A memory: 28 September 1972

An evening class at Cowell College, UC Santa Cruz, just a couple of days into Fall Quarter. I am, two years later, a freshman again, having been granted a second bite at the apple. A dozen or twenty fellow freshmen gathered around a circular table in a smallish room. At some point before the class came to order a noxious bug, something like a fly, but blacker, slower, softer, was buzzing about my head. I swatted at it, and on its second or third pass contrived to propel it across the room and into the face of the young woman directly opposite me across the table. Fate, it appears, will sometimes hinge upon an insect. At close of class, as we all dispersed outdoors, I caught up with the girl and apologized. We walked together across the Cowell upper quad. As we passed a first floor room (the same room which my younger brother was briefly to occupy thirteen years later) she noticed a political poster on the wall, visible through the window. “That’s Russian!” she exclaimed. It happened that I’d just that summer commenced my infatuation with all things Slavic. “Oh? You know Russian?” At which point Veronica—for it was the legendary, now departed Veronica—clammed up (a speaker of Russian since infancy, she’d just had demonstrated to her earlier in the day her deficiencies in the written language, and was smarting in consequence) with a charming and ambiguous disclaimer. I saw her to the ground floor of her dorm, and set off to College V, half a mile distant. “Here comes a girlfriend,” I thought, correctly, and would have whistled, had I ever learned how. Actually, that’s never stopped me. I strode across campus, in the dark through the trees, emitting low, hoarse, lighthearted hoots through my pursed lips, forming clouds before me in the cool, slightly damp autumnal air.

Bright college days

 

Half a century ago today I arrived, most unwillingly, at the Riverside campus of the University of California. That’s a long story, to be related another time, if ever. Still, the following months before my ignoble exit (conveyed in the event by the University to the good people at Selective Service) yielded up some piquant memories. Hearts full of youth! Hearts full of truth! Six parts gin to one part vermouth!

—Although my set really didn’t drink much. Back in those days we regarded it as a little counterrevolutionary.

“The Happiest I’ve Been”*

 

20 September 1970

I was summoned to the telephone at my parents’ home that Sunday morning. A group of high school friends were organizing a trip out to Zuma Beach in Malibu—was I interested? Of course I was.

This was just about a week before my graduating class was to scatter to the four winds, those of us who were going the “higher education” route, to our sundry and far-flung colleges and universities. I, to my disappointment, was bound just ninety miles away, to an institution that would spit me out half a year later; my classmates went on to various fates, some known, some not: that day was the last time I was to see most of them.

Among the teenagers present was my beloved, with whom interludes in the course of the preceding summer and the following autumn are among the tenderest of my youthful memories. That romance did not endure past the turning of the year (more on this anon), but this Sunday at the beach was the capstone of the year. At one point, as we waded in the shallows, a wave knocked my sweetheart down, and her spectacles into the churning surf: groping at my feet, I found and retrieved these before they were swept out to sea, for beaucoup points.

I do not think that, up until this day, I had ever experienced such an episode, so many seamless hours, of sustained joy.

By January the beloved, four hundred miles north of me, had developed other interests. I was unhappy, and peppered her with letters (in that distant era, meine Kinder, one had to convey text messages on paper and via the post) for the next few years until I finally wore her down and rekindled the romance in 1974. Two years later we wed; ten years after that she had reconsidered and, on this day in 1986, took a step, my weeks of anguished entreaties being dismissed, that pretty much put paid to the entire matrimony thing, so that’s another 20 September, a grim one, to bookend the first.

Someone asked me, twenty years ago, “Don’t you think it’s turned out for the best?” I imagine that the ex would agree—from the scant online evidence, she has long regarded our entire common history as an ill-considered detour from her own life’s journey. For my part, the question makes no sense: had I never been divorced, I’d be a different man today. To desire that counterfactual, to make it magically come about, would necessarily involve an act of self-cancellation of the man who might make that wish. So no, I do not rub the lamp. It is what it has been, and I am who I have become. And today is, fifty years on, the twentieth of September.

*The post title is taken from John Updike’s 1959 short story.

Waving the bloody shirt

 

God-fucking damnit, I get so tired of the bleating every year at this time: never has so blameless a nation, so virtuous a people, ever been subjected to so inhumane, so vile an atrocity. Why, innocent people died!

Break me a fucking give. Measured against the number of noncombatants this country has slain from the air during the past seventy-five years, the butcher’s bill nineteen years ago was a rounding error. To the side that has the cruise missiles, asymmetric warfare will always appear an unsportsmanlike proposition.

Got a kinda postapocalyptic vibe going here

 

I joined the landed gentry exactly twenty-one years ago. The weather outside The Crumbling Manse™ did not, as I recall, look anything like this, descried today at mid-afternoon.

How far we have come

 

There was a time—this period would elude the comprehension of my younger readers, if I had any—when the notion of policemen shooting fleeing suspects in the back was presumed to be a characteristic of totalitarian foreign regimes: the Gestapo, of course, in the service of the Third Reich. The East German border guards popping citizens attempting to flee over the wall. Even the Vichy French constabulary in Casablanca as depicted in this piece of popular entertainment in a scene that domestic theatre audiences presumably did not then applaud.

Today? The guy into whose back a Kenosha cop emptied seven rounds is deplored by about forty percent of the electorate as having had it coming for resisting police commands. We’ve come along way since 1942, have we not?

Another birthday

Born this day ninety-four years ago; seen here about a decade prior to my own debut. She stinted routine maintenance, I’m afraid, and pegged out suddenly not quite four months after she reached the Biblical span. An erratic personality with, er, issues that went back to her childhood—my father, marrying her in 1946 in Mexico City after what may be described, with some understatement, as a whirlwind courtship, took her up in the “manic pixie dreamgirl” phase, and could not, at twenty-five, have understood what he was signing onto. Well, water under the bridge; beer over the damn dam, and if the two youngsters had been less hot-bloodedly impulsive I would not be here to condescend to their memories. She was very far from being a model parent, but she loved her children well, if not wisely, and I wish I’d been home to take her phone call forty-eight hours before her death instead of rolling my eyes as I listened to her tipsy recorded message late that night on my answering machine. Here’s to you, Mom, wherever you’ve lodged in the space-time continuum.