All's well that ends well

This news clip, about a Georgia town where a police officer halted sidewalk sales of Girl Scout cookies at a strip mall because they didn't have a peddler's permit, showed up over at HuffPost with the usual "Stormtroopers Crack Down" headlines and the predictable "shame on those officers" comments from the readers who didn't take the occasion to slam the Girl Scouts or Michelle Obama.

Pardon me if I find the clip loaded with good news nearly all around.

First, there was a misunderstanding between the police officer and the Scout leaders, and we don't know how it actually unfolded. There isn't much direct indication that the officer was hostile or confrontational, though, and it's sad that one little girl thought the adults were all going to jail. But kids that age have pretty active imaginations and you can't always lay the blame for how their minds work on anything specific they've been told.

That aside, it looks like this was handled well. The police did a nice job of explaining their point of view, how the law is intended to act and what may have gone wrong. They apologized to the kids, let them go on with only one day's interruption in their sale and made a good attempt to repair whatever misconceptions those kids may have had over the role of police in the community.

And the TV news didn't insist that the first impression was going to be what was reported. The reporter appears to have gone out and gathered the facts before she decided how to report what happened. She didn't feel compelled to stick with the "storm troopers" angle and then add "but others say" in order to downgrade the information that didn't fit her predetermined narrative.

This shouldn't be rare enough to merit comment, but that's the fact, jack. And, as evidence of how rare it is, a look at Google News shows that the rest of the media seem to have all picked up the story as a chance to flog the big bad brutal cops, even though none appear to have seen anything more than the clip above.

I thought the police chief did an excellent, articulate job of explaining not only what happened but why the new law exists in the first place, and now we get into my own personal take on this sort of thing:

I haven't seen Girl Scouts out selling cookies to passing cars and I doubt I would. But I have long argued that  "boot drives" and other in-traffic fundraisers not only provide the kids with bad adult input on overall safety but are an incredibly sad and expensive lawsuit waiting to shut down the organizations that use them and the towns that allow them.

Which brings us to a very early strip in Bill Hinds' late lamented strip about youth sports, "Cleats," which you can still read in reruns here.

For Esme - With Love and Milk Bones

Vaska's "aunt" Esme, seen above beating the living bejabbers out of him shortly before he left Florida to come live here, had rather a good day at Westminster Monday:

61     GCH Kengalis Spirits R Zoomin' Fm JC
Breed: Rhodesian Ridgeback
Sex: Bitch
AKC: HP 30888105
Date of Birth: July 14, 2008
Breeder: Frank Murphy & Rhanda Glenn & Kathryn Vande Logt
Sire: Ch Adili's American Idol
Dam: Ch Wall St Zoom Zoom Zoom Of FM
Owner: Ginny Merchant & George Brown

There were far too many ridgebacks entered for my comfort -- 56, far and away the most numerous breed at the show. I have had ridgebacks since 1986 and used to have to explain them to nearly everyone we met. Now it's rare that people don't recognize them straight off. I hate seeing any breed become popular for fear that it will go into cookie-cutter sameness at one end of the breeding continuum and genetic chaos at the other end.

But it's nice to know that other people think Esme is a pretty girl. There were only five merit awards handed out, so it is significant, and she is listed first.

At the time that top picture was taken, Ginny told me that Esme had to regularly be shooed out of the whelping box because she was so fascinated with the puppies that she wanted to be with them all the time. This is a good thing, since she will have a chance now to create some of her own.

And they will all be lovely examples of the breed, though none of them will be nearly as cute as her former kennel mate who, you may note, is no longer living in Florida.

This is rather a long video, but if you skip to the end, Esme and Ginny appear at the one-minute (remaining) mark.

 Arlo Guthrie, Colorado Springs, Nov. 1980

This interview appeared in the Colorado Springs Sun, Nov. 21, 1980. The photos are by Scott Wright. I interviewed Arlo by phone the morning before the concert, then went to hear Tom Hayden speak on campus at Colorado College. Before the talk began, Arlo walked in and sat down behind me and we ended up talking for another 20 minutes or so. He's really a what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of guy. A few weeks after it appeared, I got a nice letter from Arlo's mother, Marjorie, which I thought was very cool.

Arlo Guthrie is a genuinely nice man.

After at least three other interviews and an energetic, substantial concert in the evening, he is standing backstage undergoing yet another cross-examination, this time by an earnest young student who wants to know if he thinks there will be an American war in the Persian Gulf.

He smiles his Arlo smile and takes a sip of beer, then begins an Arlo spiel in that same funny Arlo cadence so familiar from ''Alice's Restaurant" and "Reuben Clamzo." Is he serious? Does he really believe that we're contemplating a military annexation of Mexico to solve the energy crisis and the illegal alien problem in one fell swoop? The interviewer isn't certain, and jokes a little, but not too much ....

Twelve hours before, the cadence wasn't there. Maybe it only comes on after concerts. But when he was talking about his father and the hard-hitting biography, "Woody Guthrie: A Life," that has just hit the bookstores, his voice was lower, his tone serious, without the "ain'ts" and the "gonnas" that sprinkle his language in lighter moments. He has read Joe Klein's no-punches-pulled work.

"That's a really good book," he enthused with an almost salesman-like exuberance.

But wasn't it painful for the family?

Woody Guthrie's bout with Huntington's chorea is detailed without gloss or euphemism, from the sudden outbursts of violence to the daily continuing examples of behavior so bizarre that friends deserted him and rumors spread of alcoholism and advanced venereal disease, even after the nature of his illness was known. It must be very difficult to read about your father in this manner, when to most of the world he is still the happy, guitar-slinging little hobo.

"Well, one of the nice things about the book is that it makes up for that joke of a movie and some of the other things like that." In Arlo's world, it's better to be reminded of painful truth by Joe Klein than to endure the lies in David Carradine's fairytale," "Bound For Glory."

Both the title of Carradine's movie and the glorification of Woody Guthrie bring back a song in which Phil Ochs said of Woody;

Now they sing out his praises on every distant shore, 
But so few remember what he was fighting for.
Why sing the songs and forget about the aim?
He wrote them for a reason; why not sing them for the same?"

Ochs and the elder Guthrie had a kinship of their own: Both were topical singers in troubled times.

Woody Guthrie sang for the communist groups who were the organizers of labor unions in the '30s. His famous "This Land is Your Land" was written as a working man's version of "God Bless America," a version that would express love for the country without pretending that everyone in it had a good job and enough to eat.

Phil Ochs wrote civil rights and anti-war songs in the '60s and, together with Arlo Guthrie, was called as a witness at the trial of the Chicago Eight, though neither was allowed to testify.

The most chilling similarity, however, is that both balladeers became increasingly unstable towards the ends of their lives and lost most of their friends. Ochs committed suicide; Guthrie died in a hospital.

Arlo brought out an important point about Woody, however: "Phil was so interested, so driven to be attached to the anti-war movement, to the civil rights movement, that when it became less faddish, he was left without an identity. My old.man always retained his identity and brought it with him to the groups he was involved with, and it was who he was and what he thought of himself that was always getting him into trouble with them.
"It wasn't a case at all of trying to gain an identity by fitting in with a group. My father never fit into organized movements, he never fit in really with the communists."

Perhaps the communists' were too humorless, took too utilitarian an attitude towards life? 

 

"Not the people he was with," Arlo is quick to correct. "In fact, the only real criticism that has emerged about the book from my father's contemporaries is that Joe Klein was too hard on the Old Left, primarily because he was writing from a vantage point of 20 years of hindsight. He exaggerates somewhat and leaves the impression that they were really naive dupes.
"It's not that they had such a feel for communism so much as the personal involvement in those particular goals of social justice and so forth. Everything he says is true, every fact in there is right, but the facts he recites aren't counterbalanced by a feeling for the powerful personalities of the people involved. For them, it was a personal ideology, a desire to see a world where the rich guy wasn't always hitting the little guy over the head all the time."

So that whole group, so hard hit by the McCarthy hearings, weren't really communists after all?

"Well, to this day, if you ask Pete Seeger about his communist days, he invariably says, 'Well, you know, the American Indians are communist.” You can call it communism, but it's a lot more than simply a matter of the system in which the state relates to the individual. It's a way of life, no matter what you call yourself.
"All those people, you have to ask yourself, would they fit into a Communist system as it exists, say, in Russia? And you have to answer certainly not. Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Leadbelly, those guys would be just as rebellious over there as they were over here. Which wouldn't work out for them.
"So when Phil Ochs and those people came along in the '60s, they realized this, but they didn't know what they should call themselves. They decided on 'New Left,' so you had the New Left and the Old Left, who were just as committed to the same things they'd been doing all along."

Arlo Guthrie is less dogmatically political in his art than either his father or more recent "topical" singers; but isn't afraid to sing from a soapbox on occasion, as he did last Thursday night: He assailed nuclear energy with a song that shares its tune with a multitude of old songs including one that was a campaign song for Harrison and Tyler in 1840. A traditional tune, certainly, but hardly a traditional topic.

"I consider myself a traditionalist with a small ‘t,’" he explained. “I have a big of disagreement with the capital 'T' Traditionalists who are only interested in ‘Traditional' music. I think good music becomes traditional, that it does come out of the air to isolated people, moving them, almost like the wind, you know, the wind that has always inspired people to write and sing. It's that common experience that a song may have with another song that is actually called Traditional.
"I'm not afraid to call 'Coming into Los Angeles' traditional, or something by the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, because some of those songs become classics, like 'Yesterday.' A fellow came up to me after my last concert and said, 'How come you didn't do enough political songs? I thought you were going to come out here and get really angry at everybody. What happened to all those songs?'"

He paused to chuckle.

"Well, you know, what social value does 'Old Joe Clark' have? What was its social value at the time it was written? 'Old Joe Clark' was the disco of the 17th, 18th century. There's nothing anti-folk/traditional about doing fun songs.
"Folk music comes from all kinds of places for all kinds of reasons, and some of it is funny and some of it is irrelevant and some, on the other hand, is deeply moving and really relevant.
"You can't get much deep meaning out of the words of 'Old Joe Clark,' but then, you can't dance to 'A Hard Rain's A-gonna Fall,' either. I just try to incorporate what I think is real, incorporate that into the music I perform at a particular time."

Later that night, listening to a long-ago tale about Officer Obie and the eight-by-10 color glossy photos with the circles and arrows, you realize you are, indeed, listening to a traditional song, whether you call it that or not, because you're enjoying it and it's reminding you of things beyond just the song itself. What Arlo said in the morning, he proved on stage at night: That it doesn't matter what-you call a song, or a person. It's the underlying qualities which reveal its identity.

I came across this interview while I was looking for something else, but then this morning, I visited the outstanding folk music blog of a college coffeehouse colleague, Jim Moran, and thought maybe I should go ahead and scan this in. And now that you've read what I have to say, go see what he has to say. Yeah, and he plays better, too.

Why isn't this a more common sight?

These aren't starving African children at an aid station, eating donated rice. They aren't sick, they aren't covered with flies, they aren't malnourished.

These are healthy, happy African children in a desert climate, cheerfully eating African food from their families' gardens, good, nutritious, native food that doesn't require irrigation and that doesn't fail completely when the rains don't come.

It is not a difficult concept: There would be no people in those areas, if it were not possible for the land to support them. Starvation and famine are the result of encouraging people to plant non-native cash crops that will not thrive.

I've blogged about the Eden Foundation before, which I discovered through a website I was alerted to not because of the good work they are doing, but because Esther Garvi, whose family founded the program and who grew up in rural Niger, has a Rhodesian ridgeback whose pictures she posts on her own blog.

Now my cyberfriend and fellow ridgeback owner has started a new blog that is inspiring, informative and an absolute delight: www.edengardens.org

There you can see delightful pictures of her neighbors and read short accounts of their lives. The Eden approach is a way of thinking about, and of respecting, native people that needs to spread. As stated in the "About" section of the blog, "From the very beginning, Eden’s purpose has never been to tell people how to live their lives, but to supply them with options that will enable them to achieve a sustainable life, independent of external assistance."

In the past year, there were news reports that the rains had not come, the millet crop had failed and the poor people of Niger were reduced to eating leaves.

It sounded so dire, but, knowing the work of the Eden Foundation, I wondered. After all, I eat leaves regularly: Lettuce, cabbage, artichokes, spinach ... Could I be starving and not even know it?

Esther addressed the topic in a post and identified these particular leaves as malahiya, which she notes is not only delicious itself but can be sold at a good price in the city.

I try not to be too cynical, but when I contrast the approach of setting up aid stations (pulling people off their land instead of encouraging them to farm efficiently) with the Eden approach of helping people to learn to be self-supporting, it's hard not to look upon calls for international assistance with a wary eye.

Perhaps there are places where the Eden approach cannot work, but, again, I would have to ask, how did people live there for thousands of years, before there were trucks and airplanes and large bags of grain to be distributed?

In any case, Stories from Edenland is going on my daily bookmark list because I like to read about things that work and to see pictures of smiling children.

 While hair was cut, male generations were joined

(This column originally ran in the Press-Republican, Plattsburgh, NY, June 12, 1994, 50 years after D-Day)

"The next generation is coming, and they need to know what happened," D-Day Veteran John Bacon told the Press-Republican. "Guys like me won't be around for the next 50 years to tell about it."

Of all the hundreds of thousands of words about D-Day over the past few weeks, none were more important than those: The next generation needs to know what happened, and there is only so much time left to gather the stories.

My grandfather was old enough to remember the first automobile in Ironwood, Mich., and lived long enough to see mankind walk on the moon, but he didn't tell many stories. He felt only old men did that, old men who bored their children with endless reminiscences of the Good Old Days.

My father has left more behind him, in the form of letters and a journal. And I will, no doubt, leave my children a haystack of published and unpublished memoirs to deal with when I'm gone.

But passing on stories from father to son, or grandfather to grandson, is not the same as passing on a cultural legacy from generation to generation.

For that, you need a marketplace, somewhere for the generations to meet.

Much of what I know about being a man, I learned at the barbershop. Women talk about the stories and lore that were passed on when women quilted, and there is even a play called "Quilters."

Maybe we need a play about men, called "Haircut."

There were two barbers in Star Lake, too many, really, for such a little place, and you had to choose to give your trade to Bob or to Charley, both of whom you knew, both of whom you would see at church, both of whom had children in school with you. Both of them were even school bus drivers.

You had to call them "Mr. Noody" and "Mr. Henry," but you thought of them as Bob and Charley, because that's what all the men at the barbershop called them.

When I was little, we went to Bob Noody, because it was handier for our dad to pick us up on his way home from work. The three of us took the bus there after school, got our hair cut and then sat and waited for our ride, while we looked at Sports Afield and listened to the men talking.

Bob had a picture on his wall of dogs playing poker, and another humorous picture depicting some hunting trip disaster. There were placards of combs and butch wax you could buy, and his barber college certificate hung on the wall. There wasn't much girlie stuff around; Bob's shop was attached to his home, and, anyway, he had more class than to have a lot of junk around the place, what with all of us kids coming in to get our hair cut.

I'm sure the jokes and stories were different when we weren't around, of course, because there were times someone would start to say something and Bob would cough and cock an eyebrow in our direction and then everyone would chuckle and pass on to another topic.

The men talked about hunting and fishing, about baseball and hockey, and about politics. And they talked about the war.

There was more than one war, of course. I was a middle child in my family, so my dad went to World War II. Some of my friends were the oldest in their families; their dads had been in Korea. Some of the older men had been in World War I.

One time, they got to talking about World War II, and Bob stopped cutting hair for a moment to pull up his trouser leg. He had a couple of round scars on his legs, about the size of quarters, from where he got shot while he was parachuting. Later, my dad told me Bob was a Ranger, and that the other guys in the army all knew the Rangers were the toughest guys around. I remember the tone of respect, almost awe, with which he spoke.

That made me look at Bob a little differently. He was kind and he always had a twinkle in his eye when he said hello to you, and he always had something special to say to you, on the bus or in church or whenever he saw you away from the barber shop. He always let you know that he was your friend, and that you were his friend, too. I think he was as pleased as I was, the day I was finally tall enough that I didn't need him to put the padded board across the arms of the barber chair.

I thought guys who jumped out of airplanes and shot people were mean and tough, but Bob wasn't mean at all. But, if he was a Ranger, that meant he was tough. It made me stop and think that maybe being tough isn't the same thing as being mean.

I don't know if there is anything more important for a boy to know than that.

I talked to my mom the other day, and she said Bob saw some of his friends on television, the guys from the 101st Airborne who were going to jump again on D-Day. Bob didn't go back to Normandy, but I'm sure he gave it more than a brief thought.

My dad didn't get to Europe until sometime after D-Day, and his stories from the war had less to do with combat than with hungry, frightened people left in the wake of the Nazi defeat. But I knew something of D-Day because of Bob, and being at Bob's barbershop.

It's ironic that, when my generation's war came along, we stopped going to barbershops. It wasn't a political decision; it was a question of fashion. We had our girlfriends cut our hair, because they knew more about dealing with long hair than the barbers did, back then.

Today, the barbershops are nearly gone. I don't know that either of my boys have ever been in a real barbershop, "real" in the sense of having Sports Afield on the table and pictures on the walls of dogs playing poker. "Real" in the sense that your mother might drop you off, but she wouldn't come in.

"Real" in the sense that a boy got a lot more at a barbershop than just a haircut.

Bob Noody in 2004

Another friend from home

When I wrote about my friend Bill, I mentioned one of the last times we spoke.  "It was a fine conversation, with Bill and our friend Crandall, whose story is worth a whole other post." 

This is that post. That's Crandall, #44, next to Bill. A genuinely good man, but someone who, as a kid, had a steep hill to climb, not because of his own situation, but because of a situation he found himself in. He had strong character, good parents and solid values. But he had the wrong last name.

Here's a column I wrote in 1995 for the Press-Republican of Plattsburgh, NY:

When my buddy came to school each September, the teacher always had a welcoming speech ready:  "Sit down and shut up. I don't want any trouble from you."

You see, he had the misfortune to be on the Faculty Mafia's hit-list.

The Faculty Mafia is a lot like the real thing: If you ask, everyone tells you it doesn't exist. It's a myth. There's no such thing.

And that's correct, to this extent: There is no formal organization, there is no recorded hit list, there is no way to trace anything. But the fact remains that every school has a core of teachers who, if you get on the wrong side of one, whether you are a kid, an untenured teacher or even an administrator with a delicate constitution, you might just as well pack up your books and move on down the road.

My friend had cousins and uncles who raised hell, and that was enough. When the family name turned up on the class roster, the old hands would roll their eyes and groan about the awful things to be expected from him, and declare that the only thing to do was to jump right on him before things got out of control.

My dad was constantly confused, because he was both my dad and a school board member, which meant he'd meet my friends in real life and get to know them, and then he'd hear about them at school board meetings and wonder how they had suddenly turned into such monsters.

In this case, he remembered my buddy from Cub Scouts, and from altar boys, and he couldn't understand why the teachers had so much trouble with him. What was confusing him, of course, was that he still thought of my friends as nice kids, so he treated them like nice kids, and so they behaved toward him like nice kids.

Most folks are like that.

Anyway, I remember sitting with my buddy in a diner late one afternoon. He was telling me that he had decided to drop out and take a job in Rochester that, I kept trying to tell him, was never going to get him anywhere.

But the only place he wanted to get was out of town, and I was hard-pressed to explain why he should stay in school. He'd flunked two years and was now only a sophomore to my senior. For me, staying in school meant a few more months; for him it was another two and half years, more if they nailed him again.

And you have to know how that time would be spent: If I were out in the hall without a pass, I'd get yelled at. He'd be put on detention at the very least. It had been that way for years, and I couldn't advise him to stick around where he clearly wasn't wanted.

So he left for Rochester and I finished school and went on to college, and we didn't see each other again for quite a while.

Then I came home for vacation and there he was, in the bar where we all hung out. He limped over, cane in hand, and we embraced in the middle of the floor, two 20-year-olds with a friendship that went back a decade-and-a-half.

We bought each other several beers, and he told me about Vietnam, and about his time rehabbing in stateside hospitals and how he was hopeful of being 100 percent before too much time had gone by.

He wasn't at all bitter. In fact, while he hadn't enjoyed being blown up, he'd had a pretty decent time since he left town, all things considered.

In the space between his words, I heard his story.

Basic training strips you of your identity, and you're only a number to the military.

Well, maybe that's bad, if you've gotten special privileges because of your name.

But he must have found a wonderful liberation at Parris Island, when those screaming, bullying drill instructors saw the name tag on his clothes and didn't even bother to read it.

They treated him like garbage, but he was used to that. What he wasn't used to was that they treated everyone like garbage. Not only that, but it seems his physical strength and mental toughness were seen as positive attributes, not the warning signs of a low-bred, hillbilly troublemaker.

In other words, he started on exactly the same footing as everyone else, and then was judged solely on his own actions and abilities, and he responded by becoming a good Marine.

It's a nice story, but those days are past. With cuts in defense, high-school dropouts can't get into the service anymore, and the only way today's kids could have that experience would be for us to declare war on somebody.

Might I suggest the Faculty Mafia?

Of course, since then we have gotten back into a war, which opens the doors of opportunity once more. I would still prefer that there be other ways for a young person of good character to succeed.

Bill

Pardon me if this is not as well constructed, as coherent, as my regular posts.

Begin here: Bill's was the house where I didn't have to knock. And, if he wasn't home, I'd come in, sit at the kitchen table and talk to his mother instead. At some point, I started calling his folks "Mom" and "Dad" as a joke, because I was over there so often, but, after awhile, I just called them that because it felt comfortable and right. He did the same with my folks. Bill was family.

My dad was the assistant manager at the mine. Bill's dad worked on the trains that moved the ore. Now, on one level, this meant that my dad was an MIT graduate and I'm not sure his dad finished high school, but that had no real significance. None of us ever thought like that, and shame on us if we had.

No, the significance of that was that his dad was a shift worker and mine worked 8-to-5, which, in turn, meant that his family ate dinner at 5 o'clock and mine ate at 6:30.

For a pair of hollow-legged junior high kids, that meant, if we played our cards right, we could eat at Bill's house and then walk over to my house and have dinner again. It worked pretty well until our mothers began comparing notes.

Bill and I were best friends, but we weren't inseparable. It wasn't that kind of friendship. It was more than that.

Looking back, I'm not sure what we had in common except that we liked each other. I think that's what made our friendship so solid. There were no reasons why we were so close. We simply wanted to be friends. There was never anyone in my life I liked as much as I liked Bill, and there was never anyone who had my back the way he did. He was Sundance to my Butch.


Bill was in chorus, he played trumpet in the band and, after I'd graduated and left town, he played in a rock band with my little brother. I was a guitarslinger in college and played in an Irish band later, but it was all for show. Music never rose to the level of importance in my life that it did in Bill's.

But I enjoyed singing and Bill and I sang, mostly walking home from town in the dark, from streetlamp to streetlamp under the overhanging maples. We sang Irish folk songs like "Courting in the Kitchen" and especially "The Rocky Road to Dublin," since each verse of the latter can be done in one breath if you are very careful and walk at the right pace. And we sang, "When I Woke Up This Morning (You Were On My Mind)" and other pop tunes.

People along our route knew when we were going by, but they didn't seem to mind. I guess we didn't sound so bad.

Bill wasn't into the bar scene and very rarely came to the bar in town, despite the fact that it was the only place open after six o'clock and was a hangout even for those under the 18 drinking age. I was down there a lot, but not with Bill. I never nagged him about it. It wasn't his deal. I don't think we ever got drunk together, either. And that was okay. Bill wasn't into it.

When we first started hanging out together, we'd go out in the woods and shoot BB guns, but we outgrew that soon enough and began to center our lives around the pool table in my basement. I don't know how many games of pool we shot -- eight ball and rotation and Kelly and straight pool and such -- but we got pretty good at it. We also got pretty good at hashing out the world's problems as we shot.

At his house, we listened to the stereo. We knew all of Bill Cosby's routines by heart, and spun Herb Alpert's records until they nearly wore out. Bill's older sister ignored us, which is what older sisters do, and I think his younger sister had a crush on me for about an hour and a half. Long enough to accidentally bounce a rock off my head and embarrass herself to pieces. She was awfully cute, but also awfully young, and eventually married the little brother of a friend. Nice pair of kids and I think they're still together. Hope so.

Bill's dad lay on the couch after dinner and we left him alone. He worked hard and deserved his own time, and he wasn't much of a conversationalist to begin with. Didn't effect the way I felt about him, or the way he felt about me, as it turned out.

Once there was a forest fire along the railroad tracks, caused by a broken spark arrestor that had spewed sparks into the woods for a couple of miles. I was just 16, but Bill wasn't, yet, so I got to leave school to go help fight the fire. We filled our Indian tanks and climbed up on the locomotive to be taken from the crossroads down to the scene of the fire, and Bill's dad was on the crew that took us there. He didn't say anything to me, but he gave me a quick wink and a grin. He was proud of me for being there, and I was proud of his approval.

A couple of years later, I was home for Easter and walked over to Bill's house. He wasn't there, but his mother told me he'd gone downtown to find his little sister. I was walking in that direction when the forest ranger swung by in his pickup and said, "Peterson! Get in!" There was a fire, and he was empowered to impress anyone over 16 to help put it out.

I climbed in the back and we drove another half mile before we came across Bill, his little sister and her boyfriend. "Gebo! Get in!" the Ranger barked at Bill, then looked at the boyfriend. "Iaquinta, how old are you?" But he wasn't old enough to be impressed, and was left behind. I shouted to Mary Faith to call my folks and let them know where I was headed.

Bill and I spent about six hours on that fire and it was a great benefit. We weren't all that useful as firefighters, but it gave us an opportunity to be together and talk.

A year or so later, I saw him again. He was a pallbearer at my little brother's funeral. He was incredibly uncomfortable, so deep in his own pain that he could barely deal with the notion of having to play a public role in a very difficult moment for our entire town. I have nothing to say about that, except that there are debts that cannot be repaid.I already respected him. I already loved him. This just reminded me of why.

My next substantial time with Bill, after Tony's death, was at a bar in town with him, and my then-wife, and the Kyer sisters and a husband and a boyfriend of theirs. It was one of the best nights of drinking and talking I've ever experienced. Cathy and Cheryl were girls that every guy in high school had a crush on, but this was 10 years later and we could relax. For one thing, besides being incredibly cute, they were our buddies. For another, they'd chosen really good guys.It was a terrific night of nostalgia and philosophy and good vibes. If you asked me to freeze my life in a 12-hour period to be relived endlessly, that might well be the moment.

What I remember was that we began to talk about Tony, and about another departed friend, Jim Terry, a classmate of mine. We talked about Tony and Jim for a few minutes, and then one of the Kyer sisters stopped us. I don't remember which of them it was. "I can't talk about this anymore," she said. We were such close friends that there were things we all understood that were too painful to pursue.And yet we were such close friends that we could talk until we reached that critical point. And, at this moment, that was where we were.

I saw Bill again at a kind of homecoming that we have, given that our community is too small to try to rally individual classes for reunions. It was a fine conversation, with Bill and our friend Crandall, whose story is worth a whole other post. At that moment, we were three friends and it was worth anything in the world to be there then.

Shortly thereafter, my mother admitted that maintaining a large house designed for nine people was ineffective for one person and finally sold out. I went up to help with clearing out the old family home, after half a century.

It was my last moment in Star Lake as a resident, and so, as was only right, when we were done, I went to see Bill.  I gave him the eight-ball from that pool table over which we'd spent so many hours. We misted up, we hugged. We sat and talked for awhile.

But we knew that I was leaving town. This was it.I gave him one last hug and then drove out of town.

That was five years ago. This year, on Christmas day, Bill had a stroke. And then he died.

I love Bill Gebo. I always will. He is the best friend I have ever had, and there is nothing more to be said.

I know what it means to lose a brother, and Bill was as close to Tony as I was.

And so it is appropriate for me to say that I have now, once more, lost a brother.

Christmas 1952

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by His Old Man

(see below)

 So long, Sid and Alma

(This column originally ran in the Press-Republican of Plattsburgh, NY, in December, 1988)

I guess I won't be hearing from Alma and Sid this year.

They've sent a card every Christmas since 1974, usually early in the season. Alma doesn't procrastinate. Their card was always one of the first to arrive.

It was never a fancy card, never sentimental or religious, usually one of those whimsical cards with Santa sunbathing by a swimming pool or the reindeer pulling his golf cart or something of the sort.

And there was never a message, just their names, in what I assumed was Alma's handwriting. For years, it was "Sid and Alma and the kids," then it was "Sid and Alma." The last couple of years, it was "Alma and Sid." A little palace revolution, perhaps.

If you're waiting for some tearjerking tale about two lonely recluses with terminal diseases, spending their last pittances to mail out holiday greetings, forget it. And I don't have a fascinating, touching story to tell of how Sid and Alma acted as parents to me at a time when I really needed an anchor in this ol' world.

Fact is, I haven't got the faintest idea of who these people are.

All I know is that, a few weeks after we moved to Colorado Springs in 1974, we got the first card, postmarked Livonia, Mich. We racked our brains, trying to think of old business contacts, friends of our parents, parents of our friends.

The only guy I knew with that last name had done time in Joliet and was wanted by the Army for desertion, and I didn't think he'd be dumb enough to change his first name and then let everyone know where he was living. Anyway, if he sent whimsical cards, it would be Santa stealing a Mercedes or something, not sunning himself by the pool.

We asked a guy with my name if they were maybe friends of his, but he didn't know any Sid and Alma, either. We let it drop.

The next year, we got another card, and we wondered if maybe we should send them a note and let them know that they apparently had the wrong Petersons and might want to check on their friends. But, we figured, the right Petersons would probably send them a card or give them a call or drop them a line sometime and  then they would know.

Apparently not. The cards kept coming.

We continued to think that maybe we ought to set them straight, but by then the thing had begun to take on a bizarre fascination. How long would they continue to pump out the Christmas cards without any response?

Indefinitely, I guess. Last Christmas, my mail was still eligible for forwarding from Colorado Springs, since I had been here just a shade under six months. Sure enough, Alma and Sid's card came through, with a notation from the Postal Service suggesting I advise my correspondents of my correct address.

I didn't, of course. We had decided a long time ago that it would be cheating to encourage them in their spendthrift ways.

But I would like to be a fly on the wall in Livonia, Mich., when this year's card comes back to them, and Sid asks Alma, "Who the heck are the Petersons, anyway?"

The Speaker and the Demagogue
Were walking near the reef;
They wept like anything to see
So many on relief:
"If they would only go away,"
They said, "t’would cure our grief!"

"If tax breaks for the upper class
Could last beyond this year,
Do you suppose," the Speaker said,
"These poor would disappear?"
"I’m certain," said the Demagogue,
And shed a bitter tear.

"It seems a shame," the Speaker said,
"To play them such a trick,
After we've led them on so far,
With promises so slick!"
The Demagogue said nothing but
"Their health care makes me sick!"

"I weep for them," the Speaker said:
"I deeply sympathize."
With sobs and tears he sorted out
Those of the largest size,
Holding his pocket-handkerchief
Before his streaming eyes.

"O Listeners," said the Demagogue,
"You've had a pleasant run!
Shall you be tuning in again?'
But answer came there none--
And this was scarcely odd, because
They'd eaten every one.

Vaska has arrived

From left, Vasily Vasilievich Orlov-Denisov, Vasily Dmitrich Denisov and Denis Vasilievich Davydov

Tolstoy is acknowledged to have used Davydov, the romantic partisan cavalryman and poet, as a model for the character of Nicholai Rostov's brother-in-arms Vaska Denisov, but it's obvious he took at least part of the name from the Cossack cavalry commander Orlov-Denisov, who was both more prominent and more conventional than Davydov.

The fellow on the left was a Don Cossack, the one on the right, though he rode with Cossacks, was apparently not ethnically one himself. The one in the middle is proving to be a perfect little Tatar, and that's what I was hoping for. The character in "War and Peace" for whom he is named is a sidekick in the got-your-back sense of the Sundance Kid rather than in the whatever-you-say-boss sense of Sancho Panza.


Vaska flew into Burlington Thursday night, just in time for a holiday photo promotion Saturday to support the dog park that he won't be allowed to visit until after his next round of puppy shots on the 28th. Meanwhile, we're taking walks at another, less potentially infectious, park to try to work off some of the energy of this little fellow.

The first night, he slept fairly well, but that was apparently the result of a long day of airplanes and airports coming up from Orlando. Friday night, he regaled the house all night long with rousing choruses of the dog folksong, "I Do Not Wish To Be In This Crate." And the house next door as well, apparently, since on Saturday the neighbor commented, across the fence and two driveways that separate us, that he had figured I had a new puppy after hearing the commotion the night before. Yes, in winter with all windows closed.

And Saturday's holiday shoot was a pretty good demonstration of why we should all be happy that human babies are not terribly mobile, because a nine-week-old puppy is very much a baby and we ended up with a great many out-of-focus shots of a 19-pound puppy running around pulling up the fluffy cotton floor spread, attacking the decorative stuffed animals and attempting to undecorate the tree, before we finally got a few of him sitting still without a restraining hand in the shot.

On the other hand, he is wonderfully social and was pleased to greet everyone at the store, and I have no doubt that he will be very nice to walk down the street with.

Assuming he eventually comes to realize the difference between a leashed dog and a roped calf.

Waiting for the vacuum cleaner, or someone like him

I had two granddaughters over for dinner and a movie the other night. After they left, I had to pick up a few pieces of popcorn from the floor.

It really made me feel put upon: I haven't had to pick up food from the floor in a very long time. I think it was 1997 when my dog O'Malley had a heart attack, and I had to wait three or four weeks for Destry to be old enough to leave his mother and come live with me.

Before that, it was another three- or four-week stint between giving up Creamcheese, a dog I had been keeping for an ex-girlfriend who finally moved off-campus, and joining up with Taylor, a little mix who provided laughs, mostly at his own expense, for the next 14 years. That was in September, 1970.

So Vaska arrives Friday, and popcorn isn't the only thing I'm getting up off the floor between now and then, because popcorn isn't the only thing that he's going to decide belongs in his mouth. It's been a long time since I've had to puppy-proof a home and I am not running out of things to do while I wait for the vacuum cleaner.

UPDATE: The vacuum cleaner will not arrive until Monday, possibly Tuesday. He had a bit of minor surgery -- the sort of thing that is absolutely necessary but not major -- and apparently got a couple of his stitches yanked while he was playing with the Big Dogs. So there's some swelling that needs to come down and he'll be along shortly. And I just won't make popcorn until then.

I don't know why you say good-bye, I say hello

Zee, that lovely, gentle girl, is suddenly gone, and there's not much to be said about it. She had been having some pain and mobility issues all summer and at first they responded to a combination of rest or exercise depending on what she had been up to the day before. And then about a month ago, she started a real decline. One night, she shifted on the couch and was suddenly ki-yi-ing in agony. I brought her to the vet and he thought he had found the answer.

Unfortunately, he had not. I've always said that I'd spend any amount of money for something that worked but not a penny on something that would only make me feel better and not help the dog. This suddenly went from one of the former to one of the latter. When he did a secondary exam before the scheduled operation, things didn't add up and some additional testing showed deterioration of the spinal chord, a condition that made the test itself too much for the girl. There was no point in even waking her up, since she would have been in agony and would likely not have even made it home.

As it was, her last conscious time was fairly pleasant. Some painkillers were helping and she was able to go to the dogpark and see her friends, human and canine. And that was that. A fun, terrific dog and the house is brutally empty at the moment.

I knew I couldn't be like that very long and began to make some contacts. I expected, at best, to find a new litter somewhere that might be ready in six weeks or a month. But by sheer happenstance, when I contacted a ridgeback breeder in Florida who had been a classmate of my brother in high school, she had a rambunctious male puppy nearly ready to go out the door. He will arrive a week from Friday, and it happens to be a week that I have off, so we can have plenty of time for bonding and going for walks and suchlike.

That is a picture of Vaska and his brothers above. "Vaska" is short for Vasili Dmitreivich Denisov, whom Tolstoy fans will remember as the brave, tender-hearted, fearless, romantic leader of Cossack partisan cavalry. Brother-in-arms to Nicholai Rostov, he's one of the great "buddies" in all of literature.

And I'd say he has big shoes to fill, but, then again, look at those feet.

Liars, damned liars and Fox News

Fox News has outdone themselves, decrying Barack Obama's children's book because it included Sitting Bull as one of the great Americans profiled. "Obama Praises Indian Chief Who Killed U.S. General," the headline read.

Now, first of all, Custer, though named a brevet general during the Civil War, had resumed his rank of colonel at the time of his death, with "Gen. Custer" being only a honorary title. More to the point, while Sitting Bull was in the Indian camp at the time of Custer's attack, he had no military role whatsoever, even as a footsoldier. The defense of the combined force was lead by Crazy Horse and Gall. 

So there was no general present, and Sitting Bull didn't participate in the battle.

Not only is Fox News completely inaccurate, but they aren't even terribly original in their bigotry and lies. Luther Standing Bear was a young Lakota at the Carlisle School in the late 19th century, and worked at Wanamaker's Department Store in Philadelphia. He tells this story in his autobiography, "My People the Sioux." 

Hucksters, liars and cheats haven't changed much.

********

One evening while going home from work, I bought a paper, and read that Sitting Bull, the great Sioux medicine man, was to appear at one of the Philadelphia theaters.

The paper stated that he was the Indian who killed General Custer! The chief and his people had been held prisoners of war, and now here they were to appear in a Philadelphia theater. So I determined to go and see what he had to say, and what he was really in the East for.

I had to pay fifty cents for a ticket. The theater was decorated with many Indian trappings such as were used by the Sioux tribe of which I was a member.

On the stage sat four Indian men, one of whom was Sitting Bull. There were two women and two children with them. 

A white man came on the stage and introduced Sitting Bull as the man who had killed General Custer (which, of course, was absolutely false).

Sitting Bull arose and addressed the audience in the Sioux tongue, as he did not speak nor understand English. He said, 'My friends, white people, we Indians are on our way to Washington to see the Grandfather, or President of the United States. I see so many white people and what they are doing, that it makes me glad to know that some day my children will be educated also. There is no use fighting any longer. The buffalo are all gone, as well as the rest of the game. Now I am going to shake the hand of the Great Father at Washington, and I am going to tell him all these things.' 

Then Sitting Bull sat down. He never even mentioned General Custer's name.

Then the white man who had introduced Sitting Bull arose again and said he would interpret what the chief had said. He then started in telling the audience all about the battle of the Little Big Horn, generally spoken of as the 'Custer massacre.' He mentioned how the Sioux were all prepared for battle, and how they had swooped down on Custer and wiped his soldiers all out. He told so many lies that I had to smile.

One of the women on the stage observed me and said something to the other woman, then both of them kept looking at me.

Then the white man said that all those who wished to shake hands with Sitting Bull would please line up if they cared to meet the man who had killed Custer. The whole audience got in line, as they really believed what the white man had told them. 

It made me wonder what sort of people the whites were, anyway. Perhaps they were glad to have Custer killed, and were really pleased to shake hands with the man who had killed him!

I lined up with the others and started for the stage, not intending to say a word. But the woman who had first noticed me smiling from my seat, watched me all the closer as I came toward them. She grabbed me by the hand, not knowing exactly what to say and not knowing if I were really an Indian boy.

Finally she spoke in Sioux as follows: 'Niye osni tona leci,' which meant, 'How many colds (or winters) are you here?' I replied in Sioux, 'In winter we have so many cold days here that I do not know really how many colds I have been here.'

That sort of broke the ice, and she laughed, then the other Indians laughed. Then she asked me who my father was. I replied, 'Standing Bear of Rosebud is my father.'

‘Why,' she exclaimed, 'then you are my nephew.' Then she called her brother, who was Sitting Bull. 'See who is here.' He was pleased to see me again.

Of course this caused some excitement among the crowd of white people. I had been working in the store so long that I had become lighter in complexion. All the Indians then crowded about me, forgetting all about shaking hands with the crowd of white people, who could not understand it.

The white man who had spoken on the stage now came up to see what was the matter and why the Indians had suddenly left off shaking hands with the others. Sitting Bull beckoned him to come up, then he turned to me and said, 'Tell this white man we want you to go to our hotel with us to eat.'

So I interpreted what Sitting Bull requested, and the man said, 'Why, yes, you can come with them.' Then the Indians packed up their things which decorated the hall and were very anxious to get back to the hotel where they could have a talk with someone who understood them.

When we reached the hotel, Sitting Bull said to me that he was on his way to Washington to shake hands with the President, and that he wanted his children educated in the white man's way, because there was nothing left for the Indian.

He then asked me how far it was to Washington, and in what direction it was. I told him that it was toward the sunset, and that he was now in Philadelphia, a long way east of Washington. Sitting Bull expressed much surprise, saying, 'Why, we must have passed the place.' Then I told him he certainly had.

Then the white man entered the room, and Sitting Bull said to me again, 'Ask this white man when we are going to see the President, and when we are going home.' The man said to tell him, 'You are soon going home, and on the way you may see the President.' As the man remained in the room, I did not get a chance to tell Sitting Bull how the white man had lied about him on the stage.

And that was the last time I ever saw Sitting Bull alive.

As I sit and think about that incident, I wonder who that crooked white man was, and what sort of Indian agent it could have been who would let these Indians leave the reservation without even an interpreter, giving them the idea they were going to Washington, and then cart them around to different Eastern cities to make money off them by advertising that Sitting Bull was the Indian who slew General Custer!

Of course at that time I was too young to realize the seriousness of it all.

(About 10 years ago, I was working on a project that included material about the Lakota, and came across "My People the Sioux."  I called the tribal historian at Standing Rock to verify that Luther Standing Bear was considered a reliable source and was assured that he and his books are.)

Si mi quieres escribir, ya sabes mi paradero

Actually, what I meant to say was not "If you want to write to me, you know where to find me," but, rather, if you are wondering why I don't update nellieblogs more often, it's because a lot of my energy is being expended over at Comic Strip of the Day.com, where my latest posting is about the New England Webcomics Weekend. 

This particular entry might be a bit too much inside-baseball for non-comics fans, but there's a lot of talk about web vs. print and how all this online stuff works in the real world, and I don't think you have to know much about webcomics to get something out of it. 

In any case, that's where you'll find me. Most days, the favored comic is basically a prompt for whatever is on my mind. Come have a look.

And I'll be back here regularly, too. But the beast is over there, where I have set myself up in a position where I must post every day before 6:45 a.m. 

I think I'm often coherent at that hour, but you be the judge.

And if you wonder at the headline, it is the title of a classic song from the Spanish Civil War. "If you want to write to me, you know where to find me: On the front at Gandesa, in the first line of fire." 

Not all that relevant to this post - in fact, it's not in the least bit relevant - but, damn, it's one helluva great old tune:

Al Jazeera analyzes the Wikileaks files

Okay, this is just under an hour long. Hardly the sort of thing you click on as part of your morning web routine. But it's a very good analysis of the leaked files, covering a great number of topics. I had a few quibbles over questions I wish they had asked or points I wish they had insisted on forcing someone to clarify, but this is, overall, an excellent job, both of taking apart the actual information and of putting into context.

A  source or two are partisan, but you need that perspective. The interviewer doesn't call names, but he certainly lets those couple of people hang themselves. (Notably the fellow who thinks the Americans are supporting Iran's interference. The interviewer doesn't press him to prove it, but, then, why should he? The statement speaks for itself, and adds critical context to his other remarks.) And I don't follow the Wikileaks founder down the line, but he makes some good points.

The section on Blackwater is absolutely appalling, as one would expect, but much of the rest is sad and tragic and often infuriating, yet couched in the context of a sad, tragic and infuriating war where, indeed, sh*t happens.

Not that you aren't permitted to break out a shovel when it does.

So here it is, and I think it matters. When you find that the alternative is "Dancing with the Stars" or something about real housewives, pretend it's just a TV show rather than something on the computer and give it a watch. (You will want to click on it to go to YouTube and then make it full screen.)


It's an hour well-spent.
 
UPDATE: Al Jazeera has lost its press privileges in Morocco and its Rabat bureau has been shut down. From the story:
"It's a very surprising decision from the government, especially because there was no legal background. It's just a very administrative and political decision," Vincent Brossel of Reporters without Borders told Al Jazeera from Paris.
He said that RSF "suspect that this decision is linked to the way your channel has been covering different issues, especially the Western Sahara, and I think it's mainly because you open your microphone to all sides, and not only the government's side".