Natural Traveler Magazine - A Quarterly Cultural Magazine - Fall 2020

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

Henry Miller

© 2020 Natural Traveler LLC 5 Brewster Street Unit 2, No. 204 Glen Cove, New York 11542

UNFINISHED BUSINESS A Novel

By Tony Tedeschi Coming Soon from Natural Traveler Books via Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing

On an easel by the window, rested an unframed painting with the clean look of recent completion. The subject was a young, statuesque woman. In her left hand, she was gripping a huge sword; in her right, she held a parrot with what appeared to be the gentlest of touches.

“His name was Cesár.”

Caldwell turned abruptly. "Th-the parrot?"

“He was a pet when I lived near a small village in Honduras.”

Except for replacing the “v” in village with the hint of a “b,” the sentence was perfectly enunciated English.

“I am Isabel Thresher,” she added. “Won’t you sit down . . . Mr. Caldwell?”

“And the woman,” he replied.

“She’s my daughter.”

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Natural Traveler Magazine ÂŽ Autumn 2020 Editor & Publisher Tony Tedeschi Senior Editor Bill Scheller Staff Writers Ginny Craven Aglaia Davis Andrea England David E. Hubler Jay Jacobs 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 Webmaster Will Rodriguez

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Table of Contents Editor’s Letter

Page 4

Contributors

Page 5

Pandemic 2020

Page 6

Fogg’s Horn: There’ll Always Be An England

Page 8

The Colors in Water

Tony Tedeschi

Page 9

Doodles from a Slick Rock Diary

Buddy Mays

Page 13

Keeping Score with Tradition

John H. Ostdick

Page 21

Saturday Night Laundry

Bill Scheller

Page 26

Scarlett

Frank I. Sillay

Page 28

Photography: Long Beach Redux

Karen Dinan

Page 29

The Royal Baby Goes To School

David E. Hubler

Page 32

Room Over the Garage

Pedro Pereira

Page 41

Private Parker

Frank I. Sillay

Page 43

Photo Essay: Uzbekistan

Buddy Mays

Page 45

Waaaaht?

The Mosquito on the Tip of My Nose

Malcolm P. Ganz

Page 51

Border Reivers

Frank I. Sillay

Page 52

Ginny Craven Jay Jacobs

Page 53 Page 54 Page 56

Kendric W. Taylor

Page 57

Poetry: Untitled Two by Samantha Marie Blameless Le Duc, Le Dauphin et Le Comte de Paris

Cover painting by Jan Guarino

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Editor’s Letter Art Lives Here

I have always been hesitant to write about subjects too close to me: relatives and friends, my own work, even the place where I live.

I’m terrible at my author’s bios and have never managed a published article about my beloved Island. When it comes to the work of friends, I fear my objectivity could be seriously compromised. But always bowing to that caveat becomes a matter of keeping silent about work that demands attention, so I become compelled to take it on, trusting that the demands of objectivity will simply accentuate the importance of the subject matter.

Jan Guarino’s husband, Fred, has been a dear friend since I did an article on his recording studio for the local edition of patch.com a decade ago. During the course of that decade, I have come to know Jan through her graphic design work and we have collaborated on some projects. While I have been aware of her art and her watercolor painting classes, having such close proximity to it all somehow did not give it the attention it deserves. She is so prolific, it can overwhelm you. Yet it is the depth of the artistry displayed that demands notice from anyone who has an appreciation for art, which conveys meaning beyond the brush strokes on the surface. I simply had to find a way to convey that with words. Page 9.

I have had a somewhat similar experience with the work of photographer Karen Dinan. Since she is an acquaintance through family, I had to be sure I was not being influenced by a positive bias because of the connection. Karen made that easy.

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Although in a different genre, her work, like Jan’s, conveys a depth of subject matter beyond what is depicted on the surface. For me, she passes the test of what Henri CartierBresson called capturing the “decisive moment.” And like that grand master, she does much of it within a tightly defined space, the 2-1/4-mile-long boardwalk near her home in Long Beach on Long Island. The most recent examples of her work appear on Page 29.

For Buddy Mays, it’s long been havecamera-will-travel. His work has presented the peoples of the world, in the places where they live, in both color and black-and-white collections that would stand alone if he wasn’t such a damned good writer. Buddy to me is a one-man journalistic double-play combo.

Pages 13 and 45.

Our readers all know the work of Sharafina Teh. Since we discovered Fina via fiverr.com, she has masterfully produced artwork that has brought to life so much of what we write about, everything from line drawings to beautiful color creations, two of our eight covers to date and an animation of our own Markus Fogg, all of it done with her inimitable touches. This issue, through her art, she provides her interpretation of the poetry of Ginny Craven, Jay Jacobs and Samantha Marie. Pages 53-56.

On the grand scale, the contributors to Natural Traveler Magazine adorn these pages because theirs is work I have come to admire, some for decades, others like Jan, Karen and Fina that have come more recently.

Contributors Buddy Mays takes us a trail ride through back country of Utah with “Doodles from a Slick Rock Diary.” He illustrates the piece with his spectacular black-and-white photos (Page 13). Buddy turns to dazzling color in his photo essay, “Uzbekistan: Bazars, Mosques, Minarets and Madrasahs of the Silk Road” (Page 45).

“South Central Texas curries rich cultural treasures large and small, but few have been dusted with as much charm over the years as the Blanco Bowling Club Café, about 42 miles west of Austin.”

John H. Ostdick, reports on the last but lasting bastion of nine pin bowling in the US in “Keeping Score with Tradition” (Page 21).

“We lived in an attic apartment, the top floor of a Queen Anne in what once had been the most fashionable quarter of Paterson, New Jersey,” Bill Scheller writes, providing context for the ramifications of forgotten rituals in “Saturday Night Laundry” (Page 26).

Frank I. Sillay remembers his experience with the North’s version of “Scarlett” (Page 28) and fellow Marine “Private Parker” (Page 43). He also adds a take on Scotland past with “Border Reivers” (Page 52).

With her dazzling camera work, Karen Dinan adds to the portfolio of her Long Island home, which we debuted in last summer’s issue, this time with “Long Beach Redux” (Page 29).

“Mrs. Crane was a very little person. Smaller even, sitting at the piano. Maybe that’s why she was a kindergarten teacher. So she could be almost eye-to-eye with us.” David E. Hubler takes us to neighborhoods, empty lots and finally to kindergarten in The Bronx of the 1940s in “The Royal Baby Goes To School” (Page 32).

“Every year is the year I am going to do something about that room over the garage.” There’s those to-dos we postpone year after year like Pedro Pereira’s “Room over the Garage” (Page 41).

Poetry by Ginny Craven, “Untitled,” “Two by Samantha Marie” and Jay Jacobs, “Blameless,” cover right and wrong and the meaning of love and loss, each illustrated with the artwork of Sharafina Teh (Page 53-56).

“Later that night, the two sat squeezed into a corner amid the wood paneling and layered smoke of the New York Bar.” The personal connections made in war, World War I in this case, are the subject of Kendric W. Taylor’s short story, “Le Duc, Le Dauphin et Le Comte de Paris” (Page 57).

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PANDEMIC 2020

Special delivery for friends.

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A Place for Solo Contemplation.

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Fogg’s Horn The Miscreant Meanderings Of Our Man Markus

There’ll Always Be An England

Although I flatter myself as being a citizen of the world, your peregrinating correspondent does have friends and family firmly ensconced in many countries, especially England, whence this story comes.

One member, no slouch as a world traveler herself, lives in a small English market town, where she volunteers at a centuries-old cathedral nearby and takes part in delivering an hourly prayer, particularly needed in these COVID times.

One day, preparing to ascend the pulpit (using her words), she noticed a haze spreading through the center of the building.

Drawing nearer, she saw the head Verger swinging a container of incense back and forth. Initially thinking this might be holy disinfectant, the Verger answered no, he just wanted to scare a pigeon out of the building, and he had heard that they didn’t like strong smells – and what could be more powerful than churchly incense. Didn’t work. How to deal with it?

Now, in the old days of the American Wild West, one approach might be for the boys from the saloon across the street to clear the good people and the parson out of the building, and then go in with a scatter gun to

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attend to the varmint. But this is Ye Olde England. Solution – call Westminster Abbey!

You know the one in London, where all the kings and queens of England have been crowned since William the Conqueror in 1066, and where all the royal couples get married. That Westminster Abbey.

So, a call was put in – ancient church to even more ancient church – and the reply came faster than a prayer – get Rufus the Hawk to scare him out. Amazing!

Apparently, the solution to pigeons appearing in the rafters some thousand years ago in London was to bring in the hawks and turn them loose. It worked then, and it works now, so why change? Except in this digital age, Rufus the Harris Hawk now has his own website, plus a side job at Wimbledon, clearing the tennis courts of avian intruders at championship matches.

This remains all up in the air, so to speak, as nothing has been done so far at St. Albans Cathedral that our friend is aware of, leaving her to wonder, as Wimbledon is having a quiet year with most matches cancelled, might she be seeing Rufus before long?

In a land of endless sagas, anything is possible.

The Colors in Water

By Tony Tedeschi

To view water as simply colorless or just shades of blue is to ignore that a rainbow is produced when sunlight strikes raindrops.

In early 2020

when COVID-19 began sweeping across New York State like an out-of-control wildfire, Jan Guarino became one more teacher without a classroom. Unlike the thousands who are part of the state’s vast education network, however, Guarino is one of those independent contractors who conduct classes for students with an interest in subjects ranging from ballroom dancing to gourmet cooking. In her case, it’s watercolor painting.

An acclaimed watercolorist, with prestigious awards, gallery exhibitions, profiles in newspapers and magazines, Guarino had been teaching classes at artists’ organizations near her home in East Northport on Long Island and conducting away-from-theclassroom workshops in locations ranging from Santa Fe, New Mexico to Italy and Croatia, even a boat tour along the Rhône River in France.

As the pandemic continued to burn more intensely, projections by health experts about a return to some semblance of normalcy put an end to her classes for the foreseeable future. How distant that future would be grew with each passing week.

“When all classes were closed, I thought

Be the Fountain ~ Not the Drain what now?” Guarino explains. “With all classrooms and facilities shut down, and everyone forced into quarantine, the only thing possible was doing something we had never done before, go online with the classes. I had no idea what that meant or how to do it, but that became the task at hand.”

to Grammy Award winners.

“My guy is – in a word – amazing,” she says.

“I heard about Zoom, checked it out, then started trying out different cameras, angles, lighting, all trial and error. Then Fred thought to try a camcorder we had purchased to record my live classes. With a whole lot of Meanwhile, even prior to the pandemic, the ingenuity, we starting building it better and world around her was transforming, with better. Now, I have a three-camera setup and increasing momentum, from in-person contact a switching device that I can use to change to virtual existence on a computer. Across cameras at a touch of a button.” the U.S., the gradual shift of employees moving from working at business offices to Those with art in their DNA generally begin home offices, pre-pandemic one or more to demonstrate the gift early on and it builds days a week, was becoming a more from there. For Guarino it began before her established, fulltime business model with the teenage years, but really started to establish relentless march of the coronavirus. itself in high school in her hometown of West Orange, New Jersey.

For years, Guarino had been running an award-winning graphic design studio, so she “I was fortunate that my high school had a had a well-established comfort level in the senior year double major in art, which I took digital universe. However, translating the and excelled in: Art History and Creative need to guide students with paintbrush in Art.” she says, “I was in my element. Of hand via an Internet connection would be course, I had no idea that there was even challenging. Fortunately, her husband, Fred, something called “Artist of the Year.” My has made a long career of electronic wizardry. mom was notified about the awards Fred Guarino runs Tiki Recording in Glen ceremony and I was in shock when my name Cove, Long Island, having laid down tracks was called up to the stage – I totally had no continued on next page for an extensive lineup of performers with skill sets ranging from amateur singer/songwriters 9

Boating in Central Park Breakfast in Tuscany idea. At the same time I was asked to donate a specific piece of art question, what drew me to this subject?” she explains. “When I am I had done to have a permanent spot in the hallways. It was special painting, I let go, trust my instincts to guide me to discover the answer. and it gave me a lot of confidence moving forward.”

That becomes my driving force start through completion. Very much like myself, I encourage my students to paint what draws them into Two years later, she graduated with an associate degree in illustration the image. Amp that up with various watercolor techniques so as to from New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology, with a minor in direct the viewer to see what you saw and were inspired to paint. advertising. She had, therefore, prepared academically to apply her Be looser and more spontaneous in your painting, not to spend more artistic talents to working in a business environment. After her time, but less. So I run my classes that way. We paint very fast so as marriage, she set up Guarino Graphics, first in her husband’s not to ‘kill’ it. They often finish on their own, but the results are recording studio in Glen Cove, then in an office in their home in amazing when they let go and allow the paints to do the work for East Northport. them.”

If people who want to get serious about painting tend to be Inspiration and interpretation then drive the creative process, Guarino influenced by the grand masters who painted in oils, that medium explains. “My intention is always to create an unexpected depiction did not suit Guarino. of the subject, a colorful interpretation, not a literal translation – which I find extremely boring. I say, you have the photo, now create art “I tried oil, didn’t like it,” she says. “Tried watercolors and fell in love. from it! Sometimes it happens in my mind’s eye before I begin, At first, it started with a little magazine called “Watercolor Magic,” sometimes as I am painting. I never know. But once you have enough and for me it was magic. I saw wonderful artists using this medium in tools and techniques, it becomes accessible to you in a moment and special and creative ways. I’ve been a fan forever and never miss an you trust those instincts.” issue. I pour through every article and pull out the ones that ‘speak’ to me. I started a filing system with references tucked away from A Over the course of her years as a graphic designer, Guarino had to Z. I keep growing it to this day. The things I was impressed with created logos, ad campaigns, direct mail pieces, brochures, all manner years ago are not as impressive to me now, so it is a growing and of the elements that go into marketing and promotion programs. Her evolving source of inspiration for me.” interest in pure art, however, was the leitmotif just below the surface.

For artists whose work really resonates, there is a connection beyond Early in her business career, she began offering watercolor greeting the visualization. “Every image I choose to paint is an answer to the cards, with inspirational quotes, for her clients to stay in touch with their clients. Then she landed a steady gig doing covers for Creations 10 continued on next page

“I have been a photographer most of my life and taken photos while sailing along the coast of Queensland,” says Karen Longhurst, one of Guarino’s online students who takes her classes from her home in Australia. “But my real passion is art. Now that I have the time to do watercolors, I did a few tutorials but my attention span was not up to the tedious details. I thought if I have a photo I don’t need to replicate it. I wanted to be loose and creative.

While searching the Internet for the style I liked, I found some paintings by Jan Guarino. Her style and colors were perfect for me and her philosophy in painting is so similar to what I was after. I was delighted that she was doing live Zoom classes. I was so keen to learn that I got up at 3 a.m.

Australasia time to be her student. Her classes have changed my life. I’m loving painting.”

Bangles & Giggles

Double Sunshine Stony Ducks All paintings by Jan Guarino - available for purchase at janguarinofineart.com

“Our lives have changed since COVID19,” says Florida resident Barbara Stumpf. “Most of us have experienced the all-too-numerous negative feelings, especially alienation. Being able to participate in my favorite interest in the safety of my own home has added to a feeling of well-being. For a few hours every week, I wasn’t worrying about the virus.”

“I so look forward to every online watercolor class,” says Toni Panarelli, a local student. “They are the highlight of my week and my watercolor paintings have improved.They are also convenient. All my supplies set up next to the computer just waiting for the next class. No packing up supplies and driving anywhere.”

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Playing in the Band Windows of Venice Magazine, a holistic health and wellness publication based near her home on Long Island. Her beautiful watercolor covers helped migrate her work to the poetry pages inside and that generated requests from artists’ groups to do demos for members interested in their own watercolor work. The demos led to her art classes, the pandemic moving the classes online. That progression expanded her watercolor classes dramatically. Twelve students for in-person classes became 70 students online, some on the other side of the world.

Even students who could show up in person, nonetheless found there were even advantages to online instruction.

was surprised when named “Artist of the Year” in High School. At Fashion Institute of Technology, she majored in illustration with a minor in advertising to apply her skills to a workable business model and she succeeded at it. But the artist inside kept poking at her. Watercolor greeting cards for clients. Covers for local magazines; art for the poetry pages. Collectively, those efforts generated how-to demos for interested students. Next full-blown classes, but the pandemic canceled those. Finally, an online presence that expanded her artistry to anyone, anywhere with Internet.

“My process is highly intuitive,” Guarino explained in a 2018 article in Newsday. “When I am working on a new project, I know that the It took some adjustment to the new protocols, but Guarino proved answer can come in a moment’s inspiration or can build and reveal to have “the ability to handle all the equipment necessary, while itself slowly over time. More often than not, however, it strikes like painting, answering questions, giving tips and critiques and even lightning. But whether it comes fast or slow, via digital or paintbrush, supplying us all with a video recording of the class,” according to Emilia everything I create is always the result of the culmination of all my years Pitrelli, one of her local students. “My painting has improved by leaps of experience seeing the world through an artist’s eye.” and bounds and I have accomplished so much more in less time. I believe the reason for my growth is having Jan ‘captive’ online, with To view water as simply colorless or just shades of blue is to ignore her in real time, just like having private lessons in my home. Painting that a rainbow is produced when sunlight strikes raindrops. So perhaps people and pet portraits, skies, seascapes, flowers, animals, structures, Guarino is releasing the colors already captured in water and reshaping textures, fabric, lace, glass, metal . . It’s all so wonderful.” them as they reveal themselves to her. When she dips her paintbrush into a small pool of otherwise benign liquid, it magically releases subtle If life intrudes when you’ve made other plans, the unanticipated effects nuances of color through the beauty of her art. That process gives us can sometimes be positive. Initially, Guarino did not actively seek to one more reason to appreciate the magic of art for us, the viewers, to be recognized as an artist, but the artist inside recognized her. It’s value the gift of someone who sees the world differently than we do how you recognize the true artist. They do their art just to do it. She and honors us by sharing that gift. ❦ 12

Jan can be found on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest,Twitter & Linkedin.

Her work is for sale at the Firefly Artists Gallery at The Nest in Northport Village.

Doodles from a Slickrock Diary Our horses often skidded and slid across the sandstone like they were wearing roller skates.

Story and Photos by Buddy Mays

The first time I saw Wild Bill Crader, he was standing in the middle of the Great Utah Nowhere, grinning like a Cheshire cat through a black Hagrid-like beard that covered most of his face. Barrel-wide with a beer belly hanging from his chest, he was wearing tennis shoes, a pair of flowery swim trunks, and a sweatstained cowboy hat that

perched sloppily atop his noggin like JK Rowling’s infamous Sorting Hat. Bill would be difficult to miss, even in a crowd.

The place was southeastern Utah’s Rainbow Bridge National Monument, 40 miles north of Page, Arizona, at the head of Lake Powell’s Bridge Canyon. It is one of the most isolated and

inaccessible park service dominions in the United States. The bridge itself is a towering sandstone arch that spans Bridge Canyon completely from side to side. It can be visited in only two ways; up Lake Powell from the town of Page, by boat, or overland from the east along a dilapidated and

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From Rainbow Bridge through a stretch of the roughest and most beautiful slickrock country in Utah.

extremely rugged footpath known as the Anasazi Trail.

Wild Bill and his crew, professional outfitters from Durango, Colorado, had been hired to transport our small group of adventureseeking tourists on a 30mile-long, three-day horseback trip. Sure enough, when we stepped off the motorboats that had brought us up the lake from Page, Wild Bill was waiting. By himself. His crew, and our hired horses — the ones that would haul us and our gear to our first

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night’s camp, and then, over the next few days carry us across the Utah wilderness — were nowhere in sight.

“Horses ain’t here,” Bill said with a sad grin.

“Whole bunch of ‘em wandered off last night but the boys is out lookin’ for ‘em. Don’t worry, they couldn’ta got far.”

The group of people I was with was a peculiar but pleasant mix of humanity.

The main ingredients were six, youngish, well-to-do British citizens — four men

and two women — all of whom were in the middle of a very pricey Wild West Holiday, organized by a famous adventure tour company based in New York City. Traveling with the Brits as chaperones were the two women who owned the famous company. None of the Brits had ever been to the United States and none had ever ridden a horse, but all were enthusiastic. I was along for the ride, so to speak, all expenses paid of course, to help keep an eye

on the paying guests and to take pictures of them doing their adventuring. We had spent the previous four days exploring Lake Powell by motor launch and houseboat, camping on remote beaches, fending off rattlesnakes, crapping in a hole, and sleeping under the stars. When the trail ride ended, we would spend another seven days floating down the Grand Canyon on rubber rafts.

The Brits were loving it and getting their money’s worth.

“Flamin’ dear this,” one of them told me in Britainese, “but a far cry from Brighton!” Translated into American English it meant “Damned expensive, this trip, but a lot more fun that going to an English beach!”

Once Bill stopped apologizing, and with no alternatives available, we hoisted our packs and sleeping bags and ground pads and tents and full canteens and carried them to Crader’s camp, pitched in a sandy alcove in the bottom of Bridge Canyon about a mile from the boat landing. There we met Bill’s wife and camp cook Rowean, and a young Navajo named Edger Grey Mountain. Most of the ride would be on Navajo Reservation land and Edger had been hired as guide.

Wild Bill cautioned us

about rattlesnakes, scorpions, and centipedes, then showed us to a teepeeshaped canvas structure perched haughtily in a small clearing 20 yards from the main camp.

Inside was a small toilet seat on a metal frame erected over a hole in the sand. Bill proudly called it his Golden Throne.

“Ain’t many outfitters got one’a these,” he said.

“Most of ‘em make ya squat behind a blanket.

When you gotta do yer bidness, he added, “jest set yer hat on the rock outside so’s folks’ll know it’s in use and hope the wind don’t blow much.”

There was an expectant silence. “Had one of these blow over onc’t,” Bill continued. “In use at the time. Funniest damn thing I ever saw. Course the lady who was sittin’ inside wasn’t so amused.”

We were left to ourselves the rest of the afternoon, most of us hiking back to Lake Powell for a long swim before setting up our tents. At dusk, Rowean served campfire-grilled pork chops, sourdough biscuits, and green salad, all of which was gratefully washed down with cans of cold beer from the camp’s large canvas cooler. Just before dark we heard hooves clacking on boulders in the

distance and five minutes later the horses arrived, led by a pair of weary, foot-sore cowboys who introduced themselves as Bud and Leon. After an all-day chase, they said, they had finally located the animals three miles from camp, stranded on a narrow shelf 200 feet above the trail.

When the horses had stubbornly refused to be driven or coerced from their refuge, the wranglers had found it necessary to lead each one down separately. The task had taken most of the afternoon.

Darkness settled quickly over the canyon country, and by nine P.M., everyone, including the exhausted wranglers, were tucked into their sleeping bags and quiet. The horses had been hobbled and turned loose again; happy to be back among friends, they meandered between tents, munching, clacking, swishing. When they finally wandered away from camp, horsey noises were replaced by the buzz saw of Wild Bill’s snoring, which echoed off the surrounding canyon walls like thunder before a storm.

In a crash course on the Anasazi, Edger Grey Mountain told us what he knew about the Anasazi Trail over bacon, eggs, leftover biscuits and thick,

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black, campfire coffee early the next morning. The trail he said had several names: Rainbow Trail, Zane Grey Trail, and Navajo Trail to mention just three, but the preColumbian, pueblodwelling Anasazi (a Hopi word meaning “ancient enemies”) who inhabited what is now the Four-Corners region of Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado between 700 A.D. and 1400 A.D, were the creators of the path and the first to use it. No one knows for sure, but the trail was probably being used as early as 800 A.D., giving the Indians access through the slickrock wilderness to the Colorado River from the east. When drought and marauding tribes from the north drove the Anasazi out of the region in the late 1300s, the path continued to be utilized by Navajo and Paiute Indians. And during the early part of the 20th century, white Americans on foot and horseback used it to visit the newly discovered (by white people) Rainbow Bridge. Teddy Roosevelt and writer Zane Grey were among many who reached the bridge via the Anasazi Trail in the years following its National Monument designation in 1910. When

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Glen Canyon Dam was built in 1963 creating Lake Powell, houseboats and motor launches gave much easier access to the monument, and today, only a few determined backpackers and horseback riders make the hazardous journey across the slickrock.

After breakfast the horses were saddled, and one was assigned to each of us. The wranglers then gave everyone a basic course in the art of western horseback riding: how to get on and off properly, how to neck rein, what a saddle horn was for, where and when to say “giddyup” and “whoa.” By eight o’clock, we were on our way. With Edger leading and Wild Bill bringing up the rear, we set off up the wide, sandy floor of Bridge Canyon, following a path that had been used by humans for at least 1,200 years. Rowean and the two wranglers would load the camping equipment and our personal gear aboard four packhorses and would follow an hour behind us.

The Anasazi Trail is not for the lily-livered or faint of heart, or as one of the British guests said later, “Taint Stratford Upon Avon by any means.”

When the trail left the bottom of Bridge Canyon

and turned north across the slickrock toward the flank of 10,000-foot Navajo Mountain a few miles from camp, the going quickly got tough on both horses and riders. Here the path, when there was one, was over solid sandstone, mile after mile of steep-sided domes and ridges eroded from solid rock, always up or down, nothing on the level.

Often, the only indication of a route being there at all were stone cairns piled on the rock every 50 feet or so.

And where the trail was exceptionally steep, juniper logs had been bolted to the sandstone or jammed into crevices crosswise across the path creating steps and terraces upon which the animals could find footing.

In the really scary spots, our horses often skidded and slid across the sandstone like they were wearing roller skates.

Rowean caught us before noon just as we reached the lip of a narrow, 200-foot-deep canyon that Edger said was the most difficult and hazardous portion of the entire route.

We could see that the trail narrowed dramatically as it switch-backed down the sandstone slope below us.

“Time to pray to Asdzą́ą́ Nádleehé,” Edger said to the rider behind

After breakfast the horses were saddled, and one was assigned to each of us. him. “Pass it on. That’s Changing Woman,” he added, “the god who watches over fools and Bilagannas.

“What’s a Bilaganna?” asked the rider.

“White people,” Edger said, grinning.

The descent into the canyon wasn’t as bad as it looked from the top, not at first anyway. The horses were trail-wise and surefooted and all we had to do was sit back in the saddle, close our eyes, breathe deeply, and before we knew it, we had safely arrived at the sandy canyon floor. Or almost on the canyon floor. Just before

the bottom, Edger halted to eyeball the trail where it ran between an ancient juniper tree growing seemingly out of solid sandstone, and a steep, 45-degree slope that terminated on the canyon floor 20 feet below. The narrow space between tree and drop-off was about three feet wide but the rock was slanted, and crumblylooking. It looked anything but safe to walk on.

“Only joking about Changing Woman,” Edger said over his shoulder. “Let your horse find its own way. Don’t make him hurry.”

“If I wanted to walk across instead of ride,” one

of the British women asked, “would it be impolite?

“Not impolite,” said the guide. “Smart maybe.”

Edger rode across the narrow spot first, and then the rest of us followed, slowly but safely, some riding, others walking and leading their horses.

Rowean and Bill brought up the rear, and as we started up the much wider switchback on the opposite side of the canyon, we could hear the clattering of hooves above us as Bud and Leon and the pack horses began their descent from the rim.

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Just as the last pack horse stepped onto the slanty segment of trail, all hell broke loose.

We stopped and waited while the wranglers slowly made their way down the narrow path.

When Leon reached the damaged trail segment, he stopped and looked it over carefully. I wondered if Teddy Roosevelt and Zane Grey had experienced the same problem in the same place on their respective trips over the trail in the early 20th century.

Leon remounted and gingerly crossed the dangerous spot, giving his horse its head and allowing the animal to pick its own 18

way. His two packhorses followed quietly at the end of their tethers, sensing perhaps that they were in a ticklish situation and this was not the time to misbehave. Then it was Bud’s turn. He started across, leading his twohorse pack string with a tenfoot-long tether, and being just as careful and slow as Leon. Rowean counting under her breath, “One across, two across –” Then, just as the last pack horse stepped onto the slanty segment of trail, all hell broke loose as the

animal’s rear hooves simply slipped out from under it on the crumbly sandstone.

In an exaggerated, almost slow-motion tumble, the animal toppled sideways over the edge, pulling the other pack horse with it.

Bud could only let go of the lead rope and watch as the two animals rolled down the steep slope in a cloud of dust, screaming in fear and crushing their loads beneath them. Wild Bill Crader, watching the drama with the rest of us from the opposite side of the canyon, moaned as if it

was he who was doing the tumbling.

Even before the dust had cleared, the wranglers, Bill, Rowean, and Edger Grey Mountain were all there, untying pack straps to free the downed animals from their loads.

Miraculously, none of the horses were injured, although the same could not be said for our camp stove, a half-dozen personal duffels, and the Golden Throne, all of which were wounded, at least superficially.

Repairs to the pack saddles and harnesses, and repacking the equipment, took an hour. When we finally set off once again, click-clacking across the sandstone slowly and carefully until late afternoon, we rode with caution and a new respect for dangerous places.

We reached that night’s camp spot an hour before sunset. Surprise Valley had been immortalized by author Zane Grey in his bestselling western novel Riders of the Purple Sage and was so named perhaps because it seems to arrive just when you needed it most.

In this acclaimed novel, Grey described the interior of the valley like this:

“…. a wide terrace, green with grass and moss and starry with strange white flowers, and dark-foliaged, spear-pointed spruce trees.

Below the terrace sloped a bench covered with thick copse, and this merged into a forest of dwarf oaks, and beyond that was a beautiful strip of white aspens, their leaves quivering in the stillness. The air was close, sweet, warm, fragrant, and remarkably dry. All this led the eye irresistibly up to the red wall where a vast, dark, wonderful cavern yawned, with its rust-colored streaks of stain on the wall, and the queer little houses of the cliff-dwellers, with their black, vacant, silent windows speaking so weirdly of the unknown past.”

A tiny stream, dry for much of the year, meanders along the valley floor. Years before, someone had carried parts of a picnic table in on the backs of mules and rebuilt it near the streambed (no one knows exactly why), and this is where we stopped. The canvas cooler of beer had luckily survived the horse crash uninjured, and the cans were still cold and welcome, and went perfectly with Rowean’s supper of thick, grilled steaks, salad, and Dutchoven baked peach cobbler.

The next morning, we spent several hours exploring the nooks and alcoves of Surprise Valley, visiting the crumbling ruins of a small, Anasazi cliff village constructed in an amphitheater 50 feet above the valley floor. Building stones and pottery shards were strewn like confetti on the shallow cave’s floor, but the only structure still intact after 900 years of wind and erosion was a small, sturdy enclosure known as a storage cyst, tucked into a crevice in the cliff.

Although wild game played an important role in preColumbian diets, the Anasazi were first and foremost farmers, growing crops of corn, hard beans, and melons, in small protected plots of sandy soil usually near a water source. They knew that eating during the winter meant hoarding during the summer and fall. This cyst, and thousands of others just like it that dot Anasazi territory, was most likely used as a corn repository, a haven from rats, mice and the elements, in which the small ears of heat- and cold-resistant corn grown and harvested by the farmers could be dried and stored until needed.

We didn’t break camp until after lunch the next day. From the ridgeline above Surprise Valley, we

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could see the tree-dotted shoulders and snow-capped summit of 10,000-foot-high Navajo Mountain poking its snout up out of the sandstone desert to the southeast. In the other three directions, sandstone monoliths called “domes” protruded from the sandy earth, rounded, tan, polished by erosion and resembling the naked buttocks of some longpetrified behemoth.

The afternoon ride to our third and last camp near Navajo Mountain airport was on a much wider trail across flatter, less hazardous terrain. As we left the slickrock behind, the landscape began to change its appearance from barren rock and eroded canyon to sandy dells and hillsides dotted with pine and juniper trees. We began to see signs of civilization. An old Navajo sweathouse and

log hogan came and went, both thatched with desert moss and probably unused for at least a century. We passed the remains of a wrecked wagon, lurched to the trailside in quiescent abandonment and, like the sweathouses and hogans, probably inutile for at least a hundred years.

Navajos have occupied the area around Navajo Mountain for generations, migrating from regions we now know as Alaska and western Canada and arriving in the southwest around 1300 A.D. Nomadic Athabaskans, they were primarily hunters and gatherers and had been migrating southward for perhaps 300 years before reaching the southwest.

Assimilating with the descendants of the Anasazi and other Pueblo tribes, most of them gave up their traveling ways and adopted a semi-agricultural lifestyle,

similar to the Puebloans who had influenced them.

Late in the afternoon we made our final night’s camp near the trailhead where Bill’s trucks and horse trailers were parked.

The next morning the outfitter would ferry us and our duffels on a rutty, dusty road to the Navajo Mountain landing strip where a prearranged charter flight would take us back to civilization, a motel, and a restaurant meal. The following day we would head for Lee’s Ferry, Arizona, on the banks of the Colorado River below Glen Canyon Dam, meet another outfitter, and begin the long, slow float trip through the Grand Canyon.

As darkness settled in and Rowean prepared our final supper, we sat around the campfire sipping the last of the beer and watching the stars bloom overhead like silver poppies.

Annual wild horse “Pony Swim,” from Assateague to Chincoteague Island, Virginia.

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Keeping Score with Tradition Blanco Bowling Club keeps Texas ninepin culture alive Story and Waterlogue Images by John H. Ostdick

South Central Texas curries rich cultural treasures large and small, but few have been dusted with as much charm over the years as the Blanco Bowling Club Café, about 42 miles west of Austin.

Just off a town square that has more than 35 buildings listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the boxy stone building, built in 1948, was for years home to a rustic, open-to-the-public restaurant that offered a surprisingly solid menu, the proceeds from which helped

perpetuate a ninepin bowling tradition dating back deep into German history.

I can’t recall when I first stumbled into the joint, but it was probably about 40 years ago. In the ensuing years, any time I crossed through this part of the state, I would drop by for its unique vibe.

So it was distressing when I passed through last year with my Brooklyn-based daughter Madeline and her East Coast partner Vince that I couldn’t share the café’s magic with him. The Blanco Bowling Club Café’s battle-tested pale tile 21

floors and fourteen square tables had seen the last of its dependable chicken fried steak dinners, onion rings, and “Texas toothpicks” (fried strips of jalapeños and onions) served to the public a short time before.

“We closed the Café a little over a year ago,” Blanco Bowling Club board member Todd Rogers explained in a late September email exchange. “It was losing money and we need to do some major repairs to the kitchen to make it possible to cook anything again. We are working on that, but with no bowling revenue coming in, we are on hold for a while.”

Herb’s Hat Shop and Triple L Drygoods are still across the way on 4th Street. The Blanco Pioneer Museum and First Assembly of God Church remain a stone’s-throw away. The line of motorcycles in front of 300 BBQ, a much shinier affair that opened next door in the last decade, attests that the bikers who for years frequented the Café on their way through town have shifted their culinary allegiance to the restaurant run by locally raised pit master Ladd Pepper.

Yes, the town’s name derives from the Spanish word for white, in reference to the pale limestone bottom and outcroppings of the river that runs through here but, shudder, local oldtimers still call it Blank-O. Roland and Viola Bindseil built, owned, and operated the cafe and ninepin bowling alley until 1965. Another couple bought it at that point and continued the tradition until 1967, when a group of Blanco residents bought the bowling and café operation and made it a club-owned organization.

Today, the Blanco Bowling Club has about 200 members. The private membership that brings its club to life most evenings continues its ninepin heritage, even during the COVID-19 era (the club shut down in March before

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starting league play again in October), according to Rogers.

At 7 p.m. Monday through Thursday in the bowling lanes at the back of the building, the blast of a whistle marks the start of three hours of member socializing, sipping, and sporting. By 7:01, ghostly apparitions of hands float in and out of player score sheets projected onto the walls. The game is ninepin bowling, a throwback only practiced in the United States in a handful of South Central Texas communities with deep Germanic roots. The 1990 census counted more than 2.3 million Texans who claimed German heritage; although not as prevalent as its eldest generation of members pass, conversations in German can still pepper the club on any given night.

Although pinning their precise beginnings in Germany history is problematic, bowling pins, or kegels, became fixtures in early German churches as a vehicle to attack sins. As believers knocked down kegels, the

theory goes, they also struck away their sins. In fact, Martin Luther is credited with standardizing the number of pins at nine during the Reformation. Dutch immigrants later brought ninepin to New Amsterdam (present-day New York) in 1626, and its popularity spread on makeshift street-corner alleys.

Ninepin uses eight pins set by hand in a diamond shape with one larger red one — the kingpin — in the center. The object of the game is to down the eight surrounding pins and leave the kingpin standing, for a strike and twelve points.

Downing all pins resulted in a score of nine. Pins are reset only when all members have bowled two balls, all pins are downed or only the kingpin remains.

Ironic because of its origins, the game became fraught with gambling and corruption. Connecticut became the first state to ban it in 1841. Other states followed suit. Sometime in the 1850s, an English version (born in Suffolk in 1803) using ten pins was introduced to skirt the state laws and soon became the U.S. standard.

By World War I, most private and commercial bowling establishments in the state changed to tenpin, according to The Handbook of Texas Online, the University of Texas and the Texas State Historical Society keeper of all of the state’s officiousness.

Ninepin remained popular in predominantly German communities like Fredericksburg and New Braunfels until the 1950s introduction of fully automated pin-setting machinery prompted most of them to change as well, according to Handbook history. Those bowlers who still pined for ninepin teamwork and camaraderie then gravitated to clubs in small outlying communities of Bexar, Comal, and Guadalupe counties. Texas

ninepin clubs mostly started out as clubs where families played and socialized.

Others, like Blanco Bowl, started as a public business. Eighteen historic German bowling clubs remain active in the state today, according to board member Rogers.

I spent a wonderful evening in the private club in 2003 doing interviews for a story that lost the magazine it was intended for. The memory has fondly stayed with me. Between rolls, John L. Dechert, an original member of the club organized in 1967 who later served as its president for more than 20 years (the current president is Zane Smith; Dechert, in his 80s, continues to bowl), talked with me at a table in the back of the hall. The unassuming man, dressed in flannel shirt and gimme cap, gently tapped a card on the tabletop in front of him as he spoke.

Telephone calls and member inquiries interrupted his deliberate comments.

Legacy in small-town pockets

Dechert explained the club’s longevity in this way: “I guess ninepin survives because it’s a unique game that you can’t do anywhere else. All of the clubs are in this area, most of them in small towns. There’s not a lot else to do.

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then peered out of bunker-like window slits as they straddled chairs on the supports between lanes. The first five alleys are original lanes; the sixth was replaced several years ago. “In fact, the tops on a couple of the domino tables back here were constructed from the original Lane Six,” Dechert told me.

At the time, the frenetic three hours of action netted the youths $21, plus usual nightly tips of $15. (“I think, with tips, [today] they might make around $40 or $50 a night,” Rogers says.)

Turning loose competitive juices

“We have a pretty good mix of younger and older, long-time members and people who have more recently moved into the area,” he said. “New folks sign up to bowl and learn as they go; they usually pick it up pretty quickly. Straight across the board, we don’t have as strong a group of bowlers as a tenpin league, where they have a 180 or 190 average. It’s pretty good competition, an even league, but it’s a social situation.”

A little more than 2,000 people live in this town, first settled in 1953. Blanco was actually the county seat from 1858 to 1891, when the more centrally located Johnson City wrested it away. (Blanco’s courthouse, designed by renowned architect F.E. Ruffini and built in 1885, remains the center of the old square.)

Most of the area residents work in the tourism, agribusiness, or construction fields.

Membership dues don’t set many of these folks back — they are a whopping $7 dollars a year, after a one-time $12 charge.

During my visit, at the far end of the Blanco hall, two teenage boys and one girl dashed back and forth between the lanes, resetting pins by hand and shoving the spent balls down return chutes. They 24

Every man in the place wore some fashion of a hat, be it western or gimme.

Signs on the wood-paneled walls, hung between photos of longtime league members, prohibited foul language.

Seven guys, at that time in their 30s, hung out on stools in front of the club’s long bar and talked animatedly among themselves.

One of them, Terryl, notes that he was once one of those teenagers scrambling around the bowling lane wells.

“I’d ride my bike up here in the evenings and set pins,” he said.

Terryl, athletically built and decked out in Dallas Cowboy paraphernalia, had been a member for 15 years by that time.

“It’s a social gathering type of place. I come here to get together with a friend of mine, drink a few beers and do a little bowling.” On that night, his friend couldn’t make it so he was just jawing with other guys his age at the bar, waiting for a signal to roll again. Unlike tenpin bowling where players roll in a uniform order, ninepin captains select when their teammates play (two rolls a turn; each player must have two turns per frame).

“It’s up to the captain. Some bowlers do better on the right side, some are

better with a full house. I just come down here for something to do, but some people take it seriously — sometimes too seriously,” Terryl said, chuckling. “You just bring people into the game when they can do their best.”

Laughter, libations and a good shot

Laughter erupted regularly from six tables arranged near the lanes. Members sipped libations — mostly beer — and talked or played cards between turns. Loud cheers punctuated good-natured heckling when a player made a good shot.

One affable club member, Allen, worked behind the bar that night because his “arthritic knees can’t tolerate bowling anymore, and I like to stay in the thick of things.”

“To give you an idea of what we’ve got working here,” Allen said, smiling, “that’s my wife Barbara keeping score over there; my daughter and son-in-law are playing on Lane One; and a couple of these young kids running around here are my grandkids.”

Indeed, it did seem like a family affair, especially when one of the best

bowlers on Lane Three dashed off between frames to change her son’s dirty diaper.

Pre-COVID-19, the public was welcome to come watch at the Blanco Club, and as post-COVID -19 precautions ease, should be again. The organization also rents the lanes for private events on Saturday evenings (the club requests that reservations be made my phone seven days in advance — no walk-ins are accepted — to allow time to schedule a pin setter).

Still today, a running tally of the league’s twenty-four teams’ scores is tabulated faithfully on a large blackboard near the club’s entrance. Each team plays another once during the twenty-four-week schedules, culminating with the top three teams squaring off in a roll-off. There are no Yankees-like dynasties, however, as league rules call for the winning team from each six-month cycle to split up the next time around.

“It’s great being able to get together with the Blanco community once a week and catch up,” says Rogers, who joined the board a year ago after five years as a member. Everybody is so busy these days, I look forward to spending a few hours a week just catching up and hearing about what's going on with everybody else in town — that, and the beer is cheap and cold.”

The scene remains robustly smalltown Texas, with a charming cultural twist. Although competitive fires liven up play, the real points registering involve the camaraderie and sense of community that thrives here — and there is no need for scorekeeping in that part of the game.

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Saturday Night Laundry She never complained about scrubbing clothes in the bathtub.

By Bill Scheller

We didn’t have a washing machine.

My mother did the laundry in the bathtub, using a washboard, and she hung the clothes on a line.

We lived in an attic apartment, the top floor of a Queen Anne in what once had been the most fashionable quarter of Paterson, New Jersey, and which was still one of the nicer parts of town. The houses were mostly singlefamily, middle class, though the dentist on the corner had live-in help and a grand piano, and a man on the next block had a butler.

The old couple who rented us our place owned a lot of houses, and my father’s father, a plumber, had worked in them. When he told the landlord that his son was getting married and needed an apartment, the landlord said that he had one on the top floor of his own house. It was a perfect starter place. My parents lived there for thirty years.

There were a lot of reasons we never moved.

The attic was ridiculously cheap – fifty dollars a month, including, as my father liked to point out, “gas, electric, and heat.” It had a big yard, a driveway, 26

and a room in the basement where my father could putter. He had moved around a lot as a kid, during the Depression, going from one cold-water flat to another, and that attic must have seemed as stable and permanent a home as any split-level in the suburbs. Anyway, he didn’t have the homeowning gene.

If my mother did, she never let on. I don’t remember her ever starting a “how come all my friends have houses” quarrel, and she never complained about sitting on a bench scrubbing clothes in the bathtub, or lugging them downstairs to the line.

She might have, eventually, but that primitive laundry ritual didn’t last. There was a brief period when we went to a laundromat, when one opened a few blocks away, but the big change came when my grandmother got a washing machine.

My grandmother and grandfather, my mother’s parents, lived in the house where she had grown up, on the other side of town, and owned a diner on a highway two towns east. They kept the place open twenty-four hours, turning it over to the night man (a crook, it turned out, who pocketed half the wee hours’ proceeds) at eight each evening. Their ride home took them through our neighborhood, so when my grandmother got the washer, she offered to pick up our laundry and return it, folded and ironed, a few days later. It was no big deal for her;

merely something else to ward off the problem of having a spare minute in her day. Work was her medium. She spent her days running a ribbon loom in a silk mill, and took the bus to the diner in time for the dinner rush.

My grandmother had a clothesline in her back yard, one end attached to a pulley on the back porch, and the other strung likewise from a tilting pole at the far end of the yard.

The pole was maybe twenty feet tall, and made of some indestructible wood – probably cedar, as it never rotted and the bugs never got it – that had iron spikes driven into it to use as a ladder in case anyone ever had to scale it to un-foul the pulley. No one ever did, which was good because it looked like a child’s weight (mine, likely) would have brought it to the ground.

It’s a wonder the wet clothes never did.

The laundry came back on Saturday night.

My grandfather would pull up in his ’53 Chevy and blow the horn. My memory of the event is always of summer, always of hot nights when we’d hear the horn over the big fan in a dormer window, the way you’d hear the bell on the Good Humor truck.

My mother and sister and I would go down the back

stairs and past the yard to where my grandfather had nosed the Chevy to the curb. I’d take the basket out of the back seat, where it sat next to whatever provisions my grandmother was transferring from the diner to her kitchen, an arrangement that probably wouldn’t pass muster with the IRS. (Once, she had a lidless stockpot full of chicken soup on the floor, and a case of Pepsi on the seat; when she was heating the soup for a Sunday family dinner, she found an empty Pepsi bottle in the pot, then dredged out the cap. The soup was served, nobody noticed the caramel tinge, and my mother was sworn to secrecy but promptly circulated the story. It was too good to hold in.)

Standing with my mother on the curb, my grandparents in the car, both doors hanging open, the big quiet houses all around and the first fireflies in the gathering dusk – that’s my most vivid memory of a hot summer night in Paterson. We’d talk, and then the Chevy would wallow off, my grandfather handling the wheel like the wheel of the bus he drove before buying the diner. I carried the laundry upstairs. Soon my father would be home.

My father, who worked in the propellor division of an aircraft company, spent Saturdays from June through September in the part of north Jersey he always called “the country.” He knew every dairy farmer, and they were happy to see him show up to help keep their nuisance populations of woodchucks in check. Chucks are a tricky target – a ten- or twelve-pound critter poking out of a hole in a new-mown field hundreds of yards away. The weapon of choice is a heavybarreled small-bore rifle with a powerful scope — that, plus good eyes and a steady hand. I have his notes of woodchuck kills at four hundred yards and more. He never talked about it, but I suspect it was a skill he was called to use on both sides of the Rhine.

That was his summer Saturday. And it set us up for our summer Saturday evenings, since dairies weren’t the only farms “up the country.” On those hot nights, when he’s show up around nine, just after the laundry, he’d bring home corn, big Jersey tomatoes, and maybe a small basket of peaches. My mother would make a late dinner, usually burgers to go with the tomatoes and corn. He’d have a beer, talk about what farms he’d been to, then tuck in to watch the end of the Yankee game. My mother and I would stay up and listen to Jean Shepherd’s live radio show from Greenwich Village.

After my grandparents died, my mother and father moved into their house. By that time, my grandmother had bought a dryer, so the clothesline came down and, later, the tottering old wooden pole. My father cut it up with a chainsaw. There was

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still a piece, with one of the spikes sticking out, lying in a corner of the garage when it came time for me to sell the house when my parents, too, had gone. I brought it back to Vermont, an odd family

heirloom, and tucked it away in my own garage.

When we sold our house, I left the clothes-pole fragment behind. I’ve thought about the new owner finding it, grabbing it by the spike, and tossing it into the fireplace one cold night.

The hard old wood goes to ashes, the spike glows red as memory, and cools to gray as the cinders die.

Scarlett Maybe It Was A Case of Mistaken Identity

By Frank I. Sillay

It was one of those parties at the fraternity house in Boston that seemed, in my recollection, to fill every weekend. She was a very attractive girl and she jumped on me like a duck on a June bug. While not a unique experience, it was still a gratifying one, and the evening progressed in a satisfactory manner. The conversation flowed freely, as did the laughter, and the body language promised future delights.

When Scarlett (for such was her name, the first time I had encountered it outside of Gone with the Wind) invited me to her home on Cape Cod for New Year’s Eve, I was inclined to accept. With the Christmas madness in full cry, there was no opportunity for another date in the interim, but it was only a matter of a few days.

When I asked her about transport connections, I noticed that she seemed surprised.

It later occurred to me that she might have assumed that I had a car, though this was more or less unheard-of among Boston students in 1960.

Around mid-afternoon on a cold New Year’s Eve, a bus deposited me in the small town on the South Shore where she lived with her parents. I easily found her house, and was admitted by her taciturn father, who summoned his daughter, who, after a curt acknowledgement, retired to her room.

That pretty well set the tone for the visit. I had been under the impression that we would be attending a party to see in the new year, but I spent the evening watching television with her father.

I think there was breakfast on the morning of 1 January, but I couldn’t swear to it. I know I was waiting in the cold for the first bus back to Boston, wondering what had happened.

Maybe attendance at the party required private transport, that I failed to provide.

She wasn’t drunk, she only had a couple of beers at the party where we met.

I’m sure my personal hygiene was up to standard when I set out on the trip to Cape Cod. Maybe it was a case of mistaken identity (“See that guy over there? His name is George Clooney!”)

I guess I’ll never know now, but as Scarlett O’Hara used to say, “Tomorrow’s another day.”

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In our Summer 2019 Issue, Photographer Karen Dinan gave us a stunning portfolio shot “over, on, under and beyond� the 2-1/4 -mile-long boardwalk at Long Beach on Long Island, New York. Clearly the treasures just keep on coming . . .

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Sandpipers

Morning Activity

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Silvery Beach

Bicyclist at Sunset

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The Royal Baby Goes to School ‘All right, mothers, say goodbye!’

By David E. Hubler

I was born at Royal Hospital on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. In a sense, that makes me a royal baby. My grandmother certainly thought so. For years she insisted that everyone on Mosholu Parkway said I was the most beautiful baby they’d ever seen. If they’re still saying it today, it must be in Spanish. The neighborhood has changed.

The first plaything I can remember having was a raggedy, gray cloth elephant I called Dumbo. If I had had a rag monkey I would’ve called it King Kong. Even today I am greatly influenced by movies. I wanted to call my first-born E.T. It was gender neutral, it could’ve stood for Ellen Teresa or Edward Thomas. I did have a dog I named Norman Bates but he went nuts every time he heard the shower go on, so we had to put him down.

I was always told that I was driven home from the hospital in a car owned by Uncle Benny. It was a reasonable reason so I bought it. But I never met Uncle Benny who had been, supposedly, a doughboy in the

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Great War under General Pershing. I did once find a pair of puttees that I was told was part of his uniform. Later, I found hidden away a rifle, also said to be his. More on that later.

Home was a one-bedroom apartment in a six-story building on DeKalb Avenue which, according to my mother, originally had a canopy and a doorman when she and my father first moved there. Like Uncle Benny, I never saw either.

Because it was a six-story building it had an elevator, a New York City building code requirement for any structure over five stories. Elevator buildings were a sign of prosperity. They attracted mostly Jewish tenants, many of whom refused to schlep up five flights of stairs with groceries after what they went through with Hitler. An elevator was a modest reward. A six-story apartment building in the Bronx after the war could not have attracted more Jews if it had had a huge Star of David flag hanging from the roof.

Irish families lived in five-buildings called

"walk-ups" and Italians preferred private homes, semi-detached or two-family.

There is no conclusive demographic proof of this, but it has been suggested that Bronx apartment buildings taller than five stories were a silent signal to everyone else to “stay away. We’ve had enough tsoris already.” Besides, the shul was next door in case “foreigners” needed a reminder.

‘Egg Boxes’ Rejected

My parents once entertained the idea of moving to one of those new housing developments on Long Island, but once they went all the way out there and saw some of them, my mother described them as “egg boxes,” meaning too small for human habitation. A one-bedroom apartment at the rear of the building with a view of an alley and the Woodlawn-Jerome IRT tracks was better?

Life on DeKalb Avenue ran parallel to the much longer Jerome Avenue “around the corner.” Together they were like an Eastern European schtetl, but instead of small farms and a couple of cows, we had three Jewish delicatessens, three bakeries and a Chinese restaurant. For a time on the roof of one of the walkup buildings, a goy building of course, instead of a fiddler someone played a bagpipe on Sunday mornings.

DeKalb Avenue was just a couple of blocks long, which in New York hardly qualified it to join the ranks of Park, Madison, Fifth or Flatbush avenues. But I played no part in its naming so I am blameless.

Running parallel to DeKalb was the mighty Jerome Avenue, gateway into Westchester County to the north and the shopping Mecca of Fordham Road to the south, and further south was the fabled Yankee Stadium on River Avenue and 161st Street. At the northern end of DeKalb Avenue just before the Westchester County

line, you had an intriguing choice: go left and there was Woodlawn Cemetery, go right and there was the golf course in Van Cortlandt Park. A golfer’s dream -- shoot a round of par golf and drop dead, then wind up across the street.

Because Jerome Avenue was a heavily trafficked road, I was not allowed to cross it alone. It carried four lanes of traffic, two in each direction, and would have had two more lanes at least if not for the support Ibeams that held up the IRT tracks overhead and cast the avenue in near perpetual darkness.

Gun Hill Road, another long thoroughfare that stretched almost across the width of the Bronx, crossed both Jerome and DeKalb avenues. More apartment buildings, stores and Montefiore Hospital for Chronic Diseases ran down the south side of Gun Hill Road until the buildings petered out as the road approached the flatlands of Orchard Beach and Long Island Sound.

Our pre-kindergarten world, however, was confined to a triangular wedge of dirt bounded on the south by 208th Street, the tip of the triangle was where DeKalb and Kossuth Avenues converged. The small triangle park, sprinkled with an occasional dog dropping, was our playground. Besides its unusual shape, “the lot” as we called it, had a striated outcropping of rock rising like a schist iceberg in the middle of it, which made the land useless for development but nice for climbing all over.

It was playing in the lot where I first met my two life-long friends, Stanley and Johnny, shortly before we entered kindergarten and began a K-9 educational trek through PS 80, later renamed JHS 80, then Mosholu Parkway Junior High School 80, now Junior High School 80 Mosholu Parkway. The school changed its name more frequently than Prince. We looked forward to school not really knowing what it was all about because there was no such thing as preschool

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then. We just played until we were five years old on the first Monday after the Labor Day holiday, completely unaware of what lay ahead.

According to Hillary Rodham Clinton, it takes a village to raise a child. That may be true in suburban Chicago where she grew up.

Not so in the Bronx. We were raised by a battalion of forward observer mothers encamped at their apartment windows or seated on folding chairs in our triangle park directly across the street from our building.

And they could be full-time guardians because few mothers in those post-war years worked outside the home.

Our building was the largest and most imposing structure on the block. It was strangely named Clar Fin, for no discernible reason. It probably was Latin for something, only no one knew a word of Latin. Yiddish yes, enough to fill a dictionary. Clar Fin was erected in 1928, ready for occupancy just in time for the onset of the Great Depression.

According to my mother, when she and my father moved in, our building had a canopy and a doorman. It reeked of class. It was designed to attract the nouveau faux riche who had been streaming to the northernmost reaches of the city on the Woodlawn-Jerome IRT el until Black Friday. The migration halted faster than a wagon train surrounded

by Indians. So, by the time I came along, there was no canopy, no doorman, very little class and no sign of any nouveau riche tenants faux or otherwise.

Being the largest structure on the street with some 88 apartments was also no distinction. Clar Fin’s companion structures on DeKalb Avenue included two walkups, two pair of identical single-family homes on either side of us, one of which had been converted to a small orthodox synagogue with an awning that stretched across the sidewalk to the curb that read Congregation Birchas Isaac Reception Hall for All Occasions. Not really. The “reception hall” in the basement

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was so small it could hold no more than 35 people, and certainly not for anything that could truly be classified as an occasion.

We never learned who Birchas Isaac was, just as we never learned why our building was named Clar Fin. However, to those few of us -- Johnny and I as far as I could tell -- who laboriously prepared for our Bar Mitzvahs under the tutoring of Rabbi Mordecai Twersky, Birchas Isaac meant hours lost from the schoolyard basketball court or worse, the stickball games played on the street just outside his windows. Aside from when my appendix nearly burst on the first day of summer vacation, those two months poring over undecipherable Hebrew script and listening ad nauseam to a recording of my Torah portion on a small record player in my bedroom were the worst months of my young life.

As I said, my days free of any educational obligations drew to a close as I approached my fifth birthday in early September and with it school registration day.

It did not go well. I could also say it did not bode well either.

One late summer morning prior to the Labor Day weekend, my mother and I walked to what was then called PS 80 on Mosholu Parkway (hence its latter-day name) to register for kindergarten. As far too many writers have penned, “little did I know” that our three-block walk would later become an almost daily 10-year feature of my education, four times a day -- to school in the morning, then home for lunch and then a second round trip in the afternoon. Our daily march was necessitated by the fact that the NYC Board of Education did not run school buses in our neighborhood, or perhaps anywhere in the city. Probably on Staten Island, the city's terra incognita to the other four boroughs.

In those days, because of some vague school district borders, children along DeKalb Avenue and its neighboring buildings

could attend either PS 80 or PS 94 (I don’t know anything about the numbers in between). A couple of mothers of my growing circle of playmates opted to enroll their kids in PS 94, a trek that was longer than the walk to PS 80 and included a steep upward climb on Gun Hill Road on the homeward leg. The 94 kids would make that journey until they reached the seventh grade when they were transferred to PS 80, by then newly named JHS 80 to accommodate their status as seventh graders. Kids from a few other heretofore unknown elementary schools on the other side of Mosholu Parkway also came to 80 when they hit the seventh grade. I was lucky. I stayed put in the same school building from kindergarten through the ninth grade, 10 years in all and not all of them happy ones for me. Felons often serve less time.

Reverse Diaspora

This reverse Diaspora tipped the balance from our mostly Jewish school population at 80 to one that brought us more in contact with Italian and Irish kids. There was also one Puerto Rican who was drafted to make regular public appearances in the Spanish language classes to show us what the language actually sounded like. There was even the son of a deceased member of the Nazi army. I know because his son showed me a picture of him that he carried in his wallet. I cannot say I felt any sympathy for the dead man as I looked down at him in that easily recognizable Nazi uniform, especially as we had Holocaust survivors sprinkled throughout the neighborhood.

The school building was a five-story red brick building resembling a block U that faced Mosholu Parkway from atop a small rise in the park that gave the parkway its name. If you traveled around the Bronx, you could see several identical school buildings, all cut from the same cookie-cutter plans.

That must have saved the city a bundle in architectural fees and buying building supplies in bulk, in addition to not having to buy gas for the nonexistent school buses.

One wing of the building housed the groundfloor auditorium and the two gymnasiums above it, the smaller one for girls and the larger one above it for the boys. The other wing was where the school cafeteria was located, with its yellow tables and a strange odor that smelled like a combination of Lysol and mashed potatoes, the latter being a staple of the lunch menu. The cafeteria catered to those few souls whose walk to school was even longer than that of the PS 94 kids. On rainy or snowy days I envied them. The classrooms filled the floors above, except for the kindergarten classrooms on the ground floor.

The school sat on a concrete slab of multi-purpose playgrounds on either side.

The two basketball courts in the center open space between the two wings were perpetually devoid of sunlight. The front steps and the main entrance to the building contained a couple of small trees. Like latter day Druids, we held Arbor Day ceremonies there annually. Once we even planted a sapling. It died the following winter.

To register for school, we walked through the front doors and up the steps to the school offices following the signs “To Registration,� each of which contained a bright red arrow to show the way. Today such instructions need to be in several languages, but for my mother and most of our other neighborhood monoglots, English and the arrows were sufficient. (Yiddish, if it was spoken at all, was spoken only in the home and used as a special code by European-born parents when they wished to say something that the children would not understand.)

Despite her lifelong insistence on punctuality, my mother and I were not the first to arrive so we had to wait silently -- and if possible patiently (how patient can a bunch

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of five-year-olds be?) – outside the registration room just beside the principal's office. (The school’s first principal died suddenly within a year or two of my entry and he seemed like a kindly old man. Who isn’t old to a five-year-old’s eyes?). His successor, however, was another story. If you scan the long list of world tyrants you might find her name listed somewhere after Hitler, Stalin, Attila the Hun and Ivan the Terrible.

Slowly, we inched toward the front of the line. Is this what school is all about? I wondered. Waiting on a line every day just to get in? At five, I already had developed an extreme inability to stand on lines and that persists to this day. I’d rather not eat than wait for a table at a good restaurant; same goes for the movies or a crummy restaurant.

Finally we were first in line and were soon waved in by “the next available assistant,” as they always say to patrons phoning in to a help desk, which in the end usually isn’t much help. The woman behind a large wooden desk sat facing a pile of documents, some blue, some sort of pinkish.

Even I was pretty sure I knew what the designations meant. When she took out a fresh blue form from her desk drawer, my suspicions were confirmed. Then she picked up a pen and, without looking up, said to my mother, “Sit. Your son’s name and birth date?” Her voice had all the emotion of someone auditioning for the job of the recorded voice on the subway. “Stand clear, doors are closing.”

My mother promptly sat down as ordered in the only chair beside the desk and began to answer a lengthy series of questions about me while I stood silently beside her. As the questioning and answering continued, I began to wonder whether this school thing, which to me at the moment seemed like just sitting and answering questions, was going to be a good idea and did I have a chance to opt out? Being a bored five-year-old, I began to look around the room for something –

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anything – to play with. Slim pickings in an office full of adults. My perusing finally led to the floor and into a waste paper basket between my mother’s chair and the edge of the scribbling lady’s desk. The basket was filled with what appeared to be orangecolored forms, my favorite color. So naturally I reached in and grabbed a couple, not having the foggiest idea what they said or I would do with them. Even before I could think of any one way to amuse myself with these tossed-away documents, the lady at the desk shouted, “Leave that alone! That’s not to play with!”

Bad Behavior

Then she snatched them from my hand and threw them back in the waste paper basket. My mother turned toward me, her lips pursed and her eyes wide open in her familiar “stop that behavior now – or else” look. I knew it well. I waited for her to stick up for me to that nasty woman, but she did not. Instead, she apologized to her for my bad behavior. I was just a little kid! So I had run afoul of the omnipotent school authorities and I wasn’t even enrolled yet!

That was long before the school term “advanced placement” came into vogue but if misbehavior was a scored skill, I was the first to make the grade. Alas, it wouldn’t be my last mistake.

I’d like to say that the incident left no lasting scars on my psyche, but just the fact that I can recount the episode in such detail so many decades later makes a mockery of that line of reasoning. I’d also like to blame it for my less-than-stellar performance during those ensuing 10 years at PS/JHS 80, so I do.

I can even offer my report cards as proof. Ns abound (Needs Improvement, for behavior mostly).

Despite my grievous actions during my first-ever appearance in a New York City public school, I was accepted for admission

into Mrs. Crane’s kindergarten class, morning edition. Not like being accepted to Harvard, of course, but one small step . . . as they say. I could deal with the morning class, being an early riser. Besides, I would have my afternoons free. For what? I’d figure that out later.

About two weeks later, the earth shuddered under my feet and I began what they say is a lifetime of learning. After my usual breakfast of orange juice (a daily requirement even today to ward off scurvy or rickets or beriberi or worse), a bowl of Uncle Ben’s Cream of Wheat cereal (no lumps, please), an eye dropper of cod liver oil (to prevent serious illnesses not covered by the orange juice) and a glass of milk warmed “to take the chill off” (so why keep it in the refrigerator?) we were off once again to that citadel of education.

This time, the long walk to school filled me with dread. Would we have to see that mean lady again? Would she remember me?

If so, what would she do to me? I swore to myself that I would not touch her wastepaper basket ever again. My breathing returned when we walked past that room without having to enter. But those same fears would be revived just a few years later when the changing of the guard after our friendly, fatherly, suddenly dead principal was replaced with the Madwoman of Chaillot.

So my mother walked me past the principal’s office to the far end of the building and into Miss Crane’s kindergarten classroom. Once again, we were not the first to arrive. My neighborhood friends Johnny and Stanley were there and I was happy to see them. They seemed happy to see me, too. Several other children – all of them total strangers to me – were wandering around playing with the many toys strewn about.

Several mothers had gathered beside an old upright piano that sat off to one side the room, all surrounding a woman I assumed was Mrs. Crane, who seemed to me to be

about as old as anyone could be and remain upright. Up close even at my childhood height, I could see she was a very little person. Smaller even, sitting at the piano.

Maybe that’s why she was a kindergarten teacher. So she could be almost eye-to-eye with us. Even when she rose from the piano bench, gaining no more than an inch or two advantage over us but not over most of the mothers (none of whom seemed excessively tall to begin with). I didn’t want to go over to the adults, I wanted to examine all of the toys strewn around the room. Just as we got to the piano, a loud shrilly bell rang-and-rangand-rang really scaring me and just about everyone else in the room, the kids especially. I thought maybe the place was on fire. My first thought was, let’s get out of here right now.

‘Mothers, say goodbye!’

“All right, mothers, say goodbye! That was the bell. It’s time to start school. We’ll see you all later,” Mrs. Crane said happily, almost too happily, opening the classroom door. Who was more reluctant to go? The mothers or their kids? Hard to say. My mother was one of the first to leave (first step of separation that supposedly would end with me on the Harvard campus). But many of the other mothers didn’t really want to go. So as soon as they reluctantly left the room their faces promptly crowded against the large glass window on the other side of the door, looking as if they’d just sold their children into perpetual servitude and now had sellers’ remorse. I looked in vain for my mother’s face but hers was not among them. As soon as the kids saw their mothers peering in at them, reality set in. Separation! It dawned on my new classmates that they were alone now, trapped with this strange munchkin woman which triggered a Pavlovian response of crying and sobbing and foot-stomping and

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running to the door trying to bust out of the joint.

The wailing grew louder the closer the kids reached the door. I, however, did not cry, I am proud to say. What’s to cry about?

I’ll play for a couple of hours with Stanley and Johnny, maybe get to see what’s inside the playhouse, and then go home when my mother returned to pick me up. If we had had a car at that time my escape would have been perfect. But if playing around was all there was to this education thing, count me in. Indeed I was in. I just didn’t expect to be in, meaning in that building, for ten long years.

Acing Kindergarten

So began my public school days under the auspices of the New York City Board of Education. I can’t say I had any problems with kindergarten. I could draw well. I played well with others. And we even got a snack. I was not a discipline problem and I behaved in class, no fighting, no crying. What’s not to like? I would have aced kindergarten if there had been any grades. Kindergarten was an easy, no formal learning experience unless you consider a rudimentary program in music, singing silly songs and playing in an all-percussion band of cymbals, rhythm sticks, tambourines and triangles (small versions of what ranch cooks in movies rang to get the cowboys in for meals). There was no such thing as “preschool” in those days; all reading and writing began in first grade. So we played on ceaselessly it seemed, banging out rhythmic noise with sticks and drums almost in time with Mrs. Crane’s piano tunes.

If you think about it, those strange musical interludes were the kindergarten equivalent of a master class in making noise; instruction on a very rudimentary level. We even had to audition with Mrs. Crane for our instrument in the band. Sometime in the second or third week (when the crying had

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pretty much petered out) we were called up to the piano one at a time and asked to sing while Mrs. Crane banged out “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” After listening for a few bars, Mrs. Crane would assign each of us to an instrument based on our innate musical aptitude.

Watching the audition, I could see that the kids who actually sang well (and knowing the lyrics too didn’t hurt) were assigned to the good instruments, the cymbals, the tambourines and the triangles. The less talented (or no talented) were consigned to the rhythm sticks and a seat in the second row. God! Anyone could bang two sticks together, a monkey could do that! You didn't need a musical ear for that. And they made no known musical sound. So when I was called up to the piano, I was fairly confident that a pair of cymbals or at the least a tambourine was in my future. After all, my mother had a beautiful voice, my father played the drums and I had a cousin who was a professionally trained opera singer who performed in church and synagogue services (reform, of course). And she worked at the Metropolitan Opera, although not as a singer, but I was certain that her voice helped her land her the office job. After all, why would the Met hire anyone who couldn’t sing? I’ll bet any number of the Met’s office staff took the job just hoping for the day when Maria Callas came down with a sore throat and they were pulled away from their typewriter and sent on stage to instant stardom.

So I approached the piano with an air of confidence and going over the lyrics to “Mary Had a Little Lamb” in my head. I knew it cold. It was not Cole Porter. However, standing beside Mrs. Crane I got my first real lesson not in music but in destiny and the cruelty of fate. “Let's change the song, shall we, children?" she chirped, still smiling. NO! You can do that I screamed in my head? I

want to sing Mary Had a Little Lamb! I know it cold! I rehearsed it over and over! as I

awaited what surely would turn out to be my swan song.

“David, let’s sing “Old McDonald Had a Farm.” We all know that, don’t we?" and she began to tickle the ivories, as they say, while I stood dumbstruck. No, not me! I don’t know that song! Not all of it, anyway. I know the cow and the pig and the horse, but after that, who knows? There are so many farm animals that you could sing for a week without repeating one of them. Besides there aren’t many farms in the Bronx to visit and check out the animals. When she saw that I really was lost – a condition I would succumb to again years later when I tried to learn the words of my Bar Mitzvah haftorah in Hebrew by mimicking the words from a phonograph record – she slowed the tempo and whispered the words for me to follow. My 30second audition earned me a permanent position in the rhythm sticks section. I was mortified. There I was, the first grandchild of a man who banned all talk in the house when he religiously tuned his Philco radio each Sunday to Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra. How could I tell him that I was a lowly rhythm sticks player and might qualify only for Spike Jones and his City Slickers band of whistles, pops and other unusual sounds? I made up my mind to hide the ignominious truth from him.

So my musical career hit a snag. But I was determined to remedy the situation. I bided my time, sitting in patiently with the rhythm sticks section, envying those mechanical monkeys that banged two cymbals together when wound up. Then, one day when one of the girls whose talent had put her in the triangle section did not show up in class, I determined that it was my time to act. So as soon as Mrs. Crane turned her back and told us to get our instruments, I made a dash to the instruments bin and pulled out a triangle. While my classmates were seating themselves according to what instrument they played, I took a seat amid

the triangle musicians, eager for the concert of my young life that would show Mrs. Crane how wrong she was by misjudging me. I was convinced that my performance would unveil my innate musical talent.

With great anticipation, I raised the triangle and the metal rod ready to play whatever tune Mrs. Crane banged out. If I didn’t know it, I’d wing it, like jazz musicians do. However, just as Mrs. Crane cracked her knuckles over the keyboard and prepared to play, she spotted me. In an instant my nascent musical career nose-dived when she said, “David, you know you don’t belong there! Put down that triangle and take your place with the rhythm sticks.”

Crushed, exposed, defeated, embarrassed, I reluctantly dropped the triangle and metal rod in the instrument box and with them went any hopes of a real musical career. Instead, I took out the last two well-worn rhythm sticks, and made my perp walk back to the back row amid some laughter and some snickering too. Like Icarus, I had flown too high and had my wings melted. So I sat with my fellow nomusical-talent rhythm-stickers for the remainder of the term.

Bound for Carnegie Hall?

How many times have you read or seen some well-known musicians tell how they got started in their musical career? “I started playing the flugelhorn when I found an old one in my grandmother’s attic . . .” “My father bought me a $5 tuba from a pawn shop that was having a sale and the rest is history . . .” “I was banging on the garbage can lids in front of my house when a good Samaritan heard me and offered me a full set of drums he no longer needed . . .” Well, I also wish I could say that my kindergarten banging on two old wooden sticks led me eventually to a gig at Carnegie Hall and an HBO special. Didn’t happen, of course.

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Even If a tone-deaf five-year-old can learn all there is to learn about the musical art of slamming two wooden sticks together in a week – and part-time at that because we had other skills to master like finger painting (I was very good) and block building (good, but no Frank Lloyd Wright) – there was no future as a classical musician or even a rhythm sticks virtuoso in a grunge band.

About the only benefit you could derive from rhythm sticks would be the ease with which you could go on tour with them in your luggage. You could even carry a spare set or two in case you broke a stick. Try that with a Stradivarius or a Gibson Super 400 Premier Cutaway 1939 Sunburst guitar. Best of all, you never had to tune the sticks.

They say that when one door closes another opens. So my grandfather would never hear me play with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Arturo Toscanini. But in foregoing a career in music, I learned that I did indeed have a talent for art. I could color between the lines - a true sign of a precocious artist – and I always colored the blue sky down to meet the ground whereas the no-talent kids just

colored a stripe of blue across the top of the page, leaving a broad swath of white paper between the sky and the ground. In addition, no one could beat my hands when it came to grabbing a glob of squishy finger paint and smearing it across a wet piece of paper. My expressionism took finger-painting to new heights. And the sweet odor of the paint was almost addictive.

Then one day in late June, I dropped my rhythm sticks into the instruments box for the last time. Kindergarten ended on the last day of June and we all said goodbye to Mrs. Crane. There was no cute graduation ceremony as there is today in homemade cardboard caps and gowns made from our fathers’ old shirts. No diplomas either, just a couple of Lorna Doone shortbread cookies and a pint of milk, the same snack we got every other day of the term. Although we all got to take home our personal art gallery.

Now it was summer vacation -- and well deserved it was, too. Especially after hearing for several days how we would be going on to “real school” in September and how tough it was. Well, maybe I’ll get another crack at those cymbals.

Art fixes in the age of COVID-19, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

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The Room Above the Garage It would be nice to have the room finished, though.

Yes, it would.

By Pedro Pereira

Every year is the year I am going to do something about that room over the garage. This year is no different. The room doesn’t need much, you see. Just some insulation and sheetrock to go over the bare wood structure. A ceiling. Maybe a knee wall on the pitched side with some built-in storage space.

Oh, yes, and there’s the floor to think about. I guess carpeting is the way to go if we’re going to stick to a reasonable budget. And of course we’ll have to insulate the floor from the unheated garage; winters can get pretty rough in the New Hampshire woods.

And . . . there’s the matter of electricity. The room is going to need more power outlets if we are to make it usable as part office, part recreational space. If I am to work in there, I will need outlets for my laptop, the iPhone charger and for music.

Maybe I’ll just get one of those Bluetooth speakers and play the music off the smartphone or the laptop.

You know what would be nice? A coffeemaker.

Maybe a Nespresso or Keurig. But, damn, they are bad for the environment. I know, I’ll put a French

press in there. But that will still require going downstairs to heat water on the stove. Scratch the coffeemaker idea. How hard is it to run down a flight of stairs to make coffee in the kitchen, after all?

It’s a big room, though, so what else should go in there? I know. I’ll move in a guitar amp, set up a music stand and have a little practice area. Who knows, maybe the change of scenery will put an end to my songwriting drought. Sometimes all it takes is a small change to get the juices flowing.

Of course having guitars so close to the workspace could be a distraction, but I think I have the discipline to strike the right balance. Sure, I do.

If you want to talk about distractions, what about the pool table that takes up a good portion of the room? Maybe I’ll sell it. But then will I miss it? How often have I actually played pool in the last year? Can’t remember. But it would be a shame to want to play and the table not be there anymore.

OK, the pool table stays. Billiards for everyone! But how much space is left? There is enough for a couch – make it a sleeper couch to accommodate larger groups of visitors. Then I can place a decent-sized desk on the corner, facing out to the room, not at the walls, with a comfy chair, and I’m good to go.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here. Back to actually finishing the room. It’s only been sitting there unfinished for the past eight years since we bought our country house. Maybe do 41

one of the walls in pine to go with the pine motif throughout the house – the trim, doors and downstairs ceiling are all rustic pine.

It’s a big part of the house’s charm. Everyone who sets foot in the house for the first time, be it to spend a few days in the northern woods or to stay with us for a night or two when we are in town, comments on the pine.

I like the pine. It’s a little soft to be honest, and the kitchen cupboards have needed repair here and there because pine is so soft. It’s only a matter of time before a cabinet door or drawer will need replacing.

But, yeah, finishing one wall with pine in the room over the garage would look terrific – and consistent with the theme of the house. Or maybe we’ll do the ceiling in pine, with some cross beams to emulate the ceilings downstairs. Yes, that’s it.

But who’s going to do the work? Last year we actually got started, and then the friend who had so graciously offered to do it hurt his back severely. He can’t do it anymore. The odd-job guy who has painted and made repairs was going to do it a couple of years back. But he got sick. Before that, there was someone else. He got sick too. He can’t do it. There’s a friend who picked up some carpentry work to help see him through the pandemic. Maybe he can fit it in. I should ask him.

Or I should just start looking at contractors. Ugh, those guys are always behind schedule and keep finding new problems along the way.

This whole project is getting too complicated. It’s probably going to take a lot more than I realized. It would be nice to have the room finished, though. Yes, it would. You know what, next year isn’t that far off.

Next year will be the year we finish the room above the garage.

What more to be said?

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Private Parker He pulled the pin, threw it as far as he could, dropped the grenade into the trench he was sharing with an instructor.

By Frank I. Sillay The late George MacDonald Fraser, author of the brilliant Flashman books, served as a rifleman in the British 14th Army in Malaya in the closing stages of the Second World War. He was commissioned from the ranks, finished Officer Candidate School just as the war ended, and spent his remaining service in a Highland Regiment in North Africa. He wrote three slim volumes of short stories about his experiences in the post-war Army.

These stories manage to encapsulate the experience of peacetime soldiering in the 20th Century and, very likely, any other century. In the process, they deal at length with the shortcomings of a Private McAuslan, variously described as “The dirtiest soldier in the world” or “A living insult to the profession of arms.” I have been re-reading these stories, and the memories have come flooding back of one of my comrades in recruit training.

For the whole 13 weeks of Marine Corps boot camp we were sleepdeprived, and stressed in 17 different dimensions, but in the first few days, we were less able to deal with it. The first couple of nights in our Quonset hut (sleeping maybe 25, in double bunks) one kid was coughing endlessly at night.

This soon gave rise to a chorus of, “Die, you asshole, let us get some sleep!” and other, similar pleasantries.

Eventually, the verbal abuse got to be more of a problem than the coughing, so I pitched in with a suggestion that everybody give the poor bastard some slack and shut up. I didn’t think of it as an act of kindness, just an attempt to defuse the situation so I could get some sleep. It worked better than I’d expected, and the next day, the cougher, who I’ll call Parker for the purposes of this article, sought me out and thanked me. He was mistaken in thinking that he’d found a friend, as I just wanted some peace, but he persisted in his delusion throughout boot camp. I never bore him any ill will; I was torn between pity for him and exasperation with him, as he was uniformly the one guy who was out of step, the one who got everything wrong and brought punishment down on the whole platoon. He followed me around like a puppy. A scrawny, misshapen puppy, with goggle eyes and an oversized Adam’s apple.

Our platoon started with 75 members, and finished with the same number, though only seven of the original group made it through to the

end with the same platoon. Some were discharged for various reasons.

Anybody who missed three days of training because of sickness or injury was dropped and picked up by another platoon when it reached the appropriate day of training. Despite his many handicaps, Parker was one of the seven who made it all the way through without being dropped, so there was apparently a measure of toughness or perseverance in his makeup.

At the Infantry Training Regiment, after boot camp, we were trained in basic familiarity with every weapon found in an infantry regiment, with the intention that anybody could be grabbed and thrown into any opening created by a casualty.

When we dealt with fragmentation grenades, Parker was the man who pulled out the pin, threw it as far as he could, and casually dropped the grenade into the trench he was sharing with an instructor. The instructor kicked the grenade into the chamber in the bottom of the trench that was provided for just such an occasion, but both of them were sandblasted with soil and smoke and couldn’t hear anything for a day or two.

One day, when we had the flame thrower in the morning, and the 3.5” rocket launcher in the afternoon, after an hour of instruction on how to use the flame thrower, each of us had a turn at using it. The tanks were filled with straight gasoline, without the additive which gave it the consistency of yogurt, as is the case when it’s being used in anger. The only safety measure the instructors offered was under no circumstances let go of the hose through which gasoline was forced at such high pressure that it would whip around uncontrollably if it was released.

Needless to say, Parker was the one person to let go of the hose, whipping a 20-foot flame around the place, depriving half of us of our eyebrows.

The 3.5” rocket launcher (bazooka) is distinguished by being, at short range, more dangerous behind than in front, because of the blowback from the rocket. It takes a two-man crew to operate the rocket launcher: the gunner, who has the tube on his shoulder, and eventually aims and fires it, and the assistant gunner who loads it from behind. We spent an hour or two having the drill explained to us. The gunner puts the tube on his shoulder, pointing generally downrange, and puts his right hand on his helmet, to make it clear that it’s away from the trigger, while the assistant gunner puts the rocket into the tube from the rear, winds the ignition wire from the rocket around the contact terminal on the tube, then moves to one side and slaps the gunner on the back of the helmet to indicate (battlefields can be noisy places) that he can fire when ready.

Well, I got paired with Parker, and he was gunner first. I had to repeatedly remind him to keep his hand away from the trigger and on his helmet.

Eventually, we were being closely supervised by the Company commander, the company gunny, the range officer, and several other passing dignitaries. When I finally got the rocket in the tube and the wire connected, I slapped the back of Parker’s helmet, as per procedure, and he turned around, and said “What?” thereby pointing the loaded and primed rocket launcher up and down the firing line, where a discharge would have killed about twenty people.

Many years later, when I went to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, Parker was one of the people I looked up in the alphabetical listing. His name wasn’t there, but if he got to Vietnam, I’ll bet everybody else in his platoon is listed on the wall.

City center, including the massive Sher-Dor Madrasah, Samarkand, Uzbekistan

Uzbekistan: Bazaars, mosques, minarets and madrasahs of the Silk Road ‘Dead yesterdays and unborn tomorrows,’ said poet Omar Khayyam, ‘why fret about it, if today be sweet’ Story & Photos by Buddy Mays A few years ago, I had the opportunity to ride a slow freight train — with two small but comfortable passenger cars attached — across the country of Uzbekistan in south-central Asia. Home to 33 million people and sandwiched in a mostly desert no-man’s land between China, Russia, and Iran, Uzbekistan had ceased to be part of the USSR, declaring its independence on 31 August 1991. Years had passed but Russian influence was still fairly noticeable, even though the country, and its fiercely independent, primarily Sunni Muslim population, were doing their best to shake off the Communist Party tentacles that

had controlled national politics and everyday life since 1925.

My travels began in the western city of Urgench near the Turkmenistan border, and ended, two weeks and a thousand kilometers later, in the capital of Tashkent near the border with Kazakhstan. Mostly, the train followed the original route of the Great Silk Road, a network of caravan trails, between the 2nd and 18th centuries, which connected Europe with Asia, culturally, politically, and economically. Marco Polo followed the Road; so did Genghis Kahn,

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Omar Khayyam and Kublai Khan, as well as nameless millions of traders, merchants, monks, soldiers, and scholars.

Travels by Train and On Foot

When I wasn’t on the train, I spent most of my time on foot, exploring the colorful markets and bazaars, mosques and minarets and madrasahs of the Silk Road’s legendary cities — Khiva, Samarkand, Bukhara, and Tashkent. Several things quickly became obvious, even to this less-than-erudite westerner. One was that Uzbeks in general are an extremely friendly and outgoing population, quick to smile, slow to take offense, and contented, if not completely satisfied, with their post-Soviet lives. Second, and something I found very ironic at the time, whereas there were widespread shortages of food, clothing, and durable goods in Moscow and other large Russian cities, the sprawling outdoor markets and bazaars of Uzbekistan were overflowing with every sort of comestible imaginable.

Obviously, the loss of communism was a favorable circumstance for most Uzbek citizens.

Now the bad news. Although Uzbekistan literally means “Home of the Free,” it is not free, at least not for everyone. The nation is a presidential constitutional republic, which means that the President is both head of state and head of government. Executive power is exercised by the government, while legislative power is given to two chambers (Senate and Legislative) of the Supreme Assembly.

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Post-Soviet Pains

But even though the Soviets have gone home, old habits die hard, and the Uzbek government has developed a terrible human rights record; free elections are just a dream, the security services are all-powerful, and thousands of political prisoners languish in jail. Are things changing for the better?

Slowly but surely, says Human Rights Watch.

In the meantime, most Uzbeks seem to take things as they come with a grin and a wink.

“Dead yesterdays and unborn tomorrows,” said poet Omar Khayyam, “why fret about it,

if today be sweet.”

Wild camel, Kyzyl-Kum Desert, central Uzbekistan.

Sketching tourists, Registan Square, Samarkand, Uzbekistan

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Young Muslim schoolboy in front of the Sher-Dor Madrasah

Outdoor market, Tashkent, selling famed Uzbek flatbread.

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Appearing female, one of the young Uzbek male dancers of the sort who perform for all-male audiences in Central Asia.

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Islamic tourists in the garden of Ismail Samani Mausoleum, city of Bukhara.

Muslim cemetery in the remote foothills of the Chatkal Mountains.

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The Mosquito on the Tip of My Nose I began to frantically wiggle my nose, but the tiny bastard didn’t budge.

By Malcolm P. Ganz

Several autumns ago, I was enjoying an unusual, uninterrupted period at home, a few months away from clothes crammed into suitcases, having to remember to brush my teeth with bottled water, or popping one aspirin, one Tylenol, one cold tablet before going to bed, the personal hangover preventative I’d developed after years of experimentation. Home, sweet home. No demands of schedule, no crazy customs to run afoul of, merely unwinding in the cool north after a return from the hot, steamy tropics.

So, there I stood before a pile of logs in front of my house. A friend who owned a few acres of land in upstate New York had cleared some fallen trees on his property, had them cut into convenient lengths for firewood and sold them to friends and acquaintances for far less than they would cost from local purveyors. It was late November, toward the close of an abnormally warm autumn. The supply of wood had been dropped off by the curb and I was hauling armfuls to my woodpile in the backyard. Sweaty days in the super-humid tropics would soon be replaced by cozy evenings around a crackling fire with my wife, each of us enjoying a Bushmills neat, watching some refreshingly mindless TV, one dachshund curled up in my lap, the other pressed against the side of my leg.

Shaking the comforting musings from my mind, I picked up an armful of logs and

turned toward the rear of the house. About halfway through my route along the side of my home, a mosquito alighted upon the tip of my nose. Shit! The damned thing should have died months before. It was as if the travails of the tropics had somehow managed to follow me home. With both hands fully occupied, I began to frantically wiggle my nose, but the tiny bastard didn’t budge. I could almost see him (her?) raise his swordlike proboscis to drive it home in the fleshy part of my nose. Any second now, I would become the victim of this strike. So, I dropped the logs and, with a fluid continuation of the same motion, punched myself in the nose so hard I literally saw stars.

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Nice, I thought, you’ve some managed to exchange a mosquito bite for a broken nose. And, the goddamned mosquito had escaped. It was probably out there, somewhere, circling to line up another sortie.

‘Nosy’ Neighbor I stood there for a moment caressing and massaging my nose between my thumb and forefinger, to determine that it was merely damaged, not destroyed. Regaining some measure of composure, while using all of my peripheral vision to spot any other approaches by my would-be attacker, I stooped to retrieve the logs I’d dropped. It was then that I noticed a flash of color, as the curtains moved in the side window of my next-door neighbor’s house. The super-nosy gossip had been looking out, spying again.

Although she was now safely hidden behind

the curtain, I couldn’t resist a scowl in her direction.

Because of my travels, and a seemingly intuitive antipathy, my neighbor and I didn’t interact beyond “hellos” and “good-byes,” as we each left or entered our dwellings. Now, I’m home for a stretch of a few months and what does she see? Well, for starters, she couldn’t have seen that tiny mosquito on the tip of my nose. She would only have seen me walk by, stop, throw the armful of logs onto the ground and sock myself in the nose.

A few days later, our morning hello was accompanied by one of those sly looks that said, OK, smartass, the whole goddamned neighborhood is going to hear about that one.

Border Reivers

It was near midnight, and the Laird was making the rounds of his party of 17

th

century Scottish border reivers, making sure that sentries had been properly posted, and everything was secure before bedding down for the night. They were essentially a band of thieves on a military scale, and with a slight flavoring of political motivation.

The rain was coming down by the bucketful, and the wind from the north stabbed through coats like a driven nail.

The Laird found one of his marauders – in fact, his youngest son – lying spreadeagled on his back in a gorse bush, with his head pillowed on a piece of granite the size of a modest tombstone, but not as smooth. The rain was pelting into the boy’s open mouth, and as a consequence his snoring sounded like somebody was trying unsuccessfully to start a two-stroke motor. The commander took one look, and kicked away the piece of granite, growling as he went on his way, “No bairn of mine is getting soft from easy living!”

-- Frank I. Sillay

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Untitled

By Ginny Craven I’ve got so much love.

It fills me up -- jumps the banks of my consciousness . . .

Let it envelope you, cover you with sticky sex.

Or captivate you with its fragile vulnerability, Delicate as the kiss of a butterfly I’ve got so much love.

It is urgent and throbbing at every pulse point It is pure and silky sweet in its tenderness.

It is refuge; it is danger.

It is sustenance; it is indulgence.

It is all-consuming; it is isolating.

Let it rip your beating heart from your chest and lay it gently on the pillow.

Let it flow over you and slam you bleeding on the rocks.

I’ve got so much love.

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Two by Samantha Marie What you took . . .

... Every night I went out, flooding sweet and heavy I miss you’s, You weighed my eyes down into my phone. ... When I said I loved you you cupped my face and your eyes asked me to go first, you couldn’t be first but you wanted it then, My first.

I used to think your eyes were meadows.

A pool of grass to sink in under a psychedelic sky.

The colors have since warped, like the universe took the rain and you left me in the brittle dirt with only memories of the sun, the flowers, and the masquerade of bliss.

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Sitting by a fire pit I’d imagine it’s similar to drowning.

There is a moment when your body knows what is about to happen.

An intense clarity and foresight that allows us to feel the vibration of the future right before our lungs fill up with panic to smother any pocket of air that we may have saved for the moment we jumped into the water.

I can feel it coming, approaching the slam of the breaks.

The complete and deafening silence of realizing I am not happy anymore.

I am alone within myself, gasping for air as I run toward the white wall I mistake for the light at the end and there is no one who can prevent me then from sinking into the heavy sand beneath me where sadness leaks into my now paralyzed skin and latches on to the warmth my heart radiates through my limbs.

I fall down into the discomfort of my internal loneliness, surrounded by my smiling friends.

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Blameless

By Jay Jacobs

I won’t take credit for the achievements of my race Nor will I apologize for their mistakes I refuse to take blame for injustices past For I wasn’t there, though their echoes may last Those that shaped history are long in the grave Their legacy is ours to discard or to save But embracing old shackles, like phantom limbs gone Is just picking at old scabs, and can only do harm For yesterday’s injuries and wounds cannot heal by calling up ghosts that are no longer real And holding old hurts keeps one mired in the past, prevents moving forward, for the muck holds you fast There’s never a lack of new pains to go ‘round So why exhume graves then, and not break new ground?

To cultivate tolerance instead of old sorrows may bury the dead and let grow new tomorrows In the end the choice is ours, to do wrong or do right For both heroes and villains come in black and in white.

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Le Duc, Le Dauphin et Le Comte de Paris ‘Why, you boys are all the rage at home,’ the young girl exclaimed.

‘You know, in the rotogravures. Everyone’s talking about you.’

By Kendric W. Taylor

“The waiter says you want to order dinner. You’re American, he says.”

The two women at the small table looked up from their apéritif: “I thought my French was at least understandable,” the older of the two replied.

“Not for Maurice. He sets impossible standards for us all.”

He seemed pleased with himself, the young officer, with his mock formal speech, his polished leather boots, tailored blue tunic with embossed airman’s wings catching the

eye. His eyes were pinkish with a long afternoon’s drinking. He and the two men with him had arrived earlier, and for a long while, they had stood quietly at the bar while the moisture dripped from their rain capes; their caps still on, silent over their 57

drinks as they waited for the warm liquor to relax a chill that never seemed to leave. The cold spring rain still billowed in sheets against the gilt lettering on the long glass window in front of the them as outside the young girls hurried along the wet boulevard in their hobble skirts, anxious hands clinging to their hats, hurrying to be out of the rain, hesitant of the puddles and the splashing taxis.

Early that morning they had commandeered a staff car at the military airdrome near Paris where they had flown in, requisitioning the driver and consuming his supply of vin ordinaire as the vehicle splashed rumpsprung over the muddy roads toward Paris, the rain slashing through the Isinglass side curtains.

They had raced the weather in right after dawn from their forward base in Flanders, their ancient twoseaters plunging and bouncing through the gray sky, running ahead of a front that meteorological reports predicted would bring a solid three days of rain and overcast.

The young captain had seen the two young women in the lounge area and, after speaking briefly with the waiter, had approached, sweeping his damp red and blue kepi across his chest

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as he bowed slightly. They smiled up at his awkward gallantry.

“Actually, he understood you perfectly,” he confessed. “I just wanted an excuse to meet you. He’s seeing to your order now.”

“And, of course you’re an American,” the younger girl said, not really surprised. “Are all of you?” she asked, nodding toward his companions over at the bar. “But you have on French uniforms.”

“A subterfuge,” the officer replied. “If I may say,” resuming his previous manner while looking at them both, “may I say that you’ve made an excellent choice in restaurants, but rather less so in seating.”

Tongue loosened by the afternoon of drinking, he plunged ahead: “You’re in the bar, our home away from home, but it’s no place for delicate ladies, especially with rowdy aeronauts on the loose. If you will excuse me for suggesting this without a proper introduction, the dining room is right in the back there, and we’ve just ourselves decided on dinner. Please, you must join us.

“It’s not Maxim’s of course -- the General Staff goes there -- but they allow us certain latitude here,” he continued. “Besides,” he

added, “it’s been so long since we’ve talked with girls from home. There’s not that many in Paris these days.”

The two women looked at each other for a brief moment, an unspoken decision made, and then the oldest slid back her chair and gathered her belongings. They rose quickly and followed the officer down past the gleaming oak bar to where his two comrades waited, rain capes flung carelessly over the polished brass rail in the window. They all stood for a moment, reflected in the bar mirror, the faces of the three young officers permanently ruddy above their high uniform collars from endless hours flying in all weather, the women blonde and fresh against the dark wood paneling. The older woman was taller, almost the same height as the men.

Her brownish blonde hair was grown long, tucked caringly up in a bun under her hat in the fashion of the day. There was a boyish air about her slim figure in her dark jacket and long skirt.

A large silver watchcase on an ornate chain peered from her jacket pocket over her full white ruffled shirtfront. The other woman was shorter, well formed in her stylish gray hobble skirt. She had

blonde fluffy hair, a small nose, huge brown eyes and a ready smile, revealing perfect white teeth. Both women were pleased and excited with the daring of it, the attention from the men, the uniforms, by the liberating mystique and romantic foreignness of Paris itself.

“Permit me to introduce Le Duc d’Orleans,” the captain addressed the women ceremoniously, returning to his faux courtly style. “And, you no doubt will recognize Le Dauphin from his court portraits.” The other two men bowed deeply. Each wore a polished leather Sam Browne belt crossing his breast, a single row of colored service ribbons beneath his pilot’s wings.

They leaned back against the bar self-consciously, as if being photographed; one hand tucked casually into their breeches pocket, the other held carelessly at waist level, wrist up, cigarette poised between the first and second fingers.

They had removed their kepis for the women, and their hair was cut short and parted in the middle.

Beneath the light chatter they looked deeply tired, the youngest with dark circles under his eyes. Now the arrival of the women seemed to revive their spirits, giving them an air of

eagerness, like young pups.

It was apparent that, despite their attempt at sang-froid, the two were anxious for talk of home.

“Champagne, Maurice, and the large banquet in the corner, s’il vous plait,” the captain requested.

The group walked cheerily into the dining room and settled in, the women removing their sodden straw boaters, patting down their damp hair, their faces flushed with adventure. The young men glanced at the menus; more intent on studying the two women in barely concealed reconnoiters.

“I’m Alice,” the short blonde girl replied to the introductions, blushing at her words, a boldness that the war seemed to have sparked in the young.

“Alex here,” added the other.

“We’ve only just arrived in Paris,” the younger woman continued excitedly. “We’re nursing volunteers. A philanthropic agency at home sponsored us.

We’re going to work at the American Hospital in Neuilly. Do you know it? “ ‘Surely not just two of you, for all the wounded?” the Dauphin cried in mock concern, throwing his hands up dramatically to his temples.

“Oh no, no,” the young one gasped in return, fingers darting to her red lips. “There’s a whole bunch of us over, all from the east. It’s just that no one wanted to come out in the rain tonight, and there’s a reception at the embassy.

But I talked Alex into coming out. I couldn’t wait to see Paris. A little of it anyway. Despite the weather.”

The restaurant was old, and quite famous by the standards of the day.

Glass chandeliers cast a softening glow over red velvet wall drapes, subduing the gleam of glassware and the rich white tablecloths.

Because of the war’s depletion of France’s young men, the waiters were aged, but abundant, stiffly moving, officious in their short black jackets and starched white shirts.

As if summoned by some elegant bugle call, parties of officers, accompanied by various women, began to fill the tables. A group of Americans arrived noisily, posing self-importantly in their new khaki uniforms before allowing themselves to be seated. After observing the group in the corner booth for some minutes, two of them left their seats and angled between the tables to stop in front of the American

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girls. The older of the two men, a major in the new American Air Service addressed the group: “Excusez-nous, messieurs. Ladies. I saw you earlier today at the embassy with the other nurses. You’ll need escort back there to the reception . . . say,” he interrupted himself, glancing around the table. “you men are American, right? Lafayette Escadrille,” he observed, nodding selfcongratulatorily.

“Well, the Frogs and the Limeys won’t be needed any longer – now that the Yanks are here to take over,” he boasted, nodding to his companion.

We’ll pull their fat out of the fire, right enough, We don’t need them, we’ll have it won by the end of ’17, right boys?”

The tall captain rose to his feet with a faint smile, inclining his head slightly toward the American officers: “May I have the honor to present my colleagues: Captain Guynemer, Lieutenant Nungesser. He gestured with his napkin toward his two companions who also arose slightly and faintly bowed in tandem.

“Very funny,” the American major replied.

“Please. We are incognito,” the Dauphin giggled.

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“A bunch of wise acres,” the officer snarled, his face reddening. “Well, it might interest you birds to know that we’ve come over to take charge of training for the American Air Service. You’ll be transferred into the U.S. Army for proper training.

I’ll be looking for you.”

“I’ll be the one on your tail, you prick,” the captain replied over gasps from the women.

“That is, if you can fly,” he added. The major flushed violently.

“Maurice,” the captain called to the waiter in French, “these foreigners are making deviant inquiries regarding the musicians.”

“Filthy Boyars,” the Dauphin giggled as the two American officers returned to their table, startled by the fierceness of the language. “I’ll have them beheaded.”

“Now, majesty, you promised,” the captain said, settling back onto the banquet. “No head chopping. You remember what happened to your family.”

“That damn guillotine!” the Dauphin muttered.

The older nurse interrupted: “that’s what those wings are, on your uniforms – Lafayette Escadrille!”

“Why, you boys are all the rage at home,” the young girl exclaimed. “You know, in the rotogravures.

Everyone’s talking about you.”

“Who are those others you mentioned?” the older woman asked.

“French air aces,” Le Duc replied. “Great flyers.

They brought us here the first time. In the early days, Nungesser would drink champagne all night and take off on patrol in his Nieuport at dawn, still in evening dress.”

“Nungesser has 35 kills so far. Guynemer, even more,” the other lieutenant added.

The captain signaled the hovering waiters for champagne to be poured.

They seemed to be positioned as much for service to the flyers as for the protection of the other patrons. A small octogenarian orchestra creaked unpatriotically into Mozart, struggling to be audible over the drone and clatter of the diners.

“You’re not really a Duke, are you,” inquired the younger woman, “and you’re not any heir to the throne either, or whatever he called you.”

The others smiled at her indulgently.

“Actually, I’m from Boston,” replied Le Duc. “I’m Freddy. “Le Dauphin

here is from Philadelphia.

Albert by name,” adding socially prominent family names to the introductions.

“We’ve been over here since 1915, right after our junior year at Harvard.”

“Yes,” Albert interjected, “we were afraid the war would be over before we got into it. Then we spent the next year learning to fly, and training, before we even heard a shot fired in anger.”

“And, Le Comte de Paris?” the older girl asked, nodding toward the captain, who was standing to the side, once more conferring animatedly with the waiter: “Use the Spode, Maurice, we have company.”

“It amuses him to confer titles.”

“That would explain his language,” she observed.

“Beg pardon?”

“His royal blood allows him certain liberties of vocabulary in mixed company, especially during wartime,” she explained.

“Not that I approve.” * * * * * Later that night, the two sat squeezed into a corner amid the wood paneling and layered smoke of the New York Bar, on the Rue Daunou, between the Avenue de la Opera and the Rue de la Paix. The

noise in the downstairs room was deafening.

Shouts and explosions of curses in French and English, interspersed with volleys of sudden laughter, cannonaded off the dark walls of the tightly congested area. A piano in the corner pounded out ragtime while a mixture of American and French pilots from various Armee de Aire squadrons, along with British flyers from the Royal Flying Corps, crowded together in the sweaty tumult “You really wanted my young friend, didn’t you?” the woman asked him.

“What I wanted,” the captain replied, surprised by her candor, “was to show you the Chatham Bar, where we all go. But you saw how it was crammed with people, even with the rain. I still don’t know how the others were able to push their way in there. Anyway, this place is our next favorite, and it’s close by. It’s actually owned by an American, a jockey who supposedly fixed the English Derby.

He had the entire premises shipped here from New York. George M. Cohan wrote a Broadway show about him: ‘Little Johnny Jones.’ Before your time, I’m sure.”

“What? The bar?

When?”

“Yes. Ought four.”

“What, the bar?

“No, the show.”

“I don’t recall it,” she said, annoyed at the distraction. “Anyway, I was talking about Alice.”

“Ah, she’s young and very cute, yes,” he replied, shaking his head ruefully at this one’s persistence.

“And her naïveté is charming, of course. But not her questions. Albert needs someone like that right now – for her excitement of life. He’s my wingman, you know. Good lad.”

“But I ask questions,” she smiled, knifing back to her main point.

“Yours are better.”

“Alex is short for?”

“Alexandria.”

“Ah, the Russian Czarina.”

“I hope you’re not Mr. Rasputin.”

“We’re not allowed beards.”

The two sat quietly amid the din, sipping their cognac. He watched her hands curved around the snifter. They were strong, and slightly tanned. Her nails were well cared for, and she wore a family crested signet ring on a little finger. Her hands seemed to have magnetic qualities, drawing his closer, conveying an energy that

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made his want to spark the gap and leap across of their own volition to clasp hers.

He looked at his own hands, cracked and roughened; a crescent of grease still jammed under one nail. He slid them under the table.

“Do you have a name,” she asked finally.

“Outside of court circles, I mean.”

“Lawrence.”

He looked at her carefully while she thought about the name.

Not Larry?”

“Lawrence. Larry is for salesmen.”

“How old are you, Miss Alex,” he asked, already stirred by the sound of her name. “If I may be permitted an ungentlemanly question,” he added quickly.

“Well, Monsieur Le Duc, I suppose droit du seigneur commands a reply: twenty-one. And you?”

“The same,” he grinned.

“Really? When’s your birthday?” she asked.

“September 15.”

“Isn’t that marvelous!

Mine’s the day before. I’m older,” she said.”

“Capital! Say, you could have seen ‘Little Johnny Jones.”

“Well, I didn’t!” she said. Then, “you look

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much older. Around the eyes, I mean.”

“Dissolution.”

“I have no doubt.”

“Will you be in trouble for breaking curfew or anything?” he asked.

“My mother’s cousin is related somehow to the American ambassador here.”

“Oh, I see.”

“Actually, she’s his sister.”

“Uh-huh! Well. One of my relatives wrote Irish Eyes Are Smiling.”

“That is impressive,” she smiled. “Now I have a question.”

“Quel surprise!”

“Why did you join? It wasn’t our war until recently. April, just.”

He sat for some moments, the blue tobacco smoke in the airless room burning his eyes. His hands began an independent flanking movement toward hers, but were recalled, unsure of their reception. “A good question,” he replied, “one that I ask myself – often.

Easy to answer, harder to explain.”

“Try,” she prompted.

“It was a simple choice for the other two.

Defending this ancient culture. They’re from good families, fine schools, close ties to France. They feel at home here, spent summers here. More than

the usual Grand Tour, obviously. They’ve spoken the language since childhood. They felt compelled to come. They have an affinity. They’re just boys really. ” “And you?”

“Well, not for their high-minded reasons, certainly,” he said, choosing to reply to the previous question.

“It’s almost embarrassing to say. For adventure, I guess. I had had some flying lessons, out on Long Island. I worked on a magazine, played ice hockey in the evenings with a ‘gentleman’s’ team, but I wasn’t a real gentleman, and it wasn’t enough.

Frankly, I was restless. I didn’t want to miss this.”

He toyed with his glass, glanced over at a group of British airmen shouting drunkenly at one another, then continued.’

“I came to England, where my grandfather was from, in 1915, with letters of introduction to a Guards regiment. I told the recruiting sergeant-major that I really wanted to fly.

He said that after some time in the trenches, I might request transfer over to the Royal Flying Corps.

So I thanked him, left Horse Guards and went over to the RFC. And they said that if I were accepted,

I would start as an observer in a thing called a ‘gun bus.’

Do you know what that is?”

He seemed almost embarrassed to explain.

“Please.”

“It’s a thing called a Vickers two-seater, a pusher, the engine’s in the rear. The observer rides in the nose where there is a single machine gun mounted on a ring. The pilot is directly behind him.

When the Boche attacks, the gunner stands up and returns fire, while the pilot pilots. When Fritz attacks from the side or to the rear, the gunner climbs out of the bloody tub and stands on its rim while he bangs away, making sure not to hit the wings or anything important. Like the pilot.”

“My God!” “Exactly! I wanted adventure – not lunacy -some control at least over my actions. Only the British would dream up something like that. All mad.” He shook his head slowly, looking over at the group of British airmen, now busy flinging cutlery at another booth.

“But suppose they come from directly behind you? What do you call them, -- the Germans?”

“Boche, or Huns, anyway; shoot the pilot and then the propeller; I don’t know. Not many choices.

You’re probably dead

anyway. As someone said, ‘one hopes the Boche are gentlemen enough not to attack from there.’”

“My God.” “You already said that.”

“The upshot was that I came over here to France, where I found they really needed flyers. So I joined up, and later I ran into these two noblemen, whom I’d known in college.

“So you went to Harvard as well.”

“Scholarship boy.”

“What sort of thing do you fly?” she asked.

“Right now the Nieuport 26. A nice machine, but one that tends to lose the fabric off the upper wing in a steep dive.

I try to avoid them. ” “Do you have many – what did the Dauphin call them – kills?”

“Ah. Some.” He waved off an approaching party of scruffy American volunteer ambulance drivers advancing upon them, glazed eyes fixed keenly on his companion.

Rejected, they flung boozy deprecations over their shoulders as they swerved back up the crowded steps to the upstairs bar.

“You don’t want to talk about it?” she continued.

“It’s a rotten way for anyone to die.”

“Then why do it?” she pressed, staring at him with deeply intense blue eyes.

“Because the trenches are worse. Also, I get to Paris.”

She took a large, round, old-fashioned railwayman’s watch on a silver chain from the pocket of her short jacket, flipped open its embossed case and observed the hour.

“We should go. I hope the Dauphin returns Alice in time.”

“I’m sure he will.

Droit du seigneur also brings responsibility. Right now he needs something immediate to live for.

They lost a comrade yesterday, and reality is pressing in on them.

They’re up against very good pilots – the Boche still are – most of the time in superior machines.

Sometimes levity and drunkenness are not enough to keep the darkness out; a smile and a soft voice are better.”

“Have lunch with me tomorrow,” he said suddenly.

“Is that a royal prescript?”

“Certainement.”

She shook her head.

“I’m not sure. Suppose I’m on duty?”

“I’ll arrive in fake bandages, calling your name. Piteously.”

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“I have no doubt you would. Still, it’s an American hospital, and you’re in French uniform.

I’d have no choice but to turn you away.”

“I have no doubt of that either,” he smiled at her. “In which case, I’ll arrive in full fig, and demand you join my royal entourage as a gesture to Franco-American relations.”

“It’s particular Americans having particular relations I worry about,” she replied, then: “Oh jingo,” she blurted in embarrassment, “now you’re going to think I’m fast, talking that way.”

“Not a bit of it,” he lied a bit while avoiding her gaze. “We’ll meet at Fouchards. They’ll tell you where it is. The store will pack us a hamper and we’ll picnic at the gardens near the Louvre, by the pond.

The children still sail the boats there, even with the war.”

“But the rain!”

“Christ! -- Oh! Pardon me.”

“A bit late to worry about your language,” she said, looking at him sharply.

“Of course, the rain,” he said, careless of the rebuke. “I’d forgotten. At the front we love it.

64

Usually means no hops.

Operations.”

“Yes, the rain,” he repeated. “Okeh, I’ll fetch you at the hospital tomorrow at four, precisely.

No Fouchards, we will go directly to the Chatham.

Mark it on that turnip of yours. Four p.m.”

“It belonged to my father,” she said, smiling at him across the cluttered table, as she snapped the watch case shut. His hand twitched toward hers.

“I’m wondering,” she inquired, “should I take you seriously when you start these royal flights of fantasy?”

“Not for a minute,” he smiled at her.

“It makes you sound sometimes like a pompous jerk, when you speechify that way. If you don’t mind my saying so,” she continued.

“Well,” he replied, pulling on a sad face. “I do it to hide my real character.”

“Which is?”

“A pompous jerk.”

In the corner, a slim American with a YMCA armband on his olive-drab uniform clambered atop the piano and began singing in a clear sweet tenor a ballad from the previous century:

Just a song at twilight when the lights are low, And the flick-‘ring shadows softly come and go.

The crowded room quieted fitfully as the piano player picked up the melody. One by one they turned to listen to the pure young voice over the crash and thump of activity upstairs:

Tho’ the heart be weary, sad the day and long, Still to us at twilight comes Love’s old song The girl looked at him and whispered, “C’mon sport, time to hit the trail.”

She rose and touched his arm, then took his hand in hers and moved ahead of him through the silent crowd. Her hand was warm and strong, as he knew it would be. He had the oddest feeling of being safe back home. They stopped at the foot of the stairs and looked back for a moment, listening.

“I have to be on time for work tomorrow,” she said softly into his ear.

“The first day, you know.”

Still hand in hand, the couple turned up the steps, as the voice followed them:

Comes Love’s old sweet song.

Natural Traveler MagazineÂŽ is a cultural quarterly, published each year as Winter, Spring, Summer, Autumn issues in January, April, July and October.

Wells Falls, Ithica, New York Photo by Annie Cappeller