Notes in November 11

Always forgive your enemies--nothing annoys them so much.

Oscar Wilde, 1854-1900

From the Crypt to Cryptography, Part One

There are things that happened in my life that don’t fit into my self-concept and being a soldier in the U. S. Army is one of them. My son was a soldier for 20 years, a sergeant in the same Signal Corps that I briefly inhabited, but he is the real thing while I was a chimera.

For one thing, he was regular Army, while I was a visitor, volunteered into a special program that assured me that I would be a temporary draftee unless a great cataclysm occurred and I would be called up to defend my nation with my life.

As it happened, I lucked into one of the peculiar periods of peace that confounded our leaders and frustrated our war-mongering economy. Hey, it was 1958 and Korea (1950-1953) was an old nightmare and Viet Nam (1965-1975) was a noxious stew that was not yet on America’s backburner.

I have read enough novels to know that one usually blocks out catastrophic occurrences and they can only be recalled after huge outlays to psychiatrists or psychoanalysts. But, as you will see, I have no shell-shocked half-memory of being a simple soldier and the things that distinguished my brief military career, although unique, were generally unremarkable and non-violent. I simply had not chosen to remember it very well until today.

Most of it can be glossed over with a statement of facts: I was inducted and received at Fort Jackson, SC, marshaled, marched and mashed into shape on Sand Hill at Fort Benning, GA, and prepped, polished and popped out at Fort Monmouth, NJ a year later.

The aim of the Army was to make me a compliant, card-carrying killer, and I went through all the motions in unison with my squad, company, battalion, etc. I learned to dance with my M1 rifle and maintain it as clean and crisp as my closely-cropped head of hair and my neurotically neat foot locker. I learned to throw grenades into unoccupied bunkers, blast at pop up targets while running in formation (the Army had just replaced centuries of shooting at silly bull’s eyes with simulated battlefield situations), stab stationery dummies with my bayonet, and shimmy on my back in the mud under barbed wire while machine guns fired tracer bullets overhead.

I passed all my tests—even PT (physical training), sometimes at the head of my group. Because of my brilliant mathematical, logical and technological abilities (I jest), I was assigned after Boot Camp to the Signal Corps’ elite school at Fort Monmouth, a 40-week program that would prepare me as an expert in cryptography with a specialization in cryptographic machine repair. If anyone was swimming to be a fish out of water, I was headed for the ionosphere.

But let me tell you about the good parts of Basic Training. My skills at making my bed brought me to the attention of Lt. Chavez, the officer in charge of my unit. Chavez was of Mexican descent, I think. I know he was absolutely the neatest, most put together and GI little man I had ever—or would ever—meet. His uniform was always perfect, his brass brassier than anyone on Sand Hill (and there were thousands), the crease in his carefully tailored khakis sharper than a Moorish scimitar. Even his tiny black mustache above the lip of his perfectly burnished brown face was razor sharp and every hair on his head was always plastered in place—and remained so in the barracks, on the parade field, even in the swamps during war games. Explosions could not ruffle that man’s dementedly decent demeanor.

Chavez told me that he reviewed my record and that he had selected (in effect, commanded) me to represent my unit as our ambassador to the Columbus community. My duty was to attend a tea hosted by a bevy of Southern Ladies and Gentleman, smile, tell no military secrets, and try not to embarrass the U. S. Army in general and our Sand Hill unit in particular.

In return I got out of KP and much of my guard duty. I didn’t mind not having to peel potatoes for a while, but I sort of enjoyed guard duty and would miss it. I got to spend time alone and if challenged, I could proudly recite my Social Security number. Learning that number (it is still the only long sequence of digits that I can rattle off today) was one of the great accomplishments of my undiagnosed dyscalculia youth.

The tea was in a grand plantation-style house and there were many men and woman wearing white linen (I swear I remember and I am not making this up). I was wearing my dull green dress uniform, which always made me feel like an asparagus, and I admit enjoying being fussed over by several matrons who plied me with mint juleps. I had never had a mint julep and I was surprised by the amount of herbage in it. It tasted like salad steeped in lemonade.

Asked of my interests, I told me hosts that I enjoyed choral singing, oil painting and listening to Beethoven, Bach and Brahms (I decided against name-dropping Stravinsky). I thought that would make our hordes of killers being trained in their backyard appear more civilized.

When I returned and the reports were in, Chavez was pleased, although he didn’t tell me so. He did tell me that I was to be invited to try out for the Fort’s chorus: its director had apparently been at the Mint Julip affair. Passing the audition was a cinch. I was one of the few willing and able tenors on the base and I soon joined about 40 or so of my fellow recruits, many of whom were black and possessed deep bass voices, on the choral team.

As far as I remember, none of us could sight read music, but (after a few rehearsals) we could all belt out “Go down, Moses!” and other Bible Belt classics in hearty a cappella harmony. My free time and much of what would have been extra duty time at Fort Benning was spent entertaining the faithful in churches and the masses in concerts. I came across a photo (see below) of the chorus recently when cleaning out some old boxes and it sparked long-suppressed memories of how I sang my way through basic training.

Notes in November 10

Learning to See

Original Post: Monday, July 19, 2010

One always dies too soon or too late.

And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up.

You are nothing other than your life.

Jean-Paul Sartre

As a young humanities professor at Penn State University, I once described existentialism–and by extension a person’s life–by comparing it to a stone rolling down a rocky ravine. Its path is drawn by gravity to its ultimate stopping place. It rolls easily over smooth places, pebbles and smaller stones, is bounces off rough rocks, which alter its path and —if it is not stopped by something larger and stronger than itself—it eventually comes to rest among the rubble in the gully below.

Frank C. was one of my rocks and I tumbled quite a way in my life before I fully realized it. I was in high school when I met him—it must have been in the fall or winter of 1956. He was standing on the pedestrian sidewalk on the Minsi Trail Bridge, the ugliest of the three that join North and South Bethlehem. He was hunched over a camera and tripod, aiming west toward the smokestacks that lined the south bank of the Lehigh River.

I don’t know why I was walking in that area–it was at least a 20-block haul from where I lived on Goepp Street on the north side and I had never ventured there before. Whatever the reason, I can play still play the scene in my head, as if it were an eight-millimeter black & white movie clip. There were no other pedestrians on the bridge, except this man and his camera and me. A cold wind raised and lowered his light-colored overcoat like a flag. His collar was pulled up to cover his neck, but his crew cut head was bare. As I got closer, I could see a brick tied to the center of his tripod, for ballast, and that the camera was a twin lens reflex, a Rollei.

It was the first time I had seen one and probably the first time I had seen a real photographer at work. My camera was a Soligor, an inexpensive imitation of the coveted Rollei, and I was still at the stage of making contact prints and saving up to equip my little darkroom with an enlarger. It was like stumbling across Allah on the path to Mecca.

I remember the setting but I don’t remember the dialogue, but I’m sure it was the standard stuff. We had to have introduced ourselves. I learned that he was a college student and that the photos were for a class at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art. He liked photography, but his real passion was painting. When he was not at school, he lived with his family near Willow Park, a few miles from the bridge.

More important, he asked me what I saw when I looked through the viewfinder. I think I told him something that I would later elaborate into a short story, a vision that persisted with me for many years: that the grimy buildings of the Bethlehem Steel Company seemed like the decaying remains of some huge beast that stretched out and died along the riverbank.

He looked at me in a sort of breathless way, which might have been the cold, but later I noted was characteristic of him. In spite of his prominent nose, he breathed through his mouth. He shot me a small smile that verged on the ironic. When I knew him well, I learned that there was nothing ironic about him; the half-smile was part of his protective personality.

It wasn’t until I read his obituary more than half a century later that I was astounded to find out that he was 9 years older than me. In the three-year period that we were close friends—from the time we met on the bridge when I was 16 until I graduated from high school and went off to the Army when I was 18—I considered him practically a contemporary.

Reflecting on it, I think he may have been a bit “challenged,” as we say today. I don’t say this unkindly. If he had been a perfectly normal 25 year old I doubt that our meeting on the bridge would have been more than a “how-do-you-do, nice-to-meet-you, best-of-luck-with-your-photography, kid,” kind of thing.

I wish I had kept a journal. I was too self-centered to know that Frank was someone who would help me take fundamental changes in the direction of my life and I wish today I had a map of that journey. I can’t remember how our friendship grew: it just seems to me that it appeared whole as if it popped out of some Greek god’s head.

I have vignettes: visiting his family’s home, a large cozy farmhouse set off on an acre or so of land. Everyone in his family seemed unique, perhaps eccentric, especially compared with my pabulum parents. I always felt welcome, especially by his mother Frances, who accepted me as if it was the most natural thing for her son to have a teenager as his best (and I suspect only) friend. She was the only one who really conversed with me. One thing she said has stayed with me all my life: “Ronald, it is better to be a heathen than a hypocrite.”

Frank’s father (his florid name was Florimond) shot out an occasional quip but was mostly a shadowy presence somewhere off in the living room. Frank had two sisters, Francine and Faith, whom I occasionally saw, and a brother (whose name I don’t remember, but that also started with an “F”), a mysterious man who secluded himself in the attic. I don’t think I ever saw him more than once or twice, although I visited the home dozens of times.

Frank’s room was in one wing of the second floor and it was a magical place. He had his easels and paints, a day bed, a stereo and a large collection of LP records. These were not the kinds of things that came on little, big-holed 45s, that lasted a couple of minutes each, and to which I idiotically sang when I was with my girlfriend or my cousins. And they were not the sedate Beethoven, Brahms and Bach that came to me on my own 33-rpm records that I received each month at home.

Frank had wild music, such as Igor Stravinsky’s The Firebird, Petruschka, and the Rite of Spring. He was slightly deaf, so the volume was always high—no one in the house seemed to care—and he would paint furiously as I sprawled out on the day bed overwhelmed by the immensity of the sounds I was hearing. I am not musical, which you may know, but once I was fully engrossed in the music I would compose reams of stories, poems and images. I remember creating a prose poem to the Rite of Spring that Frank insisted I declaim—it had to be very loud—as the music filled the room and the house.

Also dramatic was his Mercury recording of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra:  La Marseillaise intertwined with a cacophony of grand orchestra sounds that reached a crescendo of church bells and cannon fire—if I had dared play it at home, instead of celebrating a victory it would have provoked a battle. On one unforgettable and unforgivable occasion we took turns anesthetizing ourselves with artist’s ether while under the spell of the music.

Frank loved ballet and much of what we listened to was music created for it. In December of 1957 he took me to New York to the premiere of Stravinsky’s Agon, performed by the New York City Ballet at the City Center. He was unable to see at night—so I was his guide, as he was mine. I was confounded and excited by the language of dance and the spectacle of music, muscle and motion.

He was a subtle but brilliant teacher. As he painted he would ask me, “What do you think of this,” as he used his palette knife to slice in contrasting or complementary colors. He always made me think that I was the expert instead of him—the best way to show an egotistical adolescent how to refine his sense of sight. When I picked up my own drawing pad or began dabbing paint on canvas everything I did was brilliant, according to him.

I remember one day we were in the Poconos on our way to a lake that we claimed as our own—it was about an hour’s hike from the road. I was taking photos of a ghostly forest of trees that rose starkly from stagnant waters, probably drowned, and I asked him how he would paint it. He said that he would never paint it. He would leave the details of the dark to me, because I could see into it and he could not.

When we got to the lake and we both started to paint, I was overcome by his ability to capture such things as the shape of a leaf, the tall, elegant form of a weed that rose up golden against the greens and blues of the mountain and the sky. As always, he looked at my painting and told me how original it was and that I should never let anyone tell me how to paint. He taught by example and by compliment, and he gave me no prescriptions.

The painting he started that day became the centerpiece of his first major exhibition. He asked me to give it a title and I called it “Golden Concerto.” After the show he gave it to me and it has had a place of honor in every house I have lived in. I often pause to look at it and remember that day and I still marvel at how he could mold paint into object and convert a simple plant into a symbol of the idiosyncratic beauty of eternal nature.

He took me to visit his college. I have a dim vision of his tiny room and of a large studio where he joined a handful of students sketching a nude model—and a brilliant recollection of days spent at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, bounding from room to room, dumbfounded by masterpieces.

He introduced me to the French impressionists and whenever we could arrange it we were off to see another collection: the Museum of Modern Art in New York for the Monet Water Lilies, the National and Corcoran Galleries in Washington, the Baltimore Museum of Art which surprised us with its huge Matisse collection. We traveled by bus, by train and in borrowed cars. With Frank as my Virgil, I was also traveling beyond the gray streets of a steel town into a universe of colors and sounds.

Not all of our time together was spent on such an exalted plane. I dragged him along with me on rock hunting exhibitions. Once night we crawled along the rocky fence line of his family’s farm, poor Frank stumbling and standing dazed in his haze of night blindness and me towing a black light looking for phosphorescent minerals. All I found was a horde of bugs attracted by the light!

Frank photographed my family and took my picture for my high school yearbook, photos that I still have today. He disappeared in the intervals when I was at school or he was at college or later when he was at work as a graphic artist in Allentown. Long periods would pass when we wouldn’t see each other, because I was at play or chorus rehearsals, in performances, at work on one of my odd, odd jobs, or consumed by the demands of my girlfriend.

When I left for the Army my most prized possession was an ersatz edition of Life magazine with my photo on the cover, a mock up that Frank made for me, really a tribute to our time together. Years later when I started to paint again I did it because of the confidence that he gave me and the conviction that whatever I did was alright.

There is a famous quote that sticks in my mind, “He came and unlocked the gates of light.” I think Claude Oscar Monet said it about the great painter John Ruskin, but I’m not sure. I do know that Frank C. came into my life and unlocked the gates of light for me and tuned my ears to music that I might never have heard.

My wife reminded me recently that we visited Frank shortly after we were married because I wanted them to meet.  It was the last time I saw him, since we lived—and grew—a thousand miles apart. His night blindness had come to shadow his days and his vision was almost completely gone. I hope that he knew that his eyes helped me to learn how to see.

Notes in November 9

Dyscalculia & Failing Algebra

 Original Post: Saturday, July 10, 2010

Pierre de Fermat,

1601-1665

French Mathematician

There is a learning disorder called dyscalculia—and I probably have it. I have never been tested or diagnosed, but when I came across the condition recently on the Internet, I experienced one of those Eureka! moments. 

What are the symptoms? “Normal or accelerated language acquisition: verbal, reading, writing. Poetic ability. Good visual memory for the printed word. Good in the areas of science (until a level requiring higher math skills is reached), geometry (figures with logic not formulas), and creative arts,” according to the website Dyscalculia.org.

That seems to describe me, but it gets even better:

“Difficulty with the abstract concepts of time and direction. Inability to recall schedules, and the sequences of past or future events. Unable to keep track of time….”

And this:

“Mistaken recollection of names. Poor name/face retrieval.”

And yet this:

“May have difficulty grasping concepts of formal music education. Difficulty sight-reading music, learning fingering to play an instrument, etc.

“May have poor athletic coordination, difficulty keeping up with rapidly changing physical directions like in aerobic, dance, and exercise classes. Difficulty remembering dance step sequences, rules for playing sports.

 Bingo!

If only some perceptive teacher had noticed that I was not simply an oddball, but a silent sufferer of dyscalculia, maybe I could have had therapy and my whole life would have been different.

I have been living with terrible secrets (I can never remember a phone number long enough to dial it; I tend to write the wrong date and time for appointments; I sometimes show up at the wrong address—or on the wrong day—for an event; I can’t manage more than two consecutive steps so my partner is condemned to dance in circles; I rudely avoid introducing people because I often forget the names of my closest friends—the list goes on and on).

There are so many things I might have done: I might have passed college algebra! (I did, actually, on my third try, when the instructor agreed to overlook my inability to solve the simplest equations after reading my short story about Fermin’s Last Theorem.)

I might have stopped confusing millions with billions as editor of a business publication! I might not have driven my short-lived tennis, handball and golf instructors to depression and despair! I might have learned to play that damn keyboard that I bought years ago!

It’s mind-boggling: If I had be diagnosed, treated and cured of dyscalculia I might have been a jock! How happy my father would have been! What a different story I would have been able to tell my grandchildren and their children.

Well, it’s too late for that. However, this amazing discovery in the sunset of my life may excuse the somewhat disjointed nature of my memories (“Inability to recall… the sequences of past or future events”), so from now on—whatever your name is, I’m on my own schedule.

Notes in November 8

Rock of Ages

Original Post: Monday, April 19, 2010

The Humanist view of life is progressive and optimistic, 

in awe of human potential, 
living without fear of judgment and death, 

finding enough purpose and meaning in life, 
love and leaving a good legacy. 

Polly Toynbee

Before I go into my brief but eventful military career and the two pivotal years that followed high school, I’d like to back-pedal a bit. If the child is father of the man, I skipped a few critical turns around the block that need to be retraced.

For people who now know me well, there is a shocker in my high school yearbook write-up and a few inaccuracies. I’ll address the shocker first, which has two parts. “He is also active in his church choir and the Y.M.C.A.”

I never sang in my church choir—I think my girlfriend at the time, who was a writer on the yearbook committee, made this up. It could have been a ploy to make me more palatable to her family should things ever get serious between us, and my only recollection of the Y.M.C.A. is spending winter Saturdays swimming nude with my friends in its indoor pool.

As a boy, I had been an acolyte, which is the Lutheran version of a Roman Catholic altar boy, but without the threat of clerical sexual abuse. My parents forced their children out of bed on Sunday mornings and sent us to Grace Lutheran Church. They, themselves, never went, but just about every relative I ever met in Bethlehem was a member of the congregation.

I decided to make the most of the opportunity and impress them by joining the minister each Sunday center stage. I was genuinely drawn by the organ music and by the shards of color radiating from the tall stained glass windows—sounds and colors that, sieved from faith, are Christianity’s greatest gifts. If I also had to help serve up the body and blood of Christ, well, that was part of the job.

From cherub to chaplain was not a great leap. I was a member of Hi-Y in my junior and senior years. Liberty Hi-Y was an organization devoted to “Clean Speech, Clean Scholarship, Clean Living, and Clean Sportsmanship.” It was the only time in my life that I ran around with the wrong crowd.

Most of my fellow Hi-Y Christians were jocks, including my cousin whose succinct yearbook entry lists Football 2, 4; Track, 2, 3; swimming club 2, and Hi-Y 3, 4. Few of them could read a sentence without stumbling across the first three words, so it fell to me to read the bible passage at the beginning of each meeting. It was grand: I had a captive audience, a solemn setting, and the opportunity to declaim the dramatic cadences of the King James Version of the Bible. As I came to realize that it was more honorable to be a heathen than a hypocrite, I retired from my shaky vocation as chaplain. It was some time in my senior year, apparently too late to be exorcised from the yearbook.

Joining the club with the exotic and unpronounceable name “Chemphybiogens” was also a mistake; I quit as soon as I realized it wasn’t a cult.

It is true that I was a member of the Spanish Club. I studied Spanish throughout high school, mostly because I didn’t want to learn German and because I didn’t like the people who were taking French. It was rudimentary Spanish, and I remember always getting startled when Mrs. Baker, the teacher, would say the Spanish word for flowers, flores, thinking she was calling on me. 

Because I was in Spanish Club and the Hi-Y chaplain, when the first Puerto Rican boy arrived at Liberty, it was only natural that he be assigned to me. I took my responsibility very seriously, so seriously that I even took Orlando—his name is Orlando Diaz—to a football game—one of the few times I entered gladiatorial territory. Our friendship was brief, but significant, as you will see if you stick with me as this journal unfolds.

The mineralogist business is also true. I had a long-standing fascination with metamorphic, igneous and sedimentary rocks. Rocks give the appearance of being among the most permanent, immutable forms of matter, but in fact they can change from one form to another. Although it is on a more massive timeline, move and change they do, as fickle in their way as weather forecasts or human health.

My room in the attic of Geopp Street was filled with rocks; there were piles of malachite, rose and smoky quartz, obsidian, sandstone, amethyst, and copper pyrite. I collected crystals and geodes, iron ore and slate, slag from the steel mills, coal and shale. I’m not sure how it began, but by my early teens I had amassed a veritable quarry of minerals. One of my most beloved possessions was a rock hammer, a gift from my oldest sister, later stolen.

On the few occasions that my mother ventured up the attic stairs into my room—my father never did-- she would shake her head and ask me why I didn’t collect stamps or baseball cards, or something softer, like girls, I imagined.

One of the only places in the Lehigh Valley to see and buy rocks was the shop at Lost River Caverns in my beloved Hellertown. I was there so often that I came to call the owners by their first names, and it was not long before I was offered a job as a guide. It was a great job: I mostly moseyed around the tables awaiting the transmutation of rocks until people came in to see the cave.

At first, I followed instructions and took the groups through the four or five chambers of the cave, pointing out stalagmites and stalactites, columns and flowstones. I gave them a spiel about how the cave was discovered in 1883 and how more than 80 wedding were performed in the underground chapel (I never saw one). I soon started challenging myself to invent new stories and new descriptions of the formations, a totally original version every time I took a group through the cave.

My imaginative talent came to my rescue when on one tour, the sump pump that kept the “lost river” from flooding the cave failed while I was deep in the cave making up stories. On the way back I found that the passage that lead to the cave entrance was rapidly filling with water. I told my group that they should take off their shoes and roll up their trousers to experience what cave exploring “in the old days’ was like. They gleefully followed instructions, we waded through the flooding chamber and we got out just before the chamber became impassable.

I carted my favorite rocks around for years until they transmuted into something else and disappeared. My adventures in reading, writing, acting, painting and photography—but not my faith—were resurrected on many occasions over the next decades of my life.

Notes in November 7

On Crucibles & Curtain Calls, Part 3

Original Post: Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Down in the valley the valley so low

Hang your head over, hear the wind blow

Hear the wind blow dear, hear the wind blow

Hang your head over, hear the wind blow

Roses love sunshine, violets love dew

Angels in heaven, know I love you….

American Folk Song that opens the play Dark of the Moon

By the time my senior year had come around, I was spending more time in the greenroom than in my classrooms. I joined the National Thespians Society, practiced improvisation and learned scenes from my favorite classics. My girlfriend and I easily landed roles in the senior class play.  About the same time, I stopped attending classes that bored me and spent the free time in the library, reading randomly from the encyclopedia. It was like winning the lottery with every page number!

Rachel and Victor Reis, a couple who ran the Pennsylvania Playhouse, saw one of my performances and I was invited to join their company. They were putting on an adult play, Dark of the Moon, based on the legend of Barbara Allen, and I was to play the part of Barbara’s kid brother. The play opened with me onstage singing a folksong in dialect, and from there things got rowdier. There was lots of singing, dancing and screaming and the play culminated in a rape scene. Although it was a critical and popular success, I was sort of pleased that no one I knew came to the playhouse.

Graduation was approaching. I managed to get three A’s and 2 Fs as final grades, but was allowed to graduate if I committed to summer school. I committed to summer school and skipped graduation. I had applied early in the year to the drama program at Penn State—my girlfriend was going there—and, on the basis of my experience in the Children’s Theater and The Pennsylvania Playhouse­–was accepted on condition of a final audition.

Getting bad grades and having to attend summer school had already worsened the perennial bad relations at home, and when I told my dad that I wanted to go to Penn State and study theater, he went berserk. I’ll spare you the dramatic details, but it had been filmed, and if there had been an Academy Award for the portrayal of an irate, this-is-the-last-straw-parent who was totally losing it, my dad would have won it hands down.

When I think about it now, I’m not sure of my own motivation. Of all the things to do in the wide and wonderful world I was constantly reading about, did I really want to be an actor? It’s possible that it was a decision made consciously or unconsciously to mortify him; but, then again, it may have been genuine.

So I did what any red-blooded, angry, confused, obstinate and disappointed 18-year old young man did in 1958 when he had no other options, I joined the U.S. Army.

Notes in November 6

On Crucibles & Curtain Calls Part 2

Original Post: Monday, April 12, 2010

Weia, waga!

wander you wave

wall to the cradle

wagalaweia,

wallala weiala weia!

Das Rheingold

Scene 1

Gold, even Rheingold, is a poor metaphor. It signifies something very valuable, which is presumptuous, and quite malleable, which is false. I was a teenager, and typical to my breed I had a will of steel. I was smart (my teachers told me so, and my IQ scores were in the highest percentile) and I was confident. I knew I could do anything that I wanted to do and I knew just as well that I would not do anything that I didn’t what to do.

Sports? My dad liked sports; I loathed them. Music? My dad loathed music, unless it was country western; I embraced it. Theater? My dad never saw a play in his life and never read one; I decided to be an actor.

My music career did not survive much beyond high school, but it was notable while it lasted. In music class I leaned I had no aptitude for notation, in spite of my hearing wonderful melodies in my head and writing pages and pages of gibberish, which my music teacher would mock. She did have me try out for chorus and discovered what she considered a fine tenor voice.

I sang first tenor in the school chorus in both the junior (11th grade) and senior (12th grade) years. The high point was singing Handel’s Messiah to an appreciative audience; one that duly rose for the Hallelujah Chorus and one that did not include my father. For the rest of my life the Messiah became required listening in my own home at high Christian holidays, even long after I drifted away from the Lutheran church of my forbearers, and from brief stints with universalism and agnosticism, to become a godless humanist. Even today, I can’t hear it without joining in.

My interest in acting started off innocently enough. I had dropped my first Bethlehem girlfriend because she wouldn’t let me kiss her and was deeply involved with a big-breasted, brown-eyed teaser who would do just about anything but let me take of my boxer shorts. She asked me to join her in trying our for the junior class play. We both got parts. I think I was made for acting. I could be someone else. I could be the center of attention when my character was onstage. I could be part of an imaginary family as different from my own as the playwright could imagine it. I was in competition only with myself: how can I say these lines better? How can I make the audience believe me?

In one audience was the director of a small theater company who came backstage and asked me to meet with her. Her odd name was Blanche Truse and during my first visit to her house I met six of the members of her company, all adults, all exotic, all fascinating. We played charades, a game I had never heard of. In my family all anyone did at a party was play poker, eat pretzels, drink beer and talk.

When the game ended there seemed to be a consensus: I would be welcome. I read for and got the part of “Road Wanderer” in their next Children’s Theater production, Land of the Dragon. It would mean cutting classes in order to tour schools in the region with the play. My folks had little idea of what I did, and, at the time, I was acing all my classes.

It was a wonderful role: I got to talk to birds and other imaginary animals that came to my prison cell; there were grand villains and innocent maidens. On the rare days the audience was inattentive (they were kids, after all) Blanche would storm around backstage yelling “Fucking brats, fucking god damn brats,” which I thought was so cool and sophisticated.

Notes in November 5

On Crucibles & Curtain Calls Part 1

Original Post: Sunday, April 11, 2010

 

A house without books is like a room without windows.

Horace Mann

When I think back on the conundrum of why I am so different from just about everyone else I grew up around, I come up with two facile answers. The first is that I was an only child and the second is that I had a powerful role model: my father.

I have two older sisters and two younger brothers, but—although they are truly nice people—they were not around to influence me except in the most superficial ways. My sisters are five years or more older and my closest brother is five years younger—the other is ten years younger.

That means we were never in the same schools at the same time, never had the same friends, never shared the same interests and seldom spent time together as a family. Indeed, we rarely saw each other. By the time I entered high school—one of the defining moments in a person’s life, my sisters were married and gone, and as an angst-smitten, self-involved adolescent, I paid only cursory attention to the two little kids at home. As a result there was little sibling rivalry and little peer or parental pressure for this odd pea to match the others in the pod—I could grow into my own odd, atypical shape.

And odd I was. Although (perhaps, because) I never saw my parents read a book, I was an avid reader. I read all of Shakespeare while exiled in Hellertown, and then discovered the Bethlehem Public Library where I ran up huge fines for overdue books that I didn’t want to part with. An early favorite writer was George Bernard Shaw—an iconoclast whose plays made me laugh out loud and shake my head in agreement. By the time I worked my way through the stacks and reached the end of the alphabet, I was more than ready for Voltaire’s Candide, and for Oscar Wilde, whose Portrait of Dorian Grey presented me with a philosophy for life.

“Anything that is good enough for my father is certainly not good enough for me,” (or words to that affect) Wilde had Dorian say. It was a standard I would live by. I can find a lot of reasons why there was such great antipathy between my father and me and even more for his alternating waves of brutality  (which stopped around this time) and indifference toward me (which never stopped). I wasn’t anything like him and I wasn’t anything like he would like me to be. After Dorian Grey, I didn’t care. We lived in the same house, but months went by without speaking to each other. It was a pleasant time.

My sweet and dutiful mother stayed out of the way. It was the 50s: she was his wife; he was the boss. She would sometimes rebuke me for always having my face in a book, warning me that I would ruin my eyes. What I was ruining of course was my mind, by opening causeways across chasms that they could never cross. But, hidden from my father, she supported my interest in music and helped pay for my monthly subscription to the Great Music Treasures of the World, an LP collection that introduced me to, well, great music, but especially to Richard Wagner.

(My love of Wagner’s music eventually became anathema to my future wife and most of my friends. That prelude in Das Rheingold, a low E flat that flows on and on for 136 bars to suggest the motion of the river Rhine, can still clear a room of my family or friends long before it reaches the end of its four-minute drone; imagine its effect on my father, and he was German!)

The last years I spent in Bethlehem, the three-year period between 16, when we moved back from the farm in Hellertown and I entered Liberty High School, and 18 when I graduated and left home permanently, was the crucible in which my character was fused. My father, unwittingly, was the philosopher’s stone that turned lead into gold.

Notes in November 4

Early Failure, Early Success

Original Post: Monday, April 5, 2010

You grow too soon old, and too late smart.

Pa. Dutch Expression

The hamlet of Hellertown is only three or four miles from Bethlehem, the city in which I was born and mostly raised, but as a new teenager (about the time the photo above was taken), I thought I had been sent to the Gulag.

At the time, my father was a steelworker (virtually everyone in the Lehigh Valley worked for the Bethlehem Steel Company), but somehow he got it into his head to leave our home in Bethlehem and buy a farm. He found a five-acre spread on a hillside that faced South Mountain, which—in a really moronic moment—I dubbed “Lazy Acres.”

There was nothing lazy about it. Each year—with a passion that I now recognize as equal to my own—he set off in a new agricultural direction: one year it was a truck farm, the next a poultry farm, and finally, a place to try to raise a gaggle of cattle. He supported this basically economically-unsound project with his job at the “Steel,” working swing shift, and with slave labor on the farm, mostly my own.

My memories of the farm are mostly repressed. I know I was in charge of killing the chickens and I probably assassinated thousands of “broilers.” Our farm raised White Leghorn chickens from the time they hatched until they weighed about three pounds. On butcher days my father prepared huge vats of boiling water in the summer kitchen. I cut off their heads and tossed them into bleeding funnels. My sisters or whoever was shanghaied that day dipped them into the boiling water, my mom and her helpers cleaned off the feathers and eviscerated them, they were cut in half, washed, packaged and sent off to the supermarket.

I regularly rebelled and just as regularly was beaten into submission. From the vantage point of old age, I think my father’s behavior was not cruelty (to me, not the chickens) but standard operating procedure for the kind of Pa. Dutch farm on which my father was raised.

To escape his clutches I got a job: income always trumps slavery. One of the businesses I passed on my way to junior high school in Hellertown was a nursery. I stopped in one day, talked up the owner, and got myself a minimum wage position as a horticultural engineer’s assistant. (That’s BS for a farmer’s helper.)

My first big assignment was to plant an acre of gladioli. I was given a huge crate of corms, pointed in the direction of the rows, and sent on my way. I planted, covered, moved four inches, planted, covered, and moved four inches—hour after hour under a murky spring sun. Eight hours later I had finished the job and proudly presented my empty crates to the nursery owner. After a cursory check of my work (the idiot waited until I finished the job), he suspected there was something wrong.

“How did you plant these,” he asked.

“With the roots pointed down, of course,” I answered.

“Which side is the root side?” he asked.

“The pointed side,” I answered.

Silence. I had planted an acre of gladiola bulbs upside down. The flat side is the root side. It was my first and last day on that job.

Perhaps I learned right then and there the importance of receiving and giving clear instructions and making sure they were followed. But I had another significant experience that year that unbeknownst to me was a harbinger of the future.

To get to school, I had to walk down our long gravel driveway and along a country road to the local church, where a school bus would pick me up along with the two or three other country bumpkins.

The ride to Hellertown Junior High School was so long that I felt like Pheidippides, the Greek messenger who ran non-stop from the battlefield of Marathon to Athens to announce that the Persians had been defeated—before collapsing and dying before the assembly.

To stave off madness—and to garner attention—I began to write and illustrate a newsletter that I called “Truth.” I wrote episodic stories hideously imitative of Dickens, drew caricatures of teachers in crayon and invented word games.  The newsletter was a hit—which shows you how desperate we all were to be entertained in those pre-cell phone, pre-iPod, pre-transistor radio days.

I’d like to say the bus trip became a permanent pleasure, but just as there are always budding writers, there are blooming critics. One boy said to me: “Ronald, why do you call the magazine “Truth” when there isn’t anything true in it?”

I conceded the point and worked on the problem for days. I didn’t want to mess with success, of course, and since it was too much work to redesign the cover (another harbinger of the future?) I finally came up with a new name, “Troth.” I just had to change one letter and I was sure that no one on the bus would have any idea what “troth” meant.

And they didn’t. After a few more issues, I (temporarily) retired from the publishing business—after falling in love with a girl who lived in front of the church who could play “Alice Blue Gown” on her family’s piano. We were never betrothed, of course. My family moved back to Bethlehem by the time I went to high school and, I heard later, she married the church minister.

Troth, indeed.

Notes in November 3

Rash Decisions

Original Post: Sunday, April 4, 2010

Wu fil hund si nhot d’r has ken tschans.

 A rabbit has no chance with many dogs.

(An old Pennsylvania Dutch Expression)

I have made some rash decisions over the years. Some of them, like the one that brought me from Pennsylvania to Puerto Rico where I have lived happily for nearly half a century, have been great successes. Others, like the time I decided to raise a Labrador puppy, have been disasters.

I am not good with dogs. I have a pleasant, if mutually aloof, relationship with our cat, but I have never particularly liked dogs. I tolerate pet dogs that are quiet and obedient, but I rarely meet one, and I avoid visiting the homes of people who own undisciplined dogs. Most of the dogs I know smell badly, act badly, bark loudly (and often) and some moan moronically for hours when their owners (my neighbors) are not at home.

Although I truly love human babies--and they often smell badly, act badly and cry loudly-- I'm not the kind of individual who gets emotional about puppies. That was until I met Toby, a Golden Labrador, one of a litter of eight fuzzy heartbreakers born to my neighbor's dog.

Rash decision: adopt Toby. Adorable quickly became deplorable. In three months time Toby gained thirty pounds--none of it between his ears--and failed to respond to commands of any kind. He quickly became house trained: he always came into the house to urinate or defecate. His favorite snack was the orchid plant, which he could swipe from a height of six feet. No amount of positive reinforcement could make him heel, fetch, roll over or breathe slowly. Toby became history; I will ooze gratitude until the day I die to the family who accepted him.

My most recent rash decision also involves an animal, or more specifically, birds, but it has a happier ending. My wife and I love the gamey taste of Guinea fowl and since I have some extra space in my greenhouses, I bought five "keets," built a cage and set out to raise our dinner. A web site dedicated to the adoration of these raptor wannabes listed--among dozens of mythical attributes--an ability to keep the garden clear of insects.

The first day I went to feed them they suffered a panic attack. Five screaming, hysterical birds rushed the door of their cage simultaneously--all ignoring the fact that I was in their way. During their desperate escape attempt, they thumped, jumped, humped and summarily shredded a summer squash plant that until that moment was happily flowering in a corner of the greenhouse.

I was glad to discover the literal meaning of the term "bird-brained." If they had changed direction and taken wing, my Guinea experience would have come to a rapid end right then and there, but the five thrashing and hissing harridans kept running into each other like hallucinating Keystone Cops and I was able to scoop them up and return them to their cage.

For two days they huddled in a distant corner, refusing to eat or drink, mumbling vague threats in a language that sounded like turkeys on amphetamines, while I made the cage larger. It was a successful attempt to keep my nervous Nellies from trying to attack me again and actually figuring out how to fly the coop. Just in case, I clipped their right wings to show them that I was the king of this jungle.

We declared a truce. They screamed like banshees whenever I was near, but condescended to eat and drink again. I fed them turkey mash, cracked corn and weeds from the garden. They mostly ignored the mash, marched like Marines in formation around the cage, dabbled at the corn, and devoured the greens faster than locusts.

I am glad to report that when left alone, Guinea fowl grow quickly. The first pair reached our table about three months after their arrival, the same time as my eggplants, cucumbers, and lettuce (and a handful of anemic tomatoes). Their meat is tender and tasty, somewhat like pheasant.

Every morning when I go to feed them, the remaining trio greets me with horrific howls, which I have decided is a sign of respect, but not a sign of affection.

No matter, it’s never a good idea to dissemble with your dinner.

November 2009

(Originally posted to my Year Round Gardener blog. The remaining guinea fowl eventually joined their siblings in gourmet heaven.)

Notes in November 2

Meditation After a Fall

Original Upload: Saturday, April 3, 2010

Falle is nix, abers ufschte.

It is easier to fall than to get up.

(An old Pennsylvania Dutch Expression)

I fell recently and broke my leg and I have been cobbling around in a cast for five weeks. It has slowed me down, but I refuse to let it get me down. Don’t jump to conclusions: it was not your typical septuagenarian accident in a slippery bathtub: I did a flip on the new-fangled floor of a high-tech bowling alley after overstepping the foul line.

This was a double fluke. I am not a very sporting person. In fact, I play no sports and watch no sports. I have always believed that team sports are a breeding ground for hatred, bigotry and warmongering. Sorry, sports fans, but that is how I am. Competition, it seems to me, breeds contempt. It is a lesson I learned as an oddball growing up in a football town.

My wife Olga and I attended a Puerto Rico Convention Bureau “Meet & Deal” activity at a new bowling alley in Caguas.  After the reception, the owner invited us to bowl—something I don’t remember doing since I was at Hellertown Junior High School c. 1954. It was my first time in over 50 years, and given the outcome and my interest in sports, most likely the last.

But it did inspire a spate of memories that had been long hidden, including my brief career as a pin boy. Pins—the things at the end of the alley you are supposed to hit with your bowling ball—are now gathered up by a robot and dropped into place. But when I was a boy, it was a boy who did that, and I was a boy who did that. I was paid by the game (a dime or a quarter, I don’t remember how much) and all the boys were allowed to bowl for free when there were no customers.

The bowling alley was on the main street —and one of the only streets—of Hellertown (see above) and you had to pass it on the way to and from the school. I stopped in at first to play the pinball machines—one of my early passions—and eventually was offered a job.

I don’t really remember much more than learning to bowl, spotting the pins, and dropping all my earnings into the pinball machine, which I mastered, and it couldn’t have lasted very long. I do remember that I was just discovering Shakespeare at the time and was probably the only pin boy who jumped up and down the alley in iambic pentameter… I told you I was an oddball.

It was one of my first jobs and if I hadn’t slipped in Caguas, you may never have heard about it! 

Notes in November 1

Things You May Not Know....

Original Post: Monday, March 22, 2010

D’r alt bull blaerrt faert bis in di ewichkeit.

The old bull bellows on forever.

(An old Pennsylvania Dutch Expression)

I was watching a reality show recently in which contestants  “revealed” one thing that the public might not know about them. The answers ranged from the interesting to the inane (“I like to color with crayons,” is an example of the latter).

The answers, however, got me thinking: what are some of the things about me that few people know? I am on the verge of 70 years of age and I think it is a safe bet that I will not be around to tell stories to my great grandchildren about the good old days when I did this or I did that.  Will my family and friends remember anything in particular about me, anything that made me unique?

It may be vain to think that anyone will care--each of us has enough to deal with in the jagged journey of our lives to have time to wonder what some septuagenarian did or didn’t do in his life, even if the bellowing fellow happens to be his ancestor.

But that is the point. As a amateur genealogist I have often wondered about the lives of my ancestors, especially the men named Flores from whom I descended, I knew a little about my father, less about my grandfather, almost nothing about my great grandfather, and just names and dates for the generations between them and our progenitor Johan Conrad Flores.

What motivated a man like Johan Conrad to leave the country of his birth in 1739 and make a dangerous journey across the sea? What kind of spirit carves a new life in a new land, clearing forests and fighting native tribes in the wilds of Penn’s Woods--a German-speaking Lutheran farmer and blacksmith in an English colony, founded by Quakers, for god’s sake!

I want to know and I’d like to believe that one (or more) of my descendants will want to know about me. In a sense I am like Conrad. I set sail, metaphorically speaking, from those same Penn’s Woods and made my way across the Atlantic to carve a new life on a tropical island, an English-speaking freethinker on a former Spanish colony, founded by Roman Catholics, for god’s sake.

This blog is about some of the things--from the interesting to the inane-- that you may know not know about me.