Natural Traveler Magazine - Spring 2021

NATURAL TRAVELER ® M A G A Z I N E V O L .

S P R I N G

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I I I ,

N O .

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P R I C E

Sweet Relief for the Heroes Among Us . . .

“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of looking at things.”

Henry Miller

© 2021 Natural Traveler LLC 5 Brewster Street Unit 2, No. 204 Glen Cove, New York 11542

Natural Traveler Magazine ® Spring 2021 Editor & Publisher Tony Tedeschi Senior Editor Bill Scheller Staff Writers Ginny Craven Aglaia Davis Andrea England David E. Hubler Jay Jacobs Samantha Manuzza Buddy Mays John H. Ostdick Pedro Pereira Frank I. Sillay Kendric W. Taylor Photography Katie Cappeller Karen Dinan Buddy Mays Art Sharafina Teh Webmaster Will Rodriguez

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Table of Contents

Editor’s Letter

Page 3

Contributors

Page 4

Fogg’s Horn: Tusk, Tusk

Page 5

Email from New Zealand

Frank I. Sillay

Page 7

Email from Canada

Andrea England

Page 9

Sweet Relief

John H. Ostdick

Page 11

Poetry: All Is Well

Jay Jacobs

Page 18

Hyway Diner Memories

Bill Scheller

Page 19

Unfinished Business Q&A

Tony Tedeschi

Page 25

The Old Woman of Nazca

Kendric W. Taylor

Page 30

An Ode to Old Sue

Buddy Mays

Page 34

Overheard

Bill Scheller

Page 41

Poetry: Stopping A Bully

Samantha Marie

Page 43

Miracles or Coincidences

David E. Hubler

Page 44

Poetry: Maxie

Tony Tedeschi

Page 48

Empress Eugénie and Maréchal Foch

Kendric W. Taylor

Page 49

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Editor’s Letter A Solitary Walker I walk alone, but this is not about me. talking. I took her to be the wife of the man who lived in that house. He was standing almost limply beside his wife, who was berating his fellow walker with Donald Trump’s false declarations about massive fraud in the election. “Oh, they’ll find it.

You’ll see.” The husband’s friend got in the occasional rejoinder, during the period when I was passing, but he was shouted down by the woman. They were clearly quite angry with each other. I couldn’t help wondering the effect it would have on the men and their morning walks together. I didn’t need to wonder for long.

Two days later, I saw the husband walking, alone. Over the next several weeks, I saw him one or two days each week, each time alone. We exchanged waves, but there was something unnatural about it, since he knew I would note the absence of his friend.

There was a tentativeness in the gesture, real or imagined by me. I wondered why I hadn’t seen the other man walking alone, then concluded he must have changed his route to avoid coming in contact with his friend, his former friend. One day about a month later, I encountered the husband, as he was passing his friend’s house. He made a slight wave in the direction of the house, before noticing me and continuing the upward movement of his hand in my direction, as if in an attempt to mask the gesture, as if it had been simply the routine acknowledgment of our brief encounter.

We’ve seen so much of the destruction in the relationships of highly visible people on the national stage, but it may be on this, the deeply personal level, that it hurts most.

That gesture, that morning, was one of the saddest things I’d ever seen.

I have been taking a walk around my neighborhood, most mornings, since my wife and I moved to Glen Cove, Long Island, more than 28 years ago. I walk a half-dozen variations on a central route. Throughout the way, I recede into a world that is mine, a quiet prelude to what will become the noise of the remainder of the day. The solitude allows for some of my best thinking.

I walk alone, but this is not about me.

When you walk a familiar route, thousands of times, across the course of the seasons, you become minutely aware of changes in the platform: when the first daffodil shoots poke through the ground (used to be in February, now midNovember), when the first, thin layers of ice sit atop rain puddles (used to be in midNovember, now mid-December). You also exchange a wave of the hand to those you see a day or more each week: the woman runner, who must be a formidable competitor in local races; the always pleasantly smiling Korean couple who walk accompanied by the quiet sounds of their native music; the two men who are always in animatedly, friendly conversation.

Well, it used to be the two of them.

Over the course of a half-dozen years, I’d seen the two men so often, along so many different portions of my route. I’d even seen when each had come out of his house before joining his companion at the start of their walk together.

One morning, about a week after the presidential election, as I was making the turn around a corner before one of their houses, I could hear a very loud, very angry voice, a female voice. On the street in front of the house stood the two men, along with a woman who was doing most of the loud

-- Tony Tedeschi 3

Contributors In this quarter’s edition of his Email from New Zealand, Frank I. Sillay takes us along on his visit to an Australasian one-string fiddle player, with some hilarious results. (Page 7) In her Email from Canada, Andrea England questions what it will be like when the pandemic fades. “What will we have learned about ourselves and the ones we love for having gone through this?” (Page 9) “Sweet Relief,” a gripping report by John H. Ostdick and his wife, Michelle Medley, reveals how the heartfelt gesture of providing a steady supply of cookies for healthcare workers dealing with hospitalizations of the COVID-19 pandemic can make a significant difference for those on the front lines. (Page 11) “How I could simultaneously manage four breakfast orders and an early burger I still don’t know,” Bill Scheller reflects in “Hyway Diner Memories,” about his younger years dining in, then serving at, his grandparents’ New Jersey diner.

(Page 19) A Q&A with Tony Tedeschi details how the plotlines and characters for his novel, Unfinished Business, evolved via his determination to not let go of this story over a 20-year period. (Page 25) “For more than half of a 95-year lifespan, Maria Reiche, did her slow dance with time over the lines at Nazca,” Kendric W. Taylor writes in his story, “The Old Woman of Nazca.” (Page 30) With a decades-long career photographing around the world, sheltering in place during the pandemic for Buddy Mays could perhaps result in his manipulating photos of monsters stirring in unlikely backgrounds for his pictorial “Ode to Old Sue.” (Page 34) When does a coincidence become a miracle? David E. Hubler explores the question in “Miracles or Coincidences.” (Page 44) Kendric Taylor provides the latest installment of his World War I story, “Empress Eugénie and Maréchal Foch.” (Page 49).

Poetry by Jay Jacobs, Samantha Marie and Tony Tedeschi, along with photography by Karen Dinan, artwork by Sharafina Teh, and Jan Guarino, provide all the more reasons to continue page turning throughout the issue.

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Fogg’s Horn The Miscreant Meanderings Of Our Man Markus

Tusk, Tusk whale meat lunch, the Inuit drum dance . . . and the Hudson’s Bay store. One whole aisle appeared to be the walrus tusk department, retailing ivory sold to the store by Inuit hunters who had taken their quota of walruses for meat, blubber, and hides. Most of the tusks had been made into cribbage boards — I pictured a local sub-economy involving tiny drills — but the ones that caught my eye were straight off the walrus, untouched, with no little holes for cribbage pegs. How do you play cribbage, anyway?

I paid, I think, forty Canadian for my tusk, and stuffed it into my pack for the trip back to Churchill. A couple of days later, I was set to head home when an American staying at my hotel was watching me pack and said, “You know, you can’t take that into the States. It’d violate the Marine Mammal Protection Act.” Now, I’m all in favor of protecting marine mammals. I’m glad you just can’t go off and hunt walruses. Even the Inuit have strict quotas. But my tusk came

I have a walrus tusk in my office.

It’s about sixteen inches long, and heavy as hell. You’d have to have the neck muscles of a walrus to handle two of them, grubbing for mollusks on the floor of the Arctic Ocean. Or fighting with other walruses. Or whatever they do with them.

I bought the tusk in 1984, at a Hudson’s Bay store in Eskimo Point, Northwest Territories.

Eskimo Point now has the Inuit name Arviat, and its territory is called Nunavut; the shop operated by the “Governor and Company of Adventurers of England, trading into Hudson’s Bay” is now run by Northmart, and includes a KFC outlet.

I’d flown to Eskimo Point on a DC-3 from Churchill, Manitoba, where I was covering the fall polar bear migration for a magazine published by a Washington, D.C. outfit whose trademark is a yellow rectangle. I think they’re still in business, but I haven’t heard from them in a while. The packager who ran the trip made sure we hit all the highlights, including the 5

from a walrus taken under those quotas, a subsistence-hunted walrus. It was shot — harpooned, maybe — by a guy in a sealskin parka whose family had lived off walruses and seals for maybe ten thousand years, not by some rich Yank with a .300 Weatherby Magnum. Plus, there was the forty bucks.

My first flight was from Churchill to Winnipeg. No problem there; all in-country.

Next up was WinnipegMinneapolis, and U.S. customs.

There was the hitch. But I figured my way around it during my night’s layover in Winnipeg, and made sure I left my hotel with enough time to stop at a drugstore on my way to the airport. At the druggist’s, I bought two rolls of Ace bandage.

When I got to the airport, I ducked into a men’s room and took a stall. Off came my jacket, and shirt, and out came the walrus tusk. I uncoiled a roll of the Ace bandage, cinched it around my waist with the little metal hook Ace provides, and held the tusk against my spine as I wrapped the bandage tightly around it, and my torso. Another hook, another bandage, and soon I had the tusk strapped securely

behind me. I put my shirt and jacket back on, and headed for security, not quite as secure in those days, with the posture of a major bucking for lieutenant colonel. No problem. I was glad I had my tweeds cut amply; not the slightest bulge showed.

It was, OK, a damned uncomfortable flight to Minneapolis. But it was a short hop, and I made a beeline for a men’s room the minute we landed. No more customs. On the way back east, the tusk was back in my bag and headed for its place in front of my grandmother’s cowrie shell engraved with the Lord’s Prayer, a Civil War belt buckle my father found in the attic of a house he lived in as a kid, and a ceramic statuette of Donald Duck my sister brought me from Disney World.

Next time you’re in Arviat, see if they have any walrus tusks at the Northmart store. Probably not, as they have KFC now and the demand for blubber is way down.

But if you do find one, don’t try to bring it into the States. The TSA is fussier these days.

‘The time has come,’ the walrus said, ‘to talk of many things: of shoes and ships – and sealing wax – of cabbages and kings . . .’ ― Lewis Carroll 6

Email from New Zealand One-String Fiddle Player

By Frank I. Sillay

His notorious repertoire of risqué and ribald songs had been subjected to a virulent dose of religion risqué and ribald songs, he had since gotten a virulent dose of religion, and was now a teetotal performer of exclusively religious material.

The one string fiddle in Australasia was usually based on a five gallon square tin can, of the type that was often used in those days to hold kerosene. The top surface of the can was square, with rounded corners. In one of these corners was a bung intended for pouring, a little over 1” in diameter. In the opposite corner was a smaller bung, maybe ¾” for relieving vacuum when pouring. Both were closed with screw caps that were concave on top. The larger of these two caps made a convenient socket for a short length of broom handle, to which the upper end of the string was fixed, the lower end being fixed to the middle of the top of the tin. The

Got a phone call one day around 1970 from my old friend, Frank Fyfe, and he was in a state of high excitement.

Despite being an Australian, Frank was the founder and Grand Panjandrum of the New Zealand Folklore Society and had recently spent several months fruitlessly trying to track down one Sam Barratt, who had been a celebrated one-string fiddle player around rural New Zealand in the 1920s1940s. Apparently his efforts had just been rewarded with success and Frank wanted me to come along and help with recording an interview.

As we drove to the country district where Barratt had been run to ground, Frank explained to me that though our subject had once been notorious for his repertoire of 7

smaller concavity would be the repository of a small amount of mutton grease, useful for lubricating the fingertip which slid up and down the string to change the pitch. Pitch was also affected by the lateral pressure applied to the broom handle “neck.” Notes were produced by a normal violin bow, employed in the usual way, as if on a cello.

Bean Bottling Technology?

notebook as she examined us with a skeptical eye.

Sam turned inquisitively toward the door, whereupon the woman (Mrs Barratt, as it turned out) emerged, and silently handed him the notebook. He read what she had written and told us that he had been granted dispensation to give us a demonstration of the fiddle, with the strict caveat that only sacred music could be involved.

Over the next few minutes, it emerged that since Sam’s salvation, the Architect of Creation had decreed that:

When we arrived at the address we’d been given, we found an old man, shabbily dressed, sitting in the front yard bottling string beans. Because I engaged in the preservation of vegetables myself, I was intrigued by the technology he was using.

The beans were cut to convenient lengths and fed, one by one, into the old 26 ounce beer bottles that were the New Zealand standard at the time. When full, each bottle was fitted with a stopper carved from a stick, so as to be a reasonable fit. I didn’t ask if he was going to process the harvest in a hot water bath later. I never saw anything in the paper about an elderly couple succumbing to botulism, so I can only assume that his method worked.

After we introduced ourselves, Frank explained the purpose of our visit, and at first, it looked as if our trip had been wasted, as Sam declared that he had turned his back on wine, women, and song, and devoted himself exclusively to service to the Lord.

Frank explained that we were mainly interested in the kerosene-tin fiddle, and would be perfectly happy to record it being used to play hymns.

At about this time, a shadowy figure silently appeared in the gloom behind the screen door to the house. It was a woman of a similar age to Sam, dressed in a summer house dress of the simplest type, and she was writing in a 3” x 5” paperbound school

• • •

All questions of importance must be submitted for divine resolution.

All responses should be recorded in writing and preserved for posterity.

Mrs. Barratt should be exclusively the conduit for this communication, because of the neatness of her handwriting.

My purpose was to provide some rhythm guitar while Frank drove the recording machinery. We recorded a half dozen familiar hymns, and I was impressed by the accuracy of pitch that Sam achieved, though ornamentation was limited.

As we packed up and prepared to head home, the conversation about Divine Authorization continued, and I asked if all the notebooks had been preserved. Sam assured us that they had and showed us a set of shelves groaning under the weight of the notebooks.

“Go ahead,” he said, “Have a look at any of them.” I picked one, opened it at random, and saw a message from our creator, enjoining Sam to “Stop fooling with that fiddle, and spend more time working in the garden!”

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Photo by Andrea England

Email From Canada

By Andrea England

It!s hard to un-know something once you know it.

It!s also hard to un-know someone.

did not think about it that way — as a flak jacket — until I wrote it down just now.

Before now, it was just a throw; but on the page, it has become a metaphor.

Some people don!t like metaphors, by the way: they like plain language. If you are one of those people, I am probably not for you.

I like connecting the dots, finding the why, revealing the what and the how. Like Earnest Buckler"s protagonist David Canaan, in Buckler!s The Mountain and the Valley, #saying it exactly” provides me with some comfort. And the illusion of control. But that’s where the similarity ends.

And we both know, there is no underestimating the power of illusion; in fact, I wear my blanket even when I ought not to

I don!t know who I am exactly; it!s a memory I am trying in this very minute to recall.

I!m hoping, as I write, that it — she — comes back to me.

I do know where I am, however: I am sitting in a small room on light grey low-tothe-floor, Restoration Hardware-esque couch, the same couch on which I have sat at some point watching one show or another or another for very nearly every evening now for eleven months, twenty-eight days, and twentytwo hours (the minutes do not matter for they are gone as soon as I mark them).

I sit in the couch!s leftmost corner, right up against its overstuffed arm, a pillow under the small of my back, and a white blanket covering me like a fuzzy flak jacket. I 9

need a double-thick velour faux fur weighing me down when just to my right, low to the floor, perfectly in line with the aforementioned couch and the adjacent window seat (with a broken hinge that you cannot see hidden behind a designer chair that had to be had but in which we never sit) is a modern linear fireplace.

I do not need it because I am relatively safe from gunfire here on my couch.

I say relatively, because opposite me and my couch, is the #smart” TV that, when it is not displaying reasonable electronic facsimiles of Picasso or Gustav Klimt, is projecting reasonable electronic facsimiles of American life.

I make that last distinction because, in case you haven!t guessed, I am Canadian.

Take that for what it is, and all that it is.

What I mean to say is, I sit here completely immersed in insurrection and at the same time, completely outside of the line of fire.

That!s a lie.

The dirt and hate and scandal and discontent and propaganda and racism and sexism and hypocrisy of the past four (five, really) years have all crossed the border like a wildfire — or a virus — and have singed us, too, while simultaneously we sit here, outraged self-righteous spectators, on our Northern couches, as if we are free of dirt and hate and scandal and discontent and propaganda and racism and sexism and hypocrisy . . . but we are not.

And we have never been.

However, the everyday piling on of yours in addition to ours, well it!s a lot for me and my blanket.

So I can only imagine what it feels like to be a person of colour. I say only imagine because I am aware that I am completely immersed in a system of racial inequity, and at the same time completely outside of the line of fire. That other blanket I have been

wearing — that other permanent, unjustly conferred flak jacket — the colour of my skin, has afforded me unearned protection and privilege from the worst of it.

The worst of the last five years, and the worst of the virus that has been keeping me inside, on this couch every evening for eleven months, twenty-eight days, and twenty-three or so hours . . . watching as one virus reveals the other!s true character.

I can!t help but wonder what it will be like for me, for you, for us, when the pandemic ends: will we forget what we have seen?

It!s hard to un-see things; there!s nothing more revealing of true character than a pandemic — other than, perhaps, copious amounts of alcohol (and as with alcohol, the depth and duration of the hangover is utterly unknowable until it arrives) — but when it finally ends, what will we have learned about ourselves and the ones we love for having gone through this?

Did you . . .

Did you take what you needed and leave enough for others, or did you take what you wanted and leave the vulnerable to fend for themselves? Did you check in on your neighbours, your coworkers, your family?

Were you kind to them — were they kind to you? Did you speak up when you witnessed injustice or did you stay silent, under your blanket(s) hoping for it all to pass you by.

It!s hard to un-know something once you know it. It!s also hard to un-know someone.

Especially when that someone is you.

The real question is, what will we do with that knowledge once we realize we have it?

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Sweet Relief Providing ICUs with cookies during the pandemic proves even the small things we do for the weary heroes among us can be a rewarding treat.

Story by John H. Ostdick and Michelle Medley

‘Today, me will live in the moment, unless it is unpleasant.

In which case me will eat a cookie.’

— Cookie Monster, Sesame Street In times of crisis and despair we as individuals may not be able to right major wrongs, but sometimes a simple thing we do can make a difference to others. It can even be something as simple as a cookie.

For most of us, a long period of numbness and space distortion began in the months following the first reported COVID-19 case in the United States on January 19, 2020, in the state of Washington. Our world filled with pain,

sorrow, separation, isolation, and lists of things we could not do and places we could not go. Many of us lost our jobs, our physical connection to the outside world. An incredible number of us started dying. The rest of us strained to keep frustration and depression at bay as our hospitals became swamped.

Since we both are in our 60s and John is in the COVID-19 high-risk group, in March we started sheltering in place, 11

getting our groceries delivered, managing to avoid running out of toilet paper and disinfectant wipes. John could no longer travel and interview people in person; the local college where Michelle teaches in the Pastry program shifted its classes online and reduced the number it offered. Like many people, we started feeling the economic and emotional pinch fairly quickly.

We Zoomed and zagged, making the best of the situation. We fretted about the safety and health of our daughter, Madeline, in Brooklyn, one of the early flash spots; son, Hunter, in Dallas, and siblings and friends across the country, as most people did. We tried to help others as we could. We gave blood. Michelle’s home-based Red Beret Bakery dropped off baked goods to neighbors who were also sheltered in place, leaving bread or pastries on their front step in a lime green tin box labeled “BREAD” and coming back later to reclaim the box.

For most of the year, however, virus outbreak curves and death total surges became the monsters in our closet.

Broadcast videos of our national healthcare workers describing the horrors the virus was inflicting in hospitals inundated with COVID-19 patients tore at our hearts. We wanted to help but felt helpless. We contributed to our church’s effort to provide meals for a local ICU unit but yearned to do more.

Some friends of Hunter and Madeline are among those on the Dallas healthcare front lines, and they were in our hearts and thoughts.

Michelle had just finished helping Hunter’s good friend, Lydia Tadokoro Roberts, a nurse who works in one of UT Southwestern Medical Center’s ICU units, with some vegan cupcakes and chocolates for her family backyard wedding dinner. In their conversations,

Lydia told Michelle the recent surge of patients was really impacting the morale of the beleaguered staff of the hospital’s four IC units (about 25 to 30 staff members working per shift).

Cookies are not Michelle’s passion or particular expertise. Although bread is her specialty and first love, no baker can stay out of the butter and sugar for long.

Michelle’s fingers itched to contribute something, somehow. While Michelle intended to bake just for Lydia to show her support, Lydia saw a bigger need.

Michelle could never bake enough bread for that many teams, but cookies?

A tasty idea, and oh so portable. The effort was not without its challenges: When you bake for a care team, every cookie has to be individually wrapped.

The days of cookie platters are over. We learned something about PPE, as well.

Once the ICU nurses are covered in personal protective equipment, they can’t eat a cookie or even sip water. If the shift is long, it could be many hours until they can actually taste that cookie. For that kind of care-giving commitment, one batch of cookies wouldn’t do.

Call to arms Michelle and Lydia hatched a plan to provide baked treats for the caregivers, at least through the holiday season. So in December, we launched “Operation Flying Flour Power” with a plan to deliver cookies every week. John would act as procurement manager, packaging support and communications officer. Michelle quickly sent the flour flying. And John reached for a broom and rolled up his sleeves over the kitchen sink, adding housekeeping to his project assignments.

The first wave of this small project launched with the handoff of 150 Chocolate Crinkles to Lydia for distribution to the ICU staff with two

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notes, the first a personal one from Michelle:

people they were seeing in the ICU. But it was what we could do, a humble effort of appreciation in a dark tunnel.

As Michelle said at the time, “This makes me happy. We’re fighting back.”

Just the ticket

“My name is Michelle. I’m a pastry chef instructor at Collin College. Since March, I haven’t taught classes. To keep our household safe, I can’t teach cookies now. But I can make them for someone like you, who’s still going all out, for all of us. Here are the Chocolate Crinkles we teach our students.”

From Lydia’s perspective, it was a flash of lightning she was searching for.

“When Michelle first asked if she could bake cookies for us, I was thrilled. I’d been looking for a way to boost morale in our ICUs.” Her organization was going through some large infrastructure changes years in the making, which involved shuffling units and staff between the existing ICUs and creating whole new units with limited staff resources. Unfortunately, morale took a huge hit as COVID-19 cases spiked in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, just after people starving for contact had gathered over the Thanksgiving holidays to seek comfort from their loved ones.

“I’ve always worked very hard on my unit to lift up my coworkers and try to foster a strong sense of teamwork,” Lydia says months later. “Even before COVID, I’d started multiple projects to welcome new hires and to encourage staff to express their appreciation for each other.

And anyone who knows me knows the way to my heart is through my stomach.”

She added the recipe, just in case these folks might one day in the future have the luxury of baking the cookies themselves.

John added a second, a simple statement of gratitude intended to speak for the rest of us:

“Thank you for your skill, determination, and compassion.

We appreciate what you are doing. Take a few moments, bite by bite, and know that you are held in great esteem.”

It wasn’t an offer of better or more PPE. It wasn’t additional staffing to ease their burden. It wasn’t a cartload of masks to help decrease the number of 13

Even in “normal” times, life on an ICU floor is often a hectic, time-andstress-filled place. “The doctors keep a drawer stocked full of candy on our unit for just those types of days,” Lydia says.

“Our brains all work better and we’re much nicer to each other when we have a little sugar running through our systems.”

Many times the staff is working too hard to take a break because there is an emergency happening or the unit is shortstaffed, she notes. Even if there aren’t enough people to do the work, it still has to get done. Someone has to answer the phone and open the door, even if there isn’t a secretary at the desk. Patients still have to get their meds and get turned and cleaned up even if there’s another patient next door who is so sick it requires three or four nurses working non-stop to keep them alive until they can go back to surgery or the family can say goodbye.

Lydia took on the additional burden of delivering what we baked. Since we could not access the ICUs ourselves, we deliver the cookies in boxes to her house.

She then sorts them into ten different gift bags, attaching our message notecards to each, delivering the goods to the day and night shifts of five units (Southwestern added a new ICU after we started).

“When I’m putting the cookies in their bags to deliver to our five ICUs, I can feel the love that goes into each one, individually packaged with a hand-written label on the front,” she says. “I know my co-workers can feel it as well when they’re digging through the bag, looking for their favorite options. The other units recognize me when I arrive with the bags and they are so excited to taste Michelle’s delicious creations. This isn’t just a cookie tray from Kroger. Each cookie is wrapped in love, and the difference that makes is unmistakable.”

In December, Michelle was able to

reach ICU nurse Tanner Harris, the daughter of dear former neighbors, and add her Parkland COVID unit to the weekly schedule. From the outset, the feedback for our efforts was heartwarming. Lydia texted images to us, showing her colleagues digging into the cookies and waving their thanks.

“It has been sooo fun to sample your creations and share your love with all of my co-workers,” Lydia wrote in late December. “They desperately need it and they really, really appreciated it! You are a literal angel!”

Michelle started hanging printouts of the images we receive in the Red Beret kitchen, to put faces to the cookies. As she moves about the kitchen while she bakes, John occasionally bows and whispers, “Thank you,” to each.

A personal, beautifully hand-written note from Tanner brought tears to our eyes:

“My coworkers and I loved the cookies — within a couple of hours, not even crumbs are left.

But this note is more about the graciousness behind the baked goods. Things in the hospital can look pretty bleak day in and day out, with more and more admissions and virtually no ICU beds to take them. I’m slowly accepting this will be the new normal for a while. But your cookies are a reminder of why I keep pushing through — past the hospital bureaucracy, past heated political healthcare debates, past deniers and conspiracy theorists. I keep going for sweet people like you, who just want to make the world a little brighter for those who don’t have a light source. Thank you again.”

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sealing, and boxing seems like child’s play. And whenever we wore down or the cost of what we were doing started playing heavily on us, friends and family would drop a bag of flour at our doorstep or drop a check in the mail to help out. A longtime friend (who is also our realtor) stepped up to sponsor the material cost of the cookies one week a month.

Michelle’s brother, an oral surgeon in San Antonio, Texas, dropped a whopper of a check in the mail in support of our runs to big-box grocery stores.

“You will never fully know how impactful and appreciated your kind works are,” he wrote. “Please keep going.”

We can’t tell you how many times these “winks from God,” as Michelle calls them, fortified us in our little cause. As with most volunteer situations, we received as much as we gave. Not traveling places or hanging out with friends somehow seemed immaterial.

In mid-February, Lydia texted, “Everyone was so excited to see me coming with cookies!!! Thank you for everything you do. It makes a HUGE difference.” A week later: “This is Deborah McVay, she’s one of the nighttime charge nurses. She said she LOVES your cookies. One night, everyone was so busy, all they ate were your cookies because nobody had time to

High-stress environment In general, COVID precautions forced the cancellation of most elective surgeries at hospitals across the nation, basically freezing salaries and forcing layoffs at many institutions. The market for bedside nurses became extremely fierce. Visitor restrictions made it even harder. People have had to go through some of the worst times in their lives alone, without their community there to support them. Hospitals started losing a lot of good nurses to traveling agencies, where they could make a year’s salary in a few weeks in some places. And a lot of nurses, inundated by the stress and largely separated from close contact with their spouses and children, started leaving the bedside altogether.

“COVID-19 added a baseline level of stress and anxiety, like a blanket lying over the world,” Lydia says. “I can’t personally fix the staffing problems, no one can right now. It’s a function of the times. I jumped on Michelle’s cookie idea because it was something that I could do to show my appreciation for my coworkers. I hope with a little sugar in our systems we can lift each other up in the small moments every day.”

At our house, the hours of mixing dough and baking, of fastidious decorating, brain-numbing bag labeling, 15

stop to eat lunch. You are a LITERAL life saver!!!!!!”

It’s easy to feel helpless when faced with such overwhelming events. But there are no limits to what we can do, no matter who we are or what our situation is, to make a difference.

Throughout the past year, companies and local organizations have contributed in great measure to the COVID-19 care efforts throughout the country. And individuals have donated money or supplies, volunteered virtually, and checked in on people who might need support. From texts or videos offering encouragement to outreach efforts for those in our communities who are vulnerable, people find ways.

Our daughter, Madeline, and her partner, Vince, for example, inspired us through procuring and delivering groceries to those in need through volunteer organizations in Brooklyn.

Social media groups throughout the country have acted as conduits for those wanting to help those in need. There are GoFundMe fundraisers for essential workers impacted by COVID-19 or families who are struggling following illness or death. Organizations like GetUsPPE and DonatePPE helped raise money to supply healthcare workers in need of emergency supplies. Services such as Health Hero Hotline sprung up to allow people to leave messages of appreciation and support. Many people doing small things can bring tremendous relief, and sometimes tears.

Making it real

around people in the medical field, she explains, it’s easy to forget there’s a disconnect when sharing your experiences with those in non-medical professions.

“By no means are these individuals lacking empathy or compassion, as their lives, too, have been turned upside down

by COVID as well,” she says. “It’s just difficult to verbalize the hard situations and decisions providers face every day because of this virus. For instance, when we can no longer oxygenate a COVID patient adequately (unable to push pressure through their fluid filled, scar tissue lungs), we have to flip them on their stomachs to ventilate them.

Unfortunately, the body isn’t meant to be on the stomach and face for weeks and weeks on end. And if a patient succumbs to COVID, flipping them over on their back for post-mortem care and for their loved ones to see them one last time is sometime horrific.”

In that vein, Tanner shared a recent personal anecdote from Catherine, a fellow COVID unit nurse.

“Tanner, it was horrible. We flipped the poor man over and it was like nothing I’d ever seen before. His eyes were bulging out of his head, blood pouring from them. His face was black, I mean BLACK, from skin breakdown all over his face and blood pooling in his head. I immediately started bawling. I couldn’t control myself. How could his family see him like this? How could they say goodbye to him looking like this? I ran to the bathroom and threw up. I was hyperventilating. This virus had finally broken me.

“After a few minutes of crying in the bathroom and composing myself, I went into the break room for a cup of water and as I sat, I saw a box of Red Beret cookies with a sweet note attached to it,

ICU nurse Tanner Harris drove home the power of our little Flying Flour Power campaign recently when she shared a peek into the tunnel she and her colleagues have been traveling through (something she rarely does). When you’re constantly discussing the pandemic 16

which obviously made me start tearing up again. I took a snickerdoodle cookie and thought to myself ‘if someone I don’t even know can show me this little kindness, I can continue this fight.’

“I walked back into my patient’s room and we decided to flip him back on his stomach, so his family wouldn’t have to see his face. I tried to brush his hair in the way it used to look in pictures, so they could have some sense of normalcy. But sadly nothing is normal about this situation.”

And, Tanner explains, that’s how something as simple as a cookie can make such an impact.

What Michelle wants to share from our cookie experience is that “this project saved me from my own despair in this shared pandammit. Never forget the power of small things offered with great love. You just might have the light that keeps someone going.”

As of the end of March, Operation Flying Flour Power had contributed more than 3,000 cookies to ICU caregivers since December. At the time, North Texas reached a historic and symbolic milestone in the fight against COVID-19 as Parkland Hospital closed its COVID19 intensive care units.

Reconfiguring the Red Box

and prayed. On Feb. 11, the Red Box was reconfigured to its pre-pandemic operating room functions. Parkland was no longer operating COVID-19-specific care units, although COVID-19 patients are still being treated at the hospital.

And while we are not ready to sign off on our cookie mission, we recently reduced our frequency to once a month.

When we tell Lydia or Tanner how in awe we are of what they do daily, they are quick to dispel any talk of describing it as heroism or doing the work of angels.

“It’s just my job, and I love what I do,” Tanner says.

“I love taking care of high-intensity patients who may be on mechanical heart pumps, continuous dialysis machines, or that are on 20 different intravenous medications at one time,” she says.

“Through this pandemic experience, I’ve learned that I love doing the little things to make people comfortable even more.

Most of these COVID patients have been in the hospital for months and they can barely seem human anymore. It can be easy to get preoccupied drawing labs, tracking numbers in the computer, titrating medications, etc. But in the simplest of terms, I love making patients feel like a little of what they used to be — whether that’s cleaning out their ears and nails, offering them a nice shampoo treatment and scalp rub, moisturizing their skin and massaging their feet — anything to make them and their families know that I care. Even if they aren’t conscious or aware of their surroundings, I know it’s what I’d want for myself and done for my family.”

That still seems heroic to us. Give that angel a cookie.

During the past year, Parkland has served as the largest single-site treatment center for COVID-19 patients in North Texas. It closed the hospital’s two COVID-19 ICUs, the iconic “Red Box” — a foreboding red wall — used to sequester COVID-19 patients. For months, it served as ground zero in this fight: 116 beds where patients kept a white-knuckle grip on survival and 300 hospital employees treated, held hands

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All Is Well

By Jay Jacobs Carried on the breeze through the open window, the scent of freshly mowed grass brings on a sudden, unexpected burst of nostalgia, opening a portal to an all but forgotten other when.

In a rare instant of inexplicable magic, I am five years old again, feeling the warmth of a Catskill summer enveloping me, the dappled leaf shadows casting shifting patterns as they play hide and seek with the sunshine.

Oblivious to adult cares and worries I run and play as the wonderful round world turns serenely beneath me.

I am all pure innocence, secure and safe, here and now, in this time.

Mother and Grandma are sitting in the shade on the new, modern, aluminum web chairs that cleverly fold; bright, gaudy orange, green and yellow splotches of color in stark contrast to the staid gray and brown trunks of the huge, ancient grandfather trees.

Baby sister sleeps peacefully in her carriage by mother’s side.

Daddy will be back with hot dogs and ice cream.

All is well.

Suddenly a car cuts me off.

The driver gives me the finger.

Like a cold slap, I am back in the now.

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The author, c. 1954, with his mother, Alice Marchitti Scheller. That’s an awning strut he's holding, not a putter for the miniature golf course next door.

Hyway Diner Memories How I could simultaneously manage four breakfast orders and an early burger I still don’t know . . .

By Bill Scheller any new place that calls itself a diner, all Formica and neon and chrome, a “Happy Days” apotheosis of the Fifties.

It looked like the jukebox that stood near the door of another diner I remember, a diner that didn’t, itself, look like that at all.

It had the same name. Hyway Diner.

My grandfather, John Marchitti, bought the Hyway in 1950, when he got tired of driving a bus. I imagine he and my grandmother, Fannie, looked around, and figured the little gray-and-blue-anddull steel-colored diner stood on a good money-making spot, on Route 4 in Fair Lawn, New Jersey. This was long before

The rest stops on I-93 in New Hampshire are mainly giant liquor stores.

Of course, you can pull in just to go to the bathroom, or pick up a brochure for the Mt. Washington Cog Railway, but the raison d’etre for these mall-sized caravanserais is discount hooch -- luring in the rest of thirsty New England with cut-rate liquor prices is how the Granite State makes enough money to avoid income and sales taxes. A while back, though, when I stopped at the location just north of the Massachusetts border, I saw that New Hampshire decided I might also be hungry. There was a shiny new eatery, and its name was Hyway Diner.

It was done up in the usual style of 19

you got from Paterson to New York on I80, so there would be plenty of traffic.

It was a Silk City Diner. Silk City – it took its name from silk-weaving Paterson’s sobriquet – was a company whose factory was six or seven blocks down the street from my house. I have a vague memory of seeing newly finished diners emerging from the plant, like ships sliding down the ways. That would have been in the mid-Fifties, though, and, from the look of it, I’d say the Hyway dated from the years just after the war, or maybe the late Thirties. My grandfather didn’t buy it new.

There’s a common misconception that older diners were railroad dining cars, retired and beached at some worthwhile spot. The earliest diners were horse-drawn lunch carts, and more than a few horse trolleys found new life as protodiners. Also, many pre-WWII models copied the streamlined look of the era’s trains. But by the mid-1920s, diners had lost their wheels. Like the Silk Citys I watched being readied for delivery, they were hauled to their destinations and slipped onto concrete or cinder block foundations. That was the setup for the Hyway Diner. At some point, before my grandfather bought it, a back kitchen with a cellar had been added. That made it possible to expand the menu beyond simple grilled items. A cook came in the early afternoon, and made the soups and stews and other dishes that would stay warm on the steam table for dinnertime.

At breakfast and lunch, though, diner cuisine was griddle cuisine.

The stubby little entryway into the diner was flanked by the jukebox-“Three plays for a quarter”-- and the cigarette machine, where my grandfather got his unfiltered Pall Malls. (I don’t know why he didn’t buy them by the carton, since he smoked three or four

packs a day.) The jukebox was a draw for a leather-jacketed crowd that came in after dinner and rankled my grandmother by monopolizing a booth or two and never buying anything but a few Cokes; I don’t know why she cared, since no one else was in the place at that hour, and if some guy who worked late and wanted pot roast came in, there were plenty of other booths. And who knows? Maybe the Coke boys with their duck’s-ass haircuts stayed for burgers after my grandparents went home at eight. It was a 24-hour diner in its early days, and eight was when they turned it over to the night man who ran it until my grandfather came in at five-thirty in the morning.

The night man’s name was Nick, and he was a crook. My grandmother fired him when she realized that there was no way the proceeds could have amounted to the same eleven dollars and change every night, and that a good part of the take must never have made it into the cash register. This might have been all of three or four bucks; Route 4 in Fair Lawn wasn’t exactly the Great White Way at two a.m. I can picture Fannie chewing Nick out on the day he got the axe, and him mumbling a feeble protest in his Greek accent. Fannie scorned was a fearful sight. As for my good-natured grandfather, he’d probably have let Nick have his cut, to avoid a scene.

After Nick was gone, the diner closed at eight. And the lights finally went out on Sundays and holidays.

There were three booths on each side of the entryway, and each had a wallmounted unit with a coin slot and flipthrough pages of song titles, connected to the main jukebox. This was a common diner feature, a pretty complicated technology for the era – the wiring for the setup, back before Bluetooth, must have been the most sophisticated system in the 20

The Hyway Diner in its heyday: Left to right, Mary the waitress, the cook whose name the author never knew, and proprietor John Marchitti, the author's maternal grandfather.

place. On the other side of the tile floor, though, it was all business – none of that fine-dining-in-the-booth-with-music stuff.

Six leatherette-topped swivel stools sat on each side of the passageway, flanked by the cash register, to the narrow work space behind the counter. The counter itself was made of some nondescript paleo-Formica, whatever pattern it once had worn away by Fannie’s incessant cleaning. That space-age boomerang Formica style hadn’t come along yet, and never did at the Hyway.

There was a different motif on the underside of the counter, and it had texture. Studding the surface were dozens of pieces of petrified chewing gum, many of them so old that my little fingers knew just where to find them. (A cousin told me recently that her even

littler kid fingers pried some off so she could eat them; she’s made it to sixty so I guess her dietary habits improved.)

My family used to eat in the diner on most Thursday nights. My father would pick up a quart of beer on the way, and he and my grandfather – his father-in-law – would pour it into glasses with the bottle concealed in the paper bag, not that anyone would have cared, or tried to order a glass for themselves. This was long before Jersey diners had liquor licenses. My mother would help my grandmother, and I’d hope that, after I ate, I’d get to do my favorite job – poking the little white letters and price numbers into the menu boards that were brought down from their glass cases high on the back wall. The letters and numbers had tabs that nestled into the ribbed board, 21

and the whole operation was like setting giant lines of type. The one fancy touch was “omelets” spelled diagonally, alongside the omelet options – this was some tricky typesetting for a kid.

Pulling out the stops

the door, and promptly did a quick edit, probably with her house key.

God knows what it said in the ladies’ room.

I did eventually get behind the counter, in an official capacity. I spent six weeks in the summer of 1964 taking a make-up course in Latin, after my Jesuit prep school teacher decided I was veering way off the track to becoming a classicist. The bus I took to summer school passed the diner, so my grandfather suggested I stop off and help out. The only job I remember doing was refilling the soda cooler, but this was enough to get me through the gap in the counter that led to the world of diner work. I’d never figured out where the dishes got washed, and now I found out.

It wasn’t a dishwasher; it was a sink full of sudsy water, which my grandfather parked himself at several times a day, using a little wooden bench that slid under the counter. And I finally got into the kitchen, which was dominated by a forbidding black six-burner Magic Chef gas range. The other main feature back there was a six-foot long butcher block table, which my grandfather climbed onto to take his nap when there was someone to spell him out front. To get the soda – an obscure local brand – I had to take a steep flight of creaky wooden stairs down into the dimly-lit cellar. Here was the most interesting piece of equipment in the diner – a potato-peeling machine. It looked like a little metal keg, and it spun around. You put the potatoes in, and the nubby surface on the inside of the keg battered the skins off as it spun. But I never got to see it in use. French fries came into the diner frozen, in big plastic bags, ready for the fryer. The mashed potatoes that went onto the steam table were the cook’s department; he must have peeled them by hand.

When I was little, of course, the busy space behind the counter was off limits, and the only other part of the diner I was familiar with was the washroom. The tiny, one-at-a-time men’s and ladies’ rooms stood off a tight corridor that ran behind a wooden door. Somehow the jukebox-and-cigarette-machine vendors (and in New Jersey, back then, I can imagine who they were) had gotten a cigar machine in there, a tall, narrow beast with plungers you pulled, like the stops on an organ, to pick your cigar after putting in your quarter. I never did get to be an organist, but I did like to pull out the stops, as the saying goes, and one day I did it a bit too enthusiastically. The cigar machine tilted right off the wall, which was fortunately so close to the other wall that it couldn’t fall completely over. The machine became the hypotenuse of a triangle completed by the floor and that opposite wall, with me, unscathed, inside.

Thanks to an economy of space since achieved only on airplanes, readers of the Paterson Evening News were spared the headline “Diner Tragedy: Area Boy Crushed by Cigar Machine.”

The main thing I remember about the men’s room – itself airplane-sized – was the word “BOOK” scratched onto the inside of the wooden door, which was within easy reach of seated graffitists.

Why, I wondered as a kid, would anyone ornament a men’s room door with “BOOK”? Years later, I figured out that this terse engraving had been a two person job: Fannie, during a cleaning spree, had no doubt been horrified that someone had scratched “FUCK” onto 22

Four years later, I rose to the status of counterman and short-order cook. It was Saturday work, during summer vacation from college. My grandfather, who got up at four-thirty on the other side of town, picked me up a little after five, and off we went to get ready for our six o’clock opening. This involved getting the burners going under the griddle, starting the home fries (I chopped up potatoes boiled the day before with the sharp edges of an opened can), and, of course, making coffee. What this did not involve was a double hot plate and a pair of glass carafes.

Ancient Urnology?

But the griddle was the nerve center of the diner, akin to the hearth at a colonial inn, and I learned to play it like the demanding and unforgiving instrument it was. How I could simultaneously manage four breakfast orders and an early burger I still don’t know, as I have been known to rattle easily. But I did – pour three shots of pancake batter here, slap a couple slices of American cheese onto a half-done omelet and give it a quick fold with the spatula, and flip two eggs over-easy without breaking the yolks.

And fry up some Taylor ham, either for a side, or to put on an egg sandwich.

Taylor ham is what New Jerseyans call a product sold as “Taylor Pork Roll.” It is the Garden State’s answer to Philly’s scrapple, made from ground pork and spices, only without the cornmeal. It used to come in a brown cloth wrapping - does it still? –- and we’d have it all sliced and ready to crisp up on the griddle and slide into crackle-crusted hard rolls with egg.

There was one exception to the griddle-and-egg work on those Saturdays, and that was when a guy called “Poached Egg Joe” would come in. For him, and for any other odd duck who showed up, we’d keep a pot of water going on a side burner.

And all the while, I’d be keeping an eye on the toaster, hustling tableware to guys calling for “tools,” and managing to sidle past my grandfather as he worked his orders. He was a heavy-set man, and he lumbered when he walked, due to a mild case of polio he’d had as a boy. But we kept up a friction-free pas-de-deux in that that space, probably because his motions were easy to predict and parry.

A good part of the time, unless things got especially busy, he’d be standing at the counter, his cigarette singeing little brown

A few years ago, I walked into an art gallery in a small seaside New England city, and saw that it had been converted from an old luncheonette. The counter was still there, and behind it stood a pair of shiny stainless coffee urns. They stood over two feet high, and still had all their valves and spigots, and the glass tubes on their sides that indicated the coffee level.

I got to talking with the gallery manager, and made some comments about how it was nice that they had kept the urns.

“I guess there’s nobody around who would know how to work those things now,” he said.

“I would,” I told him.

And I would, because that, too, was part of my Saturdays at the Hyway Diner.

The urns were connected directly to the water supply, and the coffee grounds sat in a cloth filter under lids at the top. You turned the tap to control the flow of water, which was brought to a boil by burners under the urns, into the filters.

The glass tubes showed when you had a full urn and, as the day went by, how far down the supply had fallen. A simmer burner kept the coffee hot. It may not have been Starbucks quality, but we didn’t cater to a Starbucks crowd.

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darts into the edge of the Formica, telling jokes to the truckers and garbagemen who made up a good part of our clientele.

Just as the breakfast crowd thinned out, the pay phone would ring with the expected call from the auto body shop down the road. I’d take down twenty or thirty orders – all egg sandwiches and burgers -- and in not much more than a quarter of an hour I’d have them all bagged up and ready for pickup. Then there’d be a lull, and I’d have my own breakfast. Soon my grandmother would come in.

On weekdays, Fannie worked in one of Paterson’s remaining silk mills, running a power loom. When she knocked off at five, she’d take the bus – the “buzz,” she always pronounced it – and head straight for the diner, to wait on the dinner trade. By then the hot waterimmersed pots on the big stainless steam table would be filled with whatever the cook had made – I remember there was almost always sliced flank steak in gravy – and she’d go back to the kitchen, put on a white uniform, and wait on the booth clientele. On my day, Saturday, she’d sleep in (or, more likely, run around her house with a bottle of ammonia, her favorite weapon in an endless war on dirt) and show up at the diner in late morning.

Unlike her husband, Fannie didn’t joke with the customers; she was all business. And business, for her, extended to chastising my grandfather for making the portions too big when he got over to the steam table. She was an early and strict practitioner of portion control.

Aside from the cook, the only other employee of the Hyway Diner was Mary the waitress, who I recall working dinnertimes off and on. I never knew her last name; I only knew that she was from Nova Scotia, and she was divorced. My

mother passed along this last bit of information as if she were telling me that the woman had a wooden leg, or a criminal record. Nobody we knew ever got divorced.

Rendering Unto . . .

I worked those Saturdays till after lunch, except for times when there was one particularly onerous chore to attend to. This involved climbing onto a stepladder out behind the diner, and using an old spatula to scrape the grease that collected on the cowlings of the exhaust fans above the griddle – the grease that people didn’t pay for and eat.

It came off in thick brown wads, and went into a barrel that the renderers would come to pick up. What they rendered it into, I never knew. I doubt if it was unto Caesar, or unto God. My grandparents sold the Hyway Diner in the summer of 1969. New people ran it for a while, and then it disappeared from a Route 4 that was teeming with faster, thicker traffic. I heard somewhere that it had been moved to Pennsylvania, but have never found anything about it on the various websites that locate and celebrate diners. Silk City diners had serial numbers, and if I knew the Hyway’s, maybe I could track it down that way – if, that is, it has survived. But I doubt if it has. It would easily be eighty years old, and few diners make it that far.

Nowadays, diners are either the scant few that did make it, fawned-over antiques with prices that would have gagged Poached Egg Joe, or shiny Jersey extravaganzas with liquor licenses and menus the size of a phone book. And there’s the place on the New Hampshire interstate, the one that stole our name.

But none of them are like the Hyway Diner.

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“A complex thriller set in the cutthroat world of corporate maneuvering… Raymond Chandleresque… characterizations help to make Tedeschi’s thriller into an efficient, spirited romp… An enjoyably diverting mystery story.”

--Kirkus Reviews “A provocative, insightful thriller. From a massacre in a Honduran Indian village to major corporate boardrooms where greed reigns, Unfinished Business grips you from the first page and doesn’t let go until the stunning conclusion. A provocative, insightful thriller.”

--Donald Bain, author of Murder, She Wrote book series

New Critically Acclaimed Thriller Exposes Ugly Side Of The Cutthroat Business World

Q&A With Tony Tedeschi

By Brian Feinblum President Media Kit Buzz Inc

Tony, what inspired you to write this provocative, insightful thriller?

My long journey as a writer has taken me down three parallel paths: writing business books, travel articles for magazines and newspapers, ghostwriting detective novels. The paths began to converge until they intersected at a thriller with a global corporation at its center and settings in places that had been the subjects of my articles. My professional background also included writing business plans and marketing programs for corporations as disparate as banking, manufacturing, commercial transportation, tourism and global communications. I had an insider’s knowledge of how a wide range of businesses operated, from the offices of the top executives down to the floors where employees met the clients.

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You have written several non-fiction books and have written for newspapers and magazines, so why a novel now? Does the cover of fiction allow you to actually share some truths?

I did a great deal of travel articles for magazines and versions of those articles, which I self-syndicated to newspapers. My travels ranged from the cities of Europe to the rainforests of Central and South America. Along the way, I met and interviewed an array of subjects from business owners to high-end resort operators to adventure tour guides. In my journals, some of those experiences morphed into ideas for novels as I played with plotlines and characterizations.

Some of the destruction in pristine areas I saw did not cast the best light upon decisions made in the name of business. Within the pages of a novel, I could express my take on what I was seeing.

Are you surprised at the warm reception your book has received from book reviewers, such as Kirkus Reviews, which says your book is “a complex thriller” and “an enjoyably diverting mystery”?

It’s always gratifying to have readers react positively to my work. Whenever I begin a project, it always gets my A-game, no matter how large or small, wellpaying or lightly paid. Kirkus also calling me “Raymond Chandleresque” was a particularly gratifying comparison to one of my favorite authors. The subject matter for Unfinished Business reflects my years of experience writing about both the business world and the natural world. Business books I’ve written reflected my experiences within, as well as my observances of, the business world. On the other hand, I wrote many special travel sections for the magazine of the National Audubon Society. I became acutely aware of where those worlds intersected.

Writing about that confluence involves subject matter I know well.

Your book takes us inside the cutthroat world of corporate maneuvering.

Without revealing too much, please tell us what happens inside this spirited romp.

Unfinished Business deals with the manipulations of an unscrupulous CEO and the consequences of those actions. It is set in locations throughout the world, where I’ve traveled extensively. The dramatic tension is driven by the CEO, whose business decisions are so egocentric they have destructive effects on the global conglomerate he heads, excused as simply the cost of doing business. It is a unique detective story, involving a business sleuth who must unravel the mystery of what is going on at the company and how it has impacted people, sometimes in lethal ways. The novel’s subject matter is particularly topical, given the state in which the US and the world find themselves in the 21st Century.

Why does using a business setting make for a good mystery?

The business world is the basis for so much of what affects our daily lives. Much of that works its way into news programming, creating potential story elements: illegal stock manipulation, short selling of shares, supply chain interruptions, offshore banking to hide assets, computer hacking, etc. At the same time, mine is

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a story steeped in the personal lives of the people in my drama, how the pervasiveness of business decisions affects their interactions with each other, driven closer together or pushed further apart. Unfinished Business is exactly that, the decisions that drive the lives of people living with the loose ends.

Business does not exist only in the business press. It is integral to the stories of our lives.

You explore, even spotlight, the manipulations of an unscrupulous CEO and the consequences of these actions. So, does power and position corrupt individuals – or is it only corrupt people who ascend to powerful positions?

If I had to make a gross generalization, I’d say both choices form the biographies of people who ascend to the top. I’ve found the corrupt leaders I have been exposed to almost always are bullies who fight their way up. Most people in business don’t like confrontation, certainly not on a regular basis. Corrupt individuals – as exemplified in my book’s CEO – exploit these different character traits and beat down anyone in their way. However, I’ve also experienced business leaders with the best of intentions falling prey to the corrupting effects of power once they’ve attained it, instances for example where corrupt international clients insisting on bribes or kickbacks, managed to pull the heretofore wellintentioned executives into their corrupt operations.

Your book takes us to numerous locations – New York City, Central America, Europe, the Caribbean – all places you have visited. You also publish a cultural quarterly, Natural Traveler Magazine®. How does inserting a global flavor enhance the story?

I created Natural Traveler Magazine® to reflect humankind’s insatiable need to explore. There’s an inherent sense of adventure in traveling. Our premise was to look at travel in its broadest sense, well beyond mere journal entries detailing jaunts around the planet, more an exploration of those interior journeys that inspire us to record, through the arts, what we have seen, heard and felt. “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of looking at things,” Henry Miller wrote. For a writer, traveling is a continuous loop, an endless exercise in research and discovery. I began to understand man/woman as a traveler by basic instinct, in fact a natural traveler. And the best of what we produce artistically is the result.

You served in the Air Force during the Vietnam era. You worked in the corporate world. Which one is harder to navigate, the military or the business environment?

Both have unique challenges but there are areas of overlap. I was stationed on a Tactical Air Command fighter base, eventually rising to a rank of captain in charge of quality control for the maintenance operations. We trained new pilots in combat tactics. After six months with us, they went to war. Our commanders were battle-hardened pilots, some arrogant leaders more suited to combat than authority over a stateside base. Adherence to their orders was a given, unless you wanted to risk a court martial. I found their counterparts in the business world, where they had risen through the business wars. While their orders did not have

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the power of a military command, failure to follow them could cost you your livelihood.

Too often people behave badly and dismiss it as “It’s just business.” Are ethics dead in the business world?

“Tell Michael it was only business,” Tessio says when his treason to the Corleone family is exposed and he is being led away to his execution in The Godfather.

No, it’s not “only business,” it’s murder. I have worked with some of the best in the business world by any measurement: how they treat their colleagues and employees, how they interact with their customers/clients, how they conduct themselves in general. Still, I’m confounded by how often we’re ready to accept terrible outcomes excused for reasons of business: the murder of Jamal Khashoggi because the Saudis spend billions on US arms, as a particularly heinous case in point. Is the business excuse part of an acceptable business model? Unfinished Business explores the question.

And then when victims of these business decisions want revenge, such as in your book, are we really surprised? We have too many examples of people who have sought revenge for business decisions that have negatively impacted their lives, some exacting lethal revenge on individual superiors or even shooting up a workplace. Such an act of revenge is, invariably, driven by an overt action against the perpetrator or even a slight, either intended, unintended or even simply perceived as one by the individual seeking revenge. But, what of an action, taken in the course of business as usual, which has devastating effects several layers removed from the business decision? Working backwards from the effect to the cause would involve peeling back all the layers of that onion. Enough said about a novel that takes the reader through the unraveling of such a mystery.

You worked for decades with your mentor, Donald Bain, who penned the Murder, She Wrote mystery series that spun off the hit television show. Both of you ghostwrote novels. What was that experience like?

Aside from being a talented, prolific writer, Don Bain was a prince of a human being. He was the author or ghost author of more than 100 books, including those spun off the “Murder, She Wrote” TV series. Despite his success, it was Don’s humanity that was always front and center. When we met, he was an established author, I was a young writer trying to establish my career. It began a friendship/partnership that lasted 45 years until his death in 2017. His success as a ghost writer drew proposals for books that he was too busy to accept. He convinced those who persisted to allow him to work with me. That mentoring experience taught me a great deal about plot, characters, pacing, etc.

Why was “Murder, She Wrote” such a hit?

The series aired from 1984 -1996 on CBS. It averaged more than 30 million viewers per week. Its protagonist, Jessica Fletcher was a mystery writer who becomes an amateur detective. She was played by Angela Lansbury, who was nominated for numerous Golden Globe and Emmy Awards. When it finished its

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run and was followed by the book series, it had a built-in franchise. As a successful mystery writer, it was a natural to have Jessica Fletcher as the author of the books. Since she wasn’t real, the series needed a ghost author. Don Bain was a natural for that role. Eventually the books were authored by Jessica Fletcher and Donald Bain, ergo, Don shared a writing credit with a fictitious coauthor.

What do you find to be challenging or rewarding about producing a made-up story that entertains but is also reality-based and expresses insights and emotions that reveal a bit of what makes us human?

Throughout my writing career, I have always considered myself a journalist. The people I’ve written articles about have been real people in the real world. But over a long career, I have found myself asking many times, “but what if?” That opens up on a much wider landscape, with me controlling the narrative. The “It’s only business” justification has had terrible real world consequences, many times and in many ways, especially when those consequences are out there for everyone to see. The “but what if” that kept gnawing at me was: suppose there was no immediate, identifiable cause and effect. I was sure those undiscovered consequences were out there. I had to write my version of how that might occur.

Where does your inspiration come for some of your characters? Are they drawn from people you know?

Often, my characters begin as reflections of real people. However, if they are too closely tied to people I have met, they become restricted by how I perceive the real person would act. My characters come to life, when they control their actions, when they insist, “Are you kidding? I’d never do that.” Years ago, I was attending a book club discussion of one of my novels. One participant was arguing with me about why one of my characters had acted a certain way. It was 180 degrees from how I had perceived the character’s intensions. It was the first time I’d realized that once my books were out there, the characters belonged to the readers as much as they belonged to me.

Does greed still rule the world of business, where some people will be willing to do anything – even murder – to get or protect what they want and have?

There is no question that can be the case. However, I’ve also been fortunate to work with business people who represent the best of the corporate world. My book, Live Via Satellite, was about COMSAT Corporation, which changed the way the world communicates and was led by a stellar management team. The Whitford Way was the story of a company making the world function more smoothly, headed by one of the best CEOs I’ve ever encountered. Whitford’s nonstick coatings are in so many unseen places: industrial equipment, homes, cars and more. The amount of energy saved is a major mitigator of climate change. Unfinished Business is not antibusiness. The unfinished business is righting a foundering ship after the destructive decisions of a bad captain.

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The Old Woman of Nazca Story & Photo by Kendric W. Taylor

Her last words stopped me . . . now, here was one. I also remembered the remarkable woman I had met there: I had written about her at the time:

Last fall I saw an item in The New York Times international edition, that archeologists had discovered a new etching on a hillside in Peru. Located at Nazca, a UNESO World Heritage Site, “The catlike geoglyph -- which experts say dates to 200 BC to 100 BC . . . is the latest discovery of the carvings of larger-than-life drawings of plants and animals . . . in a desert plain about 250 miles southeast of the capital, Lima.”

Years ago, flying down from Lima in a small government plane to see these markings, we had passed a similar figure carved into a hillside on the coast. I wondered, at the time, if there were others yet to be discovered – and

The old woman peers into the sun, a weathered hand shading her eyes, tracking the twin dust plumes rising up on the horizon. A worn straw hat protects her head. Her body is bent far over at the waist, the result of more than 50 years of peering at the Peruvian desert floor. She is looking at the Devil right now, two motorcycles cutting across the plain -- cutting across her heart – watching as they skid through marks etched into the ground by unknown peoples centuries ago.

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Her name was Maria Reiche, and she passed away in 1998, at the age of 95 (missing only five years out of the entire 20th century) and for more than half of that lifespan, she did her slow dance with time over the lines at Nazca.

Stretched across the dry, sun-baked desert, these are figures and lines of geometric precision traced on the valley floor thousands of years ago, so huge in dimension that they can only be properly seen and appreciated from the air. Giant birds spread their wings for leagues across the dusty white soil, a hummingbird hovers, suspended in time for centuries, observed by a monkey with his tail curled up his back. There are fish and whales, a spider, a flower, dogs, and a lizard.

Circles, squares and trapezoids, some up to 900 feet long, are spread out over the desert floor and inch up into the hillsides. Photographed and studied by experts from around the world, the figures and symbols have for decades sparked debate and generated theories concerning their origin, with guesses ranging from the work of Incan astronomers to their use as landing sites by ancient astronauts from other galaxies.

Talking with Maria Reiche was almost as fascinating as the work she described. At the time, she was in her late 80s, so fragile appearing it was as if the lines had made her part of their antiquity. Her eyes, faded blue, seemed to look beyond whatever was trying to claim her immediate attention.

Whether she was looking ahead or into the past, I am not sure, but she was positive that after half a century, the mystery of the lines had become apparent to her.

Information for farmers?

This gentle, German-born astronomer/mathematician with the indomitable will had determined that the hieroglyphics had provided information to farmers tilling the soil centuries before Christ, the angle of the sun telling them when to plant and when to harvest. Beyond that, she acknowledged with a shrug, the meaning of some of them had been lost in time.

The lines, skirting the Pan American Highway leading along the coastal region below Lima, have always been at risk from both nature and man: looters digging at night for Indian graves in the area, miners searching for gold, garbage trucks sneaking in to dump their loads. The summer after Maria’s death, some American tourists drove a van repeatedly over the lines, scarring the surface. Ironically, their tire tracks will point to their crime for centuries to come -- as Maria had said, “every footstep becomes an imprint.”

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El Niño has also chipped in: torrential rains having caused rivers of mud to sweep down toward the plains, imperiling the lines. Even with protections, as recently as 2018, “a truck driver was arrested after intentionally driving his tractor-trailer across three lines of geoglyphs,” the Times article noted.

Etching into one of the world’s driest deserts by the Nazca and Paracas cultures, these artisans of the day stripped the ground of its rocky surface to expose the whitish alluvial soil beneath in order to make the lines.

Probably one-fifth of them have disappeared over the centuries, despite the highly preservative climate. A historian from the U.S., Paul Kosok, was the first to write of the lines in detail, in 1939. He shared his material with Maria Reiche: “After recovering from the wonder of seeing on his tracing paper the figure of a bird, which had taken shape gradually as he was surveying the winding paths,” she wrote, “he turned to leave and found himself at a place with many lines radiating from it as the exact moment when the sun set in the direction of one of the lines.

“It was June 21, the solstice day,” she continued, “the longest of the year and the sun was streaming directly down the line, as if this line were constructed specifically for a solstice observation.

Perhaps all lines were constructed toward horizon points where heavenly bodies set and rose, making them the largest astronomy book in the world.”

Maria Reiche fought all her life to preserve the lines. She defeated a scheme to hold a motorcycle race there, for example, and foiled plans to irrigate the desert for farming. She even went so far as to donate $10,000 a

year for security guards, paying for them, I am sure, by taking the proceeds from the sales of her small book* which she gently pressed upon visitors. She received little support from local and federal governments, and not much more from the United Nations.

Flower Children and Mystics The lines survived a spurt of international notoriety in the flower child 70s, when books like Chariots of the Gods? led people to believe the lines had been marked out for prehistoric space explorers. Mystics came from around the world to sit out in the silent expanse, convinced that the lines had magnetic powers. There is no evidence that anything was ever attracted beyond flies, scorpions and curious wildlife.

Nazca seemed a pretty little desert town when I arrived, the weather sparkling, wild flowers sprouting everywhere. It boasted a modest, almost amateur museum, artifacts placed haphazardly along dusty shelves.

The old lady seemed tired, so we chatted in front of the motel room where she lived. Her adopted daughter hovered nearby in case she needed anything. By this time, the years had taken their toll, and she had difficulty walking. Trying to express my admiration for her, I found myself telling her about my mother, herself in her late 80’s, who had recently begun practicing her typing in case she obtained work, along with hosting discussion groups with local foreign residents to help improve their colloquial English. Both Maria and my mother were survivors, clinging to their intellect and independence with all their might, even as age was folding them in.

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Exciting, Fulfilling Life

lines have waited enigmatically for centuries for someone to provide the final key to unlock their silent message.

Maria Reiche opened the door partially, but much remains unsolved.

We sat outside her room in the late afternoon sun and talked. Finally, it was time to leave, while there was still light to fly back to Lima.

“Will we ever really know about the lines?” I asked, as I turned to go. Her last words stopped me: “Some have been explained, some will be explained, some never will be explained.”

Maria understood exactly, telling me she felt that she was getting younger, her hair turning from white back to gray even. “I would like to start all over again,” she said, “It has been an exciting, fulfilling life, but I would have liked to have done more.” At the time, she was lecturing in the evenings in five languages, to earn extra income.

Attested to by this latest discovery, the lines at Nazca remain unique.

Surviving somehow these thousands of years, they will no doubt survive for more, despite the acceleration of a civilization that continues to try to plow everything under for strip malls. The

Long Beach, Long Island Photo by Karen Dinan

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An Ode To Good Old Sue

By Buddy Mays I am a 77- year- old, manly, healthy (if you overlook various ills and ailments), creative specimen of Elderlyism if ever there was one, and like every other old guy on the planet with half a brain, I did not wish to catch “The Covid” — as people have started calling it — in 2020, and die a painful, lonely death after being entombed in a metallic hot dog bun with one tube stuck down my throat and another up my snarly. So, like millions of other senior citizens, I stayed home. And got bored. Quickly.

It is a boring existence indeed, when the highlight of one’s week is a shopping trip to Safeway, armed with a dozen bottles of hand sanitizer and pockets a-brim with masks.

Writer and filmmaker Susan Sontag once said, “The life of the creative man is led, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.” Easy to say, but avoiding boredom, i.e., staving off the doldrums and keeping the creative juices flowing, is not easy when one is incarcerated, hermitlike, in office/studio/home, avoiding friends and relatives, ignoring dinner and cocktail party invitations, and steering clear of restaurants and concerts and all forms of daily stimulation and inspiration.

However, I did not cry in my beer about wearing face coverings or social distancing or washing my hands, nor did I throw up my hands in despair. Instead, I took the hint from Susan and began a project that I knew would keep me interested and motivated through what turned out to be a lengthy period of isolation. Since I could not go out and make new photographs, I vowed that each week I would unite at least two and sometimes three or four perfectly good photographs from my files, into one meaningless composite that no one would ever publish or purchase, or even want to look at. I figured that probably no one had ever done it before, so creatively speaking I would be breaking new ground.

This is not a straightforward process, screwing up perfectly good photography by turning it into crap. But with the magic of Adobe Photoshop at my fingertips I made it happen, and after many long hours and days of manipulation, obfuscation, and photographic fakery, I managed to work my way through 2020, by keeping myself engaged and relatively content. Thank you, Susan Sontag, for helping me save myself from abject tedium. I have named the project Ode to Good Old Sue in your honor. I threw in some bad poetry just to make the pictures look better. Eat your heart out Annie Leibovitz.

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Bigfoot Dense is the forest, North, near the ocean.

Hear surf burst and bluster on mollusked boulders.

A shadow creeps, quietly, almost in slow motion, massive head, all seeing eyes, rippling shoulders.

Teeth like daggers, deadly sharp the claw.

Don’t walk there, don’t go near.

Curiosity can be a fatal flaw, while Sasquatch walks there, and here.

El D Odell

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Fairy Children born of fairy stock Never need for shirt or frock, Never want for food or fire, Always get their hearts desire: Jingle pockets full of gold, Marry when they're seven years old.

Every fairy child may keep Two ponies and ten sheep; All have houses, each his own, Built of brick or granite stone; They live on cherries, they run wild-I'd love to be a Fairy's child.

Robert Graves

Eyes One day in the park I had quite a surprise.

I met a girl who had many eyes.

She was really quite pretty (and also quite shocking!) and I noticed she had a mouth, so we ended up talking.

Tim Burton

Spider “Will you walk into my parlor?” said the Spider to the Fly. “'Tis the prettiest little parlor that ever you did spy; “The way into my parlor is up a winding stair, “And I have many curious things to show when you are there.”

“Oh no, no," said the little Fly, “to ask me is in vain; For who goes up your winding stair can ne’er come down again.”

Mary Howitt

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Dinosaur The dinosaur bones are dusted every day.

The cards tell how old we guess the dinosaur bones are.

Here a head was seven feet long, horns with a hell of a ram, Humping the humps of the Montana mountains.

The respectable school children Chatter at the heels of their teacher who explains.

The tourists and wonder hunters come with their parasols And catalogues and arrangements to do the museum In an hour or two hours.

Carl Sandburg

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Old Face Oh whence do you come, my dear friend, to me With your golden hair all fallen below your knee And your face as white as snowdrops on the lea And your voice as hollow as the hollow sea?"

"From the other world I come back to you My locks are uncurled with dripping drenching dew.

You know the old, whilst I know the new: But to-morrow you shall know this too.

Christina Georgina Rossetti

Overheard Bill Scheller

The best overheard conversations are not really conversations at all . . .

“Picture an older Scottish couple, in their little row house,” Harris began. “It was a Sunday morning, and they were dressing in their best clothes. ‘Hurry up, he’ll be calling soon,’ the woman said to the man. They were expecting a caller, you see -- but it was a telephone caller.”

Harris let his little group hang on the sweet quaintness of this scene, which played out long before Facetime or Zoom. Then he finished the anecdote.

“The call soon came, from an Australian movie location. It was their son, Sean Connery.”

Harris was himself on location in Toronto, which was probably what brought out the story. And I have no doubt he heard it straight from Connery.

I’ve especially enjoyed overhearing conversations that resurrect times, and even worlds, long gone. Back in the early nineties, I listened as an old lady entertained her middle-aged companions with stories of what it was like to travel on the Queen Mary. I could picture a steward, starched Cunard towel on his arm, bringing her bouillon as she sat in her deck chair.

The greatest time-travel story I ever overheard, though, came my way in a small country restaurant in southern Vermont, in the fall of 1971. It was the sort of place that hardly exists anymore, out in the sticks but lightly formal, with flowers, yellow linen, and no men

I have dined alone in restaurants many times, over decades as a travel writer, and have become a connoisseur of the eavesdropped conversation.

It’s not something I’ve done deliberately. But if your voice is loud enough, or your table is too close, you’re fair game – and if you have something particularly interesting to say, you might make it into my notebook, which I am more often than not carrying when I’m having dinner by myself.

Sometimes, it isn’t what was said that you best remember, but what you wish you could have butted in and said yourself. In a small restaurant in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, I listened to a real estate wheeler-dealer regale his tablemates with details of the many properties he had snapped up in Atlantic City. I can’t remember whether he was buying casinos or slums, but I was sorely tempted, somewhere between my entrée and dessert, to ask him if he had ever landed on Free Parking, or gone to jail.

The best overheard conversations are not really conversations at all, but star turns by good raconteurs. I was dining in a little French place in Toronto one night in the spring of 1983 when I realized that the man with the flashy cufflinks, whose companions hung on his every word, was the actor Richard Harris. Harris told a great story that night.

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wearing hats. There was one other party in the room, a man and two women who I judged to be in their late seventies. The man was the brother of one of the women; the other woman seemed to be a recent acquaintance – at least one recent enough not to have heard all the family stories.

The meal was well under way when the man turned to his sister and said, “Tell her what happened in Vienna.”

“Oh,” the sister said. “That was so long ago. It was the last year before the war, I believe.”

The Great War. “We were all in Vienna that winter, Mother and Father and Harold and I,” she began. “I was seventeen. I was walking with Harold along an esplanade on the Danube, when a small group of men approached from the other direction. They were young men, except for one, who was walking several steps ahead of the others. They were all in uniform. As they got close, the older man took off his cap and bowed, the way men did to women in those days. He could tell, somehow, that I was a foreigner, and he asked me in German if I was having a pleasant time in Vienna. I

told him yes – we had our German pretty well by then – and he smiled. He was a handsome old man, with white hair and white whiskers. He asked a few other questions, all very polite, and then he surprised me. ‘If you would like,’ he said, if you would honor us . . . there will be a ball on Saturday at Schoenbrunn Palace . . .’

“I thanked him for the invitation. He bowed again, and Harold and I started to go our way. But one of the young men who walked behind him stopped and followed after us. ‘Young lady,’ he said.

He took off his cap. ‘Young lady -- do you know who that man is?’ “ ‘No,’ I said. ‘Who is he?’ “ ‘Young lady,’ he answered. ‘that is the Emperor Franz Josef.’ Then he took my name, and gave me the details of my invitation.”

“And you went to the ball, didn’t you, Annie,” the brother said.

“Yes. And it was wonderful.”

To this day, when I hear a Strauss waltz, I think of that chance encounter on the Danube esplanade.

Long Beach, Long Island, Winter 2021 Photo by Karen Dinan

Stopping a Bully

By Samantha Marie My therapist, Sharon, prescribed a talk with my mirror.

She told me I need to look her in the eyes and apologize.

I asked, whose eyes?

She said, The girl you bully.

Oh, The one I pull apart like string cheese for 20 minutes every morning before a shaking hand smears and blends concealer into my dark circles.

The girl I must console when my stomach throws a tantrum and the singular Lean Cuisine from yesterday no longer feels like enough to dull the stabbing hunger.

The one who smiles at me only quickly before I’m reminded of the seemingly eternal absence of an accurate self-image.

The girl I scold for crying. For swollen eyes and my love handles. For feeling weak.

I said, I don’t bully myself. I think- know that I am beautiful. Other people tell me so.

Miracles or Coincidences? Which Is Which?

Are They Interchangeable?

By David E. Hubler Brady. At the time, future Hall of Fame quarterback Tom Brady was five years old.

Not a miracle but certainly an eyebrowraising coincidence.

After Anne Frank's death in the Bergen Belsen concentration camp in 1945, family friend Miep Gies, who had retrieved her diary and kept it hidden, gave it to Anne’s father, Otto Frank, the family's only known survivor. The diary has since been published in more than 70 languages.

The recovery and publication of Anne Frank’s diary has been called a miracle. Had she been discovered in her annex hideout by the Dutch resistance instead of by the Nazi Gestapo, she most likely would have lived.

What is a miracle? Is it a coincidence of time and place? Are they one and the same, just a difference of degrees? For the religious, a miracle is a God-produced act; for the nonbelievers, a miracle may only be a coincidence writ large.

Was the rescue of all 33 Chilean miners trapped in a copper mine collapse in 2010 a miracle? It certainly was to them, their families and their rescuers. When Hall of Fame quarterback Terry Bradshaw was admitted into a Louisiana hospital for shoulder surgery in 1983, he chose a pseudonym to keep the press unaware of his condition; he chose the name Thomas 44

Her rescue might have qualified as a miracle to Anne Frank and her family, but not to the the unknown Holocaust survivors who kept her childhood diary to herself, never to be read and venerated by millions in successive generations -- and even as required reading in schools around the world.

There are those who believe everything happens for a purpose. Because some Guiding Hand somewhere out there among the billions of suns and trillions of planets controls everything, like some mystical kid running creation’s largest electric train set.

And because of the vastness of the universe, miracles are commonplace. Then there are those who insist the universe is random; all things happen simply because they happen.

With no rhyme or reason.

To be honest, I am not a believer in miracles, certainly not of the biblical kind.

No parting of the Red Sea or turning water into wine. But millions of faithful souls do believe in such miracles. I am a firm believer, however, in coincidences, the Tom Brady kind. And millions upon millions of other human beings are, too. There is a special joy in coincidences; they rattle everyday life, pushing existence a little off-kilter for a moment or so. And they can be uplifting too, if you can appreciate their oddities.

Here’s a short example of an extraordinary coincidence. A neighbor of ours built a small box on a pedestal outside his home as a take-one-leave-one book exchange. I went there recently to drop off a few books that I no longer needed, including a copy of Moll Flanders, a novel written by Daniel Defoe in 1722. Not your everyday best-seller; today its read mostly by college English majors (guilty as charged). I opened the glass door and found someone else had beaten me. There, lying flat on the shelf was another copy of Moll Flanders. Now that's a coincidence!

Let me now give you two examples, both of which could most liberally be called

miracles if you stick to the dictionary definition of the word: “an extremely outstanding or unusual event, thing, or accomplishment.”

It’s a Saturday morning in mid-June following my graduation from NYU. I’m on my usual basketball court at my old junior high school playing three-on-three with our regular group of eight or ten friends. Herb is on the opposing side and we’re talking while playing. He tells me he is going to Europe for the summer. When do you leave? I ask.

Tomorrow he informs me. I leave the following week, I say. Herb tells me he has secured cheap passage on a freighter and that it will take him about a week or so to get him to a port in Europe. Well, I say, we’ll have to get together there. Yeah, sure, Herb agrees. The games continue until mid afternoon when we break up and head home for lunch.

The following Saturday my parents and sister drive me to Idlewild Airport in Queens for my departure on an NYUchartered Saturn Airways Douglas DC7C four-engine prop plane bound for Gatwick Airport, UK, an 11-hour nonstop.

Lucky me, I have a middle seat. Upon arrival at Gatwick, I’m like any first-time traveler abroad. I’m thrilled to be there. The charter company bus takes us into London and I take a cab to the bed and breakfast my friend and traveling companion, Harry, had arranged in advance. We meet as planned because Harry is already there, having arrived a couple days earlier on his Cornell charter. Our guide is Frommer’s Europe on $5 a Day, which we plan to undercut.

For the next few gray and dreary days we explore London, then we ferry across to France and onto Paris. We find a modest hotel near the Ile de la Cité and luxuriate in the beauty of the city, French food and drink, French women, too. We arrange to 45

stay at the same hotel upon our return and leave much of our excess clothing there like a deposit. Then we train to Belgium. So far the weather hasn’t been great, so after a few more days we decide to head directly to Rome. There must be some sun there!

Rome is warm and wonderful. Our small hotel is cheap with few amenities. But the city has so many free or modestly priced attractions that we give some thought to staying there for the remainder of the summer. A week’s stay barely scratches the surface of antiquities. But the Riviera and Spain await. Another train ride takes us to Nice, and another several days of sun and surf, as they say. And even cheaper accommodations in a student hostel. Why leave?

But we do, again. This time our train continues along the Mediterranean coast, and we get off in Barcelona. We find another cheap hotel near the train station and explore this fascinating city and its massive Sagrada Familia cathedral, still under construction. We come across a boat slip with destinations in Majorca and the Balearic isles, a tourist Mecca off Spain’s east coast, known for its beach resorts, limestone mountains and Roman and Moorish remains. The fare is modest but we decide to wait a few days; Majorca will still be there. It still is. We, however, move on to Madrid.

On our first evening at our hotel in Madrid we change and wait out the evening hours until about 10:30 when our hunger begins to gnaw at us. We are not used to dining near midnight as is a Spanish custom.

So we take to the streets around the hotel (which has no dining room or even a snack machine) looking to dine with the natives, who are first beginning to think about dinner.

As we turn onto a nearby street I hear American voices talking about the fine dinner they’ve just enjoyed up the street. One voice I recognize; It’s my basketball buddy, Herb.

Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia cathedral We are both stunned to see one another.

What are the odds? And what are the odds of actually doing so after having made a verbal plan on a schoolyard basketball court to meet in Europe with no fixed country, city or date in mind? For years that random encounter always brings to mind, Humphrey Bogart’s line in Casablanca, “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.” I would stop short of calling our unplanned reunion a miracle. But it surely ranks a major, major coincidence.

If you want my definition of a miracle, here’s one I’d choose. Years later my wife, two sons and I are newly arrived at my duty station in Panama. Our Ford Pinto, which was offloaded about two weeks after we arrive, is back with us and we want to hit one of Panama’s famous beaches. So off we go along the Trans-Isthmian Highway that skirts the Pacific on our left. There are no signs saying “playa aqui,” so we just have to guess where to stop. By consensus, we decide to take the next road on the left. A beach can’t be too far away.

I make the left and head down a narrow slit of a road between jungle overgrowth.

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Moments later we can see the surf just a few yards ahead, so a beach must be there, too.

As we move beachward, suddenly we are up to the wheel covers in sand. The Pinto will not move forward, it will not move backward, the beach is totally deserted and cell phones are available only in sci-fi stories. Just as I can get out and start the gnashing of teeth, a car pulls up behind me and stops just short of the sand. As the driver gets out I can see he has a Peruvian license plate. He holds up both palms, an internationally known signal that means, “Wait a minute, stay calm.” My wife and the boys get out to see what’s happening.

Then the Peruvian (I assume) silently goes into the trunk of his car, pulls out a long, thick rope and ties one end to the back bumper of our car and the other end to the front of his. He gets into his car, puts it in reverse, and immediately pulls us back onto the edge of the road. He takes off his rope, puts it away, and before I have time to thank him and offer to pay him, he is gone, never having said one word to us. The whole operation has taken less than five minutes.

For us, facing the prospect of a very long, lonely day and who knows what sort of ending, that was a miracle.

Gulls and Jetty, Long Beach, Long Island Photo by Karen Dinan

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Maxie September 25, 2000 Maxie went back today dragging her blued bottom across the tiled surface of her difficult life.

She’d been a gritter not a groaner.

They’d had to muzzle her or with her last electric pulse she’d have drawn some blood somewhere.

It had been a fade not a bang.

(I’d always thought they’d have to blast her.)

She’d been an incredible beauty as a babe, turning red taillights to white with elicited exclamations of delight.

When the weight of her life tried its crippling best, she’d beat it, wobbled but unbroken.

But the new disease had riven the core of her bones and weakened her to ground.

Fade, perhaps.

Extinguish not.

We’d strewn her ashes across a hot spot by the back fence.

She loved the sun; she could take it.

So we let it deal with her.

And she became what she’d always aspired to: a part of the light that will shine for us, forever.

Tony Tedeschi 48

Empress Eugénie and Maréchal Foch

By Kendric W. Taylor

August 25, 1917 (At the Front) Dear Alex: I am in receipt of the package containing your father’s timepiece. I especially prize the touching inscription: “To AC, from his admiring colleagues at Morgan.” I shall try to be worthy of those lofty sentiments from the board members.

Actually, Alex, it is a bully gift. I really will try to be worthy of it. Last week I dropped in (literally) on a British aerodrome for petrol, and was invited to mess.

My formal wear was not much, my usual battered tunic. I tucked the watch in what passes for a waistcoat, and made a show of consulting it, and then snapping the silver case shut importantly, gazing about confidently as if I were solely privy to the exact hour and minute of the end of the war.

After dinner, some of the subalterns sang “Land of Hope and Glory” (the only non-obscene tune of the night) around the piano, and I believe meant it quite 49

sincerely. The trouble is, I believe in it as well, despite myself. It’s just that the wretched cabal of generals, munitions makers, press lords and politicians has ruined all the sacrifice with their cowardice, their greed, their stupidity and cynicism.

I am sure it is no secret that we are engaged in yet another ”big push, supporting the British,” that will end the war. For once, this one is actually going well (although not for the thousands being pulverized). We shall be busy I would think for as long as the weather holds, which could be for some weeks.

If luck prevails, perhaps I will see you in the fall . . . touch wood. We might even have our picnic. Please try not to see too much of Paris, there are places I would like to show you.

I think this will be our last go-round with the French. Our fellow Yanks seem quite anxious to tame us here in the Escadrille. In fact, some chaps visited us recently from our AEF First Division, training near here. Possibly they heard of the lion cubs some of the lunatics here keep for pets, and came to see if this were true.

I think of the warmth of your hands, Alex, how your hair changes color with the light, and of the back of your neck, particularly. I dare not imagine beyond that, except for the sound of your laughter, which is the last thing I hear before sleep.

Most Afctnly, Paris The Dauphin has gone. He was my wingman and flew into a bank of clouds and we never saw him again. He asked of you always.

His last day as a Frenchman for Lawrence began well before dawn in the chill hut at Senard, below Soissons, with a vigorous shake by his servant, a jolt of anger the only sure way of getting him up. He dressed quickly by candle light: long johns, heavy wool sox, warm corduroy trousers tucked into fleece-lined flying boots, layers of sweaters over a cashmere turtleneck. He seldom wore a uniform jacket. He slipped on his thigh-length leather flying jacket and tucked his flying helmet and goggles into a pocket. He buckled on the web belt holding his prized pistol, a U.S. Army issue Colt .45 Automatic Model 1911, the look and heft of its black steel and walnut grips comforting in some primitive masculine way. The clothing was a protection as well; even with the August weather, the Spad VII’s capability of reaching 17,500 feet made cold an added foe of someone sitting motionless for long periods in an open cockpit.

Still another battle at Verdun had brought his squadron from St. Pol to Senard, fighting rain and fog south every kilometer of the way, the pilots soaked in their cockpits by occasional downpours. Goggles quickly fogged over, and in the obscuring mist reference points were impossible. Most of them set a compass course of 270 degrees and prayed for dumb luck. Landing at Senard, some 20 miles northwest of Verdun, they were greeted by the reverberations of a 50

terrible barrage of 2,500 guns firing on the German lines. The cataclysm kept up for a full week -- then on the 20th of August, 100,000 French troops attacked along a 15-mile stretch between Avoncourt and Bois des Caurières, at the southern edge of the Argonne forest, along the river Meuse. During the long bombardment leading up to H-hour, his Groupe de Combat had been charged with flying in support of bombing missions. Then, on the actual day of attack, they went aloft to beat back any enemy observation planes, intent on blinding the Germans to events on the battlefield.

The first patrol up of the day, they had been ordered to merely observe enemy movements on the other side of the lines, engaging any craft that crossed over. Spotting what appeared to be dust clouds rising off to the northeast beyond the Meuse, he throttled back and began a long flat glide toward the German lines, the wind fluttering and humming through the struts and rigging.

Banking low over the deserted battlefield, he passed over the flanking British lines. Ahead, he saw the French troops dug in, braced for the inevitable German counterattack. He was flying quite low now, hopeful of avoiding detection as long as possible, still heading in the direction of the dust cloud. A scene of biblical desolation unfolded beneath the Spad’s wingtips: a deadly morass of yellow-brown mud, splattered with white phosphorus, trees decapitated at the stumps, others with torn and blackened trunks, branches and foliage stripped away. Enormous shell holes crowded in on each other in drunken riot, mine craters gaped blackly, crumpled decomposing bodies sliding gradually into their maw. Dugouts and pillboxes burrowed into the surface like deadly rat holes, while trenches zigzagged through the mud and slime like rotting sutures in a mutilated corpse. A few solitary figures moved over the cratered surface -- counting the dead, or only scavenging -- he couldn’t tell. Gunning over a small town, the littered and deserted main square gaped up at him, its municipal buildings gutted. Ruined houses ran down the spokes of the side streets, their roofs collapsed, walls blown out, floors tilted, beds and bureaus and pitiful possessions spilling out into the yards. Further beyond, behind the shell of a large stone chateau, several German field guns splayed on cracked and broken wheels, unattended barrels pointing uselessly toward the French lines.

He eased the throttle forward, rising up over a copse of untouched birch trees, feeling the warmth of the ground coming up in waves. Spotting a small stream with a covered stone bridge, he settled back down to follow its meandering path northward. Climbing again to clear a small hill, off to his left he could see spirals of dust raising in the still morning air, usually a sign of marching troops. He continued to follow the tributary as it snaked northward, growing ever wider, its banks littered with bloated horses, wrecked barges, and carpets of dead fish.

Over the drone of the engine, he wondered at the stillness of the morning below, the countryside in this adjoining sector quiet under the rumble of distant shelling, dew still sparkling on the long meadow grass through the trees lining the river. The wind buffeted his face, but it was warm and welcome this close to the surface. He passed a sawmill, the wheel motionless in the water, the roof shattered, shell holes patterned around the stone building. Climbing 51

toward the sun, he sought altitude before he turned to make his run at whatever was moving along those roads. At 1,000 feet, he banked sharply to the left, throttled back once more and drifted downward, propeller barely ticking over, cylinder heads backfiring in a muted chorus. Ahead he saw long lines of grayclad troops, strung out between the poplars on either side of the straight road.

They were ready to go into the line, the soft caps of the rear areas replaced now by their distinctive coalscuttle helmets. Their bayonets were set in the rifles slung over their shoulders as they plodded stolidly forward, silent, reflecting on their last few minutes of relative quiet before they entered the sustained hell of the battlefield. Further on, he could see the flash and fire of the German field guns, launching barrage after barrage at the allied lines only a very short distance away. He drifted down behind the marching men, a gliding hawk riding the currents and updrafts, homing in on its unsuspecting prey. Many of his comrades considered strafing ground targets relatively easy because of the aircraft’s speed and the covering noise of battle. He didn’t -- working so close to the ground left little opportunity to recover if something went wrong. Moreover, the aircraft became a target for anyone with a firearm, no matter how lousy their aim might be.

Then he was on them, throttling ahead with a roar, sweeping down the raised country road right above the tree line, firing his Vickers in short deadly bursts to avoid jamming, spent bronze cartridge cases cascading away in the airstream. Men scattered into the ditches on either side of the road, others lay where they fell, punched into the dust without ever knowing they were in peril.

In the center, horses reared and plunged wildly as drovers leaped from the supply wagons out of the path of the incoming tracers. A red flame shot from an ammunition wagon, erupting into an orange ball enveloping equipment, horses and men for 100 feet around. He continued down the road full throttle, knowing it would be folly to pull up and over to repeat his pass, not with every rifle and pistol on the ground finally alerted by the wave of bedlam racing up behind them. Maximizing his supply of ammo and the effect of his single gun, he kicked at the rudder slightly, concentrating his fire on one side of the road, dooming the men heading there, sparing those on the other.

One minute he was firing full out, the next the Vickers shuddered suddenly to a halt as the last of the ammo belt fed through. He had begun a fast climb for altitude when the Hispano-Suiza stopped in a tick, a hastily aimed bullet slamming into the fuel sump, seizing up the engine. Hunched forward in the small cockpit, he could hear the hiss and rush of air, suddenly deadly around his ears. The aircraft was still climbing, and his entire body strained to keep it aloft, shoulders hunched upward: it was as if he could float the whole flimsy contraption over the German lines by his own strength; as if he were the one with wings -- a goggled Icarus with clenched teeth -- straining, straining -- not some canvas and wire marvel of aerodynamics and internal combustion – as if terror and will could carry man and machine to safety. He fluttered downward now toward the German rear support trenches, the Spad’s sudden appearance above them stunning the troops momentarily; then, in the time it took them to gape, he was over them and beyond, bleeding altitude fast, trailed by a fusillade 52

of small arms fire. He soared over a small farmhouse, hoping for a last flat-out run to his own lines that he could see just a tantalizing few hundred yards ahead.

German soldiers behind a sandbagged wall stood open-mouthed as the silent shadow ripped by a few feet over their heads, the platoon turning as a man to level their weapons at him.

A salvo of artillery shells passing overhead created a vicious downdraft, shoving him to earth, his wheels tipping a barbed wire entanglement outside the German trench. The aircraft skipped once off a stretch of solid earth between shell holes, bounced high into another sheet of small arms fire, slammed down again on the parapet of the British front line, cascading earth onto the troops below, then hopped again in huge, frantic stride, crashing down finally into a muddy field. The wheels furrowed through the filthy mulch, sinking deeper, slowing, then finally, with a sharp sucking sound, sticking solidly. The propeller snapped off with a crack, the tail flew up, his bracing arms bent as he slammed against the instrument panel. The red, white and blue rudder surface wagged proudly aloft for a last long moment, like the stern of a sinking liner, then the entire fuselage tipped over forward with a rending, cracking, tearing, breaking sound, the wreckage coming to rest upside down over the entrance of a dugout.

He hung from his seatbelt, stunned, blood and adrenaline pounding behind his eyeballs, a pain in his right leg flaming horribly. A filthy British Tommy in a tattered, blackened fleece vest stuck his head up from the dugout stairs and looked around.

“Bloody ‘ell?” The soldier craned his neck to examine what was left of the Spad, his helmet scraping the sandbags as he peered up into the pilot’s face: “‘Ello Froggy. ‘Ear for tea, are yah?”

“I’m an American,” was all he could think of to reply, “Yah don’t sigh -- come to win the war then?”

“Could you get me the hell out of here please, there’s petrol dripping down all over me!"

“Right ‘ya are, gov. Let me put out me pipe.” ***** “You must miss him terribly,” she said.

It was late fall and they had walked carefully through the Tuileries, pausing to watch the children sail their boats at the basin. It was quieter here, amid the trees and gardens. She stood behind him, her arms around his waist.

Outside, and along the streets of Paris, crowds of young soldiers and sailors jostled their way under tress still turning their foliage. After three years of war, the exhausted city had taken on a new vitality with the young men of the American Expeditionary Force confidently striding the boulevards, thronging into the bars and restaurants, barking out their few newly learned phrases of mangled French. The shopworn veterans -- French and a few British on leave from the front -- seemed pushed into remote corners, pale and ignored, their own feverish hilarity of 1915-16 long since replaced by the weary resignation to

53

hopeless fate. Their only chance now was the youthful energy of the Americans.

Their vitality might finally push the Germans into exhaustion.

“Listen, do you understand,” he said, “It does no good thinking about him.”

He paused, and leaning on his cane, turning to face her. Her eyes were very brown, flecked with gold in the sun, and fixed on him precisely.

“It’s like caring for roses,” he continued. “One bud dies, it has to be cut away, otherwise the plant’s energy is wasted being directed there -- to something that’s already dead. We need all our energy to survive. No matter how beautiful the bloom, if it dies, it has to be pruned. Another will grow. I can’t think of those that have gone. Le Dauphin, especially.”

He settled carefully into one of the wrought iron chairs scattered around the pond, anxious to change the subject “Do you know, many years ago, my grandfather saw the Empress Eugénie drive by out there on the avenue? He had come over from England after graduating from school. She was in her carriage and he swore she nodded at him as she passed on the boulevard. I remember a white van dyke beard and a plug hat.

“Who? The empress?” She asked, moving a chair close to his.

“No, my grandfather.”

She smiled at him, placing her arm across his shoulders, and kissed him.

“Lawrence, I am thinking I might be a doctor.

“I thought you might,” he responded, looking at her. “It’ll be tough.

They’ll be afraid of a woman in authority” “Let ‘em try and stop me,” she warned, her eyes hardening.

“What about you though,” she pressed him, “ have you thought of yourself, then?” “About after the war, I mean. You have time, you’re not going to be flying just yet, not until those tendons around the knee heal, and the stitches.” she said.

“No, that’s right. At any rate, my flying days with the French are over,” Lawrence replied.

“I wrote you, remember? The talk is that all the Americans will be mustered out of the Escadrilles by early 1918. I think there’s only about 100-orso of us left anyway. We’re at the point where we are waiting to see what the American air service will offer us,” he explained, “rank and so forth, I mean.

The thing of it is, I’m not going in as some shave tail lieutenant. In the meantime, I have plenty of convalescent leave.”

“Why couldn’t you just stop now?” she asked. “You’ve done enough.

So many of your friends are gone.” She took his arm as they arose and moved toward the boulevard. He glanced at the sky from habit, noting the wind direction, the fat cumulous clouds scudding below the pure cobalt. It was a priceless Sunday in Paris, a bit chilly even with the sun, and he thought idly of maybe later hiring a carriage to take them out to the Bois de Boulogne for a hot rum toddy at one of the cafes.

54

“They might form an aero squadron of our chaps,” he mused. “In any event, it’s not fair to deny my experience to all these youngsters coming over to fight.”

“Oh, tommyrot, please Lawrence, there’s more to it than that,” she interrupted crossly, “and you know it. You still feel that you have no future, don’t you?” she inquired, looking directly into his eyes.

“You still think that when it’s finally over,” she continued, “that these last years have been so exhilarating that nothing will ever measure up. That if you survive, you’ll be in a funk for the rest of your life.

“You’re still trying to have the future decided for you,” she added emphatically, “and I daresay it has nothing to do with training youngsters.” She withdrew from his arm and walked ahead, angrily pulling on her gloves.

He hobbled after the striding form, turned her to face him: “I told you once I wasn’t trying to dramatize this. You remember I spoke of Hobey Baker?”

“Oh yes,” she sighed, moving ahead of him again on the crowded street.

“I saw him in Brooks Brothers in New York the day before . . .” He quitted the sentence, exasperated by her back. He shuffled forward again, stretched his arm far out and pulled her back to his side: “Stop a minute!” He turned her toward him once more: “Please,” he entreated.

She halted again, people flowing past them on either side along the Rue de Rivoli, parting for them as they stared at the lovely young woman and the crippled airman, sympathetic for their youth and apparent distress. She moved to the building front, leaning against the ancient stone facings separating the fashionable shop windows, waiting, her face softening as she looked at him. She thought she had never seen anyone as forlorn as the wounded young man before her.

“Baker said something I didn’t understand at the time,” he continued. “I had mentioned going down to a Princeton-Harvard game in ‘13, where he had been simply spectacular, in rain and awful mud.” He shifted his grip on the cane, leaning sideways into the building next to her. “Charley Brickley, of Harvard, who looked like a cab driver, kicked the winning field goal.

“Baker looked at me (he was on Wall Street then), and then he said: ‘Think of all the things I could be doing today if I didn’t have to go to work.’

Nothing could ever measure up for him to the excitement he found on the football field. Not even making buckets of money.”

“I know, I know,” she said, shaking her head from side to side: “You’ve told me that about him. But you’re not him. That’s not your problem.”

“Thank God, no, at least about the first part. He’s led a charmed life: Philadelphia Main Line and all that. I could never stand the pressure – or the social scrutiny. Hell, a grandfather raised me. I’ve never felt I belonged anywhere. Baker knows exactly who he is and how he fits into things. Or he should. I never did.”

“You just won’t believe you’ll come through this war,” Alex interrupted.

“And I know you will. It’s almost as if you just don’t want to grow up, to go home, get a job, and be responsible for someone.”

“It’ll never be in a bloody office,” he snapped, “but if I did?”

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She hesitated, looking at him intently.

“Then, my friend, we’ll go home together.”

His eyebrows rose up under the visor of his kepi. “I’ve talked too much,” he said, thinking once again how amazing it was to be with this marvelous creature. “But it would be nice to see Al Jolson at the Winter Garden, and dinner at Reisenweber’s after, us two.”

Inside, at Cartier, he had the clerk place a slim gold chain through the Claddlagh ring he had purchased for her.

“The hands signify friendship, the crown loyalty and the heart is our love,” he told her as he placed the chain around her neck.

“Now we both have something: me, my turnip watch, and you…”

She interrupted him: “I love it, but why . . .”

“I told you I was Irish – well, part. Anyway, now we both have something from the other.”

Later, as dusk approached, they walked slowly down through the Place de la Concord and paused at the corner of the tree-filled Jardins des ChampsÉlysées.

“Remember you told me you never really got to see much of Paris except a few bars with me and maybe the tipity-top of the Arc de Triomph from the hospital in Nuelly?”

They walked a few steps around the corner, and then, ahead, up the long stretch of the Champs-Élysées in the gathering darkness stood revealed the magnificent frame of the Arc de Triomph, lighted again after the gloom of 1914, when Paris itself was threatened.

“Oh, it’s magnificent, she signed, clasping her gloved hands to her chin.

“Yes. It never fails. What would you like to do now?” he asked. “We have all Paris to ourselves. Perhaps an aperitif along the boulevard?”

“Or . . . we could go to the flat in Place desVosges?” she ventured, leaning into him with a crooked smile. “I hear Marshall Foch has been suddenly called away to the front.”

“Alexandra!”

- 30 -

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