48 Hours to London

To be in Guards Chapel at midnight on Christmas Eve for an American is an illuminating experience, particularly for an American from New England...at the rear of the chapel remained half gone walls from a World War II bombing, walls that although no longer served their intended purpose, had been incorporated into the present day...even I, enobled by the faces of old veterans wearing their medals, managed to more or less keep in tune with the hymns that resounded into the next day...
Flying PanAm from Boston to Heathrow had been our intended route without interruption but as it turned out London was in the midst of a snowstorm and that meant flying off to Brussels where PanAm gave us the choice of staying the night or taking a coach to Zeebrugge and catching a Thompson-Thorsen ferry to Dover...with three young boys voting to keep moving we plunged on, boarding busses that carried us to Zeebrugge's ferry terminal and a chance to cross the Channel by boat...we were in Zeebrugge by 6 pm and the TT ferry collected us and the other 400 passengers at about 11 for the 7 hour cross...In its haste to accommodate everyone, PanAm handed out blank vouchers that we were to present for anything along the way apparently...to some of my fellow Americans that meant a trip to the ferry's gift shop and loading up on Christmas presents, gratis PanAm (I've always believed this present-grab at their expense drove them into bankruptcy, right at that moment)...my oldest son, Eachan, spent the entire time making friends with another boy, occupied by the on-board gambling machines...only time in my life when I've witnessed 8-year-olds actually gambling (and even winning)...Deborah and I were keeping company with Ben and Will, Eachan's brothers, mildly uneventful for the remainder of the voyage...At one point Deborah told me to look up and there before me and the rest of the 400, were the White Cliffs of Dover, this now being approximately 6 in the morning...on shore, luggage had mysteriously not made it in time (held hostage by PanAm because of those thieving gift-grabbers) we headed for London on more motor coaches, fortunately without gift shops...we were into our second day and the Station Master at the Brussels airport, a man by the name of Poirot (true) had come aboard the plane to tell my family that there had been some sort of official requests from London regarding our whereabouts and could he do anything...
My grandparents were all dead by the time I came along, so I have always been fascinated that my children could experience that thrill...Kingman (Grumpy) and Mary Louise (Granny Flip) were amazing people, the kind of grandparents who dreamed up outings that their grandchildren would actually enjoy...I miss them for all their kindnesses...and for their wonderful martinis!
UPDATE Hope the Obamas enjoyed Winfield House as much as we did!!

Tales from the Hood

If I were to ever be asked if I had shot someone, I would probably blurt out "Yes" with only a slight hesitation...as a teen I had a fascination with all things explosive and my marble cannon was my prize piece of field artillery...when word got around that I had made this marble cannon, on wheels no less, I went from being a non-com to a field-commissioned officer in my neighborhood...the cannon very effective, perhaps some might say too effective and I only took it up because I was frustrated how my home-made solid rocket fuel kept blowing up at the wrong time...prep work for rocket fuel was a nuisance too, because I had to board a downtown bus, walk to the chemical supply house and wait while they measured out my warhead materiel, placed it in paper bags and thanked me for my continued business...with the marble cannon, however, I could get everything close by, at the hardware store and from my cache of cherry bombs or M-80s, for they were the propellant and boy did they work...we had a sizable backyard with a fence separating us from other houses, a fence that was capable of keeping just about everything but fired marbles out...and so, one fine Fourth of July, I set up the marble cannon so my friends could see it shooting marbles right to their targets...first test fire perfect, but on the second one, for some unknown reason (to this day) the damn cannon jumped sideways and instead of shooting the marble at the neighbor's chicken coop next door, it flew toward a house directly behind our house, about three hundred feet away...I, and my friends, watched as the marble flew toward the wooden sided two-story home where as luck would have it, the woman of the house was out tending to her flower garden along the back edge of said house...my god, the marble hit the house about six feet directly above her head and then headed downward where the woman was, bent over in a flowery sun dress, the kind that had a lot of her skin showing on her back...the marble, heated during the cherry-bomb propelled flight landed squarely on her upper torso and then proceeded to disappear into her sun dress...my friends had already hopped on their bikes and squealed outta there but I clearly saw her rise into the air, arms stretched toward the heavens and yell at the top of her lungs...Jesus, I mean Jesus, what is a kid to do? However, it wasn't too long before her husband was out the back door and directing me in a very intimidating voice to show myself...I stood terrified, expecting someone from my own home to show up shortly, but I guess they were so used to bellowing in the neighborhood that they stayed put...the husband finally calmed down and assured me his wife was very much alive, but if I ever fired that damn cannon again, he would have me jailed...normally this would be the end but there was another neighbor who got wind of all this and thought it was hilarious and apparently thought I musta had some set of balls...well, anyway, I get a call across the yard a few weeks later and it's the other neighbor telling me to come right over...okay, I like the guy, he had spent a lot of time teaching me about photography and secondly, he longed to have a son and had failed in his attempt to turn his one child, a daughter, into a tomboy...the guy handed me a medium-sized paper bag and when I looked inside it was full of cherry bombs...one of two bags holding cherry bombs, as he was holding one too...he told me he was going to stand some distance away and that we would take turns chucking the c-bombs at one another until we got tired of dodging them and that would conclude our fun...man, this was incredible, throwing those things, lit of course, close but no too close to each other...I must tell you that this guy was one tough character, because according to my parents, he had lopped off his large toe mowing his lawn barefoot and told the hospital to simply stitch it back on, which they apparently did, and I say apparently because he never mowed barefoot again...things were going quite well, the bombs were lighting up and we were playing it safe when all of a sudden the guy slipped, straddled one of the cherry bombs which of course exploded and took most of his pant leg with it and I was thinking, I hope not his balls...this concluded our afternoon, apparently no one was bothered long-term by my shooting them with marbles or the inevitability of my blowing off their pant legs...

Letters from Panama

For some unknown reason, my great uncle Jose Maldonado could really make my mother laugh, I mean uproariously laugh, from thousands of miles away no less in letters written in Spanish that only she could read and comprehend...it was one of many unknowns my mother employed to go into her own secret world, and it drove my father to distraction, these letters...Uncle Jose, brother to my grandmother, did not follow her to America from Madrid, instead curving south and ending up in Panama...so the story goes, and from what little information my mother imparted, Jose had a dual career in Panama as owner of a chain of barber shops and as a professor of Romance Languages at the university...my mother spoke fluent Spanish, although not too often...my father, the baritoned attorney, spoke English and a smattering of some Indian tongue which usually was employed to rouse me from a deep sleep...I know my mother's father had served in the Spanish-American War, although other than a medical field surgery kit and a commendation from the US Surgeon General, little was known other than malaria was years later said to have done him in...my parents were just not too forthcoming about their parents, I guess it was just that way then and rarely was Spanish ever spoken in the house unless Mom was reciting something from Uncle Jose's letters...probably the most dramatic use of her Spanish occurred in Mexico on a family vacation while we were traveling on a bus south of the border...I think I was about 11 or 12 and standing in the rear of the crowded bus when said bus lurched and a rather large Mexican woman slammed into me knocking me to the floor of the bus...the large Mexican woman and her friend seemed to think this was hilarious until Mom sprang into action and unleashed a torrent of Spanish that I did not realize she was so capable of...she got everyone's attention, most obviously my assailant, who suddenly looked as if she was about to cry and bowed her head for the rest of the journey...my mother had obliterated a stranger before my eyes and in Spanish...she told my father later this incident would not have happened if we had simply driven the car over the border...this really got my father, who spoke no Spanish and whose family had not emigrated from Madrid...he knew better than to drive over the border, he said, since Mexican drivers were waiting to crash into you and collect damages on the spot, or else...we never visited Uncle Jose, never had the pleasure of his visit, and therefore he has drifted into obscurity and for all I know I could have passed him on the street somewhere in the world...we just weren't destined to meet and talk about those letters to my mother...

Who was Louis De Servi?

Louis De Servi, the name has stayed with me for years...as a kid, the De Servis would stop off at the house on their way west to another exciting vacation that I could only imagine...Louis and Mrs. De Servi (I don't know if I ever knew her name other than Mrs. De Servi) were exciting and kinda flashy people who smiled a lot, drove really big cars and never overstayed their welcome, which often happened with others less flashy...I seem to vaguely recall they might have been from New York and eventually settled in California...they sure looked like people who would have settled in California, at least to me...there was always family talk about visiting the De Servis in California, but it never happened...my father had begun lawyer life in San Francisco before Chicago and never seemed interested in any return there...he once told me how dangerous it could be as a criminal lawyer if you didn't get the guilty man sprung...threatened a time or two, he would add...Louis De Servi could have been a lawyer, we had a lot of them coming and going through the house in those days (particularly on Poker Night when the US Marshal and a Supreme Court judge would sit in and feed me shots of beer to slow down my 5-year-old outloud observations of the cards they were holding)...just don't know...I did find on FamilySearch.org a Louis De Servi who died in San Leandro, California, in 1994, but other than that, he has disappeared, except in my memory...

The Bright Lights of San Francisco

After college and in the middle of winter, two of my friends and I decided we would drive from Aspen to San Francisco for a change of scenery and who knows what else...that what else was something else as it turned out...Nick, I and Meredith took turns driving Meredith's convertible and headed for Utah, Nevada and California...of course, there was something lurking in every state just waiting for the three innocents to appear...in Utah, we got pulled over for speeding about 90 on sheer ice (hey, it was a smooth icy highway until the state police pulled us over)...we had to appear before a territorial judge at 3 in the morning and fork over a lot of money unless we wanted to go into the jail cells which were conveniently in the next room...we paid up and left, happy we had not had to leave collateral behind, such as our skis on the car rack...whew! Outta there, ready for adventure number two, waiting for us in Winnemucca Flats, Nevada...stopped at a diner/truck stop and with the three of us sitting at the bar, a guy to my left, a dissolute version of Grizzley Adams, after getting an eyeful of the very attractive Meredith, asked how much it was gonna cost him to have a few minutes with her...neither Meredith nor Nick were privy to this exchange and I knew they weren't listening so I told the menacing Grizz to meet us down the road to the east in 30 minutes...it felt a little awkward to be selling Meredith to what could have been white slavers, but you gotta do the best you can in that situation...we left with me saying not to look back and to just drive, making sure it was west...
Nothing but partying in SF, I mean, after all, what we had been through...however, being the sensitive poet type I had to fall and it had to come in Chinatown when I had my first and only photoelectric seizure of my life...saw Chinese laundry lights leave electric sign and head for me and when they got close, out I went...tried to tell cop my name and age and didn't work out...ended up at now-extinct Harbor Emergency Hospital where the white jackets only let me out after I agreed to down some Thorazine and check into Sf General...checked in, checked out and in between docs tried to find needle marks believing I was a junkie and disbelieving that I wasn't...no, no, no, my parents were traveling in Europe and unavailable for consultation...
In the years that have gone by I have lived in the snowbelt and seen many flashing lights from snowplow trucks in the winter...there is never one that I see that I am not reminded of San Francisco, ah those lights...