Friday
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Perhaps all it shows is that, again as I've been increasingly realizing these decades, nobody knows me but myself.
Just as it must be with everyone else, I am not what anyone sees, not what anyone else sees or experiences, not even what I've seen as I've looked in a mirror every morning these years; but a self-aware glob of knowledge, feelings, ignorance and memories that, though to me it may be all that is, is as soon gone as the grass that withers in Psalm 90. So, mixing the poem and the image could not possibly make sense to anyone but me, myself, and I, as I try to work it out at least for myself.
When I was a boy, for a child under 12, a ticket to the Ritz Theatre (a Martin-Davis theater) at the corner of Harrison Avenue and 4th Street cost 11¢ - - a dime and a penny. Unimaginably unlike today, 1¢ was a real sum, money, a penny could buy any number of things. Enough candy for a small boy. A Fleers Double Bubble gum wrapped in its own comic strip. I saved up a nickel and five pennies to buy my first little red toy car for 10¢ at either Christo's or McCrory's, one of our two five and ten cent stores on Harrison Avenue; the dime store, the five and dime. My father was appalled at my excess, the waste of hard-earned money buying a toy.
Usually I was given the right change, but if my father trusted me with a quarter to "go to the show" there would be Hell to pay if I failed to return home with his 14¢ change, which, because I learned quickly, only happened once, another day's memory.
Back to battery, there was a War going on, the entire nation totally wrapped up in it emotionally and economically. Eggs and sugar were rationed, scarce, bought only with ration coupons. Butter was rationed but nonexistent anyway, mama bought a white brick of oleo, let it soften, and it was my chore to mash yellow coloring into it for "pass the butter" to spread on your toast.
We got our written news from the Panama City News Herald, heard news over WDLP our local radio station, or sometimes even WWL, "your fifty-thousand watt clear channel station broadcasting from studios in the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans". Robert or Carl may remember. And our visual news was burned into our brain by newsreels, some of it horrifying. At the Ritz Theatre the program was almost invariably newsreel, cartoon or comedy, sometimes previews, and main feature. Saturday mornings at the Kiddie Matinee with Bud Davis on stage leading us in "Hail, hail, the gang's all here" the film program also gave us a serial with a scary ending of each episode to make sure we returned next Saturday.
The newsreel was War news, and my seared-into-the-brain is spring 1945 newsreels of cremation ovens in the German concentration camps
you have to be 87 to remember, including hearing the narrator report that sometimes people were shoved in still alive.
Together with the U S propaganda that we read and saw throughout the War, including clips from Wochenschau videos of wild-eyed throngs saluting and waving at Hitler, it sealed my hatred of Germans for a lifetime - - inexplicably to me, over against an odd fascination with all things German - - music, history, language, politics, porcelain, military, food, cars, art.
And then Life magazine's breaking news and photos of My Lai
a correction burn for my prideful patriotic arrogance, proved to me that, fully as savage, morally equivalent, Americans, we, are no different, all the same, while each of us is uniquely individual one of a kind.
All these memories and reminders return home to me every year as history is recalled in the day's news. Whoever or whatever that is that I see in the mirror is too much part and parcel of civilization, humanity, and creation for me, integral with it, to judge anyone. This is us, Pogo again.
But the poem, eh? C. Felix, "Dearly Departed, Again I Dreamt About a Ship" caught me because of my own dreams, a naval officer newly reported aboard ship, out of uniform, the ship's 1mc communication system repeatedly blaring "... Weller, report to the admiral's cabin on the double" and I can't find my hat, and I'm wearing both commander and lieutenant commander rank insignia and unsure which is correct, and I stumble out of my stateroom into the gray passageway with no idea which way to go - - one of my anxiety dreams. It comes and goes over the years along with another dream about searching for my lost car and another dream about being supply priest at Trinity but unable to find my vestments even as I hear the congregation singing the gospel hymn and waiting for me to step into the pulpit.
So, Camonghne's poem to her boss the day she left her 10 year career in politics for another life entirely: does it make sense? It does to me because on one hand it's the day I retired from the Navy and on the other hand it's every anxiety dream I've ever nightmared through.
Family genealogist Gina's discovery and shocking revelation to me late in life, that we were not descended from English Wellers as I had always been taught and therefore known myself, but from a German, one Andreas Wäller - - making me bloodline German, one of them, the hated enemy, cousins doubtless in the films waving to the popularly elected Leader, changed everything about me as surely as the DNA spit-test reports that stun people with irrefutable proof that they are not who they always knew themselves to be. Pogo yet again.
And the top image? It was on this January 17th day in 1945 that Soviet soldiers broke through and found out what the Germans were doing at Auschwitz, with its news about how humans treat other humans.
What are we? Tick marks on a check off list of history. Earlier in the week I was reading an article about the possibility that we may not be the first, that millions of years ago Earth may have been home to earlier civilizations of intelligent, self-aware creatures, humanoids. Maybe it's divine experiment, trial and error. Create, let evolve and flourish, bring down mass extinction event. Create, let evolve and flourish, bring down mass extinction event. Trial and error ad infinitum. There's plenty of Time for more iterations before our Sun explodes four billion years hence. Genesis 6:5f tells us how it's been on Earth. As to creating beings in the likeness of God, I wonder whether Pantokrator has seen any greater success in other solar systems, galaxies, universes?
RSF&PTL
T
breakfast, black coffee and liverwurst sandwich, heavy, dark brown seed bread, mayonnaise, thick slices of Braunschweiger, which I once tried to render as brown sausage or some such, before finding out it was named for Brunswick, Germany, the city Braunschweig in Deutschland.