Nearsleep

I awoke at 4:00 A.M. with a mixture of images in my dreams, images easily identifiable from a movie seen on TV yesterday, together with a BBC offering involving unarmed British police as victims. The images of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. the Kennedy's - the dead Beetle, a lessor sacrifice to a gentle philosophy of peaceful persuasion of the beast by becoming victims, all dead by violence. In my dream I was an unarmed beach patrol policeman whose only badge of authority was a large sunflower pin, with the word “talk” printed on it. My job was to defuse violence by willingly allowing myself to be beaten until the aggressor had worked off his anger and was willing to talk. Jane Goodall and her patience with her chimps (also a recent TV viewing) got folded into my mental omelet and I awoke at the point where I was pondering the question of whether I was obligated to let my passive resistance proceed to the point where I permitted my own death to occur as part of the process of educating the aggressor to the understanding that violence is not productive.

The movie seen earlier was my latest NetFlix offering “Temple Grandin,” which unexpectedly hit many of my most sensitive buttons and I found tears flowing easily and surprisedly while watching the picture. The story, about an autistic young woman, with great compassion for animals, who overcame much difficulty,somehow broke loose some ancient feelings of my own, of fears and failings, due to my “refrigerator” mother and early feelings of fear and insufficiency, things whose sequela haunt me still. Recollection of awkwardness and gaucheness in parties and gatherings of people who seemed me more sophisticated than I and how I was provoked into acts of anger and stupidity as a defense.

The movie other main theme of compassion for animals hit my own level of understanding for animals - memories of Ken and Ginger bringing the vet to their home when it became necessary to put down two of their dogs, but did not want to heighten their anxiety and fear by a trip to the vet and the accompanying signals which would create panic in the dogs. My admiration for my kids for this understanding and compassion is still huge and respectful. “Secret Buddhist.”

The movie focused on redesign of the slaughterhouse to eliminate those things which created or heightened fear in the cattle. Applying her understanding of what frightened animals, the heroine goes about designing the processing of cattle, to the point of killing, to minimize their fear so that their end comes unexpectedly without causing panic; her premise “ we owe them that much.” A lovely attitude in a world which grows more brutish and unfeeling every day with promolgating concepts like “collateral damage” for deaths of bystanders or “preventative war” as a description for invading a country with which we are at peace for latent fears or to resolve perceived insults. Such is the devaluation of our values.

Our two “great wars” of the 20th century provoked some reevaluation of our values and proportion; trying ot find a rationale and justification for the mass killings ordered or tolerated in those wars and to synthesize a philosophy which could encompass those disasters and still present a face of humanity. I think so far we have failed.

In the state I now described as “nearsleep” somewhere between dreaming and reflective semiconsciousness, much of the review takes place with amazing speed, as demonstrated by an occasional time check which reflects only the passage of a few minutes.

So, now provoked out of further attempts to sleep and finding it still too dark to begin my walk, I surrender to the urge to record it all in some dim hope that upon rereading I can glean some sense of it all.

Homecoming

A painful bright morning in Florence Arizona, dad, his jaw set, largely uncommunicative as we sat with a row of suitcases waiting for the Eastbound Arizona Trailways bus to take us to Tucson connecting with other buses which would ultimately take us back to New York, - broke, humiliated and defeated after our bold, doomed to defeat, business venture to be remembered as the Shamrock Cafe. I was in tears, a self-absorbed 15 year old, feeling only my own acute sense of loss at an identity that I had won as Brooklyn, the cowboy from Brooklyn - having passed all of the small town tests and felt accepted, fully fledged and belonging to a place, a group, a community for the first time in my life. I was aware of my father’s anger, his own defeat, and his regard for my tears and turning to Tony, his untrustworthy partner for solace at my ultimate weakness, a breach in the family solidarity he needed. I had only a faint awareness of mom, who said nothing, and my younger brother, Ed, whose presence I barely felt. I was aggravating my father’s shame in defeat, (another one, inflicted after his return from the war and qualified rejection from his NYPD.)

Ultimately the bags were stored in the underneath compartments of the bus and we boarded, the first in a succession of bus rides, 20 minutes in greasy spoon meal stops until we took a break in St. Louis two days later. We had been separated on the bus, taking seats as available and I had attached myself to a young cowboy traveling East to a new job, Oklahoma as I remember, who had taken me under his wing and provided an instant sense of companionship, separating me from the low hanging gloom which pervaded mom and dad’s attitude. He waived off dad’s apologies on my behalf and was all too briefly, an instant friend. I guess the country was full of such young men at the time, some just out of service at war’s end or on their own for the first time, traveling in search of new jobs, brave horizons. Tough, self reliant guys.

Dad decamped his troop in St. Louis, declaring we needed a good nights sleep in a hotel after a few days of bouncing around on Trailways best and checked us into a commercial hotel in the downtown; then shepherding us straight to the hotel dining room. I remember how the color drained from is face as he read the menu, ultimately ordering a shot of whiskey, quickly downed and then we left the dining room. I later realized the prices were for us, beyond reach and we found ourselves a cafeteria a few blocks away, more within our means. It was rush hour and it seemed to me that every policeman in St. Louis was blowing his whistle and waving his arms at the traffic clogging the road, a sharp contrast to Florence with it’s one paved road, in and out of town, at that time.

Next day it was back on the bus for a few uneventful days re-crossing the other half of the United States, finally to surface at 42nd street and 7th avenue, the edge of Times Square about 8 P.M. Dad busy at a battery of pay phones on the side of the building while mom, Ed and I guarded the suitcases. Frantic, crow-eating calls for help to various of the relatives resulted in mom and Ed and I going to Grandpa’s on Simpson Street in the Bronx while Dad went to his brother Irving’s in Flatbush. The arrival, the reception now lost - a blur, sleeping on Al’s old art deco curved sofa - Dad signing me out of school so I could get my working papers a few days later my next clear recollection within a few days I was hired at Blomingdale’s on 59th street as a stock boy - my employment for most of that year until the reconstitued Ludacer’s made their way to Baldwin.

I visited with Phil and Frank, my former friends on the West side but clearly I was now the down and out kid, the dropout who lived in the slums, although that particular term was never uttered in my presence. The residents at Grandpa’s place, 1166 Simpson Street seemed never constant; mom moving to Brooklyn, Betty and Roy living there for a time as well as Uncle Noah. Where we all fit is now a mystery - my evenings frequently with Uncle Noah at one of the movies on Southern Blvd., - taking Roy his lunch on his late night in a hardware store on the Blvd., and suffering the terrible noises he produced while pissing away his GI bill on saxophone lessons. Almost like a set in a Saroyan play. Still we survived. Dad studying refrigeration and air conditioning on his GI bill, to emerge a newly confident, well informed salesman, by mid- 1946. His courage and stoic resilience became a model for me although we never spoke of it. He was just another depression hardened guy taking care of his family and surviving whatever life threw at him.