When I was five, our family left El Paso, Texas, on the first stage of our journey to Japan, where my father was to be stationed. We drove to California. I don't remember the drive, but I do remember that we stopped at the San Diego Zoo and Disneyland on our way to San Francisco. What must it have been like to have three kids under six in the back seat of the car?
From San Francisco, we took ship to Japan, a two-week trip with a stop in Hawaii. The ship was the USNS Gen. Hugh J. Gaffey, one of many ships in the Military Sea Transport Service (MSTS). This essay by Tom Barry on the JapanBrats blog includes the memories of many kids who made the trip with their families during those years. I also remember the spartan conditions, the boredom, the cramped cabins (I think we were all sick at one point), but also crossing the International Dateline, seeing flying fish, and arriving at Yokohama, welcomed by a band.
When we arrived, housing wasn't ready for us yet, so we lived for a few months in temporary housing at the Sagami Depot. I remember the rows of tanks and half-tracks parked on the other side of the fence. We slept in a bunk bed, which was exciting, but at least one of us fell out. I had my sixth birthday there.
We
then moved to Sagamihara Dependent Housing Area, which was part of the
military complex supporting Camp Zama, where my father was working in
the hospital as a surgeon. Here we see the base as an island of green in a highly urbanized area, but I remember farmland.
According to my father, in the first two years we were there, it was like working in a small town, but with the escalation of the war in Viet Nam, the number of wounded being transported was such that the 100 beds were increased to 500, and three other hospitals were built, to receive the thousands of casualties that were to arrive in the next few years.
Of course, I knew almost nothing of this. What I remember is my first grade teacher, Miss Bell, whom I adored. The Snack Bar had a jukebox and hamburgers. We loved an excuse to eat there.
Teachers from the Elementary School. We lived next door to Mrs. Allen.There were three kids: Sharon, who was twelve, was like a goddess to me. Debbie Cynthia, who was my age, beat me up. Billy, who was younger, was, according to my mother, a brat.
I learned to swim in this pool, where we spent hours and hours in the summer.
As I finished my Netflix marathon of the Up documentary series, I realized that I am
the same age as this group. Well, slightly younger, but I also turned 7 in
1964, the year of the first film. I decided to make my own timeline,
parallel to the series: where was I in the year of the release of each
part, or when I was the age given in each title: 7, 14, 21, 29, 35, 42, 49,
and now 56? (although because I'm a year behind, I'll have to settle for
just-turned-55).
Because my family moved frequently
when I was young (dad was a doctor in the Army), to make my timeline I
found that I had to do some work to nail down the exact dates for events
that I vaguely remembered: when did we move? when were we in each
housing situation? what grade was I in at school?
As I worked out this chronology, I also wondered what I really remembered about those
years, and how this somewhat arbitrary cycle relates to other
milestones in my life, such as graduating from high school, or moving to
Minnesota. I wondered what I might have said if I had been interviewed like those children: what was my heart's desire (to be a horse. And if I couldn't be a horse, to be an archaeologist in Egypt). Where would I go to school in the future (absolutely no clue). Did I have a boyfriend (no, but I had an intense crush on Mike Fukushima, to whom I never said a word, a pattern that would be repeated each school year until I was in high school).
My life has
been at once typically American middle class in many ways and rather unorthodox in others. I've
previously counted the number of times we moved (4), the number of
homes we lived in (7) while we were still in the Army. I've reckoned my
life in boyfriends/relationships with men. And then there are the more
traditional timelines of schooling, career, parenting. How does this 7+7
timeline intersect with these?
I started to write
about what I remembered from age 7, from the year 1964. My family had just moved from El Paso, Texas, where my brother and sister were born, to an Sagamihara Dependent Housing Area, near Tokyo because my rather had been stationed in Camp Zama hospita. I realized that Apted's films almost never refer directly to national or
world events, whereas my life was shaped, at this point especially, by my father's work as an Army doctor during the major escalation of the Viet Namwar. Yet I know almost nothing about what my father was doing, what he thought or felt about the extraordinary experiences he lived through as a surgeon at Camp Zama from 1963 to 1967.
Uh oh! In Feb 2009, TV as we know it will die, and if we don't jump on the digital television train, we will not be able to watch our reality shows! Withdrawal will be ugly.
I don't know if we had a TV when we were very little kids in Texas, before I was 5. I do remember watching Romper Room at least once, and I have a memory of Mr. Greenjeans, so there must have been a TV around, but my mother was very big on DIY toys and going out to play.
When we moved to Japan we had a TV, but of course most of what we watched was in Japanese. The only TV in English was the Danny Kaye show, and then the "Moonriver" guy. The rest was samurai movies, incredible animated cartoons (I still remember the theme song from Obake no Q), and Japanese variety shows. This didn't stop us from watching, but we had to invent our own dialogues for the movies.
Once back in the US, in 1968, the three of us kids gorged ourselves on color TV in English, fairly indiscriminately. If it was on, we watched it.
When I moved away to go to college, there was a TV in the dorm lounge, and in various apartments I shared, but watching TV was not something I did much of. For the years of graduate school, my parade of roommates brought TVs into the house, but nothing fancy. Sometimes there was no TV. I spent more time watching movies at the cheap arthouse cinemas than watching TV, although we did go through a heavy McNeil-Lehrer period, and I did get hooked on a Venezuelan telenovela. I remember this Black Flag song "TV Party" from those years.
When I moved to Minnesota, I got my first credit card and bought my first TV. It still works and we still watch it. No cable, no DVR, no satellite, just regular broadcast TV with crappy reception. No remote, so we change channels or volume with the little buttons. We do have a VCR and a DVD player hooked up to it, but now the laptop is my preferred way of watching DVDs (did I say we have no remote? can't watch the special features without one) because the quality of the image is so much better.
So this summer I think I will take old faithful to the electronics recycling center. The question I have now is, what now? I think I could live without TV again, but I'd like a better monitor for watching DVDs, etc.
One solution is to bet an HDTV to use as a monitor and hook it up to a Mac mini, thereby having a TV-computer set up that allows one to browse, show photos, etc as well as watch TV. Or I could buy and iMac and get Apple TV. I want to leave room for future developments in receiving and broadcasting multimedia content.
The geeks who game and have been doing all this stuff for years with their tinkering and hacking have all kinds of scorn for either solution, but I am that Mac customer who wants to take it out of the box, plug it in, and use it. I don't want to have to spend hours and hours doing research, buy features I'll never use, or pay twice as much as I need to.
I knew Lena Horne on TV in the 60s and 70s from her TV performances on Bill Cosby and variety shows. But it wasn't until a friend gave me a CD of from the early years of her career that I truly appreciated her amazing talent. It is one of my very favorite recordings, one I sang along to in the car countless times, trying in vain to emulate the wonderful timing, the subtle nuances of her interpretations, the ease and suppleness of that amazing voice. A singer's singer: impeccable on every level. The early voice was like "honey and bourbon" according to one critic. She was the first black woman in films to be portrayed as glamorous. Yet she also knew that many of her films were shot so that her scenes could be cut out when they were screened in the South. She was blacklisted during the McCarthy era, and for years her public persona was withdrawn and "icy". Yet when you see her interviewed in later years, her sweetness and peace are evident.
I absolutely adore her rendition of "Where or When,"
Here she performs a Kris Kristofferson song in 1973.
Here's a great interview with Lena Horne on the Rosie O'Donnell show when she was 80:
Fresca issued "The Truth and Reconciliation Hairstyle Challenge" challenge, backed by her own documentation of her life in images, and courageously met by Manfred Allseasons, to find and post an image of our "bad hair styles" of the past. Unfortunately, I have very few photos of myself from before digital days, a result of being an army brat and moving a lot, of a father who made slide shows instead of prints, and of the fact that I didn't myself own a camera until 15 years ago. But a dear friend from high school who took pictures for the yearbook sent me this photo after we reconnected on Facebook (before I got mad at Facebook and deleted my account!). I am grateful to have this picture of me and my bad hair; we all wore our hair parted in the middle in those days, but what was up with those awful layers? I was either 15 or 16 in that shot. Thanks, Jim B!
Yesterday I attended a workshop with colleagues and students about the exhumations of mass graves in Spain that are going on now, uncovering the bones of those killed during the Civil War and also in the years after by the Franco regime, or the "nationalists." I learned from the reading we did for this workshop that the fascists had already performed their exhumations and reburials; this is not the first time that bodies have been dug up from mass graves, but previously it had only been those of nationalists killed by republicans during the war. Now, it is the victims of state-sanctioned violence who are being brought to collective sight and whose stories are being told in public after being kept secret or only whispered for decades. This is a national scenario of story-telling and performance of collective memory.
"This Colloquium Series and International Conference will explore the role that the recent exhumations of mass graves from the Spanish Civil War and subsequent dictatorship have had in the emergence of the movement for the “recovery of historical memory” in Spain. At the beginning of the 21st century, over 30,000 bodies were still interred in mass graves throughout the country. Subsequently, the emergence of civic associations, created by ordinary citizens to undertake exhumations of these graves, has had an enormous impact on Spanish society. In part, the media impact of the exhumations has led to pressure to pass the “Law of Historical Memory” by the Spanish Congress in October 2007, a significant, if insufficient, step towards confronting the legacy of the war and dictatorship in contemporary Spanish society. We will analyze the multiple and complex relations between bodies and knowledge that arise in such exhumations and discuss their political, social, cultural and legal significance, in Spain and in other post-authoritarian or post-conflict settings."
The article we read, but didn't really have time to discuss at length, was "Cries and Whispers: Exhuming and Narrating Defeat in Spain Today" by Francisco Ferrándiz. First, though, we talked to each other about the history and context of these events because many of those gathered are scholars of other national contexts. Some were people born elsewhere who have been living here for many years, but have personal connections to traumatic collective histories: in Chile, Germany, the former Yugoslavia.
"With the assistance of these human rights organizations, since the summer of 2007 several teams of graduate students have been recording audiovisual testimonies of militants, witnesses, and victims of the Spanish Civil War and the Francoist repression."
The UCSD site exists in English and Spanish, so it's a good place to go for background. The Spanish transition to democracy after Franco's death was relatively peaceful, but one of the costs was a collective silence about what the legacy of the dictatorship. It's important to remember the difficult and painful process of creating the pacts, legal and social, that have made possible the emergence of a democratic civil society in the last thirty years, however critical of that process one might be.
After much negotiation, a law was approved a few years ago that makes possible a series of actions that allow engagement with the past: reparations or pensions for Republican soldiers, removal of at least some public monuments to fascism, and the exhumations of graves. The official site for the "Ley de la memoria histórica" explains the parts of the law. Non-governmental groups, such as the Asociación para la recuperación de la memoria histórica" have played a major role in bringing about these actions.
One of the questions that was asked at our meeting by a colleague from Spain: "what does it mean to the children of those who lived through the Civil War to confront this past and ask themselves if their parents were involved in the repression, if they were members of the Falange?" The exhumations are focusing attention now on the families of victims, but no family in Spain is untouched by these stories. Stories and speculation surround the fate of one of the most famous of these victims, whose body does not lie alone but with others murdered with him: this week begins the exhumation of the possible grave site of that of poet Federico García Lorca, and , in a story has even made The New Yorker. Author Jon Lee Anderson writes,
"In a recent story I wrote about the drama, the late poet’s niece, Laura Garcia Lorca (who is also the director of the Federico Garcia Lorca Foundation, which exercises control over the poet’s literary estate), told me that she and her relatives didn’t want Lorca’s body moved because they feared his exhumation would become an unseemly spectacle, “a circus.” Laura shuddered as she conjured up the image of Lorca’s bones being exhibited on YouTube."
It's not just the dead whose memories were stolen; it was also the living. You MUST read this post by entrenomadas about "los niños robados durante el franquismo" [children stolen during Franco's regime].
Chile: The Other 9/11 is the title of a program made by the BBC last year. But maybe it should be the other way around?
This short film by Ken Loach (made in 2002) is narrated by a Chilean refugee who addresses family members of those killed on 9/11/2001, on another Tuesday, Sept 11. Maybe you know that this date also has grim meaning for Chile and all of Latin America because it was Tuesday, Sept 11, 1973 that Gen Pinochet and the armed forces of Chile, with the active support of U.S. president Nixon, Sec. of State Henry Kissinger, and the CIA and the School of the Americas, seized power by bombing the presidential palace, assassinating the democratically elected head-of-state Salvador Allende, and rounding up and torturing, killing, and disappearing thousands of people, Chileans and others. At least 30,000 were killed by the regime-and many, many more were tortured, exiled, or lived in fear for decades. The fact that Pinochet is now dead has not ended the divisions in Chile.
The impact of this event on all of Latin America was as devastating as 9/11 has been to us in the U.S.A. and to the world. As Pres. Bush says in the film, "On September the 11th, enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country, and night fell on a different world, a world in which freedom itself is under attack." Those words have a terrible resonance for those of us who remember the responsibility the U.S. had in supporting the dictatorships and savage repression in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and the countries of Central America in the 80s. So while I remember and mourn with everyone the events of 8 years ago in 2001, I cannot forget, I must not forget, the legacy of suffering of that first "martes 11 de septiembre."
Chris Clarke inventories his scars and Orange has some fairly dramatic stories about hers, although she underplays the scary factor. They got me thinking about my own scar stories. Like a lot of people, I have a few chicken pox scars on my face. I remember that all the kids got chicken pox at the same time, while we were living in El Paso, Texas; we were all under five, and the moms just threw us all together in our pajamas to ride it out for a few weeks. One of the Heygood boys scratched one on my cheek and I still have the little round pock. My acne scars are a reminder of high school shame. The less said about that, the better.
I have a small scar on the top of my right foot that I got when I did a cartwheel in the living room and crashed into something metal near the fireplace. A scar on my left shin is a souvenir of my first attempt to shave my legs. I still shudder at the memory of the sensation. I made sure to tell my daughter that cautionary tale, and insisted that if she wanted to shave, she should let me show her how to do it safely. I won't get into the should you shave or not thing, because frankly, if I tell her not to, she will probably want to do it even more, and I want her to do it safely.
I have a few other nicks and cuts on my hands, but the biggest scar is from my appendectomy at age 7-8? back in the days when they just sliced you open. Each hole from the stitches has its own little round scar. I never minded that scar--it had its story. I went into my parents' room and said "My tummy hurts" and threw up (on the floor! not even in the toilet!). My dad the doctor did the little tapping thing and figured out it was appendicitis right away (he knew!) and they were wheeling me into surgery within a few hours. I got to count backwards from 100 when they gave me the anaesthesia but I only remember getting as far as 96 (scary but exciting!)
If you know where to look, it's there, but the burn mark that covers most of the inside of my right arm from the coffee pot scald I got earlier this year is almost invisible now.
Our most dramatic recent scar story is from Blas's head surgery last year. He says the scars still hurt when he is tired, but otherwise he is fine. We continue to be amazed and thankful that this is the only consequence of that frightening event.
Now the scars I inventory are my daughter's. The scar on her lip is from the gash she got when she fell and hit her face on the zipper of her parka and the floor at the age of 14 months. That was the first. It was New Year's Day, and nobody I knew was in town. The only hospital ER available was Children's Hospital, and every sick child in town was there with us for the five hours we waited. I remember looking up at the full moon as I carried her in--it was only 6 PM, but night falls early in the north in winter. I had no food the whole time we were there, and I was ravenous, but she was still nursing and was surprisingly calm. She needed six stitches, and they took special care because they wanted the edges of her lip to match up. Of course the sedative they gave her didn't work, and a large male nurse had to hold her head still while I held down her body and she screamed because she couldn't understand why we were hurting her. You can still see the faint white mark on her beautiful face, but I don't think she remembers.
There were two more emergency room trips for stitches for the cuts on the bottom of her chin. One was the typical childhood fall off the slide at school that meant I got an emergency call at work to go pick her up and take her to the hospital: the reason I carry a cell phone. Another happened while we were in Spain. They are much more brusque in their dealings with anxious parents there, and I was not allowed to be with her while they stitched her up, but they did a great job. What was the hardest about those two situations was not the stitching itself but the removal of the stitches. It didn't hurt, but she did not want to let us do it.
I'm putting together some things on for a class on narrative, and I was so happy to find this old Sesame Street Classic. I didn't watch Sesame Street growing up; I watched it with my daughter. We taped a lot of episodes and watched them over and over. A couple of my favorite bits were animated by super talented Sally Cruikshank. She has put some of her videos up on YouTube. I think this one--"Every story has a beginning, middle and an end" is a great version of a lot of narrative theory--and you can dance to it! It sounds a lot like what the Talking Heads were doing at the time, which is probably one of the reasons I like it.
When I started junior high, I became a science fiction geek--or was I a nerd? I was certainly considered a dork, I was a nerdy geeky dork? (if you want to know which you are, take the test. I score Pure Nerd, with over 90% nerdosity).
If you go to literature map you can type in the name of an author, and it will appear, surrounded by a cluster of other names. The idea is that you will probably like the ones that are closer. At another point on this very interesting site, a box asks you to enter the names of three of your favorite writers. This is the kind of question I usually can't answer because, really, how can I choose?
But for many years, my answers would have been Dorothy Dunnett, Joanna Russ and Samuel R. Delany.
I have just discovered that Joanna Russ has been unable to write for the last ten years because she has arthritis and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (a condition closely related to fibromyalgia).
Russ's literary criticism I found later when I was in graduate school. I just bought her book of essays To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction when I was out looking for books by Ellen Willis a while back. Some of them I have read before, many years ago, and others are new to me. I will enjoy reading them, and then rereading all of her fiction.
At a Science Fiction Conventions (WisCON) she was interviewed by another of my very favorite writers of all time, Samuel R. Delany. Delany is another writer of fiction who is also a brilliant teacher and thinker. Absorbant remarked on regrets about books or other things one sheds when moving, and my first thought was of the huge collection of records I abandoned in California when I moved to Minnesota. But of course, there was an even huger collection of paperback science fiction novels, with their original cheesy covers, that I bought with my allowance (back when 50 cents would buy you a book, and a nickel would get you the same book, used), and that I carted around with me for years. It seemed like a good idea at the time to get rid of them, but now I wish I had them, and the Marvel comic books I bought between 1972-1975. They were what helped me survive those six years of dorkdom, until I could become a professional nerd.
Sunday, September 17, 2006
Is there a song that has made a difference in your life?
I found this video of a live Jeff Buckley performance by way of a post by Pachacutec on Firedoglake. Buckley is singing the Leonard Cohen song Hallelujah. Pachacutec's post is about how often we confuse asking hard questions with personal attacks. So many times, our righteous anger and pain about the state of the world can lead us to turn on each other rather than work together to bring to life our common goals. His words were particularly inspiring and necessary to me this weekend. And I love Leonard Cohen's words and music, and this song in particular. Finding it today has made me feel a sense of renewal.
Pachacutec also asked, as part of his post, which artists, too soon gone, inspire us? There are a lot of thoughtful answers in the comments, and more links that I intend to explore when I have the time. This question suggests another one to me: is there a song that made a difference in your life? Not necessarily your favorite song, but one that made you think about the world in a different way? I have very clear recollection of listening to a Joan Baez record when I was in first or second grade, the one with "Stewball," "There but for fortune," and "Birmingham Sunday." That last song had a huge impact on me. I remember vividly what it felt like, swinging on the playground at school, singing "Birmingham Sunday" to myself, thinking about the mysterious words ("the falcon of death was a creature they knew"--did that mean they knew the falcon was a creature? or that they knew the falcon?), I wondered why someone wanted to kill those four girls (girls, just like me) because they were black. I didn't understand much else about the song then, but I do remember clearly the powerful recognition that I a song could tell me something important about the world.
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