Life on the Mississippi, revisited

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It’s Fathers’ Day. This is a reprise of something I posted on this blog in February of 2013, and trot out occasionally on this day.

In a dusty, fading memory of a National Geographic of my youth, among the bare-breasted African ladies and stripe-shirted Parisians, there is a sunny picture of a lad on a raft, his toes swirling the Mississippi River. His father had taken him out of school for a year of rafting on that mythic Father of Dreams, not only waters. Why could not I have a father like that, I grieved.

My own father thought peace, not adventure, was the greatest gift. He was born and grew in Latvia, in a forest of kin, as much a part of his place as the oak trees planted for the native sons. A small stone house, a well, three oaks and a horizon of fields. A burial ground nearby sheltered his ancestors on both sides; their names are gone now, weathered away like the wooden crosses that marked their graves. But he was there, where he belonged, in the embrace of family, living and dead.

When I was a boy, I would stand in front of the door of my house, looking outside, wishing and wondering. I think he was like that. Bye and bye, whatever was beyond the fields of oats and rye beckoned, and he answered. In a fit of irrational exuberance, he joined the army.

Not bad, really, at least at first. It was a free country, for that brief period between the great wars, and nothing for soldiers to do but dream of dying under foreign skies, all brave and noble. They certainly had the songs for it. He went off to Riga, to the War College. It was a blast. Bright lights, big city, no way to keep him down on the farm after that. He married a girl with an eighth grade education and a mind that was quicker than a hare chased by two foxes and an alley cat. No slouch himself, he thought she was normal. They had a couple of children. You know that feeling, in a dream, when you’ve climbed to the highest peak to look at the world, and you turn around to discover the mountain has disappeared while you weren’t paying attention?

Russians. Germans, then Russians again. The world was in one of its fits. This part of the story is a haze of half glimpsed hopes and fears, mostly projections on my part. Like one of those stunts on a magician’s stage : a loud noise, a lot of smoke, and when it all clears, everything is different. In a camp in Germany, full of shattered dreams, I was born, much to the chagrin, I’m betting, of my brothers.

The father I knew had had enough adventures, thank you. He had made some promises to God when all else had crumbled; he did his best to see that his children fulfilled them. Keep this in mind when you promise things to God: don’t involve others. Faust probably had a better deal.

These days, I live near the Mississippi, and occasionally, when I drive upriver, I see that kid on the raft in my mind. I’m older now than my father ever got. I hope I’ve done as well as he did.

Guns

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The recent appalling and tragic massacre in Charleston underscores once again the “debate” about gun control in the US. I put the word in quotes, because, in reality, there is no debate, just competing declarations of faith in either guns or gun control. I won’t beat around the bush; I blame the NRA and gun supporters for this impasse, because of the utterly uncompromising stance against any and all attempts to even regulate guns. The NRA has even had the unspeakable gall to blame the pastor of the church in Charleston, himself a victim, for the tragedy because of his position against allowing guns in his church. As if an all-out gunfight would have resulted in a better outcome. It’s hard to have a conversation, and literally impossible to reach a compromise under these conditions. And let’s not forget that one side is armed to the armpits while the other is not; not particularly conducive to a productive dialog.

It is a truism that banning guns will not stop murder, even murders by gun. For one thing, there are now enough weapons at large in the US to arm every criminal for the next several generations; the gun lobby has ensured that their mantra, “criminals will always have guns,” is true. So let’s instead talk about their proposed solution, that everybody else arm themselves.

Leaving aside the obvious point that that would make even more guns available for criminals, who by definition have no qualms about stealing weapons from law abiding citizens, there are other issues concerning the value of being armed as a deterrent to crime. First and foremost, if a criminal inclined to murder you thinks you have a gun, why wouldn’t they simply shoot first? Why wouldn’t this become commonplace as more people carrying guns becomes commonplace? Indeed, it seems to be happening already, judging from news reports.

Anyone familiar with the news knows how difficult it is for even trained persons, such as police, to properly judge when shooting people is appropriate. How is an average joe with a few hours of mandatory “training” (which, by the way, the gun lobby is also against) going to be able to do it? It is not unusual for those who have, in fact, killed someone in a situation they thought warranted it, to regret it for the rest of their lives (George Zimmerman notwithstanding). Are you ready to kill another human being based solely on your own judgment in a tense, confusing situation? I’m not asking for a public answer to that; it’s likely to be standard, and reflective of your politics anyway. I don’t need an answer. You do.

One other factor is at play here, and that is the corrosive, shoot-em-up atmosphere in our society. We revere the maverick, the lone wolf, the rebel who breaks laws and jaws with impunity to achieve some kind of primitive, retributive justice. There is no doubt that the Charleston murderer sees himself in precisely that light. It breeds contempt for law and inculcates the belief that revenge supersedes all interests of the society at large.

You might say it’s just rhetoric, just words. But language is what we humans do. We live by rhetoric and symbol. It might well be the most important factor here, as it drives the non-debate, and paralyzes the will to take effective action.

Very logical, Mr. Spocky-boots

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The relentless logic of children:

“Do they have fish in England?”

“Of course. Fish are everywhere.”

“Everywhere?”

“Yep. Everywhere.”

“Then,” with an impish grin, pointing to a coffee cup, “are there fish THERE?”

“Don’t be stupid!”

“But you said EVERYWHERE!”

À la recherche du temps déplacé: memory as myth

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In the intro to my recent post about the death of Bill Vukovich and its effect on me as a child, I lamented my mistaken memories, and how I had conflated distinct events. That made me consider how that could happen; after all, we should be able to remember things we have experienced in their right sequence, shouldn’t we?

Actually, no.  Eye-witness accounts of even fairly recent events are notoriously unreliable, and the situation doesn’t improve with the added distance of time.  Complicate this with identity issues, and it isn’t so surprising.  But how, I asked myself; what is the mechanism?  The answer, I believe, lies in the way we construct our past, that is, our identity.

Time, we imagine, proceeds according to the strict logic of causation.  Events follow one another relentlessly in a sequence.  Whether this is so is not relevant here; it’s how we’ve been trained to see things.  But we file the events of our own past in terms of epochs rather than linear chronologies.  I was a boy, a teenager, a young man, etc.  We know which things can be assigned to which epochs of our past, but the internal ordering of these things remains murky.  To make matters worse, these categories themselves remain fluid, constructing and deconstructing according to our needs.  Not only do specific events swirl around within these contexts, but physical events are thrown together with emotional events, and when we call on our memories to arrange specific occurances in their proper relationship to one another, we do so according to the logic of compatibility rather than chronology.  Thus, the separate events of a racing death and the loss of a friend got pulled out of the soup together, since both occurred in the same epoch, and had similar emotional consequences.

I’m tempted to think that this is the same tendency that leads historians to construct eras in history, rather than being satisfied with chronology.  The truth is I don’t even know whether it’s accurate for personal histories.

What do you think?

The day Vukovich died

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I wrote this as a memoir in a fit of nostalgia after watching the Indy 500 on Memorial Day. Then I decided to check names and dates, and discovered that, as often happens with memories, I had conflated several events, and the story was incompatible with reality. I tried changing it to reflect that, but couldn’t satisfy myself with the result. The original story, though inaccurate, was simply better. I see now how easy it is for memoirists to get caught up in these traps you read about, when someone exposes their work as false. I decided to leave it as it was, along with this caveat: make of it what you will. Call it memoir, call it fiction, but enjoy it if you can.

Memorial Day, 1955, Indianapolis. Me and Hughie on the railroad tracks with a portable radio, listening to the 500. Just that; there was no Indy then, the only nickname we knew for our city was Naptown, and it seemed appropriate. The race itself in those days was as pure and innocent as we were. It was before the big global car companies got involved, before Ford brought the refined, expensive high-pitched whine of its V-8s to the track, when the deep, throaty roar of the big 4-cylinder Offenhauser engines ruled the pack, when a boy could walk the alleys of Indianapolis, and catch a glimpse of an open wheeled racing car in someone’s garage, when a neighborhood grease monkey could still dream of building and driving a car in the big race without being laughed off the street.

The race took all day back then, when people in the know would say that for a car to circle the track at more than 150 mph was against the laws of physics. And so we climbed to the tracks to listen, and spend the day talking and dreaming. It was a tradition, or such tradition as not-quite-10-year old boys can have; we had resolved to do it some months before, after I had found a semi-functional radio in someone’s trash. The knobs were long gone, as was the antenna, but we put new tubes and a battery in it and tuned to WIBC as best we could. I will never forget the crackling, distant roar of the Offenhauser engines, the changing pitch of the announcers’ voices, fading in and out to the accompaniment of various screeches and howls. The few passing freight trains only added to the romantic lure for a couple of  boys.

We sat at our favorite spot, above the ruins of a factory, whose broken windows and random indecipherable gears and brackets were sheer heaven for the imagination. To us it was as mysterious as Pompeii or Stonehenge, and we spent long hours devising theories about what had been made there, and why it had been abandoned, and whether there were ghosts. All the while, the sun shone brightly, the breezes came always just in time, and the radio droned a hypnotic backdrop, as close to paradise as anything on this earth.

Then, through the crackle, came the voice of Jim Frosch, the backstretch announcer: a horrendous crash involving at least three cars. The car driven by Roger Ward had broken an axle, causing the cars behind to swerve to avoid him. The race leader and favorite, Bill Vukovich, was hit with such force that his car sailed of the track, striking an abutment upside down and landing in a parking lot. Vukovich – for us Mickey Mantle, Johnny Unitas, and John Wayne all rolled into one – was dead. We came down from the tracks, stunned, and walked slowly home through the neighborhood, which suddenly seemed stiflingly hot.

Stories and rumors swirled. Boyd, whose car had sent him flying, had hit him on purpose. Roger Ward’s car had been sabotaged. As days passed, the stories grew less accusatory but more grisly. Someone had a cousin who knew a guy who had seen the crash at the race and swore he saw Vukovich’s head roll down the track a few dozen feet before coming to rest on the inner verge. None of it was true. None of it mattered.

That was the end of the “tradition.” It marked the first real disillusionment of our short lives. From that point, Hughie and I gradually lost interest in hanging out, although we were glad enough when our paths crossed, and exchanged stories, and asked after each other’s recent adventures. But we went separate ways, each choosing, or thrust into, our separate tunnels.  I longed to escape everything familiar, parents, neighbors, greasy streets with permanent potholes; Hughie seemed evermore welded to the neighborhood. After high school, I went off to college, a relatively rare thing in that neighborhood. He joined the Navy, then was back out almost immediately, on a medical discharge.

Years later, home on a visit, I gave in to a nostalgic urge and looked him up; he still lived in the same neighborhood. I knocked on his door. A woman I didn’t know opened the door.

It was a small rundown apartment with a musty odor. Hughie sat on the arm of a couch, eyes glazed with surrender. There were two other guys, a couple of girls, a half empty whiskey bottle. We said hello, and I said so long.

Nowadays. I sometimes find myself grieving for those old times when our lives seemed pure and holy, and I still think of that day so long ago, the day Vukovich died, and how the world seemed irreparably changed. How were we to know that it was only the beginning?