Short Circuits (29 page)

I have firm opinions on very few things simply because I don't feel I know enough about anything to form one. In that regard I'm like the beauty pageant queen who, when asked what she wants to do with her life, grins vacuously and says her goal is to work for world peace. Uh, yeah…like that.

I have a love-hate relationship with those who will pontificate on any subject presented to them. On the one hand, I stand in awe of their knowledge, but on the other hand I have no idea whether they actually know what they're talking about, or if they're just blowing smoke.

One of the nice things about being a writer, as I've often said, is that your readers almost always give you the benefit of the doubt. Unless you have your hero, caught between the warring Umbizzi and M'gwuba tribes on a hilltop in 1880 Transvaal whip out his cell phone to call for backup, most readers will go along and assume you know what you're talking about. You can get away with a lot when you
sound
authoritative, as long as you don't push it.

Did you know the tradition of “women and children first” in disasters came from the 1852 sinking of the British troopship
Birkenhead
off South Africa? With not enough lifeboats for everyone, the troops formed ranks on the deck as the women and children were put on what few lifeboats there were. Few of the soldiers survived, but their bravery lit a beacon which still shines today. I love trivia.

But can I intelligently discuss the social ramifications of Harriet Beecher Stowe's
Uncle Tom's Cabin
, published the same year the
Birkenhead
went down? Nope.

* * *

LETTING GO

You're probably much too young to remember flypaper, but they were coiled strips of sticky paper hung to trap flies during the heat of summer. Once a fly touched it, he/she was trapped forever. My mind's like that, but it traps memories rather than flies. I cannot let go of thoughts and feelings and memories of physical things and people important to me. They are part of who I am, so how could I let them go? However, far too many things which stick there are wrongs and slights (perceived or real) done me; gaffes, blunders, and stupid things I've done; resentments I've harbored; griefs and grievances I've suffered, anything which the perversely self-destructive part of me can use to torment myself for my inadequacies, are things I wish I could simply let go, but cannot. They are all part of my life, too.

I always state these things as though I were the only human being to whom they happen, or who is aware of them and the reactions they engender, though I know this is not true. If you didn't share some of the feelings expressed in these blogs, you wouldn't still be reading them.

The exact details and circumstances of what sparks feelings differs from person to person, but the core results are the same: they made an impact on our lives. Most people seem able to either absorb or release these things. I can't.

I can remember, when I was probably no older than five, being called in to dinner and, while eating, hearing the bell ringing on my tricycle, which I'd been riding and left on the sidewalk near the front porch. I told my dad someone was stealing my tricycle, and started to run outside to check. Dad told me to return to the table and finish eating. When I was able to go outside later, my tricycle was gone, and for some unknown reason, my relationship with my father was unalterably changed. How very, very strange that I should still be clinging to that memory so many years later.

Standing in my front yard as a kid singing Christmas carols in mid summer and being asked by a passing stranger why I was doing so when Christmas was so far off for some reason made me feel ashamed, and pushed me even further into my closet of shyness.

Along the same lines, while in fourth grade, being asked to sing a song as part of a class project, and being so horrendously embarrassed by the prospect that when I finally agreed, I had to stand facing the wall while I sang. (And I still remember the song; the Irish lullaby “To-ra-loo-ra-loo-ra.”)

Attending a neighbor child's birthday party and having the mother insist that we must all dance, boy-girl, when I neither knew how to dance nor had the most remote desire to do so (especially with a girl) was one of my most humiliating memories. But it is still there and pops up, unbidden, from time to time.

But of course, the good memories also return: wonderful, vivid, loving memories of times and loved ones, and experiences long gone. I take comfort in them, and yet, perversely, I can only touch on them briefly, for to spend too much time on them replaces joy with a terrible longing and the knowledge that they are now only memories and are gone forever (or at least until the endless movie of time replays them, frame by frame. My belief that this is how time works, and that what was somewhere still is, and will continue to be endlessly, gives me if not total peace, at least reassurance that all is not lost when each showing of the movie ends.)

I am a strange duck. Thank God
you're
normal.

* * *

GIVING THANKS

I know I spend far more time than I should revisiting the past and feeling true and deep sorrow for the loss of so many things—friends, lovers, and family—I once had and no longer have. Thinking of them truly does create a physical ache of longing. But even as I grieve my losses, I realize just how blessed I am to have them in my life at all. I have from time to time wondered, if offered the choice of having been spared the pain of losing them by never having had them in my life at all, would I choose to relive my life without them? The answer, of course, is “no.” So even while I grieve, I am thankful for having had their company—no matter for how short or long a time—on my walk through life.

No matter how I may bewail not being 21 again, the fact is that I have been lucky enough to have lived as long as I have. Tens of millions of people never have that chance. As to physical limitations, just by looking around me, I see legions of people who I consider far worse off than I (and it is quite probable that each of them, looking around, feel the same way when they look at me).

I still have friends and family who are very dear to me, and who make my life infinitely more pleasant and meaningful than it would be without them. We seldom realize what we have until we lose it.

We are all given special gifts, talents, or character traits we are too close to ourselves to see. We're generally too busy concentrating on what we do
not
have to realize and appreciate what we do have. I bemoan the changes my poor, brave body has gone through, but I get a sharp wake-up call every time I go to the Mayo Clinic, and see what others endure with far more nobility than I could ever muster. I think of Stephen Hawking, trapped in a body which barely functions but with a mind as brilliant as the sun. I would not choose to be Stephen Hawking, but it is unlikely that he would choose to be me.

All of the above comes down to the fact that we shouldn't limit our giving thanks for our gifts to one day in November, but consciously try to make it a part of our everyday lives. And of all our gifts, by far the most important is simply the gift of life. It's all too soon taken away; so every now and then, it might be a good idea for us all to sit back, think a moment, and truly appreciate what we have.

* * *

THE
TROMPE L'OEIL
MIND

I seem to be talking a lot about memory of late, but then the more past one has, the more there is to talk about.

Memory is a painting of the past done by the mind. The result may seem totally lifelike, but in fact it is not. The artist takes small liberties, lightening the background here, touching up an area there, sometimes using heavier or darker hues than the actuality warrants. We display these canvases proudly, and are certain that they reality recaptured, when in fact they are
trompe l'oeil
.

My brief and checkered Navy experience, oddly, provided me with several of my most treasured and vivid of these
trompe l'oeil
paintings, many of which I have shared in earlier blogs. Perhaps these stand out because my military “career” was so totally different from any of my other life experiences, and because they are all backed up by “certificates of authenticity” in the form of letters written at the exact time (or within days) of the events pictured. But my two of the most outstanding hang in honored places along the walls of my mind.

The first while I was learning to fly as a Naval Aviation Cadet, which has something of a “certificate of authenticity” in the form of one of two years' worth of kept letters to my parents.

The skies over and within 50 miles of the Pensacola Naval Air Station normally swarm with pilots-in-training, like fruit flies around a bowl of ripe bananas. But on one solo flight, I found myself totally alone in a “valley” surrounded by huge, whipped-cream cumulus clouds. Just me, looping and spinning and soaring between the clouds, and the green quilt of the earth below. I've seldom had such a sense of pure joy.

The second is the week before the U.S.S.
Ticonderoga
, aboard which I was stationed, headed for home after eight months in the Mediterranean, while the ship was anchored off Cannes, France. It, too, is detailed in my navy letters and adds verisimilitude to the memory: days and evenings spent diving and swimming off an old quay with two French and two German young men, dinners at a tiny restaurant found totally by accident high in the hills above the city, walking down the twisting streets late at night singing old WWII songs, seeing the lights of the ships (including the fabled ocean liner,
Ile de France
) in the harbor below. My chest aches, remembering and wanting to be there/then now.

My main problem with memory, other than its tendency to reposition the elements of whatever picture is being recalled, is that it is too strongly tied in with emotion. As I've mentioned, even the most pleasant of memories are tainted by the tangible sense of loss and longing. I can't just enjoy memories of things and people past, I must reach out to them, and the knowledge that I cannot touch them, cannot relive them, cannot be at that time and in that place, fills me with sadness.

But like Dorian Gray's portrait in the attic, there are memory paintings best avoided, and we all have many of them, stacked against the wall in some dark, cobwebbed place.

There are also a few memories, as I flip quickly through my enormous collection, that oddly evoke absolutely no response. Primary among them is my seven-week stay at Mayo during my treatment. I remember quite vividly the daily routine: my large, comfortable room at Hope Lodge, provided free by the American Cancer Society, the fact that it did not have a TV set (how ungrateful of me even to think that!)—a deliberate decision on their part, I think, to encourage residents to get out of their rooms and mingle with others—the five-times-a-week two block walk to Radiation Oncology for 25-minute radiation treatments (35 in all); the decision to request a stomach feeding tube when trying to swallow became simply too difficult. I look back on all of it with a very strange detachment and no recognizable emotion at all.

Every moment that passes becomes memory; one more pebble on the beach of time, lying there waiting to be picked up and examined.

* * *

NAVY TALK

Looking backward through time is like peering through a Vaseline'd lens. The sharp edges blur, the harsh colors soften. I look now at my military service with far more fondness than I felt when I was actually experiencing it. Time, indeed, changes all things. Usually for the better, but not always.

Much of the romance seems to have gone out of the Navy. Glorious names for marvelous ships—
Enterprise
,
Valley Forge
,
Intrepid
,
Ticonderoga
—names which echoed the traditions, power, romance, and adventure of the sea and our American heritage have been replaced with the drab, colorless names of politicians: U.S.S.
Ronald Reagan
? U.S.S.
George Herbert Walker Bush
? Come on, those aren't names for warships, they're phone book listings! And ships, regardless of their names, have always been referred to as “she.” I find it hard to imagine the crew of the
Reagan
or the
Bush
referring to their ships as “she.”

The navy has always had a language of its own, and I'd assume much of it remains the same as when I was in. Rumors are “scuttlebutt,” the truth is “the straight skinny” (like a lot of navy terminology, double entendre is a strong factor); garbage cans are “shitcans,” westerns…movies or books…are “shitkickers.” While ocean liners may have stairways, military vessels have only “ladders,” which they very much resemble. “Upstairs” is “topside,” “downstairs” is “below decks,” and there are no “floors,” only “decks.” The front of the ship is the “bow” and the back of the ship the “fantail.” You don't go to the front or to the back, you go “forward” or “aft.” Left is “port,” right is “starboard.” Doorways are “hatches,” bathrooms are “heads.” Dining areas are “mess decks” and those who serve three-month stretches of time working in the kitchens and dispensing food are “mess cooks.”

Life aboard ship is (or was) ruled by the bosun's whistle. Every activity had its own set of notes, always followed by an announcement over the loudspeakers. The clanging of bells alerts the crew to General Quarters.

Some shipboard traditions are quite impressive. On a carrier or on a Naval base ashore, everything and everyone stops and stands at attention during the raising and lowering of the flag at sunrise and sunset. To see a vast hanger deck on a carrier bustling with activity suddenly snap to attention and turn toward the ship's stern as the flag is lowered at sunset is quite a sight. Coming aboard or leaving the ship at any time requires halting at the top of the ramp, turning to toward the stern, and saluting. You also must ask the Officer of the Deck for permission to either come aboard or leave.