My father never talked about his war. He was an enigma to me in many ways. A heavy smoker and someone who liked to tell a joke to lighten up a room and who liked to argue for the enjoyment of an argument. We argued often, until my mother would try to shut us up. For someone on the outside it looked like war. The young one full of passion and the elder full of obstinacy. I speak of my dad as the elder, but I'm years older than he ever got to be. He died when I was barely 23 and was coming off years of wandering east and west and north and south to discover the answer to those arguments that raged over the war and drugs and school and relevance. I feel sometimes ashamed at the arrogance I threw in his face, although I was then still a child. Now that I'm a father I understand what that arrogance of the young looks like, and more important I understand how he bore it. 

His life was dying all around him. First the grandmothers and then his own father and mother. His mother, my grandmother, who tried to control everything in her world, died in helpless fear two years after going through grandpa's windshield when they were hit head-on by a drunk driver on a frozen street three blocks from their house. The two of them seriously injured and grandma confined to a bed while grandpa, trapped in that house listened to her ranting until he just gave it all up and died. Then she started on my father and mother. We kids went over for regular visits and sat near the rancid smelling bed and listened for hours until leaving was the only mantra in our heads. I remember a succession of funerals. 

My son is playing a video game based on the world War Two Battle of the Bulge. That was my father's war. A single story is all that I remember him telling me. In Paris, behind the lines where my father was a master sergeant in the medical corps, a tent full of wounded men, and a gigantic Howitzer cannon placement outside that when fired caused the sides of the tent to flap up and down due to the displacement of volumes of air. Deafening sound that hurled an enormous weight of metal and explosives many miles over the enemy lines. 

I grew up watching World War Two historical romances on the screen. But the stories from my father never came. Only hints and clues left with the souvenirs in a box in the basement; a bayonet, a couple of German medals and patches, an officer's hat with a swastika on the front. Dozens of movies, and footage of destruction and horror on the television in black and white grainy images that placed it all in a world of myth and myopia. We passed by a huge asphalt field full of tanks at the General Motor's plant on the way to church. 

My own war was shown on television, as it happened, almost in real time. Instead of newsreels, doctored for propaganda and the proper message, we got a daily feed from the front, quickly edited, grainy and immediate, to be dealt with right then and there by all of us who watched.   We already lived in a world deconstructed by progress, where we were transformed into aliens by the weirdness of modernity. I remember three young boys sitting on a curb watching the house of one of us tipped by bulldozers and rolled into the flames of a huge bonfire. I remember the smell of ashes as neighborhoods were cleared through the heart of the city to make way for the Interstates. Years of magnificent destruction, where we roamed the abandoned buildings and ruins of progress and played at war games we learned from television and all of those movies about the Great War. We vandalized and haunted the construction equipment as it plowed through the parkland that provide the nest of our fantasies through all of our young lives. We stalked through the grasses like soldiers, whacking tall thistles with sticks as if they were enemy soldiers or monsters from some science fiction movie about nuclear apocalypse and the end of the world.  

We grew up with the bombs over all of our heads. We grew up when the only object of war was genocide. We were creatures of the ruins, sniffing glue in church parking lots, getting drunk at night in vacant fields, walking torturous routes home to avoid getting beat up after school. We rode bicycles as far away from home as we could. An adventure began with getting lost and ended with finding your way home from someplace we'd never been. The world of children was under bridges and next to railroad tracks and along creeks and sewage canals. The wars that were far away raged in our imaginations. We were soldiers of the wastelands. 

The freeways came through, the brick streets were paved over, the ragman and his horse stopped clopping down the street, the knife sharpener stopped coming by with his cart, the pigeons stopped circling over the block, the elm trees that lined both sides of the street all died and were ground up into chips and slivers. We went to football games in the suburbs and walked those strange empty streets throwing pennies at neon signs to break them and make them dark. We shoplifted paperbacked books and decals from department stores. We got jobs washing dishes and unpacking crates in warehouses. 

The wars raged and as those far away wars got closer friends started getting the call. Some of us burned our draft cards while hiding out in colleges. I traversed the dark metal bridges that crossed the oil soaked river and the factories breathing smoke and fumes, and on the other side was another world. Whites and Puerto Ricans on the near side and on the far side was the black ghetto, and the colleges and the rich neighborhoods on the heights. Here was my refuge from the world I grew up in, where my path differentiated from the path of my old friends of the neighborhood. President Johnson's War On Poverty sent me to school and I took advantage of that to open the world of art and music and philosophy and socialism. I met and became friends with black people. I watched the ghettoes burn all around me during the Hough riots and after the assassination of Martin Luther King. 

The wave took us all with it. Drugs and revolution. Blocking the streets and taking over school buildings. Waiting on the roofs for the cops to break through, taking acid and smoking pot and roaming the gardens like packs of wild things. I watched an old man who had fought the Nazi's in Spain, who organized young people into political resistance, hauled away to jail when we occupied Euclid Avenue. I ran with the crowd that scattered when attacked by policemen charging on horses like a scene from Doctor Zhivago. I ran from tear gas in Washington. I met gay people who were not like those who hid at night in Terminal Tower restrooms downtown waiting to pick up action. My best friend was Bill Halas and we walked and talked philosophy and poetry and invention, until later he disappeared into the woods of Vermont. 

We went to Woodstock and witnessed the barbarian dream, the bonfires sending columns into the low lying clouds, the vast crowd writhing in front of the stage, the coming storm, the rain, the smell, Hendrix playing the anthem and all the voices singing. I came home after a night of driving and being stopped and searched on the freeway out of New York, having downed all of the mescaline, and ecstatic beyond belief, telling my mother of what I had seen. Journeys across Pennsylvania to hear the Grateful Dead, holding the door shut so that a beautiful neurotic Dutch girl wouldn't leap out onto the highway. 

When my number did not come up in the Lottery and I was no longer subject to be sent off to the hopeless war I left school and went off to find a world beyond drugs and revolution, hitchhiking out of Cleveland with a rucksack from the Korean War passed to me by an uncle and a cloth sleeping bag tied over my shoulder with a rope. Stuffed into my pack along with a change of clothing and some dried fruits and nuts and peanut butter and crackers was my Oxford Annotated Bible from college and a copy of the first Whole Earth Catalogue, both which I intended to read (and did) from cover to cover.    

I rode in a truck past Chicago and Gary to the south, a huge black cloud of pollution hovering across the Interstate, and then heading southwest across the Mississippi and into the Plains, to stand under those awesome skies waiting for rides. I got a ride in a brand new mobile home being driven toward Reno. A Volvo station wagon took me over the crest past Tahoe and down the winding staircase into San Francisco. Back to Colorado for a gathering of back-to-the-land prophecy freaks and then back to California enveloped in a cocoon of magical possibilities. A hunt for my missing shoes at a gay commune in wine country, wild rides and heavenly nights along Pacific highway, north to Oregon, weeks in a commune as volunteer gardener, meeting with mystics and those who lived free off the land and food stamps, naked in the waters by the crystal clear river near Bend. I learned dowsing on the road to Eugene, then took a trip on the Mad Hatter's bus service up through Seattle and eventually got to the border of Canada where I crossed with a party of college students on their way to a borderland bar. They left me at a country intersection on Highway One where I had to narrowly talk myself out of a marijuana bust. I met a family of American ex-patriots and spent two weeks helping erect the walls of a log cabin in the wilderness of British Columbia. I got a ride with a Canadian country dope dealer and we hiked a long trail up and across a glacier to the top of the Rockies while tripping on Orange Sunshine Owsley acid. Then from Banff to Medicine Hat I crossed the flattest country in the world, full of sunflowers and grain harvested by huge machines, and then south along the pebbly shores of Lake Superior to cross the border again to connect with my father in Ann Arbor. When I called home he told me he would drive out from Cleveland to meet me there.   

There was a moment, right there, at a famous blues club on a quite afternoon, when he bought me a glass of Beaujolais and we spoke quietly as men speak to one another. There was no argument. I remember a feeling of warmth and love, but I don't know how much of it is memory and how much was in the moment. He was very close to the end of his life, and maybe he knew this. We talked and drank the wine. I told him of my adventures on the road. We drove together the hundred or so miles back to Cleveland.

My last picture is of him standing by the drive-away Cadillac that I contracted to drive me down to Florida where I would spend almost a year living and working in an idyllic hippie paradise on the Gulf of Mexico.  

*****

The bread rises as does a new era. Perhaps it's just my imagination, but I feel a new sense of possibilities has infected the atmosphere, this in spite of the dire economic news issuing from the media. We all wanted change and change we will certainly get. 

...Back to the bread. Last weekend, for the first time in a long time I baked a couple of loaves of bread, using the Tassajara Bread book recipe, which took most of the day and turned the afternoon into a kind of peaceful meditation on living and breathing and growing. My friend Carmen later showed me a documentary about Edward Espe Brown and the Tassajara Center called "How to Cook Your Life". (Yes, it's available from Netflix). The two experiences along with the Thanksgiving Season inspired the above sketches.

For those of you who live in the Santa Fe/Northern New Mexico area, or those who may be planning a visit, I'm hereby giving notice that on Saturday's I will be baking bread on a regular basis, between the hours of 11 am and 6 pm at my house north of Santa Fe just off Old Pecos Trail. Anyone is invited to stop by to share the space, the conversation and the feelings and/or culinary or otherwise creative delights that arise from the task or any that may accompany it. This will be an ongoing event and all are invited to attend.

Email me for directions.

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You can't stop the signal. 

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