'Two of One Kind'

This is the story that moved me the most today. Clara Gantt of Los Angeles, 94 years old, accepted the remains of her husband on Friday at Los Angeles International Airport, a short time after learning that he had in fact died in 1951 as a prisoner of war in North Korea. That country has slowly, so slowly, begun to release information about and even the mortal remains of battlefield dead and dead POWs to its sworn enemy, the United States.

Mrs. Gantt's final contact from her husband was a Christmastime letter sent from the front at the end of 1950. Shortly after, historians now know, he was taken prisoner on the battlefield and died in Korean custody. They had only been married for two years, or 65, depending on whether one asks Mrs. Gantt.

Her dedication to the memory of her late husband was such that she refused to consider him her late husband until this year, when she learned that the government had received remains from North Korea and positively identified them as Sgt. Joseph Gantt. She told reporters that even when she was able to purchase a house for herself in the 1960s, she also hired a gardener to tend it, since she knew he did not like yard work and she wanted him feel free to do whatever he liked when he returned home from the war.

From the Los Angeles Times story: "During the last 63 years, no one else caught Clara Gantt's fancy as she waited for news of her husband. She told the base officials assigned to check wives' homes for other men to come by anytime, (as) they'd never catch her with anyone.

"'I am very, very proud of him. He was a wonderful husband, an understanding man,' she told reporters at the airport. 'I always did love my husband, we was two of one kind, we loved each other. And that made our marriage complete.'"

Widow, 94, Receives Remains of Fallen Husband

I learned about that kind of enduring love from my grandparents. Eighteen years ago this month, William Aldrich died, aged 91. Bill and Edith (Pearson) Aldrich were married for 64 years. I asked my grandmother if she could recall how they met. "How did we meet? I don't think I remember," she said and looked at her sister-in-law, my great-aunt June, and repeated my question.

"What did we do?" she asked. June brightened, "We danced."

"I guess we danced," my grandmother nodded and looked at me. The two of them held hands and repeated, "We danced."

Edith Aldrich had a gift that the widow in Los Angeles did not receive: She saw her husband every day for 64 years. But both love stories are priceless.

As they grew old and then older, my grandparent's life became that "complete" marriage. In their small Vermont hill town, the mail was delivered twice a day to the country store. My grandfather would march down the hill, cross highway 100 and the bridge over the West River, collect the mail and return. Her eyes would follow him every step.

By age 85, he was living with Alzheimer's and her watchful care included hiding the car keys and having my uncle (and once, me) conceal the lawnmower behind the barn, lest he act on his foggy desire to fix something, anything, and hurt himself. (When I last saw him, age 89, he was still able to bend at the waist and pluck his hated dandelions out of the ground from a standing position, so he remained physically strong till the end.)

My grandmother outlived her beloved Bill by almost 14 years, dying in June 2009 at age 98. One day, years into her widowhood, she and I went for a walk on her road, the same road as the family cemetery, and she mentioned him.

"I miss your grandfather every day," she told me, as if this was something she had been thinking about. "I'm not interested in joining him just yet, but I know he's waiting for me." 

A Christmas Tree Story

I am sitting in my girlfriend's office looking at her office Christmas tree. It is white, snow white, like a snowman in a a Rankin/Bass stop-motion cartoon. (Paul Frees would provide the voice.) We will be trimming it in a few moments.

A white Christmas. Photo by Mark Aldrich

I think that tree trimming was my least favorite trimming when I was young. I still lack the eye necessary for decorating a tree correctly; in fact, I believe that almost every tree I have attempted to decorate has been quietly fixed upon my leaving.

(Two things transpired within moments of me writing the above: my girlfriend credited me with expanding her notions of tree decoration--"You're the first person I've seen who does not put all the decorations on the ends of the branches," which is true, I sometimes place them on the middle or even closer to the trunk; and we found that I had overloaded one section with the same color ornament and we needed to correct it.)

One winter, a friend enlisted me in a project to cut down a real live Christmas tree from a Christmas tree farm so her son could experience a Christmas like the one she and I had never ever had. (The sum total of my experience with freshly cut Christmas trees was buying one in a parking lot from a seller who was asked by the police to pick up his trees and move it along just after we made an offer. We did not get a discount.) 

Neither my friend, her seven-year-old son, nor I knew what cutting a live, six-foot-tall or smaller tree would take, so we brought the one saw she had (I believe it was one her uncle had rejected 45 years before for one that was actually sharp; now it also had some rust) and drove to a tree farm in Dutchess County, New York. I have chopped wood plenty of times, and I have helped take dead trees down; none of these experiences served me this day. 

The first task in cutting down a fresh Christmas tree for oneself is finding something to occupy the seven-year-old son of your friend--letting the child select the winning tree to preserve your friendship with his mom is advisable. Next up is failing in negotiations with him to pick a tree that is not on a slope. 

Many will ask the question, "Should I cut two notches to make a V or cut straight across?" I know I did, just not out loud or in the presence of someone who could tell me the answer. With my tiny, rusty saw and no one holding the other side of the saw, I started notching one side of a V. The blade sliced some bark off and did not penetrate the green wood underneath. The snow had already penetrated my boots, though. The trunk was no thicker than two inches wide, if that--I'm no tree-ologist!--but it was quickly apparent that I was going to need help. 

With that in mind, I drove away my companion and her son with my grumpy "attitude." 

An hour alone, my inner debate over cutting straight through versus cutting a V had produced several partial starts--some up, some down--all the way around the tree. Instead of a V, I had notched a lowercase w, partway to the center of the tree. My friend returned and we commenced cutting straight across, because it was taking me too long, when we discovered that there is nothing quite as unsatisfying as the sound of a tree not coming down no matter how far one has cut through it until it is ready to come down. 

It eventually came down. I accompanied it down the slope ... okay, I rode it down the hill like Slim Pickens in "Dr. Strangelove." I had not reminded her to bring rope to tie it to the roof of her car, so we drove home with it sticking out one of the backseat windows. 

* * * *
My family had one plastic tree for twenty or more Christmases. It was a well-constructed one, actually, a bare metal trunk with a two or three hoops to hook in each individual branch around the tree. It actually had an instruction manual. Our Christmas tree and boxes of ornaments occupied several boxes in the basement; the annual production of "putting up the tree" was my introduction to grown-ups not being able to remember from one year to the next the locations of things they put away in the same box in the same place every year. And now I am that grown-up.

I am sure that my mother and father found it necessary to re-position my ornaments; I swear that something happens to me when I approach a tree, ornament in hand. I have hooked ornaments into shirt buttonholes when I swear I was aiming for the tree. Just as I wanted to cut my one live tree down in one graceful and strong sawing motion, I always want this ornament here and now to be the first, last, and only one needed to make this year's tree complete and perfect. Christmas brings out the perfectionist in all his mistake-prone grumpiness in me.

An addition to my kitchen. Photo by Mark Aldrich

Thus, the only part of decorating that I relax and enjoy is either throwing tinsel everywhere or putting the angel on top. (That is an unsung rite of passage, growing tall enough to top the tree with a star or angel.) We had an angel, a cardboard seraph with glued-on glitter and thin, stringy blonde hair. Its halo was glued-on, as well. But it was our angel, and when nicer ones found their way into our house, they were always relegated to lower branches. My family's underdog mentality extended to angels.

The tree in my girlfriend's office replaced one she had had for several years. That one now sits in my kitchen, and is the first Christmas tree I have had for my own Christmas in many many years. I do not think I have told her that, yet. Here it sits:

I did not know that trees came pre-lighted. This discovery is revolutionizing my outlook on Christmas. However, I will be leaving the decorating to my housemate, for fear of hooking a ball to my shirt.

Four Facts About Me

For the last several weeks, I have been looking on as online friends participated in a game in which they were given a random number and had to share "X Number of Facts" about themselves. Stupidly, I "clicked 'Like'" on my sister's boyfriend's snapshot autobiography and was thus asked to write four facts about me. Here is my reply. I could write several more of these, but I think anyone older than eight or nine could supply a dozen unique facts about themselves. It became something of an essay in my hands and has a twist ending:

1. It is amazing (or not) that I was given the number four, as that is my life-long "secret lucky number." (Anyone who has gambled with me knows about this. Read: The Gad About Town: Against NYS Proposition 1.) Now, I know that in most of the world's luck traditions, if one declares out loud that something is secret and lucky, one has immediately kiboshed all secrecy and luck out of that thing's existence, but that is the beautiful thing about my "secret lucky number 4": It remains lucky and maybe even grows in power every time I speak of my special relationship with it.

2. I left New Paltz in 1995 to work in Narrowsburg, NY, and moved back to New Paltz in 1997. I left New Paltz again in 2000 to work in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and returned to New Paltz in 2006. (There are legends about New Paltz and eternal return and gazing upon the Wallkill River--I am legend, I suppose.)

3. Depending on my relative levels of optimism or pessimism, I may refer to my spinocerebellar ataxia as an "illness" versus a "condition." The latest feature of this condition that I have been noticing of late (first noticed last year) is that when I can not see my feet, I lose track of which is which. I may think I'm tapping my right, but it's my left that's annoying people around me. After going to bed, I may think my left leg itches, only to scratch it and find it was my right, or worse, that I am scratching the mattress.

4. I pretended to write before I knew how to write. There may even now be pieces of furniture at my family's house with my crayon scribblings on and in them--I did not draw, I wrote, wavy lines that I would then interpret to my parents as a story. I'll guess I was about three or ... four.

Shooting Stars

Every 33 years, Comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle makes its closest approach to the sun; it is one of a handful of comets that can be seen more than once in a person's life. Tempel-Tuttle's most recent visit to the inner solar system was in March 1998. 

As each comet approaches the sun, the energy from our star burns off material from the comet, creating the famous bright appearance and cosmically long tail that we see with every comet (these phenomena are on display this week with the approach of Comet ISON). This material, mostly particles the size of grains of sand, is left behind in space. Every time Comet Tempel-Tuttle starts its disintegration, the process happens at around the distance of earth's orbit, so a cloud of dust is left behind for us to crash through every year. This is the Leonid meteor shower. Every November 18 or so, we cross through a cloud of what had been the comet's tail in some previous visit.

From 'earthsky.org'

Even better, every third visit or so, Comet Tempel-Tuttle intersects our orbit so closely to where the earth actually is at the time that the cloud of debris is thick enough to make the Leonid meteor shower particularly spectacular. The woodcuts at right depict the 1833 Leonid meteor "storm," which contemporaries reported produced 100,000 meteors per hour. The comet's last visit, in 1998, was not one of those close-by visits, and we are now just about midway till our next encounter, so this year's Leonids will produce maybe 10 to 15 shooting stars per hour, which is still 10 to 15 more per hour than one sees most nights. 

This year, this weekend, there are other bright nighttime visitors--a full moon and the aforementioned Comet ISON, which is now bright enough to be seen without aid--but the Leonids are always my meteor shower. This is because November 18 is my birthday. If you see a shooting star this weekend, thanks for noticing something that is coming in third on most lists of things to look for in the night sky--my personal shooting stars.

* * * *

We did not own a telescope when I was a child and I do not remember if either my sister or I ever expressed an interest in possessing one, but my parents considered each occasional celestial phenomena the cause of a family outing. I remember this with great fondness now, which I think was something our mother would tell my sister and me when we were swaddled in the back of our station wagon, wondering why we were outside at this horrible hour just to look at the sky.

"You will remember nights like this," Mom would say with a smile. "You won't remember whether you got a full night's sleep tonight years from now, but you'll remember seeing" the Perseids or the Leonids or a lunar eclipse, sometimes partial, sometimes total. I think I remember the lunar eclipses particularly well because they are action-packed compared to patiently awaiting a shooting star, and because they end. There is no natural point of departing during a meteor shower, other than when the hot chocolate gets cold. (And then we would return home and I would discover while lying in bed that I already missed being outside in the cold, staring at the sky.) 

Our parents did not send us to bed expecting to be awakened a few hours later to drive into the country, so each night-sky outing was its own event and seemed to be sprung on us as a new thing. They are not scientifically-inclined, either, so what we were looking at and for was always mysterious, beautiful, an unexpected gift.

My dad would drive the station wagon to whatever local high point away from the lights that he could find (hard to do in suburban Poughkeepsie). One of our local schools had a parking lot that sufficed, especially for the eclipses. 

It was in adulthood that I discovered the appeal of wandering out into a field with a beloved and staring at the deep Ulster County country sky and keeping warm together while the hot chocolate went cold. Especially in November, "for my birthday."

Last night, my current beloved--who I think will be my current beloved for a very long time--and I walked the Walkway Across the Hudson, which is open at night for every full moon. We looked at the sky, kept each other warm, and because I am not scientifically-inclined, everything was mysterious, beautiful, an unexpected gift.

Veterans Day 2013

I do not come from a family with extensive military service. My father was drafted in 1958, served his two-year-long tour and then came back home to a job that had been held for him. He has never referred to himself as a veteran, and always reminds me that the term is more correctly given to those who served in conflict. But he served in the U.S. Army in Germany during the Cold War as a calculator, tasked with determining missile flight paths. (I believe he worked with the Atlas missile, an early ICBM model.) He is a veteran, in the dictionary definition sense, but not according to the military.

His older brother, my uncle Richard, was also an Army man, and served from the 1950s into the '70s. In my family's understanding of the term, Richard was a veteran, a combat veteran, and he never spoke of his experiences in Vietnam with any family member; my understanding is he would go silent for long periods so his letters home were not sent from Vietnam or associated mailboxes in order to protect his family from the fear that he was in a dangerous war zone.

Photo by 'Major M' on FindaGrave.com

Their father, my grandfather, was too young to enlist for action in the First World War, and by December 7, 1941, he was the father of four sons and so could not serve in the Second. His younger brother, my great-uncle Walter, died in action in France in 1944. (My dad has been producing family ancestries and I did not know this fact until recently. At right is a photo found online of his gravestone in Lorraine American Cemetery, near Metz, France, one of 10,000 Americans buried in that cemetery; I do not believe my father has seen his uncle's resting place until now.)

On my mother's side of the family, my great-uncle Lou served in the Army in Europe in World War Two and saw the concentration camps, a solemn thing for a American-born Jew to witness.

When I was 18 and struggling with the identity issues that 18-year-old boys are supposed to struggle with, but a bit more loudly than my New England family was accustomed to witnessing, my Uncle Richard had some advice: "Take one step forward and raise your right hand." Military service was what I needed, he made clear in his curt way, and he was the only family member, friend, or guidance counselor in my life to offer this advice. A couple decades later and a few mistakes along the way, I wonder if he might not have been correct, but only because I remember that at the time, we were not at war.

* * * *
War is one of the least common shared experiences but is the one that writers and other artists most desire to capture in the moment, to make it seem a common shared experience. Many great works are the result of the attempt to make war real for those, like me, who have not and probably never will witness combat. 

Each new generation at war masters new technologies for waging war and new languages to describe it. The Civil War brought new fighting machines and battlefield photography; the Second World War debuted mass anonymous bombing runs and heroic, large-scale battles--it was the war for novelists and filmmakers; the First World War was the war of chemical attacks, soul-crushingly slow trench warfare, and new mechanical technologies of death-creation sadly under-anticipated by those who were planning for yet another war fought in straight lines.

World War One was the absurd war, fought for reasons so complicated and obscure to the common fighting man that for Christmas 1914, an unofficial truce was declared by the soldiers on the battlefields of the Western Front and there, on the fields, carols were sung, holiday cards were exchanged, and joint burials of the battlefield dead were conducted by the opposing sides. It was the war for poets.

Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est" (Latin for "it is sweet and right") is a poem that attempts to capture a small moment of death in the large landscape of a battlefield shrouded in mustard gas. It calls the Horatian declaration that closes the poem, "Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori" ("Sweet and right it is to die / for one's country"), "the old Lie," and there the reason for the poet's close study of a fellow soldier's violent death is delivered. For Owen, there is no great message to be gleaned from recounting his comrade's gurgling death other than the sad, empty absence of any message. You would not tell children eager for heroic tales, he concludes, you would not tell them of great glory, if you were to see and hear the "smothering dreams" of death that he has seen.

If any members of my family carried such "smothering dreams" in them from the military portions of their lives, they certainly did not attempt to convince any of us in the next generation of the beauty of "patria mori." I suppose that that is an honorable silence. My uncle's Vietnam combat stories were only for the ears of his VFW buddies and hunting partners.

Owen himself would die on November 4, 1918, one week before peace was declared, on November 11. So I honor our patriots this Veterans Day 2013 by reading a poem that reminds us of the absence in the grit of war of any heroic message, a poem that some 95 years after it was composed probably better describes the unconventional battlefields seen in our current conflicts than many attempts today.

Dulce et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
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