Natural Traveler Magazine - Quarterly Cultural Magazine - Autumn 2019

“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of looking at things.”

Henry Miller

© 2019 Natural Traveler LLC 5 Brewster Street Unit 2, No. 204 Glen Cove, New York 11542

Natural Traveler Magazine ÂŽ Autumn 2019 Editor & Publisher Tony Tedeschi Senior Editor Bill Scheller Staff Writers Ginny Craven Aglaia Davis Andrea England David E. Hubler Samantha Manuzza Buddy Mays John H. Ostdick Pedro Pereira Frank I. Sillay Kendric W. Taylor Photography Katie Cappeller Karen Dinan Buddy Mays Art Sharafina Teh Web Master Will Rodriguez

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Table of Contents Editor’s Letter

Page 3

Contributors

Page 4

Email from New Zealand

Frank I. Sillay

Page 5

Fogg’s Horn: The Miscreant Meanderings Of Our Man Markus

Page 6

Trips: Lower The Night Hammers!

Tony Tedeschi

Page 11

First Night in Venice

Bill Scheller

Page 16

The Ghost of Donald Bain

Tony Tedeschi

Page 19

Photos of Central Park From a Bygone Era?

Katie Cappeller

Page 28

The War in Europe

Candy Tedeschi

Page 29

Summer Camp, The War Years

Kendric W. Taylor

Page 34

A Block of Air To Sculpt

Artemis Boyard

Page 45

Generation Z: Trading Possessions for Experiences

Pedro Pereira

Page 46

Email from the Upper West Side

Aglaia Davis

Page 50

Romance

Frank I. Sillay

Page 52

Waaaaht? Plugged and Wired

Malcolm P. Ganz

Page 53

Short Story: An Unscheduled Landing at Cheops

Anthony Germaine

Page 58

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Editor’s Letter Sing of the Unsung

With celebrations of the final victories at the end of World War II occurring throughout this year, the spotlight inevitably falls on the leaders who made the decisive decisions, led the decisive campaigns: Roosevelt, Churchill, Eisenhower, et al. Homage is also paid to the unsung, but most often only as the nameless among the larger contingent of their units. In this issue we sing the unsung, name a few names.

Our particular focus came about almost parenthetically. My wife, Candy, has been scanning in photos of our 55 years together, much of the time working her way back in time. A few weeks ago, she began showing me photos her father, Gene Grimes, had taken when he was a US Navy salvage diver, stationed in Naples under repeated attack by the German Luftwaffe. Next she moved on to an album we’d recovered when we sold the home of our aunt, Frances, and uncle, Tony, to set up a trust for our aunt after our uncle had died. Tony – Antonio Rufino – was a cadet in training for the Italian Navy when Italy surrendered and the Nazis began retreating north through Italy after their losses to the Allies in North Africa. Dates showed that both men had been in Italy at the same time, serving on opposite sides. (My uncle was arrested by the Nazis for refusing to be conscripted into their navy and was sent to a prison camp in Czechoslovakia.) Life vectored both men into the loving arms of my family. We felt it made a compelling story as just one more of the disparate personal chapters in the lives of those directly affected by the war and how their lives played out after the war was over. A photo essay of their stories begins on Page 29.

One of the peripheral stories that has always intrigued me involved my grandfather, Antonio, after whom I am named, albeit my name Americanized. My grandfather was a pyrotechnist, an artistry he brought with him from Italy. During the war, he went to work in a defense plant, there not being anything to celebrate with fireworks at the time. His English never advanced much beyond the basics, so he was unaware that the plant had been asked to come up with a thick black smoke with which American destroyers could protect cargo ships crossing the Atlantic from German U-boats. The college-educated chemists were only managing to create weak gray smoke. When a fellow immigrant told him of the failed efforts, he replied, “I can make that.” He explained pyrotechnists knew how black smoke was made because it would ruin their shows.

Skeptical, the chemists resisted until they had no choice. The result was exactly what was needed. We know he never got credit for it, but we like to think the credit lay in how many lives were saved by a jet black smokescreen my grandfather created. After his death, in the many drawings of his fireworks designs we found among his personal effects, was one of a US Navy destroyer with thick curls of black smoke trailing in its wake. Salute, grandpa.

In addition to the combatants, the effects of the war were also felt on the home front, as detailed in Kendric Taylor’s memoir, “Summer Camp, The War Years,” beginning on Page 34.

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Contributors “One expedient he found useful was to explain the fuel gauge in these terms: “You see that needle? You must keep it away from the letter E!” Frank I. Sillay explains in his Email from New Zealand: Ingenious Solution to a Poorly Understood Problem” (Page 5). “Dusk came, then nightfall, but no sign of truck or driver.” Sillay also gives us an account of mating rituals in the aptly entitled, “Romance” (Page 52).

“I walked up the steps of St. Mark’s — no familiar faces. I turned and looked back at the Piazza — no one I recognized,” Bill Scheller writes in “First Night in Venice,” the tale of what can happen when you wander off from your group in an unfamiliar locale (Page 16). On the other hand, there are worse places to be on your own than Venice.

“You almost didn’t need to know his name, but you were not likely to forget it, once you’d met him in person,” Tony Tedeschi writes about his friend, mentor and colleague, Donald Bain, in “The Ghost of Donald Bain” (Page 19). Bain who died in 2017 was the ghost writer of more than 100 books. “Yet, of all the successful people I have ever met, Don was the person least affected by his success.”

“In those far-off days, it was the custom for mothers and fathers with children going to summer camp to gather in Grand Central Station in New York City early on a particular Saturday morning at the beginning of June to put their youngsters on the train for various destinations in the northeast,” Kendric Taylor explains in “Summer Camp, The War Years” (Page 34).

“Materialism is largely confined to the iPhone,” Pedro Pereira says of his daughter in “Generation Z: Trading Possessions for Experiences” (Page 46).” “I’m not sure she has any other possession that she values.” The contrast is dramatic for Pereira, who, as a child would not let go of his matchbox cars.

“And so it began,” Aglaia Davis writes in her “Email from the Upper West Side: Love of My Life on Four Wheels” (Page 50). “And so — given my specific tastes in cars — continues, months and months after it started. My search goes on for the perfect Batmo successor: black, 2015-2019, well loved (aka happy childhood), reasonably low mileage, and most likely four doors.”

“I repositioned the now delicately balanced rug on top of my head and determined, then and there, once and for all, to go for hair transplant surgery,” Malcolm P. Ganz reveals what forced his decision to un-chrome his dome in a new feature we call, “Waaaaht?” (Page 53).

“I woke up in the middle of the night with this entire plotline in my head,” Anthony Germaine explains about his short story, “An Unscheduled Landing at Cheops” (Page 58). Convinced, if he just rolled over, he’d forget it, as he had so many others. “I got up and began typing. When I read it the next morning, I had no idea what the damned thing meant. But, thankfully, it really is a short story. My wife’s name really is Corey, however, and I really don’t know where the hell she is this morning.”

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Email from New Zealand: Ingenious Solution to a Poorly Understood Problem

By Frank I. Sillay

‘ Truck just stop, Boss. No reason.’

When my younger son was working on his engineering qualification, we lived close to the Polytech where he was studying, and several of his classmates used to come up to our house and join him for lunch when budgetary constraints made themselves felt.

Everybody eventually went their separate ways but reports from far afield occasionally trickle back.

One of the boys, Colin, got a job with an organization dedicated to providing water pumps to villages in sub-Saharan Africa. Several years later, he was back home for a visit and entertained us with some stories about his adventures.

To his surprise, he ended up managing large numbers of staff and vehicles servicing thousands of square miles of mostly empty African plains, and the level of technical knowledge – even general knowledge of his staff – could only be described as startling. While an individual might have extensive knowledge of his own culture, such as how to track game until it collapsed from exhaustion, twentieth century technology was likely to be completely unknown to him. Colin had come across this phenomenon while training the many drivers he needed. One expedient he found useful was to explain the fuel gauge in these terms: “You see that needle? You must keep it away from the letter E!” One morning he sent a driver out with a truck to a distant point and reminded him of the importance of keeping the needle away from the E. Dusk came, then nightfall, but no sign of truck or driver. Similarly the next day, so Colin threw a toolbox and a likely selection of parts, in the back of his truck and headed out.

Eventually, he noticed a small dot on the horizon, which gradually resolved itself into the person of the missing driver. As they drove on to the location of the truck, Colin quizzed his man about what had happened, “Truck just stop, Boss. No reason.”

“You didn’t let the needle touch the E, did you?”

“No way, Boss!”

When they reached the truck stalled at the side of the road, Colin found a small hole had been drilled in the clear plastic cover of the fuel gauge, and a matchstick inserted to prevent the needle from getting below about ¼ full. No, the needle was never going to touch the E.

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Fogg’s Horn The Miscreant Meanderings Of Our Man Markus

Rum Cay I got into the dinghy first . . . The rest of the maneuver didn’t go fine.

Yes, I’ve been to Rum Cay. In fact, I was just thinking about it the other day, after I heard something on NPR about the Ayatollah. Not the old Ayatollah, the new one – it’s confusing, because they all seem to have the same name, but anyway hearing about the new Ayatollah got me thinking about the old one, and that brought back memories of Rum Cay. Rum Cay. One of the Out Islands, they used to call them, before they rebranded them as the “Family Islands.” (I hate that term “rebranding,” but that’s what they did. Tourism people are always rebranding. I read where they were trying to rebrand Winooski, Vermont.) No Ayatollah, I guarantee, has ever been to Rum Cay, but I got there once, and I’ll always associate it with the Ayatollah, and the basket baby.

It was June of ’89. I was working on a piece about Columbus’s discovery of America for the 500th anniversary, which was only three years away. I know – nowadays you could get booted out of polite society for saying Columbus discovered America. But he didn’t know it was there, did he?

And neither did anyone back home. People were already living there. No fooling. People were already eating at the restaurant you said you discovered last week, too, and no one threw a fit because you put it that way. But I digress. I was working on the Columbus piece, and I figured a good angle would be to bounce around the Bahamas, connecting the dots the same way he did in 1492. Since I didn’t have a square-rigged caravel, much less three of them and a crew of dopes snookered into an adventure likely to drown them all, I flew to Nassau and decided to wing it from there. I started with the rustbucket mail boat to San Salvador, 24 hours of nausea. Next I rented a motorbike and set off to find the two different monuments that purport to mark Columbus’s landing place. (There’s a third, allegedly at the spot where he dropped anchor, but it’s underwater.)

Partway down the east side of the island, on a dirt road where my main focus was trying to drive faster than the stray dogs could run, I got to the turnoff for the Dixon Hill Lighthouse, which is a beauty. It runs on clockwork and kerosene, and was built in the 1880s by the Imperial Lighthouse Service. I happen to have several ancestors who worked for the Imperial Lighthouse Service,

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which in their case was a respectable excuse for getting them as far away from home as possible, but that’s another story. I turned up the path, and got the tour from the keeper.

It turned out I wasn’t the only lighthouse fan there that day. There was a young couple, Americans, and the guy was carrying a big wicker basket. In the basket was a baby, maybe four months old. They had hitchhiked here from Cockburn Town, the little island capital, where their sailboat was moored. We got to talking, and it turned out their next port of call was Rum Cay. This was Columbus’s next port of call, too, although of course he didn’t know it, and that made it mine. After a few minutes of admiring the polish the keeper had put on the brass innards of the lighthouse (I wondered if one of my ne’er-do-well great-great-uncles had fussed it all together), it was agreed: I’d be supernumerary on Gallant, their 28-footer. Winging it was starting to look easy.

Everybody goes to Kay’s Bar

We sailed in the morning. The trip took the best part of the day, which is probably what it took Columbus, and by four in the afternoon we dropped anchor just offshore. The guy – Bart something was his name – cooked a yellowtail he’d caught, and we got ready to board the dinghy for a trip into town. Everybody who goes to Rum Cay, and that pretty much means the boat crowd, goes to Kay’s Bar. I’d even heard about the joint, long before I knew where Rum Cay was, from a smuggler I used to hang out with in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Everybody goes there because there isn’t anywhere else to go on Rum Cay. I got into the dinghy first. The plan was to lower the basket with the baby in it down to me, and then for Bart and I can’t remember her name to climb down and shove us off. The first part went fine. I gingerly took the basket, nestled Bart Junior in the bow of the dinghy, and sidled into the stern.

The rest of the maneuver didn’t go fine. For some damned reason, the oars were on the boat, not in the dinghy. This wouldn’t have been a problem if Bart or his wife could have handed them down to me, but just as I took my seat in the stern an onshore breeze wafted the dinghy a good twelve or fifteen feet from Gallant. Bart didn’t want to throw me an oar, because he was afraid he’d hit the baby. I didn’t want to lean over the gunwale and paddle with my hands, because I didn’t want to shift weight and capsize the dinghy. Long story short, I capped off all the weeping and gnashing with a cheery “See you at Kay’s,” because it was obvious that the same breeze that yanked me away from the boat was going to deliver me gently to shore.

That’s how I happened to walk into Kay’s carrying a baby in a basket. I was a mild sensation among the piratical-looking customers at the bar, most of whom were dentists and accountants with nice boats doing their best to look piratical, but nobody paid attention for too long because they were all glued to the satellite television, which was carrying the Ayatollah’s funeral live from Teheran. This would not ordinarily be must-see TV in an Out Islands ginmill, but it was no ordinary funeral. The mourners were knocking each other over along the procession route, trying to grab a piece of the Ayatollah’s shroud, and I think a few of them actually grabbed a piece of the Ayatollah. I plopped the basket down on the bar, ordered a bottle of Kalik, and got into the Super Bowl spirit of the event.

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Three Kaliks later, Basket Baby’s parents came in. They had hitched a ride on an optometrist’s dinghy. They saw me and the basket, and pushed through to the bar. “Will you look at this,” I said. “They’re burying the Ayatollah. If there’s anything left of him when they get to his tomb.”

But they weren’t interested. Some people just don’t care about current events. *****

Foggy Days in Dublin Town Its landings creak like the Earl is still walking around I happened to be in Dublin one fine June a number of years ago, having a pint or two at the Horseshoe Bar of the Shelbourne, always my hotel of choice in that fair city. Among the afterwork crowd was a rakish looking chap -- neatly trimmed beard, small earring in left lobe, professorial, or possibly a musician -- not a Dubliner, but definitely a man of the world. He nodded in a friendly manner, and when I asked what brought him to Ireland, he replied: “Bloomsday, of course.” This is a sacred day in Irish literary history, the date in 1904 in James Joyce’s classic book Ulysses, chronicling the peregrinations and encounters of Leopold Bloom, the protagonist. Devotees of the book come to Dublin for that day, June 16, to retrace his steps, (which thankfully involve several pubs, offering ample opportunities for drink). As I happened to be there on the same mission myself, we began a long chat, but not before I took him up on his offer to stand me a drink.

“And what’s that you’re drinking,” I inquired, “looks interesting?”

“Martini. Drop of Dolin Vermouth, three shots of Bombay Sapphire, Bombay Sapphire East, Martin Miller’s, Plymouth or Tanqueray 10. I get tired of the same one all the time,” he explained. And that became the ingredients and the tradition of my life-long Foggian Cocktail Hour Ritual.

Later, after several of these shivering alcoholic combustibles, the discussion turned to the Shelbourne, which Joyce actually mentions in his book.

“How old is this place,” my new acquaintance asked. Fancying myself an expert on all things Shelbournian, I quickly replied in my best Pickwickian manner: “1824 -- named of course after William, 2nd Earl of Shelbourne, later first Marquess of Lansdowne.”

“Its landings creak like the Earl is still walking around,” he observed, swirling his drink amusedly.

“It’s been a Dublin landmark from the very beginning,” I continued, “and occupies quite a prominent place in Dublin’s history and social life.”

“Really,” he observed encouragingly, “please continue.”

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Fueled by the volatility in the glass in my hand, I needed no urging: “When it opened, much was made of its modern attractions: the most up-to-date bathrooms in Europe – with their own bathtubs, mind you. Those creaky corridors you so admire were designed extra-wide to accommodate ladies’ hoopskirts, and so remain to this day.

Identities lost over time “And Kildair Street, from which you entered today between the two statues of the young Nubian princesses so famously at the entrance, is where lady Morgan, a prominent hostess of the day, lost a locket containing a snippet of Lord Byron’s hair, which the Countessa Guiccioli, the poet’s last lover, had given her. ‘I have met with a loss which breaks my heart,’ lamented Lady Morgan.

“In any event, in more modern times, 1922 to be exact, the first constitution of the Irish Free State was drafted upstairs in a sitting room, and the hotel has continued to serve as a meeting place for government officials, statesmen, politicians, movie stars and celebrities.

“And writers?” My by now dear friend inquired.

“Of course, and I might add, along the cornice of that self-same room are the busts of 12 Irish writers, poets, and musicians, set there during the reconstruction of 1864-65. However, their identities have been lost with time. At one point, I brought Ulick O’Connor, the prominent Irish man of letters upstairs for a serious consideration of the busts, which we inspected while standing upon two shaky ladders.

“Our interest in solving the mystery from this vantage soon came to naught, especially as the hotel had been treating us to refreshments, and we were quickly hauled down to continue our scholarly consultation in this very bar. But I digress.

“When World War One broke out in August 1914, the British authorities, afraid of saboteurs, swept down upon the Shelbourne and arrested most of the waiters. The hotel had been in the habit of employing foreigners for service jobs, usually Austrians and Germans (indeed, Hitler’s half-brother, Alois, was said to have been later employed for a time), and virtually the entire staff was hauled away. Most of them had been in the employ of the establishment so long, as one employee put it, ‘they didn’t even know they was foreigners.’”

The bar was emptying by now as the dinner hour drew near, and not to detain my companion who was beginning to look a little worse for the wear, I closed with one of my favorite anecdotes, illustrating what magical prestige the name of The Shelbourne conveyed, even in the midst of chaos.

“In 1916, unrest in Ireland led to the Easter Rebellion, with the Shelbourne itself under sporadic rifle fire from rebels dug in on St. Stephen’s Green across the street. The hotel quickly came to resemble a field hospital, as the wounded were brought in from the city’s streets, mixing with stranded guests and armed troops seeking food and drink.

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“Caught on the Green on that Easter Sunday were two young ladies from London, sisters of the Shelbourne’s manageress. Thinking to rush back to the hotel, they stopped a horse-drawn vehicle whose driver agreed to take them. Surrounded en route by a frightened mob trying to turn the horse -- without a pause the drover quickly made a path by brandishing his whip and crying out the one unalterable fact that would stop any crowd, would take absolute precedence over any circumstance: ‘Get back! Are you crazy mad? These ladies are for the Shelbourne!’” *****

Hobby Blacksmithing?

You stand there by the anvil . . .

I was lounging in the corner of a village blacksmith’s shop, on the outskirts of Nairobi, taking notes and hoping to pick up some techniques by observation, as I was interested in doing a little hobby blacksmithing.

The helper was a high-school dropout on his first day at work, so the blacksmith was explaining in considerable detail what was required of him: “You stand there by the anvil with the four pound cross-peen hammer, and when the piece of iron gets up to heat in the forge, I’ll take it out with the tongs and put it on the anvil. When I get it positioned to my satisfaction, I’ll nod my head, and you hit it with the hammer.”

Doorways: Bar Harbor, Maine and Environs

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TRIP

S o

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‘Lower the night hammers!’

By Tony Tedeschi

During one of those all-too-frequent periods when my writing career was not enough to pay the mortgage and put food on the table – this one in the early 1980s – I joined two dear friends – Joe Scott and Art Santucci – as partners in a four-person public relations agency: Santucci, Tedeschi & Scott (corporate motto: “Give Us The Business and No One Gets Hurt”). The fourth member of our firm was our secretary, whom we promised to pay every two weeks, when we hired her away from a real job. That often meant she was the only one who got paid after we deducted expenses from operating revenues. Ah, but we were still young, ex of more than a half-dozen years learning our craft in the public relations department at American Airlines. Business, we felt sure, would catch up with aspirations.

In PR, of course, image is everything and that precept applied to the agency principals as well as the clients, which placed two of the principals –Art and I – in conflict-of-image with one of our clients: Tortola Yacht Charters. TYC was the third-largest charter-boat operator in the British Virgin Islands and we got publicity for the company by inviting writers down to the islands to sail with us. Two problems: 1. Art and I didn’t know a thing about sailing; 2. We both got motion sickness.

Before the first press trip Art and I were to host, we fretted over images of ourselves upchucking over the rail, while the captain begged any of the writers who knew anything about sailing (or at least could keep from tossing their cookies long enough to winch in a sheet) to please, pleeeeze help him bring the rest of us back alive.

Not to worry. We discovered during the first hour out on the Sir Francis Drake Channel that it was one of the most hospitable bodies of water on earth. We were never out of security-blanket sight of land and, in such calm waters and gentle breezes, Dramamine really did work. Which left only the matter of the lack of sailing expertise. However, that solution, too, presented itself early in the voyage: watch the captain like a hawk (seagull? pelican? magnificent frigatebird?), do exactly as he did or commanded and – this was the crucial element in terms of image enhancement – repeat whatever he said, very loudly.

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To wit, Art and I, buoyed by the euphoria of our lack of motion sickness, bounced about the sailboat all day, shouting things like: “Gibe the jib!” “Jib the gibe!” “Luff the mainsail!” “Stow the wench!” “Women and children first in the lifeboats!” et cetera, et cetera. The travel writers we were hosting were so impressed, we began to cop that air of arrogance which accompanies major conquest.

After a day of lobster salad off Manchioneel Bay at Cooper Island, a natural shower under the stacked boulders at “The Baths” grotto on Virgin Gorda, and a return crossing accompanied by the sun’s diamond sparkle on the water and the strings of a Vivaldi concerto via the shipboard stereo system, the late afternoon found us headed for port at Prospect Reef Resort on Tortola. I was draped across the deck on the bow, drifting between consciousness and un-, lying on my back (at this point still ignorant of the damage the ultraviolet rays were doing to my forehead), when I became aware of the familiar modulations of Art’s voice drifting up through the nearby hatch. My left eyelid window-shaded up, my right flapping up a second later. I rolled onto my left side and glanced below. Art noted my presence at the hatch.

‘This is one of his favorite wines, Chateau Schlemiel.’

He was in the dining salon, chatting with a pair of writers from the Hearst Newspaper Syndicate, a bottle of white Entre Deux Mer wine in one hand, a corkscrew in the other. The wine, a blend of French grapes, bottled by Sichel, a major wine distributor, had been left over from lunch.

Glancing at the label, Art began, “you know, my partner, Tony, is quite the wine connoisseur.” He pulled the cork. “And this is one of his favorite wines, Chateau Schlemiel.”

I recognized my cue. A neatly coiled line lay nearby, an empty plastic cup standing guard over it. I uncurled a length of line, tied it snugly about the cup and began lowering it through the hatch.

When it reached chest-level, Art, without missing a beat, poured a tasting sample of the liquid into the cup and tugged lightly on the line.

I raised the cup, carefully, took a sip, then pronounced it, “full-bodied, a bit tannic to the tongue, but nice anyway, quite nice.”

“Well,” Art said, “there you have it. Saluté.”

He filled the glasses of his incredulous guests and resumed his monologue on the beauty of the islands. An image-enhancement coop de grass to round out the afternoon. I returned to my snooze.

Evening was falling quickly and most of the writers, fooded-and-beveraged to the gills, lazed about the deck in various stages of undress and various states of consciousness. Dusk had taken firm hold as we approached the dock, when the captain split the silence with a command to “drop the fenders,” while, from his position in the stern, whence he maneuvered our vessel, he lowered over the side a couple of the rubber bumpers to keep the hull from hitting the dock. He motioned Art and me to do likewise amidships and at the bow.

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“Drop the fenders!” I shouted, taking up position in the bow.

“Drop the fenders!” Art echoed from amidships, as the travel writers began to stir.

Having no clue what to do next, I watched the captain carefully and inched the fender I held down to the level where the captain had positioned his. However, because I was in the bow and therefore considerably higher off the water than he, the point I’d positioned my bumper was too high to prevent the hull from striking the pier.

The captain, noticing this, shouted to me, “lower than I have ‘em.”

Unfortunately, that was not exactly what I heard.

“Lower the night hammers!” I shouted. I mean it was just about nightfall.

Clearly, Art liked the sound of that. “Lower the night hammers!” he repeated with his heftiest baritone and the knitted brows of unquestioned authority.

“What the hell are you guys shouting?” the captain demanded.

“Lower the night hammers,” I repeated proudly. “You gave us the command to lower the night hammers.”

“I said, ‘lower than I have ‘em,’ you idiot,” he blasted angrily, leaping from the cockpit and nearly trampling a trio of languishing travel writers, then seizing the line I held and dropping the fender into position an instant before the hull – now properly cushioned – slammed against the pier.

I felt as if I had been camped under a lazy fly ball during a game in the Vaudeville Cream Pie League, had waved off the other outfielders, and made the easy catch – with my face. Perhaps I’d been out in the sun too long. Perhaps it was that final sip of Chateau Schlemiel. In any event, my day as an authority on sailing ended back in the state of ignorance whence it was born. I learned two lessons that day: image-enhancement was not something I was likely to be good at; a certain level of ignorance provides a vast inventory of opportunities for screwing up. On those occasions when I’m confronted with the results of my shortcomings, others have noticed me mumbling, some asking what I was saying.

“Lower the night hammers,” I reply.

“What?”

“You had to be there.”

They always wander off and leave me be. *

*

*

*

*

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The story, however, has the unlikeliest of sequels . . .

Night Hammers, Revisited In the summer of 1992, I was aboard Cunard’s M.S. Sagafjord on its Trans-Panama Canal cruise from Los Angeles to Fort Lauderdale. My wife, Candy, and I had been seated at the staff captain’s table, along with six other passengers. One evening, the staff captain remarked he was pleased I wore a beard, as he did. It gave me a nautical look, he said.

“Let me tell you,” I replied, “about my great command of things nautical.”

I could feel Candy rolling her eyes beside me. She had heard the “Night Hammers” story dozens of times.

After the laughter at my expense had died, the staff captain said, “you know, it seems to me a ship should be equipped with night hammers.”

“I’ve been saying that for years,” I replied.

“They could be used for many things,” he continued. “They should have rubberized heads, however, to muffle their sound, since they would only be hammering at night.”

“You know, you have a real money-maker there,” chimed in one of our table mates, a retired tax attorney.

“Yes,” I responded. “Now that you mention it, I can see the potential. Set up the business, then call my Congressman and convince him we need regulations to assure that all cruise ships be equipped with night hammers. For safety reasons, of course.”

“Cruise ships are small potatoes,” said one of the other diners, a former U.S. Navy man. “Go for the big Navy contract. The Navy would pay hundreds of dollars per night hammer, thousands really. We’re talking a multi-million dollar contract.”

There was a suggestion from one of the women that since night hammers were to be used only in emergency situations, they should be kept in a glass case to be mounted on walls along all the companionways. My new company would also manufacture the glass cases.

“Yes,” I said, “and we could produce a mini-night hammer for breaking the glass to get at the fullsize night hammer to do whatever it was you did with a night hammer in an emergency.”

The collective brain trust all agreed that the concept was a foolproof moneymaker, just as one of the ship’s photographers arrived at our table. So, we all gathered around the staff captain for a group portrait of the principals in our new business venture.

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We ended the dinner agreeing that the manufacture of night hammers would be one of those good-old, made-in-the-USA enterprises that could provide thousands of jobs in middle America.

But, we agreed it all would need to get going before the Chinese got wind of it and cornered the night hammer market.

“Yes,” the staff captain said, as we all rose from the table, “there should be a night hammer on every deck.”

“I quite agree,” I said, “at least one per deck.”

Perhaps we were underestimating the potential of the cruise ship market.

I had been vindicated at last. The ignorant captain of that sailing yacht in the British Virgin Islands had taken us out into the raging currents of the Drake Channel and brought us back at nightfall without the requisite safety equipment. Then, he tried to conceal his boat’s shortcomings by making me appear the fool.

“Don’t forget the potential for day hammers,” the retired tax accountant said, as we filed out of the dining room.

“Of course not,” I replied. “That’s my next project.”

Photo By Karen Dinan Marine Parkway Bridge, Breezy Point, New York

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Photo by Katie Cappeller

First Night in Venice

By Bill Scheller

I walked up the steps of St. Mark’s — no familiar faces.

The 1980s might have been the golden age of press trips, or “fam trips,” the “fam” being short for “familiarization.” The agents promoting this or that destination, attraction, or means of getting you there were spending money like drunken sailors, and it was a great time to be a travel writer. In 1986, I got a call from the people repping the Venice-Simplon Orient Express (VSOE), which had recently restored the luxurious coaches and sleepers of the old Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits and were running trains from Paris to Venice. I was one of a group of five or six writers invited to join the VSOE at Zurich, and ride it to the end of the line. It wasn’t an overnight — these sailors weren’t that drunken — as it was all daylight from Switzerland to Venice. But they put us up at the first-class Hotel zum Storchen in Zurich, and booked us into the Cipriani in Venice. If there were a sixth star, the Cipriani would have one.

The train ride was lovely — the little roomette with its Lalique glass, an exquisite lunch in the diner, and my first eight-dollar cocktail in the piano lounge car. But it was all merely a prelude to the Serenissima, where I had never been before.

We arrived at Venice’s terminal, near the western end of the Grand Canal, in mid-afternoon. It was late spring, the air was still cool, and of course I was wearing my Borsellino and hadn’t put my

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arms through the sleeves on my raincoat. How else was I supposed to arrive in Venice? We took the vaporetto to St. Mark’s, where we boarded the Cipriani’s private launch and crossed over to the hotel, out on the tip of the island of Giudecca. There was time for a guided look around, before heading to our rooms to shower and dress for dinner. For travel writers in that distant era, this didn’t mean turning baseball caps visor forward and putting on a khaki vest with fifty pockets.

My marble bathroom had enough candles for High Mass. I lit them all against the darkness gathering over the Lagoon, filled the tub, and got out a little present I had received in Zurich and had immediately put on room-service ice when I checked into my Cipriani quarters. The Storchen, being a Swiss hotel, had noticed from my passport that I was checking in on my birthday, and sent up a bottle of champagne. This was the place to drink it, tub, candles, and all.

Bubbled inside and out, dressed and shiny, I met my fellow fam-trippers and our group leader for the launch ride over to St. Mark’s. We docked near the Piazzetta, at the Cipriani’s private space, and headed into the Piazza. It was, for all of us, our first time in Venice. And, since this was more than 30 years ago, the city was not yet strangled with people off the cruise ships.

We walked towards the campanile, and stopped to stand gaping at the Basilica. But one of us — that would be me — wanted to take in all of what Napoleon is said to have called “the finest drawing room in Europe,” and poked around the other side of the campanile to admire, in the lamplight, the rigorous neoclassical facades of the other buildings, the Procuratie Nuove and Procuratie Vecchie, that surround the square. I strolled clockwise around the great tower, reaching, to my left, the smaller clock tower where mechanical Moors strike the hours. Then, returning to face the Basilica, I expected to see my group.

I did not see my group.

I walked up the steps of St. Mark’s — no familiar faces. I turned and looked back at the Piazza — no one I recognized. Another circuit around the campanile — niente. They had no doubt all trooped off to dinner, but where was that? Our leader hadn’t told us, because what would it mean to us anyway? Just follow me, and you’ll eat. Press trips are like that.

It didn’t take more than a minute or two for me to realize that it would be silly to keep looking for them. There were a good half-dozen directions they could have gone in, all the while thinking I was with them, perhaps on the periphery, but surely not lost. That’s probably what they kept thinking, until they got to the restaurant, where I would no doubt be a bigger topic of conversation than the food . . . through the first course, at least.

The hell with it, I decided, and went looking for a restaurant. I dove down the Piazzetta dei Leoni, leading away from the Piazza, and lost myself on a warren of calles and little bridges, a first-timer’s web of Venetian wonder. One of the narrow lanes led to a place called the Malamocco, named after the fishing village near the southern tip of the Lido. There I had a very good dinner, only one course of which I remember. It was a dessert that still hadn’t appeared on menus back home, much less become a freezer-aisle cliché — tiramisu. The other thing I remembered was the captain, in his tuxedo, sitting down at a baby grand piano as the restaurant was closing, with only a few diners still lingering over their coffee and grappa.

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He noodled around a little and then launched into “New York, New York.” I don’t think it was because I was sitting nearby; I wasn’t that obvious — not like the time at a Dominican Republic resort when a couple of tableside troubadours hit me with “My Way” just because I had a heavy tan and a black silk shirt. It was a chummy little scene. I felt like an old regular who had stuck around for the music when there wasn’t any music advertised.

But I had to get back, before the fam trip leader had the carabinieri start dragging the canals for my soggy remains. I retraced my steps — something I still find tricky to do in Venice, even after several trips, no mean feat on a first visit — and found my way to the Piazzetta and the Cipriani dock. The launch was there, and I rode it over to Giudecca as the only passenger. It was after 11, and inky dark on the canal. We docked, I nodded a grazie to the driver, and into the Cipriani I strolled. I saw no one I knew in the lobby, but I wasn’t in my room five minutes before there was a knock. Half the fam trip contingent was out in the hall, and I had the feeling the group had gotten bigger with each of what had probably been several fruitless visits. “Oh, Bill — we were so worried about you,” one effusive young woman cried. I think she actually said “Billy,” which was odd as she had known me for all of two days and it was a name only my parents and grandparents still used.

You would think, from the way they carried on, that I had been lost on the Serengeti Plain, left to the mercy not of the Lion of St. Mark, but the real thing. But I was in Venice! What could have happened? I was lost and I was happy, fed and happy . . . although ever since, wherever I am, when I am really lost, I like to think that the Cipriani launch will arrive to take me home.

Autumn Welwyn Preserve Glen Cove, New York

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Donald Bain, Widely Read Author (but Not by That Name), Dies at 82 Over five decades as a ghostwriter he published novels, biographies, westerns and historical romances, mostly under fictitious names or credited to more marketable bylines; vanity memoirs attributed to corporate executives; and even long articles disguised as excerpts from nonexistent books.

-- The New York Times, October 26, 2017

The Ghost of Donald Bain

By Tony Tedeschi

I am haunted by the ghost of Donald Bain.

I find it impossible to escape its clutches. OK, not clutches, more like an embrace. Don, you see, may have been little more than an apparition to many of his readers, but he was very real to me, my benevolent mentor as well as my dear friend. His death in October 2017 ended 46 years of our friendship. During that period, we collaborated on many projects.

I first met Don Bain in 1971, when he was contracted by American Airlines’ hotel subsidiary, where I was a junior executive, to help with a PR project that was beyond the capabilities of our small staff. Don got the assignment because he had worked in PR for American before he left to begin writing books, the first of which was a ragingly successful chart-topper called: “Coffee, Tea or Me?” The title was a play on “Coffee, tea or milk?” a standard stewardess line in that bygone era of jet set travel when the women who said it all looked like they were waiting their turns to be cover models for Vogue. Don ghosted the book using pseudonyms for two Eastern Airlines flight attendants. Before we met, I knew him only by his reputation as an author and writer published enough to earn a good living at it. I was a young writer, with aspirations of following a path similar to the one Don had taken, but I had few creds, working fulltime at American and trying to establish a writing career in my free time.

Any trepidation I might have felt before meeting Don dissipated as soon as he walked through the door to my office. He had one of those smiles that put you at ease immediately, a lighthearted way about him that made you feel comfortable in his presence, and a sense of humor that became apparent very soon. Despite the huge success gap, Don treated me as a colleague right from the outset, always valuing my opinions equally with his own. All of those attributes were needed given that the decision-maker for our project was the overbearing CEO of the hotel chain, who often found little to like in anything anyone produced but made sure he personally took credit for anything that pleased his superiors at American Airlines. A combination of all his character flaws sometimes led to situations that became especially ludicrous.

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The project Don had been hired to spearhead was a multifaceted media promotion for the name change of American Airlines’ Flagship Hotels chain to Americana Hotels. We wrote press releases the CEO rewrote into releases no reputable media would run.

We wrote scripts for a video that would be shown in all our hotels around the world, which he discarded and, as a result, was filmed violating all the legal points our lawyers told us to make sure he didn’t violate. And, most damaging of all, he kept reworking the Don Bain and Tony Tedeschi, 1998 events for the big namechange party we would throw at the chain’s principal hotel, the Americana in midtown Manhattan.

His incompetence, coupled with his braggadocio, got us to nickname him “Mister Bluster.”

Mister Bluster and the Midget Colony

An unexpected problem for me arose with the hotel name-change party just four weeks away, when I was diagnosed with an abdominal condition that my doctor felt needed surgery expeditiously. He advised it would become more painful the longer I left it unattended. He said he could schedule the operation forthwith and I’d be back on my feet a day or two after that. Don and I decided it would be better to get it over with right away, which would give me the better part of three weeks to help with final preparations for the party.

So there I was, recently out of the operating room, my head gaga, my brain barely able to focus, my gut still dead from the anesthesia, when the phone rang. I had just enough muscular coordination to lift the receiver, drop it onto the pillow and roll my right ear into position against the earpiece. I managed a semi-intelligible, “hello.”

“Tony,” said the near-giddy voice on the other end, “it’s Don. I know you just got out of the operating room, but I’ve got to tell you this. Don’t talk. Just listen.”

He related that when the ad agency presented its print ads, one was designed to ballyhoo the new “Americana Call,” tollfree reservations number, which featured a picture of one of those oldfashioned “stick” telephones painted red, white and blue and with stars and stripes. It set off the dreaded lightbulb in Bluster’s head. He decided he wanted to hire a half-dozen midgets, dressed like Uncle Sam, running around the gala shouting, “American calling.” It was a takeoff on an old TV commercial, which featured a short guy dressed as a bellhop running around shouting, “Call

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for Philip Morris,” that had faded from the airwaves years before with the demise of cigarette advertising An agent of Don’s told him there were two dozen midgets living in a brownstone on the west side of Manhattan, who made a living acting in bit parts. When Don contacted the person in charge, he said they’d be delighted to get the work. Don was about to hang up, when he remembered he’d nearly omitted the deal-breaker – they all needed Uncle Sam costumes.

“No problem,” he was told. “Every midget has an Uncle Sam costume.” Don told me if and when he wrote his autobiography that would be the title.

I begged him to stop talking, convinced that my painful spasms of laughter were reopening my sutures.

Fortunately, some of Bluster’s advisers managed to convince him that there were other options for ballyhooing the Americana Call and he abandoned the idea.

The bizarre episode established, early on, two pillars in what would become my decades-long relationship with Don: 1. Illegitimi non carborundum (Google it).

2. We often could find humor in the midst of the most demanding assignments.

After negotiating a number of money-losing deals for the airline, Bluster was finally canned, although his exit deal included a press release with the standard euphemism about “pursuing other business opportunities.” I had nothing to do with writing that press release and Don had long since returned to writing best-selling books. He eventually did write “Every Midget Has an Uncle Sam Costume,” which was published as a hardcover by Barricade Books in 2003. However he changed the title to “Murder, He Wrote,” with the publication of the paperback in 2006, when political correctness had begun to dictate that “little people” considered the term “midget” derogatory. Don was, among other things, always sensitive to people’s feelings.

A Decades-Long Collaboration

We kept in touch over the ensuing years and when I finally began lining up enough freelance assignments to work fulltime as a writer, Don brought me into a company he had founded, along with his wife, Renée Paley-Bain, called Hyphenates. The company included a number of business clients who paid well and Don was convinced he and I would work well together, particularly when it involved the business clients.

Together, Don, Renée and I produced newsletters, press releases, promotional pieces and gobs of writing projects for a range of companies as disparate as a liquor importer and a worldwide personnel resources corporation. We even collaborated on a business book we ghosted for one of the Hyphenates clients. But it was the novels that kept us the busiest.

Don was a magnet for ghostwriting projects. He ghosted so many detective, cop, crime and mystery novels, he and Renée eventually got the contract to do all the novels spun off from the popular TV show, “Murder, She Wrote,” staring Angela Lansbury. They ended up writing 46

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books for that series. At first, the books were ostensibly bylined Jessica Fletcher, the character Lansbury played on TV. Eventually, they were bylined Jessica Fletcher and Donald Bain, making Don the out-of-the-closet coauthor of a book along with a fictitious character who played a mystery writer on TV. But that’s the way it was with Don: so much of the writing that spun around his universe was . . . well, unusual. The good kind of unusual.

Renée Paley-Bain was eventually added as the third byline on the final books the Bains wrote.

Don and his wife, Renée Paley-Bain It was an open secret for years that Don was the real author of Margaret Truman’s best-selling mystery novels. After Truman died, he came out of that closet as well. In addition to a book a year for the Murder, She Wrote and Truman series, he had other publishers calling him with work he had been too busy to accept. But now he had me as an additional asset. So, I began ghosting for the ghost.

Naming names

The first book he farmed out to me was a novel about a private detective, a proposed pilot for a series of books to be authored by an ex-New York City detective. We were contractually prohibited from discussing our roles in the book, which was fine with me, because parts of it were gruesomely violent and plotted so badly I kept offering fixes that were summarily ignored. Don told me that was one of the upsides to ghostwriting. You didn’t have your name on a bad book.

Since we worked on this project for a flat fee, I had no financial interest in the sales. Nonetheless, Don encouraged me to name a minor character after myself. He said it was a trick he often used, naming walk-on characters after friends and family, so if his authorship ever came into question, he could establish it by pointing to those names. At the outset for one of the Truman books, he took down the names of all those on line at his morning bagel shop and they all made it into the novel.

In fact, he gave my name to a walk-on in one of the Truman mysteries.

So, in one of the final paragraphs for the crime novel, wherein the main character is recuperating from a number of wounds at an island in the Caribbean, I wrote: “He spent a week with a former partner, Tony Tedeschi, at a resort Tedeschi had opened with his wife, Candy, a reformed Manhattan prostitute . . .”

Broad smile in place, when I read the line to Candy, she replied: “You write that, we will be in divorce court before the print is dry; if my mother doesn’t kill you first.”

I changed it to “a leggy former Broadway showgirl.”

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Don loved creating the twists and turns in mystery novels, did a good deal of research with cops, detectives, FBI agents and assorted characters whose relationships he had collected over the course of writing all those novels. One of the crime books I worked with him on began as a nonfiction exposé that seemed to have a life of its own.

A Member of the Family

Years before, Don had ghosted a book with a private detective named Nick Vasile. Nick had grown up in the rough-and-tumble Red Hook section of Brooklyn, which had sired a number of top men in the Mafia. Consequently, Nick did the detective work to support the cases of a number of his boyhood neighbors because they trusted him. For a crime writer, Nick was the ultimate contact. He worked on the right side of the law for men decidedly on the other side. He came to Don with the story of two Mafiosi doing long prison terms largely based on a turncoat who was an informant to law enforcement. While much had been written about Mafia turncoats, this case had a unique twist that Don felt would make it imminently marketable.

When the Feds met with the turncoat and showed him their evidence of his life of crime, which would put him in prison for the rest of his life, they explained they had a get-out-of-jail-free card that he needed to use. He was dating the daughter of a Mafia don.

“You’re going to marry her,” he was told.

“You nuts,” he replied. “She’s drivin’ me crazy already.”

“Well,” they said, “it’s either that or we put out the word that you have ratted to us and we have a video of this meeting.”

The wedding went forward. The turncoat became a major figure in the Mafia don’s organization and the information he provided put Nick’s two clients in prison. They wanted their story told, especially since they could provide evidence that the informant continued his life of crime while in the employ of the Feds, including several murders.

We began working on the book using information Nick got from meeting with his clients in prison.

Don turned a good deal of the writing over to me. Six months into the project, Nick showed up at the Hyphenates office with “some bad news.” It began to look like the two prisoners might get a new trial. They didn’t want our book to screw up their chances. We had a lot of sweat equity in the project and Nick had visions of being a best-selling author, so he floated the idea of going ahead anyway.

Don and I looked at each other. “I don’t like our chances with continuing to breathe if we mess with those two guys,” he said to Nick.

“Maybe so,” Nick replied, “but I’m an old man now and I’ve lived a good life.”

“I’ve lived a good life, too,” I said, “and I’m not that old.”

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Don let out one of his contagious laughs and I could see by the twinkle in his eye, the wood was already burning in his brain. “We turn it into a novel,” he said. “We change the venues, all of the names, of course, make the informant look like real pond scum and run that whole idea by your clients.”

All of that fell into place, as he predicted. I got the brainstorm for the title, although once it hit me, it seemed obvious: “A Member of the Family.”

The novel that never was

The single greatest disappointment of our professional relationship involved our proposal for a series of novels, centering around a secret gathering of super intellectuals we called “The Society of the Apocrypha.” The group we would create developed as an offshoot of the Gnostic Christians, which began to form in the first centuries after the death of Christ and whose members were challenging the conclusions of the New Testament gospels. Our group’s members would be intellectuals and men of action. Membership in the society was to be passed down patrilineally, over the centuries. New members from the outside were inducted only after they were stringently vetted. Each novel would evolve around the society debunking accepted orthodoxy while solving murder mysteries. The first would involve a contemporary Catholic priest and his discovery of the writings of a southern African disciple of Christ, Jared the Black, who has been scrubbed from the gospels because his writings describe a Savior who is markedly different from the man/God the church had been positing. The priest is assassinated in the first chapter and the society takes on the investigation as to why. Bit by bit, they discover what the priest had unearthed and the plot moves along on that path.

I was working on a master’s in English Lit at the time and was enthralled with the writers of the Enlightenment Period in the 17th and 18th centuries, especially John Milton, particularly Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” I’d also done a lot of reading about the Gnostics. However, I was having difficulty convincing Don we could come up with a modern novel, which would take on some of these themes. My efforts were to no avail until Don began seeing the possibility of creating a series of plots around some sort of investigative organization and the idea began to take on life.

We wrote a long plot summary for the first novel; the book’s first chapter; detailed descriptions of each of the society’s members and their various areas of expertise in theology, science, history, 24

literature, etc. It took months of concerted effort, during which we challenged each other continually concerning all the elements of character and plot. When we had what we felt was our best result, we were both pleased and proud of what we had accomplished. We had created an entity, completely from scratch, without some outside source dictating any element of what we had done. And that, of course, was the problem.

Don’s agent at the time was lukewarm about the project, but agreed to present it to publishers anyway. Months went by with no response, as we worked on other projects. Finally, we were told no publisher was interested enough to make an acceptable offer. We read that as no publisher had responded at all. We found out, years later, long after the project died of neglect, one had made an offer with a $20,000 advance. The agent didn’t pass the offer along. It only reinforced the perception that Don was far more valuable as a ghostwriter, churning out two manuscripts a year. Establishing this book series via a first novel would involve spending a great deal of time and energy, along with convincing the publisher to commit a marketing budget, all of which the agent must have felt wouldn’t be worth his effort. On the other hand, since I would have been doing the lion’s share of the writing, Don’s ongoing contracts would have been only minimally affected.

This all transpired in 1998. “The DaVinci Code” was published in 2003 and was a blockbuster best-seller. While that book’s plotline was markedly different from what we envisioned, it established that there was a huge market for the kind of book Don and I had proposed years earlier.

Aging takes its toll

Don and Renée met in 1983 and lived together as a couple for 10 years in Roslyn on Long Island, not far from where Candy and I lived in Glen Cove. They married in 1993 and moved into a converted farmhouse in Purdys, a town up the Hudson River in New York. They lived there for 13 years, writing books together, then moved to Danbury in Connecticut. While I made the journey to both locations over those years, and we collaborated via ever-advancing electronic innovations, our aging and the distance began taking its toll. We made a point of staying in touch on a personal level and he would call me from time to time to brainstorm plots when he was having a rare case of writer’s block.

For years Renée had dealt with a rare blood cancer called Waldenstrom's Macroglobulinemia, which involved treatments from time to time, often years apart. But when she entered Danbury Hospital around the holiday season in late 2015, the treatments stopped working. She died on January 8, 2016, after a three-week battle with the disease. Losing her began a slow decline for Don. It was clear that living without her had broken his heart. I called often over the following weeks and months but the conversations were perfunctory. He had lost all inspiration and finally stopped writing altogether. Many times I offered to come see him, sit with him, talk about the myriad subjects that had engaged us for so many years, but he always found a reason for me not to come visit. Eventually, when he was moved to hospice, I couldn’t reach him even by telephone.

At his death on October 26, 2017, his daughter, Pamela contacted me to say he did not want a formal funeral and she would organize a get-together as a celebration of his life, some months later.

I spoke at that event, with a quavering voice. There are some very special people whose passing truly does leave a hole in your life.

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Don Bain, Candy Tedeschi, Tony Tedeschi and Renée Paley-Bain (L-R) Aboard the Queen Elizabeth 2, 1997, where the Bains were researching Murder on the QE2, as part of their Murder, She Wrote Series

In a media-drenched world, overexposed with so many egotists obsessed with often-undeserved attention, Don was a man comfortable in his anonymity, because he was comfortable in his own skin. What a false judgement to assess people by how many other people know their names.

“Did Moses have a ghostwriter for the Ten Commandants? That’s the rumor,” Don wrote in a 2014 article for Publishers Weekly. “I learned something about writing from every book I wrote.

Tackling all these books exercised my ‘writing muscles,’ as Renée Paley-Bain, my wife, and my most recent collaborator on the Murder, She Wrote series, describes it. As the old man who’d been run over by a New York City taxi said to the woman who rushed to help him and asked whether he was comfortable, “I make a living.”

Just another example of Don’s love for the lighter side of life. When he thought things were proceeding far too seriously, or work was all that and no play, he would simply find ways to release the pressure. Take his creation of an “organization” he called WADDL, for Writers’ AntiDefamation Defense League. Members were not all writers, none of us had ever been defamed, ergo there was nothing to defend against. League? There were not enough of us for a starting lineup. The “League” had no charter, no board meetings, no output of any kind. We just gathered irregularly at a bar and restaurant Nick Vasile was running called “The Lake Tower Inn,” adjacent to the old Watch Tower in Roslyn, Long Island, and backed up on the lake in the center of town.

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The writers who were members were selected for their sense of humor, and were joined by various characters Don had written about. In the midst of a pre-lunch martini, I found myself engaged in conversation with two former flight attendants, who were friends of Don’s and the only two members of another ghost organization Don had created called, SADDL, Stewardess AntiDefamation Defense League. SADDL’s only function had been to send out press releases denouncing the representation of flight attendants in “Coffee, Tea or Me?” and a sequel Don had ghosted, thereby generating controversy to boost sales. “We were both pregnant at the time,” one of them told me, “which Don felt would allow the organization to fold, without suspicion, once both of us had had our babies.” I moved on to a Richard Nixon look-alike, who called himself Richard M. Dixon, listening to a monolog by a Humphrey Bogart impersonator, whose look and accent was so dead-on I was hanging on his every word, so much so it was making me dizzy. I took a deep breath and headed toward the bar for a much-needed second drink.

By the time of his death at 82, Don Bain had written more than 100 books. Yet, of all the successful people I have ever met, Don was the person least affected by his success. Don’s humanity was always front and center. The respect so many of us held – still hold – for him will long outlive his physical presence. If you met Don Bain, you knew the person. The man you saw you respected. You pretty much had to like him. You almost didn’t need to know his name, but you were not likely to forget it, once you’d met him in person. I know I can’t. I never will. I welcome the haunting of that rarest of apparitions: the very friendly ghost of a dear departed friend.

Sunset, Long Beach, Long Island Photo by Karen Dinan 27

Photos of Central Park from a bygone era? . . .

The Bridal Path

The Lake

Bethesda Fountain . . . Central Park 2018-2019 Black-and-white prints via Kodak T-Max 400 film.

Sepia effects added via Apple Photos.

Photography by Katie Cappeller

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The War in Europe and Its Aftermath Photos from the collection of Candy Grimes Tedeschi

As World War II ravaged Europe, the stories of so many participants were overshadowed by the grander narratives of those directing the massive armies and navies battling for control of land and sea. On the following pages are photos from the albums of two men, ostensibly on opposite sides of the war, Antonio Rufino and Gene Grimes. Rufino, a reluctant cadet in the Italian Fascist navy became a prisoner of the Nazis. Grimes was a salvage diver in the U.S. Navy. In later life, both men were joined to the same family. This photo essay was assembled

by Candy Grimes Tedeschi, daughter of Gene, niece of Antonio.

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The War in Europe and the Aftermath Antonio Rufino “With the German retreat through Italy, they sought to conscript Italians like me to join their ranks. I didn’t want to fight for the Fascists; I would never fight for the Nazis. I was arrested and sent to a prison camp in the Sudetenland, in Czechoslovakia.”

-- Antonio Rufino

Rufino spent two years in the prison camp, where many of his fellow prisoners were other Italians the Nazis labeled “traitors” because the Fascists had been allies before they surrendered in 1943. The other prisoners were mostly Russians, whom the Germans despised. “If they so much as dropped a food plate, they were shot,” Rufino said. When the war ended in 1945, he walked and hitched rides all the way back to Italy from Czechoslovakia.

Rufino returned to his hometown of Melfi in the province of Potenza in Italy’s Basilicata Region and began to put his life back together as Italy underwent the slow and painful process of rebuilding its cities, infrastructure and government and the reclamation of so many lives suffering the effects of the war.

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Antonio Rufino

Always a man with an insatiably inquisitive mind, he devoured anything that contained the written word. He resumed his studies and advanced his easy command of foreign languages, some of it attained by a great deal of exposure to so many foreigners during the war.

In 1955, Rufino found himself sitting with Frances Tedeschi, who was visiting Melfi, her family’s ancestral home, with her mother. “It was as if someone had pulled the rug out from under me,” he said. They were married that same year.

Rufino emigrated with his new wife to the United States, settled in New York, studied at New York University where he received his bachelor’s, masters and PhD degrees, became a tenured professor in Romance Languages at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He died in 2010, his ashes entombed in his beloved Italy.

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Gene Grimes

“We were under water with the wrecks in Naples Harbor, dealing with the remains of those who had gone down with their ships and salvaging what we could from vessels sunk or partially sunk by the Luftwaffe. When we were under attack, they shut off our communication with the surface, but we could still hear the tracer rounds zinging through the water around us.�

-- Gene Grimes

The frequent attacks on ships in the harbor provided no end to the salvage work of divers like Grimes, who descended into the depths dressed in cumbersome diving outfits, which looked more like overdone suits of knights’ armor . . .

Quonset hut living quarters for naval personnel contrasted sharply the ornate architecture of this quintessentially Italian city.

Nonetheless, these odd-looking metal tubes were an emphatic statement that this foothold would remain until the city was secure.

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Gene Grimes

Gene Grimes constantly pointed his camera at locals such as this family on a terrace in the center of the city, among the daily reminders of the ongoing support shown the US servicemen there to help them reclaim their city.

GIs have always been adept at maintaining connections with home, even if improvisation involves an impromptu baseball scrimmage among Navy colleagues on a Neapolitan side street.

Grimes returned home to Georgetown in central Illinois and married the love of his life, Ivern Bush. They had three children together. A lifelong battle with alcoholism, born of the horrors of war, put a strain on what became an on-again/off-again marriage.

There was no sublimating his superior intelligence, however, and his ability to conquer any mechanical issue. He died in 2003 in a suburb of Seattle, Washington and is buried in the US military cemetery there.

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[Editor’s Note: With the 75th anniversaries of milestones on the great battlefields of the last years of World War II occurring, we would do well to remember that time also included a home front, and for one generation of Americans, born in the 1930’s, things got off to a rough start: we might call them the “Depression Babies.” Their fathers and uncles might have fought in the Great War, they were born in the midst of an international economic crisis so severe it took WWII to climb out of it, only to be faced with another war five years later, in Korea, and so on and so on. For many though, the defining years were the war years: the home front, where no matter how profoundly things had changed, the small daily life continued but with the war never very far away.]

Summer Camp, The War Years

By Kendric W. Taylor

We see a small boy on a train. It is World War II. The boy is ten, and going away from home for the first time.

In those far-off days, it was the custom for mothers and fathers with children going to summer camp to gather in Grand Central Station in New York City early on a particular Saturday morning at the beginning of June to put their youngsters on the train for various destinations in the northeast.

On this Saturday, temporary wooden stanchions dot the marble expanse of the station’s lower level, placards tacked to them bearing legendary Indian names identifying the camps; a few harried counselors are on hand to process the children as they arrive. Groups of families trail through the great terminal, father (Saturday still a half-day of work for him) struggling down the marble stairways with the son’s camp trunk, mother anxious with last-minute instructions. On the ride in on the New York, New Haven and Hartford line, my dear mother keeps frantically sticking extra aspirin in my bag, her remedy for nearly everything she thought ailed me (when we turn in medication on arrival, the camp medico looks at me: “you’ve enough here to kill a horse;” we’re 34

both impressed). The morning is a swirl of families, surreptitious tears and hasty good-byes as each group of boys hurries away excitedly through the ornate portals to the trains, the parents left to scatter quickly, guiltily looking forward to a carefree, childfree summer.

For my camp, located on Lake George in the Adirondack Mountains in upper New York State, it is necessary to take the New York Central to Harriman, where the cars are switched to a steam engine. I recall little of that first journey, beyond the chuff of the engine far ahead on the curves, the clouds of white smoke drifting back, the feel of the powerful strain as we climb and dip hour after hour through the mountains. The more experienced travelers among the boys show the youngest how to heave open the coach windows and poke out the conical white paper drinking cups to catch cinders from the engine. Already hot and sticky in those pre-air-conditioned days, our hands and arms are soon covered with a fine blackish grit.

Grand Central Station, circa 1941

I knew no one, but we were united in our excitement. Later, I realized that most of the boys came from families far above mine in the social and economic strata. With the coming of the war, many of the elite eastern camps had closed, done in by a combination of rationing, restricted travel and a dearth of suitable draft-age counselors. Somehow, the local YMCA in my town managed to keep its camp facility going. With nowhere else to send their offspring -- the war shutting the well-to-do off from their usual vacation travel abroad -- and faced with a summer of actually dealing with their children at home -- parents from as far away as Massachusetts somehow heard of the camp and gratefully entrusted their progeny to it for two months.

How I came to be here stemmed from the annual polio scare that came with the hot weather.

With my family still gripped by the Great Depression, my anxious mother prevailed upon one of her “well-off� friends to foot the bill for the two-month season. This lady, whose own son had recently enlisted, agreed, and it was only years later that I learned of this kindness. I made a point of telling her how much those years away had meant to me, and I think she was pleased she could help me. Her son, a second lieutenant in the Marines, was killed by a sniper on Okinawa in 1945.

My mother kept a photograph of him on her desk for the rest of her life.

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That first evening, having arrived and been assigned to cabins, I gaped at the others as we rooted through our unpacked belongings for a pair of shorts for the evening meal and realized, that for most of these upper class boys, everything they had brought with them was absolutely brand new.

One lad in particular had stacks of stiff new Levi’s, and dozens of white Adler wool sox, still with their dark and light blue tags stapled to them, each pair folded neatly and aligned perfectly in the top shelf of his spacious steamer trunk. He eyed me cautiously and never spoke to me the entire summer, while I spent the eight weeks pestering my mother by letter for Adler’s sox, two pair of which finally arrived the last week of camp (I wore Adler’s for years, even though the wool gave me the most God-awful wool itch and rash).

‘Our daily uniform was of our own devising . . .’

Our group had arrived at the Ticonderoga station late in the afternoon, and we rode out to Lake George in the back of a truck, its gears grinding up the long grade from the state highway. A mile from the camp the paved road ended, and we were dumped at an inlet called Gull Bay, to walk the final distance over a two-wheel brown dirt road cut through the shaded, towering forest, the tantalizing lake glinting silver at us through the trees. It was a trek I would make many times over the years, and I always enjoyed the solitude of the woods, our young voices reverberating under its canopy. That first time, tired after the long train journey, we shortly gathered at the massive old camp dining hall, and were treated to the most satisfying meal I can ever remember – Kellogg’s Corn Flakes in white porcelain bowls, brimming pitchers of cold milk and platters of fresh bread and butter.

The camp was less concerned about social strata then about good, healthy outdoor living, although there was a subtle favoritism practiced by the camp director, based upon the amount of money a camper’s family donated to the “Y”. Neither was the food a major consideration. Although plentiful, I cannot remember another meal of the day beyond breakfast. Our daily uniform was of our own devising, usually consisting of T-shirt or undershirt, shorts or bathing suit, sneakers or moccasins, but always, an Indian belt buckled around our waist supporting the wickedly largest sheath knife this side of Jim Bowie that we could get away with.

It was a summer of sports – swimming and boating – and rough games, whatever the weather. Our days passed quickly, filled with activities. As a YMCA camp, the schedule was predicated on the old Victorian concept of Muscular Christianity, along with patriotism and stoicism. I remember old Doc, a staff member, an ancient with white hair and mustaches, a veteran of the Spanish-American War and the Great War, slumping and nearly collapsing one morning in the dining hall as we sang the National Anthem. The camp director stepped quickly to his side, massaging his shoulders and arm, holding him erect until we finished out the song.

Mornings we worked at various projects: cleaned the latrines, spruced up the pathways, cleared away the underbrush, and battled back the forest. This was the first year at this lakefront location, and except for seven cabins right on the water, a large dining hall on the hillside, and various small outbuildings that came with the property, most of the other facilities had to be built from scratch, including a ball field, basketball, volleyball and tennis courts, and a rifle range.

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Baseball and basketball on a ballfield and basketball court built from scratch.

We constructed by hand a simple open-air chapel on a rising meadow overlooking the lake, fashioning rows of logs facing a rough-hewn pulpit. Here on Sunday mornings (the Catholic boys crossing the lake to Mass at the church there), we sat on the logs, the sparkling blue water dancing before our eyes. Under an innocent, cloudless sky, we sang rugged hymns in peaceful beauty. The words still form fresh on my lips more than three-quarters of a century later.

To prepare us for a life of independence on the lake, we spent a great deal of time in, on, and under the water. We passed a demanding swimming test and various boating and sailing trials. We learned to consider the canoe as a second skin, slipped on when necessary to get somewhere, shed for shelter upon arrival. These craft were built in Old Town, Maine, and were marvelously sturdy, their fabric hulls painted navy blue, wood interiors shellacked to a rich golden yellow. We learned how to paddle correctly, were taught the difference between bow paddling and steering from the stern. We learned to kneel amidships Indian-style to most efficiently propel us when solo. We capsized these indestructible craft, swam up underneath to breathe the air trapped there, learned that it was even possible to paddle when sitting upright almost submerged, and to flip them upright back onto the surface. A favorite contest on our Sport Saturdays was to stand astride the gunnels, maneuvering the canoe by bouncing it with our feet, all the while thumping each other with Pongee sticks.

The canoe provided everything. Want to sail? Jam two paddles, blade down, into the thwarts, rig a poncho between them and catch a following breeze. Need shelter? Tilt the canoes on their sides near the campfire, bridge the gap between them with paddles, then spread ponchos across them: nice and dry, and room for everyone, along with the supplies.

Once we were proficient in all phases of small boatmanship, our tests completed successfully, we were ready to explore the 32-mile long lake. Or so we thought.

Wartime travel restrictions kept the summer visitors away from Lake George, imparting a deserted quality to the surroundings that only enhanced their pristine beauty. Around the world great battles raged, historic cities crumbled under bombardment, Pacific islands ran with blood and death. These were places we read and heard about, where many fathers and brothers were 37

fighting, places where letters to some of the boys came from. I wondered idly if I ever might see any of them. But there on the lake we were safe, isolated in our tranquil little corner. Even better, we had this sun-dappled paradise all to ourselves: the stunning blue water, the piney green woods climbing into the surrounding mountains, mist circling the summits, the cool, starlit nights. James Fenimore Cooper had set The Last of the Mohicans here, and it was easy to imagine the native people gliding through the shady groves, or out on the water, sunlight spearing off their canoe paddles, the sky above them turning instantly dark with noisy clouds of migrating birds.

Sometimes we would hear the forest animals crashing through the thickets above the camp, and snakes would occasionally nose into the outhouses, triggering delighted pandemonium. At least once every year there would be a bear sighting.

Out on the lake, we would often paddle day after day without hailing another boat close by. This wonderful body of water was for our pleasure, and ours alone, and we delighted in it. In later years, sailing the Caribbean, lying on the bowsprit watching the blue water hiss and gurgle as it rushed beneath me, I would think back to those sunlit days on the lake, amused that I thought they would last forever.

‘Legends, traditions, itineraries . . .’

Like many camps, this one came with its own legends and traditions. First and foremost were the overnight hikes. Nearly every week, usually on a Tuesday after lunch, the entire camp mobilized for one of these marvelous treats. There were several itineraries, including canoe, rowboat, and motorboat journeys. Tables cleared away, names would be read out in the mess hall to cheers and groans. The most popular was the hitchhike, where we took to the road two by two to thumb our way down the state highway to the big city, Glens Falls about 35 miles away (Cooper’s Hawkeye and his party hid behind the cascading water there in the book). This meant a dinner out, then a movie. We would stay the night in a tourist home, and then leave in the morning to hitch back around the other side of the lake to camp. In those days, there was relatively little danger for kids on the road, the only real hindrance being gas rationing, which limited the amount of vehicles passing by, generally Model As and older (they had stopped building automobiles right after Pearl Harbor).

Nothing made me happier than waking up beneath clean, rough-starched sheets in those quiet, creaky, Victorian rooming houses, then trooping down before breakfast to the 5&10 in the square to gaze in hungry fascination through the window at the most intricate machine I had ever seen, a compact colossus mechanically plopping out fresh miniature donuts, sending them bumping single-file down a series of narrow conveyor belts onto waiting trays. We could almost smell them through the glass.

I seem to remember each of these mornings as perfect, walking along the two-lane blacktop by the lake, sticking a thumb out at the approach of a car or pickup truck, and the surge of excitement when they stopped.

“Where you going, kids? Ain’t you kind of young to be doing this? How old are you anyway?”

“Well, 11.”

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“Geezus, that camp of yours must be nuts; well, here’s where I turn off.

Good luck, boys. Have fun.”

We did.

The overnight canoe trips were almost as much fun as the hitchhikes – better even -- in their healthy, outdoor, sleeping under the stars way, and held a primitive glamour all their own.

After the announcement of the hike, we could not have approached our mission in those wartime days with any less purpose and barely suppressed excitement than crack troops receiving orders for the front.

We were quiet and business-like in our preparations. First: place Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941 waterproof poncho on cabin floor, blankets and towel inside its perimeters, spare clothes spread on top. Fold into a fat square, tie neatly with line to make a relatively small, waterproof pack to fit snugly in the canoe, and float if necessary (dry land hikes required rolling into a long horseshoe pack, to be looped around the shoulder and tied (instructions provided by our Spanish-American War vet).

Reporting to the mess hall, we drew stores packed in plywood orange crates: long wax-paper loaves of fresh bread, cartons of eggs, bacon, cans of beans, hot dogs, bags of marshmallows, condiments, tins of coffee and evaporated milk, boxes of matches, clattering cooking utensils. All of this was stored in the canoe and secured, along with a couple of short-handled hatchets for chopping firewood. The smallest of the campers was plumped down amidships, then two larger boys settled in, barefoot and shirtless, in bow and stern with paddles, and pushed away from the sandy stretch fronting the canoe racks in a rush of splashing feet, and set course for adventure.

‘Off to uncharted territory . . .’

Although these were only overnight trips, we tried to push as far down-lake as we could in the afternoon, at least to the narrow island that divided our end of the lake from what I thought of as uncharted territory beyond. At night, we sat around the campfire, the fiery embers swirling madly upward toward the pines, while the old-timers told us about the pre-war “old camp,” where threeday canoe journeys were the norm. There was even talk of a special six-day expedition. How I yearned for those good old days back in the 1930s when the camp director had taken a bunch of boys on a bizarre odyssey across the country in old jalopies in the midst of the Great Depression, and then decided on the west coast to keep going all the way up into Alaska. The older camp staff still talked about it.

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I learned, however, that this budding life of adventure hinged on seniority. The youngest and most inexperienced campers usually started off modestly with a motorboat ride down to the foot of Black Mountain, the highest peak in the area, where the “old camp” had been. Here, for the first time in my mother-pampered 10 years, I encountered outdoor living. It was not pleasant, and I have never forgotten it. I had arrived at camp with brown army blankets, and wonderfully soft and warm flannel sheets my mother had provided. Two of the blankets, pinned together at the foldedover corners with large pins made a poor-boy sleeping bag. For a tent to sleep beneath, I was shown how to cut two sticks about knee-high, corkscrew the sharpened ends into the ground solidly and fasten the top corner grommets of the poncho onto them. I’d then stake two shorter, forked sticks through the bottom grommets snug into the ground, and there was a serviceable leanto. Dredge out a drainage ditch on the four sides of my little encampment with my knife, and I was ready for anything. Until it rained.

Adrift, miserable and soaked . . .

I awoke in the night, completely, totally, flooded out. I was adrift, miserable and soaked, in a bog of water, the rain pouring into the front of the shaky lean-to. I hauled myself out, wet and shivering, and spent the rest of the night huddled with several other boys in an abandoned chicken coop. (The following summer I arrived at camp with official Boy Scout sleeping bag, knapsack, two ponchos, and a surplus U.S. Army shelter-half. Never again would I have anything less than what I considered to be the best equipment.)

This event was memorable for another reason: we had the option the next day, after we dried out, of climbing the 2,000-foot mountain. Still groggy and reeking from my night in the chicken coop, I chose to remain prone in the sunlight. Of the group that went to the summit, one managed to slice an ax into his foot while chopping wood for the lunchtime fire. The senior counselor in charge, an 18-year-old, applied a tourniquet, bound the foot, hoisted the boy onto his back, and carried him back down the long, steep trail. We were fortunate to hail a passing boat, which took the two off to the nearest town and medical assistance. There were giants in those days; I always hoped he survived the war.

I can still feel the excitement when the three-day canoe trips began, although time has compressed my memories. There were nine of us in three canoes, packs and provisions stowed, the blue lake glorious in the sunshine. My canoe included a prep school boy named Baxter, who, with his porcine demeanor and porcupine haircut that thrust forward from his chubby body looked like a seal in a Thurber cartoon in The New Yorker. Not disposed to paddle, he bartered a voyage of indolence amidships for the group’s enjoyment of his cumbersome portable radio. This vacuumtubed Bauhausian masterpiece had a brown wooden front that rolled open like a shipping clerk’s desk – and was almost the same size – but it could pick up radio signals all along the Canadian border out to the Midwest. So, riding a stray northern radio beam, we were off.

We paddled and sailed most of the day, stopping to explore likely rock-diving promontories along the shoreline, then, in the early evening, hauling our canoes up over the rocks onto one of the lake’s hundreds of fir-tipped islands. Making camp, we boiled pork and beans and toasted bread on sticks over a blazing campfire. Afterward, we sat next to its shimmering warmth under the stars, happy and fulfilled, then slept, comfortable on a mattress of soft pine branches (the needles had

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another use, when aged brown and wrapped in toilet paper, they were smokable), the birch logs hissing and snapping their sparks high up toward the sky. In the morning, we dove deep into the lake, sucking in mouthfuls of cold, fresh water on the bottom, surfacing to swallow it in the warm sunshine.

‘All kinds of weather . . .’

I recall all kinds of weather – mostly sunshine – but sometimes rain advancing across the lake like walls of the darkest blue. Once I rowed back to camp through a wild, windy storm, tape wrapped around my hands to cover the broken blisters, exulting that the weather could not stop me. (Years later, in Central America, I returned to my fancy resort hotel after three days of river rafting: filthy, soaking, hands again taped for blisters, and walked by mistake into a dressy cocktail party in the lobby. I felt as I did as a boy, physically fulfilled and sorry for the people shying away from us who hadn’t been on this adventure).

We explored our end of the lake on the overnight trips, the dividing point still that mid-lake island beacon to the west. And always my imagination pushed me to see what lay beyond, what was just over that blue, white-capped horizon.

My second year at camp, out on the state highway, my hitchhiking partner and I simply could not get a ride. The few cars we saw didn’t stop. Dinnertime came, and we trudged along, gazing wistfully into the windows of houses along the road, hungry and tired, miles from our destination, watching as kitchen lights blinked on and mothers called their children. Finally, footsore, we sat quietly on a stone wall listening to the country sounds: the creaky slam of a wooden screen door, the muffled whir and grassy click of a lawnmower, the chirp of birds preparing for nightfall. I thought of my mother making dinner at home. For once, I was homesick, and I’m sure my hiking companion and I both wanted to cry. The camp truck, out looking for us in the dusk, caught our two forlorn figures in its headlights. We hoisted ourselves over the tailgate, but not before being accused of lack of effort by the camp director sitting in the front seat. I remember the sad, forgiving eyes of old Doc, who sat in the back of the truck. He knew that we had tried. He also knew that life wasn’t always fair, not even to young boys, a first lesson that we were taught that day.

I have learned to accept the fate of this, but never its reality.

The following summer, my horizons did expand beyond the next rise. This was the last year of the war, remote from us except for an occasional reminder from home in letters or newspapers -- but it was always there: a neighbor's son shot down over Germany; the so-young girl across the way who hadn't heard from her Navy officer husband in too many months.

After breakfast one August morning, all of us were told to pack our knapsacks with a change of clothing, sweater and poncho, and assemble for the walk to Gull Bay. We weren’t told where we were going. Stake-bed trucks piled with fresh hay waited for us at this dusty crossroads, and we climbed excitedly into the back and jolted down to the highway. I loved being on the road, standing behind the truck cab, wind buffeting my face while I watched the fields, green and somnolent in the sun as we rushed past, horses and cows quietly grazing, people in the small factory towns blinking at us curiously from their wooden porches as we rattled down their main street.

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That night we were in Montreal. We spent the next day walking around aimlessly, not even old enough to be admitted to the movies. Late in the afternoon, paper began to billow down from the office windows along St. Catherine Street, the main thoroughfare.

Drunken servicemen burst out of barrooms and marauded into liquor stores, parading down the streets, waving bottles, halting traffic, kicking over mailboxes and trying to kiss every female in sight. We stood in openmouthed amazement as a gang of sailors flipped over a laundry truck in front of us and began donning various garments yanked from the blazing vehicle. Finally, we began to realize that this was not your typical Canadian Saturday night. We worked up the courage to ask someone in this frenzied mob what was happening: “The war is over!” yelled a passerby. We watched in awe as emotions pent up since 1939 burst around us. As the evening grew steadily more riotous, we sought refuge at the YMCA housing us, and lay in Heading for Sunday services. our sleeping bags on the gym floor on mattresses, listening through the night to the roar of the crowds outside, the ringing of church bells, the wail and clang of police and fire sirens. My first trip abroad!

‘I overstayed camp . . .’

A good traveler knows when it’s time to go home, a wise person once told me. Anything beyond that will spoil the pleasure. I overstayed camp. My last year there I was a lost soul -- too old and impatient with discipline. I lost interest, and my sense of wonder. I discovered there was such a thing as Girls Camps, and girls in town! Trouble began to find me.

Part of it was when, finally that year, the six-day canoe trip became a reality. After lunch, the names of the participants for this historic occasion were read out to electric anticipation. In an unforgettable moment, all my friends were chosen and I was left behind. It was like Lewis setting off for the Northwest Passage with Sacagawea and leaving Clark behind, or being in the 101st Airborne on D-Day and left standing on the tarmac. I felt it was my right to go on this hike of hikes. I had prepared for four years, and I was sickened and embarrassed at the snub. They obviously felt I didn’t deserve it, and they may have been right.

Later that summer, after almost everyone else had gone on one, I was chosen at last to go on the final trip, along with the pee-wees. By this time, I had diminished its importance in my mind, and didn’t care if I went or not. Oddly enough -- because authority figures seldom took the time to talk

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with me, except to bawl me out -- one of the leaders of our trip, an older pre-med student, chose to take a few minutes and explain why I hadn’t gone with the first groups. My general attitude was horrendous and clearly visible, he said (a failing I’ve had all my life) and here, I thought I was being clever. For once I listened, and managed to try and enjoy myself, and, to my great surprise, I did.

Moreover, because of my age – 13 -- I more or less inherited the youngest boys. Perhaps there was a reason.

One evening we paddled over from our island campsite into the village of Bolton Landing for a few hours of recreation. I had the three smallest boys in my canoe, one in the front as bow paddle, the other two stowed as passengers. As we approached the rickety wooden landing, I noticed that the lake steamer was similarly headed there. My destination was the beach next to the dock, and I felt we were safely out of harm’s way. My canoe with its extra ballast was trailing the others, when I realized that the old paddle wheeler was now approaching at an angle that would trap me between the boat and the mooring. It was late twilight, hard for the pilot to see us low on the water. I had one option: I yelled “dig” to the boy in the bow, and did the same with my big wooden stern paddle. Shoved ahead by the steamer’s bow wave, we shot between the pillars of the old dock just ahead of the vessel, its great wheels churning up cataracts of foam behind us, the boys whooping in excitement, sure the entire thing was my idea to liven up the evening.

Later, on the broad green lawn of the old Sagamore Hotel, Young Doc, tall and bespectacled, with a shaggy crew cut, ambled past. He had witnessed the scene, and now looked at me quizzically. I said nothing, but the answer was that I was glad I had been there with those kids, and that I had listened when he had taken the time to talk with me. My mind went back to my first year at camp, and one of my first boat hikes. Once again, we had gone to a tiny lakeside village for a few hours in the evening, leaving our tents and baggage behind on an island. A fierce summer storm blew up, churning the lake to frenzy. The counselor in charge paced the beach for a while observing the black scene, then turned in the crash of lightning and strode past our pulled-up canoes to a large house with lights in all the windows. After announcing who we were, he told the residents that he had nine boys with him, some quite young, and he would not put them at risk by taking them out on the water in this storm. We had no money for shelter, he continued, but could they put us up?

The answer was immediate. I spent the night in a comfortable armchair by the fire, safe and warm.

Now, in my last year, in some part, a smaller responsibility had fallen on me, and I had gotten the opportunity to pass the legacy along.

What did I learn from those years at camp? How wood smoke hangs heavy in the mist, how its smell stirs memories more than a half-century later, as does the pungent odor of tent canvas in the hot sun. I learned how good it is to fall asleep at night lulled by the lap of water on the lakefront beneath the screened cabin window, or what chopped ice tastes like in the dark coolness of an icehouse in the summer. I learned how to take care of myself on the road – or on the water. I learned how to be self-sufficient, how to try and plan for eventualities, how to react when things start to go wrong. Nothing I have encountered while traveling since was as dismal as that night in the rain on Black Mountain, or as heroic as that 18-year-old carrying the other boy down the mountain. I’ve been stranded, left out at night and occasionally lost, but always with a sense of direction and dumb luck that bailed me out – that -- and the memory of that chicken coop.

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After camp, another year faced me with its challenges and pitfalls, but my dog was happy to see me, my mother had milk and sandwiches with the crust cut off, just the way I liked them; my room with its kid’s lamp on a miniature ship’s wheel was ready, and they had saved the summer’s Life magazines for me. It was good to be home.

It says here you boasted about having more money than God. The admissions board is not impressed.”

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A Block of Air To Sculpt

By Artemis Boyard At the far end of the marina, Where the glitter boats slide, Riding the echoes of the tides, A troubadour returns from the dead With new songs pounding Expounding in his head.

His face is shaken loose.

His mind is in full flight.

He is nervous, not obtuse, To what he finds in his line of sight.

He has passed on the ham-and-cheese With a classic Coke, Turns his face into the breeze Along the quay to enjoy a smoke.

He is late of the asylum And I am his factotum, Walking along beside him, Scribbling notes so I can quote him.

The water has gone clear, Oil of vitriol.

The detritus has disappeared, In a driving surge of rock ‘n’ roll.

The wavelets leave rings around the rocks Where pleasure craft cling to aging docks.

And I walk without my socks Along the algae-covered rocks.

Night has fallen like a dump truck, Where the singer glows in the dark.

Razor heads and nose flutes come unstuck, While I strike at flint to get a spark.

Fabbro lifts a finger to the sky, And, at first, I can’t tell why.

Then I see it, then I do: The morning star shining through.

Not in a spot I’d once observed.

The point exactly. It’s a curve.

He smiles and slides into this poem.

And I return to home alone.

And I go home alone.

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Generation Z: Trading Possessions for Experiences I would not let go of my new Matchbox car . . .

By Pedro Pereira

Some time after my daughter turned 13, her room switched from hoarder’s paradise to desert.

Most of her worldly possessions were pushed into other corners of the house. One day, she flipped the switch from wanting everything she could get her hands on to nothing but the essentials – a few surviving stuffed animals, some trinkets on top of the dresser and of course her iPhone.

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Scandinavian minimalism took over.

Gone were the legions of stuffed animals she had accumulated. The once-treasured snowglobe collection? The expensive American Girl dolls? The princess dresses? The dollhouse? All relegated to the third-floor landing, which now doubles as a sort of final resting place for Caroline’s toys, games and children’s books.

Where was the kid who cried disconsolately over a broken string on her cheap ukulele?

Caroline belongs to Generation Z. She was born in 2003. Possessions matter little to her.

Materialism is largely confined to the iPhone. I’m not sure she has any other possession that she values. Yes, she likes clothes and always has the shoes de rigueur – right now, it’s Vans. But she doesn’t have a bike. TV is interesting but not the obsession it was for me and my fellow Gen Xers.

Her friends seem to have the same attitudes toward possessions.

I keep hearing about how the younger generation is entitled, materialistic and overly sensitive. Old farts call them the snowflake generation. Old farts are wrong. Either they don’t know these kids or can’t see past the caricatures they’ve conjured up for them. And that’s too bad.

Because this is an impressive generation. They’d rather travel and learn than own something. They care about diversity, social justice and the environment. Witness the rise in teen activism after the Parkland shooting. As a group, Gen Zers are open-minded and inclusive. When President Trump issued the military transgender ban, Caroline’s reaction was, “Well, that’s not fair.”

Gen Zers see the world differently. They care far less about possessions than experiences. They really aren’t materialistic. And they don’t deserve their bad rap.

Personal Treasures

Still, as refreshing as this anti-materialism is, I can’t help feeling a small pang of sadness. I’m not too attached to material things, but a treasured possession is important. It makes you care about something. It teaches you about the value of things and how hard they can be to acquire.

I grew up in a family with modest means. I spent the first 12 years of my life on an island in the middle of the Atlantic. We lived through a coup – Portugal’s Carnation Revolution of 1974 – and its economically and politically uncertain aftermath.

My family immigrated to the United States in February 1980. All the possessions I’d valued in my childhood were left behind. I was obsessive about my Legos and Matchbox cars. I bequeathed them to a younger child when we left. It was the right thing to do but I remember the sense of loss from letting them go.

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Our home in São Miguel, the largest of the nine islands in the Azores archipelago, was in a town called Ribeira Grande (now a city). Every so often my father or mother – or both – would take one or all of us four kids to the city, Ponta Delgada, the island’s capital. This was always exciting. I liked the energy and bustle of our small coastal urban center. For me, trips to the city usually meant getting ice cream and riding the city bus. I’d usually come home with a new Matchbox car. It would immediately become my favorite toy.

Author with his cherished Matchbox car.

On one such trip, my parents took me to a photographer to take a studio shot for posterity.

My recollection is vague, but the event has become part of family lore. I am told I would not let go of my new Matchbox car for anything. No matter how much my parents and the photographer tried to pry it from my hands for the photo, they just couldn’t.

Today, that photo is on display in my parents’ living room with me holding the car in one hand and a prop telephone in another. It’s truly a testament to my obsession with my toys and, well, my strong-willed personality.

Later I would have other valued possessions. In America, I was given two hand-me-down bikes. I quickly outgrew a smaller blue one with a banana seat, which then made its way to a younger cousin. A pink bike, also with a banana seat, served me for years, despite the color and the fact it was clearly a girl’s bike. I couldn’t have cared less. I rode it around the South End of New Bedford, Massachusetts, imagining I was in a cruiser chasing villains or piloting a Ferrari to Formula 1 glory.

My music tapes eventually replaced the bike in importance, as did the boombox my godfather gave me as a birthday gift. As I prepared to go to college at UMass/Amherst, I replaced that GE boombox with a Magnavox twice its size but not even a quarter of its stamina. The Magnavox’s tape motor quit one day after the warranty expired, which meant I couldn’t play my treasured Fleetwood Mac, Stray Cats, Rolling Stones and Queen tapes. On the next trip home from college, I grabbed the GE and rigged it so I could play a tape on the GE and use the Magnavox as an amp.

This setup saw me through college.

The father of a good friend was a tailor. He made me a wool overcoat that I wore dutifully through my college years. It can get cold in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts and that coat saw me through more than a few snowstorms. By the time I graduated, the sleeves, elbows and rump were frayed. My mother insisted I replace it. I picked some monstrosity off the rack – double-

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breasted for some unexplainable reason – and wore the thing once or twice before I decided I hated it and let it collect dust for years in a closet before it went to charity.

Fast-forward to today and I would say my most valuable possessions are my guitars and a 1972 VW Super Beetle, in original orange, which I drive in summertime. No other material possessions give me more pleasure.

As important as all these personal treasures have been over the years, when I look back at what made them valuable, I realize it was the experiences they brought. Whether it was the 1972 Volkswagen Super Beetle ability to let my imagination run wild while pedaling my bike, the joy and comfort of listening to music on that boombox or the coziness of the overcoat, a possession is only meaningful if it makes you feel something special.

So why don’t Gen Zers have this need? I suspect they do, but it’s different for them. Growing up in the digital age, they have the world at their fingertips. They don’t know a world without the internet. A quick query on a smartphone or tablet can deliver all the information they need about anything. They can see the world through YouTube videos and contribute to its ever-expanding repository of content.

They can socialize and experience joy, comfort and excitement through their digital connections.

And draw inspiration from those connections for their physical world experiences.

Dismissing Gen Zers’ approach to life as aloofness, boredom or even laziness misses the point.

We in the older generations didn’t grow up with social media, the internet and smartphones, so we struggle to understand what makes Gen Zers tick. We dismiss social media and smartphones as bad but overlook the positives – the worldliness and open-mindedness these tools engender. Our parents thought MTV would ruin us and their parents thought rock ‘n roll would ruin them.

Gen Zers will worry about their kids too. Give them time.

Maybe the pendulum will swing and their kids will turn out more materialistic. Whatever happens, Gen Zers are bound to learn something from their kids, just as we are learning from them.

Or should be.

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Email from the Upper West Side: Love of My Life on Four Wheels I purr inside with the delight and pride of ‘showing off’ my ‘pimp-mobile’

By Aglaia Davis

To make use of hyperbole, Batmo has been the love of my life since 2008. Yes, he’s a car; and, no, I’m not pretending he’s more than that; but I have treated and loved Batmo more than I dare say any car owner could love their ride. When I drive Batmo around the City and the Great State of New Jersey, I purr inside with the delight and pride of “showing off” my “pimp-mobile” and spending “quality time” with my car.

So the flirtation with getting a new car was just that — a flirtation. It started early, you see, because Batmo’s mechanical life has been checkered with bad luck, multiple failures and more trips to the “doctor” than miles per gallon, an easy feat, given that his supercharged engine and heavy frame guzzles a whopping 14.2 miles per! Many years, I came ridiculously close to buying Batmo’s successor, searching, driving and ultimately deciding that my next car would be a Honda Civic SI — a manual shift, small car that would satisfy the avid motorist in me.

But no matter how serious I thought I was, invariably I would come back to Manhattan, look at my car and decry, “Batmo is the cutest car in the world; why would I want something else?”

And so I have kept Batmo (as I would forever in any case), paying out more than his book value to repair him as his miles climbed past 100,000 and his temperamental nature remained unchanged.

I changed his oil every 3 months, because heaven knows we only drove 160 miles per week. I repaired his fender when Batmo had his first accident. And I still puffed with pride as I walked past to “check up”on him when parked often on his “favorite” street – West 87th.

But, as Peter Paul and Mary sing, “one grey night it happened.” Okay, it wasn’t night and it likely wasn’t grey, and it sure wasn’t about “Puff the Magic Dragon.” But it happened. I determined that I would rehome Batmo (as always planned) and finally buy myself that Civic SI I had for so long wanted. My best friend and car “papa,” Malik, turned down the prospect of taking Batmo, saying, “I will not take care of it like you do. When something goes wrong, I won’t fix it.” When I told my parents the bad news, my father said, “Send Batmo up here (to his farm in Maine). Batmo can have a spot in my garage and live out his days up here.” Ironically, of course, I bought Batmo as a brand new car in Maine in 2008.

My father’s genuine offer to “adopt” Batmo and even drive him around town freed me psychologically to actually determine to buy a new car. It just felt right, and I’d talked to Batmo about it, who consented because, well, city living was no picnic. He’d still be in the family, but parked in peace and no longer profiled by police.

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And so it began, and so — given my specific tastes in cars — continues, months and months after it started. My search goes on for the perfect Batmo successor: black, 2015-2019, well loved (aka happy childhood), reasonably low mileage, and most likely four doors. I’ve come close — almost bought a 2015 (but the seller backed out), and a 2019 (I backed out when I talked myself out of buying a brand new vehicle). Countless hours have been spent searching for this car, which turns out to be a relative rarity in general and specifically in a City where changing gears will be a neverending occurrence.

In the meantime, Batmo remains my “main squeeze.” We still enjoy the weekends together, and he still is the center of my car-loving heart. Indeed, the day my search finally ends and I have the little black SI I have been looking for, I will be both incredibly happy and incredibly sad. Happy because the auto enthusiast in me will have a Batmo successor to pimp out, dote on, and have endless hours of fun “spending time with.” But, yes, sad the day that I hand the keys and title over to my father and retire my beloved, high-maintenance, pimped out Batmo to the quiet woods of Maine.

Batmo in his favorite spot on West 87th Street in Manhattan.

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Romance

By Frank I. Sillay

She was nearing 50 and looked after herself. Her overall appearance would catch the attention of a man on a galloping horse. He was more or less a contemporary and was obviously no stranger to the back of life’s hand. They began chatting while waiting at the bar for service and, when served, carried their drinks to a table near the fireplace, where they sat.

“Are you new to town?” she asked. “I haven’t seen you around.”

“I was born and raised here,” he replied, “but I haven’t been back for 20 years.”

“What has kept you away for so long?”

His increasing discomfort was apparent as he replied, “I’ve been in prison.”

She shifted imperceptibly closer, and lowered her voice as she asked, “What did you do?”

He gazed fixedly at his pint of bitter as he said, “I murdered my wife.”

Her manner brightened as she sat up and said, “Oh, so you’re single!”

Charlie

Photo by Annie Cappeller

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Plugged and Wired I determined, then and there to go for hair transplant surgery . . .

By Malcolm P. Ganz

I began losing my hair in my late twenties and the process accelerated in my thirties to the point where I started wearing hairpieces. These rugs were an interesting succession of coverings, woven of human hair, purportedly assembled and blended from hair grown on heads in some of the more exotic regions of the world: “Naturally grown in the mountains of Tibet.” “Woven of the blackest Fijian follicles.” “Nurtured on Rocky Mountain spring water.” “Fed only Miracle Gro.” And so on. All the pieces seemed to have one thing in common; they started turning red with the second washing. Perhaps Adam and Eve had been redheads instead of blondes. Who knew?

The pieces also made you the potential victim of those embarrassing scenes standup comics have so much fun with, i.e. blowing off in the wind, being pulled off in a barroom brawl, coming off in a swimming pool – if you’re stupid enough to get you hair wet in the pool, which of course I was.

My most embarrassing moment was also the source of abject terror for my little niece, Sally Jane. It occurred during a family reunion at my parents’ house on Long Island, one hot summer day. My parents had one of those above-ground pools, so popular in suburbia. It was a rectangle, about four feet deep and long enough to do short laps. My usual procedure for the pool was to get wet up to mid-chest and swim laps with most of my head out of the water. On the rare occasions where I took the plunge, it was always a cannonball, with one hand planted on top of my head to keep the piece from erupting off.

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On this particular occasion, at this particular moment, most of the aunts, uncles, cousins, et al, were gathering around the picnic tables for drinks and appetizers, leaving only Sally Jane and me still in the pool. She was seven years old and cute as a button. I was clowning around in the water and making her laugh. It was really hot and the water felt great. I was splashing Sally Jane and she was loving it.

Finally I said, “I’m gonna get you aaalll wet, Sally Jane,” and in one swift, deftly executed motion, hoisted myself onto the pool deck and immediately vaulted into the air to do one of my patented cannonballs. However, the deftly executed swiftness with which I got onto the pool deck and redirected my weight into the air had unbalanced me to the extent that I was flailing around trying not to kill myself as I hit the water. Consequently, my hand was not in its critical position pinned to the hairpiece.

As I hit the water, it erupted off, my wet baldpate now gleaming in the sunshine. I splashed after the piece, which was now bobbing about in the surf created by my cannonball. Sally Jane let out an ear-splitting scream, which of course attracted the attention of the group, most of whom rushed in the direction of the pool, convinced that she was in some dire trouble. I had only seconds to cover up. Naked-domed, I now gazed frantically about the surface of the water, spied a reddish object that looked like a drowned fox in a far corner of the pool and immediately submerged to avoid the embarrassing scene, which was imminent. Swimming under water, in the direction of the hairy object, I got beneath it, just as my lungs were about to burst, then broke the surface like a hooked billfish with the damn thing on my head – sideways. Hey, any design in an emergency, right?

Fortunately, most of the group was tending to Sally Jane, trying to understand the reason for her distress, as I repositioned the now delicately balanced rug on top of my head and determined, then and there, once and for all, to go for hair transplant surgery.

Two things about the surgery . . .

The best practitioner of such surgery, within driving distance, was a doctor in Rockville, Maryland, one of the suburbs of Washington, D.C. After a consultation visit, I made an appointment for my first procedure. My wife and I drove to Washington and stayed with friends overnight, since the procedure required two days. On the first day, the surgery was performed; on the second the bandages were removed, you got an antiseptic wash, then were sent on your way.

Two things about the surgery: it created soreness rather than pain; it was a messy-looking procedure. It was performed with me sitting up in a kind of barber’s chair, with TV providing distraction. Watching the reactions of my wife, a nurse, who had asked to observe, provided an additional distraction. The procedural steps included first an application of laughing gas, then about 10 million injections of Novocain around my head, after which saline solution was injected under my baldpate to stretch out the scalp. Round plugs of hair were taken from the sides of my head and transferred to similar small round holes punched in my scalp.

My wife had this odd wrinkle in her lips for the duration of my time in the chair. “That was disgusting,” she said later. This from a women had once assisted on bowel surgery.

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At the conclusion of the procedure, my head was wrapped in a sterile cloth turban, which extended down past the bottom of my ears. When I asked where I was to hook the earpieces of my eyeglasses, the nurse said, “no problem,” cut two lengths of adhesive tape, folded them into loops and pasted one on each side of my head. Any time I leaned forward, my glasses rode forward on twin pendulums, which now passed for my ears. The young children of the friends with whom we spent the night thought I was some sort of middle eastern prince with ears like Walt Disney’s Goofy character.

During the week that followed, the saline solution that was injected under my scalp followed the dictates of gravity and began journeying down the front of my head, creating a pronounced swelling across my forehead that made me look like one of Dr. Frankenstein’s more modern creations and forcing me once again to limit my contact with children.

For the next two years, while I went through the six-phase transplanting process, I wore hairpieces anchored loosely to the hair on the sides of my head and tried to keep maneuvering myself into positions – vis a vis other people – which did not permit them to notice that there was light showing through under my scalp. It was a delicate period for me.

When I finally came out of the closet with my new, albeit much-thinner-tressed dome, I felt a great sense of relief. There was, of course, a period of adjustment, during which people who saw me for the first time after surgery were always a bit confused about my appearance and asked questions like: “Did you dye your hair?” “Didn’t it used to be red?” But I was very forthright with my answers. “I grew up in Tibet, where the Rocky Mountain spring water has a lot of iron in it, which gravitates to your head. It’s taken years to get it all out of my system.”

Something called ‘hair ionization’

About this time, I was a partner in a PR agency that had just landed a hotel and spa near Killington, Vermont. The hotel management decided to add some health-and-fitness vacation packages. Our agency was asked to put together a press trip of health and fitness writers. I was the only one of the partners who ran road races and pumped iron at the gym, so I was the consensus choice to host the trip.

The program was a mixture of workouts and pamper sessions, the latter including massages, full and mini facials, and hair treatments. We also took tennis lessons, swam laps in the pool, hiked the nearby mountains and even had lunch near a waterfall.

All that notwithstanding, without question the highlight of the program was the massage. The hotel had hired a blind masseur, named Chris Cooper, whom every one of our participants agreed had magic in his hands. Even those among the group who had had massages in the past came glassyeyed from Chris’s table, proclaiming the man the greatest who had ever laid a hand on them.

I had never had a massage before and was a bit apprehensive about the thought of lying naked on a table, with just a towel over my butt, and having my various muscles kneaded, probed and soothed . . . by a man. On the other hand, I’d been drinking at the hotel bar with Chris the night before and we’d become instant friends. I wasn’t quite sure if that would make my massage easier or

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more difficult. Nonetheless Chris did everything from discovering the source of my headaches – “You’ve got a goddamn knot at the base of your neck the size of a grapefruit.” – to eliminating any vestige of stress that lingered from having to deal with abrasive clients of the PR firm.

My second visit with Chris, the following day, was for something called, “hair ionization.”

“Waaaaht?” I asked crossing the threshold and closing the door behind me.

“You’re asking me?” Chris replied.

“You’re the one performing this ritual.”

“They added it to fill out my day.”

“So, you have no idea what you’re doing?”

“Clothes off and up on the table,” he said.

“To ionize my hair?”

“That didn’t work with any of the women, either.”

As an aside, Chris told me that despite the fact he was blind, women did feel uncomfortable if he looked in their direction as they undressed, so he would busy himself facing away from them. I told him I felt uncomfortable if he looked in my direction.

“You should,” he replied. “I can picture you naked and it ain’t pretty.”

I got up on the table and spent a half-hour bullshitting with him while he worked a vibrating contraption equipped with some kind of steam nozzle emitting a fine mist over and over my scalp.

“Do you have any idea what you’re doing?” I asked at one point – in jest of course.

“Not a clue,” he answered.

We chatted until Chris said he needed to prepare for his next appointment. I left.

My room was on the opposite side of the hotel lobby from Chris’s office. From the moment I exited, the reactions from people in the lobby were dramatic, to put it mildly. One woman gasped; her companion throwing a double-take so hard his glasses shifted from the bridge of his nose to his left ear, creating the look of two eyes peering out of the hair-covered face of that character Chewbacca in the Star Wars movies. A guy checking in dropped his suitcase, while his eyes widened like concentric ripples in a pond. A young woman exiting her room as I went by jumped back in and I could hear the bolt slide back in place.

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I picked up the pace to my room, closed the door behind me, went directly into the bathroom and switched on the light. Before me, in the mirror, stood one of the most outrageous creatures I’d ever seen. So this was hair ionization. My head looked as if it had been wired, like someone had somehow managed to apply a great charge of electrical current through a large pad of steel wool then embedded the entire thing in my scalp. The whole affair was particularly bizarre-looking because of the somewhat concentric pattern of my hair transplants; the round, pluggy nature of the individual hair groupings and the liberal spacing between the plugs, all of which combined to create the appearance of twisted wires emanating straight out of my skull.

It took me multiple applications of shampoo to force the strands back down to the vicinity of my scalp and I had to hose the whole thing down with half a can of hairspray to keep it in place. I could only hope that those people in the lobby who had witnessed my strange perp walk could not relate that image to the real me seen later in the hotel’s common rooms.

The next day, I was scheduled for a second hair ionization treatment. “Chris,” I said, “let’s just talk, OK?” After hearing my tale of horror, he agreed it was probably not a good idea for a man with hair transplants to have his head ionized by a blind man.

Metropolitan Museum of Art New York City

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An Unscheduled Landing at Cheops

By Anthony Germaine

I ran to tell the pilot what was going on, but he was bargaining with a fuel truck driver who wanted too much for jet fuel.

Aboard the Pan Am flight from Hong Kong, I was worried. I felt we were flying too low and said so. The pilot heard me. He’d left open the curtain between the cockpit and the first row of passengers where Corey and I were seated. She shushed me, but the pilot turned around and gave me a dirty look. I just shook my head.

The pyramid at Cheops loomed before us. I was sure we didn’t have enough airspeed to get over the top. The pilot pulled back on the yoke, but it was like trying to accelerate onto a highway when you’re not hitting on all cylinders. He chose instead to go around and spiral up. It was an odd choice. I mean, once he’d gotten to the other side, why did he continue to spiral? Why didn’t he

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just head west? Once again, I voiced my disapproval. Once again, Corey shushed me. Once again, the pilot turned and gave me a dirty look.

I heaved a sigh of exasperation and tried to get my mind off what was happening by studying the pyramid. I found the brickwork surprising. It reminded me of those sturdy buildings put up by immigrant laborers during my childhood back in the ‘40s, the kind Mike Sorrentino was always pointing out to me. Mike was the bricklayer who owned the house in Queens where Corey and I had lived with our two daughters, right after I’d gotten out of the service. Mike was right. They sure didn’t build ‘em like that anymore.

As I’d suspected, all of that spiraling had cost us fuel as well as time. The pilot got on the intercom and announced we were going to land to refuel. I smiled sardonically. He saw it in the rearview mirror and responded with what had by now become his familiar dirty look. After a pretty hairy landing that pulled up just short of the base of the pyramid, I told him outright what I thought of him. He reacted very angrily and told me what he thought of smug bastards like me.

He asked if I would like to try my hand at the controls. I said I’d been a maintenance officer in the Air Force and probably knew more about airplanes than he did. He told me he doubted that, in fact he doubted that very much. I told him he could think what he wanted, but I needed to get back to New York some time this century and I would appreciate it if he could speed things up a bit. He told me what I could do with myself.

During the argument, Corey had wandered off. I went to look for her. The bazaar around the pyramid was filled with dirty, smelly people in raggedy clothes. I wondered, out loud, how they could let a national monument of such international significance be taken over by such lowlifes and street urchins. I asked one of the urchins if he’d seen a woman, about so high, light brown, wavy hair. He laughed and said, si, señor. Then he laughed again, rather lewdly. I said I didn’t appreciate that and told him the woman was my wife, but my Spanish was rusty and I wasn’t sure he got what I was saying. He just went on cackling and said what sounded like she had gone away with a group of men. Then he made a lewd gesture with the stiffened index finger of his right hand, ringed by an O shaped between the forefinger and thumb of his left. I cuffed him aside and went off to look for Corey.

I asked a few more kids and finally one told me the woman I sought had been taken by banditos who were gathering a group of women in the basement of the pyramid, down by the oil burner.

For what reason? I asked. They all giggled and one of them flapped his eyebrows up and down lasciviously. I was beginning to get annoyed.

I went in through the maintenance entrance of the pyramid and found my way down many flights of stairs to the basement. There were sounds coming from the other side of an entranceway with a heavy metal door. I could also hear the sound of an oil burner kick in. Must take a lot to heat this dinosaur, I figured. The door was ajar but guarded by a man with an Uzi. Odd weapon for an Arab, I thought. Guns, I guessed, didn’t play politics.

I walked to the entrance, but the guard stepped in front of me and impeded my progress with the barrel of his Uzi. I could see Corey, in there, kneeling on the stone floor, along with two other women from our flight. All of them were naked. A man, sitting on the floor with his back against

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the oil tank, was staring at them blankly. When I said to the guard, in a combination of English and Spanish, that one of the women was my wife, the man on the floor turned toward me. He was dangerous-looking, very thin, with an ugly expression on his face. He had rust-colored hair, steelblue eyes and bad teeth. I repeated that one of the women was my wife, this time my comment directed at the man in the room, whom I took to be the ringleader. He glared at me, a halfmocking look that said she’s mine now. I said, look, O.K. so this is your business, whatever it is, but that one woman is my wife and I’ll pay to buy her back.

Corey seemed oddly disconnected from this whole process, and not really afraid that she was in any kind of danger. Maybe she was still angry with me for the comments I’d made about the flight and was giving me the cold shoulder. She’d often told me I thought too much about everything.

The leader’s expression was frozen. He nodded at the gunman, who, at this gesture, pushed me back through the doorway and began to close the door. I said, wait a minute, you can’t do this.

But the door closed and latched. There was the brief hint of Corey’s smell in the air, stirred by the closing door. I thought about doing something violent, but I was afraid to die.

For a few moments, I stood there, in stunned inactivity. Then, I bolted up the stairs and went out, this time through the main entrance in the pyramid. The darkness of the interior was abruptly interrupted by the flat, silver light of the desert outside. It reminded me of the light in Astoria Square, which hurt my eyes when I was a little boy exiting the side door of the Meriden Theater, with my little sister in tow, after three hours of Saturday morning cartoons and the sweet smell of pizza seeping through the walls from Chappie’s, next door. We didn’t have that light or the good cooking smells in New York any more. They had drifted away to less-developed countries.

I ran to tell the pilot what was going on, but he was bargaining with a fuel truck driver who wanted too much for jet fuel. I said, excuse me for interrupting, but they are going to take my wife away.

Who? he asked. Those bandits in the basement of Cheops. He gave me that dirty look again. I said listen, asshole, this is for real. I need you to go tell those guys you’re the pilot and you want your passengers back. (I wondered what the husbands of the other two women were doing or what they’d think if they knew their wives were naked in the basement of Cheops.) The pilot said he had a whole planeload of people who wanted to get back to New York and he still had time to make an on-time arrival, if he could get this jet fuel and get the hell out of here. I said, get out of here? Get out of here! We can’t leave until I get my wife back. The pilot said he seemed to remember me wanting to get back to New York some time this century. His tone mocked me.

Then, he turned his back on me and went on arguing with the fuel truck driver.

I couldn’t get Corey out of my mind, naked there on the stone floor. For some reason, I flashed on an odd, and I guess terrifying, dream I’d had about her, the night before, when we were still in Southeast Asia. In the dream, Corey tells me over lunch that she is feeling suicidal. I say well, if that’s the way you feel . . . But later in the car driving Joanie to school, I think, no, wait a minute. I pull into a rest area and run to a pay phone, but it won’t take my number because my card is AT&T and the phone is Sprint. I try nine phones in total, without any luck.

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Did you get through? Joanie asks me, when I get back to the car. No, I say. I’m not sure what she’s going to do. Well, you tried, she says. You were concerned. Yeah, I say, I guess you’re right, and I drive off.

On the floor in the basement of the pyramid, she looked really good: her body soft, supple and shaped nicely by all those sessions at the health club. She didn’t seem to see me there in the doorway, although I was just a few feet from her. Actually, she didn’t look up at all and she didn’t seem all that concerned with her circumstance, chatting with the other two women.

It was the last time I ever saw her.

Shelling Acadia National Park Maine

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Summer ending in the Northern Hemisphere . . .

Sojo Spa Club, Edgewater, New Jersey Photo by Katie Cappeller

. . . As summer begins in the Southern Hemisphere

Chilean Research Station, Antarctica Photo by Tony Tedeschi

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Let There Be Light

By Artemis Boyard

Light does not dissipate its energy as it travels through space . . .

Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA Timelessness is An infinite collection Of glass slides, Each representing an infinitesimal moment In our lives, Transmitted as light of decreasing intensity, But nonetheless still visible Under close examination In the lab of angels.

Yet the layers can withstand The penetration of any Earthly armament.

Our layered existences Exist infinitely As reflected light Dispersing across the reaches of space, Until they are sucked through black holes Into parallel universes Ill-defined by centuries of scientific analyses, Themselves simply layers of light Dispersing across space.

Each slide is less than The thickness of an atom Creating a layering of slides So innumerable That it is invisible to the human eye.

And so on.

š

Chess Match Union Square New York City 2019

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Coming in the Winter Issue of Natural Traveler Magazine ® John H. Ostdick shares a multi-generational sojourn to South Africa that provides rich discovery and vivid moments of wonder for its participants. As they crawl inside the Cradle of Humankind, revel in the wonders of Kruger National Park and share previously undisclosed family tales around “boma” fires, they find a powerful sense of place and a stronger sense of their place with each other.

Photos by John H. Ostdick

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Natural Traveler MagazineTM is published quarterly each year as Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall issues in January, April, July and October.

A Web addition of the magazine is available at www.naturaltraveler.net

The too-blue days of late summer The empty sands Only the sounding surf . . .

Long Beach, New York Photo

by Karen Dinan