By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

I catch a trace of Father’s scent each year. He’s been dead since 1996, which makes his lingering essence kind of magical. I’ve smelled him in Dayton and Houston, in San Diego and Midland and Minneapolis… — and he was not a traveling salesman.

I smell Father just about whenever and wherever I find myself in the midst of a particular group of cane-wielding men and stalwart widows. They are the survivors of the World War II Army Air Corps’ 484th and 461st Bomb Groups. And, now, as I wait in the airport lounge to return from their most recent weekend reunion, a tradition in which I’m one of many second-generation interlopers, I try to hold on to the smell of him, of them.

And I watch a pair of beautiful young men holding hands. I am certain, pretty certain — no, absolutely confident — that, despite any discomfort any of the veterans might feel, they would still go to war to protect these young men’s freedom. At least that’s how I like to think of them.

Because they are special. Because I love them.

Oh, they’re as quick to criticize the nation — and the wildly diverse people in it — as anyone, and from all political persuasions. They flew to protect that right.

But somehow their two-cents’ worth is more valuable than that, these men who flew B-24 Liberators, these pilots and ball gunners, navigators and tail gunners, these engineers and bombardiers, nose gunners and co-pilots, waist gunners and radiomen — and their ground crews.

They offered up their lives for good old-fashioned freedom, not some contemporary convolution of capitalism and petroleum wrapped in a flag. They offered up their lives for an ideal, wisely or naively, but sure of purpose. I’m not sure that ideal has survived. Perhaps it disappeared like so many of the aviators, amid fiery explosions, in the depths of an ocean, beneath desert sands.

But these men survived the war, only to be attacked by time. Time is now their enemy, not as brutal as flak, but just as lethal.

So they tell their stories as best they can, heads nodding to each other’s memories.

Stories of ironic snafus. “I’m glad to see Gordon over there. I didn’t know him, but I saved his life. If I’d known how to use that gun, he would have been dead.”

Stories of flying in formation, seven planes mustered. “The first burst hit us, and two airplanes just kind of went. Another burst hit us, and three more airplanes went. That left two of us. The other one, he was under me. And then there was another burst. It was like when someone takes a flash photo in your face. There was the burst, and when I could see, it was just pieces. He did not float away. — You remember how the tents were? They were in rows and the doors of the tents faced each other. He was the one across from me. — Well, in that instant, all ten guys, gone. This is a memorial. But, but I can’t remember his name.”

Stories of an ornery MP, the one who hassled them every damn time they came into town for R&R — and how he got his comeuppance. “They sent him to the front. I didn’t feel bad for him then, and I don’t feel bad for him now.”

Stories of departed loved ones. “Lost my wife on January the fifth of this year, and the last word she said was, ‘You always told me we would never live forever. I didn’t doubt you, but I didn’t think I’d be the one to go first.’” …

I sit in the airport lounge and I have a Scotch on the rocks to honor them. Not because I’m particularly fond of Scotch, but because I’m fond of them and that’s their drink. I watch the beautiful young men holding hands and hope they’ll never find themselves at war. And I realize in a burst of awareness that we second — and third — generations are not interlopers. We are the receptacles for our veterans’ memories. We are the force that will keep our Liberators alive. We are the bells that will toll for them.

I swirl my drink. Their scents waft around me. I catch a trace of Father.

Love,
K-B

Please join us for a special reading on Wednesday 09 November at 6 p.m. for a Salute to Veterans with Sue Diaz, author of Minefields of the Heart, and Gulf Wars veterans from her writing workshops. The reading also features open mic for poetry and prose. Contact K-B for more information: kbgressitt@gmail.com or 760-522-1064.

Crossposted at San Diego Gay & Lesbian News.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

My mother tried to make a sandwich with the TV remote control.

It might seem sadly funny, but there was some context for her pursuit: She was watching a cooking show from her hospital bed. Watching and processing in her own inimitable style, and she just didn’t like the way the celebrity chef was doing it. She didn’t know where she was, but she knew she could do better.

“I need to put the bread on top,” she said with the slurred tongue of a stroke victim, pointing the remote in the television’s general direction.

“Yes, that would be good, but the remote won’t do that for you, Mother.”

She persisted, and my heart shrank into that tidily distant place that allows the practical to reign supreme, as I searched for unemotional words to explain to the hospital staff that Houston, we’ve had a problem; Houston, my mother is leaving us; Houston—

But then it occurred to me how glorious a response Mother’s was. How satisfying it would be to encounter idiocy, point the remote and press a button to fix it. I relished the thought as the chef smeared a heinous concoction on bread made from special grains probably harvested by child laborers in some far-off fascist stronghold.

Someplace like Libya or Saudi Arabia or Yemen, where people donate their lives for the hope of freedom; where women just want to be able to drive themselves to the market, unfettered by male watchdogs; where the innocent are splattered on city walls while power-seekers conduct pissing contests overhead with deadly weapons.

Wouldn’t it be great to be able to just push a button on the remote and fix it all?

Or how about someplace like Uganda or Afghanistan or Colombia, where ignorance and hate might try again to decree death on homosexuals; where girls and women are tortured for trying to learn; where Chiquita swapped lives for bananas.

Hit the button and — zap! — all the bad guys are gone.

Or even someplace like the United States, where people I love are not allowed to marry or to be themselves without institutionalized condemnation; where women’s wombs are purchased with the campaign contributions of ideologues and theocrats; where free speech has descended to profanity; where voters cast their lots for their wallets and politicians run on egos — not ideals.

Zap, zap, zap, zap — all better!

Yes, Mother’s new world seemed a more satisfying — a healthier — place to be. Just point, press and be done with the horror. Except—

“This is frustrating,” she slurred through the neural fog, thrusting the remote at the chef with quixotic determination, pressing random buttons to no avail.

“Here,” I took the remote, “let me help you with that.” I held the thing with both hands, aimed at the bastard chef and fired with rage. “Bull’s eye — got the sucker! He didn’t know how to make a sandwich, anyway. And look: It’s one of your judge shows.”

She relaxed into the pillows, half a whispered smile on her peaceful face.

Love,
K-B

Crossposted at Ocean Beach Rag, The Progressive Post and  San Diego Gay and Lesbian News.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

In September 1995, they soared into Dayton, Ohio, from all points of the compass: from bucolic calm and frenetic cities, from sedentary retirement and the flush of newfound love. They were seventy or eighty veterans of the World War II Army Air Corps’ 484th Bomb Group, 49th Wing, 15th Air Force. No measly designation for these men, who reunited to pay annual homage to themselves and the war they fought for the world from their homely base at the Torretta Airfield near Cerignola, Italy.

Perhaps a motley crew, yet heroes since their youth, back then, in Dayton, they were in various stages of oldth, some sprightly, some hobbled by age and infirmity; some accompanied by wives, some represented by widows. All were ready to drink to their own and the world’s past, to boogie to the 1940s brass and reed voices of Joe Aceto and His Big Band, to make mirth of their foreshortened futures.

Ostensibly, they gathered to erect a memorial of black granite and brass: an investment in eternity, an edifice more solid than the fickle flesh bestowed them.

But in truth, they came to reclaim the intimacy that war had given them, an intimacy born in dark and frigid tents; in makeshift games of baseball; in pickup quartets of faithful, hopeful song; in the innovation of desperate necessity; in fleeting lust and, sometimes, life. Theirs was the camaraderie of those who have known the brutality, the fearful allure, the graphic imagery of war. An intimacy that peace took from them. Yet, as they reminisced, they began to regain it, recounting common moments that ultimately defined the men they would become after their fifty bombing missions were complete.

Back then, in Dayton, they juxtaposed stories of the war with tales of the day, merging black and white with brilliant color — the unique vision of a generation slowly fading. The last generation to know without question the righteousness of going to war for a just and worthy cause.

They neglected their chicken dinners, too engaged in one another to take time to chew.

The gunner, who fifty years before had served his nation so well, rhapsodized over strange and fantastic conspiracies his government was purportedly perpetrating. And while he was at it, he was certain that the same had gone on during the war, for sure.

Others spoke of Hungarian girls, orphans of the war, who had waved from their pockmarked window ledges to two downed airmen awaiting return to their Italian base.

“Come up,” the girls had said. “Tell us of America.”

On a piano that couldn’t carry a tune and with the meager utensils of a war refugee’s kitchen, the soldiers had found the chords and rhythm of Captain Glenn Miller, the Dorsey brothers, Les Brown. And later, when the more innocent had been plied with his first French kiss, he had stammered to the girl, “We don’t do that where I come from!”

It could have been the war cry of his squadron.

One reunion couple, retired from the short-reined demands of a Lutheran congregation, told of traveling a world the minister had known as his battlefield. On maps once sectioned into quadrants and marked with bomb targets and flak batteries, they plotted routes to beautiful vistas and quaint villages where the scars of war had been covered by the detritus of two more generations.

Some vets spoke of the Italians, who embraced the airmen, loving the romantic heroes as only the Italians could, teaching them their language. They used B-24 Liberators as blackboards, imparting to the bombers — crew and bird alike — the critical phrases of communication: Buon giorno. Good day. Come sta? How are you? Quanto casta? How much? And, most important to the young warriors: Volete venire a passeggio con me? Will you take a walk with me?

Back then, in Dayton, the airmen had pooled their funds — from slight and abundant sources — to send scholarships to the descendants of their Italian hosts, the grandchildren of the Torretta Airfield.

The grateful students wrote, “Our grandfathers remember what you did for them during the war and they are very proud of having known such courageous and generous men. Loyalty, courage, friendship: This is the message we get from you, and we want to continue.”

But back then, in Dayton, the bombardier turned actuary gave the 484th only another eight years or so to reconnect with one another, to share their stories, to recapture their youth, to enjoy the freedoms for which they flew so bravely.

No matter: He was wrong. The 484th’s numbers did dwindle, but they defied his gloomy projection.

Now, it is September 2010, a full fifteen years since Dayton, and seventeen veterans of the World War II Army Air Corps’ 484th Bomb Group, 49th Wing, 15th Air Force, are reunited in Houston, Texas.

Now, too precious to be motley, too extraordinary for their ordinary lives, these heroes have progressed further into their oldth. A few remain sprightly, but most are a bit more hobbled by age; a few more widows represent them; some bear second and third generations. And all are ready to drink to their own and the world’s past, to boogie to the digital sounds of DJ Ben Avery, himself, a Vietnam veteran, who brought home a Purple Heart and appreciation for the comforts of music.

Now, the airmen — having no more memorials to erect, no more plaques to remind the future that they existed — come knowingly to be together, to lend poignant voice to quiet pieces of themselves, to imprint their past on three generations of progeny, to prove they indeed survived the memories that stay with them, that are always with them.

They nibble their dinners and march tentatively into their tales.

A pilot talks of flying in formation and watching the plane barely to the left and below him disintegrate with the crew aboard. Just like that. Even now, sixty-six years later, he remembers the horrible wonder of it.

“I’m a jack of all trades,” says another, “and a master of none. Except flying an airplane. And I can’t do that anymore.”

They are begrudgingly distracted by “Say whats?” by dessert, by politics.

“Obama has ruined the country,” says one.

“Hey, he’s our commander-in-chief!” says another.

Which president has most abused his power, a grandson wonders.

“George W. Bush?” suggests one.

“LBJ,” says another without missing a beat. No matter that Texas is his host.

A gunner tells of a hospital nurse, tending to his wife just a few years ago. A Hungarian child of the war, she asked if he had stories of her battlefield, and she recounted her own — of awaking from a blast to find the woman whose hand she held was dead.

“The poor, helpless soul. Just ten or twelve then,” he says. “I created hell for her. I felt so bad, all I could do was hug her. All I could do was hug her.”

And the conversation curves back toward comfort, to things new and intriguing, to computers and space shuttles, Blackberries and that texting thing young people are doing.

“The iPad, my son got one,” says the engineer. “That’s an interesting device, but, no, I don’t have one.”

Some of them have taken to email. Others don’t bother. Why should they? That’s not the sort of thing that would have kept them alive over Germany or Austria, Hungary or Romania, Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia, France or Italy. It took something more than technology. …

After the final meal, after a last tale or two, after naming those long and newly departed, they commit to one more reunion, at least one more — to again defy the actuary’s projection.

Then they head for home. Embraced in one another’s hearts. Some determinedly on their own. Some in the tow of their offspring. All soaring, nonetheless, all soaring.

And it is a beautiful day to be in the air.

Love,
K-B

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Note: This is an update of a column originally published by the San Diego North County Times on September 25, 1995.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

A sign declaring him a sesquipedalianist adorned his office door. How like him, the lover of one-and-a-half foot long words, to proclaim his eccentricity so proudly and chuckle at it with the same enthusiasm. He ushered me in, showed me his computer, the Mobius strip I’d sculpted for him proudly displayed on a shelf, a mounted segment of sharkproof fiber-optics cable — his latest delight. It was my first visit as an adult to the place that consumed my father’s focus, second only to his church. I looked for clues to reveal his character, to teach me who was this man I’d known only as a father.

Returning briefly from another life, the opposite coast, his prodigal daughter, I was presented to his colleagues, had lunch in the executive dining room — and worried that he had designed a chance encounter with one of the bearded young PhDs. But the tensile strength of such an unlikely coupling was not to be tested, for I knew better: “Never marry an engineer,” my mother said, “They’re a humorless lot, too anal-retentive, your father excepted, of course.”

As we traveled the broad halls of Bell Labs, I saw a man in love with the potential of the human mind to realize a vision. A man honored by his peers and humbly delighted with their affections.

But still, I did not know him, this man who rolled up his sleeves but left his tie in place to putter in the yard after work. The weekend warrior who spoke not a word of the broken bodies he flew home from Vietnam. The same man who taught me to ride a bicycle, to catch and cradle a lacrosse ball without flinching, to search for answers not his own, to embrace the written word, to dream of fairy tales while digging life’s ditches.

There were many visits after that, one or the other of us leaping the bounds of human mobility to soar into the other’s living room and reminisce, dance around discussions of religion, gossip of absent family members, dine on ice cream and other sweet succor.

And as we aged together, my Great White Father slowly gained human proportions. He suffered a dose of cancer with discomfort and graceful humor, sobbed at a loved one’s addiction, lamented his failure to produce a hellfire of fundamentalists.

In his retirement, he built a boat in which to scour the seas for adventure. While it sat in his yard, never quite finished, he rigged a chair on deck and enjoyed his morning coffee — not too hot and just shy two-thirds of a teaspoon of sugar — at one with his horizon.

And I, at last, began to know him, this man who wanted me to be happy but was afraid to ask if I were. A man who reveled in sharing tales of the women he met during the last Great War, of the love letters he saved for fifty years. The man who drew lush pictures of my mother reclining nude and handed them down to those who drew their own. The man who danced with the feet of youth and cupped the ears of an old fogey to catch and cradle my words.

Later, he talked fondly of lost war buddies regained. He remembered the dying highway commuter he held, whose last words of love Father carried to the man’s wife. He bemoaned the foolishness and brash decisions of his youth, his failures as a father, his walk with a God unknown to me. And he laughed at escapades survived, disappointments endured, offspring playing the fool.

At times, when we met halfway across the country, I struggled to feel comfortable alone with my father, uncertain intimates in an uncommon place. No meal preparation for distraction, no siblings to bicker over bridge or charades. Just the amorphous relationship between us.

And then I watched him sleep, curled as a child, and I saw the vast years spread over him: seventy-three years, more than half of which we shared. There were a few I spent determined to hate him, but now I rue that we share them no more, for Father is long dead. But he surely soared to rest in the succulent hues of an Aubrey Beardsley landscape, his boat set to sail, for his is the soul of an artist, a fearful, brilliant artist turned to Christianity to sooth his passions and direct his life.

He was an aesthete, he was a genius, he was a holder of patents and a builder of sailing ships, he was one of the truly faithful and he was forgiven. Though he was not at peace with his progeny, he was loved and adored by us as only a good and kind man could be. And I am grateful to whatever God guided him that the Colonel Father Sir was mine.

He once said to me, “I am a dilettante; don’t follow in my footsteps.”

So tell me: How can I help but become him? Why would I want anything else?

Love,
K-B

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

“You don’t mind if I sit here, do you,” he said. After his briefcase hit the empty seat.

I looked up from my book and was not surprised by what I found: older white male, expensive suit, assumptive bearing, and a physique to match the sonorous voice — he was too large even for the exit row. But upon a second, sneaky glance, while he stowed his luggage and adjusted himself into his seat, I noticed the faint hand tremor, the thinning hair approaching white, the hint of a stoop revealing his seventy, maybe seventy-five years.

I let a sigh slip. It was the damn tremor that swayed me, forcing me to close my book — Sue Townsend’s cruelly hilarious spoof of the British royals — and exercise the social graces Mother taught me. Besides, if he’d offered a question rather than a declarative before tossing his briefcase, I wouldn’t have thought twice about his claiming the seat. So I turned to him and said, “Of course not — please join me.”

He looked down at me without making eye contact and nodded a suitable smile in my direction as he unfurled his Financial Times, and I thought I caught disappointment flit across his visage. If only he had boarded a little faster, he might have landed next to the babe who’d sashayed down the aisle before me. She had a caboose even I noticed — as did the hungry hunter who snagged the seat next to her, licking his chops in anticipation of getting a mouthful of those sweet cheeks. So the poor old fellow was stuck with me — baggy jeans and sweatshirt (Father always said I dressed like an old boot) and a befuckled mood (I’d lost the joy of flying when the airlines stopped providing those cool little salt and pepper shakers in coach).

A flight attendant distracted our minimalist encounter when she requested verbal affirmatives from those of us in the exit row, thereby committing us to assisting in the event of an emergency. With the threat of terrorists misbehaving on planes, I took this responsibility quite seriously, but checking out my fellow prospective heroes, I had to question the legitimacy of the airline’s process.

There was one brooding skateboarder, who, upon declaring “Yes” that he was ready and willing to assist, reinserted his iPod earbuds, despite having obediently turned off the contraption, and pulled his baseball cap over his eyes, assuring neither social interaction nor emergency readiness. He was probably dreaming about the sashaying caboose.

Next to him was a gal who appeared to be on her first solo flight post aerophobia treatment. With clenched knees and jaws, her wild-eyed stare boring into the seatback in front of her and barf bag in her lap, she clutched the armrests as beads of sweat grew on her blanched face and nervous snot flicked from her nose.

Clearly neither she nor the kid could be counted on, which lent a new appreciation for my presumptuous seatmate. He looked as though he might still be strong enough to help me hoist the 70-pound door and I, having worked in social services, had proved my crisis-management abilities manyfold. In fact, the aerophobic’s nose reminded me of one such incident at the program I once directed for multi-handicapped blind adults.

I’d received a frantic call to my office from the nurse’s station one sunny California afternoon. “Conrad bit Nadine!” the shift supervisor shrieked.

“Is she OK? Did you isolate Conrad?”

“He bit her! He bit her!”

“Yes, I got that. Take a breath. Is Nadine OK?”

“He bit her! He bit her nose! In her room! There’s blood everywhere!”

“Bring bandages and an icepack to her room.” I ran from my office and met the supervisor at Nadine’s door, where Nadine stood silent and still, hands covering her face and blood drenching her blouse.

“Conrad bit my nose,” she said, dropping her hands to reveal a bloody void where her nose once was.

“Shit. Where’s the nose?” I asked the supervisor. “Did he swallow it?”

She was busy tossing her lunch in Nadine’s trashcan, so I had Nadine press a bandage to her new facial concavity, and I dropped to the floor. There I was, in my tidy little business suit and pumps, crawling across the institutional carpet in pursuit of a nose — which I found under the bed, right where Conrad had spit it.

Later, when I asked him why he did it, he said, “She was rude to me, so I felt for her nose and I bit it.”

So, yep, pushing people down the inflatable slide seemed manageable, as long as the old fellow could indeed help me lift the door out of the way. This thought shifted my predisposition from dislike to acceptance of the man.

Except then he blew it. After folding his newspaper and tucking it in the seat pocket, he settled his elbow on our shared armrest. Now, this alone is an annoying but common maneuver on a plane. Men do it to women without a thought, although bold women preempt it by getting there first. But it was the subsequent pressure of his upper arm against mine that set me off. I shifted every body part that I could toward the empty space between my seat and the emergency exit door, but it was not enough. Still his arm pressed to mine. It was surely an intrusion, and it was unbelievable that he couldn’t feel it.

Now, my Southern upbringing precluded my saying what I was thinking — that he move his fucking arm — so out of desperate discomfort, I leaned forward and buried my face in my book, determined to disregard him the rest of the flight.

But he had other plans. Having consumed his Financial Times, he proceeded to interpret it for the rest of us. “Obama Bin Laden,” he chuckled, “he is doing everything he possibly can to slow down our financial recovery.” My hackles began to rise, and I pretended to continue reading.

“People of wealth will never vote for him again,” he continued, “and the young derelicts who did in 08 might actually acquire the discernment to think twice in 2012, particularly the trust fund kids. I have one client whose offspring have probably voted away their inheritance.”

My pretense shattered and I turned to him, preparing to challenge him for likening the President to Osama Bin Laden.

But he prattled on: “Thankfully, it doesn’t much affect me. I’ve made a lot of money in my lifetime — of course, I am bragging — but, yes, I’ve made a lot of money in my lifetime. It’s long gone, now.” And then he paused, looked at me directly, and laughed a melancholy little laugh. “Most of my colleagues invested in commercial properties, things like that, but I didn’t. I saw the world instead.”

This time, it was that little laugh that swayed me. If nothing else, he deserved some consideration for his regrets, whatever they were. And there was that pesky Southern thing again. So I listened to his stories and nodded, oohed and ahhed in all the right places, and learned that as a young man he’d ridden his motorcycle across Europe; he was divorced years ago and never remarried; he didn’t usually reveal that he was an attorney, but he was; the district attorney and he barely tolerated each other, but he was friendly with a lot of the judges; he had no children he owned up to; he smoked fine Cuban cigars, but of course, he said, he was bragging again.

I patted his arm. “You’re entitled, Honey.” And he regaled me with his stories for the rest of the flight, while the skateboarder snored under his baseball cap and the aerophobic came to her senses and demanded to be moved from the exit row.

•     •     •     •     •     •     •     •     •

The lawyer was on my mind as I drove home from the airport. When I arrived, I Googled his particulars and found his name in an attorney directory, where he mugged with one of his spiffy cigars. I searched for more and found an article. “Sweetie,” I called to my husband. “Look at this. I chatted with this fellow on the plane. In the 80s, he got into a wee-wee contest with a judge over wearing a turban in court.”

“Was he packing explosives in his underwear?”

“I think that’s probably racist, Sweetie. Besides, you joke like that and I’ll have to frisk you.”

“OK, then I’m packing explosives in my underwear.”

“Funny boy.” I kissed him. “Seriously. He refused to explain why he wore the turban, and the judge insisted that he couldn’t wear it without stating a ‘legitimate’ reason. He prevailed eventually.”

“Was he wearing it when you met him?”

“No. I suppose he’d made his point when he won.”

“Hmmm. So, what’s your point?”

“Oh, I’m not sure. It’s just interesting. Nothing, I suppose.” I went back to reading the case, amused by his eccentricities and disappointed I hadn’t been a little nicer. But I don’t know, maybe it was just that Southern thing again.

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

*Oh the times! Oh the customs! – Cicero, 63 BC

(NOTE: Photograph by Nathan Rupert via a Creative Commons license.)

Writers

Want to submit your work to Excuse Me, I’m Writing for the sheer joy of having an audience? Email your original fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry — 2,500 words maximum — in an MS Word document or in RTF to kb@kbgressitt.com. If we publish your work, you keep all rights, including bragging.

A Fireside Chats excerpt
By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Walter Johnson drifted in and out of the day, waltzing at a summer dance with Maud and thanking that sweet young nurse, the foreign one, for closing his window shades so he could take a little snooze. He was old, of course, although he couldn’t remember quite how many years he had accumulated, and he was infrequently aware that he favored his reveries when he might better have attended to the present. No matter. He was no dullard. He knew his days were numbered, although he couldn’t remember what his current number might be. And it occurred to him that maybe he’d just had that thought.

“Thank you, young lady,” he rasped through tubes and phlegm to his favorite nurse, Estela, a youthful forty-one to his ninety-nine years.

“You’re welcome, Mr. Johnson. You are always such a gentleman.” She patted his arm, as she checked his pulse, then brushed a wisp of white hair from his forehead.

“And you are a kind young lady. I will ask my Maudy to bring you some of her Scotch shortbread. It is the best in —.” He struggled through a strangling cough that swished everything around in his lungs, but without the strength to bully it out, he produced nothing but rearranged congestion pressing on his aching chest.

“Well, now, that would be so sweet, Mr. Johnson.” She finished checking his vitals and removed his forgotten lunch tray, dappled with droplets of canned peach and sputum.

And then he was gone again, hoping to stealthily slip a bit of verse to Maud under the bathing room door.

You are the blessed sunshine, a wild beauty rose
You stir such joy into my heart, it must be you I s’pose
Whom the angels sent to us, to make our town so sweet —.

He stopped there and resorted to prose because his mind fixated on “nose,” and he didn’t think it a properly romantic word, regardless of the call for a rhyme. He waited what seemed an eternity for Maud to emerge from her ablutions and accompany him to the ice cream social at the Willard Hotel, over in the center of town. Her mother and father and siblings were their encouraging chaperones. He tied up the horse, leaving it hitched to the cart as Maud hopped down, not waiting for him to offer his eager hand. She was a lovely woman with an unusually bold stride and a true gift for baking sweet treasures. Walter could not have been more pleased to have her compose her skirts and take his arm as he escorted her into the hotel.

“Mr. Johnson,” Ashley, a nurse’s aide, poked his arm. “Mr. Johnson. You awake?”

“Fresh as a daisy, young lady. And a great good morning to you.”

“It’s Monday afternoon, Mr. Johnson, and there’s a wildfire. We’re evacuating all patients. We’re going to be moving you, Mr. Johnson. We’re driving all the patients to another hospital.”

“We’re going for a ride? Splendid, splendid! I’ll crank up the Ford and we’ll have a gay time.” He choked on mucus, cleared it partially with a weak cough and wandered into the kitchen to help Maud with the picnic fixings.

Ashley pulled a collapsible gurney into Walter’s room and hurried on to the next. “He thinks the ride will be a ‘gay’ time,” she twittered over her shoulder to Estela, who was helping the more mobile patients into a herd of wheelchairs so they could be pushed out to the four buses on loan from the high school.

“‘Gay’ didn’t mean the same thing when he was young,” Estela scolded. “Did no one teach you to respect your elders, child?” She hurried off with another geriatric patient, gently explaining to her again that, no, she wasn’t going home just yet.

Walter was tickled that Maud was packing all his favorites, baking soda biscuits and Mr. Reche’s Fallbrook honey, chicken fried in pork fat, and peach pie made with fruit fresh from her father’s trees, nearly bursting ripe. He leaned over to steal a peck on her soft cheek, but stopped short when someone entered the room.

“Okay, now, Mr. Johnson. We’re going to move you to the gurney, and I do promise we’ll be so gentle you’ll think you are floating.” Estela and three aides surrounded the bed.

“Who are you?” he coughed. “What is happening? Is my Maudy here?”

“Mr. Johnson, it’s me, Estela, over here, Mr. Johnson.” She patted his arm. “You know me, Mr. Johnson, your favorite nurse, Estela.”

“Oh, oh, yes, of course. Estela.” He coughed and struggled to catch his breath. “And how are you this fine day?” he rumbled.

“There’s a fire, Mr. Johnson. We are evacuating the hospital — just as a precaution. There is not a thing to worry about, but we do need to move you to the gurney so we can put you on a bus and take you to another hospital.”

“Another hospital? But why would I want to leave our own little Fallbrook Hospital? Best hospital in town, it is.”

“Was that a joke, Mr. Johnson? Very good! But there’s a fire, Mr. Johnson, a bad fire, and we need to evacuate. We’re going to lift you now, Mr. Johnson. On three, everybody. One, two, three.”

“Oh, ooh, Maudy. Where is my Maudy?”

“She’s been dead —” Ashley started to say.

But Estela cut her off with a silencing look and said, “She’s just fine, Mr. Johnson. Don’t you worry.”

“You know, I do not deserve that woman. So lovely, so lovely. I do wish I could have finished her poem.”

“A poem, Mr. Johnson?” Estela sent the others away as she strapped him to the gurney.

“Yes, a poem I attempted to write for her the day I proposed marriage,” he tried to cough, “but I could not find the proper rhyme.” Walter waited for the air to squeeze a path under the murderous weight on his chest, and he thought of his lovely Maud.

“Okay, Mr. Johnson, we’re set now. We’re just going to wheel you outside.” Estela stopped to take the picture of Mr. Johnson’s wife from the bedside table and place it by his right hand, and then they headed out to the bus, Walter weakly fighting the smoke-filled air.

“Maudy and the girls, where are they? Are they safe?” Walter ran from his car and joined the well-water bucket brigade trying to douse his home so embers from the burning barn wouldn’t set into the house. As they hauled water, the town’s sole fire truck was aimed at taming the barn, an obvious loss, but Walter knew it was a dangerous one. Maud had herded the goats and the girls out of the way, and Walter wished her a kiss between buckets and thanked God for watching over them and for Maudy’s fortitude.

“Okay, Mr. Johnson, we’re going to lift you up onto the bus now.” Estela looked into his eyes, not sure where he was at that moment, but recognizing where he was headed. “Mr. Johnson? It’s me, Estela. We’re going to take you for a ride on this nice school bus here.”

“School bus?”

“Yes, this nice school bus. The high school let us borrow it. There are just not enough ambulances available with all that’s happening today. So, we’re going to have a ride, a gay ride, Mr. Johnson, on this nice school bus!”

“Ah, the school bus! Is Maudy coming?”

“She’ll be along, Mr. Johnson. Don’t you worry, she’ll be along.” Estela managed the mass of tubing, pump and IV bag and climbed alongside while the aides lifted Mr. Johnson through the rear door of the bus. “And then we’ll ride out to the coast so you can breathe that fresh ocean air. Won’t that be nice, Mr. Johnson?” They secured his gurney atop the backs of three seats. “There we are, Mr. Johnson. You have a view out the windows, and as soon as we’re all loaded, we’ll go for our ride.”

“Splendid, splendid! The school bus ride! Maudy and the girls are coming, too. Have you met my little daughters, Opal and Sally?” He tried to wait out the need to cough. “Sally married one of the Yoakum boys, a nice young fellow. He —.” Walter lost his voice to a rumbling spasm of congestion, and Estela rushed to help the next patient board.

When his throat was clear enough to breathe, Walter looked about the bus with pride, pride and deep satisfaction. It had taken the town the better part of a year, but they had succeeded. They raised the necessary funds and now they had themselves the finest school bus in San Diego’s North County. Used, it was, but still the finest and Fallbrook’s first. And all the donors were being treated to a grand celebration, a ride on the bus and a picnic at the schoolyard, a wonderful community picnic under the live oak trees. He knew his Maudy’s baking soda biscuits and peach pies and her almond shortbread would be standouts among all the baked goods. They always were. She was a lovely woman, a lovely woman with an unusually bold stride and a true gift for baking sweet treasures. She had given him two fine daughters who did well for themselves, yes they did. He was pleased to have such a lovely woman as Maud take his arm. If he could just finish that poem for her, before she left the bathing room.

You are the blessed sunshine, a wild beauty rose
You stir such joy into my heart, it must be you I s’pose
Whom the angels sent to us, to make our town so sweet —.

He stopped there, struggling to move his mind off “nose,” the only word that came to him, but he didn’t think it a properly romantic one, regardless of the call for a rhyme. He waited what seemed an eternity for Maud to emerge from her ablutions, and then it struck him: a couplet instead, of course, of course! He was tickled with his verse, perfectly apropos as it was, and so too, it seemed, was Maud.

To My Precious Maudy
From Your Adoring Walter

You are the blessed sunshine, a wild beauty rose
You stir such joy into my heart, it must be you I s’pose
Whom the angels sent to us, to make our town so sweet
If you consent to be my wife, my life will be complete!

Maudy embraced him and agreed to be his, and though he held her tight to his heart, his chest felt as light as the day he was born.

“Mr. Johnson?” Estela touched Walter’s shoulder. “Mr. Johnson, you’re sleeping through your ride, your school bus ride. We’re almost at the coast.” She looked into his face and she knew at once, she knew from years of nursing, from midwifing her own parents to their deaths, she knew he was gone. She pulled a tissue from her bra and dabbed away the spittle on his lips, the tears from his eyes, and returned it to her heart. She shut off the pump and pulled the line from his tired vein. And she placed Mrs. Johnson’s picture on his chest, put his hands together over it and held them as she hummed a love song for Walter and Maud.

And Walter and Maud laughed at his silly, lovely rhyme and fed each other baking soda biscuits with Mr. Reche’s Fallbrook honey as they lazed in the live oaks’ shade.

©2009 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

(Live oak tree photograph by Bill Ward via a Creative Commons License.)

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

For John Amen and Alfred Joyce Kilmer

“When did poetry stop rhyming?” the man asked the visiting poet.

It was a sad, an angry question, a plea for succor in a world where the man’s perfectly trimmed coif and manicured nails, his gem-laden pinky ring and custom-tailored finery could not stave off age or the crashing waves of a new era, splattering his tidy life with the spindrift.

The graying woman beside him, sipping wine, the gazpacho, whatever he ordered for her, made everyone chuckle with her innocent retorts to well-worn social graces, to the poet’s verse of dark mannequins posing and Jewish Ophelias, to things only she remembered, mortifying her husband to his chill bone.

He scolded her for fiddling with her napkin. Poor thing. Poor thing.

“When I was young,” he mourned, “we learned wonderful poems, poems that rhymed. Like ‘Trees.’ Now that’s a beautiful poem. But today, I don’t know. This poetry, this poetry is weird.”

The responding silence — of looks askance, awkward sips of flavored coffees, the oblivious few waiting patiently for an answer — was barely broken by a whispered suggestion of excess Chardonnay gone awry.

And then the poet rescued them, “Oh, around the late nineteenth century through the 1920s — with Ezra Pound and T.S. Elliot, E.E. Cummings — poetry began to turn inward. Rhyme was replaced with intimacy.”

Lovely trees and schoolroom recitations, replaced with roiling innards shared in quaint cafés; with masturbatory imagery, rending sorrow, arching hope; with things that make well-trimmed folks blanch in horror and wonder what in God’s name is happening to the country, how the economic hurricane could prevail, how men could couple with men, how an African peacemonger could be elected to preside over landed gentry.

“The rhythm, though,” the poet soothed, “the rhythm remains. Like a song! Listen to the rhythm, the rhythm.”

Indeed, the poet did not hide behind pretty things, romantic notions, heroic meter and pattern like an eclipsed sun. No, he burst forth naked, compelling his listeners to contemplate tortured children, broken bonds, recovery, resolve — things other people simply called life.

Still, the man’s dismay seeped from the corners of his eyes. It would not be quenched with revelations of newly-beloved poets roaring through town astride freewheeling verse, rattling teacups and sensibilities. No, he wanted something else.

He yearned for her, for her to re-inhabit the body next to him. He longed for her loveliness, for her hungry mouth prest against his breast, for the intimacy of his rain dripping among her limbs.

For her, though, there was no longer rhyme or reason. Addled by tangled neurons, sticky plaque, fading familiarity, she was not always sure he was her husband.

But she could still recite “Trees.”

He wiped her mouth, applauded the next poem, then guided her out the door, a sad, an angry parting.

And the poetry continues.

Love,
K-B

Hiding

By John Amen

for Richard

I spend the morning
looking at photographs of my dead sister,
dark mannequin posing
beside husbands, parents, siblings,
her son—people who look like extras on a movie set—
the years’ battering superimposed on her face,
reminding me of Holocaust images, olive-skinned
girls who died in showers at Auschwitz.
Even in the photo where she
wades in a nurturing Atlantic, she
reminds me of some Jewish Ophelia, her
moribund drama hemorrhaging into the spindrift,
thick shadow snuffing a nirvanic beach.

Last night a friend told me she felt
my ex-wife had not been good for me,
that I had hidden behind her like an eclipsed sun,
and I thought about how my own mother was a piranha
who each morning at the breakfast table
stripped her sons and daughter to the bones.
Years later, my father would tell me
he sacrificed his children to appease his wife,
offered us to her as if she were some pagan goddess
who needed to drink daily her own family’s blood.

We all learned to hide; it is our legacy—
my sister and I, even my brother,
skulking in the custody of his own rage.
We grew out of childhood
like houseplants in a hurricane,
domestic pets abandoned in a jungle;
floating out of body in public places;
passing like ghosts through marriages and jobs;
watching ourselves fuck spouses and greedy strangers,
naked bodies move; not recognizing ourselves, honestly
not knowing how we were going to survive the relentless invasions,
the ambushes and slow, secret military movements,

this thing other people simply called life.

Click here to read more of John Amen’s poetry.

Trees

By Alfred Joyce Kilmer

for Mrs. Henry Mills Alden

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

Click here to read more of Alfred Joyce Kilmer’s poetry.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

This health-care insurance reform thing is confusing. Are you confused? I’m confused, oh yeah.

Of course, I don’t really have time to actually read anything about the House’s draft legislation. I mean, what do I know anyway, you know? So I could sure use some sage counsel on this from someone more knowledgeable than I, someone with a better-informed perspective of all the complexities of health care insurance policies and finance, reimbursement schemes, pre-existing condition stuff, policy cancellation terms, the whole shebang. Yeah, this requires a real brainiac, a Solomon, a, I don’t know, someone such as, hmmm, well, let’s take a look at who all is out there offering up their insightful opinions of this critical issue. … Could it be … Chuck Norris?

Naw, not the kung fu guy? Yes, indeedy, the kung fu guy. No kidding.

So, what does old Chucky have to say?

Welp, in his townhall.com column, “Dirty Secret No. 1 in Obamacare,” Chuck tells us that he “decided to research the reasons so many are opposed to Obamacare to separate the facts from the fantasy,” and in the course of his research he found some “dirty little secrets buried deep within the 1,000-plus page health care bill.”

Now first, I have to say, I am so impressed that the guy read the thing. Whooee! That’s a whole lot of time away from pounding on bad guys. Second, I am so grateful that he read it so I don’t have to! And I’m sure I can trust his interpretation because, well, you know, he’s like famous — and a good guy. And good guys don’t lie. Politicians lie, but not good guys, like movie star types.

So I want to know what secret he discovered about this critical health-care issue that the darn politicians tried to hide from us, buried in the 1,000 pages of that, um, well, it is a public document. But no matter. They must have known hardly anyone would read it. Thank God for Chucky!

And what exactly did he find? Well, get a load of this: The government wants to go into people’s homes and usurp their parental rights over their children’s care and development. Can you believe it? The dirty rotten scoundrels! Bastard’s all! And I do feel quite right using the male, non-inclusive nomenclature, because that’s what Chuck does — no pandering to political correctness there. So what if we have a few women in Congress.

Anyway, Chuck writes that in sections 440 and 1904 of the House bill (Page 838) — and I must say my hat is off to the guy for honing in on this specific issue, among the whole 1,000 pages, and for sourcing the references so helpfully — the bill describes a program for educating new parents about early childhood development. In the home, no less! That’s so intrusive, so darn presumptuous, as though parents don’t innately know what’s best for their own kids, like we aren’t born with a deep understanding of “age-appropriate child development in cognitive, language, social, emotional, and motor domains” and “skills to interact with their child to enhance age-appropriate development.”

Why, this is an outrage, a blight upon the very freedoms our forefathers fought and died for as they birthed our great nation! (There were no female forefathers, obviously, because the gals didn’t know nothing about birthing no nations). Bravo to Chucky for bringing this most dirty of secrets to our attention, because this sort of thing could lead to the downfall of our nation. It’s just a disgrace, an abomination, I say!

Oh, except, hmmm, in my conservative little town of Fallbrook, California, our conservative little school district, which continues to preach abstinence only, despite our burgeoning population of teen parents, offered a very similar parent-education program when my daughter was a toddler. In fact, we allowed one of those “government agents,“ as Chuck describes them, into our home, and we adored her. She taught us some wonderful techniques for encouraging Katie’s readiness for school. It was, well, it was a great program, and it was free and we were grateful for the experience.

Oh, Chucky, I’m so disappointed. You happened to pick on the one thing in the House bill that I actually know something about, and you are so, so wrong. Bummer, man!

Now what do I do? I sure can’t count on Sarah Palin, with her bogus caca about senior citizen death squads, taking out the disabled — or was it disabled death squads taking out the seniors? I don’t remember. I just know better than to trust that nitwit to explain anything. Besides, she’s pretending to be all scared about “health-care rationing,” as though she’s not aware as a former governor that we already have that in so many ways. Of course, she quit that job, which might explain her ineptitude on the health-care issue.

So, I guess what it comes down to is I have to read up on this stuff myself, so I can form my own darn opinion about health-care reform instead of relying on someone else with her or his own nincompoop agenda. Jeez, what a bitch.

At least President Obama understands that I have a life. He put up a handy-dandy website, healthreform.gov, where I can get some for-real information about what he has asked Congress to come up with and the progress being made. This, despite Republican efforts to shoot down reform in a blaze of failure — in hopes of keeping Obama from being reelected — and despite the railings of folks who are lucky enough to have good health insurance coverage, both of which groups really kind of suck, because they don’t give a good goddamn about the millions of people whose insurance companies dumped them when they got really sick, who were denied coverage for life-saving treatments, who are not insured, who went bankrupt trying to pay for their health care, who died for lack of treatment! That’s the real bummer.

You know what would be really cool? It would be really cool if Chuck Norris and Sarah Palin and all the other naysayers would actually take a look at the president’s website and let us know if they agree or disagree with his goals:

• Reduce long-term growth of health care costs for businesses and government

• Protect families from bankruptcy or debt because of health care costs

• Guarantee choice of doctors and health plans

• Invest in prevention and wellness

• Improve patient safety and quality of care

• Assure affordable, quality health coverage for all Americans

• Maintain coverage when you change or lose your job

• End barriers to coverage for people with pre-existing medical conditions

Declaring their support or opposition would put their opinions in an interesting perspective, because, if they agree, then they should be helping make reform a reality instead of trying to undermine it. And if they disagree, then isn’t that telling!

Yeah, that would be way cool.

Love,
K-B

©2009 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

(Note: Chuck Norris photo from raindog808 via a Creative Commons license.)

A short film by Constantin and Nikos Pilavios — thanks, Kim!

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Many moons ago, before the birth of my daughter in California, my mother and father made the trip from the other coast to bestow their approval on our new home. They came bearing love gifts and rituals, tales of family who dared be absent, the comforts of a senior generation. We sat down to dine on the opportunity — the tumbling repartee and laughter that is our wont. We ate and gossiped and reminisced, and then did it some more.

Those who know our family, would not find it odd that we also determined the visit a fitting moment to explore the far end of life’s spectrum: Mother, a positively inveterate social worker, and I took a class on aging and family.

The course was interesting, fun, poignant, challenging, great fodder for dinner table conversation — and ultimately useless.

It did not result in our soundly preparing for my parents’ oldth and eventual demise — our own error. We did not follow the course’s wise counsel to create a financial plan for their elder years, to plot a rational and sensitive path to a final home where physical and emotional wellbeing — and independence — could be best assured within their projected means and sensibilities. We did not define roles and responsibilities suitable for each offspring to take on as our parents’ capabilities diminished.

Oh, we knew what we should do, the right and reasonable things necessary for when that distant time comes, we even gave them a nod or two, but we just never got around to doing them. Life was far too busy for us all to lend thought to aging and death.

And then Father up and died — first! — surprising everyone, most of all Mother.

Well-entrenched in congenital math anxiety and her generationally ascribed role, she was not disposed to address their small investment accounts and tangible assets. She was not prepared to manage the documentation of life that had been Father’s bailiwick. She was sure as hell not ready to be alone.

And so, we have gradually cobbled together a semblance of a care system, the nearest offspring providing Mother a nest, the analytic one taking on things financial and legal, the others providing counsel and encouragement. It is not enough, it is imperfect, it is riddled with ill-defined expectations and sibling dynamics, but it is imbued with love.

Still, for all the eager voices in our family, we are stunningly silent about the inevitable truths that roar around us. Amidst the roiling waves of emotion, we harbor concerns and conceits, doubts and distrusts; fear and sadness are muzzled. And the gossip that would entertain us at dinner is spun into pain. The mourning of loss, current and foreseen, is silenced with discomfort. Questions become accusations. Sorrow becomes depression. Goodwill becomes dismay.

Yet life persists.

We bumble along and babies are born. Hurts are soothed. Marriages are made. Familial waters are calmed, until the next storm. And our younger generation chalks it all up to humorous family dysfunction, overlooking the quiet shadow of age that gently embraces their own parents.

And what of my progeny, an only child; have I set upon her the prospect of an unbearable burden of elder care? Or can we do any better?

It’s possible.

With the lessons of many moons ago and those of today, our plan can be made, falteringly at first, but surely with good intent, perchance with the realization denied my parents. Things will go in my getting-old file — advance directives, wills, a reminder to toss the ashes on the vegetable garden. And I hope my daughter and I can ultimately give voice to our aging, the celebration of life entertainingly-lived, the acknowledgement of limitations and gifts, the acceptance that we each come to an end, one way or another, but preferably with grace and love intact, however imperfect, and the tumbling repartee and laughter that is our wont — and that, in our oldth, makes us clench our kegels.

Love,
K-B

©2009 Kit-Bacon Gressitt