Now that we have the two most significant weddings out of the way, it’s time to turn to the other weddings and a funeral or two.
I mentioned the wedding where the groom’s father and my father-in-law got me drunk occasioning the whole discussion of king-size beds. My mother-in-law noticed that the groom seemed to be pounding back a few drinks himself. When we finally left, she said to the groom, “Be careful how much you drink. Because tonight when you want it to go like this,” and she held her index finger straight up and continued, “it’s gonna go like this,” and she curled the same finger down. The bride looks at her and with the most charming innocence says, “Don’t you worry about his fingers.” My mother-in-law looks her dead in the eye and says, “Honey, it’s not his fingers I’m worried about!”
Shortly before I went on active duty, my college roommate was getting married, He had asked me to be one of his groomsmen and I was more than happy to oblige. My wife (yes, she was now my wife) and I flew up to Rochester, New York. The bride’s father was a rather well-to-do physician with a booming practice in Rochester. The rehearsal dinner was being held at a country club which had every appearance of being one of those rich, upper-crusty country clubs. My wife and I were enjoying ourselves immensely. Of course, it’s up to me to ask the impolitic questions so I turned to her and said, “I wonder if we’re the first Jews ever to be allowed in this place.” She suggested I ask the bride’s father and, having had several glasses of intoxicating liquor of some format, I did. He thought about it for a few seconds and said, “You may very well be. But if anyone says ANYTHING to you, you let me know. I’ll buy the damn place.” The other thing that happened was that one of the pictures of the boys and the girls in the wedding party was posed to make us look like a football team with the guys being the offensive line. The bride kept saying that she wanted to have enough kids to have her own football team. Several years later, after they had two, she confided to me that football team be damned, she was done!
The next wedding we attended was after I had completed navigator training and was assigned to Griffiss AFB in Rome, NY. One of my fraternity brothers, who had been one of my groomsmen, asked me to be one of his. We took the train down to Poughkeepsie, New York where another fraternity brother and his girlfriend (soon to be wife) picked us up. We were planning on picking up a car from my parents on the way home. Anyway, unlike my wife and my roommate’s fiancée (then wife) in Rochester, the bride was not one of my fraternity’s Little Sisters. That, notwithstanding, I had gotten to know the bride fairly well and we had become friends. The wedding went off without a hitch (well, one hitch, they got hitched). Afterwards, we gathered in the groom’s parents’ room for after-wedding drinks and relaxing. Just for giggles, I said to the bride, “Ready for me to break you in for him?” Without missing a beat she said, “Yup. Let’s go!” I leapt up and she took my arm and we started walking out and heading up the hall towards my room. We were almost to the door when the groom yelled, “Wait a minute! You’re not serious?” The bride and I looked at each other and then at him and we both said, “Yeah!” before we fell on the floor laughing.
I’ve mentioned that my daughter and I were forbidden from sitting together. Here’s why. One of my wife’s cousins died fairly suddenly of a heart attack. It was a bad shock to his wife and two grown sons. As a result of how shocking it was, they were all prescribed tranquilizers. The memorial service was to be held at a very old, very dignified church in Hartford. My wife and I, our daughter, and my in-laws attended the service. The wife and sons seemed to be feeling little, if any pain. It seems that in addition to the tranquilizers, they were also rather liberally dosing themselves with alcoholic beverages. Always makes for a good mix. The first discordant note was when the boys attempted to have the family dog attend the memorial service. The reverend put his foot down and put the kibosh on that idea. The service proceeded well enough, Well enough until one of the sons got up to say a few words about his dad. He started out rather incoherently (not all that shocking) and explained that they were all a little out of it due to the drugs and the booze. At that, my daughter and I looked at each other and an unsaid message of, “Oh, this is gonna be good” passed between us. We looked around and we also seemed to be the only ones who had any idea what was coming. He rambled on for a while until he got to the end. “And I just want to say a quote that describes my father. “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil” and my daughter and I just looked at each other, knowing, just knowing, “for I am the meanest son of a bitch in the valley!” There was a collective gasp in the church which I think was drowned out by the laughter from my daughter and I. We literally, and I mean literally, fell off the pews laughing. My mother-in-law, along with a substantial number of attendees turned towards us. I am told the look she was giving us should have turned us to stone but we were laughing too hard to notice. That, then was the last time we were allowed to sit together.
We were all invited to the marriage of the son of one of my wife’s cousins which was to take place in Pittsburgh. For reasons of economy, I was sent by airline and was to pick up a rental car and then pick up everyone else at the train station. The train was only about six hours late but that wasn’t the half of the transportation issues. My daughter has always had a very fraught relationship with travel in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. If she is there, driving id an adventure, not because she does anything. It just seems that Pennsylvania’s roads have something against her. No matter where we drove in the Pittsburgh area, we could not get anywhere. It seemed that every exit we wanted to take off an interstate was closed, necessitating a trip ten miles up to the next exit and then backtracking to the correct exit on the OTHER side of the highway. This happened at least four times. Pittsburgh is actually a nice progressive city. But don’t try to drive on the highways through and around it.
Now, here I’m giving you fair warning. If blasphemous humor, especially about the Catholic faith bothers you, please skip this entire paragraph. You have been warned. The week before my daughter’s wedding, we attended the wedding of the brother of the young man who got married in Pittsburgh. This wedding was held in a very modern Catholic church on the New Jersey shore. (The entire weekend I was humming Bruce Springsteen songs.) Having learned from times past to separate my daughter and me, my wife was sitting between us, intercepting any attempt for the two of us to communicate. My in-laws were sitting to my daughter’s left and I was on the extreme right. As the ceremony was getting underway, two altar boys and an altar girl came out to light candles. I had never seen girls in this capacity before. I turned to my wife and said, “Altar girls?” And my wife says, just loudly enough for my daughter and I to hear, “Yes. The heterosexual priests need something, too.” My daughter and I lose it because it was so funny and so unexpected and my mother-in-law just had to ask my daughter what had been said. And guess who got blamed for saying it….
In the short period of time that my daughter was married, she and her husband were invited to a pig roast at a friend’s house. The roast was an honest to goodness pig on a spit roast in their friends’ back yard. Everyone arrived and the pig was cooking nicely on the roast, people were drinking and having snacks and appetizers and everyone was having a good time. My daughter and her husband, however, noticed their friends were nowhere to be seen. They went in search of them and found them inside the house. When they asked what was going on their friends said, “Oh, we’re getting married tonight.” The whole deal was a way of getting their friends assembled. Ever since then we have said, “Suppose they gave a pig roast and wedding broke out.”
At the age of 41, my fraternity big brother suddenly died of a heart attack. To say the least, we were shocked. We and another fraternity brother and his wife and I went to the funeral in New Hampshire together. Now, I knew my big brother from my freshman year in college (he was one year ahead of me and also and Air Force ROTC cadet). I knew him as a primary drinking buddy and someone who did fairly well with the ladies. (In fact, my wife might have dated him except I made a move on her before he did.) Along with the four of us, there were probably another half dozen frat brothers and Little Sisters. We sat together in the church. Good thing we did. Before the service began, we all exchanged our favorite stories about him, all of which involved drinking, women and both. The service began and we quickly learned that he had become a deacon of the church. We heard what a good, devout Christian he was and how saint-like he was. We just looked at each other and wondered if we were at the wrong funeral. After the burial, when we talked to his widow, she told us that she would be grateful if we would tell her about him in college. Somehow we never got around to it….
Another of my wife’s cousins’ sons was getting married in Chicago. This was a big deal spare no expense wedding. Buses were provided to bring the guests to the restaurant for the rehearsal dinner, the wedding and the reception. It seems that the Arizona Diamondbacks were playing the Cubs that weekend. Guess what. They were staying at the same hotel where we were staying. My daughter is a very attractive young lady who knows how to show off her assets. As soon as she realized the hotel was lousy with major league baseball players, she was all about spending a LOT of time in the hotel bar. To no one’s surprise, she got to know several of the players (no not “know” in that sense, at least not to my knowledge). She kept talking about what nice guys they were and how much she was enjoying meeting them. But do you think she got her dear old dad ONE autograph? Nooooo. Not a one. Sheesh!
One of my original dance daughters got married in Hartford. As always, a group from the dance school, including my daughter and myself, were to perform at the wedding. Now, understand that when I have to drive, I do not drink at all. My daughter, on the other hand, was driven by her escort. From the get-go I could see that she was knocking back several drinks. I suggested that she might want to slow down. She assumed that I meant that if she was tipsy she might forget her steps. I knew better than that. She has done these dances so many times that she could put herself on autopilot and dance perfectly. No, I knew something even worse. But we didn’t get to that point before a bit more drama. My dance teacher thought she had forgotten to bring the music CDs. Irish dance music being a somewhat specialized area (particularly some of the music we use all the time), the DJ was of no help. I volunteered to hop in my car, drive home the 5-6 miles or so to pick up my CDs. She thought for a second then sent me. I found out later, not five minutes after I left, she found them. So there I was, once again, breaking the speed laws to retrieve something for a wedding. I got back to find everyone changing into their dance costumes, so I quickly change into mine and was able to get into line just in time. The dancing was a great success and, once again, the bride was one of the dancers. When we finished, my daughter looked at me and said, “Uuuuuggghhh. I don’t feel so good.” I said, “Tummy bothering you?” to which she groaned, “Yes.” Never one not to say “I told you so,” I said, “Remember when I suggested that you not drink too much?” She nodded. Now you know why. She groaned out a “Shut up!” and off she went to try and settle her stomach.
The final funeral story comes from my father-in-law’s memorial masses. He passed away in Florida but my in-laws were long-time residents of Connecticut. We went down to Florida for the first of the masses. My wife was caught in a conundrum. She could not sit next to her mother and at the same time sit between my daughter and me. Thought was given to having both of them sit between us but we promised to behave. I’m not sure she was 100% convinced but we sat there next to each other. The first thing that got to us was the incense. We were sitting in the front row (and no, Bob Uecker was not there, either) and the smoke was making us cough uncontrollably. Because of past behavior, this was interpreted as laughter. What we did sit up and take notice was when the priest made reference to how my father-in-law would soon be watching us from heaven. Now, there is some question in our minds regarding the existence of a heaven/hell continuum but we looked at each other said, what is this guy talking about? Thanks for that vote of confidence that he wasn’t there ALREADY!
So there you have it. Weddings and funerals. We have always managed to find humor at the strangest times but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Monday, March 29, 2010
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Weddings and Funerals, Part 2
Flash forward a quarter of a century, or so, and we were now the parents of the bride-to-be. As I recall, we more or less knew it was coming so it was not all that surprising. (Interesting fact: The first time my wife’s mother EVER met me she guessed I was the one.) And before we go any further, here, bear in mind that my daughter is the only child of two only children. This may partly explained how the wedding turned into a rather large production.
Now, I don’t mean to sound like a curmudgeon, but the position I took on the planning was akin to the position that the people of London took during the Blitz. Hunker down in an air-raid shelter and hope a bomb doesn’t come crashing through. This partly explains why I don’t have that many memories of the planning process. In fact, my wife had a great deal more to do with the planning process than even my daughter. I think that is often the case but I believe the percentage of maternal input on this one was higher than many. So my memories of the process are kind of spotty and involve only those few parts where I had direct input.
One of the places where I wound up having a disproportionate influence was (Are you ready for this?) selection of the wedding gown. Yup. Believe it or not. And the reason this came to be is that I am a native New Yorker and learned to drive in and around the city. There were two bridal gown showrooms in the city where they wanted to look. One was in Brooklyn, one was in Queens. As it happens, I was summarily told that I was to be the, well, chauffeur. Now, I can find my way around the city without working up a sweat if I’m traveling by subway (that’s metro, underground or u-bahn depending on where you live). But traveling outside of Manhattan and certain parts of the Bronx by car? Not so much. So I made sure to get directions on how to get to our destinations on Mapquest. Smart, right? Not so much. This was the trip on which I became convinced that any resemblance between Mapquest and real roads and exits is purely coincidental. The specific exit where we were supposed to leave the highway and travel by local streets…does not exist. The exit before did. The exit after did. Not the one we needed. So, I took the next exit and backtracked. Eventually, we found the place.
We walked into a very sedate, almost somber waiting area. I plopped myself down expecting to be left there, opened the novel I had brought and proceeded to bury my nose in the book. That lasted until the consultant came for the ladies (my wife, my daughter, my mother and one of the bridesmaids). I was schlepped along although they gave me a chair outside the little changing room but not before I looked around and said, “I am in wedding gown hell.” So I plopped myself down, opened the novel and proceeded to bury my nose in the book. Every now and again, they would emerge from the changing room and I would kind of look up and note that my daughter had on a different gown. This went on for many chapters of my novel until she came out in one gown. I did my usual look up, then down…but then I looked up again. I actually got up (making like I was just stretching my legs) and walked over to take a closer look. If there was a gown that had been made for her, this was it. After the consultant had come to get that one and was taking it back, I got my wife’s attention and said, “That one looked beautiful on her. Don’t say anything to the people here but let her (my daughter) know what I said.” My wife told her and she started crying because when she tried that one on she thought it was just right. The fact that I had even expressed an opinion and one that was so positive was all she needed to hear. Not long after that, we went to the second place. This time I was left in the car so that I could read and listen to the Yankees game on the radio. That was an indication to me that unless something REALLY special was seen at the second place, a decision had been reached. In fact, that was the case although we ordered the gown through a local place in Connecticut and had a local dress shop do the alterations and fitting.
I was spared many of the trips to various possible venues for the wedding. In much the same way that when we have moved, I have only been taken to the serious possibilities for a new house, I was only taken to the serious possible choices for the wedding. One of these was a local hotel which turned out to be THE place. My wife negotiated a package for a ballroom for the ceremony, the big one for the reception, the catering, special prices for the rooms for guests and a wedding night room for the bride and groom and the parents of the bride. What I did not expect was the food tasting. Food tasting? You don’t just pick a selection off a list? You have to go taste it? Apparently yes. One evening, there we were, the bride and groom, bride’s parents (that was us), groom’s parents and one of the brides maids and groomsmen who were, at the time, also engaged. The wedding was going to be Memorial Day weekend, so spring fruits were in. That meant that the soup they were proposing was some sort of cold fruit soup. Cold fruit soup? I DON’T THINK SO! Neither did the groom. So, that meant that it was necessary to have, at the reception, two bowls of chicken noodle soup because the two of us were not going to have any fruity soup. The salad was another one of those frou-frou things. I don’t remember what sort of ick salad was decided on but the groom and father of the bride were getting special plates of salad made with real (iceberg) lettuce and French dressing.
The wedding cake tasting, on the other hand, was rather more pleasant. I have no idea how they found it but one Saturday, we went down to Old Saybrook to a restaurant on Route 1 run by a very nice young woman. We had a very pleasant lunch and the sample wedding cake was delicious. And I don’t much like cake with icing. She also insisted that when the time came, she did not want them having a saved piece for their first anniversary. She would make a small brand new cake for them as part of the price. As things happened, this was a rather moot point, but I anticipate.
My other major contribution to the wedding was arranging for a person to officiate. The wedding ceremony was going to be a civil ceremony but no one had any idea where to find someone to officiate. At the time I was one of the DMV hearing officers. Several years earlier one of our female hearing officers had been selected as a judge of the superior court. I suggested her as the person to officiate and she happily accepted. (She did a marvelous job, by the way.)
The month before the wedding was the shower. It turned into a Jack and Jill shower (meaning the guys got to go to it, too.) Here, the major issue was parental…not us, but OUR parents. Well, the mothers, specifically. For reasons unrelated to anything relevant herein, my mother and mother-in-law had not spoken for many years. Since they were both invited to the shower, to say nothing of the wedding, it took some diplomacy on the level of the SALT talks to arrange for them both to be present. Fortunately, all came off without a hitch.
Not too long before the wedding I recall a flap of some sort over the bridesmaids’ dresses. The ladies involved ranged in size and shape and there was some dispute over what would look good on ALL of them. The details escape me but the resolution of it was that I stepped in and resolved it by imperial fiat (okay, as imperial as I ever get). But that was the end of that.
So the Memorial Day weekend finally arrived. The rehearsal dinner was held in the lower level of a local pizza restaurant that has since gone out of business. (No, neither our wedding nor my daughter’s had anything to do with that.) This was notable only in that in negotiating the stairs, my father-in-law fell. Nothing funny there, but things surrounding this wedding were always interesting.
The big day, Sunday, rolled around. Now, understand that the Sunday of Memorial Day to me means: Monaco Grand Prix followed by the Indianapolis 500 followed by the Coca-Cola 600. It is my holy day of auto racing. I made it clear that when we got to the hotel, the ladies would go to the room reserved for the bride and bridesmaids and I would plop myself in front of the TV in the room for the groom and groomsmen and watch the Indy 500 and NO ONE WAS TO BOTHER ME. That was the plan, anyway. That Sunday, Indianapolis was suffering periodic rain showers and the race was very late in starting which I found infinitely frustrating.
Then I got the call. What call you may ask? It seems that my daughter had forgotten her foundation undergarment and without it she was NOT GETTING MARRIED! This was around 2 PM with the wedding scheduled to begin around 6 PM. My wife said she knew where it was and she would run home to get it. I thought about that one for a split second and vetoed it because she needed to keep a lid on the pot that was beginning to boil over. She told me where to look and I hopped into my car and blasted off. I admit it. I was exceeding the speed limit badly but here’s the deal. My daughter was very friendly with many of the police officers in Newington and Wethersfield and the groom’s brother worked for the Rocky Hill Police. Those were the three towns I needed to transit and I figured that if I was stopped, once I explained who she was and what I was doing, I’d get an escort with sirens and lights. So I got home and started to look. Why I flashed on this, I do not know but something made me think it was in a bag from J. C. Penney. I went like a beeline for that bag and there it was! Had my wife gone to look for it she would never have found it. So, back in the car, warp speed engaged, and I had completed my mission.
By this point, it was close enough that I migrated to the ladies’ suite, turned on the Indy 500 and got dressed. The race had experienced some rain delays and, sadly, I was not going to get to see the checkered flag. (Juan Pablo Montoya won it that year.) And let’s not even talk about the Coca-Cola 600 which was scheduled to start at 6 PM.
The wedding itself was fairly anti-climactic. The ceremony was very nice and we had the privilege of walking our little girl down the aisle. I sat between my mother and mother-in-law with each of them holding one of my hands wondering if I was going to pass out with anxiety.
The reception was…well, a reception. Much eating, much drinking and much dancing. The girls from the Irish dance school performed beautifully including my daughter. I’ve mentioned it before, but my favorite picture is of her dancing the hornpipe in her wedding gown and Irish dance hard shoes with one of the other girls literally holding her dress up and out of the way while they danced. Every few minutes, through the reception, my daughter or I would walk out to the hotel bar to check on the TVs and find out who was leading the race and what the score of the Yankees-Red Sox game was. (Martinez outdueled Clemens and the Yankees lost 1-0 and Matt Kenseth won the race.)
Following the reception, we went to the room that had been reserved for us. As we were changing out of our party duds, there was a knock on the door. It was our daughter, still in her gown. It seems that the suite that was provided to the bridal couple…had no furniture. None. Nada. Nichts. Rien. (Heck, at least there was furniture in the suit we got for the wedding night. It was twin beds, but at least it was furnished.) So they did a bit of scrambling as the hotel was full up and found them another room. Shortly after that, there was a knock on the connecting door to our room. The only room they had for them was the one connected to OUR room, a fact that was of infinite humor to my wife and me but somewhat less to the young ‘uns.
Sadly, the marriage did not last long. Literally, before we walked into the room for the ceremony, my wife and I both told my daughter that if she wanted to back out, we would support her. She said no, she would go through with it. There’s a particular picture of us walking her down the aisle. She has the picture and has shown it to every one of her friends. She has told them that should she ever get engaged again, if they see that look on her face walking down the aisle, to tackle her and drag her out.
To be continued…
Now, I don’t mean to sound like a curmudgeon, but the position I took on the planning was akin to the position that the people of London took during the Blitz. Hunker down in an air-raid shelter and hope a bomb doesn’t come crashing through. This partly explains why I don’t have that many memories of the planning process. In fact, my wife had a great deal more to do with the planning process than even my daughter. I think that is often the case but I believe the percentage of maternal input on this one was higher than many. So my memories of the process are kind of spotty and involve only those few parts where I had direct input.
One of the places where I wound up having a disproportionate influence was (Are you ready for this?) selection of the wedding gown. Yup. Believe it or not. And the reason this came to be is that I am a native New Yorker and learned to drive in and around the city. There were two bridal gown showrooms in the city where they wanted to look. One was in Brooklyn, one was in Queens. As it happens, I was summarily told that I was to be the, well, chauffeur. Now, I can find my way around the city without working up a sweat if I’m traveling by subway (that’s metro, underground or u-bahn depending on where you live). But traveling outside of Manhattan and certain parts of the Bronx by car? Not so much. So I made sure to get directions on how to get to our destinations on Mapquest. Smart, right? Not so much. This was the trip on which I became convinced that any resemblance between Mapquest and real roads and exits is purely coincidental. The specific exit where we were supposed to leave the highway and travel by local streets…does not exist. The exit before did. The exit after did. Not the one we needed. So, I took the next exit and backtracked. Eventually, we found the place.
We walked into a very sedate, almost somber waiting area. I plopped myself down expecting to be left there, opened the novel I had brought and proceeded to bury my nose in the book. That lasted until the consultant came for the ladies (my wife, my daughter, my mother and one of the bridesmaids). I was schlepped along although they gave me a chair outside the little changing room but not before I looked around and said, “I am in wedding gown hell.” So I plopped myself down, opened the novel and proceeded to bury my nose in the book. Every now and again, they would emerge from the changing room and I would kind of look up and note that my daughter had on a different gown. This went on for many chapters of my novel until she came out in one gown. I did my usual look up, then down…but then I looked up again. I actually got up (making like I was just stretching my legs) and walked over to take a closer look. If there was a gown that had been made for her, this was it. After the consultant had come to get that one and was taking it back, I got my wife’s attention and said, “That one looked beautiful on her. Don’t say anything to the people here but let her (my daughter) know what I said.” My wife told her and she started crying because when she tried that one on she thought it was just right. The fact that I had even expressed an opinion and one that was so positive was all she needed to hear. Not long after that, we went to the second place. This time I was left in the car so that I could read and listen to the Yankees game on the radio. That was an indication to me that unless something REALLY special was seen at the second place, a decision had been reached. In fact, that was the case although we ordered the gown through a local place in Connecticut and had a local dress shop do the alterations and fitting.
I was spared many of the trips to various possible venues for the wedding. In much the same way that when we have moved, I have only been taken to the serious possibilities for a new house, I was only taken to the serious possible choices for the wedding. One of these was a local hotel which turned out to be THE place. My wife negotiated a package for a ballroom for the ceremony, the big one for the reception, the catering, special prices for the rooms for guests and a wedding night room for the bride and groom and the parents of the bride. What I did not expect was the food tasting. Food tasting? You don’t just pick a selection off a list? You have to go taste it? Apparently yes. One evening, there we were, the bride and groom, bride’s parents (that was us), groom’s parents and one of the brides maids and groomsmen who were, at the time, also engaged. The wedding was going to be Memorial Day weekend, so spring fruits were in. That meant that the soup they were proposing was some sort of cold fruit soup. Cold fruit soup? I DON’T THINK SO! Neither did the groom. So, that meant that it was necessary to have, at the reception, two bowls of chicken noodle soup because the two of us were not going to have any fruity soup. The salad was another one of those frou-frou things. I don’t remember what sort of ick salad was decided on but the groom and father of the bride were getting special plates of salad made with real (iceberg) lettuce and French dressing.
The wedding cake tasting, on the other hand, was rather more pleasant. I have no idea how they found it but one Saturday, we went down to Old Saybrook to a restaurant on Route 1 run by a very nice young woman. We had a very pleasant lunch and the sample wedding cake was delicious. And I don’t much like cake with icing. She also insisted that when the time came, she did not want them having a saved piece for their first anniversary. She would make a small brand new cake for them as part of the price. As things happened, this was a rather moot point, but I anticipate.
My other major contribution to the wedding was arranging for a person to officiate. The wedding ceremony was going to be a civil ceremony but no one had any idea where to find someone to officiate. At the time I was one of the DMV hearing officers. Several years earlier one of our female hearing officers had been selected as a judge of the superior court. I suggested her as the person to officiate and she happily accepted. (She did a marvelous job, by the way.)
The month before the wedding was the shower. It turned into a Jack and Jill shower (meaning the guys got to go to it, too.) Here, the major issue was parental…not us, but OUR parents. Well, the mothers, specifically. For reasons unrelated to anything relevant herein, my mother and mother-in-law had not spoken for many years. Since they were both invited to the shower, to say nothing of the wedding, it took some diplomacy on the level of the SALT talks to arrange for them both to be present. Fortunately, all came off without a hitch.
Not too long before the wedding I recall a flap of some sort over the bridesmaids’ dresses. The ladies involved ranged in size and shape and there was some dispute over what would look good on ALL of them. The details escape me but the resolution of it was that I stepped in and resolved it by imperial fiat (okay, as imperial as I ever get). But that was the end of that.
So the Memorial Day weekend finally arrived. The rehearsal dinner was held in the lower level of a local pizza restaurant that has since gone out of business. (No, neither our wedding nor my daughter’s had anything to do with that.) This was notable only in that in negotiating the stairs, my father-in-law fell. Nothing funny there, but things surrounding this wedding were always interesting.
The big day, Sunday, rolled around. Now, understand that the Sunday of Memorial Day to me means: Monaco Grand Prix followed by the Indianapolis 500 followed by the Coca-Cola 600. It is my holy day of auto racing. I made it clear that when we got to the hotel, the ladies would go to the room reserved for the bride and bridesmaids and I would plop myself in front of the TV in the room for the groom and groomsmen and watch the Indy 500 and NO ONE WAS TO BOTHER ME. That was the plan, anyway. That Sunday, Indianapolis was suffering periodic rain showers and the race was very late in starting which I found infinitely frustrating.
Then I got the call. What call you may ask? It seems that my daughter had forgotten her foundation undergarment and without it she was NOT GETTING MARRIED! This was around 2 PM with the wedding scheduled to begin around 6 PM. My wife said she knew where it was and she would run home to get it. I thought about that one for a split second and vetoed it because she needed to keep a lid on the pot that was beginning to boil over. She told me where to look and I hopped into my car and blasted off. I admit it. I was exceeding the speed limit badly but here’s the deal. My daughter was very friendly with many of the police officers in Newington and Wethersfield and the groom’s brother worked for the Rocky Hill Police. Those were the three towns I needed to transit and I figured that if I was stopped, once I explained who she was and what I was doing, I’d get an escort with sirens and lights. So I got home and started to look. Why I flashed on this, I do not know but something made me think it was in a bag from J. C. Penney. I went like a beeline for that bag and there it was! Had my wife gone to look for it she would never have found it. So, back in the car, warp speed engaged, and I had completed my mission.
By this point, it was close enough that I migrated to the ladies’ suite, turned on the Indy 500 and got dressed. The race had experienced some rain delays and, sadly, I was not going to get to see the checkered flag. (Juan Pablo Montoya won it that year.) And let’s not even talk about the Coca-Cola 600 which was scheduled to start at 6 PM.
The wedding itself was fairly anti-climactic. The ceremony was very nice and we had the privilege of walking our little girl down the aisle. I sat between my mother and mother-in-law with each of them holding one of my hands wondering if I was going to pass out with anxiety.
The reception was…well, a reception. Much eating, much drinking and much dancing. The girls from the Irish dance school performed beautifully including my daughter. I’ve mentioned it before, but my favorite picture is of her dancing the hornpipe in her wedding gown and Irish dance hard shoes with one of the other girls literally holding her dress up and out of the way while they danced. Every few minutes, through the reception, my daughter or I would walk out to the hotel bar to check on the TVs and find out who was leading the race and what the score of the Yankees-Red Sox game was. (Martinez outdueled Clemens and the Yankees lost 1-0 and Matt Kenseth won the race.)
Following the reception, we went to the room that had been reserved for us. As we were changing out of our party duds, there was a knock on the door. It was our daughter, still in her gown. It seems that the suite that was provided to the bridal couple…had no furniture. None. Nada. Nichts. Rien. (Heck, at least there was furniture in the suit we got for the wedding night. It was twin beds, but at least it was furnished.) So they did a bit of scrambling as the hotel was full up and found them another room. Shortly after that, there was a knock on the connecting door to our room. The only room they had for them was the one connected to OUR room, a fact that was of infinite humor to my wife and me but somewhat less to the young ‘uns.
Sadly, the marriage did not last long. Literally, before we walked into the room for the ceremony, my wife and I both told my daughter that if she wanted to back out, we would support her. She said no, she would go through with it. There’s a particular picture of us walking her down the aisle. She has the picture and has shown it to every one of her friends. She has told them that should she ever get engaged again, if they see that look on her face walking down the aisle, to tackle her and drag her out.
To be continued…
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Weddings and Funerals
One of the longest-standing family jokes is that at weddings and funerals, my daughter and I are not allowed to sit next to each other. The reason for this is that neither of us has ever been able to take religion and religious ceremony too seriously. As a result, we tend to find humor in the strangest of places and at the strangest of times. Aside from those events, my own wedding and my daughter's wedding have both provided their own bits of amusement as I hope you will see by reading on.
Literally, the exact week before we were to get married, a fraternity brother was getting married and we were invited to their wedding. As it happened, the wedding was in East Jabroo (no, that’s not fair, it was actually Delhi), New York. East Jabroo, however also fits because one of the driving directions we got was “when you go over the mountain, turn left.” We all found that infinitely hilarious but, as it turns out, the direction was precise and unmistakable. That parts of New York State existed that would require a direction like that was a hoot to us. Anyway, the bride and groom were leaving for their honeymoon from the airport in Syracuse, New York (site of the infamous flight through the snow that some of you may remember). They asked if we would mind going with them to the airport and then driving their car back to Connecticut. My fiancée (soon to be wife) and I happily agreed. So there we are in the back seat, happily sated with the wedding meal and wedding alcohol. We both dozed off. We were awakened by the dispute that was taking place in the front. It seems the bride had forgotten her “special pillow” and was beside herself that she would be unable to sleep on their honeymoon. Of course, smartass that I am, I had to chime in with, “It’s your honeymoon. Sleeping in the bed is optional.” That was met with stony silence although I thought it was the height of humor. I was a bit concerned that the car in question would have “issues” on the way back to Connecticut since it was a Ford from the era when Ford stood for either “found on road dead” or “fix or repair daily.” As it happens, we made it back without incident and the “Just Married” sign that adorned their car adorned ours the next weekend when we got married. (And we still have the picture to prove it.)
Our wedding was the culmination of one of those classic big-white wedding planning frenzies. My fiancée had decided to convert to Judaism and that whole process began with meeting with the rabbi with whom I had grown up, a very learned man who could be intimidating as hell. For those of you who do not know, it is traditional for a rabbi to attempt to convince someone NOT to convert to Judaism because if they can shake their conviction to do so, then it wasn’t a conversion for the right reasons. Until you see this actually being done to someone you love, you cannot believe what a terrifying experience it is. By the time he was done with us, she was practically in tears and I was ready to detonate in the mega-tonnage range. But she passed the test and he then was as sweet a man as I had always known him to be and helped arrange for conversion classes.
I may have mentioned somewhere along in these tales of myself that I am extremely susceptible to any sedative-type medication, whether it be pain-killers, muscle relaxants or cold medication. Bear this in mind. My fiancée graduated a semester before I did so I was at school without for my senior spring semester. About once a month I’d visit her for the weekend. I believe it was spring break when I was there that I accompanied her to her conversion class. That week I had a muscle cramp in my neck and the university health services prescribed a muscle relaxant called Soma. I was supposed to take it with aspirin but all I had was Tylenol. When I was younger, I got a mild buzz off Tylenol. The night I was going to class with her, I took the pills before we left...and sat through the class nodding off like a junkie. What the rabbi who taught the class must have thought of me is better left unanswered.
So as not to offend the Roman Catholic part of the family, we opted to have the wedding at the Hartford Hilton, which has since been torn down. (No, our wedding had nothing to do with that. An interesting side not is that we got married in the exact same ballroom in which I would, thirteen years later, take the Bar examination.) It did, however, present a dilemma as to where we were going to find a rabbi. None with their own synagogue wanted to do a wedding where not in their own synagogue. My step-father’s sister-in-law also happened to be a friend of my mother and one of my Hebrew school teachers. She remembered a former student who was a rabbi but was at the time employed as a clinical psychologist at Connecticut Valley Hospital, a state-run mental hospital. That was an interesting experience, walking through the hallways looking for his office.
The rabbi made it clear that he had no interest in being part of the rehearsal. So we did the rehearsal in the back yard of my fiancée s parents’ house. There were five bridesmaids plus the matron of honor and I had to walk down the aisle with every one of them during the rehearsal. I’m thinking they weren’t sure I could figure out the direction to walk or the side on which to stand.
So the night before the wedding, me and the boys (my best man and groomsmen) decided to find a topless bar to go to. Only problem was, none of us, me included, knew where one was in the area. No one we asked knew where we could find such an establishment. (We knew where plenty of them were in Syracuse but this was Connecticut.) Failing to find said genre of establishment, we settled for a garden variety bar, had a few beers and then went to the motel where we boys got to stay the night before. (Interesting fact about that motel: Not too long after we got married, the motel became an X-rated motel with in-room movies, gel beds and really tacky lighting. Our wedding had nothing to do with that.)
The next morning, the bunch of us went to the Olympia Diner for breakfast where we happened to run into some more fraternity people. So we had a nice hearty group breakfast. There were still several hours, so we headed to back to my fiancée’s parents’ house. So as to avoid the evil of the groom seeing the bride before the wedding, we stayed downstairs and played bridge. Eventually we were evicted and headed for the Hilton. I remember what I was wearing (ratty blue jeans, a football jersey and sandals) because when my mother greeted me at the hotel it was with the following comment: “Nice to see the groom is the one dressed like a slob.” Thank you Mom.
The ceremony itself was very nice (so I’m told). I don’t particularly remember it. After that came the first reception. Yes, that’s right, there were two. The one at the Hilton was Kosher (read: very, vey expensive). From there we adjourned to a neighboring town where we had the second reception at a VFW hall. The amusement value here came when the bandleader did the pre-meal blessing…in the name of the Father and the son and the Holy Spirit, Amen. Somehow he had missed the memo about the wedding couple being, uh…not Catholic. My mother-in-law was mortified but my parents took it in stride. One of the last events was a dollar dance. (I had never heard of this tradition until several years earlier. We were just girlfriend/boyfriend at the time and went to a wedding along with her parents. There was a dollar dance wherein all the gentlemen had the bride a dollar for the privilege of dancing with her. The idea is to give the couple some ready cash for the honeymoon. My mother-in-law (to be) turned to us and said, “At your wedding it’s going to be a five dollar dance.” I looked at my girlfriend, she looked at me and we both said “Our wedding?” Apparently my m-i-l (to be) knew what we had not quite yet figured out.) There’s a picture of me handing my new wife a dollar with a smirk on my face since she told me no dollar, no dance. I had to borrow the money.
After the reception ended, we went back to her parents’ house to change. I was helping my new bride out of her wedding gown when I heard her mother (who by this time was well drunk) yell, “Mark Gutis! Get out of my daughter’s room while she’s changing her clothes!” I was about to do a big “oops, we’ve been caught” when it suddenly dawned on me: We’re married now and that was just what I said.
As part of the deal with the Hilton, we received a suite for the wedding night. We went upstairs and walked in. There was a nice bottle of champagne (Kosher, of course) in an ice bucket and there in the bedroom, were twin beds. We looked at each other and I said to wait. Down to the desk I went and said, “Um, my…wife (it was the first time I had ever said that and it took a split-second to process) and I got married this afternoon. Right here in fact. The suite you gave us has twin beds.” The desk clerk looked at me and said, “They gave you twin beds? On your wedding night?” I confirmed this. He said to go back and he would send someone to bring us to a new room. A few minutes later a bellman escorted to a suite on another floor where we found a king-size bed. Much better! (OK. TMI alert. Read the remainder of this paragraph at your own peril! The next month, we went to the wedding of my in-law’s best friends’ son. For whatever reason, my father-in-law and the father of the groom took it upon themselves to buy me enough drinks so that I would finally loosen up around my in-laws. We were sitting and talking and a few humorous comments about wedding nights were made. At that point, happily inebriated, I said, “Know what the best thing about a king size bed is?” and they just looked at me. Happily, I continued, “You can mess around on one-third and sleep on the other two-thirds and not have to worry about the wet spot.” My mother-in-law looked at me then at my father-in-law who, recognizing the look, knew he was in some sort of trouble.
So we went to one of the honeymoon factories in the Poconos. Our only criterion in choosing the place was that it did NOT have heart-shaped bathtubs. (They were octagon-shaped.) We did all the things they had to offer including horseback riding. Fortunately, we waited until the day before our departure to do that. By the next morning, we were both so damn sore from riding that we could barely walk normally. Of course that provoked gales of laughter and lots of nudge, nudge, wink, wink as to how we had “really” gotten into that condition.
There you have it. This June 2 will mark thirty-six years of marriage. There have been many other weddings since ours and a few funerals, too. Stay tuned for more of the story.
To be continued….
Literally, the exact week before we were to get married, a fraternity brother was getting married and we were invited to their wedding. As it happened, the wedding was in East Jabroo (no, that’s not fair, it was actually Delhi), New York. East Jabroo, however also fits because one of the driving directions we got was “when you go over the mountain, turn left.” We all found that infinitely hilarious but, as it turns out, the direction was precise and unmistakable. That parts of New York State existed that would require a direction like that was a hoot to us. Anyway, the bride and groom were leaving for their honeymoon from the airport in Syracuse, New York (site of the infamous flight through the snow that some of you may remember). They asked if we would mind going with them to the airport and then driving their car back to Connecticut. My fiancée (soon to be wife) and I happily agreed. So there we are in the back seat, happily sated with the wedding meal and wedding alcohol. We both dozed off. We were awakened by the dispute that was taking place in the front. It seems the bride had forgotten her “special pillow” and was beside herself that she would be unable to sleep on their honeymoon. Of course, smartass that I am, I had to chime in with, “It’s your honeymoon. Sleeping in the bed is optional.” That was met with stony silence although I thought it was the height of humor. I was a bit concerned that the car in question would have “issues” on the way back to Connecticut since it was a Ford from the era when Ford stood for either “found on road dead” or “fix or repair daily.” As it happens, we made it back without incident and the “Just Married” sign that adorned their car adorned ours the next weekend when we got married. (And we still have the picture to prove it.)
Our wedding was the culmination of one of those classic big-white wedding planning frenzies. My fiancée had decided to convert to Judaism and that whole process began with meeting with the rabbi with whom I had grown up, a very learned man who could be intimidating as hell. For those of you who do not know, it is traditional for a rabbi to attempt to convince someone NOT to convert to Judaism because if they can shake their conviction to do so, then it wasn’t a conversion for the right reasons. Until you see this actually being done to someone you love, you cannot believe what a terrifying experience it is. By the time he was done with us, she was practically in tears and I was ready to detonate in the mega-tonnage range. But she passed the test and he then was as sweet a man as I had always known him to be and helped arrange for conversion classes.
I may have mentioned somewhere along in these tales of myself that I am extremely susceptible to any sedative-type medication, whether it be pain-killers, muscle relaxants or cold medication. Bear this in mind. My fiancée graduated a semester before I did so I was at school without for my senior spring semester. About once a month I’d visit her for the weekend. I believe it was spring break when I was there that I accompanied her to her conversion class. That week I had a muscle cramp in my neck and the university health services prescribed a muscle relaxant called Soma. I was supposed to take it with aspirin but all I had was Tylenol. When I was younger, I got a mild buzz off Tylenol. The night I was going to class with her, I took the pills before we left...and sat through the class nodding off like a junkie. What the rabbi who taught the class must have thought of me is better left unanswered.
So as not to offend the Roman Catholic part of the family, we opted to have the wedding at the Hartford Hilton, which has since been torn down. (No, our wedding had nothing to do with that. An interesting side not is that we got married in the exact same ballroom in which I would, thirteen years later, take the Bar examination.) It did, however, present a dilemma as to where we were going to find a rabbi. None with their own synagogue wanted to do a wedding where not in their own synagogue. My step-father’s sister-in-law also happened to be a friend of my mother and one of my Hebrew school teachers. She remembered a former student who was a rabbi but was at the time employed as a clinical psychologist at Connecticut Valley Hospital, a state-run mental hospital. That was an interesting experience, walking through the hallways looking for his office.
The rabbi made it clear that he had no interest in being part of the rehearsal. So we did the rehearsal in the back yard of my fiancée s parents’ house. There were five bridesmaids plus the matron of honor and I had to walk down the aisle with every one of them during the rehearsal. I’m thinking they weren’t sure I could figure out the direction to walk or the side on which to stand.
So the night before the wedding, me and the boys (my best man and groomsmen) decided to find a topless bar to go to. Only problem was, none of us, me included, knew where one was in the area. No one we asked knew where we could find such an establishment. (We knew where plenty of them were in Syracuse but this was Connecticut.) Failing to find said genre of establishment, we settled for a garden variety bar, had a few beers and then went to the motel where we boys got to stay the night before. (Interesting fact about that motel: Not too long after we got married, the motel became an X-rated motel with in-room movies, gel beds and really tacky lighting. Our wedding had nothing to do with that.)
The next morning, the bunch of us went to the Olympia Diner for breakfast where we happened to run into some more fraternity people. So we had a nice hearty group breakfast. There were still several hours, so we headed to back to my fiancée’s parents’ house. So as to avoid the evil of the groom seeing the bride before the wedding, we stayed downstairs and played bridge. Eventually we were evicted and headed for the Hilton. I remember what I was wearing (ratty blue jeans, a football jersey and sandals) because when my mother greeted me at the hotel it was with the following comment: “Nice to see the groom is the one dressed like a slob.” Thank you Mom.
The ceremony itself was very nice (so I’m told). I don’t particularly remember it. After that came the first reception. Yes, that’s right, there were two. The one at the Hilton was Kosher (read: very, vey expensive). From there we adjourned to a neighboring town where we had the second reception at a VFW hall. The amusement value here came when the bandleader did the pre-meal blessing…in the name of the Father and the son and the Holy Spirit, Amen. Somehow he had missed the memo about the wedding couple being, uh…not Catholic. My mother-in-law was mortified but my parents took it in stride. One of the last events was a dollar dance. (I had never heard of this tradition until several years earlier. We were just girlfriend/boyfriend at the time and went to a wedding along with her parents. There was a dollar dance wherein all the gentlemen had the bride a dollar for the privilege of dancing with her. The idea is to give the couple some ready cash for the honeymoon. My mother-in-law (to be) turned to us and said, “At your wedding it’s going to be a five dollar dance.” I looked at my girlfriend, she looked at me and we both said “Our wedding?” Apparently my m-i-l (to be) knew what we had not quite yet figured out.) There’s a picture of me handing my new wife a dollar with a smirk on my face since she told me no dollar, no dance. I had to borrow the money.
After the reception ended, we went back to her parents’ house to change. I was helping my new bride out of her wedding gown when I heard her mother (who by this time was well drunk) yell, “Mark Gutis! Get out of my daughter’s room while she’s changing her clothes!” I was about to do a big “oops, we’ve been caught” when it suddenly dawned on me: We’re married now and that was just what I said.
As part of the deal with the Hilton, we received a suite for the wedding night. We went upstairs and walked in. There was a nice bottle of champagne (Kosher, of course) in an ice bucket and there in the bedroom, were twin beds. We looked at each other and I said to wait. Down to the desk I went and said, “Um, my…wife (it was the first time I had ever said that and it took a split-second to process) and I got married this afternoon. Right here in fact. The suite you gave us has twin beds.” The desk clerk looked at me and said, “They gave you twin beds? On your wedding night?” I confirmed this. He said to go back and he would send someone to bring us to a new room. A few minutes later a bellman escorted to a suite on another floor where we found a king-size bed. Much better! (OK. TMI alert. Read the remainder of this paragraph at your own peril! The next month, we went to the wedding of my in-law’s best friends’ son. For whatever reason, my father-in-law and the father of the groom took it upon themselves to buy me enough drinks so that I would finally loosen up around my in-laws. We were sitting and talking and a few humorous comments about wedding nights were made. At that point, happily inebriated, I said, “Know what the best thing about a king size bed is?” and they just looked at me. Happily, I continued, “You can mess around on one-third and sleep on the other two-thirds and not have to worry about the wet spot.” My mother-in-law looked at me then at my father-in-law who, recognizing the look, knew he was in some sort of trouble.
So we went to one of the honeymoon factories in the Poconos. Our only criterion in choosing the place was that it did NOT have heart-shaped bathtubs. (They were octagon-shaped.) We did all the things they had to offer including horseback riding. Fortunately, we waited until the day before our departure to do that. By the next morning, we were both so damn sore from riding that we could barely walk normally. Of course that provoked gales of laughter and lots of nudge, nudge, wink, wink as to how we had “really” gotten into that condition.
There you have it. This June 2 will mark thirty-six years of marriage. There have been many other weddings since ours and a few funerals, too. Stay tuned for more of the story.
To be continued….
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Life is a Dance
There’s a song by John Michael Montgomery called “Life is Dance.” For the past ten years or so, I have experienced dance as a life. This is all the more surprising when I consider that I am basically pretty inept when it comes to dancing ballroom style. The times my wife and I have taken dance lessons, we learn the mechanics of the dance and progress to a certain point...and then we have the damndest time following the music and being anything resembling smooth. My perception has been that the majority of that problem is mine because I just do not get the part about “leading.” And maybe that’s why I have found much comfort and enjoyment with Irish dancing.
Some of you know that I consider myself Irish, feel very comfortable with all things Irish and plan to retire in Ireland when my wife finally tells me that I can retire. Why I feel this way I have no explanation. Despite disclaiming any belief in metaphysical things, one of the only explanations I have for this phenomenon is that I was Irish in at least one past lives.
My first brush with Irish dancing came when “Riverdance” came to the United States for the first time in 1996. The show was performed at the Radio City Music Hall and the company appeared on the Today Show. (By the way, why I have such a clear memory of this is beyond me, but I do.) We were on vacation in Rockport, Massachusetts and I had the TV on that morning. The company performed outside the studio on the street and I was blown away by the precision of the entire company. Damn! They were more precise than the Rockettes!
At this point, my memory gets a bit hazy as to the whens and the wherefores but in 1998, my daughter began taking Irish dance lessons. Now, my wife says that our daughter’s primary motivation was that she had fallen in love with Michael Flatley. Whatever the reason, she started dancing. That summer, I had a conference to attend in Chicago and my wife and daughter came along. Coincidentally, the North American Irish Dance Championships were being held at the Marriott in Chicago, two blocks from our hotel. We walked into the lobby and my daughter's eyes lit up looking at the many dancers walking around carrying their dance dresses. We sat down and just took it all in. Finally, I looked at my wife and said, “I am in Irish dance hell!” I then had to return to our hotel for the seminars and the two of them stayed to watch the competition and shop at the vendors.
At that point, Irish dancing was the farthest thing from my mind.
After a brief unhappy stint with one dance school, my daughter changed to the one with which we are currently associated. At that year's dance recital, I watched her dance with several other adults including some men and I began wondering if it was something I could do. But I didn’t dare say anything about it. At some point that year, she got engaged and the planned wedding turned into one of those big white weddings. Among the things planned was a performance by the dancers from the school including the adults. I, then, decided that I was going to surprise her and learn a couple of easy steps to do for her at the wedding as a gift from Dad. I bought a how-to videotape done by Colin Dunne (who replaced Michael Flatley as lead male dancer in Riverdance). Let me say this about that. This was supposed to be a basic how-to tape. After ten years of dancing, I STILL can’t follow those steps. I quickly gave up and said nothing about what I had intended since it was’'t going to happen. I also assumed my inability to learn from the video was my dance ineptitude. (By the way, my favorite picture from her wedding is of her dancing the hornpipe in her wedding gown with one of the other girls holding her gown off the floor to keep it out of the way.)
Shortly after that, my daughter came home from a feis (that’s pronounced “fesh” and is an Irish dance competition) and announced that I was going to learn how to do some Irish dancing because at the feis, there was a parent-child competition. I looked at her and said something like, “Oh, okay,” with only a slight waver of trepidation in my voice. So that summer, she schlepped me to the dance studio with her. Two of the top dancers in our schools (young ladies who became my first adopted “dance daughters” and my dance teacher’s four daughters all began trying to teach me the basics. Now, for those of you who may not know, the basic step is called a three and alternates as follows: R-L-R, L-R-L. It’s almost like skipping but not. As with so many thousands of dancers before me, this basic step was extremely elusive. Being close to 50 years of age, it was also extremely klutzy looking. After several sessions, my daughter finally looked at me and said, “Didn’t you tell me you used to go wizarding across campus in college?” What she meant was that there were times a group of us would link arms and, like Dorothy and her companions in “The Wizard of Oz,” go dancing across campus singing “We’re off to see the Wizard.” I said that yes, we did do that and she said, “Well what you were doing were threes.” And that’s when the light dawned. From that moment on, I was able to do threes without a problem.
With the issue of the three solved, we moved on to sevens, another of the basic steps. Sevens are similar to what in other forms of dance is called grapevine. Essentially it’s a side-step. For whatever reason, this proved even more elusive and it was a good two years before it ever got straightened out and done correctly. Another elusive move was the over-two-three. It’s very similar to a three except that the lead leg is lifted and you go “over” the leg for the 2-3. They finally got that one across to me, sort of, when my daughter said, “It’s just like the way you ran the hurdles.” That kind of made sense when my left leg was in front but not when it was the right leg.
After several weeks of this, the girls who were trying to help me concluded the following: “Ain’t no way this guy is EVER going to learn this.” This I learned much after the fact. My daughter also told me that she was too old to be able to do the parent-child competition but that was all right because there were adult dance classes in the fall.
So we started going to adult dance classes which were pretty much a fun evening of ceili (pronounced “caley”), or group dancing, not unlike square dancing. There’s a good reason for that. American square-dancing derives from Irish ceili dancing. Since my daughter was an adult, she was in class, too. At the end, we all sat down and my dance teacher asked who was going to do the Oireachtas (that’s pronounced “or-rack-tiss” and is the regional dance competition). I looked at my daughter and she nodded her head and said, “Yes. You are.” I don’t think my head exploded but suddenly I was now going to be doing not just a competition, but the regionals. (And I understood the concept of regionals from my high school track days.)
Now, in addition to having to become proficient at 3s and 7s and hop-back 2-3s, I had to learn a four-hand reel and an eight-hand reel (that simply means a dance done with four and a dance done eight to reel music). In the eight-hand, I was paired up with one of the experienced ladies. In the four-hand, I was paired with a woman who, like me, was new to Irish dance. Little did I know, but this lady would turn out to be the only partner with whom I have ever danced a four-hand in competition (and, for that matter, was only not my partner in one eight-hand competition) over these past ten years.
The most difficult thing I found in these dances was spinning. In Irish dance, the gent is always on the left (which means men are always on the left in the dance pairing and if it is two women, the one on the left is called the gent). In the spin, the partners grasp hands together, spin in a clockwise direction while moving around the floor (and the other dancers) in an anti-clockwise direction, all the time doing threes. Sound confusing? Try doing it the first fifty times. It’s still the most challenging part for me in any ceili dance.
That year, the Oireachtas was being held at the Marriott in Stamford, Connecticut. We drove down the day of the adult competitions and walked in…and if I thought I had been in dance hell in Chicago that was nothing! The hotel was over-crowded with dancers, parents, teachers, assorted relatives…all pushing, shoving jostling in narrow hallways and don’t even consider trying to use the elevator. My daughter’s dance partner met us. He was staying at the hotel because his son was one of the dancer’s competing in individual competitions. We went up to their room so I could change into my dance costume. At the time, it was a white shirt with a red tie, blue jacket with a red sash and a kilt. We took the obligatory pictures and went downstairs, back into hell.
My two dance daughters, both of whom were doing individual competitions, had been watching for us. When they saw me and the look on my face, they both started trying to reassure me that all was okay and it really wasn’t as bad as it looked and I shouldn’t get worked up. Honestly, other than worrying about forgetting the dance and embarrassing our teacher, I was not concerned. I have always enjoyed being in front of a group of people whether it’s lecturing or performing.
We gathered together as a team and because I was one of the newbies, I just went with the herd. I wasn’t really sure what to expect but I figured those who knew would make sure I got to where I needed to be when I needed to be there as long as I stayed with the group. That was easy enough because my more experienced eight-hand partner and my daughter were keeping a sharp eye on me.
The eight-hand competition was first. I felt fairly comfortable there because my partner was a very strong partner and could move me where I needed to be if I made a misstep. I don’t remember a thing about the dance itself. I do know that we got through it without a problem. Next was the four-hand where my partner was as new to this as I was. (It was only years later that I learned that she suffers from stage fright and just getting on the stage was a major accomplishment for her. My only memory of that dance was that it was not nearly as smooth as the eight-hand had been. But we did not embarrass ourselves or our teacher. And the neatest thing about the adult ceili competition is that people in the audience appreciate the fact that we are actual adults and are enthusiastic for us.
When we were done, my head was spinning a bit, partly from an adrenalin rush and partly from the euphoria of having gotten through it without any major screw-up. I immediately ran over to our dance teacher, hugged her and thanked her and asked if there was a class she could put me in. I was HOOKED!
It was almost an anticlimax, but we finished fourth in the eight-hand and were awarded medals. There’s a great picture of the eight of us with medals around our necks. But to me, the real prize had been discovering a new passion. And if I was never going to be Michael Flatley or Colin Dunne, I was going to have a decade of fantastic memories, make some wonderful friends and be part of a tradition that still makes me feel “just right.”
Happy St. Patrick’s Day, everybody.
Some of you know that I consider myself Irish, feel very comfortable with all things Irish and plan to retire in Ireland when my wife finally tells me that I can retire. Why I feel this way I have no explanation. Despite disclaiming any belief in metaphysical things, one of the only explanations I have for this phenomenon is that I was Irish in at least one past lives.
My first brush with Irish dancing came when “Riverdance” came to the United States for the first time in 1996. The show was performed at the Radio City Music Hall and the company appeared on the Today Show. (By the way, why I have such a clear memory of this is beyond me, but I do.) We were on vacation in Rockport, Massachusetts and I had the TV on that morning. The company performed outside the studio on the street and I was blown away by the precision of the entire company. Damn! They were more precise than the Rockettes!
At this point, my memory gets a bit hazy as to the whens and the wherefores but in 1998, my daughter began taking Irish dance lessons. Now, my wife says that our daughter’s primary motivation was that she had fallen in love with Michael Flatley. Whatever the reason, she started dancing. That summer, I had a conference to attend in Chicago and my wife and daughter came along. Coincidentally, the North American Irish Dance Championships were being held at the Marriott in Chicago, two blocks from our hotel. We walked into the lobby and my daughter's eyes lit up looking at the many dancers walking around carrying their dance dresses. We sat down and just took it all in. Finally, I looked at my wife and said, “I am in Irish dance hell!” I then had to return to our hotel for the seminars and the two of them stayed to watch the competition and shop at the vendors.
At that point, Irish dancing was the farthest thing from my mind.
After a brief unhappy stint with one dance school, my daughter changed to the one with which we are currently associated. At that year's dance recital, I watched her dance with several other adults including some men and I began wondering if it was something I could do. But I didn’t dare say anything about it. At some point that year, she got engaged and the planned wedding turned into one of those big white weddings. Among the things planned was a performance by the dancers from the school including the adults. I, then, decided that I was going to surprise her and learn a couple of easy steps to do for her at the wedding as a gift from Dad. I bought a how-to videotape done by Colin Dunne (who replaced Michael Flatley as lead male dancer in Riverdance). Let me say this about that. This was supposed to be a basic how-to tape. After ten years of dancing, I STILL can’t follow those steps. I quickly gave up and said nothing about what I had intended since it was’'t going to happen. I also assumed my inability to learn from the video was my dance ineptitude. (By the way, my favorite picture from her wedding is of her dancing the hornpipe in her wedding gown with one of the other girls holding her gown off the floor to keep it out of the way.)
Shortly after that, my daughter came home from a feis (that’s pronounced “fesh” and is an Irish dance competition) and announced that I was going to learn how to do some Irish dancing because at the feis, there was a parent-child competition. I looked at her and said something like, “Oh, okay,” with only a slight waver of trepidation in my voice. So that summer, she schlepped me to the dance studio with her. Two of the top dancers in our schools (young ladies who became my first adopted “dance daughters” and my dance teacher’s four daughters all began trying to teach me the basics. Now, for those of you who may not know, the basic step is called a three and alternates as follows: R-L-R, L-R-L. It’s almost like skipping but not. As with so many thousands of dancers before me, this basic step was extremely elusive. Being close to 50 years of age, it was also extremely klutzy looking. After several sessions, my daughter finally looked at me and said, “Didn’t you tell me you used to go wizarding across campus in college?” What she meant was that there were times a group of us would link arms and, like Dorothy and her companions in “The Wizard of Oz,” go dancing across campus singing “We’re off to see the Wizard.” I said that yes, we did do that and she said, “Well what you were doing were threes.” And that’s when the light dawned. From that moment on, I was able to do threes without a problem.
With the issue of the three solved, we moved on to sevens, another of the basic steps. Sevens are similar to what in other forms of dance is called grapevine. Essentially it’s a side-step. For whatever reason, this proved even more elusive and it was a good two years before it ever got straightened out and done correctly. Another elusive move was the over-two-three. It’s very similar to a three except that the lead leg is lifted and you go “over” the leg for the 2-3. They finally got that one across to me, sort of, when my daughter said, “It’s just like the way you ran the hurdles.” That kind of made sense when my left leg was in front but not when it was the right leg.
After several weeks of this, the girls who were trying to help me concluded the following: “Ain’t no way this guy is EVER going to learn this.” This I learned much after the fact. My daughter also told me that she was too old to be able to do the parent-child competition but that was all right because there were adult dance classes in the fall.
So we started going to adult dance classes which were pretty much a fun evening of ceili (pronounced “caley”), or group dancing, not unlike square dancing. There’s a good reason for that. American square-dancing derives from Irish ceili dancing. Since my daughter was an adult, she was in class, too. At the end, we all sat down and my dance teacher asked who was going to do the Oireachtas (that’s pronounced “or-rack-tiss” and is the regional dance competition). I looked at my daughter and she nodded her head and said, “Yes. You are.” I don’t think my head exploded but suddenly I was now going to be doing not just a competition, but the regionals. (And I understood the concept of regionals from my high school track days.)
Now, in addition to having to become proficient at 3s and 7s and hop-back 2-3s, I had to learn a four-hand reel and an eight-hand reel (that simply means a dance done with four and a dance done eight to reel music). In the eight-hand, I was paired up with one of the experienced ladies. In the four-hand, I was paired with a woman who, like me, was new to Irish dance. Little did I know, but this lady would turn out to be the only partner with whom I have ever danced a four-hand in competition (and, for that matter, was only not my partner in one eight-hand competition) over these past ten years.
The most difficult thing I found in these dances was spinning. In Irish dance, the gent is always on the left (which means men are always on the left in the dance pairing and if it is two women, the one on the left is called the gent). In the spin, the partners grasp hands together, spin in a clockwise direction while moving around the floor (and the other dancers) in an anti-clockwise direction, all the time doing threes. Sound confusing? Try doing it the first fifty times. It’s still the most challenging part for me in any ceili dance.
That year, the Oireachtas was being held at the Marriott in Stamford, Connecticut. We drove down the day of the adult competitions and walked in…and if I thought I had been in dance hell in Chicago that was nothing! The hotel was over-crowded with dancers, parents, teachers, assorted relatives…all pushing, shoving jostling in narrow hallways and don’t even consider trying to use the elevator. My daughter’s dance partner met us. He was staying at the hotel because his son was one of the dancer’s competing in individual competitions. We went up to their room so I could change into my dance costume. At the time, it was a white shirt with a red tie, blue jacket with a red sash and a kilt. We took the obligatory pictures and went downstairs, back into hell.
My two dance daughters, both of whom were doing individual competitions, had been watching for us. When they saw me and the look on my face, they both started trying to reassure me that all was okay and it really wasn’t as bad as it looked and I shouldn’t get worked up. Honestly, other than worrying about forgetting the dance and embarrassing our teacher, I was not concerned. I have always enjoyed being in front of a group of people whether it’s lecturing or performing.
We gathered together as a team and because I was one of the newbies, I just went with the herd. I wasn’t really sure what to expect but I figured those who knew would make sure I got to where I needed to be when I needed to be there as long as I stayed with the group. That was easy enough because my more experienced eight-hand partner and my daughter were keeping a sharp eye on me.
The eight-hand competition was first. I felt fairly comfortable there because my partner was a very strong partner and could move me where I needed to be if I made a misstep. I don’t remember a thing about the dance itself. I do know that we got through it without a problem. Next was the four-hand where my partner was as new to this as I was. (It was only years later that I learned that she suffers from stage fright and just getting on the stage was a major accomplishment for her. My only memory of that dance was that it was not nearly as smooth as the eight-hand had been. But we did not embarrass ourselves or our teacher. And the neatest thing about the adult ceili competition is that people in the audience appreciate the fact that we are actual adults and are enthusiastic for us.
When we were done, my head was spinning a bit, partly from an adrenalin rush and partly from the euphoria of having gotten through it without any major screw-up. I immediately ran over to our dance teacher, hugged her and thanked her and asked if there was a class she could put me in. I was HOOKED!
It was almost an anticlimax, but we finished fourth in the eight-hand and were awarded medals. There’s a great picture of the eight of us with medals around our necks. But to me, the real prize had been discovering a new passion. And if I was never going to be Michael Flatley or Colin Dunne, I was going to have a decade of fantastic memories, make some wonderful friends and be part of a tradition that still makes me feel “just right.”
Happy St. Patrick’s Day, everybody.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Memoirs of a Cold Warrior, Part 2
By the time I got to high school, the war in Vietnam was in full swing. We were fighting the evil Commies there so we didn't have to fight them somewhere else...or here. (That sound vaguely familiar?) The MIC had a field day by pushing us into believing in the Domino Theory. Remember that? If we lose Vietnam, then we'll lose Thailand, then Burma, then Malaya, etc. Kind of the opposite of the winning strategy in Risk when you start with the Australian area and expand from there...oh never mind.
By this time I had settled in my own mind that following college I was going to be an Air Force aviator. The only question I had was whether I would earn a commission through the Air Force Academy or ROTC. One of my classmates was interested in the Naval Academy and we figured he had a better chance of getting in and staying in (that old mathematics thing and me) so I opted to not try and go the ROTC route instead.
I have mentioned before that my opposition to the Vietnam war had little in common with the anti-war movement. I opposed the war because I understood that we were not there to win it. Men were dying and being imprisoned as POWs for a flawed strategy and an uncertain political theory. As we continue to discover, it's almost impossible to defeat an insurgency in its own country. B-52s continued dropping tons upon tons of bombs on jungle with no ability to figure out if we were doing anything other than blowing up empty jungle. I even recall the poster that one of the math teachers had in the back of his classroom. It was a big bright flower with the legend, "War is not healthy for children and other living things." Really? Honest? No sh*t Sherlock! I had rapidly lost patience with the anti-war movement when it took on a decidedly pro-North Vietnam aspect. I didn't like the war but I still deeply believed in the necessity of opposing client states of the Soviet Union.
The Tet Offensive begat Johnson's choice of not running for re-election. That begat Nixon as President. President Nixon begat Vietnamization. Vietnamization begat the secret bombing of Cambodia which begat the invasion of Cambodia which begat making the Vietnamese fight their own war which begat the 1972 invasion of South Vietnam which begat the Linebacker bombing campaign and more bombing which begat some progress on negotiations which begat South Vietnam's disagreement which begat North Vietnam balking which begat Linebacker II and B-52s being shot down over Hanoi and Haiphong which finally begat an end to American involvement in Vietnam.
While all this begetting was going on, the arch anti-Communist, Richard Milhouse Nixon went to China. No, not Taiwan/Republic of China, but the big bad People's Republic of China in February 1972. WTF? Nixon and Kissinger going to China to open relations? Well, Stalin and Hitler signed a non-aggression pact in August 1939. (Oh, wait...how did that work out?)
Once I tumbled to the fact that college math precluded any dream I might have had for becoming an aerospace engineer, I discovered that Syracuse University had a very good International Relations and a superb Soviet Studies program. And, joy of joys (no, this was actually before THAT Joy) there was a dual concentration in International Relations and Soviet Studies. How great a major was that for the Air Force?
While I was at Syracuse, the Yom Kippur War a/k/a the October War a/k/a the Ramadan War resulted in the U.S. and Soviet Union going eyeball to eyeball over the possibility of a Soviet intervention. The Strategic Air Command generated its B-52s to a ready state but cooler heads prevailed yet again.
By the time I had figured out that my eyes would prevent me from being a pilot, my heart was set on becoming a navigator. And what was the navigator's airplane? Why the B-52. From the day I started navigator training, all I wanted was to get into B-52s. The good news was that the majority of my classmates considered a desire to be in the Strategic Air Command to be a serious mental disorder. Nope. Not me. I had been preparing for that for years. Me and Jimmy Stewart ("Strategic Air Command"), Karl Malden ("Bombers B-52") and Rock Hudson ("A Gathering of Eagles").
In 1975, North Vietnam launched the final invasion of the south. And all those lives that had been wasted and destroyed to save South Vietnam from the evil Commie aggressors? Oh well, sorry. The scenes of the helicopters evacuating civilians from the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) are seared in the memories of many of us who lived through it.
Eventually I was assigned to the 416th Bomb Wing, 668th Bomb Squadron at Griffiss AFB, NY. I was so proud when my wife sewed on my bomb squadron patch with a goat butting with its head in front of a big bomb. And I was even prouder when I certified for my Emergency War Order mission, part of the Single Integrated Operations Plan (SIOP). The SIOP was the master plan of the United States for blowing up the world by dropping many, many nuclear warheads on the Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact nations and, depending on the scenario, our new pals, the Red Chinese. The Deputy Commander for Operations was the officer who certified me and his comment was that he had never heard anyone who could pronounce the names of the Russian towns as well as I did. And I didn't even bother taking Russian!
At that time, each SAC base kept four bomber and four tanker aircraft on alert. The crews were restricted to the base and would walk around in their flight suits. When the klaxon went off, they would run out to the aircraft, start engines and be ready to take off within 15 minutes of the klaxon. A message would be broadcast and until it was decoded, we had no idea whether it was a practice, the real thing...or a boo-boo a/k/a an inadvertent klaxon. That happened the first time I was ever on alert. It resulted in the alert crews being restricted to the alert facility. My wife and my (then) baby daughter watched the 1976 Bicentennial celebrations on the TV at the alert facility's family center.
Those bombers at Griffiss were armed with four gravity bombs in the forward bomb-bay (B-61 with variable yields from 0.3 kiloton to 340 kiloton) and in the aft bomb-bay a rotary launcher with six to eight AGM-69A Short Range Attack Missiles (SRAM) with a warhead variable yield warhead from 170 kiloton to 200 kiloton. So you do the math and you can imagine the destructive capability of just one wing. Multiply that by all the squadrons in SAC plus the ICBMs plus the submarine launched missiles and you begin to get some idea why we used to giggle over the fact that they actually gave us a Post-Strike Base. Yes. We were going to take off with nukes raining down all over the U.S., refuel from a tanker, fly across the ocean, descend to the lowest possible altitude, fly a precisely timed and mapped route with nukes going off all around us and still have enough fuel to make it to a base that would probably be a large smoking hole in the ground ANYWAY! And that's to say nothing of the amount of radiation we would have absorbed. Honestly. In training, they showed a movie where they told us that flying through a post-detonation cloud would be safe enough for us to not be concerned. Come on. We might have been be crazy. We weren't stupid.
About the time I got out of the Air Force, cruise missiles were starting to become a part of the inventory. This enabled the B-52 to be able to stand off even farther from their targets and sling nuclear-tipped missiles. Cruise missiles would become one of the most contentious weapons in Europe during the 1980s. And, by the way, when the James Bond movie "Never Say Never Again" was released (essentially the same plot as "Thunderball") it was two air launched cruise missiles that were stolen.
Détente seemed to be the word as Soviet and U.S. relations seemed to indicate a thaw in the Cold War. That lasted until the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Then even Jimmy Carter, the president who canceled the B-1 bomber project, sat up and took notice. The evil Commies were at it again, invading a nation that had done nothing to them. (Hmmm. Where have I heard that more recently?) Carter was followed by that arch Cold Warrior Ronald Reagan.
Since this is about the Cold War and not about economics I'll avoid the temptation of going on about redistribution of wealth under Ronnie's two terms. But a lot of that redistributed wealth got shoveled in the direction of the Military-Industrial Complex. For one thing, he reactivated the B-1 bomber program. Then he came up with his genius Star Wars program.
Europe had become a stockpile of cruise missiles and intermediate range missiles. There were protests in the U.K. and Germany against our basing these weapons on their soil. In 1983, during a NATO exercise code-named Able Archer 83, a dedicated Soviet intelligence group was of the opinion that it was a pretext for a first-strike against the USSR and Soviet forces were generated to a near-ready state. This was based, in no small part, on Reagan's inflammatory 1950s-style Cold War rhetoric. This was yet another case of the world being on the brink of catastrophe before cooler heads prevailed.
Ultimately, Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, for their own reasons, began engaging in a dialogue which resulted in meaningful cuts in the number of warheads poised to go flying. This was a truly positive development for the world because the latest, and last, iteration of strategic nuclear deterrence was known as Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). The essence of it is this: You don't dare launch on me because if you do, I'll have time to retaliate and we will just wind up destroying each other...oh, yeah, and the world, too. (There is a 1959 Cold War novel by Mordecai Roshwald named "Level 7" in which it comes out that the two sides destroyed the world and themselves by accident and misinterpretation. And Nevil Shute's 1957 novel "On the Beach" demonstrated how a nuclear war in the northern hemisphere would, ultimately, kill life on Earth. It all makes for fascinating reading, certainly scarier than anything Stephen King or Dean Koontz ever came up with.)
Reagan is remembered for his "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this Wall speech" and while it may have given some succor and encouragement to the anti-totalitarian sentiment that was permeating Eastern Europe, greater political and economic factors were at work. (I heartily recommend Michael Meyer's book "The Year That Changed the World", reviewed here http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/04/AR2009090401751.html, for a penetrating, honest and extremely readable look at the events that heralded the end of the Cold War.) And in that dark, depressed time of my life when I had to work in retail sales to earn some money, one thing I bought was a piece of the Berlin Wall. I still have it.
December 26, 1991 was the day the Soviet Union dissolved itself. As so many things in the history of the world, it came with a whimper, not a bang. On May 31, 1992, the Strategic Air Command was reorganized out of existence. (And the body of Curtis LeMay has been spinning in its grave ever since.) Within a three year period, the basis of the bi-partite world had ceased to be. We had won. But what had we won?
MAD may have been the classic example of two scorpions in a bottle, knowing that killing the other would result in its own death. Despite the unthinkably huge number of megatons poised to be slung, there was one thing of which could be relatively sure. The Soviets knew where those warheads were and who had them under control. Their scientists and nuclear engineers were under their control. Once the USSR dissolved into separate states all of which suffered their own economic woes, much was sold to the highest bidder.
We live in a post-Cold War world. Are we any safer? There's probably less risk of an apocalyptic world-ending nuclear exchange than there was in the Cold War. But the most serious attack on what the Neocons like to call the Homeland (and if that doesn't smack of Fascist overtones, nothing does) came in the post-Cold War era. We are engaged in two wars, one of which shows little sign of ending. More men and women are being lost in combat than at any time since the Vietnam war. And the hemorrhage of money to the MIC only seems to be accelerating. Safer? Maybe in one sense, but not really. Poorer? Morally and economically.
Personally, I look back on the Cold War era with a degree of nostalgia. If you ask many Russians who lived through the Great Terror of the 1930s they will look back with nostalgia on Stalin. I seem to have a similar feeling about the world in which I grew up. It was a dangerous world. From the day we detonated the Trinity device in July 1945 mankind had the means to end its tenuous existence on Earth. That we succeeded in avoiding that fate may be more to happenstance than planning. I look back at my service in the Air Force with pride. At the same time, I find it frightening that I was prepared to participate in an apocalyptic spasm of destruction that would have destroyed everyone and everything I know and hold dear. That I have become anti-war sometimes surprises me...but not all that much and not all that often. But I think back on that poster from my high school math teacher's room and recognize the wisdom of it, that war really is NOT healthy for children and other living things.
By this time I had settled in my own mind that following college I was going to be an Air Force aviator. The only question I had was whether I would earn a commission through the Air Force Academy or ROTC. One of my classmates was interested in the Naval Academy and we figured he had a better chance of getting in and staying in (that old mathematics thing and me) so I opted to not try and go the ROTC route instead.
I have mentioned before that my opposition to the Vietnam war had little in common with the anti-war movement. I opposed the war because I understood that we were not there to win it. Men were dying and being imprisoned as POWs for a flawed strategy and an uncertain political theory. As we continue to discover, it's almost impossible to defeat an insurgency in its own country. B-52s continued dropping tons upon tons of bombs on jungle with no ability to figure out if we were doing anything other than blowing up empty jungle. I even recall the poster that one of the math teachers had in the back of his classroom. It was a big bright flower with the legend, "War is not healthy for children and other living things." Really? Honest? No sh*t Sherlock! I had rapidly lost patience with the anti-war movement when it took on a decidedly pro-North Vietnam aspect. I didn't like the war but I still deeply believed in the necessity of opposing client states of the Soviet Union.
The Tet Offensive begat Johnson's choice of not running for re-election. That begat Nixon as President. President Nixon begat Vietnamization. Vietnamization begat the secret bombing of Cambodia which begat the invasion of Cambodia which begat making the Vietnamese fight their own war which begat the 1972 invasion of South Vietnam which begat the Linebacker bombing campaign and more bombing which begat some progress on negotiations which begat South Vietnam's disagreement which begat North Vietnam balking which begat Linebacker II and B-52s being shot down over Hanoi and Haiphong which finally begat an end to American involvement in Vietnam.
While all this begetting was going on, the arch anti-Communist, Richard Milhouse Nixon went to China. No, not Taiwan/Republic of China, but the big bad People's Republic of China in February 1972. WTF? Nixon and Kissinger going to China to open relations? Well, Stalin and Hitler signed a non-aggression pact in August 1939. (Oh, wait...how did that work out?)
Once I tumbled to the fact that college math precluded any dream I might have had for becoming an aerospace engineer, I discovered that Syracuse University had a very good International Relations and a superb Soviet Studies program. And, joy of joys (no, this was actually before THAT Joy) there was a dual concentration in International Relations and Soviet Studies. How great a major was that for the Air Force?
While I was at Syracuse, the Yom Kippur War a/k/a the October War a/k/a the Ramadan War resulted in the U.S. and Soviet Union going eyeball to eyeball over the possibility of a Soviet intervention. The Strategic Air Command generated its B-52s to a ready state but cooler heads prevailed yet again.
By the time I had figured out that my eyes would prevent me from being a pilot, my heart was set on becoming a navigator. And what was the navigator's airplane? Why the B-52. From the day I started navigator training, all I wanted was to get into B-52s. The good news was that the majority of my classmates considered a desire to be in the Strategic Air Command to be a serious mental disorder. Nope. Not me. I had been preparing for that for years. Me and Jimmy Stewart ("Strategic Air Command"), Karl Malden ("Bombers B-52") and Rock Hudson ("A Gathering of Eagles").
In 1975, North Vietnam launched the final invasion of the south. And all those lives that had been wasted and destroyed to save South Vietnam from the evil Commie aggressors? Oh well, sorry. The scenes of the helicopters evacuating civilians from the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) are seared in the memories of many of us who lived through it.
Eventually I was assigned to the 416th Bomb Wing, 668th Bomb Squadron at Griffiss AFB, NY. I was so proud when my wife sewed on my bomb squadron patch with a goat butting with its head in front of a big bomb. And I was even prouder when I certified for my Emergency War Order mission, part of the Single Integrated Operations Plan (SIOP). The SIOP was the master plan of the United States for blowing up the world by dropping many, many nuclear warheads on the Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact nations and, depending on the scenario, our new pals, the Red Chinese. The Deputy Commander for Operations was the officer who certified me and his comment was that he had never heard anyone who could pronounce the names of the Russian towns as well as I did. And I didn't even bother taking Russian!
At that time, each SAC base kept four bomber and four tanker aircraft on alert. The crews were restricted to the base and would walk around in their flight suits. When the klaxon went off, they would run out to the aircraft, start engines and be ready to take off within 15 minutes of the klaxon. A message would be broadcast and until it was decoded, we had no idea whether it was a practice, the real thing...or a boo-boo a/k/a an inadvertent klaxon. That happened the first time I was ever on alert. It resulted in the alert crews being restricted to the alert facility. My wife and my (then) baby daughter watched the 1976 Bicentennial celebrations on the TV at the alert facility's family center.
Those bombers at Griffiss were armed with four gravity bombs in the forward bomb-bay (B-61 with variable yields from 0.3 kiloton to 340 kiloton) and in the aft bomb-bay a rotary launcher with six to eight AGM-69A Short Range Attack Missiles (SRAM) with a warhead variable yield warhead from 170 kiloton to 200 kiloton. So you do the math and you can imagine the destructive capability of just one wing. Multiply that by all the squadrons in SAC plus the ICBMs plus the submarine launched missiles and you begin to get some idea why we used to giggle over the fact that they actually gave us a Post-Strike Base. Yes. We were going to take off with nukes raining down all over the U.S., refuel from a tanker, fly across the ocean, descend to the lowest possible altitude, fly a precisely timed and mapped route with nukes going off all around us and still have enough fuel to make it to a base that would probably be a large smoking hole in the ground ANYWAY! And that's to say nothing of the amount of radiation we would have absorbed. Honestly. In training, they showed a movie where they told us that flying through a post-detonation cloud would be safe enough for us to not be concerned. Come on. We might have been be crazy. We weren't stupid.
About the time I got out of the Air Force, cruise missiles were starting to become a part of the inventory. This enabled the B-52 to be able to stand off even farther from their targets and sling nuclear-tipped missiles. Cruise missiles would become one of the most contentious weapons in Europe during the 1980s. And, by the way, when the James Bond movie "Never Say Never Again" was released (essentially the same plot as "Thunderball") it was two air launched cruise missiles that were stolen.
Détente seemed to be the word as Soviet and U.S. relations seemed to indicate a thaw in the Cold War. That lasted until the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Then even Jimmy Carter, the president who canceled the B-1 bomber project, sat up and took notice. The evil Commies were at it again, invading a nation that had done nothing to them. (Hmmm. Where have I heard that more recently?) Carter was followed by that arch Cold Warrior Ronald Reagan.
Since this is about the Cold War and not about economics I'll avoid the temptation of going on about redistribution of wealth under Ronnie's two terms. But a lot of that redistributed wealth got shoveled in the direction of the Military-Industrial Complex. For one thing, he reactivated the B-1 bomber program. Then he came up with his genius Star Wars program.
Europe had become a stockpile of cruise missiles and intermediate range missiles. There were protests in the U.K. and Germany against our basing these weapons on their soil. In 1983, during a NATO exercise code-named Able Archer 83, a dedicated Soviet intelligence group was of the opinion that it was a pretext for a first-strike against the USSR and Soviet forces were generated to a near-ready state. This was based, in no small part, on Reagan's inflammatory 1950s-style Cold War rhetoric. This was yet another case of the world being on the brink of catastrophe before cooler heads prevailed.
Ultimately, Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, for their own reasons, began engaging in a dialogue which resulted in meaningful cuts in the number of warheads poised to go flying. This was a truly positive development for the world because the latest, and last, iteration of strategic nuclear deterrence was known as Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). The essence of it is this: You don't dare launch on me because if you do, I'll have time to retaliate and we will just wind up destroying each other...oh, yeah, and the world, too. (There is a 1959 Cold War novel by Mordecai Roshwald named "Level 7" in which it comes out that the two sides destroyed the world and themselves by accident and misinterpretation. And Nevil Shute's 1957 novel "On the Beach" demonstrated how a nuclear war in the northern hemisphere would, ultimately, kill life on Earth. It all makes for fascinating reading, certainly scarier than anything Stephen King or Dean Koontz ever came up with.)
Reagan is remembered for his "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this Wall speech" and while it may have given some succor and encouragement to the anti-totalitarian sentiment that was permeating Eastern Europe, greater political and economic factors were at work. (I heartily recommend Michael Meyer's book "The Year That Changed the World", reviewed here http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/04/AR2009090401751.html, for a penetrating, honest and extremely readable look at the events that heralded the end of the Cold War.) And in that dark, depressed time of my life when I had to work in retail sales to earn some money, one thing I bought was a piece of the Berlin Wall. I still have it.
December 26, 1991 was the day the Soviet Union dissolved itself. As so many things in the history of the world, it came with a whimper, not a bang. On May 31, 1992, the Strategic Air Command was reorganized out of existence. (And the body of Curtis LeMay has been spinning in its grave ever since.) Within a three year period, the basis of the bi-partite world had ceased to be. We had won. But what had we won?
MAD may have been the classic example of two scorpions in a bottle, knowing that killing the other would result in its own death. Despite the unthinkably huge number of megatons poised to be slung, there was one thing of which could be relatively sure. The Soviets knew where those warheads were and who had them under control. Their scientists and nuclear engineers were under their control. Once the USSR dissolved into separate states all of which suffered their own economic woes, much was sold to the highest bidder.
We live in a post-Cold War world. Are we any safer? There's probably less risk of an apocalyptic world-ending nuclear exchange than there was in the Cold War. But the most serious attack on what the Neocons like to call the Homeland (and if that doesn't smack of Fascist overtones, nothing does) came in the post-Cold War era. We are engaged in two wars, one of which shows little sign of ending. More men and women are being lost in combat than at any time since the Vietnam war. And the hemorrhage of money to the MIC only seems to be accelerating. Safer? Maybe in one sense, but not really. Poorer? Morally and economically.
Personally, I look back on the Cold War era with a degree of nostalgia. If you ask many Russians who lived through the Great Terror of the 1930s they will look back with nostalgia on Stalin. I seem to have a similar feeling about the world in which I grew up. It was a dangerous world. From the day we detonated the Trinity device in July 1945 mankind had the means to end its tenuous existence on Earth. That we succeeded in avoiding that fate may be more to happenstance than planning. I look back at my service in the Air Force with pride. At the same time, I find it frightening that I was prepared to participate in an apocalyptic spasm of destruction that would have destroyed everyone and everything I know and hold dear. That I have become anti-war sometimes surprises me...but not all that much and not all that often. But I think back on that poster from my high school math teacher's room and recognize the wisdom of it, that war really is NOT healthy for children and other living things.
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Memories of a Cold Warrior
In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, an event that I never believed I would live to see. This was followed by the dissolution of the
I’m not sure when I became aware of the fact that there was a Cold War between the
OK. Now, let’s stop for a minute and think about this (which, unfortunately for me, is exactly what I did). My first question was how were my little arms going to stop bricks, plaster and other heavy stuff from smashing me into little Mark bits? Secondarily, if the goal was to protect my head from said debris, why were my arms not ON TOP of my head? That, however, contemplated one of two things. It contemplated that, either the big bad Russians intended bombing us with conventional explosives, like we did to Germany throughout World War II, or that we were not going to be close enough to ground zero to be vaporized. Because of my fascination with war stuff and airplanes, I was well aware of the atomic bombs we had detonated over
For some reason, our school system had adopted the stand next to the wall with your arms on your head theory of nuclear destruction avoidance. The government also had a marvelous way of making people feel safe in the face of nuclear annihilation: Duck and cover. Here’s the skinny on this genius piece of civil defense. As soon as you saw the flash from a nuclear detonation (assuming it had not burned out your retinas) you had to stop what you were doing and get on the ground under some cover…such as a table, or at least next to a wall, and assume the fetal position, lying face-down and covering your heads with your hands. Oh! Right. That wooden desk was going to protect you from several thousand degrees of heat and the over-pressure caused by the shock wave generated by a 10 megaton blast. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for playing along at home with our game of “You Have Got to Be Sh*tting Me!” This was actually taught from the 1950s into the 1980s! (I always thought a better solution was if you saw the flash, bend over and kiss your ass goodbye. But that’s just me.)
A little knowledge is always a dangerous thing. My fascination with airplanes and aviation, especially of the military variety, led me to discover that from some time in 1958, the Air Force kept a fleet of B-52s with nuclear bombs (at least we guessed they had nuclear bombs) in the air at any one time. This program was known as Operation Chrome Dome and was to prevent the dirty Commies from catching all our bombers on the ground in a surprise attack. In addition, when the balloon went up (there’s a great phrase), these aircraft would be much closer to their targets than ones sitting on the ground. That’ll show those dirty Commies! This state of affairs continued until 1968 when a fire on a B-52 caused it to crash land in Greenland with its nuclear weapons, thereby really pissing off the government of
So, when in October 1962, President Kennedy blew the whistle on the Soviets’ attempt to put offensive nuclear missiles in
In 1964, we were gifted with two excellent movies on the dangers of nuclear war. The first was Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” and the rather more sober “Fail Safe.” “Dr. Strangelove” is particularly memorable for its all-star cast with Peter Sellers playing three parts, the President, an RAF officer and the good doctor. “Fail Safe” began with a disclaimer that what is shown in the movie could not actually happen. I recall being somewhat skeptical but once I was in the Air Force and admitted to the secret of how Positive Control actually works I was finally convinced. “Fail Safe” also bothered my wife because she said that she could see me as one of the crewmembers of the bomber that presses on against all odds and makes it to
1964 also saw the fall of the Soviet bogey-man. Around the same time the Cardinals were defeating the Yankees 4 games to 3 in the World Series, a cabal led by Leonid Brezhnev managed to depose Nikita Khrushchev. He had been skating on somewhat thin ice, especially in the wake of the Cuban missile adventure and Brezhnev had been plotting since March of that year. Rather than fight it, Nikita gave in to the inevitable and accepted “retirement” to his dacha.
The
To be continued....
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
