If in some smothering dreams, you too could…
…watch the white eyes writhing in his face…
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
—Wilfred Owen, 1893-1918

The Latin means, roughly, “It is noble and gracious to lay down your life for your homeland.” Wilfred Owen was writing about watching another soldier die from mustard gas, as ignoble a death as can be imagined. Owen also died young, days before the Armistice, but not before he was able to write down his experience of war.

My own experience of war was much less wrenching, but I’ve been thinking about it ever since John McCain began fantasizing regularly about conventional military “victory” in Iraq. This morning, I did a Google search for my old outfit, the 509th Bomb Wing.

In 2008, the wing is located at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. It has a website and a public relations staff. In 1945, the 509th, then known as the 509th Composite Group, flew the Enola Gay to Japan and dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Since then, wing members have been entitled (read “required”) to wear the Presidential Unit Citation ribbon on their dress uniforms. I never could bring myself to wear the ribbon.

Thirty-five years ago, when I belonged to it, the 509th was headquartered at Pease Air Force Base in New Hampshire. We flew KC-135′s (still flying!) and FB-111b’s—then the most advanced aircraft in service. The 509th flies B-2′s these days—stealth bombers, and perhaps the most advanced aircraft in service now.

I spent my entire Air Force active duty, after training, at Pease except for a few days in the summer of 1972 when I was inexplicably sent to Whiteman! It was a Minuteman missile base in those days, and there was absolutely nothing for me to do there. I was supposed to stay there for 90 days, but by pleading with my commanding officer I was sent back to Pease after only three or four days.

What I remember about Whiteman is chiefly Missouri’s suffocating July heat. Yet somehow that short temporary assignment to Whiteman was about the most exciting thing that happened to me in four years of service.

After all the agony and anxiety I went through before I enlisted (the draft notice I had received motivated me to make other arrangements), the most striking feature of my actual service was its astonishing banality. There was neither nobility nor graciousness in it. It was an unsatisfying job at low pay that I was forbidden to quit.

Four years is nevertheless a long time for a young man, and military service changed me in ways I didn’t notice until later. When I was discharged on January 15, 1973, I drove home to our off-base apartment and carefully hung my uniform in the closet, as if I were going to wear it again.

I sat in a disoriented fog—neither soldier nor citizen—for a couple of weeks and then began graduate school at the University of New Hampshire, just a few miles up the road. I quickly learned that on campus there was no sympathy for the military or for veterans. For the whole time I was a grad student, I kept a resentful silence about where I had been and what I had been required to do.

The experience taught me the difference between supporting the troops and supporting the war the troops have been ordered to fight. The former really is dulce et decorum; the latter, almost without exception, is not. The little video below lays out some of the reasons why this is so.

…who would have thought the old man to
have had so much blood in him?
—Macbeth Act 5, scene 1

When I went to give blood yesterday, I learned that it was my 22nd donation. That’s 11 quarts! I became a regular donor several years ago more or less on a whim. Stopped at a traffic light, I saw a sign for the Red Cross and remembered the transfusion I had needed back in 1994.

Giving blood, as it turns out, is pretty easy for me. I can answer the blood donor profile questions without embarrassment, I am blessedly free of needle phobias, I have a big fat vein that a nurse can hit first time every time, and I’m big enough physically that I don’t feel much in the way of after effects.

My patience, however, was sorely tested yesterday. The nurse I got (I’ll call him “Chuck”) was obviously new to the job and managed to combine a novice’s incompetence with a natural inclination toward officiousness in a way that left me out of sorts (and in some real physical discomfort) for hours later.

I had a 1:30 appointment at the Red Cross, and when I got there the place was practically empty. I zipped through the paperwork with my usual elan, but things went downhill rapidly as soon as Chuck got hold of me.

Now I really do try very hard not to judge people on the basis of appearance (yesterday’s rant notwithstanding), but I’m only human. Chuck was a moon-faced fellow with an imperfectly realized Van Dyke beard and mustache. To compound matters, he had coiffed himself with ringlets that ranged damply across his forehead in the manner of the emperor Nero. But I could close my eyes on all that.

The real problems with Chuck were his lack of skill and his “bedside manner.” Typical Red Cross blood drive staff members can set up a blood draw in about 30 seconds. Chuck took the better part of 10 minutes. He poked and prodded; he hitched and released various hoses, lines, velcro tapes and other assorted gear; he twisted me this way and that; he set the IV itself as if it were an interrogation device. I half-expected him to waterboard me. When I flinched at one point, he said, “Oh please, sir! I’ll have to ask you again not to move that arm!”

Oh please, indeed.

In eight weeks or so, however, I’ll be back for another donation. Chuck will have improved or he will be gone. By the end of the year, I will have crossed the gallon mark. That really is a lot of blood.

Our youth love luxury. They have bad manners and contempt for authority. They show disrespect for their elders and love idle chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants not the servants of the household. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up their food, and tyrannize their teachers.

—attributed to Socrates, c. 450 BC

It’s a good thing we have written records of this bit of conventional wisdom. Otherwise, each generation might be tempted to believe no one ever thought of it before. Here is a partial list of the things that might draw me into it:

• tattoos
• piercings
• Top 40 radio
• celebrity culture
• iPods
• MySpace
• mouth breathers

I deleted a few things from the list before publishing this post, because despite my intention to write this with a cool head and a broad perspective I was really getting worked up. (Have you seen the way some kids dress? Have you listened to the crap on the radio?) It’s just so damned easy to criticize kids and to forget that many of the irritating things they do are done specifically for the purpose of irritating people like me. This is how it has always been and how it probably should be.

These days I’m having a pretty good time on the “older generation” side of things, but I also had some fun when I was on the “younger generation” side. For example, I remember arguing with my grandfather about safe driving. This was in 1963 or 1964. Gramp was about 83, and I was about 17.

The argument was about whether old timers or teens were worse drivers. I knew that Gramp, when cornered, would instinctively manufacture evidence to support his position, and he didn’t disappoint. On this particular occasion, he pulled a statistic out of thin air and announced that teenage drivers had twice as many accidents as drivers over 65.

So, that’s how it’s going to be, I thought. Inspiration struck, and I was ready for him with a made up stat of my own.

“Of course we do,” I said, “There are twice as many of us!”

It stopped him cold. “There are?” he asked.

Victory was mine, but I couldn’t keep a straight face. Before long, Gramp couldn’t either. We had caught each other in similar lies at precisely the same moment. He was badly crippled by arthritis by this point in his life, but he extended his hand and I shook it. Man to man.

It was the best moment with him I ever had.

Recently a friend pointed out that this blog quotes a lot of poetry. I suppose it does, but I don’t think of this as a “literary” site. It’s just that I spent a lot of time in school studying literature. I probably would have a Ph.D. if I could have stuck with it. The proponents of literary theory, as it was practiced in the ’70s, however, can claim the kill on that one.

I like to tell the story of my leaving grad school as if the whole thing were a heroic march to better things. The truth is considerably less grand. To begin preparing for the program’s comprehensive exams, I had enrolled in a course in which the reading assignments included Roland Barthes’ S/Z. Barthes used words like hermeneutic, semic and proairetic. He speaks of “lexia” and the “axis of castration.” Dear God.

I managed to force myself to read through about half of the book, my personal b*llsh*t alarm trumpeting like a fire klaxon through every word. The critical moment arrived when I gave up. I closed the book and held it in my hand for a few seconds. Then Marge heard the crash.

“What was that?” she asked.

“It was this book hitting the wall,” I answered, “I don’t know if what I’ve been trying to read is true or not, but I am utterly certain that it doesn’t matter.”

Suddenly there was no turning back. In a single heartbeat, I moved from wondering whether I would stay in grad school to making formal arrangements for my departure.

I kept the book around for years. Every time I found myself wondering if I had made the right decision, I would take the book from the shelf and spend a few minutes turning pages in it. I never again found it necessary to knock paint off the wall with the book, but I also found that I never regretted my decision to leave grad school.

I have nevertheless continued to read. In the process I’ve made friends with a great many books, ranging all the way from “brain candy” to classical literature. Some of it makes me feel smart, and some of it is just plain fun. Better still are the moments when things I’ve learned from reading connect.

Years ago, for example, I had a good time reading Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey novels. I had a real “aha” moment while reading Strong Poison. As the novel reaches its climax, Lord Peter, having driven himself to the brink of exhaustion to save the woman he loves from the gallows, falls asleep over a book of poems by A.E. Housman.

When he awakes, he knows the identity of the killer and the method of murder. And so did I.

Housman, I knew, really only published one collection of verse, a book called A Shropshire Lad. The best known poem in the book is called Terence, This is Stupid Stuff. The last section of the poem tells the story of King Mithradates who, in order to thwart would-be assassins, developed immunity to the poisons of his time by deliberately ingesting them, “first a little, thence to more.”

Now, in the Lord Peter novel there is a character, someone close to the murder victim, who has unusually shiny fingernails. This I knew could be an indication that the body contains high levels of arsenic. Therefore, to commit the murder, Mr. Fingernails prepares a meal laced with arsenic and shares it with the victim. Victim perishes, but Fingernails, thanks to acquired immunity to arsenic, does not.

Elementary, as another fictional detective might have said.

Anyway, what all of this means is that literary allusions and snippets of poetry are probably inevitable here. I hope most readers enjoy it, but those who do not should remember that there will not be a quiz at the end of the hour.

I’ve been a Steely Dan/Donald Fagen fan for more than 30 years, but I never was the sort of fan who gets into biographical stuff. I never cared where Fagen grew up or who his girlfriends were. I just knew I liked the music without wondering much about why that might be so.

This morning, however, my e-mail included one of those you-might-also-enjoy… messages from Amazon.com. The suggestion that interested me was a book called Steely Dan: Reelin’ in the Years—part biography of Fagen and Walter Becker, part discography and part band history. As I sometimes do on Amazon.com, I clicked on LOOK INSIDE!™ and read some of the book.

The selected passage was the story of Fagen’s high school (class of ’65) and college years (class of ’69). It was like looking into a mirror. In high school, Fagen was this alienated kid, more interested in jazz than Top 40 fluff, who hurried home after school every day to play the piano by ear for hours on end.

I did the same thing (high school class of ’64, college class of ’68).

Fagen could read music, I guess, because he played a horn in the high school marching band.

Ditto.

Fagen settled on majoring in English in college because he just didn’t want to be the kind of professional musician the music department was determined to produce.

Yup.

There were some important differences, of course. Taken together they explain why, 40 years later, Fagen is an internationally known star who has sold millions of records, while I am an amateur musician who sings barbershop in nursing homes. Here’s a partial list of those differences:

• In high school, I played a couple hours a day; Fagen probably played six or eight. It makes a difference.
• My father hated my music, and I couldn’t play it while he was around. Fagen probably wasn’t constrained in quite that way.
• In those days, the radio station choices in Portland, Maine were Top 40, country and “easy listening.” Fagen lived in New Jersey, just south of New York City where jazz broadcasts were all over the radio dial.
• My alto sax teacher had been on the road with a well known big band and was a hell of a jazz player, but he was my only direct contact with jazz. Fagen had all the jazz clubs in NYC in which to soak up the music, the personalities and the life.
• In college, I found the dope smokers to be self-important and boring. Fagen apparently joined in the fun and found fellow musicians and an audience in the process.
• I was damn good, but Fagen in my opinion was and is a genius. That also makes a difference.
• But I’m still better looking. I’ll give you six out of seven, Donald.

While still in high school, I learned to play many of the chord voicings Bud Powell had pioneered. I’d love to write about what made those harmonies so unexpected and new. You’d have to know some jazz theory to stay with me, however, and if you know some jazz theory you already know about Bud’s harmonies. Bud was the guy who figured out, for example, how to play a C7 chord that sounds like a C7—except there’s no C in it anywhere!

You still hear Bud’s chords, now at least 60 years old, any time you listen to piano jazz. My father, however, considered these harmonies to be particularly egregious, and he sort of had a point. Bud Powell, according to many accounts, was crazy, and his harmonies were crazy for their time.

Bud Powell also wasn’t the whole story, of course. I knew about Dave Brubeck, but no one told me about Red Garland; and I didn’t discover him on my own until many, many years later. Fagen, however, was a huge Red Garland fan from the beginning and apparently spent long hours trying to learn Garland’s rhythmic sense, his particular style of using his right hand to hang languidly behind the beat that his left hand maintained scrupulously.

Fagen’s cover of Ruby Baby on The Nightfly turns Dion’s silly puppy love ditty into a jazz-infused R&B classic and shows that Fagen did his homework. Listen to Fagen’s piano solo, starting about 1:45 into the track, and see if you don’t hear Red Garland inspiring Fagen’s wonderful melodic line. I certainly do.

No wonder I’m a fan.

Fort Kent lies at the northern tip of Maine. This morning’s paper brings more news of the flood there, perhaps the worst since record-keeping began. The combination of melting snow and two days of torrential rain brought the St. John River so far over its banks that much of the town is still under water. Recovery from the flood will be expensive, slow, messy and sad for a lot of people.

Aunt Frances

My own associations with the town are sad anyway, and they come from long ago. I haven’t been to Fort Kent since 1959, when my aunt Frances died at the age of 47. Frances was my mother’s sister and my favorite aunt, the one who always seemed glad to see me, the one who could always make me laugh.

Whether by choice or not, she never had children of her own. Instead, she charged into the business world in a way few women of her generation did. She paid the price for it and died young from a “Type A personality” heart attack. She and my uncle Carl had 22 years of marriage, and then she was gone.

I was 12 at the time and just beginning to notice adult behavior. We were sitting in the living room after the funeral, and Carl was reading aloud from the condolence cards he had received. One of them contained that James Whitcomb Riley poem with the line “She is not dead – she is just away.”

Carl stumbled through the poem, and I couldn’t for the life of me understand why he kept trying to read it aloud. When he reached the end, he put down the card and dissolved into sobs. I had never seen an adult do anything like that. The words of the poem must have been intended to comfort, but they seemed to have the opposite effect.

“It’s a lie,” I thought, ” She is dead, and no matter how long I live I will never see her again.” I also somehow understood that Carl would never stop grieving, and he never did.

Now, nearly 50 years later, I still loathe that poem.

Higgledy-piggledy
Emily Dickinson
Looked out her front window
Struggling for breath,

Suffering slightly from
Agoraphobia:
“Think I’ll just stay in and
Write about Death.”

—Leon Stokesbury

“Doom” is the tough love message of New England: If you go around happy all the time, you just don’t understand the situation. I suspect this is partly the residue of Puritan religion (the real sinners-in-the-hands-of-an-angry-God stuff, not that hormone-soaked prissiness we call “puritanical” these days). Yet it must also result from living in a place where “Spring” is mostly an abstract construct with no identifiable correlative in the physical world.

New Englanders devise any number of strategies to cope with this, and I think it’s important to remember that giving right in to gloom–à la Belle of Amherst, supra–is but one. There is also sublimation (calling all BoSox fans) and projection (“I’m OK; you’re doomed”).

A few years ago, my daughter developed car trouble taking an acquaintance back to Cambridge. I drove into the city to rescue her and naturally got lost. I have long believed that in laying out the street system for Boston, the founders sought to create a metaphor for the Calvinist’s labyrinthine path to Grace. They were breathtakingly successful.

The maps I had printed out from MapQuest served me reasonably well until I made the first wrong turn, but I was soon hopelessly lost. I knew that the situation was ripe for a classic Boston moment. With a sinking feeling, I stopped to ask directions. The first person I saw was a huge guy loading boxes into the back of a station wagon. I explained my situation to him.

He looked at the MapQuest pages in my hand and shook his head. “You got these on the Internet?” he asked.

I admitted that, yes, I had.

“See,” he explained, “that’s why you’re completely fucked, right there…” He then gave me elaborate, utterly incorrect directions and walked away.

…graven with diamonds in letters plain,
There is written her fair neck round about;
‘Noli me tangere; for Cæsar’s I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.’
—Sir Thomas Wyatt

She’s a rich girl;
She don’t try to hide it
Diamonds on the soles of her shoes.
—Paul Simon

The image of the poor boy in love with the rich girl is a powerful symbol of our yearning for what is unattainable. I remember my junior year of college as the year of F. Scott Fitzgerald. I read almost everything he ever published and wrote papers about his work for two or three different classes. He taught me a lot about yearning and more than a few things about myself.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald, if you haven’t dived into his work the way I did, basically had only one story to tell: boy meets golden girl; girl destroys boy; girl dances away to destroy again. There is some variation from story to story—how brutal the destruction is, how much the boy has it coming, how golden the girl really is—but the arc of the story is always the same. Again and again Fitzgerald tried to tell the story of his life with Zelda so that it would finally somehow make sense. As a result, his work presents a harsh view of life, love and humanity in general.

It worked for me in 1967 and 1968, however, as graduation and the inevitable draft notice drew nearer day by day. What I yearned for was another world, another life to step into, in which longing, if sufficiently intense, could influence likelihood. This was child-like, magical thinking that I fell into again and again: if I really, really, really wanted something, then surely I could have it. But there is no bargaining with fate.

As things turned out for me, however, fate was kind. The woman I married has been the love of my life by any measure: 40 years into the marriage I am more in love with her than ever. My military service after college was easy and strangely rewarding. When it ended, I actually missed it for a little while because it had given me my first opportunity to feel competent in the world of adults.

Now, in the final third of life, I find the the old yearnings have been mostly left behind. Zelda-like women who might have bewitched me 40 years ago, for example, now seem self-absorbed and profoundly uninteresting, however lovely they may be. Remembering the young men in Fitzgerald’s stories fills me with gratitude for how far the years have brought me.

I escaped you when I was young, Zelda, perhaps by luck, but your time is past. You won’t get me now.

Writing about black flies yesterday turned my thoughts to my old friend Gary by way of a very short series of associations. Gary was a fly fisherman and a Registered Maine Guide. As a fisherman, he had to make some sort of truce with the black fly. As a guide, he used to say, “I like black flies. They keep the tourists away.” It wasn’t true on either count: nobody likes black flies, and tourists were Gary’s source of work as a guide.

Gary and I were friends for forty years, from the fall of 1963 when we both crashed the same frat party at the college we both later attended, until he died in his sleep in January of 2004, just a few days after his 59th birthday.

Near the end of my junior year of college, Gary and I tagged along with the archeology class to Little Chebeague (shuh-BEEG) Island in Casco Bay, for a one-day “dig” in the Indian shell heaps found there. Maine Indians summered on Casco Bay islands from time immemorial, living mostly on seafood, and the shell heaps were their garbage dumps. The surviving shell heaps on Little Chebeague were supposedly begun centuries ago and used well into Colonial times.

It was a beautiful day in May, and Gary and I had no real responsibility to participate in the “dig.” We spent the morning exploring the island. On the beach, Gary found a piece of green glass. We immediately recognized it as the bottom of a Coke bottle.

Gary seemed lost in thought for moment, then broke into a grin. “Do you know how to knap an Indian arrowhead?” he asked. I confessed that I had no idea what he was talking about.

Without another word, he picked up a beach rock and began using it to chip away at the Coke bottle bottom. “This,” he explained, “is knapping.”

In about ten minutes he had transformed the Coke bottle bottom into a perfect, translucent green arrowhead. “Now,” he said, “we have to wait for just the right moment.” Once again, I had no idea what he was talking about.

He put the arrowhead in his jacket pocket and we walked back to the shell heap where the archeology students were working. Soon it was time for lunch, and the students hurried out of the shell heap to begin eating the sandwiches they had brought with them.

Gary brought out the arrowhead and discreetly dropped it onto the shell heap as we walked away.

After lunch, the students went back to their “dig.” They were starting to find some fairly interesting things. A knife that seemed to have been carved from a deer antler. The rusted remains of an iron axehead that the Indians must have gotten through trade with colonists. A few bits of broken pottery. A barbless bone fishhook. A few ordinary arrowheads like the one shown here. And, finally, the most miraculous discovery of all: a translucent green arrowhead.

There was an uproar among the students with everyone talking at once and crowding around the kid who had picked up Gary’s arrowhead. Ignoring Sherlock Holmes’ sound advice to investigators, people began “reasoning ahead of the facts” trying to figure out where the arrowhead had come from.

Coke bottle green was instantly recognizable in those days, but the archeology students refused to see it. Was the arrowhead ancient? Was it made from obsidian? Or was it emerald? Could the Indians have made it? How could they have gotten it from someone else?

Gary let this go on for a few minutes, then couldn’t contain himself any longer. He explained the trick, then made another arrowhead out of a piece of white beach glass while everyone watched. Not much digging got done after that. I suspect that someone took the glass arrowheads home as souvenirs of the dig.

We finished our island day by flagging down a passing lobster boat. We bought lobsters and clams and steamed them on the beach, over a driftwood fire.

Years later, I told this story at Gary’s funeral because it so beautifully captured his knowledge and skill, his great sense of fun and his utter lack of meanness or malice. I had to stop quite a few times during the telling to pull myself together, but no one criticized me for it.

I have a couple of redwood whales that Gary carved for me years after the day on Little Chebeague, but I wish I had that beautiful green arrowhead.

Oh a storm is threat’ning my very life today.
If I don’t get some shelter,
Oh yeah, I’m gonna fade away.
…
Gimme, gimme shelter or I’m gonna fade away.

—Mick Jagger/Keith Richards

No memory of having starred
Atones for later disregard,
Or keeps the end from being hard.

Better to go down dignified
With boughten friendship at your side
Than none at all. Provide, provide!

—Robert Frost

Take care of me, Mick Jagger pleads. Take care of yourself, Robert Frost replies. Which voice resonates more compellingly? Which voice is more like your voice right now?

I never was much of a Stones fan (in the ’60s you couldn’t really be a Stones fan and a Beatles fan) but in Gimme Shelter Mick Jagger sang for me anyway. Marge and I had parents—people who took care of us without even making us ask.

In June of 1969, we marked our first wedding anniversary. It promised to be a melancholy affair. I was in the first year of a four-year hitch in the Air Force and was stationed at Pease Air Force Base, New Hampshire. On June 15, we had been in New Hampshire about a month. Marge had found a job welding filaments on the assembly line of a Sylvania plant and we were living in a tiny and cheerless apartment about two miles from the base.

We were together, but life seemed pretty grim all the same. We had no money and almost no furniture. When we tried to prepare an anniversary dinner, all we had was the top layer of our wedding cake (carefully kept frozen for a year), a package of frozen peas, and two cans of Narragansett beer. We laughed about it without much real mirth.

Then, unannounced, my mother and father arrived, bringing a celebration in the back of their pickup truck—the table and chairs that Marge’s parents had given us, a hibachi, four nice steaks, some potatoes to bake, a salad, a bottle of wine, and an anniversary card with $100 in it.

These days we mostly have to take care of ourselves, but loving people have taught us nice ways to do that.