Nows and Forevers

Wow, the universe is working overtime to send me signs this month.

Saw this new book (September) in the Kindle Daily Deals. I read Robert Harris’ Fatherland when it came out, 30 years ago. And during that time I was on again and off again writing a novel about this very topic, the three Regicides that fled Charles II and lived the rest of their lives, in secret, in and around my homeland of New Haven, Connecticut.

It’s a pretty exciting tale, if you’ve never heard it. That’s why I thought it interesting that the new monarch went for Charles III as his name.

https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2022/sep/08/act-of-oblivion-by-robert-harris-review-regicides-on-the-run

I’ve heard the story forever, especially from my father, and you really can’t go anywhere without being reminded of it: Dixwell, Goffe and Whalley are not only that trio’s names, but they’re major streets in New Haven.

I wasn’t writing for publication, more for my own amusement. I put the story aside in the mid-’90s. Thought about reviving it again in October 2019, when I was back home for a brief visit and was walking on The Green and came upon John Dixwell’s grave behind the Church on the Green, about 40 steps from where I used to catch the bus every day for about five months in the spring of 1986. And then in January 2020 I found myself at Charles II’s grave in the magnificent Lady Chapel at Westminster Abbey, and it was one of the monarchs there whose story (and whose father’s trial and execution) I knew well). Two signs, right there.

I even ordered a few books on the topic and was reading them when the pandemic hit (and trying to find where I put the draft). Since I covered health care, the pandemic was one of the seven-day-a-week, all-consuming topics I covered so I didn’t have time to even breathe during lockdown and after that. So I went on to the next thing, which was for me Welsh.

Not sorry I followed the Welsh, as it has been inspiring and enriching, and continues to be. But I have always firmly believed in signs and their importance in calling turns in your life. And even if they don’t always point to opportunities but rather missed opportunities.

I chalk this one up to a missed opportunity, and also a sign that I’ve got to get moving. I’ve been writing a lot more lately in the past two months, being inspired I’ll say, and on two particular topics. It was already at a higher level but this makes it more of an obsession. Positive things happen when I’m obsessed. #amwriting

https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/battle-of-the-bulge

Today is the 78th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge, which was the last time the German army attacked the Allied armies that had marched across France and Belgium resolutely following the invasion of Normandy on June 6.
It’s always been a day that I have marked, ever since I learned when I was eight years old that my paternal grandfather, Edward, had been there.
Oh, had he been there.
The Battle of the Bulge is important in history because it is seen as the last gasp of the German Army, a furious surprise attack in snow that targeted the American Army most of all. It was the bloodiest battle of World War II for the American Army and it trapped American soldiers in harsh conditions until the German offensive was halted Christmas Eve and then reversed later that month and into January.
There were 19,000 American soliders killed and another 70,000 wounded. But it led, to the collapse of Nazi Germany several months later.
My grandfather wasn’t a casualty and it’s hard to pinpoint just what he was doing. He and my grandmother, who passed three decades ago, were the only two people who really remembered. Nothing of his time at the Bulge survives, and I’ve looked.
But I do know a lot about the rest of his time in Europe, and his combat career, thanks to his almost daily letters home to my grandmother and then an unpublished manuscript. He landed in France a day after D-Day, an Army officer who had been training for months in England like hundreds of thousands of others for the invasion. He wasn’t a straight infantry soldier but he was often on the front lines, and danger and potential death loomed right around the corner just the same. He was a citizen soldier, to use Stephen Ambrose’s apt term.
Grandpa was a kid from Newton, Massachusetts, who grew up poor and put himself through Boston College through boxing and as a Massachusetts National Guard officer. He had been a journalist and then a social worker. He followed the news and was, in my grandmother’s words years later, concerned about the rise of totalitarianism and the Nazis. When Pearl Harbor happened, even though he had two young children at home and was going to graduate school at Harvard University in addition to his full-time job, he volunteered and got his commission back in the U.S. Army.
He spoke French and German, he was good with people, studious and a crack shot. He was a bookish kid, the son of Irish immigrants, who had willed himself into being a soldier long before the U.S. had joined the war. But reading his letters home, you get the feeling that while he would rather have been home, he understood the moment and he understood that he needed to be where he was.
He served across France and Belgium, with service so harrowing that I’m surprised he made it out alive. He was wounded in action that fall, but returned to service. And he was serving with the Army when the Germans attacked on a snowy Dec. 16.
He didn’t talk about it much. To my dad’s generation, World War II was history and what his father and so many others did was so long ago. Besides, this was the Baby Boom generation that both fought the Vietnam War and pushed back against it. My father has told me with regret that he didn’t talk much about his time in Europe, other than that it was meaningful and he was proud.
When I came of age, in the mid-1970s, he had only a year or two left to live. I was lucky enough to have two grandfathers who had been in WWII as well as two uncles. My maternal grandfather had been a B-24 and B-29 command pilot in World War II and had flown after the war. His experiences were markedly different from my other grandfather’s.
I had learned about World War II and was excited to my grandfather about it. We went to their house on the South Shore of Massachusetts, close enough to the ocean that you could often hear the waves. He was 65 years old then, just retired, the father of three and the grandfather of four, and had been married to my grandmother for 40 years or so. He moved slower, he was frail, and I didn’t know it but he knew he didn’t have long to live. These were the last few days he would end up spending in the vacation house that he had designed and built himself, and that even now remains in the family.
I asked him, as only an enthusiastic 8-year-old could do: What did you do in the war, Grandpa?
My father’s parents were reserved. My mother’s family was nurturing, lively, happy. My father’s side of the family, Irish immigrants all up from poverty and focused, were different. I didn’t talk about my feelings with them. They wanted to know how I was doing in school, what my other interests were, what I wanted to do when I grew up. I don’t really recall having much fun with them, and while I spent time with them, it wasn’t as easy or as comfortable as with my mother’s family.
But I could see in my grandfather’s eyes that I had touched a nerve. Even now, nearly 50 years later, I could see a softening and maybe even a few tears forming. It was just him and me, on the cement steps of the beach house. He sighed and told me that while what he and his generation did in World War II helped save the world, it wasn’t fun and it wasn’t pretty and it was in many ways really bad. I didn’t quite understand. I was looking, at 8, at the airplanes and the tanks and all the things that boys see when they think of war, the only things (hopefully) that they ever do see.
My grandfather knew that I was too young to understand, and he didn’t want me to feel bad. (I was prone to nightmares then and for a long time afterward.) But he told me that he wanted me to remember one thing: War, even if it was necessary (and he believed World War II was necessary), was not something to glorify and was something to do everything to avoid.
And I haven’t forgotten that moment or the lesson. It was the last time I ever saw him. He died, of colon cancer, not too long afterward.

It’s been 10 years since the murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Twenty children and six adults were killed that morning, 11 days before Christmas, in a suburban Connecticut school. I’m a journalist who, by training and temperament, tries to stay professional about the tragedy that I’ve been around so much in my career. I’ve been able to keep to that for the most part, as difficult as it was and how often I wanted to cry.

I didn’t cover the Sandy Hook shootings. But it did occur in a town I knew pretty well, at a school I had been to once in happier times, and former colleagues of mine lost their daughter in the attack. And for all those reasons, it was more than just a headline.

As it was for so many people. Connecticut is a small state and it’s one that is connected so much to each other. I’ve lost count of the many people I know who knew somebody, or the family, of one of the children or adults who were killed.

“I wish I could tell you that the memory of that day has dimmed. I wish I could tell you that the knife-like sorrow and pain have subsided, but the fact is it is still raw and real for so many of us in Connecticut,” said U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Connecticut. “My mind goes back to the horrors of that day, and I think that reliving it reminds us of the need to honor those 26 lives with action.”

#neverforget.

The past week I’ve done something that I haven’t done in a long time: Listened to an album all the way through, the way the artists intended. Even when I lived in the world of 45s and 33 1/3s, and that was the first half of my life, I didn’t really do that. And mp3s and iTunes have saved me from that.

But I willlingly listened to Tears for Fears’ debut LP, “The Hurting,” released nearly 40 years ago. In fact, the whole album will be 40 years old in March. Some of the songs are older than that, Wikipedia tells me, being released between 1981 and 1983
“The Hurting” came out when I was in high school. It hit me at just the right time, a confluence of my musical and intellectual awakenings.
This is a different Tears for Fears from the band that would become huge by the end of 1984, with songs like “Everybody Wants To Rule the World” and “Shout.” This LP is darker, informed by childhood trauma and isolation, and overall more than a little depressing, all to a finely honed new wave synth.

In other words, it was 16-year-old me’s jam.

The songs connected with me. Looking back, I can see why I identified with them. In 1982, I had moved across the country to southern California with my mother and stepfather. Everyone else I knew and loved were 2,500 miles away. Southern California was as far away from my upbringing in Connecticut as you could be, as I would eventually learn anew when I moved back East a few years later.

Beyond that, I was emotionally fragile. My parents had gone through a yearslong separation and divorce, and fought over me constantly. I was sent into what would be my first round of therapy, and which highlighted how broken I was. My parents shared custody and they did fine, but a custody battle erupted anew when my stepfather’s job transferred him to California. I left Connecticut one cold but sunny day in January 1982, after I was taken out of school for the last time early. That afternoon I saw my father cry for the first time when I left. I hated California at first but gradually got used to it and began to like it, and had friends for the first time in a while.

This is a long way of saying that I could relate to a lot of what Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith wrote and sang on “The Hurting.”

My entry into Tears for Fears was “Change,” which I remember being in somewhat frequent rotation on MTV back then. Despite the refrain “You can change,” it’s more about it being all too late. I was too young to understand what all too late meant.

What really resonated for me was “Mad World.”

Went to school and I was very nervous
No one knew me, no one knew me

For someone who had gone to five middle schools and was already on his second high school by the middle of ninth grade, that lyric cut pretty close to the bone.

But there’s a lot going on in “The Hurting.” One song, “Suffer the Children,” provided a perspective that I had never considered, although one that would make sense at the time to someone I would grow close to in the far future. “Ideas as Opiates” and “Memories Fade” were life lessons. Memories may fade but the scars do linger. And who would know that I would live out “Pale Shelter” in my adult life?

“The Hurting” works across much of the continuum of my life.

But the album also did a lot more for me, intellectually and creatively. Here were two artists, particularly Roland Orzabal, who were speaking to isolation and trauma and feeling out of place — emotions and experiences that are not unknown to teenagers but were constant companions to this particular teenager in 1983.

Tears for Fears, unlike any other artist of the time, gave me some of the language to understand what I was feeling. I learned that I wasn’t alone, that others felt that way. It was a time when you didn’t talk about your feelings, not that much. The band, and the album, validated how I was feeling and drove me to create in my own way and to seek out further ways to understand. I started a journal that I continue to keep today. And I read like crazy, driven even by trying to understand the name of the band. I picked up a book by Arthur Janov at the library, thanks to finding out the background of the band name. (That was a lot harder back in 1983 than it is today.) And it led me to more books on psychology and then sociology, which I devoured quietly but with enthusiasm and continued to do so for years afterward.

Tears for Fears also led me down a creative path. I’m not a musician but I have wanted to be a writer my entire life and I guess I am, since I have been paid to write professionally, sometimes quite well, for the past 33 years. Art of all kinds inspires me, and Tears for Fears’ willingness to confront their demons, to borrow August Wilson’s phrase, helped my angels to sing. “The Hurting” broadened what I was willing to write about, and helped connect me with my feelings.

The years went by and Tears for Fears rocketed to stardom. I gradually stopped listening to their newer work and I didn’t always listen to “The Hurting.” But I saw they released a new album earlier this year and it was just as soulful and soul searching as their younger work. That led me to rediscover “The Hurting” and write about what it meant to be.

It meant a lot. I don’t know where I would have ended up without it.

Col. Joseph Kittinger died a few days ago at age 94. He led an extraordinary life.

As an Air Force officer, in 1960, he jumped from a gondola 19 miles above the Earth’s surface for the highest parachute jump ever recorded. It came after a failed attempt the year before that nearly killed him, at speeds of more than 600 miles an hour, and challenges on the day where he was successful.

That record stood til 2012, when Felix Baumgartner broke it. Kittinger was one of his advisers, and the voice who guided him by radio all the way up and then all the way down. I watched that record attempt 10 years ago, and I was fascinated by not only by Baumgartner’s feat but also by Kittinger’s steady counsel.

I knew of Kittinger since I was a teenager, because in September 1984 he became the first person to fly a hot-air balloon across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe on his own. Kittinger left from Caribou, Maine, and what is now celebrated as the Rosie O’Grady Balloon of Peace Launch Site, not far from where I lived in Caribou.

Yet he showed his courage in other ways. In between the record parachute jump and the record balloon launch, he flew combat missions during three tours of service in the Vietnam War. In his last mission, in 1972, he was shot down and spent almost a year as a POW.

Joe Kittinger, pioneer and patriot. RIP.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-63933837

It will be 34 years next week that a bomb brought down PanAm Flight 103, headed from London to New York a few days before Christmas on Dec. 21, 1988. It has been more than a news story or something that happened because it killed a young woman, Patricia Coyle, from my hometown, and 269 other people.

She was 20 years old, a few months younger than me.

I have marked that date ever since, and yearned for justice for those we lost. Today, there’s word that a man who was linked to the attack is in custody. It’s been a long and often discouraging hunt for Justice in this case. But I am glad that even after more than three decades, authorities in the United States and in Scotland haven’t forgotten Patricia and the others, on the plane and on the ground, who lost their lives that night.

It’s Dec. 7, a date which will live in infamy. But will it live that way forever?

The attack on Pearl Harbor occurred in 1941, when my grandparents had just graduated high school and several years before my parents were born. Yet no one in those two generations, the one that came of age during World War II or the one that came afterward, would ever forget what happened.

And so it was for my generation, even though I was born 26 years after the attack. When I was growing up, the World War II generation — Tom Brokaw’s “The Greatest Generation” — was still in the workforce, even though they were beginning to retire. Both my grandparents were World War II veterans. So were some of our teachers and our parents’ bosses and coworkers. Even in my first professional job, in the late 1980s, I worked not only with two World War II veterans but one who had been at Pearl Harbor, 81 years ago today.

So in that limited way, Pearl Harbor was one degree of separation. Since it was the only attack on United States territory since the War of 1812, it still had a lot of meaning. And it was kept alive by FDR’s iconic speech the day after the attack — it’s where “the day that will live in infamy” comes from — and by movies from “From Here to Eternity” (also a good book), “Tora! Tora! Tora” and, more recently, “Pearl Harbor.”

Yet Pearl Harbor has been receding from memory. The World War II generation is fading rapidly from the scene and, increasingly, so are their kids. It’s been eight decades since the attack and so much has changed since then. I wonder, just on that basis alone, whether or not Pearl Harbor will continue to fade as something to remember in the coming generations.

That’s hard to believe a bit. People alive 81 years ago today remembered, until they died, could tell you where they were when they heard about the Pearl Harbor attack. The same way that those alive in November 1963 could tell you were they were when they heard about President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Or where you were when the World Trade Center was attacked.

I know I won’t ever forget that.

But even 9/11, which is one of the most vivid memories in my life, is no longer universal. For the 25 years or more of people born either after 9/11 or who were too young to remember, it has less of an impact. It’s just another date. I felt that way about Pearl Harbor and JFK’s assassination, the latter that took place four years before I was born. They were significant dates in history, yes. But they were also significant to my parents and my grandparents and great-grandparents. It wasn’t significant to me.

I fell into that trap with 9/11. It was personal to me, as I lived in the New York metro area at the time, and covered the attacks and the aftermath. A childhood acquaintance died at the Trade Center. And it was one of the signature moments of our era, which rings down even more than two decades later. But with the generation since, that’s not the case. I fear 9/11 will soon become part of history and not as much of a lived experience and pain point as it was for those of us who were alive then, and that bothers me. The passage of time will do that.

Like how I have felt about Dec. 7.

While I have written for a living my entire professional career, I don’t blog. Or at least I haven’t in a long time. I certainly continue to read them, but most of my nonprofessional writing has been on social media or in other venues.

It’s been years. The last time was 2010. A lot has happened since then.

So, why now?

Because I’ve got things I should say, although they don’t fit into the outlets I have available. I want to write more and different.

So, this blog. I don’t know how many times I will be writing. I have no real thought of an audience, other than the ideal reader that I always write to.

But I plan to share my voice as long as I can.