Cubby

Some days are diamonds, some days are stone, John Denver wrote in a song. Truth is, most of them are stone and the diamonds are so rare that you tend to remember them forever. One diamond day a few years back, a wonderful outdoorsy soul named Cubby led me and three of my closest friends on a ramble to a hidden mountain lake he knew, a two-hour climb up a steep hill near Jackson Hole, Wyoming that ended at the bottom of a giant yellow meadow beside a perfect little waterhole filled with trout that had no intention of surrendering to this bunch of amateurs.

We brought lunch which Cubby, a long-time amigo of one of my friends and a local guide, tied up in a tree to protect from hungry grizzlies and black bears. As usual, I was in charge of wine, which means paying for it and carrying it; a couple of bottles of Vogne Romanee and a couple of Puligny Montrachet, just to be on the safe side.

Cub was a great host, a formidable guide and cook, a lover of good wine and a modest man who clearly loved the outdoors and nature so much that his he spent much of his life making sure it was passed on in better shape than when he found it. He had just gone through a rough patch in his personal life but his spirit was unbroken.

After a couple of hours of fly fishing, Cubby fixed lunch and we drank the wine, and laughed and talked, got a little buzz and caught a quick nap in the sun. It was one of those days when you were glad that there were no women there because they might have guessed our dirty little secret: men, even straight ones, really love each other most.

We fished until almost sundown and packed up for the return trip down the mountain. The only fish we got was caught by Cubby, of course, the professional fisherman. The rest of us had spent much of the day retrieving our flies from trees and tall grass surrounding the lake. To my relief, at least, going down the mountain turned out to be a half-hour trip and the wine bottles were now considerably lighter.

Cubby died a year or so after this day. He was in his 50s and had a heart attack getting into his car after lunch.

I hope he had a decent wine for lunch. You should always drink the good stuff now because you don't know when it going to be your last.

My Dad

The big gentle man is my father.   The photograph was taken, probably by my mother, in 1948 when I was five and he was 32, although he looks older.  I had no feeling for history at the time, but he was less than three years removed from the beaches of Normandy and the frozen forests of the Ardennes.  Whatever horrors  he carried, he bore them in silence. 
 
I think most of us now know that World War II was brutal but the men who served there were from an older, perhaps more noble, stock who did not reveal their feelings openly or easily and most of the first-person oral histories we heard were edited for family telling.
 
My dad was a combat engineer in the 80th Infantry--the "Blue Ridge Division"--which arrived in Normandy on July 7, 1944 as part of General Patton's Third Army--fortuitously held back in England on D-Day to decoy the Germans into thinking that the attack would come at Pas de Calais. Patton's troops led the Operation Cobra breakout from the Normandy beach and over the next 239 days--until the end of the war--rolled across Northern France, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Rhineland and Austria--always on the attack, except for a small detour during the Battle of the Bulge.
 
With the Germans dug in solidly across the Mosele River from Dieulouard, my dad's unit built--overnight and under heavy fire--the pontoon bridge that allowed Patton's tanks to keep driving for the Rhine. They built roads and temporary bridges ahead of advancing infantry units across the Ardennes and Alsace and on into Germany. When the Germans tried to divide the Allies in the Bulge, his unit raced north into Luxembourg to relieve the beleaguered forces. This was one of the worst winters in European history, with nighttime temperatures of more than F15 below zero. The ground was frozen so solidly that soldiers would frequently use a half stick of dynamite to start a foxhole.
 
I know all this not because he told me but because I found a record of the day-to-day command posts of his unit on the Internet and matched them up with histories of the war. He may have said it was cold. He may have said it was pretty rough going. But, in the stories he told to me, nobody died or even got wounded.
 
On January 24, 1945, "Near Lellinglen, Luxembourg, Cpl Bowles captured two hostile gun positions before being observed by other detachments of the enemy forces. Then, under severe fire, he captured another emplacement. Greatly outnumbered, he destroyed the guns, cut demolition wires, and retreated under intense hostile fire, thus saving a vital road from destruction."
 
I know this only because it says so on a piece of paper inside a box with a silver medal in it that come into my possession when my mother died. I got a couple of interesting pictures from her, too. One shows a totally wrecked building in a little French town called Pont-au-Masson. On the back, he had scribbled "Save this picture. I was in this building when it blew up."
 
The other picture was taken somewhere near Kaiserslautern in March 1945. It shows eight soldiers in fatigues--one of them my dad.  On the back it says "This is my platoon. There used to be fourteen of us."

Regrets

In general, I think regrets are useless emotions because they bog you down in things you can't do anything about. And, anyway, if you think about it, you probably did the best you could at the time or you would have done better. It is never possible to recreate a moment—the sudden rush of anger, the unkind word, the hurtful slight, the road not taken—none of these things can ever be undone.

Things said, emotions felt, the interaction of needs, desires, conflicts--all those things are a constantly moving train that never runs backward. New Haven is a different place before and after the train arrives, to bring Wallace Stevens into the mix.

I find that in my 60s I have become nostalgic. A subway musician playing "Under Paris Skies" on a miniature concertino causes tears to well up in my eyes. The bare, brown neck of the girl in the seat in front of me at a concert. The first few bars of the Bartok violin concerto, a picture of Waterloo Bridge, Reno and Smiley singing "I'm Using My Bible for a Roadmap," June Allyson turning on the radio and learning that Major Glenn Miller has been lost in the channel, followed by "Little Brown Jug," dog stories, horse stories, cat stories.

But nostalgia is not regret; it simply life seen through the sepia filter of age. Here are some things I do regret:

I regret all the little acts of selfishness, cowardice or betrayal that caused injury to others; especially those that I was aware of at the time.

I regret that my dad didn't live long enough for me to visit Normandy with him.

I regret not understanding soon enough that "no" might be common sense rather than rejection.

I regret learning far too late that when you come to a rock in the road, you can go around it. You don't have to go through it.

Envy

There is something small and poisonous within all of us that does not necessarily wish the best for our fellow man. If you publish a book, I will come to your party and drink your publishers’ wine and wish you well but if your book makes the bestseller list I will be less pleased than you might rightfully expect. As human beings, we seem to have this innate need to want people to do no better than we do ourselves. We resent those who accumulate because in a society like this one—where acquisition is the most common measure of worth—money and possessions are seen as virtues. Being poor is not only inconvenient; it's sinful.

So, when we are the losers, we say the winners got that way because they cheated, exploited, twisted the results. The possibility that they might be winners because they are smarter, more dedicated, more hard-working is rarely considered. We want—as part of our very makeup, it seems to me—to create an environment where everyone is well-off to the same degree—where there is no possibility that we will be among the losers or, more
perversely, where we are all losers together. That leveling impulse is what communism/socialism/social democracy is all about.

Every society has an expression to convey this notion. In the backwoods of West Virginia where I grew up, it is best expressed by the title of the Bill Monroe song “Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’.” In Japan, there is an expression to the effect that the “rice that bows the deepest is the richest with grain.” To describe his adopted countrymen, a Danish-born Norwegian immigrant named Aksel Sandemose coined the Law of Jante which proclaims - in a variety of ways - that "Thou Shalt Not Think Highly of Thyself". It expresses an ideology of equality that depreciates the original and the unusual. Most ambitious Norwegians believe that the Law of Jante is a deeply embedded aspect of the culture that maintains a form of equality but also discourages high achievement.

Whatever the local expression might be, it amounts to envy masquerading as egalitarianism and it no more becoming because all of us suffer from it. Our real problem is not that there are winners and losers; our problem is that we have made accumulation the only criteria for deciding who is, or is not, successful.

The Barber

It occurred to me lately that the most intimate relationship in a man's life is not with his wife or girlfriend or children--it's with his barber. I know a guy who moved to Philadelphia 30 years ago who still takes the train up to New York one Saturday every month to get his hair cut by the same barber. Few men I know are comfortable with a stranger snipping around their head with pair of scissors. Wives and children come and go but a good barber is a commitment.

From the early-1970s to the mid-1980s I had my hair cut by a Greek guy named Tino in a little two-chair storefront on 48th Street between 1st and 2nd--just around the corner from the UN. Tino's partner was another Greek man named George. I stumbled upon the place the first week they opened around 1970 and over the next 14 years or so had my hair cut only once by someone else--an unfortunate one-afternoon-stand in the barbershop in the basement of the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. It was a complete disaster and I can remember vividly how guilty I felt afterward.

Over the years, Tino got married, had kids, bought an apartment in Queens. He told me his dreams, plans, ambitions--he wanted to become an American citizen and like all good American citizens, he wanted to get rich and retire to Greece. I shared my ambitions and dreams with him. We were both aging gracefully and our relationship seemed to be settling in for the long haul. Then things started to go horribly wrong. I can't really put my finger on it but Tino became distant, less communicative, troubled. There were money problems. He was less attentive. I felt us drifting apart.

Then something really strange happen. Tino was cutting my hair one day in the summer of 1984 when Truman Capote literally crawled to the front door and yelled "Tino, George…help me." He was totally drunk or drugged or both; his pants were hanging down near his knees, his shorts tugged down below the crack of his ass, a sad state for one of America's great writers. Tino and George propped him up in the chair next to me and he looked at me and said, apologetically, in that distinctive little voice--"I'm a mess." After cleaning him up with some towels, George helped him stumble back to his nearby apartment. A week later, Capote was dead.

That was the last time I saw Tino or George. When I called to make an appointment a few weeks later, a strange voice answered the phone and said Tino and George were on vacation but it sounded to me like what people tell you when they take over an existing business and don't want to scare off old customers. I made an appointment to see if I could find out more but the new owners were cagey--Tino and George would be returning any week now. I knew it was over and felt an enormous sense of betrayal.
In fact, I was miserable.

I started seeing other barbers but I didn't like any of them. A year or so later, still curious, I went back to the little shop on 48th street and casually asked the guy who cut my hair what happened to the Greeks who used to own the place. He was more confident now and said--"I don't know really. They had some trouble with the landlord and had to leave suddenly. It wasn't much, but it was an answer.

For the past 20 years, I've been seeing Joseph, a very competent Iranian/Jewish refugee who runs a unisex hair shop across the street and charges half as much now as Tino did in 1975. I met him because he cuts my wife's hair too and, to this day, that how he identifies me. I go in and he says "Hello, Suzi husband."

Every once in awhile I have a dream. It's summer and there is a painted white house on a hill overlooking the sea. There is a small garden with olive and mulberry trees. Grandchildren are running and playing in the yard. A man, older but unmistakedly Tino, stands on the porch. When he sees me approaching he goes silently into the house. When he returns, he is carrying a high-backed chair, a bright red cloth, scissors and a comb. He sets the chair down under a big olive tree and motions me to sit. I do so and he ties the cloth around my neck. Finally, he speaks. "Hello, my friend," he says. "I missed you, too."