I was wondering, as I do around every Veterans' Day, how many World War veterans are left. From the first, twenty-seven British ones, few if any Australian or New Zealandish, a handful of Canadian, while Usan numbers are harder to find. There are more from the second, but I found out last night there is one fewer than before.
In fifth grade we had to interview a veteran. I interviewed my across-the-street neighbor. I don't remember anything about the interview except its very end: why I remember it at all. I must have asked the assigned questions, or maybe I had to make up some, which I'm sure were not overly insightful. I know he served in the Pacific and retired an officer. What I remember is Mr. H asking, "Don't you want to know if I got any medals?" He had received a Purple Heart at least and maybe a Bronze Star.
The Hs were good neighbors. They built their house when I was about three, a ranch with a paddock for their teenage daughter's taupe and pinto horses. Their driveway touched the road at two places, both within sight of my house (my boundary), plus it was paved, so it was a wonderful place to learn to ride my bike. Trick-or-treating, young enough to be with my mother, I turned from their front door and saw, I swan, a witch on a broomstick fly across the moon.* Also, they gave nickels in addition to candy.
They had a Christmas party once and I got to try something my father would never let me do: a guest left a smoldering cigarette on the kitchen counter and I touched its pretty orange glowing tip. Now I knew why my father wouldn't let me do that.
They had a toy poodle (for her) and a Weimaraner (for him). Long before William Wegman, I startled more than one Weimaraner human by knowing their dog's breed.
Later, when their daughter married (my cousin, as it happens) and had three children and divorced, the Hs had the children all the time. So they built a pool, to which they welcomed the neighbor children--me and my sister and two boys much younger. First we could come only with our mother, and after a year or two of not drowning, since we were older teenagers, just on our own, and eventually I was allowed to go by myself, wonderful in those pre-car days when the biked miles to the beach took forever in the heat and I was flat-out forbidden to go to the lake alone. Once when my mother and I went over, they were having a cookout so we turned around, but they invited her to join their party and found a lobster for her. I might have had a bite.
In return for this bounty, we gave them jam and cookies for Christmas.
When I flew to a college program when I was 17, we got up waaay before sunrise to drive to the airport, and there was Mr. H getting his paper. Four years later when I left the house at 5:30 every morning to go to work, there he was getting the paper. Getting up early after 40 years in the Army was a habit he never broke. Several days ago my mother noticed that the Hartford Courant remained in its tube after sunrise. Then last weekend she saw a moving truck. The next morning she brought the paper to the door, knocked and poked her head in and announced herself, and Mrs. H called her in.
Mr. H died very quickly, without much pain, with scarcely enough time to be diagnosed before he died. The moving truck was not to bring in a hospital bed, for Mrs. H with her repeatedly broken hips, but to move in the eldest of the grandchildren, her husband, and two young children, because they are going to live with Mrs. H now.
The last time I spoke with my mother before this was to learn that my great-uncle died. It was his wife's funeral that I declined to attend in September. My remaining great-aunt had told my mother she didn't want to be the last of the three siblings and their spouses--but she is the youngest and a woman. Her demographic sealed that fate, but in ten months, in two spates six weeks apart, she lost her husband and her sister (my granny), and then her sister-in-law and her brother.
I feel bad that I can remember enough to eulogize Mr. H when I could not my grandmother's siblings. I remember talking to my great-aunt-in-law after Granny's funeral and admiring her bravery and her certainty. I remember my great-uncle could not tell my sister and me apart (I'm not sure if he ever could). I barely remember my great-uncle-in-law at all, just a smiling face at the other great-people's annual Christmas party. My great-aunt looks very much like Granny, minus eight years, though my mother tells me she's aged a great deal in the past year, and who wouldn't.
I remember.
* A couple of days later I realized that the full moon does not rise early enough to be up when a little kid would go trick-or-treating. But it could have been a waxing moon.
My first taste of lobster (which I liked, because hey, butter!) was either a bite at the Hs' cookout or the tip my father got once from a fishmonger. I just don't remember which happened earlier. My father worked for the power company, and during an outage, after a lightning strike or a car crash or whatever, my father's crew restored power to a fish market. In gratitude for their fast work that let him keep his stock, or in acknowledgment that linemen--they were all men--on call get up at three o'clock in the morning and work without sleep for days after a hurricane, he gave every man however many lobsters.
It's good stuff, lobster. I can distinguish it from chicken even. I've withdrawn from the drawn butter camp, because what the hell, why cover delicate flesh in butter? Why not drown your bread in it instead?
I did that once during "Wizard of Oz." I bought my own stick of butter so I could use as much of it as I wanted--breaking up a pack of butter cubes after squeezing the Charmin, pirate of the grocery aisles as I was--and popped popcorn for the big yearly broadcast. I dipped each kernel in a bowlful of melted butter. Damn good, that was.
Lordy, I love iTunes. I just bought Dream of the Blue Turtles, which I've owned on a tape dating to 1985 or whenever Sting released it, and ...Nothing Like the Sun, which I've had on a crappy dub since 1987. I gave Soul Cages one listen, decided it depressed me (what a surprise: I bought it in 1991), and, I believe, never listened to it again. Ten Summoner's Tales is fine. Last night I listened to Dream, and oh my it's so '80s. But now I'm listening to Nothing: "Lazarus Heart," "They Dance Alone," "Fragile," "Sister Moon," a cover of "Little Wing." Sigh.
Plus I just bought Reckoning, soon after getting Murmur. I have missed them so much. Also I listened to snippets from Green, so vital a part of the 1989 soundtrack, yet unlike with all the other pivotal albums released or new to me that year--Passion, Sensual World, the Indigo Girls' first and also Melissa Etheridge's, Elvis Costello's Spike, my introductions to the Waterboys by way of Fisherman's Blues and This Is the Sea and to Joni Mitchell by way of Hissing Summer Lawns and Wild Things Run Fast--I can do without Green. This surprised me.
What decade is it?
A friend just lent me Beth Orton's Central Reservation. It is, if possible, even more barbituate blues than the Cowboy Junkies. And I like it! It dates, of course, from the previous millennium.
This weekend I watched "What Dreams May Come," which I had wanted to see when first released. It was cinematically beautiful, but considering how his task had been described, Robin Williams didn't put forth much effort in effecting it. Williams's inability to function in his painty heaven was unfortunately reminiscent of "Hook," and I only know Annabella Sciorra from "The Sopranos," so her becoming unhinged was just typecasting.
That also dates from the previous millennium.
But the next Netflix flick is "Lost in La Mancha," which ought to be super and is this year's, so mleah.
I do things like write "rights" for "writes" that scare the piss out of me. Occasionally I do things that reassure my sense of myself. Today as I approached Colorado Boulevard, I spotted a slouchy young man slouching toward a perfect cone (not pile) of leaves on a tarp on the verge. Judging from his appearance, I suspected he was going to scruff through the leaves. As much as I pitied whoever's work he was going to undo, I was a little envious too. He noticed my glance and probably my judging as he aimed right for the tarp, bent, and picked it up by its corners. By this time I was abreast of him. "Oh," I cried, "I thought you were going to stomple through them!"
"Aw, wouldn't that be fun!" with a regretful smile and hoisting the tarp to his back. "But then I'd have to rake them all up again."
Of course he was slouchy, dressed in layers against the changing temperature and for his labor. I'm glad that, given my previous expression, my tone was right for him to understand that stompling leaves is fun.
And I invented "stomple," just kind of accidentally. Stomp, which came from my thinking he was scruffy, and trample, which is how you destroy a pile of leaves.
Stomple!