Audace In Aurora

My uncle Audace (pronounced, accent on the second syllable, "Ow-dah-chay" in Italian) was born in Manhattan and celebrated his twenty fifth birthday while in the Fitzsimons Army Hospital in Aurora, Colorado, ninety five years ago yesterday and seventy years ago yesterday, respectively.  My grandfather named him for his courage or rather for his "audacity" in daring to live after coming into the world on what was one of the hottest days in New York city up until that time (1917). Placed outside on the fire escape of the tenement building where the family lived, the infant was apparently stillborn and attempts to revive him were initially not successful.  No doubt, Grandpa's temper, hotter than the thermometer, persuaded the midwife in attendance to further bend every effort to get little Audace to breathe. Breathe he did eventually and the little baby was deemed to have provided the greater part of the moxie needed to fight and win the battle for life.

Fast forward twenty five years, beyond a happy childhood, the early acquisition of a lifelong nickname, "Chris" as in Christopher Columbus (dubbed by his impatient playmates who had learned quickly of their companion's Sicilian parentage), college, a first "adult" job and then a war in Europe that had had a certain inevitability about it, and that by 1941 had spread its dark clouds closer and closer towards North America.  Audace made the decision to enlist in the fall of that year and his choice of the army's cavalry was an interesting one.  His training in and near Ft. Reilly, Kansas in the fall and the winter of '41-'42 occurred during the fateful attack on Pear Harbor, H.T.  The future was now dramatically more exciting as well as uncertain, until the cold rains and the ubiquitous mud of one of the series of maneuvers he was involved in brought forth even more questions about events and their consequences in these perilous times. Chris had contracted pleurisy while laying too long in the aforementioned mud. That brought him to Aurora for treatment and recovery.

By the early summer of '42 he had already languished in the hospital for several months and his family clamored for the latest news.  Letter writing was not a dead art in the America of seven decades ago.  Chris was an obliging son and brother and his most recent missive even included a photograph in his army issued pajamas with a pleasant grin on his face that he was confident would allay any fears of his aging parents in New York.  Upon viewing his pallid complexion, sunken eyes and rail thin frame underneath the p.j.s, my grandmother commenced to cry fiercely and it was quickly decided that Audace's sister, my mother, would journey to Colorado to check on him and to cheer him on his birthday. She made the two and a half day trip on a Greyhound bus and it was long, arduous, dusty and an education of the first order.  Besides prairie dogs that were often the only signs of life as the omnibus crossed the Great Plains, there were the myriad of characters among her fellow passengers (these included an old evening school professor of hers who got on in Pittsburgh) who added a bit of color to the generally tedious trek of waiting, watching, reading, eating, and fitfully sleeping (while seated, of course).  America was a beehive of activity and the movement of troops, i.e. men and materiel crisscrossing the continent, as well as the numerous civilian travelers like my Mom (many if not most heading to or from vital "home front" war work), made for a momentous and pulsating atmosphere perhaps not matched since, especially if considering what was the unity of purpose and the quality of our nation's energy level then, like what Confucius (via the late Stanley Link's cartoon character Ching Chow) reminded his disciples of: "Remember to be thankful for our enemies; they have the power to bring out the greatest efforts in ourselves."

Well, Mom arrived in mid-July and Chris was overjoyed to have company, from home no less!  Both their spirits were buoyed and two weeks, like many a vacation of novelty, new sounds and rhythms as well as sightseeing shared with a loved one, made the time not "fly", but enriching while making it denser and hence actually lengthening the perception of it without it seeming to "drag." Chris was in a festive mood the whole time, not surprisingly. One imagines however, his desire to ride a horse in the pastoral Rockies, unlike his dutiful, brief and no doubt often unpleasant "saddle ups" under Uncle Sam's auspices, was a bit of an aching frustration given his condition and the relative abundance of equine opportunities as well as hitching posts (see my blog entry of July 22nd, inst.) of the Aurora and Denver area of mid century.  The U.S. cavalry was on the verge of disbanding in the summer of 1942 and Chris must have had mixed feelings about that military decision at this particular point in his life.  It was a harbinger of so many other changes that life after the war would usher in.  Curiously, a last "hurrah" for mounted soldiers in combat would occur only a few weeks later on the plains of western Russia.  Italian horsemen would initiate a cavalry charge against unsuspecting Soviet forces that would win the day (though certainly not the war).  Chris's future lay with a mechanized unit (in the Tanks Corps) and he would end the war, finding his natural niche, like his brother and my father, in Military Intelligence.

But what of Audace's partying ways during that tiny portion of the calendar of that long ago summer?  He understood well the brief life span of Mom's visit and that certainly heightened the gaiety and intensity of their time spent together.  There were no A.T.M.s in 1942. Chris's meager paycheck, like all G.I.'s was a typical source of humor during the war and Mom had neither credit card nor checkbook to supplement the resources in the little pocketbook that she clutched more than halfway across a continent.  They dined out nearly every day and bus trips to National Parks outside of the Denver area were not without some cost and even room rates at the Y.W.C.A. can add up after a fortnight.  When Mom set out on her return trip home, she had to carefully husband her funds, eating hamburgers for most of the way and arriving back in Woodside with less than a dollar in change to her name.

Finally, what can one say about the Aurora of then compared to the mightily shocked town after the events of two weeks ago?  There are no profound pronouncements or distinctions that I can rightfully offer.  Human nature is essentially unchanging.  However, a solitary monster is, intriguingly, arguably comprehended with greater fright than an entire globe consumed by a maelstrom organized on a grand scale by men of means and determination to destroy or maim entire societies.  Somehow, faith in the civilized world of one's family and friends and then fairly easily extended to larger units of church, local, state and finally, federal government entities, neutralized and even trumped the horror of a Tojo, a Hitler or a Mussolini.  A lower threshold of pain for the infliction of harm today, given all that we have gained, materially as a people (and conversely, all that we may or can lose because of acts of evil on any level) may be part of the cause of our malaise that seems to haunt this new century of incredible technological superhighways of communication contrasted with a psychic traffic jam that literacy and old fashioned disciplines of logic, clear thinking, because of their tremendous decline along with Faith, are seemingly incapable of breaking.

Kicking Down The Cobblestones (Again)

I was recently asked by someone (on a website dedicated to nostalgia that encourages discussions of childhood memories as they relate to my old neighborhood) about a schoolmate who I hadn't thought about in nearly forty years.  There was nothing spectacularly wonderful and certainly nothing tragic or obviously poignant about this person or of my memories of him. And yet, I now think about him often and of the brevity and the pleasure of our simple but very genuine friendship. I believe this relationship, in microcosm, may be the essence of what nostalgia is, or at least what it means to me.  As one may very well remember an unpleasant person or experience, decades after the psychic poison has long stopped intruding on one's sunnier worldview, so also a memory of kindnesses and congenialities, especially somehow, small and short lived ones, can also linger or be rekindled (in this case) in one's  musings of tender bygone times precisely because of their beauty, fragility, and in essence, an awareness of their finiteness. Exchanging good deeds, fun and simple fellowship (what befriending this person meant): expressed through the unabashed desire to like and to be liked, these remain safely in the archives of some of the secret treasures of my heart.                                                                                                  

This guy was not a senior like myself, when we met. In those high school days of intense studies mixed with carefree and youthful fun, the inevitable human inclination to rank, categorize and to not fraternize with "other" persons not within one's tribe, grade, clique, etc., much like the military or any class- conscious society (which society is not?), was a habit that I became aware of the need to break as an increased relaxation and a sense of freedom in my senior year began to take hold.  The open mindedness of that period perhaps enabled me to strike up a conversation with a lower classman and for me to allow that I could learn from, not only my peers, elders (parents and teachers), but from a younger student.  My then new buddy Herman, a junior, was smart, funny, sensitive and endured all the same travails of most adolescents searching and striving to get their adult "sea legs" in that special time of ugly (or in many cases, imagined ugly) duckling status, balancing on a tightrope and praying for acceptance and a loving place in the sun. Hermie, as we called him, was short statured, like myself, and suffered perhaps a tad more than most others with his appearance, in that acne was a particularly implacable foe that his infectious smirk and jocular manner nonetheless, erased from the consciousness of anyone who bothered to get to know him.  His impression of a comedic character (especially funny and ironic being portrayed by this Jewish adolescent friend of mine): the Wehrmacht soldier created by Arte Johnson of the then smash television show "Laugh-In", revealed a certain innocence of both him, our youthful world, and also even of our time, despite the mushrooming calamities of international strife like Vietnam's conflict, the other aspects of the ongoing Cold War, assassinations and the then nascent cultural wars, growing substance abuses and general social unrest.                                                                        

Our mutual interests, the simple but powerful comfort of an understanding pal and the relief from societal pressures that pure amiability provided, cause me to remember Hermie anew and fondly, with the years melting away while the irrepressible waves of his goodness crash up against the ramparts of forgetfulness and death. Can these walls be breached so that the forlorn and lonely might be bathed in such cleansing waters?  The battle rages and the less sentimental part of me soberly reminds the dreamer in me that no exceptions for the irretrievability of the past are possible: whether they be for the decency of a Hermie (or even the most heroic deed of a general or the martyrdom of a saint): at least not in the sense that we may relive perfectly the cheery smile of a boy-man not yet in his prime or enjoy his humor and sweetness in a precisely experienced kind of video replay or Lazarushian miracle of rebirth.  But why does memory persist and what is it teaching about the ghost of Hermie and the ghost that was me? I do not know what this very special longing for what was, may bring.  That is, is there a future for the past?  I believe that remembrance, as I have stated before, has some unbreakable connection to holiness, but am not sure what exactly that may be…only that the longing is indescribably and profoundly aching and beyond beauty in its potency to sadden and to stir feelings akin to rapture almost simultaneously.

Aurora: Boring Malice

The news from Colorado is sickening.  It is really news from the new America, this sliver of which happens to be part of the urban sprawl of Denver, a place as far removed from its once vestigial hitching posts (and other considerably less obscure signs of its frontier and Christian roots of a mere half century ago) as is New York, Chicago or any other 21st century American gotham.                      

On a certain level, one does become numb to such abominations after the likes of September 11, 2001, or most of the other perpetrations that were domestically grown: such as the then retch inducing events of Waco, Columbine, Oklahoma City, Binghamton, Virginia Tech. and many more.  These holocausts, expressions of demonic delight, all produce over time, a certain ennui, despite their authors' self-proclamations of spectacular and imaginarily majestically performed evil.  Much like pornographic images (and a constant stream of new ones) that the libidinally inflamed voyeur believes bring him joy and reliable promises of ecstatic paroxysyms of greater and greater lustful bliss, the mass murderer discovers (as does the observant member of the public) one way or another, that hell, as described in certain biblical passages, offers exquisitely delectable repasts that never satisfy.  These "diners" in fact, begin to rot away while they become the meal: the apple of the eye of the gluttonous sinner contains the "worm that dieth not" as maggots and all other kinds of spiritual vermin win the day over these gourmands who imagine their stomachs full and their bodies well nourished, when starvation is their true destiny, much like the bottle that  begins to suck from the alcoholic's gullet. Still, aside from the banality of these monstrous blowhards and homicidal dullards, another kind of boredom follows on the outgoing tide of their heinous deeds.  It comes from the armies of modern day hand wringers who sweep down upon the populace after these atrocities and with the help of mass media, manage to trivialize the sufferings of the victims and their families with regurgitations (ad nauseum, of course) of the events, the speculated upon motives of the killers, the so-called human interest interviews of the "near miss" survivors and most offensively, from the ritualistic attempts by our age's secularists to "heal" and find "closure" via hordes of psychologists, social workers and Grief Counsellors (an actual job title). Endless talking heads on radio and television working their jaws overtime with few new insights and often just using the occasion to push political or social agendas like gun control, community programs and to contrive more laws that imagine men at last taming other men with no transcendent parties involved or ancient verities of right and wrong given any weight or value: these are the greater terrorists in our midst.  Non-judgmental "dialogue", the endless chatter of relativism and suppositions that one can reach an accord with, and satisfactory understanding of, satanic and irrational forces: these predictable, uninteresting and  most importantly, false ideas about the problem of human existence and sin (or the refusal to recognize the latter's reality), remain outrageous and at the same time frightfully tedious elements that hold sway in much if not most of American society today.  A strange alliance, consciously or not, among the dastardly, soul-deadened sociopaths and inhuman automatons in our land together with the modern enablers who do not subscribe to the ancient caution: "have no truck with evil" is a more frightening reality than any carnage yet inflicted on our conflicted citizens.  For to think and act as if a reason for or the cause of the monstrous acts can be determined, its full meaning processed and thoroughly dissected and thereby mastered in such a way as to prevent any repetition, is as foolhardy as to think we can control the movements of the sun, moon and stars.  Sometimes there are no answers and the bogeyman must be accepted much like our forefathers on the frontier understood the reality of the literal wolf at their door or the threat of Indians, disease or famine.  "Hope for the best and prepare for the worst" remains as good a guiding precept as any for those who love civilization and are not burdened with the delusional creed of the perfectibility of men.