Tag: Life Stories

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Some Rambling Explorations by Ray S

It was during the summer of his eighth year. Father had set up camp for the family at the Indiana Sand Dunes State Park. Close enough so he could commute into the city and be with the family all weekend. When you’re that young you take a lot for granted and looking back now it is amazing to realize how well planned and engineered the little camp community was. Besides his family, mother, father, and older brother, there were three other families that met at the campgrounds each summer. All with various canvas domiciles. One was even a real circus tent with the interior sub divided by sheets hung on clothesline to allow for some degree of privacy and decorum. But nothing in his mind could compare with Father’s layout.

There were three of the latest no-center-pole square tents. If memory doesn’t fail, they were interestingly or curiously named Dickey Bird tents. Father set the two tents up facing each other with the front flaps joining to make a dining-sitting area–the sides draped with a zippered doorway and made of something called ”bobbinet.” All of this was set upon a 6-inch high wooden deck to keep the sand out and dry in case of rain. The T-bird tent was for him and his brother.

The little kids would go swimming, or learned to swim assisted by adults in beautiful Lake Michigan–oblivious of the nearby steel mills of Gary.

There were exploring expeditions in the shoreline sand hills collecting little pails full of wild blueberries, which Mother made into wonderful pies for the crew’s communal dinners. And, yes, she baked them in a fireside tin oven. The lady was quite adept at camping culinary cuisine.

Usually on the 2nd of July a pit was dug a little way from the tents. About 5-feet square and 4-feet deep. Then the men would build a big fire and keep it going until morning when there would be a goodly pile of hot coals. Fresh ham roasts, loins and pork ribs were seasoned and wrapped tightly in layers of butcher paper followed by three layers of wet burlap sacks, all tied and bound. The bundles were lowered into the pit of coals and then covered over with the excavated soil.

The next day, the 4th of July was celebrated with everyone enjoying the pit roasted barbecue and all the trimmings.

Brother and his buddies all went down to the lakeside in hopes of finding some teenage romance. The little kids sat around the campfire watching the adults doing what adults do when it is party time and celebrating the demise of prohibition.


Summer at camp, swim and play, and know there would never be an end to those happy days.

But he does recall how everybody became so quiet and spoke in hushed voices one day. He finally asked Mother and Father why this change in the people’s mood. One of the families actually had a car radio and had heard the announcement of the plane crash and subsequent deaths of the pilot–one Wiley Post and his passenger friend, Will Rogers. This was the major national tragedy of the time, the Great Depression notwithstanding.

Exploring the childhood days of the early half of the 20th century has led from blueberries, sand and camp to realities of the Graf Zeppelin at Lakehurst, the soup kitchens and bread lines in all the cities, the underworlds personalities of John Dillinger, Al Capone, Bonnie and Clyde, the rise of totalitarian governments in Europe and the Orient, and the ultimate reality, World War II.

So much for exploring. On to our next topic, “No Good Will Come of It.”

© 1 May 2013

About the Author














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What’s My Sign by Michael King


When
people ask me about my sign I tell them that I don’t have one.
I’ve
thought about stop signs, turn right signs or do not enter, but most people
think in terms of astrology which I think is a bunch of superstitious crap
where people don’t take responsibility for their lives and the decisions they
make.
I
do have a sign. It’s in my daughter’s garage so I guess it’s really hers. At
one point in my life I was in business. I leased a space in a mall and opened a
gift and flower shop. At the entrance which was the width of the shop into the
mall I put tree trunks with branches that were from the floor to the ceiling of
the area where the shop was located. From the top of my shop to the ceiling of
the mall interior was about ten feet. I painted a sign that fitted nicely in
that space. “The Enchanted Forest” under which was “Gifts and flowers”. The
tree trunks were elm given to me by my friend’s mother. I painted them blue.
Some months later they started leafing out.
I
was very successful for about a year. Many of my customers drove many miles to
get unusual greeting cards, gifts that weren’t available in other stores or
special floral arrangements that were personalized for the recipient. One of my
best customers was The Denver Dry Department Store, which was the finest
department store in Colorado. It was hard work but also very satisfying.
I
had been open a little less than a year when The May Company,  parent corporation of May D & F, another
department store bought The Denver Dry. They closed all The Denver Dry stores
and forced the malls where they were located to go out of business. They wanted
everyone to shop in the newly expanded Cherry Creek Shopping Center. Of course
there were law suits and in most cases The May Company lost, however in the
mall where I was located  there were over
30 small one owner shops that were forced out of business without the capital
to fight the giant corporation. I was wiped out along with the thirty some
neighbors and friends that had made that mall one of the most interesting and
diverse in the Denver area.
It
took some years to get back on my feet financially, and in a way, I never did
quite recover, but slowly I moved on and had numerous other valuable
experiences. In retrospect I learned a great deal in that year and the one that
followed when I did everything I could or knew to do so as to not leave loose
ends.
I’ve
had many difficult years in my life and realize that much was due to the risks
I have taken to achieve a goal or to try to honorably face difficulties. It is
a result of those successes and failures, challenges and dreams, insights and
growth that I feel so blessed.
I
don’t remember what arrangement I made with my daughter, but the sign ended up
in her garage and when she moved from the townhouse into the big house where
they still live, the sign moved there also. It has become a reminder of the
time when I was like the man from La Mancha and followed my dream.

Perhaps
the success was that I achieved putting together that dream. Would it have
succeeded if The Denver hadn’t been sold? I would like to think so, but maybe
not. I’m glad that I had those experiences and feel a sense of pride when I
visit my daughter, peek into the garage and see my sign. 
©
20 May 2013




About the Author


I go by the drag name, Queen Anne Tique. My real name is Michael King. I am a gay activist who finally came out of the closet at age 70. I live with my lover, Merlyn, in downtown Denver, Colorado. I was married twice, have 3 daughters, 5 grandchildren and a great grandson. Besides volunteering at the GLBT Center and doing the SAGE activities,” Telling your Story”,” Men’s Coffee” and the “Open Art Studio”. I am active in Prime Timers and Front Rangers. I now get to do many of the activities that I had hoped to do when I retired; traveling, writing, painting, doing sculpture, cooking and drag.


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Multi-racial by Merlyn


Some of the most
attractive people I have known are Multi-racial, but that doesn’t guarantee
they will have good looking kids. 
I used to know a white
girl that married a guy from somewhere in Asia. They had two girls. Even though
they both looked like their parents, one of them was gorgeous and the other one
was very unattractive.
One of the kids I went to
school with had an Indian father who was always drunk and a white mother and a bunch
of brothers and sisters.
I used to deliver the
Detroit Times newspaper to his house in the afternoon when I was a kid and we
were in the same grade.
The thing I remember the
most about him was that his father raised guinea pigs in a spotless new white
garage at the end their driveway. The walls were lined with shiny cages full of
guinea pigs; it was always spotless. I never noticed any odor when I was around
the garage. His father would be sitting in a chair drinking beer bossing his
kids around as they keep everything clean waiting for when I got there with the
paper.
On Saturday I would have
to go to the front door to collect the money for the paper. They lived in a
dirty little house that was falling apart. I would have to breathe though my
month the stench was so bad while waiting for her to count out the sixty cents
in change for the week’s paper. 
He grew up in one of the
worst home environments I can imagine, but he just seemed to have something
inside of him that helped him turn into one of the most popular kids in school.
The last time I saw him he was married had kids and lived in a nice new house. He still had that sparkle in his eyes.
I don’t think it matters
that much what race or races a person is. Some people will rise above any obstacle
and other people will have every break handed to them and will blow every opportunity
and be miserable all of their lives.
I try not pay attention to
what race people are, if I like them I tend to just see them as someone I like
and forget their race or multiracial background. 


© 14 April 2013 

About the Author

I’m a retired gay man now living in Denver Colorado with my partner Michael. I grew up in the Detroit area. Through the various kinds of work I have done I have seen most of the United States. I have been involved in technical and mechanical areas my whole life, all kinds of motors and computer systems. I like travel, searching for the unusual and enjoying life each day.

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Remembering J W by Louis

When I was in my early 20’s, I was 25 pounds lighter, and I had hair on the top of my head. I was good-looking in an ordinary sort of way. I met a 22 year old man let us call him JW. JW found me appealing, for a while. JW was a model for a sports magazine. He was beyond beautiful. His feet, his toes, his hands, his ears, the shoulders, even his elbows were exquisite. He used to curl his eyelashes. In other words, though I had hot torrid sex with JW, I did not really enjoy it because, when I visited him, blood would rush to my face and I would be completely overwhelmed. He was a natural phenomenon. He was too hot to handle. He was not my peer.

After two months, he told me he was going to marry a young woman from Connecticut, become a computer technician for IBM. He did disappear.

About 18 years later, I was working as a caseworker for the New York City Human Resources Administration. My job was to interview clients with possible mental problems, especially those who were not paying their rent or other bills, to determine if an (expensive) psychiatrist should visit and evaluate him or her. After having interviewed the client/patient, if the psychiatrist recommended that the client was mentally unable to handle his or her money, HRA would go to court and have the client’s benefit checks transferred to HRA that would then pay the client’s bills, as legally authorized.

By way of coincidence, I was assigned a client, JW. I actually interviewed the red hot lover of my youth, now a plump but still good-looking middle-aged man. Of course, the Greek god was gone. For a few seconds, I said to myself, wow, now he is my peer, maybe we could pick up where we left off.

As caseworker, I had a list of about 20 questions I would pose to the client. When I did so with JW, I realized that he could not remember what he had said 5 minutes previously. His medical history indicated he suffered from severe short-term memory loss due to alcohol abuse (vodka). I gave up the idea of asking about his past life in Connecticut, etc. I do not know for a fact, but I presume that eventually a psychiatrist evaluated him as mentally incompetent and that NYC HRA is paying his bills. 

©
20 May 2013

About the Author

I was born in 1944, I lived most of my life in New York City, Queens County. I still commute there. I worked for many years as a Caseworker for New York City Human Resources Administration, dealing with mentally impaired clients, then as a social work Supervisor dealing with homeless PWA’s. I have an apartment in Wheat Ridge, CO. I retired in 2002. I have a few interesting stories to tell. My boyfriend Kevin lives in New York City. I graduated Queens College, CUNY, in 1967.
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Choiring and Singing; God Help Us All by Jon Krey

Yes,
I remember this subject from childhood.  As
I recall the songs they would sing usually had nothing whatsoever to do with my
need to hurry up and head home to the locked bathroom so I could play with my…uh…”Tinker
Toys.”  I was far better off “practicing”
there anyway rather than with the choir with all their screeching and hollering.  But too often sitting in the congregation
with Mom she would occasionally find me dealing with a very prominent stiff condition over which I had virtually
no control.  She’d grit her teeth, slap
me silly right there in front of other fine Christians and make me sit down.  Her slap never helped anyway though it did
occasionally make the situation more
rigid!  What was she to expect, I was
only 13 ½; a wet-with-sweat, tender and questioning youth. In the choir there
was one magnificent specimen, a muscular
tall blond football player from Junior High who sang a prominent tenor in the
choir and who, once in a while, looked in my direction…at me! Maybe that was the
basic cause of all my turgid grief. 
Otherwise, all the rest of that “music” coupled with the Hammond Organ’s
bass speaker right in front had a really bad effect on my auditory nerves.
Later
as an adult my ears were set to overload by disco music since I usually stood
in front of the bass speakers at dance bars trying my very best to look like
wallpaper.  I also lost some hearing due
to the fat kid next door’s Harley Davidson motorcycle with its “glorious” cacophony
of thunder which he referred to as “music to his ears.”  It wasn’t helped either when I was attempting
to qualify on the firing range without ear protection in ROTC.  The range officer didn’t particularly like me since
he probably knew my target wasn’t in front of me but usually right beside me
with his own large 45.  Ooooh! 
Consequently neither checked to see if I was…well…ready.  I was
but not for that paper target in front.
As
a result of all this, later in life, I probably couldn’t have “heard” the
difference between someone praising my magnificent high belted jeans from
Montgomery Wards and someone about to knock my “faggot block off.”
I
suppose lesser hearing may benefit me today in that I don’t have to hear most
of the harangue going on around me in “necessary” meetings, lectures, sirens in
traffic??, introductions to people I didn’t want to meet and/or  people
singing off key during a choir
practice.  So today, I find it much more
practical to just read lips and look at facial expressions.  It also helps me avoid something others tend
to refer to clandestinely as their “state wide prized choir.”  Besides, I can’t sing anyway and am too busy
listening to the ringing in my ears.

About the Author

“I’m just a guy from
Tulsa (God forbid). So overlook my shortcomings, they’re an illusion.”
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Baths by Gillian

There’s a city in England called Bath, and it has baths.
Does it ever!
It’s had them since the Romans settled there around the time of Christ, though there was a Celtic shrine there dating from about 800 B.C. 
By the 2nd century A.D. the baths were enclosed in a wooden building and included a caldarium bath, a tepidarium, and a frigidarium – no translations required, I think!

After the Romans left Britain in the 5th century the baths fell into disrepair but were later revived in several stages and the original hot spring is now housed in an 18th century building which contains the baths themselves and the Grand Pump Room where one could, and can, drink the waters.

Anyone who has ever read any Jane Austen has heard of Bath, and those watching the movies of her books have seen it on screen, as Austen’s heroine’s are inevitably off to Bath to “take the waters.”
In the early 1960’s you could still bathe and/or drink the waters flowing through the original Roman lead pipes, though for health reasons the waters have now been rerouted since the 1970’s. Just one more reason my brain is addled, I guess, as I was there lounging in the steaming water in 1963.

I was at a loose end, having recently graduated from the University of Sheffield with a degree in Geography – and what is God’s name was I supposed to do with that? In a shattered still-post-war Britain jobs were hard to come by and anything remotely to do with geography – cartography, geology, exploration in general – was male-dominated. I had a temporary job in Bristol, a city close to Bath, transferring eons of data onto Hollerith punch card – do not bend, fold, staple or mutilate – somewhat ironic as I spent most of my later life working for IBM where in the later 1960’s everything was taken off punch cards and put onto magnetic tape!

I met Lucie at a lecture. I have no memory of that talk, not even of the subject, nor how I got to talk to Lucie, but it was one of those immediate bonding moments. I might rather have thought of it as simply lust, or at best infatuation, on my part that is, but I had not come anywhere close to acknowledging such feelings for women in myself back then. We became friends, hiking at weekends, “doing lunch,” going off for picnics in her rattletrap old Austin 7 – something of an equivalent in Britain to the Model T in this country.
I was deliriously happy.

Lucie was extremely attractive and sexy. I’m sure I was not the only woman whose body parts twitched simply at the thought of her, and an endless line of men constantly offered to lay their lives at her feet. She went from one torrid affair to another, or sometimes indulged in them simultaneously, but every man fell short in one way or another.

So one day Lucie and I rattled off to Bath, not to take the waters – we had packed bottles of cheap chianti – but at least to lounge in them. For this purpose Lucie wore a very sexy very skimpy bikini that drove my heart rate up to what I’m sure was a dangerous level, especially while coming slowly to a boil in the “caldarium!”
She talked of her latest inamoratas, mainly grieving for one who had recently left to do a post-grad year at Rice in Houston. I had noticed with before that Lucie’s men were frequently viewed more favorably in absentia.

After a few minutes’ silence, bobbing about it the hot water, I was practically asleep despite my elevated blood pressure. Suddenly I heard Lucie’s voice, as if in a dream.
“Let’s go to America.”
I started and gulped and did in fact take the waters, if unintentionally.
‘Yeah. OK.”
And that was that.

Just as well for me that she wasn’t hankering after some guy in Baghdad or Darfur. My answer would probably have been the same.
Doesn’t it seem that the pivotal moment that changes the course of your life forever should be marked with something more dramatic, more insightful, than,
“Yeah. OK.”

©  10/22/2012

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After
graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered
Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965,
working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got
divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have
now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.
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Life After Truth by Carlos

I have been outed!

My partner, Ron, and I solidified our relationship on May 1st, entering into a civil union within hours after Colorado enacted them. In preparation for the historical event, we had our tuxedos dry cleaned, purchased new wristwatches to signal a new dawning, and planned a private celebration. I found myself strangely calm, that is until hours before the ceremony when I couldn’t cinch my cummerbund or tie my shoelaces. Suddenly, I understood why some people metamorphose into terrors just before their big day. It was becoming real. After all, I was committing to one man for a continued lifetime of discoveries…in real time.

Upon been ushered into the Wellington Webb Building, I inexplicably unleashed all fears, all doubts, all anxieties, and I became child-like with anticipation. Dignitaries congratulated the couples; families and supporters whooped it up; even tired agents at the Clerk and Recorder’s Office maintained genuine smiles of inclusiveness, conveying this was our day to declare that we in the LGBT community were taking another step closer toward full-fledged citizenship. I realized this was a victory in spite of it not offering full marriage rights.

Being so dapper, and hopefully so cute, every reporter wanted to photograph and interview us. Though we have never been in the closet, admittedly neither have we worn our relationship on our sleeves. That morning, we kicked the closet door open and agreed to every photograph, every interview. Only one reporter was ingenuous, an interviewer who forgot to mention she represented a conservative religious publication. Initially, her questions were innocent enough, perhaps to lull us into complacency. However, my suspicions were aroused when she queried us about whether the legalization of civil unions could in time lead to marital contracts by blood relatives or parties of three or more, arguments that have been used by homophobic institutions to prevent our forming legal families. I caught a whiff of the dankness from the rock from which she had crawled. Upon learning of the organization she represented, I unleashed a diatribe of impunities, informing her in no uncertain terms that as a former believer, I had long ago rejected its patriarchal, sanctimonious, we-are-the-chosen-of-God attitudes. To her credit she stayed in place as I defined the difference between those of us who embrace our spirituality and those of her belief who cater to their religiosity. I informed her that my unconditionally-loving God, was present and, no doubt, was at that moment dancing an Irish jig to a Mexican marimba band while singing in key of his sons and daughters whom He loved and validated and in whom He was well-pleased. I felt victorious as she slithered away, although I doubt that anything within her doxology had changed. After all, oppressors never see themselves in need of transformation, never realizing that bigotry wrapped in prayer is still bigotry. It is for us, the former oppressed, to raise our voices and our fists and repudiate their canons. Only when they feel the ire and the tension of our convictions, do they relinquish their self-appointed power…and then only grudgingly.

When Ron and I were finally ushered into the magistrate’s arena, my stalwart, stoic bravado betrayed me as tears bubbled up in the corner of my eyes, and we solemnly repeated our vows and exchanged rings. It was finally real; it was now official. Reflecting over the last few days, I feel different. For some reason that I am only now beginning to understand, I feel so much closer to my beloved. Our union bonded us as though we were enveloped in a lotus of love.

The next morning I was awakened by the ringing of the phone. Groggily, I answered. Friends were calling to inform us that our pictures of the night before were posted on the internet. My initial reaction was one of nothing-good-can-come-from-this, much like Howard Brackett’s reaction when outed in the romantic comedy In and Out. Apparently, people we have influenced throughout the years were heralding our exodus from behind the closet door. We had been fully outed, no ifs, ands or buts. Therefore, we accepted the inevitable, recognizing that in spite of ourselves a new chapter was opening up in our lives. There was little to do except be grateful for an act of synchronicity. Anonymity was no longer an option. Thus, we accepted our outing with courage, knowing honesty and love can never be wrong.

A new sun has truly arisen, and something good has emerged from it. Therefore, let us live our lives as though we have been outed. Let us finally be free, free, free. Let the echoes resonate in every nook and cranny as we slam the closet door behind us and build a new foundation for a brave new world.

© 20 May 2013

About the Author



Cervantes wrote, “I know who I am and who I may choose to be.” In spite of my constant quest to live up to this proposition, I often falter. I am a man who has been defined as sensitive, intuitive, and altruistic, but I have also been defined as being too shy, too retrospective, too pragmatic. Something I know to be true. I am a survivor, a contradictory balance of a realist and a dreamer, and on occasions, quite charming. Nevertheless, I often ask Spirit to keep His arms around my shoulder and His hand over my mouth. My heroes range from Henry David Thoreau to Sheldon Cooper, and I always have time to watch Big Bang Theory or Under the Tuscan Sun. I am a pragmatic romantic and a consummate lover of ideas and words, nature and time. My beloved husband and our three rambunctious cocker spaniels are the souls that populate my heart. I could spend the rest of my life restoring our Victorian home, planting tomatoes, and lying under coconut palms on tropical sands. I believe in Spirit, and have zero tolerance for irresponsibility, victim’s mentalities, political and religious orthodoxy, and intentional cruelty. I am always on the look-out for friends, people who find that life just doesn’t get any better than breaking bread together and finding humor in the world around us.


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Cookie Monster by Phillip Hoyle

     During my rather long life I have tasted an endless assortment of cookies. They cause me to smack my lips, salivate, and obsess, so much so that I freely identify with Cookie Monster of Sesame Street. I smell cookies; I see cookies; I want to eat cookies. I do eat cookies, way too many of them. But every so often I seek to stem the cookie tide in order to gain control of some little part of my life. Then I quit eating cookies along with other wonderful desserts in hopes of stemming my appetite. Cookies, you see, serve me as a stimulant for further eating. Cookies turn me into a ravenous food monster that isn’t pretty or couth or sharing. So every once in a while, Cookie-Monster-me wants to give it a break so I can enjoy some other possible satisfactions such as easily fitting into my clothes, having more breath, saving money, and not getting so exhausted when simply walking through a day.

     After feasting on cookies all year long and sometimes using them as a substitute for getting anything done, I have, this year, set aside my cookie pleasures. I’m doing well but my thoughts sometimes turn towards cookies. I’ve asked Ruth, with whom I live and who herself is a Cookie Monster albeit a dainty one, to quit leaving cookies in plain sight. Too often they sit in translucent boxes on the round table in the breakfast room. When I see the box, I have to run upstairs to fetch some chewing gum to keep my mouth busy and cookie free. Also, I shun buying cookies at the 7-11 across the street from work or the tea shop down the block or one of the many coffee shops I tend to visit. I’m cookie free (for several days) but my mind has turned towards them with such great force, I am going to list the cookies that have most preoccupied my eating habits during the many years from childhood to older adulthood. Perhaps the imagination of their flavors and textures will suffice for me, at least today. Here, according to my taste buds, are some of the very best, both commercial and homemade:

Hydrox cookies
Pecan Sandies
Wedding cookies (with pecan bits and covered in confectioner sugar)
Toll House cookies
Black and white sandwich cookies (the cheaper the better)
Macaroons
Peanut butter blossoms (with their big chocolate centers)
Snickerdoodles 
Shortbread cookies
Raspberry filled sandwich cookies with chocolate drizzled on top
Myrna’s Power Cookies (big oatmeal cookies with raisins & chocolate chips)
Ruth’s frosted sugar cookies
Ruth’s Cry Babies (soft ginger cookies with icing)
Lemon bar cookies
Seven layer bar cookies
Key Lime bar cookies (I used to get at Alfalfa’s bakery)

     In conclusion, I must admit I always return to Toll House cookies when my taste changes. I like cookies. I hope to lose enough weight to make a moderate return to cookies, but being the Cookie Monster I am, I find it hard to imagine life with such advanced self-control. If you ever see me reaching for the cookie jar, simply clear your throat and raise an eyebrow or, better yet, join me for an ultimate cookie pleasure.

About the Author

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, giving massages, and socializing. His massage practice funds his other activities that keep him busy with groups of writers and artists, and folk with pains. Following thirty-two years in church work, he now focuses on creating beauty and ministering to the clients in his practice. He volunteers at The Center leading “Telling Your Story.”

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Memorials by Gillian

In the UK there is an expression, the Fortunate Fifty, referring to only fifty villages in the country, which did not lose even one man to the horrors of the First World War. Every other village has a war memorial, portraying a long list of those from the village killed in World War One, with a sad addendum below of those killed in World War Two. The second list is, thankfully, usually much shorter than the first.

The First World War was one of the deadliest in the history of mankind, with estimates of total deaths ranging from ten to fifteen million. In small villages it was so devastating because at that time all the men from the village served together, and frequently died together, so in many cases a village’s husbands, sons, brothers, sweethearts and neighbors all died on the same day, leaving the village essentially bereft of an entire generation of young men.

I was walking past one of these ubiquitous memorials one day, in some village in the north of England, I don’t even remember where I was or why.

Tudhoe Village War Memorial, United Kingdom
Photo by Peter Robinson used with permission.

I glanced at the tall granite pillar with the usual almost unbelievably long list of names, and an old farmer shuffled up to me. The tip of his gnarled old stick bumped down the names engraved in the stone.
“Aye, but we showed the buggers!”

He stabbed his cane at the more recent list below,
“And then we showed the buggers again!”
He stomped off with evident satisfaction.

My mind turned to those old, grainy, jerky, black and white films taken in the trenches.
Did that young man, so fresh from his father’s farm, now lying in agony over the barbed wire of no-man’s-land, gasp with his dying breath,

“Aye, but we showed the buggers!”

I doubt it.
Nor, I imagine, was it the last thought of the pilot of that Spitfire, plummeting to the ground in flames; he too injured to bail out.

In the nineteen-fifties I was on a train crossing northern France. We passed rows of identical white crosses. For miles and miles, they flowed up the hillsides and into the valleys. I had never seen such a sight. Nor have I since, come to that; just some of the countless dead of the First War. A French couple in the seat across from me waved their hands and jabbered animatedly. My French wasn’t good enough to get it all but I got the gist; a French version of,
“Aye, but we showed the buggers!”

When I spent some time at a volunteer job in St. Petersburg a few years ago, my young interpreter took me to the Siege of Leningrad Piskariovskoye Memorial Cemetery. Half a million of the estimated 650,000 people who died during the 900-day blockade, are buried here. From 1941 to 1944 the population, cut off from supplies and constantly bombarded by planes and ground guns, starved to death.

There are heartbreaking photographs from that time, and stories which my escort, visibly puffed up with patriotic pride, translated for me. Of course she had not even been born then, neither come to that had her parents, but that fervor burned from her eyes.
“Mother Russia will never give in!”

I pictured the starving mother, huddling in the corner of the cellar in the bitter cold of a Russian winter, cuddling her starving children. Did she feel that? She, and the other 650,000, were given no choice.
Katya was waving a dramatic arm and saying something in emphatic Russian.
Clearly some approximation of, “Aye, but we showed the buggers!”

It never fails to sadden me, this surge of patriotism that seems to overtake so many people, of any generation and gender, when contemplating memorials. How will we ever see an end to the need for memorials for the war dead, when, instead of shedding sufficient tears to make Niagara look like a trickle, we continue our attitude, in any language, of,
“Aye, but we showed the buggers!”

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.

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Music and Memory by Nicholas

Some songs I associate with specific times and places. One note from the Swedish disco group ABBA takes me right back to my disco dancing days when we were all dancing queens.

The most evocative collection of singing that I have and rely on to recall a favorite era in my life, a time of enormous growth, is all the albums I’ve saved, and sometimes even replaced, from the 1960s. The rock music of that time captures my sense of those days with all their turbulence and delights.

The plaintive ballads of the Grateful Dead are still sweet to listen to. The harmonies of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young invoke American folk music and country western tunes. And those British bad boys, the Rolling Stones, take off in another direction with their raucous and violent lyrics and guitars and drums. Their song Gimme Shelter with its wild thumping beat has practically become my anthem over the years. “Oh, the storm is threatening my very life today.”

Then there are the romantic and psychedelic imaginations of the Moody Blues and Steve Miller and the Doors. The Moody Blues are just dreamy like many of the idle, dreamy days I spent back then (and now) conjuring up another world. Steve Miller and his band sang goofy songs about the Last Wombat in Mecca with his Texas twang. But it was Jim
Morrison of the Doors who was the most remarkable poet of ‘60s rock after Bob Dylan. “Strange days have found us; Strange days have tracked us down,” he wrote. “We shall go on playing or find a new town.” All powered by magical drugs and a bit of genius.

A lot of the music of that era came out of the politics of the time—the movement against the war in Viet Nam, civil rights struggles, early environmentalism, and the once and future youth revolution. We were going to remake the world and in many ways did and the starting point was the music. I don’t know how many anti-war rallies I took part in that began with Country Joe and The Fish singing I Feel like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag that told mothers and fathers that they could be the first on their block to bring their son home in a box and other sarcastic lyrics protesting the war.

I was a great fan of Quicksilver Messenger Service, one of those San Francisco bands that combined blues and country and lots of politics with a catchy rock beat. There’s a song of theirs popular in 1968 that I find myself humming more and more now. It was youthful protest then but poses the question of what are you going to do about me. We have to do something, the refrain goes, about pollution, media lies, war, lousy jobs, violence, injustice. “I feel like a stranger in the land where I was born,” they sang, and I still feel that 40 years later.

Jefferson Airplane sang a mix of ballads about protest and the revolution that never happened. But we thought it would. In 1970, a lot of people hoped or feared that revolution was exactly what we were about to face. So the Airplane (their name is of course a reference to drug use) called for revolution in its Volunteers of America rant right after they sang that we could all be together. We didn’t worry about contradictions back then. Unfortunately, their call to revolution came closer to the end of the movement than at the beginning of it.

I’m not waiting for the revolution any more. But I do still listen to this music. I listen to remember those times and the urgency of our calls for peace and justice. I also listen because the music is just plain good. The musicians and singers were top notch and they pulled together so many musical styles like jazz, rock, blues, country and sheer poetry. These songs are part of my history and I do not walk away from my history.

About the Author

Nicholas grew up in Cleveland, then grew up in San Francisco, and is now growing up in Denver. He retired from work with non-profits in 2009 and now bicycles, gardens, cooks, does yoga, writes stories, and loves to go out for coffee.