The Little Words Mean the Most

Chapter 7: Sex with Mom

 

 

I got my first sex education (little did I know) from my father's tales of wartime England. "Another night I was on guard duty down at this motor pool on the outskirts of Swindon. About six o'clock at night I see all these G.I.s coming down with girls on their arms. Everybody's got a couple of blankets with them.

"They come up to me, and they said, 'When do you go off?'

"I said, 'Another hour.' They said, 'We're going to use the ambulances.'

We had about twenty-five ambulances.

"I said, 'Go ahead. I don't care.'

"So in they went. They said, 'What time do you come on in the morning?'

"I said, 'Six o'clock.' 'Well,' they said, 'when you come on, wake us up.'

"I said, 'I better wake you up. The officer of the guard will be here at seven. And you boys better be out of here before that.'

"So the next morning I walk around the ambulances, pounding on them with the gun. 'Come on, get out of there.' They all trooped out, and off they went."

------

What this boy-child learned: men hung out with women in ambulances.

And Dad woke everybody up in the morning. To avoid shame and blame.

I couldn't imagine at my young age what was going on behind those closed doors painted olive drab with a big red cross in a white circle so you could see it clearly.

I couldn't imagine the thumps and the clumsiness in the dark. Shared cigarettes. A bottle. Two sipping mouths, wet and ready. Cloth moving from decency, moving north and south of the waist. Becoming a curtain. And a hand through the curtain. I didn't know anything about hands. Not consciously. Not with a sense of shame.

My entire sex life until the third grade was with my mother.

 

 

Can I haul you back to Chapter 5 a bit: Re: Racism at the time

 

 

Training to hate proceeded along conventional lines: demonize and dehumanize. The Germans were cruel, barbaric, robotic monsters of war. Sadists by nature and preference. Even so, the Japanese were far, far worse. Not even human. Not really.

     Racism became a weapon of mass destruction, at least in the Pacific. Allied propaganda variously characterized the Japanese as angry sheep, rats, mad dogs, rattlesnakes, lice, ants or cockroaches stirred from their nests, wildcats, terrified cattle, and jackals.

...

The subhuman Japanese, so visibly different, might invite extermination. But the average G.I. — so polls would show — felt little deep hatred for the German soldier during the war.

     After, when news of the death camps became commonly known, a permanent stink attached to Germany, a country that could allow such a thing. Who were these monsters? Even so, complicit civilians and their political masters smelled far worse than the common soldier, whose reputation for blind obedience and competence preceded him. When the German soldier took cover behind the stock excuse, "I was just following orders," it actually sounded plausible. Von Clausewitz and Bismarck had shaped a German military that was the envy of the ruthless: they got results on the battlefield. If you had the ends, they had the means.

     Not everyone was fooled. LIFE photographer Robert Capa thought they were nasty whiner-schnitzels: "The Germans are the meanest bastards. They are the meanest during an operation, and afterward they all have a cousin in Philadelphia." After you've captured them. "That is what I like about the French. They do not have cousins in Philadelphia."

 

Chapter 6: England

 

 

"I see England. I see France. I see Judy's underpants." That jibe, I believe, first developed some small desire in me to visit France. A country that was mostly about female undergarments was the country for me, as I entered puberty.

            Aboard my father's convoy, transporting him from American shores to England. "You never saw so many boats in your whole life. As far as you could see: boats.

            "Then one day!

            "The sun is out. Nice day. Everybody's up on deck. It was a big English liner. Twenty thousand troops on this one boat."

            Rounded up to the nearest ten grand. It was sailing past the tub my father was consigned to.

            The record was 15,028 troops aboard the Queen Elizabeth, virtually the entire U.S. 1^st Infantry Division. With two fast British liners, the Queen Elizabeth and the Queen Mary, the Allies transported about 420,000 U.S. troops to England, a quarter of the total, in just 37 trips. The Queens usually traveled alone, their 28.5 knot speed their chief protection against submarines.

            Dad: "We had a couple of destroyers with us. All of a sudden one of these destroyers starts cutting circles in front of us, and there's the cans" — depth charges — "coming off it like crazy. And every time they explode underneath, it's just like you took a hammer and hit the side of the boat.

            "What a bang! Oh, boy, I'm telling you. We were scared. 'Cause they had orders: if any boat gets hit with a torpedo, the other boats keep right on going. They don't stop and pick up anybody."

 

 

Chapter 5: Boot camp

 

 

"The first day we were up at Devens, they threw all the uniforms and everything at you."  

    Fort Devens was a military reservation and assembly point in Ayre, Massachusetts, outside of Boston. "Had this fellow with me, Bill Ryan. Bill Ryan was a tobacco salesman. But he had an uncle in the shoe business.

    "Well, there's an expression they have just in shoe factories. They have names for different sizes. They never say 'C.' They say 'Charlie.' Or 'D.' They say 'David.' When Bill Ryan came through in line, he said to the sergeant who was handing out the shoes, 'I take an eight and a half Charlie.' The sergeant says to himself, 'Oh, here's a wise guy.' He turns around and gives Ryan an eight.

    "The next morning, Ryan said, 'I can't get my feet into these shoes. He gave me the wrong size.'

    I said, 'Go on sick leave. Get a slip from the doctor.'

    "OK, he goes on sick leave. He went over to where they were handing out shoes. There's two sergeants standing there talking. He tries to tell them about his shoes. They don't even listen. One says to the other, 'Had your coffee yet?' And they leave. So he comes back crying, 'They won't change the shoes!'

    I said, 'Come on, I'll take you over.'

    "There was a corporal there. I said to the kid, 'Do us a favor, will you?' He said, 'What's that?' I said, 'Change this guy's shoes. He doesn't wear this size.' Corporal said, 'What size does he wear?'

    "So Bill Ryan got a new pair of shoes. I said, 'See, all you've got to do is talk to people. If you're reasonable, they'll go along with you.'"

            Lesson #3 from my father.

            Watch for brake lights. Life is hard. Talk reasonably.

 

Chapter 4: Tom and Hazel

 

 

The most influential economist of the 20^th century, John Maynard Keynes, when asked if he could recall anything else like the Great Depression of the 1930s, said he certainly could: "It was called the Dark Ages, and it lasted four hundred years."

 

What Keynes referred to was the tempering of my father's generation. Part, anyway.

Dad remembered the Great Depression as a healthy time. "Nobody had a dime." But no one cared. You helped each other, he said. Faded laundry flapping on the line, a family goat, milk bottles clinking, the account at the grocery carried until you could pay.

Economies creaked to a standstill all over the globe. A young century ceased to be promising. William Manchester later wrote, reaching for the rear of the hall: "This was calamity howling on a cosmic scale...."

 

"And do you, Thomas Francis Scanlon Ahern...."

            Scanlon? My father winced. The priest had to say that?

            "...take this woman...." Hazel, his June bride, ready top and bottom for delivery into Dad's trembling hands.

            He heard the predictable whispers skitter through the front pew where three of Hazel's sisters sat, mostly in judgment as the family was wont; three short women with exceptionally pale skin and practical hair. A well-dusted St. Joseph looked down from a pedestal. Frank Smith witnessed for the groom; honest and plain. Hazel's sister, Philomena, a busy mouse, was the maid of honor. Five Presbyterian sisters altogether, counting Hazel, female splinters from a thick plank of Scottish mother. Nervous enough in a Catholic church, with the Pope's finger pointing this way and that. Even though most of them had their own Catholic husbands and had accepted Catholic baptisms for their babies, relinquished — as the Church of Rome demanded in exchange for its blessing on a "mixed" union — to an upbringing in "the One True Faith." The One False Faith, the McKays would insist if cornered. What did the Church of Rome ever do for Scotland except get us killed?

           So: Scanlon?

           The sisters' pew calculated. Hazel knew the story but hadn't told.

 

 

Chapter 2: My Father's War Stories As Told By Toys

 

 

My parents introduced me to my first dead body when I was six.

It was a big decision for them, discussed with the relatives: Should a child go to a funeral? They were afraid I wouldn't understand. Why isn't that man breathing? But I could see their pride, too. Tommy's first funeral. A social occasion. How would he act? In a large Scotch-Irish family, dead people in open caskets were no surprise. The oldest generation went, like a worn edge against a grinding wheel. The young had accidents. You behaved a certain way. Childishness was unwelcome.

I don't even remember which of my countless aunts or uncles it was who'd stumbled into the afterlife. But children have the curiosity of Elizabethans. I was excited, if in murmurs. I tiptoed up, at my father's urging. I kept my eyes fixed on the puckered taffeta lining of the lifted lid. I'd wondered about the smell. Bouquets cloyed the air; otherwise nothing. And then I looked down. The corpse's eyelids were shut. The face looked vaguely familiar. Very wrinkled. Very powdered. Very settled. A face so still it vibrated; maybe it was the molecules.

Now I knew.

Something. I wasn't sure then. Now I know: I'd been shown the end. A voice could have whispered into my waxy ear: "You have now, my fragile little nudgkin. This time you're standing in. And then you'll have this, three showings to anyone who remembers you exist. And between those two points in time you will have to fit in anything you want to do, anything you want to accomplish, anything you want to savor, anything you want to say. We pray it's for good, but that's not truly a requirement."

 

 

Charity work is where I go for amazement and reassurance that we/me (humans) are not JUST predators.

 

The daily news says the opposite.

 

The battle is not just for your orphans (lovely as that is).

 

The battle is for < US > = can the human community stop itself? Can we grow in harmony across a planet?

 

Or are we doomed? And who's to say that "the decline and fall" aren't essential natural events, anyway?

 

No grand answers here.

 

The more I think I "know," the less I know I know.

 

It will come down to small actions done well over time. Vida Joven in a nutshell.

 

bless you, Beth

 

12-step program for lucrative donor comms

 

1. Get educated about current good practices and Phil Psych: the psychology of philanthropy.
2. Set up your metrics: response rates, LTV, average gift, cost per dollar raised; the usual
3. Assess your obstacles (some will be internal: boss, board, colleagues)
4. Eliminate those obstacles (or job hunt)
5. Realize you can now IGNORE those obstacles
6. Survey your target [donor] audience re: why they REALLY give (Phil Psych)
7. Listen ~ think ~ brood
8. Apply that listening/thinking/brooding to your comms
9. Make your comms less about your .org and more about the target audience you surveyed
10. Notice that your .org almost disappears from the conversation
11. Reintroduce the .org a tiny bit, as part of a grand team the supporters make possible
12. Make a shit-load more in donations

 

 

The Nazis didn't sweet-talk their way into power

 

The Nazis didn't sweet-talk their way into power.

They built an influential PR network, giving away radios that tuned to JUST one station.

And they relished beating people up: radicalizing, suppressing dissent.

If today's news looks familiar? Then maybe you've read about the triumph of fascism in the 1920s/1930s.

Will you/me/we let it rise again ... in America of all places? What an insult to the veterans of WW2.

 

 

I care ... do you plenty?

 

trick question; sorry

Ignore it

Nothing with to do

unfair you know

as atrained directak wirter [Google translate]

stay away