Making the Bones -- A Christmas Meditation

© 2014 by John LaTorre

It is December, and as usual I am making “Ossi di Morte.” These little bone-shaped cookies come from southern Italy. Sources on the Internet inform me that they are traditionally made for the “Day of the Dead” in November, but my family has always regarded them as Christmas cookies, and I have followed suit.

They are not the easiest cookies to make. It's not the ingredients, which are simplicity itself: flour, eggs, confectioner's sugar, and baking powder. (Several recipes call for using just egg whites, and adding almonds, almond extract, or vanilla, but mine doesn't). The only thing I add to the family recipe is a teaspoon or two of water, which makes the dough easier to handle.

For this is where the difficulty comes in: to make them in the traditional way, you take a small handful of the dough, squeeze it into the approximate shape and size of a hot dog, and roll it out on an unfloured board, using only light pressure from the flat of your hand. Push too hard, and the roll crumbles. My Aunt Molly Guido, who taught me how to make these cookies, stressed this. “It's like petting a kitten,” she would say. “Light touch! Light touch!” Gradually, I got the hang of it.

Molly's name wasn't always Molly. When she was born, in 1914, she was christened Carmela LaTorre, after her mother's sister. She was the fourth child born to her parents, who had moved the family from Italy three years before. She had three older sisters, two born in Italy and one in the United States. Two boys and another girl would complete the family before the decade was out.

When the children entered school, they didn't know English. Perhaps to help with their assimilation into American culture, some were given non-Italian nicknames. Porzia became “Grace,” Carmela became “Molly,” Giuseppe became “Joe” and Vincenzo became, inexplicably, “Jimmy” (creating so much confusion in later years that he had it legally changed to “James”). Joe was my dad. None of the documents I'd ever seen ever referred to him as “Giuseppe,” only as “Joseph,” so perhaps that was his legal name from birth, but he was always called Giuseppe until he entered school. Only my aunts Anna, Antonia, and Angelina used the names they were given at birth, although the latter two preferred “Tony” or "Antoinette" and “Angie.”

I can picture Molly with her sisters, watching their mother make the “bones.” They would have talked in Italian – or more specifically, Barese, a dialect so different that my father had trouble speaking conventional Italian when he visited that country, although the farther south he traveled, the more familiar the language became. As I roll the dough down from the diameter of a hot dog to that of a Sharpie, I am wondering what my grandmother used for a metric, since she probably had never seen a Sharpie in her life. A finger's thickness? Which finger? Whose finger? It is too late to ask Molly, since she died years ago.

I roll the dough, I roll the dough.

As I form the dough, I am thinking about my ancestors. My brother Joe has just sent me a CD with hundreds of pictures on it, all from my late father's photograph albums. Some of the faces are familiar to me, although they look impossibly young. There are many pictures of my grandfather, and I recognize him instantly, although I have no direct memory of him, since he died the year after I was born. But all his children bear some resemblance to him. He is usually shown seated. And there are many of my grandmother, in various stages of her life, gardening and talking and holding grandchildren.

Other faces are strangers to me. Their pictures date from the turn of the last century, and they glare out at the camera as if it would bite them. I wish I knew who they were. I'm afraid that their identities will be forever lost, since my father seldom took the time to caption the pictures he kept. Most of these pictures are cracked and faded. For that matter, most of the memories I have of my relatives are also cracked and faded, and some of them, like the smells of our family's summer house on Otisco Lake and the feel of my mother's winter coat, are lost forever. My memories are now inaccurate and can no longer be trusted for veracity. I have idealized my past.

Out of the corner of my eye, I catch sight of our black cat Sable darting out of the room. Sable died three years ago. There are many ghosts walking tonight.

I roll the dough, I roll the dough.

I agonize whether to add a little more water to the batch. “Never add water,” Molly would say. “It makes the dough sticky.” Well, yes it does, but it also facilitates the shaping of the dough into a cylinder of ever diminishing thickness. I compromise by wetting my hands and then wiping them dry, hoping that the residual moisture will suffice to make the dough tractable. This is not the traditional way. There are all sorts of traditions wrapped up in the making of these cookies: beat the eggs for five minutes, let the cookies sit overnight for twelve hours (some recipes say twenty-four) before putting them in the oven, don't add water, bake at 325 degrees. What would happen if I beat the eggs for six minutes, and let the cookies sit out only eight hours, and baked them at 350? I don't know; I've never tried it. If I did, the magic might not work. Magic and tradition go hand in hand with this sort of things, commingled so tightly that they are impossible to separate.

I think all traditions are like that, at heart. As I work, my mind drifts to Christmas eves of past years, of midnight Masses in cold churches, of the Christmas music my parents played on their hi-fi or stereo. I am listening to some of that music right now. My father transferred most of his old Christmas records onto cassette tape, and my brother has transferred those tapes to CD. So I am listening not only to the music but to all the artifacts of that process: the pops of the record, the hiss of the tape, the unsteady “wow” of worn record changers and tape drives. If I listened to clean copies of those recordings, would they evoke the same nostalgia that I feel when I hear the flawed ones? Or would the magic not be there?

I roll the dough, I roll the dough.

On the CD my brother sent me, there are many pictures of my father as a vigorous young man, working in the camps of the Civilian Conservation Corps or sailing a canoe on the lakes around Syracuse. And there are pictures of my mother as a young woman, very glamorous. I see them on their wedding day, and in the first house they lived in as a couple. There are other photos of various aunts, uncles, and cousins on their wedding days. My brother's two weddings are pictured, but not mine. There are no pictures of my first wife at all. There are a few pictures of my present wife when she first visited Syracuse and New Port Richey in the mid-1990s, before we married. She had a chance to meet most of my aunts, uncles, and cousins on my father's side. Now all those aunts and uncles have passed away, along with my father and mother.

Many of my older cousins have also passed away now, and I find to my surprise that my cousins and my siblings and I have become the patriarchs and matriarchs of the family. I will mail a package of cookies to those who were closest to my father, to thank them for giving him so much support after he'd had his stroke. In a way, they were better children to him than I was, because they were closer, whereas I had to close my business down and travel the length of a continent to spend time with him for a week or two every season. It was they, not I, who saw to most of his daily needs, and for that I am grateful.

Finally the cookies are all formed and on the sheets, a hundred and twenty of them, waiting to stale for the requisite twelve hours. It has taken me three hours to get it all done, including the wash-up of the bowls. Every year, I think that this might be the last year I do this. It's a lot of trouble, after all. But it's still the best way I have for connecting to my family, and to my past, and to the ghosts who have gone on before. I am painfully aware now, as I never was when I was younger, that soon I will be part of that past; my own images and writings and perhaps a few guitars and mandolins will be all that survive me. My presence, like my family pictures, will crack and fade. Children unborn will look at those pictures and wonder who I might have been. I'm still trying to find that out myself. And that's a good thing, because it means that the journey isn't over yet.

Find a Penny, Pick It Up

©2014 by John LaTorre

I have been accused of overthinking things. I plead guilty.

For example, I had lunch a few weeks ago with my wife and some in-laws at a Chinese restaurant. My fortune cookie said: 

Simple? For anybody else, possibly. But not for me.

"Well,” I thought, “Neil deGrasse Tyson reminds me that the sun is a star. So should I go and wish upon that as soon as I go outside? Or should I accept the more common reference to stars as suns that are many, many light-years away, and wait until evening? And if I do, and end up wishing on the evening star, which isn't actually a star but the planet Venus, will my wish be null and void?" This is the sort of thing that worries me. Of course, most of the people I know are not at all worried about this sort of thing. Instead, they worry that I worry about this sort of thing.

I encountered a similar conundrum when I discovered a penny lying on the driveway in my back yard. Ordinarily, I would have just picked it up. There's a saying that goes: “Find a penny, pick it up, and all the day you'll have good luck.” I can always use a little luck. Even if I don't get any luck, at least I'll be one penny richer.

(This begs the question of whether picking up a penny is worthwhile anymore. The columnist Cecil Adams was asked about that once. He did some calculations, and reported in his column that, if it takes you five seconds to pick up a penny, you are paying yourself at the rate of $7.20 an hour. So it all comes down to how much you value your time. This is an important fact, as you will see.)

As usual, things got complicated once I tried to grasp the Whole Picture. The penny was lying there face-down. I was recently informed that the penny must be facing up if it is to give you any luck. If you don't see Abe, you must not pick it up. What you are supposed to do is turn it over for the next person to find, and that person will be rewarded for your efforts. That hardly seems fair now, does it?

This new wrinkle puts an entirely different slant on things. For one thing, it takes exactly the same amount of effort to reach down and turn over the penny as it does to pick it up and pocket it. Since half the pennies you encounter on the street can be expected to be tails up and therefore unpocketable, your hourly rate for picking up pennies drops to $3.60 an hour, making an unattractive wage even less attractive.

And there's another issue here. The penny was in my back yard. If I don't pick it up, but merely turn it over, who is going to pick it up? My wife? Not likely. My wife is not the kind of person who notices something like that; she takes little notice of anything smaller than a house-cat, unless it is moving. The guy who comes in once a week to cut the grass in the back yard? He missed it the last time he last cut the grass, and probably countless times before that. (Or maybe he prefers to work at a wage of over $3.60 an hour.) How many chances am I expected to give him before I declare the penny fair game for me?

I don't know when this heads-or-tails variation of “find a penny” sprang into existence. I never heard of it when I was growing up, but several people have assured me that it goes back at least to their childhoods. “This calls for more research,” I declared. I fired up the computer, but the Google results left me more confused than ever. I learned that there are regional variants. In the American south, it's said that if the penny is found heads-up, it goes in your pocket, but if it's found tails-up, it goes into your shoe. (If you are in the South and wear open-toed sandals, you may be in trouble.) In other places, it appears that not picking up the penny will bring you bad luck, regardless of whether it's heads or tails. Still other variations specify that you must give the penny away in order to receive the good luck. “Give the penny to a friend, and your luck will never end,” the incantation reads. So now other people are required in order for the magic to work. No wonder people these days are confused and stressed out.

I'm sure that this is the true reason why Canada and Australia and New Zealand have abolished the penny. There is some talk of discontinuing the penny here in the United States of America. It won't be soon enough for me. As for the argument from the penny-pushers that everything that costs ninety-nine cents now will cost a dollar, I think there's nothing to worry about. The only reason that prices end in ninety-nine cents is to make them appear cheaper. That won't change, so what is now $9.99 will not be re-priced at $10.00; it will be re-priced at $9.95. (It will also be twenty percent smaller, but that would have happened anyway.) This change seems to have already taken place in those countries that have abolished the penny. And their citizens are now blissfully free from the burden of picking up pennies, or not picking them up, or turning them over, or giving them away, or whatever inane variation happens to be holding sway in their neck of the woods. It remains to be seen whether the tradition will be transferred to some other coin of low value, like the nickel or whatever the hell they use over there. I surely hope not.

As for my penny in the back yard, I turned heads-up and left it there. After the lawn-mower guy failed to notice it yet again, I retrieved the penny and put it in my pocket with my other six pennies. And then I realized that I was supposed to pass the penny on to a friend. But which of the seven pennies was it? Does it matter? And is that luck-passing business only true in those areas where that variation is in effect? I would have taken all seven pennies out of my pocket and attempted to give them to friends, on the grounds that they were only pennies, after all. But I have come to know the look that crosses their faces when I do stuff like this. I told you how they worry about me.

So I guess I'll have to leave these pennies surreptitiously around the houses of my friends. So, guys, if you come across a penny in some unexpected place, you'll know where it came from. If I were an evil person, I would leave it tails-up and subject you to all my recent agonies, which you won't be able to avoid since, having read this far, you already know what the rules are. But I'm not, so I won't.

The Night The Birds Screamed

The Night The Birds Screamed

©2014 by John LaTorre

It was on a Friday evening that I heard a thousand birds screaming. Blinded by tear gas, they were screaming in pain and terror; their sightlessness prevented them from flying away, out of the toxic air. I could hear them, but I could not see them, because I was blind, too.

The place was somewhere in downtown Washington, D.C. I can't remember exactly where now. In fact, I wasn't sure where I was at the time I was gassed, although it must have been within a few blocks of Dupont Circle, in the north-west quadrant of the city. There used to be slaughterhouses there in the nineteenth century. Now it is a gentrified neighborhood, with boutiques and coffeehouses and comfortable old row houses. But on the night of November 14, 1969, it was not a good place to be.

The occasion was a massive protest against the Vietnam War, called the Moratorium March on Washington. The first Moratorium demonstration was a month before. It went peacefully enough, with no violence reported. Its success prompted a second, larger demonstration a month later. This time, people were expected to be coming in from all over the country. and its promoters had hopes that it would be as peaceful as the other demonstration. We hoped so, too.

By “we,” I mean the Langley Hill Friends Meeting, a Quaker congregation I was worshiping with at the time. Our meeting house was open to those who wanted a place to stay during the demonstrations, and the basement had been converted into a sort of dormitory. Several anti-war groups had made contact with us to arrange for space. That Friday night, I was on hand to make coffee and soup, and to offer whatever I could in the way of support.

When I arrived at the meeting house, I immediately noticed a tension in the air. Several people were crowded around a television set, which was reporting riots in downtown Washington. According to the news reports, some of the protesters had attacked policemen and the policemen responded with tear gas. “It looks like Chicago all over again,” one person said. It might be worth explaining that he was referring to the demonstrations that were attacked by policemen at the Democratic national convention the year before, an action later referred to as a “police riot” by those who were there.

The phone rang and rang and rang. We were getting calls from some of the groups whom we were to host. They had been separated from their parties and were lost in an unfamiliar city. We decided to drive some of us who were somewhat familiar with the area into the city, where we would meet up with these groups and guide them home somehow. I was assigned to a group who said they had a van, but whose driver didn't know the area. I was given the name of an intersection to report to.

When we got there, the car I was riding in couldn't approach the corner where I was to find my group. The streets had been blocked off to traffic. They let me out as close as they could, and I proceeded on foot. When I got there, there was no van. There were only hordes of people running toward me. They were escaping a tear gas barrage a block away. When they got to my location, the cops came and fired more tear gas canisters at us. It appeared that the cops had decided that the best way to control the crowd was to keep it moving and disorganized, and the best way to do that was to fire tear gas at anything that looked like a massing crowd. It was not the first time the location had been teargassed, I found out later; the first barrage had driven away the people I was supposed to rescue, and traffic barriers prevented them from returning once the gas had dispersed.

Well, I got gassed. I followed the crowd to another intersection, and got gassed again. That was when I heard the birds screaming. By that time I was pretty much blind myself, so I was aware only of the vague shapes of trees and cars and people and such. I realized that the birds were in as much pain as I was, but their terror was compounded by the fact that they couldn't escape it. Because they were blind, they couldn't fly. They could only cling to whatever perches they had found and scream in pain and fear and frustration. There were thousands of them. This was not birdsong, but an unrelenting howl of noise that waxed and waned as the clouds of tear gas drifted to and fro. I could no more escape that howl than they could escape their pain. Years later, I would hear the drone of cicadas as they emerged from their sleep. This noise was like that, but multiplied to almost deafening levels.

I'm not sure how long I staggered around the streets of Washington listening to that ghastly wail. It might have been an hour, maybe two. Somehow I made my way to a place where there wasn't much tear gas. Somebody put his hand on my shoulder, and asked me, “Are you all right?”

“I can't see,” I replied.

“Do you know the area?”

“I don't even know where I am right now, except that it's somewhere downtown. But, yes, I'm from around here, more or less.”

“Maybe you can help us. We have a problem.”

They turned out to be a busload of people who had come from Ohio. They had made arrangements to stay someplace in the DC area, but the guy who was supposed to guide them there had been separated from them by the tear gas attacks. They didn't know how to get to their assigned quarters, or even where or what it was. They'd been looking for their guide for an hour with no success.

I told them that I knew of a place where they could find shelter for the night. I couldn't drive the bus, of course. But I might be able to direct the driver there. I would sit behind him and listen to him describe where he was, and I would use that information to chart our course. All he had to do was follow my directions. That turned out to be a bit harder than I thought, because the traffic by then had been so thoroughly disrupted that neither I nor the bus driver was sure where we were. He was following traffic far out from the Dupont Circle area, reading out names of streets where he could glimpse them, names which meant little to me, as I had never been in that particular part of Washington before. Somehow, I got them to the Key Bridge, where we could get over the Potomac River into northern Virginia. I told him to steer his way to Falls Church, where I was living at the time. I knew that area fairly well, and could easily direct him to Langley Hill from there.

We spent the next half hour driving around aimlessly. He would describe what he was seeing, and I'd try to make sense of it. If there were any signs directing him to Falls Church, he missed them, and we ended up circling Arlington Cemetery and getting lost in the area just west of the cemetery. But then we crossed a road that was labeled with a route sign: “244.” That was Columbia Pike. I didn't know where we were along that road; nothing he described seemed familiar to me. But I had lived for a couple of years in an area just west of Arlington and a few blocks off Columbia Pike, and was sure that if we traveled west, we would pass some landmarks I recognized.

At this point, the driver must have lost any faith he'd had in my knowledge of the area. But he followed my directions, and as we drove down Columbia Pike he described what we were passing. Suddenly, it all made sense. I knew where we were. We were about a quarter of a mile east of a neighborhood called Bailey's Crossroads, heading west.

I told him to take a right onto Leesburg Pike, and described the businesses he would see on the corner there. (That place looks like a freeway intersection now, with cloverleaf ramps and all, but back then it was a simple crossing of two main drags.) I remember the relief in his voice when he answered that the intersection was just as I described it. We turned right and made our way up Leesburg Pike through Falls Church and onto Great Falls Street and Chain Bridge Road and finally to Langley Hill, with me describing from memory the landmarks we would pass and the turns we'd have to take. It took my mind off the pain in my eyes, and eased the mind of our driver. And that was how we navigated for the next half hour, with me referring to my mental map of the area and identifying the landmarks he would need to make his way to the Langley Hill Friends Meeting.

My vision had started to return as we approached the meeting house. I couldn't see stuff in the distance, but I could hold my eyes open long enough to make out my immediate surroundings. The driver parked the bus in the parking lot of the meeting house and guided me inside, where I explained his predicament to our hosts. It turned out that the van I'd been sent to guide had called the meeting house again, and another guide had been despatched to steer them back. The Quakers hadn't planned on my bunch, of course, but space was made for them. I spent the next half hour rinsing out my eyes, and then called home to tell my folks that I'd be very, very late. I spent some time listening to the radio and television reports. From what I heard from them, there was no mention of the tactics the police had used. I'd expected that; it had taken months for the truth about Chicago to come out. It was another hour or two before I saw well enough to drive home, even on the empty back roads I knew I'd be using.

I had planned on attending the Saturday demonstration, but felt that I'd already had enough excitement for one weekend, and spent that day instead at the Friends meeting after getting a good ten hours of sleep and letting my vision return to some semblance of normal. As it turned out, that day's demonstrations went off without a hitch. The crowd was estimated at about a half a million people, perhaps twice as many as the famous civil rights march in 1963. It was peaceful. There would be no repeat of last night's police riots with its throngs of tear-gassed, bewildered people and its thousands of shrieking birds. One of those nights was enough.

The Principle of Uniform Grunge

While cleaning the kitchen the other day, I was reminded of a principle I had discovered in college,when I shared an apartment on North Calvert Street in Baltimore with another college student and had the use of a kitchen for the first time since I left home.

Being male college students, our standards of cleanliness were not surpassingly high, and months passed before I decided to give the kitchen stove a good clean. I worked with a will, and soon the stove was as pretty as the day it was new, save for the occasional chips in the enamel that had been accumulated over the years and the scorch marks on the burners that refused to succumb to Bon Ami. I stood back and inspected my work.

I immediately noticed one thing: now that the stove was clean, the refrigerator next to it seemed filthy. It had never seemed that way to me before, but next to its gleaming counterpart it was conspicuously in need of attention.

I had discovered the Principle of Uniform Grunge: when the general grunge of a kitchen, or any other space, is of a certain consistency, nothing in particular stands out. It is only when one area is much cleaner than its surroundings that it calls attention to itself, and to its untidier setting.

So I worked on that refrigerator until its condition matched the stove. Proud of my work (particularly since it seemed a better use of time than actual studying), I took a break. When I returned to the apartment later, the first thing I thought was "Gee, that kitchen floor looks really dirty."

You can see where it led from there. By the end of the day, I had cleaned the floor, the sink, and the kitchen cabinets. Only then did the room once more present a general appearance of uniformity, when no particular object stood out. My roommate came home at that point, and complimented me on the kitchen.

"You know," he said, "I never noticed how dirty the dining room is. I guess we should do some picking up there."

I groaned. I had never occurred to me that the Principle of Uniform Grunge applied not only to the kitchen, but to areas beyond it. The balance of the universe had been upset, and there was no telling where it might end. It was obvious that the dining room would be followed by the living room and the halls and, God forbid, the bathroom itself, which in most male-occupied apartments is a veritable monument to Grunge.

The Principle of Uniform Grunge explains a great many things about other aspects of the world. For example, consider the person in your office who does everything a little better than you do. If that person didn't exist, there would be no comparisons to be made regarding your own performance, or that of your co-workers. It's only when that person's performance becomes conspicuous that your own suffers in the comparison. I think that this is the reason that when you learn of this person's faults, you experience a curious sense of satisfaction. The perfection is just skin-deep, you realize, and underneath there is a person as flawed as you are. If that were not so, you would be obliged to improve yourself up to that person's level, and who wants to do that?

And there's the classic situation of a street with many old, comfortable houses. One burns down and is replaced with a sleek, modern structure with exquisite landscaping and a multi-car garage. Suddenly, the other houses look shabby by comparison, and their owners begin to notice the overgrown shrubbery and cracked driveways in their own homes. It never fails. The usual response would be to put in a new driveway and break out the hedge clippers, but that will not endear you to your neighbors, because their own homes will look worse by comparison, and force them to spend hours in home improvement that might be more profitably spent on the basketball court or the golf course or in front of the computer playing Farmville. Your formerly friendly neighbors will now shun you, and their dogs will no longer wag their tails at you. You might as well move.

But getting back to my original point about that kitchen on Calvert Street. There was really only one solution to the problem. We let the kitchen return to its normal state of untidiness. Afterwards, when a particular area got really bad, we cleaned it, but not very thoroughly. Instead, we carefully brought it back to a condition to match the rest of the kitchen, so that it would not call attention to itself by being either too clean or too dirty. It took a delicate touch sometimes, but it was worth it in man-hours saved.

The Principle of Uniform Grunge has guided my housekeeping strategy to this day, and it has saved me countless hours of labor. I would have used that time to do something like wash the car or repaint the house, but that would have alienated my neighbors, as I have explained. So in the cause of neighborly tranquility, I surf the Internet instead.

For some reason, some of my previous housemates have largely failed to grasp the significance of the Principle of Uniform Grunge. (Most of this subset were female, so it might have something to do with ovaries or estrogen or something.) They insist that the cleaning be done to its maximum extent, regardless of the surroundings. I try to explain that this will never result in happiness, since it dooms one to an escalating series of labors, but I plead in vain. But by diligently applying this theory on the sly, I could get by with an amazing amount of non-housecleaning before they noticed something amiss.

For example, it is impossible to avoid cleaning things once in a while, but the effort can be minimized by a process that artists like to call “feathering in.” Imagine a bathroom with a long counter in which there is a sink more or less centrally located, not unlike the bathroom counter in my present home. (In fact, it is exactly like the bathroom counter in my present home.) The sink is dirty. In fact, the whole counter is dirty. If I cleaned just the sink, the counter would look even dirtier. The solution is to clean the area immediately around the sink well, but not as well as the sink itself … just enough not to call notice to it. About a foot out, give that area a desultory clean, but leave it a little dirtier than the counter area around the sink. Proceed in this fashion to the end of the counter, which you leave untouched. If you have done this skillfully, the transitional areas will be hard to spot. You have saved yourself a little work on the counter itself, but the real benefit is that by leaving the perimeter of the counter as it was, it will not call undue attention to the tub and toilet area, which is where the real cleaning work needs to be done. When your spouse comes home, he or she will say, “Honey, the sink looks great!”

Try it! It might just work for you, too!

Leni

© 2013 by John LaTorre

Her name was Leni Keiner, and she came into our lives in the late 1950s. Her occupation was "Putzfrau" or cleaning woman, but she ended up being much more than that.

She was not the first maid my family had. When my parents lived in Hillcrest Heights, Maryland, both of them worked for the Central Intelligence Agency, which meant that they had both the income and the need to hire somebody to do some cleaning and ironing, and to make sure their two young sons had somebody to take care of them when they came home from school. They ended up engaging somebody I knew only as Mrs. Bouvier. Mrs. Bouvier didn't think much of of us kids, nor we her, but we generally respected each other's space. My only complaint was that we couldn't watch our new television when we came home from school, as Mrs. Bouvier insisted on watching it as she did the ironing. She favored soap operas and game shows such as "Queen for a Day," whose format consisted of several women telling the world their problems, after which the audience would determine which of the contestants had the most miserable life; the winner would be named Queen, robed and crowned as befitted her new estate, and showered with appliances, perfume, and other prizes. (I don't remember whether any of the other contestants got anything for their troubles.)

We moved away from Hillcrest Heights when I finished second grade. After a year in Bethesda, my father got a promotion and a reassignment to West Germany. This was in 1957. We lived "on the economy," in a rented apartment, for a few months, and then were assigned quarters in one of the US housing areas that had been built in the early fifties to accommodate the huge number of military families in Frankfurt.

One of the first things my mother learned was that maids could be had dirt cheap. Germany's economy, ravaged during the second World War, had been slow to recover, and there were more able-bodied people than there were jobs for them. So many people who would otherwise have been shopkeepers and skilled workers took whatever jobs that could put food on the table. Mom also discovered that our apartment building had a series of rooms on the attic floor, which I think were intended for single officers but were mainly used instead for maid's quarters. Evidently, these could be had for a small fee, and the attraction of a room in an economy short of living quarters was a powerful inducement for young women to take up temporary careers as maids.

As I recall, the first maid we hired was Julianna. A middle-aged woman with bad teeth and an easy laugh, she quickly made friends with me. I saw her knitting one day, and she taught me to knit, a hobby I practiced until Mom told me that it was not a manly thing to do. Julianna would also play records on our new hi-fi, which my parents didn't mind. She also helped herself to the family liquor cabinet, which my parents minded very much, so she was given her pink slip.

The next one was a quiet, docile girl named Renata. She did everything quietly and without complaint. I didn't get to know her as well as I did with Julianna, but that was probably because she didn't last as long. My parents got a call from the German police one day. Evidently one of the maids had been stealing from the other maids on the floor, and after some investigation they determined that it was Renata. So she was taken away to the pokey, and we were maidless again.

There may have been another maid or two, but then Leni came along. She had some advantages: she was as honest as the day was long, she had unfailing energy, and she could speak some English after a fashion. Mom was delighted to find her, and before long she was a regular employee. Also, she had her own apartment in a nearby suburb, where she and her husband lived on a pension and from which she commuted by means of a big, heavy, black bicycle, thereby saving Mom and the Dad the maid's-room fee.

Leni's frame was largely composed of spheres ... a round head, a stout body, heavy breasts, and fat hands. She had a pale complexion and straight black hair, mixed with gray and usually pulled up in a bun ... yet another sphere ... on her head. She was stronger than she looked, and when engaged on a project like scrubbing the floors, she preferred to work at a constant vigorous speed rather than stop for rests. She would usually arrive at ten in the morning, after we kids had gone to school, and we would first see her when we came home for lunch (our school was only a few hundred yards from our apartment, so we seldom took our lunches there). She would have chicken noodle soup ready for us, and would make us peanut butter sandwiches (which, in her fractured English, would come out "peanoots-booter sandvich"). She would usually be gone by the time we got home in the afternoon, having gone to her own place to prepare dinner for Herr Keiner. Once in a while, though, she would stay longer, if my mother needed her to; this was usually when we were having company, and Mom wished to serve dishes that were beyond her modest cooking skills. When Leni was finished, she would announce her departure in German, or more accurately, in the particular dialect of Hesse: "Ick geh' da-hahm."

In 1960, our family adopted a baby girl, and my mother was suddenly busier than ever, so Leni stayed longer and longer. She was the first grandmother-figure my sister had. In fact, in large part, she was the first grandmother-figure my brother and I had, too; Mom's mother died before I was born, and Dad's mother never really established much of a relationship with is, preferring to talk to us in Italian, a language we never learned. When I think of what a proper grandmother should be like, it's always Leni who comes to mind.

I can't say that she ever impinged on our social life, or we on hers. I do remember going over to her house from time to time, where she would serve us tea and cookies. (When visiting in Germany, it is expected that one will be given at least tea and cookies. Anything less is considered a horrible breach of etiquette.) I almost never saw Herr Keiner. He was often there, but preferred to stay in another room, smoking and watching television or listening to the radio. But Leni was usually there at our birthday parties, whether as a friend or a servant I neither knew nor cared. And, once or twice, I met her daughter, a middle-aged woman with a trim figure and a reserved politeness to me.

Our family returned to the States in 1962, but were back in Germany for another tour in 1964. And again we hired Leni whenever we needed a maid. Her hair was grayer, but she never seemed to slow down. In 1965, I was hit by a car and spent several months in the hospital. One day, my father brought me something. It was a medal, awarded to soldiers in the German army who had served in the Franco-Prussian War. My father told me that it was from Herr Keiner. To this day, I have no idea where Herr Keiner obtained it; he was too young to have participated in that war, but it might have been earned by someone in his family, or he may have purchased it from a veteran. (Such medals can be bought today for about twenty to thirty dollars, which suggests that there were probably a great many of them in circulation at one time.) And I'm not sure whether he meant to indicate that I, too, was fighting a battle that deserved recognition, or that he simply thought that the medal might be something a teenaged boy might find cool to own. Either way, I was touched. I have it to this day.

My parents moved back the United States briefly in 1969, and then for good in 1974. I don't remember seeing Leni when I visited them during my college days, but my sister tells me that Leni was constantly in her life during that time. Once our family had moved stateside for good, we lost touch with her. I guess that she was, in the end, just another employee with which our family had a long relationship, and I have no reason to think that were more than steady employers to her. But now that I'm at the age that she was when we last met, I think that I'd like to have known her better. I think that we could have been friends of a sort, or even part of an extended family. I guess I'll never know.

High Praise From My Father

My father never gave me much in the way of direct praise for anything I did. He didn’t criticize much, either, but I got the feeling that if I did anything well, I was simply doing what he expected me to do, and extravagant praise wasn’t necessary. When I did something right, his response was usually a sardonic “Good work, man! You’ll make PFC for this!” I also remember him saying, “Son, sometimes you display almost human intelligence!” That was his style of humor, and he would not spare himself as its target. After he'd finish a project, I might hear him say, “Well, I think I've done enough damage for one day.”

He was never the demonstrative type. Maybe that had something to with the fact that he was essentially a very private person, never letting anybody know how he felt about anything. This trait was, of course, a job requirement for his career, which was as an intelligence analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency. His job was to absorb and interpret information, not to offer it. For example, he would interview people who had just escaped from eastern Europe and glean whatever information he could. If the refugee had been a butcher and had been supplying meat to a nearby military base, my father might ask him questions like “Did you sell more meat at some times of the year than others?” or “Did the types of meat that were requested vary from one year to the next?” The answers to these questions might indicate possible military build-ups, or soldiers being drawn from different ethnic groups as time passed. It is of such seemingly insignificant bits of information that the fabric of intelligence is woven.

I learned all this only after he retired. I knew that he worked for the CIA since I was in high school, of course, and that we weren't supposed to tell anybody what he did. That was fine with us. I remember Dad asking me at one point in my early college days if I had given any thought to applying to the Agency for a job. If I wanted one, he could have probably pulled some strings for me, since the Agency preferred to recruit from within the families of their employees wherever possible. But I didn't have any interest in that sort of thing, and he let the matter drop.

I remember one time, though, that he complimented me for something. The occasion was my brother’s wedding in the summer of 1984. My father and I were in Santa Rosa, California, looking for a music store that stocked some sheet music that my future sister-in-law wanted for the ceremony.

Carole had given us the address of the music store -- 741 Fourth Street -- but not its name. But that didn’t do us much good, since at that time, none of the businesses displayed their street numbers on their storefronts. Even when we found the street, we didn’t know where the store was, or even in which direction it was. We must have spent a good half hour driving up and down Fourth Street, looking for the place.

While we were stuck in traffic, I noticed a Santa Rosa telephone book on the back seat of our borrowed car. It wasn’t the Yellow Pages, which may have been more useful, but the White Pages. I picked it and studied it for a minute. As the light changed, I said to my father, “The music store is in the next block, about halfway up the street, on the left side.”

“How did you know that?” my father asked.

“Well, I saw that the business we’re in front of is named Mac’s Deli. I looked it up in the phone book and it listed the address as 630 Fourth Street. The business next to it is the Farmers’ Empire Drug Company. The book says that its address is 640, which means that the numbers get bigger as we travel down the street. So the music store must be in the next block. And 630 and 640 are on our right, and they’re even numbers. So since the music store’s street number is odd, it must be on the left.”

My father gave me a long look, the kind of look that a parent gives a child who has just demonstrated some completely unexpected talent, and said, “You know, you would have done well in the Agency.”

High praise!

RIP Pete Seeger

I got word today that Pete Seeger is no longer with us. He was 94.

The sad thing isn't that he died. He had a life that was far longer and richer than most of us have any right to expect, and he was active right up to the end. The sad thing is that he will never get the Nobel Peace Prize that he richly deserved, for showing us how music can bind the peoples of the world together, and demonstrating how humanity's common traits overshadow our differences.

After his blacklisting in the fifties and sixties cut him off from earning a living in the United States, he traveled around the world, sharing the richness of American song and harvesting the richness of the songs of other cultures and bringing them to us. In particular, he brought home a song written by a Russian child, and a marching tune of the Red Chinese army, and included them in his concerts. For him, there were no important national boundaries. He was not the first musician to cast himself as a good-will ambassador, but he was arguably one of the most effective ones, and the one most willing to cross hard political boundaries. Who else could bring to a concert audience the feeling that people all over the world were just like them in most respects, loving their children and worrying about tomorrow and ready to repay goodwill with goodwill?

Another thing about his concerts come to me. He wanted people of all ages to come to them, from toddlers to grandparents, and he made sure that there were children's songs to round out his repertoire. That was a part of his vision of music as a unifying force. “Young and old” was just another meaningless distinction to be erased, like “black and white” or “American or Russian” or “male and female.”

He changed American popular music in more ways than people realized. He was responsible for the resurgence of the twelve-string guitar after World War II, he pretty much invented the long-necked banjo, he changed one word of the Baptist hymn "We Will Overcome" to "We Shall Overcome" and converted it from a hymn to an anthem, he wrote or co-wrote "Where Have All the Flowers Gone," "If I Had A Hammer," and "Turn, Turn, Turn" ... and the list goes on.

I wonder if his kind will ever come again. His champions, who include Arlo Guthrie and Bruce Springsteen, are themselves getting older and less relevant to the musical community. Are there young people now willing to take up the torch, and use music and love as a way of bringing people together, fighting social ills, and celebrating our common humanity? I won't say that we need them more than ever, because we have always needed them and we will always need them. But when we see these young talents coming forth again, it will be like seeing the first flowers after a long winter. And it wouldn't be soon enough for me.

Pete was intensely political, but he wasn't dogmatic, and wished for dialogue between people who disagreed with each other. Asked if he read the Communist Daily Worker, he said, "Yes, I do. And I also read the Wall Street Journal. And what I'd really like to do is get the writers of both newspapers together in the same room." At the end of his life, he had plenty of adversaries, but no enemies. 'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished, that.

A Picture of My Father

©2013 by John LaTorre

A few years ago, I built a wooden trailer that had a canvas top supported by a latticework of wooden and aluminum poles. The canvas has been replaced twice since then, killed by the fierce sun of several Sacramento valley summers. When I removed what was left of the most recent cover, I noticed some dry rot in some of the wooden members, and replaced those components with new wood and plywood. And then I waited for fair weather to paint the new members. That day came in mid-December, with a clear blue sky and light winds. I put on an old sweater and some ragged jeans, and set to work putting a coat of primer on the bare wood of the cover’s skeleton. 

 

As I painted, a picture came to mind of my father performing a similar job on his boat. He’d retired to Florida after a career as an intelligence analyst with the Central Intelligence Agency and bought a twenty-five-foot wooden boat in need of a bit of restoration. He had it pulled out of the water, and paid some young men with strong backs to scrape the barnacles off and prep it for painting. He saw no reason to pay somebody else to apply the paint, though. He could do that himself.

A local photographer named Jim Stem had gone out to the marina to take some pictures of local residents doing the sort of things that local residents do there, and he took a fine picture of my dad, in the sweater and golf cap he used to wear during the winter, applying paint to the hull of his boat. The camera caught him in profile, from about his waist to his head, framed against a robin’s-egg sky – the very picture of a man enjoying his golden years on Florida’s Sun Coast, exemplifying the retirees who comprised much of the paper’s readership. Jim Stem knew his audience. The picture ran in the Pasco Times that month.

I saw the picture when I visited him one Christmas. It was hard to miss, actually, because either he or my mother had had it framed and displayed in the family room. It continued to hang there for at least ten years, until my father decided to move back to his hometown of Syracuse, New York. I asked him why he was moving back there, and he told me that now that he was over eighty, he no longer felt the need to shovel snow; he could let younger men with stronger backs do that, too.

 

I found it odd that Dad displayed it so proudly, since he was quite camera-shy. This reticence was the result of twenty-some years of working for the CIA in the field or, in other words, twenty-some years of being a person whose job it was not to be noticed. Some documentation of his life was unavoidable, of course, since his name would be published in things like marriage announcements and the like. But the policy of the Agency was, quite reasonably, that the less of this information that was around, the better.

I remember a time he came home from one “TDY” – Army-speak for “Temporary Duty.” He would go on such things from time to time, staying a few days or even a few weeks. I didn't ask him where he’d been. I tried for a while, but he would only smile and shake his head. He knew that I was far too young and garrulous and guileless to keep a secret. (I am still garrulous and guileless, but now my beard is gray.) The only hints of his destination would be the things he brought back as presents: two small stuffed alligators from some place that had alligators, some “Mexican jumping beans” which didn't jump, a couple of transistor radios at a time when these things were just starting to hit the market. On this particular occasion, the only thing he brought home was a Polaroid snapshot of him sitting on a seat of an airliner, looking startled. He told us that free-lance photographers would take these pictures and offer to sell them to the subjects as souvenirs of their travel. Dad bought it, of course, since it was more than a simple souvenir to him. It was documentary evidence that he’d been someplace where he perhaps shouldn’t have been. It may not even have been the only photograph that the photographer shot of him, and there wasn’t anything he could do about that. But it was necessary to do what he could, and if that involved buying a picture that he didn’t want in order to take it out of circulation, then so be it.

Such discretion paid off in the long run. In 1968, the East Germans published a book called Who’s Who in the CIA, which blew the covers of hundreds of government agents. The idea was to embarrass the Agency by demonstrating how much the East Germans knew about our operations in Europe. At the dinner table that night, Dad did something he never did before or since, in his entire career with the CIA: he broke his habit of never discussing his job. He said, with visible relief, “They got a lot of us, but they didn’t get me.” I was twenty by then, and I guess he felt he could trust me to keep my mouth shut. I’d known by then that he worked for the CIA, but still didn’t know exactly what he did for them. It would be another fifteen years before he told me.

Dad lived in Florida for over twenty years, but made no deep friendships there. So when my mother passed away in 1993, he decided to move back to Syracuse, his hometown. He wanted to be around what remained of his own family, which at that point consisted of a brother, a sister, and a few in-laws, all of them living in in the Syracuse area. As these people died in their turn (only one of my father's six siblings survived him), their places in his life would be filled in some measure by those of their children and grandchildren who had decided to stay there. My brother and I tried to persuade him to come to California, but he would have none of that. He bought another boat, a smaller aluminum vessel, to sail on Otisco Lake, the scene of many of his most treasured boyhood memories. He would take it out regularly until a stroke robbed him of most of his sense of balance.

But back to the picture. Once my father started working for the CIA, I don’t remember him having his picture taken at all, except by family members on holidays and reunions. This is why the picture in the Pasco Times was so remarkable: ten years before, my father would have been very unhappy about having his picture taken, and would probably have asked the photographer not to publish it. But now things were different. Displaying that picture proudly in the family room was his declaration of independence. He didn’t have to hide now. It was all right to let the world know where Joe LaTorre could be found, and what he was up to these days. Nobody cared anymore.

At the time when the picture was taken as he painted his boat, he must have been at about the age I am now, in my oldest sweater, painting my trailer under a clear blue Sacramento winter sky. We become our fathers and our mothers, by and by, even when we aren’t watching.

I Cut Myself Today

I cut myself today.

I was chopping up some carrots, and the French kitchen knife slipped and grazed the side my right thumb. (I'm left-handed, which is why it was not the left thumb that was damaged.) The knife didn't cut very far, though. It took almost a minute to start bleeding, and the wound was dressed without a lot of fuss, once I got the bandage unwrapped with only one hand.

I should add at this point that I have a reputation for hurting myself in several small ways (and a few large ones). I have cut myself so often that the instructions on a Johnson & Johnson Band-aid -- "Tear off end, pull string down"--are now imprinted on my memory like a mantra. My hands bear numerous scars whose provenance I can no longer recall. So this sort of experience was nothing new to me. Indeed, the most remarkable thing is that this one showed every sign of healing up with no permanent damage at all.

So if I had been anybody else, this little incident would have been shrugged off. But I'm different. I was raised on the stories I read in the Reader's Digest and the Ladies Home Journal and the Redbook magazines that my mother subscribed to.

(Full disclosure here: I talked my mother into subscribing to them. The subscriptions were part of my high school's fundraising drives for the stadium lights that would illuminate our team's night-time games, many of which we actually won. The school administration also probably hoped that the increased illumination would cut down on the hanky-panky that pubescent students performed under the bleachers. They were mistaken; if anything, it made the darkness down there even darker and more inviting by comparison. When not studying, performing on the field, cheering from the bleachers, and fornicating under the stands, we students were expected to go door to door, selling subscriptions to neighbors, but appealing to Mom's maternal instincts was usually good for at least six magazines even before I left the house. The trick was to get to her before my brother -- who went to the same high school -- did.)

These stories in these magazines usually started with something like "As the knife/nail/glass went into my thumb/forefinger/toe, I had no inkling that my life would change forever." They would go on to detail the diseases the narrator had caught and the nerve damage inflicted, with the inevitable descent into sepsis, amputation, near death, and possibly an iron lung or something of the sort. This is not the sort of narrative that you feed to an impressionable high school freshman who had already been exposed to an Irish Catholic mother. Irish Catholics are convinced that disaster is already around the corner, waiting to pounce. If it's sunny today, it will be sure to rain tomorrow. (In Ireland, it always rains tomorrow.) If things seem to be going smoothly, it's only because the Fates have somehow overlooked you, having been momentarily distracted by their glee in visiting misfortune on somebody else. Sooner or later, they're sure to remember their appointment with you.

I dosed the cut with an antibiotic cream, but I'm not counting on that very much. That's what everybody in those stories did. It never helped. Sure, everything feels fine for a day or two, but disaster is sure to strike. That usually happens by the seventh paragraph, after they've described in detail their happy family in a wonderful neighborhood where all the dads are employed in meaningful jobs and all the moms are home cooking up all the recipes that are found elsewhere in the magazine (most of them apparently having something to do with the artful application of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup). This happy interlude sets up the part where, when the wound doesn't seem to be healing on schedule, the family decides to take the victim to the doctor. The doctor expresses concern. He (and in 1962, it's always a he) says comfortingly, "I'm sure that it's nothing serious, but I'm going to order a few tests anyway. Now just keep that wound clean and dry and everything will be fine."

Little does he know. A week later, the victim is back in the doctor's office, where he unwraps the wound. he examines it. He scowls. More tests are given. There are injections. The patient is comforted by the fact that the doctor looks like Doctor Kildare or Ben Casey or Marcus Welby, and that no doctor who looks like that can possibly find himself out of his depth. Modern viewers are not so easily reassured. They were raised on House, and know that even the most brilliant diagnostician will make three or four wrong diagnoses as the patient hovers between life and death. But these were simpler times.

Anyway, The story inevitably concludes with a hospitalization, usually accompanied by the aforesaid amputation or a collapse of the immune system or both. Weeks pass as a grueling re-adjustment is made to the patient's life-style. Because the magazine is a family publication, the patient can be counted on to make some sort of recovery, or at least an adaptation to new circumstances and a renewed appreciation of the Value of Life. He or she credits doctors, nurses, family members and friends for their unfailing support and skill. The reader then turns the page with newfound respect for the medical profession, and finds an advertisement about the many ways that Heinz ketchup can enliven your next meat loaf.

I'd better go change that bandage now. Not that that will help.