Popsie

There are several snapshots in our family collection that, because of the number of unusual faces depicted (wedding guests and few familiar ones) have caused me to pause and to begin to dwell on one particular individual in them. Some of the images are still glossy after more than six decades and those of a matte finish are in equally fairly good shape as well. The person in mind was my maternal uncle's first wife's father. His name was Johann and he was a strapping, German born man with powerful arms, hands and a quiet way about him. I never knew what he did for a living but the jobs of stevedore, steamfitter and longshoreman all come to mind in connection with him. He was a member of the Freikorps I learned in recent years. They were bands of German war veterans who, after the shock of the surrender of Germany in World War I, groped for some meaning in their newly forced retirements since for many, their careers as soldiers were the only ones they knew or loved. The increasingly violent social upheavals at the time soon revived a sense of purpose and helped make them critical elements in the battles against and eventual defeat of Communist forces in 1919.                                                        

Born about sixty years before me, my interactions with him were brief and necessarily insubstantial, yet my young mind apprehended a certain sense of who he was and even his character. There was not just brawn or an  intimidating presence perceived by this grade schooler. I understood, despite my tender years, that here was a person, another adult who was not frightening, but accepting and clearly another member of that tribe of adults who nourished me in many ways with patience and forbearance for a child's ways.

When I had reached the age of reason, seven years and four months to be exact, Johan died of a massive heart attack. We were informed by his daughter and widow that he had witnessed a rather horrific automobile accident while driving. In an era long before the invention of cellular telephones he had dutifully driven to a nearby police station to report the incident. While relating the events he suddenly collapsed. It was one of the first times that I had encountered death, however indirectly. The same day, our neighbor diagonally across the street from our house was also a witness to an automobile accident directly in front of his doorstep. His pet dog had scampered into the street with wickedly precise timing and was struck forcefully and fatally. Fred, our neighbor, held the animal in his arms as it died. When I related this story to him at his father's wake nearly fifty years later, he was incredulous that anyone but a member of his family would remember such a long ago event. It's often that way. My long term memory is, at least up to the present, rather intact and when it involves a life or death incident my ability to recall the travails of others has remained on the whole, unfailing, as the facts remain somehow indelibly inscribed. I'd like to imagine that my good memory is somehow entwined with a compassionate nature, but the truth may simply be that remembrance, for me, has continued to be a fairly sharp tool in my "kit" of cognition with no special moral component. A life less than filled with numerous events, changes and tumult has probably helped me to retain memories of the milestones that most others delete or consign to forgetfulness over time. And yet, what  I continue to be convinced about is that there is something reverential about remembrance.

But returning to the subject of Popsie (this was Johann's other name, affectionately given, no doubt, by his wife and/or daughter), there is also something comforting about his memory. I knew him for only five of the first seven years of my life and so his life for me, is a quite circumscribed tale tied to my essentially happy childhood, immutable and very manageable (like a baseball card I have coincidentally owned since the year of his death encased in a sleeve of lucite: special, safe, historical and an inextricable part of me). The very few other stories about him were told to me by my parents. His exceptional physical strength was demonstrated routinely when he bowled near his Bronx apartment in the days before automatic pin machines were universal. Popsie's ball's velocity caused the pins to seem to explode and the pin boys on duty were ever vigilant when this large man menacingly approached the lane. The targets of Johann's competitive strivings that became flying missiles of wood were truly frightening, I was told. One of our photos however, tells of his humorous side while reinforcing the sense of the man's massiveness. He is relaxing in our kitchen on the occasion of my grandparents' golden wedding anniversary and three of the "dead soldiers", i.e. two champagne bottles and a can of Ballantine's beer are goofily tucked in his waistband, bracketed by his suspenders and resting on his ample belly. His gregarious and convivial ways were to be repeated in my later experences through the years with other German-American friends and neighbors and they call to mind a scene in a 1958 film "The Young Lions." The scene was that of the great Marlon Brando and Parley Baer, the well known character actor of the '50s and '60s. Their characters are Wehrmacht soldiers in France after D-Day and they are old friends who haven't seen each other since earlier in the war and during much better times. As Baer's character goes deeper into the evening as well as his cups, and after their French female companions have retired to another room, he begins to share some of what's in his heart with his equally psychically wounded companion. The conviviality, the humanity and the insights expressed in Baer's performance are as memorable as any of Brando's scenes. The weariness of war and its utter waste are encapsulated by Parley with his sleepy, drunken advice to Brando's girl when they prepare to leave: "Take good care of him because he is the best of the best." Baer says this while gently tousling Brando's hair with a special affection that only men who have shared the unspeakable horrors of their profession can understand or express.

Teutonic men of course, have no monopoly on camaraderie. Neither are they the sole perpetrators of the malevolence attributed to them by mass culture's portrayals since the first world war. But they are good examples of the lot that we all share: that of thoroughly human beings, alternately happy, sad, afraid, defiant, overweeningly proud, pathetically humble and terribly mortal. We do well to see that person under the uniform, the masks of power, artifice, indifference, hauteur, calculation or any of the other many poses we all struggle to present to the world that is not our home. Whether a Popsie, understanding the assimilation processes of his life, or any other pilgrim along the path of this journey, the road is long, hard and the temptation to dehumanize another is always there. Yet the choice to understand is there as well and Popsie's last decision in life was to try to help as best he could. It was a fine example for a small boy to learn from so very long ago.