Sunday Break_September 30, 2018

Dear Friends. It's time for Sunday break. I'll let my bride-to-be-rest and I'll offer a different fare. Here's a piece from a collection of short stories I wrote about my Naval experiences. It is all as accurate as I can remember except that I combined a couple of separate incidences. I do pray you might enjoy this tale taking place December, 1968.

Home

By Jimmie von Tungeln

            Love Field, in Dallas, Texas was a lonely place at four o’clock in the morning but the man didn’t mind. He was home, or at least close to home. The terminal was nearly deserted when he awoke. The ticket counters had closed and only a few passengers, stranded as was he, waited for some flight at some time to take them somewhere to do something. He straightened the white Navy hat on his head and looked around. Most in the area were dozing. A mother held a baby to her chest and rocked softly, humming. A young couple leaned against one another and slept, holding hands. A bearded man studied a paperback book. “Just waiting,” the man thought, “waiting for something.”

            He smiled. He was the lucky one. He reached down pulled his sea bag closer, and then leaned back to continue his wait. The terminal gave forth a soft hum that seemed to sing peace. He was safe and it felt good.

            His wait had begun ten hours sooner. On deplaning from his flight into Dallas, he learned that service to his home state was sporadic, that the next flight with available seats wouldn’t leave for 24 hours. “No,” the agent had said, “you can’t check your bag now.” He’d have to wait, she had told him, until later to see how full the flight would be with regular passengers before they could gauge his chances of flying standby. No problem, he would wait and purchase a ticket later. Waiting was easy. He had made a career of it for the last 12 months. He could wait another day, or more if need be.

            Then, from a pay phone, he had called home with the news. Disappointment sounded in his mother’s voice but only slightly. Nothing could spoil her joy at hearing his voice at a place so nearly home. Then she had devised a plan. “Your brother is off work for a long weekend. What if we drove to Dallas and picked you up? We could have you home before that flight got here, and that’s if you even got a seat.”

            “That’s a lot of driving,” he said.

            “Son,” she said, “don’t you remember that morning you left?”

            “Yes,” he said. “I remember it well.”

            “Well then know that ever day since then, any time I heard the telephone ring I just drawed up in a knot. I thought December of 1968 wouldn’t never get here. It has, and ridin’ that far in a car to get my boy don’t mean shit to me.”

            He laughed. “You haven’t changed,” he said.

            “No,” she said. I ain’t changed and I hope you ain’t either.”

            “I haven’t,” he said. “Just don’t make me stand in line for a meal when I get home. Promise?”

            “I promise. Now you call back in 30 minutes and I’ll tell you if we worked it out and when we might get there. Then all you have to do is wait. Okay?”

            “Okay,” he said, and so he waited. Half an hour later, he made the second call. The deal was on. They discussed directions and estimated times. Then he returned the phone to its holder and returned to his seat.

Night came and the terminal emptied. He read a book had chosen from a bookstore in the California terminal with the odd-sounding title, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, written by a man named Thomas Wolfe. It kept him amused until sleep intervened. He slept until an unpleasant dream awakened him. “No,” he said to himself. “you’re back now.” Awake, he began to read again.

            He had seen the sun rise so many times during the last year that, even with the difference in time zones, he sensed its arrival. With it, the sounds of the terminal increased and the temperature rose as mechanical systems awoke and lumbered into action. He removed his heavy pea coat and laid it lengthwise on his sea bag. The terminal began to fill with people and the ticket counters opened one by one. The man creased the edge of a page and placed his book on his lap, taking a deep breath and exhaling. It had been more than two days now, including the trans-Pacific flight, but he still wasn’t used to a smell that wasn’t Vietnam. He was watching the bustle of the terminal when a voice to his right said, “Mind if I join you?”

            A man past middle age, with graying hair, said, “Name’s Bottoms, Seabees, World War Two. Always enjoy talking to a fellow swabbie.” He extended a hand.

            The other shook it. “Hinson,” he said. “Tim Hinson. Have a seat.”

            Bottoms was wearing a camelhair overcoat, which, when removed, revealed a well-tailored blue suit with vest and school tie. He draped the overcoat over a seat, placed a briefcase on it, and sat beside Hinson. “Trying to get to a meeting in San Antonio,” he said. “They say someday there will be more than one flight a day headed there.”

            Hinson nodded. “I’m trying to get home to Arkansas. Maybe they’ll have more than one flight every two days there by that time.”

            Bottoms laughed. “Maybe,” he said. “I see those ribbons. Guess you’ve been overseas. My neighbor’s son came back from his tour in Vietnam wearing some of the same ones. You have an extra one, though.” He pointed at a fourth ribbon.

            “It’s a unit citation,” he said. “For the Naval Support Activity.”

            “Did you support?”

            “I guarded those who supported,” Hinson said. “Naval security.”

            “What rating is that?”

            “No rating, just something they thought up and made me do for a year.”

            “The Navy can think up stuff,” can’t it?”

            “They can indeed,” Hinson said. “You said Seabees. Were you in construction before the war?”

            “Hell no,” Bottoms said. “I was a newspaper man. But I was too old for the other services. The Seabees took older men so that’s where a bunch of us ended up.”

            “Where did you serve?”

            “In the South Pacific,” Bottoms said. “So many little islands I can’t remember the name of them. How about you?”

            “Da Nang,” Hinson said, “in the I-Corps area.”

            “We never made it that far,” Bottoms said. “We were rebuilding at Okinawa when they dropped the bombs. It wasn’t long after that our outfit started shipping out for home.”

            “Bet those were happy days.”

            “Mostly,” Bottoms said, “except for one awful thing.”

            Hinson didn’t respond. Bottoms, however, wanted to continue. “They used to drink something called “torpedo juice,” he said. “The guys off the submarines made it from stuff they packed torpedoes in. It was the only way to get drunk on those islands sometimes.”

            Hinson listened. Bottoms stopped, composed himself, and continued. “We had this guy in our unit named Carl Luchenstein, a husband and father, who never drank nor smoked, just did his job and sent his pay home to his family. On the night after Japan signed the surrender papers, he agreed to take one drink to celebrate the end of the war.” He stopped.

            Hinson said nothing, simply waited for the unfolding. Bottoms continued. “Turns out that toward the end of the war, they changed the ingredients, and the torpedo juice came to be poisonous. Some say they did it on purpose, so it would make the sailors who drank it get sick—so the practice would stop.”

            “So this man got sick?”

            “No,” Bottoms said. “He was a small man and wasn’t used to alcohol in any form. Carl died, some 12 hours after the war ended.”

            Neither man spoke for a time. Then Bottoms brightened. “Hey,” he said, “I didn’t come over to bring you down. Let me tell you about one of the good times.”

            Hinson nodded, and Bottoms said, “We came back on a Cruiser and docked in San Francisco. Know what the folks there did? We all went out on deck coming through The Golden Gate, and over on the hills in Marin County, they had hauled big rocks in and painted them white. They spelled out ‘Welcome Home Boys’ in huge white letters. Sure made us feel good.”

            Bottoms immediately caught himself when Hinson lowered his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “They don’t do that for you guys, do they?”

            “No sir, they don’t,” Hinson said.

            “Was there any welcome home for you?”

            ‘No sir,” Hinson said. “There are war protestors that routinely meet the planes coming in from Vietnam, and the military doesn't want any ruckuses. They briefed us on how to get by them without incident.”

            Bottoms didn’t respond for a moment, the said, “Shitty deal, if you ask me.” The two sat in silence. Finally Bottoms spoke, “It’s a different world now.” He looked at his watch and said, “Hey, got to go. I think they’ve opened my ticket window. Godspeed.” He rose, shook Hinson’s hand again, picked up his overcoat and briefcase, and walked away.

            Hinson stared at his hands for a moment, and picked up his book. He had started to open it when a loud crash and commotion caught his attention. Across the terminal from where Hinson sat, a businessman’s briefcase flew across the terminal floor, scattering pages in all directions. He had collided with a runner who slammed into another man who then stumbled into a companion. People began to jump aside to avoid the runner. Hinson stared.

            The source of the disturbance was a small woman no more than five feet tall and weighing probably less than a hundred pounds. She wore a white blouse with a red scarf flowing behind it. A blue skirt rode up to reveal thin legs that seemed to churn like pistons. A loud shriek pierced the air as all eyes in the terminal turned toward her. Hinson broke into a smile. It was his mother. He stood and faced her.

            When she was three feet away, she leaped. He almost lost his balance as she slammed into him and draped her arms and legs around his body. “Son, son, son,” she cried. For nearly a moment, neither moved. Then she slowly slid from him and stood on solid ground. Tears had smeared makeup and her glasses had fogged. “Oh lord,” was all she said.

At that moment, a slight young man in his early twenties walked up. He looked Hinson over. “Hey brother,” he said. They shook hands.

From far away, in the corner of the terminal, a person began to clap, a sharp and lonely sound in the huge area. It was Bottoms. A person not far away joined, then another, and another. The entire terminal exploded with applause. It lasted several minutes filling the building and spreading beyond its walls into the morning. His mother turned and acknowledged the crowd. Hinson smiled and nodded. His brother studied the floor until the noise subsided and people returned to their own business.

She held his hand with one of hers and wiped away tears with the other. They looked at one another without speaking. He raised an arm and wiped each side of her face with a sleeve of his blouse. “You look great,” he said.

She smiled, raised her eyes to his, and found her voice. “Let’s go home, son,” she said.

No matter how hard I looked,
I couldn't see home.

My Redacted Life: Chapter One (Concluded)

This brief segment ends the first chapter of my “life after military duty.” That duty had afforded me ample time to ponder my future. Unfortunately, I was still at a loss, despite all that pondering, and I’m hell on pondering, just ask my wife.

Back then, though, I felt the way a modern shopper does when looking at shelves stocked with (it seems) hundreds of kinds of toothpaste. They say that having too many choices inhibits decision-making. I don’t know. I have observed that football team captains don’t tend to marry early in life, unless they have to, and many of them do.

As for me, I had always reckoned on returning to San Francisco upon my separation, maybe signing up as a merchant seaman. Or, I had a drafting job supposedly waiting with Babcock and Wilcox, one I had filled while facing the military draft. They were supposed to hire you back when you left the service, but I found out later that there were lots of ways companies had to screw veterans over. That in itself, screwing veterans over, would prove to be a national obsession, but I didn't know it yet.

There were also these things I had heard about in the Navy called “computers.” They sounded too complicated for the folks in my old SF neighborhood, but who knew? Maybe there was opportunity there. Besides, San Francisco was about the goddamdest, gut-busingest, goldardnest, fun-chasingest place in America to live, as long as you had a  job and a good, heavy, summer coat. The thought of returning there was a strong pull, particularly for one who had just served a two-years sentence in that hellhole of hatred and incivility known as Charleston, South Carolina.

Returning to “The City” seemed a logical choice. I had, after all, left my heart there. Or was it Bangkok? I couldn’t remember, but I was in “California or Bust” mode. I could almost smell the Eucalyptus trees and feel the bite of the early morning fog, not coming on “little cats’ feet” but like thundering herds of bison bounding down Haight Street from the wide, old Pacific. I figured on lighting out before too long. The pull of the West was too strong.

I hadn’t, though, counted on my Sainted Mother. Stay tuned.

Pre-Military pondering ...
San Francisco Beach 1967 ...
Notice the pack of Camels.

Growing Up Southern: February 4, 2018

We had a small stock pond on our place when I was growing up. It wasn’t as big as a city block. They dug it to get fill dirt for a Jr. high school. There wasn’t much to it—the pond that is—but square foot for square foot, it furnished about as much enjoyment as any site you could find anywhere.

There were fish in it. Fish galore: bream, sunfish, catfish, and, later, bass. We never fished it out, but oh lord did we try. There were snakes and turtles, as well. We only swam in it once, and that was when no one was watching, My mother told the story about how, when I could barely walk, I had seen some people swimming in a pool, and, I reckon I was impressed because, alerted by our family dog “Bob,” she caught me next morning “just a high-steppin’ toward the pond.”

My Sainted grandmother would laugh and talk about how she had taken me there a little later and showed me how to bait a hook and toss it out. She created a monster, I guess, for she said all I wanted to do thereafter was to go and “pish” some more. I don’t know if kids have that much fun with their grandmothers these days.

There are so many lessons one can learn from a small, postage-stamp, place like that. For one, the cork from a bottle of Garrett Snuff makes an ideal “bobber.” Bouncing it up and down is supposed to attract fish. And something that Della Nathaniel taught me, you must spit on your bait if you want to catch the really good ones. Of course, she dipped snuff, so her spit was much more potent and effective than mine.

She sought, once, to even the playing field by offering me a dip. I tied, but decided I’d rather not catch fish than live through that ordeal again. Bless her heart, she moved to Oakland California later and found equality of sorts, I’m sure. I’ll bet she missed that old pond, though, from time to time.

Sometimes, when I was older, and the Hester boys lived close by the pond, we’d start out on Friday after school and fish until Saturday afternoon. Then the mothers who lived nearby would come over with the “fixin’s” and fry our catch for the whole neighborhood.

I still recall the day my dad and I went out one Sunday morning and cut a nice gum tree that we dragged into the pond for a fish refuge. I think the hooks I lost therein outnumbered the fish I caught from it, but since Sunday was his only day off, it most wonderful that we spent the time doing it.

Today, the average teenager has a cell phone that probably cost more than my father paid for that little spot where the pond was. I’ll match memories with any of them, though.

Ever notice how things
get less fun as they
get more elaborate?

Morning Thoughts: January 19, 2018

There’s something we need in America. Forget statues of Confederate soldiers. They fought for slavery. The Abandoned Woman: she deserves a monument. That’s who deserves honor and glory.

Who do I mean? Let me give you a composite from my personal experiences over the years. The following is no single person. She is, though, as real as the computer on which I type. Everything I’m going to describe is true. It all just happened to different people I’ve known. Consider a woman’s story.

She didn’t attend college. Instead, she worked so her husband could. Or, perhaps she married straight out of high school to a promising young man and began raising the child they conceived together and she birthed. (Notice I didn’t say “his child.” That term makes me nauseated).

Things went well until after that first child. Then she changed. The change showed on a face beleaguered by the strains put on her by colic, colds, bad tempers, diarrhea, teething, accidents, or the many other trials of nurture that go unseen by husbands and friends.

Perhaps the change manifested itself by a weight gain. Maybe the “ten” her husband described her as, to his friends, while the two had courted slipped to an “eight.” Maybe she wasn’t as “hot to trot” as she had once been. Maybe she just got older.

Her husband changed too. He was becoming successful, a change he felt entitled him to the same marriage benefits as always. Besides, the more successful he became, the more the younger women at work admired him. His wife should as well, even as she washed his dirty underwear.

Then he met “Bambi” and everything changed. He hated to do it, but, dammit, Bambi was still a “ten,” maybe even better. One night his desires and disappointments collided and his wife and child were banished to a friend’s house. She found a cheap apartment for the two of them. Divorce followed.

What’s an abandoned wife to do? First a job. She still had skills, though they were rusty. She found a job typing and sued for child support. The judge, an old friend of the ex-husband’s boss, awarded an amount that was 21 dollars a month less than the cheapest child care center she could find. It cost her “ex” so much that he had to forego membership in a more prestigious duck club. He was kind enough to remind her of that often.

Once a month he would pick up his son for the weekend. It turns out that Bambi’s family owned horses. The son would come home after the weekend spent with his father and talk incessantly about riding horses and how much he looked forward to the next visitation. Oh, and why couldn’t they have a horse?

The “father-son ecstasy” would not persist. Soon, Dad and Bambi had their own child. It drew the attention. Then, the same weak moral standards that caused Dad to abandon his first family finally cost him his job. Both the visits and the child-support payments became “iffy.” In those days, there was little recourse from an all-male judicial system.

The woman just worked harder. Sometimes there was a second job that still allowed her care for the son. Maybe she attended night classes. Maybe she found herself in a better job, training men to fill the position just above hers. She thought of dating, but men wanted an unencumbered “ten” for serious involvements. Even if she were still “hot to trot,” men weren’t interested in long journeys, just short sprints around the track.

Why a monument to her? Just this: she survived, and that survival should be an inspiration to us all. Despite the abandonment, the privation, and the fact that she worked for sixty cents on the dollar compared to a male counterpart, she survived. It was a feat accomplished by a work ethic and a monumental determination that might be compared in some aspects to the strength of African-Americans during the Jim Crow era.

Yeah, I think she deserves a monument. After all, she didn’t start out on her own with a gift of a college education and a million dollars. She’s worth, though, a lot more than that.

Why do I preach about it? Because I’m as guilty as the next person, and maybe self-awareness is the first step toward redemption and reparation. Oh yes, and maybe I respect success produced from a strength that was forged from the heat of adversity more than I respect success by inheritance.

To Moms

Growing Up Southern: November 13, 2017

My Sainted Mother did have one disagreeable trait. At least it was to me. She was a strong believer in discipline, and punishment, a truly concomitant pairing if there ever was one, much dreaded by young boys in the rural South.

I resented it bigly, this requirement that all Southern boys labor under: that you have to “mind Mama” no matter what, and that sure and certain punishment follows failure to do so. I think it damaged my ability to concentrate. Something did. My wife, in typical “woman supports woman” mode, says that it’s the reason I’m not sleeping under a bridge today. Take your pick.

Whippings were the thing. Mother’s were without guile, nor were they fit for sociological study. It was transgression, apprehension, (often occurring with the aid of and older sister), trial, and immediate execution of sentence. There was no analysis, no appeal, no footnotes, and no dissenting opinions.

Punishment was even worse when Mother was the administrator. She even made you acquire your own tool of torture.

The place where we lived had an abundance of persimmon trees, known for their supple and indestructible limbs. Mother was nothing, if not prescient, so ofttimes she would make “pre-transgression” preparations if the upcoming event portended the appropriate level of exuberance.

“Go over yonder and cut me a switch,” she would say. “And it had better be a good one.”

Displaying a deficiency that has plagued me for a lifetime, i.e. the inability to connect dots of logic and understand the simplest elements of “cause and effect,” I invariably returned with a small, supple affair, believing in my heart that small size equated with less pain.

It was exactly what the hell she wanted. A diminutive woman, she favored the thin, limber models of her objets de torture. It’s this way, see. She had a musical bent, or at least a rhythmic propensity. The wiry, limber switch allowed her to add a verbal contrapuntal element to her beatings. I can still hear her, in my PTSD induced nightmares.

“I’m, (swish … whap) not (swish … whap) going (swish … whap) to (swish … whap) tell (swish … whap) you (swish … whap) again … ,” for as long as it took, some hour or so it seemed, fully to describe my transgressions and their repercussions. In the meantime, I would be voicing my earnest assurances that the beating thus far was fully sufficient to avert any repetition of the offense. “I’ll (swish … whap) tell (swish … whap) you (swish … whap) what’s (swish … whap) enough (swish … whap).”

Later, as I sulked and made mental plans to run away and live alone in the forest like a South Arkansas Tarzan, I would promise myself, that when I became a famous composer, following careers as a policeman and railroad engineer, that I would write a masterpiece using the “state-swish-whap” cadence as the musical motif for a work to be entitled “The Crazed Mama Sonata.”

I haven’t yet, and plans fade with each passing year.

Yesterday, I talked about the predilection for hyperbole among us Southerners. I no doubt demonstrated it today. We do believe that falsehood should be used for embellishing stories and not for self-aggrandizement. But, truth be known, Mable Josephine Harris von Tungeln was a sweet lady and beloved by family and friends alike. I worshiped the ground she walked on while she was on Earth.

It just didn’t pay to piss her off. That’s all.

The Harris sisters in the bloom of youth.
My métier de la justice is on the left.
Yeah. She looks harmless enough.

Survivors

Early morning thoughts while listening to the Brahms Violin Concerto in D Major.

I know it gets old to hear people drone on about the New Year and all, but it does make one think. I always remember going to the movies this time of year as a child and seeing the cartoon where the Baby New Year chased out the Old Man Past Year. I always felt sorry for the old man. On the other hand, I’ve probably stayed up, by choice, until midnight on New Year’s Eve maybe a dozen times in my life. Never saw much sense in it.

Sunday will mark the 44^th year since I reported to work (the day was a Monday in 1971) on my first real job after military service. It was with a planning firm and, since they didn’t really have an opening but took a chance on me, I took a chance on them—a job paying $400 per month, not really much even back then.

A year and a half later, when I met and married Brenda, I was making $900 per month, the equivalent of maybe $60,000 per year in today’s dollars. A few years later, I was a partner in the firm, not a major partner, but a partner nonetheless and my annual salary was the equivalent of close to $100,000 by today’s standards. I think it was a chance that paid off well.

It’s been an enlightening experience. I often think of the first secretary the firm hired after I arrived. The mother of a small child, she was kicked out on the street by her husband and “Bambi” at nine o’clock one night, child in hand. During the divorce proceedings, the (male) judge awarded her a child-support payment that was $12.00 per month less than her child-care cost. For that she tended, doctored, fed, and nurtured the child except for an occasional weekend when the “dad” would take him to ride horses at the farm of Bambi’s parents. That mother, our secretary, through no fault of her own, needed the help of her community and government. It never came, and this new batch of legislators seems hell-bent on making sure it never comes for her modern counterpoints. She, nevertheless, survived as did hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, like her. There should be a monument erected someday.

I owe the fact that we are financially independent to two presidents, I suppose—Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Reagan fouled the economy up for local governments almost beyond redemption, and, just as I started my own consulting firm, Clinton came into office. The subsequent financial boom was exacerbated for me because most cities were in such a state of disrepair that they were quite willing to use their new financial stability to pay someone to help update their planning system. It was a glorious eight years and coincided with my peak earning period. One can’t ask for much better than that.

I suppose we should also thank the current president Barack Obama. Although I now only work sporadically when I want to, our net worth has nearly doubled while he nurtured the economy from its almost total collapse. Life is good for us. I wish it could be for everyone.

We are lucky though, for we both have enjoyed good health. I’ve been sick enough to miss work only once since 1971. We’ve never faced the ordeal of some of our brothers and sisters who had to deal with an obscene, until now, system of providing health care. Blessed, we’ve been so blessed.

I will die happy if I am wrong, but I fear now that our country has begun its long slide into historical obscurity. If so, I’ll probably be able to watch it from the sidelines as they must deal with the minorities, the poor, women, and the immigrants before they come for the white, male, college graduates.

After all this time, I plan to pass on still harboring the belief that government be a force for good if used wisely, that religious institutions can be a force for evil if used poorly, and that the salvation of America may rest on the strength of our women.

 

Only a mother could teach a child goodness
from a heart that knows only misery.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

See also www.travelswithanalien.blogspot.com