Memories on Memorial Day

Me in Vietnam, 1969

This is the 40th Memorial Day since I was in Vietnam, a not-so-happy draftee serving with the 25th Infantry Division at a hot and dusty place called Cu Chi. Like most Vietnam vets of my acquaintance, I don't think much about the experience any more and I really don't like talking about it much. We got no parades when returned and we didn't win the war. Most of us just ditched the uniforms, grew our hair long and faded into our generation as quickly as we could. The last thing I ever wanted to do was tell war stories and drink beer at some VFW hall. I came away from it thinking Vietnam was just a big national misadventure that ended up doing little besides killing almost 60,000 Americans. Not a particularly popular position in VFW halls.

I was fortunate. Although I was drafted and trained to be a mobile radio operator with an infantry platoon, I never really was "out in the bush." Platoon radio operators were prime targets for snipers and their survival rate wasn't great. When I got to Vietnam, my journalism experience helped me talk my way into a job as communications specialist, writing press releases and articles for the Army newspaper at the division headquarters. I was also assigned a Polaroid camera to take pictures of the division commander and the wounded soldiers he visited in the makeshift hospital at the base in Cu Chi. My job was all about presenting a positive image for the Army and what our nation thought it was doing in that sad place. I call it my sportwriting period -- root, root, root for the home team!

I also was confused about my sexual orientation at the time, and very afraid to express what I was feeling to anybody. In other words, they didn't ask and I didn't tell. It was difficult to keep that kind of secret, always wondering who suspected and what would happen if the truth were known. I remember meeting a goodlooking Navy guy once who told me his job in the investigative unit was to get "queers to hit on him" so they could be drummed out and dishonorably discharged. He laughed about it, but it pained me to think about how many lives of decent, patriotic people they were wrecking. And I vowed that I would never become one of those statistics. I kept my secret. But if I had it to do again, I wouldn't. Why be part of a club that doesn't want me? All I had to do was raise my hand and I would have been spared the privilege of an all-expenses-paid trip to Vietnam -- keeping company with Dick Cheney, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and a host of others with good connections or at least good luck.

I have made several visits to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., and I cry every time as I read all those names of lives cut short. I also think about all those who have survived Iraq and Afghanistan but in horribly burned or mangled condition. Maybe it's almost better that so many of my generation didn't survive their Vietnam injuries, if their future would have meant the endless surgeries and hospitalization our Middle East veterans are enduring.

When we lived in Santa Barbara a few years ago, the local symphony used to give a free concert at City Hall every Memorial Day. A highlight came when they played the song associated with each branch of the service, and veterans of that branch were asked to stand as it was played and the crowd cheered. I got a lump in my throat when Terry and I stood as they played "The Caissons Go Rolling Along." Sure, we were reluctant warriors in a muddled war that maybe never should have been fought. But it felt good as people applauded us more than 3o years later. The applause we never heard when we came home.

Apple Blossom Time

Our house on Whidbey Island is almost finished at long last, and we will be moving in mid-June. In the side yard of our house stand four very old fruit trees -- three apples and one pear. I believe they were planted when the house was built in the early 1960s. They had not been pruned for many, many years, and they looked sad.

A couple of months ago, a friend who works for our construction company offered to prune them before the spring blossoms came. They really needed a haircut and now they look positively spiffy. When I was at the house early this month, I noticed that the apple blossoms were out. What a beautiful sight!

It is amazing how this world works. Gardens will produce abundant crops if you tend them. Fruit trees will bear food for many people if you look after them. They don't ask anything in return except our attention.

I expect that, when we get to Whidbey, we'll have lots of food to share.

In Love and Together

Our good friends Terry and Greg exchanged rings during a very touching commitment ceremony in their backyard recently. They are special people, and I was honored to be asked to give a toast in their honor. This is what I said:

Tonight we’re here to celebrate something very special. Terry and Greg made their own private commitments to each other over the past six years, but this evening they decided to state them publicly, in front of all of us.

My partner Terry and I were together 30 years before we had our commitment ceremony in 2005…so congratulations, you two, on getting it together a lot sooner than we did!

There is something very profound and spiritual, I think, about making a solemn commitment to the one you love out loud, in front of your friends and family. It’s a testament to the pride and love you feel for each other; you want the world to know this is a lifetime commitment – thick or thin, rich or poor, flabby or buff, or even when one of you is flat on his back on a gurney in the ER.

That’s what so many people who are opposed to same-sex marriage miss. It’s not just about a piece of paper called a license, or a tax deduction – although that would be nice, or even a holy sacrament. It’s about two people in love who want to be together, and who also want the world to know, in some formal and public way, that they’ve found something very special with each other.

I’ve known Terry for more than eight years since our paths first crossed at work. He’s everybody’s friend, a bundle of energy who’s incredibly organized. He’s always eager to help solve your problems. Or act as your father confessor. Or give you free counseling for all that dysfunction in your life. Whether you want it or not. In the corporate world you meet a lot of sharks and phonys. But I knew right away that Terry was a loving, genuine, caring person with a real passion for everything he does.

When Terry introduced us to Greg a bit later, we couldn’t help but see what a perfect match he was for Terry. A quiet and generous man of integrity and honesty, who cares deeply about other people and never stops giving of himself to the things he believes in. Terry and Greg truly are a match made in heaven. It’s obvious that they were meant for other – no matter what the Pope and James Dobson think.

Love is what holds two people together. It’s a gift that helps us see what God intended in this world. It is also a wonderful mystery, but it what demonstrates is simply this: being together is better than being alone. Congratulations, Terry and Greg on finding each other and for showing all of us, through your relationship, a bit more about what love is.

So, ladies and gentlemen, I would ask you raise your glass with me in a toast to our dear friends, Terry and Greg…..in love and together.

Happy Birthday, Virginia May

My parents, Virginia and Orrin, circa 1938

Today would have been my mother's 91st birthday. She was born Virginia May Harris on April 30, 1918. World War I was raging and the Spanish flu epidemic, which would spread worldwide and kill more than 20 million, had just been begun. Her father was a brakeman on the city trolleys. Her mother was homemaker with a 9th grade education.

I have lots of memories of my mother, warm and not-so-warm. She was complicated and insecure, frustrated in many ways. Had she been born 50 years later, she almost certainly would have been a career woman. Instead, she was of the June Cleaver generation, expected to stay home, raise kids and keep a tidy house. That was so not her natural inclination. She was a strong person who married a strong man. That made for some interesting arguments.

She died in 2002 and I miss her. As time goes by, only the good memories remain in Technicolor. The others fade to black and white.

She was a lionness when it came to protecting her children. She was generous, emotional and very loving. She was forced to be stronger than I think she really wanted to be. My father died young, when my brother was only eight. She had no career to fall back on. But she picked up the pieces and got on with her life, finding a real passion in working with the elderly as a mobile librarian.

I'm grateful that we drew quite close in the last 15 years of her life, sharing many feelings that we never shared when I was younger. I wish she were here to help me navigate the tricky shoals of growing old.

Driftwood

Driftwood is an amazing creation. It starts out as a plant or tree. Then it falls in the sea, where it's rolled against rocks, bleached in the sun, polished by the sand. The end result is like art pottery, shaped by God's own hands.

In my life, I feel as if I've been rolled, bleached and polished quite a bit. I've been places, met people and done things I couldn't have imagined growing up in Tacoma, Wash., in the 1950s. I just hope the end result is as good as the driftwood on a Whidbey beach.

What's My Line?

I was five years old when my dad bought our first television set in 1950. It was a 16-inch Westinghouse in a big mahogany cabinet with solid doors that closed over the screen when we weren't watching. There were just two stations on the air, and programming began every afternoon about 4:30 p.m. Because we were in the Pacific time zone, we saw programs from New York either live (three hours earlier), on film or delayed on kinescope (filmed live off the TV screen). There was no videotape.

Sunday night was always a big night for TV in our house. By the mid-1950s, we were avid fans of Ed Sullivan's variety hour and Jack Benny on CBS, and the Dinah Shore and Steve Allen hours on NBC.

But what I remember most was a little panel show called "What's My Line" that played at 7:30 p.m. our time, live from New York. It featured people I didn't know -- an actress named Arlene Francis, a journalist named Dorothy Kilgallen, a publisher named Bennett Cerf and a news broadcaster named John Daly. The point of each show was to have the panel guess the occupation of the contestants and identity of a mystery celebrity.

They all talked in what my dad called a high-falutin' way. Very articulate. Very witty, in a New York way. No slang. I was too young to know why I liked the way they talked so much. But now I realize, after a lifetime of working with words, that I admired them because they spoke the English language so well. They came from a generation that prized elegant repartee and wit. Network radio, in its heyday during the 1930s and 1940s, was known for this style of speaking, and What's My Line carried that tradition into television. It's ironic, isn't it, that a lesser-educated generation, with many fewer college-educated people than we have now, was attracted to high-falutin' speaking and made shows like What's My Line very popular. The show ran in primetime on CBS from February 1950 to September 1967.

Imagine my surprise and joy when I discovered several months ago that the Game Show Network on cable television is showing kinescopes of What's My Line at 2:30 a.m. every day. I have been recording every episode, and there they are: Arlene, Dorothy, Bennett and John, as if they never went away. Speaking so well, making witty remarks and bad puns.

The kinescopes are an amazing time capsule of the 1950s and early 1960s. I had forgotten that the show attracted "mystery guests" of every stripe. I've watched the panel try to guess the identity of celebrities such as opera star Helen Traubel, boxer Ingemar Johansson, architect Frank Lloyd Wright, historian and poet Carl Sandburg, and teen-idol Fabian. Meantime, they also giggled and punned their way through guessing the occupations of the guy who made horse feedbags, the champion woman wrestler, the toilet tester and the thimble maker.

What's My Line probably couldn't succeed today. The prize was small ($50 if the panel was fooled), the pace was rather slow and the decibel level was very low. But I think what would really make it fail is our modern lack of appetite for well-spoken use of language on television. Our 21st Century ears just don't get it. Too high-falutin'; just ain't worth our time.

A Beach on a Windy Day

Some friends here in Texas have asked why we're moving to Whidbey Island. So remote from the urban life we've led for most of our lives. So damp. So far away. So....boring.

Yes, all true. But if you'd been there on this clear, chilly day last November, on this north Whidbey beach, looking out at the Straits of Juan de Fuca and the Pacific Ocean beyond, Vancouver Island to the northwest seemingly close enough to touch, a lonely American flag planted in the sand up just a few yards, you would understand.

Nothing to do but think and see and hear. And be amazed.