proud of the fact that the Federal Government had let state and local government take the lead on virus protection and response. This despite the fact that the virus is a national problem that does not discriminate based on state lines; that the lack of federal leadership led to shortages where supplies were needed, stockpiling when none was needed, price gouging and most importantly vast amount of human suffering and death. How is it that the richest country on earth, is having one of the worst responses to the crisis?  We are supposed to be the world leader, but we should not aspire to be that on infections (2.7M) and deaths (128k) and break records on infections per day as we did yesterday (50k.)  But then Pence went to claim credit for New York’s, among others, response to the virus when they had nothing to do with it. If this was not enough, he then praised the federal government’s restraint in not having federal guidelines on mask wearing despite the fact it is the best way to curb the spread of the disease.

This is Looney Tunes idiocy. It is like Elmer Fudd ever thinking he can outsmart Bugs Bunny.

The governor of Florida said that he would not walk back his steps to reopen the state. It means that people can go to the gym without any restrictions. Eat inside restaurants which can be filled to capacity. He vetoed legislation that would allow distance learning for those wishing to graduate high school. This despite the fact the state is averaging 10k new infections per day. DeSantis claims that this is because of increased testing which is among the most idiotic responses of all times because there are still 10k cases per day. This will, in short order,  overwhelm the health care system. But DeSantis is not alone in his Looney Tunes behavior.

There is the Lt. Governor of Texas, whose state has ignored guidelines and because of it now has 8k new cases per day. He said that they will continue to ignore advice from the leading expert in the field. Did not Einstein define insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Sadly because of the state’s decision to ignore common sense 2,600 people have died and 175,000 made to suffer let alone the suffering of all their families.

This is Looney Tunes idiocy. It is like the Coyote thinking he will ever catch the Roadrunner.

There are people that I know who post about “White Lives Matter” despite the fact they know the “Black Lives Matter” movement is making sure that we are all treated equally under the law. They refuse to see white privilege and belittle what African American is endure despite the fact that is evident in their lives, easily viewable on video, and is documented in every imaginable way. Then they claim not to be racist even as they voice support for the couple in St. Louis who pointed an “assault weapon” and a pistol at peaceful African American demonstrators or defend monuments of traitors, and seditionists, and racists as historical objects that should be preserved.

Their believing they are not racist is Looney Tune’s crazy. It is like Sylvester ever thinking that Tweetie will be a meal.

Then there are the anti-maskers and anti vaxers who adamantly believe that asking them to wear a mask in public or getting vaccines is violation of their rights. They claim to be pro-life but say that being vaccinated or wearing a mask interferes with gods laws despite the fact that doing those things save lives. They are not pro life. They a pro themselves at the expense of anyone else.

This is Looney Tunes foolishness. It is like expecting Pepe Le Pew not to look for love.

I have “friends” who regularly post about the horrors being brought about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Talib, and Ayanna Presley for their “anti-American” stances on issues but have never once criticized Donald Trump. Not when he tears down institutions, defies the constitution, and rips apart the country with divisive and often racist behavior, tweets, and public statements. They excoriate Pelosi and Schumer political agenda but say nothing when Trump ignores that Russia has placed a bounty on American soldiers and instead invite the Taliban to Camp David and the Russian’s to join G7. They scream about fiscal irresponsibility but say nothing when Trump passes tax laws that benefit corporations and the wealthy which never make its way back in the economy. They belittle Andrew Cuomo of NY,  Jay Inslee of Washington, and Phil Murphy of NJ despite the fact their states have led the way in overcoming the pandemic while never uttering a word against Trump’s lack of response that has resulted in 2,7,00,000 cases, 130,000 lives, and 40 million jobs.

They say nothing when, in the midst of a pandemic where people need health care more than ever and 11% of American are unemployed, Trump sues to remove the affordable care act.

This is Looney Tunes stupidity. It is like believing that Marvin the Martian will ever conquer the earth.

Finally, there are people I know and respect who despite knowing what Trump is and all the damage he has caused this country… the complete bumbling of the Covid 19 crisis, self-enrichment, crushing debt, and lack of progress on virtual any front…continue to defend their vote for him. They tell me that Hillary was flawed. She was not likeable. They defend their vote despite knowing that Hillary, like her or not, would have outperformed Trump’s pathetic performance while in a coma. Not admitting that is not only delusional but dangerous and juvenile. If you needed a guide to take you some where would you choose the person you like the most or the person who has the best qualifications?

Not admitting your own failure of judgement is  Looney Tunes madness. It is like believing that Daffy Duck will speak without a lisp.

As Porky would say “That’s all folks!”

 

Before I leave the testing area, I find a washroom. While I have sanitized my hands twice since entering the building, I know that Purell, while good in a pinch, is not nearly as good as washing. And considering, that this place is far more likely to be ripe with disease than any place I had been since my flight home, I wanted to make sure that I followed protocols. I also took the opportunity to change masks.

My cardiology appointment is in the Lawrence pavilion which is directly adjacent to where I am. I enter the building. I am confronted by two staff members who direct us to Purell our hands and to take our temperatures. The greeter who directs me is properly masked and does her job with great efficiency. But as I am walking away from the entrance, I notice the other greeter is only wearing her mask over her mouth. Her nose is completely exposed.

As I climb the stairs to Cardiology on the 2^nd floor (I have no desire to get on a crowded elevator) I silently fume that a medical facility would have someone who greets half the people entering the building with such compromised precautions. It is dangerous. It sends the wrong message to people. I realize that getting worked up over this before a cardiology appointment is probably contraindicated so as I await my stress test, I try to think of reasons why this person was half masked. Perhaps she has a compromised pulmonary system, or she has a cold so breathing through a mask properly positioned would be difficult. But that did not make sense. Why would the Medical Group put someone who cannot use a mask at its front entrance? I eventually decide that it was simply a mistake.  That the greeter didn’t notice the mask has slipped from her nose. It allows me to move on so I can worry about something closer to my heart, my upcoming stress test and echocardiogram.

The rational side of my brain said not to worry. While I am not a health freak, I am an exercise junkie. I have run marathons, triathlons, and in normal times I go to the gym for an hour plus almost every day. When Covid marooned me in Brazil I walked three miles almost every day and continued when I got home to Chatham. The inverted T wave was not anything new. Six or seven years ago my EKG had shown the same thing and the subsequent stress test had given the physicians little concern. And since then I had lost weight and exercised more. Nothing to worry about.

Doubt, though, is insidious. It invades almost like a virus. Just a small infiltration gains strength until eventually it overpowers your more logical thoughts. Especially when the mortality rate for Covid 19 patients who have cardiovascular problems is far higher than those who have no underlying conditions.   What if I did not get my high cholesterol under control in time and now have blocked coronary arteries? You used to be a smoker…what if that compromised your heart? Didn’t Grandpa die of a massive coronary?

As usual for the Medical Group, I am kept waiting in the socially distanced waiting area far past the time of my appointment. It allows my doubts to blossom like desert flowers after the rain.

The team that gave me my stress test were dressed like Covid warriors. Each had a gown on over their scrubs and were equipped with masks, face shields, and gloves. My friend Sue is a therapist who believes one of the good things to happen from this epidemic is that we have learned to “read” people from their eyes. The eyes of my tester’s showed what one hoped from a health care professional: certainty, kindness, compassion, and a dash of humanity. It was reassuring and allowed me a modicum of relaxation as they placed electrodes on my chest, and a blood pressure cuff around my arm. The nurse practitioner, who was administering the test, told me she would take it easy on me as I had to wear a mask. And she did. I barely broke a sweat. As they were removing the sensors from my body, she explained I had done “just fine.” Blood pressure was normal. Heart rate climbed and fell appropriately, and inverted T-wave was stable. In other words, according to the stress test, I was fine.

If you have just passed a cardiac test, sitting in a cardiology waiting room is a humbling experience. Most of the people who surround you are not as fortunate as you. You can see from their grey pallor, hesitant steps, and furtive glances that the news they have received is not as positive as yours. It is a moment where you can pause and thank the great architect in your universe for this moment of grace. I realize this and say a prayer.

It is also boring. No television at which to rage. No magazines to distract. People watching is uncomfortable and unkind considering the circumstances of our gathering. I turned to the modern-day superhero of boredom; my iPhone. I thought I would mindlessly wander through the fields of Facebook, distracting myself with the joys, pet peeves and angsts of those people whose paths had crossed with mine. And for a while it was comforting. Monaliza baby girl was growing and still her mother’s pride and joy. Frank was giving a video lecture on some newts he had found near his home in Virginia. Bob was properly outraged at Trump’s latest tweet.

All was well until I came across a video that had been posted by Harper (the prettiest girl in my eighth grade class whom I had not seen in 50 years) I enjoy her posts not only because in addition to seeing how someone you had a crush on before you had ever kissed someone was up to but because she and I were political still soulmates.. She hated Donald Trump with at least the same burning intensity that I did. Of late, she had been particularly outraged over his lack of leadership during the Covid-19 crisis and the insensitivity, ignorance and boorishness of his supporters fighting against common sense measures to fight the disease such as social distancing and wearing a mask. Her post’s comments said “Douchenzzles” and was linked to a video titled “Anti-Maskers Lose It Over Mask Mandate.” It was a clip of people testifying in front of a commission in Florida who were considering imposing a requirement for citizens to wear masks in public.  Curiosity got the better of me, so after placing my earbuds in, I click play on the video. It was as horrifying as any slasher movie ever produced.

A woman who looked just like my next-door neighbor opined “I don’t wear masks for the same reason I don’t wear underwear…. things need to breathe. “

A white-haired grandmother, wearing a mock police uniform testified “We were going against God’s breathing system.”

A person who looked remarkably like my best friend in 2^nd grade mother’s said “You are obeying the devil’s law and will be arrested for crimes against humanity”

Another person testifying screamed they these “communist dictates that trampled on our constitutional rights”

One person claimed that since much of our communication was non verbal that requiring people to wear masks would expose us to increased pedophilia and sex trafficking. There were several folks who testified that mandating mask wear was violating their constitutional rights although they were vague about which constitutional right was being impeded.

I turned off my phone. It was heartbreaking for this cardiac patient. How could people who claimed the divine forget the golden rule? How could those who claim to love our constitution ignore the fact that fundamental to it is it “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and spreading the disease because you failed to wear a mask ignores all of those principals. How could people who I am sure saw themselves as great neighbors be so unneighborly.

Thankfully, before I could explore this death spiral anger, pity and frustration my name was called.

The echocardiogram technician dressed in the same battle gear as those who administered my stress test. She led me into an examining room where I was asked to take my shirt off and lay on the exam room table. An echocardiogram is similar to an Ultrasound conducted on pregnant women but instead of looking for a fetus they are examining the structures of the heart. My inverted t-wave might indicate structural issues with my pump that would not show up during a stress test such as blocked coronary arteries, misfunctioning valves, or other things that thump thump in the chest. From a physical point of view, it is gentle on the patient. All that is required of you is to lay there and occasionally breathe while the technician manipulates a lubed probe across your chest and side. Despite, the fact that the hardest thing that I have to do during the test is to look at an amateurishly drawn sky on the ceiling, I am nervous. What will this test reveal? We know that my heart is functioning well but is there a defect inside ? Am I okay?

The answer is yes. At the end of my exam, the echocardiast tells me that while only a Dr. is authorized to  tell me the specifics of the “study” , everything looks fine. They would not be letting me leave otherwise. I smile underneath my mask when it occurs to me that I will be leaving the Medical Group with a “good heart.”

Sadly, that good heart feeling does not last long. As I am leaving the building, I see the greeter who was wearing a mask but not covering her nose. She has not wrapped that rascal. I do not know whether or not she has been tested for the disease recently and is disease free. I do not know whether or not she has a medical condition that makes it difficult to breathe through her mouth. What I know for sure is,  at best this is a terrible example for a medical facility to set. But she could also be exposing hundreds if not thousands to the disease.

I think of countless things I can say to her but, at this point , all I want to do is get as far away from her as possible. I vow to write the group when I get home about their lax practices.  An act,  I try to convince myself, has more impact than an individual confrontation. What it lacks is immediate satisfaction. As a consequence, as I walk to the car, I seethe. I think, “A burden that I have been carrying for months has just been lifted. I don’t have to worry about whether I have heart problems. My heart is good. And this bitch with her reckless disregard for others has just ruined that moment.”

One of the truisms that guide my life is that you are responsible for your emotions. When you are hurt or angry, it is up to you whether or not you want to be consumed by those emotions and let them have power over you.  Or, you can use their energy to launch you in a different direction. If a person makes you angry, staying angry is just giving them power. You can choose to do that, or you can choose to let those emotions go and give yourself power by finding a more centered place. Invariably, at least for me, if I do that, the decisions I make are far better than when I let my emotions control my behavior.

I will not allow this woman to ruin what should be a moment of relief and wellbeing.   So, as I climb into my car and begin my ride home, I focus on what should be the headline of the day.  “I have a good heart…I have a good heart…I have a good heart.” It serves as a mantra, relaxing me and allowing the focus on the positive: “I have a good heart.” As often happens when my anger is cleared away, I begin to see the wider panorama of my petty annoyances during the day and since my return to the United States.

What connected the greeter wearing the mask that only covered her mouth, to the inconsiderate parents who children terrorized the testing facility to the women who chose to broadcast their phone calls without a mask in a crowded environment? Why was it that wearing a mask, a simple act that is effortless seem to be an afront, even a battle cry for some.? Why did Donald Trump work so hard at downplaying a national disaster and fail to pick up the mantle of leadership in this crisis every single time he had an opportunity to do so?

It would be easy,  and perhaps even correct, to say that these people were ignorant or stupid. Perhaps they did not know that in every single case where masks have been mandated the spread of Covid 19 had been retarded and in some cases completely halted.

But I did not think that was the case. I have done my best to avoid the news since the outbreak began in March. I have glanced at news sites, read the occasional post on Facebook but I have not studied the disease in any focused manner. But even I who has tried, for the sake of his sanity,  to maintain low news input knew that the single most effective way to prevent the diseases spread is to wear a mask.

Perhaps they are simply crazy. Certainly, some of the people who testified before the commission in Florida had a vastly different sense of reality than I did.  But as Hunter S. Thompson said ““The Edge… There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.” In other words, I cannot tell if those folks are crazy because I am not crazy enough to judge them.

More importantly, some of the things that I have railed against seem more deliberate than crazy. Trump not wearing a mast even when a sign says everyone must wear a mask is a premeditated political act. Whether he wants to convey invulnerability, strength, or bravery it does not matter because it is intentional. Not stupid. Not crazy. Purposeful.

What connected these things? Something did. I knew it. But similar to Tantalus grasping for the apple just beyond his reach the unifying factor in all of these things eluded me.

I had a teacher who once told me if I had a problem that I was having trouble solving I should focus on the part of the problem that I could solve. In this case, the only part of the conundrum that I utterly understood was why I felt the way that I did.

Every person on the face of the planet should realize what an awful disease Covid 19 is by now. It is impossible for them not to know that is not a simple flu that will go away if we ignore it. Prayers will not rid the world of this disease. Science and knowledge will. Science tells us that wearing a mask and being socially distant reduces the number of infections and decreases the death rate. Our hope for salvation will come through science whether it be through a vaccine or treatments that mitigates the disease’s ravages.

Why does it bother me so much that people are ignoring these facts? Some of it has to do with self-preservation. I have no desire to get the disease. The idea of being so sick, possibly being hospitalized and ventilated or even dying scares the hell out of me. But I am healthy so if I follow the rules: wash my hands regularly, wear a mask in public and maintain social distance I have a better than average chance to avoid this disease. Even if I catch it, I have great Dr’s and good insurance that will provide me with the best possible chance of beating this disease.

I know that I am fortunate. I can wait this disease out financially and emotionally.

But I also know that there are so many people who do not have what I have. They have preexisting conditions, elderly and frail, or other factors where catching the disease means a death sentence.

40 million people in the United States have lost their jobs due to this disease. Millions more each week Covid goes unabated. Some of these people are living paycheck to paycheck with little or no savings. Each day the crisis goes on unabated means one more day of despair, hunger and increasing debt. Every day that it continues it means they are without adequate or any insurance which means catching the disease will mean bankruptcy and a financial ruin that may never get repaired.

I have huge compassion for those folks. I know that if I do something as simple as wearing a mask, I am helping to protect those people and give them a better chance to weather the Covid 19 storm.

Thinking all this allows me to imagine what my mother used to say when I would exhibit compassion. She would say “You have a good heart.”

I smile to myself. So, I do. Dr. certified. But what does that say about the greeter, the phone talker, the bad parents, the testifiers and the Donald? Do they have “bad hearts.” With the exception of Trump, I do not think I can make that judgement. I do not think that they are evil.

What do you call those people who know that wearing a mask, washing hands or maintaining social distance will help make sure that their neighbors, friends and fellow citizens don’t suffer disease and hardship but choose not to do it.

As I pull into my garage the right word occurs to me. They are heart-less. It is not that they don’t have any compassion. I cannot make that judgement. But it is truly clear that they have less heart than they should.

The garage door closes. I am home. And, since this is where the heart is, I go inside.

Going to a medical facility these days is nerve racking. However, I have been a patient of this group of Dr’s since before I can remember and this particular campus was less than a quarter mile from my childhood home.  Both of those circumstances helped mitigate my fears. If you add to that general sense of comfort, the numerous emails I had received from them about the extensive procedures they were undertaking to ensure patient safety such as mandatory temperature check, hand sanitization at every entrance, required mask wearing and enforced social distancing in waiting areas made me relaxed about entering the facility if not the tests.

I felt, as much as you can about any place can these days, that my safety was paramount.  Here  the idea of “neighbor” and “first do no harm”  would be practiced. After all, by definition the people on a medical campus would be at risk and we as good neighbors would do what we could to respect each other and protect each’s others health and well-being.

I could not have been more wrong.

One of the positive aspects about the pandemic is that parking is easier to find. I found a place directly adjacent to the entry of The Whitman Pavilion.  I put on my mask and walked up the front steps to the entrance. There stood a patient, mask off, blocking the entrance, having a heated conversation with someone on her cell phone. I could, due to a vivid imagination and having watched too many internet videos, almost see the plume of microdroplets dispersing in the air around her. How can I pass without covering myself with her cloud of contaminates? I felt like saying something rude in Portuguese so she would not understand what I said about her but with enough force that she would move but settled for a loud “Ahem.” It worked. She moved to an adjacent sidewalk. But it left me with the first of many unanswerable questions.

Why do people think they need to take off their masks to speak on their cell phone?

Inside the Group, it was as advertised. I was directed to sanitize my hands visa vis a handy automated Purell dispenser, my temperature was checked via a digital infrared thermometer and  I was directed to a waiting room that had been modified to ensure social distancing. All of the above served to lower my blood pressure over the incident outside and reassure me.

One of the things I really despise about Dr.’s offices is how they make you wait for scheduled appointments. While I understand that things do not go as planned and delays occur this happens with such smooth regularity, I am sure it is planned. Overbooking makes for a steady income but is a statement that the physician believes their time is more important than yours. At the medical group this means that you have to watch, via flat panel display, the local NJ news channel. Under normal circumstances, this would be benign news about the local tomato festival or the opening of a dog park. However, these days almost all of the news, including on the NJ news channel, is about the pandemic, the increase in infections, and how sick it makes people. I understand the need to distract people while you are purposely making them wait, the shiny object that diverts your attention from your timing being wasted, but it did beg a medical question.

Why would medical professionals purposely expose people to information that createxs far more anxiety than answers and instead of distracting patients it makes them antsy to leave this viral hotbed.

I could have distracted myself with my smart phone. Surfing the web. Reading the paper. Playing games or finding out what stupidity was on Facebook. But my strategy was not to take my cellphone out of my zippered pocket. I did not want it exposed to whatever evil pathogens might be lurking here should I receive an urgent phone call and need to answer it. And normally, waiting rooms have magazines to distract you but in the age of Covid, they had been removed. As a consequence, I had no choice but to listen News 12  and their news stories about how victims of the disease had their immune system destroyed and were taking months to recuperate and the story of one New Jersey family who had lost 6 members.

I was greatly relieved when a nurse in shield and mask came to fetch me for my  2^nd Shingrex shot. Just before I left for Brazil, I had a physical. It was the source of all of my appointments today. One of the things I was told during that visit was that the previous vaccine for shingles, which I had gladly taken, was only 40% effective. But the new and improved shot had 90% efficacy. My father would have raised hell about the medical corporations foisting drugs on us they knew were ineffective and then charging us more for a new drug that was better and that certainly went through my head when I was provided with this information. However, I also had known too many people who had suffered through shingles and had no desire to join that club.  As a consequence, I agreed to the inoculation which would require two shots to be fully immunized.

With a newly punctured arm, I departed the building. The same woman was still chattering away mask free on her cell phone at the entrance. Under my breath I gave her a Brazilian benediction of “File de Puta” as I passed but she continued her conversation, nonetheless. Perhaps she thought I was sneezing…

My next appointment was on the other side of the medical campus. Being the health nut I am and , as my next appointment was still an hour in the future, I decided to drive over and park there. At least then I could wait in my car, limiting my exposure to other folks. While waiting I engaged in two of my favorite activities: Listening to my Audible Book, (Robert A. Heinlein’s newly discovered book “The Pursuit of the Pankera.”) and people watching.  The book was good, the people watching  disappointing. The latter not because of lack of people to watch but because of what I am observed them doing.

It was lunch time and the view out my car window was of the driveway that circled the campus. As often happens on large office complexes a number of the employees used the drive as a place to stretch their legs and exercise by walking multiple loops around the property. Most of these folks were dressed, not surprisingly, in scrubs. While not disturbing it was a concerning as the purpose of scrubs is allowing health care workers access to clothing that could be easily washed and not exposed patients to potential contagions. I guess this would not have been too concerning except that the average group size was five, often tightly packed so they could converse with each other without wearing masks.

I get it. Exercising in masks sucks. I know because I had done it every day for the past 3 months. It makes it more difficult to breathe, when they get damp due to perspiration they stick to your face, and communication is challenging. But I put up with it because I thought it was protecting my neighbor. It is what I hoped they would do for me. But here were health care workers who had been on the front lines of the Covid 19 pandemic in NJ. They knew the danger of this virus yet they were behaving in what I thought was a reckless fashion. Perhaps this was because they were letting down their guard as the worst of the crisis had passed. Or, maybe they were similar to battle hardened troops who knew more about the battle than I, the greenhorn with nothing but book knowledge and a sense of self preservation, so I should not let their behavior concern me too much.

My next appointment was the one in which I was most hopeful. I had arranged to be tested for the Covid 19 antibodies. Elaine and I had been in Asia, on a cruise ship, during the early stages of the outbreak. When we had returned from our journey, I had felt lousy for a week with a sinus infection and light temperature. Since, then I had worked near the epicenter of the NY outbreak in Rockland county, been on numerous airplanes and had been residing in a country with the second largest number of infections in the world. I had ample opportunity to be exposed and in my heart of hearts hoped that I would test positive for the virus’s antibodies.  Even though my understanding is that they don’t know if having the antibodies prevent you from a recurrence of  the disease I thought (with my vast amount of medical training) that if I had the antibodies and the disease did not lock me down I could (sorry for the play on words) breathe a lot easier about catching the disease.

The location for the testing was the cafeteria of the medical complex. It is a low lying building with a patio outside where diners can enjoy their meal al fresco. When I arrived at the facility, masked up, I followed the signs to where there was supposed to be a que for testing. As I approached the entrance, I was stopped by a uniformed but unmasked security guard who scrambled to place a mask on his face. He explained, while holding a mask over his face,  that testing would not resume until 1 and I should wait until then to line up. I look for and  found an unoccupied  table properly social distanced from other and waited.

It was a good place to look at fellow testees. There was a woman with her mask serving as a cravat talking loudly into her cell phone that was on speaker. I have a long-standing problem with people speaking on cell phones in public but aside from that don’t you think that if you are here to be tested for a disease you should cover up. Masks do not interfere with your ability to yap.

A Mom and Dad were nearby with their two out of control pre-school children. The kids did not want to wear their masks. They thought nothing of running without masks around the patio like it was there personal  playground. My mother’s reaction to this type of behavior would have been very judgmental.  I had, as a child, heard and felt her displeasure when I was misbehaving. Clearly this Mom and Dad had a different style parenting and judging by their children’s behavior an inferior one to Moms. And, while most parenting books place an emphasis on teaching your children to share, I don’t think any of them would think highly of teaching your kids to share Covid 19.

And then of course were the outliers. I mean that two ways. Not only were they on the periphery of the patio but they were wearing masks and social distancing from people.  My survey of the area had identified far more non mask wearers (I include in that tally those who were their masks as neck warmers and those who didn’t see the need to cover their noses) than mask wearers and by and large the nons didn’t think social distancing rules were meant for them.

Let me summarize. We are in the middle of a pandemic that has killed approximately 5% of those infected in the United States, in one of the states hardest hit by that pandemic killing almost 11% of those infected, at a medical center where people are sick and particularly susceptible to infection, getting tested for the virus because either you had it or think you have it, and you chose not to wear a mask. What are you thinking? Which brought me to my second imponderable question of the day.

Do people believe that this pandemic will disappear magically, and they have no responsibility in helping vanquish it?

Personal responsibility used to be the mantra of the party currently in power. However, they have seemed to have abandoned it for the axiom “Every man for themselves.”

Standing there in line I tried to adopt my only mantra if for no other reason than to prevent my mask from steaming my glasses. Perhaps some of these people had medical conditions that prevented them from wearing masks? It could be that have been misled and believe that you can only catch the virus in an indoor environment? Maybe they had been brainwashed by Fox TV into believing this was only a slightly more severe flu and they were only getting tested to prove that the whole thing was a hoax. Needless to say, my mantra didn’t work, my glasses still fogged, and my blood pressure continue to spike.

Testing, when it finally resumed, was quite organized. You were invited to wash your hands, scanned for fever and asked a number of questions about symptoms you may or may not have had. Your name was then checked off a list, a piece of paper was vital information on it handed to you, and you were directed to a large room with a group of work areas with modular office like partitions were strategically placed around the periphery. Each of the technicians wore a Tyvek suit with hood, masks, shield, and gloves. After being directed to one of the booths. The technician patiently (irony) tells you she is going to poke your finger take a drop of blood and wait ten minutes to see if you have no antibodies, the antibodies you produce during an active infection, or the antibodies left behind when you have recovered. After the droplet of blood is harvested, there is time to kill and I ask her how the Covid 19 crisis has been for her. I can only see her eyes and they speak volumes as she tells me how horrific it has been to be on the front line. The overwhelming illness, the long hours, the illness and death of friends and colleagues.

I ask her why she thinks that people are not wearing masks? And she just shakes her head but before she can utter a word of explanation, the room is filled with a horrific wail. The type of cry you would expect to hear from someone who is having their toenails removed with plyers or their skinned burned with cigarettes. It turns out it is not torture. It is one of the bratty kids who is begging her mother not to have the test with the same decibel level of 747 on take off and the pitch of a soprano. She is terrified and I am ashamed to admit I have a schadenfreude moment. I know this is beneath me but somehow it seems apt that this little girl whose parents had let her endanger the rest of us with her maskless play were somehow getting retribution for their folly.

But her behavior also seemed a metaphor for the past three months. We as a country run around as if nothing is wrong and then scream and wail when we are tested.

The wait seems interminable. Watching a test kit of a timer is the Covid equivalent of watching paint dry. Added to that the screams of two children piteously begging anyone who would listen not to force them to have the test. When the timer finally hits the ten-minute mark it is revealed that I have no antibodies for Covid 19. I neither have or have had the disease. I am grateful for the first and disappointed for the latter. Life would be far simpler if I could worry less.

[Part 3: Tomorrow 6/30/20]

Four weeks ago, I returned to my home in the United States.

It was not an easy decision to return, the hardest part leaving my wife behind. This goes beyond the fact that she is charming company and often laughs at my jokes. Her physical presence in my life is reassuring. Hugs, handholds, kisses and propinquity do more to shake away the darkness and fear that lurk in the corners of everyone’s minds these days. As much technology as we have these days, Zoom and Whatsapp can provide visual assurance but they can not provide the tactile. I knew when I made the decision to leave Brazil, that I would be leaving this all behind. And not just for a finite period of time when I knew I would be able to gather her up in my mind but for an indeterminate period that only the gods of travel and American Airlines could shed lite.

I also knew that I needed to return to the United States. When I had left in early March for a one-week holiday in Brazil I had some medical issues that were hanging over my head. My electrocardiogram showed an inverted T wave that concerned my physician. She had asked me to have a stress test and echo cardiogram to make sure that there were no underlying problems that needed to be addressed. Initially, this was of little concern for me as my t-wave issue is not new and has been examined before and the fact that I do vigorous exercise nearly every day led me to believe that this was a Dr. using extreme caution. However, as the news of Covid 19 spread and it became clear that those with cardiovascular disease had the highest death rates my concern grew. What if there is an underlying cardiovascular disease and I catch Covid? This started as a small fear tucked neatly away in the back of brain and grew proportionally with negative news on the disease. I needed to have this checked out. I needed to eliminate the fear or confront the problem and the only place I could do that was in the United States.

I also knew 10,000,000 people, that we know of , have contracted the diseases worldwide. More than 500,000 have died. Cities across the globe have been locked down, their citizens facing  hardships that were unimaginable 4 months ago.  International and domestic commerce has come to a screeching halt. There is no normal. There is not even a new normal because every time we think we have reached a point of stability; something happens to disrupt it. In other words, even though I have  a very healthy ego and knew that my challenges, while meaningful to me, were as Rick says at the end of Casablanca, “the problems of two little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”

What I always loved about that speech at the end of Casablanca and in fact about the greatest generation attitude towards the 2^nd World War, was that we are all in this together. We all had a roll to play. If you could not fight then you could collect scrap. If you could not collect scrap, then perhaps you would do your bit by planting a victory garden. Victory would occur only if we all did our part. That collective spirit, a generation rising to the challenges it faced, is what earned them the title the greatest

It does not take a great deal of intelligence or even imagination to understand that this is a global problem where regions, individual countries, and their peoples need to band together to solve a problem. During the 2^nd World War that is exactly what the Allies managed to do. They put aside old feuds and rivalries and established a command structure that allowed the individual countries to maintain command and control of their troops while develop strategies and tactics that would allow them to act as a single fighting force. Each of the countries managed to motivate its citizenry, those not fighting to be part of the effort to defeat the enemy. Rosie the Riveter “We Can Do It.” In Britain, “We Work or Want.”

.

A cursory understanding of the 2^nd World War can illustrate what would have happened had the allies decided to fight their common enemy on their own. The English forces in France after the collapse of the French Army were driven into the sea and only saved by the miracle of Dunkirk. The Russians Army was driven back to Moscow.

The only country in the world that could pull all the pieces together to defeat Nazism and the Japanese Imperialism in the 2^nd World War was the United States. When our name was called at Pearl Harbor our leaders marshalled an isolationist country into becoming the machine that would ultimately defeat our enemies. It was that victory, where we were the leading force in the coalition that won WW2 that made American the leader of the free world. It made American great.

While in Brazil it was dismaying, to say the least, to read about how the person who had vowed to make America great again, was forgetting our history and doing the opposite of what history had taught us. Instead of creating a global coalition that would work together to help defeat the virus he actively worked against it. It started when he disbanded the team on the National Security Council who were in charge of a pandemic response because he thought it wasteful. It continued when instead of believing the data our security apparatus was giving him and following the advice of epidemiologist, he ignored the problem calling it just a flu that would disappear when the temperature rose a few degrees.  He withdrew funding from the World Health Organization because he didn’t like what the data, they were providing the world. Instead of marshalling a federal response to the disease, he let individual states fight it out over limited resources and if a governor had the temerity to disagree with him he would threaten to withdraw any federal support.

What makes me particularly sad is I love history.

 

History, if narrated properly, is the best story. What stirred my passion for history were the great men accepting their mantle and leading their people to a better safer world. Churchill on the brink of Britain’s collapse saying, “Never in the history of human conflict have so many owed so few.” Or, “We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

 

Or FDR’s Fireside chats where he would talk one on one to the American people about the challenges we had to face and telling them “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

 

Even John Kennedy, flawed man and President, inspiring us to the stars when he said “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

 

The current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has no idea how to govern let alone motivate. His drive to be President was not due to civic duty but for greed and power. Those deadly sins have distorted true north on a compass and we lose our way.

 

The sad consequence is that when our leader does not lead, chaos ensues. People do what they do for themselves and forget about their neighbors. Instead of moving forward hand in glove, it becomes cat herding.

Add to this turmoil, invective, dissent, distrust of social institutions and media and putting politics above policy into every move he made. It becomes a ripe stew where citizens do not know where to turn in a crisis for reliable information that makes them feel safe and that things will be okay. It turns neighbors against neighbors, friends against friends, family and family not arguing about how they can help each other but why they are wrong are about the decisions they have made based on politics not science.

How many lives would have been saved had he led?  Demonstrated leading by example by wearing a mask or socially distance or any of a dozen other things that would have help move us forward he decided to go another way.  He chose not to either through incompetence, stupidity, greed or the type of narcissism that leads you to believe that whatever you do is great.

Social distancing and wearing a mask became another trick of the liberal elite pulled to keep real Americans from getting together.

The sad irony was that Donald Trump had an opportunity to attain the exaltation he has always believed he deserved.  And he blew it. Instead, he will be reviled as the worst president in the history of the United States killing more Americans than the Korean and Vietnam conflicts combined, creating more unemployment than any other President in history, the worst race riots since 1967, and creating a generational depression.

With any sense of justice, the number 45 will be banned for use by all sports team because its synonymousness with failure and bogus stats.

I knew this all before I got on the airplane to get home. But I knew it intellectually.  I thought that people were believing the Dr’s, health care providers, and experts on what we needed to do tamp down the pandemic. Where a safe path could be blazed that balanced people’s health and the need to make a living. I thought the personal responsibility that used to be the mantra of the Republican party would become all of ours. That if we took responsibility for our own behavior that beating this pandemic into submission would be the result.

Which is why when I returned to the US, I quarantined myself for two weeks. Through my travels I knew there was an opportunity that I could have contracted the Covid19 virus. It was my responsibility to make sure that if I had become contaminated that the infection would stop with me. I had a sufficient food supply for the duration so no deliveries would have to be made to my house.  The most challenging part was putting on a mask when I went outside to walk the dog and maintaining the proper social distance from my neighbors who were out strolling as well but I have been skilled at crossing the street since I was six.

I did not use the time to catch up on the news via the network and cable news channels. Since the Covid19 crisis began in March I had not listened to any broadcast news. This was partially due to being in Brazil, but I could have, had I chosen to, watched CNN or even the network news online.  However, I had no desire to listen to endless loops on how the effluence had hit the rotating blades. Broadcast news tends to go where the images are instead of following the story. Reading trusted journalistic sources such as The New York Times, Wall St. Journal triangulated where we stood in the world and provided me with a understanding of the news that resembled the truth more accurately than any single source would.

As a consequence, I was aware of the political dissent in this country about common sense, practical, and life saving steps to battle Covid such as social distancing, mask wearing, and the closing of all but essential services. (Much of the same descent was happening in Brazil fueled by their mini me Trump Bolsonaro). But I assumed that this was the news media blowing up isolated incidents like they do when their camera angles make you assume a crowd is large when, in fact, it is small.

My walks around my small townhome community had done nothing to dispel that impression. It is not crowded here and those whom I encountered on my walks with Rosie either assiduously maintained social distance or wore masks or both. This made me feel secure, but it also made me feel like I had neighbors, not just folks who lived adjacent to me. Neighbors care about each other and the fundamental message of most known religions is “Love thy neighbor as one loves thyself.”

My first forays back into the new normal world did nothing to dispel the idea that despite the destructive and divisive leadership from the White House that people were being neighborly. Visiting my sister in Montclair I noticed folks in her neighborhood were practicing basic precautions as that had in my neighborhood.  Even the folks I passed in cars seemed in tune with the message as many were either wearing masks or had them hanging in the car. The only hiccup to this kumbaya feeling I had come when I went to the Magic Fountain, a legendary soft serve ice cream stand in my hometown. While waiting in line to pick up my pre ordered black and white shake an elderly woman was ahead of me inline without a mask and had not received the memo on social distancing as well. But it was outdoors, and she was of an age where many feel that rules do not apply so I wrote it off and focused on enjoying my delicious black and white shake.

It was these positive experiences within the community that allowed me to think that at least in my part of New Jersey that we were all working together to defeat a common enemy. While not quite the efforts of our parents and grandparents during WW2 we were all still singing out of some hymnal.

Or at least so I thought, until I visited the Berkeley Heights campus of the Summit Medical Group

 

That night, while Zach and his parents were eating dinner, he sprung his idea on them. “Mom and Dad, Pops and I were talking about summer today and I told him about how I didn’t want it to end and that I wanted to figure out a way to keep it from ending. He told me that the best way that I could save the summer was by remembering it and when I asked him how  he said that when the things are really important to people they put them in Museums.” Zach paused to look at his parents who at this point had a look of bewilderment on their face….. “And I would like to start a museum of Summer….”

 

Zach’s parents were both a little taken back and amused at the same time. His Dad said “Well that is certainly a very interesting idea and very creative but have you thought about where you are going to put this museum?”

 

“Well I thought we could put it in the basement. It is bit messy down there but I could clean it up….other than that their would be plenty of room to put the the….what do you call those things like they have at the Natural History museum?”

 

“You mean exhibits?” Zachs Mom said.

 

“Yeah there are plenty of room for the exhibits and then when ever anybody wanted to remember summer all they would have to do is to go to the basement.”

 

“Zachie what type of exhibits were you thinking about?”

 

“I don’t know exactly. I was actually thinking of asking each of my friends to create their own and maybe Pop’s would want one or Mrs.D. and if you want to make an exhibit you could make one too. And I was thinking that it might be fun…” and he paused.

 

“Yes” said Zach’s Dad knowing that the pause was probably going to cost him something.

 

“I was thinking it might be fun to make it a party. We could invite everyone who was making an exhibit and we could have cake and ice cream from Caties.”

 

“Zach I don’t know” started Zach’s Dad “It is an awful lot of work.” He looked at his Mom knowing she was easier to convince and tried to give he that look that always seem to make her say yes and said “Please Mom. It is really really really important to me.”

 

Zachs parents looked at each other. They realized that their son had their heart set on this and to say no would just mean days and days of pleading because Zach could be relentless in getting the things that he wanted. They also loved the fact that he had been so creative and had used so much initiative. So Zach’s Mom said simply “Okay” and after some consultation it was decided that the grand opening of the museum and the party would be held in 10 days time on the Sunday before school began.

 

The next week and a half were a blur of activity.

 

The first thing the next morning Zach rounded up the gang from around the neighborhood and they all met at the lean to.  He did his best to explain what it was that he was trying to do. How much he had loved summer and he didn’t want to end and thought that making a museum was a great way to do that and it was something that would be all of theres even though it was going to be at his house. Rachel Roberts asked what they would need to do. Zach told them that all they needed to do was figure out what their favorite part of summer was and put together a display of that.

 

Rachel said “You mean like those diorama things we do for school” and Zach said “ Yes, exactly like that.” When a few of the kids expressed a little bit of doubt about the idea Zach told them there was going to be a party they quickly changed their mind.

 

Cleaning the basement proved to be a lot harder work than Zach had originally thought. It was an old house and the basement had not been cleaned since they had moved into the house 9 years earlier.  There were lots of boxes in there, even som that had been left by the previous owners and his mother insisted that go through each one of them to make sure there was nothing valuable in them. Then he had to haul these boxes, some of them as big as he was, out to the curb, for the garbage men to pick up. Thankfully, the house had a set of storm doors that led directly out of the basement otherwise he never would have been able to get all the boxes out. Then he swept out the place making sure to get rid of all the spider webs located in the rafters and mopped the floor. When he was done he was exhausted but the basement was spotless and his parents very proud of his efforts.

 

Zach was not the only one working hard.  His mother had ordered and sent out invitations. She and her husband had decided that Zach’s museum was a good excuse to have the neighborhood over for and end of summer gathering.  Decorations had been purchased and a caterer engaged. However, she did all the baking herself. There she had outdone herself with a three layer coconut cake, chocolate chip and oatmeal cookies, and two of Zach’s favorites raspberry pie.

 

His Dad was also quite busy. He purchased sawhorses and plywood to build the tables for the displays. He made a sign that he mounted over the storm doors that read “Museum of Summer with shiny gold letters and a green background.

 

On the day of the party each person who was making an exhibit brought their display into the basement covered with a white sheet that would only be removed when everyone went through the museum for the first time. Zach wanted to be surprised about the displays and much more importantly it would be more fun this way.

 

Zach was extremely excited as he looked around at the party. All of his friends were there and almost all of their parents. Mrs. D was there, as was his Grandpa and of course his parents who at that moment were busy getting drinks for and making plates of food for their guests.

 

Zach walked up a couple of steps to the porch doors and cleared his throat. Pops and he had written a little speech and now seemed like a good time to give it. He said “Welcome to the grand opening of the first museum of summer.” Everyone cheered and his mother much to his surprise put two fingers in her mouth and gave a really loud whistle. “Everyone” he continued” has worked really hard to put together the exhibits and I wanted to thank everyone for helping to make this museum possible.” There was more cheering and he resumed “No one knows what the displays are yet as they have all been covered in sheets to keep them a secret. So what we are going to do is all walk down into the basement together and as we get to each display the person who made it will take off the sheet and they will tell us what it is and what it means to them! Is everybody ready?”

 

And with that Zach ran down the steps crossed over to the storm doors, opened them and descended into the basement followed by the rest of the party. The basement which had an exposed beam ceilings was essentially one very large rectangle. Arranged along the wall, on the tables that Zach’s dad had built were 12 displays each covered in sheets ina variety of colors.

 

Everyone paused at the first display and Zach yelled out “Whose is this?” Becky stepped forward and with the help of her Dad pulled the sheet from her exhibit. Underneath it was a replica of the flag that she had made for the lean too….the same t-shirt with the black dog and the 10 hand painted stars on it. The only difference between it and the one at the lean too is this one was a pale red while the one back in the woods was a light blue.

 

Someone yelled out “Why did you make it?”  Becky blushed a little and said in a shy voice that got a little louder as she went a long “Well everyone liked the flag I made for the lean to and I really like our trips in the woods especially when we told stories so I thought this would be perfect for the museum.” She paused for a second and then said in a very shy voice “And this time I asked my Dad before I used one of his t-shirts.” Everyone gave her a round of applause and as a group they moved over to the next display.

 

Krissy Bradbury pulled off the sheet on the second display. It revealed a large packing box in which the front and the top had been taken off. The bottom of the box was covered with sand with a couple of figures that looked suspiciously similar to Barbie and a couple of her friends arranged in various beach poses. On the left was an 8 x 10 color photograph of what appeared to be an old house. At the back of the box was a photograph of the same size of the ocean and on the far right a picture of a very old tree with many many branches. Krissy said “My best memories of the summer are at the Cape. And that is the picture of the house we have there and over there is the water and on the right is a picture of my favorite tree. And the people playing in the sand are supposed to be me and my friends but I couldn’t figure out how to do that so I used Barbie instead.”

 

And so it went, as each display was reached the person would reveal what was underneath and tell why they had created it. Rob Kelly’s was just simply a dodgeball because it was his favorite game in the whole world which made Zach rub his knee.

 

Drew Spiro’s was a fish mounted on a piece of wood.

 

Mrs. D. had a photo album full of photographs from a trip she had to made to Italy when she was younger and when asked why she had picked that she just blushed smiled and wouldn’t say.

 

Tommy Hughes display were a collection of baseball cards and Red Sox hat along with a scorecard from the game

 

Pop Pop’s was just a flashlight with what looked like a plate of cookies and some milk. When asked he said in somewhat husky voice “I like telling ghost stories to my grandson.”

 

His parents had surprised him by putting a Bruce Springsteen t-shirt over the top of old sewing mannequin.. Zach got very embarrassed when they told the group that this was their favorite memory of summer because it was their first kiss.

 

Finally, there was only one display left: Zachs. He went over to it and pulled the sheet off revealing a large wind chime on a metal stand with photographs attached to each of the chimes. There were pictures of all the people who mattered to him: His friends,  Byron, Pop-Pops, Mrs. D and his parents. He reached out and touched the lowest hanging of the bells and touched it and it rang. Zach said “ I couldn’t figure what memory was most important to me. They all mean a lot. Which got me to thinking that what was really important to me was the fun that I had with everyone….I decided to put it on the wind chime because that is the sound I hear in my bed as I am thinking about my day and right before I go to sleep.”

 

People applauded and some even came over to shake Zachs hand and tell him how much fun this was. And for a long while many circulated around the exhibits looking at each one , savoring the memory of summer it represented for the creators. But eventually people began to drift off. Tomorrow was the first day of school and it was time to go home and get ready for fall.

 

Later that night Zach lay in bed. He could smell the fresh cut lawns, and the barbeques, and the fresh chlorine smell from the pool at Union Field.   He lay in the dark listening to the sounds of the summer night going outside his window, crickets bleating, the rustle of trees and a train’s whistle in the distance. His eyes closed and smile crossed his face when he thought about how summer had been saved. It could never leave him now

 

The wind blew. The wind chimes jingled.  Sleep came.

One day late that summer, Zach came home to a surprise. Instead of Mrs. D in the kitchen making him lunch it was his Mom. He ran over to her and gave her a hug. “Mom what are you doing here.

 

“Well right now I am making you lunch” she said smiling. She turned around and produced a peanut butter and jelly sandwich as is if by magic, “And when your done we are going to mall and shop for new school clothes. School begins in a couple of weeks.”

 

Zach was super surprised. He was having such a wonderful time this summer that school had completely slipped his mind. The thought of summer ending seemed like the most terrible thing in the world to him. He loved these long hot days of endless exploration and constant adventure. The thought of being trapped in a school room, no matter how much fun he could have there, filled him dread.

 

“Zach, whats wrong? You have hardly touched your sandwich and we have to get going. Didn’t I make it the way you like it?”

 

He didn’t answer her question.  Instead he took a bite of the sandwich. It had no flavor. He didn’t even detect that his mother had used smooth Skippy instead of crunchy. Normally that would have created quite the hub bub but instead Zach just dully bit into his sandwich bite after bite until all that was left was a few crumbs and a couple of dots of leaked jam. When he looked up he saw Mom staring at him, with her “spill it buster” look on her face. Looking down at his plate, he mumbled.

 

Zach’s Mom smiled and said “Zachie all things have to come to an end honey. If Summer didn’t end, then the fall wouldn’t come. Then you wouldn’t be able to drink apple cider or go pumpkin picking. Just think of all the candy you would miss at Halloween if we did not have a fall. Now finish your milk and go wash your hands there is peanut butter all over them.  Lets get going buddy.”

 

Zach did what he was told .He thought seriously about what his mother had told him as he walked to and then climbed into the back seat of their Jeep. After they had driven for a moment or two he said somewhat petulantly  “ I don’t care about any of that fall stuff. Summer beats it hands down. I wouldn’t even miss Halloween. I would save my money and go to Caties whenever I wanted to.”

 

He could see his Mom’s eyes smile in the rear view mirror. She said “Zach if summer never ended then you would never go to school. And if you want to be a world famous explorer you have to go to school. You have learn about geography so you know where to go, and you have to learn math so you can figure out how to get there and learn foreign language so you can speak to people when you get to where you want to go.”

 

As Zach thought about what his mother had said she pulled into the mall parking lot. He had completely forgotten that they were going shopping for school clothes. This served to distract Zach completely from the subject at hand. He hated clothes shopping. He hated the way that everyone seem to prod him, measuring this that and the other thing. To make matters worse his mother insisted he try everything on and his mother seemed to bring everything in the store for him to try. The clothes were always stiff, smelled funny and made his skin itch…and just when he though it was all over his mother would take to him to another store to try on more stuff. After a summer of wearing nothing but shorts, t-shirts and sneakers, it was torture.

 

Three hours later an over-prodded and over tired boy climbed back into their car. It had not been a good afternoon, and even the bribe of an ice cream cone, did little to lift his spirits. He decided that he needed to talk to someone else about the end of Summer….someone who was smart enough to help him figure out a way around this problem. He decided that he needed to talk to his Grandpa.

 

When he got to Pop Pop’s house he found him sitting on the front porch sitting in his favorite chair reading a book. At least he said he was reading a book. Zach could of sworn that he had a snore just as he was walking up the steps. “Hey little buddy! To what do I owe the honor of this unexpected visit.”

 

Zach explained the problem to him. He told his Grandpa how he had been surprised that Summer was almost over. He did not think that it was fair that it had to end and that he was trying to figure out a way to make it last a little bit longer. When he had finished explaining the situation to Pops he was pretty worked up. If had not been such a big boy some people might have even mistaken the wetness on his cheeks for tears.

 

Pop Pop smiled at Zach and motioned to him to come sit in his lap. He put his arm around him, smiled and said “Summer is pretty terrific isn’t Zach. What is your favorite part of Summer?”

 

“Oh Pops I love it all. I love the fact that you don’t have to wear a lot of clothes. I love the fact that it is warm all the time. I love going to camp and learning to swim and shooting bows and arrows. I love exploring the woods with my friends. I love the fort we built.” He paused for breath and gushed on “I love Mrs. D’s fried bologna sandwiches and the stories she tells me. I love learning to play chess with you and the books you read me. I love going to Caties and buying ice cream or candy. I love playing in the brook and getting muddy and dirty. I love eating on the back porch with Mom and Dad. I love playing capture the flag and catching fire flies. I love sneaking out with Dad and getting an ice cream cone when I have already had one that day. I love the way the night smells and the sounds crickets make at nights and I love falling asleep with the window open and waking up and doing it all over again.”

 

His Grandpa chuckled and said, “Wow that is a whole lot of love Zach. Let me ask you a question though. Do you think that you will ever forget any of those things that you love?”

 

Without any hesitation Zach said “Of course I won’t.”

 

“Then how can summer ever really be over if you always remember it?”

 

Zach thought for a minute and said “Pops, what do people do to remember things”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“Well, I know that I will always remember what I did this summer and all the fun that I had but you know that sometimes you sort of forget stuff and you have to be reminded. You know like in school when you are trying to remember how to spell a word and the teacher gives you a letter or two and then you can remember the whole thing. So what do people do when they try to remember things like the things that they have done?”

 

Zach’s Grandpa thought for a second and said “Well I suspect that depends on the person. Some people like to write their memories down…like the stories I read you so that re-read them later and remember what it was like. Other people take pictures of things and put them in photo albums that they could look at later. You know that your grandmother used to like make scrapbooks and put little odds and ends from the adventures we have in it and that way we would have little pieces of our memories with us for as long as we cared to look at them.” He paused and began again “And if the memories are really really important some people create museums like the Natural History Museum I took you to in New York…..”

 

In a flash Zach was out of his Grandpa’s lap and flying down the stairs. “Thanks Pops. You have given me a great idea.”

 

Sometimes he and Byron would walk to town. It was not  far away and for that matter it was not very big either but Zach like going there just to see what was going on. He would climb onto a bench and watch the world go by.  The postman go from store to store.A truck making a delivery to Mr. Brown’s hardware store or Mrs. Spiro dropping off her husbands shirts at the dry cleaners or any of the hundreds activities that take place in a small town on a quiet summers afternoon.

 

What he hated the most about going downtown was sometimes he would run into one of his mothers, fathers, or the absolute worst his grandfather’s older friends. They would make such a fuss over him which invariably ended with his hair being rumpled or his cheek being pinched or some other indignity.

 

But downtown was home of Catie’s Confectioners. It had  every conceivable type of penny candy including sour balls, pixie sticks, gummy worms, Razzles, bubble gum in 7 flavors, smarties, and buttons. They sold ice cream in all the normal flavors and then some of their own invention such as MilkyWay, Fruit Loops, and Boysandberries.  On the days when he had only managed to scavenge a few penny’s he would spend long moments examining all of the bins and trying to figure out in his mind which of the would be best suited for today….did he want to blow bubbles that would collapse over his nose or did he want to pour a pixies stick his mouth so he could watch his tongue change color. But if he had managed to find a dollar or he had persuaded his parents to give him one he always got the same thing: A double dip of Boysandberries and Fruit Loops. . He would sit outside the store and try to make it last as long as possible by taking as little licks as he could until only the cone remained. Then he would eat the cone from the bottom to the top. And when he was done he would let Byron, who sat patiently waiting, lick his hands clean.

 

Even rainy days were fun in the summer. He loved the excitement of the thunder and lightening storms. He would sit out on the porch swing and wait for the flashes of light and count the number of seconds before he heard the thunder like his father had taught to do.. He especially loved the fact that it was one of the few times that he was braver than Byron who would often sit under the swing and whimper until the storms had passed. Later after the rain had stopped he loved the way the neighborhood smelled clean and fresh. He would go out into the street and play in the puddles and wonder how the worms managed to find their way into them.

 

Dinner was always a family affair at Zach’s house. His Mom and Dad would always try to make it home from work so they could eat together and talk about their day. Everyone had a job. Zach’s Dad was in charge of the grill because during the summer most nights they would barbeque outside. His Mom thought  loved to put together complicated salads with three types lettuce, two types of tomatoes and various other bits and pieces she could find to throw in . Zach’s job was setting the table and he usually did a really good job, especially folding the napkins, but sometimes he forgot what sides the fork and knife went on.

 

When the weather was nice they would eat out on the back porch on an antique table made from an old farmhouse door. It had a heavy coat of polyurethane and you could still see some of the heavy brass fittings underneath the clear coat. His mother loved flowers and the table often had a spray of roses, or deliphinimums or some other bloom from their garden . Citronella candles in mesh coated tear dropped lamps finished off the table their scent keeping the voracious mosquitos and flies at bay.

 

Zach loved eating dinner outside with his parents. The food tasted better than it did indoors and they seemed to have more things to talk about. They still chatted about all the boring things that parents talked about like what they did at work and stuff but he always had more things to tell them about his days and the adventures that he had. And even better, instead of having to go upstairs and work on his homework or his reading after dinner he was usually set free to go play with his friends some more.

 

There was always something to do in the hours between dinner and dark. Someone might be having a game of catch or playing football. Firefly capturing was popular as was  Kickball.  But Zach’s all time favorite was, especially in the growing darkness of the early evening was Capture The Flag. He loved sitting and planning strategy with the other kids and being able to create diversions so he or one his friends could silently approach and then with war whoop capture the flag. He loved to win and would be momentarily down in the mouth if his team should lose.

 

Every once in a while, just as one of these games ended he would hear his father whistling for him…”Doahdoo.Doahdoo…DohadooDohaddooDohaddoo” His father whistling could only mean one thing…they were going to Caties Confectioners. His Dad loved Ice Cream and if had been up to him he probably would have gone to Caties every night but for some reason beyond Zach’s comprehension, his mother would only let them go a couple of times a week. She said that she was trying to protect his Dad’s waistline, whatever that meant, but Zach suspected she just didn’t love ice cream as much as his dad and he did.

 

Caties was different at night. Instead of the quiet place that it was during the day, the store was packed. Often,  it seemed to Zach,  that the whole town had turned out for ice cream at the same time. But sometimes that was okay as he would run into one of his  friends from school that he not seen all summer. For example one night while he and his Dad had waited in line they had run into his friend Krissy Bradbury. She was wearing a sun dress that had watermelons on it and she was deeply tanned from her the days she spent playing on the beach on Cape Cod. As the line moved forward they had shared the adventurers they had that summer with each other both trying to impress the other with their daring deeds. When they finally made it to the counter, he was absolutely delighted that she loved lemon Boysandberries as much as he did.

 

Even summer days need to come to an end. Zach would slowly trudge up the stairs to his bedroom with Byron climbing the steps behind him. After he washed his face, and brushed his teeth, he would crawl into bed with Byron jumping onto the bed, creating a nest at the end of the bed. His Mom would come in and tuck him in and his father would follow to tell him story of his own creation. His father’s stories were always fun and sometimes quite silly and he never grew tired of them. When his father had finished he would walk to the doorway and turn the light off and call to Zach’s Mom. Together they would sing a silly song “We belong to a mutual admiration society….my baby and me.”

 

After they had left, Zach would lay in his bed and smell the night air drifting in through the window. He could smell the fresh cut lawns, and the barbeques, and every once in while he swore he could pick up the chlorine smell from the pool at Union Field.   He Laying in the dark listening to the sounds of the summer night going outside his window….crickets bleating, wind chimes ringing, a ball game on a television down the street, a dog barking, and sometimes way off in the distance a lonely sounding train whistle. His eyes would close and he would dream of endless summer days.

[Part 3: 6/26/20

Zach’s bedroom was awake with sunlight.

It always was first thing in the morning. His parents,  who liked to sleep late when they could,  had decided that their only child should have the bedroom that faced east. In fairness, they had given him that bedroom not only so he would not sleep late but they believed their child should start every day with sunshine.  A bright beginning to a day would make their youngster to start each day on the right foot. It would fill his day with the promise of the possible. .

 

By and large there strategy had worked. Zach was an exceptionally happy and exuberant kid. The type of child that whenever you looked at him there seemed to be a smile and on his face. He loved to laugh and had an infectious giggle and an enthusiasm so powerful the could always rally his friends to help him even with the most improbable projects.

 

Most mornings he bounded out of bed. He would complete his morning ablutions, face washing, teeth brushing, and running a comb through his thicket of curly hair, as quickly as possible. Then dash down the stairs to inhale his breakfast. During the week this consisted mainly of cereal and a small glass of OJ as both his parents work. But on weekends Mom would make him breakfast of bacon and eggs or his favorite waffles with lots of butter and maple syrup. In both cases, as soon as breakfast was over he was out the door.

 

Summer mornings were devoted to sports and athletic activities of all sorts. During the week he would go down to Union Field, a city owned athletic complex, for a camp his Mom had enrolled him in. They played baseball, and dodgeball, and tennis. There was archery, nature class, and arts and crafts. His favorite though were swimming lessons with Miss Alice.  He was naturally comfortable in the water and she had a way of bringing out the best in him. Often his reward for doing something particularly well was a hug. This made him blush and squirm while at the same time always pushing him to do his best.

 

He managed to collect souvenirs from all of his activities. Baseball and dodgeball had each provided him a scar on his knees. The baseball scar had occurred when had tried to slide into second base when he had shorts on and in dodgeball when he was tried to escape being hit by Jay Kelly and slipped and fell onto to the asphalt. In nature class he made a a plaster of Paris mold of a fox’s pawprint he had made while on expedition to the nearby woods with his class. His teacher had made the mold and awarded to Zach as he was the one who discovered the tracks.   He and the class had gone into the woods looking for animal tracks and he had found the fox print. The teacher had showed them how to make a mold of the print by surrounding it with a dirt wall and laying down the plaster. As finder of the track he had been awarded custody of the mold.

 

He wasn’t very good in Arts and Crafts. He could never seem to make his fingers do the things that there were supposed to do and his exuberance made him lack patience.  For As a consequence, while he loved the idea of making a lanyard,  he couldn’t get his fingers to make the little loops correctly and his work always looked a little lopsided. The only reason he got anything done was because his friend MaryAnn had helped him with the stitches and eventually he had persevered enough to have a blue, white and gold wristlet. It was far from perfect, and in fact some of his friends teased him about it. He did not care. He was proud of it and continued he worked so hard to create it.

 

In tennis he had been awarded a certificate of most improved forehand. In archery one day he had put all the arrows into the bullseye and was awarded the order of Robin Hood which was really nothing more than a robin’s feather but he was so proud of it he put on his desk at home.

 

Zach’s favorite mementos from camp came from swimming. He treasured them not only because Miss Chatham was his favorite and he would do all he could to please her and get those treasured hugs, but he genuinely loved the water. He loved the way it felt on his skin on a hot day. He loved the smell of the pool and the way the rough cement of the deck felt against the bottom of his feet. But mostly he loved the way he felt when he was in the water. He felt like an explorer, an astronaut exploring some strange new world and the better he got at swimming the better to explore it. That summer he had passed both his advanced beginners and intermediate swimmers courses and the Red Cross had awarded him pins for each of these accomplishments which he promptly pinned to his favorite pairs shorts.

 

When Camp ended at noon, he would rush home in the heat the day for lunch only stopping occasionally to pop the tar bubbles on the street. Sin Mom and Dad worked,  his baby sitter, Mrs. D’Angelo, would be at home to greet him. She was an elderly widow whose children were grown and moved away. As a consequence, her grandchildren lived far away and she adopted Zach as a surrogate. . She would listen to his daily camp with great interests exploits while she making him his lunch… his favorite being either crunchy Skippy and Schmuckers Rasberry on whole wheat bread or Mrs. D’Angelo’s specialty fried bologna on white with a touch of yellow mustard.  There would be chips and Kool-Aid and for dessert fresh baked chocolate chip cookies. .

 

After lunch he was ready to go out and search for his friends for more fun and games but Mrs. D’Angelo would never let him. She thought vigorous activity right after lunch would be “bad for his digestion.” Instead  they would go to the big couch in the study and she would read to him from chapter books such as “The Wizard of Oz,” or When We Were Six or his favorite “Encyclopedia Brown”  that he was a little to young to read by himself.  Mrs. D’Angelo read with enthusiasm and emotion often giving the characters unique voices. That summer she had decided to read him the entire Misty of Chincoteague series and he had been entranced wondering if his parents would let him have a “Misty” of his own.

 

Sometimes, and to his everlasting embarrassment, as he was way too old for naps, he would fall asleep while he was being read too. On other days, when Mrs. D no longer had a voice for reading  all he would read a book on his own or do a jig saw puzzle or other little projects to bide away the time until the D gave the all clear for him to go out again.

 

Often,  when he went out in the afternoon he would be accompanied by his dog, Byron  a big black lab who considered himself Zach’s younger brother even though he was older. He never set out to take Byron along. This was something that dog, like all little brothers,  decided to do on his own.  Zach, like all tolerant older brothers,  never minded when he padded along quietly after him.

 

His favorite afternoon activity was to play at brook that ran along the back of the houses that were on his street. There, he and his friends, could always find something fun to do. They would build minnow traps the way his father had showed him the year before. You would take stones found at the bottom of the stream and make a U with the opening facing up stream. They never caught a lot of minnows but it was always fun to getting wet especially on really hold days. Or they would go turtle hunting. Searching for the box turtles that often lived in the skunk cabbage by the edge of the stream. When they found an exposed clay bed along the creek they would take they would craft it into small people, small animals or miniature forts.

 

There were only two downsides to playing in the brook.

 

First, and for reasons not fully understood by Zach playing in the creek would excite Byron beyond all reason. He would often run from child to child barking and pushing them out of the water with his snout. And when that failed he would lay on the bank, his head resting on his paws, his eyes scanning the children, ready to jump in at a moments notice.

 

Second, playing in the stream often made you filthy. Not that that was bad. Getting completely covered in mud and clay and grass and whatever else was a huge amount of fun. Or at least that is the way Zach saw it. Unfortunately, Mrs. D and his mother saw it quite differently. They would oget very cross with him when he would come home from these adventures. Often they would not let him into the house unless he took all of his clothes off, including his underwear, even before he got into the house.

 

Another favorite afternoon activity for Zach was exploring the woods at the end of the street with his friends. There were lots of trails and almost all of them led to one adventure or another. It was not an uncommon site for those passing on the street to see a group of children, some with back packs on, walking into the forest with a large black dog at their lead. Once inside the wood Zach would almost always make the decision for the group which way to go.

 

They could go over to the slate mine, which was really a small hillside whose slope had been ripped open by some torrential downpour long ago. That was fun because you could find neat rocks and slide down its crumbly slope.

 

There was the pine grove which held huge evergreens that were remarkably evenly spaced as if someone had planted them. The forest floor with thick with discarded needles and to walk into the woods was like walking into a church it was so silent. It was a great place to play hide and seek or to make nests out the needles and tell each stories that every one claimed was true and everyone also knew were made up.

 

Occasionally, while walking along one of the paths Byron would get all excited and he would bark and run back in forth until Zach made him stop. Invariably, it would be the carcass of some poor animal that had died. And even though the smell was often hideous and the dead body a  little scary to look at everyone had to examine the poor beast often poking it with a stick to see if there what was inside and everyone running when they discovered maggots or anything else really gross.

 

On one walk that summer they had discovered an old lean too that some previous set of adventurers had built. Who ever they were had really built it well with good strong branches and some discarded 2 x 4 s set on rocks that were arranged on what must have been a fire pit at one time. The gang and he had decided to make it their fort and soon began bringing cherished items from home to mark it as there own. His good friend Rebecca, who lived across the street from him had even made a flag for the place. She had taken one of her father’s old T-shirts that had a big black dog on it and cut off the sleeves and painted 10 stars around the dog, one for each one of the kids in the gang. And while Becky’s dad was not too pleased about losing one of his favorite T-shirts it was a hit with the kids and it was hung with honor on the inside of the lean to.

 

Even on the afternoons in which he could find no one to play with he still always managed to have fun. Somedays he would walk over to his pop-pop’s house who lived a couple of streets over. Grandpa was always glad to see him and they would have fun together. Grandpa loved to play chess and he was teaching Zach to play and even though he wasn’t  very good yet they always had fun playing. Sometimes he would sit in his grandpas lap, which was always warm, comfortable and smelled of old wool and bay rum, while he would read to him books to such as Emile and the Detectives or A Wrinkle in Time. And on really special days they would go downstairs into the basement where they would turn off all the lights and put a flashlight under their chins and tell each other ghost stories until they were so scared they had to come up stairs and have milk cookies.

[Part 2: Tomorrow]

 

It is Sunday June 17, 2001, Father’s Day, and I am standing with my father and a group of people on the pebbled beach of Skilak Lake, Alaska.  The weather is cool with a silky breeze, sunny skies with only a few puffy white clouds transiting above us as if they were late for an appointment.  The lake is a mirror, flat and unbroken with only a large inflatable motor boat maring its pristene surface. Just beyond where we are standing a brook bounces overs rocks on its way into the lake.  Off in the distance I can see the terminal moraine of the Skilak glacier and beyond it the snow covered peaks of the Chugach Range.

A postcard perfect day…in a perfect postcard setting: The type of day that I had thought of when I had told my father that I wanted to go with him to Alaska nearly nine months before.

We were all listening to our guide. He looks to me the same way Grizzly Adams would have looked if he had been outfitted by the Cabela catalogue. He is bearded, broad, and has a gentle nature about him. And like many of the folks who work at this camp we are staying at this is not his full time work. He spends most of the year teaching biology to high school students in Washington State and he is addressing us as if we are his students and an exam is looming.  In fact, what we are doing is preparing for a day long hike up the south side of the lake to the foot of the Harding Ice Shelf

The trail, he tells us, extends throught a national wilderness area. What this means is that the trail is cut once a year and that all the flora and fauna are protected. You are not allowed to pick things, collect samples or even move a tree limb if it falls across a trail. The fines, he states, for breaking the rules are extreme and strongly suggests that we do not break them. He pauses for emphasis and then begins to describe the trip.

“We will be traveling through three distinct climate zones…” His tone and cadence produced in me much the same reaction that my high school science teacher had generated when he lectured on thermodynamics. My mind drifted.

The summer of 2000 had been a busy one for me.  I had new responsibilities at work which had kept my Executive Platinum Status at American Airlines safe for another year. I had an active social life and spent weekends on Cape Cod and the Hamptons. Combine the above, with the fact that while I lived in NYC, my parents lived 20 miles away in the Jersey suburbs. It meant that even though I talked to my parents nearly every day, I had not seen them in months.

It was with a great deal of anticipation that I pulled into my parent’s driveway early in August. I had missed them, and as for many people, the feeling of coming home to the house you grew up is a singular one.  The diverse thoughts and emotions that define your everyday adult life seem to fade. Memories of childhood….street baseball, first kisses, and long summer nights….remind you of times when happiness and contentment were easier to define.  Fears of an uncertain world are replaced with the certainty and absoluteness of a parents love. You suspend your need to be an adult and, at least for a short while, can enjoy the feeling of being a child a little longer.

And it was with the enthusiasm of a child that I bounded up the stairs to the deck in my parents backyard. The deck is directly adjacent to my parent’s kitchen and I had hoped to surprise them at the kitchen table.  As luck would have it my father was on the back deck asleep. He was wearing his summer uniform of a dark blue LaCoste shirt, khaki camp shorts that are several inches short of being instyle and only inch or so shorter than being imodest,  a slouch hat, and gold Ray Ban Aviators.  My father, always the good host, would normally rise to greet any guests especially his children, even if he was asleep. Today was different. He did not bother to get up. Instead, he just pulled himself up on the handles of the chez and said hello.

The father I saw there was not the father I remembered from even just a few months previous.  My father is a big man 6’ 2. He is a man who has a robust appetite that is only kept in check by the vanity of wanting to look his best. The father I remembered was strong, active and vibrant.

The man in the chez lounge was only a shell of that man. He was gaunt and thin having lost at least 25 lbs since I had seen him last. His face was pulled tight and he looked uncomfortable in his skin…as if he could never find a position that made his body feel comfortable. And he looked tired, as if were effort just to stay up for the few seconds it took to greet us.

I said: “Hey Pops.”

“Pablo…hey how are you.” He managed to blurt out with the froggy voice of just awakening.

We gave each other kisses and hugs and he didn’t feel as strong as I remember. Those broad shoulders seemed some how frail. And he smelled different…not badly…just different. And I can remember thinking “What the fuck is going on here.” Clearly my father was ill and just as clearly this had been going on for a while and yet no one had bothered to let me know….WTF.

My father could clearly tell what I was thinking. He, much to my chagrin, has been able to read my mind for as long as I could remember. So he said “What do you think of my new diet?”

I replied “You look great old man. What is your secret?”

He explained, in the clipped voice he used to lecture his students at Columbia,  that for the past few months something odd had been happening to him that whenever he ate his body became very umcomfortable and when he explained this to his physician he prescribed an anti GERD medication and while it helped a bit, the symptoms had not gone away. He told me that the lack of eating had caused him to be tired all the time.

When I asked him what he was planning on doing about this he told me that I sounded just like my mother and that he was going to go to the Dr. in a few weeks so there was nothing to worry about now.

When I suggested that perhaps seeing a Dr. a little sooner would be a good idea. He just laughed and changed the subject. It was not that my father was not concerned about his health. He was. It was written all over his face. Instead, it was his way of taking the burden of worrying and concern away from me. It was his way of trying to protect me and yet at this moment my most precious wish was to protect him.

The guide was talking about bears and it was enough to snap me back to the present. Only the night before I was reading a book in which their was a description  describing in great detail how a man in Homer Alaska had been attacked by a bear even after he put five .44 caliber slugs into him. It reminded me that humans are not neccessairly the top of the food chain here and that I should probably pay attention to this part of the lecture. Our guide was telling us that there was a small but real chance that would run into bears on our hike as the trail was like a bear superhighway through the woods and that if we did that he would do his best to shoo the bear away.

A woman, who appeared to be more Neiman Marcus than Orvis, raised her hands and asked “What if he doesn’t shoo away.”

“Then we will wait until he does.”

“But what if he becomes aggressive?”

“The chances of that are small but if he does make aggressive moves then I will try to draw him off while the rest of you would be well advised to find a tree nearby to climb it.” He paused a second for emphasis, he then added “Folks, there is really nothing to worry about it if we follow the basic rules. Stay on the trail. Place any trash you have in the ziplock bags we have given you as bear’s have an extremely acute sense of smell, and bears are very aggressive when it comes to food….any more questions before we get on the way?”

There were none so he yelled “We leave in five minutes. Don’t forget to Deet up!”

I turned to my Dad and said “Are you sure you don’t want me to stay here with you?”

“No” he grumphed “You should go…One of us should go it sounds like a great hike.”

I could not help but hear the deep dissapointment in his voice. My whole life with my father has been one of walks in the woods. In fact, my favorite picture of us, and one that I keep atop my bureau, is of my brother at about age 2 and me at about 1 at a pebbled stream near Troy New York. I am sitting on my father’s shoulders as my brothers wanders nearby.  I love the photograph because it reminds me of all the walks in the woods I went on with my father.  Whether it was just for a walk, or building minnow traps in streams, or looking for ferns he wanted to plant in our garden, it was time that he loved to spend with his children and that we love to spend with him.  As I grew older, and probably read too much, I began to think of these woodland jaunts we would take as wonderful metaphors for fatherhood…how a parent is always trying to help  child find the right path, give him survival skills to live in an untamed world…

Beyond the metaphor, these walks always described my father the best. He was active, curious, and engaged. When you were with my Dad, you never felt that any harm could come to you. The walks were also a great mystery to me. I always wondered, but never asked, how does a boy from the inner city of Vienna get to love the woods and the outdoors as much as he did?

Had it been any other time in my father’s life there would have been no question about him climbing to the top of this mountain with me. He would have done it with joy and likely beat me to the top of the mountain much to my chagrin. However it was equally without any doubt that he could not make the trip today. If I had any question about that it had been resolved the night before.

The camp we were staying in is best described as luxury rustic. It was run by a travel outfit called Alaksa Adventure Outfitters who made a living selling adventure travel to the Orvis adventurer. The folks like my father and me who want to see the wilderness but don’t neccessairly want to pitch a tent or build our own slit trenches.  Our encampment consisted of a combination of cabins, small log rooms with small porches with rocking chairs, half tents: that is canvas tents that were built on concrete platforms with a partial wood wall; a concrete bath house and a lodge house where meetings and surprising good gourmet meals were served.

More surprising than the epicure being served was that the owners of the camp had built a wood fired sauna. Our guides had told us after dinner on the first night that they usually heated up the sauna after the evening meal and that it, combined with quick dips in the glacier fed lake were an excellent remedy for mosquito’s bites. My father and I both had fed these insects amply on our way down river and were more than willing to try any remedy that would relieve the discomfort and itching that the bites had caused us. So, shortly after dinner we changed into our bathing suits and headed down to the sauna.

Once in side the hot box we both found benches on which to lie. It was extremely warm and before too long I had worked up an excellent sweat. My original intent had been to tough it out with my father and see if I could stay in the sauna as long as he did but when I looked over at him he looked as if he could have spent the night there so I decided to take a dip in the lake to cool myself down. The water was as frigid as the sauna had been hot…it could not have been much above 40 degrees and the bottom was not sandy but lined with irregularly shaped rocks so wading in gracefully was not an option. Intsead I sort of hip hopped into the deeper water until I could dive into the water without scraping my chest.

I returned to the sauna shivering and anxious for its heat. My father on the other hand was on his way out the door. He asked how the water was I responded by saying that I had glasses of ice water that were warmer and then I warned him about the rocks at the bottom of the lake. Instead of sitting down after he left, I watched his progress into the water through a porthole in the sauna’s door. I wanted to see his reaction as his feet hit the water… What I saw through the glass was an older man, who seemed to have trouble with his feet shuffle into the water, loose his balance, fall and then struggle to get up.

And while I knew from personal experience that the footing was difficult I did not expect my strong father to falter and fall, nor to see him struggle to get up. Even though he had been through an awful lot over the past year, and demonstrated in no uncertain terms his fragility if not his mortality, his renewed health had somehow convinced me that my strong father of old had returned. His struggles in the water had demonstrated to me vividly that the man my father had once been was no longer. That he had been replaced by a different man. One that I needed to get to know.

What is more I knew I had changed too. Instead of rushing to my father’s aid, I just stood there and watched. Not because I did not want to help him, I did, but I also knew that by going to him and trying to help would have embarassed and humilated him. He still had the need to be the strong Dad that he had always been and I had no desire to rob him of that. It made me realize most of all that our relationship had changed. That now I would begin taking care of him just as he had taken care of me all my life.

So it was with that knowledge that I went into woods that Father’s Day. Just before I dissapeared into the trees, I turned and saw him stading there watching us. He waved and I sensed, more than saw, his sadness but as he had taught me to all of my life I put on a brave face, waved energetically and trekked into the Alaskan forest.

Two things hit you almost immediately upon entering those woods. One is that it is quite a bit warmer than open ground. So much so in fact that you are tempted to remove your jacket which may or may not be a mistake as the second thing you notice is mosquitos. No matter the amount of Deet you apply they swarm you the minute you hit the woods with a ferocity that is reminiscent of Pirahna. But they warn you not to apply Deet to your face as it may cause an allergic reaction so within seconds of entering the woods those vicious insects had turned my head into a pin cushion. Luckily, I had come prepared and reached into my bag and pulled out a mosquito head net that I secured with my baseball cap. Now while the world would look as if I was sitting behind the screen at Fenway, at least I would not need a transfusion at the end of the hike.

The canopy of the forest was beautiful. High above our head, its few open areas allowed streams of light to illuminate our surroundings as if we were walking through a Renisance painting depicting divine providence. The trail was clearly marked and our pace reasonable enough so that it was quite easy to keep up. This combined with the heat, and my pixalated view of my surroundings allowed me to slip back into my thoughts quite easily.

It is a miserably hot afternoon in August in a way that only New York City can produce them. That is, in addition to the hazy, hot and humid you might find anywhere there is an element of grit that burrows into your clothing and skin like a parasite. I am in the back of cab heading through the west village on my way to visit my parents and while the air conditioning in the cab is working none of it seems to making it through the pexiglass and metal partition that  separates me from the driver. As a consequence, I am drenched as I emerge from the back of the cab and head into the building my parents maintain a pied e terre.

I had received a phone call from my sister about a half hour earlier letting me know that they she and my parents were heading here after my father’s afternoon of tests at Columbia Presbatirian Hospital. My father had finally seen a doctor the previous week and while preliminary tests had shown nothing his physician had palpited a large mass deep in his abdomen. He had ordered further tests. The studies that they had done today were supposed to give us some answers as to what might be happening to him. And while none of us said anything to each other about the possible diagnosis, the presence of the mass and the tests all drew us to one conclusion: my father had cancer.

Our unspoken fears and the tenision of not knowing what bomb would blow up next had turned us grim face and determined. It also provoked the desire in my mother, sister and me to do anything to help  my father lick whatever it was he was suffering from in the way that suited our little family best : equal parts humor, nostalgia, and growling at each other.

The air conditioning was blessedly on when I entered the apartment. It was a studio that my sister had rented for years. When the simultaneous blessings of my sister getting married and moving to a new apartment had coincided with the building going condo my parents had bought the place so that my father would not have to commute home every night from Columbia and my mother could have  a base of operations when she was doing work in New York City.

As I entered I could see that my Dad had parked himself on the day bed that doubled as a couch. He was sprawled across it diagnoly his head resting on cushions and pillows that my sister and mother had no doubt propped him up on.

I walked across the room and sat in a chair directly opposite him. As I sat down, my sister decided to crack wise on me, and said something to the effect that it looked like I had run through a sprinkler before I got here. Normally, I would have come up with some clever witty reparte such as “Well at least it doesn’t look like I just french kissed an electrical outlet” but today I was too focused on my father and his illness to bother. Instead, I looked at my Dad and asked him how his tests went.

He proceeded to give me a very scientific explanation of the tests he had undergone that afternoon. I understood. Long before this day I had come to the understanding that one of the reasons that my father had become a scientist was to help explain an irrational world in a logical way. Considering what he had been through in his life it is something that I could completely understand. However, there were times like these that I wished that he would forego the scientific and provide me with the emotional.

Perhaps it was his long unemotional, emotional response to my question. Or perhaps it was the worried looks and frenetic behavior of my mother and my sister. Maybe it was the oppressive heat and grit of New York in August or my own roller coaster of emotions that had begun three weeks earlier when I realized that my father was sick. Whatever it was , I suddenly was struck with the realization that my father may not survive this illness no one had yet defined. It was as if someone had stuck an icicle down my trachea. I was chilled to the core and choking on my own emotions. I had only one thought running through my consciousness: “ I am not ready to lose my father right now…I am just not ready.”

I could feel a sob ready to come gagging out of throat and tears welling up. I didn’t want to impose my emotions on anyone else in the room, least of all my father, so for reasons that are still not entirely clear to me, I got up and walked across the room , sat down by father’s feet and began to massage them. He looked down at me and we both exchanged a glance, and then quickly  averted our eyes, both afraid of what might come up if we held the glance any longer. Instead, he just put his hand on my head and said “You’re a good son.” And since no one could see my face I cried.

As I rubbed his feet and tried to hide my tears, I also tried to hide my panic. It felt as if my father had given up…that this was one battle that he felt he could not win. That he was willing to slip silently into the good night. And it scared me but it also motivated me. I racked my brain about what I could say to him to help him get over this hump of not knowing what he was battling and the exhaustion that the disease had delivered to him.

I said him “Dad, you have to get better. Who else will get to Alaska with me.” While my father and I had talked of going to Alaska many times for all the reaons Harry Chapin had sung about we had never managed to plan the trip.

I said “When you get better, the minute you get back on your feet, we will go to Alaska. Planning the trip is something that you can do while you are recouping.” I looked up at him, and while he said nothing I saw him smile and I took it as a sign that he heard me and perhaps, just perhaps, it was the carrot that would help him keeping pushing on.

Emboldened by his response, I continued “Do you remember Dad all those walks in the woods you took with David and I? Do you remember how after a while he and I would get tired and start to whine about not be able to make it back. Do you remember what you used to say to us….”

I looked up at him and said “You used to tell us “Rothkopfs never give up.” So Dad, remember,  Rothkopfs never give up…..

After several hours of hiking the trail emerges from the woods onto the tundra. Despite it being the middle of June there are still large deep patches of snow that we need to climb through. Some are quite deep and climbing through them is a four limb operation.  Beyond the snow, on a small plateau, is a rock field no doubt left there by now retreated glaciers. They are our final destination on the uphill part of this hike and climbing towards them I become fascinated by the way walking on tundra feels which is similar to walking on partially dried sponges. There is a crunch followed by a light spring. I know it is something that would delight my father and I make a mental note to tell him all about it.

When we reach the rocks many of my fellow hikers cast off their day packs and use them as a pillow. They are exhausted from the two hour climb and need to catch their breath. I don’t feel that way because for the last two months I have been training to run a marathon. I break out my box lunch and greedily wolf down its contents of a sandwhich, apple, and super delicious chocolate chip cookie.

As I eat I stare out at my surroundings which are as beautiful as any place I have ever seen. Below me is Skilak Lake, the size of Manhattan, its waters grey blue color and opalascent from its glacier origins. To my left the Chugach range raw and jagged, its snow covered peaks scraping the sky like a primitive comb. To my right, is the densly forested coastal plain that leads to Anchorage and the ocean beyond. In front of me, on the cusp of the horizon, is a snow capped peak that I can not identify so I ask my guide. He stares for a while, checks his compass heading  and says “It is Denali.”

“How far away is that?”

“Has to be over 200 miles as the crows flies.” And laughingly adds, “You can see a lot farther with out any pollution.”

Involuntary, his comments makes me inhale and the air smells sweet and clean like sheets do after washing and hanging on line to dry. At this point, the hike, the food, and my surroundings all conspire against me and suddenly I am very tired and decide I need a nap before we begin our descent. I pull a fleece out of my pack, put it on, tuck the pack under my neck, pull the baseball cap over my face and close my eyes. And just like that I am asleep.

I am on the Eastern Spur of the New Jersey Turnpike.  It is early September, and very hot. The sun is pouring through the windows of my parents Jeep Grand Cherokee and is making the air conditioning work extra hard. Traffic has come to a stand still, a fuel truck has caught fire somewhere and the radio has told us that we are caught up in one of the largest traffic jams of the year. Next to me, on the passenger side, my father is sleeping fitfully…he keeps moving and adjusting himself so that he can find a comfortable position. My mother is in the back seat. She is silent and deep within her own thoughts as am I. It had been that sort of a day.

I had met my parents a few hours earlier at Columbia Presbtyrian.  We were there to check my father in as his surgeon had scheduled a surgery for the next day. We had still not received a diagnosis but he wanted to perform exploratory surgery. When asked what the prognosis was the Dr. had coldly asked my father whether or not he had his affairs in order. Things looked very grim and all of us had mastered putting on a happy face while internally we fought back the twin demons of fear and despair.

We took my father to the registration desk. There, much to our surprise and somewhat to our chagrin, we were told that my father’s surgery had been cancelled for the next day and instead we needed to head up to his surgeon’s office. He needed to speak to us.

He kept us waiting in his office for a long time and none of us had very much to say to each other. None of us knew what was happening and while the surgery he was scheduled to have was scary…it included the likely removal of one of his kidney’s and massive blood loss…to me the fear of not doing anything and not knowing anything was far worse. So I busied myself by examing back issues of Time Magazine and silently fuming that the Dr. had the audacity to keep us waiting so long. Didn’t they know how sick my father was? Didn’t  he know how difficult it was for us to sit and wait when all we really wanted was some forward movement….some action that would move us to the known from the unknown…some action that would allow us to move to healing from watching my Dad seemingly slip away.

When the nurse called my father and mother into the Drs exam room I was left by myself so I tried to busy myself with my new Blackberry but  couldn’t concentrate on the emails that made up so much of my daily life. Somehow they seemed far less meanifull and consequential that they had just a few weeks earlier. I had already had flipped through all the magazines worth reading so I just sat there and did the only thing I could think to do. I prayed

A few minutes later, my parents emerged from the Dr’s office looking  ashen face and shaken. When I asked my mother what was up, she explained that the surgeon had cancelled the surgery. They had discovered the cause of the mass in my father’s gut and that it was inoperable. That my father had lymphoma and that another physician needed to be contacted so that they could examine him and prescribe a course of treatment. Worse, the earliest appointment we could make with his oncologist was nearly two weeks away. We had left the hospital confused and upset. None of us knew what Lymphoma meant. We just knew that instead of moving forward we are again at a standstill and that it would be weeks before my father would get any help with his struggle.

Traffic had just begun to inch forward again when my father began to mutter in his sleep. I thought  I had turned the radio’s volume up too loud so I turned down the sound only to hear my father say “I don’t want to die” as I leaned over the dial. I looked in the rear view mirror to see if my mother had heard him speak and it was clear from the stricken expression on her face that she had.

I squared myself so that I was staring directly ahead at the road.  I didn’t know what to say or for that matter how to feel. Both my mother and I had heard the fear and despair in my father’s voice. This coming from a man who I had only heard cry once….at his mother funeral…this coming from the man who I never known to be fearful of anything…for christ sakes he had survived Krsytalnacht and the Nazi’s before immigrating to the States and then he had gone back and fought them as an artillery officer with the Blue Devils in northern Italy. My pops was scared and I had nothing to give to him. Nothing to say that would make him feel better. And it made me feel like a failure that this man who had given me everything he could and yet I did not have a clue on how to comfort him now that he needed me.

We drove in complete silence for a while neither my mother or me knowing what to say to each other. Instead my father’s words just hung over us like smoke at a bar. Eventually, traffic began to move again and before too long we were driving through Summit. While we were passing the Junior High School, I heard my mother begin to cry in the back seat.  She blurted out “ Paul, I have never been alone. I went from my father’s house to your father’s house. I don’t know what I will do if he dies….I don’t know what I will do…”

I reached back and grabbed her hand and said “Mom, he’s not going to die….we won’t let that happen…..but no matter what happens I promise you I will never let you be alone. Not on my watch…you will always have a place with me. Always.”

When we arrived at my parent’s house, we had an hour or so before my mother needed to drive me to the train station for the ride back into the city.  So we scraped together some soup and sandwiches and ate and made small talk until it was time to go. As I walking out the door, I went to my father who was sitting in his chair at the head of the kitchen table, and kissed him on top of his head and whispered into his ear “Dad, don’t forget. Rothkopf’s never give up.”

And he didn’t.

We had almost made it all the way down the mountain to the trail head when our guide called for us to stop. I was standing right behind him and I saw him looking all around as if he was trying to spot something. There was a look of deep concern on his face so I whispered “What is up.”

He pointed to the middle of the trail and replied “You see that” pointing to a large steaming brown mound in the middle of the trail, “That was not there we went up the trail this morning and it is bear scat and its very fresh. But don’t worry, he doesn’t seem to be around. I just wanted to make sure.”

I paused for a second and then asked “Do you think the Ranger’s will mind if I took a sample of it?”

He looked at me with a puzzled expression on his face and said “Sure…..but why.”

I replied “Well it is Father’s Day and I haven’t gotten my father a father’s day present….”

He laughed and said go for it. So I went over to the pile and using some card board from our box lunch as a tool and a zip lock bag as a receptical,  proceeded to collect a large sample of bear scat.

When we got back to the camp, I found my father sitting on an Adirondack chair on a bit of lawn overlooking the lake reading.  He looked up as I approached and asked how the trip was. I replied “It was great. You would have loved it but more importantly I answered a question that has plagued mankind for generations.”

“Really” he said with surprise “What is that?”

So, I reached into my backpack and pulled out my carefully collected sample of bear poo and handed it to him. He looked at, held the baggie up  to the sunlight, smiled with the recognition of what it was, and began to laugh and said. “So bears really do shit in the woods.”

That sample of bear scat, now esconced in a glass jar, sat on my fathers desk until his death 11 years later. Now it sits on mine. A permanent reminder of my much missed Dad and the best Father’s Day present I ever gave him.