War and Modern Memory

We went down to the old graveyard with our flowers for the soldiers and sailors buried there. There was a brass band, a canon, and a rifle salute, a hundred or so Penns Valley folks, neighbors and friends, many toddlers and babies in slings, great grandparents, teenagers with tattoos, speeches read under the hot sun, a prayer, and the trooping among the gravestones dropping flowers we had picked that morning from our gardens.

For someone like me of the Vietnam generation, it was hard to keep my head on straight. We did not believe in war. We thought – some of us thought – that it was all a terrible waste. We did not believe in honor and sacrifice, the words that were echoing like the snare drum across the sacred ground. We did not believe in sacred either.

That morning while we waited to enter the cemetery, I talked with a veteran of the last good war, one who had been through the invasion of Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge. It was like talking to history. He seemed too young to have walked out of the pages of that long ago story and too gentle and unassuming to have gone through both the fire of D Day and the ice of the Ardennes forest.

My own father, veteran of WWII, of Korea, of Vietnam, lies a thousand miles away in a cemetery in south Florida. I have not been there in twenty years, yet I think of him this brutal, heat-cracked morning, as I stand with a small flag in my hand among the weathered stones. I was in high school when he came back from Vietnam, looking ten years older than when he left home. Don’t go there if you can help it, he told me. And I didn’t.

Paul Fussell died this past weekend and I read his obituary on Memorial Day. Fussell was a veteran of WWII, and his breakthrough book was The Great War and Modern Memory, about World War I. Often called the Great War, mostly because it was such a great waste of youth and life, World War I destroyed 19th century Europe and laid the groundwork for the horrors of the next hundred years, not just communism and fascism, the rise of Hitler and the Holocaust, but also the Cold War and Vietnam and even Iraq and Afghanistan. It was Paul Fussell who said of the Great War, “Eight million people were destroyed because two persons, the archduke Francis Ferdinand and his consort, had been shot.” That war, like our Civil War, began with parades and flowers and ended with widows and beggars on the streets.

Every war is a failure in some sense, even those that seemed good and just at the time, like World War II. Fussell knew it, and I think my father knew it, too. Yet we send our youth, generation after generation, into the ice and fire. I stood in the sun, my head all awhirl, the bugle blew taps, and the rifles and the canon fired, startling the birds. Honor the sacrifice, but forget the glory.

First Jobs: The Commissary

Last week a navy jet flew into an apartment complex in Virginia Beach and destroyed several buildings, but no one was killed. The first responders seeing the destruction called it a miracle. It was certainly good luck at the least.

The training flight that crashed was out of the nearby Oceana Naval Base, located in what was once a remote area of Virginia Beach. I used to spend a lot of time there when I was a teenager, working at the commissary, which is what the navy calls their grocery stores.

That was my first real job, bagging groceries for tips and pushing the overloaded carts out to the customers’ cars, loading the bags into the trunk and hoping for a quarter or 50 cents. A commissary is something like a Sam’s Club for food. Because the navy did not pay well, especially if you were an enlisted man with a wife and a couple of kids, the commissary was where most of the navy wives shopped. The monthly pay check never stretched very far, and the commissary was much cheaper than the grocery stores in town. I would guess you could fill a shopping cart for less than $30.

My friend Sam’s father was stationed at Oceana, and that’s how we started working there when I was fifteen, first on Saturday’s during the school year, then every day during the summer. It’s where I learned to smoke, sadly, though, like Bill Clinton, I didn’t learn to inhale right away. All of us smoked during our breaks, the older guys showing us the ropes. There were maybe ten or twelve of us working the lines of registers, our hands blurring as we sorted the cans into double paper bags, stacked the boxes exactly, and stuffed the bread and soft food into their own separate bags.

We got so good at it that we would be mentally packing the bags before the items even reached the cashier’s hand. And the cashiers, all of them women, were faster than any scanners. They must have known the price of every item, because their right hand never slowed as they worked the keys and their left hand pushed the items along like clockwork.

I would make eight or ten bucks on a weekday in summer, sometimes up to twenty dollars on a Saturday after payday. It paid for gas and clothes for school, a big item in my budget when you were judged on wearing the right brand of shirts and the most stylish penny loafers. It paid for the books I loved and the record albums we played in my attic bedroom late at night.

There was a lot I learned bagging groceries that I didn’t know at the time I was learning –how to be competent at something, how to work together with a bunch of guys I didn’t know, the cold equation of work and money. All of that came in handy down the road. And, of course, I learned how to smoke, a habit it took me twenty years to unlearn.

I still get a small thrill when I go to the grocery store and stand at the end of the checkout counter and throw a few items into a plastic bag. I don’t get a tip, but the cashiers often smile and say “Thanks for bagging.” They don’t know that it is really my pleasure.

Unreal City

My first impression of San Francisco was of fog and mean back streets, small, tired shops with steel bars on their windows, blinking neon cocktail glasses advertising hole-in-the-wall bars where furtive, colorless people drifted out and scurried away into the fog.

I got off the bus at the old Seventh Street station in the Tenderloin, the shabbiest part of the city, at around midnight, and started walking. I had an envelope in my pocket with the address of a friend. I must have thought I could find her apartment by looking at street signs. She lived on 28th Ave., which is across the city and out halfway to the ocean, but I didn’t have a clue at the time.

A man in a blue Pontiac asked me if I needed a ride someplace. I asked if 28th Ave. was anywhere nearby. No, he said, but I can take you.

That was in 1974 and people still hitchhiked back and forth across the country in human waves – long-haired, booted, standing at roadsides with signs saying “L.A.?,” “San Jose?,” “Seattle?” And no one expected to be dumped on a dark logging road and never heard of again. All that is as gone as bell bottom jeans and the Blues Magoos.

So I took a ride with the stranger, though I wasn’t totally stupid. I wouldn’t stop for a drink at a little bar he knew, and I stayed close to the door with my hand on the handle, ready to leap out. We drove out through the wide, fog-shrouded streets that were nearly empty that late at night, toward the ocean too far away to see. He let me off, with a last offer, at Geary and 28th and pointed up the hill.

I got over my first impressions during the next nearly twenty years as I lived in one neighborhood or another, in beautiful old apartment houses on shady streets or one room utility apartments in the rumble of downtown. The city is divided into districts, each with its own topography, its ethnic mixture and attitude. Moving from one neighborhood to another is nearly the same as moving to a new town – from the upscale European restaurants of the Marina District, to the Thai places out in the Sunset, to the Maoist bookstores of the Mission District, the Italian cafes of North Beach, to the working class neighborhoods of Portrero and the Excelsior.

These are some of the things I remember from living in that great city – the hills of Pacific Heights and Russian Hill, so steep you cannot see if there is a road in front of you as you come to the top; the golden onion domes of the Russian Orthodox churches in the Richmond District; Green Apple Books on Clement Street in the afternoon, and Zhivago’s, the bar across the street with the Russian samovars shining and the icons hanging from the walls where I read the used books I had just bought, while I sipped a bottle of Bass Ale; some French girls talking at the sidewalk café around the corner from my apartment; Filipinos speaking Tagalog on the bus going downtown; a street fair on Haight Street, crowded with freaks, and the smell of grass floating on the air; watching the 4th of July fireworks break through the fog from the roof of a twenty-story apartment building in Pacific Heights; riding our bikes over the Golden Gate Bridge and coasting all the way down to Sausalito without touching the pedals; playing tennis on Wednesday afternoons on a high, windswept public court for free with views of the San Francisco Bay worth a million dollars; riding the cable cars in winter with no tourists; reading Herb Caen in the Chronicle, and the salacious novel Tales of the City serialized on the front page of the morning paper.

Those images are like riffling the pages of a book, but the book of San Francisco is closed and put away on a shelf. It was good to be young and single in San Francisco, but it was not so good a place to try and raise a family. There was always something unreal about the beautiful city, dressed in its overcoat of fog.

More Strange Science – Zombie Ants

Zombie ant credit: Hughes/NSF

David Hughes’ lab is in the new Millennium Science Complex, where I work. It’s a big building, with a wing devoted to materials science and another to life sciences, and I’ve never met David, who is an assistant professor of entomology and biology at Penn State. But I’ve been reading about his work that takes him to the rain forests of Brazil and other remote spots around the world to study carpenter ants. One of these days I hope to do a story on his work, though it is outside the scope of what I usually write.

The reason is, David studies zombie ants – normal worker ants that are taken over by a strange fungus that bends them to its will, like the zombies in night of the Living Dead or Jane Austen (You’ve seen Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, right?).

Somewhere in high school I must have missed the biology class on fungi, which, it turns out, are one of the three classes of life, along with plants and animals, and seem to lie somewhere between the two. Mushrooms, for instance, are fungi, but I wouldn’t expect a mushroom to control my mind. (Wait a minute, what about psychedelic magic mushrooms?) Hmmm.

Anyway, the ants live high up in the hot, dry canopy of the rain forest, which is not ideal for fungi, who prefer the cool, damp environs near the forest floor, but not exactly on the floor, where they can be washed away or eaten by creatures. No, they like it just nine to ten inches above the ground.

It’s a kind of never-ending cycle: a hapless carpenter ant wanders by and encounters the spoors of the fungus raining down onto the forest floor from nine or ten inches above. He ingests the spoors and makes his way back up to the colony while the spoors start to take over his nervous system. If he were to die inside the colony, the cleaning ants would immediately toss him out the door and down to the forest floor. Instead, the fungus takes over and walks him down to the favored location inches above the forest floor. Then, at noon, the zombie ant bites down on the underside of a leaf on the north/northwest side of the tree, clamps his jaw closed, and dies. The fungus sends long shoots out through the ant’s head, which releases spoors onto the floor below where another hapless worker ant is passing by.

I found this behavior on Mother Nature’s part extremely disconcerting. This kind of aggressive (and spookily intelligent) behavior on the part of a slime makes me nervous. Zombies are okay in late night movies and in spoofs of literature, but what does it say about zombies in the real world? What does it say about us? After all, our bodies are made up of 10 times more bacteria than of human cells. We’ve already been colonized by bacteria and our DNA invaded by viruses. I’m starting to feel a little itchy up above my forehead.

I Saw the Moon this Morning

Out beside the barn, walking the dog in the dark, I looked up at the bright moon hanging just out of reach in the predawn sky, so familiar, yet so strange. It was as if I were seeing it for the first time, like waking up next to your long married spouse and wondering who this stranger is next to me.

The moon has been there almost forever, created by the collision of a wandering planet-sized object with the Earth 4.5 billion years ago. So the moon is like a child of Earth and an alien invader, some Mongol from the outer darkness.

The moon has talked to us since the primordial beginnings of our race, a mystical companion in the night. A few years ago I picked my way through Robert Graves’ long and complex book, the White Goddess, that tells the stories of the religions that worshiped the moon in the long prehistory of Europe and the British Isles.

Maybe it is the ten thousand years of moon worship I feel in the darkness, as for a moment, before the dog tugs at his leash, I stand in awe under the bright crescent moon, so familiar and so strange.

In Search of Lost Time

(A little more about time)

I was washing the dishes the other evening after supper. I like that sense of nearly mindless activity, something so routine that your mind can drift back and forth in time. Van Morrison was on the CD player in the kitchen, singing about crossing the bridge where angels dwell to where children play.

I heard that song the first time late at night on a Miami radio station. I lay still in the darkness in my mother’s house in south Florida and felt like I was walking on that bridge into a kind of radiant future, propelled by Van Morrison’s Irish mystical sensibility into another dimension. As the music played in the kitchen, I was there again in the dark, as real as a ghost.

A few months later I was in Norfolk, Va., working on the trucks at the rundown RC Cola plant, dead tired every night, my body beaten up by the hardest physical labor of my life. In that year, Van Morrison gave me another gift, the upbeat jazzy tune called “Cleaning Windows,” about a Dublin window washer who plays music in clubs on the weekend. “I’m a working man in my prime, I’m happy cleaning windows,” he claims. And somehow he made me happy to be a workingman, who wrote doggerel and little pieces of fractured prose in my few free hours. I listened to the music and felt the ache.

Washing the cups and forks, my mind drifted through time and space. I was there in the kitchen of the little stone house of my childhood, watching my mother wash dishes in the big sink. My older sister dried the dishes and handed them to me to put away. While we worked we played a favorite game: What would you do if you had a million dollars?
It was a stretch for us. I collected empty soda bottles from alongside the road and walked a country mile to turn them in at Anderson’s grocery for 2 cents each, enough maybe for a small bag of penny candy, or on a lucky week, a Mars bar. While my sister and I were spending our imaginary fortune on everything we didn’t have – a nice house and a new car – my mother was aggravating us by giving her million away to her church and to neighbors and relatives more needy than we were. Looking through time, I see that she has gotten everything back by giving all of it away.
“Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future,” says the poet, Tom Eliot, in “The Four Quartets.” And “If all time is eternally present/ All time is unredeemable.”
I find that time is a shadow on the wall, a bridge we cannot cross, a game of what if. What if we had been born with a golden spoon, instead of with a mother who sang in the kitchen? The shadow moves toward evening and will not bend back, except, perhaps, when the perfect music plays.

If Time Were Not a River

If you are twenty years old, you may believe the time between ages twenty and sixty is forty years. If you are sixty, you probably know that it is only forty seconds. Now I am sixty, and I know my own past is only a few moments long, and as I get older it compresses faster, especially the years from twenty onward.

Only childhood retains a curious timelessness. In my memory it is all one seamless moment, a golden bubble floating above the stream of time that I can take in my hand and stare into, seeing the long ago – the eternal green trees, the grasshoppers caught in my fist, and the rain bouncing off of the blue-topped driveway stretching out to the distant road.

In childhood, time was expansive; there was enough of it to fill each moment with a little left over. Time grew like mangoes on the stems of the trees, full of sweet juice. It was not yet a river in a mad one-way rush to dissolution.

The metaphor of time as a river is a compelling one in the modern world. The rush of events, the magnitude of change, leaves us like rowers in a clumsy boat with a single oar, plowing into the rapids, fending off rocks, fighting to stay afloat while the river flows more swiftly. Time, like a river, flows only one way, and we cannot step out of it or float backward on it, except in memory.

But that is the modern mind looking at time. I don’t believe less driven cultures would recognize our metaphor as valid. I remember a long ago course in anthropology that examined the beliefs of the Australian Aborigines, the original inhabitants of Australia. I was struck by the way they still live, when allowed to, in a timeless world where the dead live on in different form, and the ancestors, the Dreamtime heroes, give instruction and offer guidance. The Dreamtime intermingles past and present, waking and sleeping, as well as life and death.

Of course the Aborigines did not build any great bridges and did not launch rockets to the moon, and they will probably not even exist as a culture by the end of this century. So, in the Darwinian scheme, they were a noncontender. But I like the Dreamtime, and I suspect there was something powerfully satisfying about living in it before it was ruined, like living in the mystical world of childhood, surrounded by wiser beings, speaking to kangaroos and stones, taking a part in creation.

If cultures are like individuals, and I believe they are, then ours is like a disappointed man at mid-life who has taken on the responsibilities of adulthood but has missed out on the joys. We thought that if we gave up the timeless world of childhood play, bought a wristwatch, and clocked in at work for forty years that we would be rewarded for our labors by the appreciation of our bosses, the admiration of our children, and the respect of the younger generation. We would have a warm interior sense of well being and satisfaction, and would look back on a life of contribution to a larger goal, building the safe and sane society.

I believe that particular dream has about come to an end. We look around us and see a society we barely recognize, see our lives spent in commuting to places we do not want to be, see our jobs disappear with one silly euphemism or another – belt-tightening or down-sizing. Our spouses look at us and wonder what is inside, not realizing that we have lost everything in the insane rush of the river.

Maybe it is time to bring the Dreamtime back into our lives, pluck the mangoes filled with time, speak to grasshoppers and trees. Let us cultivate the interior garden so our spouses can find a place to walk with us, and our children find some nourishment. Let’s live a little more than a forty second life.