by Dorien Grey
The State, on the west bank of the Rock River and on State Street, Rockford’s main drag, was actually two buildings. You entered the lobby, then went down a long hallway to the auditorium in the other building. The State was very popular with kids, since it showed lots of westerns, and on weekends featured cliff-hanger serials like “Sheena, the Jungle Princess” and Gene Autry adventures. One of the first times I was allowed to go to the movies by myself, my mom was furious with me when I sat through the film, short subject, newsreel, and cartoon twice without telling her in advance. Hey, I didn’t know I was going to do it!
The other theaters were in a descending order of importance to me, and were largely undistinguished. I don’t think I ever went to the Rex, which was far off the beaten path on the city’s east side, and the Capitol and Rialto, on the west side south of downtown, were within a block of one another and had a reputation for being rather sleazy.
So, you see how a simple mention of just one movie house so many years ago opened up a floodgate of memories? Oh, yes, and next to the Times was a small Caramel-Corn shop. I can still smell it, and both my mouth and my mind water at the memory.
* * *
THE BITTERSWEET VIEW
Shortly after I started putting up a blog detailing, via letters to my parents, my adventures in the U.S. Navy from 1954 to 1956, I heard from Con Filardi, a former shipmate aboard the U.S.S. Ticonderoga (CVA-14), who I’d not known at the time. He’d stumbled across my blog, and we’ve since established a friendship we never could have had aboard the Ti because he was an officer and I a common seaman, a latter-day Icarus fallen from the skies of the Naval Aviation Cadet program.
While I have some great movies of some of my adventures, I didn’t have a still camera and therefore don’t have all that many still photos of my days aboard the Ti, which were, on reflection, among the most memorable of my life. Con, however, took a great many still shots, which he has been kind enough to share with me. He recently found many more in storage, and sent some to me, including the two accompanying this entry (the first photos I’ve ever attached to Dorien Grey and Me). I am deeply indebted to him. The instant I saw these two photos, I experienced an amazingly powerful bittersweet mixture of joy, anguish, loss, and longing impossible to put into words indescribable. It was as though some invisible hand had reached through my chest and grabbed my heart.
To know that the instant those photos were taken, I was there, somewhere on that ship—probably in the commissary office with Nick and Coutre and Chief Sewell—going about my business, utterly unaware that photos were being taken that I would be looking at 53 years later made me so acutely aware of wanting to be there, physically, again, a 22 year old kid. Foolish as it may be to hear, or even to say, I miss it so much it hurts.
Primitive tribes believe that a photograph captures the soul of a person being photographed, and that second of time in which it is taken, and holds it forever. The Ti is long and sadly gone, but at the instant shown here, she is alive and vibrant, and I am one of the 3,000 men living within her.
There is much to be said for being a hopeless, irredeemable romantic. But it comes with a high price, and I pay it every time I allow myself to dare to yearn for something or someone from my past. And even now, when I am having a wonderful time I am acutely aware that it will not/cannot last forever, and that it soon will be the past, and that, even before it is gone, I will miss it.
Nostalgia requires distance. The Ti and my Navy days were not nearly so important to me at the time I was experiencing them. While I was actually in the service I hated it and couldn’t wait to get out. The last several months I would wake up every morning and, as soon as my feet hit the deck, say, “I hate the Navy!” I was very young and it never occurred to me that time would change my perspectives. The young, especially, have difficulty in being able to see the forest for the trees. They’re too busy absorbing experiences and are too close to them to be able to get a perspective on them. I know I could not fully appreciate, at the time, just how lucky I was to have been able to see worlds I’d only dreamed and read of. Not that I wasn’t thrilled by the adventure at the time, of course…a kid from Rockford, Illinois finding himself in Paris, Rome, Naples, Cannes, Beirut, Istanbul. But each day required my full attention. It takes time to blend them together and provide an overview. It is only as we climb the hill of time that we are able to look back over where we’ve been and be awed by the view.
* * *
CHICAGO LIFE
I live in a city of sirens. Police cars. Ambulances. Fire trucks. Twenty-four hours a day of sirens. Living on the 9th floor of a building within unobstructed earshot of a nearby fire station does not help, and living on a block with two large senior citizen complexes adds to the fun. Ambulances scream down my street (never mind that it is primarily residential and that at 3 a.m. there is very little traffic that needs to be warned to get out of the way) at least five times every day. One would think that at 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. they might not need to keep their sirens screaming full blast, but they do. And every paramedic visit is, for reasons I’ve never quite understood, accompanied by a huge fire truck, which has not only sirens but a horn. A very loud horn.
And all this sweet, soothing symphony of the city is set against the every-three-minute rumbling and roaring and, especially in wet weather, shrieking, of elevated trains not 1,000 feet from my window.
And yet, for all that, Chicago is a wondrous city. Laid out roughly in a grid, with eight city blocks to a mile (though there are many, many exceptions), “major” and generally commercial streets down which busses run, are located every four blocks, and the streets within the squares formed are residential and most lined with trees. Chicago is flat as a pancake, so the towers of the loop can be seen from considerable distances, and they present a great skyline, especially seen from the lake front which is, in effect, one long park running the length of the city. Even in the canyons of the Loop (so named because of the elevated train lines which circle the inner core of the city) one can easily walk to the green spaces of the lakeshore, with the spectacular Millennium Park with its Ghery Music Pavilion, and adjacent Grant Park with its beautiful Buckingham Fountain.
And there is always some free event going on, from spectacular to quaint. A great example of the latter was held this past Labor Day: the twice-annual Woogms Parade. Woogms stands for “Wellington/ Oakdale Old Glory Marching Society” and consists entirely of residents of two residential streets near my apartment, who gather to have a parade. Well, it’s just a walk, mostly. But they join up on Wellington…lots of kids on bikes, moms and dads with baby strollers, and an entire spectrum of citizens, many with silly hats (Dr. Seuss is a favorite), many waving small American flags, two guys on stilts, and led by the Jesse White Drum Corps…six or eight very enthusiastic and quite talented kids from the ghettos of the South side.
(A brief aside here to explain that Jesse White is the Illinois Secretary of State who has started a number of programs to get disadvantaged kids off the streets.)
So the parade starts on Wellington, and is led by the drum corps followed by a line of several assorted residents carrying large American flags on poles, and the 300-500 participants march…well, walk, or stroll…down Wellington to busy Sheridan Road, half of which is blocked off by the police to allow the perhaps block-long parade to pass. It moves south the four blocks or so to even busier Diversey, where it turns left toward the lake, then turn left again to pass in front of St. Joseph’s hospital. There the parade disperses and the people gather on the lawn to watch the Jesse White Tumblers go through their routine. Perhaps 20 kids, ranging in age from 8 to 18, performing some truly impressive leaps and tumbles, some aided by a small trampoline. And when the show is over, to the enthusiastic acclaim of all assembled, the kids pick up their mats, take them to two large vans parked beside the hospital, and go home, as does the crowd.
I love Chicago.
* * *
TIME AND DREAMS
/> Unless this is the first time you’ve come across my blog, you know that I am utterly obsessed with time, and deeply (albeit pointlessly) resentful of the fact that our physical bodies are trapped in it, and that it moves in only one direction. But the physical laws of time do not apply to the mind, which is one of the reasons I became a writer.
At any rate, dreams have always provided humans a refuge from our daily life and offer hope for the future. Most people keep their dreams to themselves, as though they were somehow slightly shameful. Others are carried away by their dreams to the point of losing touch with reality. But far too many people, I fear, have no dreams at all. They’re too busy handling the challenges and demands of time. For them I feel truly sorry.
I am currently dreaming of a trip to Europe when my friend Norm’s estate is settled, and I’m well aware that the possibility of realizing this particular dream could not exist were it not for his kindness.
(Of course me being me, I am already managing to throw something of a wet blanket on the dream by remembering the last time I planned a trip to New York, set for June 10, 2003, only to have it cancelled with the diagnosis of tongue cancer on June 3, 2003. I know it’s silly to even think of such a thing happening again, but it’s all part of my natural perversity: “Never pass up a chance to spoil a dream.”)
But this is a special dream, which grows more special the more I think of it. It’s the dream of bridging a gap of 55 years in time, to my first trip to Europe courtesy of the U.S. Navy. I’ve recently added to the dream by thinking of adding London and Venice, to which I’ve never been, to the itinerary. While my friend Gary may be accompanying me at least as far as London (this is still in the dreaming stages here, remember), and it would be wonderful to see the city with him, the rest of the trip I will be on my own, which will be more than a little strange but somehow oddly fitting. Of course pleasure is enhanced when shared. But though I may be alone, I will in fact be sharing it with a 22-year-old sailor named Roger—the me I once was, and will be seeing things through both our eyes.
I will try to brush up on my French and Italian before I go, but I fear I was not cut out to be a linguist. I took both French and Spanish in high school and college, and I stand in awe of those who are bi- or multi-lingual. My problem is that I will be doing very well for awhile in French, say, and then either suddenly have no idea what word I want next or, worse, suddenly lapse into Spanish.
I want to revisit Paris, Rome, and Pompeii, and most specifically, Cannes. I want to find (if it still exists, which it probably does not) the small jetty where Marc and Michel, two young Frenchmen who were on holiday from Paris before joining the army to fight in Algiers, Guntar and Yoachim, young Germans traveling the south of France, and I and a buddy from the Ticonderoga met one beautiful day in July of 1956. The week I spent with them provided me with the happiest memories of my Navy career which I still treasure. Though they will not physically be there with me, we’ll still all be together again. And anyone who ever questions how very closely related pain and pleasure are need only imagine what my feelings will be as I stand on that jetty and remember. And knowing me, I am sure that I will wonder if, as I see us laughing and diving off the jetty into the glass-clear waters to retrieve stones from the bottom of the sea, if perhaps there might have been a very old man standing there watching us.
Because the past is so very real to me—only the impenetrable wall of time, to me as crystal clear as the waters of the Mediterranean off Cannes, separates, for me, “now” and “then”—I have no idea how I will react to revisiting the same places nearly 55 years apart. I know my chest will literally ache with longing to reach through that clear, clear wall, to really see, to really feel and once again be on its other side.
NOTES ALONG THE WAY
EARTHQUAKE
Chicago (or some of it) experienced—albeit at a considerable distance—a very rare earthquake last Friday. It was around 4:15 a.m. (I have observed that most earthquakes tend to strike early in the morning) and I of course slept right through it. With elevated trains rumbling by less than half a block from my apartment every few minutes, it would have taken a pretty strong quake to rouse me.
But it got me to thinking, with some strange nostalgia, of “my” earthquakes past.
When I first moved to Los Angeles, I was looking forward to my first earthquake. Being of a melodramatic nature, the idea of actually experiencing one like the one in my favorite movie, “San Francisco,” really excited me. Therefore, my first experience was somewhat less than I’d envisioned. I was sitting in my living room in Glendale with a friend, talking, when I noticed the swag lamp over his head begin swaying back and forth. I felt nothing at all. My friend, a longtime Californian, said casually: “Ah, an earthquake.”
I subsequently learned that there are several types of earthquake. My first one was what I call a “wave” type, where it seems like the ground gently rises and falls as with a real wave. I’ve heard that some people actually become seasick in such quakes.
The type I call “the rattler” is very much like a large truck rumbling past your window—a few seconds of rattling of dishes and cups, and then it goes away. I went through a lot of those, and soon grew almost used to them. With one or two, the rattling would become a little stronger, more resembling a casual shaking.
But the worst type of earthquake is the true “Shaker”—the one you can hear coming. The sound triggers the same response as the whirr of a rattlesnake, and it arrives before the shaking. You instantly know what is about to happen, but you have no idea of just how rough it is going to be, or how long it will last. The Shaker grabs you by the shoulders and shakes you like an angry out of control parent shakes a child. I’ve only experienced one of these and one was enough.
It was shortly after 6 a.m. on February 9, 1971—the day later referred to as “the day all of Los Angeles woke up at the same time”—and I was in bed with my then-partner. The sound woke me, and I knew immediately what it was. I grabbed my partner and rolled him off onto the floor as the shaking started. Looking out the sliding glass doors at my swimming pool, I watched the water sloshing out across the yard.
How long it lasted, I don’t know. But when it stopped, I immediately got up and got dressed and headed for my mother’s house. She lived about 6 blocks away and had just moved in. On the way, I passed our local post office, whose garage had collapsed. Several postal workers were inexplicably standing around in the street looking up at the sky. Windows had fallen out of several of the stores along the route, but when I reached my mom’s she and her house were okay.
“I thought someone was throwing garbage cans against the house,” she said.
63 people died in what is now known as the San Fernando quake. I remember going to Las Vegas on business a week or so later and was able to easily spot anyone from Los Angeles…any passing truck or sudden noise would elicit a “deer in the headlights” response.
So that was my big earthquake. One is enough.
* * *
LETTER TO A NUN
I never cease to be fascinated by how life works, and by the astonishing intricacies of time, relationships, and coincidence.
Several years ago, now, I reestablished contact with a friend from grade school, and we have corresponded frequently ever since. Recently he emailed me with information of another mutual school-years friend—we all three had been Cub Scouts together at St. Elizabeth’s Social Center in Rockford IL—and with news of one of the nuns from our days at St. Elizabeth’s. I had not thought of St. Elizabeth’s in years, but as so often happens, just one mention opened the floodgates of memory.
As a non-catholic, my Cub Scout experiences with the nuns was my first exposure to any form of Catholicism and, while I was even then an agnostic, I was very impressed by their devotion.
The two nuns I still remember after all these years were Sister Marie Immaculee and Sister Ann Sebastian. Sister Marie Immaculee was probably in her 70s at the time. Tiny, wi
th grey hair and an almost palpable aura of love and compassion, she could easily have posed for a Norman Rockwell painting titled “The Grandmother Nun.” I adored her. I remember someone telling me 25 or 30 years ago, that she died.
It is people like Sister Marie Immaculee who make me hope there is a God.
Sister Ann Sebastian was tall and rather stern, very much the no-nonsense disciplinarian—no one tried to put anything over on Sister Ann Sebastian—but never harsh. I had assumed she was long dead, but when I discovered she is in fact alive, well into her 90s and living in a facility maintained by her order, I had to contact her to let her know her influence went beyond the grounds of St. Elizabeth’s.
Here, then, is the letter I wrote her.
Sr. Ann Sebastian
Missionary Servants of the Most Blessed Trinity
3501 Solly Avenue
Philadelphia, PA 19136
Dear Sister:
In light of eternity, 65 years or so is but the blink of an angel’s eyelash, but it was about 65 years ago that I joined the Cub Scouts, which held their meetings at St. Elizabeth’s Social Center in Rockford, IL. As a non-catholic, I had never met a nun, and you were my first face-to-face encounter. Not having any idea of protocol, I remember calling you “Lady.” You quickly and gently corrected me.
I have, after all these years, never forgotten you or Sr. Marie Immaculee (who I always see in my mind’s eye when I think of the ideal grandmother) and the other nuns whose names I cannot now recall.
Your always-kind firmness—no one ever put anything over on you—and the joy you all but radiated have remained with me to this day, and when I learned your address through a fellow former Cub Scout, I felt compelled to write you a brief note to let you know of the lasting impression you made on one very young boy. I cannot thank you enough for the example you set for me and so very many others.