Nows and Forevers

I’ve been obsessed lately about holes in brick walls.
In the 116-year-old building I work in, there are a lot of them. It seems like every one has a story.

This building was first occupied in 1906, four years before my oldest grandparent was born. It’s along the river and part of this region’s long industrial history, a remnant of what the Rust Belt used to be since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

That industry, which literally built and powered the United States in the 1800s and 1900s, is a shadow of what it used to be.

The city I’ve lived in for the past decade or so has a storied history, famous sports teams, and an innovation and eds & meds economy that has helped imagine a future.

Gradually, even in the time that I’ve been here, pieces of that industrial history have been refurbished and given new life. This building is certainly like that. It was a 500,000-square-foot, six-story cargo terminal, next to a cement plant and other industry, for decades. Then it was acquired by a commercial real estate company, noted in this city for their innovative work, and it’s been slowly transformed into a series of offices.

We’ve only been here a year and I’ve been here less than that, since we didn’t go back to the office until May 2022, more than two years after we and most white-collar workers were forced out from the Covid-19 pandemic. But it’s been a joy to work here, not only for the refurbishment that will ultimately cost $100 million when it’s all done, but also because of the building’s character.

It’s terrific. There are so many nooks and crannies and even though I’ve only been on the ground floor, the first level and the floor my office is on, I’ve appreciated what I’ve seen.

Now to the holes.

There’s brick everywhere, mostly painted over white, and bubbly and bulging, depending on the condition of the mortar and the bricks themselves. And there are holes in the bricks, some large, some small, all over the place. There doesn’t seem to be a rhyme or reason for most of them, although some of them clearly had important use that is still apparent today.

Even if they are just holes.

But others, it’s hard to tell. And I’ve been wondering.

Like this hole. It’s small enough for me to put my finger in — I have pretty small fingers — but I can’t seem to put my finger in what it’s for. It’s not bothering me, per se, I’d love to know more. What did this space look like before 2016, when the building was bought? What happened here, what kind of work and how many people, in all the decades between 1906 and 2016?

And whatever was in the hole, and all the holes, what happened to them?

There are a few clues. I was walking back to the office a few hundred feet away, sort of taking notice of all the holes that up until recently I had just sort of passed by. Then I saw a washer and bolt orphaned along the brick wall. That’s obviously what was in at least some of the holes.

I sort of wondered why that washer and bolt were left in place. There are a lot of holes and not a lot of bolts.

I don’t have much experience when it comes to old buildings. Most of the places I’ve lived in, including all the way through childhood, were either younger than me or not too much older. My maternal grandparents’ house was older, probably 100 years old by the time I came around, in an old and dignified section of Newton, Massachusetts. And my first newspaper had once been a train station and was modeled on a building in Siena, Italy. But neither had the level of stories, it seemed to me then, that my new/old office building does.

There was one place, however, where I lived in the mid-1990s, that reminds me a lot about this. It’s in Beacon Falls, Connecticut, and before it was converted to apartments in the mid-1980s, it had been some type of mill. Beacon Mill Village still retained that look on the outside, four stories and a little under 200 units, red brick and with some of the mill infrastructure still intact, inside and outside.

I had a two-bedroom, corner apartment there in 1995 and 1996. It was glorious, with 15-foot high ceilings and windows that were almost that tall, floor to ceiling. The carpets were plusher than I had ever seen before, even more plush than my maternal grandparents’ house, which you could sink into. The exposed brick was everywhere, it was buffed and classy, and the inside had been transformed into a chic living space for the 20-something I was. I lived there alone for most of the time I was there.

I didn’t have any particular affinity for Beacon Falls, a small town off the highway between Bridgeport and Waterbury. I worked in Norwalk at the time, about a 45-minute drive on a good day. I actually don’t remember why I moved there. It was closer than living in New Haven, where I did when I worked in Norwalk. But it wasn’t that much closer, and I didn’t at the time have any family within 25 minutes or so. And it was about that far to my graduate school classes in New Haven.

But it was wonderful.

I’ve lived a lot of places. I’ve moved about three dozen times, thanks to my parents’ divorce, my mother’s remarriage to someone who worked for the Navy and got transferred a lot, and then an itinerant newspaper career. But in terms of the bricks and mortar, not taking into account either the loved ones or the location, Beacon Mill Village was the best place I’ve ever lived.

Being in the corner, on the second floor, on the street but not on the main street, helped. It was both quiet and secluded, but not that far away from everything. It was quick to go down the stairs or the elevator to the parking lot. And when it snowed, which it did a lot in that winter, laying on my bed, surrounded by the biggest windows I had ever seen on two sides, the effect was stunning.

I really enjoyed living there.

Plus it was the best kitchen I had, big and modern and I loved cooking at the time.

All around, a great place.

I also enjoyed exploring that building, inside and out. It was historic and yet had all the trappings of modernity, too. It was almost like I could touch, if I looked closely, the history and the people who had been in there in the building’s former life.

I thought of that today when I started looking a little closer at my office building. Beacon Mill Village is red brick and an apartment building in a valley in Connecticut, 400 or 500 miles away from where I live now. I haven’t even been by the place since 2007. I just don’t get back to Connecticut much and if I do, it’s usually on the Merritt Parkway or I-95. Beacon Falls is out of the way.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot of holes in brick walls lately.

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.

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.