Rememberence

A Little Piece of Heaven

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“Is it possible for home to be a person and not a place?” ― Stephanie Perkins, Anna and the French Kiss

“Home isn’t where you’re from, it’s where you find light when all grows dark.” ― Pierce Brown, Golden Son

“Outside the Front Gate”

We were separated from our “little piece of heaven” in the foothills of the Blue Ridge in the late summer of 1987 by a chain link fence and a locked gate with a puppy dog emblem on top. To ensure we didn’t venture in was a huge, bearlike dog. He was quiet but eyeing us warily from what I assumed was a garage but could have been the Blue Ridge’s largest doghouse. We didn’t know at the time that this would be our little piece of heaven but there was a sign on the driveway saying, “For Sale.”

“Sometimes you don’t know you are lost until you are found.”

We were out making memories as we did back then. Driving unknown roads hoping to get lost on some winding pig trail. Gas was cheaper and our car a steed to find adventure. It would be the beginning of many such adventures but none as important as this one.

We talked about the need to move into something larger. Something rundown we could renovate…a couple of acres of land to surround it. Somewhere we could spread out a bit. Something better for two people and three puppy dogs than a condominium. Somewhere to make memories. This was it we just didn’t know it at the time.

My bride exclaimed, “This is perfect.” “Not so fast” my Lee Corso voice said in my head. That’s not true, I didn’t know much about Lee Corso thirty-six years ago and don’t think ESPN’s Game Day existed. What was true was that there would be many pig trails and switch backs before it became “our little piece of heaven.”

 “Not so fast!”

My bride made the phone call as soon as we got home. When she gets something in her head, she takes the bit in her teeth and will not be turned even if it means galloping over a cliff. The realtor was nice but told us a couple was signing a contract on the property the following week. My bride was deflated. I wasn’t sure what I was.

He told us 3300 Highway 11 was an old farmhouse sitting on the front right corner on eighty-seven acres fronting Highway 11. We found later it was populated with eighty-seven acres of pines, oaks, mountain laurel, black walnuts, and hemlocks. It was cut by seven streams with the scattered remains of moonshine stills littering their banks. Some foggy mornings the smell of sour mash still permeates the air.

Old as in built in 1890. It was described as gently rolling but that was a lie. It was cut with streams that left deep ravines to be navigated. Significantly more land than we needed, and I took the realtor’s word as law and immediately forgot about the eighty-seven acres and the old two-story farmhouse.

A phone call later in the week brought it back to the forefront of my pea head. The realtor let us know, “The owner, Mr. Copeland, would like to meet you and would be willing to take you on a tour.”

Linda immediately jumped at the opportunity and the rest is history. After a day of being walked into the ground by a seventy-seven-year-old retired Methodist minister, Mr. Copeland walked out of the scheduled closing simply saying, “I like them better than you.”

“Through the Front Gate”

I don’t know how many times I’ve walked through our front gate but I’m always glad to be back. I feel like this is where I want to be…need to be. It is where that special person is and where darkness always turns to light.

Despite the trials and tribulations of the past thirty-seven years, this is home. Despite the concerns of getting too old to keep up with the place, no matter how run down or overgrown, this is home. This is home because Linda Gail is there along with the ghosts of people and puppies now gone.

Weekly Update

Linda had her second treatment. She is a little “wired” from the steroids but was able to get some sleep the night after. Two days removed from the chemo she looks like she sat too long in the sun and her bruises are more apparent due to the blood thinner she is on. She is weak as a kitten.

Earlier bloodwork indicates positive results so we are hopeful that the chemotherapy will put her into remission. Her hair is falling out and it has been a bitter pill but Linda being Linda has added colorful scarves, one her grandmother wore, and a floppy purple hat.

She was also gifted a beautiful wig. Thanks for all the prayers, cards of concern and good Ju Ju, and support. Special thanks to Kristen Coward for the beautiful, knitted throw and Christin Bennett for the beautiful wig.

The blog image is at the front gate looking in through Japanese Honeysuckle. It also served as a cover photo of the book, “Through the Front Gate.” It and other books and novels can be purchased at https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Famazon.com%2Fauthor%2Fcigarman501%3Ffbclid%3DIwAR0G8ELuHBR-zAMdiSZ_Z9GoeW5Psc0S14PJw504LpXFf52Jks6KPrEQaRQ&h=AT2IgW5Kbd1ZtAc4wst-zIreyxAHAKtKLouaz6WV3uU4HpYHAY8ein7iMLZ1tAGtutYNPRNJ-Osf6jiN7_6o5okZBWh-zAESJSSmXOdrud3JDHqu2HYvwGecM2OtWP_wdYT_QI-qUUsXgW1B-_qdtw

Pearl Harbor…Revisited…Again

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I was a decade away from even being a glimmer in my parent’s eyes when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor occurred on December 7, 1941, so I have no true remembrances of the “Day Which Will Live in Infamy”. My memories come from listening to my father and his friends talking, history books, documentaries, and movies.

My father, a single, twenty-five-year-old at the time, did what many patriotic young men did and with several friends headed to the Marine recruitment center to join up…only to find out he was 4F due to a birth defect he didn’t even know he had. Determined, he attempted to enlist in the Navy and Army but was turned down.

Two years later, the now-married twenty-seven-year-old, would receive a letter that might have begun “Greetings, your friends and neighbors….” Drafting a married, twenty-seven-year-old missing an entire row of ribs and vertebrae they attached to should tell you how dire the situation was in late 1943.

My Father, a mechanic, was eventually assigned to amphibious assault teams training in Carrabelle, Florida.  Later he would join MacArthur in time to assault the Philippines, Okinawa, and finally would step ashore on mainland Japan as a part of the occupation force.  I wish I knew more but his military records were destroyed in a fire at the National Personnel Records Center (NPRC) in St. Louis, Missouri.

I remember sitting as a family in front of our black and white television on a Sunday evening, December 3, 1961. Walter Cronkite was the narrator of the CBS documentary program, The Twentieth Century. On this night, the Sunday prior to the twentieth anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack, we sat as a family watching and listening.

The episode was “The Man Who Spied on Pearl Harbor” and Cronkite’s distinctive voice narrated the black and white action scenes, some made as the attack occurred, most staged for propaganda use during the war itself, as we remembered Pearl Harbor…and as I remember that night in 1961.

Over the years my thirst for knowledge about Pearl Harbor and my father’s war has caused me to read, watch or listen to almost every available documentary, book, movie, or interview about Pearl Harbor, specifically World War Two. Thankfully, I had access to the History Channel when it aired programs about history rather than programing about Alaskan truck drivers or pawn shops. I continue to remember Pearl Harbor, the men who lived it, died during the attack, the ships that were sunk, some later resurrected…and my father who was thousands of miles away at the time.

Many of my father’s friends served and I remember their visits. Stories told around a dining room table.  Older men, cigarette smoke swirling toward the ceiling, coffee left to get cold as they talked. Like many veterans of any wars their stories didn’t focus on death and violence but on humor and comradery. 

One story even involved my mother.  She did her patriotic duty working in a munitions plant.  If one of my father’s friends was to be believed, sitting in rain filled foxholes with artillery shells being fired over their heads at unseen Japanese positions in the Philippines, one landed short and didn’t explode.  My taciturn father was quoted to have said, “That must have been one of Eldora’s.”

I have never outgrown my interest in World War Two movies seen repeatedly over again, especially those taking place in the Pacific Theater, the theater my father said he didn’t fight in.

“What did you do in the war, Daddy?”

“Son, I was so far away from the fighting the nurses went in before we did.” His admission did not deter my interest…or my pride.

My favorite movies and stories were those involving Pearl Harbor on the periphery, not the center stage like “Tora, Tora, Tora”. Instead, it was Fred Zimmerman’s “From Here to Eternity”, John Ford’s “They Were Expendable”, and my absolute favorite, Otto Preminger’s “In Harm’s Way”.

A line from “in Harm’s Way” has always stuck in my head.  It was uttered by Henry Fonda portraying Admiral Chester Nimitz, “On the most exalted throne in the world, we are seated on nothing but our own arses.” Good words to remember whether at war or sitting in your recliner.

The featured image I used is a colorized picture of the iconic USS Arizona burning after the attack.  I met a survivor of the attack in the late Seventies.  A career Navy man he had “joined” up after the War to End All Wars as an eighteen-year-old and served for thirty years.  He served in dozens of Pacific stations from China to San Diego.  One of those ports was in Pearl Harbor on board the USS Arizona.

Among his many duties was manning an anti-aircraft gun should there be an attack.  He never got the opportunity.  Providence intervened that day.  Off duty, he met a friend ashore and watched helplessly as 1,177 of his shipmates and his ship were sent to glory.  Despite the life he was able to live…to create, he never quite forgave himself for surviving.

As I’ve gotten older and a bit of a peacenik, I find myself watching less the movies about the valor and courage of our fighting men and more about the periphery, the politics, our own cruelties…which are simply the cruelties of war itself.

I hope we continue to “Remember Pearl Harbor” and the generation characterized by Tom Brokaw as the “Greatest Generation”. We need to remember the sacrifices they made in our last righteous war before the concepts of good versus evil became so blurred during the Cold War and in the Middle East.

For more of Don Miller’s unique views of life, humor, and Southern stories of a bygone time, try http://goo.gl/lomuQf

Remembering Kent State

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For those of us who were young adults or near adults, it should be a bit of a somber day. Fifty years ago, today, four Kent State students were shot, nine others wounded, one paralyzed.  Twenty-eight Ohio National Guardsmen fired approximately seventy rounds in less than fifteen seconds into students, some protesting President Nixon’s “Cambodian Incursion” by the US military, others who were simply watching from a distance, one was walking from one class to another.  Nixon had promised the day before to get us out of the war.

It had been a contentious period in our history, “The Kent State Massacre” was neither the beginning of the violence nor would it be the concluding chapter.  Three protesting students were killed and some thirty injured during a protest at South Carolina State in Orangeburg, SC in February.  Several days after Kent State, two students were killed, and a dozen injured at Jackson State.  Both were confrontations with the police and on a small scale exemplified the student unrest over the Vietnam War and Civil Rights.

Kent State had been a hot spot for student protest beginning in the middle Sixties.  Students For a Democratic Society (SDS), the Black Student Organization and the Youth International Party, (Yippies) all staged sit-ins, marches and other protests, including an attempted take over of the Administrative Offices by the SDS that led to fifty-eight students being arrested by the Ohio Highway Patrol.  There had been scattered violence, including the burning of the ROTC building, but no deaths until May 4, 1970.

Monday, May Fourth. was the culmination of four days of unrest that began the previous Friday after President Nixon announced the Cambodian Incursion on the previous Thursday.  From the aforementioned fire, a protest march, beer bottles and rocks being thrown at police, bonfires in the street, and numerous arrests, violence reared its ugly head, violence from the students, and from groups sworn to protect them.

Unconfirmed rumors of students with caches of arms, spiking the local water supply with LSD, and of students building tunnels for the purpose of blowing up the town’s main buildings added gasoline to an already volatile cocktail.  The city mayor requested National Guard Troops from the governor and the request was granted.  They came armed with loaded M-1 Garands, bayonets, tear gas, and smoke grenades.

The National Guard first became entangled on the Third, breaking up a rally and a sit-in, using tear gas and even bayoneting students.  A noon rally of some 2000 students on the Fourth became the catalyst for the shooting.  Again, rocks and tear gas were involved until the shots rang out.  It became a they said-they said situation after the gunpowder had cleared.

I was a struggling sophomore in college, less than a month past my twentieth birthday when news of the massacre flashed across the community tv screen in the basement of Brokaw Hall.  I remember the silence that followed and the debate that issued later.  Despite being a Southern liberal arts college, Newberry was not a fertile ground for liberal thoughts.

Near the end of the semester, I was more concerned about the effect exams might have on my grades than what had taken place in faraway Ohio or nearby Orangeburg.  I was also mourning the end of my first serious relationship, one I characterized as a hurricane waiting to happen.  You knew you were in for a big storm you just didn’t know when or where it would happen.  It had happened.  A hurricane that had turned my grades into a shambles.

It wasn’t that I wasn’t aware, I was.  A male, I had just participated in the first draft lottery and hadn’t won but I hadn’t lost either…April 9th came up 219…kinda in the middle.  My awareness was focused on my poor but improving grades and fear.

I had no desire to die in a rice paddy in a Southeast Asian country but like many of the young men surrounding me, I would have gone to my death rather than disappointing my family and friends.  I would do what was expected.

As I look back, I am both proud and ashamed.  Happy I wasn’t called while feeling I missed something by not being called to serve.  Ashamed for not taking a more active interest in protesting the war.  Confliction but I am a conflicted person.

There were several veterans on third floor Brokaw my freshman year taking advantage of the GI Bill.  They were good guys, damaged good guys.  Few returned for our sophomore year, fewer still graduated.   They were just too damaged.

I wondered which was worse, dying in a jungle or leaving a part of your soul there.  They all participated in the activities of college life, but it seemed they only participated from the periphery.  All still had the “Thousand Yard Stare.”

One vet, of Marine Force Recon, had been our protector during our freshman year.  I didn’t know what Force Recon was, I just knew from the whispers he was a badass dude.  He was much older and became a buffer against Rat Week and later the fraternity bull pledges whose grades were so low they had been moved out of fraternity housing and onto the freshman halls.  They weren’t happy and wanted to take it out on the ‘rats’.  Force Recon would have none of it and the bull pledges left us alone.

He sat next to me as Walter told us about Kent State.  A man of few words, he leaned over and asked, “Who gives fucking National Guardsmen live ammo against students?”  I wondered myself.  Several friends were National Guardsmen and I wouldn’t have trusted them with a pea shooter.  Thankfully, they were members of the SC National Guard Band.  They blew into their instruments instead of blowing things up.

Later, Force Recon would suggest in a bit of a drunken stupor, “If you get drafted, run to Canada.  It ain’t worth dying for.”  This from the same man who ‘liberated’ a Christmas tree from the Winn Dixie parking lot late one night so we could decorate with toilet paper and beer cans in our community restroom…good times.  Coming from a veteran I began to rethink the war.

Violence begets violence and the violence didn’t end in May of 1970.  Many more Americans, Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians would die before that little policing action was over.

The shootings at Kent State would trigger more protests, one in Washington estimated at a hundred thousand that caused President Nixon to be whisked away to Camp David.  Hundreds of college campuses would close involving over four million students due to student protest.  Eleven students were bayoneted at the University of New Mexico during a peace rally and peace protesters battled pro-Nixon construction workers in what became known as the Hard Hat Riots.

1968 was bad, ‘69 was a bit of reprieve if you didn’t look past the moon landing to the Manson Murders and Mai Lai.  ‘70 was a return to the bad but as some smart someone said, “it gets darkest just before the dawn.”  It would be five long years before dawn and the Vietnam War ended but the US had been out of the warzone for the last two.  I must believe Kent State and the protests that followed helped get us out of a war we should never have been involved in.  Helped to stop the killing.

***

I drew from a lot of sources but since I am not selling this I’m not going to footnote.   If you question something other than my sanity I will go back and do so.

The featured image is the iconic photograph of Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling over the body of student Jeffrey Miller, who was killed by Ohio National Guard troops during an antiwar demonstration at Kent State University on May 4, 1970.

Don Miller writes on various subjects and various genres.  His authors page is at https://www.amazon.com/Don-Miller/e/B018IT38GM?fbclid=IwAR2Iyegsi5CjQ4ZNPU2nA9C1e3q7jekDZ6e3T8qw5QUgwNhM9Yj_-dKOag4