The Yankee Dog

Returning after a bit more than a year. Family somewhat battered by illness and disability. The elders - of whom I am one - nauseated by the malicious destruction of the tentpoles of this society and the hysterical degrading of the legacy we have fought to maintain and advance. Constant triggering of paranoia and fear of everyone not exactly like us, of nature, of facing up to the tasks needing to be done if our descendants are to survive. A gigantic collective temper tantrum thrown by citizens who felt aggrieved and put their trust in a drummer selling nostrums of verbal flatulence. Cruelty rules as predators parade.                                                                                                              

The term Yankee Dog is an old one. During my childhood it was said to be used by our enemies: the Japanese and the Nazis and, a bit later, the North Koreans and Chinese and Russians. In the comics I read it was usually hissed by a soldier clutching a weapon and eagerly dispatching a brave American or one of our allies. More       disturbingly, as I grew older I read newspaper stories about various political speakers squawking the term like furious parrots, damning not only their enemies, but the innocent as well. I equated this with the cruel and pointless practice of my teachers in public school of punishing an entire class for the actions of a few troublemakers.

But by the time I was in my mid-teens, though, I was a kind of troublemaker, a renegade possessed by and with social and political beliefs that garnered me a surprising number of foes denigrating my ancestors as well as my family. According to whatever passed for knowledge rattling around in their tiny brainpans, my forbearers had, among numerous other offenses, been abolitionists and fought for the Union. Gloriously true. I took pride in those facts, so it no great step to choose to be what others used as a slur. I was a Yankee Dog: a young stomp down never surrender rock-ribbed radical sworn enemy of totalitarians left and right and defender of the downtrodden.

This idealized self-portrait shone brightly for awhile before fading from age and the encroaching shadow of cynicism. It became a kind of badge pinned to clothing on certain occasions.

Now I take up the portrait again, embracing the fact that at my age (in my 70th year and now the oldest family member) you can do worse than be flamboyant when facing down tyranny. Thus, the Yankee Dog; much older, gray, a bit stooped and tired, but still here.

Dedication

Many years ago (over a half-century now) in the town of Papeete on the island of Tahiti, there lived a man who managed to survive by constantly scavenging garbage cans and piles of refuse and street gutters. His features were asian, but no one seemed to know where he had been born, where he had come from. No one knew his true name. He rarely spoke, and then only to himself. He concentrated entirely on his work, his face locked in a grimace.

   One day four young boys, began following him, keeping their distance, but never letting him out of their sight. Soon they began making fun of him and what he did, joking that he probably ate the garbage and all kinds of other horrible tasting stuff, and how stupid he was for doing that. They said these things often, not caring if he heard them because they knew he couldn’t understand them. They named him Chik Chak, yelling it at him as if he were a dog to be trained to recognize it. Sometimes they chanted it as they followed him, and once in awhile he stared back over a shoulder at them and anger distorted his face. Off and on for months they shadowed him.

   Then one day they left the island, never to return. They rarely spoke of the man and what they had done to him, and when they did it was only another memory from their childhoods, nothing special.

I was one of those boys.

I will continue to ask his forgiveness for the rest of my life. The Legions In the Mud posts are dedicated to him, to all those held in slums and pits and dumps, ridiculed and forgotten.

Places From the Past • 1957

The Mechanics' Institute Library. Founded in 1854, and still a working library. My father showed it to me when I was nine. I got a card there and when we went into the city he dropped me off there while he did errands. Inside were spiral staircases leading to the stacks - thousands of hardcover books on subjects that would provide an excellent education for those left in the wake of the Gold Rush, for all the sons and daughters of the working class. Chess has been played there since it opened, and I was fascinated by the mysteries of the game, and the classic typography and illustrations and design of so many books that were no longer being published. It was like finding a trove of buried treasure that reinforced my desire to read everything possible.
   I urge you to visit it, both for it's historical and cultural significance, and in recognition of the fine work done by its staff.

57 Post Street
San Francisco
California

A Vision

It is late January, 1958, and I’m standing on the top rung of the companionway ladder inside a hatch that opens into the cockpit of the schooner that is my home. She had been built fifty-five years before I was born, and is one of the very last 19th-century boats still capable of surviving the deepwater of the world. We are hundreds of miles from San Francisco and the west coast, headed toward the Marquesas Islands, having just endured a whole gale with winds approaching hurricane force. My father has been on deck for the better part of thirty-six hours, taking catnaps in a wooden chair lashed to ringbolts next to the cockpit, ever on the watch for the slightest mistake by whoever’s at the wheel and for any change in wind and water. I know he won’t make any mistakes. This perfect faith and the wonder of what I am seeing disallow the fear I might have had were I a bit older and capable of cynicism. My eyes tear a bit from the cold wind, still strong enough to keep the sheets taut even with the fores’l and mains’l reefed. My first brother stands next to me; unusually, we are not allowed on deck, so we make ourselves as comfortable as possible and look around us. It is morning. The sun is bright in a pale blue sky. High clouds driven by the wind scud across my vision. The horizon is clear and so distant no measure occurs to me. Surrounding us is an ocean without the boundary of land or even islands – nothing impedes its power as we ride swells towering over us one moment and the next lifting us high in the water and cold salty air, over and over until the motion is almost hypnotic – my brother and I raise and lower our heads in time to it, bringing a smile to the old man’s face. Once we noticed a albatross gliding across twenty-foot waves, their tops blown into spindrift. For hours I watch all this, my kid mind in a meditative state that I had learned when only a couple of years old by staring at bodies of water. And I was...moved...   emotionally in a manner that I could not articulate to anyone, not even to myself.

...

The memory remained, unfaded and unaltered by time or me. It didn't come to mind that often, and when it did it never occurred         to me to try and figure out what that elusive feeling was.                       Until a month ago, forty-eight years after the fact. I was riding my bicycle through my neighborhood, the streets safe enough that I could indulge in a bit of contemplation without worrying about being mown down by an SUV or delivery truck, when for no apparent reason the memory came to me, and I immediately understood what my ten year-old self had sensed. It was this:                                                                                

During that instant in my mortal life I had not only seen the primeval world, the world as it was before the coming of humans – I had been there.  

A Rule

Now in my 68th year, I have a rule that I recite to myself every morning:
   Live every day as though it might be your last; live it as though you are immortal.
   Doesn't make sense, does it? Ah well, such is life.

Nicknames

Casey

My first nickname, and chosen by me, initially because I was enthralled with a picture book called Casey the Fireman, about the captain of a fireboat in New York City harbor. He was tall and handsome, like I hoped to be, and blond, which I already was, and he put out fires from a kind of tugboat. What could be better than that? Going to school gave me an additional  reason to keep the name - I had outgrown the book - because boys in the 50s were almost never called Christian, and when teachers called roll for the first time they inevitably asked for ‘Christine’, putting me at near-mortal risk for merciless teasing on the playground.

Windy

My father sometimes called me this and, in fact, had wanted  to give me that name when I was born. My mom vetoed the notion. Neither one told me why the name was considered (I did know it wasn’t about weather) and it’s origin remains a mystery.

Chip

Of Chip and Dale fame. My first brother was Dale. These were private names used only by us, and was the earliest agreement between us that we represented the two essential parts of the perfect person: Brains (Chip) and brawn (Dale). My brother shortchanged himself; he’s extremely smart and insightful. But the characters in their cartoons are a riot and we strongly identified with them.

Moose or Moosenheimer

I began struggling with my weight when I was thirteen. I’d been thin as the proverbial rail until then, but a diabolical combination of growth spurts, puberty and its sidekick, hormones, and collapsing arches and chronically inflamed achilles tendons collaborated to turn me into, well, someone you’d nickname moose. This was used by my father. When he was exasperated with me, I got the short form. The long version was used when he wanted me to know that, in spite of the difficulties between us at the time, he cared very much about the problems I was having..

Cwissy-Poo

This is from one of my sisters. Totally affectionate, with  enough           of a bite to remind me that just because three of her brothers had inflicted an annoying nickname on her didn’t mean she was incapable of retaliation.

Chipmunk

A glorious Norwegian girlfriend (sigh) came up with this one in my early 20s. It’s inscribed in a copy of e. e. cummings’s  collected poems she gave me, along with a mention of my ‘bright eyes’. The unwritten half of the phrase - ‘and bushy tail’ - may come to mind, but dis- cretion, even at this late date, requires I refrain from speculation on any implications from the fact.

Yellow Cap

During the wars in Southeast Asia in the 60s and 70s, I was active in a group called The Resistance. I habitually wore a yellow knit cap, and someone – perhaps thinking I should have a nom de guerre (or nom de anti-guerre?) – took to calling me this, a habit that was picked up by others.

Captain Terror

Not a compliment. Early in my career as a bookseller I worked at the store on the campus of UCLA. Much responsibility, which I exercised with great attention to detail – something I demanded the crew I supervised share. But while the demand wasn’t unreasonable, my attitude was, and until the scales fell from my eyes a couple of months later, I had this nickname.

Irish

Years laters, working at another bookstore, I indulged my long obsession with Celtic traditional music by putting it on the store sound system whenever it was my turn to choose what should played. This continued for nine years. About a year into the run             I was given this name by a couple of co-workers.

Big Fellah

An extrapolation from Irish when I turned to reading every book on the Easter Rising, and Michael Collins and all matters related, and I was tagged with the famous nickname given Collins. At one point, in a moment of whimsey, the store owners got everyone bowling shirts to wear, and this was embroidered on mine.

Oracle

My last job as a bookseller was with Borders. The company’s upper management was stunningly inept. The store where I worked, by contrast, had a hard-working and professional crew that kept the place afloat far longer than expected. Some of them had 10 - 25 years of experience, which was unusual. I had just under 40, with the accumulation of knowledge that goes with that length of service. Whenever a customer asked for a book that seemed impossible to get, the problem was given to me, and my success at meeting their need was high enough that I was tagged with this name.

Note: Epithets have not been included. If they had been been, the list would have made up a slender book held at length by a thumb and index finger.

Hydration on the Playground

News today that public schools in the US are bringing back water fountains to their playgrounds, so that kids might lay off the soft drinks. My immediate reaction was not puzzlement that the fountains had been removed or disabled in the first place, but rather, a vivid memory of standing more or less patiently in line to get a drink just before recess ended, watching classmates slurp the non -oxygenated and -electrolyte water as impatient warnings of "No cuts!" went up and down the line, and those taking too long to drink being barraged with the sarcastic reminder "Save some for the fishes!"

New Year's Resolution 2016

I'll be trying to follow the famous admonition by Mother Jones to striking coal miners:

"Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living!"

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.

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.