Different Slants

First Bedtime Story for MJ, by her or his (currently deceased) Great-Grandfather Israel, to the (as yet) unborn great-grandchild, as told to, once upon a time, the present grandfather-to-be.

Dear MJ,

On the first day of Spring, in 1912, I was in the same situation as you are right now in May 2010.  Meaning, I was comfortably parked in my mom’s tummy at the end of my first three months. 

I don’t remember that time, and you won’t either, but since I’m no longer walking the Earth, and you aren’t born yet, we are also both in the same sort of situation of not being able to communicate directly with each other.  No matter.

I have subconsciously willed my son, your grandfather, Grampa Bob, to write this story for you, because one day he will tell it to you, and after that you will read it for yourself.  If stories aren’t written down especially family history stories, they just float away into the clouds.  I can’t take a chance with this one, since it is actually centered on you, MJ.    It has love, war, danger, “faraway places with strange sounding names”, some twists and turns and a pretty good ending, too, because I don’t want to let my great-grandchild down.

I told my son many stories when he was a small boy, because I am a story teller, as was my father Jacob, before me.  I lived long enough to see your Grampa Bob become a pretty good story teller himself.  Must be in the blood.  It could be that you will be one, too, one day.  Well, here’s a tip about that, MJ:

People love a good story.  Not too long, with a good beginning, a solid middle, and an ending worth waiting for.  This story has all that, and you can start practicing  writing your own stories, after reading this one about your ancestors, when you begin to feel the need to write them down.  And you will.  Just wait.  Because I will be waiting for you to get there, MJ, and I have all the time in the world. 

Here we go:

I was born on the first day of Autumn in 1912, on the West Side of Chicago.  My mom and dad, Rose and Jacob, were immigrants, just like your mom Nicole’s parents are.  Everyone in my part of Chicago was from some other country.  This was a time when there were still horses pulling wagons all over Chicago, with people selling things out of the back of them.  There were places for those horses to drink some cool water on hot days all over the city, too.

Your Great-Great Grampa Jacob was a carpenter from Belarussia, from a town called Megilev, and he had a tough time learning English, like a lot of immigrants did, and probably still do.  He came to America in 1901.  After meeting and marrying his wife, Rose, he came to Chicago in 1915.  He’d go down to a place where people were hiring carpenters and hold up a hammer and saw, so the people hiring could see what kind of work he could do.  He was a very skilled carpenter, born in 1882.  His wife Rose, born in 1885, stayed home taking care of me, my brother Milty and my sisters Molly, Estelle and Sylvia, all your great-great aunts and uncle.  Rose was from Lithuania and she was an orphan.  I was born in Newport, Kentucky, a long, long way from Lithuania and Belarussia!

A couple of years after I was born, there was a very big war in Europe, fought all over Europe by giant armies, first called The Great War, and then, unfortunately, World War One.  People who make wars happen like to give them names and numbers, so the people who come along later don’t mix them up and get confused. 

(Read on …)

As it happens, my longtime wife, Joyce, has seemingly perfect memory and total recall of the names of everything in the Universe, especially movies and actors.  Out marriage, therefore, was evidently divinely preordained.  With her mental plus and my mental minus, I guess there is some mercy for me out there, after all. 

Because when I can write a story like this one, incredibly detailed and with perfect recollection, but still, frankly, can’t remember the name of that nurse or scores of other similar situations, I just call Joyce and she provides the name I need to me, instantly. 

It is easy for me to say, as husbands do, that I love her.  But much more than that, she has made it possible for me to exist with a disability that would otherwise torture me with a selectively frozen mind.  So, I pray God gives me a long life, but selfishly, to be honest I admit, I sure hope he gives Joyce a longer one. 

She has become more than metaphorically my “other half.”  She’s become the keeper of so many of my own memories; we are sometimes like one mind in two bodies.  She is essential to me, and so appreciated.  Why, in the very writing of this story, some viruses—probably Republican—attacked my computer, paralyzing it.  But Joyce, mighty Joyce, vanquished all of them and allowed me to continue writing. 

“Love” doesn’t really cover how I feel about her. 

(Read on …)

Update – May 13, 2010

Mary and went to Europe last month and spent 4 days driving around southern England (an adventure in itself) looking at sailboats. Then we flew over to Amsterdam and found our boat – a 1975 31-foot Westerly Berwick – in Stavoren, Netherlands.  She should be perfect for our intended voyage through the European inland waterways.

The new boat

We have now returned, sold our house, and shipped our remaining belongings to Rotterdam.  On June 1, we fly back to the Netherlands, stopping for four nights in Iceland, and move aboard.  Then we will have returned to our preferred nomadic lifestyle.

More details can be found on my Cruising Tips blog.

You enter a hospital with a name, your characteristic clothes, a personality and a problem. 

Within 48 hours you have been reduced to a chart, a bed and a room number.  The person you came in as has disappeared.  Soon enough you are treated accordingly, as part of the room’s furniture. 

My life is like that famed existential movie, Groundhog’s Day, about a clueless insensitive man stuck in a repeating purgatory until he fundamentally realized how much his callous attitude damaged other people.  Not many movie goers who love this movie understand that he has been trapped in this repeating day for thousands of days.  That is part of what makes that movie profound for me.  He’s in a Hell of his own making.

 Except, people, my life is such that I keep waking up, cut up, in yet another identical hospital bed, somewhere…over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over… 

Except it’s not fucking fiction! 

To defend myself from this reoccurring nightmare, every single time I’m forced to undergo yet another something, I silently re-join the Hospital Resistance, the Bandaged Underground swearing to not take any bullshit behavior lying down, even if I am actually…lying down.  

Casualties?  Always 100%. 

Treat me like an unwanted interloper in your day, or with the standard (and universal) hospital attitude of indifference, like I’m a wrinkle on a bed instead of a real person—and you’ll see the quiet person in Room 405, Bed One swiftly transform into one angry son-of-a-bitch, determined to hold onto his humanity. 

A real person—not a number—in pain. 

So, though this last day I just recounted was not a day I’d chosen to remember, but I did anyway. 

So, listen to me: 

When you go to a hospital and are treated shabbily, don’t take it, man.  Rise up! Absolutely demand respect. It works. Under all your bandages, you are still you.  Plus, you’re paying all of those uniformed pod-people ignoring you a damn fortune.  And when you do that, think of me. 

I’m Spartacus!!! 

(Read on …)