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terryquinnblog · 5 years ago

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My Father Breaks His Silence

When my brother Johnny and I were as young as I can remember, my father would never answer our constant questions about the Second World War. All we knew was that he'd served as a navigator and bombardier, that his plane had been shot down over the Mediterranean Sea, that he'd suffered thirteen shrapnel wounds, including the loss of one eye, and that Mom had her wedding dress sewn from the silk of his parachute. He'd say with great solemnity that his years as a soldier were "the most crucial" of his life, then refuse to explain why. In a sense it didn't matter. We had no idea what crucial meant, though it seemed to signify neither happy nor unhappy. What I did understand at the age of five or six was that the experience of battle still disturbed him. Even so, I wanted to know what he'd done, how he’d acted. Who he was, I guess.

Dad, kneeling at lower right corner

Back then, though, we got nothing but fanfare and mystifying symbols. At nine o'clock each night, Dad would bark one of his hut-hut chants and sucker us into marching around the dining room table and up the stairs to bed. Or if we found the sock where he'd stashed his Purple Heart and his other six medals, along with the spare artificial eye some veterans hospital had long ago issued him, he'd quickly mutter the name of each decoration then re-bury the lot in the dresser. It was the early 1950s and we were too young. Telling us anything real, I think he felt, would have done an injustice to the exhilarating terror that he and his "flying buddies" had gone through.

On the night stand in his and Mom's bedroom sat a photo of the ten men in his flight squadron, standing and kneeling in the shadow of their B-17. Dad had marked the shoulders of the uniformed figures with a ballpoint pen. I was an adult well into middle age before he told me that a double dot meant the man had been killed; a single dot, only wounded. "One of these guys panicked on the day we were hit," he said. "Turned out to be a coward." But even then, forty-five years after the war, he wouldn't tell me which one.

By the 1960's and the Vietnam era, Dad had come to despise the way the country seemed to feel about the whole idea of war. He became yet more jealous of what he knew. And by the end of that decade, most of his six kids had left home. When the family reunited at our house in Queens every July 4th and Christmas, the subject wouldn’t come up. It was treated as dead history. So we never learned what it meant to be shipped to a far-off continent and to fly fifty bombing missions over Europe. We never got much of a feel for the texture of those so-called crucial years. ... Except once.

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It was 1976, America's bicentennial and the year the National Air and Space Museum opened in Washington, D.C. My parents knew nothing about that new tourist attraction when they invited my sister Kate and me, their youngest and oldest, to tour the capital with them that July. We might not even have noticed the spanking-white architectural behemoth sprawling in the southwest quadrant of the city if Dad’s ancient Nash Rambler hadn't broken down on Independence Avenue after our two-day visit, as we were making our way out of town. It ground to a halt, wouldn’t re-start, and the motor was smoking pitifully.

At right, drinking with friends on the day they enlisted

We knew no one in Washington, and had no idea where to turn for help. The weather was a scourge: hazy sunlight, air so muggy it felt as if you were wading through water. Physically we were worthless, having trudged through the Senate, the House of Representatives, the Supreme Court, the Library of Congress and a mile or two of halls in the Smithsonian Institution. What we'd mainly seen, and felt underfoot, was a quarry's worth of hard, cold marble.

Within minutes, and unbidden, a tow truck descended upon our car. The stubble-chinned driver inspected the Rambler and wanted to haul it away on a flatbed for repairs, claiming it had thrown a rod or something. But Dad was due back at his court clerk job on Staten Island the next morning. What he wanted was immediate on-site service. So he fanned a bunch of fifties, his favorite denomination while on the road, and made swift arrangements with the mechanic before hustling us toward this massive public building across the street. The spanking-white facade announced the new museum’s name.

"C'mon," he said gamely to Mom, Kate and me. "This'll be fun. Looks like a good place to kill some time.”

"The sign says they close in less than an hour," I pointed out. “Why don’t we look for a place where we can get something to eat.” But Dad was in motion, deep-breathing the unbearably humid air, swinging his arms like the world's last optimist. I felt bad for my sister, who was 18 at the time. Somehow, climbing this particular set of stone steps, she looked like an Aztec sacrifice.

At first we drifted like ghosts through that enormous structure. Half the displays were roped off, the two movie theaters had long since emptied out, and what fellow tourists remained looked as wrecked and sated as we were. After all the landmarks and monuments we'd seen, even astronaut gear, space capsules and antique planes and blimps struck us as mundane. We were toured out. We were ready to be home.

"Can't we ask someone if there’s a deli around here?" Kate pleaded.

"Or a coffee shop?" Mom begged.

First day in uniform, at the age of 19

"Hold it," Dad broke in, his mouth hanging open as he stared at the one large concentration of sightseers left in that echoing void. They looked glum yet polite as they listened to a lecture being given by a young woman dressed in a dove-gray uniform and sensible pumps. She was standing above them on a platform, droning away about bomb loads, flight ranges, overall tonnage and speeds, and aiming a pointer at the cockpit of a vintage aircraft. "Jean," Dad said, apparently too moved to speak above a murmur, "that's my plane."

"What?" said Mom. You could hear that she’d given up on the food idea.

"That's ... that’s a B-17.” Dad moved loose-limbed toward the crowd and display, as if drawn by a magnet. "That is an actual B-17!" Now he was pretty much hollering in shock and joy. The onlookers parted, as for a crazy man. The tour guide peered down at him uneasily.

"Hughie?" Mom called out in a quizzical way. But Dad had ascended to the raised platform adjacent to the nose of the bomber, the better to inspect it. He was alone up there with the tour guide, his back turned to her and to the bemused audience of at least eighty tourists. His hands slowly stroked the glass of the navigator's dome. He looked like a trainer calming a horse. “Hughie? ... The car, Hughie.”

"Is this going to turn into something weird?" Kate whispered to me. I didn't know. My sibs and I had all seen Dad get pretty unconventional at home now and again, but never right out in front of strangers.

If the speaker was boring, she was also a pro. After scanning the area in vain for a security guard, I suppose, she forged on with her presentation while my father, maybe three feet behind her, examined the rivets lining the plane’s armored flank. Ignoring him, she indicated a nearby easel that held an illustration of the navigator's compartment. "This instrument on the right," she said. "is called an altimeter. It's basically an aneroid barometer designed to-"

"Actually," my father interjected in a respectful tone, "that's the pitot tube dial."

"The ‘pitot tube dial’?” the woman said through a false grin.

"Right. See, the pitot tube projected from the belly of the ship and registered impact and static pressure, as displayed on the dial, to allow you to measure your air speed. The altimeter, on the other hand, measured your altitude." Dad pointed to the diagram. "There's your altimeter, ma'am, just left of the pitot tube dial."

"I see," the guide said icily, then proceeded to describe in a less than steady voice the bulky equipment the crew had to wear. She seemed to do reasonably well when talking about the gloves, long johns and gabardine jump suits that protected the men against sub-zero temperatures. But when she moved on to the flak jackets and leather helmets, with their attached flying goggles and oxygen masks, Dad sensed the audience's need for elaboration.

A B-17 on a mission over Germany

"You'd go to your mask at about thirteen thousand feet," he explained to the gathering before turning toward the guide again. "You might want to mention the throat buttons at the base of the helmet, ma'am. Those were for intercom."

"Ah," she replied.

"As for the flak jackets," Dad went on expansively, "we used to lay them on the floor, first thing, to protect our privates." Everyone but the lecturer burst out in laughter. "Hey, I'm not kidding," he cried.

“Hughie?” Mom called up to Dad again. This was clearly not going in the best direction. But he didn’t seem to hear her. When the young woman next had the navigator viewing his targets through the plexiglass surface of the nose, he felt compelled to step in again.

"Fact is, ma'am," he said, "we scanned through a lozenge-shaped piece of optically flat glass, to eliminate distortion." He turned back to the nose of the plane and peered down toward its floor. "You can't quite see what I'm talking about from here," he said, "unless you ... " Standing on tiptoe and leaning forward, Dad beckoned to the guide. She took that opportunity to retreat to the opposite edge of the platform and clutch the railing with both hands. "Yep," he went on, "there it is, see? Just forward of the-"

“HUGHIE!” Mom scolded, but Dad was elsewhere. When he did turn around he seemed confused, even hurt, to notice that the tour guide had drifted so far away. But his face lit up again when a few of the pluckier onlookers began mounting the platform steps to get a better view of what this flush-cheeked man with the crew cut had to show them.

Bombardier and navigator, with the rank of Lieutenant

"See?" he kept saying, as a number of rapt adults and kids filed by, each gazing into the cockpit at the plane’s instrument panel, then ceding to the next in line. "Now look over here," said Dad, shifting the closest onlookers’ attention to the glassed-in navigation compartment, while simultaneously directing the multitude below to gather under the nose of the aircraft so he could point out every computational, cartographic and meteorological feature of what had once been his tiny domain.

The people, up top and below, responded. They spoke out, laughed, shook their heads in awe. They became individuals, took on personalities. But Kate and I stayed quiet and off to the side. We wanted to watch from a distance – less interested in seeing what our father was showing everybody than in just plain seeing our father. Observing him in action.

And he was getting through. Even when the lecturer finally succeeded in hailing two members of the security force, they hardly seemed eager to intervene. "This man is unauthorized!" she spluttered. But the pair of them kept their eyes on Dad, as though they hadn't heard her. And maybe they hadn’t; he was that entertaining. "Besides, it's closing time," the woman tried.

Nothing worked. In fact one of the guards, a silver-haired black man with a low, husky voice, asked my father if he didn't recognize the martial tune faintly playing over speakers in the background. Dad cocked an ear. "Jeez," he said, "that's the Army Air Corps song!" The employee nodded.

"I was rear gunner on the bomber that came after that Flying Fortress of yours," he said.

"Holy cow!" Dad shouted. "You flew in a 29?"

"Did indeed," the man answered with a laugh, acknowledging smiles and gawking eyes on all sides. Then Dad held up his hand to the crowd to ask for silence. And once the looped cassette returned to the anthem's intro, he started belting out lyrics ...

Off we go into the wild blue yonder

Climbing high into the sun;

Here they come, zooming to meet our thunder,

At 'em, boys, give'r the gun! Give'r the gun now!

Down we dive, spouting our flame from under,

Off with one helluva roar!

We live in fame

Or go down in flame, HEY!

Nothing'll stop the Army Air Corps!

Dad sang at the absolute top of his lungs, obliterating the instrumentals and flailing his hands and arms so as to illustrate meaning with appropriate gestures. For the wrap-up chorus, he beckoned to his new flying buddy to climb up and join him. And to everyone's delight, the rear gunner did ...

Here's a toast to the host

Of those who love the vastness of the sky,

To a friend we send

A message of his brother men who fly.

We drink to those

Who gave their all of old,

Then down we roar

To score the rainbow's pot of gold.

A toast to the host

Of men we boast, the Army Air Corps! ZOOM!!!

After the big finish, Dad grasped his fellow performer by the shoulders and shook him silly. The crowd went nuts.

The gunners compartment of a B-17

I glanced at Mom, who looked mortified and kept murmuring “God in heaven.” Kate, too, looked a bit abashed. Neither of them seemed to feel what I felt, which was overwhelming pride, mixed with a sort of low-level resentment that all these people I'd never known, and would never see again in my life, were getting this glimpse into my father's hidden past at the same damn time that I was.

"Look at that!" Dad said, distracted by something down by the tail of the plane. "It's our bumsight!" he cried, shouldering his way across the platform and down the step-ladder to the floor. Once there, he signaled with both hands for everybody to crowd around. Sweat beaded his forehead, the lid of his good eye kept flickering.

"What's a 'bumsight'?" some guy next to me whispered. I just shrugged, not wanting to miss anything by explaining. This was a variant of one of Dad's many personal pronunciations: His "calm" always sounded like "come," his "bomb" like "bum." There was no accounting for it.

"This, folks," my father exclaimed, his voice now raspy yet still strong, "this was a miracle of artistry and precision." He strolled like a ringleader around the five-foot-high display case within which a spherical gizmo sat. "This instrument was such a potent weapon in the war that its very existence was shrouded in secrecy. A special crew would lug it to the aircraft, minutes before you left on your mission, and install it in the nose. And they'd whisk it off as soon as you made it back to base. This baby would let you land a three-ton explosive on a goshdarn dime. This ingenious mechanism, ladies and gentlemen," he concluded with a flourish of the hand, "is the Norden bumsight!" Oohs and aahs all around as the audience worked out what he was saying.

"OK, hold it!" Dad let out next. He was staring at a nearby wall where there hung a photograph that resembled the one he kept on his nightstand at home. Except this sepia-toned shot of a B-17 had only one soldier in the foreground, and the original print had been enlarged to about eight by eight feet, making the subject's trim body and wide, cocky smile look a bit out of focus. It was a good-looking airman, you could tell, but that was about all you could tell.

"Schwartzy!" Dad cried out, and summarily abandoned the precious bumsight. As his tourist battalion fell into line behind him, he marched on the fuzzy photograph. "Jean!" he called back to Mom, whose face was in her hands. "It's Izzy Schwartz! The guy who saved my life!"

Wedded to my mom in 1944, after a year of plastic surgery and rehab

As if to halt him in his tracks, the public address system began squawking directives about the location of exits, the advisability of double-checking for one's personal belongings, the need to secure the premises for the evening. Nobody paid a scrap of attention. We were all swept up by the maniacal magic of this man, my dad, who looked ready to throw himself bodily onto the wall so he might hug the image of Izzy Schwartz.

"We're on a raid over Toulon, France," he began, his face brick red, his hands twitching. “We’re hunting down German submarine pens when a storm of flak rips into us, front and rear. We drop out of formation and make it halfway back to Tunisia before we hit water. I'm fading in and out of consciousness – loss of blood, concussion, whatever – and have no memory at all of the impact. Next thing I know, there's salt water up my nose and the waves around me are burning like paper. Like a swelling mass of blue and black tissue. And out of one eye I see this big chunk of the 17's wing, twisted propeller blades, an engine hurling out orange sparks and like ... like a wind of fire. There's a stench over everything. Some of it's oil, some of it's smoke, some of it's blood. My own blood, all over my face, my hair. And some of it's the bodies of men I knew. You couldn't tell who'd made it and who hadn't, but you were sure some hadn't. Just from that horrible smell of charred- ... just from the smell.

"I'm swimming clear of the wreck, the way they trained us back in the States. But I can't figure out how I'm doing it because I'm on my back, sort of listing to the right, and I hardly have any feeling in my limbs. I see an arm not mine under my chin, feel the pinch of fingers in the flesh of my armpit. I must've been babbling or yelling something because a voice tells me to shut up, save my strength. It's Schwartzy, our Princeton-educated pilot, and it's like he's screaming to me from three blocks away. I mean, his voice is strained – full of fear and a kind of, I don't know, anger. But I can barely hear him. Something's wrong with my ears, my whole head ... Twenty-three years old, I'm thinking, and I'm going to die.

"I look back again. The wing's gone, and the top third of the fuselage rises like some huge fish breaking the surface, then sinks under the waves, sucking down everything around it. Things go woozy. But Lady-killer Schwartzy, the guy with a thousand dates, as we called him, is side-stroking like mad, nearly choking me to death as he drags us through these eddies that make the surface of the Mediterranean not just rise and fall but swirl crazily around us. I can guess that my right eye is gone for good, and the left one's not working that great either. The last thing I see is the shot-up nose of our plane and the jagged window of the room with no walls where I used to sit and do my calculations."

My father paused and took a deep breath. All this time he'd never turned away from his savior's likeness, which seemed to grow more defined and more powerful by the minute. A strong jaw was now clearly visible. Black hair falling in loose strands over the forehead. Dazzling white teeth. Eyes verging on the predatory.

"Wow," Kate gasped. And I thought at first she was talking about Dad, whose words had left me slack-jawed. But she meant Schwartzy. My little sister was falling in love with Izzy Schwartz.

Irrepressible at his six children’s graduations and weddings

"Who rescued you fellahs?" an elderly man piped up. "The Navy? That was my outfit," he added with a nod, "the Navy."

"Don't know," said Dad with a jittery laugh. "Never found out. Didn't come to till I was being carried over the tarmac of some airfield in North Africa. Narrow canvas stretcher, I remember. Splintery bamboo poles. Couple of medics who looked like bouncers from the Bronx.

"Was he still with you? The pilot?" It was the tour guide. She looked as far gone as Kate.

"Who, Schwartzy?" Dad snapped. "Sure he was. Stayed with me all the way to the door of the operating room. Told the MP driving the ambulance, I'll never forget this, told him he'd break his goddamn neck for him if he didn't get us there on time. Sorry about the language, folks, but that's what Schwartzy said." Again Dad laughed. He stood there in the tense silence, shaking his head, staring at the larger-than-life pilot and letting out these dry, hacking chirps.

"He finish his tour, this guy?" the B-29 gunner asked.

"Nah," my father said brusquely, turning his back on the wall. "Killed on his thirteenth mission. Or 12-A, as we were supposed to call it." That laughter wanted to erupt again – you could see him fighting it down, smiling hard to cover the effort. "Messerschmitt tore them up good a month later, according to his co-pilot. 20-millimeter shell pretty much cut Schwartzy in two."

He looked around desperately, a fierce smile lingering on his lips. "Jean?" he muttered. "Excuse me, folks, I've got to go. Guess it's time we all did. … Jean?" With Dad leading his phalanx of admirers, we traipsed past the tour guide and the two security guards, then on through long-deserted halls and out into the Washington dusk.

With Mom at 86, five decades beyond what the doctors gave him to live

As always, Dad insisted on driving the whole way home. And he averaged seventy, his Clerk of the Court badge poised on the dashboard, just in case. Even so, the trip took ages because we kept pulling into rest stops in Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey. Each time, he'd suggest the rest of us get Cokes or something to eat, then he would disappear into the men's room. Once, too, he stopped the Nash on the shoulder of the turnpike, climbed out and ducked into the woods. "Gotta whiz," we heard him call from the darkness. This made us nervous. This wasn't like him at all. When he came back, Mom asked if she could take over for a while.

"I'm fine," said Dad in a monotone, and gripped the steering wheel. "We're almost there anyway." Which was ridiculous. We hadn't even gotten to Trenton yet. As we drove on, he started whistling a tune he used to sing to each of us kids when we were barely out of our cribs. Abdul the Bulbul Emir, it was called. He whistled it over and over. And as he did, you could smell a hint of vomit in the air.

After thirty-two years of silence on the war, my father had spoken, and sung yet, for the better part of an hour. It had been too much for his system.

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terryquinnblog · 5 years ago

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In Time of Plague, Part IX

What Music Looks Like Today

For reasons you can readily imagine, choral singing will be one of the last pleasurable activities to rebound from the Covid pandemic. So my fellow singers and I have been pursuing our passion from our living rooms, bedrooms, verandas. Under the leadership of our directors, each of us records and videotapes a soprano, alto, tenor or bass line at home, then submits that part for inclusion in a virtual performance -- on that, in the end, involves scores upon scores of singers, instrumentalists and web-savvy technicians.

Here's one such glorious concoction, just released this week -- 140 New York City musicians in a virtual rendition of the anthem "How Can I Keep From Singing?" What you see above are just one third of the participants. To watch us all, and listen, as we sing at the very epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic, just click on the link: youtube.com/watch?v=VLPP3XmYxXg

Till soon ...

Terry

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terryquinnblog · 5 years ago

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In Time of Plague, Part VIII

Making Covid Work for You

My wife Jane and I are bereft. Not at the harrowing level so many others find themselves in the throes of this pandemic. We’re not virus-infected, or worse. We haven’t been laid off from a job in mid-career. No one’s asking us to master online high school instruction, or to home-teach a roomful of sons and daughters. Yes, Jane’s PhD courses at CUNY have been interrupted, but she’s happily zooming with her professors and fellow students. And though all of my in-person chorus rehearsals have been suspended, and our spring concerts canceled, we still ‘meet’ remotely to sing.

Mike Doyle, City

No, our heart-wrenching loss is simply a daily outing to the Eastern Athletic Club, now shuttered. For Jane, no half-mile swim in the pool. For me, no treadmill and resistance machines in the weight room.

Mike Doyle, Picnic

Mike Doyle, Halibut

Only our three trips a day to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, just down the block, have kept us from despair. Have, in fact, proved to be our salvation. Each morning we take a break from our textbooks and choral music scores to leaf through the Times or a New Yorker with the East River and the glories of Lower Manhattan in view. And at sunset we walk the length of our little park twice, then watch from one of its benches as the city morphs from the grays of dusk to night.

Juliet Young, Sunset

Juliet Young, Dusk

Juliet Young, Night

But 3:00 to 4:00 each afternoon, the hour of our main meal, is when we truly drive a stake through Covid’s filthy heart. Since moving to this neighborhood in 1993, Jane and I have picnicked on the Promenade from April through October, maybe once a week on average. But now, in Time of Plague, we take the furniture and a serious dinner out there every day it doesn’t rain. We wear our masks on the way there and back, we stay socially distanced from all passersby. In this way we defy the stultifying effects of Coronavirus lockdown. In this way we trade the strictures of house-bound quarantining for the respite of sunlight and fresh Atlantic breezes.

Mike Doyle, Chardonnay

Even in months as creepy as these, you’re constantly making new friends on the Promenade – dog-walkers, musicians, workers on lunch break, European tourists. Our newest is the richly talented Mike Doyle, a professional photographer who lives one neighborhood over and who took the five daylight shots featured in this post.

Mike Doyle, Bridge

Mike’s kind of been going nuts since March 13th, the date of the pandemic’s arrival in Brooklyn and the last day he was allowed in his workplace. Jane and I have been going nuts for just as long. Desperate for a project of any sort whatsoever, Mike introduced himself at lunchtime last week, of course from a polite six feet away, and the three of us soon struck a deal – to make Covid work for us.

Till soon, Terry

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terryquinnblog · 5 years ago

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In Time of Plague, Part VII

WHAT HAIR CAN MEAN

Hair always signifies. How long or short we allow it to grow. Whether we dye it or leave it its natural color. Whether we brush, comb and otherwise groom it or purposely present it in a disheveled state. Shave your head bald and the willed absence of hair will convey a vivid message, every waking hour, to any family member, friend, acquaintance or colleague you encounter. A head of hair is a focal point, all but equal to the eyes and mouth in its ability to attract attention. It can so easily express aspects of one’s politics, sexuality, religious beliefs, ethnicity and sense of fashion. Or the lack of it. Hair, as even children quickly learn, is a realm of intimate control, of personal power. ...

But less so than usual, perhaps, in mid-pandemic.

Are people not looking kind of funny to you lately? A bit sallow of skin, haphazardly dressed? And doesn’t their hair, assuming they haven’t hacked it down themselves, look sort of shaggy, washed out, unfamiliar at the roots, unkempt? I’m definitely looking funny to myself. There are bushes in the garden bordering the Brooklyn Heights Promenade that don’t seem quite so full as my current head of hair. And since I’m living at the epicenter of the Covid affliction, where professional barbering will be banned for God knows how many more weeks, I’m expecting soon to develop a mane as out there as the one I sported back in the ’60s. And that, good readers, was a hairdo that ended by causing me heartache.

This 1958 photo of me, upper left, and my five younger siblings features the crew cuts we were expected to maintain for the rest of our lives. Our dad, who’d fought in the Army Air Corps during World War II, prescribed military do’s for the lot of us, just like his ...

But in the course of adolescence, my brothers and I learned that our most pressing job was to rebel, and so achieve a level of independence. Hair was the key. And by 1964, here’s how my brother Johnny and I were presenting ourselves in public ...

Dad wasn’t pleased. He was a wonderful father, back then and until the day he died, but hair was decidedly an issue for him. As you can see in this family wedding shot taken in ’66, his style and mine weren’t exactly in sync ...

I’d just graduated from college, down in D.C., and had decided to go straight on to graduate school. This was a departure: I was the first in my family to make it past high school, never mind earn an advanced degree. What’s more, because of the dimensions of my hair, and the clothes I was wearing, I looked like no one else in our Queens Village neighborhood. Worse yet, instead of going out and getting a job, as our neighbors’ sons and daughters were doing, I was applying to Masters programs at Ivy League universities. How could my parents not have seen me as putting on airs? In fact, when I told my dad I’d been accepted at Harvard and Princeton and asked for his advice in choosing between them, all he said was, “Can’t help you there. I hate them both.”

My mom was just as repelled by boys’ hairstyles in the ’60s as my father was. She would cringe at the sight of the rock musicians displayed on the covers of my albums. And we had dozens of spats about when, if ever, I was planning to get a cut. One day in late August of ’69, she asked me to sit with her a while in the living room and have a talk. Of course I knew what she wanted to discuss – my hippyish appearance at the end of that Woodstock summer, when my hair had reached its zenith ...

We argued for a good hour – at first calmly enough, but soon as heatedly as we ever had before or ever would again. She said I looked ridiculous. I said the girls I knew didn’t seem to think so. She said so much hair must get dirty. I said I had no more than she did, or than her sisters Aunt Helen and Aunt Agnes. Hers and theirs looked clean enough, I said, and so was mine. She said she felt shamed by what our neighbors must be thinking when they saw me walking down 92nd Road. I said that I didn’t much care anymore what the folks in our neighborhood thought about me. That I was 24 years old and responsible for my own life now. That thanks to scholarships I’d earned, my entire education – from high school through college through graduate school – hadn’t cost her or my father a penny. And besides –

I got no further in that pompous diatribe, because I saw that my mom had started to cry. This was for me the scariest thing on earth. I’d never seen my mother cry before. Not throughout the raising of six children. Not throughout years of medical complications resulting from my father’s severe injuries during the war. Not ever. And clearly I was the cause of this unprecedented – what – breakdown, really, because she was shaking now. And tears were streaming down her cheeks and the front of her dress. I was making this happen. Me and my hair.

“You look ...” she said through a wrenching sob, then paused and raised her head so that our eyes met. Then I too could not help but start crying. “I hate to say it,” she went on, “but you look like one of those Manson killers.” It was that year, that very month. What a thing to say. What a thing to hear.

Anyone who’s followed this blog knows how close my mother and I are, and have been for decades. That day in our Queens living room, 51 years ago, was the start our deep understanding of one another. We were two adults now, on equal footing, at last able to see one another with clarity. The issue of authority – hers, mine – would no longer vex or confuse us. As a sign of what I was feeling, I told her at once I would get my hair cut. And the next day, I did. Not cut short; I couldn’t ever do that. But cut.

Now here we are, all of us, in Time of Plague. Everyone needs a haircut but nobody’s getting one, including me. And up top, at least, I’m beginning to look a whole lot like I looked on that day in ’69. Which gives me a shiver. Bonnie Jean, at 97, is at the Mary Manning Walsh Home in Manhattan, holding her own against the Coronavirus. it’s just as well we’re both in quarantine – she doesn’t need to see me the way I look this morning ...

I’ll get a cut once the city is open again for business. Then I’ll cross the East River and have my next visit with Mom.

Till soon ...

Terry

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terryquinnblog · 5 years ago

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The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!

Back in the U.S ... Back in the U.S. ... Back in the U.S.S.R.

If you're anywhere near being of my vintage, you've seen the movie and you've heard the song. And if you're alive and sentient in this cruelest month of April 2020 – particularly the death-riddled New York City edition – then you're walking the ghost town I've been walking. You're leaving at last the fortress that is your apartment and venturing out, as I did yesterday morning, for butter, milk, bread and a swordfish steak, a lemon sole filet.

What I encountered out on the streets of downtown Brooklyn was something just shy of a moonscape. No traffic as I made my way, dutifully masked, down the middle of the road. Birdsong sounding freaky loud. The rumble of empty subway cars, rising from the drainage grates I passed. Store doors hung with signs saying 'Temporarily Closed Due to Staff Issues'. And the sight of scores upon scores of similarly masked, piously silent fellow citizens, ranged in single file as they waited their turn to shop. Queues of strangely polite, strangely obedient New Yorkers standing on the chalk-marked sidewalk outside Key Food, then shuffling forward in lock step whenever someone exited. Queues leading up to bodegas and delis that hadn't opened yet – and so promised a somewhat safe environment for the first quarter hour or so. And mirabile dictu, this once in a lifetime apparition: a line of blank-eyed consumers that stretched three and one half blocks from well inside Boerum Hill to the border of Brooklyn Heights.

From a good ten feet away, I asked the last, woebegone woman in line where she was headed. "What?" she screamed through her mask. I'd forgotten about my own, so I screamed my question back. "Trader Joe's!" she screamed once more. OK, I thought, that's a quarter mile away. She can expect to get her frozen pizzas sometime this afternoon.

As I gazed down Pacific Street at that seemingly endless row of folks, each two yards distant from the next, my thoughts traveled back in time – first to that haunting snippet of The Wasteland, "I had not thought death had undone so many." But soon, in my reverie, I was driven all the way back to 1950's Queens Village and a second floor classroom at Our Lady of Lourdes grammar school. Back, specifically, to a daylong lesson – delivered by my sixth grade nun, Sister George Michael – on How to Survive a Nuclear Attack.

Like all post-war kids growing up in New York City, I was assured that our jam-packed neighborhoods were the first ones the Russians planned to bomb into oblivion, and that scrambling under our pinewood desks just before the moment of impact offered the best chance of making it through. And once she'd conducted four such drills that October morning and afternoon, Sister rolled out a clackety projector and showed us a newsreel of grim-faced Muscovites lined up for what looked like miles. (Versts, she said.) "See these unfortunate Soviets, children?" Sister went on. "Well, after hours of waiting, thanks to the strictures of Socialism, they may or may not get a stick of butter, a half-loaf of bread, a pail of milk." No mention of swordfish or lemon sole.

And so yesterday, in the course of my excursion, I got it. Here, In Time of Plague, were my Russians. It was now 10:47 in the morning. I hadn't gotten to Amy's Bread or Fish Tales yet, where my own queues awaited. But I was experiencing this epiphany, this eschatological glimpse of history's continuity. The memes of my boyhood days: Krushchev slamming his shoe on the table ... Pogo declaring "We have met the enemy and he is us" ... Ronald Reagan flacking "Better Lives Through Chemistry."

How different were those, really, from today's screenshots of Putin smirkingly disclaiming interference in America's elections? ... Or the notice I recently spotted in a shuttered bookstore's window, "The Apocalypse Literature section has been moved to Current Events"? .. Or the hand-scrawled note I saw in our local CVS, pasted atop the empty toilet paper shelves, "One Roll Per Family." And you need look no further than the nicknames we assign. Back in the Russia Scare days of the '40s and '50s, we had our Hotsy Trotskys, our Uncle Joe Stalins. Last election it was Crooked Hillary, Little Marco, Pocahontas, Low Energy Jeb. Now it's Nervous Nancy, Sleepy Joe and You Know Who. Plus ca change ...

I know I'm no Samuel Pepys. However, a day after posting Part Two of this Plague series, I received a message from the director of the Brooklyn Historical Society. She asked whether they might archive what I'm writing, for inclusion in the record they're making of the Coronavirus's effects on current day society. A privilege, I replied.

But in light of that honor and its attendant responsibilities, I feel the need to let the victims of the next worldwide scourge know that this one resident of the affliction's epicenter had it far easier than so many others did. I'm not living alone, and can't imagine how devastating these months would feel if I were. I'm not living in poverty, either, and haven't lost a business or a job. Not home-schooling children, nor risking my life daily as a hospital staffer, a nursing home aide, a grocery store employee. What I am is a retired teacher, well up in the high-risk age group, So I go through each day wondering whether or not I'll be alive a week from now. But each morning as I wake up, and each night as I go to bed, I tell myself what the Beatles told me, back in '68 ...

You don't know how lucky you are, boy.

Till soon,

Terry

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terryquinnblog · 5 years ago

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In Time of Plague, Part V

STILL SINGING

On this 12th of April, 2020 – by my counting, an even month since Coved-19 descended upon us with a vengeance – an Easter sun shines bright. The Bradford pears and magnolias on my block in Brooklyn are still in flower, the cherry blossoms are just coming in, and the first fire-red tulips down in the Promenade park have that clenched, triangular look as they make ready to open.

On any other Easter Sunday at 11:00 am. I’d be standing in a 40-member choir, singing gospel. But of course we’re all at home today, because as of this morning, just under 98,630 of our New York City neighbors are infected with the Coronavirus, and 6,202 have died of its ravages.

Instead, my wife Jane and I are streaming the online service at First Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn Heights. Our pastor Adriene Thorns is preaching live ... four choristers are singing a quartet, remotely, from their living rooms ... and we’ll be using Zoom to join a series of congregation-wide chat rooms, afterward.

And at 7:00 pm we’ll lean out our living room window, and – for five raucous minutes, in public concert – shout praises in honor of all health care workers tending to the stricken.

May your own Easter, or Passover, prove a blessing in these troubling times.

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terryquinnblog · 5 years ago

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In Time of Plague, Part IV

FELIX CULPA My 97-year-old mother fell last night, and thank God she did. She falls a lot, from her wheelchair or her bed, and hardly ever hurts herself. Nor did she this time, according to the nurse who called from Mary Manning Walsh Home on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. In spite of her advanced dementia, Bonnie Jean Quinn is always in fine physical health and always in enviably high spirits. Voracious appetite, intact sense of humor. She’s all but indestructible, really.

But Covid-19 is at large in her building. My wife Jane and I know, from news reports in the Times, that numerous residents there have been infected and that some, we don’t know how many, have died. No family members or friends have been allowed to enter the Home for almost a month now. And I can’t even reach my mom by phone. There’s one in her room, of course, but she’s no longer mentally aware enough to use it.

We’ve spent deeply intimate times together, she and I – every Friday afternoon for many years – lunching in restaurants or in her room, telling stories about life back in our Queens years, singing songs from the ‘30s and ‘40s as she plays the baby grand in the Home’s parlor. And now she may die without my being at her side. Not me, or Jane, or any of my five siblings. This when New York’s mayor is warning that trenches may soon have to be dug in the city��s parks to accommodate mass burials.

For the past eight days I’ve been calling the Home’s switchboard in vain, trying to reach any of the nurse assistants on my mother’s floor. I couldn’t find out whether she was sick or not, even whether or not she was still alive. I understand why no one can get through. I know the staff are doing all they can with less than state-of-the-art medical equipment, with ponchos and raincoats instead of the specialized PPE garments being issued in hospitals. I know about the increasing personnel shortages as nurses and aides themselves fall sick. Even so ...

Mary Manning Walsh has been a godsend to my family for the past nine years. And it proved a godsend again last night when, in accordance with the Home’s policy regarding resident falls, a nurse manager called at once to report my mother’s most recent stumble. It was good, certainly, to hear that Mom hadn’t injured herself. But it was a far more powerful cause for relief to have someone finally tell us, “No, no, Mrs. Quinn doesn’t have the Corona virus.”

Christian children are taught that Adam’s sin was fortunate, a felix culpa, since it necessitated man’s redemption. How strange is life in Time of Plague that the untoward incident in my mother’s room last night should, in the end, be counted a blessing.

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terryquinnblog · 5 years ago

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In Time of Plague: Part III

Never More Alive

Ever since I was a boy growing up in the Queens Village neighborhood of New York City – late 40's, early 50's – I’ve heard men who were once soldiers say they never felt more alive than when under fire. My father was first in a long line. I remember him talking one day to my brother Johnny and me, in the most solemn of tones. This was just a handful of years after he’d been discharged from the plastic surgery ward of a VA hospital. (As a B-17 navigator and bombardier, he’d dodged German shrapnel in the skies over Toulon, France and Anzio, Italy then the deserts of Northern Africa until a mess of the stuff caught up with him.) “Never more alive,” he said to Johnny. Then, turning to me, his oldest son, “War will make a man of you.” Long-range recruitment talk for sure. We were 6 and 7, respectively.

Plenty of other dads not long back from World War II spoke that way as well, when they were feeling loose, say, at a Knights of Columbus dinner dance: Mr. Lusenskas, who lived two doors down from us ... Vince Maisto ... Ed Balling ... Ray Clinton ... Sal Giurlando – all fathers of my friends.

And as the years progressed, I would hear or read of similar language in the testimonials of young men newly returned from Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Iraq again, Afghanistan. Above all from those who’d signed on for multiple deployments to places where the fighting was heaviest – even if they were married, even if they had kids. Couldn’t get enough, they said, of the sheer exhilaration that level of danger afforded.

I’d had a kidney removed at the age of eight, so something other than war was going to have to make a man of me. In any case, I listened respectfully to what these discharged soldiers had to say. (Or clearly had to say.) And what ran through my mind on most such occasions was: I get it, but I don’t buy it. I figured they were rationalizing an emotionally wrenching if, in the end, unfortunate experience. The same fo my father, those decades ago. I just knew the time he must have felt more alive than ever was the day he married my mom. And on each of the days his six children were born.

It took a plague, but now I buy it. As I asked my wife Jane, just yesterday, will we ever feel more aware, more awake than we do right now, when all that we’ve built together, over fifty years of marriage, might vanish in a flash? In this corona-ridden epicenter that is Brooklyn, we’re not assailed daily by any visible agents of death. We’re not enduring barrages of bombs, like Londoners during the blitz. We’re fearing tainted elevator buttons, infected food delivery bags, droplets in the park air when a passerby happens to sneeze. Yet as many as 16,000 New Yorkers are expected to die in the course of this outbreak.

On the other hand, the Covid-19 virus makes me want to sing now more than ever, even if my choruses have been forced into hiatus. And food, touch and the commonest pleasures all seem more delectable gifts than they ever have. And I have always felt at one with Jane, but we’ve never been as close as we are in these strange days. My heart goes out each day to friends and strangers among the sick and dying. But as others have said before me, I’ve never felt more alive.

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terryquinnblog · 5 years ago

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In Time of Plague: Part II

A Voice from the Epicenter

Please don’t lie to me, you whom I’ve known for so long. Not in days as fraught as these. Please don’t say you haven’t been wakening lately – for me it’s been around 3:30 am – in the middle of an otherwise passable night of sleep to consider the particulars of own your possible death by Coronavirus. If, as I do, you live in New York State, the most heavily afflicted of our 50 ... and in New York City, the hottest part of that state ... and in Brooklyn, the county experiencing the highest incidence of Covid-19, and yet are untroubled, then you’re living the unexamined life.

When your Mayor announces that 50 percent of your fellow residents are expected to become infected, how can you not have the feeling that you’re walking around like a bright-white-blood red target, whether you’re self-quarantining, social distancing, sheltering in place or not? And when your President keeps warning of the wave of suicides to come, should we sacrifice a bustling economy for a natural number of pandemic deaths – and again, you’re living in the town where freshly impoverished tycoons are most likely to fling themselves from penthouse terraces and the upper floors of gilded office buildings – doesn’t it behoove you to put your moral files in order and pay heed to what are called ‘last things’?

I’m just a boy from Queens. But like St. Augustine and other certified luminaries, I feel prompted here to go the apologia pro sua route and confess certain failings, before the deluge peaks. My issues: TV, chocolates and cellphones. Call them trifling if you will, but these are the matters that have, for some time now, set me at odds with all too many family members, friends and acquaintances.

To those of you who urged me in vain to buy a goddamn television set and watch The Sopranos, Max Headroom, Friends, The Simpsons, Seinfeld, Gary Sandling, The Wire, Curb Your Enthusiasm and so many other classics of this Second Golden Age of the medium, not to mention the small-screen wonders on offer today, I’m sorry. And to all of you who, at restaurant dinner after restaurant dinner, asked me (often with an understandable note of petulance), why I wouldn’t take at least a nibble of the chocolate cake, chocolate pudding, chocolate souflé, chocolate petit four you were generous enough to want to share, I’m so sorry. And above all, to the scores of you who have berated me in vain for walking through life cellphone-free, and impressed on me the observation that my not packing one risks not just inconvenience (missed meetings) but physical danger (ambulance calls in emergencies), I’m so very sorry. I know I’ve let down people close to me. And worse, I know that, even if I make it through the madness going on, I don’t expect I’ll have the fortitude to make amends.

There’s a reason, however, if not an excuse – I’m an addictive personality. It’s as simple as that. The last TV shows I watched, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and The Honeymooners (original and reruns), became obsessions. I would regularly stay tuned so far into the early morning hours that three of my jobs back in that era – as a Legislative Assistant to two Congressmen and then as a White House Aide – nearly became compromised. I chose to go cold turkey and have never turned back.

As for chocolate, I crammed myself with it from ages 6 through 11, until an onslaught of acne, weight gain and cavities made me swear off the stuff forever. I won’t even let myself sniff chocolate now, for fear of descending upon the cake, cookie, candy bar, soufflé, fondue or Valentine’s Day gift box and devouring whatever I find there.

And God Almighty, do I know myself well enough to eschew all the Sprint and Verizon stores in my neighborhood. I’ve seen my wife Jane’s SmartPhone and sensed at once its frightful power. Were I ever to own one it would be my Fentanyl, and I’d never write another word, sing another song, draw another portrait, cook another dish. Within a week I’d be a lost man.

There, I feel shriven. Accuse me of being troglodytic, willfully contrarian, annoyingly pseudo-virtuous for denying myself these three ubiquitous pleasures – I’m used to it. But I know the addictions I can handle and I know the ones I can’t. I know too that if I should succumb in this time of Plague, I’ll go down clear-headed, clear-complected and blissfully unconnected.

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