kenstraussposts

Azua 1

2012-02-20T04:07:00.001-08:00

Act 2

Scene 1 (oval office, White House, Washington; President is conferring with his UN Ambassador)

LBJ: Alliance for Progress?

Shit!

That’s Kennedy’s hair-brained idea

That is not Lyndon Baines Johnson

That’s the sort of idea you get some evening

Sipping martinis on a Hyannis Port yacht

With all your do-goody aunts and society ladies

Talking about the poor black folks down South

And how easy it’d be to get them up and running

If we just ship ‘em some fishin’ poles

Instead of giving ‘em fish

Adlai: Sir, we can’t just shut down a program

This big overnight

LBJ: I’m from Texas, goddam it

Not from Hyannis Port

And there we live with blacks

And get so dusty in the fields

You can’t tell us apart

Instead of getting served martinis from them

While the sun sets over the waters

Goddam Kennedy and his goddamn programs.

I know my blacks

I know my latins and my Mexicans

The only two things they respect

Are a buck in the pocket

And a kick in the ass

And that’s just what I plan to give

Those tin-pot Dominicans

Adlai: Sir, the Alliance is the only thing of good

Most Latin Americans see coming out

Of the US in the last century

LBJ: We are not here, Mr. Stevenson

To be showing Latin America

Uncle Sam’s beneficence

We are here to show him who’s boss

I don’t give a monkey’s ass

What they think of us

You never get people to fall in line

By making them like you

Adlai: It’s a question of avoiding revolution

LBJ: Did Kennedy avoid revolution in Cuba?

Adlai: It was too late

That process was already ongoing

From the time of Truman and Eisenhower

Here we have the best propaganda tool

We’ve ever had in this hemisphere

LBJ: That’s the difference between you and me, Adlai

You’re one of those panty-whipped

Yankee boys like Kennedy

With all your big ideas for changing the world

Winning the hearts and minds

While I’m a grimy oil-field hand

Who knows that you only get things done

When you’re not afraid

To twist someone’s balls off

Aide: Mr. President, we have General Palmer from CINCLANT on the line

LBJ: Good, call in Earle Wheeler

(LBJ picks up phone, switches on the loud speaker; a heavily decorated General walks into the Oval Office)

Palmer: Sir, General Bruce Palmer, Commander-in-Chief, Atlantic, Sir

LBJ: Good morning, General, how are ya’?

Palmer: Just fine, Mr. President.

Watching the situation in Sanna Dominga closely, Sir.

LBJ: Yea, we are too.

I have General Wheeler here

From the Joint Chiefs

And Ambassador Stevenson

How do you see things from there?

Palmer: There’s a blood bath going on in the city

Very confusing, brother against brother

LBJ: I understand you’ve got the Marines in there

Palmer: Pouring in, Sir

The outcome’s not in question

We’re bringing ‘um out by the boatload

LBJ: Any combat yet?

Ya’ll been fired on?

Palmer: No, they scatter like rabbits

Whenever they see us

Biggest danger is all the kids

Swarming around our jeeps

Gotta be careful

Not to run’um over

LBJ: I want you to take the battle to them

Palmer: Only problem is the women, Sir

Either don’t wanna leave

Or wanna bring everything and the kitchen sink

LBJ: I want you in there

Provoking firefights

Palmer: With the American women, Sir?

I’m…I’m not following

LBJ: You get in there

And you kick their fuckin’ ass

Palmer: Sir, may I ask whom…

Whose ass are we meant to kick, Sir?

LBJ: The Dominicans

Palmer: Dominicans, Sir?

Wheeler: General Palmer, this is General Wheeler

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs

You’re job is not just to evacuate Americans

That’s step one, and not even the goal

You’re job is to stamp out the commies

On that whole island

Palmer: Yes sir.

LBJ: You wipe ‘um out so clean

Their goddam mother won’t remember ‘um

Palmer: Yes sir.

Adlai: But this is not to get out

LBJ: He’s worried they won’t love us anymore

Adlai: If they think we’re back

To gunboat diplomacy

Every city on that continent

Will explode against us

This has to remain

A humanitarian evacuation

Of our countrymen

LBJ: General Palmer, that’s a message

For Adlai and his other pansies

To sell to the media

For you, General Palmer,

This is gunboat diplomacy

Palmer: Yes, Sir

I understand, Sir

La Vega 11

2012-02-20T03:57:00.000-08:00

And we walked on…

Our house in La Vega looked out across a plowed field with a single palm towering in the middle. Every year we made a garden of that field. If I’m here it’s in large measure thanks to that. In the middle distance there was a brick mill where clay was turned in large huts by oxen. They just walked around all day in a circle. Once it was mixed, the slop (as we called it) was scooped up by hand and slopped into wooden moulds. They’d smooth off the tops with their hands and then set them in the shade to air dry. A few days later they’d turn out the bricks and fire them in a kiln. You could hear the fires roaring all night and that gave us wonderful dreams. When the wind was right, smoke and cinders would waft over and coated our roof and hanging clothes. Sometimes they’d burn holes in the clothes. That turned Mom into an inveterate wind-watcher. Whenever it was blowing from the mill she’d run out and bundle in the washing. In the far distance rose the most beautiful hills you’d ever want to see. They were blue-green with deep purple indentures. They were so sharply cut against the tropical sky that you could imagine rows of flints seen through a magnifying glass. The sky in was always changing color—azure and trembly at daybreak, blinding white at noon, a deep salt sea in the afternoon, ablaze and defiant at sunset. I used to imagine the sea on the other side of the mountains and, indeed, if you travelled far enough there it was. The sea’s always there if you travel far enough on an island.

Or anywhere. That reminds me of something by Gertrude Stein: ‘Everything is so dangerous that nothing is really very frightening.’ I don’t know why I thought of that.

We went once a year for a month to the sea.

Lucky you!

The first week at the beach we burnt. The next week we stayed inside and peeled. The third week we played around the house. The last week we went back to the beach and burnt again. I’m sure I’ll die of a melanoma before I’m forty.

Did you store up sun damage?

Apparently yes, and they say the earlier and more sporadic the worse.

You’re a sitting duck then.

I’m a dead duck.

You’re an ugly duckling that’s turning into a swan.

Or maybe a lymphoma. I got x-ray treatment for everything when I was a kid—adenoids, swollen neck glands, TB.

They give it for TB?

Not really. But I got so many chest x-rays during the months I was coughing up blood that I count them too.

You were sickly as a child.

Everyone was sickly during the civil war.

Like in every war.

During the war Dad went around from house to house on his motorcycle helping out anyone in anyway he could. And since I was the oldest, he usually took me with him. I must have breathed the TB in from somebody. But that was the most fun time we ever had together. He was like a kid on that bike, racing around and banking hard into every curve.

Probably he didn’t have one as a kid.

Not likely. They hardly trusted him on a bicycle. The day he turned eighteen they shipped him off to the Marine Corp.

That was always the solution with problem boys.

He got them back though in his own way. He became top sharp-shooter. There’s still a plaque at Camp Lejeune with his name on it as best shot ever. The Marine Corp became the home he’d never had. He got a tattoo on his arm with the Marine insignia in full color. He probably would have changed his last name to Corp if he could. He left Camp Lejeune directly for Pearl Harbor.

Was he there?

On land, not on a ship. That’s why he survived, but he saw everything. You can see him in one of the newsreels running across an airstrip with the Jap fighters banking in and coming straight at him guns blazing.

So he did know something about courage.

Well, not the courage of a martyr, like your father.

Still…

Running from an incoming fighter isn’t courage.

Give him something. If his life was unending disillusion, it must have taken grit to just keep going.

He had clinical depression, you can see it in his face.

Why did you love the trips with him on the motorbike?

Because he never took his Bible. There was no room for it with me on the back. We’d tool through the towns because they’re full of pot holes but once we got out on the roads he’d let out the stops. He told me not to tell my mother how he drove, but I could sense at those moment he was back in the Marine Corp.

Were you frightened?

No, I had him around the waist and we were one with the bike. We’d get covered with dust after a day going around and so he’d drive down to the beach…we were living then in Azua down on the south coast…and strip off and go in for a swim. There was coral on the beach so you had to wade out a ways until you got to a sand bar. We’d half-swim, half-float from one outcropping to another, trying not to touch them with our feet. The coral would slice your feet to shreds if you did. But it never happened, we always made the sandbar. When the tide was out the sand came right to the waterline. We’d sit there and talk and he’d tell me about Korea and the Chinese fighter he once shot down and all those Jap planes coming in to strafe Wheeler Field after they’d sunk the Arizona. I never saw him so happy as then, both of us sitting there with our willies all shriveled up and the water lapping at our thighs.

Too bad he didn’t have more of those days.

He was a handsome guy at that time. A baby’s face. It just kills everything though when you’re made to be a failure all your life. In all his pictures you can see the depression. His smile is so tight you’d think pliers were pulling his lips apart.

You’re tough on him.

It doesn’t mean there weren’t times I didn’t love him. He was tough on us.

It’s past, at least that part.

Nothing’s past. You carry a father for a lifetime.

If you want to. If you want you can also let it go. Let it slide off like Christian did his burden.

I’m not sure I want to introduce you to him. In fact, I’m sure I don’t.

It wouldn’t change anything between us.

I’m still afraid.

There’s time. It’s still early days for us as well.

And we walked on…

One year, during that month at the beach, I walked in on a woman naked. It was during our week peeling off at home. She was another missionary wife. She must have been putting on her swimming suit…or taking it off. I think it might have been Victoria’s mom, I don’t remember.

Why is that important?

Because there are some images that stay with you for a lifetime, you never know why.
And this one did?

I don’t know why, but it’s not every day that a young boy sees a woman completely naked.

How old were you then?

Maybe ten.

You didn’t knock?

It was completely unplanned. Several families were staying in the same house. It’s the kind of thing that happens all the time; that has no importance. She probably thought nothing of it, but it stayed with me.

Why?

It’s deep and vital…at least for me. Vital like essential to life…like vital signs. And precocious…it doesn’t just start at puberty.

I grew up around naked boys. I never gave a dangling penis a second look.

There are tribes where women go around topless. A breast to these men doesn’t provoke the slightest sexual arousal.

But a Hottentot apron might.

I don’t know why but I can still evoke this woman’s image whenever I close my eyes. I can’t make out any details, except that she was slightly bending over, as if she’d just lowered her stockings and was picking them up. I only saw her for a moment and then hurried back out.

Not having the details probably lets you imagine them better.

And, boy, have I since.

(She smiled.)

It was the surprise of it. Crossing a forbidden threshold in an instant of neglect.

You neglected to knock?

I was a kid. Kids open doors. It was she who neglected to lock it.

Maybe on purpose.

I’ve always suspected that. She wanted to be seen naked by a man or, in any case, by someone unsuspecting.

Like any exhibitionist.

There was something in her face that suggested it. She didn’t seem to be surprised or embarrassed. And she looked hard at my eyes…to see what I was looking at.

Maybe that’s why you remember it. Maybe she does to.

She was like a tableau. Like a girl in one of the Flemish paintings who’s bathing at an open window where she can easily be seen. Maybe Membling. She was leaning over like that. Have you ever done that?

I like to be looked at, but clothed. I’d die if anyone spied on me naked. I can’t imagine a missionary woman doing that…or my mother…

I’d like to meet your mother.

She wants to meet you.

I think she’d hit it right off with my Mom.

No doubt.

Two widows, in a way.

If you say so.

I know so.

We had two missionaries in Niger who were depressed…despite all the successes we were having in the field. Both were men. One even tried to kill himself by walking off into the desert and never coming back. If it wasn’t for the Touaregs he wouldn’t have. They brought him back two weeks later suffering from heat stroke. He was never right in the head after that. Always went around singing ‘Onward Christian Soldiers—to buck himself up, so he said. That’s why I hate that song.

Onward Christian soldiers
Marching as to war
With the Cross of Jesus
Going on before…
You can just see the swords catching the glint……thirsty for Muslim blood. It’s something out of the Middle Ages...the Crusades

…I’d like to see that scene.

Which one?

Those chiseled hills against a blazing sky…

And we walked on, me feeling something I’d never felt before…

Don’t just do something, STAND THERE!

2012-02-19T03:39:00.001-08:00

Faby calls me a Therapeutic Nihilist.

How can a doctor not believe in giving medicines?

This usually comes to a head when I refuse to give our daughter antibiotics for a cold or a fever. Faby reasons that Camille is our only child together. She is now approaching 50, and I, 60, so Camille will be our only child. No chances must be taken with her.

The concepts of watchful waiting, developing antibiotic resistance and unintended consequences don’t get much air-time with Faby. Her best friend is a nurse who knows how to twist doctors around her finger. One call to Marie Elise and Camille is on Augmentin.

Ken doesn’t believe in taking medicines, explains Faby, or in giving them to others.

I know several other doctors who are like that, responds Marie Elise. I don’t know what’s happened to them, but I wonder if they should still be practicing.

One glance at our medicine chests would seem to confirm this. Mine has a box of beta-blockers (which I’ve been on for 35 years for hypertension), Vaseline, dental floss, my toothbrush and a couple of cockroaches lying pleasantly lifeless with their legs in the air. Faby’s has every medicine that has ever been invented on earth and several that must have come in on UFOs.

She has more medicines for diarrhea than existed in the whole pharmacopeia fifty years ago. I tell her, just let the diarrhea run its course; that’s the body getting rid of something it didn’t like.

She looks at me as if I’ve suggested setting fire to the house.

Faby likes her Xanax every once in a while. When she can’t sleep she especially loves Xanax. In fact, she may love her Xanax more than me.

I once suggested running as a remedy for insomnia instead of Xanax.

You always sleep well after a run, I said charmingly.

You expect me to run in this rain?

Rain, Spain! It’s always raining in Belgium. Once you’re wet you can’t tell it apart from sweat.

That, my dear, is why I’ll never run in Belgium.

And so it goes.

Last week she was constipated. (Pardon, the intimacies we permit ourselves on this blog; probably another special affliction of doctors.) She was debating which of her 23 laxatives and 32 stool softeners to take. She asked my opinion, though I knew it was a set-up.

Why don’t you take some bran with me? I suggest as charmingly as I did the run.

How can you swallow that stuff?

I mix it with water and just chug it before breakfast.

It’s hideous. Have you seen how it sticks to the side of the glass? Even the dishwasher can’t clean it off. Imagine what it’s doing to your intestines. No, I think I’ll take this one, along with that one and if they don’t work in an hour I know another one that will.

And so it goes.

Seriously, what do I, as a doctor, really believe in?

I believe that when you’re really sick you should take the medicine that’s appropriate for that illness. Last August I had pneumonia. I did the sensible thing. I went to the hospital for an X-ray to prove it and took Amoxicillin for two weeks.

I believe we take far too many medicines when we’re not sick or which are not appropriate for the illness we have. Doctors are often pressured into giving these and yield just to get patients off their backs or to remain loved by them. They’re not doing anyone any favors. So be skeptical of the doctor who always gives you what you want.

I believe in taking absolute responsibility for your own health (and everything else in your life). The rules for good health have been known since the Greeks first wrote them down. Moderation in eating. Daily exercise. Avoidance of all toxins, including alcohol, tobacco and drugs. Rest and recreation.

I believe in running. I believe in biking. I believe in walking in the open air. I do this at least an hour every day wherever I am in the world. I’ve done it every day for the last 45 years and absolutely swear by it. I can’t imagine life without it.

I believe in taking one sip of my wife’s wine, but that’s all the alcohol I will drink.

I believe in taking catnaps anytime your body asks for one. I learned from my brother-in-law, a GYN surgeon in Colombia, how to take 5-minute naps. When we operated together there was always a 5-minute break between cases while they cleaned and set up the room. We’d go into the doctors’ quarters, lean back in a chair with our heads against the wall and be asleep in 30 seconds. Five minutes later the scrub nurse would call us and we’d feel like we slept all night. I now take two or three a day.

I believe in watchful waiting. Many symptoms will go away if you just wait them out. Just as importantly, you must WATCH. You must stay alert for the ‘red-flag’ symptoms. In the rare case that they come, you immediately stop waiting and start acting.

I believe in morphine. I have seen too many people tortured by the medical system at the end of life. I’ve tortured too many myself. When it’s my time (and one of the advantages of being a doctor is you usually know) I don’t want chemo or intubation or the ICU. I want my bottle of morphine, or shots of it, or a whopping big final dose.

That is how I want to die. That is how many doctors want to die.

I believe in life, in now. The past is beyond remedy. The future is just NOW a little bit later. The hereafter is unknowable, and may be just as empty as the time before we were born. So all we have is now. I believe in it.

..............................................

Now here's how another doctor feels about it. Ken Murray's essay was first published at

Zócalo Public Square and later at The Guardian.

How Doctors Die: It’s Not Like the Rest of Us, But It Should Be

Years ago, Charlie, a highly respected orthopedist and a mentor of mine, found a lump in his stomach. He had a surgeon explore the area, and the diagnosis was pancreatic cancer. This surgeon was one of the best in the country. He had even invented a new procedure for this exact cancer that could triple a patient’s five-year-survival odds—from 5 percent to 15 percent—albeit with a poor quality of life. Charlie was uninterested. He went home the next day, closed his practice, and never set foot in a hospital again. He focused on spending time with family and feeling as good as possible. Several months later, he died at home. He got no chemotherapy, radiation, or surgical treatment. Medicare didn’t spend much on him.

It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently.

Of course, doctors don’t want to die; they want to live. But they know enough about modern medicine to know its limits. And they know enough about death to know what all people fear most: dying in pain, and dying alone. They’ve talked about this with their families. They want to be sure, when the time comes, that no heroic measures will happen—that they will never experience, during their last moments on earth, someone breaking their ribs in an attempt to resuscitate them with CPR (that’s what happens if CPR is done right).

Almost all medical professionals have seen what we call “futile care” being performed on people. That’s when doctors bring the cutting edge of technology to bear on a grievously ill person near the end of life. The patient will get cut open, perforated with tubes, hooked up to machines, and assaulted with drugs. All of this occurs in the Intensive Care Unit at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars a day. What it buys is misery we would not inflict on a terrorist. I cannot count the number of times fellow physicians have told me, in words that vary only slightly, “Promise me if you find me like this that you’ll kill me.” They mean it. Some medical personnel wear medallions stamped “NO CODE” to tell physicians not to perform CPR on them. I have even seen it as a tattoo.

To administer medical care that makes people suffer is anguishing. Physicians are trained to gather information without revealing any of their own feelings, but in private, among fellow doctors, they’ll vent. “How can anyone do that to their family members?” they’ll ask. I suspect it’s one reason physicians have higher rates of alcohol abuse and depression than professionals in most other fields. I know it’s one reason I stopped participating in hospital care for the last 10 years of my practice.

How has it come to this—that doctors administer so much care that they wouldn’t want for themselves? The simple, or not-so-simple, answer is this: patients, doctors, and the system.

To see how patients play a role, imagine a scenario in which someone has lost consciousness and been admitted to an emergency room. As is so often the case, no one has made a plan for this situation, and shocked and scared family members find themselves caught up in a maze of choices. They’re overwhelmed. When doctors ask if they want “everything” done, they answer yes. Then the nightmare begins. Sometimes, a family really means “do everything,” but often they just mean “do everything that’s reasonable.” The problem is that they may not know what’s reasonable, nor, in their confusion and sorrow, will they ask about it or hear what a physician may be telling them. For their part, doctors told to do “everything” will do it, whether it is reasonable or not.

The above scenario is a common one. Feeding into the problem are unrealistic expectations of what doctors can accomplish. Many people think of CPR as a reliable lifesaver when, in fact, the results are usually poor. I’ve had hundreds of people brought to me in the emergency room after getting CPR. Exactly one, a healthy man who’d had no heart troubles (for those who want specifics, he had a “tension pneumothorax”), walked out of the hospital. If a patient suffers from severe illness, old age, or a terminal disease, the odds of a good outcome from CPR are infinitesimal, while the odds of suffering are overwhelming. Poor knowledge and misguided expectations lead to a lot of bad decisions.

But of course it’s not just patients making these things happen. Doctors play an enabling role, too. The trouble is that even doctors who hate to administer futile care must find a way to address the wishes of patients and families. Imagine, once again, the emergency room with those grieving, possibly hysterical, family members. They do not know the doctor. Establishing trust and confidence under such circumstances is a very delicate thing. People are prepared to think the doctor is acting out of base motives, trying to save time, or money, or effort, especially if the doctor is advising against further treatment.

Some doctors are stronger communicators than others, and some doctors are more adamant, but the pressures they all face are similar. When I faced circumstances involving end-of-life choices, I adopted the approach of laying out only the options that I thought were reasonable (as I would in any situation) as early in the process as possible. When patients or families brought up unreasonable choices, I would discuss the issue in layman’s terms that portrayed the downsides clearly. If patients or families still insisted on treatments I considered pointless or harmful, I would offer to transfer their care to another doctor or hospital.

Should I have been more forceful at times? I know that some of those transfers still haunt me. One of the patients of whom I was most fond was an attorney from a famous political family. She had severe diabetes and terrible circulation, and, at one point, she developed a painful sore on her foot. Knowing the hazards of hospitals, I did everything I could to keep her from resorting to surgery. Still, she sought out outside experts with whom I had no relationship. Not knowing as much about her as I did, they decided to perform bypass surgery on her chronically clogged blood vessels in both legs. This didn’t restore her circulation, and the surgical wounds wouldn’t heal. Her feet became gangrenous, and she endured bilateral leg amputations. Two weeks later, in the famous medical center in which all this had occurred, she died.

It’s easy to find fault with both doctors and patients in such stories, but in many ways all the parties are simply victims of a larger system that encourages excessive treatment. In some unfortunate cases, doctors use the fee-for-service model to do everything they can, no matter how pointless, to make money. More commonly, though, doctors are fearful of litigation and do whatever they’re asked, with little feedback, to avoid getting in trouble.

Even when the right preparations have been made, the system can still swallow people up. One of my patients was a man named Jack, a 78-year-old who had been ill for years and undergone about 15 major surgical procedures. He explained to me that he never, under any circumstances, wanted to be placed on life support machines again. One Saturday, however, Jack suffered a massive stroke and got admitted to the emergency room unconscious, without his wife. Doctors did everything possible to resuscitate him and put him on life support in the ICU. This was Jack’s worst nightmare. When I arrived at the hospital and took over Jack’s care, I spoke to his wife and to hospital staff, bringing in my office notes with his care preferences. Then I turned off the life support machines and sat with him. He died two hours later.

Even with all his wishes documented, Jack hadn’t died as he’d hoped. The system had intervened. One of the nurses, I later found out, even reported my unplugging of Jack to the authorities as a possible homicide. Nothing came of it, of course; Jack’s wishes had been spelled out explicitly, and he’d left the paperwork to prove it. But the prospect of a police investigation is terrifying for any physician. I could far more easily have left Jack on life support against his stated wishes, prolonging his life, and his suffering, a few more weeks. I would even have made a little more money, and Medicare would have ended up with an additional $500,000 bill. It’s no wonder many doctors err on the side of overtreatment.

But doctors still don’t over-treat themselves. They see the consequences of this constantly. Almost anyone can find a way to die in peace at home, and pain can be managed better than ever. Hospice care, which focuses on providing terminally ill patients with comfort and dignity rather than on futile cures, provides most people with much better final days. Amazingly, studies have found that people placed in hospice care often live longer than people with the same disease who are seeking active cures. I was struck to hear on the radio recently that the famous reporter Tom Wicker had “died peacefully at home, surrounded by his family.” Such stories are, thankfully, increasingly common.

Several years ago, my older cousin Torch (born at home by the light of a flashlight—or torch) had a seizure that turned out to be the result of lung cancer that had gone to his brain. I arranged for him to see various specialists, and we learned that with aggressive treatment of his condition, including three to five hospital visits a week for chemotherapy, he would live perhaps four months. Ultimately, Torch decided against any treatment and simply took pills for brain swelling. He moved in with me.

We spent the next eight months doing a bunch of things that he enjoyed, having fun together like we hadn’t had in decades. We went to Disneyland, his first time. We’d hang out at home. Torch was a sports nut, and he was very happy to watch sports and eat my cooking. He even gained a bit of weight, eating his favorite foods rather than hospital foods. He had no serious pain, and he remained high-spirited. One day, he didn’t wake up. He spent the next three days in a coma-like sleep and then died. The cost of his medical care for those eight months, for the one drug he was taking, was about $20.

Torch was no doctor, but he knew he wanted a life of quality, not just quantity. Don’t most of us? If there is a state of the art of end-of-life care, it is this: death with dignity. As for me, my physician has my choices. They were easy to make, as they are for most physicians. There will be no heroics, and I will go gentle into that good night. Like my mentor Charlie. Like my cousin Torch. Like my fellow doctors.

Ken Murray, MD, is Clinical Assistant Professor of Family Medicine at the University of Southern California.

Don’t just DO SOMETHING, stand there!

2012-02-18T12:06:00.000-08:00

My wife is Fabienne. I call her Faby.

During that same week that my father-in-law fell in the bathroom and couldn’t dance anymore around the wine goblet and I was in India training doctors, Faby called me to say that she’d found something in her right breast.

It all went very fast after that.

I was hopping from city to city and what I remember of Bangalore was that she said it felt like a hard lump but it couldn’t be cancer because she’d just had a mammogram two months ago and everything had been OK. By Chennai she’d gotten an appointment with the leading breast specialist in Liège for the next day. In Calcutta he’d seen her and confirmed it was a solid lump that needed biopsying. By Delhi he’d put a needle in it, and on the road from Mumbai to Pune—somewhere on that most murderous of highways— she’d gotten the results back. It was positive for cancer. By the time I was back in Mumbai she’d been scheduled to be operated on.

I went directly from the Brussels airport to the hospital.

We dived into the cancer dance and tried to keep in step. First you had to get your papers straight. She’d written everything down. (Faby always writes everything down.) We followed the instructions to the letter. Go to level 13, follow the green arrows to the black door numbered B52EZ, turn in a complete circle and then follow the yellow arrows up a single-file stair, through the turnstile and into an unlit corridor marked OncoSein. At the end sits a little lady with grey hair, a pink cap and a gammy leg. Turn left through the glass doors, take a number, turn off your mobile and register.

This we managed without a hitch. We registered, collected labels, were given a wrist band, filled in papers in triplicate, received papers back in quadruplicate and were told to retrace our steps and deposit the second and fifth of the quadruplicate papers in a slot somewhere at the end of our trek. Then we should take a seat. We’d be called.

We went through these steps zombie-like, both hoping to wake soon from the nightmare.

We found what appeared to be the right slot, slipped in the second and fourth of the papers (figuring that if they’d said the ‘fifth’ they must have meant the last one) then looked for a seat. There were no seats.

It didn’t matter. A second later the door with the slot was flung open and there stood before us as formidable a battleax as ever axed a battle.

What does this mean? she barked. She had the second and fourth of our quadruplicate copies in her hand.

We were told to deposit them here, I answered.

She marched toward us, snatched the remaining papers from my hand, shuffled them about and removed the first and third of the quadruplicate papers.

Where’s the other one? she snapped.

Which one?

The fifth. You don’t have your fifth. What have you done with it?

We were never given a fifth one, Faby answered sheepishly.

Impossible. They always give five. Somehow you’ve misplaced it. You’ll have to go back and get it now, otherwise nothing can be done for you.

By then Faby was in tears.

You don’t have to speak to us like that, I stammered, we’re doing everything we’ve been told.

Here we go by regulations. Otherwise it’s total chaos.

My husband’s a doctor, Faby sobbed, thinking that might buy us a break.

The woman pulled her stout chest back and looked me over. No doctor I’ve ever seen.

Then I lost it. I’m so sorry, madame. We should have pinned on our little yellow stars before we bothered you.

We turned away. The door slammed behind us. By this time Fabienne was weeping. You didn’t have to be just as mean as she was.

Yes, but that’s no way to treat someone who’s just learned she’s got cancer.

I gave her a hug. From now on she’s ‘Helga SS’ to us.

She smiled between the tears.

Then it all went right. Annie made it right. Annie was the breast cancer nurse coordinator. She was helping another patient register when we got back, and, recognizing Faby from the week before, invited us into her office.

Whatever you’ve heard from the doctors, I just want to tell you that it will be me who takes care of you. They’ve probably told you all about your receptor status and your her-2-neu and a lot of other mumbo-jumbo. But I want to tell you the real score. You’re scared and sad and worried sick about your little girl. I know. I have a little girl myself and I’ve had breast cancer. No matter what the doctors told you about those markers and your prognosis I want you to know that you’re going to be fine. I’ve seen hundreds of women like you, thousands probably by now, and all the ones like you do well. From now on you call me as soon as you arrive in the hospital and I’ll meet you and take you through everything.

And she did. She took us through every step. First she described what would happen; then she took us there personally. The bone scan, the X rays, the ultrasound, the blood tests, the tracer to help locate the tumor in surgery. She was there when we went in and when we came out. Or we paged her and she would appear a minute or two later. We couldn’t thank her enough. She said it was her job. She said hers was the best job in the hospital. Then she gave us her mobile number, her home number and her eMail.

(If you ever have breast cancer and happen to be in the Liège area, look up Annie. Or ask for Florence Nightingale and someone will inevitably lead you to her. NB. Helga’s the one with the yellow pigtails, the corncob nose and the billy stick.)

Faby’s surgeon was named Eric. His assistant was Luigi, a wiry Italian with a hangdog face who never stopped talking. Eric could have been Dr. Kildare. He was tall, broad-shouldered, soft-handed and handsome. He always wore black turtlenecks and black jeans. His only fashion touch was his glasses. Every day he wore a different pair. Or rather, he changed the frames. Once they were red with black stripes, next day they were indigo with orange stars, next day, snow white with a blue wave. Faby made a game of guessing what they’d be next. She loved him. He was kind and reflective. He was a man of few words but when he spoke it came from a deep well of wisdom.

Enter the MammaPrint.

I’d asked for a MammaPrint. My wife was the ideal candidate for it since her biopsy had been estrogen-receptor positive and she was pre-menopausal. The MammaPrint tests for a large array of mutations that tell you what the probability is of a relapse. They also help you know if chemotherapy is indicated or not. Eric agreed that it was appropriate and said to talk to Luigi. He’d just finished a clinical trial on the MammaPrint.

I finally got hold of Luigi the morning of the operation. He jumped at the idea of a MammaPrint. It wasn’t done routinely in this hospital yet but if I ran over to another hospital his technician there would give me the kit. I’d have to rush it back before the operation began. It was something to fixate on for Faby and me. The race for the MammaPrint took center stage and distracted us from the operation.

I drove like a demon and got the kit back in the nick of time.

The operation was a success. A 2 cm tumor was removed from her right breast. All the margins were clear, both in frozen sections at surgery and on the tissue block later. There was no her-2-neu. Three axillary nodes were removed. The sentinel one had micro-metastasis, but the other two were negative. A piece of the tumor had been sent to the Netherlands in the MammaPrint kit. The results would be back in a week. All Faby had to do was recover and wait.

She was tired but smiling when she rolled out of recovery. We both felt an immense sense of relief. She was never so happy as when Camille ran in her hospital room that evening. Three days later we were home.

Many women will tell you that the worst part of breast cancer is follow-up visits. You begin to worry several weeks in advance, work yourself into an absolute panic over the possibility of a relapse, face the oncologist, get good news (usually), almost collapse from relief, only to start the same exhausting process three months later.

And the worst of the follow-up visits is the first one. There you get the results of the surgery and find out what’s in store for you.

Unfortunately for us Eric had gone on holiday and Luigi was covering. This was the first thing to come unraveled. Luigi has a problem. He prefers to look at a computer rather than at his patients. When we walked in, my wife bare to the waist except for her bandage, he didn’t even look up from the screen. The first thing he said was, I have bad news. We steeled ourselves. I had already called ahead and knew that the margins were clean and the nodes negative. (Micro-metastasis don’t count if they’re only in the sentinel node and the others are negative.)

They couldn’t do the MammaPrint. Not enough tissue. It happens.

He was still looking at the screen. I looked at Faby’s white face and trembling lips.

So where does that leave us? I asked.

Like before the MammaPrint existed. With the classic prognostic markers.

We know she’ll get tamoxifen, I said, with it being estrogen positive. And radiation therapy. But we were counting on the MammaPrint to determine if she needs chemo or not.

She needs chemo.

Why? Faby and I said at the same time. We’d done our homework. We knew that she had all the good prognostic factors in her favor and normally wouldn’t need chemo.

Receptor miss-match, he answered. The tumor’s estrogen positive but progesterone negative.

But the biopsy was 50% progesterone positive and 70% estrogen positive. How could the tumor be different?

It happens, he repeated. The biopsy is just a needle sample of the tumor. After surgery we have the whole tumor. The pathology report on the tumor shows 100% estrogen positivity and 0% progesterone receptor. That’s a bad prognostic sign. That means chemo.

That doesn’t make sense, I answered. The opposite could happen. A biopsy could be 0% because it’s a selective sample, but not the opposite. It must be a lab error. I’ve seen it happen many times. All it takes is for the pathologist to mistype a number in the computer. Can’t we have the tumor rechecked?

I think this is a recheck. He fumbled with his computer and pretended to be verifying this.

You understand how critical this is? It’s 6 months of chemo and a year of recovery; 18 months of her life that are at stake. 18 months of misery. And it all depends on whether the progesterone is indeed 0 or not.

They re-do these things every time if there’s a contradiction.

He never looked up from his computer. He wrote out the name of an oncologist who would give her the chemo and handed the paper to Faby. His only words to her during the whole visit were his last ones: I’m sorry.

Faby was in tears again when we left his office.

I’m not going to accept this, I said. We’re going to go find the pathologist and find out the truth.

It took half an hour of wandering through the bowels of the hospital till we found her. I quickly explained the dilemma. She went to her computer. Two clicks later she gave us the answer. No, it hasn’t been rechecked. And you’re right, it doesn’t make sense. I’m going to retest the tumor sample myself. I’ll have it for Eric when he comes back in two days.

The recheck showed that the tumor was 70% progesterone-receptor positive and 100% estrogen positive. There was no miss-match. Someone had failed to type a 7. It happens, to borrow a phrase. Luigi had been talking out of a fork in his tongue. Erik agreed there was no need for chemo. He did warn us that this did not guarantee she wouldn’t relapse. And we shouldn’t regret not taking chemo if she did relapse. But there was no need for it now. She would get radiation, five years of tamoxifen and close follow-up.

And that’s how it’s gone. So far so good. The first year is behind us. Camille learned to read in that year. Faby’s father died. We got older and wiser.

DON'T JUST do something, stand there!

2012-02-17T06:35:00.000-08:00

The most fundamental principle in medicine is enshrined in the Latin phrase: Primum Non Nocere—Above All, Do No Harm!

This was pounded home to us again and again as medical students, especially in the Emergency Room on a Saturday night when all hell was breaking loose around us.

If you don’t know what to do, do nothing.

Our mentors knew that under intense pressure to do something we would (given our level of incompetence) inevitably hurt more than help.

It was not an excuse for passivity. It was, on the contrary, a stern kick in the pants to ‘fuckin’ learn what to do so that you wouldn’t just have to stand there next time’. Little by little we learned what to do and then were allowed to put our hands and minds to work on patients…but until then…do nothing!

Even after years of medical practice there are still moments when you’re stumped. That liver enzyme pattern makes no sense so what could this be... Cough shouldn’t be the presenting symptom of a heart attack, so why does the EKG... How come this healthy non-febrile child had a seizure in class half an hour ago…

And you must suppress your urge to act, or even to speak. Primum Non Nocere

But doctors are expected to act.

Doctors are expected to cure illness, to prevent death.

Doctors are not expected to die.

So how do doctors die? And how do they face illness in themselves?

I want to tell three stories that illustrate my own feelings about this.

The first is about my father-in-law. The second is about my wife. The third is about myself. After the third one I’ll post an essay written recently by another doctor giving his view on these questions. It has provoked huge debate since it was posted at Zócalo Public Square and then published in The Guardian.

My father-in-law’s name is Pierre. He is an artist—a sculptor to be exact. And his hobby is raising exotic tropical plants. He has more than a thousand packed into his greenhouse atop an apartment building in the center of Liège, Belgium. He likes to create hybrids. He has several species of plant named after him. He is 79 and has been a widower for the past 4 years.

Two years ago his doctor found that his PSA was sky-high and a trans-rectal ultrasound showed unmistakable signs of cancer in the prostate. X-rays showed multiple bones to which the cancer had already spread. He was started on a medicine that would suppress his male hormones and was prescribed an injection every month to keep his bony metastases from causing him too much pain.

He continued on with life. He sculpted. He hybridized. He made everyone laugh. The only thing he complained of privately to me was that he couldn’t satisfy his new girlfriend. She’s only 40, he told me, and has a great figure. Now I can only caress her. The damn thing’s as floppy as a wet worm…a dead wet worm! We laughed and he said it didn’t matter because she was OK with it.

Then the bone pain broke through and we started him on paracetamol and gave him radiation treatments to the bones that hurt the most. Two of these were in his lumbar spine: L3 and L5. He felt better and life normalized for a while. Then the pain came back and we gave the paracetamol around the clock and started a morphine patch. Again things calmed down.

He knew there was no cure, that it was a matter of time, but he continued to take his girlfriend out to eat and dance. He loved everything about Greece so they went twice a week to his favorite Greek restaurant, where, after the meal, he would dance around a wine glass on the floor. Everyone thought he would live forever.

Then I went away for two weeks to India to train doctors. During the second week my wife called to say her father’s pain was back and that now he was weak in the legs. He’d even fallen in the bathroom in the middle of the night. He’d said it was because he’d drunk too much that evening at the Greek restaurant. But he admitted he’d knocked over the glass for the first time ever when he tried to dance. I told her to call his oncologist immediately, that he might be having a spinal cord compression from one of the lumbar metastases.

By the time I got back he could hardly walk. He’d seen the oncologist and all that had been done was to give him a stronger morphine patch. He’d been told nothing more could be done.

He couldn’t stand when I saw him. I tapped on his knee tendon and the leg almost flew off the couch. Hyperreflexia is a sign of something impinging on the spinal cord and I knew it had to be tumor. I called the oncologist myself. He’s maxed out on radiation; we can’t give him any more in the lumbar spine, he told me.

Then why don’t we call a neurosurgeon and have him debulk it while he still has some function in his legs?

It wouldn’t change the ultimate outcome, he said.

I know, but he may live for many more months. All his other organ systems are fine. It will be awful if he has to live as an incontinent paraplegic for all that time.

I don’t know any surgeon who’d touch him. He’s got extensive mets and he’s almost 80. He might not survive the operation.

And so nothing was done.

And exactly that happened. He quickly lost all function in his feet and legs. Then he lost control of his urinary and rectal spincters. He was put to bed with an adult diaper and the family congregated to debate the next steps.

My wife and I decided to take him home in the meantime. We installed a hospital bed on the ground floor and took turns nursing him.

After three days we were exhausted. Both of us work full-time. We have a 6-year old daughter. I travel all the time. Our house is full of stairs. And Pierre required round-the-clock care.

The family continued to debate. We had agreed to take him home only temporarily until a decision was taken on long-term placement. But no decision was taken.

Finally I proposed that we go and visit a hospice center. Everyone in the family worked and so no one could afford to stay with him full-time. He didn’t want a nurse with him around the clock. He wasn’t sick enough to go into the hospital. His own house had stairs, so living there in a wheelchair was not an option.

The minute we got to the hospice parking lot I knew something was wrong. My wife’s brother pulled his car in next to us, got out and scowled at the building. This is way too far from Liège for me to drive every day to see him. And besides a hospice is for people who are dying.

It only got worse from there. He wouldn’t look at the nurse who was explaining the principle of hospice. He wouldn’t go on the tour of the facilities. He wouldn’t speak to the rest of us going down the lift.

We walked in silence to the cars. Then he said simply, My father is not coming here.

So Pierre stayed on at our house—incontinent, alone in the daytime, miserable.

Two days later we got a call from the oncologist. The brother had gone to speak to him and they’d decided they wanted Pierre to get a dose of chemotherapy. This would possibly shrink the tumor and give him back the function he’d lost. I was stunned and speechless. So I went to see the oncologist myself.

The whole family had raved about this man. He was their ideal of a doctor. He made you feel you’d live forever. He smiled and joked and used the power of positive thinking. He’s one of us, un vrai liègois.

He bear-hugged my hand. Cher confrère. ‘My dear brother doctor.’ He was 1000 watts of tele-evangelist medicine. It’s just one dose of Taxol. I’ve seen it do wonders in prostate mets. I had a patient 102 who took it. Let’s just see Pierre’s reaction to this one dose.

My protests were all parried. The family took his side. Pierre was bundled into an ambulance and whisked off for his chemo.

The Taxol did its stuff, as I knew it would. If he wasn’t sick enough for the hospital, we’d just solved the problem. He couldn’t eat. He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t stop shitting. He wrote a note saying he wanted to die.

He went into hospital.

There he languished from April till October. Hairless, swollen, forlorn. His back side was one big bedsore. He lost the ability to make people laugh.

Again and again he said to me, Ken, give me a shot to help me pass on. I can’t stand this. Give me a whopping dose of morphine when no one’s looking.

I couldn’t, of course, and tried to tell him why, but he still begged. He couldn’t understand. He felt betrayed. You said you wouldn’t let me suffer, and look…

I continued to see him every day, to examine him, touch him, massage the legs. He said he loved me like a son.

By the time he died in mid-October the family was divided and exhausted. The brother kept saying it was because we’d given up on him too soon. We’d broken his spirit by all this talk of hospice.

I said nothing. I didn’t even go to the funeral.

The next week the brother started going out with his father’s 40-year old girlfriend. Now they’ve moved in together.

La Vega 10

2012-02-13T09:22:00.000-08:00

Act 1

Scene 1 (house in La Vega, Dominican Republic, April 30, 1965)

Gloria Esteban: I am a woman of this land

Uña y mugre con ella

Its soil’s between my toes

Frank: But you can’t stay here

Gloria Esteban: I have my children here

My mother, my blind mother

And other sightless ones

I’ve buried children here

Frank: They’ll bury you too if you stay

Gloria Esteban: You have to be buried somewhere

Frank: It’s going to blow

Gloria Esteban: It’s already blown before

Frank: Not like this time

Gloria Esteban: It’s just more bodies in the gutter

Frank: This time they’ll come for you

They know you were with him

Gloria Esteban: I was with him and against him

And with them and against them

If anyone has made enemies of everyone

It’s me

Frank: All the more reason

Gloria Esteban: What would your wife say?

Sharing a seat with her husband’s lover?

Frank: She wouldn’t need to know anything

She wouldn’t know

Gloria Esteban: Wouldn’t she wonder

Why you’d put this Dominican

On an American helicopter

Destined only for Yankees

Frank: There are all kinds of people being evacuated

Gloria Esteban: Not from here. It’s only gringos

And what would you say if she asked you who I was

Frank: She’s not going to ask

She’s out of her mind with worry

She just wants to get the kids out as soon as possible

Gloria Esteban: She’s bound to ask why her husband

The head of the mission, responsible for all the others

Has delayed twenty four hours after the evacuation order came

Has put at risk all the other missionary couples and their children

Now loads on a woman she’s never seen before

And you say she’ll never ask?

Frank: She’ll never ask

Gloria Esteban: Why?

Frank: Because I’ve told her.

Gloria Esteban: What!

Frank: I’ve told her you’re coming.

Gloria Esteban: You’ve told her about us!

And you expect her now to welcome me aboard.

Frank: I didn’t tell her we were lovers

Gloria Esteban: So what did you tell her…

That a beautiful young dancer

You happened to know

Might come along to entertain the kids?

Frank: They’ll kill you if you stay here

I don’t want to come back

And find you dead

Gloria Esteban: You underestimate me

How do you think I escaped under Trujillo?

He killed all his lovers, didn’t you know?

Frank: How did you?

Gloria Esteban: The same way I’ll escape now

Frank: Which is

Gloria Esteban: I’ll tell you when you return…

But here my daughter’s coming…

(enter Maria Elena)

Maria Elena: Mama, they’re bombing Santo Domingo

Wessin y Wessin

He’s going to bomb us here too

We’ve got to get out to the country

Gloria Esteban: I know Wessin

I’ll call him

Frank: It’s war, mama

General’s don’t take calls in war

Gloria Esteban: Wessin will take my calls

Besides he’s a Colonel

Maria Elena (looking askance at Frank): Why is he still here?

I thought all the Americans were to be out

There are Marines at all the intersections

Gloria Esteban: Ask him.

Or rather I’ll tell you myself

He wants me to go with him

Frank: And leave us behind?

Gloria Esteban: That’s what I told him

But I’m not going to do it

Maria Elena: So Frank, why don’t you leave her alone

Why don’t you get out now with your family

Gloria Esteban: I think we both know why

We all do, don’t we Frank

Because you love me

Because your honor won’t let you just walk out

Your Anglo-Saxon, Calvinistic, white knight honor

Won’t let you sleep back there in Gringolandia

Knowing you’d left your lover to her fate

Well maybe she wants her fate

Frank: I don’t know why you’re so bitter all of a sudden

I’ve only come for your sake

Gloria Esteban: And now he adds the moral capstone

It’s all for you, my dear

You’re the protestant pastor again

Rounding up the flock

Well save the sermons for them

Go back to your wife and then go home

Frank: I love you, you know that

You said you loved me

I don’t want you to perish

Gloria Esteban: Perish!

Perish, I shall not, my dear

Mi alma y mi amorsito

I’m not in the habit of perishing

Maria Elena: Mama, we have to get to the country

Gloria Esteban: We have to go Frank, before they roadblock everything

Wave to us from the chopper

(she kisses him on the cheek, takes her daughter by the arm and walks out)

Scene 2 (main house on mission campus)

Sharon: Take that silver spoon, no leave it

Gosh where’s Frank?

Oh, Lydia, my mother’s china

It’ll all be gone when we return

If we return

I don’t think we’ll ever return

Lydia, did you find the children’s passports

They were under the cake pans in the pantry

Or by the Crisco cans or somewhere

Maybe in the medicine chest

Oh, where’s Frank?

(Frank walks in)

Oh, there you are Frank, where’ve you been?

The radio station’s down, nothing on, kaput

Lydia thinks its been bombed

And we can’t find the kids’ papers

Where have you been for so long?

I’ve been worried so, my hair’s turning gray

By the minute

Frank: I was in town

Checking on some nationals

They say the Marines are at the crossroads

Sharon: That’s a good sign, no?

Frank: That’s a sign the Marines are at the crossroads

Sharon: When will they send the helicopters?

Frank: I don’t know, has Hal been on the radio?

Sharon: I told you, they shut it down.

Frank: No, I mean the ham radio…

Sharon: I haven’t seen Hal.

Tammy was here about an hour ago

A nervous wreck

She was still in rollers, her slip half off

And dashing about like a chicken

Who did you see in town?

Frank: Some nationals, they don’t want to come with us

Sharon: Why should they, they’re not in danger

Frank: We’re not in danger

Sharon: Oh, Frank, how can you say that?

They’ve already attacked the Americans

At the Jaragua Hotel and at the Embajador

People just like us, missionaries,

I heard it on the radio

Before they bombed it out

Frank: Where are the kids?

Sharon: Upstairs, they’re packing

I told them one suitcase each

And just for clothes

Well, one toy, but that’s all

Frank, you took so long

I was worried

Lydia said they might have taken you

I was worried sick, I couldn’t decide what to do

Do you think we should bury the silver?

We might never come back

I don’t think we’ll ever come back

We could always send for it

But we’ll have to tell one of the natives

So they can unbury it

Frank: We could ask Ramon

Sharon: I don’t know if I trust him

Frank: He’s a Dominican pastor

He’s come to Christ

Sharon: I know, but we’ll be gone by then

And there’d be no one looking over his shoulder

And silver’s silver

Even Christ was tempted

Frank: But He didn’t yield

Sharon: Of course, he’s God

Still we shouldn’t just leave it out

In plain sight of all the natives

And my mother’s china and the crystal

Oh Frank, I can’t believe this is all happening

It’s so fast and they won’t even give us time to plan

Frank: We’ve had thirty years to plan

Sharon: What do you mean?

Frank: Thirty years the rich have had it good here

Sharon: Whadda ya mean, Frank

We’re not rich

We’re just ordinary Americans

Frank: We’re fabulously, unimaginably, appalling rich

To them

Sharon: To who? To the natives?

But what do they know

About riches?

Scene 3 (a professor’s office at the University in La Vega)

Raimundo: It’s not just students this time

The Army’s had enough too

Most of the Constitutionalists are Army

Diego: But not the higher ups

Not the Wessin y Wessins

Raimundo: The big shots can’t do anything without the rank and file

The young officers and their men are with us

Diego: That’s what they said when they killed Trujillo

Raimundo: Listen, go back to your classroom then

Go sit in a closet and wait till it’s all over

Diego: I’m just making the point…

Raimundo: Don’t you see that it’s either strike now or be stricken off forever

Here’s Mario, ask him if you don’t believe me

(enter Mario in full combat gear)

Mario: They keep landing Marines

They’re thousands and thousands now

They’ve got every intersection in Santo Domingo

And they’ve made a cordon from the airport to the US embassy

Diego: That’s normal if they want to get their people out

Mario: You didn’t believe that, did you?

That they just came to snatch out their people

They mean to split us in two

That cordon divides the Constitutionalists right down the middle

Those in the center of town

Can’t speak to those outside

They’ve cut the phones

Diego: So they’re taking sides

Mario: Of course they’re taking sides

They’ve been taking sides for a hundred years

Only it’s not our side

(The phone rings, Mario takes it, speaks nervously and then hangs up)

Mario: Now they’re extending the corridor

It’s up through the university

They’re chopping all the hot spots in half

They cordon them off

Then Wessin bombs the hell out of the middle

They’ve also got Marines up at San Isidro with him

Probably flying his sorties too

Raimundo: And Diego here is still debating the political question

Shouldn’t we write a nice article to the papers protesting

Mario: Look, Diego, if you want to do something

Go arrest someone important

Someone we can hold for ransom

Diego: Who could be held for ransom?

Raimundo: That old Trujillo girl for one

That high-priced call girl

The one who teaches dance and writes poetry

She’s friends with Wessin and all the Americans

She’s been sleeping with the head of the mission here

And all of them are CIA

Diego: Why don’t we take the missionaries then?

Raimundo: And get massacred?

They’ve got helicopters buzzing all around there now

Lifting them out to their ships

Mario: Is she with them?

Raimundo: No, she’s playing both sides again

She’s at her country house in Baní

Plotting her next move

Mario: Diego, this is just the job for a suave sexy

University professor who wants to

Do his bit for the future of mankind

Diego: I don’t even have a gun

Raimundo: You don’t need a gun with Gloria Esteban

At least not the kind that shoots bullets

(in a Marine helicopter)

Pilot: We’re going to take you to a staging area near the coast

Then they’ll off load you to a warship—the Boxer

Frank: Where on the coast?

Pilot: Can’t tell you, sir,

But if you sit up here you should be able to guess

If you know the country

Frank: I know the country

Been here 22 years

Pilot: Oh yea!

Spreading the good word?

Frank: The Gospel of Christ

Are you a believer?

Pilot: Are you kidding, I’m Southern Baptist.

My Daddy’s a preacher down in southwest Tennessee.

Frank: Then you know all about missionaries.

Pilot: We support lots uv’em.

Have ‘em in all the time for their little talks

Africa and all them places

Frank: Been in the Marines long?

Pilot: Two years as a pilot

I’m slated for Vietnam next month

Until this little thing started up

Frank: What do you know about this little thing?

Pilot: Dominican Republic?

Well, just what they told us on the way in

Some hooched up political mess

With the commies just sitting back

Waiting to gobble up the place

Something Castro’s hatched up, I guess.

Frank: Is that the word you got?

Pilot: Look, I can’t talk too much about the mission

I just ferry ‘em around

Haven’t seen no shooting yet

Frank: Are you picking up many natives?

Pilot: Yea we got some this morning from San Cristobal

The old generalisimo’s family and a bunch of cronies

Set them down on a ship directly

Them and their loot

Frank: Their loot?

Pilot: Well, I don’t know what they had in there

But it weighed somethin’ godawful, them trunks

If you’ll pardon my language

Scene 4 (country house outside Baní)

Gloria Esteban: Why don’t you just tie me up

And toss me in the back of your jeep

Diego: Listen, I’m a professor of philology

I don’t toss women in the backs of jeeps

Gloria Esteban: What can’t we talk about here

That we can in La Vega?

Diego: They just want you back there

Gloria Esteban: Who does?

Diego: The constitutionalists

Gloria Esteban: The Consitutionalists!

Since when do they run the country?

Diego: They run La Vega for the moment

And soon the whole country

Gloria Esteban: You’ve somehow failed to notice

That those whirly birds

Chopping away up there

Don’t, for some reason, seem to be flying

The flag of the Constitutionalists!

Diego: We are for a legitimate return to true democracy

Gloria Esteban: Oh, yes, and when did we have the pleasure

Of being truly democratic

Diego: For a brief period after Trujillo

If that name rings a bell with you

Gloria Esteban: I can see that gaga land

You get paid to teach in

Hasn’t taught you some basic truths about political life

Like the source of real power

Which is never the people

Diego: I’m not here to debate the source of power

I’m here to ask you to come peaceably or to bring you otherwise

Gloria Esteban: Then bring me otherwise

(he hesitates)

Gloria Esteban: Oh, I can see you didn’t expect that.

You’re not used to bringing women otherwise

You’d be useless as a source of power

Diego: You should be glad it’s me who’s come

The others wouldn’t have been so nice with you

Gloria Esteban: I would have rather enjoyed that, I dare say

Diego: Are you coming or are you not?

Gloria Esteban: What do you think?

(back in La Vega)

Raimundo: You’re useless, Diego.

You’re worse than useless.

You let her off and now she’ll be

Twice as hard to find next time

Diego: Did you expect me to tie her up

And throw her in the back of the jeep

Mario: If necessary, yes

Diego: Well, you sent the wrong man

Raimundo: That’s obvious

Mario: Just go back to writing out your Marx

And Lenin on a spotlessly clean blackboard

Come, Raimundo, let’s go get the whore.

(Gloria Esteban’s house in Baní)

Gloria Esteban: Come in gentlemen

I’ve been expecting you for a while now

Who was that milksop you sent earlier?

Mario: Brash as ever, now you’re coming with us

Gloria Esteban: And waste this coffee

I’ve been brewing for you

Por Dios, you’ll both drink it

If you want anything from me

Mario: You’re in no position to make demands on us

Gloria Esteban: Given your position in Santo Domingo

You’re not either

Raimundo: We always knew what side you were on

Gloria Esteban: I don’t take sides…

If you don’t take sides you never lose

And you keep your head

Which is more than I expect for you

Mario: We know your past with El Chibo

Gloria Esteban: El Chibo, now that’s a name

‘The goat’

He did have quite a horn

Mario: You’re a disgrace

Gloria Esteban: You’ll spoil your coffee

And that of your hostess

With language like that

Now, drink up

Down the hatch

(they drink in silence)

Raimundo: You have connections

All kinds

And that could be helpful for all of us

Gloria Esteban: You’ll use me as a hostage

Let’s shoot straight

So do it here, arrest me in my house

And drag me there in chains

Before the whole world

Mario: We think you can help sort some things out

Gloria Esteban: What things?

Raimundo: Why the Americans have come in against us

Gloria Esteban: Against you, are they? How so?

Raimundo: They’ve split our lines and are letting Wessin bomb us

Gloria Esteban: And how am I to stop that

I don’t know a single American

Mario: You know Wessin

And you know plenty of Americans

Especially a certain Frank in La Vega

Scene 5 (at staging area somewhere near the coast)

Frank: I’m going back with the pilot to La Vega

Sharon: Frank, are you crazy?

We just got out by the skin of our teeth

Whatever for?

Frank: I need to check on things

That everything’s OK

I’m the leader of the Bible school

I need to check on the natives

Sharon: You’re not going back, this is madness

Frank: I’ll come right back

There’s no danger

You saw for yourself

No one shot at us

Sharon: Think of your children, Frank

Lydia, talk to him

I know you’re a native

But the only people he seems to listen to

Nowadays is natives

Frank: Pilot, can I ride back with you to La Vega for the next pick-up?

Pilot: If you wish, sir

There’s only three more to pick up

So plenty of room

Sharon: Frank, I’ll never forgive you for this

How can you leave us here alone?

Frank, if anything ever happens to you

(she bursts into tears while he steps into the helicopter; they take off)

Pilot: You’re leaving a lot of sobbing females down there, sir.

Frank: That’s one thing a man has to steel himself against…female sobbing. Behind every successful man is a good woman

But behind every man whose success is shattered

Is usually a sobbing one.

Pilot: Yea, I’ve made a few sob in my time.

So it’s back to the farm again for you?

Frank: No, not exactly.

I was wondering if you could put me down

In a town nearby La Vega.

It’s called Baní.

Pilot: Not a problem, sir.

Will you want me to pick you up again from there?

Frank: No, that won’t be necessary.

I’ll find my own way back.

Just tell those sobbing females

That I’ve stayed at the Bible campus in La Vega.

That’s where I’ll be making my way back to in the end.

Tell them there’s no danger

I’ll be joining them soon.

And make sure they get ferried over to the Boxer as soon as possible.

Pilot: Righto, sir.

(Gloria Esteban’s house outside Baní, a helicopter approaches)

Mario: Take cover it’s the gringo’s.

(Mario and Raimundo dive for cover, Gloria Esteban runs out to greet the helicopter, without touching down it delivers Frank into an adjacent field and then rises and disappears in the direction of La Vega)

Gloria Esteban: Frank! Madre de Dios!

What in the hell are you doing here?

Frank: You know the reason.

I can’t leave you. I won’t.

I love you.

Gloria Esteban: Frank, you crazy beast!

You hopeless awful beast.

And you thought nothing of having yourself delivered here

In a US Marine helicopter…

Right into the middle of a rebel stronghold.

Frank: I didn’t know Baní…

Gloria Esteban: Never mind. Come in

I have some guys you have to meet.

La Vega 9

2012-02-10T10:06:00.000-08:00

His death is the loss of something irreplaceable.

He had an amazingly gift—that of captivating all he came in contact with. None, in all the hundred lands he visited in that busy life, failed to come under his spell—the old, the young, children, men and women—especially women.

El conquistaba a todas.

He was different from every one else, an outsider, the non-conformist, but always invested in the lives of those around him.

And more than anything else, he loved his children.

He left an impression of greatness wherever he went. Not only by his physique and features. It was his person. His eyes as they gazed on you. His questions. The curiosity and vast range of his mind.

He died, as he would have chosen, on the open road, in the wide spaces he loved—fearless, free and irreplaceable.

Wichita Vortex Sutra

2012-02-09T10:55:00.000-08:00

by Allen Ginsberg

I'm an old man now, and a lonesome man in Kansas
but not afraid
to speak my lonesomeness in a car,
because not only my lonesomeness
it's Ours, all over America,
O tender fellows--
& spoken lonesomeness is Prophecy
in the moon 100 years ago or in
the middle of Kansas now.
It's not the vast plains mute our mouths
that fill at midnite with ecstatic language
when our trembling bodies hold each other
breast to breast on a matress--
Not the empty sky that hides
the feeling from our faces
nor our skirts and trousers that conceal
the bodylove emanating in a glow of beloved skin,
white smooth abdomen down to the hair
between our legs,
It's not a God that bore us that forbid
our Being, like a sunny rose
all red with naked joy
between our eyes & bellies, yes
All we do is for this frightened thing
we call Love, want and lack--
fear that we aren't the one whose body could be
beloved of all the brides of Kansas City,
kissed all over by every boy of Wichita--
O but how many in their solitude weep aloud like me--
On the bridge over the Republican River
almost in tears to know
how to speak the right language--
on the frosty broad road
uphill between highway embankments
I search for the language
that is also yours--
almost all our language has been taxed by war.
Radio antennae high tension
wires ranging from Junction City across the plains--
highway cloverleaf sunk in a vast meadow
lanes curving past Abilene
to Denver filled with old
heroes of love--
to Wichita where McClure's mind
burst into animal beauty
drunk, getting laid in a car
in a neon misted street
15 years ago--
to Independence where the old man's still alive
who loosed the bomb that's slaved all human consciousness
and made the body universe a place of fear--
Now, speeding along the empty plain,
no giant demon machine
visible on the horizon
but tiny human trees and wooden houses at the sky's edge
I claim my birthright!
reborn forever as long as Man
in Kansas or other universe--Joy
reborn after the vast sadness of War Gods!
A lone man talking to myself, no house in the brown vastness to hear,
imaging the throng of Selves
that make this nation one body of Prophecy
languaged by Declaration as
Happiness!
I call all Powers of imagination
to my side in this auto to make Prophecy,
all Lords
of human kingdoms to come
Shambu Bharti Baba naked covered with ash
Khaki Baba fat-bellied mad with the dogs
Dehorahava Baba who moans Oh how wounded, How wounded
Sitaram Onkar Das Thakur who commands
give up your desire
Satyananda who raises two thumbs in tranquility
Kali Pada Guha Roy whose yoga drops before the void
Shivananda who touches the breast and says OM
Srimata Krishnaji of Brindaban who says take for your guru
William Blake the invisible father of English visions
Sri Ramakrishna master of ecstasy eyes
half closed who only cries for his mother
Chaitanya arms upraised singing & dancing his own praise
merciful Chango judging our bodies
Durga-Ma covered with blood
destroyer of battlefield illusions
million-faced Tathagata gone past suffering
Preserver Harekrishna returning in the age of pain
Sacred Heart my Christ acceptable
Allah the Compassionate One
Jahweh Righteous One
all Knowledge-Princes of Earth-man, all
ancient Seraphim of heavenly Desire, Devas, yogis
& holymen I chant to--
Come to my lone presence
into this Vortex named Kansas,
I lift my voice aloud,
make Mantra of American language now,
I here declare the end of the War!
Ancient days' Illusion!
and pronounce words beginning my own millennium.
Let the States tremble,
let the Nation weep,
let Congress legislate it own delight
let the President execute his own desire--
this Act done by my own voice,
nameless Mystery--
published to my own senses,
blissfully received by my own form
approved with pleasure by my sensations
manifestation of my very thought
accomplished in my own imagination
all realms within my consciousness fulfilled
60 miles from Wichita
near El Dorado,
The Golden One,
in chill earthly mist
houseless brown farmland plains rolling heavenward
in every direction
one midwinter afternoon Sunday called the day of the Lord--
Pure Spring Water gathered in one tower
where Florence is
set on a hill,
stop for tea & gas

written 1966

La Vega 8

2012-02-08T00:55:00.001-08:00

What do I love?

Riding a bicycle in the evening as the shadows lengthen by a still canal, with my children riding ahead and the dogs running at their side.

Creating a story from some uncertain idea shimmering like a mirage; writing and re-writing until it’s right, the characters now friends.

Sitting at a restaurant table, waiting for the food, my nose deep in a book. Then finishing the meal and plunging back into it as I sip coffee and munch a Belgian praline.

A pear, cool and crunchy, green beans topped with bacon sauce, neuf-cereals bread toasted with melted cheese.

Standing in the Gare Lille Europe on a wintry morning waiting for the TGV to Paris, a steaming coffee in one hand and a flaky, just-baked croissant in the other.

Chicken in a saffron sauce, roasted chicken, chicken Brazilian-style with lime squeezed on top.

The first sip of a good wine.

The brown eyes of Arab women, with all that unseen simmering behind them.

The sharp wit of a young Jew…the wise wit of the older Jew.

Chocolate! Chocolate melting in the mouth. Chocolate as it’s stirred. Chocolate as it oozes from the center of a moilleux.

Getting out of the shower after a long run.

My daughter’s teasing eyes and quick laugh, her lithe and buoyant figure bounding here and there, mistress of all she finds.

My son’s voice, its tenderness and pain and searching. The way his mind winds about an idea, slowly descending on it in tightening circles.

La Vega 7

2012-02-06T06:46:00.000-08:00

There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization.

Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberly

La Vega 6

2012-02-06T05:26:00.000-08:00

Château du Jardin, first moments

The tired old sclerotic manor limped into view at the end of a tediously long drive hedged in by ancient box. It had seen better centuries. The roof was in the style of Mansard. Its shingles—what shingles still remained—hung bedraggled and depressed, some by only one nail, three stories up.

There was an octagonal tower built into the center of a sugar-cube structure with tall, fer forgé-barred windows. That saved it, those majestic windows. There were seven of them at every level on both the front and back of the sugar cube. Twenty-one on the front, twenty-one on the back. Forty-two jewels. It would surely be luminous inside.

The double doors of the entrance were of ancient oak, heavily laden with carvings and painfully arthritic. It took two hands and a stout back to budge them. The left one was afflicted with crepitus and the right, stubbornly cog-wheeled.

Once inside the true extent of the mansion’s decline was evident. Bird excrement streaked the walls. Furry creatures scurried about. A huge slab of ceiling, which someone, in apparent desperation, had tried to re-plaster, had dehisced and fallen, sending debris down on the bust of Molière.

Stunning bibelots, statuary and Louis XV meubles were scattered in disarray, as if frivolous children had thrown them madly about. Throughout the entrance hall all was wet and moldy and green, literally organic, oozing a foul putrescence.

The floor retained its sober dignity. It was checkered marble, black squares alternating with white. Exposed above my head, though, was a huge oak beam. The fallen plaster had unveiled a horror beneath it: rampant infection of dry rot. Square, scaly gray blocks, fissured by black trenches, were all that remained of that noblest of trees.

The beam was split in two by an open compound fracture with no hope for it but amputation. Having lost all cohesion it hung precariously in midair. One imagined the whole house might fall in at any minute

With vague misgivings about my own safety I tiptoed gingerly through the détruis of the hall into the stately dining room, presided over by a stuffed boar hung high above the door. Half of the parquet floor was gone and the other half seemed to be swimming in a giant decubitus ulcer.

A water pipe had broken in the adjacent kitchen and no one had thought to turn off the main. It had obviously dripped for months and was still at it. My feet must have disturbed the equilibrium of what remained since suddenly and without warning another slab of parquet slats slid out of sight, as if ashamed of the incontinence.

There were still cast-iron radiators hanging like skeletons chained to a dungeon wall. Curious, I gave one a tug. The beast came to life. Water gushed from both ends and inside there was a gurgling like a death rattle. This grew into a drum beat and then into a cardiac gallop. It crescendoed, fibrillated, then fizzled. A tense, ponderous silence followed and then, with a sharp intake of air and a high-pitched hiss, the thing blew its top in a geyser of oily water, crashing off the wall and into a pulsating heap at my feet.

I fell in love with the place.

It was so alive and malignant. Fungus had metastasized to every bone in its edifice. Every organ would need transplanting. Every patch of sloughed skin would have to be re-grafted. Every fracture set.

But she would not be allowed to die. Not on my watch. Not if I could goddamn help it.

Arizona Border Police

2012-02-06T04:41:00.000-08:00

But at the Arizona border they stopped us and said Turn Back, and I sat in a little room with barred windows while they typed.

What relation is this man to you? (My beloved is mine and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies).

How long have you known him? (I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine: he feedeth among the lilies).

Did you sleep in the same room? (Behold thou art fair, my beloved, yea pleasant, also our bed is green).

Did intercourse take place? (I sat down under his shadow with great delight and his fruit was sweet to my taste).

When did intercourse first take place? (The king hath brought me to the banqueting house and his banner over me was love).

Were you intending to commit fornication in Arizona? (He shall lie all night between my breasts).

Behold thou art fair my beloved, behold thou art fair: thou hast doves eyes.

Get away from there! cried the guard, as I wept by the crack of the door. (My beloved is mine)

Better not try any funny business, cried the guard, you’re only making things tough for yourself. (Let me kiss him with the kisses of his mouth).

Stay put! cried the guard, and struck me.

Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, 1945

La Vega 5

2012-02-06T04:25:00.000-08:00

Sweet Deceit Comes Calling

I knew more about any one of my patients than about her. Spoke more words with my nurse on any given day than ever with her. Yet Zośka would not leave me all that fall.

Winter came. The first hard frost and a deluge of leaves. Then a second, and the trees were stripped bare. The wind was so cold and sharp it cut the chest when you breathed deeply. I hurried across the Grand Place, a blouse of Bruges lace under my arm.

I’d heard from her that morning. The letter had arrived inside my medical journals and had slipped to the floor. It lay there unseen until the end of the morning when I happened to notice it.

It was short and quirky and I loved it from the moment I opened it.

I confess my always remembrance of you and our short time. For your poem—so much loved—much thanks. Awaiting in the inn of my heart lies your room, flower-strewn and bathed in the scent of longing. Fond tenderness, Zośka.

That was it. The reason for my heartache throughout that fall: ‘bathed in the scent of longing’, ‘fond tenderness’, ‘flower-strewn’, ‘my always remembrance’. She’d felt the same.

The letter also contained an etching and a score from one of the Polonaises we’d heard at Zelazowa Wola.

I wrote back saying I wanted to see her. Anywhere she chose. I wrapped and sent the blouse.

She wrote back inviting me to Łódź, to have Sunday lunch at her house, to meet S. and her girls. ‘I want them to see you. I know they’ll love you too.’

My heart fell. So this was her sort of love. But I went, knowing it would be a disaster.

The house was magical, wood everywhere, built on several levels, with cathedral ceilings and immense windows, bordering on a forest and a frozen lake. S. was tall and so slim he was nearly gaunt, younger than Zośka and very handsome. I felt uneasy with him from the first instant.

She’d cooked roast chicken and wild rice. He made little ceremony of the wine but his choice was excellent and it loosened my tongue. Throughout the meal he was quiet as Zośka and I chatted away. We were chatting away our nervousness. At one moment she got up to serve us dessert. I smiled at him and my unease came back.

He seemed intellectual, diffident, borderline aesthetic. He was listening closely to our English, appeared to understand every word and seemed interested in me in an honest, unassuming way. I knew he knew nothing, suspected nothing.

After the meal we went for a walk around the lake. The dog frolicked in the drifts and Zośka ran after Paulina (Angelica had not come, she had exams). S. and I followed them, watching Zośka in her slim jeans and ski jacket, her beret falling as she chased a wayward child and dog.

The sparkle of the sun on the snow, the red cheeks and billowing breath of the frolickers, the quiet, gracious host beside me, the memories of such outings with my own children, the auburn hair and lithe figure of the one whose heart was an inn—all this left me giddy, confused and strangely weak.

Back at home S. took me upstairs and showed me his collection of cars—antiques, Formula Ones, Porsches, Ferraris. Then we thumbed through his English magazines—Car and Driver, Speed Age, Road & Track. None of this had ever interested me, but I forced myself. All along I was wondering, what are you doing? what are you doing here?

Then abruptly he announced he was tired and would like, with my permission, to take a nap. He said he took one every Sunday, the only day he ever drank wine. I said of course and he walked me downstairs.

By then Zośka had changed and was in the kitchen reading to Paulina. She asked me to sit at the table with them. The story was a fairy tale in English but Paulina couldn’t understand a word. I felt sorry for her. She kept yawning and asking what was happening. Zośka finally gave up and put her down for her nap.

When she came back she served me tea in the room looking out over the lake. She was wearing the blouse. It fit her very well. Through it, in the light of the winter sun, one could see the lace of her bra. Her eyes, which had been sad during lunch, were now just like the evening at the château.

We drank without saying anything. She would look at me and then out at the frozen lake. Then down at her tea and back at me. Her skirt was short and her long tanned legs were crossed and lay so close to me that I could have touched them.

‘You look sad,’ she finally said.

‘I feel strange.’

‘Are you ill?’

‘No, just out of place. I didn’t imagine this. S. is very kind. And I always imagined Łódź as grey and grimy. This is a garden.’

‘Do you feel uncomfortable…with him?’

‘No, he’s a perfect host. But I should go while he’s asleep. That would be best.’

A pained expression crossed her face. ‘Why? Why now? Now we can talk.’

‘Zośka, I’m in your home. How can we talk?’

‘We can talk here about anything, everything. He’s asleep. They’re asleep.’

‘We can’t talk about anything that’s important…. Not here.’

‘Do you want to go somewhere else?’

‘No, of course not. What would he think?’

‘Why are you sad?’ she asked again.

‘Because, all this fall, I haven’t been able to think of anyone but you…all this time.’

‘That’s why I had to see you. I can’t think of anyone but you.’

‘But why here?’

‘I thought it would be best.’

‘It couldn’t be worse. I didn’t know what to say to him. Do you know how dishonest I felt? I feel?’

‘I thought it would straighten things out, my feelings.’

‘I don’t feel right like this, coming into a marriage, a family. And this won’t sort out our feelings. Has it yours?’

We sat in deepening gloom and finished our tea.

‘Please call a taxi for me. I’ll go back to my hotel.’

‘I’ll drive you.’

‘No, a taxi’s best.’

She called me that night.

‘Are you angry with me?’

‘Is he there?’

‘He’s upstairs bathing Paulina.’

‘No, I’m just confused.’

A long silence followed.

‘Does he know who gave you the blouse?’

‘No.’

‘And the poem?’

‘I keep it at work.’

Another silence.

‘But you must love him?’

She didn’t answer.

It pleased me, this silence.

‘You were beautiful,’ I finally said, ‘running in the snow.’

I though I heard a soft sob.

The next morning she came to my hotel. She was wearing the lace blouse and the jeans. She’d taken the day off.

‘I couldn’t let you go like that,’ she said when I opened the door.

She was in my arms before I could close it.

And for the rest of the morning neither of us spoke aloud.

Later, in a steaming tub, she said she was sorry.

‘What an idea? I must have been out of my mind.’

‘Didn’t you think he’d find it strange?’

‘I told him that you were a colleague everyone liked, that I wanted us all to be friends.’

‘And he never suspected?’

She leaned back deeply in my arms. ‘He doesn’t see me anymore. He hasn’t looked at me since Paulina.’

After that there were a long series of cities: Helsinki, Vienna, Bruges, Gdansk, London, Barcelona. Wherever there was a medical congress we arranged to meet up.

In Helsinki she wore a dress her friend had just designed. It was summer, the first after we’d met, and Helsinki in the summer was all Zośka could imagine of heaven. Blue sea, brilliant sunshine and warm black rocks overlooking the water. Plus no one in the world who knew us.

The dress was beige, cut open in front with straps at the shoulders and a blouse underneath. The blouse was fluffed and gathered in a way that drew the eyes. The skirt was split in stripes as wide as one’s hand all the way around, split right up to her hips so that if she twirled (which she didn’t dare) she would have quite exposed herself. The effect was tropical and teasing, though the blouse was slightly old-fashioned.

When I saw her walking towards me in the lobby I didn’t recognize her. I was so struck by the skirt that I didn’t see the woman. The only thing I could think of was Josephine Baker and her banana dress. Then called out to me and I recognized her. ‘Zośka!’ She was happy as a child and even more to have caught me so off-guard.

In Vienna we spent the evenings in Grinsing, always catching the last tram back to the Zentrum, usually more than a little tipsy. We ran down the hill, hand in hand, and leapt on as it pulled away. We were like kids, panting in each other’s arms, kissing as the tram swayed, smiling at the few old couples—staid and Austrian—who stared at us (and usually smiled back!).

In Bruges we stayed at the Jan Brito where they claimed they’d been waiting for us for centuries. We biked to Damme and then, still following the Zwin, on to the sea. Sitting on the dunes she asked me to tell her a story in only fifteen words. I puzzled it out in the sand.

Pivot, aim, two leads whiz home. Both sovereigns topple down. So ends their people’s mutual enmity.

‘What’s “enmity”?—and that’s sixteen,’ she counted.

‘Bad feelings between two groups.’

‘So why do we need “mutual” then?’

That’s how we came to fifteen.

That’s how we’d end all wars.

Neither of us dared ask questions of the future. Our clandestine trysts were, in that sense, a curse. Long anticipated, in charmed settings, endowed with secrecy and the lure of the forbidden, they were our curse. Tenderness lingered for weeks thereafter, sating the need for love or permanence. By the time it began to fade we were planning the next one.

End of Sweet Deceit Comes Calling

Previous episode, Into Every Married Mind
Ending with The Scent of Her Lingers

La Vega 4

2012-02-06T03:35:00.000-08:00

ici, si loin

je pense que à toi

des choses les plus banals

plus oubliées, plus rein

des flaires de toi

des trucs minables

sont ceux

qui plus me hantent

toi qui ne bouge

et toi inquiète

toi femme

la mienne

toi qui me possède

qui m’a perdu

qui m’appartienne

oublie

pas de nous deux

oublie pas de nous

mon oxygène

mon ADN

ma chaîne alimentaire

tu traine mon nom sur toi

tu l’a écris

en sang

entre tes seins

tu écris ma vie

La Vega 3

2012-02-06T02:54:00.000-08:00

Once there was an English actress named Diana Dors. She was the Marilyn Monroe of her day. Her real name was Diana Mary Fluck, but, when she went into films, they insisted she change it. I suppose they were afraid, she once explained, that if my real name was up in lights, and one of the lights blew...

One day, long after she was famous, she returned to her home town of Maidenhead to open a festival. She was to be introduced by the local vicar and, while having lunch with him, she requested that she be introduced by her real name. The vicar was completely flummoxed at having to pronounce the name and could hardly finish his meal. Finally the holy man screwed up his courage, rose and spoke these immortal words:

Ladies and gentlemen, it is with great pleasure that I introduce to you our star guest. We all love her, especially as she is our local girl. I therefore feel it right to introduce her by her real name; Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome the very lovely Miss Diana Mary Clunt.

Roll over, Freud!

La Vega 2

2012-02-06T02:34:00.000-08:00

No Choice

He had no choice. The calf was flayed open. He’d already pulled a hot fragment from it. In the process the hand had been badly burnt.

Paul had been caught in a soggy cow patch west of Mons under a hail of German mortars. In India he’d seen such wounds suppurate in only hours. Then gangrene would creep up. Once it reached the groin you died.

The rest of the British Expeditionary Force was in pell-mell retreat, units mangled, everyone scrambling out before the German juggernaut rolled over them. He could join them, on foot, and then would come the suppuration and the gangrene…or he could hunker down, let the wave roll over him and, once the leg was mended, straggle to the coast, jump a ship and live to fight another day.

He had no choice.

His hiding place was behind a chicken roost in the back of a loft in an abandoned Belgian barn outside the town of Frameries. The farm was empty, except for a dozen hens, whose eggs would keep him alive from that day, August 23, 1914, till…well, until he died, in his one-hundredth year, in 1995.

He spoke hardly a word of English for the better part of 81 years and, by the second war, had lost his mother tongue completely. It had been replaced by French…and a love that would keep him at the farm those 81 years.

Wivene found him early on the morning of August 31st, after the juggernaut had moved on and she’d returned, heartbroken, from Maubeuge. She’d lost her parents and her brother, first taken hostage after the battle of Le Cateau and then shot in the wave of German reprisals against civilians suspected of being francs-tireurs. She herself had been raped. She was fourteen.

She caught him poaching her eggs early on August 31st, his nineteenth birthday. Neither spoke a word of the other’s language. She saw him and was afraid. For her they were all the same. Soldiers and murderers.

He showed her the wound. Somehow he convinced her he wasn’t like the rest. That if she would feed him until the wound healed he would work. He could work on the farm and be her savior from the war, if she would hide him.

In reality, neither had a choice.

She nursed his leg and hand. She taught him French and hid him and he stayed to his room, even after he could take some halting steps. And then she gave him her father’s work clothes and he began to work.

They grew to love each other…so he saw no reason to leave.

He had no choice.

By early September, 1914 Frameries was heavily invested with Germans who needed the coal of the Borinage region. Escape now for him was not an option. But staying was not easy either. Special troops were constantly in search of young men to send to Germany as slave labor. She hid him again and again when they came to search her house. There were no more rapes but she was with child from the one in Maubeuge. When a little girl was born the next May he took her as his own.

He had no choice. They would eventually have six more.

His regiment had listed him first as ‘missing’, then as ‘presumed dead’, finally as ‘lost in action at Mons’. No family could be found to receive a condolence letter. His father had died down the mine and his mother had passed away from cancer the year after he’d gone out to India. He’d been an only child.

In 1929, on his only trip away from the farm to the salient at Ypres, he had the occasion to read his own name, engraved in Portland stone, on the huge arch at the Menin Gate.

‘Known only to God’ was he now, and he wondered at the truth of it.

Seeing, around his, the names of friends he’d known, he was stirred by a torrent of emotions.

He saw now he had no choice.

He returned to the farm, never to leave again.

Beauty Like a Tightened Bow: La Vega 1

2012-02-06T01:16:00.000-08:00

The first thing that must be said is that La Vega is not a shortened form of Las Vegas. The two couldn’t be further apart.

La Vega is a provincial capital in the Dominican Republic a little over half way between the capital, Santo Domingo, in the south and the second largest city, Santiago, in the north. Connecting the three cities is the principal motorway of the island, Autopista Duarte.

It was here we came as missionaries in 1960. I was seven and had just finished first grade.

Like Istanbul, like Tehran, La Vega is shaken to ruin every few centuries by a monster quake. A 9.something. Again and again as a child we got warm-ups for this, and we learned the warning signs. First the china in the cabinets would begin to tingle like cymbals, then the kitchen light would sway. This lasted for about three seconds before the sonic bomb hit. It was like a bomb. By then you’d better be standing under the frame of a door or be outside. With practice we could make it.

Over the years our reactions to an impending earthquake became as automatic as spinal reflexes. The legs were moving before there was any cortical impulse. But at the beginning, just after we’d arrived in La Vega, we would sit there wondering at this strange orchestra of triangles and the metallic smell in the air. The boom caught us napping and it was quite an awakening. Since these were small quakes (on the order of Richter scale 5 or 6) and since our house was made of wood no one was the worse for wear.

Certainly one would get ‘all shook up’ and usually it was difficult to stand during the shaking phase, or even sit upright in a chair, but no one got hurt. Dad used to swear we’d never live in a brick or block house while we were in La Vega, and never in one with an upper floor.

The shaking would last about thirty seconds, although it always seemed longer. Then came the aftershocks. They were almost worse, because for days you kept anticipating them and bracing. A sudden flutter of leaves and you’d reach out for something to hold on to. Then you’d smile. It was only the wind in the lemon trees.

It was nerve-wracking and you understood why people live outside for a few weeks after a major quake. Lying on the ground in an open space, away from buildings or live wires, seems the safest place to be, but you can hardly live your life this way.

The big one never came during the years we lived in La Vega. It hasn’t yet in the fifty years since.

Miami 10

2012-02-05T23:15:00.000-08:00

And we walked on…

How do you prepare yourself for death?

By walking with the Lord. Everything’s in his hands. ‘Ye know neither the day nor the hour.’

That seems to be the whole purpose of Christianity. To prepare you for death. Everything revolves around it. Christ died for us. Then he rose from the dead. He raised the dead Lazarus. We may get eternal life—but first you have to die to be eligible. It’s a death cult.

You can say things like that to me, but to others it’s heresy. Don’t breathe a word of this to anyone else. I hope you don’t really believe this.

I took her hand.

It’s not a death cult. It’s a way of life. It’s the truth. ‘I am the Way, the Truth and the Life…whosoever believeth in me shall never die, but have Eternal Life.’

Judaism and Islam are ways of life. Sets of rules. Buddhism is a way of mind. But Christianity is a very clever way of steeling you against the day of your death.

Sometimes I wonder how you come up with these ideas. Not only do you put our faith on an equal footing with false ones, but you act as if it’s inferior. Ours is the truth faith. The Truth.

That’s what the followers of each of the others fervently believe.

Well, they’re wrong. They’re misled. You know that. If we don’t hold on to the truth what else can we hold on to.

Each other.

But the others are idolatry.

How can we be so sure ours is the truth?

It’s a matter of faith. You believe in our Lord Jesus, don’t you?

I’ve been taught to believe.

But you do believe?

My parents gave up their lives for it. To us kids they said, ‘would we do this if it weren’t true?’ So if we didn’t believe, it was a kind of betrayal.

I asked do you believe?

Yes, I must. I’m here. I’m with you, a true believer.

Don’t fall into the same trap as with your parents. You don’t believe in order to be able to be with a believer.

So, I believe, there you have it. I guess so.

You guess so? You have to know so. Once you really believe He comes into your heart and assures you beyond all doubt.

You’re talking of a transcendental experience. One that millions of people who’ve never heard of Jesus have had.

They’re misled. This is basic stuff. You’ve preached the Gospel so many times to many people. How could you be doubting now? I’m really confused.

You’ve read The Varieties of Religious Experience, haven’t you? The emotions religion elicits are universal; they’re essential to life.

The Devil can disguise himself as an Archangel. He was one once, remember.

We’ve been steeped in this stuff. We’re both missionary kids. From our mother’s breast we’ve heard nothing else, so we can’t imagine anything beyond. We’re like fish who can’t imagine a world of air.

Who are we to question the truth?

You’re starting with that assumption. I’m just starting a step earlier.

But it’s the basis of our whole life.

Maybe a flying fish, who’s seen the world of air, would be called crazy by those who are water-bound.

I’m confused.

I’m not trying to distress you.

Well in that quest you’ve been unsuccessful.

Ideas and questions should not be so threatening. If they are it’s a bad sign. It means the foundation’s rotten.

They’re dangerous. They’re the worm holes that start water seeping into the ship.

Then it wasn’t a good ship to begin with.

Worms can eat through the strongest wood.

Questions are not worms. Questions are how we get to the truth in everything.

Maybe the holes weren’t made by worms. Maybe they were drilled by a mutinous sailor.

I’m not mutinous or apostate. I can’t help thinking of these questions any more than I can help breathing.

Then maybe we need to get you some help.

Don’t be ridiculous. That’s what the Inquisition said…Torquemada is just helping you back to righteousness…now where do we light this bonfire?

She laughed and we walked on.

So how do you prepare for death?...and let’s leave everything spiritual out of it.

Well, you write your will and put your house in your children’s name and prepay your funeral…why are you frowning at me?

Do I look like I’m interested in the technical stuff?

Well, I’m a practical woman.

You can prepare for childbirth through all sorts of exercises…ritual panting and peritoneal squeezes…but when the moment comes the events overtake you. Maybe death is the same.

Then why pose the question? Live for today and ride it out later. Eat, drink and…

Doesn’t sound too Christian to me.

You know what they say to expectant mothers: millions have gone through it before you, so you’ll pull through. Well, look at the cemeteries: millions have gone…

Once you get older, you have to give thought to the morrow.

And you want to know how best to do it?

Just how to do it.

But you’re still young.

I’m one of those flying fish who’s seen the unseen.

Well first you have to imagine the world without you. You’re now ash in an urn on a mantle. Or sprinkled on a golf course. And life goes on completely heedless of your absence. You’ve not changed the world a bit. It hardly noticed you were here.

As per Voltaire, we shall leave this world as foolish and as wicked as we found it on our arrival, or something like that.

You need to imagine the state of dreamless sleep you were in before you were born. Nothing hurt you, nothing penetrated. A bomb exploded over Nagasaki and you didn’t even blink. The state of non-being.

The state of most being, if you consider how long we spend in it.

Of course this counts Christ right out of it. Those of us in Christ…

Now you’re cheating.

You can’t leave the spiritual out of any discussion of the afterlife.

This is an academic exercise.

And we walked on…

Jonathan and David at Ben Lippen

2012-02-05T08:50:00.000-08:00

The soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.

And he hurdled down Sliding Rock and, tumbling, took a knee out.

And I nursed him in the van with his hair clotted and pulled the shredded jeans from the wound. Night fell across the Carolina hills. Moon on the tumbling waters. But I would not let him sleep for fear of something someone had told me once to fear.

And the clotted hair hurt as I combed it out, so I fetched water and washed it, drying it with my shirt and keeping the wolves from his bleeding knee and the curious little foxes from telling him stories.

And there was no light to chase away the cold, and he shivered as the spirits moved across the deep. In the night he finally slept but the bouncing Appalachians curves hounded him awake and I held his smooth face in my arms. He was always the daredevil and the he-man. Kenya-born, Yankee-blood, he was the Africa of last century.

And his smooth moves on the court and his souped-up Mustang and the smile of a woman on the face of a beautiful man and his soul knit with mine.

And the knee was a bitch and weighed him down like ballast. He was never one for stillness. The moon is following us and the little foxes.

And I asked him, Why do you always have to take the odd way down? The out-of-bounds? He smiles, the tails of comets teasing in his eyes. He’d tried the sheer descent, roped off and over rocks.

And now he has my belt between his teeth and grinds the opium from it. Bouncing and lurching, he groans, my David. I call up to the driver, ‘Hea, wachit!’ His eyes have crossed the frontier into agony. The angry bees move up the leg, it shakes. Menisci hang like vines in Babylon. He had to take the hard way down.

And now I see there is no hinge remaining in that flopping leg. My shirt splint is no match for mountain curves. I shiver and blow comfort on his hands. My chest is cradle to his sweating brow.

And now we slow, the city lights, it’s 2 AM. Soon morphine will be singing him to sleep and by his bed I’ll wait the full night through. I’ll offer him my robe, my sword and bow.

And Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that was upon him, and gave it to David, and his garments, even to his sword, and to his bow, and to his girdle.

The Garden of Earthly Delights

2012-02-05T08:28:00.000-08:00

Stuck in the gluey muck of everyday, an elbow in the eye from Hal in billing, a razor shin from cubicle front left, the finger from a lover as goodbye (her thanks for picking up the bill last night) and now your own best friend, a turncoat and a mutineer, unfriended you at Facebook and won’t Tweet, supposed to come next weekend…now fat chance, your ex in recent years would always come, two stones in hand, two hands to stone, and now he’s joined her ranks, and you’re alone again.

Miami 9

2012-02-05T08:05:00.000-08:00

Every leader is a manipulator.

Recent studies of suicide bombers have pointed out the typical profile: he is usually a young man who is very much under the thrall of a charismatic and manipulative leader, to whom the youth is afraid to say no. The leaders, much as they espouse the virtues of Islamic martyrdom, would never dare strap explosives on themselves. They try to stay as far away from the action as the generals did in World War One.

My experience with business leaders is exactly the same. Most are masterful cynics and controllers who’ve made it their life study to find and exploit the weaknesses in others. You can spot them if you look carefully at their faces, especially the eyes.

Watch the way they look through and past you, the details they focus on and the things they turn away from, the things that bring a smile to their faces and the things that make it fade.

I see in my mind’s eye one particularly cagy executive whose smile looks as genuine as Christ until you wait for it to fade.

All genuine smiles are like the sun. They emerge at predictable times (a familiar face, a funny remark, a pleasant surprise), rise as a function of the intensity of the experience, reach a crescendo and then slowly recede and disappear. If they come unpredictably or without appropriate stimuli or if they stay longer than usual, something’s wrong. Some other motive is at play and you’d better watch your wallet.

The manipulator’s smile pops out full-blossomed whenever he spots an opportunity. It reaches its crescendo too fast. Then it stays. It’s forced to stay. The smile often shifts from the first object to the surroundings, but doesn’t fade regardless of what it sees. It may start to fade but then it re-climaxes, willed so by the smiler. All the while the eyes are playing about the object taking in every detail. They may look briefly away, but only because a snare is being set…a plan quickly hatched. Then the eyes come back, confirming the presence and desirability of the object, sweeping in ever more details.

This is all done quite unconsciously by the manipulator. They’re hard-wired this way. They will deny, to their dying breath, any malfeasance or untoward motives. But this is the way the human race is run from top to bottom. It is the nature of leadership.

Recent studies have confirmed it. Most of our leaders have more traits in common with psychopaths than with normal individuals.

In no arena has the race been more ill-served than in its leaders.

Miami 8

2012-02-05T07:54:00.000-08:00

I saw her in the picture of the stairs, framed there and frozen for the eternity of my short life in evanescent and angelic, windswept, star-entangled ether, gazing at some chocolate munchers in the kitchen. Come have a piece? a boy cried out. She bounded down the two remaining steps and brushed past me, not knowing that her image had, like Jacqueline at Jack’s pyre or Allende gazing up at the planes or Che in that revolutionary pose, been fixed forever and forever.

Miami 7

2012-02-05T07:48:00.000-08:00

Long live Original Sin!

Most people do not believe the old truism about human nature applies to them. What is it? That each of us is a hopeless jumble of subversive, tyrannous, lying, stealing, murdering sinfulness mixed in with saint-like generosity, selflessness, tenderness, nobility and compassion. And the mixture does not lie side by side like a yin and yang sign. It is more like Play-Doh after a child’s been at it for a while, a lump of colors all meshed and bled-together.

And it’s not just you and me who have such contradictory impulses, but Mother Teresa and the Dahlia Lama and the nicest, most loving person you know. Your mother, for example. Hitler and Saddam Hussein had as much of the good in them as any of the rest of us, unpopular though it may now be to say so.

(The more anathema a thing is to say at any time and place, the more likely it is to be true.)

And why is this important to recognize? Because none of us seem to do so. We all believe we’re mainly good and wholesome and honest (unless we happen to be clinically depressed and suicidal). And we seem to take for granted that the other guy’s got much move evil in him than good.

This universal deception has survival value. It builds self-confidence and that’s a key attribute that gets you through a particularly bitter winter; gets you off your duff and out to gather firewood or hunt bison; that makes you go for the prettiest girl instead of settling for Plain Jane. It also makes you wary of the competition, more keenly alert for deception or betrayal, less squeamish about dispatching your neighbor if it comes to that.

But it is not an objective view of reality, for it does not plumb the depths of men’s hearts. Therefore it is a dangerous deception, one that leads to disputes and litigation and wars and all other sorts of crimes. It also does not lead to good novels, for there is nothing more boring than a totally good man or an irredeemably vile one.

Marshall Frady once said of the novelist Jesse Hill Ford: ‘Like most who are authentically taken up into the obsession of writing, Ford…worked out of an older understanding of man—that primitive, profoundly reactionary, pagan vision in which virtually all true story-tellers have probably been working since Homer, which has evolved not an inch since Ecclesiastes: that the race is basically unimprovable…’

Miami 6

2012-02-04T05:29:00.000-08:00

Into Every Married Mind

When Zośka walked into the room, and I saw her for the first time, the sadness I was to know followed and enveloped her like a cloud.

She was a tall woman, tanned, poised and well-dressed—beautiful in that strange way the French call belle laide. She turned heads and was used to that.

She wore a cream satin dress with a broad Parisian belt and black designer shoes. The accessories were a small matching bag and an Italian scarf.

She was far from young, but her hair still caught the light luxuriantly.

It was the eyes that betrayed her.

I was able to guess (correctly it turned out) that she had traveled widely, had had children, probably girls, and took very good care of them and that love had seeped out of her marriage, frightening and confusing her. It was also obvious that she loved the sun.

Zośka smiled formally as she greeted the other doctors. She would exchange a few words but then seemed to tire and would step back and let the others banter.

My eyes could not leave her, though she had not yet seen me. She was with another woman, an older, stouter woman, and the two presently left the first clutch of guests and moved on to the next. Men stepped forward and shook Zośka’s hand first. Women cast glances back at her.

Was she arrogant or simply timid, no one could tell.

‘She’s a pediatrician,’ someone whispered, ‘and the older woman is the head of the Children’s Hospital.’

Zośka had auburn hair, cut in dégradé style. She moved with gliding steps. Her head was always high and she spoke softly. Her smile seemed distant. She dances well, I told myself, or is an accomplished horsewoman.

The older woman was something of a battle ax. She laughed loudly and seemed more a man than most of the other males present. Zośka though had a slim figure and her dress fit so perfectly I knew it must be handmade.

Much later, after I’d met the designer (who was to become one of Poland’s fashion leaders) and after the three of us had become much more than just friends, and I’d seen their bodies move in and out of so many lovely dresses, I remembered this moment and that satin dress with its perfect cut, her ballerina figure inside its caress and the large black belt they’d chosen to set it off.

Finally she arrived before us.

The eyes were a soft and reverent hazel as she held out her hand and said her first words. They were in English. Someone had tipped her off I wasn’t Polish. She quickly broke off my gaze and stepped aside for the other lady.

Zośka’s eyes, almonds in the center of a perfect forehead, were traitors. They had a Graves-like fright, a disarray in the otherwise perfect lattice of the irises.

‘My pleasure, pani-doctora,’ and I kissed the older lady’s outstretched hand, as the Poles will do.

Zośka was looking away, into the distance. I immediately wanted to comfort her. To sit with her and listen to her and let her cry.

They’d seated us next to each other at dinner. I took this as God rolling his dice.

A ballroom had been converted into the dining hall. We were some forty kilometers from Łódź.in a baroque château filled with statues and fountains and surrounded by stately parks. It sat at the end of a long gravel road, the only building of distinction in a squalid little town one street long.

All the town’s houses faced onto the street. All life seemed to be lived there, between its two rows of white birch. Children ran freely up and down and across, oblivious to the cars which passed at astonishing speeds. The street was just part of the road linking Łódź with Warsaw and most drivers probably had no idea it crossed a town. I saw several near-misses during my stay, each nearly stopping my heart. But the children and their parents took no special notice.

On the ballroom ceiling were sculptured angels playing amongst roses and grape vines, sexlessly provocative, their wings erect, the tips painted with feuilles d’or. The vines wound up through their legs and around their budding breasts. Eyes stared out at the heavens in frozen pleasure. I almost felt embarrassed to look up.

Across from us on the walls were tall dark paintings. Most were of Polish kings and noblemen. Each one seemed to be named Stanisław or something similar. Bolesław the Curly and Władysław the Spindleshanks. They were always with dogs and swords and magnificent horses, all looking at us with a dour and uber-serious gaze. Beautiful women stood beside the thrones—even that of Spindleshanks—their arms around dour children. One queen had eyes as sad as Zośka’s.

‘Do you have children?’

She seemed visibly relieved I’d broken the ice.

‘Yes, two girls. And you?’

‘A boy and a girl. What are their names?’

‘Angelica and Paulina.’

I laughed. ‘My youngest is named Pauline too.’

Warmth came into her face and she turned halfway towards me. ‘And your son?’

‘He’s Daniel. He’s six years older than Pauline. Sixteen and she’s ten.’

‘Mine are nineteen and three.’

‘You’ve got me beat on both ends.’

‘Angelica’s already away at university, so it’s like starting again.’

‘That takes courage.’

‘It’s easier the second time. I’m a children’s doctor, so I should be used to it.’

Soup was served. A creamy mushroom with thin white slices floating on the surface and bigger chunks towards the bottom.

‘Nas drovia,’ she said, raising her wine glass and looking up at the cherubs. There was clinking all around.

‘Smacznego!’ I said, smiling at her.

‘Bon appetit,’ she answered back.

I watched how she folded her left arm in her lap as she ate. She had the hands of a mother as well as a doctor. Hands that have held feverish children in the night and sewed lacerations without flinching. But still delicate and graceful.

I saw how she tasted the soup off the tip of the spoon. How she signaled me with her eyes that it was good. Neither arrogant nor timid, I concluded. Just sad.

And sad women have always been your downfall, I warned myself.

‘After all, children are the reason for our existence,’ she said, out of the blue.

‘The crown of life,’ I said, rather grandiosely, ‘but still there’s much more to life.’

Her face clouded. Now I felt sure about the husband. I too had known that feeling, to die for love and then see love die.

‘Yes, the crown of life,’ she repeated, looking away.

Then came the venison, a dessert and then the coffee.

Someone suggested a walk in the park. It was fall and the coats were brought out.

Zośka was immediately accosted by another doctor, an internist who had made quite a show of his vegetarianism. He’d eaten only the soup and, when the venison arrived, had chided the rest of us that animals should not eat other animals.

Everyone was offended. Someone suggested he go lecture lions if he felt so strongly about bestiality. Unfazed, he just laughed and lit a cigarette.

The internist turned out to be a great talker and Zośka, as I was to learn, was a very indulgent listener. He held her arm and whispered into her ear for the better part of the walk.

At one point the path turned left and we had a look back at the glowing lights of the château. Everyone was mesmerized. She saw her chance to make a break and thereby arrived by my side.

‘Are you cold?’ I asked her. Her lips seemed to be trembling.

‘Yes, a little. This coat is not made for long walks.’

‘Does the park go on much farther?’ I asked, wondering what the gravel was doing to her Italian shoes.

‘No, I don’t think so. We’ve reached the forest; soon we’ll turn back.’

‘Did he rebuke you for eating venison?’ I asked mischievously.

‘He was a bit drunk,’ she whispered, glancing over at the internist, ‘and he kept stepping on my toes.’ She tried not to laugh. I took her arm to steady her on the path. She looked like a schoolgirl in the reflected light.

‘I was thinking of our earlier conversation...’

‘Let me guess. You’re wondering about my children’s fathers. Yes, there were two of them. Angelica’s father left me when she was eight and then some years later I met S. Then Paulina came along. I thought we were too old, but those things happen. Tell me about your wife.’

I peered into the blackness and saw the tops of the trees looming ahead. We were at the forest’s edge. Until then we’d been on flagstones or packed gravel. But now the gravel had softened.

‘She and I don’t live together any longer. Not since Pauline was three. She fell in love with someone else. Now Pauline’s with her and Daniel’s with me.’

We both knew how that happened. Over time one or the other no longer brought tea on Sunday afternoons. No stoking pot on a platter onto which were piled chocolates and sugar and cream. No long talks and laughs about the kids and stolen kisses. Instead there became race cars and football and a scattered newpaper as he snoozed.

(Every death of love is the same.)

No more long kisses at the door before leaving for work.’

(Every unhappy marriage becomes unhappy by degrees.)

No more gazing at her intently, curiously, lovingly as she tells something she’s done or heard or finally found after so much looking.

(Only the details change.)

A few more steps and the group stopped. Someone spoke in Polish and everyone laughed. Then, almost like a herd of cattle, they turned to go back. She and I turned as well, bringing up the rear. She suddenly slipped in the gravel and her hand reached out for me. Righting her, I gave her my arm and quickly put my hand on hers so that she would leave it there.

We walked back that way, chatting softly about our children.

‘I think my son suffered most by the rupture.’

‘Angelica says she didn’t, but she doesn’t talk to S. the way she did to her father.’

‘And you?’

‘I’m over it. It took years, and for a long time I thought he was right. But I had good friends, and they helped me through it. Especially my best friend, a designer, the woman who made this dress.’

‘It’s beautiful.’

‘Were you the one who left?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then I hope you didn’t tell her things.’

‘Like what?’

‘What he told me. That it was my fault. That he was leaving because of me.’

‘No I….’

‘Then one day love just isn’t there any more and you don’t feel anything.’

We walked in silence for a while, her hand tight around my arm. The chandeliers reflected on the water and seemed to glide past us like swans.

The beauty of the night turned our conversation lighter, more amusing. I asked her if the battle ax were married. ‘What?!’ and she almost stumbled from laughing. She asked about my patients and I told her of an Ethiopian I’d seen who was externally a male but internally a female.

Her arm was still in mine as we walked up the steps and through the double doors.

‘Do you want to sit by the fire and warm up?’ I asked her.

‘I need that.’

We ordered a pot of tea and propped our feet up on little stools, pointing them towards the fire. The night had been surprisingly cold and with the tea came warmth and comfort. We laughed together at the pomposity of the vegetarian. She told me about her young girl and the little chieftain she’d already become. We stayed chatting away comfortable and confident, as though we’d known each other for years, and soon an hour had passed. All the others were already up in bed.

‘I think I’d better go now,’ she finally said, ‘we have a full day tomorrow.’

‘Would you like another cup of tea beforehand?’

‘No, I’m a bit tired,’ she replied. ‘I worked all day and after that walk I’m ready for bed.’

She slipped her shoes back on and turned to say good night. She shook my hand formally. The eyes were as I’d not seen them before, shining and softly grateful. This time she held them fast to mine. I brought her hand to my lips and kissed it.

Then she was gone.

I stood there thinking of the moment. The moment when you ask whether you will cross a line. Whether you will resist the voice inside that says no, don’t be foolish. Whether she will let herself be taken.

I stood there thinking about her. Another premonition came: she loved the first moments of love. She believed in that moment as much I did. It was, as well, what one lived for. What also crowned life.

The next morning we went to Chopin’s house at Zelazowa Wola. I wanted to sit next to her on the ride but the older lady had already claimed that seat. As I passed them in the aisle they both greeted me formally and asked how I’d slept. Zośka told me through her smile that she was happy to see me, that we would see each other again. Her eyes held tight to mine.

The only seat left on the bus was next to the vegetarian. I plopped down.

He was a pudgy, unhealthy-looking specimen who began immediately trying to impress me with his mastery of English. I listened to the story of his trip to New York, his time at the Joslin Clinic, his fascination with a President I detested. Finally I closed my eyes and pretended to nap.

Just as we were leaving the bus he took me aside and whispered in my ear that I should be careful of Zośka. She’d slept with her university professor and had gotten her medical degree that way. ‘Such things were done in Communist time.’

I walked away from him. Bastard, I said under my breath, Assassin of lady’s names.

The rest of the day was lovely and musical (we had a private concert) but there was no chance to be alone with Zośka. Once or twice I caught her stealing a glance in my direction, and she must have felt that my eyes rarely left her. But she was always surrounded by animated conversationalists, and it was always in Polish.

Our goodbye at the end of the day was no different from the other goodbyes, all in a large huddle around a waiting bus. She slipped her card into my hand.

‘Can I call you?’ I asked, but she was too surrounded to answer. Into her eyes the sadness flooded back. A minute later the only thing I had of her was the business card and a view of the back of a bus.

I walked back to the château. I would spend that night there alone before flying out of Warsaw. She was back in Łódź, that strange, gray, moldy, Jewless city that once had been so magnificent.

End of Into Every Married Mind

Continued in Sweet Deceit Comes Calling
Ending with The Scent of Her Lingers

The Winner Takes It All

2012-02-04T05:19:00.000-08:00

Die Jungfrau, Gustav Klimt 1913

The Winner Takes It All

by Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus

I don't wanna talk

About the things we've gone through

Though it's hurting me

Now it's history

I've played all my cards

And that's what you've done too

Nothing more to say

No more ace to play

The winner takes it all

The loser standing small

Beside the victory

That's her destiny

I was in your arms

Thinking I belonged there

I figured it made sense

Building me a fence

Building me a home

Thinking I'd be strong there

But I was a fool

Playing by the rules

The Gods may throw a dice

Their minds as cold as ice

And someone way down here

Loses someone dear

The winner takes it all

The loser has to fall

It's simple and it's plain

Why should I complain

But tell me does she kiss

Like I used to kiss you

Does it feel the same

When she calls your name

Somewhere deep inside

You must know I miss you

But what can I say

Rules must be obeyed

The judges will decide

The likes of me abide

Spectators of the show

Always staying low

The game is on again

A lover or a friend

A big thing or a small

The winner takes it all

I don't wanna talk

If it makes you feel sad

And I understand

You've come to shake my hand

I apologize

If it makes you feel bad

Seeing me so tense

No self-confidence

But you see

The winner takes it all

Girlfriends, Gustav Klimt 1907

Miami 5

2012-02-04T05:11:00.000-08:00

She had a very distinctive walk, a very forceful swing of the arms, her slender white legs pumping to keep up.

I recently found a picture of her. She is facing the camera but her eyes glance to the side as if she’s spied someone. Her lips are pressed together in a sly smile as if to say, you got me that time but I get you back. She loved to be teased. It made her feel loved without getting too close, without unwelcome intimacies.

The picture is her. Hair blond and windswept. Eyes alive and vulnerability. A need for self-assurance. A love for children.

I loved you desperately

with one of those now hopeless loves

that women throw themselves from windows for

I loved you sadly

as one loves a country

dreamed of for a lifetime though never seen

I loved you madly

in anger, cursing out your name

which I would wipe from ledgers for all time

And in my loving you

in every moment through the years

from which you were the only thought I had

I made the first acquaintance

with my life, with doubt, with pain

with poisoned words and struggles to explain

It’s easy now to think of loving you

strange how such sad and desperate things

can later sign a treasoned peace with one’s own soul

A wild and untamed thing

this love for you which only comes in dreams

though one unknowing sleeps beside me in my bed

ere past my eighteenth year

I loved you, forty years now flown

there is no changing in the time that’s passed…no passing really

I write, I think, I see

with the same eyes as on you lay that day

and love you still with all that distant desperation

The other day I called your name

passing a pretty corner of my town

along a rainy avenue in Paris you came back

Your old green coat

your girl-without-a-father’s eyes

your orphan-out-of-Africa strange weariness

And once again

I loved you desperately

Another of those silly hopeless loves…

“Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm; for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave; the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it; if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned.” Song of Solomon 8:6,7.

The Day Before You Came

2012-02-04T04:24:00.000-08:00

Die Tänzerin, Gustav Klimt 1916-18

The Day Before You Came

by Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus

I must have left my house at eight because I always do

My train, I'm certain, left the station just when it was due

I must have read the morning paper going into town

And having gotten through The Editorial, no doubt I must have frowned

I must have made my desk around a quarter after nine

With letters to be read and heaps of papers waiting to be signed

I must have gone to lunch at half past twelve or so

The usual place, the usual bunch

And still on top of this I'm pretty sure it must have rained

The day before you came

I must have lit my seventh cigarette at half past two

And at the time I never even noticed I was blue

I must have kept on dragging through the business of the day

Without really knowing anything, I hid a part of me away

At five I must have left, there's no exception to the rule

A matter of routine, I've done it ever since I finished school

The train back home again

Undoubtedly I must have read the evening paper then

Oh yes, I'm sure my life was well within its usual frame

The day before you came

Must have opened my front door at eight o'clock or so

And stopped along the way to buy some Chinese food to go

I'm sure, I had my dinner watching something on TV

There's not, I think, a single episode of Dallas that I didn't see

I must have gone to bed around a quarter after ten

I need a lot of sleep and so I like to be in bed by then

I must have read a while

The latest one by Marilyn French or something in that style

It's funny but I had no sense of living without aim

The day before you came

And turning out the light I must have yawned

And curled up for yet another night

And rattling on the roof, I must have heard the sound of rain

The day before you came

Danae, Gustav Klimt 1907

Miami 4

2012-02-04T04:14:00.000-08:00

Sixties in Due West

Life as a young teen was not always dreariness and religion. There were always sports. My favorites were basketball, golf and baseball. I could use my height and quickness on the court and at first base. Through golf I escaped to a private realm that was both bucolic and soothing. I could forget the world around me. It deserved forgetting.

There were weeks in the late 60’s when the losses in Vietnam were appalling. Every night I saw the boys writhing on stretchers as they were hoisted onto choppers. In 1968 Russia invaded Czechoslovakia and I felt it almost physically. China was stabbing itself to death in its worship of a megalomaniac. Then they shot Robert Kennedy.

That morning I had promised to mow our principal’s lawn. It was a huge lawn and, with my push mower, usually took four hours. Everyone I knew in the South had always hated the Kennedys, including my parents. I had to keep my admiration under wraps. He’d been shot during the night, in Los Angeles. He was dead when I woke up.

Bobby Kennedy was going to end Vietnam. He would stop the slide into chaos. He might heal the racial bitterness and help young people find meaning again. And now he lay cold in an LA morgue.

The principal’s wife brought me out a glass of lemonade. She asked me if I’d heard the news. I said I had and turned away. Something was welling up. I pretended I had sweat in my eyes. She asked if I wanted to come inside. We sat down and looked at the television. There was nothing to say or do. It was all bla-bla. He wasn’t coming back and America would never be the same.

I hasn’t been.

My basketball coach was a screamer. He would lose all control and yell at the top of his lungs in front of the crowd at any offending player on his team. He would scream full in the face when he thought you’d made an unforced error. The abuse was so brazenly that people began to accept it as a normal mode of coaching. But it was painful to be on the receiving end. One of the reasons Ben Lippen was such a relief was it meant no more of him.

Curiously, some years later on summer break from college, I got a job working for a construction company. We were to build the new high school in Due West at which the same coach had just been named principal. He was still young and vigorous at the time and decided to come out and work with us digging trenches and pouring foundations. I took the occasion to speak to him of Christ and this unleashed the most hysteric tirade I’d ever heard from him.

Apparently I’d been his hope for a winning team. He’d invested three years in me and then, between my sophomore and junior year, I cut out on him, go to some highfalutin missionary school and then come back after it’s over and talk to him about Jesus and His love…now that’s just fucking rich!

Such was the hellhole from which I emerged.

To outsiders Due West must look quite charming. There are rolling hills. There’s a small college with a campus that takes you back to the days before the Civil War. The girls’ dorm is built in plantation style. Statues of Southern heroes are scattered about.

In the 60’s there was a small post office and a drug store with a jukebox and a soda jerk. Inside you could get Coca-Cola floats made by hand while waiting for a prescription. Across the street was a country doctor with a waiting room that was always full. His manner was somewhat gruff but he was a good diagnostician and was loved and trusted.

There was a small golf course connected with the college and located in the center of town. It was there that I learned to play. I was out on it almost every afternoon between the ages of 13 and 16. It had only six holes, all par-three, ranging from 90 to 210 yards. Adjacent to the course were tennis courts and, across campus, an outdoor swimming pool and an indoor gymnasium.

Surrounding the town were small farms and subdivisions of trailers where the poor lived. The glitterati—and such towns always have their handful—lived in pre-Civil War splendor in large antebellum homes set back from the Main Street. They had huge yards filled with ancient oaks and maples. The mansions all had open porches with columns and gables on the upper floors. Here lived professors, businessmen and, of course, the local clergy. Most of the houses had been in the same family for generations.

My uncle was police superintendent in the town. There was only one deputy to superintend and no crime. The two spent their time patrolling the sleepy campus and flirting with the girl who made Coke floats. You never heard their siren unless someone had had a finder-bender backing out of a drive. My uncle had four beautiful daughters who epitomized southern charm. They could sing, draw, write and tease. They were the prettiest girls in town and, of course, off limits since they were my cousins.

I biked or walked to school every day. I always managed to get study hall as my last class of the day and would walk home early to catch some uncensored television. The World Turns was the soap opera of the day and I sneaked a peak most afternoons. People listened a lot to the crooners of the day, Dean Martin or Frank Sinatra. My favorite was Perry Como. My brother and I shared a bedroom.

The only conversation about sex I ever had was with my mother. For some reason she got worried that some man might put his hand on my leg. If it ever happened I was to get up immediately and never sit next to him again. Such men were sick and would make me sick too. She repeated this three times, and looked searchingly into my eyes to see if I’d got it. It all seemed so stupid and improbable that I wondered if she blown a gasket.

There was never a word about conception, desire, intercourse, masturbation or homosexuality. Wet dreams, or the normal process in which hormones lead one into adolescence, was also unmentioned. When I began to feel attraction to a girl I had to ask my best friend Moffett if it was normal.

He said it was, but that I would get over it.

Miami 3

2012-02-04T01:18:00.000-08:00

1967

Our lives were intimately tied up with a little church in the near wilderness of the deep South. Asseville Baptist. To this place we drove three times a week: Wednesday night for prayer meeting, Sunday morning for the main service and Sunday evening for a more informal one. The ride was an hour and a half roundtrip and the services lasted from an hour and a half (Wednesday) to three hours (Sunday morning). So you could say that our lives were quite wrapped up in this little congregation. Eleven hours a week it consumed, without counting the time dressing up or preparing our Bible lessons.

The building was a tall structure, shaped much like the churches drawn by children. It was made of wood, sat off the ground on brick columns and had a tall slender steeple with slatted openings which birds scurried in and out of in springtime. The whole of it was painted white, including the bricks. There wasn’t a trace of other color to trim or set it off. It sat in its white purity in a picturesque grove of pecan trees at the top of a hill. You approached it by a one-lane road that wound its way through green alfalfa fields.

Inside it smelled of shellac and wood smoke, for it was heated by a huge chimney set in the middle of the worship area. The chimney had once been embedded in the center wall of this former antebellum mansion, but the wall had been removed leaving nothing but the fireplace. The wood floor sagged and was pitted by cinders that blew out of the chimney whenever the wind was up. The whole of the place was wood and it was a perfect fire trap.

At every service, there would be singing and the taking up of an offering. Sunday morning service always ended with an ‘Invitation’. The pastor would invite anyone who was either unsaved (in the Baptist sense of the term) or had backslidden (again, consult Baptist dictionary) or had other burdens weighing down their soul to come to the altar, kneel and confess. What in a Catholic church is done so privately even the priest doesn’t see the confessor, is here performed before the prying eyes of friend and foe.

Kneeling beside the sinner, the pastor will pray with him, reciting his sins out loud. By the time they rise to their feet and announce to the congregation what has happened, the existential problem will had been solved. This takes a while if the sins are many or the sinner long-winded. So we sing on, waiting for the kneelers to get back on their feet. There are Sundays when we go through all the stanzas in ‘Just As I Am’ five times.

But another soul has been saved, praise the Lord. These things are all-important in the Baptist faith. In fact, a pastor or lay worker (a member of the laity who spends time trying to save souls and is therefore known as a ‘fisher of men’) will keep a careful count of souls he’s led to Christ, much like soldiers keep body counts and fighter pilots, their number of ‘kills’. God, of course, is keeping count, but it never hurts to have a back-up tally.

Occasionally one would get a real shock. Someone who’d been in the church for years, even a lay worker with a solid record of fished-men, would come to the altar and confess they’d never really been saved. The story would usually be that in a moment of weakness he’d sneaked a sip of beer or smoked a cigarette or gotten in a fight with his wife and then suddenly realized he might be a lost sinner after all and never really believed in Jesus. How fragile and ambiguous this ‘saved’ experience must be that even veteran soul-savers are tormented by doubt and accept Christ as Savior again and again to be sure. Hell fires were too tormenting to take chances.

(In my years as a doctor I’ve seen that these people die poorly. The fear mounts right up to the end.)

These Invitations were the most psychologically traumatizing moments of my youth. My brother and sister and I, and even my parents, were of a mental cast that prevented us from ever going forward. To do so would be to admit that we as missionaries were not a model of Christian behavior, were not walking with the Lord, were not in communion with the body of Christ. It was inconceivable to admit such a fatal weakness.

And yet the appeals were so emotion laden that guilt hung over every head. The music beckoning you to confession. If you stayed in your place you were haughty. High ‘n mighty, as they’d say. Everyone knew we were professionals, college-educated, white collar. The only ones there. Not coming forward was putting ourselves above the farmers and millhands and single mothers around us. The pastor’s plea was ‘humble yourself and come to Jesus’. Staying put we were not only denying our own sinfulness but insulting the working class.

But we stayed put…out of sheer cussedness. In the breast of all five of us there churned this contradicting, excruciating ambivalence. But we didn’t budge. I was an emotional wreck afterwards.

Apart from the Invitations, the sermons themselves were not bad. The pastor was a rather handsome second-generation Italian immigrant named Frank. His father was also Frank, also a pastor. Little Frankie and his beautiful buxom wife had a handsome olive-skinned little boy, Frankie the Third.

The Frankie gang always seemed friendly and kind, had us to their home for dinner, let us use their pool. But they turned vile and threatening at Invitation time, waiting, along with everyone else, to see if the Strauss family would stay in their seats or come forward with their heads bowed. I remember on two occasions I finally did break down and go forward. It only took a second of weakness. After taking that first step you can’t turn round.

I only confessed to backsliding. That’s as much as they’d get out of me.

One of these occasions corresponded with the 1967 Six Day War. During that extraordinary week we were having our annual revival, meaning we went to church every evening and there was an Invitation every night. Each day's political events in the Middle East were dissected by Pastor Frank and fitted into his apocalyptic vision of the end of the world. It was necessary for Israel to attain certain military objectives in order for the prophesies of the Book of Revelations to be fulfilled. The battle of Armageddon would then ensue.

Those objectives were being achieved, according to Preacher Frankie, every day in front of our eyes with breathtaking speed. And this could only mean that the second coming of Christ was imminent. Everyone who was not saved, not absolutely sure he was saved, should come forward immediately. It might be only minutes before the end.

Only thirteen, awkward, tormented at school, ignored at home—I was not a difficult subject to spook and, in the troughs of this panic, I went forward. I had been feeling such trepidation during the six days of that nasty war, fearing that Christ would come at any minute and I’d be lost, that I couldn’t sleep at night.

My parents knew nothing of these fears, though the climate of the times might have given them clues. When a pastor claims the world might end before the service ends, it stands to reason children will be frightened. If anything they aided and abetted the hysteria that was afoot those days.

It didn't end, of course, but the neural traces remain deeply carved in the fear centers.

Fear-mongering has been a standard ploy in churches for generations, since the time of the Anabaptists and the Great Awakening. Indeed it goes back to the catacombs of the early church. It works, especially with the young and vulnerable, even though there was no second coming, no Armageddon, no crumbling of the world as we knew it.

But their little shenanigans took its toll on my stored capital of belief. Seeds had been sown.

Miami 2

2012-02-03T03:58:00.000-08:00

Winning when it’s stacked against you

There was no settling in this family. No oasis. Removed from the war in the tropics we plunged directly into a hellhole in the South. The only glimmer I saw was my grandparents, but their Great Gatsby life was inaccessible to us of little money.

All the evil that has been written about the deep South, with none of the charm or culture, was to be found in that hellhole. A prejudice against all things foreign. Willful stupidity that rated intelligence as an effeminate, unnecessary trait. The glorification of gladiator sports. The rigidness of the fundamentalist. The turmoil of the sexual revolution in a proto-Victorian mindscape.

My intellect was my biggest handicap. It was apparently too obtrusive for the taste of my classmates. I was not afraid to speak out in class and usually knew the answers, and that set the other students’ teeth on edge. (As well it should, except that no one had told me I should shut up and play dumb like everyone else.) Tacks began to appear in my desk and had the disturbing habit of ending up in my bottom whenever I sat down. Spitballs had the same fondness for my face.

It was just the opposite at Ben Lippen. There were only curious looks to see who this upstart was. In history class we read the original papers of the Whittaker Chambers-Alger Hiss case. I knew instinctively what the political and psychological issues were, and why it was important we understand them. It was our window into the Cold War. The dark underbelly of America.

The teacher, a mustachioed man with droopy eyes not unlike those of Alger Hiss, was so delighted that he forgot himself and began lecturing at me directly. Later, catching himself, he decided to stop me from answering questions in class until the others had had a chance to think through the issues. ‘I can’t have this lesson turning into a one-man shop’ he explained to me privately. Then he plunged into an hour-long exposition of why he thought Hiss was lying, knowing I would be the only one who’d listen to it.

But it was just the tonic I needed.

I finally felt alive again.

Miami 1

2012-02-03T01:40:00.000-08:00

If it was Miami, it must have been Donna. Hurricane Donna blew in just as we were about to fly out to the Dominican Republic. We hunkered down in a Miami bungalow belonging to the West Indes Mission and promptly were all struck down with diarrhea. Donna still holds the record for retaining major hurricane status (Category 3 or greater) for the longest period of time, nine days, September 2 to September 11. I’ll let Wikipedia tell the rest:

Donna left a path of destruction across the entire peninsula of Florida, including destroying 30% of the state's grapefruit crop and leveling over half of the mangrove trees in the Everglades. Donna was the most damaging tropical cyclone to impact Florida up to that time. At least 364 people were killed. The day after the storm hit, President Dwight D. Eisenhower declared a disaster area from the Keys up to Central Florida. Because of its devastating impacts and the high mortality associated with the hurricane, the name Donna was retired, and will never again be used for an Atlantic hurricane.

The diarrhea was explosive and no one had the strength to even walk. We crawled, one after the other, to the bathroom—often not making it in time—for days on end. My brave mother succeeded in staying afoot long enough to boil some potato soup which we slurped down in agony. No sooner was it in than it re-emerged. My sole memory of those days consists of that: howling winds shaking the house and rain blowing horizontal out the window and us crawling pitifully across a shiny hardwood floor towards the toilet.

I can imagine the nervous excitement in my family as we all emerged from the devastation of Hurricanes Dysentery and Donna. We were three children by then: my sister, two years old; my brother, five; and me, seven. I had finished first grade four months earlier and had been held out of the opening of second, while we made our way to what must have seemed the end of the earth at some moments and the Great Adventure at others.

I remember sheets of corrugated tin roofing hurling through the air during the height of the storm. A man was out, bent nearly double, with his raincoat blown over his head, being dragged down the street by the wind. He was still on two feet but he couldn’t stop his movement. Passing a telephone pole which was leaning at 45 degree angle he caught his arms around it. The sheet was heading straight for him. We watched fascinated. Something in me wanted to see him cut in half. I wanted to see blood spurt. I wondered how long the legs would hold up his torso if the head were suddenly severed. I was almost disappointed when the sheet changed its angle, gained altitude and soared over the pole. The man’s grip weakened and the last we saw of him he was sliding down the street on his bottom disappearing into a black swirl of water in the distance.

It was noontime but the streets were pitch black. There was no electricity. There was no water (which made flushing our foulness down the toilet impossible). Fortunately my father had thought to fill both bathtubs with water before the storm struck and from this we drank and cooked for the better part of a week. The highest winds are around the eye, but the storm surge came before and the torrential rains came after. Tornados came throughout. We could see them forming for days out on the water. Spouts we thought would suck the bay dry. Several came crashing around us, and they were more frightening than the sustained winds of the hurricane. They were unpredictable with the winds coming form everywhichaway and our ears popping as they passed over.

A body floated in the street behind our house. We thought at first it was the man, but later we saw that it was wearing a skirt. They said it was an old lady from up the way who went crazy during the first wild night Donna made land and went running out into the teeth of the storm. Mom wouldn’t let us gawk at her too long. A man went swimming out to it, once the winds had died down, and poked it with a stick. I guess he wanted to make sure it was dead. They came later with a police dingy and fished her out. Almost turned the dingy over getting her aboard. Finally a police diver went in and hoisted her up. She was all swollen up by then. We watched from another window when Mom wasn’t looking.

Everything was messed up in Florida for a long time after that. Our departure was delayed while they cleaned up the airports. Dad took me with him to some church outside of Miami where there was only sand underfoot. It was a country church and all I remember was being frightened by the preacher. He said things about the United Nations and a man called John Birch and that we had to do something soon or they’d plum take us over. He told us what they’d do to us when they took us over and that was kinda scary and then he told us what we had to do to keep them from taking us over and that was scary too. I remember riding back in Dad’s car and asking him about it and he said there were a lot of crazies in Florida and that that man was one of them. And I asked him why we had to ask for money from people like that and he said that’s what missionaries did, they went around asking for money.

It was often like that when I went to churches across the south with him. The church people were always kind. They offered me iced tea and fried chicken and lemon meringue pie but most of the preachers were unhinged.

Columbia 11

2012-02-03T01:22:00.000-08:00

And we walked on…

My Dad was a Canadian…he was delicate as a man. Africa was just too wild for him. I think he knew he would die there. My mother says he could never dress for the place. He never wore short trousers or a missionary hat. He always dressed up, always impeccable.

How did he meet your mother?

She was American. They met at a Bible class. He was the teacher. It was his first time teaching and there were almost all women in the class. Mom says several of them were prettier than she, although I don’t believe it. She’s so beautiful in her pictures from back then.

Still is, from the pictures I’ve seen.

But she won him!

How?

Why do you want to know?

Might work on you.

She smiled at me, her eyes slightly narrowing.

She invited him for lunch with her parents. They were missionaries too. My granddad was a veteran of China. He took my Dad along to a few of his meetings. He would show magic lantern slides of the old coolies and the women with their bound feet. He was so conversational, and he knew all the old stories—Hudson Taylor and the pioneers of the China Island Mission. You always felt like you were chatting by a fireside with him. I think it was Granddad who won him for Mom, and, of course, her home cooking.

Was he far from home?

Saskatchewan. He’d left for Bible school at 18 and then both his parents got killed in a motoring accident. He never went back. He and Mom married and were in Africa before either of them was 21.

We walked on a little further…

Africa will always be only at a half-step from my thoughts…

She looked away at the river beneath us. It holds my father’s bones.

I knew when she talked of him she was in another world so I only listened.

It’s so complicated a place…he loved it but he never fit…my mother fits, she’s never left…she’ll be buried next to him…they’ve probably come further faster than any other continent…in only fifty years they’ve come from the Stone Age to where we were in 1900…we never give them credit for that…you should see pictures of him in a pin-stripped dandy suit surrounded by naked kids…it was a sunstroke that did it…what else, of course…he hated pith helmets…the missionaries still wore them when he first went out…he couldn’t stand looking at one…reminded him of Leopold II in Congo…Mother was more reasonable…cotton dresses, no nylons…we kids always wore sandals and the windows were always open…we lived in a place of winds, a picture book of Africa as one might imagine it…the land falling away in three slopes…huge acacia trees and a large veranda…even some Southern plantations would envy it…of course there were the mosquitoes and some years the crops failed…but there were no wars and no wild animals…just nothing but peace and beautiful black people…whenever I go back I’m always shocked at the silence of the place…no noises for hours except for the chickens pecking…and not even that in the hot hours…the modern world has just passed it by…but we did have a radio…Dad only played it in the rainy season…he didn’t want to waste petrol on the generator…the rainy season meant floods and he had to go pick up people in his canoe…we were on some of the highest ground in Niger…it’s a desert country you know…only a half a heartbeat away…that’s how I feel it.

We walked on a little further…

Two Christmas’s ago we skied across a large part of Saskatchewan.

Cross-country?

Yea, ski du fond. It’s the best place in the world for it.

Who did you go with?

My cousins. One of them is an instructor and he organized it. We did about 30k a day and stayed in any house we found along the way. That’s the way it is in Saskatchewan in winter. No one will turn away a skier. They almost fall over themselves to pamper you. Hot baths and saunas and homemade soups. I took a lot of pictures.

She handed me the album.

How deep was the snow?

The drifts were over your head but we stayed on routes that were already packed down. They have a lot of snowmobiles and we occasionally met mushers and their sleigh dogs. That was fun, playing with the huskies.

I saw one of her rolling in the snow with six dogs licking and frolicking about.

You couldn’t go on unpacked snow except with snowshoes, and we could never have made 30k a day hors piste.

Were you tired at the end of the day?

Exhausted, but in that really wonderful way, feeling healthy and refreshed. I also trekked in the Sahara and its strange how similar that is to Saskatchewan. The same feeling at the end of the day. And the eagerness to get started the next morning.

What did you think about on the way?

We didn’t talk too much. We just looked around us. You get in a rhythm and it’s trancelike. You don’t feel the aching in your muscles. You just go along dreamily until someone says it’s time to stop for lunch and you realize you’re starving.

But what occupied your mind?

Everything. Nothing. My father, of course. My mother in Africa. What I was going to do with my life. The eagles. We saw so many eagles, and it was weird when they circled over us. We must have been near their nests, since we saw thousands. They’re nowhere near extension. It’s interesting you should ask about what I thought? It’s true I never reflected on it. My mind was so relaxed, so much at one with the world around. I think it was almost like going back in the womb…blissful, unconscious…

We walked on a little further…

Columbia 10

2012-02-03T00:56:00.000-08:00

Ben Lippen

We listened totally engrossed to Doc day after day. We always left the chapel and walked down the slope to our classes feeling slightly shell-shocked. Wondering how we’d ever live up to the challenge he’d set for us, but feeling privileged for having been set it. This was remarkable for an adolescent audience in the 1960s.

We were passing from the 60s to the 70s with all the upheavals of 1968 and its surrounding years. We were in the worst of Vietnam. The Cultural Revolution was ravishing China and the counter-culture was rocking schools and campuses across the world. But ours was a small private high school in North Carolina, Christian to a fault. Revolutionarily Christian, a city of light on a hill over Asheville. But the counter-culture seeped in like a poisonous fog, like a breath of fresh air…for it was both.

We felt its freedom. The music spoke to us. The beat was in time with something primeval in every breast, especially of the young. And they handled it wisely—the faculty. They let the best of it in but tried to spare us from its excesses. Drugs and sex and rock-n-roll were out. But the new thinking was in. We read it, discussed it…and there was margin for different opinions.

The proof is that many of us from Ben Lippen retain a revolutionary outlook forty years on, while those who reveled in the revolution were either devastated by it or sold out later.

Most of the students were from missionary parents and a missionary kid is either a tiny version of the original or a rebel out to remake the world. The former constituted the bulwark of the school, a solid cadre of convinced soldiers of Christ. Confident, athletic, squeaky clean, polyglots. Comfortable in their skin, as the French say. Then there were the rest of us.

It was in this atmosphere, rarefied and elite though Spartan, that I made my first acquaintance with her. When I see pictures of her now she seems such a little girl. So innocent and timid, pale with skin so transparent you could see the blue veins coursing beneath. But in her eyes there is already the determined unshakable faith of her fathers.

She was scrappy and indomitable, but with an air of loneliness about her; everyone knew she’d lost her own father from a sun stroke. Everyone knew she had no self-pity and wouldn’t stand for anyone fussing over her, that she was cheerful and loyal to her missionary family, but still she had the look of someone who’d lost North on their compass.

Yet she had more radiance than any other girl. There was humor. She came alive when she was teased. For me it was a breath of life I’d never known before. Until then I'd known the dust of a tropical wasteland. Tuberculosis and a civil war, and the despair of a father who failed at his ultimate vision. The desperation of a young wife saddled with three children in a life she could not live and in a place she could scarcely understand.

Columbia 9

2012-02-02T23:53:00.000-08:00

Ben Lippen

We have two classes before 10.30 and then it’s chapel. English, World History and then God. First we sing. A member of the senior class leads it. There’s a piano if it’s a hymn, guitars if it’s a ballad. Then someone is called on to pray. It could be anyone. You have to pray out loud and extemporaneously. Everyone must be prepared to give it a go. Hearts pound. The silence is unbearable. A name is called. It isn’t me. You breathe again.

The announcements follow and are usually about sports since we are quite a renowned soccer school. After that the headmaster will speak unless there is a guest speaker.

Doc’s talks are so memorable I can still bring them back, words and feelings—especially feelings, forty years later.

You can deliver any message, even Jeremiah, if the people know you love them. Doc loved us. He smiles and scans across his audience before he says the first word. His eyes squint as he looks out. Sometimes he shades them from the spotlights with his hand. He’s lost his wife to cancer this last year. She left him with four children to raise. In his now empty bedroom, those eyes have cried him into tenderness. This man. This oak of God. This sternness turned to tenderheart. This bulwark against the flood of all the 60’s—poised to engulf his flock of teens—now philosophic, almost bemused.

You will all, he begins, wake up one morning and find that everything you’ve ever built has come crashing down to dust. It may be that you’ve been betrayed by your best friend. It may be that the church you built has been burnt down. It may be that after a lifetime of translating the Scriptures, you are being kicked out of the country just as you’re about to publish. Or it may be that, as in my case, you wake up one morning and realize you are now without the one person you loved most in your life.

This will happen to all of you, at some time in your life, make no mistake. None of us is spared. And how you react to this tragedy will be the measure of your character as a follower of Christ. That is why you’re here at Ben Lippen. That is what we want for each of you: to be prepared for such a moment and to face it triumphantly because of the principles you learned first here. Ben Lippen is proud of its great soccer team, but that is not why we’re here. We couldn’t be prouder of your SAT scores and the fact that almost all of you will go on to great colleges, but that’s not our final mission. If we have not prepared you for those moments when it all comes crashing down we have not done our job.

For those of us sitting under the gaze of this man, under his aura, under these burning words, it could never be forgotten.

Unperfect Actor

2012-02-02T07:12:00.000-08:00

Shakespeare's 23:

As an unperfect actor on the stage
Who with his fear is put besides his part,
Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage,
Whose strength's abundance weakens his own heart.
So I, for fear of trust, forget to say
The perfect ceremony of love's rite,
And in mine own love's strength seem to decay,
O'ercharged with burden of mine own love's might.
O, let my books be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast,
Who plead for love and look for recompense
More than that tongue that more hath more express'd.
O, learn to read what silent love hath writ:
To hear with eyes belongs to love's fine wit.

In an excess of feeling—fear, distrust, weakness, tongue-tiedness—love is still-born. Recourse thus to the written word and to what silent love hath writ.

Flakes have fallen now for forty years, obliterating the landmarks. Great masses of love can’t be hid but edges disappear. She is a sandstone statue worn gentle and pudgy-nosed by the wind and rain.

I want to protect her against me…even today. I know the consequences. That, and not temerity perhaps, forced me to hold my hand. I never have been a wall flower…yes, that’s the trick.

God held the hand of Abraham when raised over Isaac. She is the God of the last-minute, and only the lost know Her mysterious ways.

I saw her on the altar, face framed in fagots and wild roses. Her golden hair all tangled up in briarwood. Her child-like face staring at the dagger of God’s loving will and, as it reached its apogee, She reached out and stayed my hand.

The channel of my happiness was her martyrdom. Her happy sort cost me a sea of tears. Thy will be done, on Earth and Mount Moriah. I’d bound her hand and foot upon the altar, but angels brought a ram and set her free. A ram will butt and bite and ram. A ram is utter-less and serves only for eating. Once eaten one remembers what one’s lost.

On her unmangled body I spread my cloak of loving forgetfulness. From her unspilt blood I claim remission of sins. On her faithfulness I seek atonement for my profligacy. Her moans of marital bliss are celestial chansons, provoking the heavenly hosts to sexless copulation. Each paid for by my crucifixion.

I’ve never heard her moan, never undressed her. I never touched her face nor stroked her hair. Never even laid on a hand.

The trapdoor of my telltale heart is jammed. It’s blocked with raven’s down and nevermores.

Your Rock

2012-02-01T11:53:00.000-08:00

Here’s another one for your collection.

It came from the top of Montgo, at the easternmost tip of Spain, where it juts out into the Mediterranean. On a map you’ll see it as that pointy thing between Valencia and Alicante. In 1955 a British plane crashed into it. The pilot thought he’d follow the coast down from Barcelona to Gibraltar and didn’t count on something as intrusive as Montgo rising up out of the sea. At the beginning of the 10th century the Moorish Caliph, Abd ur Rahman the Third, made a special trip from Cordoba to collect over a hundred medicinal herbs from the slopes of Montgo. There are 650 species of flora and eight species of birds of prey.

The reason I know all this trivia is that I wrote the Wikipedia entry for Montgo. And because it looms over my home in Javea like a huge, craggy, nosy aunt. I should say ‘trunky’ aunt, since Montgo has the most astonishing resemblance to an elephant. You couldn’t have sculpted a more exacting likeness. It rivals Mount Rushmore for detail, and that was made by man.

It’s not just that it has an eye like an elephant or a forehead and a trunk; it’s that the eye has a perfectly elephantine shape with a lid to match and that the eye blinks languidly just like an elephant in the afternoon sun. And then there’s the texture and color of the forehead with its pachydermian wrinkles and the fact that the trunk slopes down into the sea as if it were sucking water up for a bath.

In case you know someone who’s a total nerd and gets into this sort of thing, I’ll attach the Wikipedia link here.

I trekked up Montgo this morning. Started at seven and was up and down again—a couple of sweaty liters lighter—at ten. Three hours. That’s the same time I took to climb it in the blaze of summer a couple of years ago, so I must have slowed down a step or two after all.

I wish you’d have been there to climb her with me. We’d have had to walk for a mile or so from the place we left our car to the base where we start the climb. That’s a good thing. The walk towards the mountain gives you the most gobsmacking look at her and serves to scare away the faint-hearted, which probably means fewer helicopter rescues for the local crew. You walk towards her like a matador towards a bull. She rises up as if to say, how dare you! And the walk back on level ground after you’ve conquered her is a just reward after doing battle with her rugged, razor-sharp, lunar surface.

Anyway I wish you’d been there. It was pitch black when I started out. She was white in the setting moon, her crags bleeding deep grey rockslides. I was already half way up her northeast slope when the sky began to lighten. In minutes the landscape below me had come alive. Undulating folds of blue pine, the golden sheen of Denia, the smoky hills of the Bernia range and the rocky peaks of Marina Alta. And beyond all this the sea. A vast indigo fringed with purple trim spreading out forever.

There is no feeling like being alone on a mountain at daybreak.

Montgo is sacred. Even people who believe in no god know that. You can’t live near her without feeling her presence constantly. There’s nothing like her. Nothing around her but a vast plain. She has the whole of this part of the world to herself.

Montgo seen from the Arenal of Javea

When the sun sets and you see her blink and a white shroud envelops her top and swirls down like a veil and then rolls back and uncovers her head and the eye opens again and you feel its gaze on your neck, you know you are in the presence of the divine.

I wish you were there.

For the better part of an hour you’re switchbacking higher and higher, stepping from one large rock to another, trying to avoid the loose gravel in between so as not to slip or become entrapped. Then suddenly, you’re out on a ledge and there’s nothing below but air for miles and miles. Javea lies before you like a sleeping girl.

Then the trail turns sharp right and sharply up. Here you become a climber. Here hands are just as important as feet. You grip the granite and pull yourself up. The trail has disappeared. Or rather there are many alternatives up and none looks any easier than the other. Here is where the faint of heart fall back. The higher you go the easier, meaning the harder it gets. Because it’s harder you know you can’t go back. Everyone knows it’s more difficult to descend a mountain than to climb.

Hand over hand, testing each foothold.

It’s this way for the last hundred and fifty meters to the summit.

I wish you’d been there when I topped out. If you had I would have taken you in my arms and given you the kiss of your life. It would have been our first, and probably last, but we’d have remembered it. If not hypoxic from the climb, you would have been from that kiss.

But at the top and without our kiss, I began looking for your rock. I knew what I wanted. It would have the shape of an elephant’s head, with an eye and a lid to boot and a sloping forehead with wrinkles. And it would be the half of another rock which you could someday look for and fit together if you ever climbed Montgo with me.

This rock must exist and I looked for it. I knew it had waited seventy million years on the top of Montgo for this moment and wouldn’t miss its date. Across all those millennia, since being thrust up by some tectonic evisceration, it had weathered storm and earthquake and bird shit waiting for my touch.

And there it was! There at my feet! I kicked it free from its twin and blew the dust from its bottom and saw its eye wink and its forehead wrinkle. I kissed it for both of us, slid it into my pocket and started down.

And here it is!

Waking in Barcelona

2012-01-30T23:57:00.000-08:00

There are few cities I prefer to be in as she awakes than Barcelona.

This morning I did what I always do here, run at six AM down to the port and back. Wherever I’m staying I always manage to find my way to Plaça de Catalunya, run directly over the star in the center and then head down the Ramblas to the statue of Columbus.

At the top of the Ramblas you always find the all-nighters walking off their drinks and at the bottom, the prostitutes still stalking for tricks. In the middle is the market where everyone is hustling in their fish and fruit and whatnots.

I pass a couple twice, going down and then back up. She’s huddled in his arms, a furry parka against the cold, with the hood almost covering her head. She’s young and pretty and in love. They’ve been out all night and she’s done for. She leans her sleepy head on his chest and his left arm holds her up as they walk. Her eyes are closed. Her long, blond curls tumble out of the parka. You barely see her face. She’s an angel. She looks like my daughter. He’s tall with a kindly face. He looks like my son.

I’m down and back in the hotel in half an hour, nearly a record, and probably too fast for a 58-year old. I’m sweating even though this is the last day of January. I hang up my clothes to dry. My meetings start at nine and the things won’t be dry by then. But anything’s better than nothing and I hate to stuff wet running clothes in my luggage.

A long shower, shave and a quick check of The Guardian on line. The usual. I close my Mac Air. Breakfast in this hotel is 15 euros, and even though the company will pay for it, I think that’s highway robbery. I decide to go out to a café. On the street I stop and buy El Mundo. I find a café open.

Just inside the door a young lady drinks coffee at the bar, a crumbly cupcake on her saucer. Four Arab men in painting clothes sit further down, talking loudly. I walk past them to the opposite end and order café con leche and a croissant. I sit down at a table.

Behind me is a table with five middle-aged women. They are talking about the circle of life. A friend of theirs died yesterday. The same afternoon her daughter gave birth to a little girl. One laughs quietly at this while the others wipe tears from their eyes.

Two young women walk in. They are dressed in business suits. The first says hello to me as she passes. The second smiles and passes on. That’s why I love Spain. They order coffee and begin at once to talk about their children.

I open my Mundo. The usual political shite. The usual crimes. An older woman and her two granddaughers have been bludgeoned to death not five hundred meters from where I sit. It’s vague on when it happened but it must have been recently since they will do the autopsy today. No one knows who did it. One of the girls is sixteen. The article makes a point of how pretty she is. Was.

None of the other bla-bla in the paper interests me. There is an article on Katherine Hepburn. A book has just come out by a pimp in Hollywood who used to find tricks for the stars. He found women for Katherine—dozens. He says he can write it now since all his clients are dead.

I fold up the paper, pay and walk out. In the twenty minutes I’ve been inside everything has changed. Now the streets swarm with life. Children are going to school, accompanied by mothers or grandfathers. Sweepers have been replaced by scooters and skaters. The sky is brightening. Earlier I’d run under a black vault. Now I know it will be a crisp sunny winter day.

That’s why I love Spain.

Columbia 8

2012-01-30T00:38:00.000-08:00

Columbia has entered my life more frequently than any other city. Four times. Like a dream you can’t stop re-dreaming.

Columbia 1955. In the first of my four stops, my father is entering Bible School. My mother delivers us my brother just as I’m approaching my second birthday. We will stay here four years; by then my sister will arrive just short of my fifth birthday.

A row of red brick apartments. Hendley Homes, they’ve christened them. (Mercifully, they are bull-dozed down some decades later.) Everyone who lives here looks like us: recently married; poor as church mice; snotty kids; scrambling for the rent every 31^st.

It is Columbia Bible College for Dad. And party time for us. Just me ’n Mom, the best times of her life, she once whispers to me—at least for the nine months that Bobby gestates. She feeds me like a prince, reads to me, takes me out on the town, teaches me to pray and in general makes sure I increase in knowledge, comeliness and the fear of the Lord.

Dad meanwhile plows his own furrow, as usual, sometimes to eccentric effect. Once he tests the effect of a passenger door on an index finger and finds out the hard way Ford makes tough trucks. He faints at the Ford’s feet, as it were, and has to be carted away by ambulance. When he finally limps home, clutching the largest bandage I’ve ever seen, it is like a Russian intellectual returning from the Gulag. We have a picture of him. His wire rim glasses are askew and he has that lost boy face that’s sometimes painted on Tiny Tim when he sees his father carted away on Christmas Eve. When it heals, he shows us the V-shaped scar to scare us. It is still staring up at me from his withered hand as I hold it during his last days.

Columbia 1965. First geopolitical awakening. We’ve been plucked from revolutionary Dominican Republic by a Miami-bound DC-9. I know there’s been a war on around me, but I only realize I’ve come from hell when we get back State-side. First glimpse of El Dorado and a cream Moon Pie.

Television and Churchill’s funeral live. The first time I hear of the great man, he’s being put to rest after an astonishing 90 years. For us it’s furlough and more pan-handling for Jesus. A squat red brick house on a randy lane near the college. (More Bible College for Dad. That’s how missionaries take their vacations.) Tarzan on a neighbor’s set and, Tuesday evening, Combat. (At home our rabbit ears is only for the news and ‘good’ movies, as Dad calls them.)

Baseball and my first glove. Little league.

Columbia 1971. Columbia Bible College for me! The worm has turned.

I had wanted anthropology at University of South Carolina but Mom and Dad, Inc. have other ideas. Post-Mission Field. Post-Ben Lippen. Post-Tet Offensive. Post-pubertal.

Those six years between ’65 and ’71 see a different me settle into a red brick dorm and attack the exegesis of the Holy Scriptures. I’m convinced of their truth and inerrancy. Mom and Dad have done their job well.

Columbia 1979. Post-Spain. Post-loss of faith. Post-virginal.

Columbia Bible College wants nothing of me now. Red brick married-student housing just up from the Carolina Stadium. My new Colombian (NB the spelling) bride. Sciences. Humanities. Evolution. Liberal Education. Them’s fighting words. The refuge of the apostate, as they say at the Bible College.

Scrubbed and rubbed

2012-01-29T12:31:00.000-08:00

A clap-board gritty cold hard-scrabble life

With hand-me-downs and water drawn from wells

And cotton fields and nails worn to the bone

An outhouse by a patch of honeydews

With lace and silk and chocolate amandines

A thing of tales in books and fairy dreams

But scrubbed and rubbed and spanking clean

Such was my mother of McConnell clan

Share-cropper on his borrowed land, her Pop

Answered to none in his proud servitude

The flinty eye, the half-curled Elvis lip

Unbeat-at-checks, card-sharking, horseshoe champ

Toothless, a ladies' man, sharp-shot, fathered a brood

Signed his name X with a florid hand, spat tobaca

But scrubbed and rubbed and spanking clean

Such was my mother of McConnell clan

Seven brothers, three sisters, uncounted cousins

‘cross the deep, unreconstructed, lost to god South

Antreville, ville of the ants, the flea-bit rump of the world

But they were happy, walked to school and were never hungry

The brothers went to war, surrounded in the Bulge

Frozed, but unharmed in ‘45. The eldest shot himself.

But scrubbed and rubbed and spanking clean

Such was my mother of McConnell clan

Married a city slick, an outsider, a college boy, rich folk

But behind his back they laughed, did the clan

‘With so much learnin’ you’da thought he’d got more sense

Can’t hitch a mule or pitch a shoe or look a man in the eye.’

He was full up of ‘vangelical and missions overseas

Wanted to drag their Eva off the save the heathen.

But scrubbed and rubbed and spanking clean

Such was my mother of McConnell clan

She thought it must be love, but how was she to know

They said to live for Christ and die to self

It felt like love in any case, but who could tell

They said the husband is the head of wife and home

At least she loved the kids and that’s enough

They said go into all the world and preach.

But scrubbed and rubbed and spanking clean

Such was my mother of McConnell clan

She came back to Antreville after he broke

Back to the sagging porch and well and honeydews

Dingue and malaria now in her veins, TB in lungs

A thousand words or more of twangy Spango on her tongue

A thousand Caribbean nights or more of dreams

Illusions shattered, health in ruins yet pride somehow intact

Scrubbed and rubbed and spanking clean

… my mother of McConnell clan.

Past, Present & Future

2012-01-29T03:40:00.000-08:00

PAST, PRESENT & FUTURE

by Artie Butler, Jerry Leiber & George "Shadow" Morton

(The past), past, well, now,

Let me tell you about the past.

The past is filled with silent joys,

And broken toys,

Laughing girls and teasing boys.

Was I ever in love?

I called it love.

I mean, it felt like love.

There were moments when,

Well, there were moments when...

(Present), go out with you?

Why not.

Do I like to dance?

Of course.

Take a walk along the beach tonight?

I'd love to.

But don't try to touch me,

Don't try to touch me.

'Cause that will never happen again,

Shall we dance?

(The future), tomorrow?

Well, tomorrow's a long way off.

Maybe someday I'll hold

Somebody's hand.

Maybe somewhere,

Someone will understand.

You know I used to sing,

"A tisket a tasket

A green and yellow basket."

I'm all packed up and I'm on my way.

And I'm gonna fall in love.

But at the moment it doesn't look good,

At the moment it will never happen again.

I don't think it will ever happen again.

If you were every European, maybe no war again

2012-01-28T01:29:00.000-08:00

If you were every European, maybe no war again

On the Isonzo in the Alps

They mowed the young grass down

Le préfané, la première coupe,

And when reborn as foin

They mowed the new growth down

As risible today as war

Between the internauts of Neuss

And hedge-traders in the City

Over airbusers of Toulouse

Was peace in those forgotten days

From Waterloo to Sevastopol

In Ypres’ stenching trench

They stacked the muddy human carrion

The Hun, The Gaul, Perfidious Albion

A thousand years of blood

Our peace was bought not by this blood

Blood only buys a mother’s tears

It had not to be spilt!

By men too old to go themselves

Too weak and blind and small and mean

But that’s behind, beyond repair

A thousand years we’ve ripped apart

This peaceful continent

The current peace as shocking new

As the innocence of its young

Who think it always was and will thus always be

Christ and Crusades are only piles of stone

--Cologne and Reims, Durham and Zaragoza--

Which we rush past in iPods for the tram

And Charles Martel chased out the Infidel

At Tours--So why those veils on girls?

You can’t imagine war, can’t even mock it up

You did Erasmus just a year ago and fell in love

Scot with a girl in Piemonte, had a kid just now

And settled down upon the coast of Spain

To grow mistela in a valley of Levante

And that this land was scorched not eighty years ago

By Franco’s Moors and Lincoln’s lite Brigade

And that those bullet husks you dug up yesterday

Went through a European heart and soaked in European blood

Your patch of vines…that…well, beyond imagining…

Columbia 7

2012-01-21T08:16:00.000-08:00

Wonder if anyone else feels like he’s talking to an empty box when he prays.

My roommate’s praying out loud for 30 goals this season.

Why do we ask for things a child would be scolded for and pretend it’s for the glory of God?

My pimples are awful today. I popped one last night. I was sick of it and now it’s a crusty smudge in the middle of my face. I wish I could just stay in my room today.

I slept through Quiet Time this morning. Couldn’t get my mind on what I’m reading. I’ve been skipping all around the Old Testament trying to find something worthwhile. Tried Amos…dull as dust.

I’ve got zits worse than any other kid except Neil. He’s got huge pus things across his back and shoulders. And scars like moon craters.

Everyone else finds it easy to believe, or maybe they just never think about it.

Fran sits next to me in English and crosses her legs. Her skirt rides up right in front of me. I wonder if she wants me to look.

I hit the cliff with a kick yesterday. The ball was rolling straight at me and I caught it clean and dry. Kicked up dust when it hit.

In golf I’ve hit screaming drives with an effortless swing. You just have to catch it right. So my kick.

I need to wash clothes but I don’t have any more dimes. Someone is selling Amway soap for a quarter.

I’ve never read anything like Schaeffer. He’s the first one to make any sense. I’d love to live at L’Abri. I may end up believing after all.

I can run up The Killer in practice without any problem, but in the meets I get so nervous I’m already pooped before we start. My mouth goes dry and I feel so drained in the first hundred yards that I fall back immediately. Why does this happen to me and not the others?

I can’t believe I didn’t make the cut for Choir. They let Jacob in and he sings worse than I do. It’s because he can play the trombone and they need one.

I feel so much better here than in public school. It’s like another planet.

Here Christ’s not like in the Baptist churches back home. Here it’s low key and cerebral. Here it’s lived, not ranted.

I’m afraid I’ll wake up someday and it will be like back home. I almost go around on tiptoes.

Jeff wrecked his car yesterday. Turned it off to save gas while coasting downhill and didn’t realize the steering blocks that way. He went off a curve and down a ravine. Lucky idiot, didn’t get a scratch.

All the rules about girls keep them estranged from us. It turns them into sexless maidens on a pedestal. I wonder if they prefer it that way.

Funny, I feel no sex drive here…I’m ashamed when I wake up with a hard-on.

The food is decent, except for the carrot salad. They put raisins in it. No one likes it so it goes around the table three times before it’s gone.

The faculty respects us and treats us like equals…almost. There are no discipline problems and everyone listens and takes notes in class. My history prof is obsessed with Alger Hiss. He’s making us read all the original transcripts but he won’t tell us why it’s so important.

My suitemate, Quentin, is full of gripes. He’s calls us into the bathroom after lights out and bitches about everything. He wants to get himself kicked out. He’s going to do something dramatic and self-destructive. He’s going to shave all his hair.

The invisible ones are the black cooks.

Doc is a force of nature. He scares me. I prefer his sons. Derrick is a good friend. He’s a little fragile now that his Mother died. He’s expected to be happy and victorious, like his father. No emotions. But he’s just not strong enough, or he’s too human. His fragility is just what I like about him.

His brother Francis is too good to be true. He’s 3 inches shorter than me but he gets every rebound. He’s been teaching me a leaping exercise. He jumps over a bench, first right then left. He does it like a rabbit but I can’t do it even once. He smiles and pretends it’s not important but I feel like a nobody next to him. He’s so kind that it makes me feel uncomfortable. I can’t reciprocate so I’m a confirmed absolute inferior.

I think my first impression of Doc will be my last. It was the right one.

He told us that when he teaches night class at UNC-Asheville the girls with mini-skirts spread their legs and show their underwear. What a reflection to make in chapel in front of a group of teens! I wonder what the girls thought of that one.

The war is hotting up, and so are the protests. I can’t get the Kent State Four out of my mind.

My Dad never writes. My Mom always says the same thing. She’s praying for me. Why does she think that will make me feel loved?

I wonder if we’ll get to go to Burger King on Saturday night. I’m going to order a Whaler.

Everyone’s afraid Ben Lippen will not prepare us for the ‘real world’. Almost everyone goes to a Bible college when they leave here.

The God Who is There makes sense.

The only subject the same here as in public school is math. It’s even easier here.

I can’t stop thinking about Miss Jensen. She crashed her car on a mountain road and got out and knelt down on the pavement and then died.

Columbia 6

2012-01-19T10:56:00.000-08:00

Love at Ben Lippen.

Sports at Ben Lippen.

Studies at Ben Lippen.

Discipleship at Ben Lippen.

That’s the order of priority for most students here, although the faculty would claim, of course, an entirely opposite one. The hearts of teens are hardwired and no amount of wishful thinking can put that different.

I was the only one in history class today who knew about the incident in the Tonkin Gulf. I was embarrassed to raise my hand and give the answer, but how can we understand how we got into Vietnam without that, so I did. I felt eyes drill right through me, but I don’t know if they were admiring or condemning. I’m used to kids in public school hating me for that.

Also when the teacher asked why people climb mountains, and there were no takers, I gave the answer Mallory did: ‘Because they’re there.’ His face opened out in a broad, approving smile. Again, eyes like daggers. Most of the kids in this class have been together for 2 years and they must wonder whom this new kid thinks he is showing off before he’s even paid his dues.

I don’t mean to show off. I just know the answers and it’s unfair to just sit there silently when no one else answers. I think I do it sometimes to keep the teacher from feeling a failure.

There’s a school choir. If you get in it you don’t have to go to Church on Sunday. Well, you go but you sing the whole time and don’t have to listen to preaching or go to Sunday School. That suits me just fine. I’ve had enough preaching for a dozen lifetimes. You get to travel to a new church every week, sometimes two different ones the same Sunday, one in the morning and one at night. (This place just keeps getting better!)

I sang in the chapel choir today. It’s a great feeling to sing with 60 other people. Like entering a huge organism that swells and soars and has a life of its own. I try out next week for the school choir as a baritone but I need to improve on my harmonizing.

I’ve been writing poetry but for no one in particular. Just for myself. I throw most of it away but some I keep. I think I’ll sneak one of the better ones into my English essay and see what Miss Barrett thinks. I could pretend it’s quoted from an obscure poet and see if she trashes it or not.

My times in the mile are improving. 5.50, 5.43, 5.44, 5.39 and yesterday 5.32. I wonder what they do with these records. Someone is always writing them down and filing them away. He’s an ace at it. He keeps everyone straight even when there are seven or eight crossing the finish line in a bunch. Maybe it’s for the coach to see who might be promising for track in the spring. I’m playing baseball, though, no matter what they say. I brought my first baseman’s glove and that’s what I have my heart set on.

There are several really nice girls. We rotate tables in the dining room every week, so by the end of the term you’ve had a chance to sit with everyone at least once. They always put seniors at the head and foot of the table and they’re supposed to make sure everyone eats everything. All the food must disappear. First the serving plate is passed around left to right and everyone must take at least a table spoon-full. Then we eat. If anything is left in the serving plate after everyone’s eaten it’s passed around and again everyone must take a serving, although I’ve noticed that the spoonful rule isn’t followed strictly on the second round. Sometimes it has to go to a third round before it’s all gone. At least it makes the washing up easier for me.

They seat you at the table girl/boy, girl/boy. When you first sit down you have to pull out the chair for the girl on your right side and seat her. The girls who’ve been here before are experts at it. They begin to sit down just as you’re sliding the chair back in and everything comes off like clockwork. But the new girls haven’t got the hang of it yet, and they either sit down too soon and almost fall to the floor or they are still standing while you’re pushing the chair seat into the back of their knees. Someone should take them aside and give them lessons.

After the meal we can go to the ‘store’. That’s a big word for it because it’s just a door in a wall with the top half open and someone behind to take your money. They have flavored potato chips (my favorite are paprika and onions) and the most delicious chocolate ice cream cones you ever tasted. They’re topped with nuts. Though, if you’ve eaten all your meal, you’re really not hungry afterwards. We just congregate there because it’s the one thing around here that is not regimented for us. A slice of liberty. (I was going to say ‘home’ but that’s the one place I don’t miss. In fact, the best thing about Ben Lippen is that it isn’t home…no parents!)

Another after dinner passion, at least for the guys, is playing table soccer. There are three to a side with rotating rods and little wooden players. We slam around a white marble ball, which is about twice the size of a large marble. It’s been beat around so much that there are pieces chipped off the side, so it doesn’t roll true, which just makes the game more interesting.

There are some real aces here. I am a nothing compared to them and wouldn’t dare take any of them on. But there are usually ten or twenty guys standing around watching the games (they always have two tables going at any time and there’s a lot of whooping and macho talk). The girls usually don’t play table soccer, although there are a couple who do. One is tall and really cute. She’s from Florida. The other looks like an Amazonian and I don’t know where they dragged her up.

Most of the girls just stand around and chat, or go out on the porch to watch the sunset or the lights of Asheville, or just go back to their dorm to study. I noticed some guys just hang around the girls and joking with them. It’s usually the same ones. There aren’t as many cliques as in public school but some clumping is inevitable. I usually just hang back and watch. It’s the one time of the day when there’s nothing we’re expected to do. I’m rubbish at these board games anyway and I’d really like to meet a few girls and chat with them. But the ones I really like always seem to disappear back to the dorm before I can get a chance. I’m not sure if I’d have the courage anyway, even if they stayed behind.

There’s one guy who can play the piano like he invented it. His name is Zack. He plays purely by ear. Wouldn’t know a written note if it clobbered him. Sometimes I just stand around and listen to him play. That’s usually what I do these days in fact.

Love, Sports, Studies, Discipleship. I’m not even sure what that last one means. They go on about it but it seems more nebulous than the rest. At least you can sink your teeth into the others.

Columbia 5

2012-01-19T10:34:00.001-08:00

First I’m told our schedule.

Monday to Friday:

Wake up, shower and dress 6.30. Quiet Time 7.00 (prayer and Bible reading). Breakfast 7.30. Domestic work (I’m assigned to washing dishes) 8.00. First class 8.30. Second class 9.30. Chapel 10.30. Third class 11.30. Lunch 12.30. Fourth class 13.30. Fifth class 14.30. Dress for sports 15.30. Sports 16.00. Shower and dress for dinner (tie required)18.00. Dinner 18.30. Evening study hall 19.30. Break 20.30. Second evening study hall 20.45. Undress and evening toilet 21.45. Lights out 22.00.

Saturday:

Wake up, shower and dress (jeans allowed all day) 7.30. Quiet Time 8.00 (prayer and Bible reading). Breakfast 8.30. Domestic work 9.00. Free time 9.30 (must stay on campus, study hall obligatory for those with C’s or worse). Lunch 12.30. Free time 13.30 (visits off campus allowed with written permission and chaperon, detention hall for those with conduct demerits). Game begins 15.00. Dinner 18.30. Evening Social 19.30. Undress and evening toilet 21.45. Lights out 22.00.

Sunday:

Wake up, shower and dress (coats and ties) 7.00. Quiet Time 7.30 (prayer and Bible reading). Breakfast 8.00. Domestic work 8.30. Buses leave for Sunday School 9.00. Sunday School and Church 10.00. Buses return from Church 12.15. Lunch 13.00. Quiet time 13.30 (must stay on campus, reading allowed but no studying for classes, letter writing). Dinner 17.30 (entrance ticket is letter to parents). Buses leave for Evening Service 18.30. Evening Church Service 19.30. Buses return from Church 21.00. Undress and evening toilet 21.45. Lights out 22.00.

Even if you want to be wicked it’s hell finding the time.

The schedule is the basic framework but there are other details. Sports in the afternoon begins with a timed run. Boys must run the mile (four laps around the athletic field) in 6 minutes 30 or faster. Girls in 7 minutes minimum. I ask what happens to those who can’t make these times. Everyone does, I’m told. Otherwise you run it a second time. I ponder the logic of this and then pound out my first Ben Lippen mile in 5.52. Someone writes this number down and motions me on to formal sports practice.

I’m starting on the junior varsity soccer team at right fullback, even though I’ve never played the game. (In the Dominican Republic baseball is the national sport.) Someone’s noticed I have a fairly decent right leg, though I can’t even connect with the ball using my left.

In the fall the Saturday game is soccer though there is a cross-country team (which only seems to attract loners and philosophers). In the winter it’s basketball and lacrosse and in the spring, baseball and track. But soccer, basketball and baseball are kings. Especially soccer.

Boys’ varsity games take precedent over all others, but there are girls’ and boys’ junior varsity games scheduled just before the boys’ varsity games. Those on sports teams spend all weekday afternoons in formal practice and sometimes Saturday morning. Those not on teams spend their afternoons playing volleyball or tennis or doing calisthenics. No one gets off without sweating. I notice there are no plump kids.

The Saturday evening Social runs the gambit from sing-alongs to skits to slap-stick. They are usually held in the gym and are the one time in the week when we can really let our hair down. Discrete flirting is tolerated. Teasing faculty members can be done openly and they seem to enjoy it. Everyone is in a good mood, regardless of the score in the afternoon game or the amount of undone homework. Everyone’s in jeans and t-shirts. The evening is one long laugh and it melds the student body into one in a way chapel (or even the games) never can.

Everyone has domestic work. None of it is too demanding, but it keeps costs down. There’s only one hired man who does the big tasks on the grounds (cutting trees, for example) and maintains the boilers and other large items. Faculty members drive the buses. Black ladies come in to cook. Those of us doing domestics in the kitchen get to know them. They love to chat and tease us. None of them has ever been out of these hills and they think of us missionary kids as some exotic species to be interrogated about all sorts of things.

Sunday lunch is the gastronomic feature of the week. It usually involves turkey or roast beef, special sauces and dressings and a huge dessert. We wallow back to our dorms after this and collapse on our bunks. The Sunday evening meal, as a consequence, is a cold one with chips from bags, sandwiches and paper plates. This is the only meal off during the week for our black cooks.

Much is on the honor system. Quiet time in the morning is supposed to be spent in silence either praying or reading the Scripture on your own. But when you put down your head on the desk, no one knows if you’re talking to Jesus or catching a few more zzzz’s. No work is to be done on Sunday except your domestic duty, but if someone curls up in the bed with his school books and studies for a Monday test, no one will ever be the wiser Otherwise, study must be confined to Monday through Saturday.

Every hall has a hall monitor. Ours is a senior whose main task is to make sure there’s no rough-housing in the halls and no noise after lights out. He usually walks the halls in his socks around 22.10 listening at the doors. He lives on our floor, so we know to wait till we hear his door close at 22.15 before beginning to whisper. He knows this (having done the same himself the year before) and often closes his door but stays out in the hall to listen. If you’re caught doing something against the rules he’ll usually just ask you to stop, but if it’s something flagrant (like fighting) or it’s the second time he’s told you, he’ll write you up.

This involves jotting down your name, the offense and the date and time on a pad with carbon paper. He’ll give you the carbon copy and send the original to the faculty member who’s head of your dorm. It’s up to him to decide on the punishment. Usually he calls you in for an explanation and then gives you his sentence. It’s often a demerit. Once you have three of these you have to stay in on Saturday and go to a special study hall where you pass the afternoon in total silence with a faculty member glaring at you.

I determine never to get a demerit. I don’t mind the studying, but the shame would be impossible to live down. Tim, who’s been here for two years longer than we, tells us about the three types of students at Ben Lippen. He claims there are just as many ‘holy rollers’ in Saturday detention as ‘sinners’. The holies, he says, just don’t have much common sense and get demerits by accident. The sinners are street-smart but with so many rules and so many spies around, you’re bound sooner or later to fall foul of the law.

Warren shrugs his shoulders and says he doesn’t care. As long as he can still keep scoring goals.

They’ll never kick you off the team, I reassure him. You’d have to shoot the head dead first.

He’s jumping again, trying to touch the top of my head.