The Gospel According to the Playground

ASHORE          
CANYON AVENUE SCHOOL, SAN FERNANDO VALLEY c. 1957

There was the Word according to our teachers and the remote figure of the Principal – and then there was the word, the absolute version, according to the playground. If the versions were judged by weight, the former was a bug up against an elephant. To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson: The mark of the intelligent person is the ability to hold two diametrically opposed ideas in their mind at the same time. By this standard the horde of feckless booger-wiping midget barbarians pinballing across the concrete (this is a school, children, no grass is needed) were exemplars of brilliance - which only proved that Jefferson was as capable of missing the mark as anyone else. Certain topics had real staying power: Sports, rock 'n roll, the ninety westerns on television, and who had visited Disneyland the most times. Others were more specific according to the grade or grades in which they flourished. The 2nd and 3rd graders were convinced the 1st graders supplemented their lunches from home with classroom paste, and had tried to eat a pet raccoon brought to school by one of the teachers. The 4th graders - my assigned mob at the time - maintained that the raccoon, having being annoyed by a group of 3rd graders while trying to delicately dismember some crayfish in a classroom sink, had thrown a wad of fish guts at them and hit them in the mouths, which instantly resulted in hysterical puking and slipping on the result so that they had to be sent home and try to explain to their parents what had happened. The 5th and 6th graders tried to remain aloof from this sort of gossip. It wasn't because they had given up the habit, but rather that they were too busy - depending on their grade - either plotting on what they would do upon ascending to the top of the motley heap of their subjects, or wondering how to survive their entry into high school, where they would begin the ascent to rulers of the playground all over again, thus enacting what the few of them who became students of classic mythology would recognize as a modern version of the Myth of Sisyphus.                      

One day during afternoon recess - a mandated period spent out on the concrete and designed to vent the excess (which is to say, pretty much all) energy of the horde - a new and compelling rumor swept through the school. One of our schoolmates (somehow no one knew his name) had been riding with his family in their car down a freeway (the exact one was unknown) when he saw a friend (you know what I'm going to say) riding in a Cadillac El Dorado. This was interesting because the El Dorado, a small behemoth with jutting tail fins, was a new car and none of our parents had sprung for one. As the El Dorado swept past the the kid's car, he leaned out the window to wave at his friend, and his arm was cut off by the tail fin. The fate of our wounded schoolmate was never discussed - the reaction of his family or those of his friend and the driver of the now infamous amputation car remained unknown to history. Logical analysis of how such a thing could happen was irrelevant. The important fact - FACT - was that a kid at our school had to live with only one arm. Never mind American History and Social Studies and Arithmetic - what kind of arm would he get to replace the one chopped into pieces that even now were being run over by thousands of cars? Was it going to be wooden, or something metal? Would he have a hand like Captain Hook? If he did would he use it to kill crayfish and feed the raccoon? I confess I was a fervent teller of the tale. And when it began to fade, to be replaced by the irrefutable fact that girls who wore sack dresses had cooties (something like polio, but not as serious 'cause you didn't have to live in a iron chamber like the ones in enemy submarines when you got captured), I spread a new detail - something just discovered - about it.                                                                                                    

When the boy's arm was sliced off, it didn't fall onto the freeway. It spun around on the tip of the fin and then stuck on it, upright, so that the hand flapped back and forth as if it was saying hello! The sight frightened everyone in the cars following so badly that many of them left the freeway sooner than they planned to call the police. But the cops never found the car (or the arm), not ever. This addition to the original story took it back to no. 1 on the Playground Top Ten for another week or so, and then the story faded away like so many before and since.

Paris 2015

Paris did not surrender.

France will never surrender.

And neither shall those of us

who lift up our faces toward

the light of liberty and

call each other citoyen.

Remembrance Day

November 11th of every year marks the observance of Remembrance Day in England and many of the countries that used to form the British Empire. First created to honor the Empire's soldiers who had fallen during the First World War, the observation has come to acknowledge all those lost in the wars of the 20th century and beyond.

The symbol of the Day is the red poppy - a flower that grows in profusion over the remains of thousands of soldiers in Belgium and elsewhere, both most markedly across Flanders Field. Worn on the 11th, the Day is also marked, in addition to many different ceremonies, by a minute of silence at precisely 11 am (GMT) on that morning - the time when the guns fell silent and WWI finally ended.

In memory of my maternal grandfather, who fought in the American Expeditionary Force in 1917-1918.

And in memory of W. M. 'Billy' Fiske, 1911-1940, of the RAF Volunteer Reserve. His gravestone reads: An American citizen who died that England might live.

Poetic Observations 1

"God gave us memory so that we could have roses in December."

—J. M. Barrie

Armed to the Teeth

I think I was about five years old when I discovered my father and one of my uncles had fought in World War II. I don’t remember the discovery being dramatic; it had probably been mentioned casually as part of a larger conversation, but I learned that both of them were thought very brave. The fact wasn’t discussed with me or my siblings or cousins until years later, and even then details weren’t forthcoming. Having a marine for a father and a parachute in- fantryman for an uncle wasn’t thought remarkable by us. What was remarkable, or to be more precise, disturbing, were the wounds they had suffered. My father bore an appallingly large scar that coiled around his left knee, and spinal damage that kept him from tossing us in the air unless he was standing in chest-deep water. My uncle carried German shrapnel in his body from several different battles. At times during the fifteen years following the smashing of the Reich he couldn’t play with us at all, bed-ridden as slivers and shards of the metal worked their way out of his arms and torso. Neither of them ever complained. I saw medals they had received for acts of except- ional bravery, but not the citations. They never mentioned them to me; in fact, like the vast majority of veterans I’ve known, they simply didn’t talk about what they has gone through. There were certainly moments when I was tempted to ask questions, but I always remembered my manners, and didn’t.

Instead, answers of a sort were stated during the almost constant bragging on playgrounds and schoolyards about what fathers and assorted male relatives had done overseas. Always overseas - I don't recall anyone admitting that their father, brother, etc had been stationed at home, or, for that matter, talking about how the old man had spent the war at a regular job and been around for dinner every night. This must have made all of us quite rare in the history of war. (Come to think of it, none of us had female family members who had served either, which meant we were positively unique.) The most popular stories were usually high heroic accounts of fighting the ‘jerries’ and ‘krauts’ or ‘japs’ and ‘nips’, the details vivid and unrealistic, having been embroidered by imaginations stoked by armchair warriors, B movies and comic books. Where the latter was concerned, two of my favorites were All American Men at War and Blackhawk. Occasionally we encountered something much more intelligent, for instance movies like Robert Aldrich’s Attack!, Paths of Glory, and John Huston’s adaptation of the novel by Stephen Crane, Red Badge of Courage, (with the role of the young infantryman struggling with his cowardice played by none other than Audie Murphy, who I knew was as brave a soldier who had ever lived). That was not the last irony of this sort I encountered as I began to learn what really happens to those in battle. I learned my dad hated sport hunting; that my uncle far preferred lighthearted costume dramas and musicals when he took my cousins and I to the movies, on one memorable occasion proving he had already seen The Music Man by singing parts of the dialogue and songs performed by Robert Preston. I learned they were much more complicated - and interesting - than comic book stereotypes and  portraits created by myth-makers. I learned more about what had motivated both of them to volunteer rather than wait to be drafted and to fight with the most fierce personal commitment to doing everything they could to defeat the enemy. This need to know them and what had happened to them continued for decades beyond when they passed, my uncle when I was in my mid-thirties and the old man several years later. 

Then, a couple of months I ago, I made a list of the weapons carried by my father at the front. A 1903 Springfield rifle; UMD (Marlin) submachine gun; Smith & Wesson .357 magnum revolver; handmade fighting knife; heavy brass knuckles; grenades and as much ammunition as he could carry. For some reason I had never done this before, but once the list was finished - it had taken less than a minute - I knew for a certainty that all the items had been put to use many times; sometimes to save and sometimes to destroy. Armed to the teeth indeed.

That’s the most unvarnished piece of information I have about his life during the war.

And now in my 68th year, I discover myself bold in my heart with the surity that my dad and my uncle were, in the best sense of the word, men, who went to fight because despite their flaws, they were armed to the teeth, not only with the tools of war, but with the en- during virtues that helped them endure that experience, that most singular and terrible passage of their lives.