Of Me I Muse

The Sweeper

My earliest solid memories in life were from when I was three or four and my family was living in Monterey, California. And, although assured as being personal memories separate from stories I was told, these were sketchy: riding my tricycle on the sidewalk in front of the house; trying to make friends with a new puppy, Sparky, that was more interested in nipping than petting and that disappeared from my life almost as soon as he had appeared; the little girl with stringy hair from down the street who might have been named Roxanne or Rosalind and who I ran away from home with—as far as the next corner; my dad soaping the corners of the windows and a mirror over the fireplace with Ivory Snow flakes to bring a Colorado Christmas to California. But I have an even more vivid memory from earlier and this must rank as my earliest recollection.

I remember a bagged floor vacuum cleaner taking up the space between two, facing railroad car seats. And I remember not talking, my mother being sad. I was on the train with my mother—and, I must assume, with my six-year-old sister, although she isn’t in this particular recollection. Because of known dates of the events, I had to be two-and-a-half-years old. This wasn’t a memory fed to me, though. This was a memory that was all mine until I mentioned it to my mother years later and she filled in the circumstances, marveling that I had remembered, at my then age, anything about a trip she never had wanted to talk about.

We were living in California and my mother took my older sister and me out to Colorado for my mother to provide end-of-life care for her mother, my maternal grandmother. Grandmother Lizzie Farmer was dying, painfully, from untreated cancer. This was in January of 1949. I do remember being awed at seeing real snow from the window of the train, so this must be a memory of arriving in Colorado; it’s highly unlikely it would have snowed in Monterey, California, even in January. I remember nothing about my maternal grandmother, which was quite a loss, I know, and that created holes in my understanding of family history that I only later was able to partially fill. And I remember nothing of the actual time spent wherever she was dying and my mother was taking care of both her and my sister and me. I don’t know how long this visit lasted. What was vivid about the subsequent memory, though, was the incongruity of having a sweeper standing between the seats of a railway car during our train trip home to Monterey.

The vacuum cleaner, it seems, was my mother’s inheritance from her mother and, in later years, my mother told me how happy at the time she was to get it, because they were scarce and she’d told my dad she needed one.

What probably stuck this memory in my young mind, though, was when Dad met us at the train in Monterey. I do remember looking out of the window of the train as we pulled into the station and my dad waving at us, me not noticing yet that he was holding something behind his back. And then, the kicker . . . I remember gingerly taking the deep steps down from the railway car and looking up to see my beaming father holding forth the new sweeper he had bought for my mother while we were gone.

Yes, It Was Me

Looking around, I see that almost everyone who would care about some of the baggage of past transgressions of mine I’ve been lugging through life is gone now—and it’s not that long, really, before it will be my turn to go. So, why the hell not confess some of the unacknowledged antics of mine earlier in life and get them out of the secret recesses of my mind? But do remember, I’ve said some of them.

Yes, it was me, not Roxanne (or was it Rosalind?), back in Monterey, California, when I was three, four, or whatever, who convinced her that cutting the curls on one side of her head would be a bold and brilliant style statement. And it was me who, when I’d had second thoughts about the haircut, peddled away with her, both of us on our tricycles, to the end of the block to run away from home until someone noticed we were just sitting on the bikes at the end of the block. And, yes, no one really stole that tricycle sometime later. I ditched it over the cliff down to the sea behind the house because I thought it was beyond time for me to have a real bicycle (with training wheels, of course).

Yes, it was me who liberated the cookies from the Roseville cookie jar—frequently and never admittedly. I did believe at the time that as long as one was left, no one would notice the ones that had escaped. This is a transgression that returns to my memory often, as the cookie jar is now a treasured piece of pottery sitting on a shelf I can see from where I sit to watch TV in the den.

Yes, I did sneak a look at my older sister’s school safety poster contest entry in elementary school and, no, it wasn’t just a coincidence that we both entered a slow down; safety first poster of a turtle crossing the street at a cross walk. And, no, I wasn’t embarrassed—at the time—that my poster won and hung on the school cafeteria wall for a week—and that my sister’s poster didn’t win anything or get displayed.

Yes, it was me in Germany that Christmas who, on Christmas morning, made the side of the doll house Santa brought my older sister fall off. Who could blame me? I’d come out in the middle of the night after Santa had gone to bed and played with the blame thing for an hour, thinking it was a gas station for me, only to find in the early light of Christmas morning that it wasn’t.

And how did all of my sister’s school friends find out about the arrival of another sister before my sister could get down the apartment house stairs on a school morning at the Gibbs U.S. Army housing complex in Frankfurt, Germany? Regardless of my denials, yes, it was me, calling from the balcony before she could hit the ground.

And that shoe that went through the large, wall-to-wall window in my bedroom of yet a different apartment in Germany? No, someone didn’t toss a rock from the outside, as I claimed at the time. In a tiff with said older sister, I’d kicked my shoe off as I entered the bedroom and it sailed through the window. I’m sure no one noticed there was no rock inside the room, or that the glass fell out rather than in—or that I had to make a trip downstairs to retrieve my missing loafer.

And yes it was me who used one bucket of dirty water to magnanimously wash four of the neighbors’ cars after doing the family Chevy.

And, yes, it was me, not the major with the beautiful pair of black standard Dutch poodles that I helped care for and that lived upstairs, who cajoled him to tell my parents he wanted me to have one of their puppies when we got back to the States. What did an eleven-year-old kid know about pedigrees and big bucks paid for show dogs?

And, yes it was me who lost the child’s tent with a Roy Rogers logo on the side in the attic when I received it years after begging for an army surplus pup tent.

And, yes, it was me who hit my uncle’s parked airplane with his car when he let me loose to learn to drive by myself on the roads running between his beet fields—and it was me who put the mysterious tire marks in the beet field that was an impossibility considering the deep trenching between the service road and the beet field.

And, yes, it was me who put the long scratch down the side of the family Impala by driving too close to a guard rail—but that no one noticed for weeks and then got blamed on someone else in a parking lot hit and run.

And, yes, it was me who made all of those boxes of frozen French fries and pints of ice cream disappear from the freezer when my parents were off somewhere all afternoon after I got home from school and I was watching the afternoon Soaps (The Secret Storm?) on the television.

And, yes, it was me who drove up the on ramp and eluded the police car when I was driving the wrong way on the Capitol Beltway the week before it opened. My government teacher had done the same with a bunch of us students in his red Chevy convertible the week before that and no one seemed to notice then, so what was the difference when I did it?

And, yes, it was me who put the mysterious 235 extra miles on the car I was allowed to take back to college for a week in my senior year and realized upon reaching my college apartment in Charlottesville that the key to the apartment was still back in Northern Virginia—and made another roundtrip in the dark of the night, moving silently into and out of the house while my parents were sleeping.

And, yes, it was me who hid the slices of Teaberry gum all over the UVa library reference section to bewilder the creepy reference librarian who slithered around giving everyone the evil eye—until after he was Teaberry gummed.

And, yes, it was me who changed the due dates on all of the snippy graduate student’s library books who then had to rush around to get his records settled before he was given his degree. It wasn’t just that he’d been snippy with me and others at the library, but also because I’d been snippy back a couple of times, realized that that wasn’t good customer service, forced myself to apologize to him—and was met with more snippiness.

And, yes, it was me who swerved away from a phantom car and wrapped my car around a street light pole in downtown Nicosia, Cyprus (the pole shouldn’t really have been buried in the center of the street anyway) and who limped home, called the embassy, and let them take care of it, letting them think it just might have been an assassination attempt. Well, it might have been. I was working for the CIA at the time.

And, yes, I confess, my suffering actor colleagues, that it was me who condemned your performance with tepid praise in stage production reviews under a pen name in one Bangkok newspaper while favorably comparing you to Sir Laurence Olivier under my own name in a review in another Bangkok newspaper.

And, yes, it was me, mistaking brownish blades of foliage for weeds rather than the last dying annual gasp of perky yellow poppy-like flowers covering the center garden in front of our new house, who pulled most of them up, leaving just a few straggly flowers to pop up every subsequent spring to haunt me.

And, yes, I take into account that I might not have been fooling anyone any of those times at the time.

And, yes, I said I’d confess some of my transgressions—and most certainly not the deepest darkest of them. Those I take away with me to the end.

But, boy, do I feel a little less guilt-burdened now to have admitted this to folks who no longer care and aren’t reading this.

War Souvenirs

[This short story, originally published in the short story collection On the Downtown Mall, was inspired by one of the few World War II experiences my father told me he’d had when I asked him where he acquired a painting of the Bavarian Alps that still hangs in my home. The basic story, buried and twisted in a more complex plotline in this story, of receiving the painting from a German refugee artist in exchange for food when my father went beyond regulations to provide the food, attempts to capture the essence of the story I was told. It stuck in my mind—becoming an appreciation of my father—until I was able to write it up in fictionalized form.

[The actual story is that my father was a lieutenant colonel at the end of the war and had been placed in charge of a unit guarding Nazi stolen artwork stored in Heidelberg Castle. The camp the unit was located in was enclosed and patrolled to keep out starving German refugees. My father caught a man, a German civilian, raiding the trash cans outside the mess hall for food and instead of expelling him from the camp, had him fed and given food to take with him—and continued to have him fed when he kept coming back. When my father was mustered out to return to the States, the painting that hangs in my den was left for him by the man who he fed and who had turned out to be an artist. The painting sustained slight damage when being shipped home, and my parents had it repaired. But everyone they took it to for repair said it had been painted by a master artist and the repair could not be as good as the original—and it isn’t.

[Although a professional warrior and in the thick of the fighting in two world wars, my father rarely spoke of the wars and didn’t glorify them when he did. He spoke of them—when he was pressed to speak of them at all—as the breakdown of civilization rather than the best answer to problems and spoke of the inhumanity rather than the spotlight for valor of war, even though his many medals testified to his personal valor. It was this essence of his character that I tried to capture in this short story.]

Jack propped the bulky package against the side of the bench and sat down. He’d have to catch his breath before he went into Snooky’s. It had been a long walk from the parking lot south of the Downtown Mall, the package had been hard to handle, and he was out of marching trim. The fact that he was pushing eighty didn’t occur to him as an explanation for why the trip had been so tiring. He plopped down on the bench beside the package and reached into his shirt pocket for his smokes. There weren’t any there. Of course there weren’t, he laughed at himself. That’s why he was down here in front of Snooky’s with this package in the first place. No smokes, no booze, no more money from his government check for a couple of more weeks, and he needed to do something to stop his hands from trembling.

Just one more look, he thought, just so I’ll remember it. He reached over for the package and maneuvered it onto his lap. He began working on the brown paper, down at the corner, but then he stopped himself. He couldn’t bear to look at it again, and he didn’t need to see it now to remember it.

* * * *

He had been just a kid, and he was happy that most kids nowadays had no idea that the world could be so cruel. But he knew it could, and he’d gotten a lesson in that he’d never forget those months it took the 157th Infantry to cross from Africa, come up the length of Italy, and take on the Germans on their home territory. All that fighting and the mud and cold and seeing all that dying and the devastation—the senseless, needless devastation—and the effect that it had on all those people, and not least the effect it had on him.

But suddenly his war was over and there he was, in Munich, Germany, waiting around with all the other soldiers for the decision on what to do with the vanquished and when he could go home. As it was, they’d left him there nearly a year after the end of the war, in an out-of-the way war camp just outside Munich. Not much had bothered him during those last months of inactivity. It was really quite a new experience for him. Only twenty-one and already a lieutenant, which put him in charge of something for the first time in his life, even if it only was a line of mess halls.

What did bother him, however, was to see how the church-going sanity he had known back in the States as an innocent kid didn’t just snap back into focus after a big ruckus like World War II. This was no more evident to him than when he had been placed between Captain Thorpe and that old man at the mess hall door. He had seen Thorpe—it was retired Major General Thorpe now—at a reunion just a few years ago. But what would really give him comfort was to have some idea that the old German man at the mess hall door had made out OK. He, of course, realized the old guy would be dead by now—he was practically dead himself and he’d only been a kid then—but it would mean a lot to know that the man had seen some better times before he went.

* * * *

The first time Jack had gotten a fleeting glimpse of the man was in the gloom of a cold, rainy Munich twilight as a shuffling blur at the trash cans behind one of the mess hall back doors. Jack had remembered thinking that, if the rats had grown that large now, he was certainly glad he’d gotten his orders for home already. Jack hadn’t been looking for trouble, but he was responsible for these kitchens, so